Mike Marqusee | ukwatch.net

Mike Marqusee's Top Ten Books

tim — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 11:58:55 +0000

A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Once you get accustomed to the invented prose idiom, the groundedness of this epic takes a grip. The architecture of the trilogy embodies a big (Marxist) picture of historical development, but it’s built out of emotional intimacy and physical immediacy. The conclusion of Sunset Song, the second volume in the trilogy, with its invocation of the sufferings of the first World War, moved me as much as anything I’ve encountered in British fiction.

Poor Things by Alasdair Gray

A wildly inventive yet in its own way utterly logical fictional confection. What’s great is that the bravura assemblage of voices, styles and narrative gimmicks all tend to a purpose; they’re not only immense fun, they’re fused and directed by Gray’s compassion for aspirant humanity and his contempt for power and hierarchy. This is a wonderfully partisan novel.

Beyond a Boundary by CLR James

This is not only by some way the best book ever written about the sport of cricket, it’s also a wonderful piece of inventive prose artistry, genre-busting in its mix of memoir, history, theory and political polemic. It ranges from colonial Trinidad to industrial Lancashire by way of ancient Greece and Victorian England — all swept along by the radical verve of James’ intelligence. He saw cricket in context, shaped by and giving shape to the conflicts of the world in which it was played. James took cricket seriously — perhaps too seriously — as an art form, and he was demanding in his judgements, which have a terrific elan, even when they’re wrong. Be warned: cricket’s most eminent Marxist has a surprising soft spot for the English public school ethos!

A Wet Afternoon by Sadat Hassan Manto

Toba Tek Singh — set in an asylum for the insane on the newly drawn India-Pakistan border in 1947 — is the great fictional comment on the tragedy of partition. Manto (who was also a screenwriter and journalist) wrote stories in a plain-spoken Urdu about prostitutes, dissolute intellectuals, compromised small businessmen and imprisoned housewives. He’s a sour but compassionate observer, and he leaves the big judgements up to the reader. Even in translation, this jaded epicurean with a stubborn moral core speaks with a distinctive voice. He died in 1955, at the age of 42.

Leon Trotsky trilogy by Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, The Prophet Outcast

You don’t have to be a Trotskyist to derive pleasure and enrichment from Deutscher’s beautifully written biographical trilogy. This is more than Trotsky’s story — which itself is one of the most dramatic, and tragic, of the 20th century — it’s a supple study in the rhythms of political and historical change. It’s clear and fluent and deeply considered and introduces you painlessly to a wide range of people, places, ideas and debates. The Polish-born Deutscher was himself an anti-Stalinist Marxist, a brave and independent intellect, whose essay The Non-Jewish Jew I’d also recommend.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

As Indira Gandhi’s ‘emergency’ grips the country, four characters — a Parsee widow, a middle class student, and two lower caste tailors — find their lives squashed together in a Bombay flat. Among other things, this book is a chronicle of the cruelties of that era, and provides a much sharper commentary on Indian politics than is found in more celebrated novels. The method here is unapologetically, and masterfully, naturalistic. The suffering in this book comes in many forms, is at times unbearable, but is always concrete and credible; so are the moments of hope or relief, buoyed up by the humour and idiosyncracy of the characters.

Out Stealing Horses by Per Pettersen

It’s hard to describe how and why Pettersen’s novel becomes so deeply engrossing. Like his previous works, this one shifts between past trauma and present uncertainties, and accumulates its insights, builds its very tangible world, sentence by sentence. In Out Stealing Horses an old man retires to a cottage in northern Norway and reflects on the events of a summer holiday some fifty years earlier. As the story unwinds, the long-term effects of these events become apparent. Pettersen refuses easy closures. His narrative is mostly close-up, but there are also sidelong glances at Norwegian history, at the Nazi occupation, at class and poverty. Despite the subject matter, and the real sadness, it’s anything but glum. When I read this book, I really felt I was seeing — feeling — the world afresh.

Walden, or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau

In 1845, Thoreau beat a retreat from the polite society of Concord, Massachusetts, to live in the woods by Walden Pond. The book is the record of his experiment: to see how many of the ‘necessities’ of civilisation we can really do without. But it’s more: it embodies an attempt to live fully and deliberately, to find a deep meaning in daily life. He didn’t go the woods just to prove it could be done, but to re-appropriate himself, to live a more authentic life than the one offered us, ready-packaged, off the shelf. Thoreau was one of the first critics of what we now call consumerism, which he sees as destructive of the environment and the human spirit. The book is full of wry humour, as Thoreau mocks himself and his society, and the prose has an un-showy solidity, like skilled carpentry.

King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild

There’s not much in modern history that exceeds the depravity of the ‘Congo Free State’, the vast territory appropriated by the Belgian King in 1885 as a kind of private enterprise free-fire zone. In the end, millions were killed, millions more mutilated, tortured, enslaved, by a small, sophisticated European business coterie. This is the story of that atrocity, but also of the global campaign protesting against it, a forerunner of the modern human rights movement. So among the genocidal villains and amoral rogues are genuine heroes: Hochschild makes sure neither are forgotten.

Complete Writings by William Blake

I take Blake at his own estimation: as a prophet. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a startling act of literary and intellectual insurgency. The conclusion of the epic illustrated book Jerusalem something for which here is no parallel in English poetry. Blake struck deep into me when I was a teenager and I’ve gone back to him repeatedly over the years, each time finding more than I expected. The ‘gentle mystic’ is largely a creation of literary legend; Blake was ferocious: “half friendship is the bitterest enmity.” The revolutionary republican prosecuted a kind of one-man ‘culture war’ for much of his life. Result: poverty and obscurity. Don’t worry about the details of Blake’s weird invented mythology; there’s more than enough that’s arrestingly transparent to compensate for the obscure bits.

London’s Embarrassment

Tim Holmes — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 05:11:01 +0000

“This is the end of political correctness in London,” exulted a Conservative as newly elected Mayor Boris Johnson entered city hall.

Nearly a month after the polls closed, it is still an extraordinary thought that London, of all places, is to be represented in the eyes of the world by a man like Johnson.

The Tory MP from Henley (outside London) first won notoriety as a right wing columnist and sometime TV quiz show guest: a bumbling parody of a right-wing upper class twit. His extramarital affairs also attracted publicity, and he was removed from the Tory front bench.

As a pundit, he struck a brusquely Thatcherite and neo-con pose. In 2005, he described Africans as “pickanninies” and called for the re-colonisation of the continent. He applauded George Bush and the Iraq war. He opposed the Kyoto Agreement and dismissed the threat of climate change. He routinely evoked social stereotypes, casually insulting the entire populations of Liverpool and Portsmouth, among others. After a bombing atrocity, he declared that “Islam is the problem” (there are more than 700,000 Muslims in London).

In the post-modern climate, it was sometimes hard to know how seriously anyone was supposed to take Johnson’s views. But as a Conservative party candidate for the Mayor of London, Johnson could no longer shelter behind the columnist’s lazy excuses, and he waged a careful and mostly dignified campaign, distancing himself from many of his earlier remarks. His central thrust was “against crime”, with the populist touch of replacing the new elongated, uncomfortable “bendy buses” with much loved double decker Routemasters.

And of course he inveighed against the “political correctness” of the incumbent Livingstone regime, including its links with the Chavez government in Venezuela (which benefited poorer east Londoners with cheap fuel).

Ken Livingstone first came to prominence in the early 80s as the left wing Labour leader of the Greater London Council. Here he spearheaded a progressive programme which became a flagship of resistance to Thatcher – so much so that she abolished the Council in 1985, leaving Londoners without any form of representative London-wide government.

Responding to long pent-up demand, Labour re-introduced a modified form of London government in 2000: an elected Mayor and Assembly were to enjoy carefully restricted powers (education, housing and much else was left in the hands of the 32 London boroughs) and a limited tax base. Barred by Tony Blair from standing as the Labour candidate for the newly created Mayoralty, Livingstone ran as an independent and won a historic victory.

In office, he soon made it up with the Labour party, and he and Blair and then Brown learned to live with each other. In 2004, he was re-elected as mayor, this time as the as official Labour candidate.

His major achievement was the introduction of the congestion charge for central London, an effective environmental policy and the first social democratic innovation in this country for more than a generation. He opposed the war on Iraq – and in doing so faithfully represented the view of a majority of Londoners. He denounced Islamophobia and continued to be associated with the rights of ethnic minorities. But he also gave strident support to the heavy handed police tactics that led to the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005 and the near killing of two others in Forest Gate in 2006. When a London jury found the Metropolitan police guilty of health and safety violations in the course of the de Menezes incident, Livingstone condemned them for exposing London to terrorist attacks.

Socialist rhetoric was reserved for left wing audiences. In practise, his economic policies were dictated by big business and the banks; his sole strategy for London was to compete with other cities to attract multi-national capital. Hence the vast sums poured into the Olympic project, which Livingstone championed. He opposed proposals for a modest tax on non-domiciled millionaires who spend months of the year in London.

As time went on his regime became identified with croneyism and petty corruption. Not all the allegations were groundless. Livingstone certainly ran a closed shop, surrounded by a coterie dedicated to protecting his personal position, and he and they sometimes displayed a very casual approach to the prerogatives of power.

The London election was heavily publicised as a personality contest though both candidates were muted during the campaign. Livingstone, in particular, was lacklustre, relying on his proven competence as incumbent and presenting himself as a safe pair of hands against Johnson’s gaffe-prone naivete. But the the campaign was given lurid fire by the extraordinary intervention of London’s main daily newspaper, The Evening Standard, which waged a ferocious assault on Livingstone. Across the city, the Standard’s familiar hoardings blazoned headlines linking Livingstone to corruption or terrorism or crime.

In the end, Johnson picked up 42 per cent of the first preference votes, against Livingstone’s 36%. After the 2nd preference votes were distributed, Johnson was elected with 53%. While Livingstone’s vote held nearly steady from 2004, the Tory vote was up by more than 14%. Turn outs were higher in Johnson supporting areas in outer London than in Livingstone supporting areas in inner London.

Still, Livingstone fared better in London than Labour did nationally, where it was reduced to third place with 24% of the vote, its worst local election result in forty years. The full story behind this must wait for another column. Suffice it to say that New Labour’s contempt for its core constituencies – crystallised around the abolition of a special lower tax band for people on low incomes – has come home to roost. Across the country, working class voters deserted Labour in record numbers.

It was Labour’s performance in national government that was Livingstone’s greatest handicap in London. Here, the working class revolt against Labour was restricted to the white working class, but it destroyed Livingstone’s chances. These people had benefited little from either Labour nationally or Livingstone locally. They didn’t even get the benefit of the political gestures.

