Guest Blog: Edward Thomas on Syria's Disabled Future

As Britain, France and the USA step up their preparations to supply weapons to some of the rebel factions in increasingly divided, sectarian and violent Syria, Edward Thomas, who has worked on a wide range of children's rights projects in Africa and the Middle East, writes on the unreported plight of disabled children in the emerging warzone.

This article originally appeared on 14 May on the Middle East Research & Information Project website, here

For background, see Peter Harling and Sarah Birke, “The Syrian Heartbreak,” Middle East Report Online, April 16, 2013.

Jamal is not yet a teenager. His school closed in 2011, soon after the Syrian revolution turned into an armed conflict, and his father found him a factory job. One day in 2012 as he returned from work there was a battle going on in the main street near his home. Jamal immediately started carrying wounded children smaller than he is to shelter in a mosque. Then Syrian army reinforcements arrived, clearing the streets with gunfire and hitting Jamal in the spine. The youngsters who took him to the hospital advised him to say that “terrorists” had caused his injury. But Jamal did not want to lie -- he told the doctors that a soldier had fired the bullet. The doctors told him to shut up and say it was the terrorists. But they treated him anyway.

From "The Guardian" 28 May; Steve Bell on William Hague
& Vladimir Putin's arming of Syria's fighters.

Syrian hospitals are at the front line of the conflict. Bullet wounds in children’s bodies are regarded as signs of sedition. Security men prowl wards disguised as medical staff; there are checkpoints outside hospitals and snipers on the roofs. Arrest and torture await doctors who treat opposition fighters or demonstrators, instead of handing them over to the security services.[1] Doctors loyal to their jobs or salaries are sometimes targeted for kidnapping by criminal gangs or armed opposition groups. [2] Health workers in conflict zones cannot get to work and vaccination systems are disintegrating -- the government reported in March that 36 percent of its hospitals are out of service. [3] Many pharmaceutical factories have been destroyed, leading the World Health Organization to express worry about shortages of life-saving medicines. In opposition-controlled areas, makeshift field hospitals slopping with infections offer crude, agonizing surgical procedures.

Things are worse in areas contested between the government and its revolutionary adversaries. Up to half of Syria’s population -- including Jamal’s family -- lives in informal urban settlements, relatively poor districts that provided the vanguard for the revolution and now are often battlegrounds. [4] These settlements mostly populated by rural in-migrants are also places where over the past four decades the Baathist state created a new Syria of textile and service industries, with free education, health and social services, and electricity and running water in nearly every home. Syria largely avoided foreign debt on its path to development. Instead, the country amassed “strategic rent” -- aid from Iran, and before that from the Soviet Union and Saudi Arabia. Syria traded with these donors its resistance to US hegemony; alternative possible futures for the Palestinians; and a version of the Arab state that was not dependent on Israeli or US guarantees.

Jamal is seeking treatment in a neighboring country. Syria’s health care system, which before the conflict delivered better health outcomes than Saudi Arabia’s, is now too politicized to cope with a child hit by indiscriminate fire. [5] Nonetheless, many of the government’s supporters today have kept their faith that the Syrian state has provided for the people. “Didn’t we give you houses? Didn’t we give you schools? Are you tired of them?” are rhetorical questions sometimes brandished by security men in house-to-house raids or torture centers.

No Longer Free

But the Syrian success story was in trouble before the conflict began. The government was not able to supply productive opportunities for many rural youngsters, many of whom were shipped off to Lebanon’s harsh labor market. Conflicts between factions of the country’s inscrutable elite -- rent-seeking bureaucrats and businessmen -- generated periodic economic crises that pushed Syria to seek external resources and policy inspiration. [6] The crisis of the past decade prompted a reconsideration of the country’s social welfare system. In 2005, a new “social market” policy encouraged foreign investment and simultaneously cut social welfare provision. The new approach brought in billions of dollars of Arab and Asian investment in construction, banking and tourism, and opened Syria’s producers to competition from countries with less generous welfare systems. As the policy came into effect, Syria’s oil production peaked and three years of mismanaged drought walloped agricultural workers. Refugees from the Syrian countryside arriving in neighboring countries tell stories of unexpectedly low social provisions -- of unvaccinated five-year olds and unschooled teenagers. These reports suggest that the service provision in rural areas was deteriorating before the conflict -- that the drought-stricken countryside was being de-developed while the center boomed. Or perhaps that the Baathist tale of modern transformation was something of an exaggeration.

Along with the lack of rainfall, the government’s social and economic policy shifts shaped the backdrop to the conflict. Farmers were pushed off the land into cities where industrial workers were being laid off, rents were no longer controlled and Gulf capital fueled feverish markets in land. [7] Government wages and pensions no longer covered basic needs and the security forces had a correspondingly bigger role in maintaining social discipline. The new rich established private hospitals and schools, while government health spending contracted. With the support of the European Union and the World Bank, the government began to outsource health services, and out-of-pocket expenditures on health care increased. [8]

Many international institutions promote a model of health financing that stresses the state’s regulatory role, allowing a retreat from the public financing of health care. Syria’s adaptation of these international models began in 2003, with immediate implications for its small disability sector. In addition to mostly free health care, Syrians with disabilities are entitled to special schooling and cash benefits, provided by the state. Like other authoritarian socialist disability systems, Syria’s did not promote independent living. The system isolated disabled people from everyday social and economic life in special schools or residential institutions. Rehabilitation services -- the mix of physiotherapy, social activities and assistance technologies designed to include disabled children and young people in social and economic life and give them the capabilities needed to live independently -- were rare, and were mostly provided by local charitable organizations. But as Syria restructured welfare, it also opened up to the international language of disability rights that inspired the UN’s 2006 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Syria ratified the convention in 2009, and the first lady, Asma al-Asad, pushed the language of disability rights through her charitable foundation, the Syria Trust for Development. The rights of persons with disabilities, like women’s and children’s rights, became a resource for reframing the legitimacy of her husband’s government as it withdrew investment from welfare.

