NUJ film shows police obstruction of journalists
10 Sep 2008
The NUJ has released a short film highlighting some of the problems faced by journalists covering public demonstrations. View it here The video was released the day after the TUC in Brighton condemned the erosion of civil liberties and media freedoms in Britain. TUC unions unanimously backed a motion, proposed by the National Union of Journalists, which called for a rethink of government policies that put journalists at risk of imprisonment just for doing their job. Speaking after the TUC vote, NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear said: ?Journalism is facing grave threats in an age of intolerance. Whilst on the streets dissent is being criminalized, independent journalism is being increasingly caught in the civil liberties clampdown.? The nine-minute video, called Press Freedom: Collateral Damage, includes examples of the police obstructing journalists in their work. Release of the film follows numerous complaints from media workers who have experiences of the police going beyond their powers in attempting to restrict the ability of journalists to do their work. The NUJ?s motion to the TUC was part of a wider campaign for a greater recognition of press freedom by the UK government. The motion also highlights cases of journalists, such as Robin Ackroyd and Shiv Malik, who have faced the threat of jail because of legal demands to reveal confidential source information. In his speech to Congress, Jeremy Dear drew attention to the case of Sally Murrer, who is facing criminal prosecution for receiving information from a police source, and highlighted the problems faced by journalists attempting to cover the recent Climate Camp in Kent. Jeremy said: ?The terrorising of journalists isn?t just done by shadowy men in balaclavas, but also by governments and organisations who use the apparatus of the law or state authorities to suppress and distort the information they do not want the public to know and to terrorise the journalists involved through injunctions, threats to imprisonment and financial ruin. ?The use of the Terrorism Act and SOCPA increasingly criminalize not just those who protest but those deemed to be giving the oxygen of publicity to such dissent. Journalists? material and their sources are increasingly targeted by those who wish to pull a cloak of secrecy over their actions.? The speech concluded: ?This isn?t over-zealous policing this is a co-ordinated and systematic abuse of media freedom ? and we must expose it, challenge it and act against those who undermine the rights of photographers, journalists and media workers. ?And we must do so because if whistleblowers and sources fear speaking out, if photographers and journalists cannot probe the dark corners of business, politics or human rights, the ability of the media ? already under threat from concentration of ownership and cost-cutting ? to hold power to account, to expose wrongdoing, to provide the information on which citizens can make informed decisions about their lives will be seriously compromised. ?The Terrorism Act and SOCPA are not sophisticated security policies ? they are the blunt instruments of an intolerant government. ?As if in some Orwellian nightmare the Ministry of Freedom tells us that the price we must pay for peace and liberty at home is not just a war in Iraq ? not just the billions spent on war ? but, in the wake of the London bombings, is the fingerprinting of council workers and the covert surveillance of M&S workers. It is ID cards and 42-day detention. It is curbs on the right to protest, the civil contingencies act and it is the extension of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, a snoopers? charter giving access to personal texts, emails and internet use. ?The price is too high. Less liberty does not imply greater security. It never has. ?Our movement has been at the forefront of the great struggles for human and civil rights over the past century. In this age of intolerance new struggles must be waged and we must lead that fight.?

Climate Campaigners Acquitted!
10 Sep 2008
Ministers suffered a blow to their energy plans today as six Greenpeace volunteers were acquitted of criminal damage by a Crown Court jury in a case that centred on the contribution made to climate change by burning coal. The charges arose after the six attempted to shut down the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent last year by scaling the chimney and painting the Prime Minister’s name down the side. The defendants pleaded ‘not guilty’ and relied in court on the defence of ‘lawful excuse’ ? claiming they shut the power station in order to defend property of a greater value from the global impact of climate change. Today’s acquittal is a potent challenge to the Government’s plans for new coal-fired power stations from jurors representing ordinary people in Britain who, after hearing the evidence, supported the right to take direct action in order to protect the climate. Over five days of evidence Maidstone Crown Court heard testimony from the world’s leading climate scientist, an Inuit leader from Greenland and David Cameron’s environment adviser. The jury was told that Kingsnorth emits 20,000 tonnes of CO2 every day – the same amount as the 30 least polluting countries in the world combined ? and that the Government has advanced plans to build a new coal-fired power station next to the existing site on the Hoo Peninsula in Kent. The ‘not guilty’ verdict means the jury believed that shutting down the coal plant was justified in the context of the damage to property caused around the world by CO2 emissions from Kingsnorth. One of the Kingsnorth 6, Emily Hall, said after her acquittal: “This is a huge blow for the Government’s plans to build new coal-fired power stations. It’s coal that should have been on trial, not us. After this verdict, the only people left in Britain who think new coal is a good idea are business secretary John Hutton and the energy minister Malcolm Wicks. It’s time the Prime Minister stepped in, showed some leadership, and embraced a clean energy future for Britain.” Another of the defendants, Ben Stewart, added: “This verdict marks a tipping point for the climate change movement. If jurors from the heart of Middle England say it’s legitimate for a direct action group to shut down a coal-fired power station because of the harm it does to our planet, then where does that leave government energy policy? We have the clean technologies at hand to power our economy, it’s time we turned to them instead of coal.” The defence called as a witness Professor James Hansen, a NASA director who advises Al Gore and is known as the world’s leading climate scientist. Hansen told the court that more than a million species would be made extinct because of climate change and calculated that Kingsnorth would proportionally be responsible for 400 of these. “We are in grave peril,” he told the jury. He said he agreed with Al Gore’s statement that more people should be chaining themselves to coal-powered stations. “Somebody needs to step forward and say there has to be a moratorium, draw a line in the sand and say no more coal-fired power stations.” Asked by Michael Wolkind QC, for the defence, if carbon dioxide damages property, Hansen replied, “Yes, it does.” Asked if stopping emissions of any amount of it therefore protects property, he replied, “Yes it does, in proportion to the amount.” He added that he thought there was an immediate need to protect property at risk from climate change. Tory green adviser Zac Goldsmith also gave evidence for the defence. He told the court: “By building a coal-power plant in this country, it makes it very much harder in exerting pressure on countries like China and India. I think that’s something that is felt in Government circles.” He later told the jury: “Legalities aside, I suppose if a crime is intended to prevent much larger crimes, I think then a lot of people would consider that as justified and a good thing.” Some of the property the court was told was in immediate need of protection included parts of Kent at risk from rising sea levels, the Pacific island state of Tuvalu and areas of Greenland. The defendants also cited the Arctic ice sheet, China’s Yellow River region, the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica, coastal areas of Bangladesh and the city of New Orleans. The acquittal is the first case where preventing property damage from climate change has been used as part of a ‘lawful excuse’ defence in court. The defence has previously been successfully deployed by defendants accused of damaging a military jet bound for Indonesia to be used in the war against East Timor before independence. The defendants had intended to paint ‘GORDON BIN IT’ down the side of the chimney but were served a High Court injunction by police helicopter, meaning they only got as far as painting the Prime Minister’s first name. Last month a new report by Poyry – Europe’s leading energy consultants – concluded that Britain could meet its energy demands without new coal. If the UK hit its existing efficiency and renewables targets it would negate the case for a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth and at least seven other proposed sites. An earlier Poyry report, published in June, found at least 16 gigawatts of untapped potential from ‘Combined Heat and Power’ plants ? super-efficient power stations that are popular in Scandinavia but little used in the UK.

Tough times? Spare a thought for the wealthy
10 Sep 2008
Are you feeling the pinch as the credit crunch bites hard? Is Gordon Brown holding down your pay below inflation? Well, spare a thought for a much-overlooked group who are also suffering ? company executives. A report by accountancy firm Deloitte found that the salaries of the bosses at Britain?s biggest 350 companies rose by a mere 6.2 percent over the past year ? down from 7 percent last year. With captains of industry on an average annual salary of just 1.08 million, a 6.2 percent rise amounts to paltry 66,960 extra a year. Just how is your average company director supposed to cope? Luckily salaries form only one part of their ?total remuneration package?. Bonuses, share plans, pension contributions and ?long-term incentive arrangements? mean that fortunes are continuing to soar. Sam Laidlaw is the chief executive at Centrica, the parent company of British Gas, which last month announced half-year profits of almost 1 billion. As a reward for arranging a 35 percent increase in gas prices, this year Laidlaw is expecting to be awarded an extra 1 million on top of his earnings last year. In addition he will be given 366,000 in lieu of pension payments and 64,000 in perks including a company car and medical insurance. In total, Laidlaw will pocket some 4.8 million. But it?s not just the energy bosses who have found a way to survive these tough times. A TUC study entitled Do The Super Rich Matter? compares the fortunes of Britain?s wealthiest today with those of each decade since the 1850s by looking at the size of estates left when they die. It shows that today?s super rich today are far wealthier than any of their predecessors. Privilege In real terms, the biggest fortune until the 2000s was the 36.5 million left by Sir John Ellerman in 1933 ? which would be worth around 12 billion today. Next was the 14 million estate of the Duke of Westminster in 1899 ? equivalent to 10.6 billion today. But the richest man in today?s Britain, steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, is worth a staggering 27.7 billion. The report points out it was necessary to be worth 50 million in today?s money to be among Britain?s 200 wealthiest people in 1990, but that now you would need more than 400 million. When the celebrity rich are excluded, it becomes clear that most of today?s super-rich have made their money not through ?enterprise and hard work? but from the difficult job of being born into privilege. Copyright Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original and leave this notice in place.

Passport and ID controls between UK and Ireland?
10 Sep 2008
Proposals to introduce passport and identity checks for air and sea travellers between Britain and Ireland are being circulated by the British and Irish governments. Should they be enacted, controls on movement around the little known Common Travel Area (CTA), incorporating the United Kingdom, the Irish Republic, the Channel Isles and the Isle of Man, will be strengthened to levels unseen since World War II. In a joint statement July 24, British Home Office Minister Jacqui Smith and her Irish counterpart Dermot Ahern pledged to use ?state of the art border technology, joint sea and port operations and the continued exchange of intelligence … to identity those people who may be of interest to our law enforcement authorities.? The announcement attracted little press attention, no commentary and would seem to be, at this stage, a testing of the water for measures that are certain to be hugely unpopular. The proposal is part of the British government?s drive to implement a host of antidemocratic measures under the guise of the ?war on terror? and a clampdown on immigration. Over the last months, Labour has introduced fingerprinting for all visa applicants, on-the-spot fines for employers who do not check workers? immigration status and an immigration points system. In the immediate future, the government intends to check all air passengers against ?watch lists? of undesirables, and introduce ID cards for all foreign nationals in the UK. The new measures are being overseen by the recently created UK Border Agency, set up by the government last year to integrate Customs, the Border and Immigration Agency, and UK Visas. The agency employs 25,000 staff and has a 2 billion budget. The government clearly views the longstanding and open travel arrangements between Britain and Ireland, and the ?Crown dependencies,? as a weakness within the surveillance apparatus it is constructing. Some 15.6 million passenger journeys are currently made between Britain, Ireland and the Crown dependencies. The vast majority of these are between Britain and Ireland. In a consultation paper published last month, Home Office Minister Liam Byrne suggested that full immigration controls should be faced by ?non-CTA? nationals moving between the UK, Ireland and the dependencies by 2014. At the same time, ?measures to verify the identities of UK, Irish and Crown dependency nationals? would be introduced. All air and sea travel between the UK and Ireland would be monitored against the government?s e-Borders watch lists. Carrier liability would be introduced on these routes to enforce travel companies to adhere to the new requirements. The government also announced that while the border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland would not be policed by ?fixed immigration controls,? ?increasing ad hoc immigration checks on vehicles? would be considered. The measures do not cover travel between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. But the Irish Times reported that powers could be implemented before the end of 2008, allowing British police to demand information about travellers from the UK to Belfast and Derry airports and ports in Larne and Stranraer. This can be done under Section 14 of the Police and Justice Act 2006 and requires only ministerial approval. Liam Byrne gave a written parliamentary answer stating, ?It is expected that this police power will only apply to air and sea routes between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Passengers will not be required to use passports, but may be required to produce one of several types of documentation, including passports, when travelling, to enable the carrier to meet the requirements of a police request.? The British and Irish governments have also apparently agreed that vehicles being carried on car ferries can be searched to ensure they have proper documentation, with ferry companies again facing a carrier liability fine. The proposal has been condemned by pro-British Ulster Unionists, who complain that the controls will contradict Northern Ireland?s status as an integral part of the UK. The British government has responded that many carriers already impose document checks. And, in a letter to then Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Ian Paisley, Prime Minister Gordon Brown denied that British citizens would be required to produce documents to travel within their own country. That, however, alongside the measures between Britain and the Irish republic, is exactly what is being considered. The CTA itself dates back to the earliest days of the partition of Ireland. Following the 1916-21 War of Independence and the establishment of the Irish Free State, Britain agreed to forgo passport controls between the UK and its former colony in return for the new Irish state?s agreement to control ?aliens? in general and ?Bolshevists? in particular. Free movement arrangements were suspended during World War II, when Ireland maintained neutral status and was perceived by British imperialism as a potential haven for agents of Nazi Germany. For their part, the Irish authorities wanted to keep refugees out. The British government only allowed entrance to those with employment and with approval both governments, while the Irish government enforced police returns from hoteliers and barred access to all other than British and Irish nationals. In the aftermath of the war, with demand for cheap Irish labour, free movement was reinstated. Visa requirements for entry to Ireland and the UK were henceforth closely integrated, although not identical. No formal checks were imposed during the ?Troubles,? when Republicans conducted an armed campaign against British rule, including several bombings. Although a series of draconian Prevention of Terrorism Acts were passed, this did not extend to compulsory ID checks. Documentation was not even required on the then contested and highly militarised border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, overseen with army watchtowers and helicopters. In 1997, around the time of the Good Friday Agreement that paved the way for Sinn Fein to enter government with the Unionists, the UK and Ireland negotiated an exception for the CTA from the EU?s Amsterdam Treaty, which concretised the 1991 Schengen Agreement ?Fortress Europe? immigration policy and information sharing system. Today, security relations between the UK and Ireland are amicable. The British and Irish governments are closer politically than ever. Sinn Fein sits more or less comfortably in the British government in Northern Ireland, along with the DUP. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) has disbanded. The Northern Irish border is open and un-militarised and increasingly economically irrelevant, save to those exploiting tax and currency differences. Why then the proposals for such controls? In a report no doubt intended to back the government proposals, MI5 recently claimed that the most serious security threat currently faced by the UK was not from Islamic terrorists, but from some 80 ?hardcore? Republican dissidents such as the Continuity IRA. No media commentator saw fit to point out the massive contradictions between the scale of the measures being proposed and the small numbers identified as a threat. Nor did they ask why the British government feel obliged to propose measures not deemed necessary throughout the entire period of the Northern Ireland dirty war. Still less was there any comment that this latest claim flatly contradicts the entire thrust of the government?s ?war on terror,? which is supposedly directed against Islamic groups considered to be a mortal threat to UK security. The truth is that whether under the guise of Islamic terror, a dissident Republican threat, or under the more general heading of a clampdown on immigration, the Labour government is assembling measures more akin to a police state.

