The Tone of Our Oppression

Looking at the Liberal Conservatives from an Anarchist Point of View…

2010-05-16T16:26:00.001+01:00

Some people might see a dissonance on this blog between my professing to be an anarchist on the one hand, and my engaging uncritically in the mainstream discourse of statist politics on the other. I don’t see that as a problem at all – the kind of anarchism that I believe in (authentic democracy) is one which will take generations to make viable. It will never exist in my lifetime and will require an entire paradigm shift in public thinking and political education over a number of years to make possible. It is an aspiration – a goal; a political system which I feel is most in line with our true nature and species-needs and interests – but it is not the world we live in right now. I therefore think it would be stupid not to engage meaningfully in the world as it is at the same time as I long for a different one. That said, I was recently asked for an “anarchist reading” of what was happening here in the UK with the Liberal-Conservative Coalition. The following is my take on the situation from an anarchist point-of-view:

The anarchist reading of what’s happening in Britain with Cleggameron is this: we had an election where the central narrative given by the politicians and the media was that the British public were fed up with Labour after 13 years in power. That sense of fed-upness was not particularly clarified other than to make vague allusions to the war in Iraq and the economic meltdown – the fact that Labour had ideologically betrayed its supporters by following essentially Tory economic and foreign policies for 13 years was not mentioned and, in fact, the Tory Party themselves were now painted as the only people who could save us from disaster.

The seeming fly in the ointment came when, during the first ever UK televised debate between the three competing party leaders, Liberal Democrat, Nick Clegg, was allowed to speak for the first time and the British public actually heard him. Offering a slight alternative to the dominant two-party parameters that had been the norm of discourse for so long, his words were heralded as radical, even though nothing that he said hadn’t already been published in the Liberal Democrat manifesto earlier that week. The media and public fawned over him and he was able to get a lot of traction out of several key ideas: not renewing the UK’s “independent nuclear deterrent”, Trident; introducing Proportional Representation into our voting system instead of the unfair “first-past-the-post” system; giving an amnesty to illegal immigrants already in the country, etc…all of which were genuine alternatives to what the Conservatives and Labour were offering, making Liberal Democrat’s polling numbers suddenly go through the roof.

Of course, this was all done in the context of safely knowing that the first-past-the-post system we have in place meant it was absolutely impossible for the Liberal Democrats to actually win an election outright, so there was no danger of any of these radical promises actually being fulfilled. And alongside the pages and pages of publicity for Nick Clegg there then came the very serious discussion of the likelihood of a “hung parliament”: no one party winning a commanding majority of seats in the House of Commons. This was put over to the public as being either a) a good thing or b) the end of Britain as we know it, but in all cases it was always put over, for good or for bad, as being a fundamental change in politics. Importantly, it planted an important seed in the public’s mind at a time when faith in our political system was absolutely battered in the wake of the MP expenses scandal, economic catastrophe and two illegal and unjustified wars: there is still a left-wing alternative to Labour, so you don’t need to go off and form any new and radical parties that actually represent something new, and at the very worst, if there is a hung parliament, it will be a chance for “radical” reform of our system which will wipe away all those bad memories of what happened under Labour and let us start again.

Chomsky calls this kind of thing “change of course”. We last saw it in the UK in 1997: after eighteen years of the Tories, New Labour were voted in on a promise of change and renewal only to continue doing exactly the same things that the Conservative government had done, but in a slightly different way, while throwing enough bones to the working classes to keep them happy.

Unsurprisingly then, after the huge propaganda campaign for it across the media, come election day we had a hung parliament. Logically, the Liberal Democrats then had two options as to whom they could form a coalition government with: an ideologically linked coalition with Labour (the two parties had very similar platforms on certain key issues throughout the election and are both, allegedly, parties of the left), or a numerically strong one with the Tories, supposedly their sworn enemies on the right. Now, there are many reasons why the Lib-Dems ultimately chose to do a deal with the Tories, but all that matters to us anarchists in terms of the state protecting itself and the interests of power taking precedent over the interests of people is that, now that they have done this deal with the Tories and the dust has settled, we have seen the real uniformity and similarity of vision between supposed political opponents and a brand new narrative has been established: this is a “new politics” and it is the “change” we all voted for. All those bad things that happened in the past – they were the doing of people like Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. They were not systemic problems. There is nothing wrong with our system. They were problems caused by individuals and now those individuals have gone. We can start again. This is a new era. Everything will be different now. Sure – all those nice and radical proposals in the Liberal Democrat manifesto that so appealed to the electorate and gained them all that press coverage have been scrapped in the name of “compromise”, and the policy areas on which the Conservatives stood alone, such as making drastic and immediate cuts in the budget right away and allowing public money to be spent on essentially privatizing education, which the business world adored – the policy areas that 52% of the public specifically voted against – have somehow made it through…but that shouldn’t make one assume for one moment that the notion of a hung parliament and a coalition government has simply allowed our leaders to pull a bait and switch with their manifestos, turn democracy into a pantomime, and cherry-pick out only those polices which best serve the needs of the elite while discarding all the rest and calling it compromise.

There are lots of interesting things to say about what has happened if you want to jump on board the dominant mainstream narrative of the situation and discuss the three parties involved as if they really do represent three different and unique constituencies and ideologies and as if the new coalition government really is a major change in UK politics (which is exactly what I have hitherto done on this blog), but in terms of an anarchist reading I think it’s pretty straightforward: the political elites have saved themselves once again. They have taken the public’s threatening disillusionment with a crumbling political and economic system and directed its rage and calls for change into something safe and manageable: not revolution, not radical reform, not addressing the systemic problems which are causing our continued despair…but by putting two new faces at the top and letting them perform the same old politics of yesterday in a way that makes it look different.

"Change of course." Like how Obama saved America and undid everything bad that Bush did :-)

Technorati Tags: UK Politics,UK Election,General Election 2010,General Election,Liberal Conservatives,Anarchism,Liberal Democrats,Conservative Party,Cleggameron,Anarchist

Coping With Cameron

2010-05-12T10:52:00.001+01:00

So the Liberal Democrats have made their choice, betraying their progressive roots, their progressive membership and the progressive mandate given to them by 52% of the voting population, and have decided to get into bed with the Tories. David Cameron is now our Prime Minister.

But this is not all as terrible as it seems.

First: the obvious. Instead of May 12th, 2010, being Day One of a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government, we must never forget that, had the election gone differently, May 12th, 2010, could have been Day Six of a majority Cameron government.

Let no-one tell you any different: the Conservatives did not get a mandate in the General Election and the country has not shifted rightwards in response to their disillusionment with Labour. The country – 52% of them – voted for a distinctly un-Tory flavour of change, maintaining the progressive values that saved this country after the ravages of Thatcherism. David Cameron as our new Prime Minister is a pretty scary thought – but it would have been even scarier had he done it on his own instead of with the help of the Quisling Liberal Democrats.

Which brings me to my next point…

While it is easy (and comforting) to call the Lib-Dems traitors for doing a deal with the Conservatives instead of Labour (and certainly, if you were foolish enough to vote for them, they have taken your anti-Tory vote and shat on it), there is actually nothing at all traitorous about it. As long-time proponents of Proportional Representation, the Liberal Democrats are a political party inherently at ease with the concept of coalition governments with strange and uneasy bedfellows. If PR were introduced to the country by the next General Election, parties like the Tories would not magically disappear, and if you are committed to the notion of proportionality in political representation then that means understanding that you must work with all parties in order to govern. There will always be a right-wing in any country, and there will always be those with whom you are diametrically opposed ideologically; but the cooperative spirit of the kind of coalition governments usually yielded by PR means that their actual political power is kept in line with their true level of public support. If 36% of the population want a Tory government, then there should be some proportional share of representation of those views in government. Importantly though, PR and coalition government is about compromise and tempering the extremes. It is about finding common ground and working through party differences for the good of the country instead of clinging to myopic tribalism, and it ensures a more rational and reasonable political dialogue than the black/white, yes/no, left/right dichotomy of our current first-past-the-post system.

On May 6th, we were offered a false choice: are we fed up with Labour? If so, then we must vote for a party, the Conservatives, who are so fundamentally different ideologically that they see the world in a completely backwards way to our every political instinct.

What about those of us, like me, who were fed up with Labour not because they weren’t right-wing enough, but because they weren’t as left-wing as I would have liked? Because their taxes on the rich were too low, because they were too in bed with the bankers and the businesses who robbed our country dry?

That sort of nuance is incapable of being articulated in a first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all system. My disappointment in Labour could not be expressed effectively by anything other than voting for Labour in opposition to the more extreme right-wing alternative.

The Liberal Democrats have long been aware of the inefficiencies and unfairness of our current voting system and have campaigned against it for years. Part of that desire for a “new kind of politics”, however, does involve working with other parties, even parties who you are not naturally inclined to work with. Proportional Representation means coalition governments, and coalition governments mean compromise and give-and-take. The Lib-Dems siding with the Tories over Labour does not mean that the Liberal Democrats are now duty-bound to support every insane Conservative policy that comes along; it means engaging in conversation with their Conservative Cabinet colleagues and limiting their excesses whilst making small progressive inroads of their own.

That they ultimately opted for a Conservative coalition instead of a Labour one is disappointing, yes, and it will certainly stop me from ever voting Liberal Democrat in the future, but in the long-term it was the best thing that they could do if they are serious about bringing this “new kind of politics” to Britain.

First of all – by choosing to form a government with the most difficult and unlikely of the two courting parties, the Liberal Democrats will show, if the coalition works, that coalition and compromise is possible and desirable within the UK. If political enemies like the Lib-Dems and the Tories can work effectively side by side and the country does not fall apart, then when the referendum for a new voting system occurs they already have a fantastic body of evidence to point to in its favour.

Related to this was the question of legitimacy. Although intellectually and ethically it is quite clear to me that a Lib/Lab deal would have been absolutely legitimate on paper (a majority coalition representing the 52% of the country who voted against a shift to the right), legitimacy ultimately rests on public perception. From the moment the idea was seriously broached, the media were all over it and denouncing it as a possible “coalition of the losers”. Furthermore, with Gordon Brown resigning, there would be no possible way of carrying out the Lib/Lab coalition with an elected Prime Minister. Again – although that is intellectually and ethically acceptable, and there is no constitutional or legal requirement for the direct election of a Prime Minister in our Parliamentary (not Presidential) democracy, public opinion – shaped and twisted by the media – was that one of the central failings of Labour over the past few years was the unelected nature of Gordon Brown’s ascent to power. That opinion was, in my view, wrong, and even irrelevant, but it is what it is: the public were fed up with a man in Downing Street that they did not have a say in voting and to replace one unelected Prime Minister with another would have been both a Public Relations and a Proportional Representation disaster. Public Relations because it would look like the Lib-Dems were propping up an unpopular and rejected Labour government (even if, in actual fact, that wasn’t what was happening at all; the slavish Conservative media would be sure to promote that narrative regardless) and Proportional Representation because when the inevitable referendum occurred the Conservative argument against it would be clear: unelected leaders, unpopular governments propped up by minority losers…this is what PR would mean for the country.

We must remember – a referendum on PR is not a vote for the House of Commons to make, and it doesn’t matter how much political support it can muster. It is a public vote, and how the public perceives the issue will be crucial. On this point, I believe that the Liberal Democrats have been quite savvy. They will lead by example: show that they are capable of compromise and that PR and coalition does not mean that we can’t have strong and stable government. By doing this, they will take away from their main political opponents on the issue – the Conservatives – the validity of much of their opposition; when the referendum comes their argument will look flimsy and out-dated.

The final reason why the Liberal Democrats’ decision is not an absolute disaster is this: it gives the Labour Party time to regroup. They can listen to their base, build on the support that they received on May 6th, woo former Liberal Democrat supporters disgusted with their party for the deal they have done with the Conservatives, elect a new and electable leader, clean off the stench of the last thirteen years, and generally sort themselves out to come out fighting by 2015 – or sooner if the coalition breaks down.

Certainly the lesson they must learn from this election is that progressive politics has not died out in this country, despite Tony Blair’s best attempts to assimilate the party into the right. Labour made two major mistakes: illegal and unjustified wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and not regulating banks and businesses sufficiently to stop them from playing roulette with our money. Their downfall came from their own flirtation with the policies of the right and their revival must come from recognising the appeal of the left, capitalizing on the exodus of Liberal Democrats angry at their party for selling them out, and then offering a genuine leftist alternative to the Conservatives and the soiled Liberal Democrats by the time election day comes.

Had they not been offered this opportunity; had they clung on to power against media and public opinion and been demonized for their actions, tarred with their record and attacked by Conservatives at every turn, you could be sure that the postponement of their demise by a Liberal Democrat deal would have led to a much greater death down the line, and a possible banishment to the political wilderness from which they might have never recovered. As it is, they have managed to bow out of the government just in time to not be burdened by the unpopularity sure to come once “savage cuts” in public spending occur, and they have allowed the country to be reminded, over the next five years, why it was that we ejected the Tories so unceremoniously back in 1997.

Theoretically – a five year recharge and revitalization of the party, helped along by continuing demonstrable evidence of the paucity of the Conservative vision – could leave Labour primed to reclaim power in 2015 and fix the inevitable mess. And if the Lib-Dems play it right, and that election is fought under rules of Proportional Representation, we could see the next five years become nothing more than a Conservative swan-song.

Of course I’m angry that we now have a Conservative Prime Minister. If you voted Liberal Democrat on May 6th then you must feel incredibly cheated and let down. But this is no ordinary Conservative Prime Minister – this is a Conservative Prime Minister kept in line by a Liberal Democrat Deputy, leading a Cabinet watered down by a handful of Liberal Democrats. I don’t believe Nick Clegg’s decision was the right one, but I do think it was the best one he could make under the circumstances. Whatever happens over the next five years, I’m fairly certain that British politics will never be the same again, and whilst this may look like a disaster in the short-term, in the long-term this could be the greatest gift the progressive left have ever received.

Technorati Tags: General Election 2010,General Election,UK Election,Politics,UK Politics,David Cameron,Nick Clegg,Labour Party,Liberal Democrats,Conservative Party,Progressive Majority

Democracy: It’s More Than Just Numbers

2010-05-10T07:00:00.000+01:00

Right now the central question in British politics is what the next government will look like. Will Nick Clegg choose to align his Liberal Democrat party with David Cameron’s Conservative Party (who got 36.1% of the overall UK vote), or with Gordon Brown’s Labour Party (who only got 29%). Despite the substantial ideological differences between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, there are those who believe that forming a government with the defeated Labour Party would be a betrayal of democracy: a “coalition of the losers”, unfairly placed to rule above the clearly victorious Tories. There are others, however, and I am one of them, who believe that, far from being a “coalition of the losers”, a coalition Labour/Liberal Democrat government is exactly what democracy requires.

Looking at the election results, although it benefits the Conservatives immensely to view their numerical majority of 306 MPs and their net gain of ninety-eight seats as a decisive victory and rejection of the incumbent Labour government, in reality it is hardly that. Though Labour did indeed lose ninety-two seats on May 6th, and only returned 258 MPs compared with the Tories’ 306, their loss was hardly a resounding rejection. Indeed, considering the appalling low polling numbers in support of Labour over the past eighteen months, one could even argue that support for the party had increased across the country throughout the election campaign. On election day, Labour remained strong in many parts of the country where the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats hoped to make a gain, and though they undoubtedly suffered a loss and part-rejection of their last thirteen years in power (sometimes where it was justified, such as anger over the illegal and unjustified wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; sometimes merely as a scapegoat, such as over the cross-party expenses scandal, or the current global economic crisis that is more a failure of unregulated globalised capitalism than it is of any specifically Labour policy) that loss and part-rejection did not translate into a massive swing rightwards towards the Conservatives. The Tories got some gains, but not enough, and though there may indeed be disillusionment with Labour after thirteen disappointing years, what was made clear at this election was that the alternative to Labour which the voting public sought was not a Conservative one.

While 36% of the public did vote Conservative; 52% of the public did not. 29% chose to continue with the present Labour government rather than pursue the Conservative agenda on offer, and a further 23% voted for the Liberal Democrats who, on all central areas of key policy and ideology, were in direct opposition to the Conservative Party and had much more in common, ideologically, with Labour.

I think it is fair to say that the central concern of this entire election, underlying all other questions of policy, was this: how are we going to deal with the economic crisis? How will we secure recovery and get the country’s finances in order? Are we going to raise taxes or cut taxes? Invest or make cuts? Are we going to protect frontline services or put them at risk? Basically: how can we propose to do anything about crime, education, health, immigration, defence, etc, if we don’t know first where the money’s coming from and how we are going to tackle the deficit? And on this central issue, the split between the Conservative Party and both Labour and the Liberal Democrats was clear: the Conservatives were alone in advocating making massive cuts in public spending immediately, whereas both Labour and Liberal Democrats believed that such measures could be risky for a fragile economy right now and, instead, proposed not making cuts until 2011.

From the three party manifestos:

CONSERVATIVE: “Labour will not take action to cut waste in government. They have identified £11 billion pounds of waste, but they do not plan to start dealing with it until April 2011. So Labour will continue wasting money while putting up taxes on working people. We will act immediately to cut government waste…we will take immediate action to cut a net £6 billion of wasteful departmental spending in the financial year 2010/11, with further savings in future years.”

LABOUR: “We will continue to support the economy while growth is still fragile, sticking with our targeted increase in public spending over the next year to sustain the recovery…Once the recovery is secure, we will rapidly reduce the budget deficit. We have set out a clear, balanced and fair plan to more than halve the deficit over the next four years and we will stick to it. We will achieve this through a combination of: fair tax increases; a firm grip on public spending including cuts in lower-priority areas; and strategies for growth that increase tax revenues and reduce spending on benefits.”

LIBERAL DEMOCRATS: “We have already identified over £15 billion of savings in government spending per year, vastly in excess of the £5 billion per year that we have set aside for additional spending commitments…If spending is cut too soon, it would undermine the much-needed recovery and cost jobs. We will base the timing of cuts on an objective assessment of economic conditions, not political dogma. Our working assumption is that the economy will be in a stable enough condition to bear cuts from the beginning of 2011-12.”

On this vital and immediate question, therefore, the British public have spoken: 52% of them do not want the fragile recovery jeopardized by making cuts in public spending too soon. Despite this, David Cameron made it clear in his “big, open and comprehensive offer” to Nick Clegg: “We remain completely convinced that starting to deal with the deficit this year is essential.”

The second important issue at the forefront of the election now is the question of electoral reform. As soon as it became likely that this election might result in a hung Parliament, a major discussion throughout the country began around the prospects, likelihood and desirability of changing the voting system to some form of proportional representation. The importance of this issue became amplified by the election results themselves: the Liberal Democrats received 23% of the votes, yet returned only fifty-seven Parliamentary seats, whereas Labour, who only had 6% more votes than the Lib Dems, received 31% more seats. Meanwhile, back in first-past-the-post-land, we were left confused and unimpressed with a Conservative majority that was not majority enough to govern.

There came a complex and subtle message from the electorate on May 6th that our clumsy and outdated electoral system is structurally incapable of deciphering: we are unhappy with Labour, but we are equally unhappy with the Conservative and Liberal Democrat alternative. Who, therefore, should govern our country?

Returning to this question of whether or not the General Election was a massive rejection of thirteen years of Labour government, the answer was clearly: no. It was a rebuke, certainly, but a rejection? Hardly. A truly responsive democracy must allow for more than black or white options: in a complex and diverse world there will always be shades of grey. Labour have let a lot of people down and have made a lot of mistakes over their thirteen years in power, but in certain areas, and on certain questions, they have done great and popular things. Why must it be that, for the handful of mistakes, an entire programme is rejected, or that, for a few bad apples, we must expel the entire bunch?

Similarly – the surge in Liberal Democrat numbers before the election did not translate into votes on polling day. Why? Well, likely because voters were all-too aware of the stacked deck against their vote in a flawed, first-past-the-post system. No one wants to waste their vote, so they voted cautiously instead: for Labour, if they didn’t want the Tories to get in, or for the Conservatives if they were sick of Gordon Brown.

Certainly in this election we can read a disappointment in what Labour have done – but that disappointment was clearly not enough for people to reject them from government entirely, nor were the alternative agendas proposed by the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats popular enough to gain mass support. True democracy, therefore, must be more than YES or NO – in a representative democracy there must be a mechanism in place for nuanced representation: not simply YES or NO, but a qualified YES or NO – something that tells the party you support that you are not going to abandon them entirely and switch your allegiances across the political spectrum, but that you are dissatisfied with certain aspects of their record and that they must change or it will cost them votes.

It is clear that, to do this, electoral reform is needed. For Liberal Democrats, such reform has been at the forefront of their agenda since their inception, and if they are to remain a party of their principles, then a demand for electoral reform must be the price they ask of any potential partner in coalition.

In their 2010 manifesto, they make it clear: “Liberal Democrats will change politics and abolish safe seats by introducing a fair, more proportional voting system for MPs. Our preferred Single Transferable Vote system gives people the choice between candidates as well as parties.”

Similarly, Labour – though late to the party – were not afraid to acknowledge this need for electoral reform in their own 2010 manifesto, weeks before a hung Parliament became a reality and it became politically useful to hold such a view: “People want a greater say in how the country is governed and for politicians to be more accountable to those they serve. So while we are proud of our record of devolving power and reforming the constitution, we believe that further and more radical reform is imperative if we are to renew our democratic public life. Britain needs a new constitutional and political settlement for a new era. To begin the task of building a new politics, we will let the British people decide on whether to make Parliament more democratic and accountable in referenda on reform of the House of Commons and House of Lords, to be held on the same day, by October 2011. To ensure that every MP is supported by the majority of their constituents voting at each election, we will hold a referendum on introducing the Alternative Vote for elections to the House of Commons.”

The Conservatives, meanwhile, on this vital matter of national interest, yet again do not share the opinion of the 52% majority. As they put it in their manifesto: “We support the first-past-the-post system for Westminster elections because it gives voters the chance to kick out a government they are fed up with.”

And that is precisely the problem.

As the results of May 6th show – the country did not necessarily want to kick the government out. Or at least: they did not want to kick the government out and replace them with a distinctly Conservative one. Only 7.1% more voters specifically chose the right-wing Conservative agenda on offer than chose the existing Labour government, and, taken as an ideological whole – those opposing a shift to the right and sharing a progressive vision of the future – 52% of the voters rejected the Conservative programme.

Now, numerically it could be argued that, similarly, 59.1% of voters rejected the Labour programme, or that 65.1% of voters rejected the Liberal Democrats’, but when we look beyond the numerical results and to what the three individual parties were actually offering, I think there can be no argument at all that ideologically the Conservative party stood alone and were rejected by the majority. They were the only explicitly right-wing party on the ballot out of the three, and stood at significant odds from Labour and Liberal Democrats on the two main issues of the day – making immediate cuts to public spending instead of waiting until 2011, and opposing proportional representation – and so the 52% who voted against this lone platform is therefore a much more significant figure than any other combination of Lib/Con or Lab/Con. It represents a 52% shared progressive mandate against the Conservatives’ meagre 36% of support.

We have been taught by first-past-the-post politics to think of winners and losers, but real democracy is more than just a number of arbitrarily distributed seats. Although with 306 seats to Labour’s 258, it seems like the Conservatives are the “winners” of this election, when we actually consider what our votes mean, and what it was that 52% of the electorate actually voted for on May 6th, then it is clear the direction that this country needs to go. Whilst certainly sense and decency suggest that Nick Clegg, as apparent kingmaker in this scenario, ought to hear out what the Conservatives have to offer in the face of their numerical victory, he should feel no shame in joining the majority of the population in rejecting a Conservative proposal if it does not concede important ground. To form a coalition with Labour instead would not only make much more sense ideologically, but democratically too. An expression not of the “coalition of the losers” but of the combined progressive majority in this country who opposed the Conservative programme.

Democracy is more than just numbers. It is about translating mechanical votes into meaningful representation. The first step, therefore, is in forming a government reflective of the nation’s true feelings; the second is in introducing proportional representation so that in future those votes can speak clearer. Neither of these things can be done with a Tory government, and I hope that Nick Clegg looks beyond the misleading numbers and makes the right decision for democracy.

Technorati Tags: General Election 2010,General Election,UK Politics,Politics,Hung Parliament,Liberal Democrats,Conservative Party,Labour Party,Nick Clegg,Democracy

The Anti-Conservative Majority

2010-05-07T14:38:00.001+01:00

This bears repeating from yesterday, because the false argument against the idea of an alleged “anti-Conservative majority” continues to be spun. From The Tone of Our Oppression yesterday:

There is a distinctively anti-Tory majority in this country that is not the same as the arguable anti-Labour or anti-Lib Dem majority one could extrapolate from the exact same polls, because both Labour and Liberal Democrat support comes from a place of shared progressive values, no matter how different the proposals of each individual party as to how best to manifest those progressive left-leaning values in practice, whereas the Tories are alone in popular support for regressive, right-wing thinking.

As I said this morning: on investing in the economy and securing the recovery now, and holding off cuts until 2011, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are in agreement and opposed to Conservative plans. Both parties are also in agreement for the need for electoral reform, whereas the Conservatives oppose it. On that basis, the two parties – Labour and Lib Dem – absolutely do form an “anti-Conservative majority”.

Indeed, right now, the vote share is like this:

Conservatives – 36.2%

Labour/Lib Dem combined – 52%

Combined with the commonality of shared progressive policy and opposition to key Tory platforms, I’d call this a distinctive and morally authoritative anti-Conservative majority formed by a Lib/Lab pact.

Technorati Tags: Politics,UK Politics,General Election 2010,General Election,Hung Parliament,Labour Party,Liberal Democrats,Conservative Party

Elected Prime Minister?

2010-05-07T11:42:00.001+01:00

I think it’s worth remembering, on this question of “who will be the next Prime Minister” and whether or not Gordon Brown has lost his mandate (indeed, on the very question of whether Brown has been our “unelected” leader until now and, if Labour should change their leader in a coalition government, would that new Labour leader be, again, an “unelected” Prime Minister): we do not vote for a Prime Minister in this country. We vote for a Parliament. We vote for the Party member in our local constituency, and then the Party – not the public – choose their leader who, if they are in government, will then become Prime Minister.

On the subject of Gordon Brown – he has repeatedly won, and won again last night, his seat in his constituency, thus he has been elected. That the Labour Party felt it right to make him their leader is up to them, and if they choose to change him and select another leader, that is their right too.

That may not be democratically sound, but that is the system that we’ve got, and the Conservative/media notion that Gordon Brown is “unelected” and “has never won an election to be our Prime Minister” rings slightly false whenever it is repeated.

Technorati Tags: Politics,UK Politics,General Election 2010,General Election,Gordon Brown,Hung Parliament,Prime Minister,Political Legitimacy

An Important Policy-Based Moral Argument for a Lib/Lab Coalition…

2010-05-07T09:20:00.001+01:00

As we wake up to the prospect of a hung Parliament, there is much argument about who would have the “moral authority” to rule the country. Constitutionally, the answer is clear: the standing Prime Minister has the first opportunity to create a coalition government that gains the acceptance of the House. But the Conservatives are making the argument – superficially sensible – that, as they have the most seats, albeit not a majority, they should have first chance at creating a workable government instead.

Something important seems to have been forgotten amidst all the speculation: an important moral argument as to why a Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition is more in line with the people’s will than a minority Conservative government.

The most important difference between the three parties throughout the campaign was on the question of cuts in public spending. The Conservatives were alone in endorsing the idea of immediate cuts this year, whereas both the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats believed that taking money out of the economy now could jeopardize the recovery, and instead proposed waiting until 2011.

On this key difference, the Liberal Democrats and Labour are agreed. In both their manifestos they state caution about making cuts too early, and on this crucial election argument on which the Conservative Party made their case – do we cut now, or do we wait until 2011 – the British public appear to have spoken: they do not want cuts in public spending this year, as the Conservatives are offering, and have voted majoritively for those parties which endorse continued investment in 2010.

This is a vital matter in terms of who gets the moral authority to form a government now, as the issue itself is specifically time sensitive. If a minority Conservative government took power and forced through immediate cuts that have been rejected by the majority of the population, where is the democracy there? More importantly, as, traditionally, coalition governments in the UK seldom last longer than a year or two, does it not make perfect sense to establish a union of collaborative parties this year who agree, along with the majority of the country, in the direction that the economy should be going now? Then, if that government fails, if their popular economic policies falter and get us into trouble, the Conservatives have a fair and demonstrable argument a year from now to hold a vote of no confidence, win an election, and introduce their immediate austerities. They do not have that mandate now.

