Resisting war crimes is not a crime
9 May 2008
Nine people in Derry in Northern Ireland have been charged under terrorism laws following an occupation of the local Raytheon plant during which, police claim, 350,000 damage was done to computer equipment. The US company Raytheon is one of the largest arms manufacturers in the world, supplying guidance systems for many of the missiles and bombs used by US and Israeli forces in the Middle East. Raytheon systems guided the Qana bomb to the bunker where it blasted and crushed at least 51 people, including many children, to death last month. Three of the arrested men, Colm Bryce, Kieran Gallagher and Eamonn McCann are members of the Derry branch of the Socialist Workers’ Party while another, Sean Heaton is a member of the Socialist Environmental Alliance. The five others, Eamonn O’Donnell, Gary Donnelly, Paddy McDaid, Jimmy Kelly and Micky Gallagher are Republicans, from the IRSP and the 32-Country Sovereignty Committee. After hours of questioning, all nine were charged with Aggravated Burglary and Unlawful Assembly. These are “scheduled” offences, meaning they would be heard before a Diplock, non-jury court. These charges also meant that the men couldn’t be given bail by the Magistrates’ Court but had to be remanded to prison before a bail application in the High Court. The only reason for the remand in prison and the severity of the charges is that the protestors live in Northern Ireland. This would not have happened in Britain or the South of Ireland. Despite the New Labour talk of a new NI, political dissent is still treated differently here. At the bail hearing, the Crown tried to raise Eamonn McCann’s convictions on public order offences going back to the civil rights movement 1968/69/70. However, the judge said that the “vintage” of these charges made them irrelevant. The arms merchants were brought to Derry in 1999 by SDLP and Ulster Unionist leaders John Hume and David Trimble: the announcement of the plant was made at the pair’s first joint public appearance following their receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize. It was part, they said, of “the peace dividend.” The savage irony was immediately apparent. An argument over Raytheon has continued in Derry since. However, all the local mainstream parties—-John Hume’s SDLP, Gerry Adams’s Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley’s DUP—-have backed the company’s presence, arguing that the Derry plant isn’t directly involved in arms manufacture and that driving Raytheon out would deter other investors in an area of high unemployment. Speaking from a window at the plant during the occupation, Eamonn McCann said: “We had to dramatise the argument so as to force the issue into the mainstream.” Documents and computers were hurled from windows and the computer mainframe and other equipment put out of action. The idea for the occupation emerged from a packed meeting of the Derry Anti War Coalition on August 2nd addressed by former Abu Ghraib interrogator Joshua Casteel of Iraqi Veterans Against War and Hani Lazim of Iraqi Democrates against the Occupation. Discussion from the floor focused on Raytheon, and the role it gave Derry in the arms trade. The activists knew that, despite the line of the main parties, there is real anger in the town at the idea of software developed in Derry helping to murder people in Lebanon and Gaza. On August 9th at 8am, protestors arrived at the building Raytheon shares with a call centre. The police were already in position. At about 8.30, an employee about to go into work hesitated for an instant and the anti-war activists rushed the door. Police started grabbing people by the scruff of the necks and literally throwing them back out. The nine now charged are those who made it into Raytheon’s premises. Once inside, the protestors erected barricades against the police and set about decommissioning the equipment. Many fliers thrown out the window gave the lie to the claims that the Derry plant had no connection with the arms trade. Once local radio started to report the occupation, others started to arrive to join the protest. In the course of the day, between 80 and 100 people kept the solidarity picket going. Cars on the main road honked their horns in support. Local residents brought coffee, sandwiches and cake. Armed police in riot gear stormed the buildinng after eight hours and carried the protestors out in handcuffs. Almost all were battered and bruised in the process. At the bail hearing, barrister Joe Brolly pointed out that Raytheon had had a turnover of $21.9 billion last year, and described them as “purveyors of death”. Bail was granted but the restrictions are draconian. Conditions include an exclusion zone around Raytheon, and also ban the protestors from attending any public meeting or any private meeting of Derry Anti War Coalition or the Irish Anti War Movement. They were told that a “private meeting” means any meeting of three or more people. A Raytheon 9 Defence Campaign is now being established across Ireland. Trial Update The trial of Derry Anti War Coalition activists, the Raytheon 9, is set to start on Monday May 19th. It is to be held in Belfast. The trial was moved to Belfast after the Prosecution Service applied to have it moved; it argued that the Derry jury pool is likely to know too much about the campaign against Raytheon, including the non-violent direct action taken on 9th August 2006 and that any jury from Derry may be too sympathetic to the action and/or intimidated by the level of support for the Raytheon 9 because of all the protests held outside the court over the almost two years since the nine were arrested. The Derry Anti War Coalition is confident that, wherever the trial is heard, there will be large demonstrations in support of the Nine and that any jury who hears the truth about what was happening in Lebanon when the action took place cannot but find that the Nine acted to stop war crimes and, therefore, committed no crime. Anyone wishing to support the Raytheon 9 can do so in several ways: Send a message of support to resistderry@aol.com (NB This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it). Organise a fundraiser for the defence fund Spread the word about the role of the arms trade in fuelling war. If there is an arms company in your town, organise a protest at it.

I wanted to report on where the silence was
7 May 2008
In the spring of 2003 Dahr Jamail, a fourth-generation Lebanese-American with a taste for adventure, was up a mountain in Alaska, climbing and earning a living by working as a guide. He was, though, following news of the invasion of Iraq, and what he read and heard made him so furious that he decided to leave the mountains – “my church”, as he calls them – and head for that newly subjugated land, armed only with a laptop and a digital recorder. In a world of gung-ho, embedded, flak-jacketed US reporters telling the tale from the military angle, he had decided to try to find out what was happening to the Iraqis, who seemed absent from the story, which was odd considering there were 29 million of them in the country, dodging the bombs and the bullets. Or not. “I wanted to report on where the silence was,” he says. “There’s this huge story going on and nobody’s talking about it. How are Iraqis getting by, what’s their daily life like?” Jamail, a spruce 39-year-old who is the author of a new book, Beyond the Green Zone, says the supine nature of the US media encouraged him to act. “With a few exceptions, most of the US mainstream was just stenography for the state,” he says. “It wasn’t journalism; it was writing down what the Bush administration was telling them. I was amazed and outraged. I felt that the lack of clear information was the biggest problem I could see in the US, so I decided I should go over and write about it.” It took him until November 2003 to get the money together – $2,000, everything he had – and make some contacts, via the internet, in Iraq. He flew to Amman in Jordan, found a driver and an interpreter – he spoke no Arabic – and took a car to Baghdad, accompanied by a young couple from the UK who intended to spend a few days there “for the experience”. The border was unguarded, US troops notable by their absence. The war had been fought at long range; now there was a vacuum. Jamail visited hospitals and went to the town of Samarra, 50km north of Baghdad, to check out a “firefight” in which the US military said they had been attacked and had killed 54 Iraqi fighters. Jamail found the locals telling a different story: two Iraqi fighters had attacked a detachment of US troops guarding a delivery to a bank, and the soldiers had responded by firing indiscriminately, killing and wounding many civilians. At first he had no intention of trying to compete with the mainstream media. “For the first two weeks [of a nine-week stay] I was just sending emails back home,” he says. “I had a list of a little over a hundred friends, mostly in Alaska. I would go out in the day with an interpreter – I found someone to work with me who was really cheap because I didn’t have much money – and interview people, take amateur photos, and then go back to the hotel and write it up. It was essentially blogging, but I didn’t know what blogging was and I didn’t have a blog, of course. I was just sending out two, three, four, five pages a night with a few photos attached to friends. “After about two weeks someone suggested, ‘Hey, you should post on this website electroniciraq.ne.’ They wanted posts from people on the ground. I did that for about a month and then towards the end of my trip, with about two weeks to go, I was contacted by the BBC to do a little bit of work with them. A start-up website in New York also contacted me to start doing some stories. I actually got paid to do some work, and that’s when it became clear I could actually come back and work as a journalist.” I try to probe why Jamail should have made this extraordinary gesture: was there something in his make-up that led him to take this stand? Born and raised in Texas, the son of a grocery store owner, he says that there is a streak of unpredictability in his family. He is the youngest of three: his sister is a pilot, his brother is a police officer. “My parents have always had their hands full and were broken in a bit, so I guess they weren’t completely shocked when I started to do my thing,” he says. He means climbing, but what about Iraq? How did they and others close to him react? “Most people thought I was crazy. My closer friends supported it. They felt, ‘If this is what you think, and you really want to do it, then all power to you.’ I decided, wrong or right, not to worry my parents about it until I got in there, so I waited and wrote [to] them after I reached Baghdad. Fortunately they were open to it; they were shocked, but they were open to it.” Before he headed for Alaska in 1996, Jamail had worked as a chemical technician on Johnston Island, an atoll in the Pacific where the US military had dumped parts of its obsolete stockpile of chemical weapons – no problem here finding weapons of mass destruction. Jamail was there to check air quality in a pilot plant designed for decommissioning the weapons, but became disillusioned when he thought results were being rigged and leaks covered up. It is tempting to see that disillusionment as the key to his later engagement, but he insists that it wasn’t. He just packed in the job and went climbing – in Central America, South America and Pakistan, as well as Alaska. His journey to Iraq, he says, was born of anger and frustration; it was not a calculatedly political act. “I did it for more personal reasons,” he explains. “I felt if I went and did this, I’d be able to come home and sleep a little bit better at night.” He was wrong about that. He had seen that first trip in the winter of 2003 as a one-off, but when he realised he could probably earn enough to live through his journalism he decided to go back. The fact that the security situation was deteriorating and that other journalists were pulling out increased the marketability of his on-the-spot reports, but also underlined the personal risks. Did he worry about the dangers? “By then I felt like I really wanted to stay in there and cover as much of the story as I could. You get into the story and you want to stay on it. It had its limits, though, and I didn’t feel like I’d be able to stay in indefinitely.” He entered Iraq for the second time in April 2004, on the very day that Falluja, the town 70km west of Baghdad that became the focal point of the battle between US forces and Iraqi fighters, was being sealed off. “We immediately started hearing these horrible stories of what was happening there,” he says. “I had a chance to go in and was really on the fence on whether I should do it or not, because I knew it was pretty crazy. But it seemed like we had a reasonable chance of going in safely, so I decided to take it. I ended up reporting for a couple of days from this makeshift clinic, and saw women, kids and some men being brought in who were all saying the same thing: the US pushed in [to Falluja] as far as they could and then just lined up snipers and started shooting into the city. There was no water, no electricity, medical workers were being targeted. It was a turning point for me.” By now, Jamail was filing his reports predominantly for the Inter Press Service, an agency based in Rome that sets out to “give a voice to the voiceless” and promote a new global order based on equality, democracy and justice. It is reporting, but reporting with a purpose, a clear agenda. So is it objective? Can someone who goes to Iraq convinced that the war is wrong and being fought for control of oil and strategic power offer unbiased reporting? “Objective journalism is a myth,” says Jamail. “Going into Iraq, I felt it was really important to read up on the history, find out what is the US security strategy, what is US foreign policy. Only then can you understand the facts and the nature of the US’s historical involvement in Iraq. If I’m guilty of something, I was guilty of going into it looking at it through that lens, as opposed to those who were looking at it through the lens of anonymous briefings from Bush administration officials. Any journalist going into a war zone is going to be looking through a certain type of lens. It’s a myth that you go in without opinions on the situation, or that you won’t feel emotions and that nothing that happens is going to affect how you report on it. I don’t buy that. I just don’t think it’s humanly possible.” He immediately qualifies that, however, by saying that he was not so blinkered that he made every fact and opinion he encountered fit his preconceived view. “When I came across Iraqis who were happy that Saddam was gone – and there were plenty, especially seven months into the occupation, before things had really started to degrade rapidly – I said so. I did run into things that challenged my preconceptions. I would from time to time run into a soldier who really believed in the mission. Early on, I met plenty of Iraqis who were glad the Americans were here, were still hopeful and wanted to give them some time, and I wrote about that.” In the introduction to his book, he quotes the story of an indigenous Canadian hunter who was called to give evidence at an inquiry into a planned dam that would flood his homeland and destroy his traditional way of life. The hunter was asked to swear on the Bible that he would tell the truth, but he had never seen a Bible and wondered how this miraculous truth-telling instrument worked. “He spoke with the translator at length,” writes Jamail, “and finally the translator looked up at the judge. ‘He does not know whether he can tell the truth. He says he can tell only what he knows.’” I take it that is how Jamail sees his own role: to give his view, to write down what he sees, to filter what he discovers at first hand through the knowledge he has gained from reading official documents; to tell what he knows rather than claim to be relaying some almost metaphysical “truth”, arrived at by being perfectly objective. He sees the war in Iraq as the direct consequence of the stated national security strategy of building a worldwide network of US military bases and “projecting power”. Talk of withdrawal from Iraq, he says, is a case of “putting the cart before the horse”; the whole strategy has to be rethought first. Iraq, in his view, is just a symptom of an endemic illness. What this role as an avowedly anti-war journalist means, however, is that Jamail’s political opponents can write him off as a propagandist. American TV networks have largely ignored him and his book. Even as the public mood has turned against the war, the mainstream media have not been able to disengage themselves from their view that, in time of war, the commander-in-chief and the boys in the field should be supported. “I certainly get accused of being an activist, but I don’t consider myself an activist,” he says. “I’ve never done any kind of activism or organising. My response to my critics is to say, ‘Tell me which of my facts you dispute and I’ll give you my sources.’ I ask people, ‘Be specific.’ If you want to attack my personality that’s fine, but if you want to attack my work and my information, then tell me which of my stories you have a problem with and I’ll happily give you my sources. I give talks in the US and people accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist, but I say, ‘No, it’s very rational, read these documents.’” Jamail’s Lebanese name doesn’t help when he tries to argue that, while trying to fill the silence on the Iraqi side, he remains committed to reporting what he sees and telling what he knows. “One time I was on this rightwing radio programme, and the guy started out trying to describe me: ‘Dahr Jamail, you’re a Muslim, aren’t you?’ ‘No. Would it matter if I was? But no, I’m not.’ ‘Where are you from, Dahr?’ ‘Anchorage, Alaska.’ It didn’t go real well for him. I didn’t even have a Middle-Eastern accent.” Jamail made two further trips to Iraq, but hasn’t been back since early 2005. The danger was now too great, and he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. “Having never reported in a war zone before, I was ignorant about PTSD,” he says. “I assumed that journalists didn’t get it. I thought you had to be a combat soldier to get it. When I got home after my fourth trip, I started having trouble sleeping. I was constantly thinking about Iraq, getting random visions of the times when I would go into morgues, and feeling guilty that I could leave the country but the friends I had made there couldn’t. I just felt numb a lot of the time. All of that put together made me realise that this was not the same guy that went over there, and that I needed some help. I took counselling, and still do it off and on when necessary.” When he returned to the US after his fourth visit to Iraq, he decided it was time to digest his experiences. He attended a session of the World Tribunal on Iraq in Rome and, rather like the Canadian hunter, reported what he had seen in the eight months he had spent in the country. He told of Iraqis who had given him accounts of being tortured, of towns collectively punished by being deprived of electricity, water and essential medical supplies, and of ambulances being shot at by US soldiers. “With 70% unemployment, a growing resistance and an infrastructure in shambles,” he concluded, “the future for Iraq remains bleak as long as the failed occupation persists.” Jamail also embarked on his book – part reportage, part catharsis – and this summer plans to write another, this time on resistance to the war within the US military, based on the stories of soldiers he has met who engaged in sabotage and fake patrols (called “search and avoid” missions) to hamper the war effort. Then he plans to return to the Middle East and maybe even to Iraq, if the security situation allows him at least some degree of freedom to report. The return to the mountains will have to wait; his heart now is in the desert. · Beyond the Green Zone is published by Haymarket Books (£11.99).

Peak Food: Blaming the Victims
7 May 2008
I’ve already written about this in previous posts under the ‘hidden holocaust’ theme, but am prompted to re-address this issue given the way it’s been dealt with by mainstream media and associated ‘experts’. In today’s Independent we see an eye-opening article revealing that amidst what is described as a series of “global food shortages”, a new “government-backed report” shows that “the British public” annually throws away “4.4 million apples, 1.6 million bananas, 1.3 million yoghurt pots, 660,000 eggs, 550,000 chickens, 300,000 packs of crisps and 440,000 ready meals. And for the first time government researchers have established that most of the food waste is made up of completely untouched food products ? whole chickens and chocolate gateaux that lie uneaten in cupboards and fridges before being discarded” — adding up to “a record 10b” every year. And that’s just us Brits. Imagine what the totals are for the Western world combined: Scary and revealing stuff that makes the word “overconsumption” seem like a gross understatement. But despite the shock value of such important revelations, I’m increasingly concerned at the way in which the food crisis is being portrayed. The Independent goes on to explain the causes of the food crisis as follows: “... millions of the world’s poor face food shortages caused by rising populations, droughts and increased demand for land for biofuels, which have sparked riots and protests from Haiti to Mauritania, and from Yemen to the Philippines.” So the food crisis comes down to three things: 1) rising populations (presumably not us in the advanced West, but rather those Third World crazies breeding like rabbits despite being so poor) 2) droughts (which may be exacerbated by climate change but in any case often occur naturally and therefore we purportedly can’t do much about) 3) and the drive from energy corporations for investment in biofuels. Indeed, according to the British government’s new chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington speaking at a government conference two months ago: “price rises in staples such as rice, maize and wheat would continue because of increased demand caused by population growth and increasing wealth in developing nations. He also said that climate change would lead to pressure on food supplies because of decreased rainfall in many areas and crop failures related to climate. ‘The agriculture industry needs to double its food production, using less water than today.’“ So again, population and economic growth in the ‘developing nations’, plus climate change, are to blame, and can only be addressed by doubling food production using less water (technologically impossible for all intents and purposes, but we’ll come back to that). It’s Them again — too many of Them, wanting More. As if to emphasise the point, we hear in the same piece that: “Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, said at the conference that the world’s population was expected to grow from 6.2bn today to 9.5bn in less than 50 years’ time. ‘How are we going to feed everybody?’ he asked.” Only a rhetorical question of course. Sorry to break it t’ya folks, but ‘feeding everybody’ has never really been one of the state’s major concerns. That’s why “Each tonne of wheat and sugar from the UK is sold on international markets at an average price of 40% and 60% below the cost of production respectively (ie, it is dumped)”, thus undercutting local farmers across the South, who thus lose any semblance of agricultural-independence they may have once had (i.e. the ability to feed their own people), thus becoming subject to the whims of the global food market, manipulated through speculation in the interests of Northern investors and consumers. But the important point for now is that as far as Hilary Benn is concerned, it’s clear that the cause of the problem is “their” population growth. Later in the article, Professor Beddington is cited pointing out that global grain stores are currently at the lowest levels ever, just 40 days from running out. He again emphasises the question of food production: “I am only nine weeks into the job, so don’t yet have all the answers, but it is clear that science and research to increase the efficiency of agricultural production per unit of land is critical.” According to Beddington, food security is the “elephant in the room” that politicians must face up to quickly. In reality, the “elephant in the room” goes far deeper than the surface issues scratched at lamely by the government, and sits in the heart of global food production. Some of Beddington’s observations show that he is dimly aware of this problem. He understands that production needs to be increased drastically. But his solution is a technological one, “science and research” in order to maximise “efficiency” so we can produce faster and better to meet escalating global demand. This is unlikely to happen. Beddington knows it. Benn knows it. The supermarket chains know it. From this conventional analysis of the food crisis, we are not left with many solutions. We may, however, pick among the following: 1) the proliferation and prolongation of droughts due to climate change means that we need to slow down our CO2 emissions by introducing ‘market incentives’ (i.e. big taxes) targeted largely at consumers, who are blamed for having no regard for the size of their individual carbon footprints. transfering to alternative renewable energies is, for some odd reason, irrelevant. 2) reducing population growth in developing countries to decrease demand for food (nothing at all to do with NSSM 200, of course). 3) go easy on the biofuels (but fail to propose investment in other viable alternative energy sources). 4) pray day and night that Science will somehow generate a technological miracle of agricultural production. Obviously, none of these ‘solutions’ seems to really offer a way out for the food crisis — and that’s because the analysis is fundamentally flawed. It’s not completely wrong, it just misses out half the picture, and so comes up with a false diagnosis of what’s actually gone wrong. The result is that the institutions that require urgent re-structuring are being absolved. The government, the state, and the network of giant multinational corporations that govern global agribusiness, are excused of any culpability. The cause of the crisis, we keep hearing is, WE, THE PEOPLE! It’s the developing nations, who just won’t stop breeding, dammit. It’s us Western consumers, who won’t stop eating and throwing a third of our food away. It’s everyone except the state-corporate complex that controls the food industry. I’m not suggesting for a moment that you and I are NOT culpable. Of course we are. We do throw away tonnes, literally, of food. We do, each of us, have large carbon footprints that we should try to reduce in our own ways. Populations are increasing. But the question is this: are these factors the fundamental causes of the current global food crisis? Or are they exacerbating factors that are accentuating and intensifying the impact of the food crisis? Following mainstream news coverage of food shortages, one would be forgiven for believing that rising food prices are all because of you and me, the public, the general consumer. We have been thoroughly pathologised. And the British government, with its eye-opening study of how much food the British consumer chucks away without thinking, is complicit in this pathologisation. Why is that the government-backed report discussed in today’s Independent, says nothing about the institutions who are primarily responsible for food wastage, the supermarkets, the multinational food chains? If the government is genuinely concerned about food wastage in this country, why won’t they do something about the fact reported by the same newspaper in February, that: “Retailers generate 1.6 million tonnes of food waste each year… An influential watchdog, the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), will condemn targets set by the Government’s waste-reduction programme as ‘unambitious and lacking urgency’. It will also say multi-buy promotions are helping to fuel waste and obesity in Britain. Speaking to The Independent on Sunday ahead of the report’s publication on Saturday, Tim Lang, SDC commissioner, said it was ‘ludicrous’ that the Government had not pressured retailers into setting tougher targets to cut waste. Three years ago, the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) left it up to supermarkets to find voluntary ‘solutions to food waste’ in an agreement dubbed the Courtauld Commitment. ‘The Government is frankly not using its leverage adequately. It really should toughen up on Courtauld, which must be enforced because this is ludicrous,’ said Mr Lang, who is also professor of food policy at City University, London. The 18-month study, which found that ‘too many supermarket practices are still unhealthy, unjust and unsustainable’, said Wrap should adopt a ‘more aspirational approach to reducing waste in food retail by setting longer-term targets and [supporting] a culture of zero waste’... A separate study by Imperial College for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, found that supermarkets preferred to throw away food that was approaching its sell-by date rather than mark it down in price.” So three months after being hit over the head by the Sustainable Development Commission, the government’s waste reduction programme completely ignores the warnings that supermarket profit-maximisation policies are not only directly generating billions of pounds of waste by dumping good food, they are encouraging consumers through excessive advertising, multi-buy offers, and refusal to slash prices on older foods, to also buy excess food they don’t need, a third of which they dump in turn. Instead, the government simply blames consumers. Period. Don’t penalise Profit, nor Power. Pathologise People. The corporate-biased law doesn’t help either, because: “The scale of the wastage from supermarkets, food processors, wholesalers and restaurants is not known, because many companies refuse to make their data public, citing commercial confidentiality.” In other words, we don’t even know the real scale of corporate food wastage. Worse, the government regularly does the same thing — here’s an example: “In the past 10 months, the government’s food intervention board dumped almost 30,000 tonnes of fresh vegetables and fruit which had been withdrawn from the market to guarantee farm prices.” So the problem is far more complex, rooted in a consumerist culture that is tied to a political economy being deliberately sustained by those institutions with the most to gain from this entrenched structure. The government has no interest in transforming that political economy. So the result is an insistence on inspecting only half the picture, ignoring the role of the global corporate food industry. Driven by capitalist imperatives for short-term profit maximisation and long-term cost-minimisation, global agribusiness has established an international food production system that is, basically, dying. Most of the Earth’s fertile land is already now being used for food production. