Oscar Reyes | ukwatch.net

Dog Whistles and Guard Dogs

Ellie Keen — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:53:53 +0000

‘I opposed the idea of a directly-elected mayor,’ wrote Ken Livingstone in 1998, because it tends to personalise debate and thus obscure the issues at stake.’ Ten years on, Mayor Livingstone is engaged in a bitter battle with Boris Johnson that comes straight out of Have I Got News For You.

It is a fight that Johnson could win. And while the image of buffoonery can be endearing, his politics are less so: in favour of the war on Iraq, railway privatisation, nuclear power, public schools and staghunting. The left-leaning Compass pressure group labelled Johnson ‘a type of Norman Tebbit in clown’s uniform’. They are right.

Behind the casually racist turn of phrase that has seen Johnson describe black people as ‘picanninies’ lies a more consistent playing of the race card, orchestrated by his campaign strategist Lynton Crosby. Crosby was behind the 2005 Conservative campaign that denigrated immigrants, then asked voters ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’

Thankfully, they weren’t. But this same style of ‘dog-whistle politics’ has been successful elsewhere. The trick is to speak in a code that chimes with racist assumptions, without making ostensibly racist statements. In this case, the Tories are building on a discourse established by the Evening Standard, the Daily Mail’s London stablemate, which has vilified Livingstone for lavishing money on anti-racist groups. Crosby may or may not have orchestrated these attacks, but his campaign message feeds off the racist fantasy that Ken ‘gives all the money to minorities’ just the same. And it is not just Johnson who benefits: come 1 May, there is a strong chance that the BNP could gain seats on the Greater London Authority.

The mud slinging also comes from a neo-con ‘left’ that sees Livingstone’s engagement with Muslim groups as a threat. Martin Bright of the New Statesman came to this position off the back of writing a report on Islamism for the Cameronite think-tank Policy Exchange. Nick Cohen has also taken a break from Iraq war cheerleading to argue that ‘Ken Livingstone is not fit for office’.

These claims are backed up by accounts of Livingstone’s bullying advisers. ‘Vote Ken Livingstone, get Socialist Action,’ as Bright put it. But the real scandal is not that a left- wing mayor has left-wing advisors or that they oppose racism. The problem, as any left or anti-racist activist who has encountered Livingstone’s guard dogs will tell you, is that they have consistently denigrated community struggles, grassroots activism and anything that veers from whatever they deem politically correct or opportune.

Socialist Action does not represent ‘the most successful Trotskyist entryist operation since Derek Hatton’s Liverpool’, as Bright argues, but the futility of entryism itself. The state is far better at transforming entryists than vice versa – although what remains unchanged, in this case, is a distaste for democracy in line with the worst of left traditions. The problem is exacerbated by the flawed structure of London government. Livingstone once denounced the mayoral system as ‘barmy’ because it concentrates power without accountability. His advisers have set out to prove him right.

The resulting politics are highly contradictory, as was dramatically embodied in the aftermath of the 2005 London bombings. Livingstone admirably steered clear of inflammatory rhetoric by referring to it as an attack on all of London’s ‘diverse communities’. Two weeks later, Jean Charles De Menezes was killed by the Metropolitan police, and Livingstone offered unblinking support to the police chief who sanctioned a ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy.

On the economy, Livingstone’s positive endorsement of a London ‘living wage’ contrasts favourably with Johnson’s rejection of even the minimum wage. But this has to be set against his extended love- in with the Corporation of London, whose ‘trickle down’ economics have proven so successful that the gleaming towers of London’s finance district back onto some of the poorest neighbourhoods in the country.

Despite this, Livingstone continues to project London as a ‘world city’ built on finance capital. In January, he went to the World Economic Forum to hawk an Olympic Games that will distort development prospects in the east end way beyond 2012. In February, Livingstone attacked the government’s plan to tax millionaire tax-evaders £30,000 a year for fear that it might drive away investment. Such policies have effects beyond London, as the City is a key node of global neoliberalism. Livingstone, like Johnson, supports it.

So whichever way you vote, the mayor always gets in. But sometimes there really is a lesser of two evils, and the electoral system makes this a relatively simple choice. A first preference vote for the Greens’ Sian Berry would send Ken a clear and progressive message. But a second preference for Livingstone remains an important signal that Johnson’s dog- whistle racism has no place in London politics.

This article is reposted from the Red Pepper website. They have a lively debate on the elections at this page

Agro-Fooling Ourselves

Tim Holmes — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 10:10:25 +0000

What has climate change got to do with the rising price of bread? The answer lies in the rush to turn farmland over to fuel production. In early September, global wheat prices hit a new record high of $8 per bushel on the Chicago exchange, which provides the global benchmark. Coupled with the unpredictability of recent harvests – itself a symptom of climate change – and increased demand from China and India, the push for agrofuels (also referred to as ‘biofuels’) has already contributed to a 25-year low in global wheat stocks, forcing up the price.

Other staple crops are affected by similar trends, dubbed ‘agflation’ by economists. And while agrofuel production is not the only factor in these price increases, it is a major one. According to the recent OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2007-2016, ‘Increased demand for biofuels is causing fundamental changes to agricultural markets that could drive up world prices for many farm products.’

With the EU and its member states incentivising the growth of ‘agrofuels’, big money is pouring into this sector – with venture capitalists and major agribusiness standing to gain from recent price hikes. This rise in the price of staple crops can also benefit small farmers, but the increasing pressure on land is threatening to displace them from their farms as large-scale plantations take over.

Fuelling hunger

When the price of staple crops rises, it affects more than the price of a sandwich. The world’s poorest people already spend 50 to 80 per cent of household income on food – and it is poverty, not scarcity, that is the major cause of hunger. When, in January, the US government announced a plan to produce 35 billion gallons of bio-ethanol a year by 2017, it was the poor of Mexico who felt the pain. The price of tortillas – the staple diet provided by hole-in-the-wall shops across poor neighbourhoods in the country – rose by 400 per cent in a matter of weeks. Tens of thousands of people protested in Mexico City in response.

Their voices have been joined by others from across the political spectrum. In April, Fidel Castro warned against the ‘sinister idea of converting food into fuel’, prompting the Economist to run a leader article with the unlikely headline ‘Castro was right’. In May, the leading US journal on international policy, Foreign Affairs, published an in-depth analysis of how ‘Biofuels could starve the poor’. In mid-June, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, accused the US and EU of ‘total hypocrisy’ for promoting ethanol production in order to reduce their dependence on oil imports – an act which, he said, could result in ‘hundreds of thousands’ dying from hunger.

Climate con

The US push for agrofuels is driven mainly by a concern to ‘reduce dependency on foreign oil’, rather than concern for the climate. Studies of corn-based bio-ethanol (the main source promoted by the US) show that it requires as much, or more, energy to produce as it emits.

In Europe, the environmental case is at the centre of the debate. The EU is currently proposing a 10 per cent mandatory target for agrofuels in transport (excluding aviation fuel) by 2020, a measure that was due to be debated in the European Parliament on 26 September.

From an environmentalist viewpoint, there is a lot wrong with this proposal. For one thing, the EU simply doesn’t have the domestic capacity to meet its agrofuel target. Even the existing EU target of 5.75 per cent agrofuel use by 2010 would require that an estimated 20 per cent of arable land be turned over to fuel production. With consumption still on the increase, it remains unclear as to how much more land would be required to account for 10 per cent of transport fuel use in 2020.

One immediate by-product is the scrapping of set-aside lands from 2008 – a plan that could decimate bird-life and insect populations. The EU’s own calculations also bank upon untried ‘second generation’ agrofuels to make crop yields more efficient. Many of these technologies would prove highly controversial, since they include techniques to genetically modify trees, endangering the precautionary principle as a basis for such research.

Even this would not come close to meeting the new target, however, meaning that a large share of agrofuels would have to be imported from the global South. Palm oil grown in south east Asia is one of the most likely sources, but the environmental impacts would be profound. The conservation group Wetlands International estimated that the import to Europe of south east Asian palm oil originating from drained peatlands would generate up to 10 times more carbon dioxide than the equivalent emissions from burning fossil diesel.

Deforestation diesel

Direct emissions from transport fuel are only part of the picture, moreover. A recent study in the journal Science found that existing forests could absorb nine times more CO2 than the production of agrofuels could achieve on the same area of land. According to Renton Righelato, co-author of the report, the ‘mistaken policy’ of targets and incentives is fuelling deforestation.

Sugar-cane and soybean farming in Latin America and the growth of palm oil plantations in south east Asia are among the major culprits, with the demand for these crops now accelerated by their cultivation for fuel use. ‘It is like kicking your head to get rid of a headache,’ as Birute Galdikas, a conservationist renowned for her work in Indonesia, recently told the Independent. ‘The palm oil prices are going through the roof because of their use as biofuel and this, one of the poorest countries in the world, is cutting down its trees to supply the market.’

This has both economic and environmental impacts. Monoculture plantations not only threaten what remains of global forest cover, reducing biodiversity, but they also subject local populations to a new wave of plantations. João Pedro Stedile, of the MST (Landless Workers’ Movement) in Brazil, has already observed ‘an extraordinary concentration of land ownership’ as a result of the agrofuel trend, with multinational seed companies and venture capitalists buying up land at the expense of small-scale farmers.
In the words of a recent report by GRAIN, an international NGO working on agricultural sustainability, this process ‘amounts to nothing less than the colonial plantation economy, re-designed to function under the rules of the modern neoliberal, globalised world.’

The sustainability myth

In the face of these criticisms, the EU is now pushing for ‘sustainability’ criteria for agrofuel production. In July, EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson warned that ‘Europeans won't pay a premium for biofuels if the ethanol in their car is produced unsustainably by systematically burning fields after harvests. Or if it comes at the expense of rainforests.’