Undoubtedly, part of Johnson’s triumph rested on a veiled appeal to racism and xenophobia. This was confirmed by the alarming success in the London elections of the far right, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim British National Party.

In the vote for mayor, Johnson received the second preferences of nearly all of the 70,000 who voted first for the BNP candidate. In addition, some 128,000 mainly Johnson supporters gave the BNP their second preferences.

Most disturbingly, the BNP secured 130,000 votes – 5.3% – in the city wide top-up vote for the London Assembly, and under the proportional representation system won a seat there for the first time. The Green Party, with 8.3% of the vote, won two seats, and the rest were divided between Tories, Labour and Liberal Democrats. Since the Tories are two short of a majority the BNP member could play a significant role, though at the moment he is being shunned.

So one of the world’s most successfully multicultural cities stands naked. In a climate of looming economic crisis, fear, scapegoating and bigotry fuelled the vote for the BNP and for Johnson. People who have been left out by London’s economic boom turn their resentments on their fellow Londoners, who in fact share their frustrations. Now that boom, sustained by cheap credit and high property prices, is ending. Gross inequalities created during the years of wealth have already turned London, for all its marvellous mixing, into a city of parallel universes. As incomes and standards of living are squeezed and jobs are lost, we’ll find out how well we really know each other. Speaking as a Londoner, I’m filled with dismay at the idea of Mayor Johnson, flanked by a BNP assembly member, presiding over this crisis.

When the Conservatives revile “political correctness” they have in mind not merely the gestures associated with Livingstone but any and all claims for equality, any and all resistance to racism. In that respect their celebration of Johnson’s victory as “the end of political correctness in London” is certainly premature.

Zionism and the Palestinians

tim — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:28:12 +0000

Israel’s 60th birthday is being celebrated lavishly in Britain. The programme includes a gala fund-raising dinner at Windsor Castle in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh, a variety show at Wembley Stadium and street parades in London and Manchester.

Meanwhile, Palestinians and their supporters will be recalling the same event in entirely different tones, without the benefit of state support or vast sums of money. In meetings, conferences and exhibitions they are seeking to remind the world of the Nakba – catastrophe in Arabic – that accompanied Israel’s birth in 1948.

In 1947 there were 1,293,000 Arabs and 608,000 Jews in Palestine. Though Jews made up 32 per cent of the population, the UN partition plan (agreed in November 1947) assigned them 55 per cent of the country, including the economically developed citrus-growing plains. Israel’s Declaration of Independence on 15 May 1948 was preceded by several months of civil war between Jewish and Palestinian forces, and followed by more months of war between the new state and its Arab neighbours.

In April and May, before the expiry of the British mandate, the cities of Haifa and Jaffa fell to Jewish forces, and more than 100,000 Palestinians fled. To the north, in Galilee, the Haganah – the mainstream Zionist defence force – systematically conquered clusters of villages, emptying them of inhabitants and often levelling them. In June, the Israelis advanced further into territory designated for the Arab state, capturing the towns of Lydda and Ramle where they killed 250 Palestinians and expelled almost all the rest – 40,000 – at gunpoint.

In the course of 1948, 531 Palestinian towns and villages were abandoned, evacuated or destroyed. In the Jaffa area, 96 per cent of the villages were totally erased. As Jewish forces proceeded with the ethnic cleansing of territories both within and outside the UN-allotted borders of the Jewish state, a British army of 70,000 refused to intervene, despite being charged under the mandate with the protection of the civilian population.

When the fighting finished in early 1949, the Jewish state had acquired 78 per cent of Palestine. 180,000 Palestinians found themselves a minority within the expanded borders of the Jewish state. 750,000 had been made refugees.

The homes and lands they left behind were quickly occupied by Jewish settlers and the new Israeli parliament passed laws confiscating their property. Of 370 new Jewish settlements established between 1948 and 1953, 350 were on absentee property. In 1954 more than one third of Israel’s Jewish population lived on absentee property. Conquest and expulsion provided the material base for the building of the Jewish state.

For many years Zionists claimed that the Palestinians had left voluntarily, at the behest of Arab leaders. That myth has been repeatedly disproved: there’s no evidence of so much as a single broadcast or leaflet telling people to abandon their homes. There is, on the other hand, a great deal of evidence that the Zionists used the war to alter the demographic facts on the ground. On April 6, for example, David Ben-Gurion told a Zionist meeting: “We will not be able to win the war if we do not, during the war, populate upper and lower, eastern and western Galilee, the Negev and Jerusalem area, even if only in an artificial way, in a military way … I believe that war will also bring in its wake a great change in the distribution of Arab population.”

The facts of the Nakba are now well documented and beyond serious dispute. Yet Nakba denial remains widespread, and shamefully acceptable in polite circles. That is partly because its victims have been so demonised and dehumanised. Acknowledgement of the Nakba is also resisted because it undermines Israeli and Jewish self-definitions; for many, it is a truth that simply cannot be assimilated.

The Nakba is far more than a historical controversy. It’s an unresolved and pressing global issue. The Palestinian refugee population – descendants of those driven out in 1948 – now numbers more than five million, one half of whom live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. One million remain stateless, with no form of identification other than a card issued by UNWRA, the United Nations refugee agency. This is the world’s largest and oldest continuing refugee crisis. Each year since December 1948, the UN General Assembly has reconfirmed Resolution 194, which enshrines the refugees’ right to return and compensation. The right of refugees to return to their homes is a necessary protection for all civilian populations in times of war. Without it, ethnic cleansing would be encouraged. Yet those who press for the implementation of that right are denounced as extremists who refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

There is today a huge Jewish population in Palestine whose rights as human beings must be recognised, but why should anyone anywhere be compelled to recognise the “right to exist” of a particular state formation? What’s being demanded here is ideological conformity: support for the right of the Jewish state to exist, in perpetuity, in Palestine, regardless of what that fact entails for others (or indeed for the welfare of Jews). For Palestinians, recognising Israel’s right to exist – as opposed to the fact of its existence – is tantamount to an historical seal of approval on the Nakba. Those who refuse to certify as legitimate a national project built on dispossession and ethnic supremacy are condemned as “anti-Semites” or, if they are Jews, as “self-haters”. The allegations rest on a false conflation of Israel and “the Jews”, one propagated by Zionists, who use it to exempt the Jewish state from the requirements of international standards of human decency.

Israel is “Jewish” in a sense that no existing state is Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist. Though these religions are privileged in various states, none of those states claims to be the sole global representative of the faith; none grants citizenship to people solely because of their religion (without regard to place of birth or residence). Maintaining a Jewish state in Palestine means maintaining a sizeable Jewish majority population which enjoys privileged access to land, work and civic rights.

The founders of Israel were secularists; they saw Jewishness as a national rather than religious identity. Many were atheists and contemptuous of rabbinical culture. Like MA Jinnah, the secular Muslim founder of Pakistan, they would be shocked and dismayed if they could see the influence obscurantist religious sects now wield in the polities they established.

From the beginning, the notion that the State of Israel could be both “Jewish” and “democratic” was unsustainable, and was seen as such by significant numbers of diaspora Jews. Indeed, it’s important to remember that anti-Zionism was a Jewish ideology long before it was anything else. But in the wake of the Holocaust, and with the evolution of big power politics in the Middle East, Zionism came to dominate the diaspora. And the truth of the Nakba was shrouded beneath the myth of Israel’s “David versus Goliath” struggle for survival against irrationally hostile Arabs.

But what of the plight of the Jewish refugees in postwar Europe? Without Israel, what would have become of them? The answer is that they would have shared the same variety of fates as the general refugee population of Europe, of which they were part. The roots of that crisis lay in the refusal of the US, Britain and other countries to admit large numbers of displaced persons. It could not be resolved by allocating each group a “state of their own”, inevitably at the expense of another people. The right of refuge is a universal right (and need) but instead of shouldering that collective responsibility, the Western powers, with the support of the Soviet Union, dumped it on Palestine, demanding that a people who bore no responsibility for the Holocaust make way for its victims.

Many Zionists who do acknowledge the Nakba characterise it as tragic but “irreversible”. The Nakba was not, however, an isolated episode; it was a paroxysm in a process that continues to this day. The Jewish state remains incompatible with Palestinian rights and increasingly the very existence of Palestinians, as illustrated by the current siege of Gaza and the continuing assault on Palestinian society on the West Bank through the construction of the apartheid wall and the extension of Jewish settlements.

It has become ever more apparent that Zionism will not tolerate any meaningful form of Palestinian independence. The exigencies of maintaining a Jewish state will not allow it. Within Israel, expansionist claims – in which the Jews are declared the rightful owners of the whole of the West Bank and even beyond – are commonplace, as are calls for the permanent transfer of the remaining Palestinian population. Some respectable voices speak openly of the need to finish the work left undone in 1948 – in order to ensure the survival of “the Jewish state”.

As ever, much of this is cloaked in Biblical sources. The paradox of Zionism was always that it was a secular ideology whose foundation lay in a religious discourse. At its heart is an obscurantist claim to historic territory. There is indeed much in the Hebrew Bible that gives succour to the wilder Zionist ambitions. But there is also another strand, one that warns against the menace of marrying religion to the state. In particular the Prophet Amos, a champion of the universality of ethical standards, explicitly denies the exclusivism of the Zionist claim to Palestine:

To Me, O Israelites, you are
Just like the Ethiopians – declares the Lord.
True I brought Israel up
From the land of Egypt,
But also the Philistines from Caphtor
And the Arameans from Kir.

No Sanctuary

tim — Sat, 03 May 2008 09:07:17 +0000

Despite an average of 40 violent deaths a day in recent weeks, Iraq, the British Home office insists, is a safe place. Accordingly, 1,400 Iraqi asylum seekers have received letters informing them that they must return home or face homelessness and destitution in Britain. Those who agree to go back will be required to sign a waiver accepting that the U.K. government bears no responsibility for what happens to them or their families after their return.

The 1,400 will be airlifted to Baghdad and Basra. Previously, the government had deported Iraqi asylum seekers, mainly Kurds, only to the safer provinces of northern Iraq. On March 27, in the biggest operation of its kind, 60 Kurds were flown on a chartered aircraft from Stanstead airport in Essex to Erbil in northern Iraq. When they landed, guards from the Kurdish Democratic Party (one of the two Kurdish parties in the ruling coalition) boarded the plane. “They were armed with guns, and they beat people from Mosul and Baghdad who refused to leave the plane,” said one man on the flight, “They even hit them in the back of the head with their guns, many people were bleeding. The British security guards were also hitting people.” Another on the flight was 19-year-old Sherwen, a Christian whose father had worked for Saddam Hussein. “I don’t have anywhere to go, and I am not safe,” he said, “The British government said they would give us $100 when we arrived, but we haven’t been given anything. I can’t even buy myself something to eat.”

