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The Insanity of Biofuels

tim — Mon, 12 May 2008 23:47:21 +0000

There is something obscenely ironic that whilst the poor starve and struggle over soaring food prices, the rich convert food into fuel so they can carry on driving in their large gas-guzzling vehicles.

The rich world is rushing to invest in biofuels as one of the solutions to climate change. Fuels made from corn, sugar, or maize are seen as producing less carbon dioxide than conventional fuels from oil. As Western nations belatedly struggle to come to grips with the daunting challenge of radical reductions in climate changing gases, biofuels offer a theoretical solution.

What biofuels conveniently mean for America and Europe is that they can carry on driving and flying, thinking they have a clean conscience over climate change. Such is their appeal that last year the US Congress mandated a fivefold increase in their use. Europe, too, is committed to raising the share of biofuels in transport from current levels of around 2% to at least 10% by 2020.

The only problem for those who support biofuels is that despite this rush, never a week goes past without further evidence of their harmful effects. These range from rainforest destruction to being partly to blame for rising food costs.

In March, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri was the latest in a long line of people who warned of the problems of biofuels.

Speaking at the European Parliament, he said “We should be very, very careful about coming up with biofuel solutions that have major impact on production of food grains and may have an implication for overall food security.”

Pachauri warned that the rush to convert corn to ethanol in the US was having an adverse knock-on effect on the agricultural sector. A fifth of the US’s corn crop is now used to brew ethanol for motor fuel. As farmers rush to plant corn, the acreage of other crops, particularly soybeans, has been cut. The rocketing demand for corn has also meant the price has gone up. Ironically other critics argue that the process of converting corn into ethanol actually releases more carbon dioxide per gallon than simply burning conventional fuels.

Then last month, Pachauri’s warning was followed by both the Bolivian President Evo Morales and President of Peru, Alan Garcia, who said using land for biofuels was putting food out of reach for the poor. They were responding to Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva who had tried to dismiss claims that biofuels are responsible for the recent rise in global food prices.

Also last month, the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, did not mince his words when blaming biofuels for making the poor starve. “This is silent mass murder,” he said. Last year he said biofuels were “a crime against humanity.”

As the politicians squabble over whether biofuels are to blame for rising food prices, the poor continue to starve and the price of food becomes ever more expensive. Global food prices have increased by 83 percent in the last three years, according to the World Bank. As basic food staples become too expensive to buy for millions, anger has spread rapidly. At least six people were killed in riots over food prices that contributed to the dismissal of Haiti’s prime minister last month. Millions are struggling to survive on the island after food prices have increased 45 percent since the end of 2006.

In Africa, there have been riots in Ivory Coast, and Senegal and Egypt where the military is assisting baking bread. In Mozambique some six people were killed and in Cameroon an estimated 100 killed in protests linked to the food prices. In Burkina Faso, where there were also riots in February over food, the unions have now called for a general strike. In South Africa, there have been protest marches.

Meanwhile in Asia, fifty people were injured after factory workers protested against the food rises near Dhaka. Indonesia has also seen protests, whereas Vietnam has seen panic buying. Pakistan has reintroduced some rationing, while India has banned the export of most rice. The ruling coalition in Malaysia was very nearly ousted by voters who cited food as one of their major concerns. Last week, the Philippine government said it was introducing “rice access cards” for help the poor buy grain.

In Latin America, there have been riots in Mexico, whilst farmers went on strike for three weeks in Argentina. In Peru, farmers blocked key road links. In Europe, Russia, which has seen a six per cent increase in food prices since the beginning of the year, has been forced to freeze the price of milk, bread, eggs and cooking oil.

Coupled with rising oil prices, rising food prices are creating global tension. “This is a perfect storm,” President Elías Antonio Saca of El Salvador told the World Economic Forum on Latin America in Cancún, Mexico last month. “How long can we withstand the situation? We have to feed our people, and commodities are becoming scarce. This scandalous storm might become a hurricane that could upset not only our economies but also the stability of our countries.”

Other voices agree the situation is getting critical. Earlier this month, Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary General warned that the global food crisis could have grave implications for international security, economic growth and social progress. “If not handled properly, this crisis could result in a cascade of others and become a multidimensional problem affecting economic growth, social progress and even political security around the world,” Ban told a conference in Ghana.

Last week, Ban Ki-Moon went further, saying that the UN was setting up a special task-force to address the food shortages, which was designed to avert “social unrest on an unprecedented scale”. Ban said “The first and immediate priority, that we all agree, is that we must feed the hungry”.

A second priority should be to ban biofuels that could be used for food crops. The inescapable fact is that biofuels are partly to blame for the rising food costs. The International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington argues that biofuel production accounts for a quarter to a third of the recent increase in global commodity prices. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations comes up with a slightly smaller figure of biofuels being responsible for between 10 to 15 percent rise in food.

So concerned was it over biofuels impacts that last month, the European Environment advisory panel urged the EU to suspend its 10 per cent goal by 2020. The panel, made up of some of Europe’s most prestigious climate scientists, called the 10 percent target “overambitious” whose “unintended effects are difficult to predict and difficult to control.” Laszlo Somlyody, the panel’s chairman and a professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics said: “The idea was that we felt we needed to slow down, to analyze the issue carefully and then come back at the problem.”

Rather than slow down, countries in the EU are speeding up. In Britain, new legislation passed last month means that all gasoline must contain at least 2.5 per cent biofuel. The same day that the legislation was passed, one of Britian’s most respected conservation charities, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, condemned the law as “over-hasty” and “utter folly”.

The situation is now getting even more ironic. As many simply cannot afford to eat, the rich world is now squabbling over the huge subsidies it gives its biofuel producers to produce more biofuels. Last week, European biodiesel producers triggered the prospect of a new transatlantic trade war by urging the EU to impose penalties on “unfair” biofuel subsidies from the US.

The subsidy allows US exporters to undercut European rivals by up to a quarter. The subsidy system is also being exploited by ruthless commodity traders, who are actually adding to climate change.

Known as “splash and dash” within the industry, the legal trick makes a mockery of the purpose of biofuels, which are meant to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. The biofuel is being needlessly shipped from Europe to the US and then back again. The traders buy biodiesel on the European market and then ship it to the US. There it is “splashed” with gasoline which means that conventional gasoline is added to the biodiesel so that traders can qualify for the export subsidy. Then the cargo is “dashed” or shipped back to Europe and resold at a subsidized price which then undercuts European producers.

Peter Power, a spokesman for EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, said “We will not under any circumstances tolerate unfair trade.” The EU and US are now threatening to take their argument to the World Trade Organisation.

It is also beyond irony that as they say they will not tolerate trade that is unfair to their own industries, they seem content to tolerate the fact that millions of people are slowly dying of hunger….

The Culture of Capitalism

tim — Mon, 12 May 2008 23:38:25 +0000

We are living through an age of transition. The new co-exists with the old. We can identify political, economic and cultural elements of this change, but we do not yet have a way of describing the kind of society we are living in. The great explanatory frameworks of political economy and sociology inherited from the industrial modernity of the nineteenth century leave too much unsaid. Theories of the moment tend to skip from one modern phenomenon to another. They are like stones skimming across the surface of water. We lack a story of these times.

In the last three decades Britain, the US and other anglo-saxon economies have been experiencing a new type of capitalism. Class and the social relations of production are being re-organised by new regimes of capital accumulation. These changes raise a number of questions. How are new technologies and the new modes of production and consumption transforming the cultures and social relations of class? In what ways are individuals as social beings changing in these new conditions? How is capitalism utilising labour as a force of production? Contradictions abound across the old and the new, the national and the global. We need an analysis of contemporary capitalism, its culture of unrest and its forms of capital accumulation. There are no clear signposts to follow. But, as Rebecca Solnit says, getting lost is like the beginning of finding your way. Britain’s old model of mass industrial production and capital accumulation began to fail in the 1970s. Growing pressure from labour for increased wages was undermining business profitability. Trade and overseas markets were limited by international competition and the decolonisation process across the third world.

The growth of industrial capital relied upon a high ratio of profits to wages.[1] The outcome was a collapse in the rate of profit and a systemic crisis. Inflation rose to double figures. Economic growth slowed and the balance of payments deficit increased. Out of this crisis arose a new and invigorated global capitalism which originated in Britain and the US. Three factors underpinned its extraordinary revival. The first was the development of new information and communication technologies (ICTs), which began to transform traditional manufacturing and distribution systems.

The utilisation of knowledge and culture as economic resources created new types of ‘post-fordist’ firms, products and markets. The second was the influence on economic policy of neo-liberal ideals, which claimed to maximise individual freedom through the deregulation of markets. Only competitive capitalism, free from the interference of the state, could guarantee the separation of economic power from political power and so ensure liberty. Third, there was the emergence during the 1960s of new values in the counter-cultures of the young middle classes. Under conditions of growing and sustained affluence in the West, the imperatives of economic security gave way to post-materialist values associated with identity, ethics and belonging. These created a powerful trend toward a ‘liberation ethic’ of individual self-expression, anti-establishment sentiment, emotional attunement to the world, and the personal pursuit of pleasure. These cultures, the ideological weapon of neo-liberalism, and the new technologies of information and communication (including the media), were key resources for creating the new regimes of capital accumulation.

