Haringey Green Party Blog

Racism in English Football

2012-02-14T09:12:00.000-08:00

Two recent high profile cases of footballers in England racially abusing opponents have shone a spotlight onto racism in the English national game. I have to say, compared with when I watched football in the 1970’s and 1980’s, the game has made good progress. In those days, black players were fairly rare, but whenever they touched the ball, opposing fans would break into a bout of booing. Some of the barracking was even worse, and who can forget the infamous incident when Everton fans threw bananas at the black Liverpool and England player, John Barnes? Other countries in Europe appear to have far worse racism problems in their football than England do, where black players are still routinely booed and abused.

Now, the English premier league attracts many footballers from many races and nationalities, and is the most popular national league in the world. But these recent incidents have demonstrated that racism still has a presence in English football.

Louis Suarez, the Uruguay and Liverpool player, was found guilty by a Football Association (FA) tribunal of racially abusing Patrice Evra the black French international, who plays for Manchester United. He received an eight match ban, but continued to proclaim his innocence and the unfairness of it all, and was backed to the hilt by his manager Kenny Dalglish and Liverpool Football Club.

The situation reached a nadir at the weekend when starting for the first time since his ban, Suarez refused to shake the hand of Evra before the return meeting of the two clubs in Manchester. Ex- Liverpool players, current players, assorted commentators, corporate sponsors and Liverpool’s American owners all demanded an apology from Suarez and his manager. This duly arrived a day later, which seemed to be grudgingly given, and only further shamed Liverpool FC.

The other recent case involves the Chelsea and (then) England captain, John Terry over racial abuse allegations to a Queens Park Rangers black player, Anton Ferdinand, which have landed Terry in court on a racially-aggravated public order offence. Terry, like Suarez, insists he is innocent, and his club have backed him, in a similar way to Liverpool did with Suarez.

When the court case was put back until the close of the football season in July, at the behest of Chelsea, with presumably Terry’s agreement, the FA in a rare moment of decisiveness stripped him of the England captaincy. They were worried, quite correctly in my view, that it would not be appropriate for the team captain to be under the shadow of racist allegations. The only mistake the FA made was not to remove Terry from the team altogether. The decision did though lead to the resignation of the team manager, Fabio Capello, in what he said was too much interference in his running of the team.

Much was made by Capello and Terry, that Terry is ‘innocent until proven guilty’, and in law this is indeed the case. But it was Terry and his club that wanted to delay the trial, which otherwise would have taken place in March, and been well out of the way, one way or the other, before the summer’s European Football Championship. So, to my mind the FA had to act to protect the image of the English game.

Who would have thought that football would be the stage upon which the issue of racism would be played out before the nation? And this coming only months after Sky Sports commentators Andy Gray and Richard Keys were sacked for making sexist remarks about a female assistant referee. English football has come a long way in challenging bigotry, if only they could deal with homophobia in the same enlightened fashion.

A4e got welfare-to-work contract despite 'abysmal' record, MPs say

2012-02-10T03:11:00.000-08:00

The record of welfare-to-work company A4e has come under scrutiny from MPs, as they questioned why a company with an "abysmal" record of delivering government programmes had been awarded new contracts to provide the coalition's Work Programme when it launched last summer.

Details of large dividends received by Emma Harrison, A4e's chair, also emerged during questioning of the company's chief executive officer, Andrew Dutton. He confirmed that all of its UK turnover last year, estimated at between £160m and £180m, derived from government contracts, and of the £11m paid in dividends to the company's five shareholders, 87% went to Harrison.

During a session on Wednesday on the introduction of the Work Programme, MPs on the public accounts committee put a series of critical questions to the civil servants responsible for devising the scheme about the way that contracts for the £5bn Work Programme were awarded.

The committee's chair, Margaret Hodge, the Labour MP for Barking, asked civil servants why welfare-to-work companies with a poor track record of fulfilling previous contracts had been given new work.

"It seemed rather surprising to me that you did not have to regard to the past performance of contractors. Why not?" she asked. "A4e … their performance on [Pathways to Work] was abysmal … Why didn't you look at past performance of contractors?"

Her fellow committee member Richard Bacon, Conservative MP for south Norfolk, added: "Are you seriously saying that you could not take into account that A4e had dreadful performance in one of the immediate predecessor programmes?"

He said that the company got 9% of clients into work in the Pathways to Work programme – it had been expected to deliver 30%.

"Despite that seriously poor track record, are you seriously saying that is not something you could take into account?"

The permanent secretary for the Department for Work and Pensions, Robert Devereux, replied: "I am saying that." He explained that because other companies, which had not been involved in providing previous welfare-to-work contracts, were also tendering for contracts, it would not have been possible to look at the past performance of companies that had previously worked in this area.

He also pointed out that most of the welfare-to-work providers had underperformed during the previous scheme.

A4e won five main contracts to deliver the Work Programme when the results of a tendering process were announced last April, along with a wide range of other companies including Serco, G4S and Working Links.

The committee spent some time trying to establish where money paid to A4e to deliver government contracts ended up.

"We have a small group of shareholders. The dividends that we pay to the shareholders reflect the personal risk that they have. Having owned a company for over 21 years, at times they have had to effectively put their own homes and mortgages on the line," Dutton told MPs. He said some of the company's profits were ploughed back into the business.