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005 reported that “there is now little room for further agricultural expansion.” One of the scientists, Dr Navin Ramankutty, points out: “The real question is, how can we continue to produce food from the land while preventing negative environmental consequences such as deforestation, water pollution and soil erosion?” Or, more bluntly, how are we going to keep producing food if our production-system continues to destroy the very means to produce food? It’s not that the Earth can’t produce the food. Its that corporate agribusiness can’t produce the food. In fact, as I’ve warned previously, it has been failing to produce the food since the 1990s, during which grain production has increasingly slowed. The frenzied application of fertilisers and other modern agricultural practices served to temporarily escalate production, but simultaneously have intensified soil erosion, destroying in years essential nutrients for crop-growth that take centuries to replace. The imminent peak of world oil production, oil being the chief underpinning for industrial agricultural methods, which is either just round the corner in 2010-ish (or worse, passed in 2005) means that the global corporate food production system is up against its own physical limits. For us to keep eating, it’s true, we have to put an end to our insane overconsumption and wastefulness. But there are real limits to what the consumer can do within the existing global corporate food system. So we need to turn our attention to that system, and demand that it changes fundamentally, which means, of course, a wholesale transformation of our political economies in ways which rely on renewable energy resources and localised less-intensive but no less successful traditional agricultural practices. We need some kind of grassroots action, which makes our voices impossible to ignore. It will take time to develop, to become strong, to gather momentum. But it needs to be done, and now. Because at current rates of declining food production and rising prices, fuelled by unscrupulous market speculation, many, many people are likely to die, not just in the South, but here too. And while this death escalates, a few at the helm of the global corporate food industry will reap unprecedented windfall profits from their deaths. That’s why real solutions aren’t being put on the table. Death is regrettable, but when it comes wrapped in $$$, it’s not so bad…

Misguided weapon
7 May 2008
Thank you Dr Nick Ritchie and Bradford department of peace studies. This new report on Trident is a model of analysis and dissection. Every justification ever produced for spending astronomical sums on yet another generation of British nuclear weapons goes under the magnifying glass and gets dealt with briskly and effectively. The report should find its way onto the desk of every person who is in any way responsible for this policy and also onto the desks of those so far silent about it. It’s high time that the major development agencies too had something to say about this vast expenditure. Making poverty history means making Trident history too. The millennium goals would be a doddle if Trident money were redirected. Not just poverty abroad but here as well. For instance, dozens of post offices are to close because, we are told, we cannot afford the subsidies. Trident money could keep the entire post office network going for 125 years. The “we need Trident because the future is uncertain” argument gets fair but robust treatment. By definition, the future, for good or ill, is always uncertain. Tidal waves, asteroids and mad dictators are all possible, but Trident is no answer to any of them. In terms of nuclear threats “our” Trident will increase not reduce dangers. The longer nuclear weapons are around the more likely accident, miscalculation and proliferation into the wrong hands: in fact, there are no “right” hands. At one or two points I came up with a grunt of disagreement. “In sum nuclear weapons contribute little to British security.” Do they add anything to British security? It seems to me that Sweden, New Zealand, and South Africa (which gave its own up without fanfare) are all safer in terms of international threats than we are here. There was also the assumption that Britain would go on trying to be the world’s junior policeman. “It is highly likely that the UK will continue to intervene in regional crises over the coming years with conventional military forces.” If we are to do so it must only be with the authority of the UN security council which is itself bound by the terms of the charter. There is now another study for Ritchie to undertake on an equally important issue. Someone has got to examine the cultural prejudices which lie behind all this. For over 50 years the great British public have been told by all shades of politician that nuclear weapons were the road to security. They were the only way of bringing the second world war to an end. They kept the peace for 40 years. Unless they get into the hands of mad or suicidal people they are quite safe. These are the cultural myths that are just as important as the technical issues. The UNESCO Courier got it right in 1993. “The problem is that belief systems have been built up to support the idea that they [nuclear weapons] are usable and indeed almost indispensable to international security.” Yet there is now a detailed draft treaty, lodged with but not discussed at the UN, aimed at the elimination of all nuclear weapons everywhere. It covers all the key issues of inspection, verification, criminality and whistleblowing. Maybe there is more interest in it today. Gordon Brown and Des Browne have both recently said that a world free of all nuclear weapons is their ultimate destination. They won’t get there while a massive roadblock labelled Trident sits stubbornly in the way.

This smearing of Israel’s critics must stop
7 May 2008
In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence ? and to a large degree, it works. There is now nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, and now even Holocaust survivors. My own case isn?t especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me ?a Jew-lover?, ?a Zionist-homo pig? and more. Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage is being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements onto Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn?t controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes. The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile ?pro-Israel? writers and media monitoring groups ? including Honest Reporting and CAMERA ? said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked. Any attempt to accurately describe the situation for Palestinians is met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, ?Honest Reporting? claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews ?poisoning the wells.? If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was detained ? in labour ? by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, ?Honest Reporting? will say you didn?t explain ?the real cause?: the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on. The former editor of Israel?s leading newspaper, Ha?aretz, David Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups ?nascent McCarthyism?. Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of ?The Case For Israel.? He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing: ?Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary? It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal.? If a prominent American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots. The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last year a group called Independent Jewish Voices was established with this mission statement: ?Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peace and security.? Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and Rabbi David Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them ?Jews For Genocide?, and said they ?encourage? the ?killers? of Jews. Where does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an ?artificial? people who can be collectively punished because they are ?a terrorist population.? She believes that while ?individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project.? Honest Reporting quotes Phillips frequently as their model of reliable reporting. These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter?s decision to speak to the elected Hamas government ?border[ed] on anti-Semitism.? A Ha?aretz poll last month found that 64 percent of Israelis want their government to do just that. As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it ? so last year he wrote a book called ?Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid?. It is a bland and factual canter through the major human rights reports. There is nothing there you can?t read in the mainstream Israeli press every day. Carter?s comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human rights group B?tselem says this ?bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime?. Yet for repeating these facts in the US, Carter has widely called ?a racist?. Several leading Universities have even refused to let the ex-President speak to their students. These campus-battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called ?From Time Immemorial? by Joan Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty when Zionist settlers arrived, and the people claiming to be Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and gross misreading of sources. From that moment on, he was smeared as an anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book. But it was when Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz had, without acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters? hoax for his book ?The Case For Israel?, that the worst began. Dershowitz campaigned to make sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even claimed that Finkelstein?s mother ? who made it through Maidenek and two slave-labour camps ? had collaborated with the Nazis. The campaign worked. Finkelstein ? a distinguished scholar, lauded by some of the leading figures in Holocaust historiography ? was let go by De Paul University, simply for speaking the truth. Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and ?Honest Reporting? becoming more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews ? the majority ? are now setting up rivals to the hard-right organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign of demonisation is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And it damages diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism ? which is growing: my Jewish nephews go to a school with bomb-proof windows ? harder to deal with. To respond to this new McCarthyism, we need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said to Joe McCarthy himself: ?You?ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?? POSTSCRIPT: In my column today, I talk about how an organisation called ?Honest Reporting? orchestrates barrages of complaints against writers who criticise the Israeli government. I thought it might be interesting to give readers a taster of what these e-mails are like. Don?t read them if you are offended by swearing and references to child molestation. Hundreds have asked a variant of ?why do you never criticise Muslims or Arabs?? I always e-mail back with links to dozens of articles in which I have vehemently criticised Islamic fundamentalists and the governments of Iran, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and for which I have been widely (and stupidly) accused of ?Islamophobia.? So far, one has written back to acknowledge they were wrong. The rest either go silent, or change the subject. To be fair, a handful of the e-mails have been polite and rational, and I?ve had an interesting if heated exchange with those readers. But the vast majority are, I?m afraid, like the following three. (To give some context, in the article they are responding to I described the raw sewage I?ve seen pumped out from Israeli settlements on the West Bank at the Palestinians and how it smells.) Ivan Stux from ivanstux@hotmail.com writes: ?When I pass male homosexuals on the street, I sometimes can smell a distinctive pungent scent of shit emanating from them. Might it be that the smell of shit you are sensing as you describe in your article comes from your own behind or mouth, or both, because you forgot to wash after you have been copulated by a man? Does that make you a dirty M.F. (as in male fucked)?? Somebody who doesn?t give their name e-mails from southernwolf@gmail.com to say: ?When I think of ‘Hari’ I smell shit. You aren’t good enough to write about Israel, Jew hater. Long after the so called “Palestinians” have faded into the shithole of history where they belong Israel will remain, proud and strong. By then Jew haters like you will have another “cause”.? John Norman from jdnorman@btopenworld.com writes: ?Surely, it’s your own smell that you smell when you write about Israel. After all, a fat faggot like yourself cant smell of anything else. It must have been your Swiss-nazi Dad that fucked you up the arse when you were a kid and fucked yr tiny brain box to bits. How you were awarded the Orwell Prize for journalism must remain an unexplained enigma for decades to come.? I?ll spare you the hundreds more along the same lines.

