gordon brown | ukwatch.net

Labour government blocks workers’ rights

JamieSW — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:33:35 +0000

Any belief that Gordon Brown’s government is going to back workers rights took another blow as the government voted down a series of amendments to the Employment Bill that would have given limited rights to workers in industrial disputes.

One amendment would ban employers from hiring agency workers to do the jobs of striking staff, and force them to inform employment agencies that there was a dispute to avoid an excuse of ignorance.

Another would have forced employers to provide contact details for workers to a union seeking an industrial action ballot, reducing the administrative burden on unions.

These basic polices are backed by all the unions and the TUC.

Only 44 Labour MPs and nine members of other parties rebelled against the government over the Employment Bill. While it is the largest backbench revolt since Gordon Brown became prime minister, hundreds of union backed Labour MPs voted against these limited rights and against the policy of unions who financially back them.

Fifteen Labour MPs also called on unions to be allowed to expel BNP members without penalty but that amendment was not even put to the vote.

The Tories as well as voting with the government against the pro-union amendments even attempted to amend the Bill to make it easier for bosses to limit agency workers rights further and deny workers having tips excluded from the minimum wage.

Left wing Labour MP John McDonnell proposed the amendments, describing the current rules as “onerous, costly and over-complicated”.

Moving what he described as an “extremely reasonable and moderate” amendment to the Bill, he said there should be a duty on employers to co-operate with unions when conducting a ballot for industrial action.

He also called for workers taking lawful industrial action to be protected from being “sued, sacked or penalised”.

New Labour Business Minister Pat McFadden called for a vote against the amendments, saying, “I am, of course, happy to continue a dialogue with trade unions about how the law operates… but I am not convinced that a duty on employers to help trade unions organise these ballots is the right way forward.”

Many union leaders keep arguing that millions of pounds of members money should go to the Labour Party. Yet again the government and union sponsored MPs have not only done nothing to deserve this money but voted against basic workers rights.

Once more Labour has treated the unions and their members with contempt.

Growing bitterness in Gordon Brown’s backyard

JamieSW — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:32:32 +0000

The billion-pound bailout of the banks has fuelled widespread bitterness over the way the system is letting ordinary people down.

This growing anger is easily noticable in the town of Glenrothes in Fife, where a by-election of national significance will take place on 6 November.

Prompted by the death of Labour MP John MacDougall, the election will be seen as a test of Gordon Brown’s ability to bounce back in the polls.

The constituency in the former Fife coal field borders Brown’s own seat, Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, and is solidly working class.

Both the prime minister and his wife Sarah have already said that they will personally campaign in the election.

The Scottish National Party (SNP), meanwhile, hopes to win the seat – building on its success in the Glasgow East by-election where it overturned a 13,500 Labour majority in July.

However, with the collapse of the two main Scottish based banks and the economies of Iceland and Ireland that were held up as a model by the nationalists, it is not clear how the anger and fear at the oncoming recession will play out in the election.

Social club

At the social club in Glenrothes Arthur McMain summed up the feeling of many local people. “People are struggling with rising heating costs but the government gives billions to those banks,” he said.

Arthur, who is in his fifties, used to work at the Brand Rex cable-making plant in the town but was made redundant about a year and a half ago.

“Some people I know worked all their lives so they could get a decent pension and ended up with nothing,” he said.

“The bankers have got it all sewn up. The man in the factory is paying the pensions of the fat cats.”

Yet despite having voted SNP all his life, Arthur said that this time he’s voting for Labour.

“Why? Because the SNP council has just raised the charges for home care.”

This is an added local dimension in the election. The SNP’s candidate is Peter Grant, head of Fife council. The SNP-Lib Dem coalition-run authority implemented unpopular and controversial hikes in care charges earlier this year that caused anger and fear among many local elderly and disabled people and their families and friends.

Council worker Andy Carr shares Arthur’s anger at the bailout. “The bonuses of those bankers should be taken off them. They don’t deserve it,” he said.

“There aren’t enough jobs in Fife,” he added. He is angry that the council have just appointed a lot of new management posts but he says he’s voting SNP.

“The SNP have done things straight away, like getting rid of the toll on the Forth road bridge. The SNP will win no bother. Everyone’s pissed off with Labour.”

Arthur added, “I hear we’re getting a visit from Gordon Brown. I’ll spit on him if I see him.”

Asked if he knows of anyone else visiting the area, he said, “Tommy Sheridan is speaking here around the start of November. I’ll be waiting to see what he has to say.”

Gordon's Problem with Mandy

JamieSW — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 20:05:48 +0000

Britain’s beleaguered Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who is still struggling in the domestic opinion polls and battling with the international financial meltdown, would have been cheered greatly by reading the New York Times earlier this month.

Writing in its opinion pages, Paul Krugman one of the paper’s columnists and professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University, asked simply “Has Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, saved the world financial system?”

Although Krugman said it was slightly premature for the question to be answered fully, he glowingly praised Brown for “defining” the “character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up.”

Krugman argued that, despite its relatively small economy, you would not expect Britain to be playing “a leadership role” in such turbulent times. However, the “Brown government has shown itself willing to think clearly about the financial crisis, and act quickly on its conclusions. And this combination of clarity and decisiveness hasn’t been matched by any other Western government, least of all our own.” This was a ringing endorsement for Brown from an influential commentator like Krugman, who coincidentally won the Nobel Prize for Economics this week.

Others agree. One financial advisor I spoke to last week, whilst quick to point out that he was at the different end of the political spectrum from Brown, readily praised his action to try and stem the collapse of the British banking system.

But whilst Brown is keen to be seen as the key international politician solving the financial crisis, one action he has undertaken recently is likely to do just the opposite. Earlier this month he appointed the veteran Labour politician Peter Mandelson as the government’s new Business Secretary. As Mandelson is no longer a Member of Parliament, he has to be made a Lord in order to take up the appointment.

Mandelson is an almost mythical political figure: hated and admired by his critics and followers. Along with ex-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, Mandelson and Gordon Brown are credited with creating “New Labour,” that went on to win three general elections.

He is seen as being one of the original “spin doctors” who twist and massage their message. Known for political subterfuge, he was once dubbed the “Prince of darkness” by his critics.

Mandelson is also unique in that he has already resigned from the Government twice. In the late nineties, he had to resign when it was revealed he had borrowed £373,000 for the mortgage from a millionaire Labour MP who was then subject to an investigation by Mandelson’s own government department. After he was brought back into the Labour government again by Tony Blair, Mandelson had to resign a second time, after it was alleged he had tried to intervene to get a passport on behalf of a prominent Indian businessman. Although a subsequent inquiry found that Mandelson had done nothing wrong, it was too late to save his job.

Brown explained his decision to bring Mandelson back into the cabinet as business secretary, by saying: “Serious people are needed for serious times.”

But Mandelson’s appointment by Brown stunned everyone. For the two men, although once close, have been feuding for the last fifteen years. The Conservative William Hague, who is the shadow foreign secretary, said it was a “stunning failure of judgment” by Brown. On the other end of the political spectrum, the veteran Labour left-winger, John McDonnell, called it an “extraordinary step backwards” to “reinstate possibly the most divisive figure in Labour’s recent history.”

And divisive the Mandelson – Brown split has certainly been. Their feud goes back to 1994 when Mandelson made the pivotal decision to support Tony Blair rather than Brown for the Labour leadership. The feud is graphically explored in the diaries written by Tony Blair’s former Communications Director: Alistair Campbell, which is seen as being one of the definitive books on New Labour.

Campbell describes the political and personal relationship between the two men as a “wall to wall disaster area”. Campbell’s diaries explicitly details how: the “real bane of Tony Blair’s life was Gordon Brown’s and Peter Mandelson’s inability to get on” and that the rift between them was “so deep that it was impossible to do anything much about it”. In fact Mandelson and Brown “hated each other”.

Over the last few years, the relationship between the two men is said to have thawed considerably. Although this did not stop the right-wing Telegraph pointing out that, at a recent meeting between Peter Mandelson and the Conservative Treasury spokesperson, George Osborne, that Mandelson had “dripped pure poison” about Brown to Osborne.

The interesting thing about Brown’s reappointment of Mandelson is that it is a move in the wrong direction, if his government is going to reign in the financial sector. Everyone knows argues that the current crisis means that we should move from an unregulated banking system to one that is regulated and works in the public interest, not just for the greed of city bankers.

However Mandelson is far too close to business interests generally and also to the financial industry, including accountancy firms. The role of accountancy firms in the current crisis is crucial, just as they were in the collapse of global giants Enron and World Com earlier this decade. When Enron collapsed it caused the dissolution of Arthur Andersen, at the time one of the world’s top accountancy firms, that had failed to notice the fraud at the heart of Enron.

