Sacking with CONfidence (Part 5)

Yet another update on the right-wing populist and often ignorantly uninformed slaughter of employment law and protection of employees in Britain.

So yesterday we were treated to the spectacle of Mrs Windsor, who has never attended a job interview in her life but who has a pretty mean track record when it comes to maltreatment of her staff in the low wage Royal Household, informing us how her Government intends to create more flexibility for employers. This will give them even more opportunities to rip off customers and staff alike by making it even easier for people to be dismissed without any chance of recompense. Lizzie's family has already got form in trying to break employment tribunal rules and withhold legal evidence, so it seems she is happy for her Ministers to make life a bit easier for the likes of her son in future employment disputes.

Get to work and be grateful, peasants!

Not content with doubling from one to two years the period of time employees new to a company can be dismissed for absolutely no reason at all, the Con Dem Government has brought forward  a series of measures to make it much harder for people who have been dismissed to raise any complaint at an Employment Tribunal. the quality of the legislation mooted in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill betrays the fact that the legislation is pretty much about Tory prejudice against all employment rights rather than a serious attempt to reform the law.

For example, in the name of reducing the number of tribunals, people pursuing a complaint will have to first lodge their complaint with ACAS in an attempt to reach a conciliated settlement. This appears to be in total ignorance of the fact that this already happens - all tribunal claims are automatically lodged with ACAS and a conciliation officer is appointed to try to broker a solution. If what is perhaps implied here is that there is a new stage of conciliation via ACAS before you can even lodge a claim to a tribunal, this suggests a number of inbuilt flaws, which probably combine hostility towards employees with a lack of understanding of how the current system works.

1. If the conciliation stage is a separate phase to the tribunal complaint, this seems to be adding to red tape rather than reducing it.

2. Tribunal awards usually pay compensation for loss of earnings to successful complainants for the period of time from the end of employment to the conclusion of the tribunal process. An additional phase of conciliation will extend this period of time, which means either employers face higher costs at the end if an employee is successful OR the Government is going to reduce the amount of compensation available even when a claim of unfair dismissal is successful - any ideas which option this Government might take?

3. Nearly two-thirds of employment tribunal complaints are already conciliated - half by ACAS and the rest privately. Few people enjoy taking their employer to a tribunal - I know, having been involved on both sides often enough - so the conciliation process is already pretty effective. Dragging things out when conciliation is not possible will simply make the process much harder on many levels for both sides - but perhaps the Government calculation is that this will deter people from asserting their rights even when they have been bullied or harassed out of their livelihoods - so much for justice.

4. The tribunal system is in much need of reform: it works essentially for two groups alone - lawyers and people with tenuous claims. People who have genuinely lost their jobs unfairly get piss poor awards averaging less than £9,000 - the fantastic six figure sums touted with some furious fanfare in the likes of the Daily Mail are news precisely because they are few and far between. However, the current round of so-called reform will do little to change this. Instead, it will simply deter yet further people in vulnerable situations from asserting what tiny amount of power they have in the employment relationship, which remains even now governed at its core by the ancient laws of Master and Servant.

In the despair of the Lib Dem wing of the Coalition, a few of their number have suggested that they might not be so enthusiastic about these new proposals, but let it not be forgotten that the most pernicious changes to employment rights so far have been driven forward by Lib Dem Ministers in the name of cutting red tape, and even their adjustments to existing laws on family leave (actually a confirmation of plans put in place by the Labour Government pre-2010) include a reduction in maternity leave rights for expectant mothers.

But then, the Lib Dems have been weak on employment rights for people for a long time now, ignoring the fact that over 85% of the workforce are employees and so the protections afforded against arbitrary dismissal are important to a large number of us ordinary mortals. In 2005, Clegg's predecessor, the supposedly social democratic Charles Kennedy fought the General Election on a platform of seeking "a bonfire of the red tape" that allegedly stifles employment in the UK.

Seven years ago, in my final days of Lib Dem membership, I was irate about reading that their MEPs were supporting the continuation of the British opt-out of the European Working Time Directive, which has prevented workers from having to work excessive hours across the Continent - apart from in Britain thanks to the opt-out negotiated by the Tories in 1992. I wrote to the then leader of the Lib Dem MEPs, Chris Davies. His reply could easily have come from any Tory backbencher, so packed it was with prejudice against workers - and it was the final thing, of many, which tipped me into leaving and joining the Greens.

The text is below: so, don't let anyone fool you - the legislative drive to weaken our employment security in the middle of a recession is very much the offspring of both parts of this most poisonous regime, which seems to view its own citizens as its enemy.

(bold italics are my emphases)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sent: 13 May 2005 14:54
To: chrisdaviesmep@cix.co.uk
Subject: Working time regulations

Dear Chris Davies,

I have been a member of the Liberal Democrats and our predecessor parties for 27 years and am writing to you after reading about our MEP's vote against the proposed changes to the EU working time regulations this week, including your own criticisms on your website about the vote to end the 48 hours maximum average working week opt-out.

I am surprised and disappointed by the Lib Dem MEPs approach to the proposed changes. I am also quite baffled by your comments that most people work a 37 hour week in the UK, but as a point of principle, people should be able to choose to work longer.

The fact is that most recent surveys indicate the averge working week in Britain is actually around 42 hours and, as I am sure you must be aware of, a "long hours culture" exists in many industries, especially among lower paid workers. While, since slavery is illegal, as a legal technicality they may "choose" to work longer than their contracted hours, the fact is that very often they have no realistic choice if they wish to avoid punitive action against them by their employer. A recent TUC survey found that less than 1-in-3 people who regularly work more than 48 hours per week have ever been asked to sign the legally required opt-out and there have been instances of people being told they had to sign the opt-out a a condition of their employment. To suggest therefore that "choice" enters into the equation for the vast majority of people who are expected to work long hours is quite frankly misguided.

The regulations as proposed would average the working week over an entire year - it is not as if people could never work more than 48 hours in any one week, or even for quite prolonged periods. It simply requires that over a full year, people do not work more than this on average. I don't know about you, but if I had a relative requiring care, or was myself being driven on a bus or train, I would feel very concerned if the person administering drugs or driving the bus/train had really been working more than 48 hours that week and had been doing so routinely. In addition, regular long hours of work make the worker more prone to both short-term illnesses such as flu or colds from a reduced immune system and longer terms diseases such as diabetes and heart condtions, which can be of little good to the worker, or, for that matter, their employer in the long run.

