“Lost generation” of Iraqi refugee children in Lebanon
Electronic Intifada - 23 Jun 2008
rr r r r rr r rr r rr r rr rr rrr rBEIRUT (IRIN) – Of the 10 million refugees worldwide, half are children, estimates UK-based World Vision—children who will grow up as a “lost generation” unless more is done to address their needs. “To preserve the young generation growing up today, we need to shield children from violence, enhance humanitarian access and provide more resources targeted to children’s specific needs,” World Vision said in a report highlighting the plight of Iraqi refugee children in Jordan, released to coincide with 20 June, World Refugee Day.

Be brave and take a radical turn
UKWatch.net - 23 Jun 2008
LABOUR appears to be in political freefall without a parachute. This is partly because of the collapse of many ?new? Labour orthodoxies ? the triangulations and trimmings based around a mythical middle England. This model now almost appears to belong to a different era, but to many it seems there is no coherent alternative to put in its place or too little time to implement it. That doesn?t have to be the case. I believe there is a way to regain the trust and support of those who are deserting Labour by meeting their aspirations for their place in a fairer society. Recent election results demonstrate that support for the Labour Party is disintegrating. In Crewe, London and across the country in the local elections, the verdict was damning. But, as many of us have been flagging up over the last few years, this did not fall out of the sky, with the biggest shifts among public services workers and more generally among working-class labour voters. In response, all we heard was: ?Let?s not go back to the 1980s?. As if anyone wanted to. The other false accusation was that we wanted to retreat to some ?old Labour? comfort zone. These are trite responses to a careful analysis of the trend in electoral decline. A year ago change was promised, but little delivered, as the general election that never was meant a rewind back to the old playbook of triangulation and tacking to the right. Increasingly we are outflanked by a modern conservatism than maintains a more literate language. It talks about values and relationships, it empathises with people who are struggling, it appears to be going with the grain of people?s vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, some on our own side are adding to this topsy-turvy atmosphere by pitching for public spending cuts and tax cuts. We are in danger of trading off the very essence of social democracy. At the heart of the debate is what the people of this country aspire to. These aspirations are not defined by individualist, Thatcherite, pro-private, anti-public greed, but by expectations of a political process that will focus on removing the barriers to realising aspirations in terms of poverty, child-care, access to housing, leisure, arts, culture and so on. It is not the aspiration of climbing the ladder and breaking the rungs after you. There is a formula at the heart of the Government based around a fundamental rupture between marginal seats and Labour?s heartlands. It cynically counter-poses aspiration and our core vote. We need politicians to break from this disparaging segmentation of the country and its associated patronising in terms of who is and isn?t aspirational. Politically, we need to reclaim the very nature of aspiration. We need to decontaminate it from the toxic interpretation of those such as Business Secretary John Hutton who see aspiration as a call for more millionaires and tax protection for fat cats. Voters are leaving Labour because of our failure to deal with their real aspirations, in terms of housing, their working poverty, their scramble over limited resources, their desperate desire for mobility and resources. These aspirations depend on collectivist social democratic actions. So we need to start again. Simply put, why don?t we say that our purpose is to build a fairer, more equal and sustainable country and planet? With that as a goal, we need to get behind some policies which are promoted in a language and story that allows people to render intelligible their concerns and aspirations. They could include: * a windfall tax on oil companies to help those struggling with escalating fuel bills, specifically those in fuel poverty; * a new fair employment clause in all public contracts to end the race to the bottom in the world of work; * building homes for families, allowing councils to build for renting; * a fairer tax system with a new top rate and a cut in taxes for the low paid with all new revenues hypothecated to boost benefit levels for the poor; * a moratorium on the private sector role in delivering front-line public services; * protection for the universal service obligation of the Post Office; * help children get healthy with free schools meals for all; * access to all local authority sports facilities free for children under 16; * make work pay by ending the national minimum wage rates and paying the rate for the job; * abolishing health inequalities through proper funding of primary care; * democratising the police through greater local accountability and elections; * pioneering local area agreements