Behind the rhetoric, though, there is little in the EU’s approach to address these concerns. Even tough sustainability criteria would leave unaddressed the major problems of the rush to agrofuels, since they would most likely displace other forms of agriculture from cleared land. The net deforestation would be the same, a ‘secondary impact’ on land use that no sustainability criteria can adequately account for.

In fact, no criteria or certification schemes can deal with the broader structural effects that agrofuels are having on agricultural intensification and food prices. The definition of ‘sustainability’ does not extend to issues of social justice – and as long as money is to be made, the push for agrofuels looks set to continue unabated. This is not simply the law of the market but is also an effect of subsidies. The US now ploughs up to $7.3 billion per year into agrofuel subsidies, while both EU and US targets are spurring on the market for agrofuel production. As long as these incentives remain in place, the price of bread looks set to rise – which, in global terms, is a symptom of the disaster facing those who already live below the breadline.

In April, Fidel Castro warned against the ‘sinister idea of converting food into fuel’, prompting the Economist to run a leader article with the unlikely headline ‘Castro was right’

Challenging Brown from the Left?

Alex Doherty — Sun, 13 May 2007 23:25:19 +0000

__With Tony Blair leaving office, Oscar Reyes spoke to Michael Meacher and John McDonnell, the two left-wing MPs from Blair’s Labour Party who have declared their intention to challenge finance minister Gordon Brown for the party leadership and job of Prime Minister.__

*Michael Meacher*

*What do you hope to achieve by standing for the Labour leadership?*

There should be an election rather than a coronation and a debate about the government’s direction of travel. The paramount issues are the sharp and alarming increase in inequality in Britain; the accountability of government; climate catastrophe; the privatisation of public services, which should be reversed; the weakness of employment rights; the loss of civil liberties, accompanied by the slow drumbeat of an authoritarian state; the lack of legal rights because of legal aid reform; and issues like Trident and nuclear energy. These are all areas where I believe the government is in defiance of Labour party and trade union opinion.

But my standing is not just about having a debate and a choice. Elections have their own dynamic, and we should not exclude the possibility that the left could win.

*How do you assess the chances of John McDonnell?*

I don’t want to discuss John McDonnell. He’s a very sincere, committed person. I have a lot of respect for him. The question is can he get the required 45 nominations? I’ve come to the conclusion he can’t. Even if I didn’t stand I don’t think he’d get anywhere near the number required.

*How many MPs have you got supporting you?*

I have 25 signed up and 15 to 20 who have told me that they will give their support as we draw nearer to the point of decision.

*Can Labour recover from Blair? How do you intend to win back the party and those who left it?*

The Blairites have hijacked the party. There has been an internal coup d’etat. We allowed him to get away with it because by 1994 we had lost four elections in a row and the party was utterly desperate to win. I think I was the only member of the shadow cabinet who didn’t vote for Blair as leader.

Now that course has got to be reversed. Not by a return to the 1980s, which is neither possible nor desirable, but through a modern progressive and participatory politics. There is a huge amount of political space that is currently unoccupied. We need to take a lead in building the kind of social democracy – socialism, not a word that is much used now – which fits current conditions.

*Do you support electoral reform?*

I am not at this stage in favour of electoral reform, but pluralism is important. We need to counter the overwhelming concentration of power at the top.

*Why did you support the asylum bills passed by New Labour?*

This has been alleged against me but it isn’t true.

*You did support the Iraq war, though.*

This was overwhelmingly the biggest mistake I ever made in my political life and I bitterly regret it now. When the Prime Minister came forward repeatedly to the dispatch box and indicated in great detail the inventory of weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein had I could not but believe that this represented the best intelligence and I am stunned that there could be such misrepresentation, selectivity and lying.

*Do you support the immediate withdrawal of the troops from Iraq now?*

I believe that our troops there are currently exacerbating insecurity in the country rather than aiding it, so there should be the most rapid possible withdrawal that is compatible with salvaging whatever security can be salvaged – I’m talking about withdrawal in weeks or months.

*How would you tackle the growing inequalities under New Labour?*

They are monstrous. The ratio between a director in a FTSE100 company and the average person on the shopfloor 30 years ago was about 25 to one. It is now 120 to one. That is unacceptable. There should be a requirement on all major companies to open remuneration discussions to all grades of workers, from boardroom to cleaners. I would also replace the Low Pay Commission with a Pay Commission that would give advice on fair and reasonable pay differentials across the whole range, particularly at the top.

*How should we tackle climate change?*

I would emphasise getting out of out of fossil fuels as soon as possible, with a massive investment programme in alternative, renewable energy. Airline companies should be subject to a commitment to reduce emissions annually. We need to move far faster to hydrogen fuel-cell cars. Construction standards should be enormously increased, and households should have carbon allowances that reduce year on year – the best way of creating public awareness about the climate effects of individual activities.

All large companies should be required to report on their environmental impact each year. As Minister of Environment I brought forward legislation for this in 2003, just before I was sacked. It was lost because Gordon Brown was speaking to the CBI at Mansion House and wanted to beat his breast as a deregulatory chancellor. His eye fixed on this and, without any discussion in government, one day it was abruptly dropped. I think that speaks volumes about Gordon Brown’s lack of concern about the environment.

*John McDonnell*

*What do you hope to achieve by standing for the Labour leadership? Can you win?*

I think we’ll be able to demonstrate overwhelming support for our ideas among the rank and file of the Labour party and trade unions. So I don’t underestimate the ability of this campaign to mobilise to win. But win or lose, the campaign is part of a longer-term project of rebuilding the left and establishing a broad united front.

*How many MPs have you got supporting you?*

We’re up to about 25 that are publicly declared, another 10 to 15 that I can’t see going anywhere else, then another 10 to 30 that are all to play for. 44 MPs nominating is a steep hill to climb, but I think we’ll get there.

*What do you make of Michael Meacher’s candidacy?*

I’m disappointed. Our campaign has tried to be a rank and file campaign, undertaken as a result of broad consultation. Every left organisation within the Labour party has supported me, not one has supported Michael. Every Broad Left of every trade union affiliated to the Labour party has met and endorsed my campaign. And within the parliamentary Labour party we’re already half way there.

We have asked him to sit down with me and compare who has the most nominations, and see how we can go forward. So far he has refused.

It isn’t about the individual anyway, it’s about the policies. But you have to be able to demonstrate a record of principled support for those policies. And if you look at Michael’s record in Parliament, on most of the key issues he’s voted with New Labour, and on the biggest issue that confronted our community – the invasion of Iraq – he voted with the government. I can’t support someone who voted for a war that resulted in 650,000 Iraqis being killed.

*Can Labour recover from Blair? How do you intend to win back the party and those who left it?*

The key thing is to demonstrate, issue by issue, a radical break with New Labour. If you’re in favour of peace you withdraw from Iraq; you break the bizarre military alliance with Bush; you scrap Trident and don’t invest up to £70 billion in its renewal.

If you’re in favour of public services you don’t privatise but invest in them. Our argument is that we’re not going back to the old forms of nationalisation, but advocate new forms of public control which involve the workers who deliver those services, the people who receive them, and elected representatives of the local community. On the environment we want to invest in alternative power sources, not nuclear power. We’re also for increasing basic benefits and restoring the pensions link with earnings.

What we’ve seen over the last 10 years is the creation of the most unequal society since the Second World War. We want to redistribute wealth, which means tackling not just income tax but also corporation tax – which is now lower than at any time for the last 30 years.

We also support the trade union freedom bill, and have been suggesting a whole set of enforceable positive rights – to health, housing and free education – that would mark a radical break with the authoritarian form of government that Blair has introduced and Brown has supported.

*Do you support proportional representation as a means to give the left more leverage?*

I’m a complete pragmatist on all of this – I support the electoral system that gets Labour to power, because that enables me then to achieve what I think would be a socialist advance. I’m happy with ‘first past the post’ at the moment, because that gives us the opportunity of working for a majority Labour government. But I can also see that in Wales and Scotland – in Wales in particular – the consensus across most political parties apart from the Tories is much to the left of New Labour.

*What is the next step for your campaign?*

We’re publishing our manifesto on 1 May, entitled ‘Another world is possible: a manifesto for 21st century socialism’. We’ve never had a proper debate in this country about globalisation, certainly not within the Labour party. We can’t hark back to past golden ages but have to come to terms with a global economy controlled by transnational corporations that determine virtually every part of our daily life.

*What are the limits to what state power can achieve, though?*

Some people will remember the pre-GLC discussions about being in and against the state. That’s what government should be about in terms of socialist practice – you go into the state to transform the state. That’s why we need to develop a broad united front that works with progressive forces in civil society, the trade union working class base, and also works in dialogue with those who may not want to join Labour.

The Struggle for Europe’s Soul

Alex Doherty — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 13:50:13 +0000

On 25 March 2007, Europe’s leaders will meet to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, which laid the foundation for today’s European Union (EU). The occasion will be marked with a Berlin declaration laying out the ‘goals and common values of the EU’.

This will, no doubt, be accompanied by several bouts of backslapping, banquets and high-sounding bluster about peace and prosperity. There will be celebrations of a Europe at peace, and warm words about pooled sovereignty – if not explicitly in the sense of ‘ever closer union’, then at least some Blairspeak about ‘achieving more together than we can alone’. But when the conversations turn to a new constitutional treaty, the assembled heads of state may be forgiven for looking a little twitchy.

When Angela Merkel addressed the European parliament at the start of Germany’s six-month EU presidency, she announced her intention to draw up ‘a road map’ for the adoption of the constitutional treaty. ‘A collapse in that process would be a historic failure,’ she said, adding that a constitution was needed to ‘give a soul to Europe’. But this process is already in trouble.