I am quite astonished that Lib Dems are taking such a stance - where is the care about people that we have campaigned on for years (remember "People First"?)? Liberals were among the first, decades ago, to introduce health and safety requirements to the workplace, tackling both moral and productivity issues at the same time. I regret deeply that this no longer seems to be the case - as additionally evidenced last autumn when the federal conference voted against holding mulitinationals to ILO standards in the employment of some of the most vulnerable people on this planet.

You may argue that you agree with all that I have said, but that the core of your argument is about subsidiarity. However, given that Britain is widely seen as a low wage, low regulated economy, is it little surprise that other EU states might want our opt-out to be ended given the unfair competitive advantage this gives to our corporate shareholders over those in other countries in what is meant to be a single market? What happened to our long trumpeted call on the Major Government to sign up to the Social Chapter with all the labour protection that envisaged? Was it our policy to sign up as long as we could opt out? I don't remember it being so and I fail to see what has changed.

I implore you and the other MEPs to revise your view on this and similar employment protection measures. Seeking to protect our people from the demands of employers who in most cases have as their sole objective profit maximisation is well within the long traditions of both liberalism and social democracy. It is also one, given that most people are employees, which would not be electorally damaging as long as you do not portray this as something which limits people's ability to act for themselves, which in all truth it is not.

I must stress I write as  a Personnel & Training Manager who has worked in the residential care industry for 15 years now. I do not find complying with these regulations, including the end of the opt-out, as a difficulty and any company that did struggle with them would quite frankly be one which was not functioning effectively at all.

I hope to hear from you.

Friday, 20 May 2005, 10:53

Chris Davies MEP  wrote:

As am MP in 1996 I introduced a Bill in to the House of Commons calling for greater employee protection within the UK.

My reason for supporting the British opt-out of the EU Working Time Directive is entirely on subsidiarity grounds.

If people want strict controls over working hours at the risk of loss of competivity then they should vote for Government to introduce it. I do not believe that measures of this kind should be set as EU standard.

It would be hard to find a more pro-European politician than myself, but if Liberal Democrats do not respect our own belief that decisions should always be taken at the lowest practicable level then we will have no hope in convincing others of the merits of the European case.

The Working Time Directive was introduced using the Health and Safety legal basis. We have supported its application where this is relevant (lorry drivers, doctors etc) but it's application in other instances is I believe illegitimate.

Yours Sincerely

Chris Davies MEP.

A Spectre is Haunting Europe...

...the spectre of anti-austerity.

The last week has seen major democratic challenges at the ballot box to the neoliberal parties of austerity economics across Europe.

In Britain, the two Coalition parties went down in flames at a series of electoral contests covering local councils and the Mayor of London and other cities - in London, the Lib Dem wing of the government ended up in fourth place, behind the Green Party, for both the Mayor and the Assembly elections. And although Tory Boris Johnson was elected, it was in the end by a much tighter margin than predicted and after a campaign distinguished by distinguishing himself from the Tory Government. At the other end of England, in Liverpool, the Conservative Party trailed in seventh place, behind parties like the Greens, Trade Unions & Socialist Coalition and the independent Liberal Party (as well as their Lib Dem allies). Meanwhile across the country, swathes of Conservative and Lib Dem councillors were felled by an anti-government revolt that saw big gains for the Labour Party but also for a range of smaller groups like the Greens, UKIP and Respect, as well as the SNP in Scotland.

Then, in France, the Socialist candidate, Francois Hollande was elected President, defeating the incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy on an anti-austerity programme committed to renegotiating the fiscal treaty of the neoliberal, cuts-obsessed EU and taxing the rich. In the first round of the election, nearly 3 out of 4 voters supported candidates opposed to austerity measures.

The Drachma marked Greece's sovereignty - then and now?

And then today, the Greek people firmly rejected the German-led takeover of their country by the Central European Bank, voting in its place for a wide range of right and left wing parties opposed to the slash-and-burn methods of the international banking community. These austerity measures have dictated a dreadful scything of Hellenic public services to pay for a combination of dodgy bank dealing by Goldman Sachs early in the last decade and tax evasion by the rich elite. An early exit from the Eurozone beckons, the clearest and most logical route for Greeks to regain control of their country from Gauleiter Papademos, Merkel's Minister without Mercy, who has been squeezing the Greek state to death for the sake of the bankers.

Italy has followed suit, with a big swing to the left in local elections yesterday as well, and even in Merkel's own backyard, a federal election held today would be unlikely to return her to power. The response of the bankers and market traders, previously secure with the "public will pay" promises of the conservative regimes that had dominated much of Europe, has been predictably negative as their ill-gotten gains come under scrutiny once again.

So what happens now? The People have spoken - austerity is rejected as the ever-decreasing circle that it is. Like the old medieval cure of bleeding the humours out of people, austerity saps the capacity of national economies to ever recover, putting the short-term gain of speculators ahead of community and national needs. But a simple return to Keynesian reflation probably won't work in a world where increasing resource scarcity and environmental damage militate against continuous growth.

The challenge now has to be to get economies moving again to create jobs, but also to distribute wealth fairly. Hollande may make a good case for the first, but unless the Left in France keep the pressure on him, there may be less attention paid to the second, promised tax increases aside. Syriza, the new second party of Greece (typically still described by the BBC as a fringe party!), argues for a wider social change in terms of ownership of resources as well as fiscal reflation and progressive taxation. It is a coalition of green and socialist groups, so its programme is undoubtedly more radical than the French Socialists, but the latter would do well to read it.

The crash of 2008 led to many on the left making bold statements to the prevailing right wing that there could be no return to business as usual. No disagreement there - but it holds for the left as much as for the right. Reflationary economics based on massive public spending programmes, like the Green New Deal put forward in the UK, have a role to play, but only in part. Keynesian economics are still the economics of capitalism - social democrats have long assumed the possibility of continued growth creating enough to keep everyone happy and in that respect, historically, they have often delivered. Except that in terms of where we are now with the resources available to humanity and the urgent need for sustainable economics, more of the same anti-austerity economics will work only marginally better than austerity - and will leave plenty of scope for capitalist speculators to play havoc with any recovery.

So although Syriza may, just possibly, lead Greece out of the Euro and back to the drachma, the rest of Europe would do well to consider the wider range of proposals coming from red-green alliances around the Continent - and end to austerity yes; but an end to inequality too. This way, slowing and even ending the obsession with growth can still lead to better living standards, to a more sustainable economics and to happier lives for people and communities throughout Europe and across the planet itself.


Previous posts : Athens and Austerity - a Hymn to the Goddess of Democracy
                         The Greek Myths

From Austerity Nut dot com - click here

Green Gains

Greens are performing well as results are declared in local elections throughout Britain. At the time of writing, with most English and Welsh results announced and Scottish ones ongoing, Green parties have picked up on average 9% of the vote where they stand, up 1% on last year, and have made a net gain of 11 new council places. This is in spite of the big swings to the Labour Party which might have been expected to squeeze the Greens down.

