Eat All You Can

Food prices are rising across the world. Un-noticed in many northern hemisphere countries, 2010 has so far globally been the warmest on record and the prolonged drought in Russia especially has led the US Department of Agriculture to predict a 5.5% reduction in wheat production this year alone. At 642 million tonnes, it will fall around 25 million tonnes short of consumption, depressing grain reserves globally by just under 10%. These statistics of course mask the vast inequalities in global food distribution - western consumers will have to pay a little more for their breakfasts, but many in the poorest nations will go hungry, unable to afford the grains produced in the fields around them. Instead the food will be exported to rich nations by the supermarkets and multinationals, many of which have bought up vast tracts of agricultural land in the Third World. Britain imports nearly 40% of its food - much of it from poorer countries where the same people who harvest our pineapples and grains cannot afford the items they farm for us.


From http://www.farmlandgrab.org/

 This forecast has been preceded by widespread speculation on the world markets in buying food futures in anticipation of scarcities making the food industry more profitable. Ultimately, although millions may starve in poorer countries, lower food supply equals higher profits for the same investment, an attractive proposition for our commodity traders.

The futures trade in food has been growing apace. Just as other sectors of the financial markets have been facing a squeeze following the banking crisis and the global recession, the rising cost of food has offered a lifeline to the stockbroking fraternity. This is a trend likely to continue as a combination of population growth, global warming and resource scarcity make the historically low cost of food enjoyed by western countries over the last few decades a thing of the past.

But of course, with the Common Agricultural Policy keeping prices artificially low in Europe and supermarkets maintaining a stranglehold on both domestic and international production of food, western consumers are insulated from all this, for a time at any rate. In the UK, just 4 large supermarkets - Tesco, Asda (Walmart), Morrisons, and Sainsburys supply three quarters of Britain's food. With government rules on monopolies set aside for this sector, they are frequently accused of abuse of suppliers - the milk industry in particular complains about prices set below the cost of production, while smaller local shops are routinely undercut and put out of business by predatory marketing. For now, this conspires to provide consumers with food which, in real terms, is pretty much the cheapest it has ever been.

Although the current projections are that there will be a rise in overall food prices in the UK of 4% during the coming winter, this is trifling compared to the real cost of food around the world, in financial, human and environmental terms. And it is as nothing to the projected crisis of rising demand outpacing supply over the next two decades - the World Bank, for example, estimates an 85% rise in demand for meat and dairy products by 2030; while at the same time, the supply of phosphorus, a vital mineral in modern agriculture, is likely to become increasingly scarce. The rising price of oil, again a vital in both the production and transportation of food, will further hit the cost of food to the extent that consumers across the world will be affected, and of course those on lower incomes will suffer by far the worst.

For example, while Americans spend on average slightly less than 10% of their incomes on food, the average for people in middle income countries like Ukraine or Syria is 35%, while in poor states it is much more, around 55% A study in 2006 found that the average Tanzanian has to spend 71% of their income to purchase a diet of slightly less than 2,000 kcals per day compared to the gut-busting US average of over 3,750kcals (Britain comes in at 3,450 - nearly 1,000 more than the recommended amount for a man). It is plain to see who will be hardest hit, at least initially, in the scarcities ahead.

A bit of fun or an insult to humanity? - the 105lb burger

But it is a fool who thinks that western society will be able to insulate itself. Morally wrong, and utterly delusional, is any argument that the current state of affairs can continue for much longer. The truth is that many world systems of food and water supply are nearing exhaustion. For now, supermarkets like Sainsburys are able to provide supposedly ethically produced, environmentally friendly organic fruit and vegetables to their customers by buying up precious agricultural land in the Caribbean. Following the spike in food prices in 2008, many western food producers or their proxies, including rich states like Saudi Arabia, began to purchase land in Africa and South America in an attempt to guarantee their own food supplies.

Yet do we seriously think that this "global land grab" can continue? Will people in the host countries obligingly starve in order to respect foreign landowners property rights? Or will we end up with military intervention to guard our food supplies in a similar way to the intervention in Iraq for oil or Afghanistan for lithium?

In a world of plenty, one billion people
go to bed hungry each night.

And behind all this, the global food industry rips off producers and consumers alike, destroying small scale agriculture to create destructive behemoths like the 8,000 cow dairy unit, and crushing small, local food suppliers. They flood the market with cheap, addictive and unhealthy food, destroying individuals' self-esteem and damaging their health with calorific crap.

The existing systems of ownership, production and distribution are both unfair and inefficient - nearly a fifth of Britain's food is thrown away; water leaks out of pipes around the world to the tune of billions of gallons every day; one in five people go to bed hungry, while a similar number are substantially overweight with associated illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease at record levels.

This is what the average US family of four THROWS AWAY
 each month. source - NY Times

The world is at a crossroads. The banking crisis, the fuel crisis and the political crises associated with these will without any doubt be joined by other major and increasingly disruptive crises of supply over the coming decade - food, water and fuel, the staples of civilised life. One specialist, a former British government adviser, predicts a perfect storm by 2030  as global demand for food and energy jumps by 50% and for fresh water by 30%, as the population tops 8.3 billion.

The good news is that there is still time to do something about it: there are many alternatives to what we do now. Energy conservation, development of clean, renewable fuel sources such as solar and wave power, support for more local manufacturing and distribution of goods and services, the fostering of local food production especially small scale - even at the individual level of allotments - could start to make the difference. The Cuban example of learning to feed itself following the collapse of the Soviet bloc is one we should learn from. It has additionally done so using substantially organic production techniques - again a means to avoid the anticipated problem of scarcity of phosphates used in non-organic food production.

Trade needs massive reforms too, as does the international financial system - speculation in vital resources such as food supplies must end. We can no longer allow city traders the right to profit from the misery of the starving - it is a silent, invisible genocide, yet the men responsible are given bonuses rather than jail sentences.

The world that could emerge from such reforms would be safer, more sustainable and fairer by far than the one we have now. Our societies could be more at ease with themselves, more socially just, healthier and peaceful. It is a challenge, but it is infinitely more appealing than where we are headed now - to increasing scarcity and conflict over our dwindling supplies, and to the rapacious destruction of our habitat and perhaps ultimately ourselves.

The choice is ours.

Supermarkets - not always the bargain they seem to be...

"Why don't they start with the bankers?"

The British Government has announced its programme of cuts in public spending today. Carefully crafting a wide range of substantial reductions in spending so that the average cuts per Government department come in at 19% over four years rather than Labour's planned 20%, the Con Dems betray the essential unity of the three main parties around a monetarist, free market agenda. Their little school boyish prank may make waves in the Westminster Village, a bit like waving condoms about in a Prefects' Room, but the impact on a wide range of poor and vulnerable citizens will be even worse than feared, with £7 billions more than expected off disability payments - £50 per week taken from people on Incapacity Benefit for more than 12 months - and a 50% reduction in the social housing budget. At the same time, precisely nothing is done to tackle the massive tax evasion and corporate tax exemptions that plague Britain.