Syria’s experiments in “social markets” were intended to shift costs from the state to families and small-scale social actors. This shift involved a reshaping of its constituencies -- the security men, bureaucrats, farmers and industrial workers who benefited to varying degrees from Baathist rule. In retrospect, the experiments were catastrophic. The government’s post-conflict budgets have tried to reverse the catastrophe, injecting new resources into the welfare and subsidies systems that helped the Baath Party to maintain social control for so long. [9] This generosity will eventually find its limits, though, and the forces that were prodding Syria toward a shrunken neoliberal private sector will resume their efforts. Syria will probably emerge from its current crisis into a long period of indebtedness, and its health and welfare systems will probably no longer be free.

The Neighbors

What would a debt-laden, post-crisis Syrian health and social system offer Jamal? How could that system help Jamal and his family work out how to bear the heavy financial burdens that war-induced disability has brought them -- increased health costs and loss of income? Might Syria’s neighbors, some of which have also undergone protracted conflicts, have found some solutions worth emulating? These questions, which weigh on the mind of every refugee now looking to finance health care in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq, are not easy to answer because the health and social systems of Syria’s neighbors are not at all easy to generalize from. Two neighboring post-conflict systems -- Iraq’s and Lebanon’s -- are particularly heterogeneous, but each offers some starting points for comparison. In Iraq, there is sobering evidence of the effects of sanctions and drawn-out urban bombardment on health and social systems. In Lebanon, the unique mix of markets and sectarianism provides insights into how privately financed health and social welfare systems operate.

The Red Cross estimates that 150,000 people have been disabled in the course of Iraq’s multiple wars -- they make up part of a much wider population of disabled people. [10] Article 32 of Iraq’s 2005 constitution assigns the state the task of rehabilitating and reintegrating the disabled: In practice, responsibility for services to disabled children is scattered among government and charitable associations. [11] And health care, which represents much of the financial burden of disability, suffered terribly during Iraq’s uniquely unfortunate recent history. After Iraq’s defeat in the 1991 Gulf war, its well-funded, high-performance, authoritarian health care system was eviscerated by 13 years of sanctions, which eventually replaced government finances with a cashless Oil for Food system. With the state’s coffers empty, public spending on health care fell to 1 percent of total health spending, foisting nearly all the costs of health care upon families.[12] Under the US-led occupation, health spending saw modest increases. Between 2008 and 2010, as the occupiers withdrew and the Iraqi government sought to garner popular legitimacy, per capita health spending more than doubled, from $118 to $247 ($340 at purchasing power parity). [13] Iraq’s health spending is still well below the global average and disabled people are poor -- Celine Cantat, a disability worker in Damascus before Syria’s conflict broke out, commented on the large numbers of disabled Iraqi children who were on the streets there at the time. A 2011 report on child disability financed by the UN Children’s Fund bemoaned the continuing lack of statistics on disability prevalence, the low state benefits (or social salaries) for disabled people, and the way that the state has devolved to NGOs its constitutional responsibility for disability services and their financing. [14]

NGO funding and NGO services are a sign that the state is relinquishing the financial burden of disability care. Families can cope with short-term illnesses using their own resources, but the costs of chronic disease and disability are much harder to privatize. Social institutions have to play a role. Lebanon’s private health and welfare systems illustrate the importance -- and the political costs -- of giving private institutions responsibility for health and social services. Three quarters of all health spending was in the private sector in 2011, according to World Health Organization data. Private religious associations provided most of the social welfare there, too. Private health and social welfare systems do not necessarily deliver better outcomes: In 2010, Lebanon’s gross national income per capita was more than three times that of Syria, but Lebanon’s child mortality rates and life expectancy were marginally worse. [15] 

Under Lebanon’s largely private welfare system, the financial burdens of disability are mostly borne by private individuals and the family. With severely limited public funds, disabled people need to find affiliations and networks outside the state in order to bear the costs of disability. In Lebanon’s uniquely sectarian political system, disabled people often seek assistance from religious institutions. Most institutions providing subsidized health and social care are linked to Lebanon’s officially recognized sects. They fund themselves through international charitable donations or by using their sects’ political clout to colonize the government’s modest welfare budgets. In order to gain access to this subsidized welfare system, poor disabled people and their families often have to invoke their religious identities. As in any private system, resources for poor people are limited. One way of limiting resources for disabled children is to provide services in residential institutions that separate them from family and social life. They are often known as orphanages, not because the children in them are parentless, but because underfunded institutions can limit costs by imposing the drastic condition of family separation on the beneficiaries of their services. In 2003, Lebanon’s privatized welfare system had 32,484 children in residential institutions; in 2004, Syria had 3,904 such children (Syria’s population is more than five times larger than Lebanon’s). [16]

Disabled people in Lebanon’s privatized, confessional welfare system have to negotiate its soup kitchens and emphatic sectarian markers in order to survive. Syrian refugees in Lebanon (there were nearly half a million as of April) sometimes get caught up in this sectarian system of services. Because Syria and Lebanon have a similar ethnic and religious diversity, Syrian refugees can negotiate access to sectarian services by representing themselves as Shi‘i Muslim or Greek Catholic or whatever -- in the same way that many disabled Lebanese people must. By forcing disabled and other poor people to invoke sectarian identities for food and medicine, Lebanon’s welfare systems give its confessional system a material basis, a tangibility lacking in many accounts of its curious identity politics.

From Secular to Sectarian

Syrian identity politics is a different matter. Officially, Syria still has a secular constitution and free welfare services. But all that is changing. The government keeps welfare services functioning in government-controlled areas and malfunctioning in contested or opposition-dominated areas. Access to health and social services is being reconfigured around the geography of conflict. This geography has a sectarian dimension, too, as some of Syria’s smaller religious groups are concentrated in areas where there has been less fighting. People from these areas and groups are then seen as constituencies of the regime. Syria’s religious and ethnic diversity is being turned into the basis for sectarianism, with many Syrian and international actors using religious differences to mobilize military support, build political constituencies, and include or exclude people from the state’s protection.

Possible futures for Syrian welfare financing may aggravate tendencies toward sectarian division. The government is facing an economic crisis -- although its 2013 budget envisages spending increases, the government may not be able to generate enough revenue to deliver them. [17]The government’s flirtation with neoliberalism reshaped the way civil society organized. It allowed religious organizations, financed by businessmen benefiting from economic change, to flourish. In the run-up to the conflict, over half of Syria’s charitable organizations were Islamic ones, and their beneficiaries were largely Syrians who were looking for new social networks to meet basic needs as the state retreated from welfare provision. [18] Syria’s conflict will make people radically dependent on new social networks for survival.