More here:
GREEN PARTY OF ENGLAND AND WALES WEBSITE

in Scotland, some big breakthroughs:
SCOTTISH GREEN PARTY

and here
BBC ELECTION RESULTS

If Voting Doesn't Change Anything, Why Did Hitler Abolish It?

"I don't vote, you're all the same..."; "Voting never changed anything..."; "I'd vote for you, but Corrie's on..."


Tomorrow is local elections day across the UK, as well as the election for the London Mayor. It is difficult to be sure, but turnout will almost certainly be well below 50%, and probably far below 40%. This is in spite of the country being in the grip of official recession and austerity economics driving a coach and horses through the social and economic fabric of the nation. It is in spite of the assault on education, health services and welfare by this most perniciously right wing of governments.

Nazi election poster March 1933

It doesn't mean that people reckon the Government is doing ok. Few governments have ever been so unpopular. In one poll this week, the two Coalition parties could barely muster 40% of the potential vote share between them, and the "others" column keeps nudging up to record highs in opinion polls - with the right wing UKIP doing particularly well in recent weeks; but also with growth for the Greens, Nationalists and a smattering for left wing Respect. The moribund BNP is the only one clearly out the running now.

But the real crisis is the loss of faith in voting changing anything. It is pointless, so many argue. And it is often hard to disagree, especially for local elections, if you look at how local government remains so emasculated and governed by national diktat even after the Localism Act supposedly devolved power to communities. Add on top the virtually identical agenda of the three main parties and a voting system which squashes challenges and a media that pretends they don't exist, and yes, you can sympathise with the "voting is a waste of time" argument.

Or you can, for about a minute.

Because the bottom line is that voting can change things. It might not happen overnight, and it might not provide exactly what you want, but voting can make a huge difference:
- between austerity and investment economics in the face of recession
- between a welfare state and "every man for himself" greedonomics (women and children perish)
- between war on Iran and diplomacy with Iran
- between nuclear power and renewable energy
- between public services and privatisation
- between developing land endlessly and protecting greenbelt
- the difference between Adolf Hitler and Otto Wells

Even locally, having served on a Parish Council and seeing the work now of District Councillors in my own area, Greens and others, making a difference to their communities, I readily choose voting over sitting at home complaining. Sure, there isn't always a good choice - but who makes the choices, who are the choices? We can leave it to big business, to the powers-that-be. Or the choices can be made by ordinary people - you, me, the woman down the street, the retired joiner. Any and all of us.

We do not live in a democracy - the combination of voting system, media ownership and a host of other controls prevent this. Likewise, the tragic subversion of the Labour Party by revisionist "third way" Blairites and the co-option of the Lib Dems into the free market magic circle much reduces any immediately obvious choice of different directions voters can opt for. But we do live at a time, unusual in historical terms, where enough of us working and voting together can make a difference.

I make a huge distinction between those who argue for the politics of resistance beyond the ballot box alone - through strike action, public demonstration and peaceful resistance/civil action: all these have a big role to play in driving change forward. But it is essential to elect radical new politicians and parties to lever the power of the state into truly democratic hands and to oversee the function of social and economic programmes beyond the local community. Otherwise, protest and dissent will be suppressed by the continuing control of the organs of the capitalist state by reactionaries - and any change will take longer and come about more violently, with all the awful consequences of such a path.

As for those who prefer to sit and watch Corrie and see the height of public participation being the tele-vote for X-Factor or Celebrity Undertaker or whatever passing pseudo-reality show has grasped the public's attention, I can say only wake up for God's sake and stop wasting this most precious of opportunities to make your life count beyond the numbers on the lottery balls. Voting can make a difference; but only if you get off your backside long enough to go and do it.

So, tomorrow, please...go and vote. For real change - for compassion and community.

Homer Simpson tries to vote for Obama from RandyR.net on Vimeo.

Jobs and the Environment: Caroline Lucas on Gideon's Tragedy

Green Party leader Caroline Lucas MP has blasted as "economically illiterate" Chancellor George Osborne's claims that tackling global warming and environmental degradation would damage the economy. On the day that Britain slipped back into official recession after two years of Con Dem slash-n-burn austerity economics, she talked about how Green Councillors have led the way in job creation.

Nationally, the green economy contributes almost 7% of GDP with potential for much more to get the economy moving and people in jobs, sustainably and cleanly.

You can hear Caroline Lucas' full interview, originally broadcast this morning at the ungodly hour of 6.50 am on Radio 4 to allow the BBC to claim it provides balanced broadcasting, by following this link HERE. 

Caroline Lucas MP (right) with Green councillors on a recent visit to Kirkburton in Kirklees; more on  Cllr Andrew Cooper's blog, "Greening Kirklees" HERE.

A Little Reminder Ahead of Elections Day

Just before the 2010 General Election, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg took part in one of the most audaciously cynical election broadcasts in history - No More Broken Policies. (Embedding has been "disabled by request", I wonder why. But you can see it by following this link HERE.)

It is a bit like some of these emails that offer to compensate you if you've been scammed by spam email - if only you'll send your bank details. Nick offers to mend politics with no more broken promises.

Well, the rest is history as we live under the most rightwing Government in modern British political history.

As for Nick's promises in the broadcast...

Tuition fees abolished? No - trebled. A promise broken!
Making votes count equally? No, sold down the river with a dreadful referendum on AV, a non-proportional system. A promise broken!
Fairstart for children? Surestart centres closing. A promise broken!
Break up the banks and make them pay for the damage they caused? No; broken up yes; but the profitable bits sold off at a loss to the taxpayer. A promise broken!
New Green infrastructure? Not with the gutting of the Green Deal. A promise broken!
Sustainable green energy? The feed-in tariff slashed, community renewable subsidies ended and nuclear power the choice for "clean" energy. Er, no... A promise broken!
Fair taxes? Nope - a marginal increase in the tax allowance for everyone (including billionaires) with priority given to cutting income tax by a tenth for people earning at the top rate. With VAT increased, the poor pay proportionately more in tax; the rich even less. Broked again!
A fairer Britain? Wealth gap widening; welfare slashed; unemployment up with only austerity as a response...

Tim Farron, the Lib Dem President, claimed on Question Time last week that of course the Lib Dems are in a Coalition so can't have got everything their own way. If they hadn't gone into coalition, he claimed, the Tories would be in untramelled control. Except that any look at the maths in the Commons shows that the Tories can't do anything without Lib Dem votes. And at the same time, the Lib Dems claims to have implemented most of their election promises...errr??