So amidst the gloom, it was good to see this video (below) of Green Party leader Caroline Lucas MP railing passionately against the cuts as socially damaging and economically illiterate - worsening the crisis of the deficit rather than tackling it. Clearly angered by the Chancellor's approach, she calls for action on investment in sustainable jobs and action against tax evasion. Government led spending on a range of activities such as improving public transport and developing renewable energy would pay dividends in a multiplicity of ways - generating jobs and tax revenue, cutting the deficit, reducing our dependence on foreign energy and cutting our carbon emissions.

This type of Keynesian economic theory,on which the "Green New Deal" is based, used to be the economic orthodoxy that worked for a coherent society. By contrast, Monetarist theory adopted by right wingers in the 1970s onwards changed that - placing economic objectives above social ones and seeking to reduce government involvement in the economy and socirty as a whole. As Nigel Lawson, Thatcher's Chancellor, explained on BBC Radio 4 last night, "I wasn't much bothered about damaging solidarity and social cohesion." All he was bothered about was creating space for tax cuts for the wealthy and a chance to flog off the national assets.

As the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats contemplate the biggest sale of public assets ever, as well as cutting deep into the welfare state, the Con Dem regime is emerging as one of the most avowedly ideological governments in British history, rolling back the shrinking public sector further than Mrs Thatcher ever dared imagine.

At least, hearing Caroline Lucas' speech, there is clearly a voice in Parliament showing that there IS an alternative to an agenda that turns citizens into numbers and shuts its eyes to real human suffering. Let's hope it keeps getting louder. And heard.

"Tolle divitem!" : why abolishing the rich would do us all a favour

"Mankind is divided into three classes - the rich, the poor, and those who have enough...Abolish the rich and you will have no more poor...for it is the few rich who are the cause of the many poor."

Radical words. An extract from Marx's "Das Kapital"? A trade union leader rallying their members against job losses? A motion passed by the last Green Party conference declaring its support for a maximum wage?

It could be any of the above, but in fact its none of them. The words were written by an author known as the "Sicilian Briton" in the first few years of the fifth century. As the Roman Empire was beset by barbarian invasions and usurper Emperors, the plebeian and slave classes began to agitate for a fairer share of the resources of the world's first superstate. While some openly rebelled and established their own states as the bacaudae, the western world's first social revolutionaries, others used parts of the newly established Christian church to demand change - the Sicilian Briton, a monk himself, was one of their spokespeople.

But what happened?

History tells us how the Roman State died, not with a bang but with a whimper - its once mighty body ebbing slowly over three generations or more before it simply faded from view and was lost to history. All through its long demise, its richest citizens clutched onto their possessions, hiding their wealth, claiming all manner of privileges (privi-legium: the law of the individual) to avoid paying taxes or contributing to the common cause. While demanding and receiving continued status as the Optimates, the "best citizens", they continuously connived to abrogate themselves of any obligation to serve their society. When Alaric the Goth stood with his army at the gates of Rome demanding gold to go away, the Senate refused him even although most of its members could have easily met the amount demanded from a modest portion of their own purse. While lamenting the darkness of their times, they willingly sacrificed their City to preserve their own wealth.

Yesterday Rome, tomorrow...?

I quote this passage from an obscure, 15 centuries old source for two reasons - one because of the old saying that if we do not learn from history we are bound to relive it; and second because the parallels between fifth century Rome and our modern world are so striking and relevant.

This week, in the UK, the Government is pledged to undertake massive spending cuts in public services. In spite of a few feints to fairness, the clear story is one of the unremitting gloom of an assault on education, welfare, transport and even aspects of the military. The reason is allegedly because of a national debt described by the Government as "record breaking" in peace time.

Except that this is far from true - indeed, it was higher than it is now every single year from 1916 until 1971. Its actual record high was in 1947, unsurprisingly just after the second world war, when it peaked at 238% of annual gross domestic product (GDP) - over four times its current level of 56%. However, that did not prevent the government in the following year launching the National Health Service. Nor did debt levels well in excess of 100% of GDP prevent the economic boom of the 1950s, with Tory Premier Macmillan boasting to a grateful electorate that "We've never had it so good!"

It was only with the Thatcherite revolution from 1979 onwards, with the Conservatives adopting the monetarist doctrine of American economist Milton Friedman (a doctrine taken up by Reagan's America as well) that it became the orthodoxy that low national debt was essential for prosperity, embraced even by pseudo-social democratic parties like New Labour and Clinton's Democrats. In Britain, public services were cut relentlessly and people thrown out of work until in 1991 national debt stood at just above 25% of GDP.

Parallel to this "tight money" policy, and the true reason for it then and now, Governments also reduced taxes for the better off, with more and more exemptions for the richest of all. Globally, off-shore tax havens have allowed an estimated $250,000,000,000 per annum of tax to be legally evaded by the very wealthiest. Britain is particularly culpable for this trend - 11 out of 40 havens identified by the OECD are British Overseas Territories; with the UK itself now an effective tax haven for "non-domestic" millionaires. Corporation tax is legally avoided by many large companies at a cost of nearly £7 billions per annum to the British Government - almost the same as the planned reduction in spending on social housing.

Even in the last recessionary year the wealth of the richest 100 people in the UK has risen by over 30% to over £355 billion. Internationally, as financial cuts bit hard across the planet, the Forbes Rich List found that 611 of the 1,011 billionaires on the Earth had increased their wealth - only 70 had seen an appreciable reduction. The richest man in the world - the ironically named Carlos Slim Herlu of Mexico weighed in with over £35.7 billion, his wealth greater than the annual GDP of over sixty nation states.

Of course, whichever country we live in, we are told we must indulge these people otherwise they might go somewhere else and we would lose their vital talents. Much better to waive their bill and hope they will stay, graciously permitting their wealth to trickle down to the rest of us in dibs and drabs. Meantime, the rest of us ingrates will need to accept increased taxes and massively reduced services to bailout these geniuses when their schemes collapse around them, as it is predicted will happen again with the British banks in 2011.

In spite of initiatives such as introducing national minimum wages these have not stopped the rise in inequality - one report found Britain to be the fourth most unequal society out of 25 affluent nations studied. Instead, in the absence of any cap on individual or corporate wealth, fantastic fortunes have been amassed by a tiny elite of super-rich people, whose lifestyles and power are ruining the lives of billions and relentlessly driving the planet to resource depletion and environmental disaster.

Professor Greg Philo of the Glasgow University Media Group has recently proposed a one-off tax on the richest 10% of Britons - taxing just 20% of their assets would raise over £800 billions. That would be enough to pay off the entire national debt and massively reduce the deficit. Unfair? Hardly, given that much of that wealth is unearned and in many cases will have been obtained by avoiding tax in the first place. Moreover, as the salaries (as well as the untaxed share options) of top executives have burgeoned to ridiculous levels in recent years, isn't it time to claw back some of that unfairly paid money?

In the years ahead, as our resources become scarcer and billions more mouths have to be fed, we need to share our wealth more equitably - between countries and within them as well. There is still enough to go round to feed and support people fairly and sustainably, but only if it is shared fairly. The capitalist system, with its focus on individuals seeking to maximise their material gain and a theoretical basis of limitless supply, is not fit for purpose for the challenges to come. Rather, left unchecked, it will simply hurry us over the precipice towards not only its own collapse, but of society and human civilisation itself. With a "perfect storm" of competing demands for food, water and fuel predicted to come as early as 2030, time is short.

