So what are we fighting for again?

"Our country can no longer speak with moral authority" 

                                                  - President Jimmy Carter on President Obama's "kill list"

Fighting for western values in the never-ending War against Terror. Bush and Blair used this line over and over; and so too have their successors, David Cameron in the UK and perhaps even more so "Democrat" President Obama.

In the name of this struggle, constitutional freedoms have been set aside, the centuries old principle of habeas corpus has been ripped up, a surveillance society has emerged across the planet, interventionist wars in Iraq, Libya and now Syria have encouraged intolerant strains of Islamism (paradoxically in the defence of supposedly democratic and increasingly aggressive Israel), and a host of new laws have criminalised previously legitimate acts of protest. The British Government is now proposing to hold some trials in secret, without juries, and the Americans are hinting at an attempt to extradite Julian Assange on a capital charge of treason should he ever leave the Ecuador embassy in London.

Meanwhile in South America, in one week two democratically elected leftwing Presidents have been deposed by judicial coups backed by the USA and its corporate masters. And now we also know that, as more American pilots are now being trained to fly remote-controlled drones from the comfort and safety of offices in the heart of the USA, hundreds and even thousands of civilians have already been killed in their strikes, and President Obama is operating a kill list. With this, he is  permitting Americans to assassinate people around the world in an orgy of international criminality which if, say, the Chinese were doing would probably by now have invited threats of nuclear assault from the White House. Often drones are used to undertake dreadfully (and deliberately) misnamed surgical strikes which slaughter dozens and scores of innocent bystanders - such as a recent mission which involved bombing a public funeral.

It makes you wonder, what is it exactly we are fighting for? What are these so-called western values which apparently set us so apart from the rest of humanity? And if they are so precious, why have they been so readily set aside?

"Oh, I got a live one here!" 

Green Left - a new website for ecosocialists

Within the Green Party of England and Wales there is an active ecosocialist group, Green Left. Formed to promote the values of socialism as a counter to the unalloyed destruction of the environment by predatory capitalism, it has been successful in moving much Green Party thinking leftwards, even if the party as a whole would not, as yet, define itself as firmly socialist (though few Greens would not see themselves as being of the broad left or at least centre-left). It acts as a network within the party and as a bridge to socialists and other radicals outside as well.

The group has just launched a new website, which sets out articles and videos (including a speech by Green Party activist, Romayne Phoenix, who is also chair of the Coalition of Resistance - below). It also includes the Green Left newsletter, The Watermelon.

There is a link to the site on the right hand panel here, but you can also get there by clicking HERE.

Stop Animal Torture as "Art" - Petition

In the Netherlands, a so-called "artist" is being allowed to torture dogs, hamsters and chicks to death as  supposed "performance art". 

More here

Please sign this petition calling on the authorities to prosecute her.

Change.org|Create a Petition

VIDEO: "United Kingdom" of Austerity?

Sometimes the most powerful words are those set to music. And occasionally they come from the most unexpected of places.

ABC were a Sheffield-based 1980's music group who had a string of hits such as "The Look of Love", "All of my Heart" and "When Smokey Sings". Lead singer Martin Fry was well-known for his lame suits and powerful voice, and the songs were moving but optimistic, in spite of the atmosphere of the times, but they were by no means vacuously devoid of meaning or intent.

In their second album, "Beauty Stab" released in 1983, they evoked some haunting themes about society at the time. And to my mind the most powerful of these was the amazingly dark song "United Kingdom", which closed the album. Fry says he wrote it on returning to Sheffield from tours to the USA and after he was so struck by the devastation to the city from the closure of the steel industry and the general recession and austerity of Thatcher's Britain. I remember hearing "United Kingdom" at the time in my student days, his deep gravelly voice conveying the bleakness of the era, while a piano leads a slow melody that quickens only to emphasise the repressive nature of a state set against its own people. Even today, its resonance makes the hairs rise on my neck.

There's never been a video for this song, so I've set some more contemporary pictures to its evocative sounds and present it here. Its lyrics remain tellingly familiar. Maybe history moves in circles, maybe each wave will push us slowly towards some sea-change: but for now, just as 1980s music enjoys something of a revival, the politics of the 1980s seems very close again too...

NB, this video is not publicly listed on Youtube. Please share from this page.
(And thanks, I think, to Seany Mac for the cracking picture of George Osborne halfway through...)

In The Name of the Holy Goat

The last week has seen the Church in both England and Scotland split over issues of discrimination. Following the lead of some of their American and African counterparts, the Anglican and Presbyterian denominations have been struggling over sharply differing views of the role of the Bible in contemporary Christian thinking and its status as the Word of God, and what that in turn means in practice.

There is sharply different thinking between those who believe the Bible to be the literal Word of God and those who seek a degree of interpretation - and so the debate has raged, with passages from the Bible quoted by both sides.

So, what does the Bible have to say on the issue of men with beards? A number of these individuals have infiltrated the highest echelons of the Anglican Church in particular, causing consternation for some followers who fear they will next suggest Jesus wasn't even a white guy!