Well, it doesn't really matter that much. They have sunk to 8% in a number of polls, and that was before we were reminded of their expenditure of £2.4 million of stolen money obtained from the fugitive criminal Michael Brown, finally caught and brought home for trial (and yes he got a dinner or three with then Leader Charles Kennedy). If there was an election tomorrow, UK Polling Report reckons they would be down to just 7 MPs.

Nice music though... I think from a film about zombies...

With Respect, Vote Green

In a move that gives encouraging evidence that the most significant components of the political Left in Britain are shedding their traditional sectarianism and reaching out to build a new movement for change, the leader of the Respect Coalition, Salma Yaqoob, has called on her party supporters to vote for the Green Party in local polls in Birmingham.

Hot on the heels of George Galloway's sweeping victory in the Bradford West by-election, where he shattered the traditional politics of the city and united people from different communities, Salma Yaqoob's call  shows that the Left is poised to build for change that chimes very powerfully with ordinary people. By sharp contrast to the right wing/nationalist alternative parties like UKIP, the English Democrats and the BNP, when people are polled about actual policies - like redistributing wealth and devolving decision-making to local communities - the policies of Respect and the Greens poll far ahead of their opinion poll ratings.

In the Greens' case, when the party manifesto was "blind tested" on quarter of a million people on the Vote-for-Policies website at the 2010 general election, they polled in top place. British culture is more aligned to the principles of the left than years of "middle-England"-obsessed machine politicians realise. The current recession, the dismantling of the Welfare State and the damaging reform of the NHS, as well as the privatising of the education system, are all anathema to most British people - but all three of the main parties are signed up with little but variations on a common theme to separate them.

With opinion polls consistently showing the "Other" parties at above 15% and the Lib Dems imploding to as low as 8%, this may turn out to be a key moment in creating a real, socialist and green alternative to the main parties. Galloway's return to the Commons last week was marked by a distinctively frosty reception from many of his former Labour colleagues who are perhaps increasingly aware that their core vote is softer now than ever after years of being taken for granted by centrists like Tony Blair and Jack Straw, as well as the false dawn of Ed Miliband.

The possibilities for a significant advance by the Left are there: they echo the rise of the Left candidate Melenchon for the French Presidential election, while three parties to the Left of PASOK, the traditional socialist party in Greece, are set to win about 35% of the vote and probably form at least part of the new Government in the upcoming general election. In Britain, the first-past-the-post voting system may frustrate electoral gains by the Left but, as Caroline Lucas' success in Brighton and Galloway's victory in Bradford show, the real alternative can win through even the most stacked and unfair system - all it takes is for both Left wing parties and voters to be true to ourselves.

For Salma Yaqoob's Blog, click HERE

Fracking Awful

In one day, the "greenest Government in history" has dealt two rapid and massive blows to the environmental cause in Britain.

First, it was announced that Government Ministers are set to approve the process of "fracking" (or hydraulic fracturing) for shale gas across the entire UK mainland. This exceedingly environmentally damaging and even dangerous process (it has been linked to causing two recent earthquakes in the Blackpool area) involves pumping water underground to force the gas out. It is dirty, energy-hungry and will leave a poisoned legacy for centuries in the places it occurs - as shown in the American documentary, "Gasland". It also, obviously, does nothing to advance the development of clean-energy alternatives in the UK.

And then came the news that the Con Dem Government's flagship "green deal" policy (the title and some of the concept were stolen from the Green Party manifesto during the last general election, except the scheme as it stands is far more limited than the Green New Deal proposed by the Greens) received a blow. Heeding the calls of the climate change Flat Earthers on the Tory backbenches, as well as some Ministers like Eric Pickles, Prime Minister David Cameron has dropped the element in the scheme which required people building extensions to their homes to have to insulate their properties at the same time. This significantly reduces the effect of any improvements in energy efficiency - Britain could save almost 40% of its energy use if it insulated properties properly, as well as creating tens of thousands of new jobs in the process. But that is now gone.

The green fig leaf covering the naked hypocrisy of the Tories on climate change has finally been blown away. The Tories, we should bear in mind, were the party that to a candidate failed to support Greenpeace at the last election in its call for action on global warming and many surveys at the time showed the Tories to be massively more sceptical about climate change than any other party bar their country cousins in UKIP. Needless to say, the Lib Dems remain as about effective as a chocolate teapot, especially now that their Environment Secretary Chris Huhne has resigned to await trial for alleged perverting of the course of justice relating to a driving offence.

And so as we face massive drought across the south and east of England, with warnings of it continuing for up to 18 months, and with last year the warmest in history in spite of near record breaking cold during the winter of 2010/11, our political masters remain as complacent as ever, modern Neros fiddling while Rome burns. Their eyes fixed on the next share dividend, the Tories grunt that we can't afford green action on climate change. But as our world slowly goes to hell in a handcart, perhaps its the Tories and their allies we can't afford.

Green Party Election Broadcast - Vote Green on 3rd May

This is the Green Party of England and Wales election broadcast for the local elections and the London Mayoral election on 3rd May this year - the London election is held using the Alternative Vote system; people can vote Green with their first preference and still have their vote counted if they make a second choice in the unlikely event that the Green candidate does not win outright in the first round. :-)

Largely under-reported if not entirely unreported by the main-party obsessed media is the fact that the decision by the Mayoral candidates and subsequently signals from the Government that leading politicians and candidates should publish their tax records came after a challenge from the Green Mayoral candidate, Jenny Jones, during a debate on the BBC2 Newsnight programme. This is something of an innovation for supposedly transparent British politics and can be seen in the second video below.

Saving the Earth: the Greens and Doctor Who

A YouGov poll just published shows that most people - or at least the ones on the YouGov panel - suspect that Time Lord DOCTOR WHO may have a blue Tardis but when it comes to voting for the Gallifrey council, his cross is decidedly verdant in its hue.

23% said they are pretty sure that the Doctor votes Green! This is well ahead of the Lib Dems and Tories who both got 16% with Labour trailing on 10%. In spite of his alien origins and interplanetary outlook, 1% thought he might plump for the British National Party, a reflection perhaps on those voting rather than the good time traveller himself - though doubtless the 7% who suggested he would vote for UKIP would like a ride back in time to perhaps the mid-19th century, or even earlier.

The Tardis - low carbon emission travel, we hope..

It is little surprise really to discover that Dr Who is a Green. Let's face it, as well as regularly saving the earth and taking on monstrous mutants spawned by human pollution and excess, and with a distinctively peacenik theme in the revived series penned by Russell T Davies, Dr Who's ability to regenerate really is the ultimate in recycling. No sign of any nasty exhaust on the Tardis either...