*Constitution at the crossroads*

The constitution, as it was originally conceived, was a delicate compromise between the demands of Europe’s varied political elites. But when French and Dutch voters had the temerity to reject this fait accompli, they ushered in a ‘period of reflection’ from which the EU is only now emerging.

One immediate consequence is that referendums are now distinctly frowned upon.The EU president, José Manuel Barroso, who supported calls for a referendum when prime minister of Portugal and promoted a Plan D (‘for democracy, dialogue and debate’) in the aftermath of the French and Dutch votes, is now encouraging countries to ‘think twice’ before calling referendums on the constitutional treaty. He reasons that they make the approval process ‘much more complicated and less predictable’ – this unpredictability being, in fact, that people might once again come up with the ‘wrong’ answer.

This assumes that a common way forward on the constitution can be found. But a recent Madrid meeting of the ‘friends of the EU constitution’, involving representatives of the 18 countries that have ratified the existing treaty, showed the extent of the splits.

Spain’s foreign minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, called for the EU to expand the scope of the treaty – a ‘magnificent document’, which he insisted should remain the basis for any future settlement. But a senior French diplomat in Brussels dismissed the group as ‘the equivalent of a group of mourners showing their grief over a dead body’.

French support is crucial if any new treaty is to succeed, with much riding on the result of the presidential elections in May. Nicolas Sarkozy, the right-wing UMP candidate, now favours a ‘mini treaty’ that would include measures to create a European foreign minister, and promote the use of qualified majority voting – a measure likely to disenfranchise a significant number of EU states. His opponent, Ségolène Royal, favours a further referendum, and there is little to suggest that French public opinion has warmed to the constitution since the resounding ‘no’ of May 2005.

The British government has also set its eyes on a stripped down, mini treaty.

Here, too, a combination of popular pressure and press and political opportunism, could make calls for a referendum irresistible. Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Poland also fall into the ‘sceptics’ camp – and would find it difficult to approve any document based closely on the existing constitutional treaty without a fight. Little wonder, then, that Merkel is now attempting to advance the debate behind closed doors, using bureaucratic ‘sherpas’ to sound out various governments’ bottom lines.

But those on the left who think that no news is good news and stasis the best result would do well to be cautious. For one thing, whatever the form that the revived constitution eventually takes, it is unlikely to address the fundamental problems that saw most progressive voters in France and the Netherlands reject it in the first place. ‘The member states will attempt to change as little as possible, while making it look as if they have made substantial changes,’ says Steve McGiffen, editor of European left website Spectrezine and author of The European Union: A Critical Guide.

The rejected constitution was an attempt to give existing EU policies a higher legal status, which, once agreed, would be extremely difficult to amend.

‘It was an attempt to fix some basic policies for decades to come, subjecting future generations to these economic and political choices of the present,’ says Erik Wesselius of the Amsterdam-based Corporate Europe Observatory.

Caroline Lucas, Green Party MEP for South-East England, agrees: ‘The constitution committed us to open markets, more and more competition, and the increasing militarisation of the EU. Putting those binding policy commitments in a constitution was a big mistake first time around.’ She sees some possibility that a pared-down version of the treaty might drop the third part, which accounted for almost three quarters of the original document – this, at least, would be a welcome development. But Erik Wesselius is less hopeful, emphasising that such a document ‘will not change the free trade, free market orientation of the EU’.

*Crisis, what crisis?*

A stalled constitution doesn’t mean a stalled EU, however. In June 2005, the Luxembourg prime minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, announced that: ‘Europe is not in crisis. It is in a deep crisis.’ But supporters of the neoliberal EU project might now be tempted to say: ‘What crisis?’ The EU is continuing its piecemeal implementation of aspects of the constitution regardless. For example, efforts to construct a European Defence Agency, which the constitution envisaged as central to the forging of common security and defence priorities, have continued without impediment. The EDA, included in the treaty as a result of heavy arms industry lobbying, is intended to advance common weapons’ procurement policies across the EU – which, in the context of an injunction that member states ‘undertake progressively to improve their military capabilities’, should mean lucrative new defence contracts.

More generally, there has been no fundamental change or reassessment of the EU’s neoliberal trajectory – the ‘period of reflection’ has left these fundamentals largely untouched.

In fact, several of the key EU initiatives since the ‘no’ votes on the constitution further entrench the EU’s free market stance. The EU budget of 864.3 billion for 2007-2013, agreed in April 2006, ties funding more closely than before to the Lisbon Agenda, which sets out the EU’s strategic objective to become ‘the most dynamic and competitive knowledgebased economy in the world’. This is true of both rural development – the Common Agricultural Policy which still accounts for the largest share of the EU budget ( 88.75 billion) – as well as the 45.5 billion allocated for the Seventh Framework Programme, which requires that EU-funded research be designed to enhance ‘global competitiveness’ through partnerships with industry and the private sector.

It is also having a pernicious role on debates in Brussels, according to Caroline Lucas. ‘Ostensibly about EU competitiveness, the Lisbon Agenda has come to be used as a crude instrument to attack valid and legitimate social and environmental legislation,’ she says.

The EU services (or ‘Bolkestein’) directive was intended to push the free market agenda even more crudely – in this case, by creating a single market in services. This was far from an unbridled victory for neoliberalism, with popular pressure in several EU states resulting in a compromise to remove its most controversial clause, the ‘country of origin’ principle – which would have meant, for example, that a company could employ someone within one EU country according to the labour standards of another.

The scope of the directive was also restricted, with some sectors, such as social housing, removed from its remit.

Yet the compromise text, as adopted by the council of ministers in December 2006, still contains measures directed towards further ‘market freedom’.

Ambiguities in its wording will give greater interpretative scope to the court of justice, which, if past experience is a guide, tends to rule in favour of greater competition.

In October 2006, meanwhile, EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson launched a new international trade strategy, which emphasised EU ‘activism in opening markets abroad’. The Global Europe – Competing in the World paper promises new bilateral free trade agreements. The aim is to force countries and regions of the global South to open their markets to EU goods and corporate investment, denying them the range of economic protections and subsidies that most European countries have themselves used to further their development, and entrenching current global economic imbalances in the process.

Such policies are already being developed in the guise of EPAs (Economic Partnership Agreements) with African, Caribbean and Pacific countries, which threaten job losses and cuts in public services as new markets are opened up for European corporations.

Closer to home, a similar strategy is at work in the rapidly developing EU neighbourhood policy, which encourages economic integration and free trade with 17 countries bordering the EU from the former USSR, the Balkans and north Africa. This, too, promotes policies ‘designed to deliver further liberalisation and privatisation than has been agreed within the EU or within the negotiations on trade in services at the EU,’ according to David Hall of the Public Services International Research Unit.

EU enlargement has also been used to entrench liberalisation. Bulgaria and Romania, in common with other central and east European states joining the EU, had to prove their ability to operate a ‘functioning market economy’ before being admitted to the club. This has clearly had some positive effects, such as pressure to curb corruption, but these are offset by these countries’ terms of entry – which look designed to ensure that they remain on the periphery of an increasingly unequal, multi-speed Europe.

Beyond grand pronouncements about aims and values for the future, this range of key policies – which bring with them an array of new market openings and financial straightjackets – is already setting the trajectory for the EU’s future development. It may lack a soul, but the EU has kept its economic head.

*Seeds of another Europe*

‘Fifty years ago it was very clear what the European Economic Community was for: building peace in Europe through a free trade economic project. Now those economic policies have become a goal in themselves,’ says Caroline Lucas. ‘And that’s one reason why people feel distant from the EU, because economics have taken priority over environmental, social and other concerns.’ Rebalancing this agenda is crucial. In economic terms, this means a rejection of the EU’s one-size-fits-all prescriptions: the stability and convergence criteria that prescribe deregulation as the basis for political co-operation.

‘One of the dilemmas that you face as an EU critic is that nowadays it is hard to imagine how Europe would look without an internal market,’ says Erik Wesselius. But it is nevertheless important, he says, to conceive of ‘European alternatives that have genuine co-operation rather than the internal market’ as their focus, offering the possibility for a diversity of economic models rather than the current, one-sizefits all approach.

If the idea of a European social model is to have any meaning, then there are plenty of alternative economic measures that the EU could be taking, as Susan George of the Transnational Institute points out. These range from a tax on corporate profits, to a politically accountable central bank with a capacity to borrow by issuing bonds.

It is not just a question of economics, however. ‘It would be better to do less at EU level, but ensure that the EU is doing what needs to be done collectively,’ says Caroline Lucas.

‘Sustainability and climate change could offer a real focus for what the EU could add. It is clear that action by individual states is not enough, whereas the momentum of 27 states acting together, and taking these issues far more seriously than the EU is doing to date, could show that we’re serious about tackling these problems, and engaging with China and India on these issues, through technology transfers and our policies, whether contraction and convergence or any other fair formula.’ Achieving these ends would require fundamental shifts in both the way that the EU operates and the balance of political forces at work within it. Yet the EU’s current political composition is hardly conducive to this – the European Commission and parliament currently have a centre-right majority, even setting aside the fact that much of the centreleft enthusiastically advocates further liberalisation. And the eastward expansion means that this is unlikely to change any time soon. As Steve McGiffen points out, ‘One of the broad effects of EU enlargement has been to move the whole political frame to the right.’

On a more fundamental level, though, it is the institutional basis of the EU itself that remains the key problem. From the Rome Treaty onwards, the EU has tended to isolate economic forces from democratic accountability. This is partly a result of ‘inter-governmentalism’ – the fact that EU decision-making ultimately rests with the European Council (of heads of government), who meet in secret.