Labour?s electoral meltdown continues to worsen
7 May 2008
The meltdown suffered by the Brown government in last week?s local elections, coupled with Ken Livingstone?s defeat by Boris Johnson in the contest for London Mayor, is a major staging post in the ongoing collapse of New Labour. The party?s share of the vote fell to a 40-year low of just 24 percent, compared with 44 percent for the Conservatives and 25 percent for the Liberal Democrats. But its eclipse by the Tories is only part of the picture. Turnout was just 35 percent, confirming the widespread alienation from all the major parties. Labour has long ago lost most of the support it once enjoyed in working class areas. The May 1 poll demonstrated that it has now also lost much of those sections of the middle class electorate it had won from the Conservatives in 1997. In England, these twin factors found expression in the Conservative victory in Bury, in the north, for the first time in 22 years, and Labour?s loss of Reading, one of its few strongholds in the southeast. The picture in Wales is even more devastating. Long considered Labour?s heartland, the party has continued to hemorrhage support and lost control of Merthyr Tydfil, Blaeau Gwent, Torfaen, Caerphilly and Newport councils. No one did particularly well, least of all Labour?s coalition partners in the Welsh Assembly, Plaid Cymru, as Labour?s vote dispersed across the political spectrum and resulted in victories for the Liberal Democrats, Tories and independent councilors. Even so, the rise in support for the Conservatives amongst those who turned out to vote would be enough to secure them a general election victory. The poll has been compared with the situation that faced John Major?s Conservative administration in the local elections that preceded Labour?s landslide victory in 1997. Just as devastating for the government was Livingstone?s defeat in London. Conservative candidate Boris Johnson has a high media profile, having cultivated his image as an eccentric plain speaker. He is in fact an arch right-winger, whose racist and anti-Islamic statements, and denunciations of people from Liverpool, has necessitated him making public apologies and made sections of the Tory party extremely nervous about his candidacy. In the final weeks, he was told to keep his mouth shut and maintain a low profile, leaving his campaign firmly under the control of Lynton Crosby who had spearheaded electoral campaigns for former Australian prime minister John Howard. The pro-Labour press and the party apparatus?along with Respect Renewal, the Socialist Workers Party and the Greens?had all urged support for Livingstone. Labour promoted Livingstone?s support in the City of London, but it also hoped, with the aid of the nominally left and socialist parties, to be able to mobilise support in the inner-city areas, particularly amongst black and Asian workers, by portraying Livingstone as the ?progressive? candidate. Labour?s vote did rise slightly in these areas, but not by nearly enough to counter Johnson?s gains in the outer suburbs. The more fundamental problem for Livingstone and his left apologists was summed up by journalist Andrew Gilligan, who led the pro-Johnson offensive in the pages of the Evening Standard. Responding to accusations that he was backing a reactionary, Gilligan retorted that, ?Livingstone is the ally of some of the most reactionary forces in this city. I?m thinking of [Police Commissioner] Ian Blair, I?m thinking of property developers he?s in bed with, I?m thinking of City big business.? The reaction in Labour circles to its electoral meltdown centred on disaffection with Gordon Brown?s premiership. He was condemned privately and publicly for his performance since taking over from Tony Blair in June 2007. Martin Kettle, a personal friend of Blair, wrote in the Guardian that ?the answer that stares these [Labour] MPs in the face is that, echoing Cromwell, they should tell [Brown]: ?in the name of God, go.? ? And there was widespread speculation as to whether a leadership challenge would be mounted and if so, when. Others more loyal to Brown urged him to ?reconnect? with the electorate and Labour?s traditional supporters, or to ?renew? New Labour?s ?coalition,? supposedly marrying economic efficiency with social justice. All that this produced was the pathetic spectacle of Brown seeking to emulate former US President Bill Clinton by telling the media how he felt ?the hurt? of people struggling with rising prices and mortgage repayments. In reality, Labour?s performance under Brown has only deepened a crisis that began under Blair. When Blair left office, he was widely hated and led a government condemned for the war against Iraq and viewed as a corrupt party of the super-rich. Its previous electoral showing in May 2007 gave it a predicted 27 percent of the national vote in a general election?just 3 percent higher than last week. With Brown?s successions to leadership, there was a concerted campaign to claim a new era for Labour. The Daily Mirror described him as a man ?on fire,? with a new ?moral purpose,? while the Guardian wrote of a new ?dawn? for a ?new government.? What actually took place was that Brown continued the big business agenda of Blair, bringing into government figures such as Sir Digby Jones, former head of the Confederation of British Industry, and praising Margaret Thatcher as a ?conviction politician.? The deluded belief within Labour circles that the new premier would somehow restore the party?s popularity found finished expression in Brown?s humiliating retreat from plans to hold a snap election as early as November last year when it became clear that, at best, Labour?s majority would be slashed and that it might even lose. Brown?s climb-down at that time took place in the aftermath of the collapse of Northern Rock, amidst scenes of savers queuing up to withdraw their money. Since then, the economic crisis that began in the US subprime mortgage market has spread throughout the world and had a particularly severe impact on Britain. Brown admitted, ?What people are most worried about…[is that] petrol prices are going up, food prices are going up, they are worried about utilities bills, they are worried about their standard of living, there is an uncertainty about the economy…. People?s immediate priority is how to deal with the family budgets and the problems we face as a result of what is an economic downturn which started in America.? But while Brown claimed to understand the ?anxiety? over economic insecurity, his government suffered particularly badly at the polls because of its decision to abolish the 10 pence tax band for lower-income workers. The move, which had been announced by Brown when he was chancellor in 2007 and took effect this year, hit millions of people earning less than 15,000 per annum. In the same budget, Brown had slashed the headline corporation tax rate by 2 pence. Under these circumstances, how could anyone believe that Labour?s support would not continue to plummet? Since it came to power, New Labour has functioned as the political representative of the oligarchy, presiding over a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth from working people to the fabulously rich and the City. Only the flooding of the economy with cheap credit and rising property prices helped to partially conceal this process. Now that this possibility no longer exists, the full scale of Labour?s decline becomes apparent. There had been calls for the prime minister to modify the 10 pence tax rate change or make some kind of recompense. But, beholden as it is to big business, Labour?s room for manoeuvre is strictly limited. Writing in Rupert Murdoch?s Times newspaper, Peter Riddell warned that ?the real danger is that the government will find it hard to resist calls for relaxing spending controls and public sector pay limits in order to respond to the worries of Labour MPs and core working-class voters.? This is equivalent to instructing Brown not to do so. Neither does Brown face any substantial unified opposition within the parliamentary Labour Party, let alone one that in any way advances the interests of the working class. Speculation that the leader of the Campaign Group of Labour MPs, John McDonnell, would stand against Brown was quickly dashed by McDonnell himself. In any event, McDonnell could only count on a few MPs and was unable to mount a leadership campaign last year. For his part, Dagenham MP Jon Cruddas, who has the support of the Compass group and is portrayed by the media as a more traditional Labourite, limited himself to calls for Brown to ?learn from Boris Johnson and from [Tory leader] David Cameron as well…. They seem to be more emotionally literate than us. Boris Johnson is connecting with people emotionally.? Aside from that, there are merely reports of 40 or so MPs supposedly considering the possibility of making their unhappiness with Brown public, Brown being ?safe? from direct challenge for at least a year and Labour?s Frank Field speaking about a sense of ?private despair? amongst MPs. What is unfolding is not simply the crisis of a premiership, but the crisis of a party. Labour?s fortunes cannot be restored by changing leaders. It is dead on its feet due to the impossibility of securing a popular mandate for policies that serve the interests of a tiny minority at the expense of working people. Labour is not merely exhausted and in need of reinvigoration. From the standpoint of the working class, it is a hostile entity that must be replaced by a genuine party of socialism.

The Colour of London
7 May 2008
We have been here, or somewhere quite like it, before. Britain’s modernising Labour government presiding over a financial crisis; people’s incomes squeezed by a rise in the cost of living; the government afflicted by its close links to an American administration fighting an unpopular foreign war; and many people worried about the effects of immigration. The voters used the opportunity of the local government elections to humiliate the national government. Labour even lost its London stronghold. This would be the precursor to a Conservative victory in the next general election. Of course, the specifics were different forty years ago. Harold Wilson had a more engaging personality and was closer to the common man than is Gordon Brown. Nevertheless, when Prime Minister Wilson declared in November 1967, following the devaluation of the Pound Sterling: “It does not mean that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket, in your purse or bank has been devalued”, his credibility crumbled. The people’s mistrust was vindicated when inflation rose from about 3% to over 6%. There followed, in April 1968, the infamous speech by the Conservative Shadow Defence Minister Enoch Powell, in which he quoted Virgil, a poet of the ancient Roman Empire: As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see `the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. Powell appealed to the white-skinned plebians in the home island of the defunct British Empire. He identified the dark-skinned migrants from the other lands of the ex-empire as the cause of the troubles of the native workers: ...they found themselves made strangers in their own country.They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker… In case anybody should fail to get the message, Enoch Powell quoted from an alleged conversation with a working class man living in his Wolverhampton constituency:...In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man. The other leaders of the Conservative Party could not be seen to sanction such inflammatory statements.They did not want rivers of blood to flow, and they did want the additional and relatively inexpensive labour which immigration brought to the British economy. In fact Powell himself, during his period as Conservative Health Minister, had encouraged black workers from the Caribbean to come to Britain in order to fill the low-paid positions in Britain’s National Health Service. Powell was dismissed from his post. But through this speech, Powell had snatched the political whip from the faltering hand of the Labour Party and put it into the hand of the Conservative Party. As the chronology in the ’1968 in Europe’ Teaching and Research project recalls: 09.05.1968: Local elections in Britain include race as an unofficial, yet important issue. In polls 74% claim agreement with Powell while 15% claim they disagree with him and 11% are undecided. The Labour vote collapsed, the Conservative Party was triumphant. The Conservatives went on to win the general election of 1971. While the Labour Party’s fortunes would recover, it would always remain vulnerable, especially during periods of economic hardship, to the loss of a significant number of poor and working class voters who are influenced by racist ideas. And Enoch Powell had inflicted severe damage, not just to the Labour Party, but to community relations in Britain. One of the main figures in the task of re- constructing ethnic relationships was a London-based Labour politician, Ken Livingstone. In 1981, during the dark days of Thatcherism, Livingstone unexpectedly emerged as the leader of the Greater London Council (GLC). Unable to persuade voters in the capital city to remove Ken Livingstone from his post, the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC in 1986. However, Livingstone’s successes in his position, which included reducing the price of using public transport, and community development through a multi- cultural approach, left a powerful and positive memory. In 2000, a locally elected political leadership for Britain’s capital city was re-constituted, in the dual form of the Greater London Assembly and the position of Mayor of London. In defiance of Labour Party leaders Tony Blair and Gordon Brown who saw him as too left wing, Livingstone stood for the post of mayor, and won overwhelmingly. Vindicated in defeat We have moved on. Nowadays, most people in Britain would not claim agreement with the divisive racist rhetoric of Enoch Powell, and fortunately, there is currently no figure equivalent to Powell within the mainstream political establishment. But, no less than in May 1968, the outcome of the May 2008 election in London hinged largely on the intersection of ethnicity and class, with the scene for failure set by the inability of the UK government to deal with global economic and political problems. Ken Livingstone, the incumbent Mayor, graced his defeat after eight years in office with a noble untruth: “I’m sorry I couldn’t get an extra few points that would take us to victory and the fault for that is solely my own. You can’t be mayor for eight years and then if you don’t at third term say it was somebody else’s fault. I accept that responsibility and I regret that I couldn’t take you to victory.” Other politicians were right to disagree. The BBC reported:...Justice Secretary Jack Straw said Labour as a whole should shoulder the blame for Mr Livingstone’s loss. He told BBC News: “I disagree with Ken in one particular only, that we all share the responsibility for the defeat that he suffered yesterday.” Mr Straw admitted