George Monbiot | ukwatch.net

How to Build a Human Bomb

tim — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:59:14 +0000

When we learnt last week that Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi had blown himself up in Mosul in northern Iraq, the US government presented this as a vindication of its policies. Al-Ajmi was a former inmate of the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon says that his attack on Iraqi soldiers shows both that it was right to have detained him and that it is dangerous ever to release the camp’s prisoners(1). On the contrary, it shows how dangerous it was to put them there in the first place.

Al-Ajmi, according to the Pentagon, was one of at least 30 former Guantanamo detainees who have “taken part in anti-coalition militant activities after leaving US detention”(2). Given that the majority of the inmates appear to have been innocent of such crimes before they were detained, that’s one hell of a recidivism rate. In reality it turns out that “anti-coalition militant activities” include talking to the media about their captivity in Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon lists the Tipton Three in its catalogue of recidivists, on the grounds that they collaborated with Michael Winterbottom’s film The Road to Guantanamo. But it also names seven former prisoners, aside from Al-Ajmi, who have fought with the Taliban or Chechen rebels, kidnapped foreigners or planted bombs after their release. One of two conclusions can be drawn from this evidence, and neither reflects well on the US government.

The first is that, as the Pentagon claims, these men “successfully lied to US officials, sometimes for over three years.” (3) The US government’s intelligence gathering and questioning were ineffective, and people who would otherwise have been identified as terrorists or resistance fighters were allowed to walk free, despite years of intense and often brutal interrogation. Should this be surprising? Without a presumption of innocence, without charges, representation, trials or due process of any kind, there is no reliable means of determining whether or not a man is guilty. The abuses at Guantanamo Bay not only deny justice to the inmates, they also deny justice to the world.

Al-Ajmi, the authorities say, initially confessed in the prison camp to deserting the Kuwaiti army to join the jihad in Afghanistan(4). He admitted that he fought with Taliban forces against the Northern Alliance. He later retracted this confession, which had been made “under pressure and threats”(5). When the Americans released him from Guantanamo, they handed him over to the Kuwaiti government for trial, but without the admissable evidence required to convict him. Among his defences was that neither he nor his interrogators had signed his supposed testimony(6). The Kuwaiti courts, without reliable evidence to the contrary, found him innocent.

All evidence obtained in Guantanamo Bay, and in the CIA’s other detention centres and secret prisons, is by definition unreliable, because it is extracted with the help of coercion and torture. Torture is notorious for producing false confessions, as people will say anything to make it stop. Both official accounts and the testimonies of former detainees show that a wide range of coercive techniques – devised or approved at the highest levels in Washington – have been used to make inmates tell the questioners what they want to hear.

In his book Torture Team, Philippe Sands describes the treatment of Mohammed al-Qahtani, held in Guantanamo Bay and described by the authorities (like half a dozen other suspects) as “the 20th hijacker”. By the time his interrogators started using “enhanced techniques” to extract information from him, al-Qahtani had been kept in isolation for three months in a cell permanently flooded with light. An official memo shows that he “was talking to non-existent people, reporting hearing voices, [and] crouching in a corner of the cell covered with a sheet for hours on end.”(7) He was sexually abused, exposed to extreme cold and deprived of sleep for a further 54 days of torture and questioning. What useful testimony could be extracted from a man in this state?

The other possibility is that the men who became involved in armed conflict after their release had not in fact been involved in any prior fighting, but were radicalised by their detention. In the video he made before blowing himself up, al-Ajmi maintained that he was motivated by his ill-treatment in Guantanamo Bay. “Twelve thousand kilometers away from Mecca, I realized the reality of the Americans and what those infidels want,” he said(8). He claimed he was beaten, drugged and “used for experiments” and that “the Americans delighted in insulting our prayer and Islam and they insulted the Koran and threw it in dirty places.”(9) Al-Ajmi’s lawyer revealed that his arm had been broken by guards at the camp, who beat him up to stop him from praying(10).

The accounts of people released from Guantanamo Bay describe treatment that would radicalise almost anyone. In his book Five Years of My Life, published a fortnight ago, Murat Kurnaz maintains that one of the guards greeted him on his arrival with these words. “Do you know what the Germans did to the Jews? That’s exactly what we’re going to do with you.” There were certain similarities. “I knew a man from Morocco,” Kurnaz writes, “who used to be a ship captain. He couldn’t move one of his little fingers because of frostbite. The rest of his fingers were all right. They told him they would amputate the little finger. They brought him to the doctor, and when he came back, he had no fingers left. They had amputated everything but his thumbs.” The young man – scarcely more than a boy – in the cage next to Kurnaz’s had just had his legs amputated by American doctors after getting frostbite in a coalition prison in Afghanistan. The stumps were still bleeding and covered in pus. He received no further treatment or new dressings. Every time he tried to hoist himself up to sit on his pot by clinging to the wire, a guard would come and hit his hands with a billy-club. Like every other prisoner, he was routinely beaten by the camp’s Immediate Reaction Force, and taken away to interrogation cells to be beaten up some more(11).

Fathers were clubbed in front of their sons, sons in front of their fathers. The prisoners were repeatedly forced into stress positions, deprived of sleep and threatened with execution. As a senior official at the US Defense Intelligence Agency says, “maybe the guy who goes into Guantanamo was a farmer who got swept along and did very little. He’s going to come out a fully fledged jihadist.”(12)

In reading the histories of Guantanamo Bay, and of the kidnappings, extrajudicial detention and torture the US government (helped by the United Kingdom) has pursued around the world, two things become clear. The first is that these practices do not supplement effective investigation and prosecution; they replace them. Instead of a process which generates evidence, assesses it and uses it to prosecute, the US has deployed a process which generates nonsense and is incapable of separating the guilty from the innocent. The second is that far from protecting innocent lives, this process is likely to deliver further atrocities. Even if you put the ethics of such treatment to one side, it is surely evident that it makes the world more dangerous.

POSTSCRIPT: A few hours after this column went to press, the charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani were dropped, as the evidence extracted from him through torture turned out, unsurprisingly, to be worthless.

References:

1. Josh White, 8th May 2008. Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack. Washington Post.

2. Department of Defense, 12th July 2007. Former Guantanamo detainees who have returned to the fight. http://www.defenselink.mil/news/d20070712formergtmo.pdf

3. ibid

4. Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants at US Naval Base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Department of Defense, No date given. Abdallah Salih Ali Al Ajmi: summary of evidence. Pp8-9 of the pdf file.
http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/csrt_arb/000201-000299.pdf#38

5. Department of Defense, no date given. Summarized Administrative Review Board Detainee Statement. Page 47 of the pdf. http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/csrt/ARB_Transcript_Set_17_22822-2….

6. No author given, 26th May 2006. 5 ex-Guantanamo detainees freed in Kuwait. Associated Press.

7. Philippe Sands, 2008. Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, extracted in Vanity Fair, May 2008.

8. Quoted by Alissa J. Rubin, 9th May 2008. Bomber’s Final Messages Exhort Fighters Against US. New York Times.

9. ibid.

10. Ben Fox, 7th M ay 2008. Ex-Gitmo prisoner in recent attack. Associated Press.

11. Murat Kurnaz, 2008. Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo. Palgrave Macmillan. Extracted in the Guardian, 23rd April 2008.

12. Quoted by David Rose, 26th February 2006. Using terror to fight terror. The Observer.

Travelling Light

tim — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:43:32 +0000

Of all the charges levelled against environmentalists, perhaps the most unfair is the accusation that we are opposed to technological change. Most of the greens I know are fascinated by gadgets (sometimes to the exclusion of better solutions), while some of the people we confront seem terrified by new technologies, and react to them – witness the campaigns against windfarms – with irrational hostility.

But because environmentalists tend to have a feeling for material constraints, we recognise that solutions cannot be conjured out of thin air. In some cases they just don’t appear to exist. There are two reasons why we make such a fuss about flying. The first is that, even as governments promise to cut emissions, everywhere airports are expanding. In the UK, the government expects the number of airline passengers to rise from 228 million in 2005 to 480 million in 2030(1). Before long, there will scarcely be a patch of sky without a jet in it. The other is that there are no alternative means of propelling people through the air which are not more destructive than burning ordinary aviation fuel. Or so we think.

The airline companies prescribe two cures that are even worse than the disease. Even before they are deployed commercially in jets, biofuels are spreading hunger and deforestation. At first sight, hydrogen seems more promising. If it is produced by electrolysis using renewable electricity, it’s almost carbon-free. The prohibitive issue is storage. Hydrogen contains just a quarter of the energy as the same volume of jet fuel (kerosene), which means that planes could fly long distances only if they were filled with gas rather than passengers or cargo.

This means that if hydrogen planes are to fly commercially, they need much wider bodies than ordinary jetliners. According to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution “the combination of larger drag and lower weight would require flight at higher altitudes” than planes fuelled by kerosene(2). A technology that is green at ground level becomes an environmental disaster in the stratosphere. Hydrogen’s great advantage – that it produces only water when it burns – turns into a major liability: in the stratosphere, water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas. The royal commission estimates that hydrogen planes would exert a climate changing effect “some 13 times larger than for a standard kerosene fuelled subsonic aircraft.”(3)

But there is another use for this gas, though I am aware that it will go down like a lead balloon with most of my readers. The word airship elicits a fixed reaction in almost everyone who hears it: “what about the Hindenburg?”. It’s as if, every time someone proposed travelling on a cruise ship, you were to ask, “but what about the Titanic?”. Yes, there was a spectacular disaster – 71 years ago. It has lodged in our minds because, like the Titanic, the Hindenburg was bigger and plusher than any craft built before it, and it was carrying rich and prominent people. The conflagration was witnessed by journalists and broadcast all over the world. It also become the technology’s funeral pyre: the Hindenburg was doomed long before it burnt, as airships were already being displaced by aeroplanes.