The political response to the crisis of capitalism came with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. The Conservative government began with no coherent ideology, but neo-liberal ideas soon began to set the agenda for change. A hegemonic project – Thatcherism – took shape. Milton Friedman’s ‘shock therapy’ was applied to the British economy and working class. The welfare state began to be dismantled. Low profit, traditional, manufacturing industry was shut down and de-industrialisation was allowed to accelerate. Mass unemployment was used to drive down labour costs and destroy the influence of the trade unions. Capital controls were abolished. The aim was to eradicate collectivist cultures and optimise the conditions for capital accumulation. A possessive, petty bourgeois individualism spoke a civic language of self-reliance and authoritarian populism. In contrast a hedonistic culture of consumer choice created markets in aesthetics, personal leisure and fashion. Technology first revolutionised the retailing sector and then catalysed change across the economy. As the de-industrialising North disintegrated into poverty, the big cities and Southern England boomed with new service, financial and high tech industries.

The neo-liberal ideology of Thatcherism virulently attacked the progressive social influences of the civic counter-cultures of the 1960s, while at the same time marketising them in consumer culture and in the social relations of the new industries. It transformed the political and economic landscape. However its attempts to reduce public owned resources as a share of GDP foundered on a residual, popular social democracy. In 1997 New Labour achieved power by appealing to this social democratic sensibility while accommodating itself to the neo-liberal ascendancy. To manage this contradiction it abandoned traditional class-based politics for its own brand of aspirational individualism. The ideological driving force was the Department of Trade and Industry under its Minister, Peter Mandelson.

A key figure was Charles Leadbeater, who had developed his idea of a new individualism a decade earlier in the pages of Marxism Today. The failure of the left, he had argued, was its lack of a vision of an individually-based collectivism. However, by the 1990s his ‘socialist individualism’ had metamorphised into the figure of the entrepreneur: ‘confident, inspiring, charismatic … quick to absorb new ideas, restless to discover new opportunities’.[2] Two documents have come to define New Labour’s adoption of this politics of individualisation. The 1998 Competitiveness White Paper, Our Competitive Future – Building the Knowledge Driven Economy, set out a framework for Britain’s industrial policy in which the market and its values were central. National prosperity depended on the ability to create a knowledge driven economy.

Peter Mandelson delivered New Labour’s vision: ‘Knowledge and its profitable exploitation by business is the key to competitiveness’. This was followed by the 2001 White Paper on Enterprise, Skills and Innovation, which addressed the creation of a labour force for the knowledge economy. Individual and business success was dependent upon a culture of innovation and competitiveness. Education and training would create workers who were autonomous entrepreneurs rather than dependent employees.

A new economy developed rapidly, based in the South East, organised around the technological development of the commodity and trading in intangible intellectual assets. It was dominated by the global financial sector, whose share of GDP increased from 6.6 per cent in 1996 to 9.4 per cent in 2006. Its business model became the new paradigm of the capitalist revival and has been incorporated into traditional sectors of the economy. Profit seeking in the traditional way is no longer the sole driver of economic activity. What counts is increasing shareholder value. As Richard Sennett has argued, companies must constantly ‘re-engineer’- introduce new products, create new markets, restructure their organisations and re-brand – to signal to the capital markets their economic dynamism. Profit alone will not guarantee a rising share price. This demand for constant change creates organisational cultures characterised by a state of permanent revolution without a cause.

The pursuit of insecurity is the business model of the new economy. It is this business model that New Labour adopted in its policies on the knowledge economy and in its modernisation plans for the public sector. Public service reform turned the organisational cultures of education, healthcare and welfare into quasi- or proxy markets. Intangible outputs such as relationships of care, the processes of learning and the provision of social security were incentivised and measured by proxies such as cost indicators and league tables, in order to judge their ‘value for money’.

A capitalism of intimacy

The fastest growing economic sector during the 1990s was the cultural industries- advertising, architecture, TV and radio, music, publishing, film and video, design, designer fashion, and computer and video games. Their raw materials are information, sounds, words, symbols, images, ideas, produced in creative, emotional and intellectual labour. By 2001 the Government’s Creative Industries Mapping Document reported that the cultural industries were worth £112.5bn and employed 1.3m people. Now estimated to be worth 8 per cent of the economy, they are indicative of the rise in an experience-oriented consumerism whose ends are aesthetic pleasure and self-fulfilment.

The Future Foundation’s regular survey Changing Lives asked interviewees in 2004: ‘If you had just one wish, which one of these would you choose? To be more highly esteemed; to have less fear; to be able to afford something; to be able to fulfil yourself; to have more friendship.’ The proportion choosing personal fulfilment as their number one wish more than doubled between 1986 and 2004; for those in their 60s it increased from 18 per cent to 56 per cent; for those in their 40s the rise was from 19 per cent to 48 per cent. In another question the survey asked: ‘For each item I read out will you please tell me whether you feel the need for it strongly, moderately, slightly, or not at all. Firstly … To satisfy my need for new experiences.’ Eighty per cent of 16-24 year olds felt they must strongly or moderately satisfy their need for new experiences, up from 56 per cent in 1983. A similar proportional increase was registered in those aged 35 to 54, with the largest increase being amongst 45 to 54 year olds: up from 22 per cent to 42 per cent. This cultural revolution crosses classes. During this period social group AB registered a fairly small increase in those responding positively to this question, from 55 per cent to 60 per cent; but in other social groups the proportion increased by a much greater margin. In the C2 group it rose from 32 per cent to 51 per cent and in the DE group from 35 per cent to 49 per cent.[3]

Individuals increasingly view culture as something to be actively created, rather than passed down from on high and passively consumed. The 2006 Office of National Statistics survey shows that after housing and transport costs, the highest household spending category is recreation and culture. Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace have facilitated new kinds of community for tens of millions of individuals. The virtual world Second Life, established in 2003, has over 5,500,000 avatars and L$2.6bn (Linden dollars) in virtual circulation. Its real world exchange rate is L$250 to the US dollar.

After social networking and pornography, the internet’s largest collective activity is the creation of family histories. Individuals are redefining a sense of history through their personal genealogies. Technology is creating new kinds of commons and at the same time opening up new opportunities for capital to commodify these cultural practices. The new capitalism is extending commodification into the realms of subjective life. Its forms of production are not confined to output, but use individuals and their relationships in the co-inventing of cultural and symbolic meanings and new ideas. The market creates communities of interests and seeks the intimacy of the consumer in order to embed commercial transactions in personal and daily life.

Promotional culture creates desiring consumers whose personal histories can be mined for their interests, desires and purchases. The economic sphere expands as production conscripts the thinking, imagination and sensibilities of individuals. New kinds of property and property relations are being created by companies using patenting and intellectual property law. Just as early industrial capitalism enclosed the commons of land and labour, so today’s post-industrial capitalism is enclosing the cultural and intellectual commons (both real and virtual), the commons of the human mind and body, and the commons of biological life. Paulo Virno argues that the productive force of post-fordist economic activity is ‘the life of the mind’.[4] Not just cognition, but also intuition and the symbolic world of the unconscious, where communication is non-verbal. In order to utilise this potential, capital is creating communicative forms of labour. These forms do not make tangible products but function as transmitters of care, information, symbolic meaning and learning (in effect, they lubricate the means of production).

Education plays a central role in producing these new kinds of production. The organisational cultures of schools, colleges and universities have been subjected to continuous corporate reform as they are geared to the labour market and economy. Their function is to realise individual productive potential and to facilitate the restructuring of the class relations of production. Because communicative labour has no end product, what counts as a measure of productivity is performance. In school and at work, a culture of capitalism rewards individuals who comply with market shaped criteria to measure, judge and discipline themselves in pursuit of a self-reliant, entrepreneurial form of life.

This culture of capitalism is about producing the subjectivity of the individual as a form of economic potential. Failure, closely linked to class, brings with it the threat of exclusion from its promise of a good life. But success on its treadmill of competitive exams, performance demanding careers, and never-be-still life trajectories, can lead to a sense of inauthenticity and futility. The culture of capitalism is nihilistic. It invades what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott calls the space of creative living, which is ‘sacred to the individual’. Here, in the name of profit, or utility or function, it requisitions the tools of social life – intellect, learning, relational life, communication.

Class and consumption

The promises of economic success and the pleasures of consumption cast a veil over the inequalities generated by these new modes of capital accumulation. A majority of the UK population is peripheral to wealth creation and its productive forces. One in six leaves school unable to read, write or add up properly. Social mobility has diminished. The fastest growing occupations are not in creative and knowledge work, but in low paid communicative labour: data input, admin, face-to-face services in health, education and care. Half the population share just 6 per cent of UK wealth, owning assets of £600 or less. In stark contrast to this low wage, low skill workforce is the new, high net worth market of very rich individuals. The Institute of Fiscal Studies has identified the top 1 per cent of individuals – 470,000 people – who earn an average annual income of £220,000 and between them own approximately 25 per cent of marketable wealth. Within this group wealth is unevenly distributed, with the top 0.1 per cent earning an average of £780,000.[5]

The traditional working class in the UK, formed out of the industrial revolution, has lost its economic role as the engine of wealth creation. Manufacturing as a share of GDP fell to 13.2 per cent in 2006. With the introduction of new technologies, its workforce continues to decline. Goods are increasingly imported from a periphery of poor, low-wage economies where primitive forms of capital accumulation, backed up by WTO rules and bilateral trade agreements, are creating a global proletariat in conditions of violence and exploitation. The working class, forced to compete with this global proletariat in a flexible labour market, is being caught in a vortex of Victorian-era casualised labour. Migrant labour is used by unscrupulous employers to further deregulate the labour market and drive down wages. The institution of work, once a source of collective cultural identity, has become fragmented, making forms of class solidarity difficult to organise.