In the current crisis many people are now asking how could the accountancy firms audit the books of banks and mortgage companies and not notice that something was so terribly wrong again? Could it be that accountancy firms are part of the problem?

Prem Sikka, the Professor of Accounting at the University of Essex, has been tracking accountancy firms for decades, and also Mandelson’s relationship with them. “When he was at the Department for Trade and Industry [DTI], he started making very favourable noises to accounting firms”, argues Sikka. According to Sikka, when Mandelson was at the DTI he gave auditors greater protection from lawsuits than had existed before. He did this by introducing “proportional liability” for accountancy firms, who before had had unlimited liability. This made it harder for injured parties to get compensation from accountancy firms and gave greater protection to the accountancy firms.

Then within months of being sacked as the Minister, Mandelson had been offered a £40,000 deal with the accountancy giant Ernst and Young to carry out “executive networking.” So he had went from regulating accountancy firms to working for them.

After Mandelson lost his job a second time, he resigned from being an MP and reignited his political career as EU Trade Commissioner, in Brussels. When he arrived in 2004 to take up his job, he was heckled by protestors brandishing a giant puppet. They accused Mandelson of having “strings that are pulled by European lobby groups and multinationals”.

Mandelson was quick to annoy his critics at the European Parliament too. When the Green MEP from Italy, Vittorio Agnoletto asked a question on the close relationship between the Trade Department and business lobby groups, Mandelson dismissed the criticism. He said: “I am not conscious of any incestuous or damaging relationship.” He ignored the long list of evidence compiled by his critics.

The following year, in 2005, the corporate watchdog, Corporate Europe Observatory, submitted a complaint against the European Commission after Mandelson’s Department had started blanking out the names of industry lobbyists in documents released under EU rules to make official documents public.

After a two year investigation, in a significant rebuke to Mandelson, the European ombudsman ruled that his office had been “wrongly blanking out the names of industry lobbyists” in the documents. It said that “disclosure of names of individual lobbyists is essential”. The failure to reveal this information “would constitute an instance of maladministration by the commission”.

Since then, Mandelson has been at the forefront of removing barriers to trade and investment. He has pandered to the corporate lobbyists who want a de-regulated open financial system. As the Sunday Times once noted, Mandelson is regarded as “being close to the financial services lobbyists who are pushing for the liberalisation of rules around the world.”

For example, Mandelson was there in May 2008, when the body set up between the EU and US to foster greater economic ties and deregulation, called the Transatlantic Economic Council (TEC) met for the second time in Brussels. According to the official news release: the TEC continued its work to “eliminate barriers to transatlantic trade” and “advance capital market liberalization, and strengthen support for open investment regimes.”

By bringing back the “Prince of Darkness” to his government, Gordon Brown has signaled that whatever the short-term quick fix for the banking sector, the longer term will see more of the same. Mandelson will make sure his banking friends get a good deal. And that is bad news for everyone.

Big flaws in Labour’s new spending plans

JamieSW — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:59:06 +0000

How quickly New Labour’s old orthodoxies of the free market have come crashing down.

Not long ago Tony Blair and his “Iron Chancellor” Gordon Brown told us that sticking to agreed spending plans meant there could be no utopian dreams of council housing, good transport infrastructure, or even school roofs that didn’t leak.

They said that in the era of globalisation it was no longer possible for the state to intervene in the economy.

Those who disagreed were at best old fashioned and at worst, enemies of “reform”, they said.

Now, with the financial crisis and the onset of recession, it appears that times have changed. Chancellor Alistair Darling says that he is prepared to spend billions on capital projects in order to stave off another Great Depression.

Housing minister Margaret Beckett will be given millions to buy up empty homes for council houses. More money will be splurged on a strange collection of “public works” such as aircraft carriers, replacing Trident nuclear submarines, the Olympics and London’s Crossrail project.

The ranks of disillusioned Labour voters – who have endured years of cuts in pay and public services alongside tax breaks for the rich – will doubtless be wondering why it has taken an economic calamity for the government to abandon its free market dogma.

Many will have watched the signs of economic collapse and feared a return to the Tories and the mass unemployment of the 1980s.

Now they will hope that Labour’s spending plans can avert disaster.

Closer look

But a closer look at Labour’s new spending plans reveals the enormous gap between what the government is prepared to dole out to the banks, and what it is says it will do for ordinary people.

On housing, the first phase of Beckett’s plan will release £13 million in London – enough to buy up just 335 unsold homes.

There are 9,000 people on the council house waiting list in the London borough of Barking & Dagenham alone.

Subsequent phases will release a further £200 million around the country. But according to town hall leaders, by then the numbers waiting for a home will have reached around 2 million.

That means the plan, if it were divided equally between all on the waiting list, will be worth just £100 each.

The money for this plan – and those for other big money “capital projects” such as new school buildings – is not new. It is merely being brought forward a year.

And the stark reality is that the government’s spending plans do not go nearly far enough.

First, there is the question of scale. Economists are predicting that up to 2.2 million will be on the dole by the end of next year. The current measures could not save more than a few tens of thousands of jobs.

To build and maintain a new generation of council houses that could really make a dent in the number on the waiting list would require spending that approached the amount used to bail out the banks.

Second, there is the question of what is being prioritised.

The government has decided it is prepared to spend nearly £4 billion on two new aircraft carriers.

But most people, given the choice, would rather see the skills of 10,000 workers that depend on those contracts used to improve lives, rather than threaten them.

Lastly, there is the question of who will benefit most from the spending.

If much of the government’s investment money is handed to the same developers who profit from schemes such as Private Finance Initiatives (PFI), then how much of the public’s money will actually benefit the public?

Recession

In the NHS there are fears that government plans to “spend their way out of recession” will result in “retargeted spending” to create short-term jobs, and that the much slower growth in spending after 2010 will lead to cuts in services.

The demise of the world economy has killed the rationale for New Labour’s obsession with the market. But we are some considerable way from policies that could really benefit working people during a recession.

Thanks to the scale of the bank bailout, Gordon Brown now runs four banks and most of Britain’s mortgages. Surely they should now be made to operate in the interests of workers, rather than the rich.

We need a fight for real public investment – under the control of those who build, use and protect public services. And we should keep pointing out that the the market has failed – it is time to kick it out of public services for good.

These are the fights that hold the key to the future.

New Labour’s affair with the super rich

JamieSW — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:27:15 +0000

The sheer scale of the global financial crisis has forced Gordon Brown and the government into making a few critical noises about “excesses” in the City and corporate greed.

But New Labour has been tied to and subservient to big business throughout its time in office. This is not simply an ideological commitment – there are deeper economic reasons for this close relationship.

Despite the rhetoric you hear from business leaders about “freedom from state interference” and “cutting red tape”, corporations need a smooth relationship with the states they operate in.

In recent years big business has attempted to make government the direct servants of its immediate needs. You can see this most starkly when companies get into trouble and demand that the government bails them out.

But there is a wider background process of corporations asserting their control over the state. Thousands of private sector lobbyists swarm around Westminster jostling for access and influence.

Capitalism is built on competition, which creates pressure on each company to gain an advantage by developing strong relations with the state while cutting out its rivals.

Public relations firms set up “public affairs” departments dedicated to lobbying MPs and ministers. These tend to recruit individuals who have been members of the political elite or have worked closely with government ministers and top party officials.

New Labour has been an eager partner in this process of buying up political influence. Brown has even fast-tracked the whole process, bringing private equity bosses directly into government and making a former head of the bosses’ CBI organisation a trade minister.

The push for more privatisation has also strengthened the links between government and business. Over 24 former Labour ministers and senior civil servants are involved in the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) industry.

These include former Labour health minister Alan Milburn. He is a director of Covidien, which describes itself as “a $10 billion global healthcare products leader”.

Milburn is also a member of Lloyds Pharmacy’s healthcare advisory panel, and an advisor to leading private equity firm Bridgepoint, which specialises in healthcare investments. He gets £75,000 a year from these companies.

Former education and home secretary Charles Clarke is a non-executive director of the LJ Group, which supplies training services, teaching materials and equipment to schools.

Clarke is a also consultant to accountancy firm KPMG on public sector reform. He advises Charles Street Securities, an investment banking and private equity fund management firm. On top of all that, he is a consultant to Beachcroft, a legal firm specialising in PFI deals.

Patricia Hewitt was health secretary from 2005 to 2007. She is now paid over £55,000 a year to be a senior advisor to Cinven, a private hospitals and healthcare group that is backed by private equity. Hewitt also gets a further £45,000 a year for being a special consultant to Alliance Boots, which is owned by private equity firm KKR.

And it’s not just ministers. Some of the government’s most senior officials also have extremely close ties to some of the biggest banks – and vice versa.