The coerced return of Iraqis living in Britain — and the continued refusal of entry to many thousands more — exemplifies the ethical bankruptcy of British policy on asylum seekers. Many come here from places whose societies have been turned upside down by British or Western intervention. The wars, repression, economic and social turmoil from which they seek refuge are part of a global order for which the U.K., both historically and currently, bears a hefty share of responsibility.

Last year, Britain received 23,430 asylum applications, the lowest for 14 years, and a quarter of the record high set in 2002. (The top five applicant nationalities were Afghanistan, Iran, China, Iraq and Eritrea, with significant numbers from Zimbabwe and Somalia.) At the same time, 12,525 asylum seekers were deported. Meanwhile, at any one moment, some 1,600 (including 50-60 children) were kept in detention, mostly in the government’s 10 Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs), seven of which are run by private contractors.

Unlike most European countries, and contrary to the recommendations of the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, in Britain there is no legal limit to the time a person may be held in immigration detention. Periods of up to six months detention — for people who have not even been charged with a crime — are not uncommon. The IRCs are overcrowded and lack medical and recreational facilities. Communication with the outside world is severely restricted. Many detainees claim to have been insulted and assaulted by immigration staff. A recent study found that excessive force was used against a number of detainees who had already suffered torture in their countries of origin.

“I came to England because my political activities in Zimbabwe meant my life was in danger,” said Yeukai, a middle-aged woman detainee, “But when I was locked up in Dungavel, having committed no crime, I wasn’t sure whether this was Britain or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.”

Britain is the only European State that detains asylum-seeking children, a policy condemned by Amnesty and a host of other independent observers. On April 10, a group of mothers held in Yarl’s Wood IRC, in Bedfordshire, protested outside the staff office, removing their clothes to mark their disgust at the imprisonment of their children. “I took my clothes off because they treat us like animals,” said Mercy Guobatia, 22, from Nigeria. “We are claiming asylum, we’re not animals. They treat us as if we’ve done something terrible.”

Asylum seekers are also increasingly subject to “dawn raids” in which their homes are invaded by immigration officials looking for people liable to detention or deportation. In 2006, 8,100 “enforcement operations” were carried out before 8 a.m. — roughly 22 dawn raids a day. Of those, only 2,009 led to arrests of any kind, which means that three out of four raids served no purpose but to intimidate law-abiding asylum seekers.

The dawn raids are one facet of a policy that aims to deter future asylum seekers by punishing those presently in the country. Those who escape detention face destitution. They are not permitted to work and must subsist on meagre hand-outs from the State, which also tells them where they must live. According to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, some accommodation provided to asylum seekers is so poor that it violates Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (on the right to home, family and private life).

It is estimated that 20 per cent of asylum seekers and refugees in the U.K. have severe health problems. Yet, since 2004, most have been denied access to free NHS secondary (hospital) care. Now the government is considering restricting access to primary (GP) care as well.

The casual cruelty of British immigration policy is illustrated by two recent cases, both tragic, both avoidable.

Ama Sumani, a 39-year-old Ghanaian widow and mother of two, had come to Britain as a student in 2002. She overstayed her visa but worked and paid taxes. She was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and treated by the NHS. In January, immigration officials removed her from her hospital bed in Cardiff and deported her to Ghana, where she died several weeks later. The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal, denounced the government’s behaviour as an “atrocious barbarism”.

Zarine Rentia was a 15-year-old Indian girl who had been severely disabled by an extremely rare disease. On a visit to Britain in 2005, she was diagnosed and began a course of treatment at Great Ormond Street, the world famous children’s hospital. In the meantime, she attended a local London School, where she impressed children and staff alike. With the support of Zarine’s doctors, her mother applied to the Home Office for leave to remain in Britain on medical grounds, but was refused. After an immigration judge turned down their appeal in February, mother and daughter returned to Gujarat, where Zarine died weeks later.

These women were two of the many victims of the British government’s approach to xenophobia, which is to appease it at all costs.

Much of the British media, including at times the BBC, depicts asylum seekers as threatening and parasitical. Any crime committed by an asylum seeker is blazoned in headlines, while the more numerous crimes committed against them are scarcely reported at all. Here the politicians follow the media and the media claims to be following the public. Yet the public’s confusions on the issue owe a great deal to its continuous misrepresentation by the media and the politicians. For example, in one survey, on average people thought that the U.K. has taken in 23 per cent of the world’s refugees. The actual figure is closer to 2 per cent.

Hearteningly, the atrocious treatment of asylum seekers has spawned a network of resistance. Community campaigns, aided by lawyers and activists, have stubbornly opposed deportations, detentions and the policies that lead to destitution. When asylum seeking children attending local schools have been threatened with removal, pupils, teachers and parents have rallied round them and exposed the injustice of government edicts. This on-going effort is a welcome corrective to the assumption — all too easy to make — that British people are universally hostile to refugees.

The Great Catastrophe

Ellie Keen — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:53:56 +0000

In the coming months, the same event will be commemorated by two different groups in starkly contrasting fashions.

May 15 sees the 60th anniversary of the birth of the State of Israel. In Britain, the programme of celebrations includes a gala fund-raising dinner at Windsor Castle in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh (the Queen’s husband), a variety show at Wembley Stadium and street parades for Israel in London and Manchester.

Remembering a tragedy

Meanwhile, Palestinians and their supporters will be recalling the same event in entirely different tones, and without the benefit of State support or vast sums of money. In meetings, conferences and exhibitions they will seek to remind the world of the Nakba — catastrophe in Arabic — that accompanied Israel’s birth in 1948.

In 1947, there were 12,93,000 Arabs and 6,08,000 Jews in Palestine. Though Jews made up 32 per cent of the population, the U.N. partition plan assigned them 55 per cent of the country, including the economically developed citrus growing plains. Israel’s Declaration of Independence was preceded by several months of civil war between Jewish and Palestinian forces, and followed by more months of war between the new State and its Arab neighbours. When the fighting finished in early 1949, the Jewish State had acquired 78 per cent of Palestine. 1,80,000 Palestinians found themselves a minority within the expanded borders of the Jewish State. 7,00,000 to 9,00,000 had been made refugees.

In April and May, before the expiry of the British mandate, the cities of Haifa and Jaffa fell to Jewish forces, and more than 1,00,000 Palestinians fled. To the north, in Galilee, the Haganah — the mainstream Zionist defence force — systematically conquered clusters of villages, emptying them of inhabitants and often levelling them. In June, the Israelis advanced further into territory designated for the Arab State, capturing the towns of Lydda and Ramle where they killed 250 Palestinians and expelled almost all the rest — 40,000 — at gunpoint.

In 1948, 500 Palestinian towns and villages were abandoned, evacuated or destroyed. More than 70,000 Palestinian houses were demolished. In the Jaffa area, 96 per cent of the villages were totally destroyed. As Jewish forces proceeded with the ethnic cleansing of territories both within and outside the U.N.-allotted borders of the Jewish State, a British army of 70,000 refused to intervene, despite being charged under the mandate with the protection of the civilian population.

Expansionist State

At the onset of the conflict, Jews owned 1,159 sq. km. of land (6 per cent of the total). By July 1949, thanks to the Absentee Property laws passed in haste by the new Israeli parliament, they owned more than 20,000 sq. km. In 1954, more than one third of Israel’s Jewish population lived on absentee property. Of 370 new Jewish settlements established between 1948 and 1953, 350 were on absentee property.

For many years, Zionists claimed that the Palestinians had left voluntarily at the behest of Arab leaders. That myth has been repeatedly disproved: there’s no evidence of so much as a single broadcast or leaflet telling people to abandon their homes. There is, on the other hand, a great deal of evidence that the Zionists used the war to alter the demographic facts on the ground. On April 6, for example, Ben Gurion told a Zionist meeting: “We will not be able to win the war if we do not, during the war, populate upper and lower, eastern and western Galilee, the Negev and Jerusalem area, even if only in an artificial way, in a military way…. I believe that war will also bring in its wake a great change in the distribution of Arab population.”

The facts of the Nakba are now well documented and beyond serious dispute. Yet Nakba denial remains widespread, and is as vile as denial of any other historic crime. Acknowledgement of the Nakba is resisted because it undermines the moral foundations of the Israeli State. It’s a handicap in the Israelis’ global propaganda battle with the Palestinians, and a challenge to their own self-definitions, a truth that simply cannot be assimilated.

The Nakba is no mere historical controversy. It’s an unresolved issue. The Palestinian refugee population — descendants of those driven out in 1948 — now numbers more than 4 million, one half of whom live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. One million remain Stateless, with no form of identification other than a card issued by UNWRA, the United Nations refugee agency. Each year since December 1948, the U.N. General Assembly has reconfirmed Resolution 194, which enshrines the refugees’ right of return. Any peace treaty that leaves these people out would be neither just nor lasting.

Shocking perversion

As if experiencing a Nakba wasn’t enough, the Palestinians are now being threatened with a Shoah, the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. In a shocking perversion of a historical legacy, the word was used by an Israeli defence minister to describe the punishment that would be meted out to the people of Gaza — who are there because they were driven there in 1948 — in response to the Qassam rocket attacks. Already, as I write, in the past four days alone, more than 100 Palestinians, including 49 unarmed civilians, among them 25 children, have been killed. Another 250 have been injured. As the furious assault on Gaza continues, Israel’s 60th birthday celebrations look increasingly unpalatable.

Commemoration and Denial

Tim Holmes — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:17:42 +0000

In the coming months, the same event will be commemorated by two different groups in starkly contrasting fashions.

May 15 sees the 60th anniversary of the birth of the state of Israel. In Britain, the programme of celebrations includes a gala fund-raising dinner at Windsor Castle in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh, a variety show at Wembley Stadium and street parades for Israel in London and Manchester.

Meanwhile, Palestinians and their supporters will be recalling the same event in entirely different tones, and without the benefit of state support or vast sums of money. In meetings, conferences and exhibitions they will seek to remind the world of the Nakba – catastrophe in Arabic – that accompanied Israel’s birth in 1948.