We may be fifteen centuries late, but we are not too late. Not just yet. But we need a new, radical will and the sense to do us all a favour. Change the politics. As the Romans used to say: "Tolle divitem!" Abolish the rich!

Pay Up or Burn Up!

Two incidents today, separated by thousands of miles and the Atlantic Ocean, and on the face of it totally unconnected.

In Britain, Lord Browne, former CEO of the BP oil company, where he enjoyed a remuneration package of over £5 million per year latterly, delivered a report on funding support for students in Higher Education. In summary, he recommended a reduction in public support to students from £3.5 billion per annum to just £0.7 billion. On top of that, university fees will be uncapped and the average fee will need to at least double to £7,000 p.a. with some universities already indicating a likely charge of £10,000 p.a., and Oxbridge touting the idea of three times that amount. Given that the additional income earned by graduates is now estimated at around £100,000 in their entire working life, other than among those with wealthy and willing parents, or confident of high earning employment, University education will become simply unaffordable.

Vince Cable, the Business Secretary claimed this afternoon that the Browne proposals would be driven forward by economic necessity. This although the UK's national debt was almost double what it currently is back in the 1960s when the Robbins report advocated free, universal higher education.

In the United States, there was this bizarre and sad story - in rural, bible-belt, God-fearing Tennessee, firefighters stood and watched a house to burn to the ground because the homeowner hadn’t paid a $75 fee. Even when Gene Cranick pleaded with the 911 operator to let him pay the fee, they refused him, turning up only to protect neighbours who had coughed up previously.
 
Last year, when the health proposals put forward by President Obama in America were being characterised as "Nazi Communism" (!), I was one of 23,000 people who joined the ironically titled Facebook group "One Million Strong Against our SOCIALIST fire departments". Starting from the premise that universal public provision of a fire service for was taken as read by everyone, the group sought to show that extending such protection to health was eminently proportionate. A number of neoCons posted to criticise the group as ludicrous on the grounds that of course fire brigades are a public service! Not even they would argue against that - at that time.

History first recorded a fire service being established in ancient Rome around 90BC by Marcus Licinius Crassus. As the Eternal City grew in size as its empire burgeoned, it's cramped space, filled with wooden buildings, was repeatedly plagued by devastating fires. Crassus bought himself some 500 slaves and gave them the  reassuring brand name of the "Familia Publica" (The Public Family). When fires started, the FP rushed to the scene and immediately set about negotiating a fee with the property owner. If a deal was struck, they would put the fire out; if not, the buildings burned.

The Romans established the first
public fire service.

Eventually, the Emperor Augustus recognised that this set up was inefficient, abolished private fire brigades and in their place set up the "Vigiles urbani" (The City Watchmen), hundreds of public servants on permanent patrol, complete with pumps, ladders, buckets and a public water system ready to extinguish fires. With the exception of the devastating conflagration of 64AD, this worked well for five centuries until the collapse of the Empire. Nothing comparable was to emerge in Europe until the 19th century.

Now, the story from Tennessee is not one of privatisation - but fees are charged separately from other local taxes and this hypothecation extends to the provision of the service. If you want the service, you pay, regardless of the consequences of non-payment. It is, quite seriously, called "pay to spray". That is disturbing in itself - but even more disturbing is the willingness of firefighters and public officials to stand idly by while the Cranicks' house burned to the ground; and the enthusiasm of right wingers to subsequently praise their inaction. Although the $75 fee was not part of an insurance scheme, but a flat charge, they refused to let Mr Cranick pay on the spot - something that not even old Marcus Licinius Crassus would have done!

So what's the connection here between British students and a house-fire in Tennessee?

It is the decline in the concept of universal public services, provided to all citizens. Although in material terms both countries, even in these recessionary times, are richer than they were 30 years ago, services that were taken then as a given are in real jeopardy. From Thatcher and Reagan onwards, it has become an implicit assumption that the private sector is inherently more effective than the public. Motivated by profit, it is argued, people in the private field will deliver a better service. The notion that you might want to work in the public services because you want to deliver a decent service to the public without trying to maximise your return from their wallets is scornfully dismissed as the delusions of idealists or the excuses of lazy folk unable to hack it in the world of free market competition.

Is there any proof of this being anywhere near a correct approach to what society needs?

Never mind the poor Cranicks' torched home. What about those other collapsing houses - houses of cards like Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, Northern Rock and RBS, private companies whose unlimited pursuit of greed presaged the economic collapse that only record public spending prevented from turning into financial chaos?

Or the hundreds of millions of pounds ripped from the pockets of the British public by huge "service organisations" like Serco and Crapita, who have taken on government contracts in almost any sector you care to mention - schools, cleaning, construction, hospitals, railways - at utterly massive profit margins in return for pisspoor services? Or with the grossly misnamed "public-private partnerships" that have mortgaged public assets for decades into the future? Or the "regeneration" of Iraq, where billions of dollars of American and Iraqi citizens' money was sequestrated by a wide range of grasping private contractors?

Western politics are build on a dangerous lie.  Denying all the evidence of the recent disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, or the continuing devastation of the Indonesian rainforest - the "lungs of the world" - by private logging firms, or the successful lobbying by the nuclear industry in the UK for £1.7 billion a year of tax money to clean up its radioactive mess; we are told repeatedly that this is the best, indeed the only, way to do things. There is no alternative.

Really? Tell that to the young people in Britain now facing either decades of debt or lives denied the opportunities and fulfillment of higher education - things enjoyed in the past by the Cabinet of Millionaires who now say such luxuries can no longer be afforded.

And tell that to the Cranick family as they search the ruins of their destroyed home for the charred remains of their three dogs and cat.

The Curse of Bono

'Every time I clap, a child dies in Africa,' Bono intoned. 'So stop clapping,' yelled a voice. (Sunday Telegraph, 19 November 2006).

Ever since Live Aid back in the 1980s during the Ethiopian famine, there has been more and more involvement by celebrities in charity campaigns and non-party political campaigning, especially around third world issues and the green movement. Although it rises and falls in the "cool" ratings, the environment remains a favourite for many of these characters.

Yet their relationship with those genuinely engaged long term in their campaigns of choice is often, to say the least, uncomfortable and often counter-productive.

Bob Geldof, washed up on the far shores of has-been pop stardom, was an undoubted power in conceiving and driving Band Aid forward to what was a generally successful programme (though not without some qualification - but it is too easy to snipe sometimes). Band Aid and Live Aid saved lives and at least temporarily raised awareness of the issues around Third World poverty. That was the good side.

The down side was that it presented an easy solution.

"Never mind the address, just send the f***ing money!" Saint Bob urged BBC viewers at one stage of Live Aid. And many did, including myself. And that was both the success and the problem. It was nice and easy. A simple solution to a huge problem.

So when famine again raised its head in the Horn of Africa, some people talked about "where did the money go?". As appeal followed appeal for famines there and elsewhere, some talked of the phenomenon of "compassion fatigue". Helping your fellow humans has its limits, it seems, especially if it means thinking about more than tossing a few quid in a bucket at a pop concert.