These transformations have serious consequences for children with disabilities. Disability services need to be comprehensive, to join up accessible education and health care with measures for social and economic inclusion if people with disabilities are to live dignified independent lives. But Syria’s welfare system is fragmenting under multiple pressures. Future state-funded welfare systems are likely to be much more parsimonious, and to impose the draconian targeting methods of Lebanon’s orphanages. Families disoriented and impoverished by disability are likely to seek out new social networks to survive -- and these networks are likely to emphasize social differences. International aid agencies are unlikely to step in. With few exceptions, these international agencies invest little in disability -- although good disability services are powerful ways to build an inclusive society, they do not offer the quick, decisive impacts that their management consultants promise them elsewhere.

Jamal did not engage in calculations about responsibility for the costs of health care when he went to help the wounded children he encountered in a street battle. Now a refugee, he has personal experience of the region’s health financing dilemmas. He mostly lies in a hospital bed, his big observant eyes set in a round childish face on the cusp of adolescence. He is cool and assured, and his morale is exemplary. Nursing staff say that with the right treatment he could walk again, and he has taken steps with assistive devices. His father, hard-working, poor, shrewd and warm, with old-fashioned country manners still intact after years of city living, is bravely hustling to gather the thousands of dollars that a spinal cord operation will cost, while trying to keep his family fed.

Endnotes

[1] “Torture in Syria’s Hospitals,” The Lancet, November 5, 2011, p. 1606.
[2] UN Human Rights Council, Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, A/HRC/22/59, Geneva, February 5, 2013.
[3] World Health Organization, Situation Report, March 12, 2013, p. 1.
[4] Robert Goulden, “Housing, Inequality and Economic Change in Syria,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 38/2 (August 2011).
[5] UNICEF and Syrian Commission for Family Affairs, Situation Analysis of Childhood Status in Syria (Damascus, 2008), p. 26.
[6] See Volker Perthes, The Political Economy of Syria Under Asad (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995); and Bassam Haddad, “Syria’s State Bourgeoisie: An Organic Backbone for the Regime,” Middle East Critique 21/3 (Fall 2012).
[7] Raymond Hinnebusch, “Syria: From ‘Authoritarian Upgrading’ to Revolution?” International Affairs 88/1 (January 2012).
[8] Kasturi Sen and Waleed al Faisal, “Syria: Neoliberal Reforms in Health Sector Financing: Embedding Unequal Access?” Social Medicine 6/3 (March 2012).
[9] Syria Report, October 26, 2011.
[10] International Committee of the Red Cross, “Iraq: Giving Disabled People a Chance to Live a Normal Life,” October 20, 2011.
[11] Alison Alborz et al, “A Study of Mainstream Education Opportunities for Disabled Children and Youth and Early Childhood Development in Iraq” (London: Council for Assistance to Refugee Academics, London South Bank University, 2011).
[12] According to World Health Organization data available here.
[13] Thamer Kadum Al Hilfi, Riyadh Lafta and Gilbert Burnham, “Health Services in Iraq,” The Lancet, March 13, 2013, p. 946.
[14] Alborz et al, op cit.
[15] UNICEF, State of the World’s Children (New York, 2012), pp. 89-90.
[16] UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 44 of the Convention: Third Periodic Reports of States Parties Due in 2003, Lebanon, CRC/C/129/Add.7, Geneva, October 25, 2005, p. 60; UNICEF and Syrian Commission for Family Affairs, Situation Analysis of Childhood Status in Syria (Damascus, 2008), p. 138.
[17] Economist Intelligence Unit, Country Report: Syria, March 2013, p. 6.
[18] Line Khatib, “Syria’s Civil Society as a Tool for Regime Legitimacy” in Paul Aarts and Francesco Cavatorta, eds., Civil Society in Syria and Iran: Activism in Authoritarian Contexts(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2013), p. 30ff.

"Global Warming Is Over" - or how the media change the laws of science

The last week has seen perhaps the most twisted response yet of climate change deniers to the global warming that is heating up our planet, melting the ice caps and changing our weather disastrously.

A new report noted that some of the more extreme predictions of global warming have not been reached - and since 1998 there has been no further warming.

But is this in fact true?

Well, yes if you look at global warming in a very peculiar way. And no, not at all if you look at it in a logical way.

1998 is frequently cited by deniers as proof that global warming has stopped: every year since then has been cooler than in that year. So, you see claims of no warming in the last 15 years.

But this is baloney - 1998 was the warmest year in recorded history; the tarmac melted on Heathrow airport runways as the mercury rose to a record level. This was because of the impact of an unusually strong El Nino weather current, beginning in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Peru which warmed the world significantly more than normal: no one in the climatology community thought that the next year would be as warm as El Nino goes in cycles and would almost certainly not be so strong in 1999, as indeed it was not. 1998 saw a heat spike - but to use that as the starting point for measuring global warming is nonsensical. No one anywhere at any time has suggested temperatures will rise in a nice, smooth incremental curve. Inevitably, there are fluctuations, as happened in 1998 for perfectly explicable reasons.

"Global warming is over" - Really?

And so whilst temperatures since 1998 have been lower than in 1998, in 10 of the 14 years since, they have been the warmest in history other than in 1998. So set against pre-1998 level, the trend is still upwards to levels of heat not seen in several millenia.

Now comes the next conundrum, reported by the BBC last week: temperatures may be continuing to rise, but more slowly than the climate models have predicted. Well, again true if you look at the upper range of the climate predictions (which like all predictions are not and could not be an exact science). But, as leading scientist James Hansen has pointed out, they have risen within the range of predictions plus there is increasing evidence that much of the excess heat from increased carbon dioxide is being absorbed by the sea.

Hence we have seen the much faster than predicted melting of the Arctic ice cap - so much so that an ice-free Arctic in the summer may be just a few years away. Similarly, we see the destruction of coral reefs, a key component in the biology of the oceans, owing to temperature increases that have disturbed the delicate balance that keeps coral alive. While most people probably understand the role played by trees and other land vegetation in the photosynthesis process that turns carbon dioxide into oxygen, less well known is the major role played by plankton and other marine plants in the same process - over fifty per cent of our oxygen comes from miniscule photoplankton in the sea, tiny podules of life that are being massacred by a combination of pollutants and climate change. Their destruction by heating the oceans will in turn fuel a cycle of saturation of the natural carbon sinks that have made life possible, creating in their place ever more dangerous scenarios for the survival of our own and thousands of other species.