There is also another important area of policy agreement: electoral reform. If this election shows anything, it is that our first-past-the-post system is absolutely useless at truly representing the views of the people. Indeed, the very party who so vehemently oppose electoral reform – the Conservatives – on the basis that only first-past-the-post politics can provide strong governments, are today realizing that this simply isn’t true. On numbers alone, they have seemingly “won”, but their chances of forming a strong government are absolutely nonexistent, yet still they refuse to consider the idea of proportional representation. The people are desperate for this outdated system to be scrapped, and it is only the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party who have been proposing electoral reform, not just today, when it is politically convenient to do so, but in their manifestos.

On the two major issues facing our country today – the economy and election reform – the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats share a joint, and publically endorsed, vision. The Conservatives stand alone, and their policies on these issues – when looked at collectively – have been roundly rejected by the majority of people, giving them absolutely no moral authority to rule.

Technorati Tags: Politics,UK Politics,General Election 2010,General Election,UK General Election,Hung Parliament,Economy,Electoral Reform,Lib/Lab Pact,Labour Party,Liberal Democrats,Conservative Party

Election Day 2010

2010-05-06T15:49:00.001+01:00

Well, today’s the day and I’ve done all that I can. At 7:55 this morning I placed my vote for Labour candidate, Steve McCabe, here in Selly Oak and all I can do now is sit back and wait until the wee small hours to see if this country is as stupid as I fear it might be.

Walking around the constituency yesterday, the signs were good – lots of Labour posters, a couple of Lib Dem ones, and only two for local Tory, Nigel Dawkins; one of which was in the window of a cafe which also boasted posters for the Lib Dems and the Christian Party – so not exactly a ringing endorsement.

But I still fear the results around the rest of the country. The media coverage of the entire campaign has been disgusting, and with the preponderance of Cameron-slanted Murdoch outputs all across the nation – not only in the papers, but in the all-too-common big screen TVs found at train stations and supermarkets constantly churning out partisan SKY News – I worry for how many people might have bought into a plainly false narrative of a “failed” Labour Party, a “long-shot” Liberal Democrats and the unquestionable right to rule of the anointed Conservatives.

The absolute burying of Gordon Brown across all media has been truly astounding. There are plenty of things to hold Brown accountable for, but inane things like his supposed temper, his social awkwardness, his non-telegenic appearance, his unlikability, etc, are not one of them. From day one he has been made the scapegoat for problems arguably out of his control, and the media – too lazy to report the intricacies of things like a global financial crisis or their own involvement in Labour’s unpopular wars – have latched on to the simplistic idea that if we just cleared the decks and started again then everything would work out ok.

Brown and New Labour have done some terrible things to this country – but everything terrible they have done is right out of the Conservative Party playbook too: they are the failings of power, not of party. The failings of a pseudo-democratic system that always puts the elite interests of a small but powerful minority over the interests of the many, whoever has the keys to Number 10.

Importantly though, because of where the Labour Party splits ideologically from the Conservatives – if only in the minds of the voters who hold it to account – it is restrained in how much it can ignore the needs of its regular citizens whilst pursuing those unchanging elite power goals, and so small but significant steps of social progress are made along the way: a minimum wage here, a Sure Start programme there… The Conservative Party, however, have no such need to appease the masses when they take control. They are a selfish party for selfish people, built on an openly selfish platform. When they take money away from the poor, or shut down schools and sell-off hospitals – there is no safety-net of accountability there, only the open declaration that this is what they were always going to do. They are the party of business, of greed, of “you’re on your own” responsibility, of disregard for those who can’t, or won’t, help themselves. They are the party that closest resembles the elite interests of the truly powerful in our country – the rich – and as such, the same pattern continues to repeat itself throughout our electoral history:

An elite, right-wing party – in this case, The Conservatives – start off in power. The rich get what they want, but eventually the people get pissed off and threaten to revolt, so a party of the left is formed to funnel the public’s righteous anger into something neutered and less threatening to the accepted social order. That party – in this case, Labour – then win an election and help to redistribute wealth a little and make things fairer for the disgruntled citizens (whilst never straying too far from the underlying power goals of any government to promote elite interests above all else). Eventually though, the failings of that party at creating any real change becomes clear to all those who hoped they would be much more radical than they are, and with that disillusionment comes loss of support. Meanwhile, those who have benefitted from the redistribution and advantages provided by the left-leaning party during its time in power begin to identify with the rich people they had previously despised. They begin to decide that maybe it’s time for lower taxes, that there’s maybe too much regulation and “political correctness”, and that it’s time to go back to a “less complicated” era of governance, where a person isn’t “punished” for doing well. Labour are discredited, the Conservatives are painted as the only alternative, and before you know it they have taken back the throne…until the next time the people threaten revolt and the whole cycle begins again.

For some reason we never seem to get into the stage of actual progression following the restoration of order after a destructive Conservative rule. When our progressive leaders let us down for not being progressive enough, we are told to look backwards again, not forwards.

A few days ago, some pundit or another thought they were being smart when they countered Gordon Brown’s claim that there “is an anti-Conservative majority in this country” with the argument that, if that is true, then it must also be true that there is an anti-Labour majority here too. All Brown was doing, so this pundit said, was taking the polling numbers for Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters and plotting them together against the solitary Tory figure, but he called that tactic into question as it could work in all three directions and was a blatant straw man.

This, to me, showed a fundamental misunderstanding of political ideology within contemporary political debate because, undoubtedly, Brown was right and the pundit was wrong.

There is a distinctively anti-Tory majority in this country that is not the same as the arguable anti-Labour or anti-Lib Dem majority one could extrapolate from the exact same polls, because both Labour and Liberal Democrat support comes from a place of shared progressive values, no matter how different the proposals of each individual party as to how best to manifest those progressive left-leaning values in practice, whereas the Tories are alone in popular support for regressive, right-wing thinking. Taking today’s Harris poll, for example, with the Tories on 35%, Labour on 29% and the Liberal Democrats on 27% – although it does seem like the Tories have the majority, when you look at the poll in terms of ideology, then it is clear that 56% of the country oppose the hard-line right-wing agenda of the Conservatives. This is important stuff, yet the media have been more concerned with pathetic character assassinations and sound-bites than in delving any further into the true nature of what we, as citizens, really want.

There is so much more I want to say about this but no doubt it will form a continuing theme of critique in the commentaries to come once we get the election results in the morning. Even in the most optimistic and partisan polls, the Tories are looking hard-pressed to find an outright and undisputable majority right now, and with one in four voters apparently still undecided as of this morning – not to mention the effects that increased turnout and a huge surge in youth voting will have on the polls – it is still really anybody’s guess as to who will win come ten o’clock tonight.

Like I said at the start: I’ve done all I can. There’s nothing left now but the waiting…

Technorati Tags: UK Politics,Politics,General Election 2010,General Election,Labour Party,Media,Steve McCabe

Prime Ministerial Debate III: Question Time

2010-04-30T10:40:00.000+01:00

Watching the BBC debate show, Question Time, is a frustrating experience at the best of times. More often than not the panel of political representatives and media personalities are so busy spouting out their own sound-bites and prepared talking points that you are left screaming at your television set that they are not answering the question, or that they are lying, or that they have no idea what they are talking about, or that the views they are expressing have been outdated and discredited for twenty years… And even though the audience are allowed to speak and call these people to account, what usually follows is simply more of the same evasiveness and spin: the audience-member feels wonderful that their view has finally been represented, but the panellists air-time is longer and their voices carry more weight. The question is forgotten and only emptiness remains.

Last night’s episode of Question Time was doubly frustrating, because instead of being at home, where you are buoyed by a certain sense of detachment and the ability to turn the sound down, I was in the studio audience at Birmingham University and watched the entire thing live.

You would have thought that this would make it far less frustrating: instead of watching in futility at home, unable to get engaged with the debate and call the politicians on their spin and manipulation, in person I could actually put my hand up and get involved. I could ask my questions, I could state my opinions.

But I discovered last night that there is something much more frustrating than the impotence you feel at home when you see an entire panel of liars and idiots and there are no means of having your say: actually being in the audience, with your hand up for sixty minutes desperate to put forward your opinion, and not being called on throughout.

I’ll blame it on my positioning. We had no real choice in where we were seated and unfortunately I found myself at the far left end of a row quite near the back, not only out of the sight of most of the cameras, which concentrated mainly on the central section, but crucially – because of the placement of one of the main cameras that filmed the panellists – often out of the sight of David Dimbleby himself. Though he looked in my direction several times, for whatever reason, I wasn’t asked to participate. And so I had to sit, with my arm aching in the air, listening to hollow lies about the debate earlier that evening, awful and – yes – bigoted rubbish about immigration, the various ways in which the parties plan to cut public spending instead of taxing the rich and how democracy had changed for the better because of the implementation of vacuous television debates.

Still, despite not getting to add my own venom and bile to the vibrant melange of misinformation and spin, I had a thoroughly enjoyable time. It was nice, if nothing else, getting to boo Liam Fox in a roomful of people and hearing David Dimbleby tell us to “just bloody enjoy yourselves” before we went on air. It was also nice, in the sound-check portion of the technical rehearsal, to be able to ask a question of the fake stand-in panel even if I didn’t get to do it on TV. We were told we couldn’t address anything that might actually come up in the show, so I contributed this little enquiry to the proceedings: “This week, Stephen Hawking has told us that if we came into contact with aliens, it is highly likely that they will be hostile. Liam Fox, as Shadow Defence Secretary, should we go to war against the aliens?”

A heated debate ensued, with audience members and fake panellists suggesting that the rationale for war might be different if we knew that the aliens had oil and once we knew just exactly what the alien weaponry was like…and if they had weapons of mass destruction.

It was a hell of a long evening though. We arrived at the University at 5:45pm and didn’t leave until midnight. Once we’d arrived, we were bussed (quite needlessly – it was about a two minute walk) to the venue, where we sat around tables getting to know each other, eating free sandwiches and coffee and writing our second Question Time question.

We had already been asked to email a question earlier in the week. The question I had sent in was this: Would Conservative proposals to give parents public money to set up experimental new schools take vital funding away from the schools that we already have? I thought it would be something likely to come up being as how the Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, was on the panel, and there had been such an excellent furore about the issue earlier in the week that saw Michael Gove absolutely eviscerated on Radio 4.

It didn’t, and I wasn’t asked to read the question. But my second submission was this: Is it really so wrong to call a person “sort of bigoted” after they have just expressed some “sort of bigoted” views?

That obviously didn’t fit in with the editorial take on the whole “bigot-gate” incident though, because the version of the question ultimately asked in the show was: Are you a bigot to ask the Prime Minister about immigration? With not a single person on the panel (including Ed Balls), or Dimbleby himself, attempting to clarify the fact that Gordon Brown did not explicitly call Gillian Duffy “a bigot”, but rather described her, undeniably “sort of bigoted”, views as “sort of bigoted”.

After the coffee and question-writing was done, we moved into the real studio, where the alien-based technical rehearsal occurred and people were told whether or not their questions had been chosen. Sadly, after spending the earlier part of the evening with a great group of left-leaning people (utterly by accident – we were obviously drawn to each other), somehow I ended up sitting next to an excitable Tory guy who clapped vigorously at every empty trope Liam Fox uttered all night and tried to convince me that David Cameron had “won” the Debate.

Indeed – the Debate. Before Question Time began, we had a giant screen brought into the makeshift studio and watched the entire Prime Ministerial Debate live as an audience. This was actually pretty cool. Unlike watching at home, with just me and my wife grumbling to each other, or even watching it live in the auditorium, where you are not allowed to make a sound, watching the debate cinema-style in a big room full of people meant that we could boo and cheer as we pleased to the various points the leaders put across. We could clap when they said something sensible and we could call out “RUBBISH!” when they said something we disagreed with. Unfortunately, it was quite depressing to see how many people cheered and got excited when David Cameron laid into the usual Tory memes of immigrants and people on benefits. Indeed, on Question Time too, my heart sank at how deeply so many people feel this hostility towards immigration.

Still, the biggest cheers of the night went to Clegg, and when we were polled later via a show of hands, in our room, Clegg won. If I were a focus group manager for Gordon Brown I would point out two major observations from last night: Gordon Brown smiling makes the entire audience laugh, and not in a good way. And everything that he says – no matter how valid, reasoned and true it may be – simply does not connect with voters who have been misled and lied to by a promise-breaking Labour government for thirteen years. If anything loses him the election though, it will be the shit-eating grin he whipped out right at the end of his atrocious prepared final statement. The statement was bad enough – an attack on Clegg and Cameron instead of a robust defence of Labour and positive reason to vote for them, that ended with him telling people he was “desperate” – and then when he smiled I have never heard such a groan fill a room. Just terrible, and I actually thought he did really well once you take presentation out of the equation. That said, I was fairly disgusted that he failed to point out the fundamental, £40 a week better off in work guarantee and rise of the minimum wage, that, according to the two manifestos, separates Labour policy on cutting benefits from the Tory one considerably. In a bid to out-Tory the Tories, he simply pressed on about “no life on the dole” and forcing people to work. That correlating rise in the minimum wage and promise that when you are forced into a job you will be guaranteed to earn at least £40 a week more in work than you would on benefits, however, makes the Labour policy much more humane, but not a single voter watching the Debate last night will know about it.

I also can’t believe that the opinion polls have Cameron winning the Debate last night. What did he actually say that was any different from any of the two previous Debates, or indeed from the Conservative manifesto? Absolutely nothing. I guess it just proves that old adage that if you repeat a lie long enough, people start to believe it as truth. He was evasive, he offered platitudes instead of arguments, his policies don’t add up and all have fundamental flaws, and yet he drills through all the sound-bites and pounds them into your head and by the end of ninety minutes you feel like you’ve been convinced; a sophistry of the highest order.

It would have been nice to have said that on Question Time too – but I guess there’s always next time.

I just hope that next time it won’t be Prime Minister Cameron I will be talking about, and that on May 6th, even without having heard me speak on TV, the great British public will show me that they’re not as dumb as I think they are, and go to the polls and vote for our future, instead of our draconian past.

Technorati Tags: Question Time,UK Politics,Politics,General Election 2010,General Election,Prime Ministerial Debate,Gordon Brown,Nick Clegg,David Cameron

On Immigration, Gillian Duffy IS Bigoted…

2010-04-29T09:54:00.001+01:00

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past twenty-four hours you will be aware that a lot of fuss has been made about a certain Prime Minister calling one of the residents of Rochdale a “bigot”. Indeed, this fuss appears quite capable of completely derailing the already failing Labour election campaign and knocking them out of the race entirely.

Yet am I the only one out there who agrees with Gordon Brown?

The most important thing to take away from the “Bigot-gate” incident is not that Brown was caught calling a Labour supporter a “bigot” when he left his SKY News microphone turned on after waving her goodbye, but that what he in fact said was this:

When asked what Duffy had said that had made the meet-and-greet such a “disaster”, he said, quite hurriedly, trying to short-hand his explanation: “oh everything - she’s just a sort of bigoted woman…said she used to be Labour”.

The difference between saying “she is a bigoted woman” and “she’s just a sort of bigoted woman” are immense. In the one case you are dismissing a person entirely, whilst in the other you are stating a vague feeling about what was said and why it left a bad taste in your mouth. Not that she is a bigot, but that what she said was “sort of bigoted” and it was surprising coming from a woman who “said she used to be Labour”.

And on this point Brown was absolutely spot on. Duffy was not some misunderstood victim of a cruel and intolerant monster. She was a woman who, in the midst of talking about benefits and the economy, suddenly said: “You can’t say anything about the immigrants…all these Eastern Europeans what are coming in – where are they flocking from?”

Now, just as Brown claims that what he said was not exactly what he meant, perhaps Duffy herself did not mean to sound as bigoted as she did when she spoke about “the immigrants” and their “flocking” in. But in the one minute handshake conversation on which Brown was forced to make his opinion, all he had to go on was that she claimed to be a Labour supporter, yet spouted the standard right-wing tabloid garbage about “all these Eastern Europeans”. If I had been having that exact conversation with Duffy, I would have come away thinking exactly the same thing too.

Furthermore, the media is also claiming that this off-mike/on-mike outburst was a public illustration of the exact kind of behind-the-scenes tyrant Brown has been portrayed as being over the past few months: an intolerant bully who blames everybody but himself.

I did not get that at all from listening to what was actually said. I just heard a tired and disappointed man who felt that the last few minutes had been a “disaster” say quite calmly that he thought it was ridiculous to have been put in that position and wanted to know who’s idea it had been. He did not say he wanted anyone’s head on a platter; he did not shout and curse and scream. He said that the meeting with Duffy had not gone well, he should have never been put in the position of having to deal with her, and when he was asked what she had said which had made him feel it had gone badly, he pointed out, quite fairly, that what she’d said had been “sort of bigoted”.

In any civilized country with a less-hysterical media, this private and reasonable conversation between a politician and his aides might have been mentioned as a point of humourous faux pas and then quickly brushed aside for more important things (for instance: the solid answer Brown had given Gillian Duffy when confronting her “sort of bigoted” views – that, though we have about a million EU nationals coming into the UK each year, we also have about a million UK nationals going into the EU so it all evens out). Instead though, we had this empty, sensationalist flogging of the issue – filming Duffy’s reaction to what was overheard by deliberately misquoting what Brown had actually said; showing her (understandable) offence when she was finally played the tape and the word “bigot” was heard in a manipulated context; swarming around her house as if one woman’s obvious offence at an individual, heat-of-the-moment, personal evaluation of her principles were some vital crux of the election campaign; and mentioning the gaffe as if it were headline news every five minutes and having various talking heads dissect the ramifications of events now largely caricatured out of all recognition to the actual facts of what happened.

I also think it is important to note the source of this irrelevant hysteria: Rupert Murdoch’s SKY News.

The mike which caught Brown’s statements was a rogue SKY News microphone that the Prime Minister had left on. Murdoch, of course, is an arch-conservative; the owner of the US’s rabid FOX News Network, and, here in the UK, owner of Cameron-backing The Sun, The Times and The News of the World. He is a highly partisan player in this election and his news organization is being used as a tool to help promote the Conservative cause. This could be seen during last week’s Prime Ministerial Debate, when SKY host, Adam Boulton, violated the agreed rules of the debate and attempted to derail the surge in Liberal Democrat momentum by asking Nick Clegg an erroneous question about party donations which had already been cleared up and dismissed earlier that day, and it could be seen yesterday, when a reasonable man’s reasonable comments about an angry woman talking ignorantly about immigration was used to smear his election campaign and discredit an entire political party.

That our politics have come to this is a sad indictment of the current British system, and one can only hope that a hung Parliament, and radical voter reform, will help change all that on the morning of May 7th.

In other news: I will be attending the BBC’s Question Time tonight in Birmingham. I don’t know if I’ll get to ask a question, but it sounds like it should be a good one: Ed Balls, Vince Cable and George Osborne were announced last time I checked, and we all get to watch the final Leaders Debate together beforehand – a political junky’s dream :-) I’ll let you know how it went, and, of course, you can watch it tonight at 10:45 on BBC One, following the news and the final debate.

Technorati Tags: Politics,UK Politics,Gordon Brown,Gillian Duffy,Bigot-gate,Bigot,Media,General Election 2010,General Election,Rupert Murdoch,Question Time,Rochdale,Sky News,Labour Party

Prime Ministerial Debate II: The Quickening

2010-04-23T09:57:00.001+01:00

Some thoughts on last night’s 2nd Prime Ministerial Debate:

Whilst David Cameron continued his efforts to manipulate and con the British public into anointing him Prime Minister through shallow sound-bites and comforting repetition, Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown actually offered meaningful policy discussions on some of the major issues of the day.

Quite frankly, Cameron infuriates me. After last week’s ridiculous and transparent anecdote about a “black man” who supports immigration (a 40 year old black man who Cameron claimed had served in the Royal Navy for 30 years – making him, at most, 10 years old when he joined!), this week we had an even more annoying gaffe: when Gordon Brown laid into Nick Clegg about his opposition to Trident, Cameron said – in a very well-rehearsed way - “I have never uttered these words before…but I agree with Gordon.” A funny line in light of last week’s “I agree with Nick” catchphrase, but an absolute heap of rubbish because just a few minutes before, on a question about Afghanistan, Cameron had said “I completely agree with Gordon Brown” about how brave and heroic our troops were, and how we must continue to fight al-Qaeda around the world so that they cannot commit atrocities here in the UK. The news agencies this morning have not seemed to pick up on this blatant bullshit, however, because it gets in the way of a good sound-bite.

I also found much of what Cameron said last night to be completely void and empty: tried and tested Tory tropes about “people who work hard and save hard not getting punished” under a Conservative government, “people who do the right thing their whole lives not losing out”, and how, if a thousand business leaders think something must be wrong, then clearly it must be.

In many ways it was like seeing a magician try to do magic after you’d read the book on how all the illusions are performed: the newspapers and websites yesterday were full of inside information about what Cameron’s team were going to try and do in order to improve his performance from last week’s, and he did exactly what they told him. Talk more directly to the camera (he did), paint a picture of the Conservative Party as being the only real possibility for breaking free of Labour (he did), sell the terror of a hung Parliament (he did), and tousle your hair a bit (he did!) It was an absolute master-class in vapid talking points and well-rehearsed spin, which reached its crescendo when the same man who tells us that “Gordon Brown’s jobs-tax will kill the recovery” and that a hung Parliament will destroy the economy, accused Gordon Brown of scare-mongering! Brown, who stated – quite reasonably – that the Conservative Manifesto makes no mention of free prescriptions or eye-tests for the elderly, was taken to task for leaflets which therefore claim that a Conservative Government would take medicines away from the sick. This is apparently scare-mongering, whereas the entire Tory campaign, which is based around the fundamental premise that “we can’t go on like this”, is not?

But enough of David Sham-eron. What of the other contenders?

Well, once again Nick Clegg showed that he was a serious political candidate and that the Liberal Democrats are a genuine party to vote for. The only people to be amazed by this fact continue to be the media, but nevertheless, although lacking in the novelty-value of last week’s debut (and in the willingness for Brown and Cameron, fearing a potential hung Parliament, to suck up to him) Clegg remained sound and innovative on policy and fresh and bold on politics. Continually, he discussed new and practical ways of getting difficult things done, and showed that there were real alternatives to the fictional limits on action set in place by the traditional two-party system. He not only did well, he did amazingly well, considering that both Cameron and Brown were out to get his blood. After last week’s disastrous schmooze-fest, the game this week was expose the Liberal Democrats as a flash-in-the-pan novelty, and at that task, both Cameron and Brown epically failed. When questioned and scrutinized about Liberal Democrat policies, Clegg had answers; when grilled and interrogated about the nature of his character, his opponents were forced to fabricate fictions and put words into his mouth. No one managed to win a knock-out blow on Clegg, and far from showing he was a one-trick pony, he used this second debate to clarify and expand on positions put forward last week. Indeed, his performance was decidedly Prime Ministerial.

Which brings me to Gordon Brown.

Gordon Brown is the man who bank-rolled the two unjustified and illegal wars on terror, continued the Tory economic policies of the 80s and 90s, and sat back and made friendly with bankers instead of giving them more regulation…yet last night, and the week before, I couldn’t help but be impressed by his contributions to the debate. Just as I felt when reading the Labour Party Manifesto last week, whilst there have certainly been some tremendous failures and nightmares brought about by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, since 1997 the Labour Party really have done so many wonderful things for this country: be it the implementation of the minimum wage; furthering the equality of women, homosexuals, the disabled, and ethnic and religious minorities; providing better benefits for the elderly; improving health and educational services; attempting to shake-up the House of Lords; the Freedom of Information Act…the Labour Party have by no means got everything right (and even in their successes there could have been much bigger improvements and much better means to achieve them) but what they have done right has been important. Crucially, it is these areas of social reform that are most at danger with a Conservative victory (we all remember how things were under Thatcher and Major), and I thought that last night Brown managed to remind us of Labour’s successes, admit to some of their failings, and put forward an clear and appealing vision of the future.

When it came to substance and policy – Brown was a machine. He gave figures, facts, agendas and aspirations, and he did it all whilst pointing out the stark ideological differences between the right and the left in 2010. “Not everyone has the answers,” he told us, right off the bat, “but I say get the big decisions wrong and Britain’s security and jobs are at risk. Get the big decisions right and we can have a prosperous, fairer, greener and better Britain. Like me or not, I can deliver that plan and the way to do it is with a majority Labour government.”

And that is Gordon’ problem – nobody seems to like him. He could sit down and rationally explain an absolutely cast-iron solution to all of the world’s problems with a thoroughly costed ten-point plan of exactly how that agenda would be achieved by the end of the first year of Parliament, and still people would shrug their shoulders and say: “well how can we trust him? We’ve been lied to by Labour before.”

If anything is the subtext of this election it is that: Labour have badly let us down since 1997, we all know it, and we are desperately looking for an alternative.

Now, that alternative could be Nick Clegg, or it could well be the Labour Party themselves. A revitalized and re-energized party, starting a new chapter in their political lives and admitting to the mistakes of the past with the first General Election of the Gordon Brown era. Don’t forget – the past thirteen years were largely on Tony Blair’s watch, and because of the weird way in which Gordon Brown became our Prime Minster, he has never really had a mandate or opportunity to truly lead the party.

It could, of course, all be bullshit, but the 2010 Manifesto suggests a Labour Party that is changing – a more responsive, more democratic Labour Party, that has looked itself in the mirror, been woken up and shaken about a bit by the fallout of the expenses scandal and the war in Iraq, and wants to remember why it was put in government in the first place. In thirteen years the social and economic advances that the Labour Party have brought to this country have been significant and they have been welcomed. They have not all been perfect, and there has been their fair-share of mistakes, but the good things that Labour have done have been entirely the result of the significant ideological differences between a party on the right and a party on the left.

The Conservative Party, ideologically, do not care about social justice. They do not care about economic justice. They do not care about equality, the environment, multilateralism, or human rights. They simply care about what they have always cared about: keeping the better off, better off, and helping the rich get richer. Yet I truly fear that on May 6th our disillusionment and cynicism with Gordon Brown and the Labour government might deliver this country in David Cameron’s hands. When you’ve been raped and beaten for thirteen years, you don’t really care who rescues you, so long as you are saved.

No matter how much sense the Labour Party talks, and how much it fights to remind us of all it has done for us, the fact of the matter is this: thanks to Iraq, thanks to rendition, thanks to the economic crisis, and thanks to a thousand promises un-kept, the Labour Party is a broken brand. It’s like Toyota – they can make the best cars in the world over the next few years, but because of the problems of the last few months, nobody will really want to buy them.

“I’ve met some of the people who have rightly complained about the abuse that they were subject to when young” said Gordon Brown early on in the debate, discussing the Pope’s imminent visit to the UK. “It never leaves them, it’s something that is with them always and no matter what you can try to do to help, there is always this problem that they have to face up to every day that they were abused, cruelly abused, by people in whom they placed their faith and trust.”

As much as I hope it isn’t true, and as much as I wish for a Labour or Lib Dem victory in two weeks’ time, there was a part of me last night that thought Gordon Brown speaking of the cruel abuses suffered by people in whom they had placed their faith and trust was like a eulogy for his own party.

Technorati Tags: Politics,UK Politics,General Election 2010,General Election,UK General Election,Prime Ministers Debate,Prime Ministerial Debate,2nd Debate,Debate,Gordon Brown,David Cameron,Nick Clegg,Labour Party,The Pope

My Favourite Moment of Election Madness Yet…

2010-04-22T15:45:00.001+01:00

My local UKIP candidate, Jeff Burgess, put his election leaflet through my door this week. Though I have no intention on voting for such a hollow and xenophobic party I thought it’d be amusing to give the leaflet a read anyway. I wasn’t wrong.

After a fairly standard UKIP ramble about declining standards and political correctness gone mad, the pièce de résistance came in the section headed: “My local issues are”.

Two bullet-points followed the heading. The first was definitely a local issue: “Ensure that no jobs are lost at Cadbury due to the Kraft takeover, also to ensure Cadbury and its traditions remain in Bournville.” He wasn’t clear exactly how he would achieve this, but to give Burgess his credit it is a far saner and much less disgustingly xenophobic statement than Conservative candidate, Nigel Dawkins, offered hysterically in his own new leaflet this week: “It was one of the saddest days of my life when Cadbury ceased to be British.”

Bullet-point number two, however, is possibly the maddest piece of election literature I have ever received.

After the relative calm of the Cadbury promise, we are suddenly greeted with this nonsense: The promise to “Expose the myth of global warming created through the use of falsified figures which are then used to raise excessive taxes.”