A quick fix for the soul
10 Sep 2008
A woman convinced that she emits an unpleasant smell is persuaded to travel around on public transport with a portion of fish and chips to monitor how people react to her. This will allow her to assess the “evidence”: she will realise that there is a difference between times when she is the bearer of a strong smell and when she is not, and this will help her to “correct” her beliefs. Welcome to the world of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which has enjoyed a massive expansion over the past 10 years, not only in Britain but in much of the west. Where once a diversity of therapies flourished, today CBT is progressively replacing the older treatments. It’s cheap, it shows results on paper and it chimes with a commonsense, problem-solving view of the world. Developed by the American psychiatrist Aaron Beck in the 1960s, CBT was based on the idea that our emotions and moods were influenced by our patterns of thinking. The aim of therapy was to “correct” these processes, “to think and act more realistically”. It would allow the patient to avoid the misconstruction of reality that had led to their problems. Rather than focus on the patient’s history – say their childhood and early experiences – like most other psychotherapies, CBT is mostly directed to the here and now. Patient and therapist agree on targets and formulate ways to achieve these in each session. Patterns of negative thinking are pinpointed and alternatives discussed. Homework is set at the end of each session, which might include self-monitoring, record-keeping and other tools of self-inspection. After her strange sojourn on the tube, the woman with the fish and chips would meet her therapist and discuss the events of the day. If she realised that people in fact reacted to her less when she didn’t have the malodorous meal, then she might be able to change her thought pattern, to see her life in a more positive way. She would learn that her symptom was an incorrect interpretation of reality and hopefully come to see the world as everyone else does. But why did she suffer from this olfactory symptom in the first place? What function did it have in her life? If she was certain about it, what role did certainty play for her? Could it have been a solution to some other, less obvious problem? And if so, what would be the consequences of trying to remove it? Most therapies aim to hear what is being expressed in a symptom: not to stifle it, but to give it a voice and to see what function it has for the individual. CBT, by contrast, aims to remove symptoms. The popularity of CBT with government agencies is no surprise. This year has seen the launch of Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT), an initiative to train a “workforce” of mostly cognitive therapists to cure the nation’s anxious and depressed inhabitants. Lord Layard, the so-called happiness tsar and one of the architects of this new project, is delighted. At last, everyone will have access to proven treatments that have the right scientific credentials. And we will save a lot of money into the bargain. Depression and anxiety cost the economy around 12bn a year – 1% of the total national income – yet the new therapies will be able to cure people for only 750 a head. The saving on drugs bills and incapacity benefits is staggering. But what might the real costs of this initiative be? And what does the rise of CBT tell us about the world we live in today? The government also plans to regulate mediums and spiritualists. It will no longer be up to us to believe in them or not, but a higher power will tell us who is legitimate and who is not. Just as a new rhetoric of “science” tells us that CBT is the best treatment, so it will arbitrate the “other side” – and all government has to do is back up science with legislation. These are extraordinary developments in our times. And they highlight a strange paradox of the modern self. We are told that we are responsible for our own lives, that we have the power to transform ourselves. Yet at the same time we are treated as minors who lack the faculty of critical judgment and must be protected against unscrupulous and dangerous predators. Today it is plasticity and change that govern our self-image. Personality itself is represented as a set of skills that we can learn and modify. Just as we can alter our bodies through cosmetic surgery, so we can change our behaviour through “work” on ourselves. Reality TV displays princes who become paupers, children who swap parents and geeks who become Don Juans. The possibilities of transformation seem endless. Thatcher’s dream of social mobility has become not just nightly entertainment, but also individual imperative. CBT promises change just as swiftly. Unwanted character traits or symptoms are no longer seen as a clue to some inner truth, but simply as disturbances to our ideal image that can be excised. Instead of seeing a bout of depression or an anxiety attack as a sign of unconscious processes that need to be carefully elicited and voiced, they become aspects of behaviour to be removed. The market has triumphed here, as our inner worlds become a space for buying and selling. We pay experts such as life coaches to teach us how to change in the desired way. Aspects of ourselves, such as shyness or confidence, become commodities that we can pay to lose or amplify. Depression or anxiety are seen as isolated problems that can be locally targeted without calling into question the rest of one’s existence, in the same way that a missile attack on a terrorist installation is supposed to get rid of the problem posed by terrorism. This is a modern self for which depth has become surface. In soaps and reality shows characters share their innermost feelings and emotions, as if there were a perfect continuity between interior and exterior life. If there’s any ambiguity, a panel of experts is there, as on Big Brother, to explain people’s motivations. The self is no longer a dark cave; everything is laid bare. In effect, we have been robbed of our interior lives. Many social theorists have seen this atomisation as a consequence of market-led economies. As the market governs all, it was only a matter of time before basic human attributes would come to be taken as commodities and relationships as transactions. Students became clients of educational services, children clients of their parents. And it was no surprise that the view of human beings as subjects competing in the marketplace for goods and services would need a psychology to underpin it. This new psychology broke radically from traditional ideas. The self had once been understood as a place of conflict: between reason and passion, between the will and understanding, between repressed desires and their inhibition. But, as Nikolas Rose observed in his study Governing the Soul, the self is now no longer intrinsically fractured, it just needs to “actualise” itself. The divided self dear to the 60s has vanished, along with the recognition that grief, despair and frustration strike at the heart of our image of self-possession and fulfilment. The psyche has become like a muscle that needs to be developed and trained. There is no place for complexity and contradiction here: the modern subject is represented as one-dimensional, searching for fulfilment. The possibility that human life is aimed at both success and failure and never simply at wealth, power or happiness no longer makes sense. Suddenly the world of human relations described by novelists, poets and playwrights for the past few centuries can just be written off. Self-sabotage, masochism and despair are now faults to be corrected, rather than forming the very core of the self. The new psychology is thus in the service of the market. Symptoms become understood as deviations, pieces of learned conduct that can be undone by short courses in re-education. This is the soil in which CBT came to flourish. Its textbooks refer unashamedly to “belief modification” and to “selling the treatment” to the patient. It follows a market-led vision of the psyche in which a symptom, for example depression or insomnia, is not seen as a general problem in a person’s existence – which, if unravelled, might lead to the unravelling of the self – but as a local disturbance that can be managed and put right. This commodification of the psyche is reflected in the change in mental health diagnoses. In the early 20th century, there were between a dozen and two dozen discrete diagnostic categories – breaking down different aspects of mental health. By the early 90s there were more than 360. Easily observable surface symptoms, such as shyness, have been taken to define disorders. Many of these have been developed and advertised by drug companies in order to carve out market niches for new drugs. Social phobia, for example, was sold as a diagnosis by the makers of a drug – moclobemide – that claimed to cure it. The new focus on surface behaviour makes cognitive-style therapies seem more scientific. As Ian Parker, professor of psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University, observes, if a disorder is defined by symptoms, get rid of the symptoms and you’ve got rid of the disorder. The therapist carries out a more or less mechanical procedure, a series of protocols formulated in advance, which have been approved by management and checked by inspectorate. On paper it looks good: symptoms appear reduced. But there is no tracking of so-called “alternative symptoms”, the problems that will emerge in mind or body when the original symptom is removed. A woman troubled by a dog phobia may be able to overcome this with a behavioural treatment, but what of her relationship with her father, a concentration camp survivor who became terrified of German shepherds after the war? If her symptom articulated a certain identification with his anxiety, how would this find expression once she was deprived of the phobia? These important complexities have little place in a society where depth has become surface. What matters are quick-fix cosmetic solutions, rubber-stamped by so-called experts. Where articles and books once used to develop concepts and ideas, today the expression “Research shows …” encourages us to stop thinking. Not long ago the media excitedly carried the “news” that research had shown that depressed fathers had an effect on the wellbeing of their children. Well, who would seriously have thought otherwise? Was it really necessary to have a government grant to show this? And in fact, the methodology in most of these studies is deeply flawed. This is a world in which nothing counts as knowledge unless it is sanctioned by experts. Advice on baby-rearing or nutrition may seem sensible, but can there really be a correct way to conduct a relationship, to fall in love or to maintain beliefs? Knowledge has become almost synonymous with a product: any new idea or discovery has to demonstrate how it can be practically put to use – which means sold. Researchers have to specify the “outcomes” they seek and how these will be beneficial. Even a public sculpture project has to explain what use each detail will have. In today’s outcome-obsessed society, people must become countable, quantifiable, transparent. And this leads to a grotesque new misunderstanding of psychotherapy. Therapy is now conceived as a set of techniques that can be applied to a human being. This makes sense if we see it as a business transaction with a buyer, a seller and a product. But it totally ignores the most basic fact: that therapy is not like a plaster that can be applied to a wound, but is a property of a human relationship. Therapy is about the encounter of two people, and the real work is done not by the therapist but by the patient. As the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott observed, the therapist provides a space in which the patient can construct and create something. The therapist encourages and facilitates, but whether a therapy takes place or not depends entirely on the patient. Unlike CBT, traditional therapies do not aim to give access to a common, scientific reality but to take the patient’s own reality seriously: to explore it, to define it, to elaborate it and to see where it will go. No outcome can be predicted in advance: the patient may go back to work but equally they may give up a well-paid job to pursue another path. Therapies such as CBT, which claim to deliver a product, can certainly be helpful for some people. But it is crucial to distinguish the question of whether a therapy works and how it works. For any therapy to get started, unconscious belief systems need to be mobilised. Human belief is a very powerful thing and no external authority can tell us what to believe in, although the persecution of religion groups shows that this is hardly self-evident. Lord Layard stunned therapists earlier this year with the following vignette: “The most striking experience I’ve had in the last few years was when the chief executive of a mental health trust … said his life had been saved by CBT ... He said he is a fully fledged bipolar case but he has not had a day off work for the last 15 years. He has a little book, which he carries around and whenever he has funny thoughts coming into his mind, he turns to the relevant page, according to what kind of thought it is or if he has a mood attack, and he does exactly what it says on the page. Now, you could say that’s mechanical. I say that it’s brilliant and not so different, you know, from what Jesus or any other great healer did for people.” Mao would perhaps have liked this story, and hoped that the little book was his own. And indeed, cognitive therapy was perhaps used most widely in the Cultural Revolution in China, where people were taught that depression was just wrong thinking. Separated from their families, unable to contact loved ones, subject to cruel punishments and witness to the murder or “vanishing” of those closest to them, millions of people were “taught” to devalue their reactions. The world should be thought about in a different way, and happiness and enthusiasm replace despair and despondency. Positive thinking should banish unhelpful negative attitudes. This denial of the legitimacy of people’s symptoms may have dangerous consequences. Diverting psychological processes from proper working through can result in both new symptoms and acts of violence. CBT’s effort to ignore the effects of an individual’s history in favour of a shallow analysis of the here and now sets a bleak example to those who believe that if the 20th century had any lesson, it was precisely not to deny the significance of human history and memory. Darian Leader’s latest book The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, is published by Hamish Hamilton

Academies – attacking the poor in the name of justice
9 Sep 2008
At the end of the last school year, schools secretary Ed Balls threatened nearly one in five secondary schools in Britain ? 638 in total ? with closure. Balls has earmarked schools where less than 30 percent of pupils gained five or more GCSEs at grades A*-C, including English and maths. Because this is much harder in areas of poverty and deprivation, he mainly hit schools in inner cities and council estates. In fact two thirds of schools where over 30 percent of pupils are entitled to free school meals are under threat. But it is not the individual schools that have failed ? it is government policies. Balls intends to turn these schools into academies, even though the whole academies experiment, where control of state-funded schools is handed to private businesses or charities, has been a disaster. Improved exam results are entirely the result of using easier qualifications ? GNVQ instead of GCSE ? and changing the school population ? recruiting better-off pupils and pushing poorer ones into nearby schools. Academies exclude up to two thirds more children than state-run schools. Despite this, 26 academies are included in the list of 638 ?failing schools?. Unfortunately we have a government that just doesn?t learn. It is now talking of converting primary schools into academies. The government digs itself in deeper every time because it is devoted to the privatisation of public services. It is this agenda that lies behind the attack on ?failing schools?. Many of these schools have had very good inspection reports. Most had improving GCSE results and Ofsted classified several as ?outstanding?. But the academies programme can?t be sold to the general public on the grounds that it gives more power and control to the rich. So instead, the government regularly claims that its policies of privatisation and business involvement in welfare services are ways of promoting social justice. No socialist can be complacent about children getting low qualifications because of family poverty. But we cannot swallow government lies about privatisation. McJobs The root cause of low school achievement is poverty, including the demoralisation and insecurity that comes from working in a McJobs economy. Schools can make some difference but it is difficult under the constant pressure of exam league tables, Ofsted inspections and government ministers announcing that you have failed. Schools in poor areas need a big boost in funding, and the freedom to develop a different curriculum and more interesting ways of learning. Though there are now signs of a relaxation of the centralised national curriculum, only schools in better off areas are likely to benefit. Schools in the poorest areas are kept constantly under government threat. It is beyond dispute that growing up in poverty reduces your chances of a successful education. But poverty doesn?t affect all children the same way. For example, some single mothers with a good education, who live in poverty because of problems juggling work and childcare, are able to give their children lots of help. Some teachers are very good at inspiring and supporting children to succeed. So some children do succeed against the odds, but the general trend is undeniable. This is an enormous problem in Britain because there is so much child poverty. It increased massively under Margaret Thatcher?s conservative government ? from 14 to 33 percent. Under New Labour child poverty has started to rise again. It is a scandal that, in one of the richest economies in the world, nearly three million children ? one in four ? are growing up in poverty. Gordon Brown has himself to blame. As chancellor he set modest targets for improvement, 20 years to abolish child poverty, but soon let things slide. The minimum wage is too low to keep a family and the tax credit system is often impossible to understand. International studies of school achievement link low achievement in British schools to the extent of child poverty. There is more poverty here, but poverty also has a bigger impact than other countries. There are many reasons for this ? the emphasis on testing makes young children feel they have failed, and a rigid national curriculum makes it difficult for teachers to relate to children?s interests and local environment. It is hard to make learning exciting. Competition between schools has been encouraged which leaves some schools with a high concentration of deprived children. These policies were introduced by Thatcher but have been continued by New Labour. Countries with high levels of educational achievement such as Finland have lower levels of child poverty, but they also have education policies that mean poverty makes less of a difference. All children there receive healthy, free school meals. Excellent libraries and childcare make children enthusiastic readers. Secondary schools in Finland are small, with an average of 300 students, avoiding large anonymous schools where vulnerable children slip through the net. Classes are small too, and there is excellent help for those who are struggling. New Labour?s education policies have failed, but Gordon Brown, like Thatcher and Tony Blair before him, prefers to blame individual schools. Resistance But if the government is now threatening hundreds more schools with closure and privatisation, this will only increase resistance to their policies. Instead of isolated struggles in each area, there will be a broad and vigorous political struggle across England. Already the NUT and all the other teacher unions, Unison and many other trade unions are affiliated to the Anti-Academies Alliance. Now is the time to challenge a desperately weak government and its damaging neoliberal policies. Terry Wrigley is a lecturer in educational development at Edinburgh university. He is the author of Another School is Possible. It is available from Bookmarks, the socialist bookshop. Phone 020 7637 1848 www.bookmarks.uk.com Copyright Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original and leave this notice in place.

Academies – attacking the poor in name of justice
9 Sep 2008
At the end of the last school year, schools secretary Ed Balls threatened nearly one in five secondary schools in Britain ? 638 in total ? with closure. Balls has earmarked schools where less than 30 percent of pupils gained five or more GCSEs at grades A*-C, including English and maths. Because this is much harder in areas of poverty and deprivation, he mainly hit schools in inner cities and council estates. In fact two thirds of schools where over 30 percent of pupils are entitled to free school meals are under threat. But it is not the individual schools that have failed ? it is government policies. Balls intends to turn these schools into academies, even though the whole academies experiment, where control of state-funded schools is handed to private businesses or charities, has been a disaster. Improved exam results are entirely the result of using easier qualifications ? GNVQ instead of GCSE ? and changing the school population ? recruiting better-off pupils and pushing poorer ones into nearby schools. Academies exclude up to two thirds more children than state-run schools. Despite this, 26 academies are included in the list of 638 ?failing schools?. Unfortunately we have a government that just doesn?t learn. It is now talking of converting primary schools into academies. The government digs itself in deeper every time because it is devoted to the privatisation of public services. It is this agenda that lies behind the attack on ?failing schools?. Many of these schools have had very good inspection reports. Most had improving GCSE results and Ofsted classified several as ?outstanding?. But the academies programme can?t be sold to the general public on the grounds that it gives more power and control to the rich. So instead, the government regularly claims that its policies of privatisation and business involvement in welfare services are ways of promoting social justice. No socialist can be complacent about children getting low qualifications because of family poverty. But we cannot swallow government lies about privatisation. McJobs The root cause of low school achievement is poverty, including the demoralisation and insecurity that comes from working in a McJobs economy. Schools can make some difference but it is difficult under the constant pressure of exam league tables, Ofsted inspections and government ministers announcing that you have failed. Schools in poor areas need a big boost in funding, and the freedom to develop a different curriculum and more interesting ways of learning. Though there are now signs of a relaxation of the centralised national curriculum, only schools in better off areas are likely to benefit. Schools in the poorest areas are kept constantly under government threat. It is beyond dispute that growing up in poverty reduces your chances of a successful education. But poverty doesn?t affect all children the same way. For example, some single mothers with a good education, who live in poverty because of problems juggling work and childcare, are able to give their children lots of help. Some teachers are very good at inspiring and supporting children to succeed. So some children do succeed against the odds, but the general trend is undeniable. This is an enormous problem in Britain because there is so much child poverty. It increased massively under Margaret Thatcher?s conservative government ? from 14 to 33 percent. Under New Labour child poverty has started to rise again. It is a scandal that, in one of the richest economies in the world, nearly three million children ? one in four ? are growing up in poverty. Gordon Brown has himself to blame. As chancellor he set modest targets for improvement, 20 years to abolish child poverty, but soon let things slide. The minimum wage is too low to keep a family and the tax credit system is often impossible to understand. International studies of school achievement link low achievement in British schools to the extent of child poverty. There is more poverty here, but poverty also has a bigger impact than other countries. There are many reasons for this ? the emphasis on testing makes young children feel they have failed, and a rigid national curriculum makes it difficult for teachers to relate to children?s interests and local environment. It is hard to make learning exciting. Competition between schools has been encouraged which leaves some schools with a high concentration of deprived children. These policies were introduced by Thatcher but have been continued by New Labour. Countries with high levels of educational achievement such as Finland have lower levels of child poverty, but they also have education policies that mean poverty makes less of a difference. All children there receive healthy, free school meals. Excellent libraries and childcare make children enthusiastic readers. Secondary schools in Finland are small, with an average of 300 students, avoiding large anonymous schools where vulnerable children slip through the net. Classes are small too, and there is excellent help for those who are struggling. New Labour?s education policies have failed, but Gordon Brown, like Thatcher and Tony Blair before him, prefers to blame individual schools. Resistance But if the government is now threatening hundreds more schools with closure and privatisation, this will only increase resistance to their policies. Instead of isolated struggles in each area, there will be a broad and vigorous political struggle across England. Already the NUT and all the other teacher unions, Unison and many other trade unions are affiliated to the Anti-Academies Alliance. Now is the time to challenge a desperately weak government and its damaging neoliberal policies. Terry Wrigley is a lecturer in educational development at Edinburgh university. He is the author of Another School is Possible. It is available from Bookmarks, the socialist bookshop. Phone 020 7637 1848 www.bookmarks.uk.com Copyright Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original and leave this notice in place.

