Ian Sinclair | ukwatch.net

Sinners/Scroungers/Saints

eddie — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:19:53 +0000

“People’s understanding of lone mothers have been dominated by myth and misrepresentation,” asserts one display in the Women’s Library’s current exhibition about the history of lone mothers in Britian.

Along with Muslims, Gypsies, asylum-seekers and black youths, single mothers have been fair game for the British press for many years, their punchbag status peaking in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

Who can forget John Redwood and Peter Lilley’s infamous vitriolic attacks on single mothers when they were members of John Major’s cabinet?

Drawing extensively on the records of the organisations One Parent Families and Gingerbread and using photographs, pamphlets, audio testimony, films, timelines and a visitor comments board, Sinners/Scroungers/Saints aims to right some of the popular myths surrounding lone motherhood.

Although lone-parent households have existed in substantial numbers throughout history, in Britain, their numbers, in common with other industrialised nations, have increased, with an estimated 1.9 million lone parent families caring for 3.1 million children today.

And, while lone parents are not exclusively women, historically, the majority of lone parents have been, with 91 per cent of lone parent families today headed by a woman.

“Few women choose to become lone mothers because to do so usually results in increased poverty,” the exhibition argues. Indeed, the poverty associated with lone parenthood is exacerbated by the many thousands of fathers who fail to provide for their children.

“Only around one in three lone parents receives maintenance from their child’s other parent,” reads one display. The testimony of the now best-selling crime novelist Martina Cole provides an interesting insight into coping as a single mother.

“I remember being so hard up that I had to sell the tumble dryer in the middle of winter,” she remembers. Following her mother’s advice, she would post herself “£5 with a second-class stamp at the beginning of the week and, that way, I’d always have a fiver for the weekends.”

Insightful statistics are dotted around the walls, but, if anything, the exhibition is a little too soft. Where are the killer facts that would slay, once and for all, the pernicious myths that surround this issue?

For example, while it is a popular assumption that there has been an increase in lone mothers because they have access to relatively high rates of benefits, in their book Lone Parent Families, Karen Rowlingson and Stephen McKay explain that “the US has the highest level of lone parenthood in the Western world,” but “its level of social assistance is among the lowest.”

Sweden, on the other hand, “has the largest proportion of lone parents in paid work but the benefit replacement rate is also the highest.” They conclude that “this therefore contradicts a narrow rational economic model of behaviour that assumes people weigh up the financial costs and benefits of a particular course of action and then act accordingly.” Take that, John Redwood!

The two academics also question the supposedly “high rates of benefits” that single mothers can receive. “Numerous independent academic studies have been carried out into benefit levels and they all show that those levels are woefully inadequate to allow people to participate in society in any meaningful way.”

Furthermore, while it is often assumed that lone parenthood has detrimental effects on children, Rowlingson and McKay note: “The research that has been carried out suggests that, once poverty is taken into account, there is little, if any, independent effect of lone parenthood on outcomes for children.”
Again, Sinners/Scroungers/Saints fails to correct this popular misgiving about lone parent families.

Despite these criticisms, an hour or two spent here will provide visitors with an informative and balanced corrective to the often disgusting representation of lone parenthood in Britain’s gutter press.

As “Lone Mother, 2007” says, “Working mothers this, working mothers that. You’re either a benefits scrounger or you’re a man-hating career woman who neglects her children. And, actually, most of us are just trying to do the best we can.”

Sinners/Scroungers/Saints: Lone mothers, past and present runs until March 29. ian_js@hotmail.com.

The Fairford Five

Alex Doherty — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 13:22:10 +0000

“We are always shy about recognizing the historic worth of events when they take place before our eyes, about recognizing heroes when they are still flesh and blood and not yet transfixed in marble.” US historian Howard Zinn had black civil rights activists in mind when he wrote that, but his observation could equally apply to 58-year old Margaret Jones.

Just after 7:00 pm on March 13 2003, Jones and fellow activist Phil Milling snuck in to RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire with the intention of damaging support vehicles to American B-52 bombers. Aware the aircraft were about to attack Iraq, the pair acted to delay their take off to give Iraqis “the chance to get out of harm’s way before the bombing” says Jones, a retired American Studies Lecturer. They tried “to prevent war crimes – more concretely, to save life”, she adds.

“It was a beautiful moonlit night”, remembers Jones. “As you can imagine, it felt very tense – not so much with fear, as with anxiety about not getting caught before we’d achieved anything.”

Carrying bolt cutters, hammers and grinding paste to put into fuel tanks, they slipped in to the airfield’s bomb compound and cut the brake pipes on “several dozen” trolleys used to load the bombs on to the B-52s. Committed to non-violent protest Jones and Milling left warning notices to say the vehicles had been tampered with so nobody would have an accident. They then used the bolt cutters to gain access to the main airfield and proceeded to smash the windscreens and dashboards of three fuel tankers.