Though the designs have changed, their disadvantages have not disappeared. While a large commercial airliner cruises at about 900 kilometres per hour, the maximum speed of an airship is roughly 150kph. At an average speed of 130kph, the journey from London to New York would take 43 hours. Airships are more sensitive to wind than aeroplanes, which means that flights are more likely to be delayed. But they have one major advantage: the environmental cost could be reduced almost to zero.

Even when burning fossil fuels, the total climate-changing impact of an airship, according to researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, is 80-90% smaller than that of ordinary aircraft(4). But the airship is also the only form of transport which can easily store hydrogen: you could inflate a hydrogen bladder inside the helium balloon. There might be a neat synergy here: one of the problems with airships is that they become lighter – and therefore harder to control – as the fuel is consumed. In this case they become heavier. Michael Stewart of the company World SkyCat suggests burning both gaseous and liquid hydrogen to keep the weight of the craft constant(5).

Airships fly much lower than planes – typically at about 4000 feet – which means that their emissions of water vapour have very little effect on temperature. If they were powered by hydrogen fuel cells, they would be almost silent, greatly reducing the effects for people on the ground. Though they are slower than jets, the cabin can be built much wider, which means that travelling by airship would be rather like travelling by cruise ship, but at twice the speed and using a fraction of the fuel.

There are four small companies trying to get airships off the ground(6). Most of the new designs make use of aerodynamic lift as well as buoyancy (they are shaped like fat planes with stubby wings or tails) which means that they are heavier and more stable than the old dirigibles, and can land without help on the ground. They can alight on and take off from almost any flattish surface, including water. But all of them have a problem with flotation: of the financial rather than the physical kind. While the price of carbon stays low, companies have no financial incentive to switch to a different form of transport.

The only help governments are prepared to provide is some development funds for military applications (raising money for killing people is always easier than raising money to save them). For a few years the Pentagon took an interest in craft which could land anywhere and carry several hundred tonnes of equipment(7). Otherwise, like so many other promising green technologies, this proposal is losing height in a hostile market. All the companies promoting large commercial airships are concentrating on freight, especially in places which are poorly served by roads. The danger here is that, if they take off, they could displace not jet transport but freight shipping, in which case, if they burn diesel, they are likely to cause a net increase in carbon pollution.

Paradoxically, the other major constraint could be an environmental one. Airships are one of several green technologies which might be killed by a shortage of materials. A new generation of solar panels relies on gallium and indium, whose global supplies appear close to exhaustion(8). The price of platinum, which is used in catalytic converters, has tripled over the past five years(9). Beyond a few natural gas fields in Texas, economically viable supplies of helium are rare; even there they might be exhausted in 50 years at current rates of use, or much faster if airships take off(10,11). If there is a God, he isn’t green.

Is this proposal just a flight of fancy? Because airships feature in no official document, because they have not been considered by either government or major industry, I have no way of knowing. But like most greens I’m prepared to try almost anything, as long as it works. Can the same be said of our opponents?

References:

1. Department for Transport, November 2007. UK Air Passenger Demand
and CO2 Forecasts. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/aviation/environmentalissues/ukairdemandandco2…

2. Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, , 29th November 2002. The Environmental Effects of Civil Aircraft in Flight: special report, para 4.27. http://www.rcep.org.uk/aviation/av12-txt.pdf

3. ibid, para 3.47.

4. Alice Bows, Kevin Anderson and Paul Upham, February 2006. Contraction & Convergence: UK carbon emissions and the implications for UK air traffic, p23. Technical Report 40. Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. www.tyndall.ac.uk/research/ theme2/final_reports/t3_23.pdf

5. Michael Stewart, pers comm.

6. World SkyCat Ltd, 21st Century Airships Team Inc, Aeroscraft and Ohio Airships.

7. See http://www.defensetech.org/archives/Draft_Solicitation_Walrus.pdf

8. David Cohen, 23rd May 2007. Earth’s natural wealth: an audit. New Scientist.

9. See http://www.platinum.matthey.com/prices/price_charts.html

10. Nicola Jones, 21st December 2002. Under Pressure. New Scientist.

11. No author given, 5th January 2008. Helium Supplies Endangered, Threatening Science And Technology. ScienceDaily. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080102093943.htm

The Great Consolidation

Ellie Keen — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:49:50 +0000

Everything is getting bigger and further away. Hospitals, post offices, schools and prisons are being “rationalised” and “consolidated”. The government says that this process improves efficiency. Instead, it outsources inefficiency: we must travel further to use public services. This is bad for the environment, bad for community life, bad for universal provision. But we haven’t seen anything yet. We are about to be confronted with the biggest shutdown of all: the government has started the process of closing England’s network of doctors’ surgeries.

If you know nothing of this, don’t blame yourself. The announcement was buried in an interim report published last October by a health minister(1). The report was 52 pages long, and the policy was explained in a single paragraph on pages 25 and 26. Rather than being brought before parliament, it was released four days before MPs returned from their recess. Since then there has been no further public announcement. But in December the Department of Health sent a letter to all the strategic health authorities in England, demanding that the policy be implemented immediately(2). The greatest transformation in the history of the NHS is taking place without public debate, public consent or formal consultation.

The government’s policy is to consolidate doctors’ surgeries into a series of giant health centres or polyclinics. Thousands of small practices will be closed and patients will be processed in buildings containing up to 50 GPs. The new clinics will also house some services currently provided by hospitals, which allows the government to claim that it is bringing healthcare “closer to home”. The net effect will be a massive reduction in convenience.

The policy was launched by Ara Darzi, a colorectal surgeon who has been raised to the peerage and made under-secretary of state for health. He wrote his interim report in three months, during which he claims to have spoken to thousands of people. But it contains no record of who they are, how they were selected or what their answers were: he reveals only that “their views have helped shape this interim report.”(3) His final report will not be published until June, but the Department of Health has instructed England’s primary care trusts (PCTs) to advertise for bidders for the new polyclinics by May 2008(4): the first notices have already been posted in the Health Service Journal.

During a parliamentary debate launched by the Conservatives last week, Alan Johnson, the secretary of state for health, claimed three times that this policy is not being imposed on primary care trusts. “There is no national policy,” he said, “for replacing traditional GP surgeries with health centres or, indeed, polyclinics”; “we are not specifying polyclinics as any part of the exercise”; “[the Tories say] we are imposing a system of polyclinics throughout the country. We are not.”(5) Three times, in other words, he misled the House. The letter sent by the Department of Health in December ordered that “each PCT will be expected to complete procurements during 2008/09″(6). In a parliamentary answer in Febrary, the health minister Ben Bradshaw confirmed that “every PCT in the country will be procuring a new … health centre during 2008-09.”(7) A press release published by the Labour Party on April 15th confirmed that the new health centres would be built “in every town and city.”(8) I hope MPs demand that Alan Johnson apologise to parliament.

Lord Darzi insists that polyclinics will offer “a more personalised service”(9). This is nonsense: in the huge new centres we are less likely to be able to see the same GP and more likely to get lost in the system. A recent paper in the British Medical Journal reveals that “patients in small practices rate their care more highly in terms of both access and continuity” and that small practices “achieved slightly higher levels of clinical quality than larger practices”(10). The new centres will be built not where they are most convenient for patients but – as Darzi revealed to the Commons health committee – where the NHS happens to own land(11). If you live in a village or a distant suburb and depend on public transport – as many elderly and sick people do – visiting the doctor could take all day. Ara Darzi is the new Dr Beeching, shutting down the branch lines of our primary health service.

So why is this happening? In seeking surreptitiously to privatise healthcare, the government has a problem. Primary care is already in private hands: GPs run their own practices. But they are the wrong hands: the corporations demanding guaranteed streams of income from the taxpayer can’t play. Polyclinics are perfectly designed to let them in, while preventing doctors from competing.

It’s not just that GPs can’t raise the capital; because the contracts are much bigger than ordinary practices’ and involve many different services, the tendering process is expensive and fiendishly complex. The big service companies can produce the same bid for any number of clinics: they need spend their money only once. The Department of Health says that primary care trusts should use a type of contract called Alternative Provider Medical Services(12), which is designed to allow corporations to bid. This is not a public-private partnership: it is the outright privatisation of primary healthcare.

Do I need to explain the implications? The US health system, which the British government seems determined to emulate, is both more expensive and less efficient than ours; those who can’t afford to pay are either excluded or treated like battery pigs(13). The independent sector treatment centres (ISTCs) – private clinics performing routine operations for the NHS – that the government introduced in England in 2003 have been a costly disaster. Private companies receive their money whether or not they carry out the work they are contracted to do. The government refuses to release comparative figures, but the little evidence we have suggests that their costs are much higher than the public sector’s(14). The risks have been transferred back to the taxpayer and in some cases the standards of treatment are appalling. In 2006 Angus Wallace, professor of orthopaedic and accident surgery at Nottingham University, told the Guardian, “We expect failures of hip replacements at approximately 1% a year and knees at about 1.5% a year. But we have got some of the ISTCs that are looking at 20% failure rates.”(15) Because they put profits first, companies that run these centres have generated a stack of litigation claims and a huge NHS bill for repairing the damage they have caused(16). Far from reversing its policy in the light of this evidence, the government is setting up a competition panel, to ensure that the health service never discriminates in favour of the public sector when awarding contracts(17).