Class consciousness is displaced by the fear of redundancy, not simply from employment but from life’s purpose. This threat to the integrity of the self generates anxieties over individual status and loss of recognition as a social being. The culture of capitalism has depoliticised class while heightening the inequalities and social gulf between classes. In the society of consumers, class develops a new lexicon of cultural domination. Individualised status-seeking consumption enacts the old class conflicts and inequalities. Consumption offers the pleasurable pursuit of desire, but it is also a mass symbolic struggle for individual social recognition, which distributes shame and humiliation to those lower down the hierarchy. The pain of failure, of being a loser, of being invisible to those above, cuts a deep wound in the psyche. This kind of stress dramatically increases our vulnerability to disease and premature death. Violence is more common where there is more inequality because people are deprived of the markers of status and so are more vulnerable to the anxieties of being judged by others.

This is the culture of consumption that has driven growth in the UK economy. It has been primed by the hard selling of cheap credit, which makes accessible a never-ending value chain of positional goods. The resulting personal debt has created an indentured consumption that requires never-ending work in a precarious labour market. Total UK debt stands at £1.4 trillion, of which £223bn is unsecured debt. In terms of profitability what counts is not the selling of commodities, but the lending to buy them. The highly lucrative markets in debt have fuelled the City bonuses of the super-rich. In 2007 they totalled £14bn. In effect capital lays claim to future earnings as a means of accumulation.

The extension of the commodity form into non-market areas of life has privatised the public realm and opened up intimate, personal life to the market. It has eroded civility, and the boundary between social relations and economic utility. It threatens the social bonds of care, association and community. Isolation and alienation contribute to a social recession: a near epidemic of stress, eating disorders, alcoholism, mental illness, men’s violence against women. The culture of capitalism, with its boundless choices and omniscient dreams of celebrity fame, disassembles human wanting and need. What is claimed to be freedom veers toward a tyranny of objectless desire, an opaque and unbounded world that leads to all kinds of compulsive and addictive behaviours. Personal boundaries are more easily pierced by nameless fears. Young women, subjected to an unremitting commercial sexual gaze, are incited into anxious states of self-dislike and body-management. What is inside and what is outside is no longer clear. It has become commonplace to feel one lives, so to speak, as a stranger outside the community.

Cultural difference is the prism through which large sections of the white population experience and react to their insecurity. Migrants whose cheap labour is exploited to bring down wage levels are viewed as competition for housing and under-resourced public services. They become the portents of social disaster and cultural loss. Political antagonisms and culture wars around race, gender and religion attempt to construct boundaries of identity which will define a sense of belonging and entitlement. At stake in the transition from an investment in an imagined mono-culture to a capacity to live with multi-culture is the struggle for individual and cultural recognition. As Sue Gerhardt argues, ‘we are dependent on what others see, and how much of our “being” they recognise’. Class inequality creates a paucity of recognition, and cultural difference becomes a focus for people’s fear, paranoia and hatred.

The uncertainty, the constant change and the decline in a sense of belonging herald the spectre of the cultural destruction of the traditional working class. Life continues but the cultural symbols that gave it meaning have been destroyed. Those who flourished in the old class culture find themselves ill equipped to deal with the new. For them the future becomes difficult to imagine. The question of hope is bound to the question of how to live. To lose a way of life is to lose a sense of hopefulness.

A new politics

We live in a time not of capitalism without class, but of capitalism destroying and creating class cultures and social relations around its new modes of production. Technologies continue to transform industries. Large sections of the population live and work as if they are a reserve army of labour: economically inactive, or working in casualised and temporary jobs, or threatened with the loss of their job. Class inequalities in health and education are becoming entrenched. The process of individualisation, evident for much of modernity, has been accelerated by the market and the imposition of entrepreneurial ways of life. Employees, students, schoolchildren, welfare benefit recipients are made responsible for their own social capital investment decisions, risk management and life course.

With the decline in welfare provision, work, however insecure and poorly paid, is deified by the government as the panacea of all social and individual ills. The culture of capitalism demands competitive self-enhancement and performativity, and with these come the threats of a precarious life, personal failure and existential redundancy. This culture of nihilism erodes the trust and reciprocity which underpinned the interdependencies of individuals. Non-market modes of life are squeezed between the intensifying demands for target driven productivity and commercial value, and the fear of being excluded or made useless and invisible.

After three decades, there is no end in sight to this period of transition. Despite the vigour of capitalist growth, the structural problems of the 1970s associated with the falling rate of profit have not been resolved. Rising oil prices associated with peak oil and growing international competition from China and India threaten the longer term hegemony of Western capital. The collapse of the US sub-prime market has revealed the inherent dangers of under-regulated financialised capitalism. An argument can now be made that the era of possessive individualism is on the ebb.

Popular response amongst the middle classes to the experience of individualisation is changing. The benefits of economic growth and the pleasures of consumerism are increasingly marred by anxieties over debt and now the prospect of falling house prices. The growing levels of mental illness are not confined to people living in poverty. Middle-class children are at risk of self-harm, eating disorders, depression and burn-out. The fear of impoverishment in old age, and the burdens of caring for aged relatives, extend across the population. Compounding these is the threat of global warming. For the great majority of people, there are no individual, market solutions to these problems.

New forms of political activity have grown up outside the institutions and structures of the old order. They have created a multitude of skirmishes that defy the old political categories. An extraordinary array of social movements, single issue campaigns and community actions reflect a growing level of political activity that is often global in its dimension. These social and cultural politics are also manifest in individual and group pre-occupations with race, identity and belonging. There is a ‘bio-politics’ of the body, emotions, sexuality, nature. ‘Life’, argues Virno, ‘lies at the centre of politics when the prize to be won is immaterial labour power.’ Democratic personal relationships, an ethics of authenticity, and ecological concern inform alternative ways of living that seek to counter the invasive force of the market and commodification. These micro-politics are without common voice or organisation, but they articulate the contradictions and conflicts of the emerging social and class relations of contemporary capitalism.

The change from a society of producers to a society of consumers requires a new kind of politics. The old politics and language of collectivism has lost its applicability. Central to any new politics of the left will be the revival of forms of political struggle around class and inequality. It will need to develop an idea of the common – a livable balance between togetherness and individual autonomy. Individuals are not the discrete and closed personalities of capitalist markets. We bring into the world our own propensities, but our minds and individuality are properties of the cultures, values, conscious and unconscious communications we grow up within. They form the fabric of our social bonds and relations. The culture of capitalism does violence to this fabric because it destroys the relational nature of individuality. A new politics will be socialist because it will recognise the interdependence of individuals. Tend to the social and the individual will flourish.

Notes

1. Andrew Glyn and Bob Sutcliffe, British Capitalism: Workers and the Profits Squeeze, Penguin 1972, p15.

2. Charles Leadbeater, Living on Thin Air, Penguin 2000, p243.

3. See Will Hutton, Aine O’Keefe, Phillipe Schneider, Robert Andari, Staying ahead: the economic performance of the UK’s creative industries, The WorkFoundation 2007, chapter 3.

4. Paulo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, Semiotexte, p84 www.generation-online.org/c/fcmultitude3.htm.

5. Mike Brewer, Luke Sibieta, Liam Wren-Lewis, Racing Away? Income inequality and the evolution of high incomes, Institute of Fiscal Studies 2007.

How the US Targets Photo-Journalists

Ellie Keen — Mon, 12 May 2008 22:53:42 +0000

Hidden by the mainstream UK media, the past three weeks has brought wonderful news – the freeing of Sami al-Haj, al-Jazeera cameraman, from Guantanamo, and Bilal Hussein, award-winning AP cameraman, from Iraq. The Guardian and the Press Gazette appear to be the only UK national news outlet to have covered their release. The Guardian’s Richard Norton-Taylor wrote a brilliant cover story on Sami for the MediaGuardian: “The other Alan Johnston“. You can also watch Sami al-Haj’s remarkable speech from his hospital bed on the day of his release.

But why the deafening silence in the British media? The release of Bilal Hussein, a member of the AP team that won a Pulitzer Prize for photography in 2005, held without charge in Iraq for two years, went almost entirely unnoticed. When the British journalist Richard Butler was mercifully freed after in Iraq for two months, his rescue was given widespread coverage.

When the BBC’s Alan Johnston was held in Gaza last year, there were calls from throughout the international press and political community for his release. One of those appeals came from Sami Al-Haj, who imprisoned without charge in Guantánamo since June 2002 after being seized on his way to Afghanistan the previous December to work on an assignment.

Johnston responded to Al-Haj’s plight by writing an open letter in support of a fair trial; the ex-BBC documentary journalist Rageh Omaar also spoke out about him. However, unlike Johnston, this Sudanese-born journalist, received little sustained support or coverage from his colleagues in the media. This is despite the fact that he is the only journalist in Guantánamo and he was offered no opportunity to refute the US government’s charge of being an “enemy combatant”. Rageh Omaar, speaking to Guardian journalists in January 2008, said: “If you look at the response to the kidnapping of Alan Johnston in Gaza and compare it to the over-whelming, deafening silence in Sami’s case, it’s completely shaken my confidence in the notion of journalistic solidarity.”

From January 7, 2007, until his release al-Haj was on a hunger strike to secure his liberty or a free and fair trial. He was force-fed through tubes into his stomach, his weight plummeted and health deteriorated, with reports of poor sight, heart and kidney problems. Al-Haj’s supporters also claimed he suffered physical and mental abuse, including the withdrawal of medication.