The panel also picked up on good Green Party policy themes for a couple of other fictional characters. Reflecting their strong support for public services, Greens polled well with FIREMAN SAM - 13% reckon he would be careful about what chemicals are used to make fire retardants and plump for a party with an ecologically sane approach.

Likewise, again doubtlessly looking to the Greens' sound policies on keeping the mail service public and supporting local post offices, speculation about POSTMAN PAT'S psephological inclinations found a Green surge to 21%, eclipsing all the others bar Labour up on 29%.

But it was far from a clean sweep for the Greens. Predictably, the Tories got Hyacinth Bouquet as well as Corrie's sweatshop capitalist chancer Mike Baldwin, both on a massive 60%, while Labour got Smithy from Gavin and Stacey and Eastenders Pat Butcher - given the state of politics in some boroughs, Pat's recent death may not necessarily prevent her voting for Walford Labour...

The Lib Dems hang in there with the Vicar of Dibley. Well, everyone likes a good funeral...

AND NOW, RECYCLE, RECYCLE, RECYCLE......

The Arrogance of the Ferret Killers

Deep in the laboratories of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka busied himself recently on a proud piece of work. Like a scientific acquaintance who once told me that "society should f*** off and let us get on with science!" the Professor and his team decided it was in the best interests of the rest of us to create not one but FOUR hybrid strains of killer bird flu, the class of deadly virus that many in the scientific and medical communities are worried might suddenly mutate and cross over into humans and create a pandemic.

Why did the Professor do this?

Well, for a start, he wanted to give the newly created death virus to some ferrets. You know ferrets, don't you? Nasty wee furry bastards with sharp teeth. Killing them with a deadly bird virus is, according to the Professor, the best thing for them.

Why?

Because apparently if you infect ferrets, it will help protect us from bird flu if it ever mutates. Ferrets and people - like peas in a pod. Why, each time I sink my row of razor sharp teeth into a mouse, and use my hind claws to give my furry neck a good scratch, I just feel thankful for the Professor infecting these ferrets and now controversially releasing the full set of information on how to make his deadly virus so his fellow scientists can maybe have a go in their own labs at infecting their own ferrets.

Ferrets - the absolute spit of you and me. Apparently....

So, just how ludicrous have we now got to? We create viruses from elements of bird infections to kill another species of animal supposedly to protect humans and then we publish the data. At which point does it stop being wrong and just become plain stupid?

There is already plenty of evidence that the routes taken by bird flu when it has been prevalent among animals have not followed the migratory paths of wild birds, but rather the routes of live animal transportation by big food companies like Bernard Matthews. Crushed into unsanitary, unsafe and cruel conditions in factory farms, animals of many species are highly susceptible to all sorts of disease and bird flu has been no exception. With live chicks hatched in Britain flown to Japan to be reared and flown back, our global transportation system is by far the most dangerous component of spreading diseases of all sorts and especially among animals moved for thousands of miles in cramped surroundings. Very often this is done with a very high in-journey attrition rate, with animals flown or driven sometimes for days with the corpses of their brothers and sisters lying next to them, rotting slowly, collateral damage in multinational food corporations quest for profit, regardless of the welfare of both the "livestock" and the eventual human consumers.

Migratory birds have often been blamed for spreading Avian (Bird) flu, when in fact research suggests the opposite may be the case: the flight of wild birds disperses the virus, reducing the spread of infection, while the concentration of battery farmed animals provides fertile conditions for viruses to infect large numbers of creatures.

"A lot of migratory species are unfairly blamed for spreading infections to humans," Barbara Han... of the University of Georgia and a co-author of the new paper, said in a prepared statement. "But there are just as many examples suggesting the opposite—that humans are responsible for creating conditions that increase disease in migratory species."

So we have a classic case of trying to clean up our own mess by making a new mess! A bit like spending hundreds of millions on elusive carbon capture technologies rather than on reducing carbon emissions to begin with. Lets fight a virus with...a virus. 

And let's kill some ferrets on the way. After all, they are disposable. And perhaps they are not the only disposable items in the minds of some of these purists who want society to get out of their way.

Worried about bird flu? Maybe we should stop this rather than manufacturing even more...

Ed Vaizey - "Let the Bookworms Gnaw His Entrails..."

For him that stealeth a Book from this Library, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with Palsy, and all his Members blasted. Let him languish in Pain crying aloud for Mercy and let there be no sur-cease to his Agony till he sink in Dissolution. Let Bookworms gnaw his Entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final Punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever and aye. 
— Curse Against Book Stealers 
Monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona

The curse is pronounced against one who would steal a book. But what more torments might assail one who steals not just a book, but a whole library, or ONE HUNDRED LIBRARIES?

100 libraries have been closed down since the Con Dem "Culture Minister", Ed Vaizey, took office in 2010. As the Government has wielded its axe on public services across the country, our libraries have not been spared. At best, they might hope to survive in a twilight zone of "Information Points", where it is assumed that everyone now has access to the internet and is happy to download stuff to ipads or Kindles. Books? So last six millennia!

Yet this cultural Armageddon comes at a terrible cost and potential threat to our society. Ever since humans first gathered in the cities of Sumeria back around 2,600 BC, libraries have been a hallmark of civilised life, of access to knowledge and of the fostering of learning and citizenship. It was the loss of the great classical era libraries such as that in Alexandria that marked the decline of learning and reason that led to the superstition and persecution of free thinking during the Dark Ages of Europe. And it was the recovery of knowledge in libraries such as those of Islamic Spain and Renaissance Italy that set us on the path to the Enlightenment and the birth of the modern age. And Karl Marx of course constructed his mighty opus Capital on the tables of the British Library.

Cultural tragedy or real estate opportunity? The great
Library of Alexandria burns, c 30BC

But when times are troubled and resources scarce, the ruling class views knowledge as dispensable at best and dangerous at worst. If people know, they will question; and if they question, they might act. And so Mr Vaizey and his ilk, while decrying poor education standards and the collapse of community in their patronising "Broken Britain" strap line, are content to close libraries down in the name of efficiency savings. Google, it seems, is the way forward, copyright of the elite, monitored by their minions.

And so, as we head back to a world of superstition, half-truths and net-powered rumour, let me be the first to dust down the ancient book of curses and gladly heap them upon the brows of the morons who ascribe to themselves the custodianship of our culture.

May the worms bury deep...