It was at this point they were discovered by an American serviceman and hauled off to Stroud police station. In the morning a magistrate ordered the two Trident Ploughshare activists to be remanded in custody and Jones spent a week in Holloway prison before being granted bail. For carrying out the action they faced up to 10 years in jail, on charges of conspiring to cause criminal damage to property.

Did Jones feel they achieved what they set out to do? “We certainly damaged the vehicles quite thoroughly!” However, she believes they conducted the action a week too soon. “We certainly made the technicians do some lengthy repairs – but I doubt whether we really created any delay, or gave anyone time to flee Baghdad.”

Between Jones and Milling’s action and the start of the war three other activists were also arrested trying to enter the airbase – Phil Pritchard, Toby Olditch and Josh Richards. All are now life-long members of what has been dubbed the ‘Fairford Five’.

Since then the group has been involved in three years of legal proceeding described as “a marathon” by Jones. After a series of pre-trial hearings, they made appeals that went all the way to the House of Lords.

“We were seeking the right to say in our defence that we were resisting an illegal war”, explains Jones. In the end the Law Lords ruled that the legality of the war could only be tested by the International Criminal Court, not by a British court. Nevertheless, in an unprecedented ruling, the Law Lords allowed the “secondary effects” of the war to be discussed by the defence – war crimes such as carpet bombing, says Jones.

Although all three of the first ‘Fairford Five’ trials ended in hung juries, remarkably Pritchard, Olditch and Richards were all acquitted in their re-trials. In short, two 12 person juries accepted the activists’ defence that they were acting to prevent the US Air Force from committing war crimes. However, as these were jury verdicts in a crown court, the rulings did not set a legal precedent.

Before her own trial, Jones – a self-professed “green socialist” – was hopeful about the outcome of her case. “I have huge faith in the good sense of the average jury”, she commented, noting the Iraq war had “divided juries, the way its divided the nation.” Unfortunately, as Jones now knows “the jury system is a gamble.” After just three hours the jury found Jones and Milling guilty, with the latter receiving a conditional discharge and £250 court costs. Sentenced on August 2, the judge imposed a curfew order on Jones, confining her to her home from 7 pm to midnight, Tuesday to Saturdays, until January next year.

As she left court Jones was unrepentant, telling reporters “I’d like to see Tony Blair with a curfew and I’d like to see him in an international court because he’s the real criminal here.”

Solicitor Robbie Mason notes there were several important differences between the ‘Fairford Five’ cases. Jones and Milling acted over a week before the other three and actually succeeded in causing significant damage to support vehicles (allegedly $18,000 worth). The former made it “significantly harder” to argue there was an imminent danger “to life, limb and property”, while the latter actually made “it easier to establish ‘efficacy’ of preventative action in their case, rather than mere protest.”

According to Jones, her and Milling’s punishments differed because she had “roughly a dozen previous convictions for protest-related actions, including cutting through fences at military bases”.

Would she do it again if she had her time over? “I’d definitely do it again”, Jones states unequivocally. “The impending invasion was so clearly wrong – not only morally, but in international law. We felt so strongly we were acting to uphold the law.”

An edited version of this article appeared in the Morning Star. ian_js@hotmail.com.

Leon Rosselson - Impossible to Ignore

Alex Doherty — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 06:11:02 +0000

Throughout his 50-year musical career Leon Rosselson has been lauded by critics as one of England’s most talented songwriters. “His songs are fierce, funny, outraged, blasphemous, challenging and anarchic”, the Guardian has raved; “Some of the most literate and well-made topical songs now being written”, praised the New York Times. And from the Star: “Rosselson writes songs [that] have to be listened to because they aim to change opinions.”

However, this critical acclaim has not led to celebrity status or commercial success. So while Morrissey is surely miserable in his Los Angeles mansion and Paul McCartney lives in his £4 million London abode, 73-year old Rosselson resides in a modest house on a leafy suburban street within spitting distance of the new Wembley Stadium.

After welcoming me in to his front room, Rosselson explains that while he received lots of press in the 1960s, today he can’t get a review in any of the national papers (with the exception of the Daily Telegraph bizarrely). “It’s very market driven. If you are not in the market place it’s difficult to get media coverage.”

“I don’t think anybody writes songs quite the way I write songs“, he continues. “In a way they don’t fit into any known category – which is a bit of a problem from the marketing point of view”. Influenced by both the English folk revival and French songwriters like Jacques Brel and Georges Bressens, Rosselson’s wry, clever acoustic songs are certainly out of step with the mainstream, offering radical critiques of, among other things, our ‘free’ press, the English class system, the institution of marriage and UK foreign policy.

Unlike, poetry or novels, Rosselson – who has also published over twenty children’s books – laments that songs are not “given serious consideration as an art form.” However, he believes “the craftsmanship and the technique involved in writing songs are as complex, difficult and challenging as any other art form.”

Of the more than 300 satirical, topical and political songs Rosselson has written, two will surely outlive him and be sung for generations to come.