Hawking the Technofix
9 Sep 2008
Last month, a senior UK government adviser warned of the real risk of a devastating rise in global temperatures of 4 degrees Celsius. Professor Bob Watson, the chief scientific adviser to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), said: “There is no doubt that we should aim to limit changes in the global mean surface temperature to 2C above pre-industrial [levels]. “But given this is an ambitious target, and we don’t know in detail how to limit greenhouse gas emissions to realise a 2 degree target, we should be prepared to adapt to 4C.” (James Randerson, ‘Prepare for global temperature rise of 4C, warns top scientist’, Guardian, August 7, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/aug/ 06/climatechange.scienceofclimatechange ) But what would a 4C rise mean for the planet? According to the 2006 Stern review on the economics of climate change, up to 300 million people would be affected by coastal flooding annually. Water availability in Southern Africa and the Mediterranean could drop by half, and agricultural yields in Africa may be cut by up to 35%, with devastating consequences for millions at risk of starvation, malnutrition and disease. Half of all animal and plant species could face extinction. Worse, rapid runaway warming could be triggered – for example, by the release of methane hydrate deposits in the Arctic – rapidly escalating the temperature rise far above even 4C. The idea that we should somehow “adapt” to such cataclysmic outcomes is deeply irrational. Sir David King, the government’s former chief scientific adviser, has backed Watson’s call to “prepare for the worst.” King said that even if a global deal could ever be agreed to keep carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere below 450 parts per million (ppm), there is a 50% probability that temperatures would exceed 2C and a 20% probability they would exceed 3.5C. By contrast, Professor Neil Adger of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research has rejected the call for “adaptation”, describing it as “a dangerous mindset.” Unfortunately, it is considered “improbable” by some scientists that, under current policies, global warming will even be kept below 4C. The authors of a new report say that stabilising carbon dioxide at the required atmospheric concentration of 650ppm would require industrialised nations to “begin to make draconian emission reductions within a decade”. (Jenny Haworth, The Scotsman, ‘Temperature rises “will be double the safe limit” for global warming’, September 1, 2008; http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Temperature- rises-39will-be-double.4444056.jp) The authors also warn that the G8 promise to cut emissions by half by 2050, in an effort to limit the global temperature rise to just 2C, has no scientific basis. Instead, this delusion could lead to “dangerously misguided” policies: “Political inaction on global warming has become so dire” that “nations must now consider extreme technical solutions.” These “geo-engineering options” include dumping iron into the oceans to boost the growth of plankton (which absorbs carbon dioxide) and injecting aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight back into space. (David Adam, ‘Extreme and risky action the only way to tackle global warming, say scientists’, Guardian, September 1, 2008) As humanity teeters on the brink, the corporate media are sure to give increasing coverage to these dubious and risky “technofixes.” Influential business lobbyists will make ever-greater efforts to push for lucrative, but diversionary, “solutions” to climate chaos. We need to be alert to such self-serving manoeuvres and willing to expose them. This much is clear: after more than twenty years of ever more urgent scientific warnings, and government and corporate obstructionism, we really have arrived at the edge of the climate abyss. Pushing Carbon Storage – Pushing Profits Professor Watson’s response to his own dire warning to “prepare” for a 4C rise was to call for the UK to take a lead in research on carbon capture and storage (CCS). This would require an “Apollo-type programme” akin to the huge resources devoted by the US in the 1960s space race. So what does CCS entail? First, carbon dioxide is “captured” by separating it out from the waste gases emitted by power stations. The CO2 is then liquefied and pumped into underground geological formations, such as former oil reservoirs, and thus “stored.” Proponents of this technology claim that carbon emissions from power stations could be reduced by as much as 90 per cent. The words “carbon capture and storage” have now become a standard buzz-phrase along with “pollution permits”, “joint implementation mechanism” and “tradable energy quotas.” We conducted a Nexis newspaper database search for “carbon capture and storage” in the British press over the 12-month period of Sep 1, 2007 – Aug 31, 2008 and discovered 219 mentions. Almost one half (100 mentions) was in the Guardian alone. This compares with 86 (23 in the Guardian) for the previous twelve month period and 48 (14 in the Guardian) for the year before that. The numbers drop off quickly going further back, with the first mention in a Times article in 2004. This article reported that people who had been interviewed about CCS had, understandably, never heard of it: “They said it sounded dangerous and unnecessary… They don’t like the idea of a quick fix or burying the problem. Most people would rather see a move to renewables and improved energy efficiency.” But when “the problem of emissions was explained”, we were told, “they came round a bit” and understood that “CCS could solve a problem over the next few decades. People are more inclined to accept it as part of a package of measures, policies and ideas.” (Anjana Ahuja, ‘A global threat buried’, The Times, May 20, 2004) As indicated by its rapidly escalating media profile, CCS has been hyped into the foreground with serious discussion of alternative “measures, policies and ideas” left trailing in its wake. Corporate energy chiefs have pushed CCS hard, a greenwashing strategy to protect business interests, profits and power. The stakes are high for big business. Between now and 2020, the UK must replace about a third of its existing electricity generating capacity. One of those jockeying for prime position is Paul Golby, chief executive of E.ON which runs the Kingsnorth power station, scene of the summer’s Climate Camp protests. Golby has declared a breathless enthusiasm for “a new generation of nuclear reactors, more gas storage facilities and gas stations, and a limited number of new coal-fired stations, built ready to be fitted with CCS equipment, which could cut carbon emissions by 90%.” (Paul Golby, ‘Protesters at our coal plant are deluded if they think renewables alone can serve Britain’s needs’, The Guardian, July 31, 2008) We are to believe that E.ON, as “one of the UK’s leading green generators”, is ready to serve the country by doing its bit to minimise any risk to “our security of supply” in the “face [of] greater cost burdens.” Whereas the aspirations of the climate activists for a huge expansion in renewables and energy efficiency are “simply unrealistic”, Golby believes that “if we are to achieve the low-carbon economy we want, then existing nuclear capacity needs to be replaced at least on a like-for-like basis.” But consider the extent of the hype. A recent report from Corporate Watch warns that CCS technology is unlikely to be proven, scaled up and in widespread use until 2030 at the earliest, and possibly not until 2050 – too late to prevent climate chaos. (Claire Fauset, ‘Techno-fixes: A critical guide to climate change technologies’, Corporate Watch, 2008, p. 4; http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/ download.php?id=78) Nick Reeves, executive director of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management, comments: “[I]t is disingenuous of the energy companies to use the promise of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology as a carrot to get the approval they need to build the power station [at Kingsnorth], when they know full well that CCS technology is unproven and costly.” Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, states emphatically that it may well never be “prudent or politically acceptable” to adopt such risky measures; and, in any case, “they must not divert attention away from efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.” In 2007, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dismissed geo-engineering as “largely speculative and unproven and with the risk of unknown side-effects.” (David Adam, ‘Extreme and risky action the only way to tackle global warming, say scientists’, The Guardian, September 1, 2008) Contrary to the assertions of E.ON’s chief executive, Reeves argues that carbon emissions targets can be met without resorting to nuclear power or coal, adding: “Investment in energy conservation instead of nuclear and coal would result in seven times the reduction in emissions. Renewables can provide the power we need, given the political will.” (Nick Reeves, ‘No to nuclear’, letter to New Statesman, August 25, 2008) Nevertheless, huge propaganda campaigns are being launched by powerful companies, such as E.ON, to push both CCS and nuclear energy. The latter is already firmly back on the government’s agenda. A welcome, but entirely inadequate, note of caution about corporate claims appeared in a Guardian editorial: “The idea of stripping pollution from fossil fuels is seductive – a quick fix to an overwhelming crisis.” However, the paper added, “for countries that develop it there could also be big profits.” (Leading article, ‘Climate change: A captivating remedy’, The Guardian, June 2, 2008) More accurately, the “big profits” would enrich corporations and investors, not the citizens of the countries concerned. Corporate media coverage has shamefully buried the truth that CCS would be exploited to enhance oil recovery: pumping carbon dioxide into ageing oil reservoirs has the effect of forcing out oil that would otherwise stay underground. CCS and other technical “solutions” to impending climate chaos are thus being used to prop up the fossil fuel industry which remains committed to massive exploration and exploitation efforts for decades to come. David Hone, climate change adviser for Shell, concedes that fossil fuels will remain Shell’s core business “for some time.” (Terry Slavin, ‘Promise of a green industrial revolution’, The Guardian, July 16, 2008) The push for CCS then – and, indeed, for nuclear power – is yet another outcome of pathological business greed. It is a fatal display of short-sightedness and arrogance which relies on technical fixes to tackle symptoms, rather than the systemic sickness at the heart of global capitalism. One might as well feed beta-blocking drugs to an obese person with heart disease in an effort to prevent heart attacks, rather than address fundamental issues of health, diet and lifestyle. Tinkering At The Edges – The Independent’s Environment Editor The public is encouraged to believe that, if anyone in the media ‘gets it’ on climate change, then it is the environment correspondents and editors of the liberal press. Michael McCarthy, the Independent’s environment editor, wrote recently that, for “the idealists of the green movement”, the threat of global warming meant: “People would be obliged to live in respectful harmony with the earth. They would be obliged to alter their ways: swap their cars for bikes and public transport; substitute renewable energy systems for coal-fired electricity; and consume less of everything. The alternative was catastrophe. It was go green, or die. “It has gradually become clear that this dream is not going to be realised, which is a sad recognition for anyone who sympathises with the environment movement to have to make.” Instead, claimed McCarthy, the best hopes of tackling climate change now lie “most of all with technological fixes.” He even went so far as to claim that CCS is “now the only realistic response to climate change.” (McCarthy, ‘A simple plan to save the world’, The Independent, August 22, 2008) And yet, just two years earlier, McCarthy had described “how hard it is to cut carbon emissions by tinkering at the edges of a capitalist economy in full growth mode. It is now clear that the pursuit of economic business-as-usual is simply not an option.” (McCarthy, ‘Blow for Britain’s fight against climate change as emissions target is missed,’ The Independent, March 29, 2006) McCarthy was responding to the rational analysis of Labour MP Colin Challen, who had argued “the pursuit of economic growth makes controlling CO2 an impossibility… a different path must be sought.” (McCarthy, ibid) How can the Independent’s environment editor possibly justify the dodgy CCS technofix – which may not even be in place before 2050 – as anything other than “tinkering at the edges” of capitalism in full growth mode? And why has he had so little to say about critical challenges to the political orthodoxy of unsustainable economic growth? McCarthy’s failures and omissions are symptomatic of everything that is wrong with even the best news media. Fatal Taboo – Endless Growth We cannot rely on environment editors, far less other journalists, to challenge the elite consensus on the need for relentless economic ‘growth’, a cancerous process that is killing the planet. The issue is rarely addressed seriously in the corporate media, or discussed by politicians, academia, think tanks – or even by the major green pressure groups. George Monbiot calls it “the last of the universal taboos.” (Monbiot, ‘In this age of diamond saucepans, only a recession makes sense’, The Guardian, October 9, 2007) Colin Challen courageously challenged this fatal conceit in 2006: “We are imprisoned by our political Hippocratic oath: we will deliver unto the electorate more goodies than anybody else. Such an oath was only ever achievable by increasing our despoliation of the world’s resources. Our economic model is not so different in the cold light of day to that of the Third Reich – which knew it could only expand by grabbing what it needed from its neighbours. “Genocide followed. Now there is a case to answer that genocide is once again an apt description of how we are pursuing business as usual, wilfully ignoring the consequences for the poorest people in the world.” (Challen, ‘We must think the unthinkable, and take voters with us,’ The Independent, March 28, 2006) The media’s obsequious compliance with “the last of the universal taboos” make it complicit in this genocide, in this crime against humanity and against the Earth. Rather than “slouching towards disaster”, as the Independent’s environment editor once put it (Michael McCarthy, ‘Slouching towards disaster’, The Tablet, 12 February, 2005), we could take a wise, compassionate and optimistic approach. The fact is that sudden, unexpected radical social changes do occur. As the media critic John Theobald noted, the events of 1989 in Eastern Europe give one example: “It may be remembered that even weeks before the dramatic events and the short timescale in which they took place, they seemed impossible. Apparently robust social systems, power structures and ideologies… [can] submit to counter-hegemonic pressures for radical change in which popular action plays a significant role.” (Theobald, ‘The media and the making of history’, Ashgate, 2004, p. 139) US historian Howard Zinn also reminds us that governments rely on our tacit acceptance of their policies, and on our obedience. Withdraw that obedience, and we truly do have a “power [that] governments cannot suppress.” (Howard Zinn, ‘A Power Governments Cannot Suppress’, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 2007) If we can loosen, even a little, the crushing chains of corporate power and thought control, then we still have a chance of averting disaster. SUGGESTED ACTION The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone. Michael McCarthy, environment editor of the Independent Email: m.mccarthy@independent.co.uk Roger Alton, editor of the Independent Email: r.alton@independent.co.uk Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian Email: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk Helen Boaden, director of BBC News Email: helenboaden.complaints@bbc.co.uk Please send a copy of your emails to us Email: editor@medialens.org Please do NOT reply to the email address from which this media alert originated. Please instead email us: Email: editor@medialens.org This media alert will shortly be archived here: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/080909_hawking_the_technofix.php The Media Lens book ‘Guardians of Power: The Myth Of The Liberal Media’ by David Edwards and David Cromwell (Pluto Books, London) was published in 2006. For details, including reviews, interviews and extracts, please click here: http://www.medialens.org/bookshop/guardians_of_power.php ?Surviving Climate Change: The Struggle To Avert Global Catastrophe?, edited by David Cromwell and Mark Levene was published by Pluto Books in 2007: http://www.plutobooks.com/cgi-local/nplutobrows.pl?chkisbn=9780745325675… Please consider donating to Media Lens: http://www.medialens.org/donate Please visit the Media Lens website: http://www.medialens.org We have a lively and informative message board: http://www.medialens.org/board

The wrong message to Israel
9 Sep 2008
When Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown, visited Ramallah in mid-July, he told the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas: “We want to see a freeze on settlements. Settlement expansion has made peace harder to achieve. It erodes trust, it heightens Palestinian suffering, it makes the compromises Israel needs to make for peace more difficult.” In that case, the decision by the British government to rent space for our new embassy in Tel Aviv from the Africa-Israel Investments company chaired by businessman Lev Leviev sends precisely the wrong message. Leviev, a Russian-Israeli real estate and diamond billionaire who recently became a UK resident, is also a major settlement builder. Danya Cebus, a subsidiary of Leviev’s Africa-Israel group, has built homes in three West Bank settlements – Mattityahu East, Har Homa, and Ma’ale Adumim. Additionally, Leviev is a major donor to the Land Redemption Fund (LRF), which is affiliated with the radical fundamentalist Gush Emunim settler movement. The LRF uses highly questionable methods to secure Palestinian land for Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, in clear violation of international law and the Fourth Geneva convention. The settlement of Mattityahu East along with Israel’s wall, which was built mostly inside the occupied West Bank to grab land for settlements, seizes 50% of the village of Bil’in’s land, including olive groves that its residents have relied on for centuries. Leviev’s Zufim settlement, again along with Israel’s Wall, seizes as much as two-thirds of the village of Jayyous’ agricultural land and six wells, effectively annexing one of the West Bank’s most fertile agricultural zones. Since 2002, residents of Bil’in and Jayyous have held more than 250 nonviolent protests, with the support of Israeli and international activists, in an effort to save their lands. The Israeli army meets the protesters with clubs, teargas, bullets, curfews, arrests and stink sprays. The settlements where Leviev’s companies have recently built homes trap Palestinians in disconnected enclaves, destroying the possibility of creating a viable Palestinian state. The settlements of Ma’ale Adumim and Har Homa constitute part of an outer ring of settlements that cut off East Jerusalem from the occupied West Bank, and separate its north from its south. Israel’s facts on the ground, created by companies like Leviev’s, make the two-state solution impossible, resulting in a de facto one-state solution, in which half the population lives under apartheid-like conditions ? contradicting Israel’s proclaimed democracy. Having raised this issue in petitions and pressure on Israel’s architects and construction industry, Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine has protested at Leviev’s Bond Street jewelry boutique, in conjunction with Adalah-NY, which has also carried out a series of protests at Leviev’s Madison Avenue store in New York. These actions respond to a call for a boycott of Leviev’s companies issued by the villages of Jayyous and Bil’in – a call that has also been taken up by US and Israel-based peace groups and the Palestinian Boycott National Committee, which represents 171 Palestinian civil society organisations. Yet the British government seems to be immune to taking positive action. In late June, after three Israeli settler leaders were invited to the Tel Aviv home of the UK ambassador, Tom Phillips, for the Queen’s birthday, Crispin Blunt MP sent a blistering protest letter to Foreign Office minister Kim Howells. “Entertaining the pioneers of this colonisation movement has certainly given the strong impression that Britain tacitly endorses it or no longer objects to it,” demonstrating a “weakening in the government’s long-held position that settlements were illegal and an obstacle to peace”. Blunt demanded that British taxpayers’ money should not be “spent entertaining those who violate the Fourth Geneva Conventions and whose very presence has been an obstacle to a vital and much needed peace deal in the Middle East”. Kim Howells responded that the settlers’ presence “was not helpful” and that they would not receive such invitations again. Rewarding Leviev with the contract for our new embassy shows that Her Majesty’s government is not serious about stopping Israeli settlements. Rather than mouthing admirable but empty platitudes about freezing settlements, for the sake of all Israelis and Palestinians, let us apply serious sanctions to stop Israel expanding illegal settlements and the Wall, and take our business elsewhere.

Work for Benefits
9 Sep 2008
The Labour government in Britain has escalated its attack on the unemployed, the disabled and other vulnerable people with an announcement in a green paper to introduce a work for benefits scheme. The Green Paper??No one written off: reforming welfare to reward responsibility??follows the Welfare Reform Act 2007 which will phase out Incapacity Benefit and replace it with Employment Support Allowance. The Act is a wide-ranging attack on millions of the poorest and most vulnerable people who rely on Incapacity Benefit (IB) as their primary social security payment. Currently recipients of the benefit are deemed unable to work due to poor physical or mental health. The government plans to reduce the number of people claiming Incapacity Benefit by one million by 2015. Among many other changes, the green paper proposes that people who have been on benefit payments for 12 months or more will be required to do four weeks? work in their neighbourhood, or lose the right to benefit. Anyone who has claimed Job Seekers Allowance for more than two years will be made to take full-time community jobs in return for their benefit payment and will be required to ?sign in? each day. This would mean claimants working a full 35-hour week to earn a 60.50 Job Seekers Allowance payment. This equates to 1.70 an hour, less than a third of the minimum wage. In a move aimed at the further privatisation of welfare provision, firms in the private sector and voluntary organisations are to be awarded contracts and bonus incentives to find work for those on benefit. Incapacity Benefit and Income Support are to be ended by 2013 and replaced with the new Employment Support Allowance, which comes into operation in October. All 2.7 million recipients of Incapacity benefit will be forced to undergo stringent tests by doctors other than their own to determine whether they can work. Under the new proposals lone parents with children aged seven or more will be expected to seek work. Announcing the Green Paper to Parliament in July before its annual recess, Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell said, ?The longer people claim, the more we will expect in return. At three months and six months, claimants will intensify their job search and have to comply with a back-to-work action plan. Work works and it?s only fair that we can ensure that a life on benefits is not an option.? The measures were immediately supported by the Conservative Party opposition. Leader David Cameron said, ?Great?the government has taken up our ideas. I am absolutely thrilled at that. What (Mr. Purnell) has done is very much taken the ideas we came up with in January, that are very clearly thought through and involve tough choices.? So right-wing and authoritarian are the proposals that Conservative work and pension?s spokesman Chris Grayling told Parliament, ?Since these are Conservative proposals we will certainly support them. I know you will have some difficulties getting them through your own party. Can I assure you we will help you get them through this House even if you have a backbench rebellion to contend with.? The measures lay the basis for a final break with any welfare-state consensus that existed in the postwar period. Remarking on the importance to any future Conservative government, Grayling added, ?It?s particularly helpful that they?re bringing them forward now because we always expected the reforms to take a couple of years to prepare before being ready to yield results. ?So in reality what this announcement means is that the next government will inherit a set of proposals that have been turned into action and are ready to bring about real change to our welfare state.? The Liberal Democrats merely criticised the already ?complex benefit system? and called for more ?careful thought.? They were most concerned about the effect the measures would have on the private sector. Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesman Jenny Willott said, ?James Purnell may think that privatising all back to work support marks out his modernising credentials but it lacks foresight. ?If recession takes hold it may not be profitable for companies to bid for welfare contracts, yet the public infrastructure will have been completely eroded. There needs to be more careful thought about how the market would operate in a severe downturn with rising unemployment.? The paper is presently going through a ?consultation period? to last until October. A legislative paper will then be drawn up by January, with the measures expected to become law in the Spring of 2009. One of the central priorities of Labour when it was elected in 1997 was to make drastic cuts in state spending on the unemployed and benefits as a whole and that they sought to implement the measures to do so. The report states, ?In 1997, we inherited a largely inactive welfare state. For the last 11 years, the Government has gone about transforming it into an active one.? Lauding its ?New Deal? programme the paper boasts, ?In return for extra support, young people were expected to take up jobs and training or see their benefits cut. It was the beginning of the end for the idea that people could sit at home and claim benefits if they were able to work and had the offer of a job.? The paper boasts, ?Together with a growing economy, these reforms moved a million people off key out-of-work benefits, including almost halving claimant unemployment. As a result, we are spending over 5 billion less on benefits for unemployed people?. Whilst lambasting the unemployed for ?sitting at home,? the paper makes no mention of why swathes of people were unemployed in the first place and forced to live on a pittance. This was wholly due to the economic and social policies of the previous 18 years of Conservative Party government, which saw tens of thousands of jobs destroyed as part of smashing up nationalised industries in order to facilitate privatisation and drive up profitability. Upon assuming office Labour continued in the same vein, with the stated aim of creating a ?flexible labour market? for Britain?s service sector and a low wage economy for the corporations. The New Deal programme was aimed at forcing the unemployed?especially the young?off welfare benefits into low paid jobs at the newly set minimum wage level. With its green paper the Labour government is stating that these policies did not go far enough and that further attacks on what remains of the welfare state are required if the British economy is to remain competitive internationally. The document frames the attack on the unemployed as being bound up with ?the need for people to get the skills to progress in an increasingly competitive and globalised society.? ?Work for your benefit? The paper states: ?Our objective is a social revolution: an 80 percent employment rate?the highest ever.? This drive to reduce the unemployment rolls is to be based on the creation of a massive pool of cheap labour. Essentially the unemployed and most vulnerable members of society are to be used as a battering ram by employers to cut pay and conditions in general. There are already 2 million more people employed in Britain than in 1997. Britain has the highest work participation rate of any of the world?s richest nations. Under the section ?an obligation to work,? the paper states, ?Throughout the course of their claim their responsibilities will increase. The longer people claim benefits, the more they will be expected to do.? Anyone who has been unemployed for 12 months or more ?will be transferred to a private, public or voluntary sector provider who will be paid by results. No one who completes 12 months with a provider without moving into work could do so without having undertaken at least four weeks of full-time activity.? Labour outlines the punitive measures to be implemented against the unemployed. In the section ?Work for your benefit,? the document states, ?We want to send out a clear message that people capable of work but who have not found a job by this stage will be required to work full-time or undertake full-time, work-related activity in return for their benefits.? Under the section ?A stronger sanctions regime,? the paper proposes the loss of up to two weeks? benefit for those who don?t attend appointments and interviews or to sign on in time. Those benefit claimants currently receiving Incapacity Benefit will face being coerced into ?work-related activity? or have their benefit cut. Up to 40 percent of those claiming Incapacity Benefit are mentally ill or physically disabled. The paper states, ?We will enact powers in the Welfare Reform Act 2007 to require new customers in the Work Related Activity Group to undertake general work-related activity. Customers who do not meet these requirements will have their benefit reduced. We will also extend throughout the first two years of a claim, the period during which new customers are required to engage with us by introducing Work Focused Interviews.? Those deemed fit enough by a doctor will be moved from Incapacity Benefit to the new 82-a-week Employment and Support Allowance and will be expected to look for work. Private sector to bid for contracts The paper outlines the further privatisation of welfare under a new ?Right To Bid? scheme. Private companies will be able to bid for lucrative contacts and be paid for the number of people they dragoon into employment, whatever form that takes. Companies that currently deal with the mentally ill provision will, for example, be allowed to run schemes aimed at finding them work. They will then be paid a bonus for each person who finds employment. These measures were first proposed in March 2007 by David Freud, an investment banker hired by the government to advise on welfare policy. He authored the report ?Reducing dependency, increasing opportunity: options for the future of welfare to work.? The previous month Freud had claimed that ?up to two thirds of people claiming Incapacity Benefit are not entitled to the state handout.? This included some 1.9 million people who Freud claimed were perfectly able to work, despite being assessed by a doctor and certified unfit for work. Freud?s comments, which were roundly condemned by organisations representing the mentally ill and disabled, were a deliberate attempt to whip up the media-led campaign denouncing Incapacity Benefit claimants as ?fraudsters? and ?cheats.? The Disability Alliance pointed out that Freud?s figures were vastly exaggerated and that the ?most recent official figure for incapacity benefit fraud suggests it is below half a percent.? In his report to the government Freud proposed a ?greater use of private and voluntary sector resources and expertise so harder-to-help benefit claimants receive more employment support, particularly existing customers who have been trapped on benefit for long periods of time.? His report recommended ?the use of private contractors because no one else could raise sufficient capital. It is proposed that there will be eleven regions, one contractor for each region. Voluntary sector organisations may be subcontracted for certain services.? The new work for your benefit measures are to be implemented in six pilot areas before being introduced nationwide. These include Greater Manchester and Lambeth, Southwark and Wandsworth in London, inner city areas which have been blighted for generations by poverty, unemployment, an increase in mental illness, low mortality rates and other social ills. Earlier this year statistics released by the Conservative Party, based on Department of Work and Pensions? Neighbourhood Statistics, found that 820 out of 1,074 working-age adults in Falinge and College Bank, two districts of Rochdale in Greater Manchester, were claiming out-of-work benefits. The figure of 76.4 percent was the highest in the country. According to the figures there are 60 wards (local districts) of Britain in which more than half of all adults are unemployed and on benefits. The statistics were seized on by the national press and highlighted as an example of ?welfare culture.? The Sun described Rochdale as the ?the scrounge capital of the UK.? Following the release of the figures, Paul Rowen, the Liberal Democrat MP for the town, commented on the widespread poverty and social misery, ?You cannot destroy British manufacturing and expect it will not also destroy some of our working-class communities.? ?Falinge scores highly in all the wrong ways?deprivation, joblessness and ill health. The large-scale shutdown of factories in the ?80s and ?90s has decimated the area.? Even while posing the question as to whether the residents of Falinge were ?feckless scroungers,? the right-wing tabloid newspaper the Daily Express had to acknowledge that a council estate visited by its reporter in Falinge was ?a depressing warren of poverty.? Rochdale, as with most of the towns in south Lancashire, once employed tens of thousands of workers, mainly in textile manufacturing and other industries. Over the past 30 years these have closed, leaving a legacy of unemployment, poverty and ill-health. According to figures by Rochdale Borough Council, ?life expectancy for men and women in the Borough is less than the national average and in some wards is ten years less than in other parts of the Borough.?