to offer real and enduring devolution drawn up and delivered locally; * a new radical covenant between the people and the military funded by the scrapping of Trident; * workplace environmental reps to make work healthier and more fulfilling; * greater working time flexibility for parents; * tackling the legacy of Home Office failure with the introduction of earned regularisation of unregularised migrants. These will meet the real aspirations or real people in real need ? not least that half of the population which shares just 6 per cent of Britain?s wealth, while the top 1 per cent owns a quarter of it. The very rich have become the new untouchables through the myth that their massive wealth will somehow flow to the rest of us and that, if we dare tax them fairly, they will jump ship to another country. A new politics of hope must start with idealism and the belief that another world is possible. No one?s life should be compromised by the brute luck of birth. Utopianism has been given a bad name by those who want everything to stay the same. The National Health Service, full employment and even the minimum wage were all initially decried as hopelessly utopian, but people had the courage and the desire to struggle to make them a reality. Political leaders are reluctant to take a lead. They play it safe, caught in the trap of electoral timidity when the moment demands bravery. This is not a surprise. History teaches us that lasting changes ? from the vote and the NHS and on to greater women?s equality ? were not handed down from on high by benevolent politicians, but fought for by millions of people, convinced that the time for change had come. The bottom line is this. We can fight to change the direction of the party ? but only if we have the political will. Given the patterns of injustice that we see every day, it is no less than a categorical imperative that we accept the challenge to change this country. It cannot be beyond our collective wit to do so. We could start by organising ? and quickly ? a lurch to the centre-left. Jon Cruddas is Labour MP for Dagenham. This is an edited extract of a keynote speech given to the annual Compass conference in London last weekend.

Big Oil’s Big Lie
UKWatch.net - 23 Jun 2008
Of course, it’s not a crime, and it’s hard to see how, in a free society, it could or should become one. But the culpability of the energy firms the climate scientist James Hansen will indict in his testimony to Congress today is clear. If we fail to stop runaway climate change, it will be largely because of campaigning by oil, coal and electricity companies, and the network of lobbyists, fake experts and thinktanks they have sponsored. The operation sprang directly from Big Tobacco’s war against science. It has used the same fake experts, the same public relations companies and the same tactics: as I showed in my book Heat, the campaign against action on climate change was partly launched by the tobacco company Philip Morris. But while the tobacco companies’ professional liars were smoked out by a massive class action in the US, the sponsored climate change deniers still have massive influence over public perception. A survey published yesterday by the Observer shows that six out of ten people in Britain agreed that “many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change.” This is an inaccurate perception, which results from Big Energy’s lobbying. Almost without exception, the scientists who claim to doubt that manmade climate change is taking place fall into two categories: either they are not qualified in the branch of science they are discussing or they have received money from fossil fuel companies. Of all the self-professed climate “sceptics”, I have been able to find only one ? Dr John Christy of the University of Alabama ? who has relevant qualifications and who does not appear to have received fees from lobby groups or thinktanks sponsored by the energy companies. But even he has had to admit that the figures on which he based his claims were the results of “errors in the ? data”. The others are the very opposite of sceptics. Many of them are paid to start with a conclusion ? that climate change isn’t happening or isn’t important ? then to find data and arguments to support it. In most cases, they cherrypick scientific findings; in a few cases, like the fake scientific paper attached to the celebrated Oregon petition, they make them up altogether. But people who don’t understand the difference between a peer-reviewed paper and a pamphlet are taken in. The energy companies’ propaganda campaign is amplified by scientific illiterates in the media, such as Melanie Phillips, Christopher Booker, Nigel Lawson, Alexander Cockburn and the television producer (who made Channel 4’s documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle) Martin Durkin. I don’t believe that the energy companies should be prosecuted for commissioning the truckload of trash their sponsored experts publish. But their campaign of disinformation must be exposed again and again. Like the tobacco lobbyists, they are not only delaying essential public action; they also create the impression that science is for sale to the highest bidder. The awful truth is that sometimes it is.