Popularised in the 1980s by Billy Bragg and folkie Dick Gaughan, World Turned Upside Down is a rousing anthem about the seventeenth century proto-socialist Digger movement, who believed, as the song says, “no man has any right to buy and sell the earth for private gain”. Led by Gerald Winstanley – whose writings the song is based upon – the Diggers believed the earth should be a “common treasury for all” and proceeded to dig up the common land on St Georges Hill in Surrey to provide for everyone. Not surprisingly the powers that be quickly nipped the nascent revolt in the bud, dispatching soldiers to destroy the Digger’s encampment. “In a way it’s the most simple song I’ve written.” says Rosselson, noting the song has been sung by “anti-road protestors, in America it’s sung by anti-logging campaigns, and in Australia the land-rights for Aborigines campaigns.”

More controversial is the Christian-baiting Stand Up For Judas, which Rosselson says he wrote because he was “getting tired of Christian hymns.” He conducted a considerable amount of research for the song, reading Hyam Maccoby‘s influential book Revolution in Judea and re-reading the New Testament. “What I did was put the gospel Jesus in to his historical time. The gospel Jesus is not a historical figure. It’s a creation of the gospel writers who were writing 40-70 years after he was supposedly crucified. They are very contradictory stories.” Although Judas is the song’s hero, Rosselson is quick to point out “the message of the song is you shouldn’t follow any heroes really”.

While Rosselson describes his upbringing as close to the Communist Party – “we always read the Daily Worker” – today he describes himself as “libertarian left”. Never “a joiner of organisations” he is currently involved with CND and the Israel-Palestine conflict, through organisations such as Independent Jewish Voices and Jewish Socialists.

“I’m opposed to a Jewish state”, he says. “I think the whole idea of a Jewish state is very suspect – is basically racist. Because if you are not Jewish in a Jewish state then you are not a full citizen.” Having lived in Israel for a year and visited the West Bank recently he is pessimistic about a resolution. “I don’t see a two state solution as feasible and I don’t see a one state solution as being acceptable at this time. Perhaps in the next generation.” The problem is “the only country that could bring about a resolution is the United States, but they are totally committed to backing Israel.” How does he feel about Tony Blair’s appointment as a Middle East peace envoy? “It’s ridiculous”, he replies, comparing it to Henry Kissinger receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. For Rosselson the ex-Prime Minister is “a fantasist and a liar and a war criminal.”

Returning to his career, Rosselson says he is working on a new album which he expects to release early next year. Does he ever wish his music was more popular? “I don’t think it is ‘popular’ I want to be. I think I would like a bit more recognition, because I think songs are generally not valued for their creativity or imagination, they are valued for their saleability. Songs are those things you hear on the radio while you are doing something else.”

While Rosselson’s new album is unlikely to be heard on the radio, you can be sure it will be full of what he calls “adult, literate, intelligent songs” that you won’t be able to ignore.

Leon Rosselson is touring in October. Visit http://www.leonrosselson.co.uk for more details.

Helmand: The Soldiers' Story

Alex Doherty — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 14:02:02 +0000

Helmand: The Soldiers’ Story National Army Museum, London SW3

While the majority of exhibitions at military museums date back to World War II and before, Helmand: The Soldiers’ Story may be the first to actually record an ongoing deployment.

Just how hot a topic Afghanistan is at the moment was underlined on the day that I visited the National Army Museum, with the commander of British forces in Helmand telling the Observer that he believed troops would still be there in 10 years time.

The report also mentioned that, despite ex-defence secretary John Reid’s claim that operations might be conducted without firing a single bullet, 650 soldiers from the First Battalion of the Royal Anglians had fired an incredible 480,100 rounds since April.
“This exhibition is written about, and by, soldiers,” the visitor is told as they enter the exhibition space. “Their wish is not to upset you, but to show you.”

Using soldiers’ oral testimony, film footage, photographs, mock-ups of living quarters and examples of equipment used on the battlefield, the exhibition tells the story of the 2006 British Airborne troop deployment to Helmand province, Afghanistan, an area half the size of Britain with a total population the same as Cambridgeshire.

Beside a looping video showing the 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre, the exhibition’s “objective” written commentary explains that the overall aim of the invasion was to “encourage a peaceful and democratic Afghanistan.”

Stationed in towns such as Now Zad, Sangin and the state capital Lashkar Gah, the troops were involved in some of the fiercest fighting that British forces had seen since the Korean war.

On top of this, they were working in one of the most inhospitable environments on earth, with temperatures as low as minus 15 degrees centigrade in the winter and over 45 degrees in the summer.

The problem is, like other recent investigations into British foreign policy – think the Hutton Report or Channel Four’s Iraq Commission – the exhibition has a very limited remit.

So, while it gives an interesting insight into British soldiers’ experiences in what they renamed “Hell Land,” it ignores anything that contradicts its overall message of benign intervention.

Where is any mention of the 2-3000 Afghan civilians who died in air strikes last year, according to the international policy think tank the Senlis Council?
For example, in one single incident in June, 25 civilians, including three children, were killed in an air strike called in by British soldiers, according to the Times newspaper.