Environmental Technofixes – Climate Solution or Corporate Scam
8 Sep 2008
Can science save the planet or should we avoid putting our faith in high-tech fixes to deliver us from the ecological mess we?ve made? Jim Thomas and Paul Fitzgerald push each other?s buttons. Dear Paul Let?s start with an agreement: we have to deal with humanmade climate change. The ridiculous fight over whether it is real is long over. What society faces now is a more serious conflict over how to deal with the problem. Behind wonkish debates over ?adaptation? and ?mitigation?, the new battle-lines are being drawn around whose interests get trampled in the name of saving the planet. Trillion-dollar industries, exploiting the climate crisis, are man?uvring to get that fight resolved in their favour. From biofuels to nuclear power to ?clean coal?, the idea of deploying technology as a silver bullet has become a shiny talisman in the corporate response to climate change. Nowhere is that talisman more apparent than in the new strategies emerging from the US right wing. Newt Gingrich, a prominent Republican strategist and former climate sceptic, is now a ?believer? in climate change but is choosing an election year to fight against carbon dioxide emission reductions. He claims he has a better proposal: namely ?geo-engineering?, the large-scale intentional manipulation of the atmosphere, oceans and soils to ?fix? climate change. Gingrich?s think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute, appears to favour a scheme of polluting the upper atmosphere with tiny sulphur particles in order to reflect heat, cooling the climate in the process. Such a scheme would likely also damage the ozone layer, increase respiratory problems, reduce rainfall and spread drought. The oceans would continue to acidify because it won?t curb CO2 emissions ? but that?s not the point. The point is to give industry a free pass to continue polluting and to shift political will away from challenging industrial consumption. Another crazy geo-engineering scheme, ocean fertilization ? dumping iron and urea into the oceans to grow plankton, is being pursued by at least three companies. They claim the plankton will gobble up CO2 and hope to make big bucks on carbon credit markets. In May 2008, 191 nations at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity agreed a de facto moratorium on ocean fertilization because it seriously threatens marine life, human health and coastal livelihoods. That moratorium is a sane beginning in the emerging battle over geo-engineering. On the one side, Newt Gingrich is offering technofixes to defend business-as-usual; and on the other, global environmental conventions are defending life on earth. These battle-lines look eerily familiar. Which side do you stand on? Dear Jim I?m on the side of the direct action, no war for oil, buy nothing day, pro-democracy, anti-corporate rule radicals. (Being one myself, I?ve kind of got to be…) We?re opening a huge moral can of worms here, dominated by one simple question ? what will we do if our campaigning fails to bring about an urgent and massive reduction in CO2 emissions? Or if those emissions have already gone past the point of no return, leaving the next generations nothing but violent social collapse to look forward to (some climate change models predict the damage we?ve already done will produce a runaway ?feedback loop?)? Yes, this kind of capitalist political system will always behave in a bizarre, exploitative, short-term manner, for the benefit of its self-appointed oligarchy. Yes, it?s easy to find villains like Gingrich who support the concept of geo-engineering, and being in the same world ? let alone political bed ? as him gives me a shudder down my spine. But that doesn?t help answer the question: if all else fails, do we want to deprive future generations of the only solution left available to them, by refusing even to contemplate a large-scale technological solution to the problem? Believe me, if it turns out we can escape this trap without resorting to ?technofix? methods, I?ll be partying in the street right next to you. But if not, what then? Are we saying we want to punish the next generation for our sins? ?Sorry, kids! We set the house on fire, but you can?t use a fire extinguisher, because that?s industrial technology, which is bad, just like those matches we dropped in the first place. Tough luck, eh?? Dear Paul Alarm bells always go off for me when I hear that something is ?the only solution left available?. Really? Has our imaginative capacity collapsed along with the iceshelves? Somewhere in my unconscious I hear the jackboots of ?the final solution? or Margaret Thatcher spelling out TINA (?There Is No Alternative?). Of course that is how geo-engineering will be sold to us ? as inevitable. After a barrage of doomsday hysteria we?ll gratefully pay the geo-engineering companies to pollute our atmosphere, ruin the seas and then grant them immunity from any liability because policymakers will have been convinced they are our saviours ? after all: TINA. Nor do I accept the narrowness of your ?one simple question? on CO2 emissions. Let?s put the coming climate emergency in some perspective. Climate change is not the root cause of our global problems or social collapse. Billions of people were already living in a state of emergency before climate change, Kyoto or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Simply solving the problem of gases in the atmosphere may reduce pressure on the poorest and let some of us off the hook but it doesn?t get us to a fairer world. Even ?before? climate change there were over 800 million people hungry in the world, a billion without adequate access to water, a species extinction that surpasses anything in history and an insane economic system creating what the United Nations calls ?grotesque inequalities?. That?s an ?inconvenient truth? that neoliberal enviromentalists such as Al Gore would rather gloss over, yet he and his buddies are framing the debate. Unless we are radical in our analysis and conscious in our strategies, that deeper global emergency could be much worsened by the geo-engineers, even if they ?fix? climate change. ?Contemplating? geo-engineering isn?t enough. We need to analyze intelligently the power relations that are built into all our technological ?solutions? whether geo-scale or nano-scale. Unless those ?solutions? genuinely address both crises ? the Johnny-come-lately problem of climate change and the deeper entrenched problem of global injustice ?we may end up further kicking the powerless in the teeth. Dear Jim The question is one that needs a better answer than ?You sound like Thatcher, you do!? We may well fail to reduce (rich world) CO2 emissions fast enough, and then have to respond by any means we can ? in a way that doesn?t make the situation worse. Yes, we need a radical global perspective here, otherwise we end up saying political problems only become serious when they impact upon rich white Westerners. Yes, the global majority are already suffering because of our dysfunctional, exploitative economic system ? I didn?t say climate change has somehow ?caused? that. But if rising sea levels flood the world?s coastal cities and desertification runs riot, what we?ll get is a whole lot more poverty and agony. And I?m not gonna sit here and say ?Let them suffer! That?ll show the neoliberals we?re not fooled by their devious geo-engineering schemes!? Yes, some technology does have a kind of inbuilt political agenda ? such as guns and nuclear power. But not all does ? trains, turbines, industrial looms, hypodermic syringes, power tools… Having printing presses does not inevitably lead to Rupert Murdoch. Computers do not inevitably lead to Bill Gates. Syringes don?t inevitably lead to mainlining heroin. Access to and democratic control of technology is a political issue ? one we solve by political means, not by rejecting the technology itself. I?m not saying let?s accept any form of geo-engineering that?s suggested. Some aren?t feasible soon enough, some will be impossible to control once initiated, and some do have an inbuilt political agenda, such as GMO-based solutions, or those requiring a huge amount of energy to construct and operate, thereby perpetuating emissions. As you say, we need to be very shrewd about this. What I strongly disagree with is your ?all or nothing? assumptions that a) we don?t want or need geo-engineering under any circumstances, ever; and b) considering it as a last resort will inevitably mean we ignore our CO2 emissions and further entrench exploitation and corporate political power. That just isn?t a logical argument. In fact, isn?t it kind of ?TINA? itself? Dear Paul I think we have a really different perception of the politics of technology. Industrial looms did have a powerful inbuilt political function ? they put large swathes of artisans out of work in the early 19th century and moved hundreds of thousands of people into an exploitative factory system that ruined communities and damaged workers to fatten the wealth of an emerging class of industrialists. That?s why thousands of so-called ?Luddites? acted to destroy power looms under threat of being hanged, and the British state had to deploy more soldiers to quell their direct action than had been sent to fight Napoleon. Today industrial looms are the enabling technology for large sweatshops in poorer communities. Likewise, trains are the archetypal technology of industrial conquest that once opened up indigenous lands for rapid theft, exploitation and movement of raw materials back to the captains of commerce. In some parts of the world trains still steal minerals, metals and lumber from the marginalized to swell corporate coffers. The point is that many technologies have power relations built into them which they can perpetuate and entrench. Geo-engineering technologies, by their very nature, embody probably the most unequal power relations possible. These are large-scale, capital-intensive endeavours that can only be deployed by industrial lites and yet claim to have the power rapidly and unilaterally to alter planetary ecosystems. We?ve had a few technologies like that before ? nuclear bombs or maybe space weaponry. The similarity to weapons of mass destruction is not by chance. In 1976 the world signed the ENMOD treaty against the hostile use of large-scale environmental modification techniques. In fact it was the last environmental treaty the US bothered to sign. Even they recognized that the development of such capabilities would grant awesome and destabilizing power in geopolitical affairs. You say you wouldn?t accept any old form of geo-engineering. I?m glad you are discerning but please explain what you are advocating. To help narrow the field, let me suggest a taxonomy. First, there are the proposals to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and sequester it somewhere unspecified (in the ocean maybe, or perhaps vented into outer space). Second, there are proposals to reflect more sunlight back into space to reduce warming ? by laying millions of hectares of white plastic over deserts or shooting nanoparticles into the stratosphere. Third, there is straightforward weather modification, such as blowing hurricanes off course so that they don?t hit American cities. Which of these are you suggesting we should fall back on? Should we prepare to suck, reflect or blow? Dear Jim The Luddites suffered from the absence of democracy, not the presence of a new piece of technology. I?d love to know what forms of technology you feel can be within our political control… or are we helpless victims in the face of all innovation? Anyway ? suck, reflect or blow? All three! Professors John Latham and Stephen Salter?s proposal to seed clouds using sprayed ocean water droplets (thereby increasing the quantity of cooling, reflective cloud cover over the oceans) involves all three, and looks really promising. At present, the plan involves a fleet of 1,000 wind-powered automated vessels. Most of the electricity would be generated by turbines dragged along behind the craft. To quote Latham: ?The ideal solution to the global warming problem is that the burning of fossil fuels be drastically reduced… One advantage of our plan is that it is ecologically benign; the only raw material required being seawater. The amount of cooling could be controlled, via satellite measurements and a computer model, and if an emergency arose, the system could be switched off… What effect will this have on the world?s fragile ecosystem, and do we have the right to interfere with the planet in this way? Before we could justify deploying such a scheme on a global scale we would need to [conduct tests] to establish whether there might be serious or harmful meteorological or climatological ramifications.? I?m not a qualified meteorologist? there may be serious drawbacks to this proposal, but 1,000 boats powered by the wind, that can be switched off if need be, doesn?t strike me as a megalomaniac, uncontrollable industrial plot against the poor. If anything, it has something of an Intermediate Technology feel to it. Perhaps it won?t work. But then who knows what other solutions might be possible, human creativity being what it is? Dear Paul Latham and Salter?s is actually just a ?reflect? proposal. It aims only to reduce sunlight, not CO2, so will do nothing to arrest the acidification of the very ocean being sprayed skywards. It?s also the sort of remedy that once you start you likely have to keep going. If you ?switched it off?, temperatures might rise quickly since there would still be significant greenhouse-gas concentrations. Nor is it exactly a small-is-beautiful ?intermediate technology?. Scientists working on the project privately estimate that they would need to enhance cloud cover over about 20 per cent of the ocean to be effective (that is, to counteract a doubling of warming). Such artificial cloud formation would be targeted to coastal areas such as the Peruvian and Californian coastline and along storm tracks and would likely reduce rainfall. In effect they would then be engaging in large-scale inadvertent weather modification along coastal regions. I?m not sure how Peruvian and Californian farmers will feel about losing rainfall in a time of severe water shortages, but my suspicion is that they won?t be in on the decision-making anyway. Applying this technique in storm zones may lessen storms and hurricanes or it may just redirect them to hit new unfortunate targets. The problem is, you will likely be replacing one set of unpredictable climatic events caused by warming with another set of unpredictable climate behaviours caused by geo-engineering, and I don?t see how that is progress. What Latham euphemistically calls ?tests?, like atmospheric nuclear tests or GM crop tests, means altering real world weather patterns. But your question about which forms of technology could be within democratic control is a really important one that policymakers and scientists alike repeatedly fail to ask. I think the best of technological creativity is far removed from the world of big budgets and PhDs. There are a multitude of unsung solutions being quietly developed by communities in response to climate change, which can be every bit as ingenious and complex as geo-engineering but far more appropriate. Small farmers across the globe are breeding resilient seed varieties and developing farming techniques to adapt agriculture to climate change. Forest communities are practising forest management techniques that avoid deforestation, while organic farming systems offer real promise to increase carbon storage in the soil while eliminating nitrous oxide emissions from synthetic fertilizers. These are not the ?big science? one-size-fits-all solutions that our technocratic ?leaders? prefer. And that?s too bad. As we?ve learned from globalization and t-shirt sales alike, the promise of ?one-size-fits-all? rarely delivers what it says on the label. In reality such ?solutions? tend to fit the big guys just fine but leave the little people swamped. Whether you are talking t-shirts or climate policy, what sort of justice is that? Dear Jim You?ve raised a lot of (very interesting) questions about the political control of technology, but still not answered the key question ? what will we do if we fail to bring about sufficient CO2 reductions? None of the ?small science? projects you outline will resolve the worst case scenario. Latham and Salter clearly acknowledge the need to reduce CO2, and that their scheme needs to be carefully scrutinized for unforeseen consequences. But being alarmed by a localized drop in rainfall, when taken in the wider context of the devastation climate change may bring, seems odd. Prove to me that we?ll succeed in lowering our emissions successfully, that we haven?t reached the point of no return, and I?ll stop considering geo-engineering. If not, let?s be involved in the process rather than indulge in post-modernist tut-tutting from the sidelines, and ensure it isn?t dominated by reckless short-term neoliberals who want to use it as permission to carry on business as usual. You insist that exploring a geo-engineering approach automatically means the end of all future efforts to curb CO2 emissions. That simply isn?t logical, and smacks of a defeatist lack of faith in people. We clearly identify the same corporate power lite as the main obstacle to justice and freedom. What I find strange is you seem to think all industrial technology is inevitably tied up with that lite, and forever lies beyond democratic control, as if any technology you don?t like has some kind of innate voodoo quality. There?s a wider context again to this debate… I see great potential for (but no guarantees of!) a profound ethical transformation in the way our species behaves. Our history resembles a kind of moral evolution, slowly and painfully struggling towards increasing levels of democracy and human rights. Undoubtedly there are very serious enemies and injustices to overcome still; enemies who want to perpetuate a feudal, robber-baron style of economic power over the majority. Continuing that progress requires time and breathing space. The massive social chaos climate change may well bring will result in fascism, not liberation. Yes, let?s keep a sharp critical eye on the political issues thrown up by new technology. But I simply refuse to take an entrenched position when so much is at stake. If there is a workable and sustainable safety net option available to us, let?s explore it, and if need be, I say we take it. Then use the ?second chance? it gives humanity to end poverty, injustice and corporate rule, and bring into existence a genuine economic democracy. Jim Thomas is a technology activist and writer with the ETC Group: www.etcgroup.org Paul Fitzgerald is an activist, artist, writer and science educator.