What the what?

Where the hell did that come from? And how is it in any way a “local issue”, let alone an election priority?

UKIP: not just xenophobic pound fetishists, but climate deniers too.

Technorati Tags: General Election,General Election 2010,UKIP,Selly Oak Constituency,Jeff Burgess,UK Politics

Volcanic Ash and the Paucity of the Conservative Vision

2010-04-19T12:23:00.001+01:00

If ever there was a working metaphor for exactly what is wrong with the Conservative Party’s vision of a decentralized Britain, with basic public services put into private hands, it is the current travel crisis.

With Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, sending dangerous plumes of ash into the skies of Europe and air-space now locked down, leaving thousands of people stranded across the world, the Labour government have decided today that it is time to call in the Navy to try and bring people home. Alternative commercial carriers – ferries, Eurostar, coaches and cars – are simply pushed to capacity, and there are more people needing passage than there are seats, so the plan is to send out three Royal Navy ships to help repatriate those that the private sector have had no choice but to leave behind.

The lesson here is stark: for all the good-will in the world, the private-sector is not perfect, and we cannot rely on private enterprise when it comes to providing necessary public services.

Sometimes, as has happened here, human need demands more than the private sector can offer. The system breaks down, or is ill-equipped to deal with requirements that extend beyond the basic drive for making profit, and we need some form of public, not-for-profit, intervention to perform the function unburdened by cost-benefit analysis.

Train, ferry and coach companies are not evil – but they are not able, by market economics alone, to cope with the sudden influx of needy passengers desperate to get back to jobs and loved ones across the sea. They can only do what they can do, with the limited amount of tickets they have left to sell. Meanwhile, it makes perfect economic sense, as demand for their product grows and grows, to start charging ridiculous amounts of money for the few tickets they have left; to exploit the needy and desperate willing to pay anything to get home.

Government cannot just sit back and let private enterprise perform its tasks for it. It cannot abdicate its responsibility and hope the free-market will sort it out. Sometimes, it has to act – to send in Navy ships where commercial ferries are failing, to regulate banks who are not regulating themselves, to impose fines and taxes on persistent polluters who don’t care about the environment they are poisoning so long as they make money, to provide welfare and housing to those the private sector has left behind.

We really are all in this together, and, until the perfect anarchist utopia materializes, part of that means creating some sort of permanent and responsive central safety net – or government – for when things go wrong…or, better still, for ensuring things don’t go wrong in the first place by allowing that central safety net to oversee the smooth and continuous running of various laws and regulations that protect citizens from harm, be it harm from natural disasters, or the harms that are more man-made. This is something the Conservative Party do not understand, and just another in a long line of reasons why you should not vote for them on May 6th.

Technorati Tags: Volcanic Ash,Travel,Conservative Party,General Election,General Election 2010,Labour Party,Navy,Eyjafjallajökull,Economics

After the Debate…

2010-04-16T20:32:00.001+01:00

If ever David Cameron was exposed it was last night, and boy did he look worried under the bright lights and scrutiny of the first ever UK election debate between the three contending Prime Ministerial candidates. The format was perfect for perforating through all the Conservative sound-bites and exposing the hollowness of their “Big Society” programme, and both Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown, in my opinion, demolished the Tory candidate at every turn. If it isn’t clear to you now that the Conservative programme is nothing more than empty and unworkable promises, arbitrary and compassionless punishments and stale and outdated rhetoric masquerading as something new, then you can’t have been paying attention. There is nothing new here in David Cameron’s Conservative Party that hasn’t been tried and discredited already in the 80s and 90s, and the entire 2010 Tory campaign just a shameless grab for power based on a manipulative and dishonest platform of old wine in new bottles. That said, there were some very sage words from Tom Clark in The Guardian today: "Amid the renewed excitement about breaking the mould, progressives would do well to remember that they will pay a high price if they forget the psephology of their own seat. They are desperate to smash an electoral system that forces them to choose between their heart and their head. But they will not succeed if they forget to follow their head in the meantime."

Along with what seems to be the majority of the country right now, I left the big debate last night thinking how nice it would be if Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats could actually win the General Election in three weeks time, and as someone who has voted Lib Dem in every General Election since I was old enough to vote, I began to ponder the possibility of actually voting with my heart on May 6th here in Selly Oak instead of holding my nose and voting tactically for Labour.

“I agree with Nick” is clearly the “I Like Ike” of our generation (at least until some hideous BNP supporter co-opts the phrase for the wrong Nick and puts it on a racist tee-shirt), and it amazes me that by simply being given some air-time in which to lay out the policies already available in the Liberal Democrat manifesto, the British public are finally waking up to the realization that this election is a legitimate three-horse race. The media last night were quick to say things like “in many ways the debate served to introduce Nick Clegg to the British people for the very first time” and the question I kept asking myself was: why? Why had the media done such a bad job up until now in portraying a central political party in our supposedly democratic country as somehow being outside the scope of electability despite their rising poll numbers each and every year? As recently as Monday, I watched Jeremy Paxman interviewing Clegg for the BBC, and he was basically ridiculing him for daring to believe he might actually become Prime Minister. It was disgusting, and I’m glad that this watershed moment has seemingly sky-rocketed the Liberal Democrats into contention and made the derisive and mocking commentators out there finally listen up.

However, as much as I would love to vote Lib Dem on May 6th, the fact of the matter remains that, in my local constituency, historically the Liberal Democrats have never even come close to winning a seat here. Indeed, whilst the leaflets and letters from Conservative, Nigel Dawkins are endless, and Labour’s Steve McCabe is sending out mail-outs and pressing the flesh all over town, our Lib Dem candidate has been highly conspicuous by his absence.

If I thought he had a hope in hell of winning here, I would vote for him, but right now it seems highly unlikely, no matter how well Nick Clegg did on TV last night, and this is an important point to remember for whatever constituency you may be voting in.

For a political party to win a General Election, they do not need to win every seat – they just have to win a majority of seats. If you think your local Lib Dem candidate could actually win the seat in your area, then you should do everything you can to make that happen if that is the outcome you wish for. But if you are living in a seat, like me, where a Lib Dem victory seems improbable, then there is absolutely no shame in voting Labour to keep the Tories out. Indeed, by keeping the eye on the prize – if either Labour or Liberal Democrats get in, they have both promised massive electoral reform; if both get a lot of votes but there is no clear majority, it is highly likely they will work together to form a coalition government – you make sure you avoid the worst of all scenarios: another George Bush moment.

For those who don’t remember, America in the year 2000 wasn’t a particularly inspiring place. Eight years of Bill Clinton hadn’t really given the country the massive social reform that had been hoped for on the left, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal had left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. Meanwhile, on the right, some clown named George W Bush was seeking to fill the shoes vacated by his daddy just eight years before. Ralph Nader and the Green Party, therefore, thought it was high time to step in and try to force the issue of third party politics and offer the voting public a real alternative to political business as usual.

It was an admirable effort, and if I were registered to vote that year the chances are, I would have voted for them too. The problem was though, that with an uninspiring Democratic Party to vote for, many of those who would have voted Democrat voted Green instead because they were so disillusioned with the party, whilst those who would have voted Republican continued to vote for George Bush. What that meant in real terms was that the Greens still didn’t get enough votes for serious Presidential contention (because not enough new or swing voters signed up alongside the disillusioned Democrats), but as a result of the exodus towards the Greens, the Democrats lost a lot of their support. We all know what happened next: the Supreme Court made George W Bush President, and one of the key reasons this travesty occurred was because the difference in votes between the Republicans and Democrats was so slim.

Now, this isn’t to blame Ralph Nader, as many have done, as some kind of “spoiler” in that election – if the Democrats had wanted their Green Party votes back they shouldn’t have sold their supporters down the river and conceded so much to the Republicans during the Clinton years (sound familiar?) But it is a warning about voting with your heart instead of your head: if people like me on May 6th vote Liberal Democrat without being cognizant of the specific circumstances of the constituency in which they are voting, instead of shocking the world and getting the Lib Dem MP that they want, it is much more likely that they will split the Labour vote and return an unwanted Conservative to the seat. And that would be a terrible thing in our first-past-the-post, majority-take-all, electoral system.

This needn’t be seen as cynicism, nor as the claim that a vote for the Liberal Democrats is a wasted vote. It isn’t. I expect a lot of people to vote Lib Dem on May 6th and in a perfect world, they would even win. But it is an endorsement of voting smartly instead of stupidly. I agree with Nick as much as the next guy…but I agree with Gordon a hell of a lot more than I agree with David Cameron, and if it comes to a choice of risking a Cameron victory by taking an unwise gamble on Clegg, I think it’s far safer to stick every time.

Technorati Tags: Politics,UK Politics,General Election 2010,General Election,Debate,Prime Ministers Debate,Nick Clegg,Liberal Democrats,Tactical Voting,Steve McCabe,Gordon Brown,David Cameron,I agree with Nick

Before The Debate…Some Thoughts on the Manifestos…

2010-04-15T18:41:00.001+01:00

I have spent much of this week reading the complete 2010 manifestos of the three main UK political parties – Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative. I will never get that time back.

The most important phrase I read in any of these three documents has got to be this: “our core values have not altered and our core beliefs remain consistent.” That phrase is to be found near the start of the Conservative Party’s so-called “Invitation to Join the Government of Britain”, following a fairy-tale passage about how “the Party has remoulded itself for the modern era, applying its deepest values and beliefs to the urgent problems of the hour” after “a journey that began four and a half years ago, when the Conservative Party itself voted for change by electing David Cameron as its leader.”

Once you debunk the fact from the fantasy – and once you have trawled through the massive 131 page manifesto – the paucity of this opening salvo becomes apparent. A more truthful statement would read: we are the exact same party we always have been, “our core values have not altered and our core beliefs remain consistent”, but after losing three consecutive elections, four and a half years ago we decided to cynically manipulate public opinion with the appearance of change by voting in the seemingly young and vibrant, David Cameron, to reboot the party’s image for the 21st Century. The only real change we stand for though is changing things back to how they were the last time we were in charge.

The big idea at the heart of the Tories’ manifesto in 2010 is the notion of their so-called “Big Society”. The very use of the phrase “Big Society” here is a deliberate piece of theatre: how best to re-introduce many of the same selfish and individualist ideas of the discredited Thatcher government to a political audience who remember only the failings of Thatcherism and the unpleasantness of the “nasty party” of the 80s and 90s? Why, you deliberately distance yourself from the most defining statement Thatcher ever made about Tory-style individualism and fend-for-yourself governmental abandon – that there is “no such thing” as society – and appear to embrace exactly the opposite idea.

Don’t be fooled though – appearance is all that it is – and as you read exactly what Mr. Cameron means by creating his “Big Society”, you discover that, in the ideas within: “our core values have not altered and our core beliefs remain consistent.”

The apparent push for “people power” and “we’re all in this together” sloganeering is, in reality, the same old Conservative shtick in a brand new 2010 window-dressing: deregulate everything, cut centralized government power and devolve the running of nearly everything to private enterprise under the facade of empowering local communities, give more tax cuts to the rich, take more benefits away from the poor, and make sure the City remains doing big business for the few, no matter how bad the unemployment gets for the many…

“We will increase the private sector’s share of the economy in all regions of the country”

Yawn.

“We will improve Britain’s international rankings for tax competitiveness”

Yawn again.

“Anyone on Jobseeker’s Allowance who refuses to join the Work Programme will lose the right to claim out-of-work benefits until they do, while people who refuse to accept reasonable job offers could forfeit their benefits for up to three years.”

Yawn times three.

“We are proud of the last Conservative government’s industrial relations reforms, which helped bring about our economic revival in the 1980s, and we will always be prepared to build on them if necessary”

Yawn to the power of – what? They’re actually proud of that horror? Shit – this is worse than I thought!

“A Conservative government will reduce the amount of paperwork that the police have to deal with, starting by scrapping the stop form entirely and reducing the burden of stop and search procedures.”

And they want to go back to the stop-and-search prejudices of before? “Our core values have not altered and our core beliefs remain consistent” indeed.

Whilst the Tory manifesto has clearly attempted to appeal to the people of Britain with this seemingly radical idea of reclaiming government from Westminster and running the country for ourselves, throughout the document only one thing was made clear: “we’re all in this together” and “the Big Society” means, essentially, that once again under a Conservative government you will be entirely on your own.

Private businesses will run rampant, with no regulation and ever-more weakened unions, government protections and government services will be sold off to the highest bidder, or scrapped completely to pay for more tax cuts, civil liberties and basic human rights will be repealed once again in the name of “cutting red tape” and “reducing the amount of paperwork” for police, unemployment will rise up at the same time that benefits will be plummeting right down, education will become polarized, and citizen will compete against citizen for an ever-depleting pool of public resources whilst the wealthy will accrue more and more.

As an avowed anarchist, I actually found it quiet insulting to see how much the language of radical decentralizing and the self-empowerment of local communities was co-opted by the Conservatives to paint a picture so very far removed from what real self-governance would look like, and if ever my argument about the importance of tone in our inevitable oppression at the hands of external governments held true, it was in the reading of the Conservative manifesto.

When it comes to the actual actions each party is proposing in this election, there is a vast similarity of objectives. Everybody wants to cut public spending, balance the budget, fix our schools, protect the NHS, improve the environment, continue the war in Afghanistan, re-link state pensions with earnings, commit to an 0.7% budget for aid, support the Millennium Development Goals, etc, but the importance here is in the underlying philosophy which is guiding each party and the way in which this philosophy informs the spirit by which those objectives are intended to be met.

For instance – the Labour party intend to throw a lot of people off their benefits too if they are elected in on May 6th (for the record: I don’t condone this, but am working within the parameters of the given debate). Like the Tories, Labour will similarly be implementing a new policy if elected in the new Parliament: after two years on benefits, unemployed people will be given a job that they have to take or risk having their benefits cut off. But the difference here is the tone. Whereas the Conservatives’ plan places sole responsibility on the unemployed, painting them in the traditional Tory light as work-shy shirkers and scammers and enforcing claimants to take whatever job they are given or risk being barred from collecting benefits for three whole years (a completely arbitrary policy which gives no guarantees of financial security to the claimant and could literally condemn a person to life-threatening poverty if they refuse to take a poorly compensated job), the Labour plan is made in tandem with two very important and co-related policies: an increase in the minimum wage, at least in line with average UK earnings, and the “£40-a-week Better-Off-In-Work Guarantee”. What this means, in theory, is that when you are forced into taking that job at the end of two years of benefits, the job – whatever it is – will pay you at least the minimum wage, and that higher minimum wage will ensure that by working for a living instead of collecting benefits, you will actually take home £40 a week more than you do on Jobseeker’s allowance. Instead of the cruel and stupid Conservative notion of just kicking people out of the system and leaving them to rot, the tone of Labour’s nearly identical plan is massively different, and with that tone comes a much more humane proposal.

All political parties running for government this year have put the environment high on their list of priorities, but whereas both Liberal Democrat and Labour manifestos make the moral case for tackling climate change alongside pointing out the business and job-creation opportunities that a green economy would bring, the Tories’ emphasis is purely on the business side of global warming: “We have a vision of a greener Britain,” they tell us. “It is a country that leads the world in the market for green goods and services…Instead of pulling bureaucratic levers from above telling people what they can’t do, we will provide people with the information they need to make more responsible choices. Instead of holding businesses back by imposing unfair retrospective stealth taxes, we will unleash the power of green enterprise and promote resource efficiency to generate thousands of green jobs”

Again: it’s all in the tone, but it is clear to me that the Conservatives don’t care about the environment, they care about capitalizing on the environmental markets, and the emphasis on “responsible choices” and not “holding businesses back” means an ineffective voluntary transformation to a green economy instead of making real legislative changes to enforce the urgent environmental changes that we need. And whilst we’re on the subject of the Conservatives’ pro-business/anti-public stance, it should be pointed out that the Conservative manifesto – which repeatedly endorses private solutions for public problems in all areas of British life, and the underlying mantra that “the markets” will sort everything out – is the only manifesto out of the three main parties to not mention the BBC. Whereas both Labour and Liberal Democrat documents pledge to protect and maintain the BBC as a vital public service broadcaster, the Tories – who have, of course, been endorsed by Rupert Murdoch, a long-time opponent of the BBC’s publically subsidized competition to his commercial media empire – remain worryingly silent on the subject. Indeed, on the Arts and Culture in general, the Conservative manifesto is strangely mute.

It is the little things like this which show you that no matter how much the Tories may talk a good game, and say all the right things to appeal to people disgusted with the state of politics in this post-Iraq, post-expenses scandal, post-economic disaster world, fundamentally little has changed in the party that got us all here in the first place.

I encourage all of you with sufficient time and stamina to read all the party manifestos, and I hope, like me, you’re looking forward to watching the first of the three live debates tonight. Just make sure though that when you do, you keep this one vital thought in your mind at all times; repeating it over and over like a mantra that will protect you from harm; a mantra that might just save your lives: “our core values have not altered and our core beliefs remain consistent.”

Don’t believe the smoke and mirrors: Same Old Tories, Same Old Dangers…

Technorati Tags: Politics,UK Politics,General Election 2010,General Election,Conservative Party,Labour Party,Liberal Democrats,Manifesto,Conservative Manifesto,Labour Manifesto,Prime Ministers Debate

General Election 2010: Selly Oak Constituency. More reasons I will NOT be voting for Nigel Dawkins…

2010-04-12T15:34:00.001+01:00

The announcement of the 2010 General Election means, of course, party literature falling through your door at an alarming pace, and I was delighted yesterday afternoon to see my local Conservative candidate, Nigel Dawkins, grinning up at me from a campaign leaflet pushed through my letterbox.

“And so it begins,” I thought, and immediately began to deconstruct it.

First off, we have the cringe-worthy photograph on the cover. Ignoring the negative campaigning of the highly emotive and factually dubious headline (“My children’s share of Gordon Brown’s debt will be over £75,000”), we have a nauseatingly stage-managed picture of Dawkins sitting on a park table alongside his three children. Two of these children are in their respective school uniforms: look! The picture says. I’m a local dad with local kids who go to local schools. My children wear the same school uniforms that yours do. Vote for me! Vote for me and my local children! The third child is in her Brownies uniform, complete with badge-laden sash. Again: look at my locally engaged and community minded kids. I’m one of you. My kids go to Brownies too! Vote for me. Vote for me please!

Beneath all this, we have what seems to be the running theme of Dawkins’ campaign at the moment. A tag-line: “In 10 years of serving you as a city councillor, I have never claimed a single penny in expenses”.

No prizes for guessing why Conservative Central Office chose Dawkins to run for MP then? Shameless opportunism? Surely not.

Inside the leaflet, we have an expansion on this theme, framed around the damning details of local Labour opposition, Steve McCabe MP, having claimed not only £5,500 in expenses for a new bathroom, but recently having paid for a leaflet entitled “Annual Report 2009” with tax-payers money instead of funding the leaflet himself.

The highly expensive, full-colour, glossy Nigel Dawkins leaflet I am reading this information in, Dawkins makes sure to tell me, is different than those of evil Steve McCabe. “This leaflet,” he tells us, “has been produced, printed and delivered by Nigel Dawkins and the Selly Oak Constituency Conservative Association.” Indeed, above that statement is a pledge: “I am not a member of any other organisation or political group other than my political party and nor will I ever be. I promise that I have never taken any money, nor will I ever take money for any reason, including contributions to my election expenses, from any other organisation.” “No talk, no expenses claims,” goes the slogan on the next page, “Just 10 years of action and hard work.”

Now, this all seems very admirable until you actually think about it. First of all, we have to remember something very important when Nigel Dawkins tells us he has never claimed a single penny in expenses: whilst that may well be so, he has not been an MP either, and thus has not been entitled to claim from the clearly flawed and abused MP expenses system that was put in place by Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Government during the eighties and nineties in order to circumvent the pay-freeze imposed on public sector workers and give MPs a package of bonuses and pay-rises through the back door. I too have never claimed a single penny in MP expenses, because I too am not an MP. “If I am elected as your MP”, Dawkins tells us, “I will only ever claim for travel costs and rented living accommodation”. Well, of course he would, because we are now living in a post-expenses-scandal world. Sadly, Dawkins has missed the gravy train years of ridiculous MP expense claims, and would no longer be able to get away with the sort of stuff his predecessors did. Meanwhile, his record on expenses as a councillor, claimed through a completely different expenses system than that of MPs, is largely irrelevant when it comes to the hypothetical question of what expenses he might have claimed had he been an MP. It is classic smoke and mirrors.

Similarly, we must look deeper into the idea that Dawkins will accept no money from anyone “other than my political party” for his campaign publications, or anything else. That might be all very good and well, but where does his political party get its money from? A related attempt to smear Steve McCabe comes from the “great shock” of discovering him to be a member of the UNITE union. “Birmingham MPs should not be members of a trade union!” Dawkins’ leaflet loudly blares in big red writing. Ignoring for a moment the patently ridiculous idea that no MP should be a member of a trade union (how far do we take that idea? Should no one who has ever been a member of a trade union be an MP? And what exactly is wrong with representing unions, and thus the rights and interests of organized working people – British citizens – in Parliament? There seems to be no similar outrage when politicians court the professional lobbying organizations of workers’ bosses, such as the CBI? But I digress…), wouldn’t you rather know that your local MP is getting support from Britain’s largest trade union, with over 2 million members across the country, who openly explain their goals, purpose and political ideals quite clearly on their website and let you know exactly what they want from the politicians that they lobby, than that he is getting his support from the usual collection of shady corporations and private donors whose lobbying and interests remain secret? Councillor Dawkins may well only get his money from his own private coffers or from the Conservative Party, but unless we know exactly where that money is coming from and what it represents, that makes Dawkins no less bought or compromised than anyone else. If anything, it makes his allegiances far less transparent.

It would be nice if we all had vast sums of wealth to borrow from in order to fund our own personal political campaigns, but because of the great financial disparity in this country – as promoted in the individualistic economic policies of the Conservative Party – it is only the rich who do. Do we really want a politics reserved only for those who can afford it, as Councillor Dawkins seems to suggest?

Finally, after a photo-spread rightfully celebrating some of the local council successes in improving near-by parks and leisure facilities (victories that Dawkins absolutely deserves to take some credit for, though it should not be forgotten that the Birmingham city council, though Conservative-led with 49 elected councillors, also has 36 Labour councillors, 32 Lib Dem councillors, and 3 Respect Party councillors who all work together to make these things happen. Indeed, Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for Selly Oak, Dave Radcliffe, a Selly Oak councillor, has equal claim to many of these success stories and local victories, and Dawkins’ attempt to co-opt and spin these combined political efforts as his own personal crusade has been sticking in my throat for months), we come to the last page of the leaflet: “The issues that people want answers to…” and here we have the reminder, if one was ever needed, that we’re not just voting for friendly old Councillor Nigel Dawkins here in Selly Oak when we put a cross next to his box on May 6th, we’re voting for a Conservative, as part of a national campaign by the Conservative Party to get back into power. Thus we have the usual Tory drivel – above a slightly suspect Union Jack-heavy photo of Dawkins that wouldn’t look out of place on a BNP pamphlet – about “Labour’s ‘open-door’ immigration policy” causing “the largest and most sustained rise in immigration in our history” and the promise that the Conservatives will “reduce immigration to the levels of the 1990s – tens of thousands a year, instead of the hundreds of thousands a year under Labour”.

In my mind, “immigration” in politics has always had a slightly nasty sense of racism about it, be in from the Right or from the Left. It is to my great dismay that all parties here in Selly Oak seem obsessed with stemming immigration as a priority because, personally, immigration is just not something I feel too strongly about. Indeed, I feel proud to live in a country that helps the disadvantaged from around the world and which offers opportunities to all people, no matter what their race or country of origin. However, at least Steve McCabe’s position on immigration seems to be born from practical experience in government, with an inherent sense of fairness and human decency amongst his track record of proposed “solutions”, and isn’t just some nostalgic appeal to the past, based on fear and dangerously sweeping promises that offer no real explanations of what such a reduction in numbers would entail.

The same veiled xenophobic “fear of the unknown foreigner” oozes from Dawkins’ position on Europe too: “A Conservative government would change the law so that never again would a Prime Minister be able to agree to a treaty that hands over areas of power from Britain to the EU without asking the people in a referendum”. It smells like an argument for democracy at first whiff, but it doesn’t take long to register the same stench of anti-European prejudice beneath it that has for so long permeated the Conservative Party. Not only is it based on some underlying fear about Europe, but it is an easy and disingenuous promise to make: the Lisbon Treaty has already been signed, as had Maastricht been before it (by a Conservative Prime Minister, I might add!). Never again would a Prime Minister be able to agree to a treaty that hands over areas of power from Britain to the EU without asking the people in a referendum, because never again will such a treaty be needed; it already exists and therefore the issue is moot.

Further redundancies like this are to be found throughout the rest of the page. Alongside repeating his empty record on expenses as if new expenses legislation is a distinct Conservative policy and not just the universally endorsed consequence of all MPs – Labour, Lib Dem and Conservative alike – being caught with their hands in the cookie jar one too many times, there is the equally vacuous promise to “give teachers the power to restore discipline in the classroom”. What does that even mean? Give them guns? Bring back the cane? Or perhaps that ridiculous idea Michael Gove has already broached about putting soldiers in the classroom? Whatever Dawkins means by the claim, it isn’t clear on the leaflet, and it isn’t meant to be. It is meant merely to sound appealing, and remind us of the spectre of David Cameron’s infamous “Broken Britain” without offering any sincere evidence, solution or meaning to the problem allegedly being discussed. Which is the same thing that Nigel Dawkins has been doing regarding “Industry and Jobs” ever since the Cadbury buy-out by Kraft: promising changes in policy and “woulda, coulda, shouldas” under a Conservative government that are simply contradictory and untenable under the free-market economic philosophy that guides Tory economic policy.

“Labour’s ‘everything is for sale’ industrial policy”, which Dawkins calls “a disaster”, is simply a continuation of the exact same Conservative “everything is for sale” industrial policy that destroyed British industry and jobs throughout the 80s and 90s. Labour’s “neglect of manufacturing” which has “wreaked havoc on jobs” is a direct descendant of the deregulation and privatisation enacted by the Tories during the reigns of Thatcher and Major, and still promoted by the Party to this day. There is absolutely no sign whatsoever of David Cameron denouncing the misguided free-market economic system that has brought us here. If anything, it will only get worse under a Tory government, as the continued insistence on public spending slashes and tax cuts for the rich as a solution to our economic woes show only a continued commitment to doing everything in their power to make life easier for the rich whilst crushing the lives of the poor.

Those of us who remember the 1997 election will remember the failed Conservative smear-campaign of “New Labour, New Danger”. The idea they were selling at the time was that Tony Blair’s re-vamped new Labour was somehow even worse than the Labour Party of the past. In 2010 I feel we need a similar slogan: “Old Tories, Old Danger”. The Conservatives can try to spin it and distort it any way that they may like, they can even try to fool us with empty ideas about a vote for them being a “vote for change”, but once you actually unpack and unravel their hollow and meaningless platitudes the evidence becomes obvious: although the leadership may have changed and some of the faces we’re seeing on TV appear to be young and new, the Conservative Party of 2010 is the same old party we booted out of office back in 1997; the same old party it has always been. And Councillor Nigel Dawkins is just the latest in a long-line of Tory opportunists trying to present himself as something different when, in fact, he is anything but.

Technorati Tags: UK Politics,General Election,General Election 2010,Election,Selly Oak Constituency,Selly Oak,Nigel Dawkins,Steve McCabe,David Radcliffe,Conservative Party,Labour Party,Liberal Democrats,Campaign Leaflets,Tories,Media,Spin,Propaganda

“It’s Been A While Since Last We Spoke…

2010-04-11T16:14:00.001+01:00

…so much has changed, so much has not.”

That’s actually the first line to a song I wrote last year which, if all the stars ever aligned correctly, would be the opening track on the oft talked about but never actually pursued “Academy Morticians Reunion Album™”. I think it pretty succinctly sums up the state of affairs after my month away from this blog.

So Much Has Changed

For one thing, the General Election is now no longer mere speculation, it is a fully announced reality, set for May 6th. For another thing, the Digital Economy Bill is now law, which is the single stupidest thing the music industry could have done to itself, and the most backwards law we’ve seen in this country for a long time. America has passed its weak and disappointing “healthcare reform” which has further enshrined the for-profit system of healthcare into law, and the Pope has shown the world that there are even worse things in his closet than being a former member of the Hitler Youth. (Personally, I really hope he steps down over the child abuse controversy. Not just because he should, but because I bought an awful Pope Benedict 2010 calendar as a joke on my honeymoon in Rome and would love to own the calendar that marked the very year of his downfall).