Hodge said it was important to follow taxpayers' money along the chain, stating: "Your top management last year took £4.7m … you pay £11m dividends."

She added: "You're one of the first examples we have had of a company which is entirely dependent on public contracts for your existence. We, in terms of looking for value for money, have an interest in following the pound. All your business is public contracts. You and Emma Harrison have to accept that there will be a different interest in the remuneration and profits made because the profits you make come from the taxes that ordinary, hard-working people pay."

Civil servants told the committee that the Work Programme's new payment-by-results model would ensure that companies such as A4e would only get large payments for implementing the scheme if they got large numbers of benefit claimants into long-term, secure work.

"I genuinely believe that we as providers have to perform," Dutton said.

There was discussion of whether companies would be able to make money by "creaming and parking" – creaming off and helping those who are easier to help, and parking those who are unlikely to find work, having taken the initial government payment of £400 for signing them up to the scheme.

Civil servants said that companies would not make money if that was the approach they took.

There was some analysis of a recent National Audit Office report which suggested that the forecasts for the numbers of people that the programme could get into work were over-optimistic. Devereux said he was confident that the Work Programme would get the forecast number of people into work, despite the fact that the economic environment had significantly deteriorated since the programme was devised.

Fiona Mactaggart, Labour MP for Slough, was concerned about the possibility of "job substitution" – companies delivering the Work Programme getting paid for pushing their clients into jobs that would otherwise have been filled by other jobseekers, without the need for a third-party payment.

"In my constituency, a lot of people are being given work experience, unpaid, in retail, and then the retailers, I think, are being directly encouraged to employ people who have been given this one-month or two-, three-month interview process … and when they're offering jobs, a company like A4e, which operates in Slough, can say to Primark, if you want more of our free workers, I hope you are going to give our people 20-hour-week jobs. I'm sure it's not quite as overt as that, but I believe there is a risk of that happening.

"How in this system do we protect against the risk of job substitution?"

Devereux said that if the long-term unemployed were helped into work that was a positive development. "It is in society's interest to get people who have been out of work a long time into jobs," he said.

Alan Cave, senior responsible owner for the Work Programme, told the committee: "It is an observed big change in the labour market over the past 10 years that more and more companies are using work experience as a tester of whether someone might be a full-time employee. That's the reality. The providers have become quite skilful at taking someone coming on to the programme with a very weak CV … finding them some quick blocks of work experience, which will not be paid, [but] which will greatly improve their chances of getting a job that will be paid."

This article first published at The Guardian

Unemployed Exploited by Workfare Programme

2012-02-05T06:13:00.000-08:00

Just to add to Mike’s blog, which I much agree with, the unemployed are not just being turned into scapegoats, they are being turned into a source of profit ! Firstly Atos Healthcare, for their persecution of sick and disabled people to chase as many of them as possible off the (higher) benefits available to those ‘unfit’ to work on to the lower JSA rates, are getting £100mn a year from the government. That’s compared to a total of £994 million that the government expects to save by shifting disabled people from ESA to JSA between 2010 and 2015. Rather poor returns you might say, especially considering that £30mn a year is being spent by government on fighting claimants’ appeals against Atos’ decisions. Secondly, G4S, the company charged with running the new ‘Work Programme’ stands to make up to £14000 per person it manages to place into a job that lasts a minimum of 2 years. Altogether their expected income from ‘placing’ unemployed people will be around £5 billion. Thirdly, the Work Programme offers unemployed people not as ‘wage slaves’ but as UNWAGED bodies for up to three months to private employers. No conditions about whether these employers would otherwise have hired ‘real’ employees. No time limit either – the three months can be repeated so that any claimant can be made to do up to 12 months unwaged work (receiving benefits only). Nor any limit on the amount of labour a single employer can have free of charge – the local Poundland in Wood Green, for example, may be entirely staffed by job centre conscripts for all we know. Certainly anti-workfare campaigners and press reports (e.g. The Guardian here) have highlighted Poundland, Argos , Tesco and Sainsbury’s as companies that are taking part in this scheme. So how many millions of pounds are being made out of these unemployed ‘non-wage slaves’ ?

I have come across at least one GP member who thinks it’s ok for jobseekers to work for their benefit, to ‘put something back’ into society. Some already did – the requirement to join the Work Programme, for some people only three months into unemployment, is REGARDLESS of whether they paid for these benefits through their national insurance. Others might well be doing useful voluntary work which is really voluntary, if they were left to get on with it – but they are not allowed to choose that, they must go where the job centre or G4S puts them. They also might be doing a college course, but they can be asked to give that up too. All under threat of; ‘if you don’t accept a Work Programme placement, we will stop your benefits.’

What effect do these benefit sanctions have ? Hunger, homelessness, mental and possibly physical illness, driving people into crime. The more so if the government does what it wants and extended the maximum ‘benefits denied’ period to THREE YEARS! Already during the period of Labour’s ‘New Deal’ for the unemployed in the early noughties, government research showed that sanctions against refusenik youth who dropped out of jobcentre programmes were counter-productive; they went underground, were lost to the world of work and training, and often became homeless.