The constitutional treaty promised limited improvements here, although what it offered with one hand it took back with the other – since, by giving neoliberal policy a higher status, it would have rendered meaningful discussion on the major economic issues, transparent or not, largely redundant.That settlemtnt remains in trouble, but its spirit lives on in both the EU’s existing constitutional arrangements and the policies that it produces.

This continued tendency to place liberalisation before democratic accountability is Europe’s true ‘historical failure’. Another Europe remains possible, and it is easy enough to imagine the principles on which it could be built – but it will be harder to construct the conditions under which its soul can be set free.

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Eyes to the Right

Tim Holmes — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 10:34:44 +0000

Journalists can’t do maths – or, at least, that is the simple insight that underlies the success of Migration Watch, the anti-immigration think-tank that crunches the numbers for Fleet Street’s antiimmigrant lobby.

Migration Watch first hit the headlines in May 2002, when the Sun reported its prediction that one million immigrants would arrive in the UK in the next five years. But the story quickly died, prompting the organisation to rejig its statistics until they were taken up again by the Daily Mail, Express, and Telegraph in the form of front-page lead stories proclaiming immigration at the rate of ‘a city the size of Cambridge every six months’.

Such soundbites are Migration Watch’s stock in trade, with its press releases and reports spawning xenophobic scare stories that mix a selective reading of official statistics with heavy lashings of innuendo to claim that ‘One in Ten Londoners is an Immigrant’, or that ‘400 New Schools Are Needed for Asylum Seekers’. Underlying the headlines is the assumption that immigration threatens national coherence and is, therefore, a bad thing.

Migration Watch provides the figures, which are rarely scrutinised, and news angles – which, without being straightforwardly racist, nevertheless play upon racist fantasies and associations linking immigrants to the spread of disease, exploitation of welfare services and sham marriages.

Since 2002, it has argued that asylum seekers with HIV or hepatitis should be removed from the country; that immigration checks should be a routine requirement before medical treatment is given; that foreign students and overseas visitors should pay a financial bond before coming the UK; and that marriage between British citizens and foreigners should only be recognised where both partners are aged 24 or over.

It is not surprising that a rightwing think-tank should draw such conclusions. But it is surprising that such credence is given to its claim to be promoting evidencebased research, given the web of evangelical conservative and corporate vested interests that lie behind it.

The founding figure behind Migration Watch is Andrew Green, formerly British ambassador to Syria and Saudi Arabia. The way Green tells it, his interest in asylum questions stems from a frustrated attempt to deport the Saudi dissident Mohammed al- Massari from Britain: ‘We wanted him out, the Saudis wanted him out and we spent 18 months trying to get him out. When we failed I realised the asylum system was in chaos.’

Green fails to mention that he was a non-executive director of Vickers Military Systems, an arms company with links to Saudi Arabia, on his appointment as ambassador in 1996. Or that a failure to deport al- Massari was seen as a threat to a proposed Vickers contract to supply that country with 200 Challenger tanks. Or that leaked correspondence showed direct contact between Green and Sir Colin Chandler, then chief executive of Vickers, and senior executives at two other arms companies, British Aerospace and GKN, to update them on the progress of official attempts to silence al-Massari to appease the Saudis.

Green’s main collaborator in Migration Watch is David Coleman, professor of demography at Oxford University.

Coleman has made a career of telling governments that immigration restrictions are necessary. He served as a special advisor to Tory ministers Leon Brittan and William Waldegrave in the mid-1980s, and remains a close friend of disgraced former minister Jonathan Aitken. He is also a member of the Galton Institute (formerly the Eugenics Society – until that name was dropped due to the racist associations), having once served as its honorary secretary.

The Migration Watch advisory council also has leanings towards the Thatcherite right. Its members include Baroness Cox, a Eurosceptic cross-bench peer appointed to the Lords as a Conservative by Margaret Thatcher in 1982. The evangelical baroness, who is president of Christian Solidarity Worldwide (on whose board Andrew Green has also served), has long used her position there to rail against Britain’s moral decline.

This has included supporting the anti-gay section 28 legislation, and using her position to promote a book, Great Britain has Fallen, which equated abortion with the Holocaust and blamed multiculturalism for the import of ‘foreign practices’, such as ‘destructive’ homosexuality. More recently she can be found emphasising the dangerous demographic reality, as she puts it, that several MPs are becoming ‘deferential’ to their Muslim constituents and warning of the ‘Islamist’ threat at home and abroad.

Cox is joined on the Migration Watch council by James Duguid, a retired professor who recently used his local Inverness paper to rail against the ‘madness’ of increasing the immigrant population, blaming it for everything from energy shortages to traffic congestion. Mervyn Stone, a University College London statistician whose work Migration Watch used to quote as an independent verification of their own, is also now an adviser for the organisation.

It's Our Foreign Policy, Stupid

Tim Holmes — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 16:57:06 +0000

When the news came in that Britains security services had foiled a terrorist outrage on the scale of 9/11, I should have felt relief at mass murder averted, shock at the audacity of the plot, and fear that Britain was once again under attack. But five years on from the collapse of the Twin Towers, I find those instincts clouded by thoughts of a more troubled kind: that prejudice and moral indignation will close down the space to ask why, and that the threat of terror will, once again, be put to such dangerous political uses that it breeds more of the same.

This should not be confused with cynicism about the existence of a terrorist threat, even though the record of the past five years WMDs, the ricin plot, the Menezes killing and the Forest Gate raid has provided ample reasons to be cynical. It is likely that several of the 24 suspects detained in raids on 10 August played no part in any terror plot. But the signs are that, this time around, the police did disrupt a plan to blow up trans-Atlantic flights.

To be caught in a game of truth about the plausibility or otherwise of a failed terror plot or, worse, to fantasise about conspiracies is to risk losing sight of the key issues in the debate on terrorism. Innocent until proven guilty is a vital principle, but it is not a sufficient political response. And there are several examples of specious reasoning that we need to confront.

The most glaring is the idea that foreign policy should not be invoked to explain foiled terror attacks. Such reasoning is dangerous and foolish, says transport minister Douglas Alexander. But he makes the fatal confusion between explanation and justification as though the US and British occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and complicity in the Israeli destruction of Lebanon, had not fanned the flames of resentment and injustice that fuel terrorism.

John Reid claims that it is a dreadful misjudgement to believe Britains foreign policy should be shaped under the threat of terrorist activity. Yet domestic policy is made in precisely these terms, with new police powers, anti-terror laws and surveillance following each and every terrorist threat. On 9 August, Reid launched a pre-emptive strike on the critics of such measures, arguing that we should modify some of our own freedoms in the short term to counter those who would destroy all of our freedoms in the modern world. A dreadful misjudgement, indeed.

Not all politicians are in denial about the bigger picture. George Bushs response to the London plot was to join the dots between Islamic fascists in the UK, Lebanon and Iraq. Tony Blair will likely make the same connection in slightly less offensive terms, extending his arc of extremism from Beirut to Birmingham.

This is politics in the moral register, or a different way to deny the impact of foreign policy. If our enemies are fundamentally evil, then there is no need to understand causes or alleviate grievances but rather, to destroy our enemies and promote our values, a communitarian response to foreign policy that has been mirrored, unsuccessfully, on the domestic front.

Muslims are not a monolithic community, and the idea that they should indulge in a new bout of self-policing to unearth the terrorists in their midst cannot fail to reinforce the alienating sense that they are being held collectively responsible for the criminal intent of a small, extremist group. Worse still, right-wing commentators are already editorialising against the threat of an enemy within, to quote the Sunday Times editorial of 14 August.

This comes on the back of a trial by media, which has given the private lives of the accused the kind of going over normally reserved for Big Brother contestants. The suspects fail to conform to the bearded, hook-handed norm. They seem all too ordinary, living normal westernised existences in neat terraced houses. It is not hard to find a racist undercurrent here, the fantasy that even moderate Islam is a façade for extremism expressed, by the Sunday Times, as a sneaking admiration for jihad even among seemingly sensible Muslims. This is the real cynicism.

If we are serious about counteracting terrorism, then an understanding of politics and power should be our guide. For over a century, terrorism has mostly involved responses to military occupation by outside state powers. It has been conducted on behalf of (rather than by) the poor in contexts where the perpetrators perceive no legitimate channels to advance their political demands. Religion has sometimes been used to legitimise such actions, but has rarely been a cause.

Attacks by British-born Muslims seem little different, except that their political sympathies, fuelled by internet videos and 24-hour news broadcasts, express a more globalised struggle than that of their predecessors. For as long as the British government acts with impunity and supports state terror abroad, there can be little hope that we can resolve the problem of terror at home.

A Law Unto Themselves?

eddie — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 15:39:11 +0000

The killing of Jean Charles de Menezes by armed police on 22 July was more than just the tragic collateral damage of a campaign against terrorism. Those seven bullets to the head announced the shift towards a shoot-to-kill policy by British police one which, had they not gunned down an innocent man, would no doubt by now have been re-branded, with Orwellian overtones, as shoot-to-protect.

The case raises far larger concerns about the accountability of policing in Britain. For without a parliamentary word being spoken, or a community organisation being consulted, the police were able to make a substantial change to the legal limits of their use of force. Law and order, it seems, trumps democracy; and, where terrorism is at stake, the police seem to be a law unto themselves.

The British tradition of policing has long presented itself as being governed by the consent of those it serves: the impartial rule of citizens in uniform. But state power is rarely neutral and, from Britains first police forces in the mid-19th century, maintaining the peace meant keeping a watchful eye over the activities of the criminal classes. Upholding the rule of law required social control, and a significant part of the polices role was to break up political meetings and spy on emerging working class movements.