So Much Has Not

My views on the election, however, remain the same, and, all things being equal, it is highly likely that I shall be voting Labour on May 6th. I shall also be doing everything in my power between then and now to make sure that David Cameron and the Conservatives do not get into power. Normal service on the blog is therefore about to resume, and as we build up to the General Election, I look forward to convincing you all that a victory for the Tories will be far worse than our continued governance by New Labour’s Tory Lite.

I, and this blog, remain very much alive, and shall be detailing the whole sordid election right here on The Tone of Our Oppression in the weeks to come, so stay tuned, stay radical, and stay away from Cameron.

Technorati Tags: Politics,UK Politics,US Politics,General Election,General Election 2010,Academy Morticians,Blogging,Pope Benedict XVI,Digital Economy Bill,Healthcare Reform

Why I’d Rather Vote For A Mass-Murderer With An Ostensible Conscience, Than One Without…

2010-03-09T11:49:00.001Z

This weekend a fantastic sequence of events occurred and, in their occurrence, I was reaffirmed in my self-hating decision to vote Labour in the General Election.

My decision to vote Labour in 2010, despite being disgusted by their nearly thirteen years of continuing the exact same foreign and economic policies as the Tories, and never before voting for them in my life (thus far it’s either been Lib Dem or Green all the way), is one I’ve discussed several times on this blog. The basic motivation – to remind the long-term-memory-deficient – is to put up a strong front against the expected Conservative victory by voting tactically for their closest opposition because, though Labour are bad, the Tories are arguably worse, and I’d rather vote Labour and get Labour, the lesser of two evils, than vote with my heart and allow David Cameron to win by default.

Still, it makes me feel dirty to lend my support – if only strategically – to a party and government responsible for so much death and destruction during their time in power. From Hawk Jets to Indonesia, to the ongoing horrors of Afghanistan and everything in between; from tuition fees and the private finance initiative to academies and the new deal; the Labour Party might well be the lesser of two evils in that, under an ostensibly left-wing government there are always superficial yet significant real-world improvements alongside the business-as-usual thrust of continuity capitalism, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that they’re not still an evil. I do not support the Labour Party; I merely oppose the Conservatives.

But when I read the paper on Saturday morning and re-lived Gordon Brown’s shameless and unapologetic defence of the Iraq war during the Chilcot Inquiry, there was a very real moment of despair.

I can’t vote for these blatant murderers, I thought. I really can’t, in good conscience, place a cross in the box for a man who bankrolled the illegal and unjustified invasion of a sovereign nation and still cheerleads that decision today…

But then I read the story underneath the report on Chilcot.

The one about the Young Britons’ Foundation.

The Young Britons’ Foundation, according to the Guardian, are a right-wing group “whose leadership has described the NHS as ‘the biggest waste of money in the UK’, claimed global warming is ‘a scam’ and suggested that the waterboarding of prisoners can be justified.” They also have suggested that police should shoot down protesters.

At least eleven prospective Conservative Party candidates running in the upcoming General Election have undergone training at the YBF, a group that it’s chief executive, Donal Blaney, calls a “Conservative madrasa”, designed to “radicalize” young Tories into extreme neo-conservativism, and at the recent annual YBF parliamentary rally at the House of Commons, shadow defence secretary, Liam Fox and Conservative Party chairman, Eric Pickles both spoke. Former YBF speakers include David Cameron’s former chief of staff, Alex Deane, shadow education secretary, Michael Gove, shadow arts minister, Ed Vaizey, Andrew Rosindell, Conservative MP for Romford, and former Tory ministers, John Redwood and David Davis. In other words, if you vote for the Tories this spring, then you will be getting graduates and supporters of this rather ugly neo-conservative boot camp, with close links to neo-con groups in the States, forming your next UK government.*

That’s why I’ll be voting Labour – because as bad as Labour is, the Conservatives are still worse. Gordon Brown might be a murderer, but at least he’s an accountable murderer.

And just to punctuate the point that a right-leaning left-wing government is still better than a right-leaning right-wing government, lo and behold a leaflet for the BNP came through my door the very next day.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: the ideas expressed by racist and fascist groups like the BNP are so detestable that I always assume some level of sophistication in the way that they manipulate and recruit people to join them; so it always amazes me when I read some of their moronic campaign literature and realize that it is simply written by idiots, for idiots.

“Thousands of pensioners freeze to death every winter because Labour cares more about foreign aid than they do about our old folk. The BNP would put British people first”

No. Capitalism is what causes pensioners to freeze every winter, because utilities companies care more about profits than they do about human life. The extortionate price of gas bills have nothing to do with foreign aid, and if you wanted to subsidize the elderly and give them free heat during the winter you could do that by taxing the rich, properly taxing businesses, decreasing the military budget, and a million other simple solutions that have nothing to do with decreasing the pitiful amount of money we give to countries like Haiti and Chile when they need help. The real undertone here is clear: we hate giving foreigners money and think helping old people makes us sound caring.

“As a working family we know what it’s like to be taxed to death and what effect Labour’s mismanagement of the economy has had on our house price. The BNP would ensure British jobs for British workers.”

Can you see the theme emerging? Here it is even more blatant than in the last one, because giving British jobs to British workers really has nothing to do with the tax policy the BNP is ostensibly aggrieved about in the first passage of this promise. A logically coherent second sentence would read something like: As a working family we know what it’s like to be taxed to death and what effect Labour’s mismanagement of the economy has had on our house price…therefore we promise a progressive new scheme of taxation whereby working people won’t be taxed so much and rich individuals and corporations will be taxed much more. Even a traditionally racist BNP approach of …therefore we will increase the taxes paid by foreigners living in the UK by 2000% and lower the taxes for “indigenous whites” because we hate foreign people and have no meaningful sense of history or mathematics would have made more sense than what was actually written. But the BNP weren’t looking for “sense” here, or coherency; they were just looking for invoking that now-familiar racist undertone: the needlessly proffered fear of “British” jobs being lost out to “foreigners”, and an even more insidious allusion to house prices falling – a common refrain for racists who believe their neighbourhoods to be “overrun” with ethnic minorities.

Speaking of which…

“The government prioritises immigrants when it comes to housing. The BNP will house British families first – it’s only fair.”

Actually, it’s not “only fair” to house British families first over immigrants who may need the housing more desperately – it is prejudiced and discriminatory. And as the leaflet provides no real information or statistics to prove that the claim the government prioritises “immigrants” over “British” families is true, then we have no real reason to believe that it is. Also, it should be noted that for the government to have anything to do with an “immigrant” in an official capacity, then it must be presumed that the immigrant in question is a legal immigrant, working within the system and not outside of it, in which case, technically, they are now a British family too, and any housing they are given is therefore going to a British family. The BNP do not really mean “immigrant” here though – they mean: people of colours other than white.

“The NHS is in decline and many of our friends find it hard to get operations – yet we’ve fought for this country and paid in all our lives. The BNP is the only party that listens.”

Considering that the NHS is mentioned by every political party during election time, the BNP are demonstrably not the only party that listens. They are, however, the only party who randomly invoke the idea that “we’ve fought for this country” in the middle of an argument about underfunding of the NHS. Because that is the cause of the NHS’s “decline”: underfunding. A solution, and easy way of improving the service provided by the NHS (which, despite all its faults, is still a million times better than any private alternative) is – and now you might spot my recurring theme – more taxes on big businesses and the rich, and a change of priorities in the budget so that more is spent on healthcare and education, and less is spent on defence and corporate welfare. The money is there if only it was spent correctly. Parties like the BNP (and the Conservatives) are only too happy to harp on about the cost of benefit cheats on taxpayers, but when you consider that, in 2009, individual benefit fraud cost UK taxpayers just £900 million, whilst corporate tax evasion, tax avoidance, and tax “efficencies” cost us £18.5 billion each year, it is clear to say that the real criminals are getting away with defrauding our system, including the NHS, year after year after year.

The BNP’s statement about the NHS, however, is not a meaningful policy statement regarding our health services. Nor is it intended to be. Again, the undertone is clear: they do not point to the causes of NHS “decline” or offer any solutions. They simply say: “we’ve fought for this country and paid in all our lives”, which is, again, code for the idea that those who haven’t fought for this country and those who haven’t paid in all their lives – read: bloody immigrants! – are somehow coming over here and taking away our emergency services, so now grandma can’t have her knee operation. The ignorance is astounding, and it only gets worse:

“We have children and we want them to be brought up in a Christian country and taught about our religion, culture and traditions in school. The BNP opposes the Islamification of Britain”

Well, firstly, let me just say that I went to a state school in the UK where the Christian religion, culture and traditions were first and foremost on the agenda (“Nothing without God” was our school’s motto). We also learnt about other religions and cultures in RE lessons, but the primary spiritual concern was Christianity and the Christian faith. Despite the school’s best efforts at indoctrination though, I came out the other end an atheist. The reason being: we are a free society and not a fascist state, and despite all the best propaganda in the world, we are still free to choose what we believe.

This is the reason why the UK today is a very different place culturally, ethnically and spiritually than it was, say, fifty years ago. Not because bloody immigrants have come over here and corrupted our children with their crazy foreign gods and cultures…but because, as life has gone on, society has evolved. We’ve learnt more about other cultures, religions and traditions, we’ve re-assessed our own, we’ve integrated the bits that we liked and we’ve ejected the pieces that we didn’t. We are in a constant conversation with each other and that conversation has allowed new ideas to flourish, old ideas to adapt and grow stronger, and a diversity of equally valid lifestyles, beliefs and value systems to blossom and evolve alongside each other for the common good.

The fact is, the BNP may want their children to be brought up in a Christian country, but in 2010 the UK is simply not a Christian country. And this is a good thing. Christians can still be Christians here, but now also Hindus can be Hindus, Sikhs can be Sikhs, Jews can be Jews, Buddhists can be Buddhists, Atheists can be Atheists, and, yes, Muslims can be Muslim. The existence and acceptance of other religions within our society has not diminished the Christian church at all, but it has freed up the spiritual life of British individuals and shown them a variety of different options of belief.

The biggest threat to the Christian church today is not Islam; indeed the same thing which threatens Christianity is equally a threat to Islam, and is taking believers away from the Qur’an as much as it is from the Bible: it is atheism. It is the fact that we, as a culture, are slowly moving forward, out of the intellectual dark ages, and as people like myself grow up and re-think the superstitions of our elders, we begin to grow out of these silly and outdated religions and seek a non-religious spiritual and ethical alternative for ourselves. Sadly for the BNP, this exodus away from religion and into the realm of the humanist and the rational is nothing to do with immigrants, Muslims, or any of the other usual scapegoats of the far-right, it is simply the result of free-thought and free-will: two innate human capacities fascist groups like the BNP seek to wipe out.

“We opposed the war in Iraq and now in Afghanistan. British troops are losing their lives for a war which only serves out-of-touch politicians. The BNP would bring our boys home NOW!”

This final statement is seemingly meant to be the BNP’s big selling point in 2010. Indeed, the cover of the leaflet says in big, bold writing: “PUTTING BRITISH PEOPLE FIRST! NO to Crime. NO to Immigration. NO to EU Rule. NO to High Taxes. YES to Bringing Our Troops Home!” all written over a patriotic backdrop of soldiers in the desert sands. The back of the leaflet says: “BNP: THE ONLY PARTY COMMITTED TO BRINGING OUR TROOPS HOME…Our troops are being sent to their deaths in the Middle East for a political crusade which serves no British interest.”

Now, ignoring for a moment the historical ignorance here which shows the BNP clearly have no real idea why these wars are being fought (the “British interest” at stake here is what it always is in unnecessary foreign invasions: political power and economic gain. It is not a war which “only serves out-of-touch politicians” – it is a massive albatross around most politicians’ necks and will probably cost Labour the election. It is a war which, like all wars, serves their capitalist masters and the geo-political dominance of elites, and which we need a massive overhaul of the political and economic system to change); the first question one has to ask here is why exactly the BNP wants to bring our troops home? One dreads to think what uses Nick Griffin would put our armed forces to at home if he were in power, nor should one be surprised that a fascist party wants to make sure a well-armed military is at their domestic disposal and not stranded overseas where they can’t be easily deployed.

Although the anti-war message is populist at the moment, the philosophy behind it from the BNP is severely hollow. They are not opposed to the war because it was wrong, unjust, illegal, or immoral. They are not opposed to it because we have destroyed Iraq and Afghanistan and murdered countless numbers of Iraqi and Afghan civilians. They are not even opposed to it because they disagree with invading foreign countries so long as it is in the “British interest”. No. They are only opposed to it because “our boys” are being killed over there for what seems on the surface – if, like the BNP clearly do, you believe the propagandist lies of our government – a war to help out undeserving nations in the Middle East. In other words, it’s the same old racist undertone that we found in all the other promises: why should we help those brown-skinned people over there? Why should our troops be dying just to save a bunch of Arabs from themselves?

The BNP leaflet exposes the emptiness and the prejudice of their policies, all wrapped up in a Union Jack and garnished with creepy master-race-style pictures of smiling all-white families. That people might actually read it, and choose to vote for these racist thugs on the basis of the ill-thought-out drivel inside, speaks more to the stupidity of our nation than it does to the skillful manipulation of the British National Party.

Still though, again, it was a gentle reminder of why I must vote for the warmonger Brown on election day, despite opposing so much of what he stands for.

Though Labour might be despicable, they at least operate on a level where you can have a serious conversations about their actions, and they have a political base they must appease with social programmes, welfare, diplomacy, and all the other expectations of the left, even if it goes against their elite power-interests. When you get Labour, you get disappointment, but at least you have a basic framework of shared social understanding – rights, duties, responsibilities, ethics – if only on the surface, by which you are to judge them.

With these hooligans on the far-right, however, and their more respectable brethren in the official opposition, it is like undoing decades of social progress and starting again from square one. It is championing ignorance, greed, selfishness, meanness, cruelty and stupidity. It is voting for racists. It is voting for homophobes. It is voting for delusion and pig-headedness. It is voting for oppression, intolerance, violence and brutality.

The Labour Party might well be a shell of their former selves, and they might even betray everything that they once stood for – but at least there is a shell and a sense of betrayal – with the Conservative Party, and especially with the BNP, you are simply getting exactly what you voted for.

Voting for Labour might make us feel temporarily dirty, but a Conservative victory will never wash off.

*As I wrote this blog, Conservative Chairman, Eric Pickles, denounced the YBF and tried to sever Tory links with the group following the report in Saturday’s Guardian. Though the move may be politically expedient now that the YBF have come under fire, it does not really explain why the Conservative politicians listed were happy talking and training with the YBF until it became politically damaging to do so. I suspect here not a change in belief and policy, but a change in public perception that has necessitated a public distancing from the controversial organization, but not from the ideas which first brought these two groups together.

Technorati Tags: Politics,UK Politics,General Election,Labour Party,BNP,Conservative Party,Gordon Brown,David Cameron,Nick Griffin,War on Terror,YBF,Young Britons' Foundation,Democracy

Throwin’ Out The Trash #4

2010-03-05T12:30:00.001Z

Late Friday afternoons are traditionally the time that politicians, businesses, celebrities, etc, release bad news to the public in the hope that they won’t see it. Season 1, episode 13, of The West Wing calls this “Take Out The Trash Day”. Each week, there are so many fucked up stories and newsy bits and pieces that cross my path in this 24/7 media blitzkrieg that we’re living in, and I simply do not have the time or inclination to write a full-on commentary piece about all of them. Throwin’ Out The Trash is my chance each week to clear the decks of all these niggling odds and sods without ignoring them completely…

First off I simply have to comment on the eye-opening horror with which I have recently been re-reading Howard Zinn’s amazing People’s History of the United States.

The first time I read this book, I was sixteen years old, and though I got its basic gist and was shocked by much of what I read (it never let me look at history the same way again), there was a certain youthful naivety that went into my reading of it. For one thing, having not been raised in America and thus not been taught the formal lessons of US history directly from the mouths of the victors, it presumed a basic knowledge of the standard version of events that, at the time, I just didn’t have. For another, there is a depth and scope of the argument that surrounds the historical accounts – the real philosophical meat of the book – that I was really too young to fully understand at the time. Or at least too ignorant of the wider political context to make it meaningful.

Since that first read, I have gone back to the book many times. But usually only for chapters on specific subjects which I was writing about at the time. I hadn’t read it chronologically – from start to finish – since I was a teenager, and when Zinn died a month ago, I decided it was high time to return to his magnum opus once again and check it out all these years later from beginning to end, with the eyes of an adult and the brain of a much more learned man.

As of last night, I had reached up to the First World War, and though – having read it before, and studied bits of it on and off throughout the last twelve years – I was well aware going in of all the terrible things about American history that it exposed, the most depressing thing about it reading it now, as an adult, is seeing how everything awful that is happening in the world today has been happening over and over again since 1492. Though the resistance remains permanent, and at all stages of history there has been uprisings and rebellion from the oppressed masses – just as there is now – the lie beneath the benevolence of our “democratic” system is lain out in stark black and white: laws that control and make obedient; wars for private profit; the rich getting richer via the exploitation of the poor; the intentional quelling of revolutionary rage through legislative bribery and misdirecting jingoism; people consistently being manipulated to work against their own interests for the benefit of their masters… Everything I hate about the world now, everything that is ingrained into our system; in A People’s History you see the entire foundation for our current oppression be built brick by brick by a minority of elites who treated nations as playthings for their own amusement and wealth.

If you haven’t read this book already: do. If you have read it before: read it again.

As I write this, Gordon Brown is giving evidence at the Chilcot Inquiry.

Should I be watching it? Should I be concerned with what he says? After seeing Blair’s performance – and the pass he received from the media and his colleagues for expertly lying with a smile – I have no interest in what Brown has to say for himself. I don’t need a public inquiry to know the facts: an illegal and unjustified war was declared, and Brown, as Chancellor, willingly wrote the cheques and continued the war when he became Prime Minister.

What else is there left to say?

It was nice to see the Armenian genocide finally called the Armenian genocide.

I really have no informed opinion on this matter except that when I was a kid listening to the first System of a Down album, I remember Serj (the band’s front-man) used to talk about the Armenian genocide (and it’s deletion from history) all the time. Serj was cool and his politics were sound: if Serj says it was genocide, then I decided it was genocide. Evidently, 95 years later, so too does the U.S., despite Hillary Clinton’s best protests.

The underlying philosophy of this Blog has always been that, though an avowed anarchist, and believer that all mainstream political parties represent elite interests and not the genuine interests of the population they claim to represent, until we see real political change we have to operate in the world that we’ve got. As such, there is an argument to support parties of “the left” over parties of “the right”, if only because – on a very minor scale; the only scale that we have – the propagated differences between the two main parties must at least be paid lip service to, in order to maintain the illusion of democracy. These superficial differences, to which parties are publically perceived to be bound, therefore create a genuine and distinct difference in the tone of our oppression under governments of the left and governments of the right. Though we are oppressed in all cases – and must continue striving to change the system entirely if we ever want that to change – our oppression is “better” under governments of the left because their ostensible guiding philosophy does not allow – in the public’s eye – for the same extreme transgressions as found in governments of the right.

I’ve always said that, when choosing between left and right, you just have to look at each side’s more extreme ends in order to assess which one is objectively better for society. On the left, the most extreme form of bomb-throwing terrorists are throwing those bombs because they want an end to tyrannical government who oppress and exploit the majority of their citizens, and wish to establish a world where the people are in control of their own lives, their days are not spent enslaved to bosses and banks, and a more humane and free society will evolve, based on mutual cooperation and freedom instead of competition and greed.

On the right, we have Nazis.

And in America at the moment, according to a recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, there has been a 250% rise in extremist right-wing “patriot” groups since the election of Barack Obama.

"Already there are signs of ... violence emanating from the radical right. Since the installation of Barack Obama, right-wing extremists have murdered six law enforcement officers. Racist skinheads and others have been arrested in alleged plots to assassinate the nation's first black president. One man from Brockton, Massachusetts – who told police he had learned on white supremacist websites that a genocide was under way against whites – is charged with murdering two black people and planning to kill as many Jews as possible on the day after Obama's inauguration. Most recently, a rash of individuals with anti-government, survivalist or racist views have been arrested in a series of bomb cases."

The surge in such groups and their associated violence is, according to the SPLC, in part because their views are now aired nightly on places like Fox News and Conservative talk radio, with crack-pot conspiracy theories once considered extreme and discredited now forming part of the mainstream debate.

Weird huh? The conservatives who are coming after Obama claim that it’s nothing to do with his race (it’s to do with him being a communist – a bank-lovin’, war-expandin’, non-healthcare providin’ communist!), yet their arguments are helping to fuel this distinctly racist fire…

Speaking of Obama not being the Communist the right believe him to be, who else is sick of the pantomime surrounding the ill-fated healthcare bill?

Now that any attempt at dialogue between the two parties have allegedly failed, the word is that the President shall be attempting to fast-track his bill through Congress.

What seems to be lost in all this irrelevant conversation about who’s won what – will the bill be a victory for Obama; or will concessions found within it be a victory for the Republicans? – is the fact that this is supposed to be about providing universal healthcare to American citizens, not about which political party is best at getting bills through Congress, and on that count the President’s bill – and every bill that came into either house – spectacularly fails.

The American people want single-payer, universal healthcare as is available in every other industrialized country in the world. Boasts that a new bill might cover 96% of the people or 98% of the people just aren’t good enough: 100% and it should be free. That’s what we have here in Britain, and it’s what America should have over there.

There is literally nothing complicated about this once you take away all the vested interests – you pay through it with taxes, and if you need more taxes you tax the rich, but even if you tax the people a little more than you currently do, without them having to pay for health insurance, they could not only afford it but it would be cheaper. Everyone is covered – no one dies unnecessarily; no one goes broke because they got cancer or had a baby. End of discussion.

Obama, Republicans, Democrats – their failings to get this done is, to them, not a failing. It is an expertly played piece of political theatre that makes it seem impossible for their citizens to have the thing they actually want and sells them a twisted form of compromise which they can then sell to voters as a victory.

I was going to write something about the Californian guy who got eight years in jail for stealing a piece of cheese…but what more can be said about the stupid three strikes rule?

45000 people die in America per year because of lack of healthcare, yet is anyone being arrested about that?

What about those war criminals Bush and Cheney? And now Obama, Biden and Clinton?

Tough on crime: so long as it’s the right crime.

Still no word from Councillor Dawkins regarding my reply to his last letter – I guess he’s realized I won’t be voting for him or his party so I’m probably not worth the email anymore (or he’s waiting for answers from head office).

If there’s one thing I learn from watching Question Time each week it’s that politicians don’t like being called up on their spin. Seriously – look at these people’s faces whenever they’re asked a follow-up question regarding a talking-point statement or statistic that they’ve dutifully churned out. It’s like a rabbit caught in the headlights. And then they give Dimbleby this headmaster’s look to a naughty schoolboy, the one that says – now you know you’re not allowed to do that David – before returning to avoiding the question and talking about something else instead.

How has it come to the point where we allow these people to do that? Talk show guests who are only there to sell their products, political guests who are only there to sell their policies. Whatever happened to journalism?

Finally, Max and the Marginalized are a band I only found out about a few days ago and yet they are quickly becoming a huge favourite. Relevant, political, and putting their art and activism before their profits, here’s the video that set the ball in motion for me…

If you like their stuff, check out the website. You can download their songs for free or buy a sweet $5 zip file of all 62 tracks!

Technorati Tags: Throwin' Out The Trash,Max and the Marginalized,Chilcot Inquiry,Gordon Brown,Obama,Healthcare Bill,Three Strikes,Southern Poverty Law Center,UK Politics,US Politics,Politics

SCANNER REPRINT: Nov ‘09: The Science of Politics

2010-03-01T08:00:00.000Z

For those who didn’t catch it on Scanner the past few months – here’s a reprint of my previous JWTMTR column. For the latest, check out: http://www.scannerzine.com/danmckeefebruary2010.htm

*******************************************************

THE SCIENCE OF POLITICS

In late October, 2009, Professor David Nutt was sacked from his position as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), following two major clashes between official government drugs policy and his "outspoken" personal views.
The first clash came from an academic paper Nutt published in January, 2009, entitled Equasy, an over-looked addiction with implications for the current debate on drug harms. In this paper, the well-respected expert in neuropsychopharmacology argued a very simple premise: the harm caused by illegal drugs is equal to harm caused in other, more socially acceptable, legal pastimes; yet it is only drug-based harm which is penalized and legislated against.

Nutt focused, in the paper, on the love of horse-riding, or "equasy", as he jokingly called it (a made up term to describe a condition he dubbed as "equine addiction syndrome"), comparing the harm caused to self and others by "equasy", to the level of harm to self and others stemming from the use of the illegal drug ecstasy. The conclusion was as compelling as it was simple: when ten deaths a year and over a hundred traffic accidents are caused by the perfectly legal pursuit of "equasy", why is it that horse-riding is considered any less dangerous than taking ecstasy? And if one form of similarly harmful behavior is deemed to be legal and socially acceptable, why then isn’t the other?

Although this was an academic paper, written in Professor Nutt’s professional capacity (and not an official government document, released under the auspices of the ACMD), the paper sparked a knee-jerk furore from those appalled by Nutt’s bold suggestion that the drug might not actually be the unequivocal poison it is traditionally depicted as being in the media. Indeed, he was forced to apologize by then-Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, and, when the ACMD later made the suggestion that the drug be downgraded from being a Class A substance to being a Class B, the advice was roundly ignored.

Recognizing that political prudence and real scientific fact were two very separate things (and that he was, first and foremost, a scientist, not a politician), Nutt did not ignore the science behind his position on drugs just because it was revealed to be politically unfavourable. Although a government minister, necessarily concerned with public opinion, might choose to ignore rational argument and empirical data if the conclusions they yield turn out to be a PR nightmare, a scientist dedicated to a factually supported and objectively researched understanding of truth does not have that luxury. Despite his official advice being ignored, Nutt remained committed to his well-supported position and, over the summer, gave a private academic lecture on the relative risks of a wide variety of drugs, in which he concluded that the legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, were much more harmful than many illegal drugs currently criminalized in the UK, such as: cannabis, ecstasy, and even LSD. Further still, Nutt argued that Jacqui Smith’s proclaimed "precautionary principle" method of dealing with drug-laws was often counter-productive; targeting her move to reverse the decision to downgrade cannabis. By doing this, he argued, the drug not only gained a new notoriety and cachet on the streets, which made people who otherwise wouldn’t be interested more eager to seek it out, but it also served to confuse the public, who were now seeing a consistent clash between the supported scientific evidence about drugs, and the direction of government strategy.

"It starts to distort the value of evidence," said Nutt. And clearly he is right. If all the real and demonstrable scientific evidence points to, say, cannabis being an objectively less harmful drug than alcohol, yet the policies we have in place – in spite of all that evidence – continue to treat marijuana possession as a prisonable offence whilst keeping wine and beer flowing freely on the streets, it implicitly puts forward the message that verifiable scientific evidence is no better a tool for seeking truth than unsubstantiated, knee-jerk opinion. Yet it was for making these valid criticisms of current government drugs policy – a defence of hard science, logic and reason against inconsistent and baseless politics, with no justificatory intellectual foundation – that Smith’s successor, Alan Johnson, finally decided to fire Professor Nutt from his position on the ACMD. Nutt, according to Johnson, had over-stepped his remit, and undermined the government’s attempts to send out a clear message on drugs.

As a leading expert on neuropsychopharmacology, however, (the effects of pharmaceuticals on the brain) who was hired to be the government’s chief adviser on drug’s policy; to me, it seems plain that any inconsistencies between what Professor Nutt and his office were saying, and what the government was actually doing, must be placed squarely at the feet of the government, and not with Professor Nutt. By not following the guidance of the scientific evidence on this complicated issue, and pursuing instead a policy based solely around how legislation would play in the tabloids this close to a general election, the British government have undermined the credibility of their own message on drugs all by themselves. Chasing favorable headlines – instead of what might actually be best for its citizens – two consecutive Home Secretaries have now ignored the empirically based conclusions of its senior scientific advisor on this particular issue because their practical ramifications were unpalatable. When the dissonance between the policies they were pursuing and the truth of the actual evidence became too threatening, they chose to shoot the messenger rather than confront his sound but inconvenient truths.