The evidence against al-Haj has never been presented in public. Some see his imprisonment as part of a wider US campaign against al-Jazeera itself. His brother Asim al-Haj, speaking to Democracy Now in January 2008, said: “Sami al-Haj is a victim of a political operation against al-Jazeera, which Washington does not approve of. And as evidence of this is the fact that he was interrogated 130 times. And during these times, the interrogations were all about al-Jazeera and alleged relations between al-Jazeera and al-Qaeda.”

Al-Haj’s British lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, director of legal action charity Reprieve, also believed this to be the case and confirmed that virtually all Sami’s interrogations were an attempt to “prove” a link between al-Jazeera and al-Qaeda. He also said al-Haj told him he had been offered release if he was prepared to spy on his colleagues at al-Jazeera. On Sami’s release, his lawyer told the BBC: “We’ve disproved everything they threw at him.”

Reprieve also released two sketches by the political cartoonist Lewis Peake, based on drawings which al-Haj himself made of his experiences inside Guantánamo. The most recent showed a skeleton strapped to a gurney and indicates al-Haj’s own horrendous experience of the camp hospital.

Dozens of journalists – mostly Iraqis – have been detained by US troops over the last three years, according to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists. While most have been released after short periods, in at least eight cases documented by CPJ Iraqi journalists have been held by US forces for weeks or months without charge. Several of the detainees were photojournalists who initially drew the military’s attention because of what they had filmed or photographed.

Journalists continue to be targeted, by the US and by their puppet regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In February, Afghan journalism student Pervez Kambaksh was arrested for distributing a pamphlet about women’s rights, tried and sentenced to death without a defence lawyer, in a closed court. The Independent’s defence and diplomatic correspondent Kim Sengupta wrote to MWAW this week about his plight:

“Pervez has been transferred from Mazar to a prison in Kabul where, according to the authorities, he is being kept in solitary confinement for his own safety. As far as prison conditions are concerned, he was better off in Mazar where he could mix with other prisoners and had the protection of the fairly enlightened head of prisons for northern Afghanistan, Gen Taj Mohammed. There are still no definite dates for his appeal.”

Add your name to the Independents petition to free Pervez Kambaksh here:

www.independent.co.uk/pervez

Burning Capital - Exit Strategy II

eddie — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:49:10 +0000

Back to Black

John Browne is not the first head of BP to leave under a cloud. After Robert Horton, chairman & CEO from 1990-92, was ‘encouraged’ to leave his post, the corporate initiative with which he was identified – ‘Project 1990’ – was swiftly brought to a halt. David Simon, his successor, set about re-focusing BP on the core activity of extracting oil & gas. It is clear that a similar kind of shift has been taking place since the fall of Browne in May 2007.

In July 2005, timed to coincide with the G8 Summit in Gleneagles, BP relaunched its ‘Beyond Petroleum’ strapline and unveiled plans for the world’s first carbon capture and hydrogen power station at nearby Peterhead. It was a brilliantly executed PR campaign and arguably the high-water mark of Browne’s ‘green strategy’. But last May, 22 days after Browne’s resignation, BP announced that due to government subsidy not being forthcoming, the project was shelved. Whilst the effectiveness and safety of CCS are far from certain (see article on page 3), Hayward’s dropping of the project sent a clear message of where he wanted to position the company.

The same month, Hayward employed the consulting firms Baines and McKinsey to review the company’s structure. On 10th October he announced an outline of the resulting shake-up, including the break up of one of its three divisions: Gas, Power & Renewables. Most of its assets will be merged into the remaining divisions of Exploration & Production and Refining & Marketing. What is left will be downgraded from a division to a small business unit – BP Alternative Energy. This constitutes a significant shift of emphasis away from renewables.

Then in December BP announced that it was purchasing 50% of Canada’s Sunrise tar sands field from Husky Energy. In contrast, Browne had been sceptical about tar sands. In 1999 he oversaw the sale of BP interests in Alberta and in 2004 he publicly declared that there were ‘tons of opportunities’ beyond the sector. Now, simultaneous with the Climate Conference in Bali, BP press released its acquisition.

Such a contrast to the announcement of the Peterhead Carbon Capture project during the G8 two years previously. No clearer indication could be given of the change of direction under Tony Hayward.

Accounting for Emissions

The company assessed its “operational emissions” for 2006 to be 64.4 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, excluding TNK-BP (effectively BP’s Russian arm, responsible for 1/3 of BP’s production). Leaving aside this qualification, the company’s operational emissions have been falling over recent years. However these constitute only a fraction of the company’s total emissions – a mere six percent.

In Spring 2005, Nick Robins, working at Henderson Global Investors in Broadgate, noticed that the total emissions reported in BP’s 2004 Sustainability Report made the company to be responsible for 5.6% of global greenhouse gas emissions: more than twice the 2.5% share of the UK, with 62 million citizens.

A year later, Nick noticed that BP had shifted the goalposts. By changing its methodology to count oil within one sector of the company (mostly refining), rather than counting the emissions from all products it sold (whether crude oil, aviation fuel, diesel etc), BP had cut its emissions to less than half.

BP no longer publishes its full emissions under the original methodology. Yet PLATFORM has calculated the company’s full annual emissions since 1997 by analyzing its production and refining & marketing data. These show that production has risen steadily over the past decade, with a slight decline since 2005 (mainly due to the high oil price) – and the company’s CO2 emissions have risen in parallel with this.

On the morning of May 19th 1997, in a lecture theatre at Stanford University, California, John Browne addressed an audience with his ‘Climate Change Speech’. In the hour that followed Browne broke ranks with his peers in the global oil industry, recognising that human activity was altering the global climate and accepting the need to take precautionary action.

Browne said “Nobody can do everything at once. Companies work by prioritising what they do. They take the easiest steps first, and then they move onto tackle the more difficult and complex problems[…]. Over time we can move towards the elimination of emissions from our own operations and a substantial reduction in the emissions which come from the use of our products”. With these words, a frisson ran through the oil industry. Browne, as BP’s bold new leader, was charting a distinctive course.

But, in Browne’s ten years at the helm after Stanford, he never moved beyond the ‘easiest step’. Instead, BP’s product emissions continued to rise. Meanwhile, renewable energy peaked at 3% of the company’s capital investment. Now, Hayward is seeking to reverse even the tiny steps Browne took.

A Change in the Political Climate

The political landscape of climate change shifted in 2007.

Between February and November, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published four reports, declaring that if temperatures went two degrees above pre-industrial levels the effects would be “irreversible and catastrophic”. In March the EU agreed to a 20% cut in CO2 emissions by 2020. In June the G8 summit draft communiqué stated that ‘beyond a temperature increase of two degrees, risks from climate change will be largely unmanageable’. In June and September the White House indicated that it was engaging in the issue. In December at Bali it was agreed to achieve a new Kyoto by 2009.

There is a growing consensus that we have to avoid exceeding 2 degrees of warming. In order to do so we need to stabilise CO2 emissions by 2015 – in less than 100 months – and thereafter reduce them radically.

Gordon Brown has talked of setting a target of 80% CO2 cuts by 2050, the Tories and Liberal Democrats likewise. US Presidential favourites, Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama, have also called for an 80% target. These all require effectively the same thing – a fossil fuel phase out over the next generation.

In these demands for striking global CO2 cuts, the direction of travel is clear – the cuts should fall heaviest on the countries of the global Global North. At Bali, the EU, Japan, Canada and Russia talked of cuts of between 20 and 45% by 2020.

For BP this poses a particular challenge. For example, if there are moves to dramatically reduce fuel consumption in Europe and the USA it will hit the company hard. 84% of the refined products it sold in 2006 were in Europe and the USA. However, the company can adapt to such challenges. It is already directing capital to enable an expansion in the Indian and Chinese retail markets.

Similarly BP has been striving to apply technology to the challenges – by developing internal and external emissions trading systems, or carbon capture and storage projects. But the fate of Peterhead power station, illustrates that these are peripheral ventures at the mercy of financial and political pressures.

This challenge goes to the heart of BP’s core activity – the extraction of oil & gas. These are challenges to which it is far harder for the company to adapt.

2007 might be remembered as the year in which the company had to consider the threat of carbon pricing. The Stern Report concluded that the social cost of a tonne of carbon dioxide was $85. In December 07 the UK Climate Change Minister, Phil Woolas, made it clear that the government is to factor in the ‘shadow price of carbon’ for all infrastructure decisions.

If the logic of this is carried through, BP’s combined operational and product emissions in 2007 constitute a massive liability to the company. If this were set against the profit for 2007 then the company’s profitability would be severely hit, and with it the share price.

The question stands, how long is it before public pressure, driven by the rising impacts of climate change, shifts this theoretical carbon cost into an actual carbon cost? How long until the company is hit by the economic impact of climate change?

A change in the weather and a change of direction

Back in May 1997, John Browne recognised the relationship between BP’s oil & gas production and global CO2 emissions. In the intervening 10 years the company has produced 12.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. Over the past decade BP’s oil & gas output has been rising most years and in the coming decade it is the company’s intention that it should grow further over the coming decade… – causing its produce emissions to rise in parallel. CO2 emissions will also grow. Especially with the development of projects such as Sunrise.

But yet this growth runs in direct contradiction to the demands of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and rising public opinion. At the very least the contradiction between the company and public opinion threatens to erode BP’s ‘social license to operate’ in key countries such as the UK, Germany and the US. An erosion of acquiescence that may lead to the demand that BP carries the cost of the carbon it sells.