The exhibition, of course, is littered with the usual grumbles made by squaddies on tour, but surely some soldiers have more serious concerns about the operation than the state of the toilets? And, if you are looking for testimony from Afghans themselves, forget about it.

Nevertheless, sharp-eyed visitors can still discover valuable information. On one look-out post, soldiers had noted 79 confirmed kills, four 2,000lb bombs and seven 500lb or 10,00lb bombs dropped.

Elsewhere, there is an example of a cross-shaped Mousehole charge used to “blast holes into the walls of houses or compounds,” a tactic also used by Israeli forces against Palestinians and by US forces in Iraq.

Further along on one wall, the reality of what the British army is actually paid to do is made plain. “So we let rip with the four 50-cal heavy guns. The force of the blast from those guns is so powerful it can rip off your arm without even hitting you. All that was left of those guys was a pink mist,” reports Capt M, from 3 Para.

So who are “those guys” that British soldiers are fighting in Afghanistan? “Anti Coalition Militia,” says one display, that is “those presenting a threat to UK troops in Helmand. These could be Taliban troops, al-Qaida, local warlords, drugs traffickers or press-ganged members of the local population.”

The idea that an Afghan might have a legitimate grievance and has willingly taken up arms against the occupying British forces is simply unthinkable to the creators of the exhibition.

Heavily advertised in Tube stations across London, it is difficult not to see Helmand: The Soldiers’ Story as, wittingly or unwittingly, part of the government propaganda effort to whip up support for the continuing British occupation, at a time when 53 per cent of the British public would like to see troops withdrawn “more or less immediately,” according to a recent YouGov opinion poll.

Helmand: The Soldiers’ Story runs until December 2008.

Send in the Clowns

jo — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 19:54:05 +0000

Barrister, mother, clown, activist, blogger, documentary film star, human rights observer,ambulance attendant – 32-year old Jo Wilding has quite a CV. She also has glowing references. Hans von Sponeck, former UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator for Iraq, praises her “enormous courage” and “deep sense of justice”, while John Pilger called her dispatches from Fallujah “the best and bravest eyewitness journalism”.

Over lunch in a Farringdon café, Wilding talks about witnessing first-hand what the Guardian called “our Guernica”.

Radicalised at university she was soon protesting the US-UK driven UN sanctions levied on Iraq between 1991 and 2003, which according to a 1999 UNICEF report had led to the death of over 500,000 Iraqi children. In 2001 Wilding made her first visit to Iraq – breaking the sanctions by taking items such as medical CD-ROMs in without an export licence. “I think Saddam probably made the most of it in terms of propaganda.”, she comments about the blockade. Her minders made sure she was shown the hospital wards with dying children in “but at the same time they were objectively there.” About the sanctions regime Wilding summarises: “I always think of it as someone experiencing domestic violence. You don’t lock them in the house with the person who is being violent towards them.”

As the war loomed in early 2003 Wilding decided to return to Iraq as part of a travelling circus. She began writing a blog, which she has since edited into her book Don’t Shoot the Clowns. “It’s a space for ordinary Iraqi people to tell their stories and experiences”, she writes in the introduction. Although Wilding emphasises she can’t speak for everyone, she believes the general consensus among the Iraqis she met before the invasion was “we want to get rid of Saddam but we don’t want the Americans to invade us for that to happen.”

In early April 2004 Wilding heard about the US military’s aerial and ground assault on Fallujah and the dire humanitarian situation that was developing there. Adhering to her activist motto “If not me, then who?” Wilding – along with her friend and documentary filmmaker Julia Guest – travelled to the city to help distribute medical supplies to the local population.

“The mainstream media just weren’t there”, says Wilding. “To an extent you can understand they don’t want to risk people’s lives, but the cost of that is people not having the truth of what is going on there.”

In spite of this news blackout, we know – partly through Wilding’s own reporting – that US forces committed massive human rights abuses in Fallujah in April 2004 (and later during the second assault on the city in November). According to the academic Jonathan Holmes, whose play Fallujah has just ended, the US armed forces contravened 70 individual articles of
the Geneva Conventions – including cutting off the city’s water and power supply, targeting hospitals, refusing entry to aid agencies and sending unarmed military aged men back in to the war zone.

Wilding notes it wasn’t just men who were barred from leaving the city. “We were having people coming in to the clinic who had been shot trying to leave and it was women and children.” She believes the US military treated Fallujah – a city the size of Edinburgh – as a free-fire zone, with American soldiers even shooting at the ambulance she was travelling in to pick up the dead and injured. In another incident Wilding saw an old man who had been shot dead outside his house. “He wasn’t armed. And the people in the house wouldn’t come out until we were there and then the sons came out saying ‘he was unarmed and had just gone out to get the car’.” Shockingly she mentions two separate reports she heard of US soldiers slitting the throats of injured Iraqis. “They would have known they were going to get away with it because no one was going to a) see them b)stop them or c) punish them for it afterwards.”