Consider this: Leviticus 21.5 says: They shall not make bald patches on their heads, nor shave off the edges of their beards, nor make any cuts on their body.

Jeremiah 48.37 , admittedly not the happiest bunny in the Bible, sees the idea of shaving as not the most positive event: For every head is shaved and every beard cut off. On all the hands are gashes, and around the waist is sackcloth (Sounds like a pretty grim experience Jerry had at the bathroom mirror, though in context he was writing before safety razors were invented - aha, but "context" is precisely the sort of revisionism we need to be careful about!)

Later on from the Bible writings came the Church Fathers, and, praise the Lord, they are pretty clear - shaving is for girls! 

"How womanly it is for one who is a man to comb himself and shave himself with a razor, for the sake of fine effect, and to arrange his hair at the mirror, shave his cheeks, pluck hairs out of them, and smooth them! ... For God wished women to be smooth and to rejoice in their locks alone growing spontaneously, as a horse in his mane. But He has adorned man, like the lions, with a beard, and endowed him as an attribute of manhood, with a hairy chest, a sign of strength and rule." - Clement of Alexandria (vol. 2, p. 275)

Yep, beards are good; razors the implements of Satan.

So, as we contemplate all these namby-pamby, bare-faced Bible deniers like Pastor Fred Phelps, preacher Mike "Shagger" Reid, Governor Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich, you have to ask where's the beards? These perverts stand chin-naked before the Lord, picking and choosing which bits of the Bible they want to believe - like stoning homosexuals and demonising rape victims - and which bits they want to forget about (beards!) like the demon-worshipping dilettantes they clearly are. What a shocking example to young people! What an abomination, undermining western values and abandoning all the good facial hair to the Muslims and Jews...

At least in England, one man stands out, no girly priest in the contest for the Yorkie Bar of Faith: praise the Lord for Archbishop Rowan Williams and his Mighty Fuzzface! This is Muscular Christianity at its Bible Best! A Real Man and His Real Beard - let no one tear asunder!

The only razor is his mind - his Mighty Fuzziness

Undercover Sex - the curious logic of the Minister for Police

Hot on the heels of Caroline Lucas' charge that an undercover policeman exploded a bomb in order to help inflitrate an animal rights group, Police and Criminal Justice Minister, Tory MP Nick Herbert, has defended more recent operations involving police agents having sex with suspects as part of their investigatory duties.

As covered in yesterday's blog, there have been several recently revealed undercover operations where, aside from acting as agents provocateurs, undercover officers struck up intimate relationships with suspects and members of the groups they were working, in one case going so far as getting married and having children. Speaking to the continuing debate in Westminster Hall today, Nick Herbert said that it was not only acceptable, but important that officers could have sex on duty so that they are "plausible"- otherwise, their targets might rumble them more easily if they did something so inexplicable as turn down the opportunity of having it. "Banning such actions would provide the group targeted the opportunity to find out whether there was an undercover officer specifically within their group.", he declared.

Nick Herbert - important for police to have sex with activists they investigate

This is staggering: not only does it essentially oblige police officers to have sex as part of their job; it also logically suggests that they should go along with a whole range of activities to sync with whatever group they are involved with. Yesterday, Mr Herbert insisted in response to Caroline Lucas that the alleged bombing in 1987 could not happen now because of changed procedures under the RIPA laws, but in truth, it is easy to extend sleeping with targets to gain their trust to carrying out criminal acts to do the same. Indeed, this presumably was the motive of the police officer back in 1987 (unless, of course, it is to encourage the group to commit acts they would not otherwise have thought about doing, as appears to have been the case with officer Mark Kennedy's shenanigans).

Where would Mr Herbert draw the line? If fathering children with unsuspecting women who have done nothing criminal is ok, what about an undercover officer was faced with the prospect of being plausible within a suspected paedophile ring? Mr Herbert's logic is really badly flawed - what happens if the group decides they want their new member to rob a bank or mug someone as an initiation - do they have to fit in then? And what about the police officers themselves - can they refuse to have sex with their targets? Most police would see this behaviour as unethical and counter-productive. But with Nick Herbert setting the tone, will their superiors castigate them for failing in their duty if they don't hop into bed, close their eyes and think of England? 

Herbert is both proposing conduct more in keeping with an authoritarian regime than a democracy; AND he is pushing decent police officers down a very conflicted and personally dangerous path. But then its back to the office for him, smug in his bold rhetoric about things he will never be called on to do himself.

Of course, the authorities can be quick to cut loose their operatives - senior officers let it be known, after many years of apparent ignorance on their part, that Mark Kennedy allegedly exceeded his orders (something he flatly denies). Nick Herbert's line of argument today suggests otherwise - the Minister at least seems comfortable with some pretty unethical behaviour. Indeed, it seems he might positively require it. By his logic, Chief Constable Kennedy should only be a matter of time...

Nuclear Nonsense - do you trust them?