VOICES FOR THE LIBRARY SITE: CLICK HERE

Little Children, Big Guns and Dark Hearts

Miriam Monstango, 8 years old - her face a little apprehensive but full of life as she looks to the camera. How apprehensive it must have looked on Monday morning as she ran for the safety of her schoolroom at a Jewish school in Toulouse in France, only to have her hair caught by the gunman who was firing at her classmates. When he tried to shoot Miriam, his gun jammed. But he gripped onto her while he switched to another weapon and shot her in the head. On the same day, he killed a rabbi and his two little children - the youngest just three years old.

This was apparently done, in the gunman's mind, in revenge for the hundreds of Palestinian children killed by the Israeli Defence Force in Gaza and the West Bank. As blogged before here, the IDF routinely blames Hamas and others for the so-called "collateral damage" that occurs when Israeli jets strafe Gaza indiscriminately, or when IDF tanks fire illegal white phosphorus shells into Palestinian hospitals, allegedly having "no choice" because of the presence of enemy fighters in the vicinity. For collateral damage, of course, the decoded words should be civilians and children - especially the more than 1,400 Palestinian children killed by the Israeli military during the last decade, most of them when they were committing such dreadful acts as playing football, going to school or even shopping. No more excusably, though perhaps demonstrating the massive imbalance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, during the same period, 125 Israeli children were killed in Palestinian attacks. (The western media tends to ignore this fact, just as, while it has already designated the Toulouse gunman, Mohammed Merah, as a Muslim extremist, it is hard at work mitigating the murderous rampage by US soldier Robert Bales, who killed at least two babies in his slaughter of 17 Afghan civilians last week, as the product of prolonged stress.)

We will never know for certain Merah's state of mind or motives now that the French police have shot him dead. But his apparent claims of revenge and self-justification of his terrible deeds echo the words of all too many political leaders who seek to sanctify their worldview with religious beliefs that place the fate of individuals, no matter how innocent, below the proclaimed, divinely-ordained interests of the respective Faith community.

Yet what minds think like this, on either or all sides? Under what religious law, what political ideology or vaguely humane rationale do children become collateral damage? By what mindset does it become acceptable to kill a child - any child, anyone's child - because of the loss, however appallingly, of a child of your own, or your faith community?

A Gazan childhood: The final, terrifying moments of the life of
Mohammed al Doura, a 12 year old Palestinian boy killed in 2000.
More here.

Well, there is a mindset which contradictorily both condemns such a viewpoint and validates it. It is a mindset found within the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Between them, these three faiths are followed, at least notionally, by the majority of the people on this planet. They are linked inextricably, although many of their followers vehemently deny this fact, or are unaware perhaps - but their God/Allah is the same Divinity, their prophets - Abraham/Ibrahim, Moses/Musa, Jesus/Isa are often the same people; and the Muslims' final prophet, Muhammed, enjoined his followers to give special protection and respect to Christians and Jews as fellow "People of the Book".

Each faith universally decries killing of humans and prescribes forgiveness and love of neighbours and all humanity. But some followers of each of them doggedly hold to the concept of "reciprocal justice" or like for like punishment - an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth as the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament set out their bloody tariff of vengeance. In Islam, although the Koran mentions rather than promulgates the principle, the other holy writings, the hadith (laws developed over centuries by Islamic scholars) sanction revenge and some versions of sharia law interpret and implement the rule literally. In all these faiths, although all their prophets advocated generosity of spirit and forgiveness, the concept continues to be held by many believers to be both just and holy.

And so we end up with the dreadful, twisted self-justification for shooting up a school playground in France or shelling schoolrooms in Gaza; or the rarely mentioned rape camps of Bosnia set up by Serb Christians with their avowed aim to breed Muslims out of existence - many of the Bosniac Muslim victims were children, some as young as 12.

In the old days of polytheism, by default, pagans held that there are many ways to the same Truth, while philosophers such as Aristotle identified good and evil acts as the deliberate choices of humans, not the mystical interventions or injunctions of God or Satan. But the potential logic of revealed monotheist faith and its potentially exclusive nature means that a gospel of love can be twisted into one of hatred by those so-minded to do so. This is all the more likely if The Word divides the world so sharply into good and evil, into fellow-believers and the unfaithful or Fallen.

Mahatma Gandhi lamented that  - "An eye for an eye simply makes the whole world blind." Those who seek revenge are blind people - blind to the hypocrisy of revenge; blind to the destruction of the justice they seek by acts of injustice; blind to the beauty of the Creation they claim to be the gift of their God.

An eye for an eye - it is not a holy concept at all; it is simply the red mist of the psychopath's pathetic self-regard. Those of any faith or nationality who adopt its tenets do so at the cost of extinguishing the very humanity they claim perversely to supremely epitomise, and almost certainly betray the intent of the founders of their faith and the beliefs of most of their co-religionists. Whether Anders Breivik, or Ariel Sharon or Mohammed Merah, their empty souls are the antithesis of the lives they sacrifice for their own vanity - the lives of the children of Gaza and Toulouse, or the youths on Utoya; lives now gone, but remembered and valued far beyond the banal egos of the small men with big guns and dark hearts.

In the Name of God: since 2000, 125 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinian attacks; in the same period, the Israeli armed services have killed 1,471 Palestinian children.

REMEMBER THESE CHILDREN WEBSITE: CLICK HERE

The Repugnance of George Osborne

"I regard tax evasion and – indeed – aggressive tax avoidance – as morally repugnant," Mr Osborne said. 

And so, today, in his latest national Budget, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Gideon Osborne (whose personal fortune is valued at around £4 million) handed the very richest in society a huge tax cut - a 10% reduction from 50p in the pound to 45p on earnings above £150,000 per year - on the spurious grounds that because it was allegedly so high, it deterred our wealthy compatriots from paying their tax. So, by creating perhaps the biggest piece of tax avoidance in history, he has legitimised their non-payment - balancing the cost of doing so by freezing age-related tax allowances for pensioners - greedy old sods that they are (in George's universe, not mine dear reader!).

George is worried that the rich may desert us and go elsewhere. You might wonder where, exactly. Tax havens, George warns - except the British Government, more than any other in the world, could act to end the curse of these pirate enclaves where multinationals and the very richest individuals move their money to avoid contributing a fair share to the societies they live in - seven out of the fourteen non-sovereign tax havens  belong to the British Crown, but our neoliberal Government is doing precisely nothing about the exemptions legally enjoyed by these. This although the havens deprive the UK Treasury of somewhere between £2 billions and £12 billions in lost revenue every year. 

Yes, this is the logic of the new moral crusader in 11 Downing Street, hoisting high the flag of fiduciary purity on his crusade against the repugnant and immoral. Time for us all to pay our way. And if the billionaires don't magically cough up more tax on a lower tax bill (????), well, we'll just slash another £10 billion off the beleaguered welfare budget, ignoring the needs of an increasingly larger elderly population.