What angers Wilding the most is that the atrocities that happened in Fallujah have occurred all over Iraq – in Ramadi, Hit, Tal Afar etc. “And it is still happening. Massive numbers of casualties. There has to be. If you are dropping bombs on a city from above you are going to kill people.”

Having experienced first hand how the US war machine reigns death and destruction down upon the powerless, Wilding is not afraid to highlight the big picture: “The war is just the inevitable consequence of the market capitalism we live in.” Currently juggling bringing up a toddler with practicing as a Barrister, Wilding is in the initial stages of setting up a housing co-op. “We are spending our entire income on rent because of the way the housing market operates. Everybody needs a roof over their heads and the way out of that particular crisis is housing co-ops, undermining the housing market by collective action.” Returning to Iraq, I ask Wilding if she is hopeful of a change in policy when the Prime Minister steps down? “I don’t think it makes any difference. It won’t make any difference if the Tories come back in.” Not taking her eye off the real issue she adds, “it doesn’t make any difference to the Iraqi people under the bombs whether it is done by Tony Blair or Gordon Brown.”

Don’t Shoot the Clowns is published by New Internationalist, priced £8.99.

An edited version of this article recently appeared in the Morning Star.

The Two Nations

Alex Doherty — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:38:00 +0000

Recently, taking advantage of the summer weather, I spent a lazy Sunday on Hampstead Heath. As I made the short walk from my home in Archway to the park it became increasingly clear to me there was defacto segregation in effect in north London; that it was possible for people to live in very close proximity to each other, but to live completely separate lives – working, shopping and socialising in two different worlds.

Of course I am talking about social class – which has become a dirty word under New Labour. Inequalities of gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation are currently ‘in’, while talking about class gets you labelled a dinosaur. However, social class is still a central concept in understanding society today, with numerous studies showing how the class a person is born into influences many aspects of their lives, and directly affects a person’s life chances. But what does it mean to be on the wrong side of this class divide?

Poverty is seriously damaging to your health. Studies overwhelmingly show that for most health conditions, those with lower incomes have it much worse than those who are rich. Respiratory diseases, coronary heart disease, lung cancer, strokes, tooth decay and suicide are all more prevalent among the poor. Fat is also a class issue. Recent figures from the Department of Health show that the rate of obesity for girls in the most well-off quintile was 4.5 per cent, doubling to 8.8 per cent in the most deprived quintile. One of the reasons for this disparity might be nutritional. The Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) notes “the poorer you are the worse your diet”, with surveys consistently showing poorer families tend to consume less fruit and vegetables, and more fats and sugars.[i]

According to Office for National Statistics figures the life expectancy gap between the richest and poorest parts of the country is at an all-time high. Women living in Kensington and Chelsea can expect, on average, to live 12 years longer than their counterparts in Glasgow City, while men born in Glasgow City face a worse life expectancy level than developing nations such as Algeria or Vietnam.[ii]

Children from poorer families tend to do less well at school than those who are richer, with less staying on after GCSEs.[iii] Indeed, the attainment gap tends to widen as children progress through the education system.[iv] Those children from poor families that do make it to university can expect more debt than other students, and by taking part-time jobs to ward off this debt, tend to depress their final degree mark.[v]

Oblivious to all the evidence I have just presented, recent research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation about attitudes to poverty found “the public are largely unaware or in denial of its existence.”[vi] When poverty was admitted many put it down to “bad choices and wrong priorities”, “laziness or lack of will power”.[vii]

These individualistic explanations mirror what many of the privileged say about poverty: “Yes life is unfair, but if you work hard, you can make it”. This meritocratic myth is a convenient justification for gross social inequality. However, as well as being an insult to the millions of people who work tremendously hard just to survive, this argument is becoming increasingly dated. Over the past twenty years, social mobility has ground to a halt, with the gap between rich and poor actually widening. Today, a middle-class child is 15 times more likely to stay middle-class than a working-class child is likely to move up into the middle-class. “By 18 or 20 your life is largely mapped out for you”, argues Danny Dorling, Professor of Human Geography at University of Sheffield. “You’ll either have interesting jobs where you use your mind your whole life or your life will be working in a servile occupation.”[viii]

The system works by exploiting the many to create wealth for the few, not by rewarding hard work in and for itself. Interestingly, it is the countries with the least amount of social mobility (the US and UK) that have the strongest myths about working your way to the top. A coincidence? I think not. However, there are nations that do have a far greater amount of movement between the classes (and importantly, far less poverty) than Britain – Sweden for example.

Although New Labour has made some progress in reducing child poverty, the recent news that the number of children living in poverty actually rose by 200,000 in 2005/6 demonstrates the Government is not doing enough to achieve its publicly-stated aim of halving child poverty by 2010.[ix] “Reducing child poverty will require much more investment and a broader strategy”, says CPAG’s Chief Executive Kate Green. “It’s time address the structural causes, including Britain’s dependence on poverty-pay jobs and the high levels of inequality… It will need an extra £4 billion annual investment.”[x]

Confined by the straightjacket of neo-liberalism and happy to bank roll imperialist wars and Trident replacement, it is unlikely Gordon Brown is going to significantly reduce poverty further.