Did any of us ask for this? Are there crowds on the streets demanding the privatisation of the NHS? Even the Tories, for God’s sake, have come out against it: David Cameron’s speech last week placed them to the left of Labour(18). Why, after the 60-odd consecutive quarters of growth that Gordon Brown keeps boasting about, can he not maintain a public service founded in the midst of poverty and rationing? What mysterious hold on policy do the corporations possess, that they can persuade this government to wreck Labour’s finest achievement and damage its chances of re-election?

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Ara Darzi, October 2007. Our NHS, Our Future. NHS Next Stage Review: Interim report. National Health Service. http://www.ournhs.nhs.uk/

2. Ben Dyson, Commissioning and System Management Directorate, Department of Health, 21st December 2007. Letter to SHA Directors of Commissioning.

3. Ara Darzi, ibid, p3.

4. Ben Dyson, ibid, para 14.

5. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080423/debt…

6. Ben Dyson, ibid, para 5.

7. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080229/text…

8. The Labour Party, 15th April 2008. NHS on your side. http://www.labour.org.uk/nhs_on_your_side,2008-04-15

9. Ara Darzi, ibid, p30.

10. Martin Roland, 22nd March 2008. Assessing the options available to Lord Darzi. British Medical Journal, vol 336, pp625-626. doi:10.1136/bmj.39510.702234.80

11. Professor Lord Darzi of Denham KBE, 25th October 2007. Minutes of Evidence taken before the House of Commons Health Committee. Answer to Q94. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmhealth/uc11…

12. Ben Dyson, ibid, Annex A.

13. During the Commons debate last week, Richard Taylor MP cited two recent papers about the failures of the US medical system, published in the BMJ and the New England Journal of Medicine. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080423/debt…

14. Allyson M Pollock and Sylvia Godden, 23rd February 2008. Independent sector treatment centres: evidence so far. British Medical Journal, vol 336, pp421-424. doi:10.1136/bmj.39470.505556.80

15. Quoted by Sarah Boseley, 1oth March 2006. NHS forced to fix bungled private sector hip replacement operations. The Guardian.

16. See also Stewart Player and Colin Leys, April 2008. Under the knife. Red Pepper magazine.

17. Nicholas Timmins, 16th March 2008. NHS providers to win right of appeal. Financial Times.

18. David Cameron, 21st April 2008. Speech on Primary Care.
http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=news.story.page&obj_id=143765&s…

Anticipatory Compliance

Ellie Keen — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:13:01 +0000

If you want to know how powerful Rupert Murdoch is, read the reviews of Bruce Dover’s book, Rupert’s Adventures in China. Well, go on, read them. You can’t find any? I rest my case.

Dover was Murdoch’s vice-president in China. He took his orders directly from the boss. His book, which was published in February, is a fascinating study of power, and of a man who could not bring himself to believe that anyone would stand in his way(1). So why aren’t we reading about it?

Murdoch, Dover shows, began his assault on China with two strategic mistakes. The first was to pay a staggering price – US$525m – for a majority stake in Star TV, a failing satellite broadcaster based in Hong Kong. The second was to make a speech in September 1993, a few months after he had bought the business, which he had neither written nor read very carefully. New telecommunications, he said, “have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere. … satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television channels.”

The Chinese leaders were furious. The prime minister, Li Peng, issued a decree banning satellite dishes from China. Murdoch spent the next ten years grovelling. In the interests of business the great capitalist became the communist government’s most powerful supporter.

Within six months of Li Peng’s ban, Murdoch dropped the BBC from Star’s China signal. His publishing company, HarperCollins, paid a fortune for a tedious biography of the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, written by Deng’s daughter. He built a website for the regime’s propaganda sheet, the People’s Daily. In 1997 he made another speech in which he tried to undo the damage he had caused four years before. “China”, he said, “is a distinctive market with distinctive social and moral values that Western companies must learn to abide by.” His minions ensured, Dover reveals, that “every relevant Chinese government official received a copy”.

But the satellite dishes remained banned, so he grovelled even more. He described the Dalai Lama as “a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes”. His son James claimed that the Western media was “painting a falsely negative portrayal of China through their focus on controversial issues such as human rights”. Rupert employed his unsalaried gopher Tony Blair to give him special access: in 1999 Blair placed him next to the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, at a Downing Street lunch. To secure some limited cable rights in southern China, News Corporation agreed to carry a Chinese government channel – CCTV 9 – on Fox and Sky. Murdoch promised to “further strengthen cooperative ties with the Chinese media, and explore new areas with an even more positive attitude”.

Most notoriously, he instructed HarperCollins not to publish the book it had bought from the former governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten. Dover reveals that Murdoch was forced to intervene directly (he instructed the publishers to “kill the fucking book”) because his usual system of control had broken down. “Murdoch very rarely issued directives or instructions to his senior executives or editors.” Instead he expected “a sort of ‘anticipatory compliance’. One didn’t need to be instructed about what to do, one simply knew what was in one’s long-term interests.” In this case executives at HarperCollins had failed to understand that when the boss objected to Patten’s views on China it meant that the book was dead.

Anticipatory compliance also describes Murdoch’s approach to Beijing. Dover shows that the Chinese leadership never asked for Chris Patten’s book to be banned: they didn’t even know it existed. But when Murdoch killed it, “our Beijing minders were impressed and the Patten incident marked a distinct warming in the relationship”.

The strategy failed. Murdoch was astonished that he couldn’t replicate “the cosy relationship he enjoyed with Britain’s political Establishment”. For the first time in his later career, he had encountered an organisation more powerful and more determined than he was. He has now retreated from China, after losing at least $1bn.

This is a riveting story about two of the world’s most powerful forces. Dover’s British publisher told me “I thought this was a natural for serialisation. We had the author primed and prepared to come over here. But we had to cancel as we could not raise enough interest. We’ve hit brick walls and we don’t understand why.”(2) The book has been reviewed in the Economist and the Financial Times, but neither the other British newspapers nor the broadcasters have touched it.

As far as I can discover, the book has been reviewed by only one Murdoch publication anywhere on earth – the Australian Literary Review – and that was an article of such snivelling sycophancy that you wonder why they bothered(3). The editor of another of News Corporation’s titles, the Far Eastern Economic Review, commissioned a review of Dover’s book, then admitted to contracting “cold feet” and spiked it(4).

But what of the other papers? Why should they appease Murdoch? “When you see the reaction of the British media to the book,” Bruce Dover tells me, “one can better understand why in some respects the Chinese so admired Murdoch – an Emperor who inspires fear in his followers need not raise a hand against them.”(5) He might be right, but I think there is also a general bias against relevance in the review sections. When I worked in faraway countries my books about the tribulations of obscure peoples were comprehensively reviewed. When I came home and wrote Captive State: the Corporate Takeover of Britain, it was ignored. There appears to be an inverse relationship between how hard a book hits and how well it is covered.

Paradoxically for a publication which inspires such fear, Bruce Dover’s story sometimes steps back from the brink. He observes that News Corporation never promised the Chinese government favourable coverage; Murdoch undertook only to be “fair”, “balanced” and “objective”. Dover takes these terms at face value, though it is obvious from his account that they were being used as code for sympathetic treatment. His book does not contain News Corporation’s most direct admission: the statement by Murdoch’s spokesman Wang Yukui that “we won’t do programmes that are offensive in China. … If you call this self-censorship then of course we’re doing a kind of self-censorship.”(6) He is wrong to suggest that “Murdoch very rarely issued directives or instructions”. As the testimony by Andrew Neil (formerly the editor of the Sunday Times) before the Lords Communications Committee shows(7), the paramount leader micromanages the editorial content of the newspapers he owns which swing the greatest political weight.

But I am sure it is true that anticipatory compliance is Murdoch’s most powerful weapon. I doubt he needed to tell all 247 of his editors to support the invasion of Iraq, but they did(8). He might not even have had to lean on Tony Blair to ensure – as Blair’s former spin doctor Lance Price reveals – that no British minister said “anything positive about the euro.”(9) Power is sustained not by force but by fear, as everyone seeks to interpret the wishes of his master and to meet them even before he asks.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Bruce Dover, 2008. Rupert’s Adventures in China: how Murdoch lost a fortune and found a wife. Mainstream Publishing.

2. Email from Bill Campbell, 17th April 2008.

3. Mark Day, 2nd April 2008. More than a mogul can bear. Australian Literary Review.

4. Donald Greenlees, 3rd March 2008. Review of Book on Murdoch Is Killed. The New York Times

5. Email from Bruce Dover, 17th April 2008.

6. Agence France Presse, 20th December 2001. Murdoch’s News Corp looks for further China access after TV.

7. Andrew Neil, 23 January 2008. Minutes of evidence taken before the Select Committee on Communications: Media Ownership and the News. House of Lords. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld/lduncorr/comms230108ev15.pdf

8. David Harvey, 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p35. Oxford University Press.

9. Lance Price, 1st July 2006. Rupert Murdoch is effectively a member of Blair’s cabinet. The Guardian.

The Pleasures of the Flesh

tim — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:10:04 +0000

Never mind the economic crisis. Focus for a moment on a more urgent threat: the great food recession which is sweeping the world faster than the credit crunch.