Another Treaty That Won’t Lie Down
UKWatch.net - 23 Jun 2008
The Irish government, obliged by its own national constitution to put the question of the Lisbon Treaty to the vote, will win little sympathy from its ‘partners’ in the European Union. Those national leaders who did not dare to put the matter to the vote, and those who were bullied out of doing so by more powerful actors in the EU drama – the Commission and the big member states – will breathe a sigh of relief that they cannot be blamed for this farce. When EU leaders gather for their regular summit meeting in Brussels at the end of this week, the Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen is going to have some explaining to do. The instructions from Brussels were quite clear. A second round of ‘No’ votes must be avoided at all costs. You might compare the Taoiseach’s position to that of a minor gang leader required to explain to a mafia boss why takings are down from his protection rackets. He can whinge all he likes about constitutional obligations, but having caused this mess he will be expected to offer a feasible way out of the brown stuff into which the leaders gathered in Brussels find themselves sinking. Of course, there is only one honest, democratic way out, and that is to abandon the whole project. The constitutional position is quite clear. The Lisbon Treaty, like the virtually identical Constitutional Treaty before it, is dead. And yet what is almost certain to happen is that a set of clearly rejected constitutional arrangements will be imposed on the peoples of 27 countries. Three countries which held popular votes have actually rejected one or the other version. Only Spain and Luxembourg held referenda which resulted in approval, but what matters here is not the three-two scoreline. The rules in the case of both the Constitution and the Lisbon Treaty were simple. If one country rejected either, it fell. Modern European politics is, however, a game which can be halted at any time by one team, the ruling elite, which can then proceed to change the rules. It also gets to appoint the referee. People voted against these treaties for a variety of reasons. If Lisbon is imposed, small countries will lose power. National institutions under democratic control, or at least influence, will see their powers transferred to unelected and unanswerable bodies. National vetoes will disappear across a range of policy areas, so that ever more laws can be imposed which have the assent of neither the government nor the parliament of the member state involved. A European army will be born. And neoliberal economic policies which are good for no-one but multinational corporations and international criminals will be reinforced. The Irish in particular could see much to alarm them in a treaty which would jeopardise their military neutrality, undermine their agriculture and allow unprecedented interference in their system of taxation, until recently an unquestioned national preserve. Their reasons for voting ‘no’ are, however, their own affair. As in other contexts, no means no, whatever motives may lie behind it. Yet the Taoiseach has said only that there is no “quick fix”. He has also said that Ireland will do its best not to halt what he describes as “the ambitious project of EU reform”. European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, meanwhile, has joined the leaders of many EU member states in refusing to declare the treaty dead. The British government has said that the ratification process will continue. So, you can vote Yes, you can vote No, but the process is more akin to a multiple choice test than an election, and don’t worry, if you don’t get the answer right the first time, you’ll likely be given a second chance. Similarly, depending on where you live you can vote social democrat, Labour, Christian Democrat, Liberal, Communist or for the Man in the Moon, but don’t expect it to make any serious difference to the way in which your country is governed, the decisions your government takes, or life in general. There are now only two sets of interests which really matter: those of multinational corporations and those, sometimes still slightly different, of the governments and political parties which now exist primarily to serve their interests. This includes not just conservatives but Europe’s social democratic and labour parties, most Green parties – our own being an honourable exception – and the whole ragbag of centre-left, centrist and right wing groups which are increasingly indistinguishable at the level of policy. So, viciously anti-trade union labour rulings by the European Court of Justice go unchallenged by parties which were created by those same trade unions. And the EU’s ‘flexicurity’ proposals, which translate as flexibility for us, and security for them, are enthusiastically supported by parties built by working people to defend their interests The European Union, which likes to present its opponents as narrow nationalists and backward-looking xenophobes, is dragging us back to a time before working people could demand, if nothing else, that they be treated with respect, paid a living wage, and allowed to organise in pursuit of their legitimate demands. By imposing neoliberal economics on twenty-seven member states, the EU is making real international cooperation, of the kind needed to confront the crises facing us in a world increasingly spinning out of control, impossible. The Irish people, like those of France and the Netherlands before them, have had the courage and good sense to vote to reject the heinous Lisbon Treaty and thereby give us a further chance to confront those who would deprive us of our rights and of our livelihoods. This time we must seize it with both hands.