In 1947 there were 1,293,000 Arabs and 608,000 Jews in Palestine. Though Jews made up 32% of the population, the UN partition plan assigned them 55% of the country, including the economically developed citrus growing plains. Israel’s Declaration of Independence was preceded by several months of civil war between Jewish and Palestinian forces, and followed by more months of war between the new state and its Arab neighbours. When the fighting finished in early 1949, the Jewish state had acquired 78% of Palestine. 180,000 Palestinians found themselves a minority within the expanded borders of the Jewish state. 700,000 to 900,000 had been made refugees.

In 1948, 500 Palestinian towns and villages were abandoned, evacuated or destroyed. More than 70,000 Palestinian houses were demolished. In the Jaffa area, 96% of the villages were totally destroyed. As Jewish forces proceeded with the ethnic cleansing of territories both within and outside the UN-allotted borders of the Jewish state, a British army of 70,000 refused to intervene, despite being charged under the mandate with the protection of the civilian population.

At the onset of the conflict, Jews owned 1,159 square kilometers of land (6% of the total). By July 1949, thanks to the Absentee Property laws passed in haste by the new Israeli parliament, they owned more than 20,000 square km. In 1954, more than one third of Israel’s Jewish population lived on absentee property. Of 370 new Jewish settlements established between 1948 and 1953, 350 were on absentee property.

The facts of the Nakba are now well documented and beyond serious dispute. Yet Nakba denial remains widespread, and is as vile as denial of any other historic crime. Acknowledgement of the Nakba is resisted because it undermines the moral foundations of the Israeli state. It’s a handicap in the Israelis’ global propaganda battle with the Palestinians, and a challenge to their own self-definitions, a truth that simply cannot be assimilated.

The Nakba is no mere historical controversy. It’s an unresolved issue. The Palestinian refugee population – descendants of those driven out in 1948 – now numbers more than 4 million, one half of whom live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. One million remain stateless, with no form of identification other than a card issued by UNWRA, the United Nations refugee agency. Each year since December 1948, the UN General Assembly has reconfirmed Resolution 194, which enshrines the refugees’ right of return. Any peace treaty that leaves these people out would be neither just nor lasting.

As if experiencing a Nakba wasn’t enough, the Palestinians are now being threatened with a Shoah, the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. In a shocking perversion of an historical legacy, the word was used by an Israeli defence minister to describe the punishment that would be meted out to the people of Gaza – who are there because they were driven there in 1948 – in response to the Qassam rocket attacks. Already, as I write, in the past four days alone, more than 100 Palestinians, including 49 unarmed civilians, among them 25 children, have been killed. Another 250 have been injured. As the furious assault on Gaza continues, Israel’s 60th birthday celebrations look increasingly unpalatable.

Evading the Invasion

Tim Holmes — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:40:54 +0000

Who’s being invaded by whom?

From the headlines in Britain’s most popular newspapers, and statements from politicians, not least government ministers, you’d think the country was about to be swamped by an alien horde, a wave of immigrants threatening its culture, public services and safety.

In his speech to the ruling Labour party’s annual conference – one of the set-pieces of the British political calendar – new prime minister Gordon Brown used the words “Britain” and “British” more than eighty times (including the dubious soundbite “British jobs for British workers”), while Iraq and Afghanistan each received no more than a single passing reference.

It was a prime example of the insidious unreality that pervades the conduct of both the war abroad and the war at home. As anyone acquainted with daily life in Britain knows, the country is dependent on immigrants for essential services, not least health care, as well as cheap labour in construction and agriculture. Britain is also, of course, a massive recipient, globally and historically, of benefits from overseas. Despite the numbers that have entered in recent years, Britain still does not admit its proportionate share of those seeking to exercise their human right of refuge from repression and violence. Instead, our press and politicians depict them as importers of alien values, bearers of the plagues of fundamentalism and terrorism.

It is now British policy to deport asylum seekers back to Iraq and Afghanistan, places British-US invasions have made among the most unsafe in the world. Ministers and immigrant-baiters alike appear impervious to the irony.

Despite our supposed great leap forward in global communications, Iraq and Afghanistan are among the most poorly reported conflicts in living memory. At least 112 journalists have been killed in Iraq (more than in the Vietnam war). Hardly any reporters venture outside the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad unless they are “embedded” with occupying troops. As a result the reality of invasion is obscured. There is a vague apprehension that violence, presumed to be sectarian or criminal, has engulfed the country, and that “we” can’t do much about it.

This reflects not only the absence of on-the-scenes reportage, but also the enslavement of the British and US media to the myths of Western beneficence. No one doubts or denies that “mistakes” have been made in Iraq; the war may even, as many pundits assert, constitute a “debacle”. But rarely is this tragedy traced to the source that gave it birth and sustains it to this day: the imperatives of vested interests and imperial presumptions.

When, earlier this year, Bush’s “surge” brought 30,000 additional US troops on to the streets of Baghdad and other restive areas, this was not portrayed as an act of violence but an attempt to stop violence. In fact, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent, the surge resulted in the displacement of another 600,000 Iraqis from their homes; one opinion poll showed 70% of Iraqis thought the “surge” had made them less secure.

The single most shamefully under-reported reality of Iraq is the death toll – and our role in it. A recent report by the firm Opinion Research Business (ORB) says that 1.2 million Iraqis have been killed since the invasion of 2003. That extends and confirms the findings of a survey published last year in The Lancet, a widely respected medical journal, that estimated the dead at 655,000 – at least 30% of them at the hands of occupying forces. The ORB report indicates that most violent deaths are from gunshot wounds (not suicide bombers) and most occur outside Baghdad (and therefore go unreported).

Though these figures are grounded in research and have been supported by independent experts, they are scarcely mentioned in the British media and when they are, their credibility is doubted. (Surely “we” could not have perpetrated this sort of atrocity? Numbers like these belong to places like Rwanda). Nonetheless, facts about the horror in Iraq do leak through, though you might miss them if you blink while watching the BBC. 2.2 million out of population of 27 million have fled the country; another 1.9 million are internally displaced. According to the charity Oxfam, 28% of Iraqi children are now malnourished, compared to 19% before the invasion. 43% of Iraqis live in “absolute poverty”. Half the population is unemployed. 70% are without adequate water supplies, compared to 50% in 2003.

Although Iraq today is the site of many conflicts, the core contest remains that between the occupying forces and Iraqis resisting them. US aircraft dropped five times as many bombs and missiles (437 in total) in Iraq during the first six months of this year as in the first half of 2006. In June, attacks on US and allied forces were up to 177.8 per day (about one fifth of which were roadside bombs), the highest since 2003.

Opinion polls in both Britain and the US continue to show majorities favouring withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. Partly because of the veil that has been drawn over the ugliness of occupation, these majorities are, however, neither impassioned nor active. Crucially, they are politically dispossessed. The Democrats owed their victory in the November 2006 mid-term elections to discontent over Iraq; but since then they have dismally failed to restrain Bush’s war or push US withdrawal one step closer. In Britain, if there is a general election in the coming months, as rumoured, Iraq will not be among the issues. The elite consensus here – that withdrawal is not an acceptable option – is shared by Labour and Conservative, which will keep the matter safely distant from the ballot box.

What’s behind this sclerosis of democracy, this continuing pursuit of draining, unpopular, apparently unwinnable wars? A significant clue can be found in the recent announcement from BAE, one of Britain’s largest corporations, that profits this year would double to more than £500 million, thanks largely to Iraq and Afghanistan. However costly for others, these conflicts have proved immensely profitable for British and US security and defence contractors. If the new foreign investor friendly oil law – designed by and for multinationals, with the assistance of British and US governments – is ensconced in Iraq, two giant British businesses, BP and Shell, are poised to join the massive plunder.

As Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, observed in his recently published memoirs, “It is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war was largely about oil.” What is common sense nearly everywhere is treated as far-fetched conspiracy theory by the mainstream media in Britain and the US. For Iraqis, however, it is lived experience. Which is why, also under-reported to the point of oblivion, opposition to the oil law has proved widespread and stubborn. Unions, academics, civil society and religious organisations as well as political parties have joined forces, across those boundaries that are said to have made Iraq ungovernable or unsustainable. Behind them, opinion polls indicate, are the majority of Iraqis, who strongly favour retaining control of the nation’s oil wealth, and for whom the oil law is confirmation that the invasion was never intended for their benefit.

London’s Olympic Reverie

Tim Holmes — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 17:04:39 +0000

Four miles from my doorstep lies one of Europe’s largest construction sites: 500 acres to be transformed into an Olympic Park and Village in time for the 2012 Games. At the moment, it’s a wasteland. A few hundred tenants have been evicted from a council estate. Nineteenth century garden allotments have been bulldozed, as have a cluster of pitches used by weekend footballers. Migratory birds have been chased from their inncer-city marsh habitats and local residents find themselves corralled by fences, plagued by noise and harassed by security guards.

Over the next five years, the nuisance and inconvenience will spread. Costs will mount up. Already, the initial estimate of £2.5 billion has been revised upwards to £9.3 billion, the bulk to be covered by the taxpayer. In return, we’re told, there will be jobs, new homes and offices, regeneration for a deprived area, “the largest new park in London for 150 years,” an aquatic centre and perhaps another football or athletic stadium.

A report issued during the summer by the London Assembly has confirmed that there is no evidence that Olympic host cities have enjoyed the benefits promised them. Jobs are temporary and casual; left-over facilities are often unsuitable; regeneration ends up meaning property speculation and gentrification. A recent reconsideration of the Barcelona Games of 1992 – widely considered a success – concluded that “the only economic indicator that experienced an important impact as a result of the Olympic Games were price levels.”

London is already one of the most expensive places on earth. For millions of Londoners buying a home in their own city has become an unrealisable fantasy. Property inflation – which always accompanies Olympic developments – is just what London doesn’t need.

Despite much talk of London’s Olympic “legacy”, it remains unclear what this will consist of and how it will be measured. That’s in the nature of the Olympic deal: the commitment of the host city to have the facilities ready on time is ironclad; everything else is, at best, aspirational and negotiable. As 2012 approaches, meeting the timetable will take precedence over other considerations, including the safety of construction workers and the wishes of local people. Crucially, a precondition for bidding for the Games is the agreement by the host city to carry all their costs and liabilities. The risk is off-loaded to the public sector, but not the revenue. The two major streams of Olympic income – broadcast rights and the international sponsorship programme – remain in the hands of the International Olympic Committee. This shadowy and profligate body will determine the shape of the spectacle for which London is the host, and it is primarily to this body that the agencies constructing and managing the Olympic site will be accountable.

You’d think that such a one-sided arrangement would deter potential bidders, but not so. The myth that the Olympics are a boon endures, despite the evidence. It fits neatly into the neo-liberal model, in which cities (and countries) compete for investment on a global playing field, in which the priorities of private investors are the arbiters of social development, in which brand promotion equals increased market share.