In the last few years, Saint Bob has been far eclipsed by Bono, or Bono H. Christ, as some know him. Bono, lead singer with Irish rock group U2, is often to be seen lecturing audiences about how appalling the world is, how they all have to change, and then jets off in his plane to the next harangue, sorry, concert.

Not only have Bono and his mates in the band gone offshore to avoid paying their taxes, his "save the planet" concerts come at a high price to poor old Mother Earth - last year's tour produced enough carbon to have sent the boys all the way to Mars (unfortunately on a return-journey!). One reviewer did suggest all this damage was worth the "spiritual uplift" to be had a U2 gathering, perhaps adding to Bono's evidently messianic worldview, but maybe of little comfort to unbelievers.

The curse of celebrities' adoption of just causes goes beyond the hypocrisy and fakery of their narcissistic self-promotion. With many political leaders, Blair being the most obvious, slipping away from ideological politics into the numb consensus of market capitalism, some celebs have been granted wisdom and influence far beyond their abilities or right.



Everybody wants to rule the world

 Back in 2005, the "Make Poverty History" campaign launched a major effort to achieve debt relief for the poorest states in the Third World ahead of the Gleneagles G8 summit of international leaders. Their demands were for radical write-offs of debts which had long paid massive amounts of interest to western financial institutions and seriously impaired development and life chances for hundreds of millions of people. It was a much bolder, deep-seated change than anything the by then knighted "Sir" Bob Geldof had ever called for but he duly rushed out of retirement to hijack the campaign with the "Live 8" concerts (Live 8/Live Aid, geddit?). Although few had bought any of his music in decades, the saintly knight naturally had to sing at the concert (totally spontaneously, of course) and then with Oxfam, Make Poverty History and other development campaigners (and Bono, of course), he called on the G8 leaders to take real action to cancel debt.

The summit agreed some action - adopting barely half the recommendations of Tony Blair's Commission for Africa - and most in the development movement were sorely disappointed.

That didn't stop Sir Bob from rushing in front of the cameras to rather chillingly echo the words of someone else in relation to exaggerated achievements: "A great justice has been done. On aid, 10 out of 10; on debt, eight out of 10 ... mission accomplished, frankly."

And of course in the world of our celebrity-obsessed right-wing media, it was his easy message that was taken up. The concerns of the development movement were largely ignored, even though now, five years on, it is the case that even the partial decisions of the G8 have gone by substantially unimplemented. The campaigners recognised their mistake in letting him get involved, but too late.

More recently, Bono has been criticised for hobnobbing with President Medvedev, who proclaimed himself a fan of U2, ignoring the suppression of several human rights activists with whose cause he had initially linked his concert tour of Russia. And Sir Bob meantime has been charging up to $100,000 per speech on world suffering - it's a hard topic, but it seems he is ready to rise to it if his palms are sufficiently well-greased.

"Sir" Bob - send the money

Now this weekend, in the UK, the 10:10 climate change campaign has been hit by charges of eco-facism following the disastrous decision to release a video written by Richard Curtis (of Blackadder and Four Funerals fame) which shows schoolchildren being exploded into a graphically bloody mess for the crime of not being committed to reducing their carbon emissions. 10:10 have now withdrawn the green movement's first ever video nasty, but not before the right wing media have been able to seize on what is being portrayed as proof of an inherently anti-human strain among environmentalists. It is quite an achievement that he has in a ten minute film been able to leave the movement charged with Nazism, sadism and pure bad taste. And it is another clear example of the curse of celebrity involvement in causes which the celebs often know little about and, one suspects, may care even less.

Curtis' video is not just unpleasant. It also shows his ignorance of what the green movement is ultimately about. We are NOT concerned about "saving the planet". The planet is resilient and will endure whatever we throw at it. What the green cause is about is saving our species, saving humanity (along with many other species), from extinguishing our own ability to survive by polluting our planet or exhausting the resources we need to exist and thrive on the Earth. None of that involves the intolerance and violence displayed in his pathetic little effort, which we are now told was an attempt to inject humour and passion into the debate.



Richard Curtis' counter-productive contribution to 10:10

With friends like these, who needs enemies? The message to the environmental movement, the development campaigns and indeed anyone on the Left should be to treat these self-regarding dilettantes with real caution. It might seem glamorous to have them around, it might garner some well-needed publicity, but not all publicity is good.

Whilst there are sincere and effective celebrities who can and do help, all too often these people adopt development and green campaigns as "worthy causes" for their own promotion, depoliticising them and misleading the public into believing in simple, unchallenging answers to complex issues requiring radical solutions. The threats we face of resource scarcity and planetary crisis are too great to let them indulge themselves any longer. Paris Hilton is promising yet more charitable redemption when she completes her latest criminal sentence. Thanks, but no thanks.

9/11 Remembered: LET FREEDOM RING!

Nine years ago, on 11 September 2001, three hijacked airliners slammed into the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. Had it not been for the bravery and prompt action of passengers, a fourth flight was destined for either the White House or Congress but ended up crashed in a field with all on board dead. As the Towers imploded and the defence centre at the Pentagon burned, 2,996 lives, including those of 19 hijackers, came to premature and terrible, violent ends.

As they say, the rest is history. Tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of deaths and one invasion of Iraq later, the so-called "War on Terror" continues under the new US President, Barak Obama. At the dawn of the 21st century, incredible as it may seem, religious conflict has re-emerged as a defining issue across the planet in a way unparalleled since Pope Urban preached his fateful sermon in 1095 declaring Holy War on Islam because "God wills it!"

And in New York, by the "Ground Zero" site of the former Twin Towers, a new battle rages. No explosives have been used, but the invective and hatred expressed by many more than compensates.

The Cordoba Initiative, an Islamic charity dedicated to interfaith conciliation and named after the Spanish city which, in the Middle Ages, was a haven of multi-religous tolerance, co-operation and learning has proposed to build a cultural centre dedicated to reconciling the Christian and Muslim faiths. Its leader, Imam Faisal, has stressed that "Not all Muslims are terrorists, and terrorists actions are certainly un-Islamic." He has received support from President Obama and from New York Mayor Bloomberg, both of whom have stressed that if the concept of America was built on anything, it was religious freedom.

But the Amercian Right has piled in, decrying the idea of the centre as an affront to the dead, a "Victory Mosque" (even although it is not a mosque!). It is as if the Caliphs have been resurrected and turned up in Manhattan ready to build their own Islamic Triumphal Arch. Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and the odious Glen Beck have decried it. Backed by calm, open-minded, reasonable people like this man - Youtube videoblogger "drinkingwithbob" (who to my mind gives the distinct impression of having spent a little too much time too much with Bob and leaves you mildly concerned about the state of his heart muscles), they have argued the old mantra that such a thing would not be granted to Christians or Jews in Muslim countries.

And here is the thing. Many people in the West assume that once you leave Greece and head east, you don't find another church until you reach Australia. From primary school onwards, the Islamic states are portrayed as a great totalitarian montolith. From Morrocco in the far west of North Africa in a great arc through the Middle east down to Indonesia, it is alleged that no other faiths are permitted and a theocracy of dour mullahs holds sway. And if they have their way, the Muslims are all engaged in a Great Conspiracy to turn countries like Britain and America into similar Muslim fiefdoms.