The British Government is extending the life of our existing 16 nuclear reactors. This in part helps them fudge the divisions within the Coalition on nuclear as a component of future energy production; but the prospect of even older reactors continuing to produce more and more radioactive waste is concerning. All the more so when you consider the repeated assurances by Government Ministers and industry "experts" that the systems used are safe - and yet, time and again, everything from technical failure to human error raises new concerns.

We have the potential to develop the most powerful offshore wind and wave energy production in Europe; this would be clean, risk-free in terms of waste and safety. Yet one of the first acts of the Coalition Government was to drop plans for manufacturing and installing offshore wind farms in the North Sea that would have created thousands of jobs, made Britain a contender in the alternative energy market (where we are far behind the likes of Germany) and given a massive boost to clean energy.

This was done in the name of austerity; but the extension of the life cycles of ageing nuclear power stations means that the Government will find billions of extra pounds to subsidise this inefficient, dirty and dangerous technology. The public support wind farms by a margin of over 2 to 1, contrary to the claims put up by the right wing press - and if the concentration is on offshore, this would be even higher. Wind alone is not the answer - no green campaigners have even claimed that; but it is a vital part of the mix, and one that Britain could readily harness.

Isn't it time we demanded the Government's investment goes there instead of continuing the massive subsidy of nearly £4 billion per year to run and, eventually, decommission nuclear reactors (let alone store and protect the waste for several thousand years)?

Bad Science

"Questions of science, science and progress, do not speak as loud as my heart..." 

( from "The Scientist", by Coldplay)

In the video above, Natasha Thomas-Jackson* puts forward her call to science to serve humanity rather than indulging itself in dangers with unknown consequences. In this impassioned plea to science to recognise the inherent and immeasurable value of each individual human, she touches on many of the contradictions in scientific research and the all-too-frequent confusion in scientists' actions of the possible with the desirable, or even acceptable.

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Natasha's words in the introductory video talk to a very current and relevant debate which has had a considerable airing in the UK recently both in terms of popular protests against GM food and just the other evening in a powerful new television documentary on BBC4.

"Surviving Progress", asked the question, what is progress? And why is it the common assumption of humanity is that all progress is good? As one illustration pointed out, the Stone Age hunters who developed weapons that killed two woolly mammoths rather than just one ate well; but the hunters who worked out how to drive a herd of two hundred over cliffs to kill them on a near industrial scale and so wipe them out as a species were suffering from a progress trap - perhaps not immediately, but sooner or later the change they had created destroyed their means of survival by destroying a key source of nutrition.

From the felling of the last tree on Easter Island to the rush to exploit our rapidly diminishing natural resources, humans often seem on auto-pilot: if things can change, they will, and we should always, universally, welcome change. We are the most creative species to have existed, yet simultaneously the most destructive, in spite of (or maybe because of) our unique intellect.

Nowhere it this more apparent than in the field of science. Science has driven the series of quantum leaps in human existence and experience in the last three centuries: life expectancy has risen exponentially, with human numbers rising similarly. In the Middle Ages, it took nearly thirteen centuries to add 200 million people to the human population of Earth; now it takes just three years.

This massive increase is the fruit of scientific advances in fields as diverse as medicine, engineering, agriculture and energy. It is without a doubt a benefit to countless individuals, and yet alongside this has been a blindness to some of the less beneficial impacts of these changes on people and their environment: so we live longer but in a world driven by unprecedentedly high levels of destructive consumption (with associated pollution and chronic ill health) and unprecedentedly low levels of personal happiness and community cohesion. Science has made facts of miracles, but in doing so it has often diminished as much as enhanced our existence.

Progress is not of itself good; like everything else, it depends on the choices of people to determine its nature. Science often portrays itself as a search for a discernible, measurable truth. Yet it is packed with assumptions and hypotheses it often simply cannot prove; it depends far more than it would ever admit to on theory and choice. And in this, the potential consequences of a scientific discovery or development must play a much bigger role in decision-making - the threads linking decisions for change need to be linked and pursued, not put to one side in an appraisal of simply the immediate target of change. 

For example, the current genetically modified crop trials in Britain might improve the yield of wheat by destroying aphids, but if aphids' numbers fall, other insect and bird species who feed on aphids may suffer, with a domino effect with untold consequences for the food chain and our own survival. And on what level can we be assured that the genetic modification of our food will not affect us? After all, this is not crossing different crop strains by natural means - rather it is altering their makeup at the most basic level. Fish genes are implanted in tomatoes to make them look redder; growth hormones are fed to chickens to make them grow faster and more profitably. There seems to be little in the way of any moral compass - simply if something can be done, in time, it will be done.

Left - Henrietta Lacks, possessor of key cells in the battle against cancer

This may sound exaggerated, but consider the willingness of many scientists to develop weapons of mass destruction; to undertake lethal experiments on humans and animals with nuclear radiation and toxic chemicals; or to assist companies seeking to copyright the DNA of medicinal plants in order to alienate and profit from the Commons of Nature. Consider the awful case of black American Henrietta Lacks and her "immortal cells" of cancer - where her tissue was taken without her knowledge or consent. It was cultivated and used for decades of experimentation which created huge strides in the treatment of the disease yet simultaneously some of her family members were left to die virtually untreated for cancer because they were uneducated, black, poor and unable to pay. Who or what has determined the moral choices in each of these cases? Often, it seems, has been the seeking of profit rather than truth; frequently with plenty of prevailing prejudice and bigotry silently thrown in for good measure.