You have probably seen the figures by now: the price of rice has risen by three-quarters in the past year, that of wheat by 130%(1). There are food crises in 37 countries. One hundred million people, according to the World Bank, could be pushed into deeper poverty by the high prices(2). But I bet you have missed the most telling statistic. At 2.1bn tonnes, last year’s global grain harvest broke all records(3). It beat the previous year’s by almost 5%. The crisis, in other words, has begun before world food supplies are hit by climate change. If hunger can strike now, what will happen if harvests decline?

There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), will feed people(4).

I am sorely tempted to write another column about biofuels. From this morning all sellers of transport fuel in the United Kingdom will be obliged to mix it with ethanol or biodiesel made from crops. The World Bank points out that “the grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol … could feed one person for a year”(5). Last year global stockpiles of cereals declined by around 53m tonnes(6); this gives you a rough idea of the size of the hunger gap. The production of biofuels this year will consume almost 100m tonnes(7), which suggests that they are directly responsible for the current crisis. In the Guardian yesterday the transport secretary Ruth Kelly promised that “if we need to adjust policy in the light of new evidence, we will.”(8) What new evidence does she require? In the midst of a global humanitarian crisis, we have just become legally obliged to use food as fuel. It is a crime against humanity in which every driver in this country has been forced to participate.

But I have been saying this for four years and I am boring myself. Of course we must demand that our governments scrap the rules which turn grain into the fastest food of all. But there is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals(9). This could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.

While meat consumption is booming in Asia and Latin America, in the United Kingdom it has scarcely changed since the government started gathering data in 1974. At just over 1kg per person per week(10), it’s still about 40% above the global average(11), though less than half the amount consumed in the United States(12). We eat less beef and more chicken than we did 30 years ago, which means a smaller total impact. Beef cattle eat about 8kg of grain or meal for every kilogramme of flesh they produce; a kilogramme of chicken needs just 2kg of feed. Even so, our consumption rate is plainly unsustainable.

In his magazine The Land, Simon Fairlie has updated the figures produced 30 years ago in Kenneth Mellanby’s book Can Britain Feed Itself? Fairlie found that a vegan diet grown by means of conventional agriculture would require only 3m hectares of arable land (around half the current total)(13). Even if we reduced our consumption of meat by half, a mixed farming system would need 4.4m hectares of arable fields and 6.4 million hectares of pasture. A vegan Britain could make a massive contribution to global food stocks.

But I cannot advocate a diet I am incapable of following. I tried it for about 18 months, lost two stone, went as white as bone and felt that I was losing my mind. I know a few healthy-looking vegans and I admire them immensely. But after almost every talk I give, I am pestered by swarms of vegans demanding that I adopt their lifestyle. I cannot help noticing that in most cases their skin has turned a fascinating pearl grey.

What level of meat-eating would be sustainable? One approach is to work out how great a cut would be needed to accommodate the growth in human numbers. The UN expects the population to rise to 9bn by 2050. These extra people will require another 325m tonnes of grain(14). Let us assume, perhaps generously, that politicians like Ms Kelly are able to “adjust policy in the light of new evidence” and stop turning food into fuel. Let us pretend that improvements in plant breeding can keep pace with the deficits caused by climate change. We would need to find an extra 225m tonnes of grain. This leaves 531m tonnes for livestock production, which suggests a sustainable consumption level for meat and milk some 30% below the current world rate. This means 420g of meat per person per week, or about 40% of the UK’s average consumption.

This estimate is complicated by several factors. If we eat less meat we must eat more plant protein, which means taking more land away from animals. On the other hand, some livestock is raised on pasture, so it doesn’t contribute to the grain deficit. Simon Fairlie estimates that if animals were kept only on land that’s unsuitable for arable farming, and given scraps and waste from food processing, the world could produce between a third and two thirds of its current milk and meat supply(15). But this system then runs into a different problem. The FAO calculates that animal keeping is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental impacts are especially grave in places where livestock graze freely(16). The only reasonable answer to the question of how much meat we should eat is as little as possible. Let’s reserve it – as most societies have done until recently – for special occasions.

For both environmental and humanitarian reasons, beef is out. Pigs and chickens feed more efficiently, but unless they are free range you encounter another ethical issue: the monstrous conditions in which they are kept. I would like to encourage people to start eating tilapia instead of meat. It’s a freshwater fish which can be raised entirely on vegetable matter and has the best conversion efficiency – about 1.6kg of feed for 1kg of meat – of any farmed animal(17). Until meat can be grown in flasks, this is about as close as we are likely to come to sustainable flesh-eating.

Re-reading this article, I see that there is something surreal about it. While half the world wonders whether it will eat at all, I am pondering which of our endless choices we should take. Here the price of food barely registers. Our shops are better stocked than ever before. We perceive the global food crisis dimly, if at all. It is hard to understand how two such different food economies could occupy the same planet, until you realise that they feed off each other.

References:

1. Eg http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/7284196.stm

2. World Bank, 14th April 2008. Food Price Crisis Imperils 100 Million in Poor Countries, Zoellick Says. Press release. http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:21729143~men…

3. Food and Agriculture Organisation, April 2008. Crop Prospects and Food Situation.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/ai465e/ai465e01.htm

4. ibid.

5. World Bank, 2008. Biofuels: The Promise and the Risks. http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/EXTWDRS/EXT...

6. Gerrit Buntrock, 6th December 2007. Cheap no more. The Economist.

7. Food and Agriculture Organisation, April 2008, ibid.

8. Ruth Kelly, 14th April 2008. Biofuels: a blueprint for the future? The Guardian.

9. Food and Agriculture Organisation, April 2008, ibid.

10. The British government gives a total meat purchase figure of 1042g/person/week for 2006.
http://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/publications/efs/datasets/UKHHcons.xl…

11. There’s a discussion of global average figures here: http://envirostats.info/2007/09/18/0406/

12. See Food and Agriculture Organisation, 2006. Livestock’s Long Shadow. Figure 1.4, p9.
ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/a0701e/a0701e.pdf

13. Simon Fairlie, Winter 2007-8. Can Britain Feed Itself? The Land.

14. Based on the current population of 6.8bn consuming 1006mt of grain.

15. Simon Fairlie, forthcoming. Default livestock farming. The Land, Summer 2008.

16. Food and Agriculture Organisation, 2006. Livestock’s Long Shadow.
ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/a0701e/a0701e.pdf

17. The FAO (ibid) gives 1.6-1.8. On April 12th, I spoke to Francis Murray of the Institute of Aquaculture, University of Stirling, who suggested 1.5.

Jobs are used to justify anything, but the numbers don't add up

JamieSW — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:22:06 +0000

There is no nonsense so gross that it cannot be justified by the creation of jobs. The Ministry of Defence has just announced that it’s spending £13bn of our money – via a fantastically complicated private finance scheme – on a fleet of refuelling planes. Do we need them? Only if we intend to attack another defenceless country. But it’s worthwhile, because the new contract will “create up to 600 jobs at AirTanker Ltd, and will safeguard up to 3,000 jobs directly at British sites, with thousands more sustained indirectly.”(1)

John Hutton claims that new nuclear power stations will generate not only the energy we need, but also 100,000 new jobs(2). When and how? Here or in France? Northumberland County Council has revealed that it is spending £3.6 million on one new roundabout, at Haltwhistle. A staggering waste of public money? No, “it will both attract new jobs to the town and secure existing employment.”(3)

It is true that investment creates employment. But jobs are used to justify anything and everything. If recession strikes, the political value of any scheme which boosts them will rise. Projects which in more prosperous times might have been rejected by planners or ministers will suddenly find favour. Anyone who stands in their way – however daft the schemes may be – will be walloped as an anti-social Luddite.

But the big question is asked very rarely in the press: how reliable are these promises? Whenever a new defence contract or superstore or road or airport is announced, the papers and broadcasters repeat the employment figures without questioning them. They rarely return to the story to discover whether the claims were true.

The Guardian’s research service was able to find only two stories which challenged individual claims about job creation. One, from 2003, covered a National Audit Office investigation into the government’s grants to companies in deprived areas(4). The grants cost the taxpayer £1.4bn and were meant to have created or protected 300,000 jobs. But the auditors found that only 45% of these jobs were additional: the rest would have been saved or created if the grants hadn’t existed. Of these, 11% displaced other jobs in the same region, even when the multiplier effect (jobs creating further jobs) was taken into account(5). The schemes had worked, but not as well as the government had claimed.

The other story, in February this year, reported an odd but quite common phenomenom: a private equity boss attacking his own industry. Jon Moulton, the founder of Alchemy Partners, berated his own trade body for using “very dodgy statistics”(6). The British Venture Capital Association had claimed that jobs at private equity firms have risen by 8% a year over the past five years, while in publicly-listed companies jobs have grown by only 0.4% a year(7).

Speaking at the industry’s SuperReturn 2008 conference, Moulton pointed out that the association’s figures excluded the private equity firms that had gone out of business. “If you use an adjusted figure, the number should be more like zero. We’re putting these things out as fact and we shouldn’t.”