London, however, is not a brand, or to be more precise, promoting the London brand on the global marketplace is nor the same as promoting the sustainable welfare of Londoners. The city’s great crises – economic inequality, sclerotic transport, a degraded environment, over-stretched public services – will not be addressed or mitigated and in some cases could be exacerbated by the Olympics.

The Olympics are an engine of distortion. Already, in response to rising costs, the government has raided existing funding for the arts and for grass-roots sport. As the 2012 deadline approaches, the Olympics are likely to swallow an ever larger share of the budget for the cultural life of the nation. The physical legacy will do nothing to correct the imbalance. London already enjoys a surfeit of internationally known sports venues (football, cricket, athletics, rugby, tennis). What it needs is accessible playing fields, of which the Olympics provides not one.

Shortly after London was awarded the Games in 2005, the British government rushed through legislation aimed at protecting the Olympic brand from ambush marketing. In its attempt to uphold the exclusive rights of organisers and official sponsors, the new law restricts freedom of expression in a manner that under other circumstances would have set off alarms. Somehow, because it’s the Olympics, we let our guard down and allow ourselves to be imposed on.

Perhaps too late, Londoners are turning sour on the Olympic project and especially the Olympic propaganda. In a recent poll, only 28 per cent agreed that the financial risk was “worth taking” because of the potential benefits, whereas 44% thought “the money could be better spent on schools and hospitals.” A vast majority – 89 per cent – did not believe the Government’s claim that the cost of the games would be no more than £9.3 billion. Only 3 per cent thought that the 2012 Games would be delivered on or under budget.

So the Olympics can be added to Iraq as another source of popular cynicism. The Games become a juggernaut of vested interests (government, corporate and media). Those who resist its priorities find themselves fighting an unequal battle. For Londoners, the primary Olympic experience will be one of disempowerment. We neither own nor control the spectacle that will be staged in our midst, at out expense.

It’s not that I’m hostile to the Olympics. On the contrary, I’m a fan. Despite the widely noted disparity between Olympic ideals and practises, there remains something uniquely compelling about this quadrennial global assembly of talent, with its admixture of big and little sports, big and little countries, amateurs, part-timers and dedicated professionals. It’s a two-week demonstration of the varieties of human excellence; here the chunky weightlifter, the lithe gymnast, the bespectacled sharpshooter, play their parts alongside the magnificently proportioned decathlete. And a closely contested 1500 meter Olympic final is an unrivalled three and half minute drama. It’s just that, as a Londoner, I wish it was taking place in someone else’s city.

As Long as You've got Your Health

eddie — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 15:26:11 +0000

St. Bartholomew’s Hospital – known to Londoners for generations simply as Barts – has a claim to being the world’s longest-established provider of free medical care to the poor. It was founded by a penitent Norman courtier in 1123 as a priory hospital on the edge of the then walled City of London. Following Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1539, the citizenry of London petitioned the king to save the hospital. He granted it to the Corporation of the City of London and it continued as a municipal institution until 1948, when it was absorbed into the new National Health Service.

Having been diagnosed some months ago with an illness that requires frequent visits to hospital for complex treatments, I’ve been spending much of my life these days at Barts. Not far from St Paul’s Cathedral, I enter via the 1702 gateway – a little gem of English baroque – past the unadorned solid square tower of the 13th century priory Church, under the North Wing with its Hogarth murals, and into the compact eighteenth century square designed by James Gibbs to provide a cloister-like retreat for patients and staff. It’s now an unprepossessing carpark, but will shortly be pedestrianised and returned to its former sober elegance, with the bubbling mid 19th fountain as light-hearted centrepiece.

The architectural legacy reflects a remarkable medical history. The 17th century scientist William Harvey was a surgeon at Barts when he discovered the circulation of the blood. In the century that followed Barts became a major medical school, and its staff led the way in breaking from the old barbers’ guilds and establishing surgery as a modern science. It was one of the first hospitals to employ anaesthetics and pioneered developments in ophthalmology, surgical techniques, pathology, radiotherapy, and the treatment of thyroid disease and cancers. On the negative side, the hospital resisted the introduction of antiseptic procedures and excluded women students until 1947.

The school’s most famous student was not, however, renowned for surgical prowess. WG Grace studied here between 1874-1876, years when he was busy revolutionising the game of cricket and had already become one of the most famous names in the realm. Teachers and fellow students expected little from the young celebrity, for whom the medical profession was mainly a sinecure that protected his otherwise dubious status as an amateur cricketer.

Historical intrigue aside, what counts for any patient in any hospital is the quality of treatment. When I was transferred from my general practitioner to Barts I feared I might fall through the cracks at such a large, multi-faceted institution. I was not reassured by the fact that at the moment Barts is something of a building site, as a long delayed and often controversial refurbishment finally gets underway. Despite the confusion caused by temporary access, diversions and scaffolding, the coordination and integration in the inter-disciplinary care I’ve received – from doctors, nurses, technicians and support staff – has been exemplary.

Here I have benefited from recent sea-changes in best medical practise. The glibness and arrogance for which some sections of the medical profession are noted and resented – across national and cultural boundaries – has given way in some quarters at least to a commitment to transparency and patient involvement. Doctors share with me all the information about my case on their computer screens, from lab reports to x-rays and MRIs. They copy me into correspondence. The various nurses and specialists treating me are kept up to date with all the details of my condition and, importantly, my medication regime. At each stage, I’ve found an openness to questions and a willingness to address anxieties. Given the pressure on resources, there are sometimes delays, but every effort is made to keep me informed of these and to minimise inconvenience.

All this is delivered with a quiet, caring, un-panicked but thorough efficiency by a staff drawn from all over the world. Only 36% of Barts staff are British and white; 13% come from the Indian subcontinent; 10% from Africa, 7% from the Philippines and 4% from the Carribbean. In my experience the diversity is anything but an obstacle to the impressive teamwork.

Most importantly, I am not treated as a lab rat or an ambulatory statistic but as an intelligent and autonomous human being. The more democratic practise yields more effective treatment. I am able to benefit from the high tech and clinical advances that in other contexts can tear patients into pieces as they cope with uncoordinated, sometimes contradictory information and the diverging dynamics of various specialisms.

My entire treatment, including medication, is free and I receive it by right. It’s not charity and it’s not conditional on anything but my need for it. I’ve not only never been issued a bill of any kind for all the numerous services provided; I’ve never had to fill in a claim or an application or a form (except for consent forms). We take this for granted in Britain but friends in India and the USA learn of it with envy. The complete alleviation of the burden and anxiety of finance is an obvious boon for all concerned, and it transforms the ethos with which care is delivered and received. Medical care is surely a human right, like primary education, and India and the US are both societies that can afford to make it a reality for all their citizens. That they have failed to do is the result of vested interests and wrong priorities.

Not that Barts is safe from the relentless pressures corroding the social democratic principles of the NHS. In the early 90s, the Conservative government threatened it with closure (it occupies a piece of prime central London real estate). As in Henry VIII’s day, London’s populace rallied to Barts’ support; more than one million signed a petition to save the hospital. In 1997, the new Labour government promised to refurbish Barts on its historic site. Years of consultation and delay followed. The government insisted that finance for the project should be provided exclusively from the private sector, in keeping with its favoured Private Finance Initiative (PFI), through which consortia of banks, building firms and developers finance, build and supply hospitals which are then leased back to the NHS over 30 or more years at a handsome and guaranteed rate of profit.

As the projected PFI costs for the Barts project soared, in early 2006 the government once again renewed threats to the venerable institution’s existence. And once again popular resistance, including an appeal signed by 1000 doctors, prevented the worst, though at a cost. The scaled-back redevelopment involves a 20% loss of planned bed capacity (250 beds) plus leaving empty several floors of the new buildings, presumably for commercial lease. This will still saddle the Trust that runs Barts with annual re-payments to the PFI consortium of some £55m – more than 11% of its total income – for 35 years. Inevitably, the patient will pay, as staff and services are squeezed to ensure risk-immune private investors get their promised return.

So the quality of care I’ve received at Barts is by no means guaranteed for the future. That will depend, as in the past, on the willingness of the people of London and the staff at the hospital to fight to sustain (and expand) its democratic heritage.

Northern Ireland - Addressing Grievances

Alex Doherty — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 12:37:16 +0000

It was a low-key conclusion to the British Army’s longest continuous campaign. On 1st August, Operation Banner, the British military intervention in Northern Ireland, was declared at an end. Some 5000 troops will remain stationed in the area, but with the same duties as troops elsewhere in the United Kingdom, principally preparing for action in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s 38 years since British soldiers marched up the Falls Road in Belfast, the beginning of what was initially depicted as a “peace-keeping” mission, supposed to last only six months. At first, the troops were welcomed by the Catholic minority, who sought protection from attacks by Protestant paramilitaries and the Protestant-dominated local police. But they were soon engaged in a prolonged war with the IRA, and often direct conflict with the nationalist population. Bloody Sunday – January 30 1972, when British troops shot dead 13 unarmed protesters in Derry – was the nadir in what was often a dirty war, on both sides.

During the course of Operation Banner, some 300,000 British troops took part in the campaign in Northern Ireland. More than 700 lost their lives, and another 6000 were injured. In total, the war in Ireland produced more than 3,600 dead and more than 42,000 injured – in a province with a population of only 1.5 million.

At its peak, the British deployment in Nothern Ireland numbered 27,000 troops at more than 100 bases. That number had come down since the Good Friday agreement of 1998, and even before the end of Operation Banner, British troops had not been seen on the streets for nearly two years.

What made possible the final standing-down of the British Army in Northern Ireland was the power sharing agreement reached in May between the British government, Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, and the Democratic Unionists, under the leadership of Ian Paisley, for decades the foremost voice of intransigent Protestant unionism. Now, a joint Sinn Fein-Democratic Unionist administration governs the province through the democratically-elected Northern Ireland Assembly, to which a variety of powers have been devolved by Parliament.

The key steps leading to that remarkable development included the IRA’s 2005 declaration of the end of the armed campaign, and the replacement in 2001 of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the communally-dominated local police, by a non-sectarian force. It was only with that reform (still ongoing) that the nationalist population could enjoy equal civil rights. And it was the demand for equal civil rights that had given birth to The Troubles, as the conflict came to be known, in the late 60s.