Much has changed since then, of course. The local autonomy of the 19th century gave way to a nationalised structure, formalised by the 1964 Police Act, which gave the Home Office ultimate control. Methods of policing have changed too, shifting the emphasis from street patrols to detection, and placing greater faith in the efficient uses of new technology. In recent years, these trends have continued, with central government targets constraining the independence of Britains 52 local police forces, and the development of new national agencies to police serious crime. At the same time, there has been renewed emphasis on local engagement. Community and neighbourhood policing have become buzz phrases under New Labour.

When David Blunkett spoke of community policing during his time as home secretary, it was easy to conjure up the image of a modern day Victorian out to discipline todays criminal classes. And when Tony Blair launched the Building Communities, Beating Crime white paper last November, he proposed neighbourhood policing as a way for the law-abiding citizen in the community to take control against the minority who want to cause trouble. This is Blairs vision of community: an essentially conservative population, which seeks protection from the dangers of todays hoodied, ASBOd youth.

But this should not blind us to the fact that, in principle, community policing should be good for democracy if it were to provide a genuine way of holding the police to account as well as being a relatively successful means of maintaining social peace. Effective policing requires the support of communities, says Jenny Jones, Green Party member of the Greater London Assembly and a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority. If you dont have the trust of the community you wont get the information you need to combat terrorism, or to fight gun crime properly.

So why is it, then, that community policing in Britain consistently fails to match up to this standard?

Law and order policies are an important part of the story with ASBOs, fixed penalty notices, curfews and the like tending to address the symptoms of alienation rather than their social causes, as well as handing the police additional powers without adequate democratic safeguards.

But they do not tell the whole story. Another condition for effective community policing is that there must exist meaningful channels of democratic accountability. And the picture here is decidedly mixed.

On paper, London in particular has seen a great improvement over recent years, with the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) established in 2000. Prior to that, the home secretary had retained direct control of the capitals policing, which allowed for no direct scrutiny by Londoners.

But, as Jenny Jones explains, making the Met more accountable has still been a struggle: When the MPA first started we werent allowed to ask any questions, we just got a report. Five years on, authority members can now directly question Met commissioner Sir Ian Blair, but the police themselves have often resisted changes: Theres a tendency within the police to keep things quiet, and they havent really adapted to the idea of open government.

For Asad Rehman, chair of the anti-racist Newham Monitoring Project and spokesperson for the Justice4Jean campaign (see Day in the Life, page 8), the birth of the MPA is not much of a victory: In the 1980s we were arguing that local people should be able to hold the police accountable for operational and policy issues, rather than just having to answer to a hand-picked or appointed group of people on the police authority. The response has been to give us the Independent Police Complaints Commission and the MPA, but theyre not robust enough to hold the police truly to account. Some people say that the new bodies have given the police another breathing space, because they can now say there are new arrangements, we should give them a few years, and so deflect criticism.

At a more local level, Police Community Consultative Groups (PCCG), which are meant to give citizens a channel to discuss policing, come in for similar criticisms. Ruhul Tarafder of the 1990 Trust, a black community organisation, argues that: A lot of the existing structures are talking shops. Theyre mostly about managing and controlling the community rather than representing it in an equal partnership.

Asad Rehman adds that with no direct power over operational policy or policing priorities, they are little more than PR exercises. Although some PCCGs have been able to forge an independent role for themselves, complaints abound that they remain unrepresentative, too close to the police with local authority funding and staffing encouraging this hand-in-glove relationship and even, at times, racially divided.

One of the biggest problems that the official mechanisms for police-community accountability suffer from is an imbalance of power, says Kevin Blowe, of the United Friends and Families Campaign, which works on deaths in custody. There have been some real improvements in policing policy over the past 10 to 15 years, including on domestic violence and hate crimes, so in theory things have improved. But the real test of how people view the police is how they actually behave and that has shown little change.

Take the example of police stop and search powers, which have long been a flashpoint for police-community relations. The Brixton riots in 1981, although symptomatic of wider social and economic exclusion, were triggered by the racist use of sus laws, a stop and search measure originally passed in 1824 to make vagrancy an arrestable offence.

The 1984 Police And Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) modified this, requiring that the police must have reasonable suspicion before conducting searches. And the Macpherson Report, which followed the death of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, led to further transparency in the reporting of stop and search statistics. But these measures have so far failed to prevent the disproportionate targeting of minority ethnic communities. Black people remain eight times and Asians five times more likely to be stopped than white people, according to 2004 Home Office figures proportions that have increased since the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.

Statistics tell only part of the story, however. For Zareena Mustapha of the Newham Monitoring Project, The problem with stop and search is not only disproportionate targeting but also the manner of the searches, which are often fraught with fear, suspicion and sometimes quite severe violence. For a lot of young black kids its routine, a part of their criminalisation.

The MPA itself has recognised the problem, publishing a study in May 2004 showing that disproportionate stop and search has increased distrust, trampled on human rights, and cut off valuable sources of community information and criminal intelligence. It concludes that stop and search practice continues to be influenced by racial bias, stereotyping and institutional racism.

Although most stop and searches are authorised under PACE, there has also been a significant increase in the use of Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act (see "Guerilla Guides":http://www.guerillaguides.com/, April 2005). This measure has been used notoriously to curtail the right to protest against the DSEi arms fair in east London and at Fairford airbase in Gloucestershire. It has also been used increasingly against British Asians.

In the aftermath of the London bombings, transport police have been given operational orders to search suspects of Asian, West Indian and east African origin. As Ian Johnston, chief constable of the London Transport police, put it: We should not waste time searching old white ladies. It is going to be disproportionate.

The message seems to be that exceptional times call for exceptional measures. But there is not a shred of evidence that such tactics work and there has never been a terrorism conviction resulting from a stop-and-search. All too easily, the exception can become the rule, undermining the possibility of community cooperation by criminalising whole communities.

Theres a real climate of fear at the moment, says Ruhul Tarafder, with a community thats facing a backlash. We need community policing thats built from the bottom up, but how are we going to achieve that when were treated with suspicion by the media and politicians?

The biggest block in the road to genuine community policing lies here. For all the consultations and scrutiny groups, the problem remains that the police exist to establish the rule of law of a state that is not neutral because it is itself not under effective democratic control.

Living Together

Alex Doherty — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 14:58:40 +0000

__Tariq Ramadan is one Europes leading progressive Muslim scholars. He talked to Oscar Reyes about integration, multiculturalism and the role of the global justice movement after the London bombings.__

*The British government says the London terror attacks have nothing to do with its foreign policy, the press chastises talk of the alienation among young Muslims, and Muslim leaders say the attacks have nothing to do with Islam. What steps need to be taken to move beyond these reactions?*

Its normal to have this kind of defensive reaction at first. When Tony Blair says that there is no relation between the attacks in London and those in Iraq, he is correct on ethical grounds you cannot justify what was done in London by what is happening in Iraq. But on political grounds there is a connection, of course. So one aspect is to stand up and say what is right and what is wrong. Another is to offer an understanding without justification of what is going on.

Beyond this, we need a second step, which involves people from all sides. As Muslims we need to stop being defensive and face up to our responsibilities for Islamic education and understanding. But the government and wider society also have a responsibility to look at the kind of education that we are providing in this society, and whether it helps Muslims to understand that they are accepted as fellow citizens. This needs a comprehensive approach from the government and not only a focus on security, which is the typical response. We face the same problem throughout Europe now in Holland after the murder of Theo Van Gogh; in France, where they are expelling and banning imams and it will be the same in the UK. These actions do not respect European human rights legislation, with people being sent back to Algeria or Pakistan, where we do not know what will happen to them. But more than that, they are purely symbolic actions, which do not solve the real problems.

*A separation is typically made between moderate and fundamentalist Muslims. How would you move beyond this simplification, while at the same time isolating those who use Islam to justify terror?*

It is really important not to accept this simplistic division, where the Muslims who are saying what we want them to say are the moderates and all the others are the fundamentalists. The Muslim community is as complex as, say, the Christian community and we have different voices. The very moment that you accept and recognise that the other is as complex as you, it means that you are respecting him or her.

It is also important for Muslims from all schools of thought to take a clear stance on the idea that Islam means against the West. We have people, ideologists, using Islam in that way and they are playing exactly the game of the neo-cons on the other side, with their perception that there is one civilisation against the other. Both extremes are nurturing this new ideology of fear. And its up to us all, Muslims but also others in the West, to understand that we are fighting two extremisms that are nurturing each other.

*Young Muslims are often presented as a problem, but youve spoken much more positively about a silent revolution among young European Muslims. What do you mean by this phrase?*

In the last 15 to 20 years, second and third generation Muslims have developed a better understanding of what Islam is all about. This means being able to distinguish between cultures of origin perceived as a richness, of course and Islamic principles. Many people say, You have to integrate in our culture. But this does not mean giving up on Islamic principles. My point is that our universal values are helping us to integrate what is good from European cultures.

In the face of the current reaction in Britain, you can feel that the second and third generations are asserting their identities, being British and Muslims at the same time. They are asking for their rights and not remaining on the margins of society. This shows an acceptance of their citizenship, that this society is their home, that they are no longer in dar al-harb (abode of war). Women are more present, more assertive, and more aware of their rights against discrimination too.

If we are looking for signals in different countries, then I think that what happened in Britain with the anti-war coalition is really important. We have seen more Muslims getting involved in the European Social Forum too. And in France we had the group École pour tous which brought together non-Muslims and Muslims and, even within feminist groups, saw them working together in the name of common values. These are evidence of new trends, a new movement that is coming out of our presence. And this is what I call the silent revolution.