Now, before anyone reading this gets the misconception that I am some brainwashed and bitter stoner, angry that my precious drugs are being re-criminalized by my government, and frustrated that the holy grail of legalization has once more been taken away, let me lay my cards out on the table. Far from being a habitual user of recreational drugs, I am what people round these parts would call: "straightedge" (though it’s a title I personally eschewed for years because of the unpleasant cult-like mentality some of its advocates developed during the late-nineties). This straightedge lifestyle isn’t a recent development; I am not making up now for past abuses by going cold turkey on old habits and taking a crash-course in sobriety. In my near-three decades on this planet I have never once done a single non-prescription drug, never once smoked a cigarette, never once drank a beer, never even tasted spirits or hard liquor, and – apart from one glass of white wine at the age of twelve, and a couple of celebratory sips of champagne when I was even younger and didn’t know what I was doing – I have never willingly drunk alcohol in my life. I have never been "high", I have never been drunk, and, despite the usual moments of peer pressure in school toilets and ill-advised teenage gatherings, I have never felt the need to light up a burning stick of deadly carcinogen and inhale it into my lungs for pleasure.

I do not oppose the firing of Professor David Nutt because, like thousands of other pro-legalization supporters, I am sick of risking my freedom every time I want to smoke a joint. I oppose the firing of Professor David Nutt because my straightedge belief that all drugs are harmful, stupid and unnecessary distractions to a meaningful and fulfilling life, (used to keep populations docile and psychologically controlled via the quick-fix solution of ephemeral false-pleasures that make people too stoned and vacant to effectively fight the real causes of their anxiety and despair; thus sacrificing real and permanent change and happiness – possibly of the revolutionary variety – for hollow and artificial hallucinations that keep them compliant and enslaved) is, at its core, a belief in putting science, reason and fact before mindlessness, irrationality and false comfort. The cornerstone of my own personal rejection of drugs and alcohol is the idea that an authentic sense of happiness and wellbeing is a much better pursuit for each of us than its numbed and synthetic, narcotically-induced facsimile. By prioritizing that which is true and meaningful over a patchwork of easy, but empty, lies, the same commitment to truth and clarity over illusion and unthinking that makes me personally opposed to taking drugs, makes it impossible for me not to defend scientific evidence like that of Professor David Nutt’s over the unfounded and reactionary drug policies of a headline-pandering government. I may not personally like drugs, but I cannot deny the science and logic behind calls for their legalization.

As David Nutt made clear: alcohol and tobacco demonstrably kill thousands of people in the UK each year. According to the British government’s own Office of National Statistics, there were 8,724 deaths from alcohol in 2007 alone (with some sources claiming the real number to be even higher, once alcohol-related deaths are taken into account too). Tobacco, meanwhile, kills an estimated 100,000 people a year. As unnecessary and dangerous, non-essential items in our lives, there is no compelling reason for either of these drugs to be legalized, yet both of them are freely sold – and profitably taxed – by governments around the world. Once you have permitted these two confirmed killers to be sold without a problem though, you then have either one of two logically consistent options regarding the legal classification of any other drug that is demonstrably less dangerous: you must either legalize those other drugs too, on the same argument – whatever it is – that made you legalize alcohol and tobacco in the first place, or, you must concede that all drugs are dangerous and completely ban them all.

The history of prohibition has shown us what happens when governments try to ban things for which there is an insatiable market. Indeed, there is no better example of how prohibition doesn’t work, than the world’s thriving drugs market today: every banned substance on Earth can still be easily acquired by those with the money to pay for it. Even our prisons – right at the heart of our criminal justice system, right under our police officer’s noses – are swamped with an influx of easily accessible narcotics and home-brewed hooch: prohibition doesn’t solve the problem, it merely sweeps it underground.

This undeniable truism – that banning these substances doesn’t work – is the underlying argument used to validate the continued non-criminalization of alcohol and tobacco. It is an argument I agree with, and it is an argument which clearly applies to all other drugs too: whilst total prohibition simply doesn’t work, sufficient regulation of potentially harmful substances can demonstrably help temper some of their dangers and keep their usage under control.

Right now, there is a hugely lucrative black-market in illegal drugs – the people who want them are not denied their vice just because it is illegal; they just have to work harder to get it – and when the hard science continues to tell us that some of these currently banned substances are much less harmful to us than the two highly prized drugs we have arbitrarily decided to allow into our societies – alcohol and tobacco – there seems to be no good reason at all why we shouldn’t just throw up our hands and concede defeat at these ridiculous attempts to police people’s appetites: clearly, criminalization does not work.

Not only does it not work regarding the basic issue of keeping the drugs off our streets, it also doesn’t work because, by making drugs illegal, we create a whole host of brand new problems and dangers on top of any legitimate chemical concerns.

By forcing those who crave drugs to buy from criminal markets, we create those criminal markets. People become beholden to the exploitative extortionate prices of the mob, with no other choice of supplier; some even going on to commit other crimes, such as robbery or murder, to feed their growing addictions. This is not the fault of the drugs themselves, but the fault of legislation. With the drugs being illegal, most addiction remains untreated, and desperate users are led into taking drastic action once they can’t meet the asking price of their unregulated dealers. Fearing imprisonment should they "come out" and try to seek professional help for their dependency, users become victims, stuck in a cycle of uncontrollable cravings from which there is no easy escape.
Another corollary of criminalization is that it actually increases the levels of harm that taking these drugs exposes us to. Many of the deaths and medical complications that come from taking illegal drugs these days, stem from a mixture of nefarious criminal dealers cutting an expensive "pure" product with dangerous and unknown additives (bulking up their stash in order to double its potential profits), and the fact that, being illegal, there are no clear instructions or health warnings concerning what to do with your drugs once you’ve got them. Whilst we are constantly told each day about the acceptable number of "units" of alcohol that we should consume in any twenty-four hour period, how smoking will kill us, and even guided on the levels of nutrients, fats and sugars that we should be eating when buying our food, the average teenager buying an ecstasy pill at a nightclub remains completely unaware about what exactly the drug will be doing to their body, and how they should therefore respond to it. Should they drink lots of water, to stop their body from overheating? Or does too much water actually kill you on ecstasy, because the kidneys can shut down? With no instruction booklet to guide you when buying junk out on the streets – with no health and safety regulation, government oversight or industry standards with which to comply – the supposedly "protected" citizen does not know what the fuck they are buying, or how to take it without causing themselves harm.

This is why, despite being straightedge, I think that all drugs should be legalized. Not just the ones safer than cigarettes and alcohol, but everything.

That is not, of course, to say that I necessarily endorse a world where we sell cocaine and heroin in every neighbourhood chemist; but it is to suggest that even drugs such as these ones would be much better off supplied to addicts by professionally trained doctors who know what they’re doing, on prescription – with additional help and support offered to gradually wean them out of the habit, without sending them directly to jail – than by thugs on the street, simply looking to make some blood money off a terminally addicted clientele.

I still won’t buy them once they’re legal, but with all drugs on some level inherently deadly, dangerous, and detrimental (yet impossible to stamp out so long as the world we’ve created for ourselves remains ridiculously predisposed to inducing tedium, anxiety, trepidation and fear; the relief from which makes such drugs often seem like a necessity – hey, even a straightedge goody-two-shoes like me needs his coffee three times a day!) picking just two of them out, seemingly at random, as being somehow "better" for us than any of the other substances on offer (especially when the research tells us completely the opposite) simply makes no sense. What’s more, it makes our streets more dangerous, puts our drug-curious citizens more at risk, and it means that millions of extra pounds that could be generated in lucrative taxation and drug manufacturing jobs instead get pumped into the criminal underground, funding murderers, gangsters, and, yes, terrorism too.

If we legalized and taxed even a small selection of the drugs currently prohibited by law, there would be no economic crisis. Social security would be secure; hospitals and schools would no longer have to compete with "defence" budgets for money…hell, we might even be able to give public sector workers a pay-rise or two and, dare I say it, even raise people’s benefits?

So yeah, I’m the straightedge guy who thinks all drugs should be legal because I believe in free-will and self-discipline over externally enforced baseless government-dictated moralities. But the sacking of Professor Nutt speaks to a much deeper problem in contemporary British politics than just the relatively innocuous question of what particular brand of mind-numbing narcotic we should be freely allowed to piss away our lives with. The real scandal here is not that David Nutt told us ecstasy was less dangerous than horse-riding, or that he dared tell his peers that alcohol and tobacco were bigger killers than LSD; it is that our government has once again let the compelling data of scientific fact fall on deaf ears, proceeding to take a position on drugs which flies in the face of all expert opinion; a legislative practice which has much bigger implications that the mere classification of cannabis or LSD.

How many times, for example, have we recently heard that same government talk about Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons programme?

In September this year, after what is now known as the "Fordo" reactor site was discovered by the CIA, MI6 and the French DGSE Intelligence Agency, Iran admitted in a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency that they were building a secret uranium enrichment plant, causing huge stirs around the Western world. Considered "proof" of a wider nuclear weapons project, the admission of the development of a fledgling enrichment site saw the country roundly condemned by world leaders, and the Fordo reactor became cited as "evidence" that years’ worth of rumour and accusation about Iranian nuclear weaponry was now indisputably true.

Following the duplicitous way in which we were dragged into war with Iraq, the need for calm and rationale, objective, scientific fact here, in place of prejudice, propaganda and misinformation, is clear. Is the Fordo site proof that the Iranians can’t be trusted? Is it really the first menacing step towards our nuclear Armageddon, or is it what the Iranians say it is: an innocent uranium enrichment facility designed for a peaceful domestic programme of nuclear power? (That same "clean and safe" nuclear power that our own Western governments are so keen to constantly tell us is the environmentally friendly solution to our current carbon-dependency, and for which, here in Britain, there are plans already unveiled to build a whole new generation of reactors by as soon as 2018?)

Unless we start listening to scientists – people who actually know how these nuclear reactors work; the nuances of capability determined by centrifuge capacity; the qualitative differences between warhead enrichment and energy creation – then we are left only with the words of our governments to guide us. Those same deceitful politicians who we entrusted with the "evidence" of supposed Iraqi nuclear weapons programmes back in 2003.

As with David Nutt and our current foolhardy drugs policy, when it came to what was really happening in Iraq, the expert advice – though widely available – was ignored. At the time of this writing, according to the conservative estimates of Iraq Body Count, between 94,144 and 102,728 Iraq civilians have thus far been killed by that treacherous decision. 4,681 coalition soldiers have also been killed. That is, by even the lowest estimates, over thirty-three nine-elevens’ worth of death and destruction doled out, for those who are counting, and all because our war-hungry governments decided to ignore all the available factual evidence and go to war with unfounded and unsupported policies that played well in the tabloids and got the brain-dead patriots rallying blindly round the flag.

In terms of Iran, I am not saying that their Fordo reactor is not a viable concern – perhaps Tehran is, as our governments have been asserting for years, trying to build a nuclear bomb so that they can wipe Israel off the face of the planet and kick-start World War III? What I am saying though, is that I want the basis of any conclusions we ultimately make about what Iran is doing, and how we might respond to it, to come from experts, scientists, specialists – people who deal in solid, empirically-based facts – not agenda-blinded governments who shrug away the difficult truths that don’t fit in with their already predetermined worldview, and then sell lies to the public as reality, in order to turn fiction into a basis for policy.

We live in tumultuous times, and the verifiable and well-documented answers provided by science, and those hundreds of thousands of diligent researchers in all kinds of specialist fields not constricted by twenty-four hour news-cycles, fashionable search-trends and 140 characters or less – they should be the cornerstone of any relevant policy decisions our government makes, not the paranoid ranting and raving of unhinged tabloid readers.

This is a world that is quite literally in peril because of our collective scientific ignorance since the industrial revolution. A world where listening to what climate scientists are telling us might be our only key to survival after a century and change of our own fossil-fuelled self-destruction. Yet, like David Nutt, what these climate scientists are telling us is not always politically sensitive: an 80% reduction of our carbon emissions needed by 2050, or else the damage is irrevocable; an urgent need to radically change our everyday lifestyles and most basic cultural assumptions; an imminent peak-oil crisis; the end of air-travel as we know it; a rejection of the push for nuclear power that well-lobbied politicians are so currently keen on, and the proper funding and commitment for clean, renewable energies like wind and solar power, that don’t leave us with mountains of toxic waste, continued nuclear proliferation, and the ever-present threat of a catastrophic meltdown…

If our government can’t even bear to be told that perhaps smoking cannabis might be just as bad (if not better) than smoking a cigarette, then how the hell do we expect them to process the truly life-changing scientific data concerning what we must do about something as drastic as climate change?
The survival of the planet, our health, the lives of our soldiers and innocent civilians worldwide – these are just a few of the vital areas in which a need for fact over fantasy is crucial, yet time and time again our governments have eschewed logic, reason and awkward empirical data to push through an agenda of their own – usually one politically or financially motivated. An agenda drawn up by lobbyists and ideological think-tanks to boost opinion polls and private coffers, no matter what the damage and danger to the general population.

The firing of one scientific advisor on a tiny island nation might seem like quite an insignificant event in the global scheme of things, but with the sacking of David Nutt comes an important lesson for us all: as our elected leaders continue to ignore the weight of science and reason in favour of substanceless, crowd-pleasing untruths, they do so at our peril. We can only bury our heads in the sand for so long, before we find we are soon choking to death on the dirt.

DaN McKee, 19th November 2009

Technorati Tags: Scanner Zine,Jail Where Terrorists Make The Rules,Drugs,David Nutt Sacking,David Nutt,UK Politics,Politics,Science

New Scanner “Jail Where Terrorists Make The Rules” Article

2010-02-27T11:23:00.001Z

My latest SCANNER ARTICLE is up on the Scanner-zine website. Entitled “General Election 2010 – How Ignoring Minor Differences Can Lead to Major Disappointments”, it deals with my thoughts on the impending UK election…

Technorati Tags: UK Politics,General Election,Scanner Zine,Jail Where Terrorists Make The Rules,Links,US Politics,Democracy,Politics

Dear Councillor Dawkins #2…

2010-02-25T18:08:00.001Z

So I finally got a reply from Councillor Dawkins from the letter I sent a few weeks ago about the seeming contradictions in his public position on the Kraft takeover of Cadbury and the underlying economic policies of his party…

Dear Dr. McKee,

You are perhaps being a little harsh on me. I have been making similar points in various speeches over the last few years in public. Either one can accept that or one can accuse me of being disingenuous.

I have to disagree with your assertion regarding the Conservative Party. Like most parties we are a broad church with widely held views.
I have said often is that we are all for free trade. However the free trade of goods does not necessarily have to translate into the free trade of companies. Selling off our priceless manufacturing and exporting companies to foreign companies in no ways makes us a better country.
There are already rules devised by the takeover panel to control the details of hostile takeovers, so it is not a complete free for all. What I have suggested is that we need to reconsider these rules and to determine if they are currently serving the national interest or should they be made harder. For instance instead of 51% of shareholders needing to agree to a hostile takeover it could be 75% needed (that in itself would have scuppered the Kraft takeover as they only managed a 71% agreement).
Another suggestion perhaps is that only shareholders which have held shares for more than 6 months could vote in such circumstances rather than a company falling prey to hedgefunds whose only interest is in making money.
It may be that we would only apply these more stringent rules to our exporting manufacturing companies. It is these companies which have taken generations to build and are vital to this country's wealth building capacity. When they are taken over that wealth producing capacity invariably leeches away from this country.
There is also the issue of a level playing field. We are the most open economy for such takeovers far more so than our foreign competitors.
I seriously doubt that we would have been permitted to buy a company like Cadbury from the Japanese, the Chinese and even the French.
When people mention the Conservative party I always gently remind them that the first company I ever worked for when I left University was Rolls Royce in Derby; a company nationalised in 1971 by a Conservative government in the national interest rather than letting it go bankrupt. The government still has some golden shares in Rolls Royce which prevents it being taken into foreign ownership. Those golden shares have not prevented Rolls Royce becoming perhaps our greatest engineering company and our second largest exporter.
I hope this has been helpful.
Regards,
Nigel

Though it was nice that he had a go at defending himself, I had problems with his reply right away. First off – yes, free-trade under the neo-liberal style of free-market economics promoted by the Tories since Thatcher does have to mean the free-trade of companies too if it is to remain a coherent theory. And secondly – isn’t his Kraft-beating idea of a 75% majority just a little too convenient and arbitrary to hold any water? Why not 69% or 70%? With no sustaining argument behind it, any number higher than the 51% we have in the current system is basically just taken at random, and that the 75% mark proposed just so happens to be enough to thwart the takeover at Cadbury seems a little bit easy to me.

Anyway, I sent off the following reply and we’ll see how this thing goes.

Dear Councillor Dawkins,

Thank you for your reply to my previous email regarding your recent comments about Cadbury. Although I appreciate your efforts at explaining to me the perceived contradictions that I see in your public position on the Cabury takeover and your continuing membership in the pro-free-market Conservative Party, I am afraid that your argument remains unconvincing.

Yes the Conservative Party is a “broad church” – but, like any church, there are still certain sacrosanct parameters at which that broadness ends (or else what would be the difference between parties?) and for the Conservative Party one of the core elements of its unifying philosophy, for at least the last thirty years, is a belief in the free-market system.

Though you may wish to pick and choose which bits and pieces of your party’s policy-guiding economic philosophy you as an individual subscribe to, the fact of the matter is that under the terms of the endorsed philosophy of free-market economics synonymous with the Tories since Thatcher (not specifically free-trade, but of the free-market ideal behind it), the Kraft takeover of Cadbury was a text-book case of legitimate free-market acquisition: an independent and profitable company was given an attractive offer to sell, its board recommended it, and its shareholders accepted it.

Now I, as someone who opposes this rapacious economic ideology that puts the profits of the few over the wellbeing of the many, agree with much of what you publically say: it is a disgrace that thousands of Bournville jobs might now be lost because lining the pockets of Cadbury shareholders was deemed of higher social value than the economic well-being of this community. But it is Conservative economic policy – and the continuation of that misguided policy under Labour – that got us here, and so long as you are affiliated with that party your words can only seem, at best, tainted, and, at worst, like shameless opportunism. As those words are so often also wrapped up in the hollow whiff of an ugly flag-waving nationalism, I sincerely have my doubts – the issue is not, as you seem to suggest, whether a company is British-owned or foreign-owned, but whether we have an economic system in place which secures well-paid British jobs regardless of the nationality of a particular company’s owners, and which ensures all businesses – British or otherwise – are properly taxed and incentivised to invest their successes back into the local community and not just into their own private pockets.

I would be much more likely to take your position seriously, Councillor Dawkins, if you were seen less on the front-pages of the local newspaper holding a Union Jack in your hand and blaming the Labour Party for not signing a letter, and more in the fine-print of that newspaper, presenting an intellectually honest and coherent opposition to the economic policies and practices that have guided your party for decades.

As far as I am aware, neither David Cameron nor George Osborne have publically renounced this historically Conservative position of economic theory, and though it strikes a populist chord to talk about saving British jobs and tightening the rules on hostile takeovers in the aftermath of what happened at Cadbury, as long as the framework for those rules remain an economic philosophy which puts the needs of businesses above the needs of people, the only real change you and your party can offer, despite your public posturing, is a slightly different shade of the same colour.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Daniel McKee

PS… Whilst I thank you for the wistful nostalgia invoked by reminding me of Edward Heath’s nationalization of Rolls Royce in ’71, may I in turn remind you that it was Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative government which ultimately privatized the company again in 1987, and that Rolls Royce was one of the many companies over the past few years to cut hundreds of British jobs during the economic downturn, despite having an order-book worth over £35bn.

In other news, evidently I am not the only person not buying this for-the-people act…

Technorati Tags: Anti-Capitalism,Cadbury,Cadbury Buy-Out,Capitalism,Conservative Party,General Election,Kraft Food,Local Politics,Spin,UK Politics,Nigel Dawkins

Throwin’ Out The Trash #3

2010-02-12T12:29:00.001Z

First of all – I take it all back about how other countries can deal with snow and we can’t. No sooner had Charlie Brooker jokingly called the UK’s cold-snap “Snowmageddon” this past January, then US President, Barack Obama, used the exact same word in relation to Washington’s recent snow-storm at a DNC meeting.

That said, the US “snowmageddon” actually looks pretty, you know, “snowmageddony”…not just like the local council didn’t properly grit the roads.

The awfulness of the current academic scene continues, with announcements made this week that universities across the country are planning to slash jobs, close campuses and shut-down courses in a bid to deal with expected cuts in public funding.

Yes, as students themselves continue to pay higher and higher fees, the quality of their education and the service they are receiving from universities continues to get ever worse. The more money they pay, the less choice they are getting, the bigger their class-sizes are, and the more unconcerned their lecturers are, as the major emphasis in a university lecturer’s professional life these days is not on teaching, but on “research”. By “research”, I mean excessive publication and funding acquisition – the two major concerns of university philosophy departments looking to score well in their assessments.

By a bizarre twist of logic, already limited funding is dictated on performance, performance is dictated on how well departments do in assessment, assessment is determined by the amount of “impact” a department has, arrived at via analysis of the number of publications produced by the department, and amount of money brought into the department through funding, and nowhere in this is much concern for the quality of education received by the fee-paying students. Indeed, as I still keep my eye on academic jobs in order to possibly one day put to use my cumbersome Ph.D., I have noticed an increasing tendency in academic job ads for the teaching component of the job to be literally the very last thing mentioned! They want to make sure new staff have vast publication records, proof of having acquired independent grants and funding, the ability to contribute to the research life of the university…and then, at the bottom of the page, they will also be required to teach both undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

Meanwhile, right-wing think-tank, Policy Exchange, have decided that university tuition fees must be raised even further – to a rate of at least £5,000 a year – if university degree-schemes are to remain viable.

So to get this straight – universities have less money than ever before, but are getting more money in tuition fees than ever before. In a bid to get more public funding, they are putting all of their efforts into gaining high marks in RAE/REF assessment exercises, which places little to no emphasis on quality of teaching, and thus are placing a primacy within their departments on research “impact” over quality of teaching, and yet the neglected students are paying much more money to the institutions than they ever have. Indeed, one of the ways in which universities hope to cut costs and free up full-time academic staff for more important “research”, is to leave the majority of the teaching to post-graduates – so now our students are paying more money for less qualified teachers, to subsidize the career-driven, assessment-obsessed research of pressured academics, increasingly concerned with publication for publication’s sake, rather than because they have anything worthwhile to say.

And speaking as someone who has been a postgraduate tutor, there are two things that come to mind.

1) We were constantly told not to spend too much effort on teaching our classes because our real focus must be on our dissertations/theses; nor were we paid appropriately to compensate for much more than a few hour’s preparation time a week. So postgraduate teachers are not only less qualified, they are less motivated to provide quality education.

2)We were cheap, and essentially exploited labour. Wages continued to be tweaked downwards during my two years of teaching, with pennies pinched here and pennies pinched there, and when we tried to talk about fair compensation in the Research Committee Meetings, the Head of School essentially told us we were lucky to be being paid at all. “The experience is so great,” he told us, “that many would be willing to do the work for free.”

This was true – and I loved the teaching enough that I would have worked for free, and repeatedly worked many more hours at my seminars/essay marking/student’s concerns than I was paid for – but to rely on this exploitative system of internship as the primary mode of education for all fee-paying undergrads at the same time as we are raising their fees is a disgrace.

For more proof that I am constantly out of step with the mainstream – it appears that I proposed to my girlfriend at a time when marriage was at its biggest low in Britain since 1895. So for all you guys who thought my decision to get married was pretty conventional for a usually non-conformist anarchist like myself – well, now you know :-)

Isn’t the bigger scandal here that the US government are paying BLACKWATER at all, rather than that, as part of their payments to these hired mercenary killers, they are also occasionally paying for prostitutes?

It should be noted that, whilst Barack Obama did make a pledge to cut the US nuclear weapons arsenal and seek a nuclear-weapons free world, he also asked Congress to increase spending on US nuclear weapons by more than seven billion dollars in his last budget proposal.

Technorati Tags: Throwin' Out The Trash,Politics,UK Politics,US Politics,Academia,Universities,Higher Education,Blackwater,Nuclear Proliferation,Marriage,Snow

Dear Councillor Dawkins…

2010-02-09T16:10:00.001Z

The following is an email I just sent to a local Tory councillor in my area who keeps trying to campaign for the upcoming election off the back of the Kraft Cadbury takeover…

Dear Councillor Dawkins,

I found your recent newsletter about your efforts to save Cadbury highly disingenuous.

Whilst I have absolutely no doubt that you wrote your "important letter" to Lord Mandelson and delivered our petition to Downing Street, opposing the hostile takeover of Cadbury, there is no getting away from the fact that, as a member of the Conservative Party - where the ideology of free-market capitalism is sacrosanct - your words and deeds sound inherently hollow.

The Kraft Foods takeover of Cadbury, though it will likely be devastating for our area, was a direct result of free-market capitalism working absolutely as it should do: a money-making, independent business got an attractive offer from another company, the price was right, and so they decided to sell. Not only is this loss of Cadbury to Kraft nothing to do with the Labour Party (other than the fact that, to their eternal shame, they have done nothing but continue to pursue Tory economic policies since the day they came to power), it is the underlying economic philosophy that specifically drives your party - the promotion and celebration of unfettered free-market capitalism - which encourages it. Indeed, one of the central tenets of Conservative economic theory is that it is not the business of government to get involved in the natural functioning of markets, so how you can pretend to be upset that the Labour government did nothing to intervene in the Cadbury decision, when you know full well that it would be ideologically incoherent for a Conservative government to have acted any differently? It just smacks of opportunistic electioneering and, to me, seems highly cynical.

According to your newsletter, you said: "We know that the banks, the shareholders, the city whizz kids and Kraft will all make big money out of this takeover but it will be the ordinary residents of Birmingham who will eventually end up paying for this terrible loss." Your sentiments are entirely right, but coming as they do out of the mouth of a party-member whose party has championed precisely this approach to doing business for over thirty years, you'll excuse me if I remain unconvinced.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Daniel McKee

I’ll report back if I get a spin-free reply…

Technorati Tags: Cadbury Buy-Out,Cadbury,Capitalism,Anti Capitalism,Conservative Party,General Election,UK Politics,Politics,Local Politics,Kraft Food,Spin

Tony Blair Made His Decision, Now It’s Time That We Made Ours

2010-02-03T08:58:00.001Z

Whilst the weekend papers were filled with much repetition of Tony Blair’s slippery and well-crafted answers during last Friday’s “grilling” at the hands of the Chilcot inquiry, far too little analysis was made afterwards of how those soundbite-friendly responses actually stood up to scrutiny.

It was always highly unlikely that the former Prime Minister would sit there and admit to being a war-criminal, or to misleading the public and Parliament in order to start an illegal and unjustified invasion into a non-aggressing sovereign country. To do so would be suicide, and the media-savvy Blair, as we all know, is far too smart to do that. His deftness for dealing with interrogation, however, does not prevent us from studying the unrepentant explanations and rationale he did offer, and seeing if they actually hold water.

“This isn’t about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit or a deception. It is a decision”, said Blair early in the morning, as if decisions were a mutually exclusive breed of thought, separate from lies, conspiracies, deceits or deceptions. As the very issue in question here is whether or not Blair made a decision to go to war independent of the readily available evidence to legally and morally do so, we must never forget that it is entirely possible for a decision to be made for which lies, conspiracy, deceit and deception are the only available means to fulfil it. Every heinous, illegal and unjustified act in history has been someone’s decision. Decisions are what motivate the majority of human action. Our job now, in the face of this particular decision, is to determine why it was made, and whether that decision led to lies, conspiracy, deceit and deception in order to achieve its goals.

If Blair decided to go to war first, and then lied about WMDs in order to do it, we have a very serious problem. A problem which should be at the crux of the Chilcot Inquiry.

“Sometimes”, said Blair, “what is important is not to ask the March 2003 question but to ask the 2010 question.” But the decision to go to war with Iraq in March, 2003, prevents us from seriously answering the “2010 question” with anything other than speculation, and right now we are looking for answers, not more guesswork and baseless assumption, so it seems prudent to stick to the questions of March, 2003.

“I genuinely believe that if we had left Saddam in power,” said Blair, “even with what we know now, we would still have had to have dealt with him, possibly in circumstances where the threat was worse and possibly in circumstances where it was hard to mobilise any support for dealing with that threat.”

The question of legality and justification regarding the war in Iraq, however, does not ride on what the former Prime Minister might or might not “genuinely believe”. It rests on some very simple principles that were unquestionably relevant in March, 2003: if Iraq was a legitimate and immediate threat, and if all non-military options had been exhausted, then we would have a right to defend ourselves against their clear and present aggression. If there was no aggression, no threat, and no clear and indisputable evidence that all other diplomatic options had failed, then we had no right to go to war.