How long the sea will absorb excess heat that is unknown - what is pretty certain is that in this process many more species of plant and animal life in the oceans will be gone, further threatening the delicate balance of biosphere; while in due course overall global warming driven by emissions into the atmosphere will sooner or later speed up again. This is not an even process: as we cross particular barriers such as the melting of Arctic and Siberian permafrost, more and more other greenhouse gases, such as methane, will be released, with an even greater environmental impact - methane is nearly twenty times more effective than carbon dioxide in trapping heat. Fortunately, for over the last million years, much of it has been trapped deep under ice - ice that is now steadily melting. If you don't believe it, watch the evidence in the video below.

Sea Change - surface level marine temperatures
are also rising

The equivocation driven on by the climate change denying, UKIP-compliant media this last fortnight has been dreadful. It has come at  precisely the moment when a global warming milestone has been reached: carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere crossed the 400 parts per million barrier. This is a rise of over a third in the last century and the highest it has been in over two and a half million years. All this at the same time that humanity has burned more carbon fuel than in all the rest of history put together.

And this is where no amount of wishful thinking, equivocation or downright lies will make any difference - the science is irrefutable: if you increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, you thicken it and make it harder for the heat from the sun to escape the Earth's atmosphere, making for a rise, steady or not so steady, in the temperature of the only home we have - planet Earth.

The clock is still ticking towards a 4 degree rise in temperatures by the end of this century: it may not sound much, but the last time they were so high, humans had not even emerged as a species and the Arctic was covered in tropical jungle. The impact of so rapid a rise in heat will lead to massive disruption of weather, food and energy, plus growing parts of the world becoming uninhabitable and driving mass migrations of desperate people around the globe. It is nigh inevitable that conflict will follow - and well before we reach the full impact of 4 degrees. Many of our food and water systems are already breaking down under the pressures of record demand set against increasing temperatures, with some scenarios predicting global catastrophe within just 15 years.

And yet, on cue, the likes of Britain's Daily Mail or America's Fox News, Rupert Murdoch's US propaganda wing, run headlines like Fox's "Global Warming is Over" (although since in their Universe it never began, the headline is typically inept). They trumpet bizarre conspiracy theories about global scientific plots to make up global warming in order to qualify for grants and other funding, and ignore the true science yet alone, increasingly, the disturbed and disturbing weather patterns that hit extreme after extreme again and again. Just yesterday, Oklahoma was devastated by a near-two miles wide tornado in yet another of those once-in-a-century event which seem to happen every few months now.

So don't listen to the siren voices that want to carry on as before. Just like the Sirens of old, they will simply dash you to pieces on the rocks of their own crassly myopic greed and selfishness and gladly drown us all in a Tartarean sea of fire.

The Boston Tea Party - UKIP and the End of Britain

Erm....thanks, but no thanks?

The Boston Tea Party was in full swing earlier today. In the area of Lincolnshire covered by the orginal town of Boston, the rightwing, populist United Kingdom Independence Party took five of the seven wards up for election. It was part of a major breakthrough for the party, which took 16 seats in all on the local county council to become the official opposition. Tonight, the BBC estimates its national vote share at 23%, eclipsing the junior coalition partner the Lib Dems and snapping at the heels of the Conservatives on 25%.

So who are UKIP?

Established over 20 years ago by anti-European Thatcherites who wanted to leave the European Union, it has an essentially elitist/populist rightwing agenda - anti-Europe, anti-immigration and anti-"benefits scrounger". It opposes controls on the banks and backs massive tax cuts for millionaires. It  supports a so called flat tax of around 31% of income (this would also incorporate national insurance) - meaning tax rises for the majority of people and substantial cuts for the elite. In foreign policy, it wants the same relationship with the EU as Switzerland and Norway enjoy - associates rather than members, seeking the benefit of multinational companies to the detriment of ordinary employees in the name of so-called competitiveness.

UKIP is headed by Tories - its leader, Nigel Farage is a former stockbroker and son of a stockbroker, and a former Conservative Party activist. Most of its leadership hails from the Thatcherite wing of the Tories. It is backed financially by big business and some very wealthy people, whom it backs in return. But it plays on a classic divide and rule agenda - struggling to pay your mortgage? Well, that's because of Asians/fake disabled people/slothful benefits scroungers, etc. Nothing to do with corrupt bankers or millionaire tax dodgers. The majority of its voters are former Conservatives, but it has also tapped into disillusioned former Labour supporters, playing to an anti-migrant agenda - in Lincoln, for example, against the eastern Europeans who have moved there to work in the agricultural sector. It offers divisive but powerful explanations for society's problems, playing on the fears of the vulnerable and by doing so reinforcing the hold of the elite.

Farage likes to portray himself as a blokey man-of-the-people, pint and fag in hand, although the velveteen jacket lapels and checked bonnet can't quite hide his hankerings for country squire status. And behind him are some fairly unpleasant characters. Never mind that in the last European Parliament, several of his MEPs ended up in trouble for fiddling their expenses, with one actually jailed, while more recently the sole female MEP left because of alleged bullying - one of his colleagues, Godfrey Bloom, who sits for Yorkshire, openly backed the bombing of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior by the French secret services, apparently forgetting that a photographer was killed as a result.

UKIP candidates and elected representatives have called for a range of bizarre, antiquated practices, including not employing women of child-bearing age and taxing bicycles. Additionally and very oddly, they are committed to subsidising nuclear power to almost the equivalent of what they claim withdrawal from the EU would save the taxpayer. Like their Italian and American counterparts of Berlusconi's Forza Italia and Palin's Tea Party, they portray themselves as anti-establishment when in fact they are both of the establishment and keener than ever to reinforce its hold over ordinary people.

But of course people often don't vote for policies - they vote instead for the narrative: and UKIP's narrative is straightforward - vote for us for a return to a mythical 1950s of white guys in pinstripe suits and bowler hats smoking in the pub on the way home from the office, polite kids, women in the kitchen, gays in the closet and a grateful Empire. They are the "Madmen" of British politics - for as long as politics remain British.