What is to be done? How can BP adapt to this coming climate impact?

In the past 12 months decisions were made in BP to finance new developments in Russia, Indonesia and Norway, and to purchase exploration licenses in Colombia and the USA. And with the opportunity afforded by the $100 barrel oil price, the decision was made to purchase tar sands in Canada. We do not know exactly how much carbon these actions will bring to the world’s atmosphere, but we do know that the decisions were made by approximately 20 people.

How would it have been if those who made the decisions in the past 12 months had had at the forefront of their minds the carbon limits recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? What if they had committed themselves to stabilising global CO2 emissions in less than 100 months and then to reducing emissions radically?

How might the company’s year 2007 have been different? What meetings might have taken place to plan the decarbonising of the company? What new investments in non-fossil fuel energy? Would Tony Hayward’s announcement of bringing onstream the Shah Deniz, Rosa, Dalia, Greater Plutonio, Mango and Atlantis fields in 2007 have come to be seen as marking a high-water point in BP’s oil and gas production history?

Nigerians in the UK urge boycott of British Airways

Ellie Keen — Sun, 11 May 2008 01:00:54 +0000

British Airways has been criticised over its handling of a forced deportation and its treatment of Nigerian passengers on a flight from Heathrow airport.

Passengers on board the 27 March BA flight to Lagos began to protest about the manhandling of Augustine Eme, a Biafran independence activist, who was allegedly being restrained by up to five police officers while pleading not to be sent back to Nigeria where he feared he would be killed. (Eme’s brother has already been killed and his wife and children are missing.)

The police promptly removed Eme from the flight, but returned to arrest another passenger, Ayodeji Omotade. This prompted other passengers to complain about his detention, which resulted in the pilot ordering all 136 economy class passengers off the flight.

Omotade, who is from Kent, was on the flight to attend his brother’s wedding in Nigeria but was detained by police for ten hours following his arrest. In that time police confiscated £1,603 that Omotade had on him, stating that they had strong reason to believe the money came from criminal activities. Omotade was then returned to Heathrow without any money and having missed his brother’s wedding. He has also been banned for life from travelling with British Airways.

The flight did eventually go to Lagos, but with only Eme and first class passengers on board. British Airways defended its removal of the economy passengers, on the basis that their behaviour constituted a security threat to staff.

The incident has prompted calls for a boycott of BA from within the Nigerian community in the UK. Over one thousand people signed a petition sent to the Nigerian government demanding a written apology to all the passengers. The petition also called on BA to compensate Omotade and lift the lifetime ban against him, as well as lifting any criminal charges against him. The Nigerian president, Umaru Yar’Adua, has ordered an investigation into the incident at Heathrow.

British Airways recently came under fire from one of its own pilots for ignoring racism amongst its staff. Captain Doug Maughan, who has worked for BA for fifteen years, recently accused management of failing to deal with his complaints about frequent racist remarks made by senior BA employees.

Oppose Unjust Proposals of the Counter Terrorism Bill

Ellie Keen — Sun, 11 May 2008 00:47:35 +0000

Yet another Counter-Terrorism Bill is now before Parliament. These proposals would extend the injustice of current ‘anti-terror powers’, which make exceptions to the normal criminal law, especially its protection of suspects through the right to a fair trial.

The proposed powers are based on the Terrorism Act 2000, which defined terrorism so broadly as to include simply the threat of violence to property in an attempt to influence a government, anywhere in the world. Such a broad definition could include many normal political activities in this country and any resistance to oppressive regimes abroad. That Act also created ‘terrorist’ offences of associating with particular organizations, sharing a platform with their members, and helping them financially, e.g. simply by selling publications.

Since the Terrorism Act of 2000, ‘anti-terrorism’ measures have imposed much injustice, particularly on Muslim and migrant communities. Of over 1200 people arrested under anti-terrorism laws, less than 5% have been convicted of ‘terrorism’ offences, few of these involving any plans for violent activities. A key effect has been to create a climate of fear – fear that political activity, or simply talking to the wrong people, will bring arrest or house raids.

The proposed new powers would extend current injustices, especially punishment without trial, in several ways:

Detention without charge would be extended from 28 days to 42 days
‘Terrorism suspects’ could be detained without charge for six weeks. Before 2000 it was 4 days. Neither government nor police have given any convincing reason why so long is needed.
Post-charge questioning of ‘terror suspects’ – presumed guilty?
‘Terror suspects’ could be subjected to further questioning after a criminal charge, even up to the trial date. Saying nothing could count against them at trial.
At present, people once charged can refuse to answer until their trial, without their silence being interpreted as a sign of guilt or deception.
‘Terrorist connection’ would justify a heavier sentence
Judges could give people longer sentences for ‘ordinary’ offences if they had a ‘terrorism connection’ – for example, allegedly supporting a banned ‘terrorist’ organization.
Confiscation of property without trial
Convicted ‘terrorists’ could have their property confiscated – such as bank accounts, vehicles, computers or even a house. The special procedure would not be a normal trial; it could involve secret evidence.
Extra punishment without trial beyond the original sentence
Convicted ‘terrorists’ could face a ban on foreign travel once released from jail. This would be done by a special order, not a trial. Those convicted could also face a requirement to tell the police where they go whenever they sleep away from home, in some cases for life.
New offence for volunteers of not giving information to police
Volunteer workers, for example in a youth project or charity, could be prosecuted for not telling police about suspected ‘terrorist’ activities. People might be over-suspicious and report imagined activities because they are afraid of being criminalised for concealment.
New offence of providing information about the armed forces
The Bill would make it an offence to seek or communicate information about the armed forces which could be useful to terrorism. This could apply simply to peace protestors telling each other, for example, what happens at a military base.
Hiding evidence about police killings
Some inquests could be held in secret, without juries. Sensitive material about how and why a person was killed by the police or army would be hidden away; they would never be held properly to account.

Ask your MP to oppose those proposals of the Counter-Terrorism Bill. Support the due process rights of all ‘suspects’.

Model letter to send your MP can be downloaded at http://www.campacc.org.uk/Library/MP_letterCTB08_260208.doc
DEMONSTRATE against the Counter-Terrorism Bill on Monday 12 May 2008, 5-7pm 10 Downing Street. Details available at www.cacc.org.uk

Resisting war crimes is not a crime

tim — Sat, 10 May 2008 11:52:34 +0000

Nine people in Derry in Northern Ireland have been charged under terrorism laws following an occupation of the local Raytheon plant during which, police claim, £350,000 damage was done to computer equipment.

The US company Raytheon is one of the largest arms manufacturers in the world, supplying guidance systems for many of the missiles and bombs used by US and Israeli forces in the Middle East. Raytheon systems guided the Qana bomb to the bunker where it blasted and crushed at least 51 people, including many children, to death last month.

Three of the arrested men, Colm Bryce, Kieran Gallagher and Eamonn McCann are members of the Derry branch of the Socialist Workers’ Party while another, Sean Heaton is a member of the Socialist Environmental Alliance. The five others, Eamonn O’Donnell, Gary Donnelly, Paddy McDaid, Jimmy Kelly and Micky Gallagher are Republicans, from the IRSP and the 32-Country Sovereignty Committee.

After hours of questioning, all nine were charged with Aggravated Burglary and Unlawful Assembly. These are “scheduled” offences, meaning they would be heard before a Diplock, non-jury court. These charges also meant that the men couldn’t be given bail by the Magistrates’ Court but had to be remanded to prison before a bail application in the High Court.

The only reason for the remand in prison and the severity of the charges is that the protestors live in Northern Ireland. This would not have happened in Britain or the South of Ireland. Despite the New Labour talk of a new NI, political dissent is still treated differently here.

At the bail hearing, the Crown tried to raise Eamonn McCann’s convictions on public order offences going back to the civil rights movement 1968/69/70. However, the judge said that the “vintage” of these charges made them irrelevant.

The arms merchants were brought to Derry in 1999 by SDLP and Ulster Unionist leaders John Hume and David Trimble: the announcement of the plant was made at the pair’s first joint public appearance following their receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize. It was part, they said, of “the peace dividend.”

The savage irony was immediately apparent. An argument over Raytheon has continued in Derry since. However, all the local mainstream parties—-John Hume’s SDLP, Gerry Adams’s Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley’s DUP—-have backed the company’s presence, arguing that the Derry plant isn’t directly involved in arms manufacture and that driving Raytheon out would deter other investors in an area of high unemployment.

Speaking from a window at the plant during the occupation, Eamonn McCann said: “We had to dramatise the argument so as to force the issue into the mainstream.”

Documents and computers were hurled from windows and the computer mainframe and other equipment put out of action.

The idea for the occupation emerged from a packed meeting of the Derry Anti War Coalition on August 2nd addressed by former Abu Ghraib interrogator Joshua Casteel of Iraqi Veterans Against War and Hani Lazim of Iraqi Democrates against the Occupation. Discussion from the floor focused on Raytheon, and the role it gave Derry in the arms trade. The activists knew that, despite the line of the main parties, there is real anger in the town at the idea of software developed in Derry helping to murder people in Lebanon and Gaza.

On August 9th at 8am, protestors arrived at the building Raytheon shares with a call centre. The police were already in position. At about 8.30, an employee about to go into work hesitated for an instant and the anti-war activists rushed the door. Police started grabbing people by the scruff of the necks and literally throwing them back out. The nine now charged are those who made it into Raytheon’s premises.