Many of the published figures have to be wrong. At the beginning of his nuclear speech, John Hutton praised the efforts of Dougie Rooney, the energy officer for the trade union Unite, for his “unique contribution to nuclear’s renaissance in the UK”. But they can’t get their story straight. Rooney has claimed that the nuclear programme will generate 10,000 new jobs: one tenth of Hutton’s figure(8).

Ten years ago, a research organisation called the National Retail Planning Forum – financed by Sainsbury, Tesco, Marks and Spencer, Boots and John Lewis – published a report on the superstores’ impact on employment. It found that there is “strong evidence that new out-of-centre superstores have a negative net impact on retail employment up to 15 km away.”(9) The 93 stores the forum studied were responsible for the net loss of 25,685 employees: every time a large supermarket opened, 276 people lost their jobs. This is hardly surprising. The New Economics Foundation has calculated that every £50,000 spent in small local shops creates one job. You must spend £250,000 in superstores for the same result(10).

But the press – especially the local papers – reports Eldorado every time a new store opens. In the past few days the Telegraph and Argus claimed that Marks and Spencer will create 2,500 new jobs in Bradford(11); the Halifax Evening Courier announced that the local B&Q will hatch an extra 60 jobs by moving to bigger premises(12); the BBC published a story headlined “Morrisons site creates 1,000 jobs”(13). Seldom is there a word about the employment these schemes will destroy.

To produce a definitive account of the gap between the claims made by companies promoting new schemes and the jobs they really deliver would take years. Instead, I asked a researcher, Nicola Cutcher, to conduct a rough sampling exercise. She took the latest year for which job figures are broken down by the size of employer are available – 2006 – and selected the middle week of each quarter. She then went through all the stories that mentioned the word “jobs” in a press database(14), selecting those which reported new openings or closures by large enterprises (over 250 staff) that were definitely taking place. She ensured that each claim was counted only once. To produce a rough average for the year, she multiplied the four weeks by 13.

The government reports that the number of jobs among large enterprises rose by 189,000 between 2005 and 2006(15). Our rough sample suggests a net gain of 1.4 million, or 7.4 times the official rate. If the same exaggeration applied to the whole economy, there would be 218 million workers in the United Kingdom(16).

This exercise has severe limitations. Job figures tend to be quite lumpy. Some of the posts take several years to create, so they won’t show up in the 2006 figures; though 2006, of course, harvested the jobs announced in previous years. But the gains among large employers this decade have fluctuated between 160,000 and 330,000(17): in no year has anything like 1.4 million net jobs been created.

Should we be surprised by such exaggerations? Of course not. Though the papers are generally good at reporting job cuts, they rely for the good news on companies and government departments that have an interest in talking up the benefits of their schemes. There is also plenty of confusion, often cunningly sown in corporate press releases, about whether the new jobs are being created directly or indirectly. When claiming wider benefits for their schemes, employers use the most generous possible multiplier effects. The indirect employment claimed by one company is the direct employment created by another. As they all declare responsibility for work created elsewhere, new jobs in this wacky world are generated several times over.

We need some reliable research into the reporting of employment claims. We need journalists to start asking questions about the figures they are fed; perhaps to refuse to print them unless they have been independently audited. And we all need to make a simple demand whenever a shiny new scheme promises to solve the community’s problems: prove it.

References:

1. MoD, 27th March 2008. £13 billion deal for new Tanker Aircraft signed. Press release. http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/DefenceNews/EquipmentAndLogistics/13Bi…

2. John Hutton, 26 March 2008. New Nuclear Build: How do we make progress?
http://www.berr.gov.uk/pressroom/Speeches/page45417.html

3. No author, 28th March 2008. £3m road scheme to aid jobs. The Cumberland News.
http://www.cumberland-news.co.uk/news/viewarticle.aspx?id=820414

4. David Hencke, 17th June 2003. £100m jobs subsidy scheme is poor value, say auditors. The Guardian.

5. National Audit Office, 17th June 2003. The Department for Trade and Industry: Regional Grants in England. http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/nao_reports/02-03/0203702.pdf

6. Siobhan Kennedy, 27th February 2008. High-profile buyout chief turns on his peer group. The Times.

7. The British Venture Capital Association, 13th February 2008. The Economic Impact of Private Equity in the UK 2007. http://www.bvca.co.uk/pdf.php?id=842&filename=the_economic_impact_of_pri…

8. No author, 26th March 2008. ‘Thousands of jobs’ in nuclear design licences
The Herald. http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/other/display.var.2145944.0.Thousands_of…

9. Sam Porter, Paul Raistrick, January 1998. The Impact of Out-of-Centre Food Superstores on Local Retail Employment. The National Retail Planning Forum, c/o Corporate Analysis, Boots Company PLC, Nottingham.

10. Emma Hallett, New Economics Foundation, April 1998, pers comm.

11. Jo Winrow, 27th March 2008. D-day looms for massive jobs project. The Telegraph and Argus.
http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/newsindex/display.var.2149091…

12. Carmel Harrison, 28th March 2008. DIY superstore prepares to open. Evening Courier.
http://www.halifaxcourier.co.uk/local-business/DIY-superstore-prepares-t…

13. No author, 19th March 2008. Morrisons site creates 1,000 jobs.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/7305548.stm

14. UK News.

15. http://stats.berr.gov.uk/ed/sme/smestats2005.xls

and

http://stats.berr.gov.uk/ed/sme/smestats2006.xls

16. The latest total figure is here: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/lmsuk0307.pdf

17. All the tables are here: http://stats.berr.gov.uk/ed/sme/index.htm

Carbon capture is turning out to be just another great green scam

Ellie Keen — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:22:08 +0000

“Coal is so clean and fresh that the prime minister brushes his teeth with it, Downing Street said last night. Mr Brown said advances in coal technology meant it was now one of the cleanest substances on Earth, and an unrivalled remover of stains and scaling.” So says the satirical website the Daily Mash(1). The real claims are scarcely battier.

Ministers are about to decide whether to approve a new coal burning power station at Kingsnorth in Kent. This would be the first such plant built in Britain since the monster at Drax was finished in 1986. As well as coal, it will burn up the government’s targets, policies and promises on climate change.

John Hutton, the secretary of state in charge of energy, has started justifying the decision he says he hasn’t made. “For critics,” he argued last week, “there’s a belief that coal fired power stations undermine the UK’s leadership position on climate change. In fact the opposite is true.”(2) Quite so: if we don’t burn this stuff the Chinese might get their hands on it. Or could he be a true believer? Does he really think there’s such a thing as clean coal?

Clean coal’s definition changes according to whom the industry is lobbying. Sometimes it means more efficient power stations (which still produce almost twice as much carbon dioxide as gas plants). Sometimes it means removing sulphur dioxide from the smoke (which boosts the CO2). Sometimes it means carbon capture and storage: stripping the carbon out of the exhaust gases, piping it away and burying it in geological formations. None of these equate to clean coal, as you will see if you visit an opencast mine. But they create a marvellous amount of confusion in the public mind, which gives the government a chance to excuse the inexcusable.

In principle, carbon capture and storage (CCS) could reduce emissions from power stations by 80-90%. While the whole process has not yet been demonstrated, the individual steps are all deployed commercially today: it looks feasible. The government has launched a competition for companies to build the first demonstration plant, which should be burying CO2 by 2014.

Unfortunately, despite Hutton’s repeated assurances, this has nothing to do with Kingsnorth or the other new coal plants he wants to approve. If Kingsnorth goes ahead, it will be operating by 2012, two years before the CCS experiment has even begun. The government says that the demonstration project will take “at least 15 years” to assess(4). It will take many more years for the technology to be retrofitted to existing power stations, by which time it’s all over. On this schedule, carbon capture and storage, if it is deployed at all, will come too late to prevent runaway climate change.

Kingsnorth will produce around 4.5 million tonnes of CO2 every year(5); if all eight of the proposed coal plants are built, they will account for 46% of the emissions Britain can produce by 2050, assuming the government sticks to Brown’s new proposed target of an 80% cut(6). Aviation, using the government’s own figures, will account for another 184% (7)(these figures are explained on my website). Even if we stopped breathing, eating, driving and heating our homes, the new runways and coal burners the government envisages would more than double our national greenhouse gas quota.

The government seeks to bamboozle us by arguing that the new power stations will be “CCS ready”, meaning that one day, in theory, they could be retrofitted with the necessary equipment. But even this turns out to be untrue. In January, Greenpeace obtained an exchange of emails between EO.N – the company hoping the build the new plant (yes the same EO.N that broadcasts footage of fluttering sycamore keys, suggesting that its dirty old habits have gone with the wind) – and Gary Mohammed, the civil servant drawing up the planning conditions(8). Mohammed begins by sending an email of such snivelling obsequiousness that you can almost smell the fear on it. “Drafting the conditions for Kingsnorth. If possible I would like to cover CCS … I admit this suggested condition could be without justification and premature but no harm in trying to gauge your opinion.” (This “suggested condition” was actually government policy. Who’s running this country?) EO.N replied by claiming that the secretary of state “has no right to withhold approval for conventional plant” (in fact he has every right). All it would allow the government to specify was that the potential for CCS “will be investigated.” Mr Mohammed wrestled with his conscience for all of six minutes before replying. “Thanks. I won’t include. Hope to get the set of draft conditions out today or tomorrow.”