We cannot just attack any country that we feel like on the basis that, one day, they might become a threat. Our leaders are not psychics, and this is not Minority Report – we must err towards peace until we are truly given no other choice but to fight back. That is how international law works. It’s what distinguishes aggression from self-defence, and just as a police officer can’t arrest and jail a person they simply have a “bad feeling” about unless there is demonstrable evidence that a genuine crime is being planned or committed – even if a similar crime has been committed by this person before – a government cannot go to war in self-defence unless there is substantial evidence first that the crime of aggression is actually taking place.

Putting aside these legal and historical objections to the former Prime Minister’s defence, however, the argument Blair proffered still doesn’t make sense, even on its own terms. If he had not acted in 2003, and the alleged threat posed by Saddam had indeed become worse, why on earth would it have then become harder to mobilize support? If anything, that should have made it easier. Whilst it has certainly proven difficult to convince other sane countries into attacking a nation who has posed no real danger to anyone outside of its own borders, seldom has it been hard to find allies to fight a justifiable war against a legitimate enemy when the evidence of external aggression is clear.

“After September 11,” though, said Blair, “the calculus of risk changed”. We could not just sit back anymore, the way we once did, and give enemy nations the chance to strike first. We had to be more pro-active.

Whilst perhaps the 9/11 terrorist attacks might have opened our eyes to security risks on Western soil that, hitherto, we just hadn’t thought about, it did not suddenly give governments carte blanche to drop bombs on any country they now felt uneasy about. Though the “calculus of risk” may well have arguably changed, the basic tenets of international law had not. Yet for Blair, despite the fact that the events of 9/11 were in no way connected to Iraq and the regime of Saddam Hussein, and that the 9/11 hijackers had committed their atrocity not with nuclear bombs or chemical weapons, but with stolen airplanes and low-tech box-cutter knives, “the primary consideration for me was to send an absolutely powerful message after September 11 – if you were a regime engaged in WMD you had to stop.”

It seems a peculiar leap of logic, but maybe I can follow it: though the 9/11 hijackers did not use WMDs, perhaps future attackers might, and so it would behove us now to tackle that problem before it’s too late? In a way, it kind of makes sense. But though it is perhaps an admirable goal to want to bring about the end to deadly WMDs after seeing the destruction and devastation caused on September 11^th without them, the personal desire to send the world a strong message of disarmament does not exonerate Mr. Blair from observing the limits and procedures of international law. Whilst he had every freedom in the world to put pressure on countries about WMDs through organizations such as the UN or EU, to step up weapons inspections and sanctions in particularly tricky areas, to draw up multilateral disarmament treaties and lead by example by decommissioning the UK’s own nuclear, chemical and biological arsenal (and encouraging allied countries to do the same), he simply did not have the freedom to go to war against a non-aggressing country just to “send out a powerful message”.

Similarly, although Blair asserted on Friday that the issue of WMDs in Iraq and regime change were “conjoined”, and that “a regime that is brutal and oppressive - that for example has used weapons of mass destruction against its own people, as Saddam did, and had killed tens of thousands of people by the use of chemical weapons…is a bigger threat if it has weapons of mass destruction than one that is otherwise benign,” the fact still remains that, even if this is theoretically true, in practice, because of the existing rules of international law, just war, and non-aggression that separate “brutal and oppressive” regimes like Iraq from “benign” ones like us, we cannot be permitted to say, as Blair did: “we have to deal with his WMD ambitions. If that means regime change, so be it”. The two issues are not, as the former Prime Minister asserted, just “a different way of expressing the same proposition”, because one of the two propositions (curbing the development of WMDs) is a perfectly legal matter of enforcing nations into compliance with binding global agreements and commitments through inspection, enforcement and sanction, whereas the other (regime change) means – unless acting in legitimate self-defence following a genuine act of aggression – the illegal invasion and interference with the internal political affairs of a sovereign nation at great physical cost both to its people, and to our soldiers.

Astoundingly though, Blair concluded, of his decision to go to war with Iraq: “I do genuinely believe the world is safer as a result”.

Ignoring for a moment the over a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians estimated to have been killed as a result of Blair’s invasion, the forty-plus sites across the country that are now contaminated with radiation and dioxins that will be toxic for generations to come, and the nearly two hundred British soldiers who have lost their life in the region since 2003, how the former Prime Minister can maintain this ludicrous assertion becomes even harder to fathom when one looks seriously at the post-Iraq world. Whilst the invasion of Iraq has still yet to bring its promised “liberation” to the Iraqi people, it has obliterated the country’s infrastructure and continued to serve as a rallying cry for terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda around the world. The perception of callous slaughter of Iraqi innocents by cruel Western aggressors remains a compelling reason for outraged Muslims to join the ever-growing ranks of jihad in all corners of the globe, and consecutive National Intelligence Estimates in the US have admitted that the war in Iraq has only “made the overall terrorism problem worse”. Closer to home, as the UK’s “terror threat” has once again moved up to “severe”, one only has to remember the home-grown horror of the 7/7 bomb attacks in London – committed by British terrorists in direct response to what they saw as an unprovoked assault by their government on the people of Iraq – to see that, far from making us safer, the war in Iraq has only made things much worse.

Contrary to Mr. Blair’s allegations, the world is not at all safer now here in the West, nor is it any safer in Iraq. Long after Saddam Hussein was killed and the regime in Iraq was changed, our soldier’s guns and bombs – and those of multiple warring insurgents set predictably free in regime change’s ugly wake – continue to kill civilians in their thousands. And though Saddam’s former atrocities in Halabja will forever disgust the world, they will soon pale in comparison to the shocking legacy of cancer and mutation our own chemical weapons have left behind.

Yet for Tony Blair, none of this appears to matter: that he believes a different story is true seems enough to make it so.

When asked if he had any regrets about his decision at the end of his time in the chair, Blair said he felt “responsibility but not regret for removing Saddam Hussein”. This was not surprising. The underlying message of the entire six-hour inquisition was that regime-change had always been the goal in Iraq, and that, in Tony Blair’s mind, going after WMDs was merely “a different way of expressing the same proposition”. As far as Blair was concerned, and for that matter, Bush, a decision had been made, regardless of any evidence there might be to the contrary: Saddam Hussein was a threat to world peace who needed to be taken out at any cost. Whether Saddam actually had weapons of mass destruction, and whether he actually posed a real threat became only a minor detail once the decision for war had been made, and in achieving that central objective toppling Hussein, the war was a huge success.

But decisions must have consequences. Especially when they so flagrantly break international law and are based entirely on a wilful fabrication.

That Tony Blair believes the decision he made on Iraq was right and that he tried to defend himself at the Chilcot inquiry was neither surprising nor important. Thankfully, these days, Blair’s opinion is no longer the opinion that counts: he is done making his decisions, and now it is our turn to decide.

Regardless of what Blair may have “believed” at the time, or what he “believes” right now, it is history that will ultimately judge him, and the facts of history remain unflinching: there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There was plenty of evidence from UN inspectors and other sources before March, 2003 that this was the case, and yet Blair chose to go to war anyway. Instead of giving Hans Blix and his team the time they had asked for to finish their job, Blair opted to invade instead. The war he chose to fight had no legal basis in UN resolution, nor was it a justified case of self-defence against an enemy aggressor: the majority of the British population were against it, and even members of his own Cabinet were forced to resign in protest. It was an illegal and unjustified war that was sold to the British public through a conspiracy of lies, deception and deceit, and as a result of that war, over a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians were killed, nearly two hundred soldiers have died, terrorism has increased both within the region and around the globe, and we have lost billions of pounds of public money that, perhaps, might have saved us from recession.

Regarding his decision to take us into Iraq, Tony Blair can believe and say what he wants, but back here in the real world, the evidence against him is damning.

Technorati Tags: UK Politics,Tony Blair,Chilcot Inquiry,Iraq Inquiry,Iraq,War on Terror,9/11,Media,war

Cadbury and the Chicago School

2010-02-01T09:41:00.002Z

Naomi Klein would be proud.

This morning, here in Birmingham, as we countdown the final twenty-four hours before we find out if the Cadbury shareholders are going to sell their business to Kraft, the local news gave us some calming advice about the takeover from Chicago Booth Business School Professor, Sanjay Dhar.

Dhar told us that everything would be ok under Kraft, and that nothing would really change. Anything that did change, he told us, would probably have changed under Cadbury ownership anyway, as it would be driven by market forces. Kraft ownership, the message was clear, would be a good thing for Cadbury.

Dhar, a professor of marketing at Booth (a central component of Milton Friedman’s infamous “Chicago School”) is currently head of the Kilts Center for Marketing. The Center is named after, and overseen by, James Kilts who, between 1994 and 1997, as Executive Vice President at Philip Morris was “responsible for integrating Kraft and General Foods worldwide and for shaping the group’s domestic and international strategy and plans”. Kilts also previously served as President of Kraft USA (where he consolidated Kraft and Oscar Meyer into one company), President of Kraft Limited in Canada, and Senior Vice President of Kraft International. He was also Senior Vice President of strategy and development at Kraft.

This year, in the Fall 2009 season at Kilts, under Sanjay Dhar’s headship, Mike Hsu, President of Kraft North America Grocery, has joined the Kilts Steering Committee.

For some reason the BBC News failed to point all this out, and simply referred to him as a business “expert”.

Technorati Tags: Politics,Business,UK Politics,Chicago School,Cadbury Buy-Out,Cadbury,Kraft Food,Sanjay Dhar,Media,Naomi Klein,Capitalism

Throwin’ Out The Trash #2

2010-01-29T12:00:00.000Z

So, today Tony Blair comes before the Chilcot Enquiry. I am writing this at 11am, before the conclusion of events, but I expect nothing more from this than Blair sticking firmly to his position that he believed in what he did and thought it was the right thing to do for both Iraq and the security of the world.

What else is he going to do? Admit that he lied; that he’s a war-criminal and a mass-murderer? That he wilfully started a war that has killed hundreds of soldiers and thousands of civilians in full knowledge that the justification for it was bullshit?

Of course not.

Blair’s testimony is a red herring. As I’ve said before and I’ll say again now: the evidence that Saddam was not a threat was available to anybody with an internet connection and a library card, and speaks to a much deeper problem within UK and US foreign policy than this one unjust war alone.

We need more than the Chilcot Enquiry – we need a radical change of course.

Obama has announced a pay-freeze, just as, here in the UK, whoever wins the election later this year has promised to make cuts in public spending. Anyone else troubled that we had billions for the banks, and billions to spend on slaughtering innocent Iraqis and Afghans, and yet no money to pay for schools, hospitals, civil servants or benefits?

Here’s a saving we could make on both sides of the Atlantic ocean immediately: withdraw, right now, without hesitation, from Afghanistan and Iraq, stop picking fights in Pakistan and Yemen, and put all that money you’re pissing away on genocide back into the public coffers.

Oh, and then tax the fucking rich already!

If you think the new Apple iPad is a good idea then you’re an idiot, and probably think HDTV, Blu-Ray and 3D movies are good ideas too. They’re not, and you’re a gullible mark.

In the Good News Department: the BNP are still in trouble regarding their constitution. Their ridiculous pseudo-amendments made a few months ago to try and appease the Equality and Human Rights Commission have been laughed out of court, and if they don’t sort it out properly by the end of next month, they’re legally fucked. As spokesman, Simon Darby said, the ruling forces the party to “emasculate its constitution and drop its policies and principles…This is a deadly serious attempt to put us out of business.” Good. I watched This Is England the other night and can’t believe racist idiots like this still exist in 2010.

In the Oh My God It’s Worse Than I Thought Department: A recent poll in America has shown that Fox News is the most trusted news network in the country. This is the stuff that nightmares are made of.

Revelations continue to come out about Haiti – how the US government sent soldiers instead of aid, and prioritized “securing” the area over giving people food. Obama already got blood all over his hands by stepping up Bush’s war in Afghanistan and claiming it as his own; now it seems he has left Haitians to die in much the way Bush left the victims of Katrina. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, as The Who might sing.

I wrote about the UK’s repressive Prevention of Terror Act of 2000 about ten years ago for Scanner fanzine. This was in the heady days before 9/11, and the big concern at the time was that the UK government were using anti-terror legislation to target activists. Well, now it’s 2010 and, according to The Guardian, the Ministry of Justice’s new “guidance on extremism” has included eco-activists on its terror list, alongside members of al-Qaeda and far-right extremists.

The Lib Dems have called it “a quite astonishing conflation of legitimate protest with terrorism”.

Haven’t they been paying attention? The entire war on terror has just been a concerted effort in manipulation designed to quell the anti-capitalism movement that was making such great progress between 1999 and 2001.

The sad thing is: it has worked.

George Clooney’s new film, Up in the Air, is rubbish. Unless you enjoy watching a film about the assholes who go into downsizing corporations to professionally “let people go” that in no way deals with the subject of just how fucked up that is.

Finally, I’m pretty sure that Obama’s momentary “tough talk” about banking regulation will die down pretty quickly. Not only has “Mr Bank Bailout”, Ben Bernake, been given a second term at the Fed (so no change there), but Wall Street have been gearing up an army of lobbyists over the past twelve months (to the tune of $26m) and are planning of unleashing them in opposition to any plans for regulation. When you combine that, the banking industry’s $78.2m in donations to well-greased federal candidates and party committees, and the recent Supreme Court decision to remove all limits on how much private corporations can spend on political influence, I think you’ll agree: banking regulation in 2010 just doesn’t have a chance.

Technorati Tags: Politics,UK Politics,US Politics,Throwin' Out The Trash,Chilcot Enquiry,Tony Blair,Obama,iPad,BNP,Haiti,Fox News,War on Terror,Banks,Up in the Air,Ben Bernake,Prevention of Terrorism Act 2000

Howard Zinn: 1922 - 2010

2010-01-28T19:10:00.002Z

This morning I woke up to the sad news that historian and social critic, Howard Zinn, had died. As awful as it might seem, I had been so prepared over recent years for the inevitable news of the death of Noam Chomsky (another awesome octogenarian radical of whom the world should take more note), that it hadn’t even occurred to me that Zinn, six years Chomsky’s senior, might die first.

To say I was shocked would be an understatement.

Perhaps that sounds a little bit morbid – worrying about the death of Noam Chomsky – but when your heroes reach their eighties, it’s really hard to not be concerned.

Howard Zinn was also a hero, and he and Chomsky will be forever intertwined in my mind. Between the two of them – and a healthy dose of Dead Kennedys and Subhumans lyrics – my teenaged eyes were opened up to a whole new way of seeing the world. But whereas Chomsky provided my education through his prolific canon of never-ending texts and articles, and the Dead Kennedys and Subhumans required several records each to shake me from my political stupor, Howard Zinn achieved his life-changing alteration of my perceptions with just one single book.

A People’s History of the United States was a book I only ever read from start to finish once, but it’s effect on how I understood the world has never left me. One simple idea – the telling of history not through the voices of the powerful, but through the seldom-heard voices of the poor, the weak, and the everyday – revolutionized the telling of a history which I thought I already knew. Slave rebellions, worker uprisings, corporate and government corruption – the true tales of history were wrested from the grip of its victors and put back into the hands of the people.

Ever since I read the work of Howard Zinn, I could never trust status quo historians again.

Alongside the influence of Chomsky, both my MA and Ph.D. work would not have been possible without Zinn’s perception-changing insights. When I wrote about just war theory in my Masters Degree dissertation, my arguments were backed up by a historical record of war and conquest radically different from those offered to us by our leaders, yet one no less substantiated by evidence. When I spoke of the democratic failings of our so-called contemporary “democracies” in my Ph.D. thesis, it was with Zinn in mind that I portrayed an accurate, but alternative, history of Western political evolution.

In 2000, I saw Howard Zinn speak at the annual Marxism festival in London. After several days of quite turgid and dogmatic lecturing from different party-line speakers on a variety of different issues, I remember Howard Zinn as being a breath of fresh air from the hitherto stultifying zealots. Here was a man, I realized, who was not afraid to question accepted faith, even within his own doctrines, and a man who made me realize that being politically radical didn’t have to mean leaving your humanity and charm at the door.

Charm and humanity aside, that one simple book and one simple idea could have such a life-changing effect on so many generations of people will be Zinn’s greatest legacy. That simple idea (and that wonderful book) will not die along with him, so long as those of us who learnt the lessons that A People’s History of the United States had to offer, continue to pass them on each and everyday.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, but those whose past has been stolen from them by manipulative rulers who benefit, will forever have A People’s History to unchain them. For that, we must thank Howard Zinn.

Technorati Tags: Howard Zinn,History,Politics,A People's History of the United States

The Real Questions for Chilcot

2010-01-26T15:51:00.001Z

As the Chilcot Enquiry enters its ninth week and star-witnesses, Blair and Brown, approach their impending interrogations, there are still a wealth of important witnesses who have not yet been called to give testimony.

Sadly, it seems highly unlikely that they ever will be.

I am not talking about any more key members of government, nor am I talking about MPs, civil servants, the security services or the army. I am talking about the million-plus people who marched on London, February 15th, 2003, in clear opposition to this war. I am talking about the unwavering majority of British citizens polled repeatedly before the March 20th invasion who were consistently opposed to the war. I am talking about people like me, a university student at the time, who had no access to secret government documents or high-clearance intelligence briefs and yet still knew enough – from just a couple of visits to the library and a little online searching – to know that the reasons for invasion were bogus.

The fact of the matter is, an enquiry into whatever government officials claim they did, or did not, know at the time of the Iraq invasion is far too short-sighted an endeavour to yield any meaningful results, especially when it is limited solely within the self-serving bubble of Westminster spin. Regardless of what Tony Blair thought he knew in his heart of hearts, what convinced Gordon Brown to write the cheques, or what regrets and reservations Jack Straw might have had, the real question about Iraq is not how individual politicians happened to clear their already ambidextrous consciences on the matter, it is how so many people like me – people who marched in opposition to the war; people who signed the petitions and knew all along that we were being lied to – managed so easily to find out that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, just from reading readily available books and reports on the area, and yet our government and media apparently remained so utterly in the dark?

If the Chilcot Enquiry were to interview someone like me, I would tell them how I read the reports of UN weapons inspectors, Hans Blix and Scott Ritter, who both said that there was no sign of Iraqi WMDs. I would tell them how even Colin Powell was on record as saying there were no WMDs in Iraq, and how about seven different books on the subject all said the same thing. I would tell them how the only evidence we had of Saddam posing a “threat” in March of 2003, was the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 (for which America arguably gave Iraq the green light, in an effort to teach them a lesson through a manufactured conflict) and the gassing of Kurds with chemical weapons in 1988 (gas which was sold to Iraq by the USA in the first place). I would remind Sir Chilcot that, though it was nice to see how upset Blair and Bush suddenly were about attacks that had happened back in 1988, it would have been much more useful for our governments to have been upset about them in ‘88, when they actually happened, instead of doing what we really did at the time, which was continue selling chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein.

There are a lot of things I could tell him, and I’m sure that any number of the millions of UK citizens opposed to the war long before the invasion – and aware that the WMD claims were a lie – would have much to say if they took the stand at the Iraq Inquiry. If people like us could find out the truth about Iraq just from looking at books in our spare-time, the idea that the Prime Minister, the Chancellor, and the Foreign Secretary – whose sole job at the time was to know about this sort of stuff – were unable to acquire that same information with all the resources of state at their disposal, is even more hard to swallow than the absurdist fantasy that there were WMDs hidden under the Iraqi sand.

Technorati Tags: UK Politics,Politics,Chilcot Enquiry,Iraq Enquiry,Iraq,War on Terror,War

The True Face of Liberation

2010-01-23T12:22:00.001Z

Remember when we were told we had to go into Iraq because Saddam was a tyrant who used chemical weapons against his own people? Well, according to this story from the Guardian today -Iraq littered with high levels of nuclear and dioxin contamination, study finds - guardian.co.uk – our going in there to “save” the Iraqis from such atrocities has left them with a legacy of radiation and toxicity that will contaminate the country for decades. Who needs Saddam when we can commit his tyranny ourselves?

Technorati Tags: Iraq,Links,War on Terror,Radiation,Politics,UK Politics,US Politics

Throwin’ Out The Trash #1

2010-01-22T15:57:00.001Z

Late Friday afternoons are traditionally the time that politicians, businesses, celebrities, etc, release bad news to the public in the hope that they won’t see it. Season 1, episode 13, of The West Wing calls this “Take Out The Trash Day”, and with that in mind I give you the first instalment of a new semi-regular feature on the Blog: Throwin’ Out The Trash.

Each week, there are so many fucked up stories and newsy bits and pieces that cross my path in this 24/7 media blitzkrieg that we’re living in, and I simply do not have the time or inclination to write a full-on commentary piece about all of them. Throwin’ Out The Trash is my chance each week to clear the decks of all these niggling odds and sods without ignoring them completely…

So, multi-millionaire pop mogul, Simon Cowell, has decided to release a charity pop single of REM's classic song, "Everybody Hurts", in order to raise some much needed funds to help the devastated victims of the January 12th Haitian earthquake. A nice idea, and a lot of people are out there doing what they can to raise money to help with this terrible tragedy. But when the guy proposing the charity single has a personal fortune of £120m – and just signed a brand new £100m deal to bring his television show, X-Factor, to the United States on the very day that Haiti suffered the earthquake – you have to wonder why he isn’t just putting a hand into his own pocket to help out the aid effort instead of making us, the not-so-wealthy British public, do it for him?

To put this into perspective, whilst Cowell could personally afford to give several million pounds to the Haitian aid effort if he wanted to without the British public spending a single penny, Peter Kay’s 2009 charity single for Children in Need, released last November, raised only £170,000. Cowell’s own recent charity efforts have done a little better, with last year’s X-Factor single for Great Ormond Street raising at least £200,000 in its first week, and the 2008 single raising over £1m for Help for Heroes and the Royal British Legion. But the fact remains that Cowell himself could personally contribute the amount of money earned by all three of those charity singles to Haiti combined, plus an extra million, and still have a very comfortable £117m to live off without the generous British public having to give a thing.

If anyone out there reading this still thinks that free-market capitalism is a great idea, maybe they can explain to me why I should support an economic mentality that sees stock-prices drop and Wall Street panic when the President finally says that he’s going to do something about the dangerous financial de-regulation that so recently brought the world economy to its knees?

For the majority of Americans, and people all around the world, the last year and a bit has been a hellacious time of recession and unemployment. Life has become a struggle, work has become scarce, homes have been taken away and dreams have been shattered. All of this misery and turmoil – every single bit of it – was down to the rapacious greed of an unregulated financial industry who sucked the economy dry and then had the temerity to ask us to bail them out or die.

This wealthy minority of money-obsessed gamblers and con-men (or “motherfuckers”, if you want the correct term) essentially gang-raped the world’s economy for their own material gain and sent the globe into a depression-risking downspin and yet, yesterday, when the President finally announced his plans – at long last; a dollar short and a year too late – to place some much needed restrictions on the out of control banking industry, they responded by sending a petulant and unrepentant message to the Whitehouse that, if he dare tell them to curb and regulate their greed, there would once again be hell to pay.

The worse thing is, the media actually reported this bullshit tantrum as news. A bunch of out of control wealth-addicts get told they’re going to have some restrictions placed over their previously unfettered playground of destruction and they throw their toys out of the pram in protest? Good. It’s time these fat-cat motherfuckers felt some of the same ramifications from what they’ve done as the rest of us, instead of thinking that cutting their bonuses down to a measly $498,000 per person counts as suffering!

David Cameron today cynically used the recent case of two school-aged brothers from Edlington violently torturing a nine year old and eleven year old boy as proof that Britain under Labour has fallen into “social recession”. The case was horrific – the work of two very disturbed young sadists who left their victims for dead after 90 minutes of reprehensible cruelty – but the argument that this anomalous case of horror is a sign of the times under Labour must be dismissed as spurious when we remember that the equally horrific Jamie Bulger case (in which a much younger boy – a two year old – was actually murdered by his equally sadistic young attackers) happened in 1993, under a Tory government in its fourteenth year of power.

If anything, under Labour, society has gotten better by Cameron’s preposterous argument, because the Edlington victims survived whereas Jamie Bulger did not.

The use of this meaningless and emotively charged example is hollow opportunism at its most base and ridiculous, and it is a travesty of the highest proportions that the ghastly ordeal of two unfortunate children is being exploited like this by a man who thinks himself suitable to be our next leader.

Finally, if you didn’t think that corporations ruled the world already, well…they will do pretty soon. The US Supreme Court, this week, made a landmark ruling to remove the limits corporations previously faced on how much they could spend to elect and defeat candidates running in US elections. That’s right – multi-billion dollar corporations can now pay whatever they want to the campaigns of the candidate of their choice to ensure that the “right” guy gets into office.

Oh functioning democracy – we hardly knew ye…

Technorati Tags: Throwin' Out The Trash,Simon Cowell,Haiti,Obama,Banks,Edlington,Supreme Court,Capitalism,David Cameron,Links,UK Politics,US Politics

Who’s Responsible? We Fucking Are…

2010-01-20T18:42:00.001Z

The Cadbury plot thickens further today as it transpires one of the central banks lending Kraft Foods the money to buy out the company is none-other than the Royal Bank of Scotland – you remember, the bank we tax-payers bailed out last year and thus, technically, own?

As Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, said to Gordon Brown during today’s Prime Minister’s Question Time: “When British taxpayers bailed out the banks, they would never have believed that their money would now be used to put British people out of work. Isn't that just plain wrong?"

I’d like to take that question further – when British tax-payers bailed out the banks, shouldn’t have the government, the opposition, or the Liberal Democrats have ensured that with that money came strict conditions and regulation that the banks were forced to follow? Shouldn’t our “ownership” have actually meant something, and shouldn’t it still mean something – for instance, shouldn’t we, as RBS owners, be able to refuse to give Kraft Foods the loan?

Technorati Tags: Cadbury Buy-Out,Cadbury,Gordon Brown,Kraft Food,Business,Capitalism,Banks,Links,Nick Clegg,UK Politics

Why (Sadly) The Election of Scott Brown Really Means Nothing

2010-01-20T12:30:00.000Z

There are two things that are making me crazy about yesterday’s election of Republican, Scott Brown, to the Massachusetts Senate seat formerly occupied by Ted Kennedy.

First, of course, is the very fact that those idiots in Massachusetts voted in a Republican. Especially a Republican committed to blocking healthcare reform of any kind.

What the fuck happened to the Massachusetts I know and love? The shitty healthcare deal on the table right now is the direct result of Republicans like Brown interfering with it and getting their twisted way. The idea of adding more bad-will to the already tainted mix is just depressing.

That said, the second thing making me crazy about the Brown election is the idea that his victory means something significant regarding Obama’s ability to get difficult bills passed through the Senate.

Yes, without a doubt it means that the hallowed 60/40 majority is no longer in effect. But let’s be honest, folks – what exactly has Obama done to take advantage of that unstoppable 60/40 majority thus far? The Democrats have achieved pretty much nothing of any worth during Obama’s first year in office.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are still ongoing, as illegal and as unjustified as ever, only now there has been a brand new troop surge, intensifying the war, and extending it across the Afghan border into Pakistan.

The banks were given billions of dollars with absolutely no strings attached. People continued to lose their homes, their jobs, and meanwhile the banks are bouncing back into excessive profit – producing multi-thousand dollar bonuses for their executives whilst continuing to offer no credit to the poor. What happened to helping Main Street instead of Wall Street? What happened to regulating the banks?

And what happened to that commitment to the environment we heard so much about on the campaign trail? Copenhagen, mainly due to U.S. opposition and wrangling, was a disaster. And where are all those “green” jobs Obama promised? For that matter – where are all the jobs Obama promised? You know, the ones that would be paid for by raising the level of income tax for those earning $250,000 and above?

Why has the PATRIOT ACT not been repealed? Why is Guantanamo still open? Why have basic human rights not been restored to America?

And healthcare. Well, let’s talk about healthcare, shall we? How a President, voted in on a mandate of change – specifically regarding healthcare reform – and with a majority in both houses, in a country where, according to ALL available polling data, single-payer, universal healthcare was the most popular choice and number one demand of its citizens, still managed to come away from negotiations with a gutted, ball-less, love letter to the insurance industry? No single payer. No public option. Hell – not even any state-funded abortions anymore. If this has been the best that Obama could do with his “unbeatable” 60/40 majority, I think the presence of Scott Brown in the Senate now won’t really change things all that much.