that the row over the 10p tax rate had left some voters “understandably very upset”. Brian Paddick, the unsuccessful Liberal challenger for the post of London mayor, put it more personally: “Labour suffered because of the failure of Gordon Brown.” These statements are undeniably correct. In the rest of England and Wales, where the record of Gordon Brown was the matter on which the voters delivered their verdict, the Labour vote fell catastrophically, putting the party into third place, behind the Liberals. In London, where the records of both Prime Minister Brown and Mayor Livingstone were put to the test, it was a much closer contest, and one in which the Labour vote actually increased from its level in the previous contest in 2004. An examination of the election results in London shows that in every constituency, the vote for Ken Livingstone as mayor was much higher than the vote for the Labour Party candidates for membership of the Greater London Assembly; also, although he lost, the actual number of votes cast for Mr Livingstone was significantly higher than in 2004. The London election was preceded by a long and intense smear campaign against Livingstone, in which he was accused of having links to Islamic terrorism; making anti-semitic remarks; employing a cabal composed of Trotskyists and financially corrupt individuals; being drunk on duty; and of being an apologist for the murder, by Metropolitan Police officers, of an innocent Brazilian immigrant. This campaign, led by the capital’s only non-freesheet daily newspaper, the London Evening Standard, rose to a crescendo after the Conservatives adopted a celebrity candidate, the affable Boris Johnson. As the results demonstrate, the anti-Ken campaign made little dent in Livingstone’s main base of support. Rather, correctly fearing that he would be defeated in a close contest, the social groups to whom Ken Livingstone most appeals turned out in very high numbers; and when they got to the polling stations, most of them also voted for the Labour Party candidates for the Greater London Assembly (GLA). So, although in the rest of the country the Labour vote collapsed, in London it increased. Labour held all its existing GLA seats, and in one London constituency, Brent and Harrow, the Labour Party candidate for the GLA position unseated the incumbent Conservative. Even in defeat, Livingstone proved to be an asset to the Labour Party. But those who would vote for Boris Johnson, the celebrity candidate of the Conservative Party, turned out in even higher numbers. Class, race and city The outcome of the contest between Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson illustrates the enduring relevance of some hugely important political factors. Firstly, those of class and ethnicity; it shows also how closely class and ethnicity are related. The people who surged into the polling stations to support Livingstone included the black and other ethnic minorities, most of whom are working class and / or poor; and also the majority among the poor and working class whites who do not hold racist opinions. These groups, who mainly although not exclusively inhabit the inner-city areas, were not put off by the virulent anti-Ken smear campaign- because not only does Ken speak for them, he has also delivered to them. Surrounding the class and ethnic aspects was an emotional issue: that of identification with London – not merely as the capital of ones country- but London as ones home city, wherever one was born or ones parents were born; and furthermore as a multicultural city and an international city. Livingstone’s promotion of multiculturalism, during and since his period as leader of the Greater London Council in the 1980s, and his promotion of London on the world stage since becoming Mayor, has helped to transform, and to strengthen among many people, the feeling of identity with the city. This has been assisted by a material factor also- the rising global importance of London as a hub of world finance. Of course, the social groups which comprised Ken Livingstone’s core base are the same groups which have traditionally been the core base of Labour Party support not just in London but throughout Great Britain. As Gordon Brown is discovering, if a party or a leader becomes perceived by their core base of support as no longer articulating their interests or delivering to them, he, she or it will begin to fail. Livingstone did deliver. His success in delivering, within the limited range of powers available to the Mayor of London, has involved some byzantine compromises; indeed, as mayor for eight years, he demonstrated in practice his mastery of the mixed success: difficult compromises, ensuring that the deals he made had positive effects outweighing the negatives. But, due to the nature of these covert agreements, he could never ask to be judged on this great ability; neither could he escape responsibility for the negative aspects. One of Mayor Livingstone’s successes was the tackling of racist behaviour and attitudes within the Metropolitan Police Force. To achieve this, Livingstone needed to win over and shore up the faction among the senior police officers who would get on board with his anti-racist agenda. To simplify, one aspect of the de- facto deal was that the police would receive a rise in funding, allowing a generous increase in the number of policemen and women; this- so long as they were not racist police officers- was no bad thing, and it allowed the mayor to claim credit for the overall reduction in crime which has occurred in the capital. But there was another necessary aspect of the tacit compromise- the mayor had to give his unstinting political support to the police, and particularly to the leader of the fragile faction within the force which was with Livingstone’s agenda- Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair. Fortunately for the Conservatives, disaster struck in the aftermath of the 7/7 terrorist bombing in London. Suspected as a potential bomber merely because he was a man who was in the wrong place, at the wrong time and with the wrong colour skin, the Brazilian electrical worker Jean Charles de Menezes was lynched at Stockwell tube station in South London by an armed unit of the Metropolitan Police on the 22nd of July 2005. There then followed a campaign, opportunistically supported by the Conservative Party, to dismiss Sir Ian Blair from his post. The logic of his position required the mayor to excuse the shocking murder and to defend the Commissioner. For this, Ken Livingstone became the subject of hypocritical outrage. Manufacturing dissent Another of Livingstone’s mixed successes was his management of the public transport system. Defeated in the struggle to prevent the part-privatisation of the London Underground rail network (known as the tube), he was left with the responsibility of managing the dire consequence- to get to work using the tube, it costs the equivalent of about ten US dollars a day, thus either excluding or exacting a punitive tribute from lower-paid workers. Those who can afford, or have no choice but to use the tube, face their entry to the tunnels with little hope of a comfortable journey and no certainty of punctual arrival. However, on the buses- used for short journeys by most people, and even for long journeys by the poor, the lower-paid workers, the nightworkers and also the night revellers- it was a different story. Bus services in England as a whole have been declining since their disastrous privatisation and de-regulation by Margaret Thatcher in the mid-1980s, thus forcing people into their cars or into isolation; in the English shires and metropolitan areas excluding London, this dismal process has continued under New Labour. But, in an unacknowledged concession for Ken Livingstone’s acceptance of defeat on the issue of tube privatisation, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair permitted the London Mayor to aquire sufficient powers and funds to roll hundreds of new and improved buses out onto the roads. As transport pundit Christian Wolmar wrote: Livingstone… concentrated on a deliberate and systematic policy of improving bus services. New routes have been introduced, the bus fleet has been modernised, notably through the introduction of 300 bendy-buses that are easier to board and leave than the old double deckers, and frequencies have been increased. This has reaped major benefits in terms of passenger numbers. The buses were cheap for anyone to use, free for children and pensioners; and thanks to a deal with Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, half-price for the very poorest Londoners. Under Mayor Livingstone’s reign, bus passenger numbers in the capital increased by 45%. Livingstone could not be allowed to get away with this achievement. Ken had produced buses, but the media and the Conservatives could manufacture dissent. The unruly behaviour of some of the children who rode to school by bus was blamed on the mayor. Boris Johnson took up cycling- a means of transport for which Ken Livingstone has been the acknowledged champion; Boris rode out as an enthusiastic exponent of the ‘health and safety culture’, hitherto denigrated by the Conservatives. His foppish blond hair flying in the polluted wind of London’s West End, Mr Johnson declared that the ‘bendy- buses’- a key component of the new public transport fleet- were dangerous, their articulated rear-ends a fearful menace to the bicycling fraternity. He proposed to replace them with an updated version of the obsolete but fondly remembered double-decker ‘routemaster’ bus. Of course, there was an anti-Boris campaign which sought to match the anti-Ken campaign; pointing out that Boris Johnson is a posh ‘hooray Henry’, an Eton educated buffoon, prone to making remarks that insult poor and black people: a man with not a care in the world and unfit to hold a responsible job. And when pressed, Mr Johnson had no idea what it would cost to phase out the bendy-buses and replace them with his proposed new routemasters. Paradoxically, the negative campaigning led not to a decrease but to an increase in both the number of votes and the share of the vote for both the main candidates. The attacks on Boris Johnson did not deter the kind of people whose votes a Conservative candidate was likely to attract; and these were in any case people who were unlikely to consider voting for Livingstone: mainly the better off white people, who live in the suburbs and therefore identify less with London as a city, who are more likely to travel in a four-wheel-drive car than a bendy-bus, and who would not be affected by a revival of racist policing. Another group also voted for Johnson: a minority among the poor and working class whites who, believing that they are in competition with immigrants for jobs and social resources, are influenced by racist ideas. Because it was clear that only Johnson or Livingstone could win, and also because the nature of the ballot allowed voters to spread their crosses between different candidates and parties, a good deal of tactical voting took place. From the results it can be reliably surmised that a large number of Liberal Party supporters voted for Johnson in order to get rid of Ken Livingstone and to inflict a defeat on the Labour government of Gordon Brown. This added at least 5% to Johnson’s vote. Of equal significance, the fascist British National Party (BNP) told its racially- motivated supporters to vote for Johnson, and nearly all of them followed this instruction. The BNP’s support was just over 5%. Livingstone lost by 6%. In the end, it was this tactical convergence by the fascists and many of the Liberals which gave Johnson the edge over Livingstone. The collapsing compromise Still, as Jack Straw and Brian Paddick observed, the main political factor in the defeat of Ken Livingstone was the perceived failure of the Labour government and specifically Gordon Brown at national level. Reasons mooted for Brown’s failure include his dour personality and his poor tactical judgement; without doubt, he lacks the ruthlessness and the hypnotic charm of his predecessor Tony Blair. But Prime Minister Brown has a deeper problem. Like Livingstone, Brown is a man who pursues his agenda through compromise, and the main compromise which worked for Gordon Brown during his years as Chancellor of the Exchequer has come unstuck. During the first two terms following the stunning ‘New Labour’ victory in 1997, Chancellor Brown was able to deliver, to nearly everybody, something of what they wanted. Big business, the City of London and the very rich got their privatisation, their de-regulation and their tax cuts, and this attracted huge amounts of international money into the UK. Brown used much of this money to invest in public services, thereby not only improving those services but boosting employment and pay levels; some of the money was also channelled through the state benefits system to raise the incomes of low-paid workers and other poor people. Thus resistance to privatisation and de-regulation was blunted and concern about rising inequality was allayed. For nearly a decade, the British economy rode high on the back of globalisation and the increasing role of financial services. This was put down to competence, Gordon Brown took political credit for this, and most groups in society drew a dividend, even though the gains were not equally shared. But now the forces of globalisation are delivering higher prices for petrol and food, and the financial services are in crisis. Perhaps Brown saw this coming. He has certainly sought to create a refuge for himself by advancing the concept of Britishness. But while Ken Livingstone made himself into ‘Mr London’ by bringing the ethnic communities together through multiculturalism, Gordon Brown has been trying to become ‘Mr Britain’ at a time when the components of Britain- England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland- are drawing further and further apart; and while also, Britain’s image as perceived by the people who live in it is badly damaged by the UK’s foreign policy, including the subservient relationship to the USA and the Iraq war. Can the Labour Party recover? Following the debacle of 1968, Labour had recovered enough by 1974 to be winning general elections. One of the main reasons for this was that the Conservative government of Edward Heath decided to take on the powerful trade unions, and in response the unions used their power to smash the Conservative government. But, with the complicity of Gordon Brown, most of the industries in which the unions were powerful no longer exist; the remaining trade union members are hamstrung by legislation which, with the complicity of Gordon Brown, makes it very difficult to go on strike effectively; and, with the complicity of Gordon Brown, an ideological atmosphere has developed in which it is impossible for the Labour Party to be associated with strike action. Nevertheless, even in the darkest days, opportunities emerge, and leaders emerge to make use of those opportunities; as when, in 1981, Ken Livingstone unexpectedly emerged as the leader of the Greater London Council.