This exchange took place in mid-January, a few days before the European Commission published a proposed directive specifying that all new coal-fired power stations must be CCS ready(9). Mr Mohammed must have known that he was helping EO.N to win approval for the plant before the directive comes into force next year.

You might by now be beginning the derive the impression that carbon capture and storage is not the green panacea that ministers have suggested. But you haven’t heard the half of it. Even if it does become a viable means of disposing of carbon dioxide, new figures suggest that it’s likely to enhance rather than reduce our total emissions.

For the companies which will bid to bury the gas, one technique is more attractive than the others. This is to pump it into declining oil fields. The gas dissolves into the remaining oil, reducing its viscosity and pushing it into the production wells. It’s called enhanced oil recovery (EOR). The oil the companies sell offsets some of the costs of carbon storage.

A few weeks ago, the green thinker Jim Bliss roughly calculated the environmental costs of this technique. He used as his case study the scheme BP proposed (but abandoned last year) for pumping CO2 into the Miller Field off the coast of Scotland. It would have buried 1.3m tonnes of CO2 and extracted 40 million barrels of oil(10). Taking into account only the four major fuel products, Bliss worked out that the total carbon emissions would outweigh the savings by between seven and fifteen times(11).

So has the government ruled out enhanced oil recovery? Not a bit of it. Its memo about the demonstration project says that Mr Hutton’s department “will want to ensure that the treatment of EOR and non-EOR projects are dealt with on a level playing field basis.”(12) Another document suggests it favours this technique: enhanced oil recovery will lead to “increased energy security, domestic revenue and employment”(13). But, the government notes, this will have to happen before the North Sea’s oil infrastructure is dismantled. “Now is the perfect opportunity to realise the significant opportunities offered by CCS.”(14)

Like biofuels and micro wind turbines, carbon capture and storage turns out to be another great green scam. It will come too late to prevent runaway climate change, the government has no intention of enforcing it and even if it had the technique is likely to boost our carbon emissions. This is what John Hutton calls “meeting our international obligations”(15). Heaven knows what breaking them might look like.

References:

1. http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=...

2. John Hutton, 10th March 2008. The Future of Utilities. Speech to the Adam Smith Institute. http://www.berr.gov.uk/about/ministerial-team/page45211.html

3. The commonest technique for flue gas desulphurisation is the limestone gypsum process. As well as making the power station slightly less efficient, the chemical reaction produces CO2. The two key reactions are:

CaCO3 + SO2 = CaSO3 + CO2

and

CaSO3 + _O2 + 2H2O = CaSO42H2O

See: Dept of Trade and Industry, March 2003. Flue Gas Desulphurisation (Fgd)
Technologies For Coal-Fired Combustion Plant. http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file20875.pdf

4. BERR, 19th November 2007. Competition for a Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage
Demonstration Project. Project Information Memorandum. http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file42478.pdf

5. Greenpeace, 2007. Letter to Alistair Darling. http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/files/pdfs/climate/kingsnorth_objection.pdf

6. Here’s how Greenpeace makes this calculation:
“In December 2007, Gordon Brown said he aspired to an 80% cut in emissions by 2050. That would give us a carbon budget of 117.8mt/CO2/per year. The new coal plants currently proposed – 10.6 GW of capacity – would emit more than 54 million tonnes of carbon dioxide which represents almost half of that quota. (10.6 GW x 7884 hours of generation per year, assuming 90% operational = 83.57 TWH/y. 83.57 TWH/y x 0.65 = 54 mt/CO2/y).”

7. This is 80% of the 1990 level, namely 161.5MtC (please note that this weight refers to elemental C, not CO2). That leaves 32.3MtC.

The Dept for Transport’s conservative figures suggest aviation emissions will rise to 15.7 MtC by 2050. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that net radiative forcing from aircraft emissions is 2.7 times that of the CO2 alone, which gives a nominal carbon equivalent of 42.4MtC. The government’s figures systematically underestimate the UK’s contribution, by assuming that British people are responsible for 50% of the seats on flights leaving or arriving in the UK. The true figure is 70%, which means the total equivalent figure is 59.35MtC.

8. You can read these emails here: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/files/pdfs/climate/FOI-1.pdf

9. Commission Of The European Communities, 23rd January 2008. Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the geological storage of carbon dioxide and amending Council Directives 85/337/EEC, 96/61/EC, Directives 2000/60/EC, 2001/80/EC, 2004/35/EC, 2006/12/EC and Regulation (EC) No 1013/2006. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2008:0018:FIN:...

10. BP, 30th June 2005. BP’s plan to generate electricity from hydrogen and capture carbon dioxide could set a new standard for cleaner energy. Press release. http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=97&contentId=7006978

11. Jim Bliss, 17th January 2008. Oil companies and Climate Change. http://numero57.net/?p=224
Jim Bliss was asked to do this by the environmental writer Merrick Godhaven.

12. BERR, 19th November 2007, ibid.

13. The North Sea Basin Task Force, June 2007. Storing CO2 under the North Sea Basin – a key solution for combating climate change, p9. http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file40159.pdf

14. ibid, p9.

The Patient Stalkers

JamieSW — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:48:42 +0000

This was surely a victory for the people. We have lost, over the past 20 years, all kinds of public services, but next month one is due to expand. After heavy bludgeoning by the government, Britain’s general practitioners have agreed to open their surgeries late into the evening and on Saturday mornings. As Gordon Brown says, the health service is “too often centred on the needs of the providers rather than those of patients.”(1) Now we will have a service better matched to the pattern of our lives.

This, at any rate, is the government’s story, and at first sight it is plausible. The truth, as always, is stranger and more complex. It begins with a bare-faced lie.

The government launched its campaign a year ago, with a press release published by the Department of Health. This claimed that a report by the Cabinet Office, published the same day, “reveals that nine out of ten” people polled “said they want public services, such as GP surgeries, that are open some evenings and weekends, even if that means they would sometimes be shut during the working week.”(2) This was reported verbatim by the press(3), but it was a complete fabrication. I have read the report(4). It contains no mention of this poll, or anything resembling it. The terms “surgeries”, “evening”, “weekend” and “working week” do not occur.

But on the strength of this fiction, extended opening hours became government policy. It is a bit like the war with Iraq: the decision to go ahead was made before the evidence materialised. Just as the government was publishing its misleading press release, Ipsos Mori was completing the huge poll – of 2.6 million people – that the same department had commissioned. This, surely, would support its fictitious claim. Who would not welcome longer opening hours?

To the department’s intense discomfort, Ipsos Mori found that “the vast majority of patients (84%) say they are satisfied with the hours their GP practice was open during the last six months”(5). Those who must visit GPs most often are the most relaxed about opening hours: only among 18-34 year olds – the healthiest section of the population – does the level of unhappiness rise above 20%(6), and then only by a whisker.

But, like the weapons of mass destruction, if the government said the public demand was there, it had to be. On Thursday Gordon Brown insisted that “people want weekend opening; people want to be able to see their GP in the evenings.”(7) Yes, some people do, but not very many.

The Confederation of British Industry was also unhappy with the results. It commissioned another survey, again from Ipsos Mori. This received responses from just 1,014 people – one 2,500th of the department’s sample size. It asked a slightly different question: “how easy or difficult was it to get an appointment at a time that was convenient to you?”. Thirty-one percent said they had found it “fairly or very difficult”(8).

The CBI issued a report claiming that “a commonly heard complaint is that GP practices are not open at weekends, early in the morning or in the evening … GP services are not responding to clear signals for change from patients”(9). But it produced no evidence: the survey didn’t ask about opening times. There are plenty of reasons why patients might have found it difficult to get a convenient appointment.

But even if the government is using dodgy figures and has misjudged popular support, what’s wrong with longer opening hours? Strange to relate, quite a lot. In some places, where there are large numbers of commuters who travel far to work, it makes sense. But Gordon Brown wants to impose it on surgeries everywhere.

This means, in effect, transferring resources from children, the old and the very sick to working people, who need the services least. GPs will have to work shifts, which undermines one of the most important foundations of the NHS: the continuity of care. It is not clear that longer opening times will in reality be much more convenient for working patients: the appointment clerks, specialist nurses, consultants, physiotherapists, dentists, X-ray departments, biochemistry labs, blood sampling services and computer technicians with whom GPs work are not available in the evenings and at weekends(10), so patients might have to come back to complete the consultation. If the government wants a genuine health supermarket, open all hours, it will have to pay much, much more.

So why is it so keen on this reform? Because it assists a quite different agenda. To avoid the political firestorm big business rains on any government that stands in its way, Gordon Brown must make constant concessions. What business wants most is the 40% of the economy controlled by the state. He must find clever and camouflaged means of delivering it that do not prompt us to take to the streets.

This means waging a public relations war against GPs and the other public sector dinosaurs who impede choice and change. It means a thousand small steps towards privatisation. The government is expanding the number of independent sector treatment centres, even though they turn out to be far less efficient than the NHS and leave the taxpayer with major liabilities(11). It is opening staggeringly expensive polyclinics, operating seven days a week, which will be run by multinational companies(12). It will allow the primary care trust in Birmingham to shut the city’s surgeries and replace them with primary care units franchised to corporations – the promoter of this scheme happily admits to modelling it on McDonalds(13). It is transferring GPs’ surgeries to supermarkets (the first was opened by Sainsbury’s last week(14)) and giving high-street chemists responsibility for diagnosing and treating minor ailments, even though they are not qualified to tell the difference between an ordinary cough and lung cancer. No minister can now discuss the NHS without mentioning “new providers” or “alternative providers”, which is their code for private companies, or “choice” and “reform”, which means privatisation.