How industry money protects killer chemicals
8 Sep 2008
It happens almost every time. When a study is published linking a workplace chemical to serious disease, a scientist working for the industry disputes the findings. David Michaels, author of ‘Doubt is their product’, exposes industry?s dangerous tactics to protect its toxic favourites. This strategy of ?manufacturing scientific uncertainty? comes directly from the tobacco industry?s playbook. In fact, many of the same scientists who manufactured doubt for the cigarette companies are now performing that same task for a wide range of other industries. How did we get here? In the 1950s, when scientists first showed that smokers had hugely increased risk of lung cancer, the cigarette companies ran a sophisticated public relations campaign to raise doubts about the increasingly definitive scientific evidence. The companies realised that if you could argue about the science, then you could avoid having to address solutions: how to help people stop smoking. But even when that didn?t work, Big Tobacco could always fall back on the argument that smoking was a choice ? whatever the risk, smokers made the choice themselves, and that it was their right to do so. That all changed in the 1980s and 1990s, when studies began to demonstrate that cigarette smoke killed not just smokers but their non-smoking spouses and workers employed in smoke-filled environments. Big Tobacco spent millions of dollars employing more and smarter scientists to argue that these studies were flawed. The result was the creation of an industry of scientific consultants who specialise in ?product defence,? and the recognition by corporate spin experts that manufacturing doubt works ? do it well and you can stop government regulators, or at least slow them down for years. In 1969 an executive at Brown & Williamson, a cigarette maker now owned by RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company, unwisely committed to paper the perfect slogan for his industry?s disinformation campaign: ?Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ?body of fact? that exists in the mind of the general public.? Big Tobacco has lost all respect and credibility, but the practices it perfected have proliferated. A growing trend that disingenuously demands proof over precaution in the realm of public health. Product defence In field after field, year after year, conclusions that might support regulation are always disputed. Animal data are deemed not relevant, human data not representative, and exposure data not reliable. Whatever the story ? workplace chemicals that cause cancer, diesel exhaust, global warming, sugar and obesity, secondhand smoke, plastics chemicals that may disrupt endocrine function ? scientists in the ?product defence industry? will manufacture uncertainty about it. The ?debate? over global warming is perhaps the most pernicious outgrowth of tobacco?s strategy. We can expect to see the scientists who last year claimed uncertainty about humans? role in climate change now asserting that there is so much uncertainty about the public health impacts, or the technology required to reduce carbon emissions that we must undertake more research before setting new policy. I call it Denying Climate Change 2.0. While much of the media has learned to be sceptical about manufactured uncertainty in the climate debate, less public attention is trained on the pervasive use of doubt-for-hire in other industries whose products threaten the health of workers and consumers. In Doubt is their product: How industry?s assault on science threatens your health I dissect industry?s campaigns to manufacture doubt about a series of important workplace hazards, including asbestos, benzene lead, aromatic amines (dyes and rubber chemicals that cause bladder cancer), beryllium, chromium 6, diacetyl (the artificial butter flavor component that has killed or damaged the lungs of dozens of workers ? Hazards 101) and ergonomic hazards. I focus largely on the US, because this country dominates the worldwide standard-setting process. When our regulators allow manufactured uncertainty to weaken or delay protections, workers across the world suffer the repercussions. Standard response I have had the opportunity to witness at close range the process of manufacturing scientific doubt. In the Clinton administration, I served as US Assistant Secretary for Environment, Safety, and Health in the Department of Energy (DOE), the chief safety officer for the nation?s nuclear weapons facilities. I ran the process through which we issued a strong new rule to reduce exposure to beryllium, a metal vital in nuclear weapons and now used in consumer products like golf clubs. Beryllium causes lung disease at extremely low exposure levels, and it causes lung cancer. After leaving the government, I was able to obtain a collection of secret documents which showed that the beryllium industry has run a 30 year campaign industry attacking any study that questioned the old, out-of-date OSHA standard. Chromium 6 is another industrial chemical featured in Doubt is Their Product. For more than five decades, we have known chromium 6 is a powerful lung carcinogen. But in the US, it has never been regulated as cancer-causing. Secret minutes of the Chrome Coalition [1], the chromium employers? trade association, reveal that when the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was finally considering a new workplace exposure standard, the chromium industry brought in some of the nation?s top product defense scientists, to design a sophisticated counter attack. The chromium manufacturers also sponsored an important study which showed that chromium 6 caused lung cancer at levels far below the OSHA standard in effect at the time [2], but those results were never revealed until I discovered them. Deadly tactic These examples are not exceptional. I report on corporate efforts to manufacture uncertainty about asbestos, lead, vinyl chloride, diacetyl, and a host of other chemicals. Doubt is their product is filled with never before published documents, like the never-published letter from the medical director of DuPont stating that 100 per cent of the men who made beta-naphthylamine (BNA) at one factory developed bladder cancer [3]. DuPont also produced other bladder carcinogens in that same factory; at least 450 workers at the plant developed work-related bladder cancer [4]. One of the chemicals closely related to BNA made at that plant was ortho-toluidine (OT). Through a series of DuPont letters, reports and papers, the book demonstrates that DuPont managers witnessed this development and growth of this tragic epidemic, yet refused to acknowledge that OT could also cause bladder cancer, shipping the chemical out without proper warnings. As a result, dozens of workers exposed to OT in a plant in Niagara Falls New York, USA, have developed bladder cancer. For many years, DuPont and other manufacturers have disputed the link between OT and human bladder cancer. Earlier this year, the International Agency for Research on Cancer evaluated OT and reached the same conclusion I did, too late for the Niagara Falls workers: OT is a human bladder carcinogen. In researching this book, I uncovered a many documents like the DuPont bladder cancer ones. Some of these documents are shocking. To ensure they can be used by activists, public health practitioners and regulators, I have posted every reference in the book, with links to all of the ?smoking guns,? at DefendingScience.org. Doubt is their product powerfully demonstrates that conflicted science is not good science. If a scientist is paid by a polluter or a manufacturer of dangerous products, her or his judgment is inevitably clouded by that financial relationship; this is true even for scientists who have great integrity and who try to be honest. As a result, we cannot rely on the judgment of these scientists when considering how to best protect workers from toxic exposures. Activists, unions and scientists need to demand that our government agencies rely on independent studies conducted by independent scientists, not ones bought and paid for by the producers of the hazards. The mission of health and safety activists, as well as public health and environmental agencies, is to reduce hazards before people get sick or the environment is irreparably damaged. We don?t need certainty to act. It is time to return to first principles: use the best science available, but do not demand certainty where it does not exist. References: 1. Secret minutes of the Chrome Coalition. [pdf1] [pdf2] [pdf3] 2. Collaborative cohort mortality study of four chromate production facilities, 1958-1998, September 2002 [pdf] 3. June 18 1947 letter from the manager at DuPont?s Chambers plant [pdf] 4. 25 October 1991 email from Robert Weiss MD [pdf] This article was first published in Hazards Magazine, 103, August 2008

Work – Good for your health?
8 Sep 2008
Work is good for your health, according to the Government in its recent consultation document on reforming the welfare state. Yet five million workers in Britain suffer from stress at work and half a million of them believe this makes them ill. A survey by the Samaritans found that people?s jobs were the single biggest cause of stress. According to the Government?s own research, mental health conditions are now the single biggest cause of absence from work and of claims for incapacity benefit. The number of people claiming the benefit more than trebled between 1979 and 1997. This is also the period when the Conservative Government passed laws which greatly restricted and controlled trade union activity. Has this disenfranchisement of working people led to a situation where incapacity benefit provides the only respite for those for whom work has become unbearable? My experience has led me to believe this is so. When I became ill as a result of workplace stress, my employer promptly made me redundant. My trade union proved to be as bureaucratic as it was toothless. I could not afford a lawyer and public funding is not available for employment tribunal cases. So I had to take on my employer single-handedly. Needless to say, the added stress did nothing to improve my stress levels. Had I left my job before I became ill and signed on while looking for another one, I would have made myself ?voluntarily unemployed? and thus being penalised with a ?sanction? of up to 26 weeks without any money. So I had no choice but to stay put until my stress levels reached crisis point and I had to escape ? first to my GP and then onto incapacity benefit. I now live on 86 per week, out of which I have to pay for prescriptions, dental and osteopathic treatment. I get no help with travel expenses. Consequently, I am often forced to choose between lunch and a bus pass. I am continually subjected to ?medical assessments? and ?work-based interviews? by the local Jobcentre. I am stigmatised by the right-wing media. So how is the Government planning to help me and others in my position? The consultation document tells me that the ?Access to Work? budget is to be doubled to 140 million and that public and private sector ?providers? will be paid out of benefit savings to get incapacity claimants back to work. In other words, money will be taken away from the sick and disabled and given to Government departments and private companies which care about targets and profits, not claimants. A further 173 million will be spent on ?psychological therapies?, provided by therapists who are to work alongside Jobcentre advisors to ?support? people to get off welfare benefits. Here is my response to the consultation document: Stop kicking the victims of rampant capitalism. Stop telling us that being bullied off benefits is good for our health. Stop pouring money into machinery designed to deprive us further and leave us in peace, so that we can get better and/or find alternative ways to make a contribution to society.

Follow the money
8 Sep 2008
Immigration is an emotive issue. The possibilities of a rational debate are constrained as many commentators have already adopted certain positions. The latest proposals are to expel non-EU immigrants after four years. The proponents of such policies are happy to collect taxes from non-EU immigrants, but do not wish to extend social rights to them. Yet politicians have shown remarkable unwillingness to address economic causes of legal and illegal immigration. In a world of uneven economic development, many people are persuaded to leave their homes, families and friends in search of greener pastures, especially to the western world. Some immigration is encouraged as often the indigenous population is less willing to accept poorly paid jobs. Immigrants from the Mediterranean countries and Eastern Europe are increasingly providing cheap labour for the leisure, tourism and agriculture industry. Immigration helps to boost the reserve army of labour and enables some employers to make excessive profits by driving down wages and working conditions. Unsurprisingly, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) opposes any cap and claims that immigration is essential for business growth. It is silent on the social rights of immigrants. Immigrants often have dreams, energy and willingness to work long hours. They have revived the British textile industry and run the ubiquitous corner shop. Immigration also results in huge wealth transfer from developing countries to developed countries. The developing countries bear the cost of producing scientists, engineers, doctors and other professionals, but many then migrate to developed countries. The main reason for migration to the western world is that it has comparatively good education, healthcare, economic and social infrastructure. Developing countries, often rich in natural and human resources, can also develop such infrastructure but are hampered by local corruption, export of capital and organised tax avoidance. Due to historical legacies, developing countries are estimated to have an external debt of some US$2.85 trillion. A large part of this is due to theft by many dictators and deposited in western banks. A report by the UK Africa All Party Parliament Group (pdf) noted that “220 bn was stolen or misused by [Nigeria’s] past rulers between 1960 and 1999 and much of this was held overseas”. Developing countries paid developed countries more than US$540 billion in debt service in 2005. Low-income countries continue to pay out $100 million each day to creditors. Developing countries are estimated to be losing an additional $350bn-$500bn a year through organised tax avoidance (pdf), often by western multinational corporations. This is more than three times the total of all foreign aid and assistance. Christian Aid reported that tax avoidance prevents investment in social infrastructure and will lead to some 5.6m deaths of young children. A recent report by Greenpeace e.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/conning-the-congo.pdf noted that logging companies in Congo are avoiding taxes of at least $12m a year. The main tool for this is ‘transfer pricing’, a technique used by companies to shift costs and profits. The sums are not trivial by local standards. In terms of 2000 prices, they are over 50 times the country’s environmental operating budget. Some $12m is equivalent to 80% of the country’s public healthcare budget and could help to vaccinate some 700,000 children under five years of age against deadly diseases. Altogether, developing countries are exporting nearly a trillion dollars each year to developed countries, leaving precious little for investment in education, healthcare, public administration and jobs. Is it any wonder that those who are mobile migrate to developed countries, either legally or illegally? Curbing the export of capital from developing to developed countries and greater investment in local infrastructure will go a long way towards reducing pressures for immigration. Developed countries have been slow to write off debts, or repatriate the funds looted by foreign dictators. They have done nothing to investigate and prosecute companies that avoid taxes in developing countries. While some immigration is a feature of the neoliberal global economy, pressures can be significantly reduced by curbing tax avoidance and creating geopolitical structures that promote more equitable share of wealth and power. Without addressing the economic inequities, there is little prospect of curbing the pressures for legal and illegal immigration.

1978: Fighting Fascism on Brick Lane
7 Sep 2008
The mid-to-late 1970s were something of a high point for organised fascists. The National Front could mobilise thousands of members for confrontational demonstrations. Their street stalls and paper sales littered the pavement, Their outspoken racism attracted sympathy, if not outright support. Violence, provocation and intimidation were the order of the day. It was a time when the fascists must have entertained the notion that they were going places. Maybe soon a desperate and ramshackle ruling class would employ them to throw the final blows against a militant labour movement. It would give them free reign to ?sort out? minority communities ? to drive Asian, Afro-Caribbean and Jewish people out of Britain. It would rely on them to shore up ? or perhaps replace ? a rickety, failing government. These delusions ultimately came to nothing. In some ways, the situation today for the BNP looks better than that for the NF thirty years ago. In the 1970s the NF failed over and over again to get their members elected to local councils ? let alone Parliament. The BNP today has something over fifty borough, district, town and city councillors. It has a member elected to the Greater London Assembly and an electoral base that puts them in a position to win seats in the European Parliament. For their own reasons, the BNP have moved away from confrontational street politics. But this move does not negate, does not wipe from the record of history the actual aims and intentions of the violent, fascistic core of the BNP. For now, their methods appear distinct and far-removed from the tactics of the 1970s but they remain a real, political and physical threat. A survey of the anti-fascist movement of the 1970s and that of today tells a similar ? dispiriting but not totally disheartening ? story. Take the Socialist Workers Party for example. For the SWP, their involvement in anti-fascism is a major point of honour. From the ?Battle of Lewisham? to the current organising efforts against the BNP, the SWP has been “at the centre of struggle”. This is only part of the truth. The SWP’s record on anti-fascism is not as ?honourable? as they would paint it. The story of how UAF’s predecessor organisation, the Anti Nazi League, betrayed the local community of Brick Lane in East London is a warning from the past of the consequences of splitting anti-fascist activity: Two large mobilisations were planned for Saturday 24 September 1978. One an enormous carnival in south London, called by the Anti Nazi League (ANL) ? and the other a march through the East End of London by the National Front. To be sure, both events took a long time to plan, coordinate and organise. Anti-fascists had been busily booking and trying to fill coaches from every part of the country for months. The fascists had been organising themselves for a massive show of force. Stuck between these two groups were the residents of Brick Lane and a small band of supporters from the local labour movement. A few weeks before the planned fascist demonstration, the ?Hackney and Tower Hamlets Defence Committee? and a number of socialist and other campaign groups received definitive evidence that the NF planned to march through Brick Lane. The fascist march was almost certainly planned to clash with the ?Carnival?. Upon receipt of this information, the Defence Committee issued a wide appeal for a demonstration in opposition. This part of East London was ? and remains so today ? a predominantly Asian community, with a high concentration of Bengalis. The NF’s march was planned to do two things: to ?celebrate? the opening of a new NF headquarters close by; and to physically intimidate the local community, to crush their confidence and to claim political territory. The tactic of opening fascist headquarters in or near minority-community areas was not a new phenomena. Before and after World War 2, the British Union of Fascists and its successor organisations opened offices in predominantly Jewish areas. When the leadership of the ANL were warned of the NF march they responded: ?No, there?s not much we can do, we?ve got a concert organised which mustn?t be spoiled?. This, just a year after the great battle of Lewisham in August 1977. As Workers? Action [foreunner of Solidarity] reported: ?the National Front celebrated its greatest triumph in years. Unchallenged and unmolested, they marched 1,500 strong through the City of London to Great Eastern Street in Shoreditch, ?within spitting distance of Brick Lane?, as the NF leader Richard Verrall gloatingly put it.? Activists from Workers? Action?(forerunner of the AWL), the Socialist Campaign for Labour Victory, and the Black Socialist Alliance joined the resistance, but, with the big-name anti-fascist organisation off at its carnival, mostly the community was left to organise its own defence. Mobilised by the Defence Committee, up to 1,000 anti-fascists occupied Redchurch Street making it impossible for the NF to march into the heart of the community. Augmented by a small number of people persuaded to come over from the ANL carnival, the anti-fascists held their ground, but the counter-demonstration was nowhere big or organised enough to take the initiative, to widen protection or to halt the fascist march altogether. Had the ANL called off their carnival, had even a fraction of the 100,000 concert goers in Brockwell Park, south London, made their way to the East End, the National Front would have faced a humiliating defeat. It was not to be so. The results, as we reported them at the time, were as follows: ?Already, the Bengali community in Spitafields is paying the price for this defeat. After the Nazi rally dispersed, groups of fascists began prowling the area. One gang of 50-60 thugs got through to Brick Lane and smashed up an Asian shop before being driven off. In several underground trains and stations, black people and anti-fascists were attacked by cock-a-hoop National Front bullies. The hugely boosted morale of the Front will mean an escalation of racist assaults in the area and a renewed push to control the Sunday market in Brick Lane. That is the price of the fun and games in Brockwell Park…? What the leaders of the ANL did on that day ? the leadership of the SWP in particular ? must go down in history as a shameful display of sectarianism. Too often, the SWP Central Committee put the narrow interests of developing prestige and advantage for their own organisation before the tasks of building, educating and mobilising the labour movement on the basis of working class politics. We should remind the SWP of their real history in the anti-fascist movement and win as many of their members as possible to a militant, working class anti-fascist politics.

Seeing the bigger picture
7 Sep 2008
This might sound hyperbolic, but it is true: there is no longer any part of the globe that remains ?natural? in any meaningful sense. Even the apparently pristine ice-clad poles are contaminated by man-made chemicals, many of which concentrate in the food chain ? through fish, whales and seals ? making the breastmilk of Inuit women so loaded with poisons as to constitute, in effect, toxic waste. Humanity bestrides the planet in a way no single species has ever achieved before: enough now, according to many scientists, to merit our name being applied to a new geological era, the anthropocene. The rain that falls anywhere on the planet?s surface is different in its chemical constituents from pre-industrial rain; we have doubled the natural flow of reactive nitrogen through living systems, causing enormous algal blooms, not to mention ? at the last count ? 405 dead zones in coastal waters around the world. There is now a third more carbon dioxide, double the methane and a whole host of artificially manufactured gases circulating in our atmosphere. We have even managed to make the entire global ocean measurably more acidic, a remarkable achievement by any standard. Our moral and artistic senses have barely begun to comprehend the scale of what is going on. Yes, it is there in black and white for anyone to read in weighty scientific reports such as the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Some of these reports are reasonably readable. Some even have pictures. But works of art they are not, nor are they intended to be. This has a tangible impact: in cultural terms, we still fondly imagine ourselves to be tiny and insig nificant little creatures, beetling about on a vast planet that is relatively impervious to our presence. We terrify and titillate ourselves with stories of natural disasters ? earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis ? which seem to prove once again how powerless we are against the ?great forces of nature?. This is a false impression: the greatest force of all is we human beings. Our collective footprint now far outreaches anything this planet has naturally produced for tens of millions of years: even the worst imaginable supervolcano would have less of an effect on the biosphere than humble little Homo sapiens so far has. Artistic representation is integral to us ever developing a true understanding of our new place in the world. Good art bridges the intellectual/ emotional divide, communicating meaning in a way that UN reports cannot. It can help us think about why something hurts that is lost, why any of this matters, and how we might feel differently about it. It can step outside the rationalist discourse of modern scientific environmentalism into a different mental space where freer thinking is allowed and encouraged, and an impressionistic appreciation of changing nature is as valuable as rigorous facts and figures. Art should not be propaganda ? but it can change minds. At its best, it is a connecting rather than a dividing force. This is the difficult and contested territory that a new and visually stunning photographic collection, Vanishing Landscapes, occupies. Some of the images are truly shocking, such as Robert Adams?s pictures of logged redwood trees in the American north-west. No one can flick through these pages and not be appalled at the scale of devastation that humanity has inflicted on the landscape: not only have the trees been cut, but the whole ground has been butchered and vast areas bulldozed over. Stumps the size of houses are upended, thrown together like so much matchwood. In the final picture of the series, Adams?s wife sits hunched against a tree stump, surrounded by discarded branches and rotting timber as if by death itself. The ethereal quality of the images is highlighted by them being printed in black and white, which makes their content all the more stark. Similarly striking are Edward Burtynsky?s pictures of nickel tailings in Ontario, Canada. Bright red rivers flow through a charred and blackened landscape, reminiscent of volcanic lava flows in both colour and form. Burtynsky puts it well in the introduction: ?These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence,? he writes. ?We are drawn by desire ? a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success.? But what of landscapes in which the human impact is less obvious? Walter Niedermayr cleverly juxtaposes the human with the natural in his photographs of Alpine glaciers in Austria: on one side of the page fold sits an apparently natural icescape, and on the other people are emerging ? their bright clothes the only colour in the grey-whites of the glacial mass ? on duckboards from an ice cave. Other pictures in Niedermayr?s series show people sprinkled over the surface of the ice, like flecks of pepper in a salt-pan. Though the figures appear tiny in comparison to the bulk of the ice on which they are walking, they also dominate it with their sheer numbers when spread out. Thomas Struth contributes photos of intact forests, each named Paradise plus a number: an Australian forest is Paradise 03, a tangled Peruvian jungle is Paradise 31. There is no evidence of human impact at all; indeed, the pictures look as primeval and verdant as the Garden of Eden itself, which I suspect they are intended to evoke. And yet we know that, even in such landscapes as this, all is not what it seems. As the climate scientist John Schellnhuber says in an interview transcribed in the introduction: ?As an image of nature, the landscape can no longer be conceived of as independent of humankind but is always something that we ourselves have created.? We may not know it, but the composition of Peru?s forest in Paradise 31 may be subtly different from how it would have been in a world without human beings. That is not to bemoan our presence on this earth: we have as much right to be here as any other element of the biosphere. But the converse also applies: all the species we are busily wiping out ? consciously or unconsciously ? themselves enjoy inherent rights of existence. If we can understand and appreciate them more, perhaps we can also learn to respect them. ?Vanishing Landscapes? is published by Frances Lincoln on 18 September (35)