Yes, this is the logic of the moral crusader who preaches the virtues of contributing to the common purse while quietly "aggressively avoiding" a huge tax bill himself.

This is the George Osborne who has allegedly avoided paying at least £1.6 million in taxes himself  by means of a Trust Fund that will benefit him personally and family members - however aggressively or not he has done this, we will never know. That is a secret between him and his accountant.

Twisted Cable Whips the Youth of Today

So Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, is at it again. Somehow this man twists logic in on itself in a way that would leave Steven Hawking at a loss to explain. Perhaps reflecting some dark, inner turmoil over serving in the most right wing government in history while continuing to harbour fantastical delusions about being able to press a nuclear button to destroy the evil Cleggeron, Vince has today announced a tiny increase for people on the national minimum wage - just 11p per hour, taking it to the princely sum of £6.19 per hour from 1 October. (The current assessed Living wage, by contrast, is £7.20 per hour outside London, £8.30 in the capital.)

That's if you're old enough to have the "key to the door", as Vince's Mum probably told him would be his 21st birthday present sometime back when young people knew their place. Because Vince reckons that, if you are younger than that, you should work for less, even if you are doing the same job just as competently as older people.

So much less, in fact, that this year, in spite of high inflation and cuts to tax credits, he reckons young minimum wage earners should not have an increase at all. So, if you are aged 16 or 17, your £3.68 per hour rate stays put; and if you are 18 to 20, it remains at £4.98. (Apprentices, who the Government makes much of creating lots more, will see a whopping rise of 5p per hour to as much as £2.50!).

Now, this differential is not entirely Vince's fault. The Nu-Labour regime of Messrs Blair and Brown created the differentials when they introduced the national minimum wage (NMW). They even introduced legal exemptions to the laws against age discrimination to allow lower rates of NMW to be paid to younger people.

This was and remains really counter-intuitive. Employers can discriminate legally against younger people as long as they keep workers on the national minimum wage. As soon as they pay them any more than that, the exemptions no longer apply and they have to pay all ages the same or they can be sued for age discrimination. Quite rightly too, I say - except that this provides unscrupulous employers with a justification for keeping their lowest paid workers on the NMW.

Vince of course could be sweeping this ludicrous arrangement aside. He could be telling employers that if 19 year old is doing the same job as a 21 year old, they should be paid the same rate. Why on earth not? Would we accept such a distinction between a man and woman any more? Or a white person and an Asian? It is rightly illegal to pay older workers less - you can't differentiate between a 40 year old and a 75 year old. So why is it ok to pay young people less to do the same?

And why on earth has Cable made the gap 11p per hour worse? Well, here is the really twisted logic...

He claims it is to prevent young people being uncompetitive in the workplace and stifling job creation. How so? How can the very lowest rate of pay of all be uncompetitive? Who would be able to outbid them? And what employer would not create a real job because it was going to cost another £4 or so per week to pay? Only illegal gangmasters and ruthlessly exploited Chinese cockle-pickers come to mind. Is this really the sort of economy the Coalition is benchmarking its employment policies against?

In the Budget this week, the Lib Dems are hopeful that they will finally gain their nirvana of a £10,000 p.a. tax allowance for workers. Very nice - it will deliver an across-the-board tax reduction to everyone earning above the current tax allowance threshold of £8,105 per annum. So millionaires will be better off by the same amount as someone earning dead on £10,000 p.a.

However, with a pay rate of £3.68 per hour, working say 40 hours per week, a 17 year old on the national minimum wage has an annual pay of just £7,655 p.a., so will not benefit at all - and in real terms their paltry earnings will in fact buy even less as prices rise. Their employers, meantime, with both the rise in tax allowance and likely abolition of the upper tax rate for earnings over £150,000 p.a., look set to be quids in.

The other week in the Guardian, as he prattled on in some sort of mysterious way about some mild disagreement with Nick Clegg, Cable reveled suitably self-effacingly yet still sickeningly smugly in the faux appellation of the Karl Marx of the Lib Dems. What a load of twaddle. This grandee of social-lite liberalism is more Groucho than Karl when it comes to Marxism, his social concern worn as shakily as the bleeding-heart-on-his-sleeve.

Celebrity Come Shelf Stacking - Cable can still see off these
young dudes

Still, at least once he is out of government post-2014, when he picks up a job working the aisles in age-enhanced-friendly B&Q, Vince won't need to worry about being undercut by some young upstart racing up from the glue section.

God Spare Us from the Uninformed Lawmakers...

Well, first we had Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg calling for a "new" right for employers to have "off the record conversations" with employees they wanted to leave because of misconduct or bad performance.

Except the right already existed in the form of "without prejudice discussions" to resolve disputes that can not be entered as evidence to Employment Tribunals.

Next, Government adviser Adrian Beecroft thundered that employers should have the right to ask employees if they intend to retire any time soon. Their inability to do so prevented panning ahead and was choking off the flexibility and innovation needed for entrepreneurial-led recovery.

Except, again, this right already exists and is explicitly set out as a right in guidance from the current Government to employers. Check it here.

And now.....

Norman Lamb,MP, Lib Dem, has called for employers to have a right to be able to offer employees a payment in return for which they will waive the right to claim unfair dismissal at an employment tribunal.

This just takes the biscuit. What the hell are we paying these MPs for?

Compromise agreements, where employers pay an agreed sum to employees to terminate employment in return for waiving their right to go to an employment tribunal, has been a feature of employment law since the early 1990s.

If our political masters are really keen to make laws, it would be helpful if, first of all, they could take a small portion of time to check out what is already law. The three statements from these supposedly expert, high-paid men betray a total lack of research and simply a wish to pander to the ignorant or deliberately devious agenda of the right wing press that prints repeated lies about it being impossible to dismiss anyone.

Twenty minutes with an employment lawyer would have put them right about their ingenuous "new" ideas. And maybe saved the public some wasted money paying them for unnecessary work.

Personally, I'd fire the lot of them for gross negligence.

And yes, as long as I followed a fair process, if I was their employer, I could.

Oh, it turns out, I am their employer - and so are you!

Perhaps we should do something about their moves to allow employers to sack anyone with less than two years' service without needing any reason at all; and to remove employment rights for the millions working for small businesses. Smacks of definite breakdown of mutual trust and confidence...

"You fool! Check your facts! You're fired!"

This Is Not Who We Are?

This is not who we are.

The words of US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton today as she reacted to the brutal murders of 16 innocent Afghan villagers - including two year old babies shot in their heads - by a US trooper who set out on a long walk from his base with slaughter his sole aim. Clinton looked suitably shocked as President Obama called Afghan President Karzai to offer apologies and condolences.