The West has long lived in fear of The Other. In the 1900s, it was the "Yellow Peril", the Chinese, who were portrayed as slanty-eyed non-Christian devils, cleverly positioning themselves to take over London via the cunning disguise of laundry operatives and waiters. Around the same time, German rightwingers were hawking the fictitious "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", the alleged blueprints for the Jews to take over the world: a conceit that was eagerly spread throughout Europe by the Right and one which persists even now.

Now, with significant Muslim minorities in most west European countries, it is their turn to be tarred with the same brush of alleged hostility and ill intent. With their Arabic script and bearded priests, they are painted as foreign, strange and, inevitably, not to be trusted. Their actual beliefs are largely ignored, their similarity and common origins with Christianity and Judaism unmentioned and even unwelcome as they too clearly challenge the prevailing image of them as strange and alien. Instead, a mosque is set on fire in the USA and a church group proposes to have a "Burn a Koran Day", on the anniversary of 9/11.

So, were we to turn to the Islamic world, would this drab, monlithic, extreme picture be what we would see? Are there really no churches after Istanbul? No tolerance of The Other by these universally blood-thirsty jihadis?

Let's take a quick tour: starting in Turkey, a firmly Muslim country. Its largest city, Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), was the seat of the Patriarch (the head)of the Greek Orthodox Church in the days of the Christian Byzantine Empire. And it still is.

Lets move on south and east to Syria, at one stage threatened by the US with invasion following the fall of Iraq. Here, this summer, the government banned Islamic veils on university campuses, not great for individual freedom but hardly the actions of a theocratic regime. With nearly 1.2 million Christians living and worshipping freely in Syria, about 10% of the population, however, it seems Syria does not fit the Rightwing/Evangelical stereotype of an Islamic state. Perhaps though, with its socialist Baath party regime, it isn't typical.

South to the Lebanon. There was trouble there in the past but...what's this? An elected Parliament with two opposing blocks in it: on one side a pro-western/free market grouping composed of Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Catholic Christians, Maronite Christians and Druze; opposed by a pro-eastern, slightly social democratic grouping composed of...the same mixture of faiths. The President is a Christian. 40% of the MPs are Christian, as is a similar proportion of the population. Beirut is a bustling metropolitan city...

Not there. So how about Jordan, with its 400,000 Christians (7% of the populace), or Egypt, where one in five people worship in the ancient Coptic Christian Churches. Or among the Palestinians, where 75,000 Christians, are honoured by their Muslim neighbours as "The Living Stones" owing to their ancient traditions. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, denounced by the West as a Muslim terrorist organisation, was in fact founded by a Christian, George Habash. More recently Hannan Ashrawi was a prominent female Christian legislator elected to the Palestinian National Assembly.

Christians are smaller in number in North Africa beyond Eqypt, but there are churches of ancient provenance all the way across the Maghreb to the Atlantic shores. And in the opposite, eastern direction, 300,000 Iranian Christians worship at over 70 churches - although in Iraq the once substantial Christian community has ironically largely fled the country following the violence that accompanied the arrival of the US and British forces there in 2003. In Pakistan, nearly 3 million Christians hold to their faith, exempted from many of the laws on clothes and behaviour that are imposed on Muslims and even enjoying a free ration of alcohol from the government each week.

And so it continues, on into Malaysia and Indonesia, where millions more Christians worship, normally untroubled by their Muslim neighbours.

I am not saying that all is sweetness and light. There is real restriction and persecution of people who think the wrong way or don't conform to very restrictive rules in countries like Saudi Arabia - although the Wahabist regime there owes much to western oil companies and governments for its rise and continuation in power. States with sharia law do impose restrictions which we do not see in the West, though they are not of the magnitude imagined by many Americans and Europeans - nor are they necessarly specifically or solely targetted at Christians. As in many other parts of the world following other faiths, politics often twists and manipulates religous belief to cause fracture and discord quite at odds with the core principles of the faith in question.

There has been and is violence and interfaith conflict and in all too many places religion keeps people apart, living parallel rather than joint lives. But this is as common between Christian communities such as the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland or the Catholics and Orthodox in former Yugoslavia as in the Muslim world. And unlike both Judaism and Christianity, Muslims specifically are enjoined in the Koran to protect the followers of the other two faiths as being "Peoples of the Book" as Muslims are also.

And so, to portray Muslims as either monolithic or totalitarian is plainly wrong. Their faith is interpreted by believers in many different ways. Many of their leaders have issued fatwas (decrees) condemning violence and terrorism as plainly un-Islamic - yet efforts by people like Dr Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri and the 1,300 young Muslims at an anti-terrorist Muslim conference in the UK are simply ignored outside the liberal press.

And likewise the Cordoba Initiative in New York. It is not a mosque and is not on Ground Zero, but rather several blocks away. (There are in fact already two mosques closer to Ground Zero than the proposed centre).
And, anyway, what if it was?

Over 70 Muslims were inside the Twin Towers and died in pain and innocence alongside the other victims. These were ordinary people, like 35 year old Sarah Ali from London, who had taken a job there just three weeks earlier and whose father was harassed in the street by rightwing thugs vowing revenge for the "Muslim" attack. Is her death somehow less than the death of her fellow Britons and others who perished? Was she, as a Muslim, somehow collectively culpable?

If this was the case, then by logical extension, are all Christians therefore culpable for the appalling massacre of 7,000 Muslim men and boys by Serbian paramilitaries (who were formally blessed by their Christian priests before carrying out their slaughter) at Srebrenica in July 1995? Or for the 33,000 Muslim civilians killed in the same war (80% of all civilian casualites)?

No one is their brother's keeper. And no one is defined purely by one aspect of themselves. In his wonderful book, "Identity and Violence", Amartya Sen argues that harmony can only come when we start to see each other as individuals first, shaped to some extent by our cultures and faiths, but not helpless victims, or unchangeable automatons. We are each complex and worthy. Only when we recognise that and rise above our apparent desire for simplistic tribal identities that define us so one dimensionally - white or black; Muslim or Christian; man or woman; gay or straight;golfer or tennis player (!)- will we reach a point where we can value and be valued for the multi-faceted humans we are.

There is no war by Islam against the West. There should be no war by the West against Islam. There are many competing interests. Some of them are dark and powerful and selfish. Some of them want to oppress others, force a single world view on everyone else. These can all be found in all countries and among people of all faiths and none. It is only by reaching beyond the simplistic, self-limiting barriers these forces create that we can reach a point where there is true understanding, genuine stability and real, lasting peace.

So, America, be the Leader of the World. Let the Cordoba Initiative build its centre and, in the words of one of the greatest American Christians, "Let freedom ring!"

"People of the Book" - a review of Zachary Karabell's history of Islam and the West

It is always a treat to read something that is tightly written, fresh, and a bit different. This relatively short book (291 pages) is just that - American writer Zachary Karabell captures a broad sweep of history with an exciting gusto that brings periods and places normally obscure to western historians alive and with an immediacy that is explained by his central premise - that Judaism, Christianity and Islam have existed far more in mutual tolerance and respect, and sometimes even harmony, with each other than they have in conflict - whether the conflict of the Crusades or of the contemporary jihadists and neocons.