For there is a further consequence - even if the Farage name has Gaelic rather than Saxon origins, UKIP is not British. It has little presence and even less interest in Scotland. For United Kingdom, read England .The party, for example, plays up the myth popularised by the right-wing media that Scots benefit financially from the English taxpayer. Lord Monckton, the party's deputy leader, recently depicted the Scots as dependent on "subsidies from Britain", ignoring the fact that Scotland actually contributes a larger per centage of public revenue to the UK Treasury that its population share merits - 9.4% of tax revenue from 8.4% of the population.

UKIP's rise mirrors the rise in English people identifying as English rather than British - in the 2011 national census, only 29% of the population of England viewed themselves in any way as "British", and 55% of UKIP supporters in one recent survey choose the option of "I am English, not British." or "More English than British." So the "UK" part of "UKIP" looks increasingly misleading, whatever Farage may claim to the contrary.

And so UKIP's successes today may further the view among a growing number of Scots that, faced with an increasingly neoliberal rightwing political consensus in England, it will bode well to leave an ever more fractious Union. This would free Scotland to preserve and develop a more egalitarian society independent of the somewhat harsher worldview that is emerging in English politics.

With UKIP working to repeat its showing in next year's European elections and Scotland voting in its independence referendum just a few weeks later, 2nd May 2013 could one day be looked back on not simply as the date of a surprising result in English local polls; it may also ultimately be seen as the day when the United Kingdom itself finally began to unravel.

And if you are reading this in Scotland, looking south at what is emerging between the rightwing Coalition Government, the continuation of neoliberal New Labour and the rise of the Faragists, why on earth not?

Back to the future or forward to the past - UKIP's ideal workplace?

Coda: Thatcher Triumphans

The "Iron Lady" was as everyone knows laid to rest this week with £10 million of taxpayers cash funding her cremation and a further £15 million now proposed by David Cameron to pay for a completely unprecedented publicly funded Thatcher museum (even when we already have the historically themed National Coal Mining Museum near Wakefield in Yorkshire, which probably tells more truths about Her Legacy than any new foundation ever would). 

Unprecedented and unwarranted. Where is the Churchill Museum or the Attlee Memorial Library? Both were politicians who, whatever their failings, achieved infinitely more in unifying the nation than she ever did. And yet here we are with this hagiography, the State paying to remember someone who detested the State. 

All you need to know about Thatcher - the National Coal
Mining Museum is sited in a closed pit.

And yet, her mark is indeed indelible. "Thatcherism" has redefined the country and has been followed by every Government since - more and more, our public services are opened up for profit by privateers with virtually our entire NHS now up for compulsory competitive tendering courtesy of the Coalition Government, its extreme neoliberalism the culmination of the Thatcher Project. And our society is atomised - the rich are smaller in number than ever, but wealthier than at any time since the Feudal Age; while everyone else is set against each other by the media owned and run by the elite: Asian against white, able bodied against disabled, worker against unemployed, old against young. She said there was no such thing as society and, in her years and the times since, she and her successors have worked hard to bring her words to fruition.

She was an agent of change; but not the only one. And this is where focusing on her alone and her demise is a mistake - Thatcherism would still have happened without her; and long after her "friends" knifed her in the back and threw her out of office, others have carried on, taking her work further and further, to places maybe even she never imagined possible. As radical comedian Jeremy Hardy pointed out, her funeral was an opportunity to remind ourselves of just what unpleasant company she kept - a grim assortment of (nearly entirely male) plutocrats, including criminals, racists, tax dodgers and arms dealers. These men are the rulers of our nation, the people who shape the agenda and control the communications that set the tempo of what passes for national debate. Her funeral was as much a celebration of their omnipotence as it was of her life, their presence perhaps a final thank you to their masthead.

Can the tide be turned back? Of course it can, and maybe in the ashes of our society, a new collective will can yet emerge to rebuild a country where citizens look out for each other even when they will never meet; where a spirit of generosity exists, recognising it may be better that 0.5% of benefit claims are fraudulent rather than live in a society where illness or unemployment threatens hunger and homelessness; and where we find a way to marshall our finite resources for the good of all rather than meekly accept the obscene wealth of a tiny elite.

This will come. But for now, we still live in Thatcher's Britain and we need to oppose her legacy and any attempt to lionise it or turn it into some sort of Diana-esque beatification of someone who, as they say, was no saint - no saint at all.

I watched the video below in a pub with some friends waiting to go to the election count in Glasgow in summer 1987. We were in good spirits - the BBC had just announced an exit poll pointing to a hung parliament; at last, after eight years, Tory Britain might be drawing to a close. Sadly though, the Conservatives were to win again and in the next three years Thatcher was to preside over the rise of the yuppies, the end of the Cold War and finally over-reach herself with the ill fated poll tax.

But the song in the video, a satire by the sadly missed Spitting Image team based on a scene from the film Cabaret and incorporating the Nazis favourite ditty, remains as powerful today as all these years ago. Long after she fell from power, and now even in death, the day does indeed belong to her and her poisonous ilk.

But, eventually, in its darkest hour, every day comes to an end.

For Liberty, Equality...and Survival - Vote Green

http://www.greenparty.org.uk/

This week has seen a tirade of bad news even in the richest country in the world. The Boston bombing, the explosion of a chemical fertiliser plant in the aptly names town of West, and the continuing drought in the American Mid West which now seriously threatens world food supplies in the second half of this year.

And, too, the longer term looks little better across the whole planet - with a UN report setting out how the last decade has seen carbon emissions reaching unprecedented levels and governments turning away from reducing greenhouse gas production towards the sci fi scenario of tech fixes such as, somehow, sucking carbon and similar damaging gases out of the atmosphere in unimaginable quantities. The self-interest of a capitalist system, driven by seeking in every transaction, every resource and every atom an opportunity to extract value rather than use for the common good, has bought up the political system around the planet. Everything is for sale; even the future.

We need a new politics. The change we need won't come from the current system or parties. If we are to survive and thrive, we need to make fairer and sustainable use of our resources and build real, genuine freedom - from want, from wage-slavery, from the vested interests of the few.