It would be being more than over-optimistic to hope that things have changed - as one article put it recently, "For scientists, cells are often just like tubes or fruit flies—they’re just inanimate tools that are always there in the lab. The people behind those samples often have their own thoughts and feelings about what should happen to their tissues, but they’re usually left out of the equation." (Smithsonian Magazine).

What should drive science - profit, people or simply the possible? As we enter this ever braver new world, we need to ask what science is for other than to serve humanity and the planet safely, and how to limit it in terms of its actions and their potentially dreadful consequences without crushing its creative potential. Science has a vital role to play in our future - indeed, it will be one of several vital responses to the crisis of global warming, especially in developing clean energy. But it is precisely for this reason that science needs to be shaped and tempered by a morality and ethics which represent more than simply what is feasible or even scientifically rational. Science may be the means, but it can't be the end.

Just as there is good progress and bad progress, each of these have close and ready allies in good science and bad science. The choice of which path to take has to be guided by more than simple profit-seeking or experimenting simply because it is possible to do so. By law, by regulation, by democratic consent and engagement, progress should be for people, for all of us, our companion species on this planet and the precious, fragile biosphere without which survival, yet alone progress, would not be possible.

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*Natasha Thomas-Jackson is Executive Director of RAISE-IT UP, a project in Flint, Michigan, USA, which promotes youth engagement, expression, and empowerment via performance arts opportunities, community involvement, and social justice initiatives. Please share her call to science in the video above; it deserves to be heard.

The Darkside of the Jubilee

‎'Royalty,' according to Bevan 'in the propaganda apparatus of society as it is', had four functions: to foster the illusion of national unity; to preserve the hierarchy of honours and titles by which representatives of the workers are subjected to the most insidious form of corruption; to supply a fertile source of diversion; and, above all, to intervene in a time of acute political crisis and exert its influence in favour of the existing social order."


My thanks to Amanda Adlem for this gem of a quote: and nothing proves its continued relevance more than the news that has broken this evening about how the Jubilee Pageant on the River Thames was staffed.

Who wouldn't want to "volunteer" for their big day?

So, while the rich and famous were feted at ceremonies and banquets to celebrate the Queen's incredible achievement of living for sixty years after her father died, the Royal Family lived fully up to what it is all about: exploitation of the weak and poor to buttress the status quo. For while it laid on a spectacle for the masses, it achieved it by using unpaid "volunteers" from a Government workfare scheme to work 14 hour shifts stewarding the crowds of sheeple as they were herded towards the sounds of trumpets and the flashing of fireworks over the Thames.

And not only did it use free labour: it also required these "volunteers" to sleep under Tower Bridge the night before with no access to toilets or washing facilities. But then, in the eyes of our rulers, the Great Unwashed probably wouldn't need such things - after all, there was always the river...

This from the Guardian newspaper:
Two jobseekers, who did not want to be identified in case they lost theirbenefits, later told the Guardian that they had to camp under London Bridge overnight, to change into security gear in public, had no access to toilets for 24 hours, and were taken to a swampy campsite outside London after working a 14-hour shift in the pouring rain on the banks of the Thames on Sunday.

So well done to the Windsors - yet again they've pulled of a taxpayer-funded fest to celebrate themselves and the social hierarchy they represent scrounging off the backs of the least well-off. All the self-congratulatory TV coverage and the smug looks of the Establishment may smother the news, but make sure the truth isn't hidden away: write to your MP and local papers, 

The full Guardian article can be found here.

The Cradling of Capitalism

The Horror, the Horror - apprentices at work...

Tonight, with nothing to watch but highlights of the Royal Jubilee pageant on most channels (interspersed with adverts urging people to buy food, clothes, furniture - all in celebration of Her Maj's sixty years of sponging off the taxpayers), I tuned in to the "exciting climax" of the Lord Sir Alan Sugar publicity vehicle that is The Apprentice.

I have to confess that, in spite of my socialism, I have watched this programme before. There is something minorly spellbinding about the obsequious nature of these would be Masters-of-the-Universe, privately trumpeting their sheer brilliance (one tonight even likened himself to the Norse God Thor - he works in executive recruitment, after all!) before being lined up like errant pupils before a schoolmaster and parroting "Good morning Lord Sugar" as the hirsute one clambers out what looks like a hire-car to pronounce on their task that week. "Please may I clean your shoes with my tongue," feels just a short, short step away for some of these eager entrepreneurs.

They were a rum bunch - each somehow worse, both more self-abasing and yet simultaneously fantastically arrogant, than the last. There was not a single sympathetic character among them - one wanted to set up a hedge fund to let people speculate in wine they'd never drink; another wanted to create a call centre to identify people in debt to sell on their names to debt management companies; while even the one who talked about helping cut carbon by getting people into green jobs was actually just eyeing up the chance to charge finders' fees for staff hired by alternative energy companies (he won).