Greens should be demanding the government drop the Work Programme and bring back the Future Jobs Fund, as well as letting the unemployed do voluntary work or training of their own choice. But what of Citizen’s Income, the policy Greens have been after for years ? On the face of it we will be half way there with Universal Credit – the plan now going through Parliament that from 2013, tax credits and most unwaged benefits will be wrapped up into a single benefit. Then, it will become legal to do casual or part-time work alongside claiming benefits – you will just have to ’ fess up to the tax office how much you made, and benefits will start to fall away once it’s more than a specified level. But a huge gulf still remains between Universal Credit and Citizen’s Income in terms of the rules for claiming. With Universal Credit, claimants will still have to attend job centre interviews, prove they are seeking work, and join job centre programmes whenever ordered to. Any breach of these rules will lead to loss of Universal Credit. The spirit of Citizen’s Income is that it’s UNCONDITIONAL – it should not depend on jumping through all these bureaucratic hoops.

Rather than endlessly wonder about the cost or details of Citizen’s Income, Greens should be campaigning for a lifting of compulsory programmes and easing of benefit sanctions. Not only because they demean and harass unemployed people and have negative effects in practice – there is a huge amount of research criticizing ‘workfare’ and tough benefit rules, which I wrote about a few years ago (Anne Gray, ‘Unsocial Europe’, Pluto Books 2004). We should also be pushing home the argument (which I also made in that book) that the effect of forcing people to work for nothing, or to take rock-bottom pay for fear of losing benefit, is to drive down wages for everyone. We may be campaigning for a ‘living wage’, but it’s no good if the job-centre system is continually pressuring the unemployed to work for the legal minimum and encouraging employers to take free workfare labour.

Written by Anne Gray
Haringey Green Party

Counter Power: Making Change Happen by Tim Gee

2012-02-03T10:25:00.001-08:00

If you've ever stood on a windy street corner handing out leaflets to disinterested shoppers, or traipsed from Embankment to Hyde Park Corner and found yourself wondering “What am I doing here? How does this help further the cause to which I am committed?”, then this is definitely not the book for you. In fact, it's hard to know exactly who this book is for. It's not really political theory, because there isn't much theory in it. It isn't really practical tips for organisers either, because most of the examples which occupy so much of the book don't apply to capitalist democracies like Britain. There is little attempt to evaluate either tactics or overall strategies.

Gee asserts the legitimacy of 'counterpower', by which he means popular dissent and protest, then categorises it into Ideas Counterpower (conventional campaigning such as leaflets, petition and media strategy), Economic Counterpower (strikes and boycotts), and Physical Counterpower (everything from non-violent demonstrations to insurrections). He then spends the bulk of the book describing various popular struggles at considerable length, including the movement for independence in India, the campaign against the Vietnam War in the US (with walk-on parts for the UK supporters), and the struggle to overthrow Apartheid in South Africa in terms of the categories he has created.

The end result is a sort of relentlessly cheerful history of protests movements, with most of the politics taken out. There is no indication that either the anti-war struggle in American or the overthrow of Apartheid owed anything to the global balance of forces; the USSR may have been a really rotten model for how to construct an alternative society, but there can be little doubt that its military and geopolitical strategy in the Cold War acted as a brake on American power. But this does not even appear to have crossed Tim Gee's mind.

If you don't know anything about the history of protests around the world, you could do worse than read this book. But if you really want some strategic direction about how to make change happen, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Written by Jeremy Green
Haringey Green Party

'Insider Trading', Anyone?

2012-02-02T03:02:00.000-08:00

Global health insurance company Unum -- formerly Unum Provident -- has been advising UK governments on welfare reform since 1994. As Haringey Green Party's Anne Gray in the Green Party's 2008 response to Labour's welfare reform Green Paper 'No-one left behind' touched upon by reference to Prof Jonathan Rutherford's research into the matter when she wrote:

"The Green Party is also very concerned about the strong role of one or two private companies in advising the government about the development of welfare to work proposals, particularly in relation to the restructuring of incapacity-related benefits,(see Jonathan Rutherford here) It seems extraordinary that so much attention has been given to the views of a company which is on record as saying that it sees the UK benefits system as one of its major markets for the future; one would expect advice to have been taken from a wider and more balanced range of sources. As Rutherford’s paper shows, the credibility of Unum — formerly Unum Provident - has been badly damaged by having been prosecuted for fraudulent business in the USA."

Televised ads for Back-Up Plan state openly, "If you have to give up work because of an accident or injury, it's as if the rug has been pulled out from under you...." It then goes on to promoting Income Protection Insurance, that is exactly in line with Government plans for replacing Disability Living Allowance. What is the company behind Back-Up Plan? You've guessed it, Unum. For further info that goes deeply into nepotistic interactions between the Department for Work & Pensions' former Chief Medical Adviser, Unum and Atos Healthcare — as well as Unum's attempts to censor its online critics — see here

Mike Shaughnessy refers in a previous post on this blog to the housing benefit implications of the ConDems' welfare reform plans, and the high cost of rents in London and South-East England as a major factor in this. The Welfare Reform Bill is not alone in making the prospect of homelessness worse for the least comfortably off. The ConDems' agenda in the Localism Bill includes restricting local councils' housing stock. More here.