Going strong

Jonathan Powell, former chief of staff to Tony Blair, is now at investment bank Morgan Stanley. Jeremy Heywood, now the top civil servant at 10 Downing Street, worked for Morgan Stanley in the past.

This movement from government to the banks and back again is going strong under Brown’s premiership.

The close connections between New Labour and the City are just one aspect of a wider picture of the ultra-rich being given a free hand by this government to make money at our expense. And even with economic disaster on the horizon, they are still making a pretty packet.

Stephen Green, chair of the HSBC banking group, said last week that the the £14 billion paid out last year in bonuses by London’s financial institutions was “excessive”.

He has a point. Green received a bonus of £1.75 million last year, on top of his £1.25 million a year salary. Last week HSBC announced 1,100 job cuts.

It is in the nature of the economic crisis that while banks and companies fail, some rich individuals carry on doing very well.

About 80 percent of those worth £50 million or more plan to splash out more of their obscene riches this year, according to a survey by US-based wealth analysts Prince & Associates.

The number of billionaires worldwide is growing by almost 20 percent a year, according to Forbes magazine.

There were 476 billionaires in 2003 – this grew to 946 by 2007. A further 179 have joined the ranks since.

The richest 50 people in the world are now worth £723 billion, a 23 percent increase on one year ago. The richest man in the world, Warren Buffett, has a net worth of almost £62 billion.

In the US the richest 0.5 percent of the population spends £75 billion a year – equal to total household expenditure across the whole of Italy.

London boasts 36 billionaires. These include Lakshmi Mittal, the steel mogul worth £28 billion, and Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch whose personal fortune stands at £12 billion.

In the middle of the economic crisis some companies are making a fortune gambling on the chaos.

There are an estimated 8,000 hedge funds around the world controlling around £1.37 trillion – a sum that would pay for over 9,000 hospitals at £150 million each.

The job of hedge fund managers is to make the very rich – a category that conveniently includes themselves – even richer.

For instance, Philip Falcon made millions gambling that HBOS’s share price would plummet.

He recently bought a £24 million home that boasts a room specially built for Pickles, his pot bellied pig.

He “earned” £950 million last year and his firm now manages two funds with a total value of £10 billion.

John Paulson, another billionaire, placed a near £1 billion bet that that bank share prices would fall.

But it isn’t just a matter of individual “rogue traders”.

One of the companies betting on banks’ shares falling was Barclays Global Investors – owned by Barclays Bank. The ultra-secretive, mega-rich elite plies its trade behind the brass plates in the Mayfair and St James’s districts of central London.

One leading hedge fund manager, who was recently asked about what he did, replied, “It is none of your business – and until you have £1 million to invest and become a client, it will remain none of your business.”

Billionaires who’s who

Crispin Odey

Crispin Odey is one of London’s leading hedge fund managers and was outed as betting on bank shares plummeting during the financial crisis. He paid himself a cool £28 million this year.

Profits disclosed by his Odey Asset Management firm reveal that the company made £55 million in the year to 5 April. After Odey’s massive salary, the remaining £27 million was distributed between 11 partners in the firm. Odey Asset Management has £2.6 billion of funds under management and tripled its revenues to nearly £65 million last year.

Odey has been jokingly referred to as one half of the Posh’n’Becks of the City – he is married to Nichola Pease, a fund manager and heir of one of the Barclays banking families. Pease was one of the directors of Northern Rock before it went bust.

Odey and his wife are reckoned to be worth more than £300 million between them from their stakes in Odey Asset Management and in her company JO Hambro Capital, an offshoot of the Hambro banking empire.

Noam Gottesman

From GLG Partners’ office in a glass-fronted building in Mayfair, Noam Gottesman recently summed up his skills to a client in three words – “I make money.”

Gottesman and co-founder Pierre Lagrange are both ex-Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers traders. They are comfortably billionaires.

GLG Partners are the biggest players in the European hedge fund industry. Each of the partners holds £250 million stakes in the firm.

Its overseas assets are worth about £11 billion and last year Gottesman made an estimated £400 million.

Tragically, Gottesman is currently renting a house in Belgravia after being gazumped on a £27 million house in Chelsea. His rent is £20,000 a week.

Gavyn Davies

Gavyn Davies used to work for the investment bank Goldman Sachs, where Hank Paulson, US treasury secretary, used to be chair and chief executive. Davies is married to Sue Nye, Gordon Brown’s fixer and gatekeeper.

Davies was the chair of the BBC from 2001-4 and is a former economic advisor to the government. He is reported to have £150 million. Davies has in the past donated to the Labour Party and has been a long term supporter of the party.

He worked in Harold Wilson’s policy unit from 1974-6 and then as an economic advisor to James Callaghan from 1976-9.

Afterwards he had stints as chief economist at Simon & Coates and Goldman Sachs. He was later promoted to Goldman Sachs’s international managing director.

Tom Scholar

Tom Scholar is a senior civil servant and a director of Northern Rock, now owned by the government. He was previously chief of staff for Brown at 11 Downing Street and also an executive director at the World Bank.

Sir James Sassoon

Sir James Sassoon quit his post as Alistair Darling’s ambassador to the City earlier this month. Sassoon has technically been working as a civil servant in the treasury since 2002.

From 1985 to 2002 he was vice chairman for investment banking at UBS Warburg’s global privatisation business. Sassoon advised government departments on a variety of privatisation projects.

He was awarded a knighthood in recognition for his services to the finance industry this year. He is now advising the Tories on the City.

Baroness Shriti Vadera

Baroness Shriti Vadera, the parliamentary under secretary of state for business and competitiveness, is allegedly the person Brown trusts more than any other in his government.

She arrived at the treasury in 1999 after 14 years at the investment bank UBS Warburg where she had pioneered a privatisation programme in South Africa.

She has been involved in a number of high profile PFI and public-private partnership (PPP) processes, including the part privatisation of the London Underground train system.

Fleming Family

Tucked away in a townhouse on Dover Street in Mayfair, nestling among the posh shops and restaurants, sits Fleming Family & Partners – just one of the numerous investment services tailored towards the ultra-rich.

In order to get your foot in the door and to stand on the fine Turkish carpets, you need to have at least £10 million of ready cash to invest.

In return, you get small army of financial flunkeys to advise you on keeping down tax bills and to offer you a range of investments.

There is a cheque book and dark green credit card, both of which signal that you are seriously rich. The bank manages £6.3 billion of assets and trusts for 41 wealthy families.

Fleming is a major shareholder in Jersey-based Highland Gold, which owns and runs goldmines in Russia.

It bought them several years ago from Roman Abramovich at a rather low price.

The bank has close links with billionaire businessman Wafic Said. In 2005 it bought Sagitta Asset Management, which looks after investments of other wealthy Middle Eastern families.

Said’s son Khaled sits on the Fleming board. Wafic Said was the subject of a Serious Fraud Office investigation – abandoned by the government – into a slush fund to induce Saudi Arabia to buy British weapons.

The New World War - The Silence Is A Lie

Alex Doherty — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:11:41 +0000

Britain’s political conference season of 2008 will be remembered as The Great Silence. Politicians have come and gone and their mouths have moved in front of large images of themselves, and they often wave at someone. There has been lots of news about each other. Adam Boulton, the political editor of Sky News, and billed as “the husband of Blair aide Anji Hunter”, has published a book of gossip derived from his “unrivalled access to No 10”. His revelation is that Tony Blair’s mouthpiece told lies. The war criminal himself has been absent, but the former mouthpiece has been signing his own book of gossip, and waving. The club is celebrating itself, including all those, Labour and Tory, who gave the war criminal a standing ovation on his last day in parliament and who have yet to vote on, let alone condemn, Britain’s part in the wanton human, social and physical destruction of an entire nation. Instead, there are happy debates such as, “Can hope win?” and, my favourite, “Can foreign policy be a Labour strength?” As Harold Pinter said of unmentionable crimes: “Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

The Guardian’s economics editor, Larry Elliott, has written that the Prime Minister “resembles a tragic hero in a Hardy novel: an essentially good man brought down by one error of judgement”. What is this one error of judgement? The bank- rolling of two murderous colonial adventures? No. The unprecedented growth of the British arms industry and the sale of weapons to the poorest countries? No. The replacement of manufacturing and public service by an arcane cult serving the ultra-rich? No. The Prime Minister’s “folly” is “postponing the election last year”. This is the March Hare Factor.