Once inside, the protestors erected barricades against the police and set about decommissioning the equipment. Many fliers thrown out the window gave the lie to the claims that the Derry plant had no connection with the arms trade.

Once local radio started to report the occupation, others started to arrive to join the protest. In the course of the day, between 80 and 100 people kept the solidarity picket going. Cars on the main road honked their horns in support.

Local residents brought coffee, sandwiches and cake. Armed police in riot gear stormed the buildinng after eight hours and carried the protestors out in handcuffs.

Almost all were battered and bruised in the process.

At the bail hearing, barrister Joe Brolly pointed out that Raytheon had had a turnover of $21.9 billion last year, and described them as “purveyors of death”.

Bail was granted but the restrictions are draconian. Conditions include an exclusion zone around Raytheon, and also ban the protestors from attending any public meeting or any private meeting of Derry Anti War Coalition or the Irish Anti War Movement. They were told that a “private meeting” means any meeting of three or more people.

A Raytheon 9 Defence Campaign is now being established across Ireland.

Trial Update

The trial of Derry Anti War Coalition activists, the Raytheon 9, is set to start on Monday May 19th. It is to be held in Belfast. The trial was moved to Belfast after the Prosecution Service applied to have it moved; it argued that the Derry jury pool is likely to know too much about the campaign against Raytheon, including the non-violent direct action taken on 9th August 2006 and that any jury from Derry may be too sympathetic to the action and/or intimidated by the level of support for the Raytheon 9 because of all the protests held outside the court over the almost two years since the nine were arrested.

The Derry Anti War Coalition is confident that, wherever the trial is heard, there will be large demonstrations in support of the Nine and that any jury who hears the truth about what was happening in Lebanon when the action took place cannot but find that the Nine acted to stop war crimes and, therefore, committed no crime.

Anyone wishing to support the Raytheon 9 can do so in several ways: Send a message of support to resistderry@aol.com (NB This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it).

Organise a fundraiser for the defence fund Spread the word about the role of the arms trade in fuelling war. If there is an arms company in your town, organise a protest at it.

Peak Food: Blaming the Victims

Ellie Keen — Thu, 08 May 2008 23:48:27 +0000

I’ve already written about this in previous posts under the ‘hidden holocaust’ theme, but am prompted to re-address this issue given the way it’s been dealt with by mainstream media and associated ‘experts’.

In today’s Independent we see an eye-opening article revealing that amidst what is described as a series of “global food shortages”, a new “government-backed report” shows that “the British public” annually throws away “4.4 million apples, 1.6 million bananas, 1.3 million yoghurt pots, 660,000 eggs, 550,000 chickens, 300,000 packs of crisps and 440,000 ready meals. And for the first time government researchers have established that most of the food waste is made up of completely untouched food products – whole chickens and chocolate gateaux that lie uneaten in cupboards and fridges before being discarded” — adding up to “a record £10b” every year.

And that’s just us Brits. Imagine what the totals are for the Western world combined: Scary and revealing stuff that makes the word “overconsumption” seem like a gross understatement.

But despite the shock value of such important revelations, I’m increasingly concerned at the way in which the food crisis is being portrayed. The Independent goes on to explain the causes of the food crisis as follows: “... millions of the world’s poor face food shortages caused by rising populations, droughts and increased demand for land for biofuels, which have sparked riots and protests from Haiti to Mauritania, and from Yemen to the Philippines.”

So the food crisis comes down to three things:

1) rising populations (presumably not us in the advanced West, but rather those Third World crazies breeding like rabbits despite being so poor)

2) droughts (which may be exacerbated by climate change but in any case often occur naturally and therefore we purportedly can’t do much about)

3) and the drive from energy corporations for investment in biofuels.

Indeed, according to the British government’s new chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington speaking at a government conference two months ago:

“price rises in staples such as rice, maize and wheat would continue because of increased demand caused by population growth and increasing wealth in developing nations. He also said that climate change would lead to pressure on food supplies because of decreased rainfall in many areas and crop failures related to climate. ‘The agriculture industry needs to
double its food production, using less water than today.’“

So again, population and economic growth in the ‘developing nations’, plus climate change, are to blame, and can only be addressed by doubling food production using less water (technologically impossible for all intents and purposes, but we’ll come back to that). It’s Them again — too many of Them, wanting More.

As if to emphasise the point, we hear in the same piece that:

“Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, said at the conference that the world’s population was expected to grow from 6.2bn today to 9.5bn in less than 50 years’ time. ‘How are we going to feed everybody?’ he asked.”

Only a rhetorical question of course. Sorry to break it t’ya folks, but ‘feeding everybody’ has never really been one of the state’s major concerns. That’s why “Each tonne of wheat and sugar from the UK is sold on international markets at an average price of 40% and 60% below the cost of production respectively (ie, it is dumped)”, thus undercutting local farmers across the South, who thus lose any semblance of agricultural-independence they may have once had (i.e. the ability to feed their own people), thus becoming subject to the whims of the global food market, manipulated through speculation in the interests of Northern investors and consumers.

But the important point for now is that as far as Hilary Benn is concerned, it’s clear that the cause of the problem is “their” population growth.

Later in the article, Professor Beddington is cited pointing out that global grain stores are currently at the lowest levels ever, just 40 days from running out. He again emphasises the question of food production: “I am only nine weeks into the job, so don’t yet have all the answers, but it is clear that science and research to increase the efficiency of agricultural production per unit of land is critical.”

According to Beddington, food security is the “elephant in the room” that politicians must face up to quickly. In reality, the “elephant in the room” goes far deeper than the surface issues scratched at lamely by the government, and sits in the heart of global food production. Some of Beddington’s observations show that he is dimly aware of this problem. He understands that production needs to be increased drastically. But his solution is a technological one, “science and research” in order to maximise “efficiency” so we can produce faster and better to meet escalating global demand. This is unlikely to happen. Beddington knows it. Benn knows it. The supermarket chains know it.

From this conventional analysis of the food crisis, we are not left with many solutions. We may, however, pick among the following: 1) the proliferation and prolongation of droughts due to climate change means that we need to slow down our CO2 emissions by introducing ‘market incentives’ (i.e. big taxes) targeted largely at consumers, who are blamed for having no regard for the size of their individual carbon footprints. transfering to alternative renewable energies is, for some odd reason, irrelevant. 2) reducing population growth in developing countries to decrease demand for food (nothing at all to do with NSSM 200, of course). 3) go easy on the biofuels (but fail to propose investment in other viable alternative energy sources). 4) pray day and night that Science will somehow generate a technological miracle of agricultural production.

Obviously, none of these ‘solutions’ seems to really offer a way out for the food crisis — and that’s because the analysis is fundamentally flawed. It’s not completely wrong, it just misses out half the picture, and so comes up with a false diagnosis of what’s actually gone wrong. The result is that the institutions that require urgent re-structuring are being absolved. The government, the state, and the network of giant multinational corporations that govern global agribusiness, are excused of any culpability. The cause of the crisis, we keep hearing is, WE, THE PEOPLE! It’s the developing nations, who just won’t stop breeding, dammit. It’s us Western consumers, who won’t stop eating and throwing a third of our food away. It’s everyone except the state-corporate complex that controls the food industry.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that you and I are NOT culpable. Of course we are. We do throw away tonnes, literally, of food. We do, each of us, have large carbon footprints that we should try to reduce in our own ways. Populations are increasing. But the question is this: are these factors the fundamental causes of the current global food crisis? Or are they exacerbating factors that are accentuating and intensifying the impact of the food crisis? Following mainstream news coverage of food shortages, one would be forgiven for believing that rising food prices are all because of you and me, the public, the general consumer. We have been thoroughly pathologised. And the British government, with its eye-opening study of how much food the British consumer chucks away without thinking, is complicit in this pathologisation.

Why is that the government-backed report discussed in today’s Independent, says nothing about the institutions who are primarily responsible for food wastage, the supermarkets, the multinational food chains? If the government is genuinely concerned about food wastage in this country, why won’t they do something about the fact reported by the same newspaper in February, that:

“Retailers generate 1.6 million tonnes of food waste each year… An influential watchdog, the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), will condemn targets set by the Government’s waste-reduction programme as ‘unambitious and lacking urgency’. It will also say multi-buy promotions are helping to fuel waste and obesity in Britain. Speaking to The Independent on Sunday ahead of the report’s publication on Saturday, Tim Lang, SDC commissioner, said it was ‘ludicrous’ that the Government had not pressured retailers into setting tougher targets to cut waste.

Three years ago, the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) left it up to supermarkets to find voluntary ‘solutions to food waste’ in an agreement dubbed the Courtauld Commitment. ‘The Government is frankly not using its leverage adequately. It really should toughen up on Courtauld, which must be enforced because this is ludicrous,’ said Mr Lang, who is also professor of food policy at City University, London.

The 18-month study, which found that ‘too many supermarket practices are still unhealthy, unjust and unsustainable’, said Wrap should adopt a ‘more aspirational approach to reducing waste in food retail by setting longer-term targets and [supporting] a culture of zero waste’...

A separate study by Imperial College for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, found that supermarkets preferred to throw away food that was approaching its sell-by date rather than mark it down in price.”

So three months after being hit over the head by the Sustainable Development Commission, the government’s waste reduction programme completely ignores the warnings that supermarket profit-maximisation policies are not only directly generating billions of pounds of waste by dumping good food, they are encouraging consumers through excessive advertising, multi-buy offers, and refusal to slash prices on older foods, to also buy excess food they don’t need, a third of which they dump in turn.