Next week, in England and Wales, the Green Party goes into the local county elections on 2 May with an unashamed platform calling out to those who want public services renationalised and put to use for the common good; for those who want to scrap nuclear weapons rather than waste tens of billions on destruction; and for those who support a redistribution of wealth through fairer taxes and investment in sustainable green jobs.

A vote for the Greens supports these and more moves towards a world where the interdependence of ecology and social justice are not just recognised, but embraced and nurtured. It is just one small step but it is on a journey where every single one matters. Every inch gained is an inch towards a future that will work, where humanity can survive and thrive.

The broadcast is here. The Polling stations are near wherever you live.

R.I.P. - The Prime Minister who Changed Britain for Good

Clement Attlee, Deputy Prime Minister through the war, Prime Minister of the first majority socialist government from 1945 to 1951, made Britain a safer, kinder and more equal country; a Land Fit for Heroes after the struggle with Hitler. His story here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Attlee

It is a thinner veneer than we often care to think about that divides civilised society from the harsh and fearful chaos of survival of the fittest. Attlee's government went a long way to ridding our country of such fear - fear of losing your job and going hungry, fear of not being able to pay for a doctor if you were sick and the many fears born of the ignorance that exists when there is limited education. It is forgotten that before his Government, women did not even enjoy the same legal property rights as men - how easy it is to to take for granted things that past generations had to struggle tooth and nail for.

Margaret Thatcher set out to roll back the achievements of Attlee - she despised his belief in community, denouncing his legacy with the statement that "There is no such thing as society, just a collection of individuals."

And with that cri de coeur, she set about a process of lauding self-interest at the expense of others that carried on through the dull days of Major and the self-congratulatory smirking of Blair's Nu-Labour, to the ever harsher neoliberalism of the Coalition. In their hands, the social veneer is worn and chipped, and thinner than ever.

We commemorate her and forget Attlee at great peril to ourselves, our country and our future.

Rest in peace, Clement Attlee. And thank you for all the chances you gave to all of us to make our lives and our nation better.

Rubbish

A chick, fed to death by the plastic stuff we threw away.

I defy anyone to watch this video and not feel nauseated. This is the consequence of our wasteful, trash-ridden consumer society: albatross chicks, killed just days after their birth by their confused parents feeding them bits of plastic rubbish they collect from the ocean, mistakenly thinking they are pieces of food that will nourish their young.

Instead they kill them - in droves.

As one person put it: "Birds do not have as high of a range of taste buds as humans do. Albatrosses eat these plastic fragments because they look similar to the fish they eat. They cannot distinguish between food and plastic as well as humans can. They don't even understand what it is. If it's in the ocean and flowing along like a fish, how could they know?"

The Pacific is known for its ten million square mile plastic garbage patch - the Gire - where the currents of the seas have gradually gathered a vortex of human waste from around the world. See the second video below for more on this.

But it is far from alone. Whether Chinese lanterns sent into the sky by British revellers, only to fall into fields and fatally pierce the mouths and gullets of animals that chew them; or the "dead zone" of chemical waste that extends out from Texas hundreds of miles into the Gulf, humanity's cast asides are killing millions of innocent creatures whose only crime is to have been mistaken. Just today, hundreds of dead birds - mostly guillemots - were found washed ashore in thick chemical waste on the south coast of England.

So, next time you can't be bothered to recycle, or you object to reusing a supermarket bag, remember this. And if someone tells you the environmental lobby talks rubbish, ask them where they think theirs ends up.

Read more about THIS PLASTIC EARTH here.

 

Urgent Warning - Food Security at Risk from Global Warming, say scientists

As blogged here previously, global warming is likely to have a major impact on world food supplies in the coming decades - not only will it become more expensive, increasingly, it will become less available regardless of money, especially if we retain a free market system to determine supply and distribution.

The lead article in today's Observer newspaper sets out new, updated warnings that we are heading for disaster and, as ever, the poor will be the first to be hit. But only the first - climate change, if not checked, is set to overwhelm our civil systems well before the century is out. And the timeframe to stop runaway climate change is now perilously short. If we don't stop it, then when the time comes and famine sets in, it will be truly human-made and driven, both by human-induced climate change and by our short-sighted failure to act on both global warming and the harsh, vicious nature of unregulated 21st century market capitalism.

As Andrew Sims explored in his chilling report Nine Meals from Anarchy, the consequences, for everyone, will be beyond dreadful.

For the full Observer article, click here.

Other articles: from Viridis Lumen - Green Left Watermelon article on World Food Day
                                                     - Eat All You Can
                                                     - Salmond's Leap
                                                     - Supermarket Sweep
                                                     - Mass Produced Horse shit -guaranteed
From New Economics Foundation - free Nine Meals from Anarchy pdf download here.

Todays' Guardian

Thatcherism After Thatcher - Challenging the Legacy

Nelson Mandela is invited to Mrs Thatcher's funeral - but some of her supporters wanted him dead years ago.

The last week has seen a surge of controversy as Britain stands totally divided on how to mark the passing of former Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

The Coalition Government recalled Parliament specially to eulogize her and in spite of our austere financial times has also found over £8 million to pay for her funeral (most of it on security arrangements, in itself a telling statistic of her ability to divide even after life). By contrast, the Left has been left somewhat bamboozled on how to respond. A few have taken to the streets in apparent celebration, with a handful of instances of violence; while others have preferred the option of downloading a song from the Wizard of Oz, Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead, in such numbers it is expected to reach the top of the charts.

Most of the Left have been somewhat more restrained - Miliband, if he counts as left at all, unsurprisingly giving her qualified praise in the Commons debate, whist others have been rather subdued, cravenly overawed perhaps by the bullishness of the press in granting Thatcher a sort of Diana-esque beatification in death.

One in memoriam stands out, however, for being apposite in marking her passing not by gloating over the death of another human being, however flawed and unpleasant she was, but rather looking to the impact of her continuing legacy.

This was the statement issued by the National Union of Miners, the legitimate union which she once smeared as "The Enemy Within", ironically at the same time as criticising the Polish Government's suppression of the Solidarity trade union movement.

"To her family our condolences.