The CBI has produced a long list of complaints about GPs’ failure to “rise to the challenge” of the market(15). In truth they are among the most efficient workers in the NHS. One of the reasons why their pay has jumped so quickly is that they have responded more effectively than the government expected to the incentives in their new contract (giving the government a further stick with which to beat them). They are way ahead of the hospitals in their use of information technology. But there is money in primary care, which is why they are now in the firing line. GPs say that the government was hoping they would reject its demand for longer opening hours, knowing that the private sector could then step into the breach.

None of this serves either the customer or the taxpayer. The irony of Brown’s reforms is that they are wholly centred on the needs of the providers rather than the patients – as long as the providers are corporations. So don’t wait to take to the streets. Little by little, the privatisation of the NHS is happening already, disguised as a crusade for patient power.

References:

1. Gordon Brown, 7th January 2008. Speech on the National Health Service.
http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page14171.asp

2. Department of Health, 19th March 2007. More family doctor services for deprived areas.
http://www.gnn.gov.uk/environment/fullDetail.asp?ReleaseID=272142&NewsAr…

3. Eg Sarah Hall, 19th March 2007. Fruit, veg and a trip to the GP as stores are asked to open surgeries. The Guardian.

4. Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, March 2007. Policy review – Building on progress: Public services. http://archive.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/policy_review/documents/building_on_…

5. Department of Health, 2007. The GP Patient Survey 2006/2007: National Report, p58. http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/PublishedSurvey/GPpati…

6. ibid, p60.

7. Gordon Brown, quoted by Daniel Martin, 7th March 2008. GPs grudgingly agree to work evenings and weekends at last. Daily Mail.

8. LLM Future Services, 2007. Survey conducted for CBI, May 30th-31st 2007. Sent to me by the CBI.

9. Confederation of British Industry, 18th September 2007. Just What the Patient Ordered: Better GP Services. http://www.cbi.org.uk/ndbs/press.nsf/0363c1f07c6ca12a8025671c00381cc7/f60cebe0663c98d68025734600573f81/$FILE/CBI%20report%20′Just%20what%20the%20patient%20ordered’%20September%202007.pdf

10. Gruffydd Penrhyn Jones, GP, pers comm.

11. Allyson M Pollock and Sylvia Godden, 23rd February 2008. Independent sector treatment centres: evidence so far. British Medical Journal, vol 336, pp421-424. doi:10.1136/bmj.39470.505556.80

12. See British Medical Association, January 2008. Access to GP services in England. http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/Gpaccess.

13. Nick Britten, 4th February 2008. GP surgeries ‘could be run by Tesco or Virgin’. Daily Telegraph.

14. Hugh Wilson, 4th March 2008. The Sainsbury’s GPs: checkout, then check-up. The Guardian.

15. See Confederation of British Industry, 18th September 2007, ibid.

A Likely Story

Ellie Keen — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:59:36 +0000

Something unusual is going to happen tomorrow. The Press Complaints Commission, Britain’s only arbiter of fairness and accuracy in our newspapers, is due to make a ruling. What’s so odd about that? Well, as Nick Davies shows in his book Flat Earth News, out of 28,000 complaints to the PCC submitted over ten years, it managed to make a formal adjudication on just 448, or 1.6%(1). Most of the time it finds a reason to look the other way. This isn’t too surprising: 6 of its 16 commissioners are newspaper or magazine editors(2).

But tomorrow’s case is so serious, and the evidence that has accumulated over the past seven months so strong, that even the PCC can’t brush it under the carpet. It concerns the Evening Standard’s reporting of the climate camp established close to Heathrow last August. Soon after it opened, the paper accused the campers of putting the lives of millions at risk by planning to invade the airport and plant hoax bombs. The story was repeated by the Sun, the Mail, the Express, the Telegraph and the BBC. I have now seen the correspondence about this case. It makes astonishing reading.

The front page article, written by the paper’s chief reporter and headlined “Militants will hit Heathrow”, claimed that “climate change activists plan to use illegal tactics such as hoax suspicious packages to cause maximum disruption at one of the busiest times of the year. They have also discussed simultaneous assaults on the airport’s security fence to stretch police resources to the limit.”(3) Inside the paper a journalist called Rashid Razaq, who spent a night undercover in the camp, reported that one man was “urging us to ‘get them panicked with different things at the same time like bags left around the airport and people climbing the fence.’ Late that night, I saw two protesters checking out the security fences.”(4) As the organisers of the camp began to probe, the story started to fall apart. They also discovered that this is not the only occasion on which Rashid Razaq has been accused of taking liberties with the truth.

How did Mr Razaq see protesters “checking out the security fences”? The camp was over a kilometre from the airport fence: he could not have seen anyone from there. When challenged by the campers, the Evening Standard claimed that “Mr Razaq had left the camp to go to a nearby petrol station to buy food when he was returning to the camp with a colleague, Sebastian Meyer. Their route back took them close to the perimeter fence of the airport, where he saw two men whom he recognised from the camp. One was trying to climb the fence while another kept watch.”(5) The Standard contends that “It was a sufficiently light night to recognise faces”.(6)

There are several problems with this story. As photos and maps produced by the campers show, neither the petrol station nor any part of the route to the camp is close enough to the fence to recognise faces(7,8). Sebastian Meyer is a professional photographer. If, somehow, they had seen people at the fence, and managed to recognise them as protesters, why did they not take photographs? I put this question to the Evening Standard’s managing editor, Doug Wills. “He didn’t take any photos of it because it was pitch black.”(9) But the Standard had already claimed that “it was a sufficiently light night to recognise faces”. I asked Mr Wills for a map reference for the section of fence. He has not been able to provide one. And why, if one of the protesters was trying to climb the fence – a more serious matter than merely “checking it out” – did Mr Razaq not report this?

What about the claim that the protesters were planning to plant hoax bombs? The Standard explains that the man who raised the plan was “white and in his late 20s”. “He used words to the effect: ‘we need to make people sit up and take notice. Leave some packages around Heathrow. That’ll make them take notice.”(10) This is a completely different statement to the one quoted in Razaq’s article. In the published version someone else – “a woman in her thirties” – says “we have to make people sit up and take notice”(11). None of the alleged statements amounts to a “plan” by the camp.

But the real problems arise when you see Mr Razaq’s notes, which were obtained by the PCC after several requests from the campers. At first Mr Razaq claimed that “I made an accurate note of what was said as soon as the meetings finished.”(12) But when the notes were released, they turned out to be dated “13/8”, the day after the events Mr Razaq describes(13). They contain none of the damning quotes or descriptions the Evening Standard published. The only quoted speech was an intention to make “a big impact and make people around the world sit-up and take notice, to know we mean business”, this time attributed not to a man in his 20s or a woman in her 30s, but to a “group of three campaigners.” Why did Mr Razaq record this and not the far more serious instigation to plant hoax packages, supposedly made by the same man, in the same breath, at the same meeting?

Mr Razaq has also been accused of misreporting by the Freud Museum in London. In January 2007 he claimed it was showing a film containing footage from Al Qaeda recruitment videos, “outlawed in most Western countries”(14). It wasn’t. The curator told me “He made up details. He put in facts that were completely wrong. I think he is one of those journalists who is prepared to just go and make up a story.”(15) Doug Wills, the Standard’s managing editor, told me that the curator himself had informed Razaq that the Qaeda film was in the exhibition. Mr Wills forwarded an email from him, which mentions the film but not its inclusion in the show(16). Ironically, the title of the exhibition was “Paranoia”.

In January 2008, Razaq wrote that he had gone undercover as a cleaner in Barnet Hospital, and found that staff were flouting basic safety rules(17). The hospital tells me that he was in fact employed as a porter, and that he misunderstood or misreported the rules(18). The Standard insists Razaq was a cleaner. When I spoke to Mr Razaq, he referred me to statements by the managing editor.

Is the Evening Standard worried about his reporting? Not a bit of it. Of the Heathrow coverage it says “we are 100 percent satisfied that our published reports were fair and accurate on a matter of public interest.”(19) They were not just Razaq’s work, but the product of “an extensive operation organised by an extremely experienced team of executives and senior reporters”(20). When the Freud Museum sent a letter of complaint, the paper neither published the letter nor replied to it(21). The problem seems to be a systemic one.

I don’t know how the Press Complaints Commission will rule. But the evidence I have seen suggests that if the Evening Standard is not required to publish a correction we need a bolder arbiter.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Nick Davies, 2008. Flat Earth News, p364. Chatto and Windus.

2. http://www.pcc.org.uk/about/whoswho/members.html

3. Robert Mendick, 13th August 2007. Militants Will Hit Heathrow. Evening Standard – West End Final.

4. Rashid Razaq, 13th August 2007. In the shambolic climate camp, protesters plot campaign on panic. Standard – West End Final.

5. Susan Ryan, acting managing editor, the Evening Standard, 8th October 2007. Letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission.

6. ibid.

7. Alex Harvey, the Camp for Climate Action. 26th September 2007. Map included in letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission.

8. Alex Harvey, the Camp for Climate Action. 18th January 2007. Pictures included in letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission.

9. Doug Wills, by phone, 3rd March 2008.

10. Susan Ryan, acting managing editor, the Evening Standard, 8th October 2007. Letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission.