The Democrats may have lost their filibuster-proof majority with the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts last night, but they lost their ability to use it a long, long time ago. One year ago today, to be exact: when a charismatic vessel of empty rhetoric and lies got sworn-in in front of cheering crowds and we all were fooled again.

Technorati Tags: US Politics,Obama,Scott Brown,Republicans,Massachusetts,Democrats,Healthcare Bill,Senate

Forget the Banker’s Bonuses – Cadbury’s Boss Makes £12m Whilst Workers Fear for Their Jobs…

2010-01-20T08:35:00.001Z

Don’t worry Cadbury workers – you may all lose your jobs over the next few months, now that the company has been sold off to Kraft Foods, but at least chief executive, Todd Stitzer, will be making £12m from the deal.

“After more than 25 years at the firm, 56-year-old Stitzer is also sitting on a £15m pension pot that promises to pay out £1.5m a year when he retires.” says the Guardian. This coming after “the group's chairman Roger Carr admitted he had put shareholders first and job losses were inevitable.”

Again - “principled capitalism” anyone?

Technorati Tags: Cadbury Buy-Out,Cadbury,Kraft Food,Capitalism,Anti Capitalism,Bournville,Business,Guardian,Links,UK Politics,Principled Capitalism

Dairy Milked

2010-01-19T20:14:00.001Z

Today I haven’t been able to get a particular film out of my head: Michael Moore’s debut documentary, Roger and Me.

In that film, Moore attempts to get an explanation from then-General Motors CEO, Roger Smith, as to why he closed down several car manufacturing factories in his hometown of Flint, Michigan – costing over 30,000 jobs and financially ruining the city. As he does this, he paints a very sad and depressing picture of how the closure of these auto-plants led to the painful collapse of Flint’s economy, community, and pride. The lesson is simple: once upon a time the GM factories were the economic and cultural heart of the city of Flint; once those factories were destroyed though, so was Flint.

The reason this film keeps on haunting me today, is because this morning I woke up to the news that Cadbury, after four months of allegedly fighting for its independence, finally succumbed to a £12bn take-over bid from American food company, Kraft Food.

The Cadbury factory is within walking distance from my house; a house which was actually built, in the late 1800s, for Cadbury workers to live in.

The local train station around here, is proudly painted a shade of Cadbury’s trademarked purple; the local supermarkets stock special “local deals” on Cadbury’s products; tourists come from far and wide to visit the nearby “Cadbury World”; and a short walk away from where I live, the quaint and idyllic Bournville Village, where I so often take afternoon walks, simply would not exist had not Richard and George Cadbury, the sons of the company’s original owner, not bought up the old Bournbrook estate and created it.

In other words, as with Flint, Michigan and General Motors, the area in which I live is inextricably linked to the industrial goings on at the local factory: Cadbury provides jobs for people in the community, draws visitors to the area, and makes the air around our streets smell distinctly like Dairy Milk chocolate. The idea of it being sold to the highest bidder therefore, purely for profit, leaves me extremely worried about what the future might bring.

Unlike a lot of other corporations in the world, the Cadbury brand, coming as it did from the strong Quaker traditions of its founders, was theoretically more than just about making money. Guided by an underlying business philosophy that was driven by something deeper than the usual free-market capitalist dogmas, Cadbury purported to care for its workers, care for the local community, and generally adhere to what chief executive, Todd Stitzer recently called its unique form of “principled capitalism”.

The ramifications of selling the business to a company who do not share these same ethical principles and underlying philosophies, could well be significant, and damning to the town in which I live.

That said, one has to question exactly how “principled” Cadbury’s latter-day “principled capitalism” really was? When Kraft first approached the company in late August/early September last year and began its hostile takeover, a lot of noise was made about the heritage, values, and unique position of the company both in terms of public goodwill and its ethical practices. If any buy-out were to take place, we were told, it would have to be about more than just money. Jobs would have to be protected, traditions maintained, ethics adhered to. “We will continue to execute our strategy as an independent standalone company” said Stitzer, “unless someone comes along with a compelling offer, and I mean compelling.”

What he meant by “compelling”, it turned out, did not mean job protection, or a guarantee that Cadbury’s “principled capitalism” would remain in place. All “compelling” really meant, it turned out, was Kraft raising its proposed share-price offer up ever-so-slightly, from 770 pence a share, to 850 pence a share. A difference of eighty pence.

Once the money was good, and all shareholders would be guaranteed a tidy profit from the sale, all that other stuff – you know, the “principled” capitalism – was thrown out the window.

Truth be told, that isn’t necessarily Cadbury’s fault. It is more a fundamental problem with capitalism.

Under the current system of capitalism, public companies have a legal obligation to their shareholders to make them as much profit as is possible. If I am an executive of a company and reject a highly profitable business opportunity that would make my shareholders a lot of money, I will have acted in breach of the law and against the best interests of my shareholders, even if I chose to reject that opportunity based on arguably higher principles of ethics. Capitalism doesn’t care about rationales like that, and shareholders don’t want to hear that you are saying no to an opportunity to let them double their investment just because you want to ensure silly things like jobs, commitments to Fair-Trade, and the continued health of a particular local community. So once Kraft increased their offer and the shareholders were offered a 850 pence jackpot, Cadbury legally had no choice but to recommend the sale go through – principled capitalism be damned.

One has to wonder about the value of an economic system like that: one which literally leaves no room for higher principles and reduces everything to the bottom-line. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been fighting against capitalism ever since I was old enough to understand it – it’s not that its a good system gone bad, its that it is a system which is inherently flawed, and incapable of prioritizing the things that are truly important to a society if they ever get in the way of a tiny minority of people making some money.

So as with Flint, Michigan and General Motors, Cadbury unions now fear that up to 30,000 jobs may be at risk as a result of the proposed deal with Kraft.

That was the exact number of job-losses it took for Flint to start to crumble.

Because of the amount of money needed to make the deal impossible for Cadbury to refuse, Kraft is going to be about £22bn in debt going into its new operations in Bournville. In the past, the company have had a savage record for job-slashing and aggressive cost-cutting measures when it needed to reduce its debts: between 2004 and 2008, according to the union, Unite, Kraft shed 19,000 jobs and shut down 35 sites in order to save money and pay the bills. That jobs at the Cadbury factory are in serious trouble, therefore, is basically beyond a doubt.

For the moment though, the factory remains open, albeit in a state of pre-emptive mourning. It is unlikely that Kraft will shut down the place immediately, if it shuts it down at all – but what is clear is that the local community is now on edge, not knowing exactly how this story will end. I went for a walk this afternoon, as I often do during the weekdays, and as I walked past the Cadbury’s buildings there was a look of shock and fear on the faces of workers outside. Usually, at lunchtime, the grounds surrounding Cadbury’s are full of happily chatting people eating sandwiches and sharing jokes and stories. Not today. Today there are just grim smokers and news-teams. Everywhere I look there are cameras being set up, men running frantically around with tripods, reporters interviewing locals, journalists preparing for their close-ups... Outside the main offices, someone has attached two tiny Union Jacks to the entranceway in a futile attempt at denying the new American owners their claim.

The superstitious among you might find it interesting to note that, in late January 2009 – about a year ago today, and long after twelfth night had passed – Christmas trees were still up inside these same main offices, shining brightly into the night.

Keeping Christmas decorations up after Epiphany is supposed to bring you bad luck. I remember saying to friends and family at the time: if anything bad happens to Cadbury in this recession, it’s those Christmas tree’s fault.

I didn’t really believe that – I still don’t. It’s just stupid superstition. But I did find it interesting to note that, this year, the trees disappeared promptly on January 6th: certainly someone at Cadbury must have been thinking about it.

Yet the year they avoided the supposed “bad luck”, thirteen days later, they were sold.

Well, almost.

As yet, there has still been no official “sale”, of course – merely the recommendation of a sale by management to the shareholders: the fucking over of entire communities is not without its formalities.

But anyone who has ever watched capitalism at work, principled or not, will know that the rest is now just a rubber-stamping: it is only ever very rarely that shareholders refuse themselves the chance to make money. Rarer still are the occasions when shareholders refuse to make money in order to save jobs and preserve a local community.

What do they care?

They got their 80 pence extra per share.

They got their 10 pence dividend.

And so, after a year of already watching one side of my local neighbourhood fall slowly victim to the recession – with once-thriving shops gradually becoming derelict and boarded up, and former restaurants and take-aways shutting their doors one night and never opening them again – I now get to watch the same thing happen all over again on the other side of the canal.

Ain’t capitalism grand?

Ain’t “principled” capitalism even better?

Technorati Tags: UK Politics,Cadbury,Cadbury Buy-Out,Kraft Food,Bournville,Capitalism,Michael Moore,Roger and Me,Flint,Michigan,Business,Corporate,Hostile Takeover

Cold-Snap Election

2010-01-19T20:00:00.000Z

During the recent snowmageddon that hit the UK a few weeks ago, I wrote this sketch as a submission for last week’s episode of Newsjack on BBC Radio 7. It didn’t get on the air, but I still think it’s funny. So here, for your edification and entertainment is a random political comedy sketch about the snow…

Cold-Snap Election

By Daniel McKee

JUPP: The most shocking news of the last week came from Westminster, when it transpired that, in a bold political move, Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for a January 6^th snap election, and nobody heard him.

The news, given at an ill-attended Cabinet meeting on the evening of January 5^th, was missed by most major broadcasters, newspapers and websites, due to the much higher priority given to stories about snow. Even the Conservative Party and Liberal Democrats were unaware that an election was going on.

BROWN: I think that settles the argument

JUPP: Said a victorious Brown from the doorstep of Number 10 the following morning. Though, at the time, nobody really knew what particular argument he was talking about, and so quickly went back to looking at pictures of snowmen and sledding taken on mobile phones.

Whilst some critics are calling the move “cynical”, others are praising the strategy.

ADVISOR: What Brown did was a stroke of genius!

JUPP: Said one senior advisor.

ADVISOR: He heard about the weather during a privileged MET Office briefing and went straight on the offensive. Even if voters had known it was Election Day they wouldn’t have been able to get out and vote: if they weren’t already snowed in, the majority of the schools we traditionally use as polling stations were closed. It was brilliant!”

JUPP: In total there were only thirty-six votes cast on Election Day, all in favour of Mr. Brown’s party, and all sent in by text message from Whitehall.

MANDELSON: It’s a referendum by the British people!

JUPP: Said Peter Mandelson.

ACADEMIC: It’s not even legal.

JUPP: Said one leading academic.

When the news finally came through that he had lost a General Election he hadn’t even known was taking place, a red-faced David Cameron was left almost speechless:

CAMERON: Inquiries shall have to be made.

JUPP: But there are already rumblings within the party about a new leadership race now that the Tory’s latest hopeful delivered the Conservatives their third consecutive electoral defeat since 1997.

SOURCE: It’s done him a lot of damage.

JUPP: Admitted one source close to the Cameron camp.

SOURCE: You can get away with a lot of things as a politician these days – mistresses, duck ponds, illegal and unjustified wars – but being less interesting than snow to the majority of the population? I don’t think he’ll come back from that.

Technorati Tags: UK Politics,General Election,Gordon Brown,David Cameron,Snow,Comedy,Newsjack,BBC

The 10:23 Overdose Protest – And Why I’m Skeptical

2010-01-19T16:28:00.001Z

On Saturday, January 30th, skeptics groups all across the country are planning a seemingly very worthy protest against the worldwide scam that is homeopathy. Specifically, they are protesting against UK pharmacy chain, Boots, and their sale of homeopathic remedies.

At first, when I heard that some mass public-awareness-raising actions were being planned in opposition to homeopathy, I was eager to join in. Homeopathy has long seemed self-evidently preposterous to me, and the fact that it is endorsed and promoted by a supposed chemist like Boots as legitimate medicine is a crime. The idea that a sugar pill dripped with the vastly diluted “memory” of a illness could cure you (so diluted, in fact, that most of the time there is literally nothing left of the original element) is not only prima facie ridiculous, but has been demonstrably proven as ineffective time after time in scientific studies.

The idea of knocking some sense into the people at Boots, therefore, and letting them know we will not stand for their malicious profiteering off the vulnerable and ill-informed was appealing. I haven’t been to a good protest in a long time, and the idea of standing up for rationalism and science against the forces of ignorance and superstition seemed as good a cause as any.

But then I heard what the actual protest was going to entail, and I completely changed my mind.

On January 30th, at 10:23am, across twelve British cities, skeptics groups intend on buying up various homeopathic remedies sold at Boots branches and then publically “overdosing” on them, to prove that there is nothing in them but sugar.

On the surface, this seems to have all the elements necessary for a successful protest – it has a cause, a righteousness, a gimmick and a visible action that will help highlight and expose the issue. The more I thought about it though, the more I began to see that this strategy is misguided, and that it is less of a meaningful protest than it is a lame publicity stunt.

Firstly – I think the idea of protesting against the homeopathy industry by buying a whole bunch of homeopathy products is ridiculous. Three hundred people are supposed to be doing this across Britain. Here in Birmingham, we were told to bring ten pounds each for the occasion. Essentially, therefore, the big plan is to fight homeopathy by giving the industry an extra £3000 from people who normally wouldn’t buy their products. Yeah - that’ll teach ‘em!

If anything, this approach shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the economic principles which guide the decisions of companies like Boots into what they choose, or choose not to, stock. At bottom, Boots sells homeopathic stuff, because people buy homeopathic stuff. The aim of the protests, therefore, should be to make people stop buying homeopathic stuff through education, petition and boycott. What the proposed strategy of the 10:23 campaign will do instead, however, is show Boots shareholders that, in January, 2010, homeopathic products at Boots did very well indeed, and earned the company at least an extra £3000!

As companies have a legal obligation to make their shareholders money, so long as homeopathic products are making Boots money, then Boots will be legally obliged to keep selling them. Their accountants won’t care that the £3000 this month came from protesters, they will simply reflect the success of the homeopathy range this quarter and want to repeat that success again.

But I suppose this is the point of the actual protest – the cost of the remedies is a necessary evil for the big mass action that follows, which will show people how useless homeopathy is.

You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs and though, yes, a downside to the methodology might be a momentary increase in Boots’ profits in the short-term – in the long-term, now educated by the “overdose” demonstration, people will stop buying homeopathic remedies in their droves, and the losses to business as a result of this will far outweigh the small but regrettable gain the company made one day in January.

This, however, is flawed thinking, because I don’t think that the “overdose” demonstration – though surely quirky and “newsworthy” enough to draw attention – is actually going to change many minds when it comes to people who already use, and buy, homeopathic remedies. The reason for this, is because the idea of an “overdose” of the remedies in question – though certainly showing how harmless these sugar-pills might be – is actually disanalogous to the way that people who use these products actually take them.

The argument a skeptic really has against a person who believes that homeopathy works, is not whether or not large doses of the product would be harmful or ineffective, but about whether or not the remedy actually works as prescribed.

To the idiots who take homeopathic sugar-pills whenever they have a migraine, an asthma attack, or suffer from chronic insomnia, it will not matter a jot that we have ingested an entire bottle of the things and suffered no ill-effects.

What exactly has that proved?

All that they know, is that when they take the pills “sensibly”, as directed, and in the “correct” dosage: for them, placebo or no, it works.

In many ways, battling against the users of homeopathy and preaching the virtues of real medicine and science is like arguing against religious people if you’re an atheist: at some point in the argument you realize that you will never get through to these people because you are using completely different systems with which to process and analyse the available facts. I, the atheist, am using logic and reason, and they, the theist, are using faith and belief. I can tell them a million ways in which it is clear that God doesn’t exist, but they can tell me a million times more that none of that matters, because they have faith.

Now I’m not for a minute defending that kind of idiocy – in my opinion the theists who ignore logical argument for faith and dogma are morons, pure and simple. But I am saying that sometimes you have to be aware of who your audience is, and work out what the best way is to circumvent their particular defences so that you don’t just spend your time banging your head up against a wall.

When it comes to homeopathy, it already seems clear that battling believers with science and reason doesn’t work. The science and reason is already irrefutable, and has been told to them often – yet still they keep on believing.

Why?

Not because they have been convinced via logic and argument, but because they have logic-busting, rationale-ignoring, anecdotal evidence that trumps all science and will never ever sway: you may well say that in double blind lab tests all of this stuff is demonstrable bullshit, but when I had pneumonia last winter and took some homeopathic medicine, I got better. So there.

Logic is closed for business.

I simply don’t think that hearing about how a bunch of skeptics overdosed on an intentional excess of homeopathic remedies will make these people any more likely to reassess their opinions than any other fact they have previously had thrown in their face. They’ll simply shrug their shoulders, note that the protesters weren’t taking the stuff properly, as directed, and say well, it worked for me.

As I said before – on the face of it, this is a righteous battle, and a worthy idea. It’s execution, however, is clumsy and ill-thought out, and on January 30th, at 10:23am, I will be not be participating in this protest because I believe, much like homeopathy itself, there is nothing in it.

Technorati Tags: Skepticism,10:23,Boots,Homeopathy,Protest,Overdose,UK Politics,10:23 Homeopathy Overdose,January 30th,Rationalism,Science

The X-Factorization of British Politics II: The Quickening

2009-12-15T20:12:00.001Z

“We would have a red telephone in the middle…at anytime, someone from Number 10 could call in…”

Two months ago I wrote about what I called the “X-Factorization of British Politics” and now it seems that things are only going to get worse.

On the BBC programme, Newsnight, this week, Simon Cowell, the mastermind behind the pop-music show in question, X-Factor, revealed that in 2010 he hopes to bring a political version of the X-Factor format to our TV screens in a series of referendum-type shows leading up to the General Election.

In essence, the premise is simple: an important political issue would be presented to the voting public each week – immigration, the war in Afghanistan, knife crime, etc – and advocates from both sides of the debate – professional and public – would put forward their arguments. The issue would then be voted on by television viewers and a “winning” position declared.

But the simple premise of the plan hides its equally simple flaws, especially when Cowell himself describes what he wants to see as a “bear pit” rather than an American-style formal debate.

Complex issues require a serious level of argument and analysis if they are to be meaningfully discussed, and any real debate on controversial subjects must be first and foremost informed. Hearing what “the public” thinks is all good and well – indeed, it is the essence of a functioning democracy – but hearing what an informed and educated public believe, in light of all available evidence and the substantiated claims of experts, is one thing. Hearing what an un-informed and knee-jerk public believe, after hearing only the condensed and sensationalistic TV sound-bite versions of those issues, reduced to a simple “for or against” dichotomy is the ugly politics of mob rule.

Cowell himself knows this of course. In perhaps a damning Freudian slip, when trying to explain his motivations for making such a show and saying that he was more interested in what the public think than what politicians think, what he actually said was: “what I’m always interested in is what the public fear…” before correcting himself and saying “…think on certain issues”.

Informed public debate on a popular Saturday night TV show would be a wonderful thing. But after seeing Cowell’s work on the X-Factor for so many years – subtly manipulating the public into voting exactly the way that he wants them to and dividing the country up into fabricated tabloid outrages – the idea of this Cowell-conducted political “bear pit” occurring in the weeks before a hugely important election is very worrying indeed.

The Next Phase Is Beginning

2009-12-11T20:51:00.001Z

In case there is any doubt that the latest phase of the murderous war on terror is a propaganda battle designed to prepare us for an inevitable invasion of some kind into Pakistan, check out this story about how Blackwater, and the CIA, are already there.

Technorati Tags: War on Terror,Blackwater,Pakistan,Afghanistan,Afpak,Links,Politics

Priorities

2009-12-10T15:11:00.001Z

On September 11th, 2001, just under 3,000 Americans were killed in horrific terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

As a result, a decision was made to go to war against Afghanistan (and eventually, Iraq). Wars that have cost the US tax-payers nearly a trillion dollars thus far, killed over five thousand US soldiers, and slaughtered over a hundred thousand Iraqi and Afghan civilians.

A trillion dollars, and an estimated two trillion more to cover the rest of the post-war and ongoing costs, according to economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. Nearly two 9/11’s worth again of soldier fatalities, and over thirty-three 9/11’s worth of innocent civilians killed – and all because, on September 11th, 2001, almost 3,000 people were killed.

Yet did you know that there are an estimated forty-five thousand premature deaths in the United States each year because of poor healthcare provision? That, on that estimate, because of extortionate costs and profit-motivated private insurers, in the eight years since nearly 3,000 people died on 9/11, 360,000 Americans died because they couldn’t afford basic healthcare?

There is no denying that 9/11 was a tragedy, but how come we have torn the world apart, murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people in retaliation, pissed away a trillion dollars, and created a whole new generation of America-hating terrorists because of the outrage of 19 lunatics killing 3,000 people one crazy day in September, and yet the systematic killing over 45,000 people a year is a crime that it has taken so long to get around to fixing?

Worse – how can we justify the ludicrous waste of resources and life that the war on terror has proven to be, and yet claim that universal healthcare coverage that could save the lives of fifteen 9/11’s worth of people a year is too expensive a proposition?

As a dual UK/US citizen who has sat from the pleasantly NHS-covered shores of Great Britain and watched America faff about so uselessly to come up with a viable healthcare plan for so long, the priorities of Washington politicians truly sicken me.

30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

A couple of billion dollars more pissed away into the wind.

Expand the war into Pakistan.

Rattle sabres at Iran.

Because the 3,000 people who died on live TV will always take precedence over the 45,000 faceless, nameless annual casualties on America’s unnecessary and immoral war on itself.

Technorati Tags: 9/11,War on Terror,Afghanistan,Iraq,Healthcare,US Politics,Politics

A Change We Can Deceive In…

2009-12-03T19:27:00.001Z

So President Obama has committed 30,000 more troops to the unjustified and immoral war in Afghanistan, proving once and for all that it doesn’t matter who you vote for – the interests of power and business always rule the day.

Worse: this is just the 30,000 troops that he’s telling us about.

Who knows what the true total will be once all the private military contractors like Blackwater (sorry: Xe, as they are called today) are added to the mix?

It’s also only the 30,000 more American troops we are talking about here, exclusive of all the other additional surges the President has demanded from all other “allies” involved in the “Coalition of the Killing” currently fighting in Afghanistan (the UK, for example, will be sending at least 500 more too).

Of course, what we’re supposed to feel about this 30,000 number, is that it shows a tremendous restraint in comparison to the gung-ho, “kill ‘em all” approach of the previous administration. Sure, Obama’s sending 30,000 new soldiers into a war we have no business being in, but the General McChrystal wanted him to send 40,000. Even the media got it wrong when they spent the week predicting 34,000 – Obama has undercut the General’s demands by 10,000 soldiers, and the media consensus by 4,000 – what a guy!

He also spent a very long time coming to this decision.

We are supposed to feel – as has been repeated in every media report I have read, seen, or listened to since this decision was made – that this was a decision Obama didn’t want to have to make; that he struggled long and hard with his conscience over this one, but the facts, in the end, were just too convincing to ignore…

Perhaps that idea would hold a little more weight had Obama’s long and torturous soul-seeking not ended in the entirely predictable outcome of an Afghanistan decision that completely conforms to over sixty years worth of historically consistent US Foreign Policy?

I remember a girlfriend I had once. I knew I needed to break-up with her, but when I told her about it she told me that maybe I just needed a little more time to think about things? She gave me the night to re-assess our relationship and said she’d be back in the morning for my real, thought-out, answer.

I knew all along that my answer wouldn’t change – I wanted to break up with the girl and the relationship was done. But I also knew that the appearance of deliberation was important to her. So I stayed in my room – not really thinking things over at all; just playing on my Playstation whilst she waited in her room hoping I would come to my senses.

When we met the next morning, the illusion of deliberation complete, my decision to end the relationship carried a lot more gravitas to the girl in question – this wasn’t just a knee-jerk decision I’d come to after one or two bad dates, I’d thought about it, damn it! It had pained me to come to my conclusions…

The whole idea that Obama legitimately wrestled with this issue is an insult to anyone actually aware of US Foreign Policy since the end of the Second World War. Obama has simply done what every President before him has done for nearly seven decades. Namely, whatever is best for elite power and business interests; human rights, international law, and the domestic population be damned!

Of course the next argument meant to salve my outrage is that, at the same time Obama committed yet more troops to this ridiculous war, he unveiled a timetable for withdrawal by the end of 2011.

Well, first off, excuse me for not being tremendously overjoyed at the news that this murderous and unnecessary war is now guaranteed to continue at least one and a half more years. We could pull every single soldier out of that country today and be no less safe than we currently are – if anything, an immediate withdrawal, along with a publically made apology for invading an innocent country in the first place and the prosecution of George W Bush as a war criminal, would make us far safer, because the massive al-Qaeda problem we allegedly have now in Afghanistan and Pakistan is entirely the result of our having invaded both there and Iraq since 2001, as consecutive National Intelligence Estimates have concluded – but by committing to an escalation of the war – even a limited one – instead of a withdrawal, Obama has committed himself to both the continued occupation and massacre of a previously innocent country, and the assured radicalization of the native population into the terrorists of tomorrow; a self-perpetuating war machine.

Secondly – how exactly does Obama know that we will be out in 2011? Escalating the war at this stage is a completely unknown variable: will our escalation be met with escalation from the other side? Will things get progressively worse – as they did in Vietnam – until yet more troops are needed, and more pseudo-justifications for continued occupation are explored?

Let us not forget what I said above – the problem we are facing in Afghanistan now, is entirely the result of the initial 2001 invasion. That invasion was illegitimate. At the time – and arguably still today – there was no evidence of Afghanistan’s involvement in 9/11 (only that its alleged mastermind, bin Laden, was “hiding” there). The Afghanis agreed to hand bin Laden over as soon as they were given evidence to support the claim that he was culpable for the 9/11 attacks. No evidence came, and instead the bombs started falling.

If we are already justifying our continued occupation of the country on the basis of a situation that we have created ourselves, what is to stop us from staying long past 2011 if the additional 30,000 troops in the region cause even more complications that we then have to deal with?

The answer is nothing. As always: what elite power wants, elite power shall get. I’m sure that, if troops do stay past 2011, Obama will explain that decision to us too, with all the gravity that accompanied this one. He will dwell long and hard on it. He will seek advisement from experts and Generals. He will play his role perfectly, maintain the illusion of “change”, and then – with his fabulous skill at oratory – he shall spin us the latest eloquent version of the exact same line of bullshit the Whitehouse has been shovelling out since 1945.

And even if the troops do leave Afghanistan in 2011; where will he send them to next?

I said throughout the Obama campaign that my central worry about this President – despite the obvious fact that no President in history has truly brought with them the change that they have promised – was that he was being portrayed as a dove on Iraq whilst his tremendously hawkish position on Afghanistan was often ignored.

Obama, wrongfully perceived as the candidate for “peace”, spoke a lot about getting the troops out of Iraq – but he did so only via the argument that Iraq was a “distraction” from the real problem at hand: Afghanistan.

Obama never once questioned the legitimacy of the war in that country, and often he spoke of his desire to see attentions turned more thoroughly to it. Indeed, he was implicitly arguing for troop escalation all along: we need to get our soldiers out of the unnecessary war in Iraq, so that we can put them where they need to be: Afghanistan. That, my friends, is escalation. That is taking the troops out of Iraq not so that they can go home and see their families or return to civilian life, but so that they can be re-assigned to a different – less controversial –unjustified war.

So the troops may well leave Afghanistan in 2011…but will they be leaving Afghanistan because the war will finally be over? Because it will be acknowledged – at long last – that they were only ever causing more harm than good by being there?

No.

They will likely be leaving Afghanistan in 2011 because intelligence will tell us that al-Qaeda has now moved further into Pakistan, and the soldiers currently deployed in Afghanistan would be much better served relocating over the border. The US is, after all, already funding private military contractors in the region to fight the war in Pakistan…by 2011 the country should be nicely softened up for a full-blown invasion.

And if Pakistan won’t do, there’s always Iran nearby…or North Korea…or we could always give good old Syria a go. You see, until we have a President who actually stands up and acknowledges that this whole bogus war on terror is a crime, our troops will never be truly “coming home”, they will simply be re-fuelling and re-focusing for the next phase of this seemingly endless bloodbath.

30,000 more troops to Afghanistan may not seem like a lot compared to the numbers already there fighting – or compared to the much higher number demanded by General McChrystal – and getting troops out by the end of 2011 might even seem like real progress. But what Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan really means, is that Obama is just another in a long line of confidence-tricksters who have manipulated their way to the Oval Office and pursued the consistent and unchanged policies of American imperialism whilst pretending to offer us change. It means that he endorses this war, he endorses its duplicitous justificatory principles, and the fundamental wrongs of the war on terror will not be addressed during his Presidency, if they are ever addressed at all.