It would barely matter - on one level, it is just another piece of bad unreality TV; but on the other hand, because of its popularity, it has done a lot of damage to people's view of the workplace and of what is needed to get on in life, especially among younger people. Just as other programmes like Big Brother have become more and more extreme in their thrill-seeking, so the apprentices have become more and more cut-throat and two-faced, as well as completely over the top in their claims of transforming his Lordship's £250,000 investment into £25 million in one case and £145 million in another.

It's a bit like the people in some soap dramas who are on their uppers one week before declaring they are "going into business" and, hey presto, two episodes later they own a pub or run a car lot that has made them rich. No turned-down-by-the-bank here; lots of murders but no bankrupt businesses. Everyone just needs to shout a lot and declare themselves to have a dream. Just like the apprentices. Hard graft and capitalism will deliver the rest.

Yes, of course. It's on the telly, so it must be true. Except of course, as such a driver of our culture, the mass media can and does shape its own reality, which led to an interesting moment in The Apprentice this evening. Bamboozled by the flood of pseudo-business jargon from the pseudo-business people, deafened by the strategic business plan roll-out process and the apparent belief that if you say I will bring something totally new to the world of business often enough it somehow becomes true, even Sur Alan, sorry Lord Sugar, bemoaned the emptiness of the competitors' statements. One of his sidekicks suggested this was on account of people thinking they need to use big words to big-up their dull proposals. But perhaps it is more than that.

Perhaps, watching previous series of this supposed window on the world of business, these young people actually mistook the waffle and hyperbole that issued from the lips of previous competitors and His Magnificence Himself as being...well...real and the accepted way to get ahead in business. So much so that Lord Sugar is in fact the author of his own bewilderment.

There can be only one: dog-eat-dog capitalism at is very worst.

The Apprentice is a nasty piece of work. It takes (mainly) young people and brings out the most aggressive, mean-minded, over-competitive aspects of their characters in a dog-eat-dog race where friendship and co-operation are reduced to social masks behind which lurk the fangs of a blood lust for success. One competitor thought it a good idea to boast smirking that she can stab people in the back while smiling at them: "they call me the blond assassin!" It shows a world where hierarchy is all, where anything that doesn't make money is nonsense and where you need to find ways to make cash from almost anything at all...

Well, maybe I am doing it a dis-service: on reflection, perhaps it really does show up at its most basic the commodification of anything and everything in a consumer society shaped by the ill-named free market; and the sheer aggression and relentless unpleasantness and exploitation that is capitalism, the endless drive towards eliminating rivals until just one remains - the only one who matters or counts for anything in this world. Yes, in its unreality, perhaps it in fact exposes neoliberal capitalist reality better than any documentary or speech ever would; but in the same moment, it validates all of this as normal, right and indeed unavoidable if you ever want to savour the sweet taste of success.

Even when it momentarily acknowledges its own unpleasantness, with one interviewer tonight querying the plan to make money out of people in debt, it quickly passes over any moral questions to concentrate on the contest. Indeed, not once in any of the programmes I've seen in its eight series has anyone ever mentioned ethics. But then, there's maybe not enough profit in that, and profit is all; at least, that's the apparent zeitgeist of this show.

I could change channels, but to what? Bring on the first series of The Apparatchik. Now, that would make for different viewing...

Forty per cent in Four Decades: the startling decline in Africa's Biodiversity

Africa is the cradle of humanity: in the final analysis, we are all Africans. Our human species emerged from the heart of the Continent some 150,000 years ago, spreading over the planet that is our home. Since then, as we have "advanced" in numbers, technology and resource use, humans have changed the face of the Earth like no other species in its existence. With both massive potential for creative good and destructive bad, humans now stand at a momentous crossroads where one path leads to a powerfully different but better way of life, sustainable and co-operative, while another, the "business-as -usual" scenario, leads to increasing resource exhaustion, worldwide pollution and warming and increasing conflict between humans.

Nowhere perhaps is this choice more urgently apparent than on our Mother Continent of Africa: a report just published today charts a forty per cent decline in African biodiversity in just four decades; and, as everywhere, it is the poor who are bearing the brunt of this.

In this article, Emmanuel K Dogbevi, Managing Online Editor of "GhanaBusinessNews.com", sets out the issues covered by this ground breaking report and the choices that face both Africa and humanity as a whole.

African biodiversity - Miombo Woodlands in Zimbabwe

Africa suffers 40% ecological decline – Report

A new report on Africa’s ecology shows that the continent has suffered a decline of nearly 40% in biodiversity in the last four decades.

The report, a joint effort by the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) was launched June 1, 2012 in Arusha, Tanzania during the Annual General Meetings of the AfDB.

Titled, ‘The Africa Ecological Footprint Report: Green Infrastructure for Africa’s Ecological Security’ takes stock of the health of Africa’s ecosystems, as well as trends in resources use patterns. It also lays out recommendations on implementing green development pathways for Africa, the AfDB has said in a press release.