He takes us through the founding of Islam right up to the 1980s Middle east, yet somehow you do not get the sense of any period being overlooked or short-changed. Whether scholars, soldiers, merchants, priests or philosophers, he brings different ages to life by focusing on individuals of note at various points, though also slips down to take in anecdotes of every day life - how Moses Maimonides, a Jew, felt about working as a doctor at the court of Saladin, the Muslim prince, during the day to go home at night and work on his great treatise of rational Judaism; or how the Muslim caliph, Harun al-Rashid, turned Bagdhad into a centre of multi-faith discourse and learning, where his son held debates with Christian scholars; or how, more recently, men like Abduh argued for a new interpretation of Islam to mirror the Enlightenment process in Europe.

Yet there are dark tales here too - the slaughter of Muslims, Jews and heretic Christians by the Crusaders at the fall of Jerusalem in 1099. The suppression of much of the learning of Islamic centres such as Cordoba and Bagdhad by a more conservative strain of thinking around 700 years ago, one which has persisted in some respects and some societies ever since. And more recently the expulsion of the Palestinians and the creation of an essentially religious based state in Israel in 1948 and subsequently, flying full in the face of history while simultaneoulsy recasting history to justify the present.

Karabell's premise is that, as the third of the three faiths to emerge, Islam has always had to define itself in relation to Christians and Jews, acknowledging them all to have a shared history and a shared God, yet viewing both as incomplete. Mohammed invoked special protection over both Jews and Christians and this is central to the not always easy tolerance shown to both these faiths through history by often politically and militarily superior Muslims.

Contrary to the popular myths in the West of bloodthirsty Arabs forcing Islam on cowed conquered peoples, the book shows how in truth many eastern Christians welcomed the Muslims as they were far more tolerant of their beliefs than their previous rulers, the Orthodox Romans, had been. While in Europe, Jews and Christians who did not hold quite the right beliefs for the official church were persecuted and burned, for centuries, Muslims provided sanctuary to these people, demanding nothing in return other than a poll tax (which excused them from military service, not a bad deal at all). When the Jews were expelled from Christian Spain in the early 16th century, it was the Muslim Ottoman lands that sent ships to carry them to safety - and prosperity under the Sultan and Caliph.

By the same token, Karabell shows that the Crusader states, after their initial belligerence, settled down to a century of tolerance and even interfaith marriage and mixing which worked well for the people in the near east, but caught the inevitable displeasure of the Pope.

So where did this all go wrong?

In one sense of course, it didn't. There are still many societies where people of all three faiths live alongside each other, sometimes integrated, sometimes leading separate lives, in peace. In fact, most of the time, in most places, that is still precisely the case - whether in Egypt with its 10% Coptic Christian populace rearing pigs and drinking wine in a predominantly Muslim society; or in the Lebanon with its multi-religious coalitions, Christian President and Muslim Prime Minister; or in Dewsbury where I live, home to the London bombers but also to the country's first woman Muslim Cabinet Minister.

For most people, their religion is just one aspect of their lives to varying degrees of importance or unimportance. For example, Turkey is portrayed by some in Europe as a fundamentalist Muslim society ill-suited to joining the EU. Yet any visit to Istanbul would show you a city (outside the tourist area) indistinguishable from London, Berlin or Paris, and where a lower per centage of people attend Friday prayer at mosque than turn up at the near empty Churches of England on Sundays. Why then all this talk of a clash of civilisations? And why a desire to rediscover a false history of conflict and despair when in truth the times of togetherness have been far more of the story - and will need to be again for any hope of a future for us all?

There is no neat answer - except that perhaps where there has been conflict, it has been where religion is one of many elements, the central ones being, as ever, social justice and freedom, yet religion has been used sometimes by religious zealots, and often sometimes by populist (or just desperate) political leaders to justify the most dreadful deeds.

If Karabell shows anything, it is that each of these faiths can be and are interpreted in many many ways by their followers. And perhaps there is the one issue he does not tackle - Monotheistic faiths which each claim to be the revealed word and the sole, true, exclusive path to God and Truth, contain within them the seeds of conflict. However hard they may try, either scripturally or as individual believers, to respect, tolerate or even associate with those of other faiths, can faiths which proclaim one God and one way, ultimately live in real peace with each other?

The violence of Bin Laden's jihad and Bush's crusade may sit ill with faiths which proclaim love and peace, but as they each also proclaim themselves as the sole Truth, everything else by default stands ultimately as a lie. And woe unto those who worship a lie when a Believer of a certain ilk, fired up with the zeal of the One True God, steps forward to spread the Word.

Very much worth reading; this book has made and will keep making me think for a very long time.



"People of the Book" by Zachary Karabell is published in the UK by John Murray, isbn 978-0-7195-6755-1

"If You Don't Have Tears In Your Eyes, You Will Cry In Your Heart."

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN Tuesday, 10 February 2009 at 00:11

These poignant words will stay with me until the day I die, not least because the girl who spoke them is just ten years old - a Palestinian in Gaza interviewed on tonight's "Panorama" programme on BBC1. She had just shown a picture - a drawing in typical child's form, stick figures drawn with crayons - "This is my Mum when the missile cut her in half." "This is my brother holding his baby son...his brains were dripping out." She said she still hoped to have a life, or at least half a life, but she was finding it hard to believe both her parents were dead.

This appeared to be a belated attempt by the BBC to right their bias in their reporting of the war against Gaza, as well as their bizarre refusal to broadcast a humanitarian appeal a couple of weeks ago in case they were seen to be anti-Israeli. Here, their reporter, Jeremy Bowen, did go out of his way to show that many many homes of Palestinians had been bombed and even susbequently flattened by Israeli bulldozers with the dead unburied still inside, entombed in their homes. And he did point out as he stood among the rubble that each pile represented someone's home or business and was unlikely to do anything but increase hatred and antagonism towards Israel.

He interviewed International Red Cross representatives who said that, in contravention of international law, Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers had denied them access to the injured for 2 days and there was no evidence that they had treated anyone themsleves as they are expected to do. One boy of 15 was interviewed, his eyes bleak with despair, as he explained how he had sat with the corpse of his mother, his own legs shattered and unable to walk, while his brother slowly bled to death a few feet away.

This, we were then told by the Israeli Government spokesman, was done to stop terrorism and if people suffered it was the fault of Hamas, not the IDF weapons that rained down on Gaza. They had warned civilians to get out of areas due to be attacked he insisted - and of course claimed they only attacked buldings where Hamas fighters or weapons were.

But Gaza is a tiny, cramped place - 1.6 million people in an area smaller than the Isle of Wight - so where were these people supposed to flee to? With both Israel and Egypt keeping the tiny territory sealed, anyone inside was effectively trapped and at the mercy of what was clearly pretty indiscriminate firing by the IDF.

Bowen did not point this out, however. Just as he also failed to point out that Hamas fighters inevitably were in the streets of Gaza - because where else could they be? No modern war is fought on some neat, open battlefield like Waterloo or El Alamein. Gaza was more like Stalingrad - so if we eulogise, rightly, the Soviets who defended the ruins of that city house by house, why was it so wrong or surprising that Hamas fighters, the only army that the Gazans have, defended their city when it was attacked by fighting in that city?