In the background larger social and political changes have framed the context of agreement. From the early 1980s, Sinn Fein embraced an increasingly political and democratic strategy, which enabled them to secure representative status at the ballot box. South of the border, the Republic of Ireland underwent economic and social changes that transformed it from a backwater to one of Europe’s most prosperous and liberal societies. The British government came to accept that Ireland, as well as the IRA, had to be part of the solution, and that the war would not end unless the parameters were shifted. Meanwhile, Scottish and Welsh devolution meant that a similar arrangement in Northern Ireland would no longer be anomalous.

It’s hard to recall that in the 70s and 80s the IRA were as demonised as today’s “terrorists”. Successive British governments vowed publicly not to negotiate with them; Margaret Thatcher banned Sinn Fein from the airwaves in an attempt to starve them of the “oxygen of publicity”; it was a commonplace among British leader writers that Irish terrorism had to be defeated, not appeased.

But demonisation did not work. In the long run, it actually strengthened the IRA’s popular base in the nationalist community. Nor was there to be any military solution. In fact, it was the recognition of that reality – within both the British military and the IRA – that made a negotiated settlement possible.

For decades, the conflict in Ireland was portrayed in Britain as “intractable” and unresolvable, rooted in an inexplicable mutual hatred of two warring tribes in which Britain was something of a helpless by-stander. The process that has led to peace has exposed just how facile and irresponsible that view always was. Progress has been possible not because “tribal affinities” have been overcome but because there has been an effort to address, concretely, the grievances of disaffected communities, and to empower their representatives.

Another platitude that accompanied the long war and has now fallen victim to the peace is the assumption what was needed was for moderates in both communities to triumph over extremists. In a sense, the opposite has happened. The moderate Catholic Social Democratic Labour Party and the Protestant official Unionists have been marginalised. Instead, hard-liner Paisley presides in company with his erstwhile “terrorist” arch-enemy, Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness. The constituencies represented by the “extremes” have to be involved in and consent to a settlement or there can be no settlement. Attempts to cut a deal over the heads of an aggrieved population will not work.

There are lessons here for other supposedly intractable conflicts, including Kashmir.

It’s frequently supposed that politics in Northern Ireland will now undergo a process of “normalisation”. The issues that count in the rest of the country – health care, transport, jobs, the environment – will come to dominate politics here too, and the national question will retreat in importance.

But what pertains today in Northern Ireland would not pass for normal elsewhere in Britain. None of the major British parties organises there or plans to organise there; all the parties involved in the current settlement are defined by their relation to a particular community (nationalist or loyalist); the neighbouring Irish government enjoys a formally recognised role for which there is no comparison elsewhere in Europe.

It’s hard to see why the national question should become more salient in Scottish politics – and everyone agrees that it has – while in Northern Ireland it should be doomed to fade away. However, the context is now one in which the spectrum of options has widened. So although the end of the 38-year deployment of British troops does not signal a resolution of the national question in Ireland it may herald an era in which the terms and possible solutions of that conundrum evolve in new forms.

History vs. Heritage

Tim Holmes — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 02:52:03 +0000

That the teaching of history is politically disputed terrain will come as no news to Indian readers. Efforts by the Hindu right at the centre and in the states have amply illustrated how the study of the past can acquire an all-too-potent present-day ideological and communal force.

In Britain, the announcement of a new, slimmed-down national curriculum for 11-14 years olds elicited indignant headlines when it was realised it would no longer be compulsory for this age group to learn about Winston Churchill. For much of the British press, the apparent downgrading of the iconic war-time leader was another episode in a long-running conspiracy against the British heritage and way of life, for which, in various measures, at various times, the European Union, “political correctness”, immigration and Islam are blamed.

The new curriculum may omit Churchill (along, it should be noted with Gandhi) but it goes out of its way to respond to the high-profile, if remorselessly vague, discussion about the future of Britishness. As part of “citizenship” studies (made compulsory by the government in 2002), pupils will now learn “shared British values and study national identity in the UK”. History lessons, inevitably, are expected to play a significant role in this process, though no one seems clear just how this is to be done, not least the teachers supposed to be doing it.

In the wake of the announcement, a survey of teachers showed that 58% disagreed with the statement: “It is quite proper for state-funded schools to promote loyalty to the state”. Only 18% agreed. Only 13% think schools should “actively promote patriotism”. Among teachers in Britain, there seems to be, reassuringly, a healthy commitment to democracy and a reluctance to being used by the Labour government to appease the nationalist right.

The real problems facing history teaching – in contrast to the tabloid fantasies – were outlined by a recent report from Ofsted, the national schools inspectorate. While pupils demonstrate knowledge of the particular areas they’ve studied, they are “weak at linking information together to form an overall narrative” and “not good at establishing a chronology, do not make connections between the areas they have studied and so do not gain an overview, and are not able to answer the ‘big questions’.”

Inspectors found that history teaching continues to favour a narrow handful of topics, including the 16th century Tudors and 20th century wars and dictatorships. While World War II is extensively covered, few pupils learn anything at all about Japan and Germany since 1945. Overall, the subject as it is studied in English schools is too “heavily based in aspects of English history,” with Scotland, Wales and Ireland “largely ignored, as are major European and world themes” and (despite what the media would have us believe) Britain’s history as a multi-ethnic society.

Will any of this be remedied by the new stress on British values and identity? Certainly it offers that over-arching narrative whose absence the inspectors lament. A chronological-national framework does makes history easier to present and structure and study. But it can do so only by substituting, at the expense of genuine historical inquiry, a pre-digested package premised on an ahistorical postulate, that there is a continuing and ever-distinct “Britishness”, and that it is, somehow, a good thing.

Ironically if ‘Britishness’ is to supply the missing “over-arching narrative”, then history teaching will be less able to address the very issues that gave rise to its inclusion in the curriculum: Britain’s relations with Europe, the changing make-up of the British population, and the devolution of power to elected assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

What the report calls “the biggest issue for school history” is simply and starkly “its limited place in the curriculum”, i.e. too few young people are spending time studying it. Only 30% of pupils post-14 years of age study history and even fewer post-16. As result, the report notes, they “never consider important historical issues when they are mature enough to do so”.

Why should this be so? Unlike in most of Europe, history is not a compulsory subject in English schools after the age of 14, and there are currently no proposals to remedy that. Instead, the government’s emphasis continues to be on literacy, numeracy, vocational and market-orientated skills, squeezing history to the margins. What’s more, “some policy developers, senior school managers, parents and pupils,” the inspectors complain, “do not perceive history as either relevant or important compared with other subjects.”

One of these appears to be the none other than the chief executive of the government’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (the body that demoted Churchill). In response to a question about the role of history in schools, he said: “Are we going to deal with the battle of the Nile or are we instead going to concentrate on how to take out a mortgage and manage it – and use the school time for that purpose?”

In the Battle of the Nile, fought in the summer of 1798, Nelson defeated the French navy and secured British supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean. This was only the beginning, however, of more than a century of British-French competition over control of the fragmenting Ottoman domains – including Iraq, where 5000 British soldiers are currently bogged down fighting an insurgency which can only be understood in a context that includes that imperial competition and indeed the poor old Battle of the Nile.

Terror & the Iraq Connection

Tim Holmes — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 08:54:02 +0000

The British government response to the failed terrorist actions in London and Glasgow was markedly more measured than in the past. The “war on terror” rhetoric was toned down, there was no threat of yet another round of anti-terror laws, and greater care in speaking about and to Muslim communities. That’s more than I expected from Gordon Brown, and it’s a relief. But Brown and his government continue to deny reality by insisting that the attacks are on on “our way of life”and have no connection to British policy in Iraq.

Speculating about the mind-set of would-be mass murderers is an uncertain business, and to some extent a diversion from over-arching questions. What we know of those who have been involved in planning or perpetrating such acts in Britain in recent years is that they are diverse in background and in the paths that led them to violence. Some are entirely home-grown, products of British society in every respect; some have spent most of their lives elsewhere. No stereotype fits. Doctors and engineers, students and unemployed, isolated people and well-integrated people, some who’ve lived mainly among non-Muslims and others who have not. This time individuals involved in the bombings had no links to madrassas in Pakistan but did to Rajiv Gandhi University in Bangalore.

Islamism in all its forms combines the religious and political. But all experience of violent Islamism confirms that it is the sharp edge of political grievance that ignites, fuels and determines the targets of the jihad. Britain became a much more politically significant target after its involvement in the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. If the motor force had been the Islamist indictment of western society in general, then one would expect the terror campaign to range much more widely over Western Europe as a whole

In this case, those who would deny a link with Iraq must conjure with the fact that the man arrested delivering the car bomb was a British-raised Iraqi who had spent the last several years qualifying as a doctor in Baghdad, and had friends who had been killed in the US-led assaults on Fallujah and Ramadi.

Iraq remains a stubborn breach in British public trust which the new Brown administration has done nothing to heal. But the nightmare in Iraq is sensed here as a remote tragedy, a chaos of violence and schism, and the role of occupying troops, including British, is glossed over by the BBC and most of the mainstream press. Deaths of British soldiers (now 158) are reported but there is little real news from Iraq’s various battlegrounds, except for sectarian atrocities in Baghdad and other cities. Of the US-British assaults on “insurgent strongholds” – including the bombardment of densely populated urban areas – almost nothing.

It has not been widely reported in Britain, for example, that on 17 June, in the course of a British operation against Al-Sadr supporters (not Sunni or al-Qaeda) in the city of Amara, an air strike killed eleven civilians and injured 34 others. The planes shelled houses while locals were sleeping on roofs during intense heat. According to residents, cluster bombs were dropped during the attack.

Even the British role in the strategic, oil-rich hub of Basra is scarcely examined. A damning report by the International Crisis Group, entitled “Lessons from Basra”,was released at the end of June but largely ignored. It was initially assumed that southern, anti-Saddam, Shia-dominated Iraq would welcome the US-British invasion and that therefore the British had drawn the easier billet. Once it became clear that the populace would not accept the imposition of rule by the pro-US elite groomed in exile, the occupiers, in a turnabout that proved of huge significance, were forced to elevate various Shia parties as the expense of Sunni, Baathist and secular forces, thus promoting competition among armed sectarian groups for resources and power.

In response to rising factional violence, the British launched Operation Sinbad in September 2006. The aim was to rid Basra of the militias, the means (house to house searches, detentions, checkpoints) were predictable, as was the upshot. One British soldier told the press: From “the end of January to March, it was like a siege mentality. We were getting mortared every hour of the day. We were constantly being fired at.” In April, Operation Sinbad was called off. Within weeks, militias returned to the streets. According to the ICG, the 5,500 British troops have been driven by “relentless attacks” into “increasingly secluded compounds”. Meanwhile, British administrators “appear to have given up the idea of establishing a functioning state”.