It indicates that the report is intended to stoke up thinking on greener development in Africa and to rally action by policy-makers and investors in the lead-up to Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development taking place later this month in Brazil.

According to the release, the Africa Ecological Footprint Report 2012 outlines two alarming trends, which if not addressed by policy-makers and investors are likely to lead to important social and economic impacts.

The first, it says is by tracking the changes in wildlife populations as a proxy for ecosystem health, the Africa Living Planet Index shows a decline of nearly 40% in biodiversity in the last four decades. This decline reflects a degradation of the natural systems upon which Africa’s current and future prosperity depends.

Secondly, the rapid population growth and increasing prosperity are changing consumption patterns, with the result that Africa’s ecological footprint – the area needed to generate the resources consumed by the people who live here – has been growing steadily.

The report finds that while Africa’s total ecological footprint is set to double by 2040 in a business-as-usual scenario, the good news is that Africa is in an advantageous position to act.

READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE  HERE AT GHANABUSINESSNEWS.COM

The Future's Bright, the Future is Green...

Well ok, it's a small sample, but it is UK-wide and it's satisfying to see: contrary to myth, young people remain politically aware and are switching leftwards towards the Greens, eschewing the likes of UKIP and xenophobic nationalists. This evening's YouGov rolling survey gives figures for 18 to 24 year olds' nationwide British party political support as:

Not mincing (vegging?) their words: Young Greens
 in Canada tell a global truth...

Labour 38%
Conservatives 20%
Green Party 19% 
Lib Dem 12%
Nats 6%
UKIP 5%


Little wonder perhaps - it is the coming generation that will face the full brunt of global warming; but there's still just time for the current generation to help them stop the worst of it.


Link to Young Greens here.

  

The One Million Climate Jobs "Caravan of Hope"

The Campaign against Climate Change has launched an initiative calling for massive public investment to create a million jobs in tackling the causes of global warming in Britain. With its Caravan of Hope travelling the country to promote the campaign, which has been developed in conjunction with a number of major trade unions and the Green Party, the CCC is arguing for Keynesian economics to be used to put unemployed workers back in jobs. There are echoes of the Green New Deal here, but with some significant differences.

Unusually, but most welcome, is its proposal that these should be public sector jobs, deployed on a wide range of tasks, many skilled in their nature, switching to a near zero-carbon energy sector within twenty years as well as saving emissions meantime by a national programme to insulate every  building in the country and also to massively improve and reduce the cost of public transport. Other initiatives would seek to cut emissions in industrial and agricultural processes, and, as each stage completed, the workers involved would be retrained and moved into new roles in the next phase. Their jobs and pay would be guaranteed, providing a currently unknown level of security with immense social benefits as well as massively driving forward the environmental agenda.

It is a bold plan, with a net cost of £18 billions per year. This is dwarfed by the £200 billion given to the banks in 2008 and by expenditure by the current government on areas of spending like the military and nuclear power.  if the Trident nuclear missile system is replaced, its current estimated cost will be around £80 billions, so spending a quarter of that on jobs in sustainable recovery is not only possible - it is urgently necessary to help avoid climate catastrophe. With global warming continuing to gather pace as the Siberian and Canadian tundra begin to melt and release extremely dangerous methane gases (which are 23 times more warming than CO2), we have a very short time indeed to prevent climate change racing far ahead of any chance of human action stabilising the warming trend.

The capitalist market system, with its in inherent need to commodify more and more activities and resources, will not deliver the change we need in time, if at all. For example, as the Arctic melts to a point that ice free summers at the North Pole may be only a few years away, rather than ring the bell to sound a global emergency, the oil companies and their investors are extolling the profitable prospects of being able to drill for oil and gas in hitherto inaccessible water.

And so Government led action, such as the million jobs campaign, will be necessary to drive down our carbon gluttony. Beyond the current campaign though are a number of other major issues to tackle, such as breaking the power of multinational corporations, re-localising economies and redistributing wealth to make a low/no growth economics possible.

The Caravan's progress and schedule can be found on the Campaign against Climate Change website here. You can download the report setting out the initiative on the same web page.


A video has been launched to promote the campaign.

In the Company of Kings

Today, celebrating her 60 years on the throne, the British monarch, Elizabeth Windsor, hosted an event at Windsor Castle attended by several unsavoury characters, including the Kings of Swaziland, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Although the Bahrain tyrant, Hamid al-Khalifa, missed a later banquet at Buckingham Palace, the Queen's appetite for his frequent company seems undiminished in spite of his brutal suppression (much aided by his Saudi neighbours) of democracy protesters last year. Scores of people were killed, hundreds have disappeared (including a number of children) and even a number of doctors and nurses who treated injured demonstators have been jailed for lengthy terms.

Died for democracy:  and now his killer lunches with the Queen

But, Bahrain, like Dubai, exists pretty much to service the financial and recreational desires of the international elite, of which Elizabeth Windsor is one. And of course, she and Hamid love horse-racing. So the troublesome people asking for the right to vote in a country which has had the same Prime Minister (a relative of the King) since the 1960s matter not a whit to her.