Brutality and Fear
UKWatch.net - 23 Jun 2008
The human costs of dawn raids There are some statistics that the New Labour government makes sure the public know about. The constant rise in the number of police officers patrolling British streets for example; the number of arrests that these police officers carry out; or the relentless year by year increase in people incarcerated in prisons up and down the country. Another of these statistics is the number of people that are removed from the UK. The higher the figure, the better; and last year this statistic reached an all time high. Every eight minutes a person was removed, one way or another, from the country. According to the Home Office, these numbers equate, quite simply, to a form of success: evidence that ?strong controls are working?. So it is ironic that the means through which these figures are realised are shrouded in secrecy and misinformation. Dawn raids ? or to use their official term ?enforcement visits? ? are rarely discussed in the same self-congratulatory tones as the aims they supposedly achieve. And there is a reason for this. They are brutal. They rip people from their homes at the time that is least expected. And they tear families apart from each other; sometimes never to see each other again. Dawn raids have emerged as a central facet of New Labour?s asylum and immigration policies, with little semblance of public debate. Statistics are not available to the public, yet what evidence there is suggests that dawn raids are carried out at rapid pace. Records of the number of dawn raids have only been made available since April 2005, but in the House of Commons in 2007, the Minister of State for Borders and Immigration explained that 8,100 ?enforcement operations? were carried out before 8 am in 2006. On average, that is roughly twenty-two dawn raids a day. Dawn raids are carried out explicitly for the purposes of detention and removal. Yet of these 8,100 conducted, only 2,009 led to arrests. A ?success? rate that equates to roughly one out of every four suggests that they are – from one perspective – an ineffective way of meeting government targets for ?removing more failed asylum seekers than new anticipated unfounded applications?. Yet it is exactly these targets that continue to justify their use. Ensuring the former figure is higher than the latter is described as ?public performance? and according to Liz Fekete from the Institute of Race Relations, ensures that ?[i]n the process, the fact that those who seek refuge?are human beings, not mere statistics, is lost?. This reduction of people to statistics covers a horrifying level of abuse, harm, and fear. As stated above, dawn raids are particularly barbaric. They are carried out in the early morning ? when people are most likely to be at home, asleep, and disorientated ? apparently in ?the interests of health and safety and to help minimise disruption?. But the reality of dawn raids suggests that health and safety is far down the list of priorities. For example, the 1993 raid on immigraion overstayer Joy Gardner led to her death, after she was placed in a body belt, had her wrists, thighs and ankles tied to handcuffs and belts, and thirteen feet of tape wrapped around her mouth to stop her making any noise. Statistics for the number and nature of complaints made by people in relation to dawn raids are not available. But work by the Border and Immigration Agency Complaints Audit Committee gives some idea of mechanisms of redress. In their 2006/7 Annual Report the Complaints Audits Committee emphasised that 20% of records of complaints against BIA had gone ?missing? (although this was later reduced to 15%), and of complaints against arrest teams their audit sample showed that ?none was handled in time?. Of overall complaints, those of criminal behaviour (some of which were assault) rose 7% from the previous year. Where there is hope though, it rests within continuing actions of campaigners, many of whom are in the asylum process, who continue to display solidarity, raise awareness, and resist. In doing so, they emphasise not only their refusal to succumb to one of the fiercest tools available to the Home Office; but the wider polices in which these activities are concretely embedded.