Not who we are?

Doubtless, within hours, or days at most, the American soldier will be declared insane, his terrible act of destruction the foaming fury of a madman out of control, a man possessed by crazy delusions. Not one of us at all. Perhaps, deep down, not even responsible for his own awful actions - gripped instead by some sort of traumatic stress disorder, in turn a symptom of the great stress he was under while on his fourth tour of duty in war torn Afghanistan. Indeed, when you look at it that way, perhaps his actions were caused by the Afghans. Maybe, deep down, these unruly people with their civil war and unholy faith were really asking for it. Perhaps, he had become one of them in his red mist blood lust...

Not who we are?

Tell us another Hilary. The soldier's actions were extreme, in some respects, but his only "crime" was to do what he did without being under orders at the time. Because increasingly, the American military has become defined by precisely this sort of arrogant brutality, a death-soaked zeitgeist that lifts so-called western civilisation above the value of troublesome mountain peasants and Muslims. This was evident in spade in Farenheit 9/11, when Michael Moore interviewed American tank crews who revealed that driving into Iraq in 2003, they sat in their tanks with their MP3 players streaming music to kill by as they shot up the ill-equipped Iraqi fighters outside their mobile armoured fortress - "It was like a computer game!" one gunner approvingly revealed."The ultimate rush!"

And so it went on - the horrors of Abu Ghraib, where American troops subjected Iraqi prisoners, many taken there on the slenderest of pretexts, to tortures and "heavy interrogation" that a good number did not survive. Photos that were released were just the tip of the iceberg - showing hooded prisoners menaced by dogs or threatened with electrocution. President Obama decided in the end to suppress hundreds of photographs, including many allegedly showing the rape of many of the women prisoners kept by the US soldiers in the former Saddam prison.

And then there was the case of six US soldiers charged with plotting for some weeks before seizing a 14 year old Iraqi girl, Abeer Qasim Hamza, and repeatedly raping her. They then murdered her, her 5 year old sister and her parents and set their bodies on fire. The crime only came to light when one of the soldiers revealed the incident months later to his psychologist.

Abeer - raped and murdered by the US army

The same army later spawned the "Kill Squad" in Afghanistan under one Sargent Morlock, who led his men in killing innocent Afghans for sport. Other instances that have come to light - collecting body parts as trophies, playing football with the decapitated heads of Afghans, firing at random into queues of civilian vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and pissing on the corpses of the dead. There are many, many more, few covered by the mass media and, of course, there will be many others we know nothing about. 

What drives them to these things? The standard excuse is stress and fear - except that nearly all these cases have taken place outside of combat zones, where the perpetrators were in no fear of their lives and where their victims represented no threat at all. The arrogant dehumanizing of their enemies by these men reaches something of a hubristic crescendo in their apparent eagerness to display their exploits, caught on ubiquitous mobile phone cameras, on youtube and Facebook. The immensity of their war crimes seems to slip by these "warriors".

Referring to the Kill Team in an interview following yesterday's atrocities, Mark Boal, screenplay writer of the Hurt Locker, explained a key motive was boredom and frustration with lack of kills of Taliban fighters. He reported a high level of racism endemic among the regiment involved and how this, in turn, affected their attitude and behaviour towards the Afghans. No hearts and minds here - just pure, brute force. Brute force and profit, of course - because alongside the US army in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the Blackwater mercenary company has implanted thousands of security contractors into both countries. Even less disciplined that the regulars, Blackwater has been associated with dozens of violent incidents, including killing 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Nisour square in Bagdhad in order to "clear a path" through people shopping at market.

From the My Lai massacre of 500 innocent villagers in Vietnam to the gunning down of ambulances and children by whooping helicopter gunners above Bagdhad in the video below (released by Wikileaks), the brutality of the American army is frankly far beyond doubt. If the Taliban are vicious, the US forces are constrained purely by the light restraint of vaguely possible bad publicity, a factor that clearly has little impact on what happens on the ground.

American soldiers raped and killed over 500 people at My Lai.

But then, it is not just the poor bloody infantry on the front line defending the corrupt Karzai regime, the young western lives being thrown away on a pointless war, that are responsible for the brutality of the American war machine. The massive carnage among non-combatant civilians that goes by virtually unacknowledged, allowing both the alienation of the Afghans and the continuing brutalisation of often young soldiers, is in fact a product of formal American military policy and planning.

In spite of the dreadful deaths and injuries, Afghanistan actually represents one of the safest wars for US and allied troops in history. The casualty rate pales into insignificance beside the tolls of the second world war, and even of the Korean war. This is because, ever since Vietnam, driven by the exposure of sensationalist 24 hour TV news, US policy has been to promote military adventures as being comfortable, even risk free - the safety of their own troops utterly paramount regardless of the impact on innocent civilians - defined now by the sick and sinister sanitised term, collateral damage.

Hence the use of drones, piloted from thousands of miles away, to spy on and increasingly attack ground targets - indiscriminately causing collateral damage. And plans are increasingly concentrating on making the US military capable of massive armed interventions with the use of fewer and fewer soldiers by means of "smart" weapons and robot technology. Popular with western media for its protection of western soldiers, this strategy will simply make armed conflict all the easier for the Pentagon and the collateral damage all the more acceptable, and the bitter harvest of terrorism and war without end all the harsher and more severe for decades to come.

The American soldier's "inexplicable" actions yesterday then become very explicable indeed - the mindset developed to turn ordinary humans into brutal killing machines inevitably dehumanizes their targets, whether combatants or civilian bystanders. With much military training neatly segued from increasingly life-like computer gaming into training programmes into reality, the boundaries are blurred between fact and fiction, like the tank commanders storming into Bagdhad to the sound of drums: and what the rogue soldier did becomes routine, becomes precisely who we are. It may not be what many of the troops put into the front-line start out being, but the cynical exploitation of their commitment - and often their dire economic circumstances when they sign up - means that the strategy and tactics of the Armed Services sooner or later makes it what they become. And, as America seeks to shore up its declining world power, we will see more and more of this in the years ahead as  the USA continues to spend more on its military than every other nation on the planet put together.

So, this is not who you are?

Are you so sure Hilary? As you stand next Commander-in-Chief Obama, you should know better.

.

Green Leader on Tory Spending Lies

The Tories and both their Coalition partners the Lib Dems and now the opposition Labour Party claim massive cuts in spending on social services, welfare to the vulnerable and education are needed to cut the national deficit. But as Green Party leader Caroline Lucas told the party conference in Liverpool this weekend, this is very much a matter of choice driven by perspective rather than financial necessity. It seems there is plenty of money left for some pretty unpleasant choices the Con Dems are happy to splurge out on...