Instead, the government simply blames consumers. Period. Don’t penalise Profit, nor Power. Pathologise People.

The corporate-biased law doesn’t help either, because: “The scale of the wastage from supermarkets, food processors, wholesalers and restaurants is not known, because many companies refuse to make their data public, citing commercial confidentiality.” In other words, we don’t even know the real scale of corporate food wastage. Worse, the government regularly does the same thing — here’s an example: “In the past 10 months, the government’s food intervention board dumped almost 30,000 tonnes of fresh vegetables and fruit which had been withdrawn from the market to guarantee farm prices.”

So the problem is far more complex, rooted in a consumerist culture that is tied to a political economy being deliberately sustained by those institutions with the most to gain from this entrenched structure. The government has no interest in transforming that political economy. So the result is an insistence on inspecting only half the picture, ignoring the role of the global corporate food industry.

Driven by capitalist imperatives for short-term profit maximisation and long-term cost-minimisation, global agribusiness has established an international food production system that is, basically, dying.

Most of the Earth’s fertile land is already now being used for food production. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005 reported that “there is now little room for further agricultural expansion.” One of the scientists, Dr Navin Ramankutty, points out: “The real question is, how can we continue to produce food from the land while preventing negative environmental consequences such as deforestation, water pollution and soil erosion?” Or, more bluntly, how are we going to keep producing food if our production-system continues to destroy the very means to produce food?

It’s not that the Earth can’t produce the food. Its that corporate agribusiness can’t produce the food. In fact, as I’ve warned previously, it has been failing to produce the food since the 1990s, during which grain production has increasingly slowed. The frenzied application of fertilisers and other modern agricultural practices served to temporarily escalate production, but simultaneously have intensified soil erosion, destroying in years essential nutrients for crop-growth that take centuries to replace. The imminent peak of world oil production, oil being the chief underpinning for industrial agricultural methods, which is either just round the corner in 2010-ish (or worse, passed in 2005) means that the global corporate food production system is up against its own physical limits.

For us to keep eating, it’s true, we have to put an end to our insane overconsumption and wastefulness. But there are real limits to what the consumer can do within the existing global corporate food system. So we need to turn our attention to that system, and demand that it changes fundamentally, which means, of course, a wholesale transformation of our political economies in ways which rely on renewable energy resources and localised less-intensive but no less successful traditional agricultural practices. We need some kind of grassroots action, which makes our voices impossible to ignore. It will take time to develop, to become strong, to gather momentum. But it needs to be done, and now. Because at current rates of declining food production and rising prices, fuelled by unscrupulous market speculation, many, many people are likely to die, not just in the South, but here too. And while this death escalates, a few at the helm of the global corporate food industry will reap unprecedented windfall profits from their deaths. That’s why real solutions aren’t being put on the table. Death is regrettable, but when it comes wrapped in £££$$$, it’s not so bad…

The Colour of London

tim — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:18:58 +0000

We have been here, or somewhere quite like it, before. Britain’s modernising Labour government presiding over a financial crisis; people’s incomes squeezed by a rise in the cost of living; the government afflicted by its close links to an American administration fighting an unpopular foreign war; and many people worried about the effects of immigration. The voters used the opportunity of the local government elections to humiliate the national government. Labour even lost its London stronghold. This would be the precursor to a Conservative victory in the next general election.

Of course, the specifics were different forty years ago. Harold Wilson had a more engaging personality and was closer to the common man than is Gordon Brown. Nevertheless, when Prime Minister Wilson declared in November 1967, following the devaluation of the Pound Sterling: “It does not mean that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket, in your purse or bank has been devalued”, his credibility crumbled. The people’s mistrust was vindicated when inflation rose from about 3% to over 6%.

There followed, in April 1968, the infamous speech by the Conservative Shadow Defence Minister Enoch Powell, in which he quoted Virgil, a poet of the ancient Roman Empire:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see `the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.

Powell appealed to the white-skinned plebians in the home island of the defunct British Empire. He identified the dark-skinned migrants from the other lands of the ex-empire as the cause of the troubles of the native workers:

...they found themselves made strangers in their own country.They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker…

In case anybody should fail to get the message, Enoch Powell quoted from an alleged conversation with a working class man living in his Wolverhampton constituency:...In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.

The other leaders of the Conservative Party could not be seen to sanction such inflammatory statements.They did not want rivers of blood to flow, and they did want the additional and relatively inexpensive labour which immigration brought to the British economy. In fact Powell himself, during his period as Conservative Health Minister, had encouraged black workers from the Caribbean to come to Britain in order to fill the low-paid positions in Britain’s National Health Service.

Powell was dismissed from his post. But through this speech, Powell had snatched the political whip from the faltering hand of the Labour Party and put it into the hand of the Conservative Party. As the chronology in the ’1968 in Europe’ Teaching and Research project recalls:

09.05.1968: Local elections in Britain include race as an unofficial, yet important issue. In polls 74% claim agreement with Powell while 15% claim they disagree with him and 11% are undecided.

The Labour vote collapsed, the Conservative Party was triumphant. The Conservatives went on to win the general election of 1971. While the Labour Party’s fortunes would recover, it would always remain vulnerable, especially during periods of economic hardship, to the loss of a significant number of poor and working class voters who are influenced by racist ideas.

And Enoch Powell had inflicted severe damage, not just to the Labour Party, but to community relations in Britain. One of the main figures in the task of re- constructing ethnic relationships was a London-based Labour politician, Ken Livingstone. In 1981, during the dark days of Thatcherism, Livingstone unexpectedly emerged as the leader of the Greater London Council (GLC). Unable to persuade voters in the capital city to remove Ken Livingstone from his post, the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC in 1986. However, Livingstone’s successes in his position, which included reducing the price of using public transport, and community development through a multi- cultural approach, left a powerful and positive memory.

In 2000, a locally elected political leadership for Britain’s capital city was re-constituted, in the dual form of the Greater London Assembly and the position of Mayor of London. In defiance of Labour Party leaders Tony Blair and Gordon Brown who saw him as too left wing, Livingstone stood for the post of mayor, and won overwhelmingly.

Vindicated in defeat

We have moved on. Nowadays, most people in Britain would not claim agreement with the divisive racist rhetoric of Enoch Powell, and fortunately, there is currently no figure equivalent to Powell within the mainstream political establishment. But, no less than in May 1968, the outcome of the May 2008 election in London hinged largely on the intersection of ethnicity and class, with the scene for failure set by the inability of the UK government to deal with global economic and political problems.

Ken Livingstone, the incumbent Mayor, graced his defeat after eight years in office with a noble untruth:

“I’m sorry I couldn’t get an extra few points that would take us to victory and the fault for that is solely my own. You can’t be mayor for eight years and then if you don’t at third term say it was somebody else’s fault. I accept that responsibility and I regret that I couldn’t take you to victory.”

Other politicians were right to disagree. The BBC reported:...Justice Secretary Jack Straw said Labour as a whole should shoulder the blame for Mr Livingstone’s loss.

He told BBC News: “I disagree with Ken in one particular only, that we all share the responsibility for the defeat that he suffered yesterday.”

Mr Straw admitted that the row over the 10p tax rate had left some voters “understandably very upset”.

Brian Paddick, the unsuccessful Liberal challenger for the post of London mayor, put it more personally: “Labour suffered because of the failure of Gordon Brown.”

These statements are undeniably correct. In the rest of England and Wales, where the record of Gordon Brown was the matter on which the voters delivered their verdict, the Labour vote fell catastrophically, putting the party into third place, behind the Liberals. In London, where the records of both Prime Minister Brown and Mayor Livingstone were put to the test, it was a much closer contest, and one in which the Labour vote actually increased from its level in the previous contest in 2004.

An examination of the election results in London shows that in every constituency, the vote for Ken Livingstone as mayor was much higher than the vote for the Labour Party candidates for membership of the Greater London Assembly; also, although he lost, the actual number of votes cast for Mr Livingstone was significantly higher than in 2004.

The London election was preceded by a long and intense smear campaign against Livingstone, in which he was accused of having links to Islamic terrorism; making anti-semitic remarks; employing a cabal composed of Trotskyists and financially corrupt individuals; being drunk on duty; and of being an apologist for the murder, by Metropolitan Police officers, of an innocent Brazilian immigrant.

This campaign, led by the capital’s only non-freesheet daily newspaper, the London Evening Standard, rose to a crescendo after the Conservatives adopted a celebrity candidate, the affable Boris Johnson.

As the results demonstrate, the anti-Ken campaign made little dent in Livingstone’s main base of support. Rather, correctly fearing that he would be defeated in a close contest, the social groups to whom Ken Livingstone most appeals turned out in very high numbers; and when they got to the polling stations, most of them also voted for the Labour Party candidates for the Greater London Assembly (GLA). So, although in the rest of the country the Labour vote collapsed, in London it increased. Labour held all its existing GLA seats, and in one London constituency, Brent and Harrow, the Labour Party candidate for the GLA position unseated the incumbent Conservative. Even in defeat, Livingstone proved to be an asset to the Labour Party.

But those who would vote for Boris Johnson, the celebrity candidate of the Conservative Party, turned out in even higher numbers.

Class, race and city

The outcome of the contest between Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson illustrates the enduring relevance of some hugely important political factors. Firstly, those of class and ethnicity; it shows also how closely class and ethnicity are related. The people who surged into the polling stations to support Livingstone included the black and other ethnic minorities, most of whom are working class and / or poor; and also the majority among the poor and working class whites who do not hold racist opinions. These groups, who mainly although not exclusively inhabit the inner-city areas, were not put off by the virulent anti-Ken smear campaign- because not only does Ken speak for them, he has also delivered to them.