*Often, talk of integration can end up meaning assimilation tacitly requiring Muslims to stop professing their faith to gain recognition in the public sphere.*

Integration is a concept used with different meanings in different countries. In France, integration is much closer to assimilation. You are integrated the very moment you think like us, dress like us, and are invisible. It is not exactly the same in the UK, where you can integrate and stay who you are. But you can stay who you are amongst people who are like you. Although multiculturalism as we speak about it in the UK is good, it is not good if we mean by it a patchwork of communities not living together but living next to each other. And this is the problem. We have an ideal of multiculturalism but very often British indigenous citizens dont mix with Muslim and culturally Pakistani-British citizens, or those of Bengali or Indian cultures of origin.

Integration should mean stay who you are, live with your multiple identities and live with the other. Its about how we tackle the visibility of differences and the psychology of knowing that we live with people who are not like us in the name of our common society, within the same legislation and with mutual respect.

This is not easy. There is no mutual or reciprocal integration without knowledge, education, and taking the time to know more about the other. You cannot have integration or a multicultural society built on mutual ignorance.

*Integration can also be seen as a test of loyalty. How do you promote ways of living together that allow western Muslims the space to question the cultural predominance of consumerism and individualism in the west at present?*

This is very important, because once again were asking the Muslims to show loyalty and a sense of belonging. Its as if they have to follow blindly the dominant culture. The real integration within western societies is to mix, to be selective, and to promote the critical mind.

Our loyalty is often questioned when we speak about the morality of consumerism or individualism. But here we need a critical loyalty. Its important for Muslims to understand that they should not be so scared as to present a blind loyalty, because of the psychological pressure that they are facing today.

And we have people like that. During colonisation, there were some people who were totally absorbed and invisible within the perceived dominant culture. As western Muslims, its really important to say that we integrate from western culture everything that is good, but that were going to be self-critical and critical towards anything that is wrong according to our values and principles. And this is the true loyalty, one based on a critical assessment of what were doing and on consistency. Its very easy to say we are promoting democracy, promoting freedom. But the key question for each civilisation is how to achieve consistency between the values it proclaims and the policies it implements. This is what we have to ask for, and what Muslims should also ask for when they have to deal with the Islamic majority countries.

*Are the new global justice movements reaching out effectively to Muslims, or are they also repeating a kind of cultural imperialism?*

Both. Some within these movements understand that they have to study, to know more, to decentre themselves from the culturally dominant ideology. But others are totally misled by their perception that they are politically progressive, and fail to understand that they are culturally still very conservative and even backward sometimes, very imbibed with the ideology of colonisation, that we know best. Its very difficult to deal with such people.

Within the movement we have a mix of people, but the majority are still quite ignorant of the potential from other cultures or other religions. Its as if we are using old concepts, old understandings, and reorganising them and trying to find new strategies. But we dont only need new strategies. We need a movement built on new perceptions and even new members. We need people who understand that they have to be serious about diversity. We deal with people in the name of our common resistance but we come from specific realities, values and histories.

Out of this realisation can come a more transparent movement. Because its as if the old guard still know how things work, and those coming into the process are a bit lost. You cannot hope that another world is possible if we are duplicating the same old and non-transparent strategies to take over or to keep power.

The Sun and The Terrorists

jo — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 16:35:09 +0000

The worst that can happen to a democratic society is to see its citizens being transformed to passive victims paralysed by fear. The proponents of the global clash of civilisations theory shall win if we accept to be individually colonised by emotional caricatures and suspicion towards people of other faiths and cultures.

- Tariq Ramadan, 9 July 2005

In a move that appears designed to stir up Islamophobia, The Sun newspaper yesterday launched a front page attack on Professor Tariq Ramadan, an internationally respected progressive Muslim scholar.

The Suns leader column claims that Ramadan is more dangerous than extremist clerics Abu Hamza or Omar Bakri because he is a soft-spoken professor whose moderate tones present an acceptable, reasonable face of terror to impressionable young Muslims.

This shows a dangerous inability to distinguish between the progressive Islam promoted by Ramadan, a best-selling author whose work focuses on the compatibility of European and Muslim principles, and the proponents of the terrorist attacks on London. Ramadan himself unreservedly condemned the London bombings in a statement on 7 July, stating that The authors of such acts are criminals and we cannot accept or listen to their probable justifications in the name of an ideology, a religion or a political cause.

The Suns attack on Tariq Ramadan repeats the Islamophobic myth that even moderate Muslims are extremists in disguise. To repeat uncritically a series of unfounded claims made by neoconservative commentators would be irresponsible journalism at any time. But at a time when Britains Muslims are facing increasing numbers of racist attacks, it reads like an incitement to violence.

An oft-repeated truth

Ramadan is no stranger to smear campaigns against him, which directly contributed to the revocation of his US visa shortly before he was due to take up a position as Professor of Islamic Studies and Luce Professor in charge of the Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding programme at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana last August.

That move provoked outrage amongst academics, with the American Association of University Professors condemning it as manifestly at odds with our societys respect for academic freedom and others claiming that the case exhumed the ghost of McCarthyism.

Ramadans exclusion also drew criticism from Muslim community leaders: it sends the disturbing message that even moderate and mainstream Muslims will now be treated like terrorists, said Nihad Aawa, Executive Director of the Council for American Islamic Relations.

Writing in The Guardian last August, Tariq Ramadan responded to the news of having his US visa revoked by analysing how unfounded allegations gain the status of truth:

Over the years, I also learned that in the world of mass media, "truth" is not based on clarity, but on frequency. Repeated hypotheses or suspicions become truth; a three-time-repeated assumption imperceptibly becomes a fact. When I ask about the source of this information, the response is: this is well known, check the internet. A closer examination reveals that what we have is journalists or intellectuals repeating and reporting what others said yesterday with caveats. Strange truth indeed!

These words look prophetic when read alongside yesterdays Sun, which dedicates its whole front page, a two-page spread, a leader article and the Richard Littlejohn comment piece to the story that Ramadan who has lectured to audiences of world leaders, academics and fellow Muslims around the globe is to speak at the Middle Path conference in London on 24 July, an event partly funded by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and the Metropolitan Police.

The neo-con connection

Most of the claims made against Ramadan in The Sun, and repeated in its Murdoch-owned stable mate The Times, appear to have been cut and pasted from an article written last year by neoconservative US commentator Daniel Pipes. And the papers reliance on self-appointed experts does not stop here.

Terrorism expert Steven Emerson says: The telegenic, soft-spoken and charming professor is just the modern, westernised face of the same enemy that wears a different mask on other battlefields, according to The Sun. But the paper does not report that Emerson (a friend of Pipes) is a discredited source whos 1994 US television documentary Jihad in America was widely denounced for its Islamophobic content, or that the same commentator claimed that the 1995 Oklahoma bombing showed a Middle Eastern trait because it was done with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible (CBS News, 19 April 1995).

Further column inches are given to The Suns own neocon Islamophobe Richard Littlejohn, who duly denounces Ramadan as a fanatic. Yet all his You couldnt make it up ranting cant hide the fact that the allegations made against Ramadan are based on ideologically-motivated inventions and distortions.

Take, for example, The Suns front page headline that Professor Ramadan is banned in France for links to terrorists. This is simply untrue, as Ramadan has a flat and a permanent office in Saint Denis, Paris. The basis for the claim arises from the fact that he was briefly barred from entering France in 1996, but no reason was ever given for this and the ban was quickly overturned after it was revealed to be a case of mistaken identity.

The Sun also claims that Ramadan denies that there is any proof that Osama bin Laden said to have studied with his dad Said master-minded the 9/11 slaughter. In fact, Ramadan immediately condemned the 9/11 attacks in the strongest terms, and there is no evidence that Ramadan or his father ever met bin Laden.

Most damningly, The Sun claims on its opening page that Ramadan is An Islamic academic who says suicide bombings are justified, a claim repeated in a Times article headed Police fund visit by academic who justifies suicide bombings.

Yet the only evidence offered for this is an unattributed comment on Palestine that directly contradicts Ramadans own published views, which he repeated today:

I never justified suicide bombings. My statements were always explicit. To kill innocent people is to be condemned. I have been going on repeating that we must understand and analyze the political contexts and environment in order to understand why people are using these ways to resist. For more than 40 years, the Palestinians have not used suicide bombings and they started to do so in 1994. Why? It was three years after the Barcelona agreement, one year after Oslo and just after the massacre in Hebron. They then had the feeling that they were lost, isolated and forgotten by the world. Suicide bombings started after this series of events. One can explain why it happened; it does not mean that one is justifying it. To explain is not to justify. This is my stand, this has always been my stand.

I could go on, but it seems unnecessary when Ramadan himself has previously issued a point-by-point rebuttal to all of the allegations repeated in The Sun and Times when responding to Daniel Pipes.

Stirring up the clash of civilisations

There is a wider issue at stake here, however. In attacking a leading progressive Muslim scholar, The Sun is promoting Islamophobia more widely. That is why anti-racist campaigners were quick to condemn The Suns coverage. As Ruhul Tarafder of The 1990 Trust puts it:

The Suns sensationalist, disgraceful and irresponsible front-page story is simply an attempt to fuel Islamaphobia. Tariq Ramadan is a highly respected moderate Muslim scholar and was one of the first to condemn the London bombings, as he has condemned previous outrages. This demonisation does nothing but promote hostility towards Muslim communities. At a time of high emotions and the need for strength and unity between all faiths and communities, the inaccuracies and lies in this account only seek to encourage divisions. The Sun should issue an immediate apology to both Tariq Ramadan and the Muslim community.

Since these words were spoken and in the time that I have been writing this article, strong evidence has emerged that the London bombers were young British Muslims. According to The Suns logic, this will no doubt make Ramadans visit all the more controversial, as it continues to deploy the rhetoric of Daniel Pipes, Steven Emerson and Fouad Ajami (who claims that Ramadans moderate face hides his radical heart) to attack him as a Muslim wolf in sheeps clothing.