*An edited version of this article recently appeared in the Morning Star. ian_js@hotmail

[i] Elizabeth Dowler, Sheila Turner and Barbara Dobson, Poverty bites: food, health and poor families, (London: Child Poverty Action Group, 2001).

[ii] Edmund Conway, ‘Where to live if you want a healthy old age’, Telegraph, 25 November 2006, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/22/nhealth2….

[iii] Malcolm Dean, ‘Social mobility is still an unequal struggle’, Guardian (Society), 3 May 2006, http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/comment/story/0,,1765869,00.html.

[iv] Jo Blanden and Sandra McNally, ‘Mind the gap: child poverty and educational attainment’, Poverty. Journal of the Child Poverty Action Group, Issue 123, Winter 2006, p. 11.

[v] John Crace, ‘Students set sail on choppy waters’, Guardian (Education), 19 September 2006, http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,1875318,00.html.

[vi] Sarah Castell and Julian Thompson, Understanding attitudes to poverty in the UK. Getting the public’s attention, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2007, p. 7, http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/eBooks/2000-poverty-attitudes-uk.pdf.

[vii] Alison Park, Miranda Phillips and Chloe Robinson, Attitudes to poverty. Findings from the British Social Attitudes survey, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2007, p. 3, http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/eBooks/1999-poverty-attitudes-survey.pdf.

[viii] Mary O’Hara, ‘Vital statistics’, Guardian (Society), 8 February 2006, http://society.guardian.co.uk/interview/story/0,,1704223,00.html .

[ix] Ashley Seager, ‘Blow for Brown as poverty figures increase after years of decline’, Guardian, 28 March 2007, http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialexclusion/story/0,,2044236,00.html.

[x] ‘CPAG press release: Complacent strategy risks not working for children as child poverty rises’, Child Poverty Action Group, 27 March 2007, http://www.cpag.org.uk/press/270307.htm.

The BBC - A Liberal Sacred Cow

jeppe — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 22:21:33 +0000

In contemporary Britain the ideology of liberal democracy reigns supreme. This encompasses many liberal myths such as a basic belief in the neutrality of the state, in the benign nature of government and a pluralistic view of the distribution of power in society. However, there is no bigger liberal sacred cow than the BBC.

While laughing at the American news media, many people, including many on the left, reverentially hold the BBC up as a shining light of independence and integrity in the dirty world of journalism. If the American news is subservient, bombastic and partisan the BBC must be questioning, balanced and neutral, right?

In reality the BBC has a long history of support for, and subservience to, state power, starting almost from its own inception with Lord Reiths collusion with the Government during the 1926 General Strike.

Taking the invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq as an example, we can see little has changed.

Greg Dyke, Reiths successor at the time, wrote to Tony Blair in March 2003 to defend the BBC from government criticism. Dyke argued in its defence that he had set up a committee which…. insisted that we had to find a balanced audience for programmes like Question Time at a time when it was very hard to find supporters of the war willing to come on. The same committee, when faced with a massive bias against the war among phone-in callers, decided to increase the number of phone lines so that pro-war listeners had a better chance of getting through. All this, wrote Dyke, was done in an attempt to ensure our coverage was balanced¹. Dyke then admits to deliberately manipulating audiences and phone-ins to create an impression of balance that in reality never existed. This truly is Alice in Wonderland stuff.

More recently, the internet media watchdog Media Lens challenged the BBC to justify its claim that British and American forces “came to Iraq in the first place to bring democracy and human rights”. Clearly unaware of Eduardo Galeanos dictum that in general, the words uttered by power are not meant to express its actions, but to disguise them², Helen Boaden, the BBCs Director of News, replied that this analysis of the underlying motivation of the coalition is borne out by many speeches and remarks made by both Mr Bush and Mr Blair³. Presumably, had Boaden been working as a journalist in Germany in 1939, she would have taken at face value Adolf Hitlers justification for invading Czechoslovakia: “We have no interest in oppressing other people. We are not moved by hatred against any other nation The Czech maintenance of a tremendous military arsenal can only be regarded as a focus of danger. We have displayed a truly unexampled patience, but I am no longer willing to remain inactive while this madman ill-treats millions of human beings⁴.”

Inspired by Media Lens I wrote to my local BBC television news after a story referred to British troops on leave from peacekeeping duties in Iraq. I noted this was a very odd way to describe an occupation of another nation, after an illegal (as explained by the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan) war of aggression Were German troops on peacekeeping duties in France between 1940 and 1944? The Editor of BBC Look East replied, “We called the forces ‘peacekeeping forces’ because that is their official title, bestowed on them by our elected government⁵.”

Am I the only person who is horrified by the fact a person can reach the upper echelons of this agenda-setting organisation with so little intellectual independence? Alas, this naïve, herd-like mentality is all too common among the Corporations journalists and is broadly confirmed by two studies concerning television news coverage of Iraq.