Of course, Britain is targeted by terrorists not because of the specific actions of British troops in Iraq but as a result of the British government’s role as the US’s pre-eminent military and political ally in the invasion and occupation.

The US’s five month old security “surge” in Baghdad has proved no more effective than Operation Sinbad in Basra. US and allied Iraqi forces control fewer than one-third of Baghdad’s neighbourhoods. Violence has spread to areas which were previously quiet. Meanwhile, increased reliance on air power has generated so much extra traffic that US air bases in Iraq have installed new lighting and control systems to operate on a round-the-clock basis. In one week in March, the Pentagon reported 327 missions – a 50% rise over the previous year, and with it inevitably, escalating civilian casualties.

The death toll as a result of invasion and occupation has now reached, in all probability, the one million mark. The John Hopkins mortality study published last year suggests that at least 31% of these died directly at the hands of occupying forces. In Baghdad, they still get only one hour of electricity a day. Economic production is said to be down by 80% from 2003. Deaths of Iraqi children from preventable disease are running at double pre-invasion levels. Violence of all types has left over 4 million displaced, 14% of the Iraqi population.

The occupation has already proved one of the greatest examples of human-inflicted suffering since World War II, and it grows more destructive by the day. In an act of folly, the UN Security Council, which had refused authorisation of the invasion of March 2003, subsequently gave the US-British forces a mandate to govern Iraq; in light of their breaches of international law, attacks on civilians, failure to provide basic services and minimum security, that mandate should now be revoked. Until it is, and US-British forces are made to withdraw, the UN and the international community will be prevented from offering Iraqis the assistance they desperately need.

The Iraq war was not merely a dreadful error committed by lame duck politicians. It is an ongoing atrocity, a crime in the course of being perpetrated. As it is a crime in which the British government is a major culprit, the consequences are likely to continue to be visited on our shores.

www.mikemarqusee.com

Good Riddance Tony Blair

Alex Doherty — Tue, 08 May 2007 19:34:46 +0000

After ten years as Prime Minister, Tony Blair faces the end of the road, and for most of us in Britain, his resignation will come not a moment too soon.

A man elected in 1997 because he was portrayed as moderate, prudent and sincere has become a by-word for mendacity, double-talk and self-serving recklessness. He promised a sea-change from the sleaze-tainted Tories, but his administration became notorious for dishing out special favours to the rich. His last months in office have been dogged by the cash-for-peerages scandal and his quashing of the inquiry into the bribery of Saudi officials by BAE, Britain’s biggest arms manufacturer.

Blair’s devotion to the welfare of the wealthy has been his single most consistent policy. Under his administration, low tax Britain had become a happy home for the world’s super-rich. There are now 68 billionaires in the country – three times as many as in 2003 – most of whom have moved here from abroad. Over the past five years, Britain’s 1,000 richest people saw their liquid assets increase by 79%; the next 0.3.% of the population saw theirs increase by 66%; while the 30% at the bottom have no liquid assets at all.

According to the Gini coefficient, income inequality is now even higher than it was when Labour took office after 18 years of Tory rule. Despite sustained GDP growth and some positive measures in tax credits and benefits, the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies reports that relative poverty, absolute poverty and child poverty all rose last year. Poverty rates for working-age adults without dependent children are at their highest levels since 1961. University tuition fees have been introduced, bringing to an end decades of free higher education – while corporation taxes have been slashed, and are now lower than in the US.

Privatisation has been extended into realms even Thatcher never dreamed of, including schools, colleges, prisons, hospitals, underground transport and air traffic control. Meanwhile, the four giant supermarket chains – some of them major donors to the Labour party – have been licensed to colonise ever more public space, depressing both wages and farm prices.

In a recent UNICEF report ranking child welfare in 21 wealthy countries, Britain came last overall. British children are the most likely to have a jobless parent, to have been drunk, involved in a fight or bullied. A study by academics at Dundee University revealed that Britain has the second highest child mortality rate among the 24 richest countries, with infants in the UK twice as likely to die before the age of five as children in Sweden.

Despite recent record levels of spending, the National Health Service is in severe crisis with health workers being laid off and treatment units closed. Thanks to a below-inflation pay offer, public sector workers now face a cut in living standards; NHS staff, including nurses, have threatened strike action. What has happened is that with each tranche of additional public funding have come managerial diktats demanding stepped-up internal “competition” and expanding private sector involvement. Under Blair, the NHS has signed more than 800 Private Finance Initiative deals, leaving the NHS with more than £200 billion in long-term debt repayments.

Britain now has has the lowest levels of product and labour market regulation in the OECD. Last year, the number of construction workers killed on building sites rose by 25 per cent, but convictions of companies responsible for these deaths declined by nearly three-quarters. British employees enjoy less security than before Blair took office, working for more years and longer hours than their European counterparts.

Nonetheless, productive output per hour lags behind Germany, France and US, and the gap is wider in services than in manufacturing, where Britain has shed some one million jobs since 1997. According to financial journalist Anthony Hilton, “The entire UK economy has become, in effect, a giant hedge fund with a massive one way bet on financial services – and no Plan B.”

Despite his own indifference to elementary ethical requirements – including flagrant conflicts of interest in his relationships with the super-rich – Blair has never tired of preaching personal responsibility to others. Over the years he has scapegoated one social group after another, single parents, public sector workers, Muslims and most recently the whole black community for its alleged failure to address “gun culture”. Meanwhile, asylum seekers have been subject to an almost annual round of punitive legislation, resulting in internment or deportation for thousands of innocents, while British citizens find their civil liberties hammered thin by a succession of “Anti-Terror” laws, each one criminalising an ever wider circle of legitimate political activity.

Under Blair, voter turn-out in general elections has plummeted – from 72% in 1997 to 60% in 2005, the lowest in Europe – while the prison population has rocketed – from 60,000 to 80,000, the highest in Europe.

All this is in addition to the most acute horror of the Blair years: British foreign policy. Britain joined the US in bombing Iraq in 1998 and Yugoslavia in 1999. It backed Russia’s assault on Chechnya in 1999 and Israel’s on Lebanon in 2006. It armed Indonesia as it attacked Aceh province in 2003 and continues to succour brutal regimes in Colombia, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan. Blair and his chancellor Brown have made much of the growth of Britain’s international aid budget – now up to a measly 0.52% of GNP – while acting in global trade forums as insistent voices for the kind of one-sided pro-corporate liberalisation that has wrecked the lives of millions in the developing world.

Finally and most damningly, Blair leaves Britain deeply embroiled in two avoidable, unjustifiable overseas wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. He comes second only to Bush in bearing personal responsibility for the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis and the near destruction of an entire society. After the calculated lies Blair told both Parliament and the public to get Britain to make war against Iraq, the greatest regret is that he will leave office without being impeached, though there is still hope he may face an international criminal tribunal at some time in the future. In Blair’s book, of course, accountability, like the obligation to pay your taxes, only applies to those Leona Helmsley once infamously described as “the little people”. For the rich, there will always be an exemption, and Blair’s successor, whether Labour or Conservative, will work hard to make sure it stays that way.

Growing Resistance

Alex Doherty — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 17:41:05 +0000

ON April 9, the fourth anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein, more than a million demonstrators took to the streets of Najaf, Kut and other cities of the Iraqi south, chanting, “Yes! Yes! Iraq, No! No! America.” Amid an ocean swell of green, white and red Iraqi flags, one placard read, “We were liberated from Saddam, now we need to be liberated again,” and another, simply, “Stop the suffering, Americans leave now.”

That the demonstrators were overwhelmingly Shia, supposedly the beneficiaries of the occupation, blew a gaping hole in several prevalent assumptions about Iraq, not least that Iraqi nationalism had been wiped out by religious sectarianism. It rendered even more tenuous than before the claim that foreign military occupation is the only way to prevent the country descending into all-out civil war.

Sunni clerics marched with their Shia counterparts at the head of the massive and peaceful processions. Pictures and slogans with sectarian implications were notable by their absence. “Four years of patience and what do we get?” Ali Hashim, a Basra merchant, explained to a journalist, “The United States failed us and sold us cheap to those who would have no mercy on us.”

Salman Yaseen, a Basra city councillor, admitted, “We were late to realise that we were wrong about U.S. intentions. We waited four years while U.S. and Iraqi authorities kept us busy fighting each other while they were setting the plan of stealing our oil.”

He was referring to the Iraqi government’s proposed Oil and Gas Bill, under which foreign companies will be allowed to secure exclusive rights to exploit the country’s natural resources. There will be no limits on the transfer of profits outside Iraq, no minimum level for State participation, no requirement to deal with Iraqi contractors or suppliers or employ Iraqi labour. Contracts with multi-national oil companies will be awarded, without public or parliamentary scrutiny, by a newly created Federal Oil and Gas Council, whose composition is likely to embody the sectarian and regional share-out of the spoils through which the occupiers have sought to govern. Hassan Juma’a Awad, leader of the rigorously anti-sectarian Iraqi oil workers union, warned that the Bill “threatens to set governorate against governorate and region against region… history will not forgive those who play recklessly with the wealth and destiny of a people.”

If the Bill is passed, Washington and London will have achieved one of their key war aims – but if the law is to be made to stick, their armies will have to stay on indefinitely. The reclaiming of the country’s oil from foreign powers was one of the major achievements of the Iraqi national struggle, one that long pre-dates Saddam Hussein. Iraqis across religious and regional divides rightly regard control of their oil resources as the key to the country’s economic and social development. Now more than ever, it’s clear that the fate of the occupation will be determined by the political evolution of the resistance to it, and in particular the extent to which it acquires a national and democratic character.

In a recent report, the normally circumspect International Red Cross paints a picture of terror and suffering across Iraq. Poverty, unemployment, malnutrition are all on the rise. Power and water supplies continue to deteriorate, as does health care provision. UNICEF reports that Iraq’s mortality rate for children under five, which was 50 per 1000 live births in 1990, rose to 125 per 1000 in 2005 and to 130 last year. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, some two million Iraqis have fled the country since 2003 and another 1.9 million have been internally displaced, a total of 16 per cent of the Iraqi population. Add to that the more than 6,55,000 killed since the invasion, at least 30 per cent directly by occupying forces. (These figures were rejected by the British government when published last year in the medical journal, The Lancet, but have since been described by the Ministry of Defence’s own chief scientist as “robust” and “reliable”.)