Film was shown of white phosphoros shells falling on Al-Quds hospital, again in contravention of international law - by which hospitals are never to be attacked. Bowen did mention that the use of white phosphoros is illegal "in some circumstances" - he did not specify that its use in civilian areas (like hospitals) is one such; nor, more importantly, that when the first reports of its use emerged during the attack, Israel flatly denied it.

The BBC remains guilty alongside much of the rest of the international media of grossly misreporting this war. It continued even tonight to equate the puny attacks of the Hamas rockets which killed 4 Israelis to the assault of the IDF which killed 1400 Palestinians. They left unchallenged the Israeli claim that nearly all the 1400 were "Hamas terrorists", when at least 600 were children and many more were women and male civilians.

Israel will tomorrow almost certainly elect its most extreme rightwing Government in history. In pole position is likely to be a party committed to expelling the remaining Israeli Arab citizens, completing the ethnic cleansing which began in 1948, when hundreds of thousands were driven out of Israel into Gaza, which now exists as a huge, permanent refugee camp.

President Obama has early on indicated that he believes Israel has a right to expand its borders - as indeed Israel's constitution allows for, a unique position in world constitutions - and has ruled out talking to Hamas. Like the BBC, he seems to ignore the unassailable fact that Hamas is the democratically elected Palestinian government which came to power in multi-party elections - instead, like Bush before him, he is already signalling he will deal instead with the electorally defeated and discredited PLO-Fatah.

How would it be if the world had ignored Obama's election and was treating John McCain as the real President of the USA? How does he expect Hamas to respond? And how does he, and Israel, expect the people of Gaza to respond? Looking into the empty, grief-struck eyes of the traumatised children of Gaza, have they not simply created a new generation of grievance, a next generation of suicide bombers and budding rocketeers?

It is common in the West to see Israel as "like us" and the Arabs as "the Other". Yet the Palestinians we saw tonight were striking in that their world, their lives and homes, their aspirations were so like ours - the doctor who mourned his four teenage daughters, one of whom had hoped to follow him as a doctor and another studying to be a journalist; on the wall of their destroyed bedroom, next to the splattered brains of another dead daughter, a "Barbie" sticker incongruously decorated the shattered plaster. A legitimate target, the IDF spokesman said, because Hamas may have been nearby.

History is written by the victors and, in spite of a half-hearted effort, Bowen and the BBC comprehensively failed tonight to explore the truth - that this war, like the war in Lebanon in 2007, was a war embarked on by an Israeli Government with poor poll ratings and by a country terrified of any of its neighbours being successful - because if they are, they may cease to be "the Other".

Just as Lebanon has an albeit fragile unity across three or more distinct faith groups, the Palestinians contain a significant Christian minority (the so-called "Living Stones") which enjoys greater protection among its Muslim compatriots than the few Christians inside Israel have in an increasingly monolithic society. These facts are never explored, never revealed - why, for example, was Yasser Arafat trying to reach Bethlehem for the last Christmas of his life, when the IDF decided to besiege him in Gaza for the final terrible, tragic weeks of his time on earth? Because, although a Muslim himself, he was trying to join with his Christian compatriots in their religious celebrations.

The Middle East is a complex, mulitfaceted range of different societies, faiths and politics. It is this that makes it both far more tolerant than people in the West realise and which frustrates hope while simultaneously offering it - Jew, Christian and Muslim have lived longer in peace there than they have in war; it is not impossible they may do so again. But first we have to step back from the simplistic politics of confrontation where manipulative politicians deliberately drive polarisation to the extremes.

This will not suit the western media as it does not sit with a western culture which demands instant, easy explanations with things neatly fitting into boxes and defintions. But it will be the only way to find a solution, the only way to reach any ultimate truth.

And as a start, President Obama and the European Governments which between them wield so much influence over Israel need to recognise that, however unpalatable it may be, Hamas is part of that solution.

Maybe he's been watching too much of the BBC.

In war, truth is the first casualty. Aeschylus Greek tragic dramatist (525 BC - 456 BC)

And the children are the second, followed by the future...

The Winter of our Discontent

Worst winter in years throws further doubt on 'global warming'
(Times Educational Supplement)
Alarmists wrong on global warming (British Democracy Forum)
If global warming is real, why is it so damned cold? (Answerbag)

And so on....

With the freezing cold weather of the last few weeks across much of western Europe, plenty of climate change deniers have happily huffed in the cold that here is the proof climate change is...a political delusion; a stealth tax; a leftwing conspiracy against big business, etc.

Yet a few weeks of bad weather does not mean global warming is not happening - on the contrary a long predicted symptom of climate change is more and more extreme weather, both hot and cold, droughts and floods, as the planet's systems come under increasing strain. And warming is a gloabl phenomenon, which means you can have all manner of local and regional variants. For example, while Britain reeled under inches of snow and the lowets temperatures in decades, Alaska and Canada were nearly 10 degrees warmer than normal for this time of year on many days.

Globally, the weather event known as La Nina has artificially cooled the planet over the leat decade or so since the record warm year of 1998. In the last few weeks, this has finally ended and been replaced by its opposite, El Nino, which equally warms up the planet. Both in their different ways mask the real underlying trend, which ramians steadily upwards as countries continue to fail to agree any effective concerted action to tackle climate change.

And more locally here in the UK, with people grumbling that the Government should be salting roads more? (It always strike me there is a high correlation between people who expect local councils to have an endless supply of salt to scatter on roads, and vehicles to do this, and those not wanting to pay any more tax ever, period! Let's have our cake and eat it!)

So, how does the UK face warming disaster with our land shrouded in dazzling white snow and ice?

For thousands of years, Britain has enjoyed a temperate climate owing to the warming effects of the Gulf Stream coming across the Atlantic. Now, global warming is melting the polar icecaps and colder water is flowing into the Atlantic Ocean. Indeed, for the first time in recorded history, the North Pole ice receded so far in summer 2008 that ships could sail from Europe to Japan over the once mythical North-west sea passage. This meltwater is cooling the Gulf stream waters and reducing its warming effect on the UK, so as the planet warms overall, the real irony is that our winters may become much colder, and our summers much warmer.

One swallow does not make an autumn, and one snowflake does not usher forth a new ice age. Wise up!

"Everything is fine today - that is our illusion." - Voltaire

It is a widely promulagted fiction that Britain's political system is the fruition of centuries of linear development towards a liberal democracy: we arrogantly grant our Houses of Commons and Lords the title "The Mother of Parliaments". No gory French Revolution for us; no Latin American military juntas or Nazi dictatorship. The British people have over centuries of graceful partnership, moderation and, well, plain jolly good sense worked out the wonderful paragon of freedom and democratic practice we are today.

The truth is very different - both today and in history.