This is a particularly dangerous kind of nonsense. It sends out the message that Islam and terrorism are intrinsically connected, by perpetuating the racist myth that extremism is lurks behind the moderate façade.

For such commentators, what is threatening about Ramadan is precisely the fact that he doesnt fit the extremist caricature. His very presence is an affront to the belief that a clash of civilisations is just around the corner, because his work expresses the strong commonalities between European and Islamic principles, and invites European Muslims to embrace their connections with the society in which they live without giving up on their faith identity. Moreover, he does this by offering a vision of social justice that moves beyond the perspective of religious minorities to argue that Muslim values can contribute to the construction of universal values of social justice and so help breach the divide that a culture of terror widens to an insurmountable chasm.

The events of the last week make this message more relevant than ever, since Ramadans approach represents an articulate political and theological response to the literalists who would claim that British and Muslim values are incompatible. And it does so in a voice that neither requires an impossible or secularist compromise, whereby the only good Muslim is one who has effectively given up her or his faith, nor ignores the social injustices that lie at the root of alienation within our society.

It may be impossible to ever full understand what motivated the London bombers, but the effect that they sought to divide society and to spread fear is more easily discerned. The Suns reporting on Tariq Ramadan highlights the risk that the media will regard British Muslims with caution and suspicion, a sure way to close off the path to mutual understanding. For if we make mistrust the basis of our exchanges then we are doing the terrorists work for them.

G8 and London Terror

Alex Doherty — Sat, 09 Jul 2005 11:36:48 +0000

We learnt from 9/11 that initial responses to a terror attack tend to confirm existing prejudices rather than force us to raise critical questions. There can be no hesitation in condemning the bombing of innocent civilians. But our condolences and horror at the attacks should not blind us to the dangerous political uses to which they will be put.

The immediate political responses to todays abhorrent attacks, which have killed more than 33 people, already show clearly how the attacks will be used to gain political capital.

At 12 oclock, Tony Blair claimed that It is particularly barbaric that this has happened on a day when people are meeting to try to help the problems of poverty in Africa, and the long term problems of climate change and the environment.

An hour later, Blair returned to the podium this time flanked by G8 leaders to read a joint statement which echoed his own earlier words, condemning the barbaric attacks:

We will not allow violence to change our societies or our values, nor will we allow it to stop the work of this summit. We will continue our deliberations in the interest of a better world. Here at the summit, the world's leaders are striving to combat world poverty and save and improve human life.

Over the coming days, well hear a lot more of this. Civilisation versus barbarism, and our values aligned with those of the G8. Already we are seeing that the carnage and tragedy of todays events are being lined up to confer legitimacy on the summit and its outcomes.

Todays events were abhorrent and should be condemned as such. But shared expressions of condolence cant be the basis of political unity around policies that feed the climate of terror. It is this political bias and not the bad faith of our leaders (or still less any supposed conspiracies) that we should be most wary of.

The loss of innocent lives in London, as in Iraq or Afghanistan, is a symptom of a world that has become more dangerous in recent years. Since September 11 we have been told that there is a war on terror, which in practice has perpetrated further violence and war rather than tackling the massive political injustices that fuel political resentment.

Against this backdrop, the British governments use of the G8 to tackle poverty presents itself as a step forward. As Donna Andrews points out in Red Pepper, the Africa Commissions report on Our Common Interest sought to explicitly connect the agendas on poverty and security, the idea being that we need free market interventions in Africa to prevent al-Qaeda from acting here.

Todays events were shocking, disturbing, horrific though by no means unique in our troubled world. But there will undoubtedly be attempts to use them to push forward the G8 agenda, to fit them to an ideological script that has already been written, to develop a new global enforcement regime.

Now more than ever, opponents of this new Washington consensus should be loud and clear in voicing an alternative view.

They Owe it All to their Fans

christian — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 11:34:18 +0000

Bob Geldof calls one million demonstrators to Edinburgh. Round-the-world yachtswoman Dame Ellen MacArthur backs Sail 8, a flotilla of boats carrying G8 protesters. It can only be a matter of time before Tiger Woods joins the Peoples Golf Association event at Gleneagles golf course.

Welcome to the era of celebrity-endorsed protest, where the hard work of grass-roots political organising can be swept aside at the whim of a few famous backers. It is tempting to sneer at the embrace of celebrity culture as a trivialisation of development issues, or worse, a patronising subversion of the real agenda by pin-headed pin-ups. After all, pop stars do their street-cred no harm by uniting around a feel good feed the world message, but youre unlikely to see a Sugababes ballad about the WTOs GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) any time soon. This argument has merits, but it ignores the more awkward fact that the celebrity succeeds in raising the profile of the very issues that campaigners are talking about.

The advent of Live 8 has achieved far more press coverage than months of Make Poverty History and Dissent! mobilisations combined. And with more than one million text messages scrambling for concert tickets, it has provoked the interest of the Crazy Frog generation way beyond the level that more conventional campaigns could hope to achieve. Organisers of protest trains to Edinburgh are still struggling to fill seats, and heretical whispers can be heard on the activist grapevine: offer the trains to Geldof.

The most positive lesson of this celebrity turn is that we should not ignore cultural politics. Successful protest movements have rarely brought people around to our view. Rather, they have sought to engage with the feelings, norms and symbols of everyday life, and articulate them in a more progressive manner. Judged by this standard, the appearance of debt, aid and Africa on the agenda is an important political opening, since it poses questions about the eradication and causes of poverty to which the G8 is unlikely to find a convincing answer.

In opening one set of questions, however, celebrity endorsement closes others. This is the lesson of the original Band Aid and Live Aid in the 1980s. It was no mean feat to raise significant funds and, more importantly, raise the profile of African development in a context of Thatcherite indifference and me-first individualism. But those original interventions also cast Africans as victims of a process in which they had no agency of their own, no ability to question (let alone change) the conditions in which they found themselves. Geldof is still rehearsing the white mans burden routine today, and the return of Live Aid brings with it the same negative stereotypes of Africa, the same failure to address the fact that between 1970 and 2002, Africa alone transferred $550bn to the North in debt repayments on loans estimated at $540bn, yet it continues to owe some $300bn.

Celebrity-driven politics does not stop here, though. Where the 1980s campaigns focused on fundraising, todays politically conscious stars front professionalised lobbying operations. For every impassioned plea to make me some fucking money (at least I think thats what Geldof said), theres a seat on the Africa Commission. And for every charity record, theres a tour of Washingtons Republican elite.

U2s lead singer Bono is the acknowledged master of this political smooth-talking. He famously declared Blair and Brown to be the Lennon and McCartney of global development, and hailed former World Bank president James Wolfensohn as the Elvis of economics. With less fanfare, he has also celebrated the role of the IMF, courted George Bush and far right Republican senator Jesse Helms, and could even be found sharing a joke with Geldof and Russian president Vladimir Putin during the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001 as the citys streets burned. In 2002, Bono and Geldof launched DATA (Debt Aids Trade Africa), an awareness raising and lobbying group, which uses media attention to gain access to key decision-makers and unsurprisingly has the same agenda as the British government.

Underlying this narrative is an old-fashioned great men theory: the idea that meaningful political change can be achieved by the few on behalf of the many (see Make the G8 history, page 20). But what makes it work is something far more modern: the widespread penetration of government by public relations (PR).

Celebrities lobby politicians who, in turn, use campaigning techniques pioneered by celebrity publicists. This is not a wholly new phenomenon as early as 1928, PR pioneer Edward Bernays brought a trainload of Broadway stars to the White House to project president Calvin Coolidge as having a warm, sympathetic personality. But contemporary politics has taken this process further. Blairs willingness to be personally associated with eye catching initiatives, and his preference for softer, chat-show formats over hard-news interviews, are symptoms of a far wider process of focus groups, polls and surveys designed to maintain the right political image, using publicity techniques that extend deep into the policy-making process itself.

It can be argued that this is an appropriate form of politics for an information age. We need a clear point of reference to negotiate the complexity of our social interactions, so we place our trust in personality as a guide. But there are more immediate political concerns at work here, too. Ideological convergence around a market-driven politics means that todays politicians are no longer offering meaningful choices, different visions of how the world could be. And in this situation, personal reputation and image become increasingly important factors. Celebrity has stepped in because mainstream politics seems incapable of stirring our passions.

In the face of this, it would be tempting to turn our backs on celebrities altogether. But this approach doesnt always work. For example, when the World Social Forum (WSF) abolished plenaries the platforms for major speakers the same star system re-emerged anyway: with Venezuelan and Brazilian presidents Chavez and Lula, in particular, playing court to political rallies far larger than the sessions that were scrapped. This is not simply a matter of bad faith. The politics of representation is alive and well, but it rests upon the recognition of faces above and beyond their formal authority. The WSF says that politicians can participate only in a personal capacity. But that personal capacity was shown to be a mobilising factor in itself, a source of legitimacy and popularity. Needless to say, the media circus followed suit since its values system puts a premium on faces, on representatives who can articulate the demands of what it otherwise sees as a disordered mass.

In light of this, we should not reject celebrities but rather demand more from them. At the 2004 WSF in Mumbai, for example, novelist Arundhati Roy used her star status to call for a coordinated campaigning initiative against corporations profiting from Iraq. In other words, she sought to use her position to catalyse a common initiative, inviting us to bring our collective wisdom to bear on one single project in a way that months of consensus meetings cannot. But at the same forum, she also gave a platform to Dalit women (oppressed by the caste system) to express their grievances. This is closer to what can be achieved: celebrity as catalyst, and celebrity as facilitator not directly voicing the concerns of others, but giving up a platform for them to do so.