When News is Noise: the Media and South Ossetia
4 Sep 2008
The Strain Behind The Smile A Los Angeles Times editorial observed last month that China had persuaded world leaders to attend the Olympic Games "despite their misgivings about Beijing’s horrific human rights record both domestically and abroad". The horror, the editors noted, could not be entirely suppressed: "What planners in Beijing miscalculated is that no matter how well you teach performers to smile, the strain behind the lips is still detectable." (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-olympics26-2008aug26,0,5033807.story) Needless to say, no mainstream British or American journalist referred to the host nation’s "horrific human rights record" at the time of the US Games in Atlanta in 1996, or of the Los Angeles Games in 1984. And of course no media outlet has discussed "misgivings" about the awarding of the 2012 Games to Britain. But why on earth would they? Historian Mark Curtis explains: "Since 1945, rather than occasionally deviating from the promotion of peace, democracy, human rights and economic development in the Third World, British (and US) foreign policy has been systematically opposed to them, whether the Conservatives or Labour (or Republicans or Democrats) have been in power. This has had grave consequences for those on the receiving end of Western policies abroad." (Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power, Zed Books, 1995, p.3) A Guardian leader in July described how "western leaders rightly remain uneasy about giving their imprimatur to a [Chinese] regime which jails dissidents, persecutes religious groups, backs Burma and bankrolls Darfur." (Leader, ‘Beijing Olympics: Faster, higher – but freer?,’ The Guardian, July 12, 2008) On the other hand, the Guardian leader writers might have felt uneasy about giving their imprimatur to "western leaders" who are the destroyers of Baghdad, Fallujah and Mosul, and who have promoted chaos and terror in Afghanistan, Haiti, Serbia and Somalia, among many other places.  An Independent leader naturally shared the Guardian’s view: "The outside world will have a crucial role to play in the coming years. Engagement will produce much better results than isolation. But at the same time, the developed world must guard against soft-pedalling sensitive issues such as the treatment of Tibet, or Beijing’s sponsorship of vile regimes in Africa." (Leader, ‘China must not let its brief democratic light go out,’ The Independent, August 2, 2008) It is taken for granted that "the developed world" is the great hope for human rights. Again, comparable Independent editorials did not appear ahead of the Atlanta and Los Angeles Games condemning Washington’s "sponsorship of vile regimes". Everything in the media starts from the assumption that ‘We mean well,’ and from the unspoken, indeed unthought, assumption that this claim need never be questioned. This isn’t just a matter of choice – career success depends on it. Senior journalists like the BBC’s Huw Edwards have to be willing to make the Soviet-style claim that British troops are in Afghanistan "to try to help in the country’s rebuilding programme". (Edwards, BBC 1, News at Ten, July 28, 2008)  Respecting Sovereignty One tragicomic consequence of this self-imposed simple-mindedness is the inability of the mainstream media to make sense of last month’s war in Georgia. Journalists kept a straight face as they communicated George Bush’s demand that "Russia’s government must respect Georgia’s territorial integrity and sovereignty." (http://afp.google.com/article/ ALeqM5i2LdnLHTyJgB2Ng8VSQyMQ3eMVrw) Few felt inclined to mention the small matter of Bush’s own invasion of sovereign Iraq, or the US-driven separation of Kosovo from sovereign Serbia. Gordon Brown, proud ‘liberator’ of Iraq, or what remains of it, somehow avoided choking on his own hypocrisy as he insisted: "when Russia has a grievance over an issue such as South Ossetia, it should act multilaterally by consent rather than unilaterally by force." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/aug/31/russia.georgia) Occasional mentions have been made of the fact that the largest pipeline between the Black Sea and the Caspian oil fields and Europe is the 1.2 million barrels a day BP Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) line that passes through Georgia and parts of Abkhazia, and which happens to be the only pipeline not under Russian control. The Christian Science Monitor recently described the politics of the pipeline: "The $4 billion BTC pipeline, managed by and 30 percent owned by British Petroleum, was routed through Georgia to avoid sending Caspian oil through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, or Russia. A 10-mile pipeline could have connected Caspian oil to the well-developed Iranian pipeline system." (http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0816/p14s01-cogn.html) In 2000, Bill Clinton described the pipeline as "the most important achievement at the end of the twentieth century." (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/may2000/geor-m02.shtml) Securing this "achievement" has involved intense US efforts to manipulate Georgian political and military elites. The US and France are the main suppliers of Georgia’s military, but the prime US ally, Israel, has also supplied some $200 million worth of equipment since 2000. This has included remotely piloted drones, rockets, night-vision equipment, electronic systems, and training by former senior Israeli officers. To be sure, media hints that oil might help explain American and Israeli involvement have far exceeded mentions of the even more embarrassing reasons behind the British and American attack on Iraq in 2003, when the subject of oil was completely off the news agenda. Patrick Collinson wrote in the Guardian of the Georgian crisis: "It’s a superpower confrontation in a region criss-crossed with oil pipelines vital to the west." (Collinson, ‘Money: Sell oil, buy banks?: Crude prices are falling and commodities are plummeting,’ The Guardian, August 16, 2008) An article in the Observer last month was titled: "Europe’s energy source lies in the shadow of Russia’s anger: Behind the tanks in Ossetia are key oil and gas pipelines." (Alex Brett, The Observer, August 17, 2008) In the Times, Richard Beeston wrote a piece headed: "Oil supplies and Kremlin’s relations with the West at stake." (Beeston, The Times, August 9, 2008) The media have presented the West as innocently seeking to protect its energy supplies from an erratic Russian predator – we just want to keep our economies running. Perhaps the insatiably greedy Western interests that have wrecked havoc across the world in the post-1945 period are busy elsewhere. In the Guardian, Jeremy Leggett wrote: "The Kremlin has a strategy to control a vast slab of the world economy via oil and gas. Dmitry Medvedev, lest we forget, used to run Gazprom. The Georgia crisis, if not a planned piece in the strategy, certainly fits." (Leggett ‘Beware the bear trap: Britain, like most of Europe, is at risk of being the target of Russia’s energy export weaponry,’ The Guardian, August 30, 2008) Recall, by contrast, the almost complete media taboo on identifying oil as a factor in the US-UK invasion of Iraq. We can imagine a companion piece by Leggett from, say, 2002: "The White House has a strategy to control a vast slab of the world economy via oil and gas. George W. Bush, lest we forget, was the founder of Arbusto Oil, and chairman and CEO of energy company Spectrum 7. The Iraq crisis, if not a planned piece in the strategy, certainly fits." In the real world, Johann Hari wrote of Iraq in the Independent in 2003: "Blair went into this with the best of intentions. It is just silly to claim that Blair cooked up all these arguments to justify a grab for oil, or a straight-forward imperialist project." (Hari, ‘What Monica Lewinsky Was For Clinton The Hutton Inquiry Is For Tony Blair,’ The Independent, August 27, 2003) A year earlier, David Aaronovitch manufactured the required sneer: "Over in the New Statesman, John Pilger cranks out, as though Xeroxing on an old machine, piece after repetitive piece telling us that it’s all about oil and money and greed and imperialism." (Aaronovitch, ‘You couldn’t be sure what anyone would end up saying,’ The Independent, September 10, 2002) “The UK, meanwhile” Leggett added sagely in his actual article, “has no energy strategy”. Certainly not in Iraq, where, in late June, Iraqi oil minister Mohamad Sharastani announced that contracts had been drawn up between the Maliki government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq. Edward Herman takes up the wretched tale: "No competitive bidding was allowed, and the terms announced were very poor by existing international contract standards. The contracts were written with the help of ‘a group of American advisers led by a small State department team.’ This was all in conformity with the Declaration of Principles of November 26, 2007, whereby the ‘sovereign country’ of Iraq would use ‘especially American investments’ in its attempt to recover from the effects of the American aggression. The contracts have not yet been signed, and the internal protests are loud, but clearly the fig leaf of WMD and democracy has been stripped away as an ‘enduring’ occupation and a systematic looting of Iraq’s oil are arranged under a non-democratic tool of the occupation." (Herman, ‘Further Nuggets From the Nuthouse: The Law of Conservation of the Level of Violence,’ Z Magazine, September 2008) The BBC’s World Affairs Correspondent, Paul Reynolds, found no difficulty this week in recognising the realpolitik in Russian policy: "In some ways, we are going back to the century before last, with a nationalistic Russia very much looking out for its own interests, but open to co-operation with the outside world on issues where it is willing to be flexible." (Reynolds, ‘New Russian world order: the five principles,’ September 1, 2008; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7591610.stm) By contrast, Reynolds wrote in 2006: "The third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq prompts some melancholy thoughts about how it was supposed to be – and how it has turned out. "By now, according to the plan, Iraq should have emerged into a peaceful, stable representative democracy, an example to dictatorships and authoritarian regimes across the Middle East." (Reynolds, ‘Iraq three years on: A bleak tale,’ March 17, 2006; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ world/middle_east/4812460.stm) Russia’s plan is to look out for ‘number one’; the US-UK plan was to spread peace, love and understanding to Iraq and the region. Not a trace of recognition was allowed that the Iraq invasion was fundamentally about American profit and power, and certainly not the welfare of the Iraqi people, about whom, traditionally, US policymakers have not given a damn. Mostly the level of analysis of last month’s conflict has been pitifully thin, as in this comment from Bronwen Maddox in the Times: "Why now? The main reason is Georgia’s desire to throw in its lot with Nato, the US’s enthusiastic support for that, and Russia’s passionate opposition." (Maddox, ‘Simmering dispute could turn Russia against the West,’ The Times, August 6, 2008) It simply isn’t done for corporate journalism to expose the true goals of Western corporate titans and their militant state allies. The preferred realm of discourse is restricted to nonsense about "security", "democracy" and other "humanitarian" goals. Favouring Georgia Britain isn’t afflicted with a state-controlled media system, although one would hardly know it from press performance. Typically, a country identified as ‘nice’ by the British government is also ‘nice’ for our ‘free press’. The same is true of governments labelled ‘nasty’. The media have therefore presented the Georgia/South Ossetia conflict as the result of irrational Russian bullying. Max Hastings emphasised in the Guardian that, "The Russians yearn for respect, in the same fashion as any inner-city street kid with a knife." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/aug/18/russia.georgia) In a rare example of independent thought in the Guardian, Peter Wilby noted the consistent bias: "Russia’s behaviour, newspapers implied, was in a quite different category from Georgia’s. In the Sunday Times, Russian tanks went ‘rampaging’ in South Ossetia, while Georgian tanks merely ‘moved’. If Georgian forces had bombarded civilians, it was ‘reprehensible’, the Telegraph allowed. Russia, however, was ‘offending every canon of international behaviour’." (Wilby, ‘Georgia has won the PR war,’ The Guardian, August 18, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/18/ pressandpublishing.georgia) Wilby added: "Georgia’s actions in South Ossetia went largely unexamined, and it was hard to find, from press accounts, what refugees from the province were fleeing from." Indeed, an August 19 ITV News report explained the tragic results of the fighting for the people of Georgia. But as in so much reporting, no mention was made of the initial Georgian attack or the consequences for the people of South Ossetia. In fact Georgian forces had bombed the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, for 72 hours. An August 20 article in the Times reported how a "makeshift operating table lay under a weak lightbulb in the corridor of a dank basement that smelt strongly of excrement." Dina Zhakarova, a doctor in South Ossetia, commented: "This is where we had to try to save people’s lives. The whole place was a sea of blood while the Georgians were bombing our hospital." (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ news/world/europe/article4568945.ece) Dr Zhakarova described how staff had treated more than 250 people underground after the Georgian Army’s assault, adding: "All the staff gave blood for the patients because there were so many wounded. The Georgians knew very well that this was a hospital, so how could they say that we are their fellow citizens when they were firing rockets at us? It’s nonsense." Such commentary has been vanishingly rare. The bias is clear, but the deeper point is far more interesting – the entrenched propaganda function of the mainstream media renders it incapable of making sense of events in Georgia and South Ossetia. References to Russian self-interest are allowed, and to Western concerns about energy security. But on the real reasons why people were killing and dying, on how Western state violence consistently supports Western corporate greed, journalists have had next to nothing to say. In a world where rational understanding conflicts with the ‘ideals’ of propaganda, "news" is often little more than noise. SUGGESTED ACTION The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone. Write to Paul Reynolds Email: paul.reynolds@bbc.co.uk Write to Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian Email: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk Write to Roger Alton, editor of the Independent Email: rogermalton@googlemail.com Please send a copy of your emails to us Email: editor@medialens.org Please do NOT reply to the email address from which this media alert originated. Please instead email us: Email: editor@medialens.org This media alert will shortly be archived here: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/080904_when_news_is.php The Media Lens book ‘Guardians of Power: The Myth Of The Liberal Media’ by David Edwards and David Cromwell (Pluto Books, London) was published in 2006. 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Prisons- The Wrong Philosophy
4 Sep 2008
“Naive” is the kindest word that can be used to describe the decision by crime reduction charity Nacro to get into bed with private security contractor G4S to bid to run two prisons. Nacro has a commendable record of opposing private prisons with their priority of producing profits and dividends for shareholders. It has shared with other members of the Criminal Justice Alliance the view that prisons should not be used simply to lock away wrongdoers but should be part of process of turning people away from crime. Indeed, there has been widespread agreement on the need to prioritise non-custodial sentences with service and supervision within the community taking the place of isolation and deprivation. However, it is a giant step away from a general agreement on tackling crime that seeks to convince offenders to recognise their behaviour and to make amends for it to a willingness to be involved in a for-profits enterprise with G4S. Nacro chief executive Paul Cavadino believes that, if reform charities are involved in the planning of a prison regime, prisons would be more likely to provide high-quality resettlement and rehabilitation. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Private security contractors, whether G4S or any other company, will operate whichever regime shows the greater likelihood of generating profits for their shareholders. Mr Cavadino’s mistake lies in believing that he and Nacro can isolate one part of the criminal justice system and engender a humanitarian regime. But one look at the government’s approach, with its likely adoption of US-style Titan prisons, indicates that new Labour is pushing for profits to be the deciding factor, as it has done in the NHS and other public services. Profits are prioritised on the basis of cutting down on expenditure, which is why privateers do not pay the same salaries or contribute to the same pension scheme as in publicly operated jails. Is it likely that privatised prisons, in these same circumstances, would invest more heavily in rehabilitation, education and post-imprisonment supervision than the state sector? You don’t get to rake in half-yearly profits of 175 million if you have been doing so. The main problem with the Prison Service is that the government has not been prepared to invest in humane alternatives to the “lock ‘em up and throw the key away” approach favoured by right-wing tabloid newspapers. It has adopted in reality the desperate and deceitful philosophy of former Tory home secretary Michael Howard, the absurd view that “prison works.” If prison worked, we would not have the current high rates of recidivism, the widespread availability of class A drugs in jail, and the majority of prisoners having drugs or alcohol abuse problems. Our prisons are overcrowded because the message coming from government is that more and more people should be locked up. The government assures us that this illustrates its toughness. It does no such thing. It is tougher for offenders to be compelled to confront what they have done and to be helped to find a better way of existence than reliance on crime. Nacro will either be part of this tougher but more humane approach or it will fall for the privateers’ mantra that, if it brings in profits, it works.

Military Recruitment at Schools and Colleges
4 Sep 2008
Who’s the new guy in the leafy attire handing out fitness advice and wads of cash? After moving the motion objecting to army recruitment at congress, confirming our solidarity with NUT and overwhelmingly supported by you all, our local campaign began in earnest this week. The Army have set up a stall in the drama hall during enrolment offering a 5000 bursaries to students to commit themselves to 4 years in the army after leaving college. With no other employers have been granted this privileged access,and no other organisation has been offered the opportunity to counter the one-sided propaganda; we were understandably concerned. Their material as one member put.. “ its like a promotional material for a sports centre for bird spotters”. Why has the army has been permitted access during enrolment week when students are making important choices about their future. Pressure, bribes or inducements from outside institutions are inappropriate in this context. In response to UCU’s distribution, and in solidarity with our UNISON branch, we leafleted outlining our opposition to the army’s recruitment activity in the college during enrolment. As a direct consequence our college principal publicly lambasted our new branch secretary through a microphone in front of the assembled college, at a meeting called at the start of the year. The army had been distributing their literature unchallenged to all curriculum desks throughout enrolment. Our concern is for the welfare of our students, particularly the 16-18 year-olds, and a profound distaste that they are being recruited with inducements and under false pretences to an institution which is failing in its duty of care. A recent independent report by the Rowntree trust has condemned the army for using false and misleading propaganda to recruit young people. A full-page article in yesterday’s Observer newspaper (‘Record numbers of ex-soldiers in jail as combat leaves mental scars’) supplies further evidence that the MOD are failing in their duty of care to soldiers, Soldiers comprise the largest occupational group in the prison system with the number doubling in the last 4 years to 8500. The Howard League for Penal Reform attributes this to ‘‘an inability to cope with civilian life, particularly for those who joined the services on leaving school’ Veterans in Prison argue that ‘‘they’re fighting in back-to-back conflicts, coming out and going back again; they haven’t got time to recover. There are not enough of them. They don’t have the right cover or equipment and they’re absolutely knackered’ ‘staff at [one prison] have become so concerned at the lack of support traumatised soldiers receive upon release that they have taken to issuing them with information packs giving details of mental health charities’ National and local public opinion is overwhelmingly opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our local community amongst others is struggling to deal with gun crime and violence, especially where it affects young people. As a community college we should oppose violence and should not be feeding our young people to the war machine. The UK has been criticised at the UN (Child Soldiers Global Report 2008) as the only country in Europe that recruits 16 year-olds into the armed forces. The army targets youth because they are more vulnerable to army propaganda, especially in areas of high poverty and unemployment where young people have fewer choices than in leafy suburbs. The Army is enticing young people with glossy propaganda that conceals the facts that: - The Army is a racist, sexist and homophobic institution - 20% of 16-23 year-old women recruits suffer sexual harassment (2006 Equal Opportunities commission survey), with 10% of new recruits report being bullied in the first 12 months (Army’s own figures, report arising from the recent Deepcut inquiry) - Two thirds of people helped by Shelter, the homelessness charity, in 2001 were ex-armed forces - Hundreds of soldiers have been sent to fight illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with defective or inadequate equipment - Soldiers returning from the front-line are suffering record levels of mental breakdown, drug abuse and alcoholism as a result of the trauma that they have endured The army own offices and seemingly unlimited funds for media advertising campaigns. They have mobile recruitment buses that have previously pitched up outside Tottenham Town Hall. Groups that oppose their activities are free to protest their presence in such spaces. But educational unions the NUT and UCU have taken the considered view that army recruitment activities should have no place in educational institutions, and this is a position that we intend to fight for. This is opposition to government policy, and trades unions have long fought for the right to express a political position. We plan to publicly express our position by having a protest outside our college on Wednesday lunchtime, 12.30 ? 1.30pm. Demonstrate at Tottenham Centre UCU and UNISON have raised strong objections to management about the army in the college during enrolment, recruiting 16-18 year-olds under their FE Bursary Scheme. Although there are of course a range of views about the army within the UCU and UNISON, our common concern is for the welfare of our students and a profound distaste that they are being recruited with inducements and under false pretences to ease the army’s recruitment crisis. Misleading Propaganda The UK has been criticised at the UN (Child Soldiers Global Report 2008) as the only country in Europe which recruits 16 year-old into the armed forces. A recent independent report by the Joseph Rowntree Trust (www.informedchoice.org.uk) has condemned the army for using false and misleading propaganda to recruit young people. Army literature emphasises comradeship, active lifestyle, travel and training opportunities. It omits or obscures the risks of dying (estimated at one in 36 of those sent to Afghanistan), the long-term damage to physical and mental health, the legal obligations of enlistment and the demands of a military lifestyle. Army Failing in Duty of Care A full-page article in the Observer newspaper on Sunday (‘Record numbers of ex-soldiers in jail as combat leaves mental scars’) supplies further damning evidence of the damage that our students may suffer if we facilitate their signing-up. According to the article, ex-soldiers comprise the largest occupational group in the prison system, with the number doubling in the last 4 years to 8500. The Howard League for Penal Reform attributes this to ‘‘an inability to cope with civilian life, particularly for those who joined the services on leaving school’. Veterans in Prison argue that ‘‘they’re fighting in back-to-back conflicts, coming out and going back again; they haven’t got time to recover. There are not enough of them. They don’t have the right cover or equipment and they’re absolutely knackered’