It is remarkable how she gets away with it. Even critics of the visit like Dennis McShame and George Galloway have said the Government has let her down by not advising her to not invite this man. Yet, time and again, we hear the stories of how well-informed of the world she is, how she keeps up keenly with the news and supposedly interrogates her Ministers on their policies with a razor-sharp intellect.

Well, the tales are probably overblown, but there can be no doubt she is as aware as any about the blood spilled on the streets of Bahrain. The bottom line is neither our Royal Family nor our Government care. Unlike Libya, Syria and Iran, Bahrain, Saudi and the other Gulf monarchies dutifully fall into line when it comes to supporting the economic interests of the west. A number of these corrupt regimes, including the Bahrain one, were sustained by direct intervention by the British and American military in the 1950s and 1960s and have retained power in the teeth of popular opposition ever since only by means of repression and violence. The West, so willing to kill Iraqis and Libyans in the name of democracy, doesn't merely sit back in Bahrain and Saudi - we sell them weapons, patronise their desert luxury resorts and do business with their near-slave economies. Yet again, oil and money have trumped the aspirations and human rights of the local people.

And it seems as if Elizabeth Windsor does not care.

"A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all." (Mark Twain)

The Terrible Burden of Equality

Since the 1970s, the concept of equality of treatment in the workplace has become more and more part of the accepted culture in Britain - which does not mean for a moment that it has been achieved, but relatively few would argue that it is not both ethically and indeed in terms of business efficiency the best way to work. Discrimination has been outlawed in terms of disability, gender, sexual orientation, age, race, transgender and belief/non-belief. There are exceptions where these are valid - for example, a church can require priests to be Christians; care homes can recruit male or female staff as necessary to ensure the privacy of their clients; and theatre directors can employ actors according to role requirements, and so on. In 2010, these were drawn together into the single Equality Act, which added the need to not discriminate on grounds of social background and required employers to protect their staff against discrimination by third parties, such as clients and customers.

These laws, as Home Secretary Roy Jenkins spoke of the first of them, provide a basic floor of rights - they are not rigid, nor stupidly dogmatic as the likes of the Daily Mail would have you think - political correctness gone mad! They have not achieved all their objectives - women, for example, still earn significantly less than men overall - but, working in Human Resources as I do, equality laws have made a huge difference in general attitudes over the last twenty years or so, and from the perspective of working to improve processes and culture within organisations, they have provided a major impetus in challenging attitudes and, in turn, changing behaviour.

So it is utterly depressing, though unsurprising, now to discover that the Coalition Government is reviewing these workplace equality laws in the name of cutting the awful burden of red tape, which even now is apparently holding back billionaire investors from pouring cash into job creation in the UK. In particular, they are looking to abolish:

1. the rule that employers are liable for repeated discriminatory harassment of their staff by people from outside their organisation where inadequate steps have been taken to prevent it; 
2. the ‘questionnaire procedure’ that enables people who think they have been unlawfully discriminated against to seek information and explanations from the person they believe has discriminated against them; 
3. the power given to Employment Tribunals to recommend that an employer take certain steps to avoid others being affected by discrimination. 

In defence of the planned abolition, the Government argues that, for example in the case of harassment, good employers would still take action to stop harassment of their staff because, if they didn't, morale would get poor and performance suffer and staff leave.

A few points on that argument:
- good employers would take action; but if all employers were good, we wouldn't have needed the law to begin with and it wouldn't create a "burden" on anyone as they would already be doing what it required. There are plenty of bad employers.
- in the absence of the law, it will be harder for good employers to take action against harassers, as they will not have the backing of the law to do this.
- morale may get poor and staff leave - yes, they may do, and the harassers will have won and discrimination will have won.

So, in other words, if a member of the public comes in and makes offensive remarks to a disabled member of staff, their employer will be able to tell the staff member, "too bad, not my problem." And their only recourse will be to resign. One-nil to discrimination.

And on the other points:
- the questionnaire procedure is rarely used; but when it is, it is actually very helpful to an employer facing an employment tribunal complaint in terms of understanding the complaint and assessing whether or not the employer is, in fact, at fault and should seek to settle the claim. It IS a bit of paper, but it can save lots of other bits of paper and hours and days of litigation. Abolishing this would be a really counter-productive own goal, though our headline grabbing Government will doubtless portray it as a nail in the coffin of litigants.

- and the suggestion that, having found that someone has been discriminated against, employment tribunals will no longer be able to make recommendations for changing practice to the employer to prevent similar problems in future. How is this a burden of red tape as opposed to very useful advice to help the employer avoid similar problems and costs in the future and end discrimination against employees who have not yet gone to a tribunal?

Unless of course, deep down, you don't actually believe in equality. Unless, in fact, discrimination actually is your cup of tea and, chipping away, bit by bit, line by line, you'd rather refashion the Equality Act 2010 into the Charter for Bigots 2015.