Migrants: Britain’s hidden labour army
6 May 2008
Xiao Fan came to say goodbye. He had decided to return home, to Tianjin in north China. “I can’t live a life like this any longer, hiding myself in the kitchen every day, fearing the next immigration raid. When it’s so hard to earn even a pittance, it leaves you no dignity. What is the point? I’ve had enough.” He looked at a photo of his son, which he showed me. “When I left home, he was only eight. Now he’s taller than me!” Seven years in Britain have earned him an apartment in his city, which he couldn’t have afforded without coming to work in the dark kitchens here. He has also been able to help his sister with her medical treatment. Healthcare is not for everyone in China today. “I’ve done it for my family. I have no regrets.” When I waved Xiao Fan farewell at the station and saw how relaxed he finally was, I remember that morning when he called me four years ago. I could hear anxiety in his voice. It was the morning after the sea swept away 23 young lives at Morecambe Bay. “Ah Hui is dead. He’s dead. I can’t believe it. He’s dead.” Ah Hui was his colleague. They spent day and night working together in the dingy kitchen of a south London Chinese takeaway before Ah Hui decided to move to a job at Morecambe Bay to improve his income. “I didn’t know lives could be lost so easily working in this country,” Xiao Fan said. Xiao Fan imagined himself having the same destiny as Ah Hui – he knew that he too could have been there that night. For me, like Xiao Fan, the tragedies at Morecambe Bay and Dover were not only saddening stories on the TV screen. It was what happened all around me, and it had a personal impact. I saw people losing their friends and colleagues; losing their parents and their only breadwinners. While multinational corporations globalise their exploitation of workers, workers are pushed to risk their lives crossing borders and trying to earn a living for their families. The death of workers for corporate profits is a direct testimony to the barbarism of the system under which we live. These tragedies motivated me to begin a fact finding journey. I set out to listen to the stories of Chinese migrants and document their working lives. In doing so, I followed many people’s lives, some of them from when they arrived in Britain to when they decided to return home. I knew that gaining access to a workplace could be very difficult, especially when workers have so much to fear: the possibility of their identity being revealed, of losing their job or being arrested and deported. The lack of access, in the case of mainstream journalists, can lead them to reinforce prejudices. A team of cockle pickers once told me that a journalist from a local newspaper in Liverpool knocked on their door soon after the Morecambe Bay tragedy. He wanted hot news, but he didn’t know how to interact with them. He left without talking. The next day, the cockle pickers were shocked to hear that their house had been named “House of Horror” in the newspaper headline. On one occasion I was setting up interviews with the help of a Chinese chef. He said to me, “How can you really know about their lives if you don’t live it yourself? It’s not something you can understand in an interview or two.” The idea of actually spending a few days with my interviewees also came up in the process. Some people challenged me about the idea of undercover work and subterfuge. But didn’t veteran undercover reporter Gunter Wallraff say that sometimes we need to use deception to expose social deception? Over the following two years I went undercover in a variety of workplaces – in a food processing factory in Suffolk; a book packaging factory in Birmingham; on a leek farm in Northamptonshire; as a domestic worker in a private household in London; as a dim sum trolley pusher in London’s Chinatown; and as a receptionist in a brothel in Burnley. Living and working alongside the workers, I was then able to make realistic observations about their working life and see the structure and patterns of recruitment and the below-minimum working conditions in the informal economy. It allowed me to witness evidence of systematic abuse of these migrant workers’ rights. It is precisely the systematic nature of the exploitation that makes it so horrific. Britain maintains the illegality of this hidden workforce, and in doing so benefits from the misery of the informal economy. By denying people’s right to work and keeping them underground, Britain gives the green light to corporate manslaughter, slave wages and forced labour. Zhang Guo-Hua wouldn’t have been worked to death if he had been given the right to work. Lin Yun and Ah Hua wouldn’t have been physically attacked if they were allowed to enter Britain in a legitimate way. Xiao Fen wouldn’t have ended up working in the sex trade if she was permitted to work and not paid a third less than the national minimum wage working in a restaurant kitchen. In 21st century Britain workers are not entitled to basic protection and cannot be guaranteed minimum standards of working conditions because they are without documents. Currently, there are between 700,000 and 1 million people in Britain who are leading this ghost-like existence. Within the European Union there are 5.5 million undocumented people filling labour shortages without any entitlement to rights. I wanted to demonstrate what this means through telling the workers’ own stories. They are speaking for themselves. My book, Chinese Whispers, is narrated from their voices. It is them talking about their struggle: their once in a lifetime decision to migrate for work; their journey in Britain; moved on from job to job to fill the need for temporary seasonal labour; the way they cope with daily exploitation, institutional racism, social exclusion and marginalisation in a country that needs them but doesn’t recognise their rights. Having documented their struggle, I argue that we need to move beyond the current migration debate about numbers and their effects. It’s time to ask: what is Britain doing for the undocumented as workers and as human beings? What should Britain do in order to protect and uphold the rights of workers, regardless of their immigration status? We need to ask these questions: When immigration controls are weakening the labour movement and dividing Britain’s workforce, what are our unions doing? What do they say and do about immigration controls? Are they taking part in the fight against the recent immigration raids that are putting undocumented workers out of work and making them homeless and destitute? Are our unions doing next to nothing? We need to argue for the regularisation of workers’ status. But we need to do it critically. What kind of programme are we backing? We should be very suspicious of regularisation programmes whose criteria exclude certain groups of undocumented migrants. We need to question programmes that give employers more power to determine workers’ status and their future working life. Fundamentally, we need to argue that the right to work across borders is a human right not to be bargained with or compromised. Chinese Whispers is out this month and published by Fig Tree. It is available from Bookmarks.

Brown slated on ?cynical? poverty event
6 May 2008
?Business allies given free ride on rights abuse? British prime minister Gordon Brown today faces heavy criticism for launching his Business Call to Action on global poverty with corporations that have been widely attacked for deepening poverty and undermining human rights. The attack comes from the charity War on Want as Mr Brown and the United Nations Development Programme host a meeting with business leaders to showcase private sector initiatives. The companies behind the Call to Action on the UN?s anti-poverty Millennium Development Goals include several that War on Want has condemned in its reports on poverty and labour rights abuses in Africa, Asia and Latin America: UK mining giant Anglo American, one of the first to sign up to the call, has been criticised for profiting from violence against poor communities in countries such as Colombia, South Africa and the Philippines. Wal-Mart has achieved global notoriety for its record on labour rights and opposition to trade unions. In a recent report War on Want revealed that workers in Bangladesh making clothes for Wal-Mart subsidiary Asda are paid just five pence an hour for toiling 80 hours a week, well short of a living wage. Coca-Cola, which signed up in support of Brown?s call at this year?s World Economic Forum in Davos, has been the target of action in countries such as India and El Salvador for taking communal water resources from poor farmers and for its pollution of agricultural land. Bechtel has been widely attacked over the failed privatisation of water in the Bolivian town of Cochabamba and its subsequent attempts to sue Latin America?s poorest country for millions of dollars. Government officials leading on the Call to Action have told War on Want that there has been no prior screening of the companies? records on human rights or poverty, and that there is no intention of using the initiative to persuade them to clean up their operations overseas. The officials have also admitted there is no mechanism in place to measure whether the new products and services to be announced by the companies will indeed lead to poverty reduction. This is despite UK government acknowledgement that complicity in human rights abuses, labour rights violations and pollution is ?unacceptable? corporate behaviour. John Hilary, War on Want?s new executive director, said: ?This whole event smacks of a cynical public relations exercise. Instead of holding these companies to account for their actions, Gordon Brown has allowed them to portray themselves as allies in the fight against poverty. The prime minister should be working to address the poverty and human rights problems caused by business, not giving the companies a free ride.?

Unfair Trade
6 May 2008
As the AGM of BAE Systems takes place in London today, the company’s supporters will again pop up in the media to trot out the usual phrases about “living in the real world”. In reality, it is these very supporters of the arms trade who display staggering levels of naivety. This became very clear last month, at the time of a landmark High Court ruling in favour of the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) and The Corner House. The judges ruled that the government had behaved unlawfully in cutting short a corruption investigation into BAE’s Saudi arms deals. Among the congratulatory messages which flooded into the CAAT office were a few abusive ones and the odd death threat. But one message left on my phone began: “I’m a member of the British public and I live in the real world.” The anonymous caller claimed that were “thousands of British jobs” dependent on Saudi arms deals. His comment was typical of people who believe that it is naive to oppose the arms trade but who simply accept assertions about employment figures without scrutiny. Such scrutiny is vital to those of us who believe that everybody’s livelihood is extremely important. As a child in the early 1980s, while my unemployed father quite literally got on his bike to find work, I experienced the realities of unemployment far more closely than most of those who are willing to make questionable claims about jobs to claw back public support for BAE – such as Norman Tebbit in the Daily Mail recently. This sight was common in 2006, when BAE was lobbying for the Saudi corruption investigation to be dropped. BAE’s supporters rushed onto radio and television, pausing only to pluck random figures from the air. A report by arms companies had previously suggested that BAE’s latest Saudi arms deal might create 11,000 jobs across the whole of Europe. By November, BAE was citing the figure of 16,000 British jobs, while the figure of 50,000 regularly appeared in the media. After the investigation was dropped, and the deal signed, BAE admitted that most of the jobs would not even be based in the UK. Saudi Arabia was to receive 72 Eurofighter aircraft, the first 24 of which had been intended for the RAF, who now have to take second place; so much for British jobs and national security. BAE is keen to present itself as good for Britain, having reacted to the recent bad publicity with an advertising campaign covered in union flags. This is rather rich, given that BAE is developing away from the UK. George Bush’s aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan has created countless business opportunities for those who profit from war and BAE now has more staff and shareholders in the USA than in the UK. Far from enhancing our country, BAE has weakened it. In the High Court last month, judges found that the BAE investigation had been dropped following a Saudi threat. They described this as a “successful attempt by a foreign government to pervert the course of justice in the United Kingdom”. Giving the impression that Britain will give into threats sends an appalling message to terrorists. Most of all, BAE’s supporters are naive about the arms trade itself. I have lost count of the times that I have been accused of opposing arms deals “even when countries need arms for self-defence”. This displays an utterly unrealistic perception of what the arms trade is about. The main players in the arms trade are often those using weapons for aggression and repression. Indonesia has been a good customer of BAE, not the people of West Papua who have they so easily bombed. Morocco and China both appeared at the DSEi arms fair in London last year, but no representatives from the Western Sahara or Tibet. People suffering aggression are victims of arms companies, not their customers. Sometimes the attitude of arms trade supporters goes beyond naivety. Some suggest that corruption is a western concern and “they play by different rules to the ones we stand by here”. This ignores the reality that when bribery leads to ministers wasting public money on arms they will not use it to provide health care or tackling poverty. The victims of bribery are the poorest people in the poorest countries. Yet people here in Britain are also victims of the arms trade. The unhealthy influence of arms companies over government distorts democracy and leads to about 850m of taxpayers’ money being spent every year on subsidies for the arms trade, although only 0.2% of UK jobs depend on it. In these circumstances, it is no surprise that BAE can boast about how many engineers it employs. I am often told by engineering students that their career prospects will be severely damaged if they are not willing to work in the arms trade. Is this where British taxes and British skills should be going? Future generations may not understand why we chose not to subsidise the engineering needed to tackle the unprecedented horrors of climate change but to assist the sale of weapons to dictators. They will think that anyone who thought this would help Britain must have been shockingly naive. The world in which supporters of the arms trade live is not based on reality, but on fantasy. It is a world straight out of 1950s boys’ adventure stories. It is a place in which honest British arms companies work hard to provide jobs and to sell arms to grateful democracies in need of self-defence. It is a world in which any British company engaging in bribery would do so reluctantly and only because you can’t expect foreigners to live up to our standards. It is based in a fictitious Britain in which millions of people work in the arms trade and climate change isn’t real. This is a world as real as Narnia and most British people know it. They would rather see their taxes used for health and education, just as many engineering graduates would rather use their skills to fight climate change. They know that corruption kills, that the arms trade fuels aggression and that arms trade bosses are moved to emotion not by the union flag but by profit graphs. A dwindling minority of people – among them a disproportionately high number of politicians and columnists – still remain oblivious to this. After a year which has seen an unprecedented rise in public opposition to the arms trade, it’s time for such people (as they would put it) to move into the real world.