Whether this might be a case of real 'unintended consequences' or a covert agenda, who might gain from this move to greater dependency on the 'buy to rent' market? Ironically, while asylum seeking families have been scapegoats for a clamp down on both security of tenure for social housing and local councils' housing stock, the winners in the compendium of ConDem 'joined up thinking' include offshore landlords who regard the UK as part of their 'global village', as Mike McNabb has clearly outlined.

In targeting a Somali family as undeserving beneficiaries of UK government funds, the Daily Mail conveniently overlooked who really gains by the hiking of rent in a Tory borough as case study material for informed policy-making. As McNabb has written: "What we should be more concerned about - because the Mail evidently is not - is the doubling of the rent from £1,050 last year to the maximum available now under housing benefit rules.

"The landlord, a company based in the British Virgin Islands, is not named in the report. Neither is anyone questioned about the hiking of the rent, which seems to have coincided with the arrival of Abdi Nur and his family.

So who is playing the system now?

Written by Alan Wheatley
Camden Green Party
Co-author with Anne Gray of the Green Party's response to Labour's Welfare Reform Green Paper of 2008.

Welfare Claimants are Scapegoats for Financial Crisis

2012-02-01T02:21:00.001-08:00

The ConDem government is attempting to cut £18 billion from welfare benefits in the latest wave of austerity measures, that they insist is necessary to cut the UK budget deficit and borrowing requirements. This policy seems to have attracted a fair amount of populist support in the country, with the government’s friends in the right wing press producing screaming headlines about ‘benefit scroungers’ and the like.

The proposal to cap benefits at a maximum of £26,000 per year, per family, has been held up by the House of Lords, but will be returned to the House of Commons, and no doubt eventually pushed through into law. This does seem like an extraordinary amount of money to be claiming in welfare benefits, when the average UK gross wage is exactly the same figure, but this tells only part of the story. The vast majority of people receiving this sum live in the south east of England, mainly in London, and most of the money claimed is in the form of Housing Benefit, from tenants of private sector landlords. So the claimants never really see this money, but if they lose it, then they will more than likely lose their homes along with it.

Disability Living Allowance (DLA) is also to be cut for those lucky enough to still be in receipt of it, whilst the rest are forced onto Jobseekers Allowance (JSA), whether they are really fit for work or not, by ATOS, the government’s private health company assessors. (The Guardian reports here that a man who has been registered blind since 2000 due to a hereditary degenerative sight condition was surprised to read his report's conclusion that "the client's level of disability would be expected to improve with time and appropriate treatment"). And of course everyone on JSA gets harassed and threatened with the loss of their benefit, regardless of the lack of job opportunities; with unemployment soaring as the economy stagnates and public sector jobs are cut to the bone. The only growth area I have heard of in the public sector is in benefit fraud investigators.

Contrast this with cuts in the government’s tax inspectorate, where far more money is lost to the public purse than in fraudulent benefit claims, and you can see a pattern emerging in ConDem strategy. The whole aim of this government is to pin the blame on people on welfare benefits for the poor state of the country’s finances, (and by implication the last Labour government), when it seems to have been conveniently forgotten that the current financial crisis was caused by the reckless behaviour of the banks, where the directors of these banks are richer now than they were before they plunged the nation, and indeed most western nations, into recession.

There’s not much sympathy for the bankers though amongst the general public, so the benefit cuts have to be sold as being not fair to the ‘working poor’. Classic divide and rule, as Diane Abbott might say. There are far too many workers on low wages, but the government’s rhetoric doesn’t match its actions. Most claimants of Housing Benefit are actually in work, but this isn’t stopping the government reducing payments and ‘localising’ the system to that end. The government is also cutting Working Tax Credits, which go to the lowest paid workers, and the likely increase to £10,000 of the income tax personal allowance (tax free earnings), will not fully compensate those on the lowest wages. Oh, and it will be made easier for employers to sack workers too.

The only problem for the government with this strategy is that it is not reducing the budget deficit, quite the reverse. The government admits that the deficit will be £158bn higher by 2015, but they have managed to drown this fact out, by shouting noisily about ‘fairness’ and ‘scroungers’. What a pity people fall for this irrelevant diversion, but I hope eventually the proverbial penny will drop, and people will see all of this for what it truly is.

And there is another way. We need to catch the tax cheats and we need to tax the very wealthy properly, and there are a variety of ways that this can done, see here and here on this blog for some examples. To address the Housing Benefit situation, we need to build more social housing and reintroduce rent controls in the privately rented sector.

We need to stop blaming the victims for this mess that we are in, and lay the responsibility at the door of the perpetrators. Now, that really is fairness.

Labour Reverts to Neo Labour

2012-01-19T09:18:00.000-08:00

With what I think were heartfelt reasons, the Labour party (including their affiliated trade unions), elected Ed Miliband to the leadership of the party, to represent views that brought to a close the New Labour project. His brother David, the heir apparent, was defeated because he embodied all that Labour party members had come to despair about the party. Ed seemed to talk a good game about getting back to a form of social democratic politics at the leadership election, long absent through the Blair and Brown regimes, and this is what won him the contest in the end.

Tens of thousands of people have joined, or re-joined Labour since their 2010 general election defeat, many who I am sure wanted to vote for the new leader, and all with the optimistic hope that Labour would now get back to being something like the party it once was; a champion of the people, not the wealthy, big business and finance capital. They must be very disappointed.