11. Rashid Razaq, 13th August 2007. In the shambolic climate camp, protesters plot campaign on panic. Standard – West End Final.

12. Quoted by Doug Wills, 17th September 2007. Letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission.

13. A photocopy of the notes was included with a letter from Doug Wills, 22nd November 2007 to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission.

14. Rashid Razaq, 10th January 2007. Film of 9/11 terrorists celebrating is displayed at art show. Evening Standard.

15. Predrag Pajdic, by phone, 29th February 2008.

16. Email from Predrag Pajdic to Khaled Ramadan, 9th January 2007.

17. Rashid Razaq, 7th January 2008. Standard reveals hospital workers flouting basic rules on hygiene. Evening Standard.

18. Press Office, Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals NHS trust, by phone, 29th February 2008.

19. Doug Wills, 11th December 2007. Letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission.

20. Doug Wills, 12th February 2008. Letter to Hannah Beveridge, Press Complaints Commission.

21. Predrag Pajdic, by phone, 29th February 2008

Pro-Death

Tim Holmes — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:36:33 +0000

Who carries the greatest responsibility for the deaths of unborn children in this country? I accuse the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, His Eminence Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. I charge that he is partly to blame for our abnormally high abortion rate.

Let me begin with a point of agreement. “Whatever our religious creed or political conviction,” Murphy-O’Connor writes, the level of abortion in the UK “can only be a source of distress and profound anguish for us all.”(1) Quite so. But why has it climbed so high? Is it because of the rising tide of liberalism? The absence of abstinence? Strange as it may seem, the evidence suggests the opposite.

Last week the cardinal sacked the board of a hospital in north London(2). It had permitted a GP’s surgery to move onto the site and the doctors there, horror of horrors, were helping women with family planning. Though it is partly funded by the NHS, St John and St Elizabeth’s is a Catholic hospital, which forbids doctors from prescribing contraceptives or referring women for abortions. The cardinal says he wants the hospital to provide medical help that is “truly in the interests of human persons”(3).

Murphy-O’Connor has denounced contraception and abortion many times before. That’s what he is there for: the primary purpose of most religions is to control women. But while we may disagree with his position, we seldom question either its consistency or its results. It’s time we started. The most effective means of preventing the deaths of unborn children is to promote contraception.

In the history of most countries which acquire access to modern medical technology, there is a period during which the rates of contraception and abortion rise simultaneously. Christian fundamentalists suggest that the two trends are related, and attribute them to what the Pope calls “a secularist and relativist mentality”(4). In fact it’s a sign of demographic transition. As societies become more prosperous and women acquire better opportunities, they seek smaller families. During the early years of transition, contraceptives are often hard to obtain and poorly understood, so women will also use abortion to limit the number of children they have. But, as a study published in the journal International Family Planning Perspectives shows, once the birthrate has stabilised, the use of contraceptives continues to increase and the rate of abortion falls. In this case one trend causes the other: “rising contraceptive use results in reduced abortion incidence”(5). The rate of abortion falls once 80% of the population is using effective contraception(6).

A study published in the Lancet shows that between 1995 and 2003 the global rate of induced abortions fell from 35 per 1000 women each year to 29(7). This period coincides with the rise of the “globalized secular culture” the Pope laments(8). When you look at the broken-down figures, it becomes clear that (except in the countries of the former Soviet Union) the incidence of abortion is highest in conservative and religious societies. In the largely secular nations of western Europe, the average rate is 12 abortions per 1000 women. In the more religious southern European countries, the average rate is 18. In the United States, where church attendance is still higher, there are 23 abortions for every 1000 women(9), the highest level in the rich world. In Central and South America, where the Catholic Church holds greatest sway, the rates are 25 and 33 respectively. In the very conservative societies of East Africa, it’s 39(10). One abnormal outlier is the UK: our rate is 6 points higher than those of our western European neighbours(11).

I am not suggesting a sole causal relationship here: the figures also reflect the regions’ changing demographies. But it’s clear that religious conviction does little to reduce the abortion rate and plenty to increase it. The highest rates of all – 44 per 1000 – occur in the former Soviet Union. Under communism, contraceptives were almost impossible to obtain. But, thanks to better access to contraception, this is also where the fastest decline is taking place: in 1995 the rate was twice as high. There has been a small rise in the level of abortion in western Europe, attributed by the Guttmacher Institute in the US to “immigration of people with low levels of contraceptive awareness.”(12) The explanation, in other words, is consistent: more contraception means less abortion.

There is also a clear relationship between sex education and falling rates of unintended pregnancy. A report by the United Nations agency Unicef notes that in the Netherlands, which has the world’s lowest abortion rate, a sharp reduction in unwanted teenage pregnancies was caused by “the combination of a relatively inclusive society with more open attitudes towards sex and sex education, including contraception.”(13) In the US and UK, by contrast, which have the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the developed world, “contraceptive advice and services may be formally available, but in a ‘closed’ atmosphere of embarrassment and secrecy.”(14)

A paper published by the British Medical Journal assessed four programmes seeking to persuade teenagers in the UK to abstain from sex. It found that they “were associated with an increase in number of pregnancies among partners of young male participants”(15). This shouldn’t be surprising. Teenagers will have sex whatever the grown-ups say, and those who are the least familiar with contraceptives are the most likely to become pregnant. The more effectively religious leaders and conservative newspapers anathemise contraception, sex education and pre-marital sex, the higher the abortion rate will go. The cardinal helps to sustain our appalling level of unwanted pregnancies.

But while his church causes plenty of suffering in the rich nations, this doesn’t compare to the misery inflicted on the poor. Chillingly, as the Lancet paper shows, there is no relationship between the legality and the incidence of abortion. Women who have no access to contraceptives will try to terminate unwanted pregnancies whatever the consequences might be. A report by the World Health Organisation shows that almost half the world’s abortions are unauthorised and unsafe(16). In eastern Africa and Latin America, where religious conservatives ensure that terminations remain illegal, they account for almost all abortions. Methods include drinking turpentine or bleach, shoving sticks or coat hangers into the uterus(17) and pummelling the abdomen, which often causes the uterus to burst, killing the patient(18). The WHO estimates that between 65 000 and 70 000 women die as a result of illegal abortions every year, while five million suffer severe complications. These effects, the organisation says, “are the visible consequences of restrictive legal codes.”(19) I hope David Cameron, who has just announced that he wants to place restrictions on legal terminations in the UK(20), knows what the alternatives look like.

When the Pope tells bishops in Kenya, the global epicentre of this crisis, that they should defend traditional family values “at all costs” against agencies offering safe abortions(21), or when he travels to Brazil to denounce the government’s contraceptive programme(22), he condemns women to death. When George Bush blocks US aid for family planning charities that promote safe abortions, he ensures, paradoxically, that contraceptives are replaced with backstreet foeticide(23). These people spread misery, disease and death. And they call themselves pro-life.

References:

1. Cardinals Cormac Murphy-O’Connor and Keith O’Brien, 22nd October 2007. Open Letter on the occasion of the 40th Anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act from the
Presidents of the Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of Scotland and England and Wales. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00222/Open_Letter_Aborti…

2. Riazat Butt, 22nd February 2008. Archbishop orders Catholic hospital board to resign in ethics dispute. The Guardian.

3. ibid.

4. Catholic News Agency, 19th November 2007. Defend marriage and family life at all costs, Benedict XVI tells Africans.
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=11014

5. Cicely Marston and John Cleland, March 2003. Relationships Between Contraception and Abortion: A Review of the Evidence. International Family Planning Perspectives, Volume 29, Number 1. http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/2900603.html

6. ibid.

7. Gilda Sedgh et al, 13th October 2007. Induced abortion: estimated rates and trends worldwide. The Lancet vol 370, pp 1338–45.

8. Catholic News Agency, ibid.

9. The Guttmacher Institute, May 1999. Abortion in Context: United States and Worldwide. http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/ib_0599.html

10. Gilda Sedgh et al, ibid.

11. Office of National Statistics and Department of Health, June 2007. Statistical Bulletin:
Abortion Statistics, England and Wales: 2006. http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/Publicati…

12. Hannah Brown, 17 November 2007. Abortion round the world. British Medical Journal. doi:10.1136/bmj.39393.491968.94

13. UNICEF, July 2001. A league table of teenage births in rich nations. Innocenti Report Card No.3. UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence. http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/repcard3e.pdf

14. ibid.

15. Alba DiCenso et al, 15th June 2002. Interventions To Reduce Unintended Pregnancies Among Adolescents: Systematic Review Of Randomised Controlled Trials. British Medical Journal 324:1426.

16. World Health Organisation, 2007. Unsafe abortion. Global and regional estimates of
the incidence of unsafe abortion and associated mortality in 2003. Fifth edition.
http://www.who.int/reproductive-health/publications/unsafeabortion_2003/...

17. Andy Coghlan, 21st October 2007. Family planning lowers abortion rates. New Scientist.

18. World Health Organisation, ibid.

19. World Health Organisation, ibid.

20. James Chapman, 25th February 2008. Cameron: Cut the abortion limit to 21 weeks. Daily Mail.

21. Catholic News Agency, ibid.

22. Tegan Fleming, 21st June 2007. Contraception spree: Brazilian government lowers birth control costs for the poor. Pharmacy News.

23. See http://www.globalgagrule.org/