President Obama committed 30,000 more troops to the war in Afghanistan this week, and by doing so he showed us that the Bush years are far from over, and that democracy in the twenty-first century is as meaningless as slogans for change.

Technorati Tags: Politics,US Politics,War on Terror,War,Obama,Afghanistan,9/11,Democracy,Foreign Policy,Troop Surge

The Sacking of David Nutt…

2009-11-22T12:15:00.001Z

Check out THIS LINK to Scanner E-Zine for the first proper "The Jail Where Terrorists Make The Rules" column I've written in about six years - thoughts on the sacking of Professor David Nutt, UK drugs policy in general, why I support legalization of all drugs, despite being straightedge, and why the sacking of David Nutt points to a much deeper problem in government (that has life or death ramifications) as time after time agenda-driven policy is put ahead of science and empirical fact when making legislation...

The Jail Where Terrorists Make the Rules was my long-running political column that I wrote, first for Smokin’ Troll online ‘zine, and then for the print fanzine, Scanner, between 1997 and 2003. I’m now glad to announce that it is back as a regular, bi-monthly feature, over at Scanner’s online home. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Politics,UK Politics,David Nutt,David Nutt Sacking,Drugs,Legalization,Legislation,Straightedge,ACMD,Alan Johnson,Science,War on Terror

If you liked Agent Orange…you’ll LOVE this…

2009-11-17T09:30:00.000Z

Here’s some of the real legacy of our illegal and unjustified war in Iraq.

It turns out: “Doctors in Iraq's war-ravaged enclave of Falluja are dealing with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants and a spike in early life cancers that may be linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting.”

According to the Guardian’s excellent (and tragic) piece, published on Saturday - Huge rise in birth defects in Falluja | World news | guardian.co.uk - “The rise in frequency is stark – from two admissions a fortnight a year ago to two a day now. ‘Most are in the head and spinal cord, but there are also many deficiencies in lower limbs,’ [Falluja general hospital's director and senior specialist, Dr Ayman Qais] said. ‘There is also a very marked increase in the number of cases of less than two years [old] with brain tumours. This is now a focus area of multiple tumours.’”

Oh, and don’t forget about the “baby born with two heads”…

Where are the poppies for the “flipper babies”?

Technorati Tags: War on Terror,Iraq,Falluja,Birth Defects,Links,Agent Orange,US Politics,UK Politics,Politics,war

David Cameron’s (Empty) Pledges

2009-11-16T19:00:00.001Z

So I received a hilarious (and glossy) newsletter the other day from my local Conservative councillors here in Birmingham, and on the back of this dull piece of dross about 20mph zones and anti-social behaviour orders was the most hilarious political “filler” I have ever seen.

Entitled “David Cameron’s Pledges”, this third of a page is, I assume, meant to be the early yawning-signs of an ambitious party coming to life before a general election, but all it really is, once they are actually thought about, is a collection of empty platitudes that are as hollow as they are meaningless.

“If you save money your whole life, …you will be rewarded” goes the first one. Well, great. But that’s not really David Cameron’s pledge is it? That’s the pledge of basic economics. If you save money your whole life, the reward is all that money you saved. End of story.

“If you are frightened, …we will protect you”

Well…I hope so. That’s kind of the government’s job. The State provides police, armies, social services…you know, all the things that we use to protect ourselves against the things that we fear, and these same protective social institutions have existed under twelve years of a Labour government too. Last I heard, I don’t recall Gordon Brown saying that a re-elected Labour government were not going to protect us in the future? Do you?

“If you want to raise a family, …we will support you.”

Yeah, because for twelve years the Labour Party have been doing their level best to dissuade us from raising our families. Since 1997, prospective mothers and fathers have become social pariahs all across the country, spat at for wanting children, reviled for keeping a pet… And all those various tax credits and benefits that Labour have implemented for working families (and that the Tories want to take away come 2010), they have been designed specifically not to support families under a Labour government.

Meanwhile, let us not forget, it was eighteen years of a neo-liberal Conservative government between 1979 and 1997 that brought us to our current situation, where it now requires two wages per family to bring home the same amount of real-term money that just one wage would have brought in during the 1970s. Ah progress, don’t it taste sour?

“If you risk your safety to stop a crime, …we will stand by you.”

Because the running theme of the past twelve years has been the Labour government jailing and condemning those who risk safety to stop a crime? Under David Cameron’s new government, I can only assume that this means he is condoning carte blanche for Watchmen-style vigilantism.

“I injured my arm hitting a cricket bat into the hoodie’s skull after he terrified our neighbourhood by…gasp…riding his bike!”

“We will stand by you! No jail! More cricket bats!”

“If you start your own business, …we will be right behind you.”

Ignoring how sinister that sounds (right behind you…lurking; right behind you…ready to skim off our 10%), again, we have the false impression that somehow the Labour government are not right behind small businesses.

Every government in living memory has paid lip service to the idea of being “behind” small businesses whilst, in reality, helping to finance the mega-corporations that crush them. The Tories did just this from ‘79 to ‘97, and Labour have continued from ‘97 to the present.

The stuff about high taxation, etc is all a misleading red herring – the real reason small businesses often fail is not because of the overheads they couldn’t afford, but because of the monolithic competition they have no feasible means to defeat!

“If you risk your life to fight for your country, …we will honour you.”

Great. Because Labour have spent the eight years of the war on terror publically spitting on soldier’s graves, haven’t they?

Any idiot can honour the dead (Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, and John Major all did it last week – callously placing poppies in “honour” of the innocent people they knowingly sent off to die in unnecessary wars to protect the economic interests of a small minority of powerful elites); the trick is keeping these people alive, not unnecessarily sending them into harm’s way.

Yes – the war on terror transpired under Labour’s watch. But let’s not forget, it was with the full, unwavering support of the Tories. And as for Iraq – we would not have been there in the first place had it not been for the Tories’ original invasion back in ‘91. A war which, technically, never ended until the 2003 invasion.

A lot of dead soldiers have been “honoured” by Conservative and Labour governments alike over the years…few have been spared their unnecessary sacrifice in the first place, and that’s the real missing pledge.

“We will reward those who take responsibility, …and care for those who can’t.”

If you’re interested in how this pledge pans out, see UK History, circa 1979 – 1997. At its heart, the guiding Conservative philosophy is simply incapable of achieving this goal. A more likely scenario, therefore, is: “we will reward those who take responsibility, …and demonize those who can’t.”

Remember kids: those who don’t remember their past are condemned to repeat it. And those who are taken in by David Cameron and his empty, meaningless pledges, will be condemned to experience a brand new, 21st Century version, of one of the 20th Century’s last great living hells.

Technorati Tags: Politics,UK Politics,Conservative Party,General Election,Advertising,Democracy,Labour Party,Propaganda,Welfare,David Cameron

How the US Funds the Taliban

2009-11-12T20:48:00.001Z

Some more depressing news from Afghanistan, courtesy of The Nation…

How the US Funds the Taliban

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan,War on Terror,Links,US Politics,Politics,Taliban,Private Contractors,Privatization

Close…but no Cigar…

2009-11-10T07:00:00.000Z

I’m still struggling to see how the American people can be happy with a lousy and complicated (not to mention entirely retrograde, vis-a-vis abortions) healthcare bill that will extend coverage to only 96% of the population, when covering 100% through a simple, government-run, universal healthcare system, akin to the British NHS, is not only possible, but the demonstrable norm is most of the developed world?

Technorati Tags: US Politics,Politics,Healthcare,House of Representatives,Healthcare Bill,Obama,Democrats,Abortion

Evolution is a Mystery

2009-11-09T19:20:00.001Z

As evolution gains another victory for sense and reason against the superstitious forces of ignorance and religion, with the announcement that the theory will soon be added to the primary school curriculum here in the UK, I feel it’s finally time to dispel a ludicrous myth that has been doing the rounds under the guise of "journalism” over the past few weeks.

"Teach both evolution and creationism say 54% of Britons" ran a headline in the Guardian on Monday, October 26th, followed by the worrying first paragraph: “More than half of British adults think that intelligent design and creationism should be taught alongside evolution in school science lessons – a proportion higher than in the US”, and for the next 24 hours, you couldn’t move online without seeing a link somewhere to this report, citing it as some kind of evidence of our intellectual downfall as a nation.

54% of people in favour of teaching creationism? What are we – America?

Well, what people didn’t seem too keen on exploring was the actual details behind this misleading headline. Namely, that the question within the Ipsos Mori survey which led to this supposed conclusion did not actually ask British adults whether or not they thought that creationism should be taught in schools alongside the theory of evolution. Rather, it asked if participants agreed or disagreed with the statement: "Evolutionary theories should be taught in science lessons in schools together with other possible perspectives, such as intelligent design and creationism."

Of the 973 people polled, about 54% said that they “agreed”.

So really, the headline is that the majority of people polled believed that evolution, not creationism, should be taught in schools, alongside theories such as “intelligent” design and creationism, which the wording of the question makes it appear are already being taught there, with evolution pitched as the interloper.

Maybe as well as adding evolution to the primary school curriculum, we might do well to add a little critical thinking and philosophy in there too, to prevent any further misunderstandings of relatively simple poll data?

Technorati Tags: Education,Evolution,Media,Creationism,Science,Religion,Statistics,Links,UK Politics,Politics,Schools

Remembrance

2009-11-08T07:00:00.000Z

Today is Remembrance Sunday, and for the first year ever, I have – intentionally – not bought a poppy.

For those who do not know, the “poppy” which I am talking about is the red, black and green, paper and plastic representation of the flower, sold each year in the UK by the British Legion, in commemoration of those killed in war. Started in 1921, following the end of the First World War, the British Legion is a charity dedicated to providing financial, social and emotional support to current or former servicemen and women, and their dependants, in the British Armed Forces. The remembrance poppy takes its symbolism from the poem of Canadian soldier and physician, John McCrae, In Flanders Field:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The idea is simple: by wearing a poppy in the weeks leading up to Remembrance Day on November 11th each year, we honour the memory of those who have died in war. Further still: by buying our poppies exclusively from the British Legion, this exercise acts as a great fundraising opportunity to collect money and look after those soldiers injured, or otherwise in financial need, after the multiple horrors of war.

In previous years, I have grudgingly worn the poppy because, although I oppose all unnecessary wars, the idea of remembering how many people have died in war seemed as good a way as any to remind people that war is a murderous and unconscionable evil that is far too often invoked by our leaders to sort out petty power squabbles and economic battles, at great and unforgiveable human cost. If wearing a stupid symbol on my jacket made a few people remember that war actually kills real people, and the couple of quid I threw into the donation bucket helped out some poor amputee soldier recover from their heinous exploitation at the hands of an uncaring government, then why the hell not?

But as eight long years of the unjustified war on terror have repeatedly shown me the same despicable spectacle each November – the very same leaders who knowingly send these manipulated and unquestioning young men and women off to needless and unnecessary wars, feigning grief and sorrow as they disingenuously lay poppy-wreaths at Cenotaphs for the fallen – I have finally decided that there are plenty of reasons why not.

“Remembering” our war dead means nothing if that remembrance does not also mean learning. Learning that war is the single most terrible thing that the state can involve its citizens in; that it must only be used as a last resort, and even then, with as much protection for non-combatants and the innocent as is possible under kill-or-be-killed conditions.

Every time I see killers in government, hypocritically wearing a poppy in remembrance of those soldiers they have essentially murdered by sending them into harm’s way for no good reason – or for all those soldier-deaths still to come, as long as our troops remain in Afghanistan – it makes me sick, and tells me that any meaning the poppy might once have had, is now gone.

Like a serial-killer who still attends church on Sunday and kneels before the cross, these empty symbols become meaningless in the absence of meaningful action.

What does “remembrance” even mean these days? For those who have friends or family who have died performing military service, the answer is obvious. But then, these people no doubt grieve and mourn for their loved ones each and every day, and do not need to be told that their tears and sorrow are somehow more appropriate on November 11th than they are on any other day of the year. For the rest of us, “remembrance” must mean learning, or else it is simply a mawkish and pointless exercise in group depression.

After the first world war, why did we remember? Well, we remembered because there was something there to learn: by remembering those who died defending our lives, we honoured the sacrifice these soldiers had made. Hopefully, we learned that our lives were precious; that their lives had been precious, and that no generation of people should ever have to go through that kind of death and destruction again.

Even then, however, the lessons – the poppies – were ignored. Twenty years later, we had the second world war and yet more precious lives were lost again.

Of course, there have arguably been no more “world wars” since WWII, and certainly none with as great a death toll, both of soldiers and civilians, so perhaps we finally did learn that lesson? On the other hand though, what has transpired in the interim decades has, perhaps, been even worse: a normalization of small-scale wars to the point that their political use is now barely even questioned anymore.

As I’ve said a hundred times: to go to war with Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 attacks on the United States was not simply the “strategic mistake” it is acknowledged to be today, it was an unjustified and immoral attack on an innocent country which had not – as a nation – committed an act of aggression against the countries which now invade it. It was the moral equivalent of, say, Russia going to war against Italy after a group of nineteen French, British and Spanish extremists flew planes into the Kremlin under orders from a lone lunatic who once took a holiday to Venice!

But even without all the faulty arguments which led us to war with Afghanistan, what was important was that, following the 9/11 attacks, the question wasn’t: “oh my god, why would somebody do this to us; how can we stop it from happening in the future?”, it was: “who are we going to kill for this; where are we going to war?”

The reason for this, is because war, in the twenty-first century, is simply what you do when some foreign country is giving you trouble: you invade (or you pay others to invade for you). So we invaded Afghanistan in 2001 the way we’d done in Iraq back in ‘91, the way we’d done in Kosovo back in ‘99; the way we’d done in the Falklands back in ‘82, and the way that America has been doing since 1945 in Korea, Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Haiti, Vietnam, Ecuador, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama…to name but a few!

Year after year, following that second world war (the lapsed sequel to that infamous “war to end all wars”) our governments continue to treat the lives and limbs of our soldiers as their personal geo-political playthings, and here, in Britain, every November 11th, they put on their poppies, bow their heads in silence, and they claim to “remember”.

So this year I have decided to opt out of the empty charade.

I honoured the fallen soldiers when I marched on London back in 2001 in opposition to the proposed war in Afghanistan; I honoured them again in 2003 when I marched with millions of other real patriots to oppose the proposed war in Iraq; I have honoured them for the full eight years of the hateful war on terror by continuing to spread the truth about our unnecessary and unjustified occupation of a country that bore no responsibility for the 9/11 attacks and I honour them still today, all these years later, as I continue to fight against these illegal and unjust wars and do my best to bring these soldiers home.

And I do all of this without a poppy. Because putting a pound into a charity box and pinning an empty gesture onto your lapel isn’t doing anything to help our soldiers. Nor is standing silently for two minutes at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month every goddamn year; such “remembrance” is futile so long as we continue to treat our living soldier’s lives with contempt and disregard.

Importantly, until we also have a day of remembrance for the true victims of war – the non-combatants; the innocent corpses of “collateral damage” our governments refuse even to acknowledge, let alone record the numbers of – then our remembrance remains incomplete. Because when soldiers aren’t truly fighting to defend us – when they are simply being used as tools by our government to carve up the world and its resources into profitable fodder for power and profit-hungry corporations – can we really call these people “heroes”? Do they not then just become killers, or, at best, misguided and manipulated manslaughterers, with innocent blood on their hands?

Where are the poppies for the hundred thousand Iraqi civilians killed since 2003? Why do the families killed in Afghanistan, for no bigger crime than having an unfortunate country-of-residence, not deserve to be honoured too?

I shall not be wearing a poppy this year, and I shall not be wearing a poppy in the future either, until this supposed day of remembrance becomes more than a photo opportunity for politicians, absolving their shame and culpability in the glow of blood-red flowers, and becomes a truly meaningful day of learning: no life should be murdered by the actions of a rapacious and blood-thirsty state; not a citizen’s, not a soldier’s, and not a civilian. War is hell. War is always hell. There is rarely any justification for this grotesque act of human hatred, and there are never any heroes; war leaves us only ever victims.

Technorati Tags: Remembrance Sunday,Remembrance Day,Poppy Appeal,British Legion,War on Terror,First World War,Second World War,Iraq,Afghanistan,UK Politics,US Politics,Politics,Anti-War

Undercover at Royal Mail: The Army Comes to Town…

2009-10-28T17:10:00.001Z

Intriguing to see the Guardian’s Steven Morris going undercover and getting a job via Manpower as one of the new Royal Mail casual workers supposedly not hired to counteract the effects of the postal strike.

Undercover at Royal Mail: parcel basketball, scabs and yorks | UK news | guardian.co.uk

More intriguing, however, is the information passed on to me from some postal worker friends: in some branches across the country, the ARMY are making visits this week to offer “employment advice” to striking workers.

Hmmm, the government supports the intentional self-destruction of Royal Mail, mass redundancies masqueraded as “modernization” and now, when the workforce is finally used up and spat out, intends to ship all the able bodies off to Afghanistan.

Is that what they call “balancing the budget” these days?

Technorati Tags: CWU,Postal Strikes,Royal Mail,Industrial Action,War on Terror,Links,Afghanistan,Army Recruitment,UK Politics,Politics

Moving The Goalpoasts of Modernization

2009-10-24T19:40:00.002+01:00

The following was sent to me by postman, Adam Brazier, for anyone wanting a real insight into what has led to the current dispute between the CWU and the Royal Mail. One man’s story of what “modernization” really means…

***

MOVING THE GOALPOSTS OF MODERNISATION
By Adam Brazier

I have worked for Royal Mail for well over a decade. In that time, I’ve seen some changes, gone the extra mile, and entered into the spirit of the change I was sold. The first was what they described as ‘The Way Forward’. This tagline soon ended when they realised the nonsensical ‘Consignia’ name-change was commercial madness. If the management had bothered to ask any of us, we would have told them, when we weren’t laughing. The Consignia thing, always struck me as a clear sign of management intentions; privatisation. After all, they wouldn’t really be able to use the ‘Royal’ bit if they were in the private sector would they?

Then they invested millions in a computer system for post office benefits payments, that didn’t work. More money wasted (and one of the real reasons they couldn’t turn a profit for years). Then attention began to turn to us, the humble donkeys, who had it easy... doing all the work. The new tagline ‘modernisation’ came into being, and we were all convinced, over a period of years, by more and more ‘team talks’, ‘briefings’ and ‘huddles’. Week on week, we were sold the big new idea, along with phrases like; ‘the way the business is going’, repeated ad nauseam as justifications for every necessary evil.

Then came the time when they took away your second delivery and Sunday collections, not to mention changing mail delivery times to long to after you’ve all gone to work. The carrot on the stick, to accept taking up to half an extra workload for zero remuneration, later in the day, was the next mantra; ‘job and finish’. The concept of job and finish, was that we would accept all this, and in return, management would turn a blind eye to us getting half hour here, or half hour there, as an incentive to get the new increased workload done, in a speedy and efficient manner. The agreements were signed. We were moving towards the future and there were to be four phases.

Before the ink had dried and while we were struggling with our new workload, a new phrase came into being; ‘we just want you to work the hours you are paid’. We never heard ‘job and finish’ again, which now gets used to somehow portray us as lazy, work-shy, corner-cutters, eager to swan off down the boozer at midday complaining that we have to work our hours. Since the revision about four years ago, when we had an extra half of our workload added on top, we have had two further ‘revisions’ in our office. And each time, we get extra work, same pay (there’s been a freeze for a while now, but we understand, these are tough times). The latest revision happened to us this last spring, I willfully took on the new round, and signed the new contract, in the spirit of change which I had been sold. A month later, I took the family away and on my return, I was called into the manager’s office; “While you were away, we had some teething problems. We’ve added two streets to your walk, trialed it, and it works.” “How can it not work?” I thought, “you’re just giving me more to do”. I now deliver to going on 500 houses 6 days a week.

As well as the threat of instant dismissal if we forget to put our cycle helmets on in the early hours (‘health and safety’ or insurance claim worries?), there are other things that have happened recently. There’s a certain TV guide that we have always delivered monthly, and ever since I have worked there, we have had three days to deliver them unless they are late and it’s near the end of the month. Last month, I was again summoned to the manager’s office. A pile of these TV magazines were in front of me. It was what I had left from the day before, and was due to finish that day, a day ahead of schedule. My contract was waved at me and I was told I could be sacked on the spot, but they would let me off this time. Apparently the rules had changed, and from now on I had to deliver them all in one day, and if I did it again I would be sacked. I asked why I hadn’t been told, but apparently I had, and I must’ve not heard it. A common occurrence in our workplace. I guess the manager’s must walk down the aisles whispering our new diktats for that week. It got to the point a while ago, where I started joking to my workmates on a Monday morning; “So what’s new since last week? What are we doing differently today?”

Very recently, a new imposition came into being. If we fail to get a Special Delivery signed, we now have to phone the office by 1:30pm so they can tell the computer ahead of it’s return by the van driver. I had some difficulty remembering when I got home (probably due to being a bit tired), and last week I phoned in 45 minutes late. Yet again, I was whisked into the manager’s office and told that as a punishment, they had no choice to make me report back to the office every day at 1:30pm. My round is a couple of miles from the office and I cycle. The reason for this is apparently that for every failure to report Special (non) Deliveries, the boss gets £15 docked from his bonus. Management go to great lengths to repeatedly tell us about ‘bullying and harassment’. Maybe this is what they are on about. These constant changes in rules and regulations brings to mind my favourite Ayn Rand quote: "There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws."

A few months ago, I couldn’t take the pressure and the backbiting culture of the letter sorting anymore and decided to buy my hours down. In return for cutting my hours to 30 a week, I got a pay-off and took the kids on that holiday I mentioned. I take home £200 a week (as well as being a regular Royal Mail customer too, putting a fair chunk back). I don’t consider myself lazy. Like my workmates, most days I work like a dog. We don’t have breaks. We don’t sit down at all from the time we walk in the office to the time we walk into our houses. And we definitely don’t get to sit on the internet in offices posting about how lazy workers in other jobs are. Of course, we are entitled to breaks, but if we take them, there is no way we will finish on time, and then questions will be asked, and punitive measures implemented.

What about the ‘volumes are falling’ mantra you ask? Well, we’re delivering more than ever. You’re getting more junk, more bills and many many more packages, and that’s good for the company surely? They just do to the mail volume figures what is done to crime and unemployment figures. Reassign certain things, give other things different names, and then, as if by magic, they aren’t counted in the figures anymore. Check the postmarks on your mail. All those non-Royal Mail logos are companies that ‘deregulation’ allows to make a profit for sorting, only to hand back to Royal Mail to deliver for peanuts. The internet is like a golden goose for a company like Royal Mail. I’ve always wondered why, apart from delivering the eBay packages, the management didn’t really go to town with the possibilities of the web for a company positioned like it is.

Doublespeak is also a common managerial tool. This last few months we’ve had a spate of people apparently ‘talking out of school’ where we’ve been called into meetings to be punished by being made to watch videos before we are allowed to deliver the mail due to people apparently doing this. ‘Talking out of school’ is apparently one of our number talking to postmen from other offices about working practices in our office. The line we are sold is that we have it better than other offices, and therefore ‘loose lips sink ships’. Somehow, I see this as simply divide and conquer. Each office is isolated and encouraged, by threat, not to communicate with others. And by the way, as soon as there were murmurs of this strike months ago, our boss announced in a meeting about it; “I just so happen to be reading a book on the miner’s strike at the moment, and this is the way I see this going, to the bitter end.” Dressed as an observation, I believe this was a briefing, and quite a lot of manager’s ‘happened’ to be reading that same book. The implied threat. The invisible stick. That same observation is now getting regular airplay in the media, including The Sun’s feature on how the police are being prepared to deal with us. Isn’t Mr. Murdoch a shareholder in TNT? Isn’t Mr. Mandelson too? I’m sure I read that somewhere. Funny how that company name keeps popping up as the favoured buyer. You, the public, are being primed.

A dark chapter for me was before the last general election, when, as usual, I refused to deliver the racist BNP leaflets. Something which is getting harder and harder to do, even with the CWU’s ‘conscience clause’ (this last local election my bosses words were ‘f*** that’ in response to my citing said clause). As usual, I left the leaflets on my work fitting, then one morning I came into work and someone had graffitied it with the words “You F***in’ C***!” with three swastikas underneath. I was shocked. The room span. I don’t know if you know what it feels like to be surrounded by people and not know who would do something like that, but it’s not pleasant. I told my line manager at the time. He laughed and mumbled something about it being childish. I asked him if there was anything that could be done as I’d photographed the graffiti. He told me to write a letter and he would put it on the notice board. I told him that advertising it would hardly solve the problem. I then asked him; “What about the CCTV cameras you are always tell us are watching us?” He replied with a wry smile; “They’re not on.” I lost a little bit of faith right there. I didn’t tell the union as I just felt like no-one would help me at that point, and I didn’t want to attract anymore attention to myself.

Another great moment was being put on a stage one disciplinary (three strikes and you’re out) for nearly dying, but being saved, within hours, by a lifesaving operation. This operation meant I had to take six weeks off to recover. It was the only blemish on a spotless sick leave record, but I was treated the same as if I’d pulled a sickie and just felt like some time off. Hauled in the office on ‘unavoidable’ disciplinary charges. This was after six weeks of daily phone calls asking me when I would be back in work, when I could barely move to pick up the phone.

The problem with Royal Mail is not the workforce, the problem lies with the people who’ve spent the pension I’ve been paying in for years. Those with a vested interest in running this all into the ground to get their hands on the loot before the Tories do when they get into power. Chairman Allan Leighton has gone now. He used to run the Royal Mail, the UK’s largest employer, from Canada a couple of mornings a week for a million quid while running his real businesses over there before going on the telly to tell us that we needed to get ‘significantly more motivated’ than we were. Adam Crozier seems to be doing alright. He gets bonuses for closing Post Offices. Good money if you can get it I guess. Although a practice reminiscent of making us stand by our work fittings every day, waiting to be allowed to leave and deliver the mail. Sometimes we wait for an hour, sometimes it’s half an hour. Either way, how many companies do you know that rewards inefficiency? It’s like a race to the bottom. A race to the bottom for a reason. It’s the same class of people who stand to gain in this, as the bankers and the politicians caught with their hands in the till.

And that’s why I personally think that ‘modernisation’ is simply a buzzword for preparing the company for a sell-off. It’s the same old story: Get public finances to buy all this shiny new machinery they keep talking about, while destroying public confidence. Demoralise the workforce, sideline the trade union, and get everything positioned perfectly for a bargain price quick buck for government debt, and then all the private profit can go out un-noticed once the deal is done. A deal that will miraculously see the private sector sort out all the problems and turn the company around. The old ‘the rich take the credit and the poor take the blame’ axiom. Next in line once they’ve sold Royal Mail will be the NHS, once they’ve convinced you that the ‘filthy hospitals’ need ‘modernisation’.

Do you know what the fourth phase of ‘modernisation’ is? It’s supposed to be the last phase, but something tells me that this is a permanent revolution, until it gets sold. Apart from the automated sorting machines to again increase the amount of mail we can deliver a day, the next phase is to take the postman’s bike away and stop those postal workers who use their own vehicles (at their own cost). The postmen will then go out in teams of four in vans, and be tied to those vans, returning back and forth to get mail for delivery until everyone is done. These four postmen will not take out four rounds, they will take out five, and the fifth will be split between the four in the spirit of one of the many new buzzwords ‘Flexibility’. Why? To slow down the postal service so that we ‘work our hours’ and you get your mail even later, and in an even more disorganised manner. Why? Because when they come over the tannoy every day asking if any of us want EVR (Early Voluntary Redundancy), those of us who leave, will not be replaced. Every full-timer who leaves, his or her round is ‘absorbed’ into the surrounding postal worker’s duties. The only people coming into ‘the business’ now are on 20 hour contracts. What is the end result? A part-time workforce with no rights, no pension and no union. This is what they really mean by ‘modernisation’: death by a thousand cuts. Their vision for the future is a mail service akin to working at McDonald’s. How much will your privatised ‘postman’ care about ‘the service’? I don’t know, as I doubt any of us will be working there by then.

***

For more interesting reading check out:

John Pilger: The New Statesman

Victoria Coren: The Observer

Technorati Tags: Royal Mail,CWU,Industrial Action,Postal Strikes,Modernization,Privatization,Adam Crozier,NHS,TNT,Peter Mandelson,Adam Brazier,UK Politics,Politics