Recent pronouncements from both Ed Miliband and Ed Balls the shadow chancellor have made it clear that Labour is not going to change at all. They will now not reverse any of the ConDem government’s cuts to public services and welfare benefits, and will effectively continue the present government’s programme of austerity, if they are elected to government at the next general election. Public sector pay freezes will remain in place under a future Labour government and the richest people in the country will continue to benefit from paying meagre amounts of tax. One really has to ask, what is the point of the Labour party these days?

The trade unions are quite rightly furious with this lurch to the right by the party they provide something like %80 of the funding for. Bob Crow, leader of the RMT union was spot on when he said: “Why should unions give money to the Labour party for policies that we can get from the Tories for nothing?”

It seems we live in a one party state, where all three of the main parties agree on the same policies, making elections redundant. The Green party does set out a new vision, an alternative to the disastrous neo liberal policies of last thirty odd years, but we are small, steadily growing, but unlikely to win the next general election. We might win enough seats to wield some power, if the result is close enough again, but that is all.

The times are crying out for a better, more just, sustainable model for the way we live, with the status quo found to be built on sand, and sinking fast. The worldwide Occupy movement, UK Uncut and other direct action groups demonstrate a desire for change, more widespread than the old media would have you believe. Support for the recent public sector union’s industrial action was slightly in favour amongst the public at large, according to several opinion polls. People do recognise that those least able, and the least to blame for the current financial crisis should not be forced to shoulder the burden of propping up the system, whilst those who are to blame, get rewarded for their greed and incompetence. To steal the Tories recent election slogan, ‘we really can’t go on like this.’

I had hoped that Labour could be a partner with the Green party in the pursuit of a fairer society electorally, chart the way towards the ‘good society’, sadly that seems not to be the case. Labour members and trade unionists should think about supporting and joining the Greens, that way they can help build us into a party of government that represents their views. Stop wasting your time supporting a party that will never deliver what you believe to be right.

Fortnightly Refuse Collections to Begin in Haringey

2012-01-18T12:28:00.000-08:00

Beginning in March this year (although this may be delayed until the summer), fortnightly refuse collections are to be introduced in Haringey. In the first wave of this initiative, the wards of Muswell Hill, Highgate, Fortis Green, and parts of Bounds Green, Crouch End and Stroud Green, will move to the new arrangements. In June, the arrangement will be extended to Wood Green, West Green, Bruce Grove, Haringay and St Ann’s wards. In October, the rest of the borough will be brought in line with the new regime.

We were informed of this change in ‘Haringey People’, the council’s glossy, paid for by residents, Labour party propaganda magazine, in December.

Items that are currently recycled will continue to be collected once a week, but ‘residual waste’ (what we put in black bin bags) will only be collected on a fortnightly basis. Existing bins will be used in the first instance, but the ‘green box’ recycling bins will be replaced later, with small green wheelie bins, for glass, paper, tins and plastic waste. Existing garden waste bags and food waste containers will continue to be used for these types of refuse. The scheme will only apply to households who have front gardens or yards large enough to store the extra bins. To encourage food recycling, compostable bags for food waste will be provided free for six months only, and bones can now be put in food waste.

Of course, we in the Green party welcome a move to more recycling, although the current ‘co-mingled’ form of recycling practiced in Haringey (and set to continue) is far from ideal. By mixing different waste, some of it becomes degraded, paper for example, and becomes unsuitable for pulping, and so unrecyclable. Also, glass bottles are not reused or even made into new ones, but used to build roads in places like Malaysia, hardly a very ‘green’ way of dealing waste. All the same, even this limited type of recycling is preferable to landfill, and the new refuse collections are likely to see more waste recycled than at present.

Our old friends the Lib Dems are up to their old tricks again, calling for consultation with residents before the scheme begins, and of course consultation is important, as well as the education of residents, to ensure that implementation and continued usage is successful. But we all know by now what the Lib Dems modus operandi is, sit on the fence, and see which way the wind blows in public opinion, then claim they are speaking for the ‘people’. Shameless opportunism is the Lib Dems stock in trade.

I do though foresee possible problems with moving to a fortnightly collection system. Will residents cooperate in the way necessary to make it work properly? Or will people just dump rubbish in the street and other public areas, or over stuff their ‘grey’ bins so the lid won’t close? We already have a big problem with vermin in Haringey (and much of London) and this policy could well make matters worse. The food recycling bags should be provided free for as long the scheme runs, as I’ve had problems in the past with food waste not being collected because it was in the wrong bag, and they left the lid of the bin open, but no explanation as why it was not collected.

Residents should also be encouraged to reuse items where possible and to compost some waste, but all of this would lead to less refuse, and so less money for private contractor Veolia who will run the new scheme. And there we have the real reason that we are to move to fortnightly waste collection, it’s all about money. Money for Veolia and saving money for the council, in these cash strapped municipal days, not any great concern for the environment, local or further afield.

Veolia can be contacted about the new arrangements on 020 8885 7700 or at enquiries.haringey@veolia.co.uk.

We need to design a new economic order

2011-12-17T07:33:00.000-08:00

I want a debate about how we move away from today's failed economic order and build a new one that is socially just and ecologically sustainable.