A 2003 study carried out by Cardiff Universitys School of Journalism regarding the way the four main UK broadcasters reported the invasion of Iraq concluded, “The BBC emerges as generally more respectful and sympathetic towards the government than other broadcasters⁶.” 11% of the sources quoted by the BBC were of coalition government or military origin, the highest proportion of all the main television broadcasters. Furthermore the BBC was least likely to use independent sources such as the Red Cross, to focus on Iraqi casualties and to report Iraqi unhappiness about the invasion⁷.

A second survey conducted by Media Tenor for Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper found that, of broadcasters in five countries, the BBC featured the lowest level of dissent of all, even lower than ABC news in the United States⁸.

The stakes could not be higher. The journalist George Monbiot noted, “The falsehoods reproduced by the media before the invasion of Iraq were massive and consequential: it is hard to see how Britain could have gone to war if the press had done its job⁹.” BBC journalists, for the most part sitting in comfortable offices in Britain, need to realise people – about 655,000 Iraqi people according to the Lancet medical journal – pay with their lives for the poor quality of the journalism they practice.

In May 2004 the New York Times and the Washington Post both printed belated apologies for their coverage of the build up to the Iraq war, with the former noting “we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been… Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged – or failed to emerge¹⁰.”

Perhaps, with all the evidence collected above, it is time the BBC did the same?

This article originally appeared in the Morning Star

¹ Dykes letter to Blair, BBC News, 1 February 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3448797.stm

² Eduardo Galeano, The Machine, Znet, 27 April 2002, www.zmag.org/content/TerrorWar/galeano-machine.cfm

³ Bambi journalism – the art of professional naivety, Media Lens, 9 January 2006, www.medialens.org/alerts/06/060109_bambi_journalism.php

⁴ Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Monitor, April 2003 www.swt.org/share/ancientciv.htm)

⁵ Email to author, 23 December 2004, www.medialens.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1111

⁶ Was the BBC really biased against the war?, www.cardiff.ac.uk/newsevents.5309.html

⁷ Matt Wells, Study deals a blow to claims of anti-war bias in BBC news, Guardian (Media), 4 July 2003, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,4705454-110779,00.html

⁸ David Miller, The anti-war movement accuses the BBC of having had a pro war bias; the government says it was too Baghdad friendly. So who is right?, Guardian, 22 April 2003, www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,4652312-103674,00.html

⁹ George Monbiot, ‘Our lies led us into war’, Guardian, 20 July 2004, www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1264809,00.html

¹⁰ ‘From the editors’, New York Times, 26 May 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/international/middleeast/26FTE_NOTE.ht…. ‘Leading US daily admits underplaying stories critical of White House push for Iraq war’, Common Dreams, 12 August 2004, www.commondreams.org

Media Lens Interview

jeppe — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 18:44:54 +0000

In 2001 David Cromwell and David Edwards set up the internet-based media watchdog Media Lens, having become increasingly frustrated by the “unwillingness, or inability, of the mainstream media to tell the truth about the real causes and extent of many of the problems in the world.”

Today Media Lens sends regular ‘Media Alerts’ to over 6500 subscribers around the world which provide rapid and detailed analysis of news reports in the British liberal media and encourage readers to challenge journalists and engage them in debate.

In January the first Media Lens book was published. Now in its second print run, John Pilger said Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media was “the most important book about journalism I can remember” and “ought to be required reading in every media college.”

The Star talked to one of the co-editors, David Edwards, about the Media Lens project.

1. At a recent Media Workers Against the War meeting the Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown said she was “proud” of the British media’s reporting of Iraq and the ‘war on terror’. Does Media Lens share Alibhai-Brown’s feelings?

Assuming the quote is accurate and the comment was not intended ironically, we must assume, then, that Alibhai-Brown is “proud” of the British media’s very real complicity in the killing of upwards of one and a half million people in Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War.

As we have reported in great detail, the role of the media has been to facilitate US-UK government violence by boosting its deceptions while suppressing the catastrophic consequences for the Iraqi people. Reviewing British media performance in the Guardian in 2004, George Monbiot wrote that “the falsehoods reproduced by the media before the invasion of Iraq were massive and consequential: it is hard to see how Britain could have gone to war if the press had done its job”. (Monbiot, ‘Our lies led us into war’, The Guardian, July 20, 2004)

Monbiot omitted to mention that his own employer, the Guardian, played a leading role in reproducing these falsehoods and in so making war possible.

The devastating consequences of the 1991 war on Iraq were suppressed by the media. The consequences of the 1990-2003 sanctions – with one million Iraqi civilians including 500,000 children under 5 killed – were suppressed. The clear illegality of the 2003 invasion and the consequences for the civilian population were suppressed. Aid agencies reported in 2003 that basic surgery in Basra, under British control, was being performed without anaesthetics as health services collapsed – the reports were simply ignored. The suffering has been reported so rarely and so dishonestly that the 2004 Lancet estimate of 100,000 excess deaths and the October 2006 Lancet report of 655,000 excess deaths have stunned both journalists and public – but not to the Iraqi public and the Iraqi Red Crescent who find them eminently plausible.