The Surveillance Society Does Not Work
5 May 2008
Costing in excess of billions of pounds each year, every single area of the British surveillance society has been proven ill effective when dealing with crime, fraud and terrorism ? the very reasons government officials implement such measures. Which begs the question: How can the Government justify such spending when it also imposes an increasing risk to our personal freedom and privacy? What is more, as current technology has failed to live up to the expectations of the British Government they still have widespread plans to advance citizen surveillance like we have never seen before. Passport Interrogations The latest statistics are cause for concern. A procedure introduced in 2007 made it compulsory for all passport applicants to attend face-to-face interviews. We were told this was a necessary measure in fraud prevention but out of 90,000 interviewees not a single criminal had been caught. The cost of the network has run into the hundreds of millions. DNA Database More statistics show the DNA database, which contains the details of over one million innocent people, has almost zero effect in solving crimes. On average just 1 in every 800 crimes will be solved and the cost runs into the millions, turning the innocent into suspects. Each DNA sample added to the database cost 3,575 – last year the database held 660,000 samples. Phil Booth of NO2ID said: ?This utterly blows away the myth that the DNA database is the perfect detection tool. It is, in fact, creating-a nation of suspects.? The British DNA database contains 4.5 million samples and is the largest in the world yet it does not hold the information of terrorist suspects or serious offenders currently in jail. Police across the EU can access the database creating what civil liberty advocates call a ?Big Brother Europe?. CCTV Just this week it was revealed that only 3% of London street robberies were solved using CCTV. Britain is the most monitored country in the world with an average of one CCTV per ever 14 people. ?Billions of pounds has been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court. It?s been an utter fiasco: only 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV. There?s no fear of CCTV. Why don?t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working,? said Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville. Still the development of a national facial recognition CCTV database continues at the taxpayer?s expense. RIPA What is more worrying still is the use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), a spy law that was introduced in 2000 which gives the police and security services the power to monitor people and their communications. In 2002 the act was extended to include local councils allowing them to commit extensive surveillance of its citizens. The law was introduced to catch terrorists but is currently being used to stop benefit cheats, anti-social behaviour, graffiti and even poor parking. The abuse of Government authority is abundantly clear as our privacy and freedoms are needlessly stripped way while the taxpayer is forced to pay for technology which fails to protect us from criminals or terrorists. A surveillance society simply does not work.

Legal Blow to Secret Government Lobbying
5 May 2008
The Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) has lost an appeal to keep secret its meetings with business lobbying group the Confederation of British Industry. The case has dragged on for three years and originally concerned secret meetings between the CBI and BERR, which was formerly known as the Department of Trade and Industry. Friends of the Earth asked for information about a series of meetings between Digby Jones, then boss of the CBI and Alan Johnson, DTI minister, as well as a corporate jolly for senior civil servants and CBI staff. Last year the Information Commissioner ordered the DTI to release most of the information requested. But BERR, including Minister of State for Trade and Investment Digby Lord Jones of Birmingham – previously known as Digby Jones, boss of the CBI – appealed the decision to the Information Tribunal. The Tribunal ruled yesterday that most of the information requested by FoE should indeed be released. Phil Michaels, head of legal at Friends of the Earth, said: “The Tribunal has recognised the strong public interest in members of the public having access to lobbying records and has recognised that transparency is particularly important where a group like the CBI has privileged access to Government to push their views. It is crucial that the Government now changes its outmoded culture of secrecy.” A spokesman for BERR said: “We believe that there are circumstances where it is in the public interest to protect the ‘thinking space’ necessary for good public policy formulation and to enable the Department to have a private discourse with external organisations.” The judgement reads in part: “In our view, there is a strong public interest in understanding how lobbyists, particularly those given privileged access, are attempting to influence government so that other supporting or counterbalancing views can be put to government to help ministers and civil servants make best policy. Also there is a strong public interest in ensuring that there is not, and it is seen that there is not, any impropriety.” BERR claimed that making such meetings public would have a chilling effect on meetings between it and lobby groups. The Tribunal said it viewed such possible effects with sceptism. BERR has 28 days to comply with the ruling or to take an appeal to the High Court. The victory is a big filip for the wider movement, led by the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency, to force the UK government to introduce more transparency into its dealings with lobbying groups. ALT is calling for compulsory registration of lobby groups and a record of their meetings with politicians and civil servants. The full judgement is available as a 44 page pdf – follow the link below. http://www.informationtribunal.gov.uk/Documents/decisions/DBERRvIC_FOEfi…

Travelling Light
5 May 2008
Of all the charges levelled against environmentalists, perhaps the most unfair is the accusation that we are opposed to technological change. Most of the greens I know are fascinated by gadgets (sometimes to the exclusion of better solutions), while some of the people we confront seem terrified by new technologies, and react to them – witness the campaigns against windfarms – with irrational hostility. But because environmentalists tend to have a feeling for material constraints, we recognise that solutions cannot be conjured out of thin air. In some cases they just don?t appear to exist. There are two reasons why we make such a fuss about flying. The first is that, even as governments promise to cut emissions, everywhere airports are expanding. In the UK, the government expects the number of airline passengers to rise from 228 million in 2005 to 480 million in 2030(1). Before long, there will scarcely be a patch of sky without a jet in it. The other is that there are no alternative means of propelling people through the air which are not more destructive than burning ordinary aviation fuel. Or so we think. The airline companies prescribe two cures that are even worse than the disease. Even before they are deployed commercially in jets, biofuels are spreading hunger and deforestation. At first sight, hydrogen seems more promising. If it is produced by electrolysis using renewable electricity, it?s almost carbon-free. The prohibitive issue is storage. Hydrogen contains just a quarter of the energy as the same volume of jet fuel (kerosene), which means that planes could fly long distances only if they were filled with gas rather than passengers or cargo. This means that if hydrogen planes are to fly commercially, they need much wider bodies than ordinary jetliners. According to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution ?the combination of larger drag and lower weight would require flight at higher altitudes? than planes fuelled by kerosene(2). A technology that is green at ground level becomes an environmental disaster in the stratosphere. Hydrogen?s great advantage ? that it produces only water when it burns ? turns into a major liability: in the stratosphere, water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas. The royal commission estimates that hydrogen planes would exert a climate changing effect ?some 13 times larger than for a standard kerosene fuelled subsonic aircraft.?(3) But there is another use for this gas, though I am aware that it will go down like a lead balloon with most of my readers. The word airship elicits a fixed reaction in almost everyone who hears it: ?what about the Hindenburg??. It?s as if, every time someone proposed travelling on a cruise ship, you were to ask, ?but what about the Titanic??. Yes, there was a spectacular disaster ? 71 years ago. It has lodged in our minds because, like the Titanic, the Hindenburg was bigger and plusher than any craft built before it, and it was carrying rich and prominent people. The conflagration was witnessed by journalists and broadcast all over the world. It also become the technology?s funeral pyre: the Hindenburg was doomed long before it burnt, as airships were already being displaced by aeroplanes. Though the designs have changed, their disadvantages have not disappeared. While a large commercial airliner cruises at about 900 kilometres per hour, the maximum speed of an airship is roughly 150kph. At an average speed of 130kph, the journey from London to New York would take 43 hours. Airships are more sensitive to wind than aeroplanes, which means that flights are more likely to be delayed. But they have one major advantage: the environmental cost could be reduced almost to zero. Even when burning fossil fuels, the total climate-changing impact of an airship, according to researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, is 80-90% smaller than that of ordinary aircraft(4). But the airship is also the only form of transport which can easily store hydrogen: you could inflate a hydrogen bladder inside the helium balloon. There might be a neat synergy here: one of the problems with airships is that they become lighter – and therefore harder to control – as the fuel is consumed. In this case they become heavier. Michael Stewart of the company World SkyCat suggests burning both gaseous and liquid hydrogen to keep the weight of the craft constant(5). Airships fly much lower than planes ? typically at about 4000 feet ? which means that their emissions of water vapour have very little effect on temperature. If they were powered by hydrogen fuel cells, they would be almost silent, greatly reducing the effects for people on the ground. Though they are slower than jets, the cabin can be built much wider, which means that travelling by airship would be rather like travelling by cruise ship, but at twice the speed and using a fraction of the fuel. There are four small companies trying to get airships off the ground(6). Most of the new designs make use of aerodynamic lift as well as buoyancy (they are shaped like fat planes with stubby wings or tails) which means that they are heavier and more stable than the old dirigibles, and can land without help on the ground. They can alight on and take off from almost any flattish surface, including water. But all of them have a problem with flotation: of the financial rather than the physical kind. While the price of carbon stays low, companies have no financial incentive to switch to a different form of transport. The only help governments are prepared to provide is some development funds for military applications (raising money for killing people is always easier than raising money to save them). For a few years the Pentagon took an interest in craft which could land anywhere and carry several hundred tonnes of equipment(7). Otherwise, like so many other promising green technologies, this proposal is losing height in a hostile market. All the companies promoting large commercial airships are concentrating on freight, especially in places which are poorly served by roads. The danger here is that, if they take off, they could displace not jet transport but freight shipping, in which case, if they burn diesel, they are likely to cause a net increase in carbon pollution. Paradoxically, the other major constraint could be an environmental one. Airships are one of several green technologies which might be killed by a shortage of materials. A new generation of solar panels relies on gallium and indium, whose global supplies appear close to exhaustion(8). The price of platinum, which is used in catalytic converters, has tripled over the past five years(9). Beyond a few natural gas fields in Texas, economically viable supplies of helium are rare; even there they might be exhausted in 50 years at current rates of use, or much faster if airships take off(10,11). If there is a God, he isn?t green. Is this proposal just a flight of fancy? Because airships feature in no official document, because they have not been considered by either government or major industry, I have no way of knowing. But like most greens I?m prepared to try almost anything, as long as it works. Can the same be said of our opponents? References: 1. Department for Transport, November 2007. UK Air Passenger Demand and CO2 Forecasts. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/aviation/environmentalissues/ukairdemandandco2… 2. Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, , 29th November 2002. The Environmental Effects of Civil Aircraft in Flight: special report, para 4.27. http://www.rcep.org.uk/aviation/av12-txt.pdf 3. ibid, para 3.47. 4. Alice Bows, Kevin Anderson and Paul Upham, February 2006. Contraction & Convergence: UK carbon emissions and the implications for UK air traffic, p23. Technical Report 40. Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. www.tyndall.ac.uk/research/ theme2/final_reports/t3_23.pdf 5. Michael Stewart, pers comm. 6. World SkyCat Ltd, 21st Century Airships Team Inc, Aeroscraft and Ohio Airships. 7. See http://www.defensetech.org/archives/Draft_Solicitation_Walrus.pdf 8. David Cohen, 23rd May 2007. Earth?s natural wealth: an audit. New Scientist. 9. See http://www.platinum.matthey.com/prices/price_charts.html 10. Nicola Jones, 21st December 2002. Under Pressure. New Scientist. 11. No author given, 5th January 2008. Helium Supplies Endangered, Threatening Science And Technology. ScienceDaily. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080102093943.htm