In a month dominated by the political and economic crisis in Europe, those of us following events at the COP17 climate summit in Durban took what little hope we could from the talks.

Politically, there was some success in the form of a roadmap towards a new treaty to succeed the Kyoto protocol. The fact that this new agreement to cut emissions, which will have legal force, is to include the United States, as well as the fast growing economies such as China, India and Brazil, is encouraging.

Sadly, it says a great deal about people's faith in the UN climate negotiations process that, after so many summits and empty pledges over the years, an agreement "in principle" to tackling climate change without much in the way of substance could still be hailed as an overall success.

But at least we do now have an international consensus on the need to cut emissions. The real tragedy is that our government will completely fail to rise to the challenge in the post-Durban, euro crisis landscape - and seize the opportunity to build a different kind of economy.

Drowning out calls for the coalition to deliver on its green pledges and invest in the low-carbon industries which can help lift us out of recession and create jobs, are those who frame the debate as a false choice between "going green" and keeping the economy on track.

And drowning out news about critical decisions made in Durban has been the coverage of the prime minister's euro-sceptic swaggering at the Brussels summit, where he singularly failed to defend the interests of the people of Britain who, like Europeans, are threatened by a financial crisis that could result in the loss of their homes, their life savings and livelihoods.

Preventing financial meltdown was, after all, the purpose of the summit. Instead, Britain used the occasion to defend the interests of a tiny minority - the 1% - that are the cause of the crisis, and that thrive on the back of taxpayer-backed subsidies in the City of London.

In answer to my question to the prime minister this week: "Why did he choose to conflate the interests of the nation, with the interests of the City of London?" no real explanation was offered.

Meanwhile, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy appear hellbent on accelerating the crisis by intensifying austerity across the eurozone. This is likely to be explosive: in economic, political and social terms.

But for all their misguided approach to the consequences of the crisis - rising public debts - German and French politicians are clear about the causes: lax and loosely regulated financial centres like the Square Mile.

And in that analysis they are not wrong. The City of London is set, once again, to play a major causal role in the coming financial catastrophe.

The reason is not hard to find. This week we learned about the impotence of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in dealing with bankers at RBS that destroyed a bank, caused many to lose their jobs, and stripped British taxpayers of £45bn.

That's £45bn which could have been used to keep millions of young people in employment for a considerable time, to support renewable energy and energy efficiency measures to create jobs and help those in fuel poverty, or to pay more nurses and teachers.

Payday lenders have scuttled across the Atlantic to avoid the anti-usury laws of Canada and the United States, and found refuge in what the FT calls the "singularly attractive market" that is the City of London - where there are no usury laws.

According to Thomson Reuters, the City's "lax and loose regulation" allows companies, like the recently bankrupted MFGlobal, to gamble with money that belongs to clients and then " …to finance an enormous $6.2bn eurozone repo bet … a position more than five times the firm's book value, or net worth."

It is this kind of financial speculation that once again threatens not just Europe, but the global economy.

Occupy Wall St protesters at St. Paul's are exploring alternatives to this failed system of financial liberalisation. Even the Bank of England, in papers published this week, is considering a transformation away from deregulation towards a rules-based system, that constrains capital mobility and secures stability and "internal balance" for countries like Britain.

Our politicians should be debating these profoundly important issues. They should be leading us out of this global financial morass, towards a more just, stable and sustainable future.

But they are not. Across the political spectrum - from Ed Balls, to Ed Miliband, to Nick Clegg and David Cameron - we are governed by politicians that have all promoted and defended the current neo-liberal system: "light touch regulation".

They are all part of the design team that brought you credit crunch 1.0 and that is about to deliver credit crunch 2.0.

The fact that the government has confirmed it will not support a financial transactions tax such as the Robin Hood tax, or offer anything new to tackle tax avoidance and evasion, tells us all we need to know about the commitment to social justice amongst the cabinet's millionaire ministers.

So I want to appeal for a debate about how we transform our economic system away from today's failed economic order - designed to serve the interests of the City of London's 1% - and instead build a new one.

One that is socially just and ecologically sustainable. One that provides useful and meaningful employment for all and strengthens our communities. We can and must find a better way of bringing people closer together and building a better society, while operating within the limits of the ecosystem.

Why will my fellow politicians not engage in these debates? The system we have is catastrophically impaired, yet our leaders remain prostrate before neoliberalism - an ideology that has destroyed jobs and firms, ruined the life-chances of millions, while enriching crooks, thieves and oligarchs. I call on others to join me in calling on our political leaders to match progressive politics with meaningful action, and in taking a principled stand to challenge the deeply corrupt financial system that has plunged us into environmental and economic crisis.

Caroline Lucas, Green Party Leader
The article was first published in The Guardian

Haringey sends a huge ‘message of hope’ across the world

2011-12-12T02:03:00.000-08:00

Hornsey and Wood Green Amnesty International again teamed up with Haringey Green Party to send messages of hope to political prisoners and individuals at risk around the world.

The ‘Greetings Card Campaign’, run by Amnesty International each Christmas, is an effective way of highlighting the plight of individuals and groups around the world, and often results in people’s safety being secured and prisoners being released.

On Sunday, residents from across the borough flocked to Stroud Green’s Hornsey Vale Community Centre to sign cards and enjoy homemade mince pies and Christmas cake.