‘Them and us’ economy hits the rocks
4 Sep 2008
“The economic times we are facing are arguably the worst they’ve been in 60 years”, blurted out chancellor Alistair Darling in an unguarded moment on his summer holiday. “And I think it’s going to be more profound and long-lasting than people thought”, he added. Darling’s words sent a chill through millions of working people as we leave the summer that ‘never was’ and prepare for a long winter. It is working class people who will bear the brunt of the recession that many economists believe has already begun. It’s not just the chancellor. Bad news has spilled out from the City for over a week. The pound reflected the dire state of the British economy by tumbling to a new low. The normally cautious Nationwide building society said house prices are falling at 150 a day and the CBI, the bosses’ union, reported the biggest annual decline in shopping since records began in 1983. A member of the Bank of England monetary policy committee has predicted two million people will be unemployed by Christmas. Over a thousand workers at Northern Rock are amongst the first to lose their jobs in this wave of redundancies, because the multi-billion pound rescue of the bank by the government does not include saving their jobs. But some people don’t have to worry about a cold winter. Energy multinational Centrica’s shares rose in value when it announced its latest price increase for British Gas customers. Having blighted Christmas for these customers, Christmas came early for Centrica’s big shareholders a couple of days later, when it posted a profit of 992 million in six months. Meanwhile Shell oil recorded a profit of 4 billion in just three months – that’s 2 million an hour! So while the rest of us tighten our belts and count our pennies, the super wealthy are doing very well. On the day that it was announced that pay increases are falling behind the rate of inflation, it was reported that in central London in July, houses priced at over 10 million rose in price by 1%, while the average house price in the same area went down. Many working people cannot afford to buy any house, but the super wealthy are buying more expensive homes than ever before. In his March budget speech, Darling said: “Britain is better placed than other economies to withstand the slowdown in the global economy”. This is not true. First Margaret Thatcher and the Tories, and then New Labour, encouraged the decline of manufacturing industry and moved the economy onto one based on finance and services, lubricated by a flood of debt. This appeared to work for a period, but as The Socialist warned, would come a cropper in a financial crisis. Now the mega rich who got us into this mess want working class people to get them out of it – we are expected to pay the price. But faced with this agenda, anger is growing and major struggles are inevitable. This anger and action will be accompanied by people drawing political conclusions, including the vital conclusion that a new workers’ party needs to be built. The ‘Them and Us’ recession Them: * 37% pay increase for FTSE 100 chief executives last year * 992 million profit for Centrica in first six months of this year * 26.9 billion pumped into Northern Rock Us: * 3.5% average annual pay increases April -June * 35% increase in prices to Centrica’s British Gas customers * 2000 jobs to go at Northern Rock

Contaminated Water- Yet Again!
4 Sep 2008
For the third time in three years there has been an outbreak of cryptosporidium in the Gwynedd and Anglesey water supplies. Last time over 200 people were left ill after contracting the parasite which causes severe diahorrea, in late 2005 and a notice to boil all water (which kills the parasites eggs) was in place for several months. Last time the company (Welsh Water / Dwr Cyrmu) agreed to compensate 37,000 customers 25 each for their inconvenience and were fined a tiny 60,000. After the incident the company spent 1million on new treatment equipment. But, the bug is back again with a notice to boil water on 30th August which will affect 45,000 people. It appears that this new treatment isn?t working either. A letter released by the Drinking Water Inspectorate pointed out that Welsh Water had been warned about possible problems with Cryptosporidium way back in 1998. The investigation into the 2005-06 incident said that treatment was in line with regulatory standards because it was believed the bug would be sufficiently dilute in the water not to cause harm! Welsh Water, like other water companies across the UK was privatised by Thatcher in 1989. The debts of these companies were written off by the government, but this still led to price increases and staff cuts. Maintenance and investment was also cutback on as part of ?cost-cutting? exercises. So we have seen water shortages, outbreaks of bugs like cryptosporidium and poor maintenance of sewerage which made last years flooding much more severe. The provision of water is a vital public service and should never have been privatised. Socialists argue for the re-nationalisation of the water companies, under democratic control and scrutiny of the local population.

Climate, Class and Coal
3 Sep 2008
In August, me and Arthur Scargill enter another big field to fight the corner for the miners and coal our industry and cause. Last time it was that field at Orgreave, this time it?s the Climate Camp at Kingsnorth Power Station and instead of thousands of cops there?s thousands of eco-warriors who now believe coal is killing the planet and want to stop all new coal stations. If truth were known, they want to close down all coal stations per se. This time there is only Arthur, and me, we have no squads of pickets, no marching bands and no flying banners. It is in many respects as daunting a prospect, but it shows the quality of this man, our differences aside, he came into the teeth of opposition with an unpopular and untrendy message, among people who are hardly receptive to his old school brand of Marxist-Leninist socialism but prepared to debate till the cows come home why the NUM and clean coal technology are allies in the struggle for a socialist ecology and a just world. Arthur is now 70 and I am 60, I think we present a figure of two rather battered and scarred alley cats come for a peace conference with the league of dogs. This is a sad and confusing conjuncture of forces. I have never in my life experienced a situation where the miners and what we do is the unpopular foe except among the ruling class and Tories. Outside of the Young Conservatives, I have never known young people regard mining and pit heads as their enemy. What is worse is that these are my traditional constituency on the Anarchist left, they have the aura of the hippies, they aspire to the freedoms and love of life, which our 60s/70s generation did. I come across the Newcastle and Scottish camp, and know many of the activists from the Toon scene and demonstrations. Previously we have always held each other in a silent mutual respect, now there is a mutual distance, coolness, a sort of mutual Et tu Brutus. However, I see here also the mortified conviction of my own anti-nuclear youth. The conviction that myself and the world were on the brink of extinction. The certainty that if we delay we are all doomed to a wretched and painful end. Now it is climate change, and the gathering speed with which the earth is crashing toward climatical obliteration ironically for all carbon based creatures and vegetation on the earth as we know it. A change, which will cleanse us all from the surface of the globe for eternity. The camp like some latter day Woodstock; they are a commonwealth, locked in debate and dedication, little communities with kids romping through the fields, longhaired, dreadlocked, singing and dancing. It is deeply wounding to be the enemy. This is an anti-Durham gala, everywhere are Workshops on mining, on resistance around the world to mining of all descriptions, pictures of headgear and open cast, industry and miners, and the campaigns against them. It is like a Durham miner?s gala on bad acid. Instead of everywhere a celebration of the miners, our work, our communities, are protests for its end. I am shocked that many left groups are now Groupies to the eco movement and have abandoned all attempts at class analysis. Arthur?s worst critic in the field is the local secretary of The Socialist Party, who tells him the NUM and miners? struggle was yesterday?s cause, this was where the struggle was now, that EON and the big generators to facilitate their profits are using us. I argue the opposite that every attack on coal feeds the nuclear agenda, sets the agenda for government policy. I remind them too that they are enthusiastic supporters of EON when it comes to ramming wind turbines down the throats of protesting locals resolved not to have them. Around the tent, are dotted Trade Union members of the SWP are they now ready to bury him having once been full of his praise? For a month, the Weekly Worker has carried uncritical adverts for the camp while the Morning Star warned me I was underestimating the forthcoming climate holocaust and declined my article criticising the camp. I have the honour to have wrote the official NUM bulletin The Miners and The Climate Camp, which Ken Capstick the Miner?s editor has managed to reduce from eight sides to four with a bit of clever editing. I?ve humped 2000 of them in a huge bag from Doncaster and have spent the morning spreading them round the field, where they are received with less than enthusiasm. About 150 protesters turn up to the tent, where Arthur and I are speaking from 1500 in the field. Their bottom line argument is we shouldn?t be generating so much power anyway, it should be cut by 50% and we need to get use to not having electricity. Arthur gets one of the Greens scientific officers to admit she was talking about taking out all nuclear and coal capacity, which would leave Britain virtually without power generation of any sort. They are non-plussed by the fact that we both accept practical renewables, that we see solar energy as the long-term future for the planet. That many other clean sources, as long as they are not equally environmentally damaging (like land wind turbines) should be deployed along with mass insulation projects and energy saving programmes. But that coal should be the base supply agent and buy the world a breathing space so long as we developed carbon capture systems to burn it cleanly. There is sympathy for the miners generally accepted as the most exploited people in Britain over the last century, but there has to be losers if we are to save the Planet, and we have been chosen to be it. Few people believe that CO2 capture works, and anyway will not be ready ?in time? to stop the climate going into free fall. At the same time as facing the Climate Camp and linked to it across the left and green movement, more and more people are coming over to the Government programme for nuclear power, and an end to coal mining and coal burning in Britain. I have argued far and wide that clean coal is the alternative to a civil nuclear programme. I am stunned to be told the NUM?s new policy supports both coal and nuclear although I still claim this to be untrue. It needs urgent clarification, because this is a central plank in our defence. I am asked to give a Workshop on the relevance and importance of the great 84/5 coal strike, nine people come. The relevance clearly isn?t too well established. ?The Earth? becomes an abstraction, humanity is some sort of foreign and alien invader and the storm troops, this time not of the TUC but of tidal waves, poverty and death, are the miners. Of course, Arthur?s arguments are not totally mine, he talks of ?dirty foreign coal? and unfair competition, slave labour and child labour, these are not my arguments. Import controls are not a progressive answer, in my view, but I am for a level playing field of subsidies and a ?fair trade? standard of terms, conditions and union rights, which would be, for the millions of coal miners abroad as much as for us. We agree though that clean coal technology is an achievable science now, and it is vital that it is applied wholesale across coal generation. The cops are arseholes as usual I am stopped and searched two sometimes three times a day, against my consent and often with force. Indeed, I am almost arrested, which would have been proved interesting in court. They could hardly argue they had reasonable grounds for suspecting I was going to sabotage the Power Station when I had gone down two thirds of the country with half a tonne of literature in its defence. They attack the camp on numerous occasions and lay into protesters with truncheons; day after day, they line people against the fence from the very youngest toddlers to very old people, and search and harass them. Arthur makes a very strong Statement to the media at the gate, in defence of the right to protest and welcomes the protesters invitation to him and to debate this vital issue. It was a privilege to stand with Arthur again, in the teeth of opposition again, though we could have done with thousands more supporters so short sighted ?greens? are not allowed to dominate this crucial debate. I am trying to put together a Labour Movement Conference on Climate, Class and Clean Coal in Newcastle for the end of the year, and very much hope the NUM sponsor it and supply key speakers.

Waiting for the barbarians
3 Sep 2008
In his verse ?Waiting for the Barbarians?, Greek poet Constantine Cavafy describes a country where all public life focuses on its enemies. Citizens wait in the forum because ?the barbarians are due?. The emperor and consuls are dressed in their finest garments to impress the barbarians when they arrive. Normal laws are suspended, and parliamentary debates cancelled during the present barbarian danger. Then the worst possible news reaches the city: ?... the barbarians have not come. / And some who have just returned from the border say there are no barbarians any longer.? The barbarians? failure to materialise hurts more than their expected arrival ? after all, ?... what?s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution.? A generation of Western politicians grew up during the Cold War, when the fear of the ?barbarians? of Russia and China was used as a key to international and domestic politics: all confrontations between the West and developing nations were recast as battles between freedom and communist tyranny. Anti-communism dominated home politics during the 1950s, and remained a significant force right up to the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Ideas to the left of the Democrats in US, or of social democracy in Europe, were often painted as illegitimate relations of the communist enemy. Some leading politicians seemed disorientated when the barbarians of the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a unified force. The Soviets had provided a ?kind of solution? to how to organise US and European government, and now they were gone. Leaderships in the White House and Westminster have seized on the new terrorist threat as a new kind of useful barbarian, again shaping much of foreign and domestic policy into the frame provided by the ?war on terror?. Relations with the developing world are determined according to who is on side in the battle against terrorism, and who harbours the diverse terrorist enemy. Authoritarian regimes like those of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia can be part of the coalition for freedom simply by declaring themselves against terrorism. Populations or nations that find themselves in conflict with the Western consensus ? like many Iraqis, Palestinians and Iranians ? are lumped together with Osama bin Laden?s small, violent network as part of the terrorist threat. Home politics are also bent towards an authoritarian, surveillance-happy ?homeland security?, with the suspension of ordinary civil liberties and the enactment of emergency laws. The threat of the new barbarians provides a new and unhappy political ?solution?. The theme of this book has been that, while legislators and officials are drawn to this political solution by themselves, they are also encouraged along this road by a substantial business lobby with a commercial interest in militaristic and authoritarian responses to the threat of terrorism. The neoconservatives have a long history of building up the threat of the barbarians. In the 1970s George Bush Sr founded a group called ?Team B? to second-guess the CIA?s estimate of Russian weapons and intentions. This group, which included Paul Wolfowitz and other prominent neoconservatives, deliberately overestimated the scale of the Soviet military and the aggressive threat of the Russian leadership in an attempt to derail dtente between East and West. From Team B developed the Committee on the Present Danger, a lobbying group which sought to keep up political pressure for a strong, interventionist US army. The Committee fought against anti-military feelings generated by the Vietnam failure, countering them by emphasising the Soviet threat. In effect the Committee on the Present Danger, led by neoconservative figures like Richard Perle, strained to keep the Cold War going. Unfortunately, these ideologues saw their present recede decisively into the past, when the Soviet bloc fell apart during the last decade of the twentieth century. Unsurprisingly, given this past, neoconservatives like Cheney and Wolfowitz seized on the terrorist threat as a source of new barbarians. They set out an argument that would make the Islamist terrorists into an enemy around which all Western foreign policy ? and a substantial amount of domestic policy ? could turn. They enthusiastically embraced the idea that the terrorist menace could replace the red menace. A new ?Committee on the Present Danger? was formed by figures like James Woolsey to argue that the terrorist threat was not a ?law enforcement issue?, but rather an ?existential war?. The US leadership tried to frame all foreign policy questions in terms of the war on terror, in the same way that a previous generation of leaders had tried to squeeze all international conflicts into the frame of anti-communism. During the Cold War, the US and British leaderships were willing to back any dictator, warlord or coup that was thought to provide protection against communism. For example, millions suffered and died while the West backed the South African regime and its vile proxies in Angola and Namibia, simply because they were seen as bulwarks against the red menace. In Southeast Asia, the Cold War was very hot, taking the form of the Vietnam War. In Central and South America it meant backing death squads against anyone ? whether guerrilla or nun ? who looked the least bit red. During the war on terror, all conflicts have been squeezed into the framework of the battle with Osama bin Laden ? even when, as in the case of Iraq, such a connection had to be fabricated. As during the Cold War, reactionary, authoritarian and bloody regimes ? Libya, Egypt, Uzbekistan ? were welcomed aboard as long as they were ?against terrorism?. Perhaps it is not so surprising that Bush and Cheney tried to update old red-baiting strategies for the age of terror, and to use the war on terror to police domestic opposition to their policies. But Cold War nostalgia was not limited to the US. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown explicitly argued that the Cold War model should be used in the new war on terror ? for example, in an article for Rupert Murdoch?s daily Sun newspaper. Brown?s apprentice in his previous post as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Ed Balls, made the same point in a radio interview. Brown wanted the Cold War analogy to sound reassuring after some of Prime Minister Blair?s bellicose stands, by emphasising the ?cultural? nature of the conflict with communism and the use of the ?soft? power of influence, as well as of the ?hard? power of war. Brown said that the Western confrontation with the Soviets had been ?a battle fought through books and ideas, even music and the arts?, and a ?battle for hearts and minds?, as well as one of military power. The cultural war against communism included the covert funding of political organizations and magazines; the imposition of loyalty pledges; the removal of ?unsound? people from positions of influence, from Hollywood to local schools; the harassment of labour activists and campaigners ? so Brown?s evocation of ?soft power? offered little comfort. It underlined the fact that Brown saw himself as continuing with the policy of making into a wide-ranging ?war? a conflict with the lethal but thankfully relatively small threat of domestic terrorism. Brown?s comments about the Cold War were revealing in two ways. Firstly they showed that, though one of the main actors in the war on terror, Tony Blair, had walked off the stage, his understudy Gordon Brown intended to follow a similar script. Secondly, by invoking the Cold War Brown invited us to wonder whether the problems of the Cold War were going to be repeated in the war on terror. The theme of this book has been that President Eisenhower?s warnings about the ?military?industrial complex? can be restated for the war on terror: in short, there is a new ?security?industrial complex? made up of a circle of businessmen and politicians with a vested interest in responding to the terrorist threat with ever more aggressive, broad, expensive and counterproductive overreactions on the domestic and international fronts. Eisenhower?s warning came from the old Cold War years, but Brown?s attempted revival of one aspect of that conflict showed that the old warning could not, unfortunately, be treated as a mere historical curiosity. One battle over Iraq, in 2007, affords a clear sense of how closely the British and US political leaderships were intertwined with business interests in the war on terror. The battle was not fought in the streets of Baghdad, but in the courts of Washington, D.C. Rival security companies launched legal actions and political lobbying campaigns to wrestle the most significant private military deal in the Iraq theatre ? the ?Reconstruction Support Services? contract ? out of the hands of Aegis, the British paramilitary company run by Tim Spicer. This $280 million-a-year contract was at that point one of the most complete military privatisations ever. The deal put a private company in charge of mobile armed units, called Security Escort Teams, guarding the most important political figures. The contract also demanded that the company create and run ?Reconstruction Operations Centres? in Iraq, which would be in charge of all other private security companies in the country. These centres would manage military intelligence for the contractors, which they would also provide to the US army. Clauses in the contract said that the private company must have analysts with ?NATO equivalent SECRET clearance?, who will conduct ?analysis of foreign intelligence services, terrorist organizations, and their surrogates targeting Department of Defense personnel, resources and facilities?. The contract places the contractor in charge of the most delicate military intelligence. After gathering this intelligence, the company is supposed to use its analysis both to assist the US army in its battle with the insurgency and to help direct the other security firms ? keeping them out of harms way in the dangerous Iraqi ?red zone?. Aegis itself codenamed this contract ?Project Matrix?. The company told the Washington Post that its teams would go into Iraqi towns and cities and report back to the US ? to ?provide ?ground truth? to the Army Corps? ? and help guide other contractors with ?threat assessments for the people that travel the battlespace?. Aegis worked hard to keep this lucrative contract. Spicer took great pains to build relations with the US state, hiring Kristi Clemens to run Aegis?s Washington office. Clemens had the right background to lobby for her new employer in the US. Clemens had previously been a spokesperson for Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Iraq. She later became a Republican political appointee in the US Department of Homeland Security, but left that job after being accused of distorting public statements about terrorism to help get Bush re-elected. Spicer also hired Robert MacFarlane as an Aegis director. MacFarlane had worked for Ronald Reagan, helping run the Iran?Contra operation. McFarlane was central the plot, which involved selling arms to Iran in return for hostage releases, while using the profits to pay for the ?secret? US backing of the Contras in their war against Nicaragua?s government. MacFarlane had been found guilty of misleading Congress in the affair, and had tried to kill himself with an overdose of Valium. He was later pardoned by President Bush Sr. A number of veterans of the Iran?Contra affair turned up in the administration of the younger President Bush, so MacFarlane was a useful contact. The advantage to Iraqis of these legal battles and struggles for influence is less obvious. Spicer?s new links with the US security establishment did not guarantee that the company would be able to retain its grip on this slice of business. The contract was so central to the new military privatisation that other leading companies tried to take over, keen for their staff to be in charge of the ?battlespace? and the delivery of ?ground truths? in Iraq. When the contract came up for renewal in 2007, this jewel in the crown of military privatization attracted multiple bids. Two of the companies rejected from the bidding ? the US firm Blackwater and the Anglo-South African Erinys ? immediately launched court actions, demanding to be reconsidered. One of the consequences of privatisation was that the new wings of the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq now devoted valuable time and resources to fighting each other in court. Links with the political establishment ? the British establishment as much as that of the American ? were clearly prized by the security companies. Two British firms were allowed to bid for this US security contract: Spicer?s Aegis and the Armor Group. Aegis had hired a prominent British politician ? former Conservative defence minister (and grandson of Winston Churchill), Nicholas Soames. The Armor Group?s chairman was former Conservative defence secretary, Malcolm Rifkind. Rifkind had been Soames?s boss in the last Conservative administration, but now the two MPs were rivals in the battle for Iraqi security cash. The fact that the military companies were so keen to employ former ministers meant that any current or future politician knew that they could look forward to a lucrative career in the new security industry. The ?revolving door? between politicians and the security business provided the basis for the new security?industrial complex. It created a financial incentive for politicians to press forward with the subcontracting of state security services. In turn, the security industry had a vested interest in persuading politicians that new military interventions or extended police powers were feasible, and even positive ventures. This game of musical chairs between positions of political influence and the boardrooms of the security industry is now well documented. Former Conservative leader Michael Howard sits alongside former CIA director William Webster on the advisory board of Diligence, a private intelligence company set up by former MI5 and CIA agents. The traffic of personnel between the new security industry and the leadership of Britain?s political parties affected both the Labour government and opposition. Prime Minister Gordon Brown made several ministerial appointments from outside his own party, announcing that he wanted a government ?of all the talents?. One such talent was the former First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Alan West. While Sir Alan had never been talented enough actually to be elected, he did have his admirers. After resigning from the navy, Sir Alan had become a paid adviser to a company called QinetiQ, which had been formed out of Britain?s military laboratories, which had themselves been sold to US-led private investors. QinetiQ?s workshops once housed the historical counterparts of ?Q? ? the gadget man who supplies James Bond with his spy kit. The newly commercialised boffins knew which way the market was moving, and the firm set up a ?rapidly expanding security business? to deal with ?homeland security? issues. The company sells surveillance systems, ?data mining? programmes to identify ?dangerous passengers?, scanning machines designed to identify dangerous weapons, and other high-tech security products. Shortly after Brown appointed the ex-QinetiQ man, the leader of the Conservative opposition, David Cameron, made Dame Pauline Neville-Jones his own senior security advisor. She had formerly been the head of Britain?s Joint Intelligence Committee, but in her retirement from public life had been chairwoman of QinetiQ for three years. So the security advisers to both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition had worked for the same security-focused company. The government could approach the terrorist threat politically or technically: it could aim to reduce the terrorist danger by trying to bring enough disaffected people into the political consensus, to isolate the hard core, violent minority; but it could also look to expensive computerized security systems as a way of trying to identify terrorist groups. The strong presence of security industry veterans in the political process makes the latter strategy more likely. The nexus of links between the political class and the new security industry can both make company employees into ministers and ministers into company employees. Lord George Robertson ? previously Labour defence secretary and then head of NATO ? now works for Englefield Capital, a banking firm that owns GSL, which itself operates the private prisons, immigration detention centres and secure transport that form the backbone of the private security industry. The post-ministerial career of former home secretary, David Blunkett, includes a job advising Entrust, a Texas-based security firm bidding for work on Britain?s identity card. Former Labour cabinet minister Lord Barnett runs Atos Origin, a French-owned company also bidding for work on the identity card. The US and British states have taken on new powers to fight the war on terror, and then promptly delegated these powers to a new and growing corporate sector. discontent over individual parts of the war on terror has not yet been enough to substantially shift British or US policy. One of the many reasons that the transatlantic leadership continues to reach for militaristic and authoritarian solutions to current crises is that there is now a substantial commercial lobby beckoning them in this direction. The first step towards unravelling the influence of the security?industrial complex is the recognition that it exists. I hope this book goes a little way towards making that possible. Footnote War on Terror, Inc: Corporate Profiteering from the Politics of Fear, by Solomon Hughes, is published by Verso, price 16.99