Reality can be detected, however, by applying the Orwell Rule and inverting public pronouncements and headlines, such as “Aggressor Russia facing pariah status, US warns”, thereby identifying the correct pariah; or by crossing the invisible boundaries that fix the boundaries of political and media discussion. “When truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”

Understanding this silence is critical in a society in which news has become noise. Silence covers the truth that Britain’s political parties have converged and now follow the single-ideology model of the United States. This is different from the political consensus of half a century ago that produced what was known as social democracy. Today’s political union has no principled social democratic premises. Debate has become just another weasel word and principle, like the language of Chaucer, is bygone. That the poor and the state fund the rich is a given, along with the theft of public services, known as privatisation. This was spelt out by Margaret Thatcher but, more importantly, by new Labour’s engineers. In The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle declared Britain’s new “economic strengths” to be its transnational corporations, the “aerospace” industry (weapons) and “the pre-eminence of the City of London”. The rest was to be asset-stripped, including the peculiar British pursuit of selfless public service. Overlaying this was a new social authoritarianism guided by a hypocrisy based on “values”. Mandelson and Liddle demanded “a tough discipline” and a “hardworking majority” and the “proper bringing-up [sic] of children”. And in formally launching his Murdochracy, Blair used “moral” and “morality” 18 times in a speech he gave in Australia as a guest of Rupert Murdoch, who had recently found God.

A “think tank” called Demos exemplified this new order. A founder of Demos, Geoff Mulgan, himself rewarded with a job in one of Blair’s “policy units”, wrote a book called Connexity. “In much of the world today,” he offered, “the most pressing problems on the public agenda are not poverty or material shortage . . . but rather the disorders of freedom: the troubles that result from having too many freedoms that are abused rather than constructively used.” As if celebrating life in another solar system, he wrote: “For the first time ever, most of the world’s most powerful nations do not want to conquer territory.”

That reads, now as it ought to have read then, as dark parody in a world where more than 24,000 children die every day from the effects of poverty and at least a million people lie dead in just one territory conquered by the most powerful nations. However, it serves to remind us of the political “culture” that has so successfully fused traditional liberalism with the lunar branch of western political life and allowed our “too many freedoms” to be taken away as ruthlessly and anonymously as wedding parties in Afghanistan have been obliterated by our bombs.

The product of these organised delusions is rarely acknowledged. The current economic crisis, with its threat to jobs and savings and public services, is the direct consequence of a rampant militarism comparable, in large part, with that of the first half of the last century, when Europe’s most advanced and cultured nation committed genocide. Since the 1990s, America’s military budget has doubled. Like the national debt, it is currently the largest ever. The true figure is not known, because up to 40 per cent is classified “black” – it is hidden. Britain, with a weapons industry second only to the US, has also been militarised. The Iraq invasion has cost $5trn, at least. The 4,500 British troops in Basra almost never leave their base. They are there because the Americans demand it. On 19 September, Robert Gates, the American defence secretary, was in London demanding $20bn from allies like Britain so that the US invasion force in Afghanistan could be increased to 44,000. He said the British force would be increased. It was an order.

In the meantime, an American invasion of Pakistan is under way, secretly authorised by President Bush. The “change” candidate for president, Barack Obama, had already called for an invasion and more aircraft and bombs. The ironies are searing. A Pakistani religious school attacked by American drone missiles, killing 23 people, was set up in the 1980s with CIA backing. It was part of Operation Cyclone, in which the US armed and funded mujahedin groups that became al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The aim was to bring down the Soviet Union. This was achieved; it also brought down the Twin Towers.
War of the world

On 20 September the inevitable response to the latest invasion came with the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. For me, it is reminiscent of President Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in 1970, which was planned as a diversion from the coming defeat in Vietnam. The result was the rise to power of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Today, with Taliban guerrillas closing on Kabul and Nato refusing to conduct serious negotiations, defeat in Afghanistan is also coming.

It is a war of the world. In Latin America, the Bush administration is fomenting incipient military coups in Venezuela, Bolivia, and possibly Paraguay, democracies whose governments have opposed Washington’s historic rapacious intervention in its “backyard”. Washington’s “Plan Colombia” is the model for a mostly unreported assault on Mexico. This is the Merida Initiative, which will allow the United States to fund “the war on drugs and organised crime” in Mexico – a cover, as in Colombia, for militarising its closest neighbour and ensuring its “business stability”.

Britain is tied to all these adventures – a British “School of the Americas” is to be built in Wales, where British soldiers will train killers from all corners of the American empire in the name of “global security”.

None of this is as potentially dangerous, or more distorted in permitted public discussion, than the war on Russia. Two years ago, Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian Studies at New York University, wrote a landmark essay in the Nation which has now been reprinted in Britain.* He warns of “the gravest threats [posed] by the undeclared Cold War Washington has waged, under both parties, against post-communist Russia during the past 15 years”. He describes a catastrophic “relentless winner-take-all of Russia’s post-1991 weakness”, with two-thirds of the population forced into poverty and life expectancy barely at 59. With most of us in the West unaware, Russia is being encircled by US and Nato bases and missiles in violation of a pledge by the United States not to expand Nato “one inch to the east”. The result, writes Cohen, “is a US-built reverse iron curtain [and] a US denial that Russia has any legitimate national interests outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin former republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. [There is even] a presumption that Russia does not have fully sovereignty within its own borders, as expressed by constant US interventions in Moscow’s internal affairs since 1992 . . . the United States is attempting to acquire the nuclear responsibility it could not achieve during the Soviet era.”

This danger has grown rapidly as the American media again presents US-Russian relations as “a duel to the death – perhaps literally”. The liberal Washington Post, says Cohen, “reads like a bygone Pravda on the Potomac”. The same is true in Britain, with the regurgitation of propaganda that Russia was wholly responsible for the war in the Caucasus and must therefore be a “pariah”. Sarah Palin, who may end up US president, says she is ready to attack Russia. The steady beat of this drum has seen Moscow return to its old nuclear alerts. Remember the 1980s, writes Cohen, “when the world faced exceedingly grave Cold War perils, and Mikhail Gorbachev unexpectedly emerged to offer a heretical way out. Is there an American leader today ready to retrieve that missed opportunity?” It is an urgent question that must be asked all over the world by those of us still unafraid to break the lethal silence.

www.johnpilger.com

Brown's Speech

Alex Doherty — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:31:37 +0000

Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s keynote speech to the Labour Party conference was billed as a declaration of war on the “something-for-nothing” society. It served as a perfect reminder of why his government is so detested.

The Labour conference gathered under conditions of financial meltdown of the global capitalist system, and a political meltdown of the Labour Party.

Just days before, the US treasury had outlined a trillion-dollar rescue package for Wall Street after a fall in share values reminiscent of the Great Crash of 1929. In the UK, the collapse of Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS)—Britain’s largest mortgage lender—saw the city and government engineer a £12 billion take-over by Lloyds TSB in breech of competition rules.

Yet such is the precariousness of Brown’s position that there was open speculation in the media that he might be the first prime minister to be rescued by an economic crisis.

Whereas the weeks and months before the conference had been plagued by revelations of a plot to unseat Brown in advance of a general election due next year, the financial turmoil of the preceding days had reportedly led many in the party to question whether now was the best time to depose a sitting prime minister—not least because it might lead to a run on the pound.

Brown’s speech to conference on Tuesday was considered a pointer as to his future. His performance, it was felt, would finally demonstrate to the party and the country his strengths and underscore his claim that—as former chancellor of exchequer—his was the safe pair of hands needed to guide Britain through volatile economic times.

There was even evidence, it was claimed, that Brown would solidarise himself with public hostility to the bailout of the City of London and the concerns of those millions of Britons struggling with debt, rising prices and potential job losses.

Hadn’t the prime minister signalled such an approach with his claim that the stock market crisis had been caused by “irresponsibility” and short-term bonuses that were unrelated to long-term profits? And wasn’t his highly trailed intention to inform conference that “on the side of hard working families is the only place I’ve ever wanted to be. And from now on it’s the only place I ever will be,” further proof?

But the central message of Brown’s speech—his assertion that “Nobody in Britain should get to take more out of the system than they are willing to put in” and his pledge to crack down on the “something-for-nothing” society—was not directed against the banks and city speculators, but the working class, and its most vulnerable members at that.

Brown stipulated, “We are and will always be a pro-enterprise, pro-business and pro-competition government.” Referring to calls for a change of direction, he insisted that any “new settlement” between the market and government would remain determinedly “pro-market.”

In keeping with this pledge, there was no mention of the more than £70 billion in taxpayers’ monies the government has spent bailing out the Northern Rock Bank. Nor did his injunction against those taking “more out of the system” than they put in apply to those for whom Washington has created a “Toxic Asset Dump.” The transference of the banks’ liabilities onto the federal government will massively increase the government budget deficits and demands sharp cuts in essential public spending that will create untold misery for millions of American workers and their families.

In fact, the Brown government is reportedly considering a similar package for British banks, at the urging of the US. Brown and Darling depart for Washington at the end of the week. While Brown has made great play of his demand for a stronger international regulatory system to manage the global markets, there are increasing demands for Britain to emulate the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented transfer of wealth from working people to Wall Street.