This is the fourth year the event has been held, and this year an impressive 422 cards and letters were signed in total.

Green Party London Assembly member – and Green Party candidate for London Mayor – Jenny Jones was in attendance this year. Jenny commented, “The very simple act of sending greetings cards to these individuals and groups is extraordinarily effective. Receiving thousands of cards from people all around the world gives these victimised people strength and also shows the authorities that these people cannot be simply made to ‘disappear'.”

One of the recipients of the cards this year is Filep Karma of Indonesia who was arrested in 2004 after taking part in a peaceful ceremony. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison for 'rebellion'.

Jenny Jones added, “It was a really special afternoon and we’d like to thank everyone who came along and took part. We can now send our messages of hope across the world – and they really will make a difference.”

Lib Dem Equality Minister opposes equality

2011-12-09T10:22:00.000-08:00

Featherstone backs discrimination against heterosexuals & pro-gay religions

Peter Tatchell, Coordinator of the Equal Love campaign and Director of the Peter Tatchell Foundation, writes on the Liberal Democrat Voice website:

http://bit.ly/sROR3t

Lib Dems should stick to their principles and urge Lynne not to renege on equality pledge

Bravo to the Liberal Democrat party conference. Two years ago, party members voted overwhelmingly to end the twin legal bans on same-sex civil marriages and opposite-sex civil partnerships. They committed a future Lib Dem government to scrap sexual orientation discrimination in marriage and partnership law. Well done. Thank you.

Sadly, the Lib Dem Equality Minister, Lynne Featherstone, apparently with the support of the Lib Dem Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, is now actively backing discrimination. She plans to keep unequal laws, contrary to the Lib Dem's election pledges.

Specifically, Lynne is vowing to retain the prohibition on heterosexual civil partnerships and on religious same-sex marriages by faith organisations that want to conduct them. This is in direct defiance of what her party members voted for: equality.

Nick Clegg has not dissented from her stance. We can only assume that he endorses it.

Lynne is lovely. I like her as a person. However, she has announced a long and unjustified delay in the government's promised consultation on civil marriage and civil partnership; pre-empting the consultation findings by ruling out straight and religious equality.

She said at the start of this year that the consultation would begin in June. Then she postponed it until October. Now it has been put off until March next year. Why can't the consultation start now? Despite all our requests, Lynne has failed to explain why this delay is necessary.

I am not persuaded that there needs to be any consultation at all. The ban on same-sex marriage is homophobic discrimination and should therefore be repealed immediately.

If black or Jewish people had been banned from marriage, the government would act swiftly to ensure marriage equality. There would be no long drawn out consultation period. There would be no appeasement of racists and anti-Semites. Why the double standards?

No other government legislation is being subjected to such prolonged consultation and repeated postponements.

The Scottish government has not hesitated. It's consultation on marriage and partnership equality is already underway. Why is the UK Equality Minister dragging her feet and delaying her consultation until next spring? It doesn't make sense.

The Westminster government has promised to legislate marriage equality before the date of the next election, due by May 2015 at the latest. However, the delayed consultation could result in the measure not completing its parliamentary progress in time. Likely resistance by the House of Lords might result in its being timed out. Is this deliberate?

Ending sexual orientation discrimination in marriage law is not only the right thing to do, it has majority public support. There is, therefore, no reason for the government to delay in bringing forward legislation to end this legal iniquity.

Nearly two-thirds of the public support marriage equality. According to a 2009 Populous opinion poll, 61% of the public say that lesbian and gay couples should be allowed by law to get married:

http://www.populuslimited.com/the-times-the-times-gay-britain-poll-100609.html

Lynne Featherstone's gay marriage consultation announcement looks like an attempt to head off the Equal Love - www.equallove.org.uk - legal case in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR.

In February, four gay couples and four heterosexual couples filed an application in the ECHR to overturn sexual orientation discrimination in civil marriage and civil partnership law.

Speaking as the appeal coordinator, I can say we are quietly confident that we will win the case - eventually (an ECHR ruling can take four years).

The current UK ban on straight couples having a civil partnership is clear discrimination. Lynne's commitment to maintain this inequality is both surprising and shocking. It is wrong for her to exclude in advance any discussion about opening up civil partnerships to opposite-sex couples.

I stand for equality and this includes equality for straight people too. It would be wrong for the LGBT community to demand equal rights for ourselves and then ignore or accept the denial of equality to heterosexual people. In a democracy we should all be equal before the law.

There are many heterosexuals who would like a civil partnership. To deny them this option is very unfair - and it is illegal under human rights law. How can a Lib Dem Equality Minister support inequality?

The Netherlands has an equivalent to civil partnerships. Called registered partnerships, they are open to both same-sex and opposite-sex couples. The vast majority of Dutch civil partnerships are heterosexual ones. They are hugely popular and would be equally popular in the UK, if the government allowed straight couples to have them. To deny British heterosexuals the option of a civil partnership is profoundly wrong and unjust.

This is bad enough. However, Lynne has also ruled that her consultation will not consider the option of ending the ban on religious marriages for lesbian and gay couples, even though some faith organisations - such as the Quakers, Unitarians and Liberal Jews - have requested that they should be allowed to marry same-sex partners. Lynne says no. She says the ban must stay. This is a violation of religious freedom. While no religious body should be forced to perform same-sex marriages, those that support gay marriage should not be barred by law from doing so.