Surrounding the class and ethnic aspects was an emotional issue: that of identification with London – not merely as the capital of ones country- but London as ones home city, wherever one was born or ones parents were born; and furthermore as a multicultural city and an international city. Livingstone’s promotion of multiculturalism, during and since his period as leader of the Greater London Council in the 1980s, and his promotion of London on the world stage since becoming Mayor, has helped to transform, and to strengthen among many people, the feeling of identity with the city. This has been assisted by a material factor also- the rising global importance of London as a hub of world finance.

Of course, the social groups which comprised Ken Livingstone’s core base are the same groups which have traditionally been the core base of Labour Party support not just in London but throughout Great Britain. As Gordon Brown is discovering, if a party or a leader becomes perceived by their core base of support as no longer articulating their interests or delivering to them, he, she or it will begin to fail.

Livingstone did deliver. His success in delivering, within the limited range of powers available to the Mayor of London, has involved some byzantine compromises; indeed, as mayor for eight years, he demonstrated in practice his mastery of the mixed success: difficult compromises, ensuring that the deals he made had positive effects outweighing the negatives. But, due to the nature of these covert agreements, he could never ask to be judged on this great ability; neither could he escape responsibility for the negative aspects.

One of Mayor Livingstone’s successes was the tackling of racist behaviour and attitudes within the Metropolitan Police Force. To achieve this, Livingstone needed to win over and shore up the faction among the senior police officers who would get on board with his anti-racist agenda. To simplify, one aspect of the de- facto deal was that the police would receive a rise in funding, allowing a generous increase in the number of policemen and women; this- so long as they were not racist police officers- was no bad thing, and it allowed the mayor to claim credit for the overall reduction in crime which has occurred in the capital. But there was another necessary aspect of the tacit compromise- the mayor had to give his unstinting political support to the police, and particularly to the leader of the fragile faction within the force which was with Livingstone’s agenda- Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair.

Fortunately for the Conservatives, disaster struck in the aftermath of the 7/7 terrorist bombing in London. Suspected as a potential bomber merely because he was a man who was in the wrong place, at the wrong time and with the wrong colour skin, the Brazilian electrical worker Jean Charles de Menezes was lynched at Stockwell tube station in South London by an armed unit of the Metropolitan Police on the 22nd of July 2005. There then followed a campaign, opportunistically supported by the Conservative Party, to dismiss Sir Ian Blair from his post. The logic of his position required the mayor to excuse the shocking murder and to defend the Commissioner. For this, Ken Livingstone became the subject of hypocritical outrage.

Manufacturing dissent

Another of Livingstone’s mixed successes was his management of the public transport system. Defeated in the struggle to prevent the part-privatisation of the London Underground rail network (known as the tube), he was left with the responsibility of managing the dire consequence- to get to work using the tube, it costs the equivalent of about ten US dollars a day, thus either excluding or exacting a punitive tribute from lower-paid workers. Those who can afford, or have no choice but to use the tube, face their entry to the tunnels with little hope of a comfortable journey and no certainty of punctual arrival.

However, on the buses- used for short journeys by most people, and even for long journeys by the poor, the lower-paid workers, the nightworkers and also the night revellers- it was a different story. Bus services in England as a whole have been declining since their disastrous privatisation and de-regulation by Margaret Thatcher in the mid-1980s, thus forcing people into their cars or into isolation; in the English shires and metropolitan areas excluding London, this dismal process has continued under New Labour. But, in an unacknowledged concession for Ken Livingstone’s acceptance of defeat on the issue of tube privatisation, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair permitted the London Mayor to aquire sufficient powers and funds to roll hundreds of new and improved buses out onto the roads. As transport pundit Christian Wolmar wrote: Livingstone… concentrated on a deliberate and systematic policy of improving bus services.

New routes have been introduced, the bus fleet has been modernised, notably through the introduction of 300 bendy-buses that are easier to board and leave than the old double deckers, and frequencies have been increased. This has reaped major benefits in terms of passenger numbers.

The buses were cheap for anyone to use, free for children and pensioners; and thanks to a deal with Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, half-price for the very poorest Londoners. Under Mayor Livingstone’s reign, bus passenger numbers in the capital increased by 45%.

Livingstone could not be allowed to get away with this achievement. Ken had produced buses, but the media and the Conservatives could manufacture dissent. The unruly behaviour of some of the children who rode to school by bus was blamed on the mayor. Boris Johnson took up cycling- a means of transport for which Ken Livingstone has been the acknowledged champion; Boris rode out as an enthusiastic exponent of the ‘health and safety culture’, hitherto denigrated by the Conservatives. His foppish blond hair flying in the polluted wind of London’s West End, Mr Johnson declared that the ‘bendy- buses’- a key component of the new public transport fleet- were dangerous, their articulated rear-ends a fearful menace to the bicycling fraternity. He proposed to replace them with an updated version of the obsolete but fondly remembered double-decker ‘routemaster’ bus.

Of course, there was an anti-Boris campaign which sought to match the anti-Ken campaign; pointing out that Boris Johnson is a posh ‘hooray Henry’, an Eton educated buffoon, prone to making remarks that insult poor and black people: a man with not a care in the world and unfit to hold a responsible job. And when pressed, Mr Johnson had no idea what it would cost to phase out the bendy-buses and replace them with his proposed new routemasters.

Paradoxically, the negative campaigning led not to a decrease but to an increase in both the number of votes and the share of the vote for both the main candidates. The attacks on Boris Johnson did not deter the kind of people whose votes a Conservative candidate was likely to attract; and these were in any case people who were unlikely to consider voting for Livingstone: mainly the better off white people, who live in the suburbs and therefore identify less with London as a city, who are more likely to travel in a four-wheel-drive car than a bendy-bus, and who would not be affected by a revival of racist policing. Another group also voted for Johnson: a minority among the poor and working class whites who, believing that they are in competition with immigrants for jobs and social resources, are influenced by racist ideas.

Because it was clear that only Johnson or Livingstone could win, and also because the nature of the ballot allowed voters to spread their crosses between different candidates and parties, a good deal of tactical voting took place. From the results it can be reliably surmised that a large number of Liberal Party supporters voted for Johnson in order to get rid of Ken Livingstone and to inflict a defeat on the Labour government of Gordon Brown. This added at least 5% to Johnson’s vote. Of equal significance, the fascist British National Party (BNP) told its racially- motivated supporters to vote for Johnson, and nearly all of them followed this instruction. The BNP’s support was just over 5%. Livingstone lost by 6%. In the end, it was this tactical convergence by the fascists and many of the Liberals which gave Johnson the edge over Livingstone.

The collapsing compromise

Still, as Jack Straw and Brian Paddick observed, the main political factor in the defeat of Ken Livingstone was the perceived failure of the Labour government and specifically Gordon Brown at national level. Reasons mooted for Brown’s failure include his dour personality and his poor tactical judgement; without doubt, he lacks the ruthlessness and the hypnotic charm of his predecessor Tony Blair.

But Prime Minister Brown has a deeper problem. Like Livingstone, Brown is a man who pursues his agenda through compromise, and the main compromise which worked for Gordon Brown during his years as Chancellor of the Exchequer has come unstuck. During the first two terms following the stunning ‘New Labour’ victory in 1997, Chancellor Brown was able to deliver, to nearly everybody, something of what they wanted. Big business, the City of London and the very rich got their privatisation, their de-regulation and their tax cuts, and this attracted huge amounts of international money into the UK. Brown used much of this money to invest in public services, thereby not only improving those services but boosting employment and pay levels; some of the money was also channelled through the state benefits system to raise the incomes of low-paid workers and other poor people. Thus resistance to privatisation and de-regulation was blunted and concern about rising inequality was allayed.

For nearly a decade, the British economy rode high on the back of globalisation and the increasing role of financial services. This was put down to competence, Gordon Brown took political credit for this, and most groups in society drew a dividend, even though the gains were not equally shared. But now the forces of globalisation are delivering higher prices for petrol and food, and the financial services are in crisis.

Perhaps Brown saw this coming. He has certainly sought to create a refuge for himself by advancing the concept of Britishness. But while Ken Livingstone made himself into ‘Mr London’ by bringing the ethnic communities together through multiculturalism, Gordon Brown has been trying to become ‘Mr Britain’ at a time when the components of Britain- England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland- are drawing further and further apart; and while also, Britain’s image as perceived by the people who live in it is badly damaged by the UK’s foreign policy, including the subservient relationship to the USA and the Iraq war.

Can the Labour Party recover? Following the debacle of 1968, Labour had recovered enough by 1974 to be winning general elections. One of the main reasons for this was that the Conservative government of Edward Heath decided to take on the powerful trade unions, and in response the unions used their power to smash the Conservative government.

But, with the complicity of Gordon Brown, most of the industries in which the unions were powerful no longer exist; the remaining trade union members are hamstrung by legislation which, with the complicity of Gordon Brown, makes it very difficult to go on strike effectively; and, with the complicity of Gordon Brown, an ideological atmosphere has developed in which it is impossible for the Labour Party to be associated with strike action.

Nevertheless, even in the darkest days, opportunities emerge, and leaders emerge to make use of those opportunities; as when, in 1981, Ken Livingstone unexpectedly emerged as the leader of the Greater London Council.