According to reports, leading economists are stipulating that a Toxic Asset Dump is required urgently in Britain, at a potential cost of some £200 billion to UK taxpayers.

A Treasury spokesman stated that while the “UK does not have plans to implement a U.S.-style resolution regime…the Chancellor and the Prime Minister have made it clear we are prepared to take whatever action is necessary in the interests of financial stability.”

At the same time, the government has also made clear that it intends to break its own fiscal rules on public borrowing in a further attempt to bail out the City of London. The UK budget deficit is now expected to reach a record £100 billion in 2010/2011—double the previous post-war record.

Borrowing must rise to “support the economy,” Chancellor Alistair Darling said, signalling the introduction of new fiscal rules to this end. This can only be recouped by massive cuts in public spending further down the line.

Already, in his own conference speech, Darling had ruled out any clampdown on City bonuses, stating that it was necessary to “remain level-headed and avoid knee-jerk reactions.”

Brown did not take heed of such prescriptions against “knee-jerk reactions” in his own remarks. The government is well aware that its bailout of the super-rich will increase public unrest—hence Brown’s efforts to scapegoat immigrants and the unemployed for social injustices.

“Our policy is that everyone who can work must work, so that the dole [unemployment benefits] is only for those looking for work or actively preparing for it,” Brown said. “We recognise the contribution that migrants make to our economy and our society, but the other side of welcoming newcomers who can help Britain is being tough about excluding those who won’t and can’t,” he continued.

“That’s only fair to the tax-paying public,” he claimed, promising to “create rules that reward those who play by them and punish those who don’t.”

His attack on the unemployed comes under conditions in which tens of thousands of people have been laid off over the last months as a direct result of the credit crunch. Many thousands more will join them, with unemployment expected to rise at 500,000 per month, far surpassing the 2 million mark by Christmas.

While those whose jobs, homes, pensions and savings now hang in the balance are to receive no help from government and are instead treated as potential spongers and parasites, there will be no penalties imposed on those responsible for enabling a gargantuan accumulation of super profits for a few by means of massive indebtedness, financial speculation and fraud.

Acknowledging that some bankers had taken actions that had proved to be “disastrous,” Darling gave them a free pass, stating that “Banks will always take risks, and that’s right and proper.”

It remains to be seen how Brown’s speech will play out in the City and in the media. For its part, the Trades Union Congress had already pledged its loyalty to Brown—despite the fact that the government’s economic policies will impose further hardship on millions of its members in the public sector already subject to a below-inflation wage cap.

TUC leader Brendan Barber congratulated Brown as the man best placed to steer Britain through “tough times.”

“It is at times like these, where new ways forward have to be fashioned not just at home but on a global level, that our country most needs the wisdom and experience of this Labour government—led by Gordon.

“We will inevitably have our disagreements. But there will always be more that unites us than divides us. And it’s during the hard times, like now, that the enduring strength of our relationship matters most.”

Ultimately, Brown’s future will be determined by the financial oligarchy on whose behalf Labour governs. And some of its leading figures have already made clear they are opposed to any “sops” to public opinion.

In an open letter to the Financial Times on September 22, 11 “captains of industry,” including Whitbread chairman Anthony Habgood, Simon Wolfson, the chief executive of Next, and Severn Trent chairman Sir John Egan, attacked any talk of regulation.

“The lesson of recent years is clear. Economies must carefully manage public spending and reduce unnecessary budget deficits,” they wrote. “They should have simple taxes and competitive tax rates and reduce the burden of regulation.”

In its September 22 editorial, in advance of Brown’s speech, the Guardian also warned that the government should not forget where its fundamental loyalties lie.

“It is healthy for Labour to reconsider its attitude to business, after getting much too close in many ways,” it declared. “But this debate needs to start with some acknowledged truths. The first is that—like it or not—Labour has become a party of the free market, and that sudden retreat would bewilder voters as much as encourage them.”

A rich man's world

JamieSW — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:07:23 +0000

Global financial meltdown may have bought Gordon Brown time, but just as important among many Labour MPs and activists in Manchester this week is fear of the return of full-blown Blairism in the shape of a resurgent David Miliband.

After a couple of months in which the foreign secretary’s bid to position himself as Brown’s main challenger seemed to have come unstuck, his weekend media offensive – with lavish soft focus interviews in the Times and Daily Mirror – sent waves of alarm through the growing ranks of those who want to see Labour respond to the economic crisis by moving away from the discredited market orthodoxies of the Blairite years. Despite Miliband’s unpopularity among MPs and the unions, few doubt the likely impact of a full-on media campaign on his behalf in any post-Brown election (hence his discreet wooing of the Murdoch empire).

Even more worrying from that point of view was the apparent endorsement of Miliband by the health secretary, Alan Johnson, seen by some on Labour’s centre-left and in the unions as potentially the most credible Stop Miliband candidate – though his own Blairite history casts doubt on how viable a vessel he could be for the hopes of those looking for a change of political direction.

In fact, Johnson’s Miliband-flattering interview with the Times stopped short of ruling himself out (“I don’t aspire to that job”) and – despite claims from leading Blairites that Johnson has signed off a deal to run as Miliband’s deputy – the man himself has now let it be known that his remarks have been misunderstood, and no such decision has been taken.

There’s no doubt that the mood running through the conference in favour of a crackdown on City speculators, redistribution and tougher intervention in the economy should benefit any leadership contender prepared to move on from the well-worn New Labour formulas of the past.

But Miliband has made it abundantly clear in his various appearances on the conference fringe that he will be doing no such thing. His speech last night to the pressure group Progress was classic Blair – New Labour was a “coalition, not a faction”, guided by a combination of “head and heart” – and his apparent self-criticism offered little sense of any kind of new political direction. Earlier in the evening, he defended the Iraq war without qualifications, insisting – like Blair – that the rights and wrongs of the invasion and occupation would be left to history.

Brown and Alistair Darling have been making a few more rhetorical concessions to the dominant mood: the prime minister calling for tighter control on “irresponsible” City bonuses and the chancellor today promising the conference to do “whatever it takes” to deal with the upheavals in the markets. But both have stopped well short of promising the kind of decisive action both the party and the public are evidently looking for – and Brown has typically rushed to reassure the City that Labour remains a “party of business”.

That’s obviously not going to satisfy the mood inside the conference and beyond. The call by the Dagenham MP Jon Cruddas for a new 45% tax rate on those earning £175,000 a year to fund tax cuts for low and middle income earners has attracted widespread support. Meanwhile, delegates this morning voted for a radical union-led agenda – including price controls and a windfall tax on the energy companies – to be sent to the party’s national policy forum. Of course, that doesn’t make it Labour policy, but it’s a significant reflection of the new pressure for change.

Outside the conference hall, there are other signs of the wider dissatisfaction with the refusal of New Labour over more than a decade to give any representation to the huge swathe of public opinion to its left. Throughout the conference, a convention of the left – organised by John Nicholson, former Labour deputy leader of Manchester city council – is holding a series of meetings and debates on the alternative to Labour’s record of “wars, privatisation and environmental destruction”.

Labour Campaign Group MPs, such as John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn and Katy Clark, have joined speakers from a dizzying array of groups and parties, from Respect to the left Greens, with the aim of bringing together the notoriously fissiparous left inside and outside the Labour party in common action. Some see it as part of another attempt to form a new leftwing party. But what it certainly reflects is the frustration at the effective denial of a voice to millions in the political mainstream – and an early taste of some of the fractious fallout that can be expected to follow a Labour defeat at the next election.

Deep sense of fairness?

tim — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:00:00 +0000

With the Labour Party conference and the Convention of the Left running concurrently, Manchester is going to be a city of contrasts for the next week.

And it started even before either conference had got fully under way, with the colourful and vociferous peace march on Saturday and the Unite rally on Sunday providing an inside and outside contrast which may well, in its own way, provide the pattern for the week.

While new Labour loyalists in the conference were desperately mounting a rearguard action to save the Prime Minister – and new Labour’s – bacon, and Mr Brown himself was doing a mea culpa on TV, admitting that mistakes have been made and pledging, like a naughty schoolboy, to do better next time, thousands of peace activists were on the streets outside the conference campaigning against new Labour’s biggest mistake, the Iraq war.

And as Unite the union joint general secretary Tony Woodley called on marchers to remember the “many thousands of innocent victims of the lunatics that have taken us to war,” one of the chief lunatics was being praised by Cabinet Office Minister Ed Miliband for his “deep sense of fairness.”

On Sunday, this deep sense of fairness was put centre-stage again, with furious public-sector workers demonstrating outside the conference against the below-inflation pay deals that are being thrust on them as a result of government policy, while that same deeply fair government is doing absolutely nothing to curb the swingeing power company price rises that are producing a profits bonanza for the privatised utilities.