The legacy of what the Conservative Government did to British Industry under Thatcher is not one to be proud of if you really did want the best for the people. Of course Thatcher was the symbol of “free enterprise” and set out to serve those whose interests were profit for the few. The coal mining industry is not on its own in suffering the decimation of a world class industry in the name of the “free market”.

Thatcher lived long enough to see her beliefs demolished when the “free market” collapsed and came running to the State for support.  Unlike the Banks who gambled, cheated and were bailed out – Coal mines were closed and communities were left to suffer.

Margaret Hilda Thatcher is gone but the damage caused by her fatally flawed politics sadly lingers on."

And of course, with us now reeling under the oppressive boot of the most rightwing Government in history, this analysis is as pertinent as ever. The Coalition parties are rolling back the State further than Margaret Thatcher ever tried, but working fully in the spirit of her neoliberal ideology with its concept that Government should do as little as possible while profit-making should be introduced into every conceivable social transaction. It must have been with some satisfaction that in her final days she witnessed both the near destruction of the social welfare system and the effective privatization of the NHS with nearly all frontline services being put out to compulsory competitive tender from 1 April.

But of course, as with so many leaders, there are many myths about her which do not quite bear up to scrutiny.

- Contrary to myth, her Government borrowed vast amounts of money whilst preaching parsimony, needing it first to pay for  the record unemployment caused by her initial monetarist economic policies; and then to pay for tax cuts when she finally gave up on the doctrine so she could court re-election in 1987. She did reduce borrowing for a short time artificially by one-off sales of privatized state assets like the telecomms, energy and transport sectors, a policy castigated by her One Nation Tory predecessor Harold MacMillan as "selling off the family silver." Only in her last two years out of ten in office did she balance the books paying off £8 billion of the national debt, barely a quarter of what Gordon Brown managed (but for some bizarre reason never seemed to speak about in the 2010 election - we forget that just as she was the Iron Lady, Brown was for some years titled the Iron Chancellor).

Borrowing by Governments - since the war, Labour's financial record has bettered the Tories on running surpluses until having to bailout the banks. (Source - Guardian Newspaper)

- Contrary to myth, the Tory regime did not conquer inflation: it was suppressed to low levels for some years by her inducing a recession which put millions out of work, but overall it was just above 10% when she came to office, and just under 10% (and on an upwards spiral) when she left. 

- Contrary to myth, in spite of "hand bagging" the European Community, it was Thatcher's government that passed the Single European Act ushering in free movement of labour and capital across the Union, the single biggest step towards the Europe we have now. She also took us, albeit with reservations, into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, the precusor of the single European currency. She was no Euro-federalist, but in spite of the rhetoric and image, her support of the EU defies her adoption now as the masthead of the Eurosceptics: the EU we have now is in no small part down to her actions in office.

It was her Government that began the process, continued by the Major Conservative Government, of moving the long-term unemployed off the unemployment register and onto long term disability benefits. Disability/sickness benefits nearly trebled in pounds cost under Thatcher, rising from 15% to nearly 22% of the total social security bill (and to 26% under her successor John Major) as the Tories massaged the unemployment figures for political ends. This supreme example of statistical manipulation, as well as the manipulation of the lives and wellbeing of millions of vulnerable people, has now reached a viciously twisted denouement with her successors' assault on people they now decry as the LTB - lying thieving bastards. 

We could also remind the public that, as the ailing political giant Nelson Mandela, who led his nation to remarkable reconciliation, is invited to Mrs Thatcher's funeral, they might reflect that some of her supporters were keen to hold his funeral many years ago. After she derided Mandela as the leader of a "terrorist organisation" and refused to boycott the apartheid state, Mrs Thatcher was content to permit the Federation of Conservative Students to campaign for his execution by hanging.

By their works shall ye know them - and so we did and should continue to. This then is her legacy.

And yet, rather than partying at her death, the real challenge for the Left is to disseminate that legacy. The privatization of the NHS, for example, has been decades in the making - it was Thatcher who first brought in the internal market in health and ever since then hospitals and doctors have been pushed into ever-decreasing circles of both chasing the lowest price and proving their worth in terms of money rather than quality of care. Administration costs have nearly tripled while billions of pounds of public money have been robbed from the public coffers in the form of the Private Finance Initiative, yet another child of Thatcherism.

The risk now is that by courting controversy with tasteless "death parties" and the like, the Left allows her politics to be converted into some sickening hagiography that belies the truth of it : how many times have you heard ordinary members of the public saying things like Maggie would have sorted out the bankers or how she would have stopped the mess the Coalition have got us into? 

These of course could not be further from the truth - Thatcher led the way in deregulating banks and breaking the mutual building society sector; and more widely the Coalition are simply fulfilling the process which she began (and Blair continued), taking it to its next, ideological stage. Like Thatcher, they laud inequality and seek to destroy the social bonds between people, just as she once declared that there is no such thing as society. Britain under her Government became a place which was less kind, less united, where sterling replaced community. Memorably, her bleak take on the parable of the Good Samaritan had more to do with cash than care: “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions - he had money too”

It is what she leaves behind that we should be debating. Instead, by focusing on (and, even worse, publicly celebrating) the death of an elderly woman, someone whose place would simply have been taken by someone else had she never existed, we cede the real debate about now and the future of our society. The anger may be real, understandable and shared, but it is tragically misdirected. And, in spite of all the fluster in the right wing press, the Iron Lady herself would doubtless have thoroughly approved.

Her Legacy Remains

Red Maggie - Thatcher's Part in the Great Socialist Warming Conspiracy

Climate change is a "left-wing conspiracy to de-industrialise the world" (US Senator Minchin, 2009)

Santorum: Climate Change is a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy(US Republican Presidential Primary candidate Rick Santorum, 2012)

"....a disgraceful scam whereby the global depression was prolonged and deepened, where thousands of people died in artificially induced fuel poverty..." (James Delinpole, British journalist, 2013)

Just a smattering of not unfamiliar headlines echoing the now nearly hackneyed claims by right wingers around the world that global warming and climate change are some sort of mass Socialist/Communist conspiracy, which somehow has co-opted virtually the entire scientific community, to de-industrialise the planet - why socialists would want to do such a thing is never actually explained. Indeed, Green Parties often emphasise re-industrialising their home countries - reviving local manufacture rather than destroying it; instead ending the ludicrous and polluting long-distance import of goods made in sweatshops on the other side of the world.