Today, we are ruled by a Government that, thanks to our voting system, holds 60% of the seats in Parliament with just 35% of the votes cast - would Mugabe have got away with this? A Government which rules as "King-in-parliament". This means that the constitutional legitimacy of the Government stems from its appointment by the monarch, the Queen, rather than by the choice of the people. We all are, in any case, subjects of the monarch. In most European countries, the Constitution establishes the rights of the citizen; in the United Kingdom of Great Britain, our rights and freedoms are granted by the Monarch, and able to be removed at any time. Unlike most Europeans, the USA and many, many others, we have no written constitution - only rules and precedents established over time, open to wide interpretation and fairly arbitrary change.( http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/british_constitution1.htm )

Surely it doesn't matter that much? It is just theory - in practice, we are free. But consider this: in the last 8 years, buoyed along by the USA after 9/11 and showing no sign of stopping, the British Government has established hundreds of new criminal offences and state powers to spy on you and arrest you for nothing more than the suspicions of some petty official.

A protest exclusion zone around Parliament has led to the arrest and prosecution of peace activists for nothing more threatening than reading out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq at the national Cenotaph; terrorist law has been used to confiscate green activists' toothbrushes as dangerous weapons and arrest a teenage girl for riding her horse in a suspicious manner; and notoriously, Labour Party member Walter Wolfgang survived Nazi persecution arriving in the UK in 1937 as a Jewish refugee only to end up being arrested and held by police for several hours for booing the Home Secretary during his speech at the 2005 Labour party conference. You may even now be arrested for handing out leaflets in town centres without a proper licence - in some, you cannot do it at all as many of our public spaces have been sold off to prviate landowners and, as such, are private property.

In themselves, these instances may seem obstructive and nonsensically counterproductive - the laws have even been used to spy on the incorrect use of dustbins - but the return of Binyam Mohamed from Guantanamo earlier this year to the UK reminds us of the more sinister side of this. ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/23/binyam-mohamed-guantanamo-plane-lands ) This man was held for seven years, tortured by proxy by Pakistan and Moroccan security services using questions provided by the UK. The most damning evidence against him? That he had read a joke article by a leftwing magazine about how to make your own nuclear bomb from the contents of your kitchen cupboard - ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/feb/21/barbara-ehrenreich-guantanamo ). Detained without charge or trial, he is home now, a broken man. And in the UK, horrendously, a raft of people - mainly wanted by the security services in such free countries as Jordan and Algeria - are held in indefinite home arrest.

And coming soon...a national database of every email, telephone call and text message you send, preserved by the State and its tens of thousands of officials to inspect, interpret and act upon as they decide; a database of the details of every child in the UK (let's put the vulnerable at as much risk as possible!); and then the greatest of all - the National Identity Card - not compulsory, but required if you want medical treatment, social security and just about any service requiring proof of identity. The Government has already admitted the ID scheme will not work against terrorism, but is throwing up to £18 billion into it - a little know fact is that one of the the private companies bidding to be involved has on its Board the former Home Secretary who introduced the scheme - David Blunkett. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_national_identity_card )

The current Government claims of course that all this is simply to protect us from the allegedly innumerable threats against our peace and security; our way of life, it is said, is at threat. Yet what are we left defending when we surrender the freedoms we have fought for centuries in a matter of months?

And fought we did. Not just in the war against Hitler, which is usually meant when people say that. The fact is, we had to fight tooth and nail for our freedoms against an instransigent, often violent and oppressive state which sought to demonise, exclude and destroy any and every threat to the Establishment that runs our society. For centuries, Church and State combined to keep the Order of things intact through a mix of faith and fear. And when with the passage of time that became harder, they did not change their method, but rather refined it - controlling "freedom" of speech and arresting those too radical to be accommodated within the system.
The Magna Carta is often touted as the start of constitutional government in England; yet this was little more than a Baron's Charter. It retained the feudal order intact, while the Parliaments of de Montfort incorporated the new merchant classes into the Established way of things. These were instruments which maybe rearranged the existing order a little, allowed some "New Men" in, but ultimately left the system untouched. Even Cromwell suppressed the first socialist stirrings of the Levellers and Covenanters during our short-lived Republic and the "Glorious Revolution" of 1689 simply enshrined bigotry and hierarchy in spite of the titles given to laws such as the "Bill of Rights".

In the late 18th century, Thomas Spence emerged as a radical thinker who advocated land redistribution, freedom of the press, voting rights for men and women, and social security for those unable to work. Under slogans such as "The Land is the People's Garden", he and his supporters advocated social reform which quickly gained popularity, so much so that the Government quickly took to arresting many and closing down the pamphleteers who spread their ideas - this, a foretaste of today, was done for the sake of national security and public order, with France rather than Islam as its bogeyman. Spence himself was imprisoned several times.

After his death in 1814, Spencean societies were formed as part of a widespread, decentralised movement, with public houses as their meeting places and social and economic equality their watchwords. Government spies inflitrated them and in 1816 the authorities violently suppressed a rally and charged several leaders of the movement with high treason, with death as the penalty. Fortunately, the jury system meant they were acquitted. (The jury system is one of the few mechanisms that seems rooted in British thinking, though in recent years even this has come under threat from the current Government).

In 1819, at Peterloo in Manchester, a rally by people demanding the right to vote for Parliament (a right at that time granted to a tiny handful of the richest members of society) was charged by cavalry, killing 15 and injuring as many as 700 people. The Government followed this up by a strikingly familiar raft of new laws called the "Six Acts". These made it possible to arrest someone suspected of undertaking irregular military training; allowed homes to be searched arbitrarily for weapons; reduced the opportunities for bail; required public meetings to be registered if more than 50 people attended; imposed stiffer penalties for publishing material held to be seditious; and taxed newspapers which published opinions as well as facts. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Acts )

Unsuprisingly, this did nothing to reconcile the Spenceans to the Government, and during the succession crisis following the death of the King in 1820, twelve of the most radical attempted an ill-conceived plot to muder the entire Cabinet at dinner - later known to history as the Cato Street Conspiracy after the site of their shortlived base of operations. This ended in a sword and gunfight and the execution or exile of the leaders.( http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRcato.htm )( http://thomas-spence-society.co.uk/ )

Over the rest of the century, trade unions, socialist societies and many religious reformers struggled hard for change - and slowly won changes, however grudgingly surrendered by the Establishment. As late as 1884 many men did not have the vote and a further 45 years (and several deaths of suffragettes) were to elapse before all women were to enjoy that right too. And every step of the way, the Establishment resisted - even when overt violence declined and political debate did become more established, the incumbent Order continued to resist any changes or challenges to how things are - even now, with the collapse of the banking system and the economy of the world in disarray, it kicks back and resists any suggestions of real, deep seated change.

So Britain remains prey to those who would limit and remove the rights we have won over centuries of struggle. And our lack of a written constiution and the fact of our Monarchy combine to make us ever more vulnerable to those who would hold our freedom in their hands, to dispense with as they please. If this is not quite entirely the intention of the current Government, what guarantee might we have of the motives of a future one, perhaps of different hue? How much easier has this Government made the path to Britain's future concentration camps?

We need a written constitution and a republic if we are to have any chance of establshing a truly fair and free society and changing the rotten core of inequality, greed, excess and waste that is at the heart of capitalism. Violence, actual and implied, has been at the heart of the struggle for rights for all for centuries - most of it instigated by the Government of the day, the agent of the status quo. Our political masters, in the Name of the King, are all-powerful, their police state mentality cleverly concealed in a cloak of liberalism. If we allow, it could soon just as easily be a shroud, a winding-sheet for democracy and freedom.
http://www.unlockdemocracy.org.uk/