Deep fairness again prompted Mr Brown to observe that the City’s bonus culture encouraged “excessive” risk-taking, but that it was difficult to regulate as bonuses were part of a global system.

It’s a bit difficult to work out what the difference is between speculators working for foreign-owned banks and factory workers employed by foreign-owned manufacturers or NHS privateers, but we are sure that deep fairness means there is a reason why one set should have their wages pegged and others not.

But we probably shouldn’t get carried away with blaming it all on poor Mr Brown.
After all, he is only doing what he is told by his masters in the banks, who have made it very clear that, if their mistakes are not covered by taxpayers’ money, then the entire global financial system will collapse.

Does the blame, then, lie with the global capitalists who are holding a financial gun to the otherwise good-hearted Prime Minister’s head?

Or is it that, lacking the courage to face them down, this country’s government is doing its best to preserve and underwrite the system that has brought the world’s most developed countries to the brink of ruin?

Perhaps there is a lesson here for the trade union movement on the exercise of industrial muscle.

But the movement cannot exercise the power that it has without the full-hearted support of the people of those countries who, at the moment, have swallowed the biggest lie in history, that there is no alternative to capitalism, warts and all.

Therein lies the lesson for the Convention of the Left. Unite and refute the big lie that is capitalism.

Or stay divided and stay powerless. The trade union movement needs the left and the left needs the trade unions. And everybody needs a movement united under the banner of defeating the money-men who have made the City their own and who easily control Labour governments that are utterly divorced from their working class.

Brown goes nuclear

Alex Doherty — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:58:19 +0000

The problem with the Labour government is not the unpopularity of Gordon Brown, as measured by successive opinion polls, but the policies being pursued. Let me take one important example.

Last Wednesday Gordon Brown held his monthly prime-ministerial press conference. The reports by the Guardian’s current and former political editors (‘Producers may pass on cost of energy package to consumers’; “Brown comes up with a cones hotline moment” and the supporting editorial, ‘Lofty ideals’ ) overlooked the fact that in the press conference launching the energy support package, Brown chose on no less than three occasions to praise nuclear power.

He said: “I think people may have forgotten that we made the right decision about nuclear power, I think very few people now doubt that”.

Actually, the prime minister might be surprised that many do still oppose an energy source that produces dangerous plutonium as an unavoidable byproduct, and sometimes uses it in new fuel too, requiring methods of transport that are vulnerable to terrorism. Some 105,000 kilograms of this stuff is stockpiled at Sellafield: it takes but 5 kilos to make a bomb of the size that devastated Nagasaki in 1945.

As Dr Bennett Ramberg, security advisor to the state department in the 1980s, has argued, nuclear regulators are unfortunately not likely to implement appropriate protective insurance strategies “as long as they cling to the view that attacks are improbable and plants are well protected. The annual commemoration of the Chernobyl accident should serve as a useful reminder of what can happen if the presumptions prove wrong.”

Some think that Brown, hitherto sceptical about the benefits of nuclear power, may have been unduly influenced by the fact that his brother is public relations chief for EDF-UK, whose parent company in France – a company 78% dependent on nuclear power – is in the final throes of buying the majority share in Britain’s main nuclear generator, British Energy.

Brown added “I am encouraging other countries to go ahead with nuclear power, France and Britain are leaders in nuclear power … “ This is inconsistent with Brown’s insistence on fighting international terrorism and the foreign secretary’s oft-stated determination to curb nuclear proliferation. More, France has been a major industrial partner in the controversial Iranian nuclear industry. A little known report prepared last year by Paris-based analyst, Mycle Schneider, for the Green group in the European parliament, revealed that in 1974 Iran took a 40% share in a special purpose nuclear company Sofidif, the other 60% owned by the French Government owned nuclear giant, Areva. The next year, Schneider reports, Sofidif took up a 25% share in the international Eurodif consortium that built a large uranium enrichment facility in Pierrelatte in the south of France. Sofidif still exists, still holds the same share in Eurodif and is still active. In a letter dated 13 February 2006 (reproduced by Schneider), addressed to the CEO of Sofidif, Reza Aghazadeh, vice-president of Iran and president of the Iranian atomic energy organisation, announced the changeover of the Iranian representatives on the board of Sofidif, demonstrating their contemporary involvement.

Is this the kind of international nuclear partnership Brown wants to promote?

And on broader geopolitical energy matters Brown asserted: “Russia must maintain the obligations and commitments it makes to the international community … I do say there is another thing that has arisen from not only what has happened in Russia, but it is happening in other countries as well, we cannot allow a country like ours, given the need for energy security, to be wholly dependent on the supply of one resource. Instead of being wholly dependent on oil and gas, which of course is not going to be the best way of us proceeding as North Sea oil declines, we want a balanced energy policy, and so in my view does the rest of Europe. That will mean more nuclear building … “

Brown finds himself a curious political bedfellow with none other than the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Copeland, the constituency containing Sellafield. In a letter to his local newspaper, the Whitehaven News, on September 11, Councillor Chris Whiteside wrote: “But if we don’t support nuclear or coal, how are we to keep the lights on? Are we going to rely on buying gas from Vladimir Putin? I don’t think that’s a good idea”.

You can dress up nuclear power stations however you like: they are still inevitable generators of nuclear explosives and nuclear waste, alongside electricity. Ducking under the duvet won’t change these facts, Brown.

Climate Campaigners Acquitted!

tim — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:11:30 +0000

Ministers suffered a blow to their energy plans today as six Greenpeace volunteers were acquitted of criminal damage by a Crown Court jury in a case that centred on the contribution made to climate change by burning coal.

The charges arose after the six attempted to shut down the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent last year by scaling the chimney and painting the Prime Minister’s name down the side. The defendants pleaded ‘not guilty’ and relied in court on the defence of ‘lawful excuse’ – claiming they shut the power station in order to defend property of a greater value from the global impact of climate change.

Today’s acquittal is a potent challenge to the Government’s plans for new coal-fired power stations from jurors representing ordinary people in Britain who, after hearing the evidence, supported the right to take direct action in order to protect the climate.

Over five days of evidence Maidstone Crown Court heard testimony from the world’s leading climate scientist, an Inuit leader from Greenland and David Cameron’s environment adviser. The jury was told that Kingsnorth emits 20,000 tonnes of CO2 every day – the same amount as the 30 least polluting countries in the world combined – and that the Government has advanced plans to build a new coal-fired power station next to the existing site on the Hoo Peninsula in Kent.

The ‘not guilty’ verdict means the jury believed that shutting down the coal plant was justified in the context of the damage to property caused around the world by CO2 emissions from Kingsnorth.

One of the Kingsnorth 6, Emily Hall, said after her acquittal:

“This is a huge blow for the Government’s plans to build new coal-fired power stations. It’s coal that should have been on trial, not us. After this verdict, the only people left in Britain who think new coal is a good idea are business secretary John Hutton and the energy minister Malcolm Wicks. It’s time the Prime Minister stepped in, showed some leadership, and embraced a clean energy future for Britain.”

Another of the defendants, Ben Stewart, added:

“This verdict marks a tipping point for the climate change movement. If jurors from the heart of Middle England say it’s legitimate for a direct action group to shut down a coal-fired power station because of the harm it does to our planet, then where does that leave government energy policy? We have the clean technologies at hand to power our economy, it’s time we turned to them instead of coal.”

The defence called as a witness Professor James Hansen, a NASA director who advises Al Gore and is known as the world’s leading climate scientist. Hansen told the court that more than a million species would be made extinct because of climate change and calculated that Kingsnorth would proportionally be responsible for 400 of these. “We are in grave peril,” he told the jury. He said he agreed with Al Gore’s statement that more people should be chaining themselves to coal-powered stations. “Somebody needs to step forward and say there has to be a moratorium, draw a line in the sand and say no more coal-fired power stations.”

Asked by Michael Wolkind QC, for the defence, if carbon dioxide damages property, Hansen replied, “Yes, it does.” Asked if stopping emissions of any amount of it therefore protects property, he replied, “Yes it does, in proportion to the amount.” He added that he thought there was an immediate need to protect property at risk from climate change.

Tory green adviser Zac Goldsmith also gave evidence for the defence. He told the court: “By building a coal-power plant in this country, it makes it very much harder in exerting pressure on countries like China and India. I think that’s something that is felt in Government circles.” He later told the jury: “Legalities aside, I suppose if a crime is intended to prevent much larger crimes, I think then a lot of people would consider that as justified and a good thing.”

Some of the property the court was told was in immediate need of protection included parts of Kent at risk from rising sea levels, the Pacific island state of Tuvalu and areas of Greenland. The defendants also cited the Arctic ice sheet, China’s Yellow River region, the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica, coastal areas of Bangladesh and the city of New Orleans.