Reaping What they have Sown
4 May 2008
The collapse of Labour ?s vote in these local elections is about something more than New Labour ?s Daily Mail electoral tactics and the stay-at-home revolt of Labour?s traditional supporters. Though this continues to be a factor ? reinforced by the 10 per cent tax ?mistake?. But there?s something deeper going on and it?s less easy to reverse. New Labour is now reaping what it has sown: a cumulative weakening in values of social solidarity, public service and altruism which provide the invisible bedrock on which the electoral fortunes of the Labour Party ultimately depend. New Labour has lived electorally off the legacy of earlier eras of Labour politics without renewing it and it?s a renewal that has been direly needed. From Mandelson?s celebration of the ?filthy rich? and Blair ?s contempt for public sector workers to Gordon Brown?s present refusal to properly reward public servants and the contracting out of services to private business means self-seeking individualism has been valorised and public service ethics denigrated. In his first few months as prime minister, Brown appeared to acknowledge the need to explicitly advocate social democratic value but it wasn?t reflected in significant policy shifts. And he now seems to have abandoned even this relatively superficial effort to shift Labour?s presentational tone. Brown?s strategy (the economic foundations of New Labour) has been to make Britain a fast growing economy competing on the terms set by finance-led global capitalism and to stealthily engineer a trickle down to the deserving poor. As we all know by now, this has meant being soft on the super rich and a micro redistribution from the lower end of the top 10 per cent highest earners to low income families. This formula could more or less appear to work when the economy was buoyant but as soon as this speculation-led growth began to falter New Labour ?s uncritical attachment to the priorities of the City was visibly paralysing. As growth slows the government has less money to spend on tackling poverty or investing in services and it dare not borrow more or tax the wealthy because this will torpedo the Thatcherite economic model they inherited and developed. They?ve been outflanked by the Governor of the Bank of England who last week made the kind of statement attacking city pay and incompetence that we should have been hearing from Labour?s front benches . Even Mayor Johnson expostulates about the growing ?inequality between rich and poor?. (It will be interesting to see whether he sticks by his commitment to London Citizens to maintain Livingstone?s use of the GLA?s power as employer and purchaser to implement a living wage of 7.50 an hour).We are seeing a new Tory rhetoric of fairness combined with a strong anti-statism aimed at a caricature of Gordon Brown?s ?top-down government?. The combination has an appeal which New Labour is finding difficult to answer because it has neither a strategy for social justice nor a confident vision of the positive role of the state. The two go together. Seriously redistributive and now green taxation is only politically possible if the state has real legitimacy; if there?s a popular belief grounded in experience, that it responds to people?s needs and the money paid in taxes is returned in responsive services which users feel are theirs. Back to the future The British state won this legitimacy throughout the post-war decades of reconstruction, building the welfare state and enjoying its first benefits. The result was a 20-year or so social democratic consensus legitimating taxation and redistribution. The administration and delivery of these social benefits, however, was via an unreformed mandarin state whose administrative hierarchies were imitated throughout the pubic sector and whose most powerful links with civil society were predominantly with business . The result was a daily experiences of state institutions – from universities and the education system through to local government and even the health service – that was contradictory and frustrating. Unresponsive to growing expectations and a new diversity of demand. The movements of the 1960s and 1970s were one response. Arguably one reason for the significance and lasting memory of Ken Livingstone?s GLC was that it was one of the few politically successful experiments in translating the diffuse but creative radicalism of the 1970s into a popular political programme. It was cut short in its prime. We all know what happened then. But perhaps now after 1 May the significance of what didn?t happen is coming home to roost for New Labour ? and tragically for Londoners as a result of Ken?s political downsizing to rejoin the party he once loved. What didn?t happen was the Labour Party grasping the importance of the GLC experiment – in all its messiness -and showing the possibility of transforming, opening and democratising state institutions, and translating this on to the national level. It could have been the basis of a direct challenge to Thatcher?s privatisation and Hood Robin approach to redistribution. Indeed Norman Tebbit saw the threat when he remarked of the GLC on the eve of its abolition: ?this is modern socialism and we will kill it.? It?s no real comfort but there was in Livingstone?s extra 14 per cent support on 1 May, on top of Labour?s share national vote, a residue of that old potential to present a modern alternative. Reactivate public service values We on the radical but pragmatic left cannot now simply say ?I told you so.? It?s mightily tempting. But we are in no position to come out of the wings with a perfectly formed alternative strategy and means of implementing it. But the belief in public service values are still there on the ground, as is much thinking and experimentation in renewing them. But they lie dormant, unnurtured, lacking champions and increasingly overgrown in the jungle of competitive, self-seeking values. It?s not to late to reactivate them. Drawing together the scattered left, across party boundaries, we need to resist the persistent and pervasive intrusion of a narrow, desiccated commercial logic into every public space. And to resist by celebrating the values of cooperation, of human ingenuity meeting urgent sometimes desperate social needs, of the satisfaction of helping to resolve the problems of fellow citizens. These values are still daily enacted all over the place; in hospital intensive care units, in what?s left of youth services working innovatively with voluntary organisations, in councils that have blocked privatisation and developed means of genuine improvements and so on. Everyone has their own personal stories of public services values being practiced, unsung, not only within the public sector but in voluntary organisations working long hours and in the face of almost impossible funding pressures. These values and the kind of practices keeping them alive against the odds need the mutual reinforcement of some kind of broad based national movement. Addressing this need is surely a condition for reviving the electoral fortunes of the Labour Party or indeed any party on the left.

Fair Wages are a Fantasy
4 May 2008
... in the brutal underside of Cowboy Boss Britain With Labour reeling from the worst electoral drubbing for four decades, you could argue that this week is not a good moment to bring out an exhaustively researched, carefully thought-out report on the blight of insecure, low-paid work in the UK, 18 months in the making. But this Wednesday was set for the date of the launch of the TUC’s Commission on Vulnerable Employment (of which I’ve been a member) many months back, and no one envisaged then that one of the biggest research initiatives of the TUC since 1997 would thump its catalogue of the inadequacies of Labour employment policy on Brown’s desk at such a point of desperate soul-searching. But I would argue that this investigative analysis is exactly what Brown needs if he is to understand what happened last Thursday. Brown makes much of his commitment to poverty. Even his most grudging critics concede that some headway has been made on child poverty even if it has not been enough. But the headline figures obscure how stubbornly persistent the phenomenon of working poverty has been. Many poor families may now have an earner, but it has not got them out of poverty: the number of poor children living in working households is 1.4 million – exactly the same figure as it was in 1997. Half of all children living in poverty have a parent in work. The advances in child poverty have been among those on benefits, while the number of poor working households with children has actually increased by 200,000. Labour promised it would “make work pay”. It hasn’t. Low pay is not just a problem of an extreme underclass or of migrants; it is endemic across the country. One in seven of all working households are poor; one fifth of all workers, 5.3 million people, are paid less than £6.67 an hour (two thirds of the median), the worst low-pay rate of any in Europe. It works out at less than a £12,000 salary. In some regions, the proportion of low-paid is well over 25%, while in some constituencies (in Wales, Birmingham, the West Midlands, even the rural West Country) it is comfortably over 40%. For those scratching their heads over the mystery of Labour losing Merthyr Tydfil, perhaps they should look at the pattern of low-paid, insecure work. This is the shocking record of a country after 11 years of Labour rule and economic boom. It explains why the 10p tax debacle caused such resentment: these are the “hard-working families” extolled in Brown’s speeches and yet they are scrabbling to make ends meet. The Brownite rhetoric of “unleashing potential” is a nonsense to those trapped in jobs that consign them to fall ever further behind. This report challenges another of Brown’s much-used rhetorical flourishes: fairness. He talks of it as a national characteristic, but it’s not one that the 5 million-strong army of low-paid, insecure workers would recognise. This is the section of the labour market where regulations about the minimum wage, holiday pay and employment rights reach only intermittently or not at all. The chance of an employer being inspected on the minimum wage is once every 330 years. Given such odds, an unscrupulous employer takes the risk. Labour has made much of bringing in the minimum wage and the working time directive (which gave many workers their first rights to paid holiday) but after these advances, the reality is that progress in tackling Britain’s chronic problem with low-paid, insecure work stalled. Increases in the minimum wage are not keeping pace with average earnings, and it is set at a considerably lower rate than in other countries. A combination of political cowardice (Brown didn’t want a fight with the CBI) and indifference – it earns no political capital with middle England – ensured that Labour has repeatedly prevaricated in tackling this brutal underside of Britain’s economic boom. It has fudged crucial issues such as equal treatment for agency workers or the much-needed clarification on worker status, a legal loophole which makes a mockery of employment rights – both were manifesto commitments. The months of sitting on the commission listening to people’s accounts of their working lives and to those who tried to offer advice when things went wrong provided a glimpse of what an obstacle course it is when you’re poor. It’s not always the lack of material resources that cuts deepest, but the lack of power and the absence of options. When you’re sacked or when you don’t get the sick pay or holiday pay you are owed, how do you fight back? How do you find the employment adviser to help or the courage to stand up to an employer and the sheer guts to take a case to an employment tribunal with no legal aid or a lawyer to help you? The answer is that more often you don’t, you can’t – and that’s how you get trapped in bad jobs. Poor pay is inextricably bound up with a culture of institutional negligence: no one ensures workers know their rights or how to find out about them; a myriad of enforcement agencies with tiny budgets confuse everyone, and the legal system to arbitrate on abuse is slow and inaccessible. While the government has consulted and dithered, low-paid, insecure work has flourished like some rapacious mould. The face-to-face legal advisers (which the most vulnerable are known to find easier to deal with) have been axed and replaced with cheap websites and telephone helplines (but how do you know about them?). English language lessons have been cut. While millions of pounds are devoted to advertising for benefit fraud, the amount allocated to advertise the national minimum wage was, until a recent increase, a sixth of that spent on a government campaign urging people to use tissues when they sneeze. Here is a compelling moral purpose on which that famous Brown compass could take its bearings. I haven’t a clue if it will restore his electoral fortunes, and frankly that’s not the point. This is an issue that any Labour government worthy of its name should have sorted out by now and yet it has devoted a fraction of the effort and energy required. If Labour cannot ensure that at the end of a hard week’s work, someone has earned enough to keep themselves and their children out of poverty, then it doesn’t deserve