If right wingers are concerned about de-industrialising left wingers, they might look to history and explain why it was the Communist Soviet Union that undertook perhaps the most rapid and massive programme of industrialisation in history, whilst Marxism itself is predicated on the development of an industrial proletariat. By contrast, in recent decades the right wing neoliberal governments in the UK and USA have led the way in shutting down a lot of industrial manufacturing in their countries in favour instead of big multinationals shifting industry overseas to countries with low wage, low safety and insecure protection for workers.

There was always something about Maggie...

This conundrum aside, the right wing's lack of historical awareness in their paper-thin claims is also evident in their ignorance of who was the first major British politician to raise the issue of global warming. It was that wild-eyed Red Menace, Margaret Thatcher, UK Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. Now, she was/is a scientist by qualification and pre-political profession, so it may well be that, along with almost every other scientist on the planet, Maggie was in fact co-opted into the vast left wing conspiracy to promulgate climate change and use it as a means of de-industrialising Britain: personally, I always thought her economic policies did a pretty good job of that without needing global warming, but who knows?

I have to say, if she was a sort of British Manchurian Candidate, Maggie Thatcher has to have been the most effective socialist sleeper agent of all time. Objectively, she must have been in such a deep sleep that she never actually woke up. Perhaps, rather, she was hypnotised when she spoke to the United Nations in 1990, warning that 

"... the threat to our world comes not only from tyrants and their tanks. It can be more insidious though less visible. The danger of global warming is as yet unseen, but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices, so that we do not live at the expense of future generations.

In recent years, we have been playing with the conditions of the life we know on the surface of our planet. We have cared too little for our seas, our forests and our land. We have treated the air and the oceans like a dustbin. We have come to realise that man's activities and numbers threaten to upset the biological balance which we have taken for granted and on which human life depends.

We must remember our duty to Nature before it is too late.

Promises are easy. Action is more difficult. For our part, we have worked out a strategy which sets us on the road to achieving the target. We propose ambitious programmes both to promote energy efficiency and to encourage the use of cleaner fuels.

We now require, by law, that a substantial proportion of our electricity comes from sources which emit little or no carbon dioxide, and that includes a continuing important contribution from nuclear energy.

Many of the precautionary actions that we need to take would be sensible in any event. It is sensible to improve energy efficiency and use energy prudently; it's sensible to develop alternative and sustainable and sensible ... it's sensible to improve energy efficiency and to develop alternative and sustainable sources of supply; it's sensible to replant the forests which we consume; it's sensible to re-examine industrial processes; it's sensible to tackle the problem of waste. I understand that the latest vogue is to call them ‘no regrets’ policies. Certainly we should have none in putting them into effect.

We are, as the poet said, in symmetry with nature. To keep that precious balance, we need to work together for our environment. The United Kingdom will work with all of you and all the world besides in this cause—to save our common inheritance for generations yet to come."

This call to action was part of a speech to the Second World Climate Change Conference in Geneva in November 1990 and echoed sentiments she had voiced in speeches over the previous two to three years. It's importance was overshadowed by the crisis that was engulfing her collapsing Premiership, which was to come to an end shortly afterwards. Only in 2003 did she ever suggest any contrary views and then only in a rather rambling diatribe pitched mainly at the disputes raging between her devotees (who had adopted climate scepticism as an ideological cri de coeur for a non-interventionist state) and (slightly) more liberal elements in the Tory Party.

Greens disagree profoundly with Thatcher's economics, which deregulated markets and encouraged the conditions which have led to an ever upwards spiral in global greenhouse gas emissions; nearly all would also disagree with her support for nuclear power as a useful, safe or efficient alternative to carbon fuels; but none would disagree with her analysis or her apparent call to action on global warming. To be fair, she called for further research - which has been done and has done nothing but confirm her analysis and fears for the future. And in the 22 years since, both warming and emissions have continued upwards. 

So, Daily Mail readers, Mr Delingpole, UKIP leader Farage and all the other right wingers who laud Thatcher as your role model, inspiration and guru, if you won't listen to the Greens, perhaps you might take some time to read Thatcher's speech - in full here. And then ask yourselves, if global warming really is a load of Bolshevik propaganda and part of some bizarre conspiracy too fantastical for even a Dan Brown novel, how on earth did we manage to get Margaret Thatcher on board the vanguard of revolution?

The Only Green is Mould - the Planet Strangling Coalition of the Damned

Three years ago, the Cleggeron regime pledged itself to become the greenest government in history. Heading this mission was the criminal liar Chris Huhne, then the Energy Secretary.

Well, a bit like Mrs Huhne, few believed them then and even fewer do now. After a litany of half-hearted greenwash window dressing to try to disguise the bankruptcy of their environmental commitment (remember that the majority of Tory MPs don't even believe climate change is happening), the Coalition has now delivered the final blow to its tattered credibility on tackling the global warming crisis according to newly released Government figures.

In 2011 to 2012, a surge in use of cheap coal has increased UK carbon emissions by a staggering 4.5%, a rise of over 19 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (and overall with five other "greenhouse gases" the rise in total emissions is 3.5%), which thicken the atmosphere, trap the sun's heat and warms the planet.

In spite of claiming even now to be delivering the greenest government ever, the Coalition has stripped schemes such as the community owned renewable energy feed-in tariff of any genuine support and undertaken a programme of roadbuilding which will significantly increase emissions once completed by encouraging greater use of cars.

The recession has been touted by some, especially the Chancellor George Osborne, as a good chance to stop investing in renewable energy. In spite of the issue being a global emergency, the Government seem to think action can wait - a sharp contrast to Scotland, where the SNP Government is on target to meet a 100% renewables target for electricity generation nationwide by 2020. Likewise, as posted a few days ago, Germany continues to lead the field (and investment) in renewables at a staggering pace.

With global warming continuing apace, and even the current freezing British weather attributable to the impact of rising temperatures on sea ice melt, the need for action has never been so urgent. However, the only green in this regime is the mould encrusting their ideas and the gangrenous stench emitted by their puffed up claims of supposed concern and action.

Time is passing too quickly to delay any longer. And the Coalition, in this area as well as many others, is simply not fit for purpose.