The acquittal is the first case where preventing property damage from climate change has been used as part of a ‘lawful excuse’ defence in court. The defence has previously been successfully deployed by defendants accused of damaging a military jet bound for Indonesia to be used in the war against East Timor before independence.

The defendants had intended to paint ‘GORDON BIN IT’ down the side of the chimney but were served a High Court injunction by police helicopter, meaning they only got as far as painting the Prime Minister’s first name.

Last month a new report by Poyry – Europe’s leading energy consultants – concluded that Britain could meet its energy demands without new coal. If the UK hit its existing efficiency and renewables targets it would negate the case for a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth and at least seven other proposed sites. An earlier Poyry report, published in June, found at least 16 gigawatts of untapped potential from ‘Combined Heat and Power’ plants – super-efficient power stations that are popular in Scandinavia but little used in the UK.

No principles and no bottle

tim — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 14:16:24 +0000

Conspicuous by his absence in the running order at next week’s TUC in Brighton is, Yes, you’ve guessed it, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the man who will don his dinner jacket and go running to address City bankers at the drop of a fiver.

And it’s hardly surprising, given that he has been instrumental in betraying everything that the labour movement stands for ever since he took office.

His government’s decision to rule out cash handouts for households struggling with soaring fuel bills was rightly blasted by the trade unions on Friday as a “downright disgrace.”

And his abject surrender to the power companies over their obscene profiteering demonstrates why this newspaper has no time for a man whose treachery has long outweighed any good that he has ever done.

Mr Brown’s wittering on about “no short-term giveaways and gimmicks” does nothing to obscure the fact that he hasn’t had the bottle to take the power firms to task over their highway robbery of working people and has, instead, reneged on his government’s commitment to ease the burden of the increasing number of people who find themselves struggling in fuel poverty.

Talk about energy efficiency, “reducing bills not just temporarily, but permanently,” does nothing to disguise his rubber-stamping of the utilities’ distribution of vastly increased profits to shareholders at the expense of the consumers. And any such savings would be quickly absorbed as the companies continued to jack up prices without restraint.

The outrageous cheek of counterposing the need to make the country more fuel-efficient against the urgent necessity of controlling the privateers in their continued plundering of the nation has infuriated the trade unions and explains why Mr Brown has done a runner rather than face his critics in Brighton.

But face them he must at some time or another, since, without bringing the unions on board, his government doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of re-election.

But what on earth could he tell them?

That he doesn’t want to renationalise the utilities because it would offend his mates in the City and his colleagues in Brussels?

That the market mechanism is the best way of controlling prices, when it is clearly failing to do so?

That it is right that pensioners and the low paid should underwrite massively increased bonuses to shareholders while they are dying of cold or cutting their food budgets in order to do so?

Clearly, none of the answers above would serve.

And, equally clearly, Mr Brown has abandoned any hope of winning the next election for Labour.

It is unpleasantly obvious that new Labour has no answers, no principles and no intention of doing what is right for working people.

New Labour has nailed its colours to the mast of privateering, profiteering and blatant, unbridled capitalism.

It is no longer a question of merely challenging Mr Brown’s leadership of the Labour Party.

Brutally, Labour must remember its roots and honour its generations-long commitment to working people or it will disappear into the vaults of history as yet another failed project and will be replaced by an organisation of the working class which will honour its historic mission to defend and advance the interests of the poor, the oppressed and the exploited in a way that new Labour has no intention of doing.

SATs fiasco- Labour’s failure

tim — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:50:33 +0000

On August 15, the British Labour government’s regulatory body, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), terminated the contract of the company responsible for marking Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs) school test papers (which are mandatory for all school children in England aged 11 and 14 years.)

The QCA had only signed the £156 million, five-year contract with ETS Europe (a branch of the US-based Educational Testing Service Global BV) in February 2007. However, a series of major problems with the administration and marking of the tests this year caused almost a month’s delay in publishing the majority of results for key stage two (11-year-olds) and three (14-year-olds). Key stage three results were not released until August 12, although some were still incomplete.

Not only was the deadline missed, but the accuracy of marking was severely compromised, with many schools reporting that inexplicable results in some cases suggested that the markers either did not understand the questions themselves or that there was not adequate time to check.

When ETS was awarded the contract to administer the SATs, it had boasted of a new method to ensure marking accuracy. Markers would have to sit online tests every time they had assessed 80 exam papers, supposedly to ensure they were marking to the given criteria. In practice, however, the markers were given no feedback other than a pass or fail and could not adjust their marking accordingly.

Not only was the marker training inferior to previous years, but markers did not receive papers in sufficient time, as they were sent from schools to a central depot and then on. This meant the papers had to be marked under tremendous pressure during school term time, further undermining accuracy. Papers/scripts that were near the borderline of grades were not double-checked, as was the case in previous years. On top of this, some markers received no papers at all, while others received papers for the wrong subject. Unlike in previous years, pupil registers had to be checked online and marks for every single question submitted online—an extremely time-consuming if not futile exercise, exacerbated by crashed websites and helplines that went unanswered.

Following the virtual collapse of the test paper marking system, the QCA and ETS Europe agreed to dissolve the contract with immediate effect. Under the agreement, ETS Europe is expected to pay back £24.1 million of the nearly £40 million it received to run this year’s testing process and is to be stripped of the five-year deal. Government agencies will now oversee the delivery of the last 30,000 results and the appeal process. ETS has been banned from contacting schools directly.

ETS Europe had hoped to prove itself in the English school system so as to expand elsewhere in Europe. It won the SATs contract despite a catalogue of past failures to deliver on its commitments. In 2002, software errors by ETS led to serious failures, including giving the wrong marks, in the graduate management admission test (GMAT) in the US. According to the New York Times, in 2004, mismanagement by ETS led to more than 40,000 teachers taking a flawed exam and ETS paying out millions of dollars in compensation.

From the very start of its contract in England, there had been problems with the delivery and collection of test papers from schools, the electronic registration and moderating system crashed, and markers and schools could not log on. The helpline was constantly engaged. Thousands of teachers dropped out of the marking scheme, and many other markers resigned. A backlog grew, forcing ETS to set up 24-hour emergency marking centres. According to the Guardian newspaper, at one point, the National Assessment Agency went in and found 10,000 unopened emails from increasingly desperate schools.

Now, the exams regulator, Ofqual, has asked Lord Sutherland to head an inquiry into the delays. Ofqual head Kathleen Tattersall said that if there is a significant rise in schools appealing over results, then all 1 million SATs results should be annulled. The general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, Mick Brookes, said that such appeals “are set to rocket.” He has urged the schools inspection body Ofsted to disregard SATs results when making a judgement on a school. Results that Ofsted deems poor could contribute to a school being placed in the failing category of “special measures,” in some cases resulting in heads and teachers losing their jobs.

State education given over to the market

While no parent, teacher or child in England will shed a tear on the departure of such a clearly incompetent company from schools across the country, the more fundamental issue exposed by this latest crisis is not the marking but the actual tests themselves. But rather than replace the testing system, as most teachers, educationalists and parents have been arguing—well before the latest marking fiasco—the government intends to replace one company with another in order to continue with the whole flawed testing enterprise.

Teacher unions have already cast doubt on whether a new contract could be awarded in time to deliver next year’s SATs and called on ministers to overhaul the system. Schools secretary Ed Balls said he was “open to reform long-term.” He floated “lower-intensity” testing but flatly ruled out suspending SATs for 2009.

The government has hinted that the data-handling firm Capita may be contracted to run next year’s SATs. Ken Boston, chief executive of the QCA, said it would launch an urgent tendering process and that he expected organisations that previously expressed an interest to bid again. ETS was one of five companies short-listed two years ago. According to the Guardian, two of the three other major exam boards have already ruled themselves out of the contract, on the basis that they did not believe there was a strong enough educational rationale for the SATs tests. Greg Watson, head of the OCR exam board, said it did not bid because the tests were used to measure schools against one another, rather than qualifying a child at a certain level and diagnosing skills. A second exam board, AQA, also said it had not bid because of concerns about the purpose of the tests.

One unnamed senior examiner said that the process was so educationally “vacuous” that it would actually be more suited to a company such as Capita, which is used to dealing with large-scale public sector data projects rather than educational examinations. So indefensible have the SATs now become that a former aide of Tony Blair admitted recently that they risked turning schools into “drab, joyless assessment factories” where preparation for tests crowds out real learning.

The disparity between the overblown election promises the Labour government made on education policy and the subsequent mess that it has made in the school system has been widely acknowledged. But the government and the media are seeking to conceal how and why this has happened.

The cash-starved and moribund education system that emerged after 18 years of Conservative-rule was the one of the most glaring examples of the socially regressive policies of the Thatcher and Major administrations.