From Baloo's Cartoon Blog

The Regime is carrying out a supposed consultation exercise on these proposals. Anyone can comment on them via this link. 

Link to consultation papers (closing date for responses 7 August 2012) http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/equalities/

Book Worth a Look: "Citizens' Income and Green Economics" by Clive Lord

Clive Lord is said by some to be the oldest Green alive; now in his mid-seventies, it is fortunately likely that there are older Greens in terms of biological age, but as possibly the oldest surviving member of the 14 individuals who established People, the predecessor to the Ecology/Green Party of England and Wales, and as such the first established Green Party in the world, he may well be the longest serving Green member on the planet.
     Clive lived in Batley in Kirklees until last year and I worked closely with him on various local campaigns in our area - I was his deputy when he was the Agent for the last Yorkshire European election campaign, where we were rather narrowly beaten to a successful place by the odious but now collapsing BNP. And he he worked tirelessly with me in a determined but slightly ill-starred by-election campaign for a council ward in Dewsbury a few years ago. He is well known in the Green Party for his efforts at elections around the country and he fought nearly every national and local election in Batley & Spen between 1974 and 2011.
     Clive is not a socialist; but at the heart of his many years of eco-campaigning is a belief in sustainability combined with fairness and he has been a tireless proponent of the concept of the Citizens' Income. This policy (once, interestingly shared by the Liberal Party but quietly dropped in its post-SDP merger) involves the state paying all adults over 18, whether working or not, a basic income. The Green Party has this as a policy, though apart from a Pensioners Income of £160 per week at the last election, it has not set a rate for this and there is some tension inherent in how this would work set against the Party's support for a national minimum wage set at the Living Wage level.
     But a Citizens' Income to my mind is crucial in changing the economic paradigm, including in any shift towards a more ecosocialist economics. This is because it creates the possibility for all sorts of productive new activities by citizens. It would not directly reward activities which are currently not valued and therefore not paid by the capitalist economy - such as parenting, or supporting the local community or any number of non-profit-seeking creative activities - but it would free people to have some new possibility of undertaking these without loss. To anyone concerned with a more sustainable society, where extracting the highest possible financial return on our dwindling resources is ended, the Citizen's Income raises at least the possibility of new courses of activity and a renewal of community and citizenship infinitely more powerful than the devious twaddle of Cameron's evaporated Big Society initiative.
     Clive Lord first published a book on the Citizens' Income in 2003 and this year he is about to launch a newly published updated edition, which he has edited with other prominent members of the Green Economics Institute. Using the example of Easter Island to illustrate the propensity of societies to keep on "developing", i.e., exploiting their resources to exhaustion, the book shows how a society with a more even distribution of economic power can calm the drive to accumulate ever more without consideration of the longer term and how we need to shift to a greater emphasis on conservation and sharing of resources. This touches on the "Commons" concept, a matter of some debate between the ecological and ecosocialist wings of the Green Party and the wider green movement; for ecosocialists, the book holds to arguments about possibilities under the market system which we are unlikely to agree with, but it is a valuable contribution to the debate on how we can move to a fairer world.
     The updated book is available now from the Green Economics Institute - details below.

An Age of Green Economics: A ground - breaking  new book:

 Green Economics and Citizens Income

This collection of essays, speeches & articles Introduces Green Economics and the Citizens Income to the general reader!

Edited by Clive Lord, Miriam Kennet and Judith Felton

Just Published by the Green Economics Institute

This fresh perspective on the theme of how to stop mankind over-exploiting the Earth challenges reassurances that scientific warnings are unduly pessimistic. The fate of Easter Island offers new insights into the dynamics driving economic expansion, and why the major players can never know how or when to stop. Lord outlines how a so-called ‘primitive’ tribe solved the problem which devastated Easter Island, and which now confronts us globally, by a cultural shift based on a strategy of sharing necessities unconditionally, allowing other rules for everything else.

Lord explains why such a strategy is an essential precondition for a sustainable world, and how it can be adopted nationally and internationally. Practical measures, however vital once such a shift has taken place, will do more harm than good if used instead to prop up the existing growth oriented mind-set.

 

Book Overview: 7 parts. No. of pages 337 ISBN: 9781907543074

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Concepts: Tragedy of the commons, etc. 

Part 3: A way out: Making it happen

Part 4: Wider Implications: How the Citizens' Income can form the basis for a paradigm shift

Part 5: Tactical and strategic implications for implementation

Part 6: Case studies of new developments

Part 7: There are no utopias

Normal RRP £ 30.00 plus postage and packing

£20.00 plus p and p if ordered direct from the Green Economics Institute: order via

greeneconomicsinstitute@yahoo.com Special introductory offers: 5% discount on all orders

Special Price £14.99 if bought at one of the four Book Launches in Leeds:

• Central Library, The Headrow 22nd May 10am-12 noon & 2pm-4pm
• Branch Library North Lane Headingley 23rd May 7pm-9pm
• Branch Library 106 Harrogate Rd.Chapel Allerton 24th May 7pm-9pm

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.