Politics in the extra-parliamentary mould could learn from this to mobilise a different kind of cultural politics. When politicians increasingly draw legitimacy from their personal profile, their trustworthiness, they become susceptible to attack on this same ground (as Blair did with the Iraq war). What this teaches us, too, is that political power does not come to rest in the offices of government and multinational institutions. Public profile, image, trustworthiness: all of these are resources in the publics gift to bestow and to take away. Seen in these terms, power is better thought of as something dispersed, and that we are all capable of activating. This doesnt mean we ignore the traditional hubs of power, but instead understand them as places that gain legitimacy through our own belief in, or even identification with, the values of the personalities who inhabit and interact with them. It does mean we need to stop believing a message that is hardly new to many activists. But the challenge remains to develop a cultural politics that can stir up political passions in the interests of a more democratic and radical form of political change.

A White Elephant?

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 17:57:41 +0000

The banner on the Millennium Dome reads London 2012. This doesnt look like a very good bit of PR to me. It looks like an apparition: we wasted £800 million on one white elephant, just think what we could do with a whole herd of them.

Thats more or less the situation in Athens where almost all of the 36 purpose-built Olympic venues now lie empty. The main Olympic complex remains closed to the public. The Peace and Friendship Stadium has reported leaks and electrical faults, the marathon route and a new US$380 million tramway have caused severe drainage problems, and the floor of the Galatsi indoor arena is covered in broken glass. As costs mount, even the Greek government admits to a lack of planning: We did not have a reliable post-Olympics plan in Greece. Many venues were designed without their post-Olympic use in mind," says Fani Petralia, the deputy Culture Minister who was the country's top Olympic official.

This comes as no surprise to the city's anti-Olympics campaigners, however. The venues aren't needed for the normal life and sporting needs of the city says Campaign Anti-2004 activist Haris Konstandatos. They were constructed in open public spaces that should have been kept for socially useful projects or as free, green spaces. The Olympic bandwagon has moved on, but the citys inhabitants are still coming to terms with the legacy of the Games including the destruction of public spaces, a massively increased security apparatus, and a huge public debt. So why is the field to host the 2012 Olympics the most competitive ever?

*Competing to consume*

The key to this paradox lies in the promotion of competition between cities under conditions of neoliberal globalisation. Increasingly, local government and corporate strategists look at the development of cities through the framework of international competitiveness. With the decline of production-based jobs, the leisure industry is seen as vital to economic growth. This was certainly the case with the Athens Games, which sought to project the image of a competitive mega-city, a regional hub for the Eastern Mediterranean and a desirable tourist destination. But it is equally true of London, where the Greater London Authority has promoted the vision of a world city in which financial services and corporations flourish.

The Olympic Games, whose five-ring symbol is recognised by around 90% of the worlds population, is the mega-event of choice in the bidding race for consumer-oriented development. But the costs of such a strategy are stark, since it can lead to greater urbanization and the deepening of the divide between core and periphery. As a result of the 2004 Games the unequal allocation of resources between Athens, where almost half of the Greek population resides, and the rest of the country has grown more severe. The Olympics has also polarized Athens itself, with the evidence pointing to gentrification rather than regeneration in the areas that it has touched. In the most extreme case, it resulted in the forced resettlement of Roma families to make way for Olympic venues.

Athens is by no means unique, however. Gareth Poynter of the University of East London points out that the consumption-led services growth model, implicit to Olympic bid strategies, has tended to generate an acceleration of an urban regeneration and development process that has exacerbated income and wealth differentials within cities. The risk of Olympics-led regeneration is that it displaces poverty rather than redistributing wealth. And that is a story that East London residents, who have seen the Docklands developments of the 1980s and the Millennium Dome pass by without the promised trickledown effects, know only well.

*The Trojan horse of privatisation*

Things will be different this time around. Or so say the backers of Londons 2012 Olympic Bid, who have worked hard to promote the Games as a vehicle of genuine regeneration. London Mayor Ken Livingstone promises a lasting and sustainable legacy, whilst the London Development Agency Deputy Chair John Biggs talks of investment, not only in the physical transformation of the area, but also in local communities by creating new job opportunities and improving health and education resources in the area. The Olympic Bid committee has even signed up to an ethical Olympics charter, promoted by The East London Communities Organisation (TELCO), which contains promises of affordable homes in the Olympic park.

These are impressive promises, but if the history of Games-driven regeneration is anything to go by they will not be met. A far more typical story is one in which planning concerns are routinely flouted and residents voices are ignored. In Athens, several venues were erected against planning laws or through special regulations. Local opposition was only dampened by the promise that a number of venues would be provisional. Yet this hasn't happened and, as the cost of keeping vacant buildings escalates, there is much talk of offloading them onto the private sector. The venues will stay and be privatised, since maintenance costs cannot be met by the local authorities says Haris Konstandatos. But as the private sector moves in, it reserves the right to add extra facilities to make the venues more attractive investment propositions. The result is a double blow for the citys residents, with the Olympics blazing a trail of privatisation which is then extended even further in the aftermath of the Games.

The origins of this gap between warm promises made before the Games and the cold, hard reality of its aftermath lie in the way that decisions about the Olympics get made. The International Olympic Committee (IOC), which has overall responsibility for the event, is simply not designed as an instrument of public policy or urban planning. What it is geared to do, rather, is to stimulate competition and corporate sponsorship. This has led to an unhealthy climate of greed, commercialism and rampant corruption within the IOC. But it has also resulted in an event whose governance is above the control of local populations. Put simply, when hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate sponsorship are at stake, what is the likelihood of local populations having a voice?

*Counting the costs*

While the Games are the responsibility of the IOC, however, their legacy is not. Host cities are contractually obliged to bear the costs of any debt incurred as a result of hosting the Olympics according to IOC rules. This is particularly problematic since, with the exception of Los Angeles where regeneration was never considered an issue, the modern Olympics have consistently lost money. The 1976 Montreal Games resulted in debts of around £600 million, whilst the cost of the 2000 Sydney Olympics to the public purse was closer to £800 million, over twice the initial estimate. These figures look certain to be dwarfed by the costs of the Athens Games, which could top 10 billion euros according to some estimates five times the original budget. Panos Totsikas, coordinator of Campaign Anti-2004, notes that the public purse is the hardest hit: The money comes from public funds, and because there's been extensive borrowing by the state the future generations could suffer. This is a normal story in other Olympic cities too but with Greece being small country, and additional security costs, the debt here is particularly high.

The record of sporting mega-events in Britain is a poor one too. Sheffield Council is still carrying an annual debt burden of £22m arising from the World Student Games in 1991, and the overall cost is estimated at anywhere up to £400 million. And if Londons profligate spending so far is anything to go by, the signs arent promising. £30 million in public funds have been allocated to the Olympic Bid alone (as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Tessa Jowell recently confirmed), and the allocation of Lottery Funding means the true figure could be much higher. Rupert Litherland, a boat owner in Walthemstow and an anti-Olympics 2012 campaigner, says that this has already had detrimental effects on the sporting life of the area: In terms of grassroots sport, were seeing money diverted in the form of Lottery grants from community sports projects to this big spectacle for elite athletes. Already in London over the last year theres been a freeze on community sports Lottery grants in order to fund the bid. Well feel the ripple effects across the UK if we get the bid.

Before a single venue has even been built, the London 2012 team has also embarked upon a massive Public Relations exercise which has visibly transformed the citys public spaces and transport system. 35,000 Back the Bid posters have been placed at bus shelters and underground stations, whilst five major stations have been dressed in Olympics 2012 branding. Tube trains routinely sport Back the Bid: Make Britain Proud stickers, whilst 40 buses and 100 taxis have been decked out as moving billboards. Whole trains have been decorated with Olympic logos which are even woven into the seats in a few cases. The cumulative effect of this propaganda exercise is to further extend the scope of advertising beyond its traditional billboards. The symbolic economy of the city is transformed as more space becomes fair game for advertisers. This effect can already be seen on the Docklands Light Railway, where Olympic trains are interspersed with others promoting the London Arena and Diet Coca Cola.

*Securing the Olympics*

There is a more sinister side to all this, however, which manifests itself in the use of the Olympics to militarize urban space. The 2004 Games, the first to be held since September 11, were woeful in this regard. The Greek government used the occasion to push new anti-terror legislation through Parliament, and during the Games themselves restrictions were placed upon freedom of movement within the city. Athens was prepared as a potential battleground for the war on terror with patriot missiles, fighter planes and US battleships all on standby. The US$1.5 billion cost of this massive security operation also included 70,000 security personnel and 16,000 soldiers. Accompanying these measures, the Athens Olympics saw the introduction of a bewildering array of security technologies: CCTV cameras, chemical sensors, and a vast computer surveillance network.

This is clearly good news for some people. For example, an Israeli Manufacturers Association recently reported that US$200 million worth of [Israeli] security products were sold to companies and organizations tasked with providing security at the Athens Olympics. But it is more ominous for the population of the Greek capital, since the bulk of this expensive security apparatus still remains. Haris Konstandatos argues that the Olympics was used as an excuse for spending money on police infrastructure and the introduction of new anti-terrorist laws. Huge amounts of money were spent on equipment that didn't work. But the part that works is now used for the surveillance of Greek society.

Back in London, the picture is likely to be a similar one. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair has already revealed a £224 million plan for Olympic security and this does not even account for the possibility of military personnel being deployed, as they were in Greece. The Greatest Show on Earth, it seems, would be accompanied by one of the largest security operations ever mounted in the UK. Long after the TV cameras have moved on, the CCTV would still be watching. And thats a spectre we would be foolish to ignore.

__Oscar Reyes teaches cultural studies at the University of East London and manages the __Red Pepper__ website. He visited Athens as part of the research for this article.__