In the absence of a mass socialist alternative to address this, the right-wing “new” Labour Party under Blair successfully capitalised on popular support for a radical break with the pro-market policies of the past and for a reduction in the levels of social inequality that rocketed following the speculative boom of the 1980s.

On taking office in 1997, Blair and then-chancellor Gordon Brown kept rigorously to Tory spending limits while introducing cosmetic changes in education—such as more classroom assistants and the introduction of learning mentors. Most significantly, however, the Labour government sought to introduce the most pro-business agenda in education for a generation. Virtually every area of education was opened up to corporate profit making; from the building of school infrastructure, the development of business-friendly “specialist schools,” the increase of “faith schools” and to the setting up of private “academies.”

State schools have become testing grounds for ever-more uninspired ways to narrow the already prescriptive national curriculum and force children through a selective testing system. The effects of teaching to the tests—as in the present SATs—on especially young children is to squeeze out the joy of learning that should be inherent in an imaginative, widely scoped, generously resourced syllabus. This contributes significantly to the growing levels of disaffection amongst pupils that has been confirmed by international reports on the levels of unhappiness amongst children in the UK.

Furthermore, teachers have been demoralised as they are turned into part-time administrators of prescribed curriculum, while being scapegoated and even publicly hounded by the government for its own policy failures. Many well-meaning teachers have found themselves grubbing for each test paper point instead of being free to open young minds to the exploration and discovery of the world around them. Crowning it all, each school faces the constant threat of government inspection whereby they are monitored, praised or punished on the basis of fulfilling increasingly arbitrary targets. Schools are encouraged to compete against one another—via league tables—in a desperate bid for decreasing resources. At the end of this process, parents are thrown into a scramble to get a place at the “best” school for their children.

The end result of the corporate-inspired curriculum and the assessment system—the implementation of which has been the mainstay of the Labour government’s education policy since taking office in 1997—is the straitjacketing of the intellectual and imaginative capacities of children in order to provide for the demands of big-business and industry.

The government’s education policies have long since alienated millions of parents, but such is the damage it has caused, the very corporate interests that it sought to serve have signalled their dismay at the results of the school system. After complaining about the low literacy and numeracy levels of school levers, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) announced recently that it was withdrawing its support for the government’s new diplomas, which were intended to replace the current A-Levels (taken at 18 years of age). Whatever new schemes Labour devises in response to such criticisms, its continued drive to redistribute wealth away from working people to big business and the super-rich, further fuelling social inequality, means it is incapable of arriving at a “better,” or more just education policy.

Political epitaph

tim — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:45:25 +0000

Which genius dreamed up the idea of sending Gordon Brown off to Afghanistan to meet puppet president Hamid Karzai and to mimic Tony Blair’s previous media stunt of posing in brilliant white shirt surrounded by British soldiers?

President Karzai could only have been the answer to the question of what international leader’s grip on his job is more tenuous than our Prime Minister’s.

Commentators used to joke that his writ only ran as far as the outskirts of Kabul. This overstates his real influence.

The Afghan president continues to be guarded by US contractors because he distrusts his own armed forces and he is utterly dependent on NATO military power, which remains incapable of suppressing resistance to the occupation of Afghanistan.

Mr Brown’s lavish praise of British troops, likening them to Olympic heroes on a daily rather than a four-yearly basis, is unlikely to have endeared him to them, knowing, as they do, that he is responsible for placing them in the dangerous and unwinnable situation that faces them.

British troops were originally dispatched to Afghanistan in what was said to be a cross between a peacekeeping and a nation-rebuilding mission.

It has turned out to be an all-out war, especially since they were redeployed, at Pentagon insistence, to Helmand province, where resistance is fierce and where casualty levels have inexorably risen.

Despite this reality, the Prime Minister claims that “substantial progress” is being made against the Taliban and the proof for this is that the Afghan resistance is having to adopt tactics “more of a guerilla nature than head-on confrontation with our forces.”

How very unsporting. Wouldn’t it be so much better if the Afghans formed up into massed ranks to charge tanks and heavy machineguns or to present a clear target to the occupiers’ aerial power rather than using roadside bombs and suicide attacks.

The government’s advisers should have known that such guerilla tactics would be favoured in a long-lasting war of attrition, but new Labour put subservience to the White House before any concern for British troops, to say nothing of the Afghan civilian population, who are the real sufferers in this US imperial aggression.

Still, it’s an ill wind that blows no-one any good and the arms traffickers of BAE Systems aren’t doing too badly at all, thank you very much.

Our government’s slavish determination to support every Made in Washington war has meant a bonanza for the company’s private shareholders, with the latest contract to supply ammunition to our armed forces over the next 15 years weighing in at £3 billion.

That should guarantee plenty of bonuses and dividends for senior civil servants and new Labour ministers who jump on board after being deservedly turfed out at the next general election.

Armed Forces Minister Bob Ainsworth is delighted that this programme will ensure “a modernised, sustainable munitions industry which will support British jobs.”

What a pity that such concern for industry and jobs has never extended to the rest of Britain’s manufacturing sector, which new Labour has allowed to disintegrate without lifting a finger.

And it is this obsession with war and private profits that will be new Labour’s political epitaph.

Labour Must Endorse Living Wage Campaign to Win Back Popular Support

tim — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:59:09 +0000

Cast your mind back nine years to a time when the Labour party had recently stormed to power and a wave of public optimism still swept the nation. We may have been duped but back then Labour did implement some radical reforms. Now, as the poorest members of society are struggling to cope with rising food and utility bills, it is time for the government to revisit one of its most successful policies, the minimum wage.

It is clear that the introduction of the minimum wage improved the circumstances of many workers, and even Conservative critics now back the policy, with the predicted negative impact on businesses never materialising. £5.52 per hour, however, is no longer enough and as the minimum wage has failed to increase in line with inflation its impact has diminished.

Labour should now go further. Introducing a national living wage – which allows anyone in full-time employment to enjoy an acceptable standard of living – would do more than any of the policies being mooted at present to tackle the impact of the ‘credit crunch’ on the poorest workers.

London is already leading the way with its own living wage. Without enforcement, however, the majority of employers have understandably chosen to stick with the national minimum wage. The Living Wage Employer Award hopes to change this. Stephen O’Brien, joint president of London First, described the award as “a new and much anticipated mark of socially responsible business practice”. “A growing number of high profile organisations are now part of the Living Wage Employer Group and London 2012 is set to be the first ever living wage Olympics.”

While the benefits of a living wage for workers and society are obvious – social cohesion, higher living standards, lower crime levels, improvements in health, greater incentive to work – there are also many benefits for employers. A KPMG report stated that since becoming a living wage employer the Royal London Hospital reduced its cleaning staff turnover by 50%. Furthermore, better pay means higher productivity and a happier and more motivated workforce.

Even Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who opposed the national minimum wage, is an advocate of the London living wage and earlier this year increased it to £7.45 per hour. “This is not only morally right but makes good business sense contributing to better recruitment and retention of staff, higher productivity, and a more loyal workforce with high morale,” he said. It is a sad state of affairs when a Tory such as Johnson is the one defending workers’ rights and the Conservatives are claiming to be the party of the poor. They will not fool many but there is, at the moment, no alternative.

London may have been an exceptional case in the past but nationally wages of average earners have remained almost static in recent years and those of the bottom third fell between 2004 and 2007. A national living wage would help to change these damning statistics. If Labour want to tackle poverty they should export the living wage to the rest of the UK. By implementing a national living wage, perhaps with regional variances, they would be able to help those most at need.

Business leaders would plead poverty themselves, as many did prior to the introduction of the minimum wage, but the cost would not have to sit solely with them. By increasing the tax free allowance the government could, in effect, pay much of the cost itself. Public opinion, for a change, would be behind them with a recent Harris poll showing that the majority of people favoured lowering taxes for the poor. The same poll also showed the majority in favour of higher taxes for the richest, but that would surely be asking too much from a government in thrall to the super-rich.

How to decide the level of the living wage would be a contentious issue. However, the results of a recent research project carried out by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation calculated the amount of money required for a ‘socially acceptable standard of living.’ The report concluded that ‘a single adult, working full time, needs to earn £6.88 per hour to reach this weekly standard.’ The study also found that the minimum income standard calculated was higher than the current threshold for relative poverty. The government’s already poor record on tackling poverty, therefore, is even worse than current measures indicate.

Julie Unwin, director of the foundation, said: “This research is designed to encourage debate and to start building a public consensus about what level of income no one should have to live below.” If Labour, whoever their leader is, want to regain the trust of core supporters and improve their chances before the next election they need to be the party leading this debate. Back in their heyday they fought hard to introduce a national minimum wage; they should now do the same for a national living wage.