The grand lie that Saddam Hussein offered some kind of threat to the world’s premier nuclear powers was endlessly boosted by the media – verifiable claims by senior UN weapons inspectors that Iraq had been “fundamentally disarmed” of 90-95% of its WMD as long ago as December 1998 were simply dismissed. Expert claims that any retained WMD would by 2003 have anyway been “harmless sludge” were similarly rejected. Journalists cannot claim ignorance – hundreds of our readers have sent them thousands of cogent, accurate emails over the past five years on these issues. The suppression of truth has been consistent, ongoing – and not just on Iraq, on all the horrors for which the West has been responsible in the Third World. The same pattern is repeated in coverage of Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela, East Timor, Indonesia, Kosovo, Afghanistan – wherever one chooses to look. But we would not necessarily expect a highly-paid component of the corporate propaganda system to recognise any of this. The American novelist Upton Sinclair explained a phenomenon we have encountered endlessly:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

The same applies, of course, to women.

2. What effect, if any, has Media Lens had on the mainstream news media?

It’s very difficult to evaluate. Anecdotally we hear from media insiders (there are a surprising number who strongly, if covertly, support what we’re doing) that we are a “rallying point for dissent” in organisations like the BBC and the Observer. It seems clear that we’ve encouraged a greater level of scepticism in some people about media performance, and we believe many more people are challenging journalists directly now. Our primary concern is to continue doing what we’re doing out of a compassionate motivation, rather than concern ourselves overly with what people think of us.

3. Although you have said “it is quite reasonable to draw attention to an important problem without offering a solution” do you see a way we can have a well funded news media capable of daily, indepth, international coverage without corporate ownership or advertising?

An embryonic version of this appears daily on websites like ZNet, Democracy Now!, OhMyNews, and our own website. There is also the trail-blazing example of the NewStandard website in the US, which is subscriber funded. Large numbers of intelligent, honest and compassionate people are now providing in depth analysis of international issues on a daily basis, often in their own time entirely free of charge. It’s inspirational, growing, and sure to have a very real impact on mainstream politics as it increases in strength and outreach. We think the vast, global anti-war marches ahead of the Iraq war in 2003, were early signs of the impact of this online community.

4. A survey this week by Ipsos MORI found journalists were the least trusted profession, but everyday approximately 3.4 million people buy The Sun. What does Media Lens take away from these seemingly contradictory findings?

We doubt Sun readers are much concerned with the paper’s honesty – they’re looking for entertainment, gossip, sports coverage and titillation. The more serious question is why people continue looking to newspapers like the Guardian and Independent, and to media like the BBC and Channel 4, for honest reporting. The answer, ironically, lies in the uniform conformity and lack of honesty of these media. Because they all accept essentially the same propaganda framework of domestic and foreign politics – including the same unsustainable premise that our government has benign motives – it is still comparatively difficult for readers and viewers to find more honest opinion that contradicts this framework. It takes a very independent mind to assert a different view in the face of this apparently well-informed consensus. But as the influence of internet-based media rooted in compassion for suffering rather than greed for profit grows it will be much harder for the corporate media to deceive large numbers of people. The implications of this for progressive change can hardly be over-emphasised.

5. Media coverage of domestic issues such as crime, youth, industrial relations and gender inequality are absent from your Media Alerts. Why?

We have written often on domestic issues – party politics, elections, immigration, climate change and so on. But we do tend to focus more on international issues. The main reason is that our aim is not to provide a news service, but to expose the structural corruption of the corporate media. As discussed above, the strict conformity of the mainstream creates a very powerful impression of an apparently well-informed, rational consensus.

The impression given is that it is not that thought is controlled but that everyone simply agrees on obviously common sense assumptions about the world. We focus on high profile issues covered, for example by the BBC, Guardian and Independent, and contrast their version of events with alternative versions supported by credible, expert opinion. Credible dissident views of this kind are much more readily available and easily accessible on international issues – the subject of investigation and discussion by far more diverse media, activists and specialised interests.

It is often difficult for us to quickly and easily access honest, dissenting views on domestic issues. But when we do – for example Peter Goldings’ excellent work exposing the extremely limited range of issues discussed ahead of British general elections – then we are very happy to cover them.

6. What are your plans for Media Lens in the future?

Next year, for the first time, our co-editor, David Cromwell, will be able to commit himself part-time to the project – this represents a major increase in resources for us. We are drawing up plans for a follow up to this year’s book, Guardians Of Power – provisional title: Media Insurrection. Several groups based on the Media Lens project in Norway (www.medialupe.org), Ireland and India are currently operational or about to become so. We’re keen to do what we can to assist these and other efforts. We also hope to continue increasing the amount and quality of our analysis.

David Edwards and David Cromwell, November 8, 2006

An edited version of this interview originally appeared in the Morning Star