On the same day that anti-occupation crowds surged through the cities of southern Iraq, the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, nemesis of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, demanded that politicians implicated in the Iraq nightmare be placed on trial for war crimes. “Those who joined the U.S. President in the war against Iraq have as much or more responsibility than him because, despite having doubts, they put themselves in the hands of the aggressor to carry out an ignoble act of death and destruction that continues to this day.”

To the global majority who made quite clear their views on the inadvisability of this war well before it started, the idea that those responsible for Iraq’s agony should be held to account will seem self-evident. Sadly, it appears to be entirely beyond the ken of even the liberal wing of the British media.

In a lengthy interview with Gordon Brown, still Tony Blair’s most likely successor, The Guardian did not permit the word “Iraq” to intrude once. The occasion of the interview was the publication of Brown’s new book, entitled Courage, in which he sings the praises of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Aung San Suu Kyi, and other icons of moral purpose.

Throughout the past decade, Brown, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, has been the second most powerful individual in the British government. His latest budget provides an additional 400 million pounds for the war in Iraq, to which he has already allocated some £5 billion of public funds. The questions he should have been asked, which a healthy political culture should have made it unavoidable to ask, went something like this: “Mr. Brown, can you explain to us how any intelligent, presumably well-informed person with a sense of responsibility about the use of power could manage to utter not so much as a squeak of protest as this disastrous policy unfolded? If you admire Nelson Mandela so much why did you ignore his public warning that the Iraq invasion would create a `holocaust’? When Mandela charged that `the powerful countries, all of them so-called democracies, manipulate multilateral bodies to the great disadvantage and suffering of the poorer developing nations’, wasn’t he talking about people like you? In short, can you tell us why you and Tony Blair should not be tried for war crimes?”

Unreality TV

Alex Doherty — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 20:36:03 +0000

All words can be cheapened by misuse, especially when they are misused by the powerful. The reality they refer to is disguised, rather than revealed. But what happens when the word in question is “reality” itself?

On his visit to India, Gordon Brown, still the bookie’s favourite to succeed Tony Blair, urged people back home to support Shilpa Shetty because a vote for Shilpa was “a vote for Britain”. Like others, he was at pains to stress that Jade Goody did not speak for her fellow Brits.

That’s both true and untrue. There is a very large number of people in this country who share Goody’s prejudices and use language more offensive than Goody’s without blushing. Racism remains a demonstrable fact of British life — on the streets, in workplaces, in the media. It permeates the criminal justice system, from police on the beat through courtrooms and into prisons.

On the other hand, significant progress has been made, progress reflected in the response to Goody’s televised behaviour: the record number of complaints, the withdrawal of sponsorships, Goody’s vilification by the very tabloids that turned her into a celebrity in the first place.

Yet the suggestion that this is a landmark in British race relations is far-fetched. For a start, it seems to take “Reality TV” at face value.

While Shilpa and Jade were locked together in the Big Brother house, in another part of London six men were going on trial for conspiracy to bomb the London underground. The prosecution presented evidence that they had used chappati flour in their explosives. The headlines the next day read “Chappati Bomb Plot”. None of the six defendants in the case is South Asian; all are from either Ethiopia or Somalia. The prosecution also presented evidence that they had purchased vast amounts of hydrogen peroxide (a more critical element in the explosive mix than flour). Yet there were no “Bleach Blonde Bomb Plot” headlines (despite the alliteration).

Had Goody attacked a Muslim contestant, using recognisably anti-Muslim insults, I wonder if the reaction would have been quite the same? Under the impact of the war on terror, racism has mutated in Britain, acquiring a more Islamophobic emphasis. Yet as the “chappati” headlines indicate, the spillover victimises not only Muslims but South Asians in general.

Goody’s tearful repentance completed the story arc in accordance with the producers’ preference. A more significant outcome to the affair would be the demise of Big Brother itself and indeed the whole genre. This is not “reality”, with or without the quote marks. It’s a highly contrived spectacle, as should have become obvious when the BB producers informed Goody of the widespread offence her comments had caused. (The premise of the show is that the contestants are living in a sealed bubble, on view to a public from which they are cut off.) If the producers had kept Goody in the dark, would we have had the self-criticism and the rapprochement with Shetty?

The reality constructed by “Reality TV” producers is one in which banality is alleviated by personal antagonism. It institutionalises the exhibitionism-voyeurism syndrome that seems to be characteristic of our global consumer society. It was by being obnoxious on Big Brother that Jade Goody became a celebrity, and it was for that quality and that quality only that she was recruited for this year’s series. In Goody’s mind, when she attacked Shetty, she was only doing what she was paid to do. It’s a performance mode by no means confined to Big Brother. Across the media spectrum, columnists and commentators are well rewarded for a willingness to vent prejudices and make sweeping generalisations, the breezier the better.

Gordon Brown expressed great concern about the effect of the BB blow-up on Britain’s image as a tolerant multi-cultural society. What a disturbingly unreal world we live in when the nation’s leaders believe more damage is done to its overseas image by a contestant on a TV show than by its participation in the Iraq war, its collusion with human rights abuses in Guantanamo, its support for Israel’s onslaught on Lebanon, or the fact that its current Prime Minister is widely regarded at home and abroad as the puppet of a foreign regime and an unscrupulous liar.

On the day Jade got the boot from Big Brother, police investigating the cash-for-peerages scandal arrested one of Tony Blair’s top aides on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. As an example of impartiality, this event might actually be good for Britain’s image abroad, especially in countries where politicians are not fully subject to the rule of law. The government, of course, would rather talk about Jade Goody and Shilpa Shetty.

On the Indian side, there has been a parallel preoccupation with image. The hype that preceded Shetty’s appearance on British television was far greater in India than in Britain, where she was, to begin with, just another C-list celebrity of the type Big Brother specialises in. (Now she has become, according to the BB announcers, “Bollywood’s number one box office star”.) In sections of the Indian media, the event was trailed as some kind of international breakthrough, another breathlessly welcomed it as a bit of recognition for India on the global stage (or rather, the global stage as perceived in the West). For too many, this has become an end in itself, as well as an apparently unappeasable hunger.

The Indian Tourism Ministry plastered the British press with full-page adverts inviting Jade to make a “healing visit” to India. The bright sparks behind this marketing strategy no doubt considered it ultra-hip: getting down and dirty in the pop cult arena. But I don’t know anyone here who wasn’t startled by the spectacle of the Indian Government seeking dialogue with Jade Goody, even with tongue in cheek. As for the Indian politicians venting their indignation over British racism, how many have said a word about Britain’s war on Iraq or the persecution of British Asians in the name of the war on terror? I hate to use the phrase, but it’s time for everyone to get real.

Behind the Iraq "Surge"

Alex Doherty — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 18:26:21 +0000

It beggars belief. After nearly four years of occupation, resulting in the deaths of 650,000 Iraqis, the US and its British lapdog have decided that the only remedy for the Iraq debacle is more of the same. Despite a clear-cut desire on the part of the majority of Iraqis for a rapid withdrawal of foreign forces (a desire shared by majorities in both the US and Britain), troop numbers are to be increased. It seems the White House, if no one else, is convinced that the problems that have beset the occupation can be overcome by a further military “surge”.

The proposed escalation poses a major test for the new Democratic Congressional leadership – one they are likely to flunk. Unpleasant as it may be to acknowledge it, the reality is that the Democrats were swept back to power in the November elections principally thanks to the Iraqi resistance, whose actions brought the human cost of the war home to the US electorate. The Democrats’ own feeble and equivocal responses to the misbegotten war on terror would never have done the trick.

Historical analogies are not reassuring. By early 1969, it had become obvious to US policy makers (not to mention the public at large) that the military engagement in Vietnam was a disaster. Nonetheless, that engagement continued for another four years, during which perhaps a million more Vietnamese perished.

One reason for the compounding of error with error was the nature of the explanations of the debacle offered to Americans, which – then as now – tended to stress the US’s “good intentions”, thereby letting America’s collective conscience off the hook and obscuring the roots of the disaster in a long-standing and intrinsically criminal imperial policy.

Thus we are now treated to the obscene spectacle of commentators such as Thomas Friedman and Charles Krauthammer – not so long ago among the most super-confident champions of the invasion of Iraq – admitting ruefully that it’s all gone wrong, but placing the blame on the Iraqis themselves, who have somehow proved unworthy of American sacrifices on their behalf. Iraqi culture is now portrayed as endemically sectarian and inimical to democracy. Iraqi leaders are seen as hopelessly weak, factional and corrupt (as opposed, presumably, to the perspicacious and principled public servants who hold power in North America or Western Europe).

Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek’s international editor, considered a liberal critic of the Bush regime, takes a somewhat subtler tack, but still divides the blame for the Iraq fiasco between the “ignorance and naivete” of the neo-cons, on one hand, and a deeply flawed Iraqi society, on the other. Iraq’s Sunnis, he states, “have mostly behaved like self-defeating thugs.”

Racist generalisations of this type are commonplace in the US discourse on West Asia (and also, though to a slightly lesser extent, in the British version). They serve as a handy substitute for serious analysis and as a mask for US and British culpability. And they routinely betray a breath-taking ignorance of modern history.

Take Richard Haass, president of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, who believes that what he calls the “American era” in the middle east began only with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like Zakaria, he is critical of Bush’s foreign policy not because of its unethical neo-colonial premises but because it has led to an erosion of US influence. The answer, he suggests, is less emphasis on “democracy” and more on “economic liberalism”. Similarly, the White House-appointed Iraq Study Group called for a reduction in troop numbers but at the same time recommended immediate privatisation of Iraq’s oil industry. The country’s principal resource would fall into the hands of US corporations, which, of course, is how the US became involved in the region in the first place.

A significant section of the US elite would clearly prefer a military disengagement to the escalation Bush seeks, but at the same time remains strongly in favour of entrenching other forms of US power. It is this soft-focus empire-building that ensures that the wrong lessons are being drawn from the tragedy of the last four years.

Virtually obliterated from the current discussion about what went wrong in Iraq is any mention of the sanctions that took the lives of half a million Iraqi children in the 1990s (a policy rigidly pursued by Bill Clinton), or of US and British support in the 1960s and 70s for any regional force (including Saddam) that would curtail the influence of the secular left, or, going back further, of the forty years of non-sectarian nationalist struggle by Iraqis against British dominance.

It is not the Iraqis whose culture lacks a developed grasp of democracy, but the Americans and the British. Specifically, they have never digested the meaning of colonialism and the democratic impulse to resist it. Where Stalinism and fascism are now rightly recognised as epitomes of inhumanity, the third great nightmare of the 20th century, colonialism, is not, though its victims are at least as numerous. Not surprisingly, in the absence of a reckoning with this historic crime, it is being repeated.