Strange Fruit
2 Sep 2008
I feel almost shy about writing this column. It contains no revelations, no call to arms. No one gets savaged – well, only mildly. The subject is almost inconsequential. Yet it has become an obsession which, at this time of year, forbids me to concentrate for long on anything else. Though we still subsist largely on junk, even bilious old gits like me are forced to admit that the quality and variety of most types of food sold in Britain has greatly improved. But one kind has deteriorated. You can buy mangoes, papayas, custard apples, persimmons, pomegranates, mangosteens, lychees, rambutans and god knows what else. But almost all the fruit sold here now seems to taste the same: either rock-hard and dry, or wet and bland. A mango may be ambrosia in India; it tastes like soggy toilet paper in the UK. And the variety of native fruits on sale is smaller than it has been for 200 years. Why? Most people believe it’s because the supermarkets select for appearance, not taste. This might be true for vegetables, but for fruit it’s evidently wrong. Green mangoes, Conference pears, unripe Bramley, Granny Smith or Golden Delicious apples look about as appealing as a shrink-wrapped stool. Appearance has nothing to do with it. What counts to the retailer is how well the variety travels. Take the Egremont Russet, for example. It’s a small apple that looks like a conker wrapped in sandpaper. But it has one inestimable quality. It can be dropped from the top of Canary Wharf, smash a kerbstone and come to no harm. This means it can be trucked from an orchard at Land’s End to a packing plant in John O’Groats, via Sydney, Washington and Vladivostock, then back to a superstore in Penzance (this is the preferred route for most of the fruit sold in the UK) and remain fit for sale. The supermarkets must have had some trouble shifting it because of its strange appearance, so they promoted it as a connoisseur’s apple. Such is our suggestibility that almost everyone believes this, even though a dispassionate tasting would show you that it’s as sweet and juicy as a box of Kleenex. For the same reason, we are assaulted with Conference pears, most of which resemble some kind of heavy ordnance, rather than any one of a hundred exquisite varieties such as the Durondeau, Belle Julie, Urbaniste, Glou Morceau, Ambrosia, Professeur du Breuil or Althorp Crasanne. It is because these pears are so delicious that they cannot be marketed. They melt in the mouth, which means they would also melt in the truck before it left the farm gate. As the best pears, plums, peaches and cherries are those which go soft and juicy when ripe, the grocers ensure that we never eat them. To compound the problem, the supermarkets demand that fruit is picked long before it ripens: it doesn’t soften until it rots. This makes great commercial sense. It also ensures that no one in his right mind would want to eat it. But, happily for the retailers, we have forgotten what fruit should taste like. The only way to find out is either to travel abroad or – the low-carbon option – to grow your own. I find myself becoming a fruit evangelist, a fructivist, whose mission is to show people what they are missing. When I lived in Oxford, at a time when allotments were underused, I spent a week in the Bodleian library reading Hogg and Bull’s Herefordshire Pomona, a massive book of apples and pears, written in the 1870s (you can now buy it on CD from the Marcher Apple Network). Then I cleared two and a half plots and planted the best varieties I could find. I left just as the trees were ready to fruit. But land here in mid-Wales is cheap. I bought half an acre and have started planting a second orchard. When I first tried to place an order, I caused great excitement among the nurseries I phoned. Where had I seen these apples? Who recommended them? Two of them, I discovered, had been extinct for at least 50 years. So I have had to settle for second best, by which I mean breeds that still exist. I began by planting a Ribston Pippin and an Ashmead’s Kernel. These apples, both exquisite when fully ripe, can be stored from October till May. To spread the fruit as far through the year as possible, I have ordered an apple called the Irish Peach, which ripens in early August; a St Edmund’s Pippin (September) and a Wyken Pippin (December to April). After a long search I think I have pinned down the apple I once tasted and loved in a friend’s garden. I’m pretty confident that it was a Forfar, also know as the Dutch Mignonne, so I’ve bought one of those too. If I’d had more space, I would also have planted a Catshead, a Boston Russet, a Sturmer Pippin and a Reinette Grise. I have bought two pears – a Seckle and a Beurr Rance – a green plum (the Cambridge Gage), a fig, a medlar, a peach, currants, gooseberries, raspberries, loganberries and blueberries. But what excites me most are the suggestions made by a man called Ken Fern. Once a London bus driver, Fern has spent most of his life cataloguing and growing the edible species of fruit and vegetable which can survive in this country. His list now extends to 7,000, some of which are featured in his book Plants for a Future. I’ve decided to buy an Arnold Thorn (Crataegus arnoldiana), which belongs to the same genus as the hawthorn, but grows sweet juicy fruits the size of cherries, and to replace my hedge with Elaeagnus x ebbingei, which produces sweet red berries with edible seeds, in (uniquely) April and May. This means, if it works out, that I can eat fresh fruit all the year round. I can store apples and Beurr Rance pears until the Eleagnus fruits, then my strawberries should be ready more or less when it stops. One day, when I can afford it, I will buy more land and plant a few dozen of the weird species Fern has found. Most people have less space than I do, but even a tiny garden can support half a dozen apple trees, if you grow them as cordons (single stems with short spurs) 80cm apart against a wall. If you have room for only a couple of pots, you could grow blueberries, strawberries, cranberries or some of the little shrubs Fern recommends, such as Vaccinium praestans and Gaultheria shallon. Or you could become a guerrilla planter or guerrilla grafter, growing fruit on roadsides, on commons and in parks and wasteland. Apple twigs of any kind can be grafted on to crab trees. Medlars and one breed of pear (a delicious variety called Josphine des Malines) can be grafted on to hawthorn. Kiwi fruit, passion fruit and a vine called Schisandra grandiflora will climb into trees of any kind. It’s not just the produce I love. When you start growing fruit, you enter a world of recondite knowledge, accumulated over centuries of amateur experiments. You must choose the right rootstocks and pollinators and learn about bees, birds and caterpillars. But above all you must learn patience. Growing fruit forces you to think ahead, to imagine a sweeter future and then to wait. Perhaps it is this, as much as the forgotten flavours, that I have been missing.

EDA: Arms for War and Profit
2 Sep 2008
One of the many surprises thrown up by the Lisbon Treaty debate was that the European arms industry had managed to set up shop within the EU. Not only were we being obliged to spend more on armaments [“Art. 28(3): Member States shall undertake progressively to improve their military capabilities”], but an entire EU agency dedicated to bolstering the defence sector and the arms trade was being brought into an EU Treaty. How had this happened? Where had this European Defence Agency (EDA) come from? And what was the attitude of the Irish Government to all of this? There are a number of excellent reports by the human rights group, Statewatch, and the Transnational Institute outlining how the European arms merchants got into the EU shop: it was via the EU Commission ‘kitchen’. There are over 15,000 lobbyists in Brussels, mostly representing business interests, and many of them are invited by the Commission to sit on special policy committees. One such group was the EU Advisory Group on Aerospace. Nearly half its members were aerospace industry chairmen, including those from Europe’s four largest arms companies. Their ‘Strategic Aerospace Review for the 21st Century’, published in July 2002, called for the creation of a ‘level playing field so Europe’s industry can compete fairly in world markets’. Ultimately, what was required was the establishment of a: “European armaments policy to provide structure for European defence and security equipment markets, and to allow a sustainable and competitive technological and industrial base”. The EU Commission embraced this proposal: good for business, good for EU military ambitions. By the spring of 2003, it had produced Towards an EU Defence Equipment Policy, incorporating the Aerospace Review concepts and calling for the creation of an Agency to oversee these developments. The very first draft of the EU Constitution in 2003 contained provisions for a European Armaments, Research and Military Capabilities Agency, (later renamed the European Defence Agency). It was not surprising that such an agency would be part of the new EU Constitution, which was on track to boost the EU’s military dimension. Indeed, during the preparatory work for the Constitution by the EU Convention, thirteen ‘expert’ witnesses were called before the Working Group on Defence including a General, military reps from the EU and member-states, two reps from the arms industry, and President of the European Defence Industries Group. The working group never asked to hear from civil society representatives. Measures to boost EU military capabilities pre-dated the EU Constitution. Member States in 2003 promised to develop their military capabilities to an agreed state of readiness by 2010 (the so-called Headline Goal), so the EU could ‘respond with rapid and decisive action ?.to the whole spectrum of crisis management operations’ included in earlier EU Treaties. Under the 2004 Irish Presidency, the European Council gave its final blessings to these Goals, adding that the EU must consider pre-emptive actions and have the ‘ability to conduct concurrent operations ? simultaneously at different levels of engagement’. This was all underpinned by the European Security Strategy authored by EU Foreign Affairs and Security chief, Javier Solana, in 2003. The EU Constitution would have leant a helping hand to these military improvements. When it was defeated in 2005, its military provisions were fully incorporated into the Lisbon Treaty. Lisbon spells out the EDA’s role in ensuring that the EU is fighting fit. Not only will the Agency be responsible for supporting the defence sector and defence R&D, but it will identify operational requirements for the EU’s developing military force, assist in defining a European capabilities and armaments policy, and monitor the improvement of EU military capabilities. It has a special responsibility for the new Permanent Structured Cooperation provision in Lisbon, a mechanism allowing certain member states to form mini-military alliances within the EU’s structures for the EU’s ‘more demanding’ missions. The EDA is to ensure that these states are fully equipped to carry out these demanding missions. The EDA has no misapprehensions about the importance of its role. It shouldn’t have. It already exists. So eager were the EU Powers That Be to have its services, that the EDA didn’t have to wait for the Constitution’s blessings. It was up and running from July 2004, when approved by the EU Foreign Ministers. In other words, with the Constitution defeated and Lisbon knocked down by Ireland, the EDA has still not been placed into the EU Treaties. The EU’s Foreign Affairs Supremo, Javier Solana, is head of the EDA. Its steering group consists of the EU defence ministers and the EU Commission. The self-assured Agency even produced a Long Term Vision Statement in 2006, outlining some of the tasks it sees before it: “The Headline Goal and European Security Strategy envisage a broad and significantly challenging set of potential missions. These include separation of warring factions by force, on the sort of scale that would have been required had a ground invasion of Kosovo in 1999 turned out to be necessary. They may also encompass stabilising operations in a failed state …. So the demands of today’s European Security and Defence Policy are already potentially deep and comprehensive.”...“Future joint forces will need agility at the operational and tactical levels as well as the strategic. Once deployed, EU Member States’ joint forces may need to be able to operate at will within all domains and across the depth and breadth of the operational area, possessing combinations of stealth, speed, information superiority, connectivity, protection, and lethality. They may need to operate in complex terrain and inside cities.” These EU joint forces are already under development, including a 60,000-strong Rapid Reaction Force capable of intervening far beyond the EU’s borders. The French Presidency next month hopes to speed up that process. Meanwhile, the EU is already in action with a number of rapidly deployable Battlegroups, consisting of up to 2500 troops, with capabilities for high intensity operations. NATO has described the Battlegroups as “providing the EU with ‘ready to go’ military capability to respond to crises around the world”. Ireland has been a member of the Nordic Battlegroup since 2006. This Vision Statement was also written with the knowledge that the EU’s military tasks had been expanded by the EU Constitution (and now Lisbon). In addition to the humanitarian, peace-keeping/peace-enforcement tasks of previous treaties, there are new provisions for joint disarmament operations, post-conflict stabilization and combating terrorism in countries outside the EU. There are also mutual defence and solidarity clauses, with the latter dealing with joint actions against terrorism, including the need to counter perceived ‘threats’ as well as attacks. Ireland: eager members of the EDA Ireland joined the EDA immediately, in July 2004. There was no Dail debate and no vote. The decision was taken by the Government. Defence Minister Willie O’Dea stated the EDA was an intergovernmental agency within the framework of the EU’s European Security and Defence Policy and that membership didn’t oblige or commit Ireland to do anything other than contribute to the EDA’s budget. The fact that the EDA would be in the business of promoting armaments and boosting the arms trade didn’t seem to bother the Minister or the Irish Government. It is within the Lisbon Treaty provisions concerning the EDA that Member States are obliged to improve their military capabilities. EDA Head Javier Solana has made it clear that there is an ‘absolute requirement for us to spend more, spend better and spend more together’. In 2008, Ireland will be making a financial contribution of ?327,000 to the EDA. In addition, Ireland has, since 2007, been participating in the Joint Investment Programme on Force Protection. This has a budget of ?55 million over 3 years, to which Ireland is committing ?700,000. (Research areas include: Stand off detection of Chemical, Biological, radiological, nuclear and high-yield explosives; Defence options for airborne threats; Scope spotting and sniper detection: Research on new materials for force protection). There are basic questions which must be asked about Ireland’s involvement with the EDA. Historically, Irish Governments – in keeping with popular sentiment — have not been proponents of the arms industry. Ministers have invariably denied the existence of any indigenous Irish arms sector (despite evidence from Amnesty International and Afri to the contrary). Indeed, for over thirty years, Irish state boards promoting research and enterprise, such as Enterprise Ireland, have been bound by legislation stating they: “shall not engage in or promote any activity of a primarily military relevance without the prior approval of the Government” The Department of Defence’s Strategy Statement, 2008-2010, extols the EDA as providing “opportunities of interest to Irish-based enterprises and researchers” and states: “We will work closely with Enterprise Ireland to exploit potential research and commercial opportunities arising”. Ireland’s relations with the developing world have prompted concerns about arms spending and the global arms trade. But the EDA is focused on increasing global competitiveness for EU arms industries, particularly in relation to the United States, a direction reinforced by the EU Commission in its 2007 “A Strategy for a Stronger and More Competitive European Defence Industry”. Already, EU companies are responsible for over ?80 billion a year in arms sales. The EDA and Lisbon Since the EDA already exists, one might ask: how has defeating Lisbon affected that organization? There are at least four implications. 1. Without Lisbon, Member States are not legally obliged to progressively improve their military capabilities; 2. The EDA has still not been placed into the EU Treaties; 3. The new expanded military tasks have not been given Treaty status and the EDA should not be promoting capabilities, etc. in these areas; 4. The provision of Permanent Structured Cooperation — in which the EDA was to have played a major role — has not been approved. How Ireland ever joined the EDA without parliamentary debate or approval is incomprehensible. Maybe now, post-Lisbon, questions will begin to be asked about Ireland’s involvement in this agency and about the entire EU military project. Carol Fox is Research Officer for PANA, the Irish Peace and Neutrality Alliance. See also http://www.spectrezine.org/europe/street.htm