I appeal to Lynne - and Nick Clegg - to rethink this ill-considered consultation timetable and its pro-discrimination parameters - to both ensure non-discrimination and to avoid an embarrassing defeat in the European Court of Human Rights.

It is outrageous that the Equality Minister wants to maintain the unequal, discriminatory laws that bar gay religious marriages and opposite-sex civil partnerships. Her stance is not compatible with her professed Liberal Democrat values or with the wishes of the vast majority of Lib Dem party members.

If you share my concerns, I urge you to email Lynne Featherstone via her Equality Office senior officials, Emma Reed: Emma.Reed@geo.gsi.gov.uk and Lucy Phipps: Lucy.Phipps@geo.gsi.gov.uk

Your help could ensure a much needed rethink. Thank you, Peter Tatchell

To sign the Equal Love petition go to: www.equallove.org.uk For more information about Peter Tatchell's human rights campaigns and to make a donation: www.petertatchell.net

Note: This article was published this week on the Liberal Democrat Voice website:

http://www.libdemvoice.org/the-independent-view-peter-tatchell-writes-lib-dems-should-stick-to-their-principles-and-urge-lynne-not-to-renege-on-equality-pledge-25888.html

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Haringey Sends a Message of Hope

2011-12-06T09:30:00.000-08:00

Haringey residents will have the chance this week to send greetings cards to people at risk around the world. An event, held jointly by Haringey Green Party and Hornsey and Wood Green Amnesty International will take place on Sunday, 11th December, 2pm ‘till 5pm, at Hornsey Vale Community Centre, Mayfield Road, Stroud Green. It is the fourth consecutive year the event has been held here, with residents signing no fewer than 482 cards in one afternoon last December.

The event is part of Amnesty International’s annual Greetings Card Campaign. This campaign puts people across the world in touch with each other in a simple way – by sending a card with a friendly greeting or message of solidarity to someone who is in danger or unjustly imprisoned.

The recipients of the cards are prisoners of conscience, people under sentence of death, human rights defenders under threat because of their work, and others at risk.

One of the people Amnesty have asked signers to send cards to this year is Filep Karma of Indonesia who was arrested in 2004 after taking part in a peaceful ceremony. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison for 'rebellion'.

The very act of sending these cards offers hope and encouragement to the people who receive them. It can also help bring about change - the impression their international mail makes on police, prison staff or political authorities can help keep these individuals safe.
Participants will be offered homemade Christmas cake and mince pies.

Green Party London Mayoral candidate and London Assembly member Jenny Jones will be in attendance, signing cards alongside residents.

For more information about the Amnesty International Greetings Card Campaign see

http://www.amnesty.org.uk/content.asp?CategoryID=12138

Public Sector Unions set to Strike on 30th November

2011-11-25T10:48:00.001-08:00

On Wednesday 30th November, probably millions of public sector workers will take industrial action in opposition to the ConDem government’s attack on their pensions. From nurses to teachers, from local authority staff to civil servants, this promises to be a dramatic statement of rejection of the government’s plans to make public servants work longer, pay more into their pensions, and receive less when they retire.

The unions taking part, with the ballot results are as follows:

AEP 64% for strike action
ASPECT 75.1% for strike action
ATL (30 June ballot mandate still valid)
CSP 86% England & Wales for strike action (89.1% Scotland)
FDA 81% for strike action
GMB 83.7% for strike action
NAHT 75.8% for strike action
NASUWT 82% for strike action
NUT (30 June ballot mandate still valid)
PCS (30 June ballot mandate still valid)
Prospect 75% for strike action
SCP 85.3% for strike action
SOR 86% for strike action
UCATT 83% for strike action
UCU (30 June ballot mandate still valid)
Unison 82% for strike action
Unite 75% for strike action

The government spin has been all about ‘gold plated’ public sector pensions, but in reality, the average public sector pension (median, i.e. the one that 50% will receive) is a paltry £5,600 per year. Not even copper plated, let alone gold plated. The government is trying to divide and rule, by pointing to the private sector, where most workers are not in inflation linked pensions, as the model for the public sector. It has long been an attraction of public sector employment that although the pay is lower than in the private sector, at least the pensions were reliable. Indeed two in three private sector workers have no workplace pension at all. These workers without a pension should not direct their anger at public sector workers, but should be livid at the extraordinary costs of providing pensions' tax relief, with two-thirds of the £30 billion bill going to higher rate taxpayers.

This latest assault on public sector pensions comes after the government reduced the rate at which pension’s rise, by moving from the Retail Prices Index (RPI) to the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), which excludes housing costs, and generally runs at about 1% less than RPI. Whilst at the same, the government refuses to do anything about pay, bonuses and the pension arrangements of those in boardrooms of private corporations, even the banks, some which are publically owned, and most of who received bail outs from the public purse.

But we are well used to this kind of hypocrisy from the government, where everything possible must be done to encourage the so called ‘wealth creators’, who are really responsible for creating chaos and poverty in our economy, but are revered rather like rock stars. I’ve never understood why rich people need to be paid more to encourage them to work harder, but poorer people need to be paid less.

The Green party supports public sector workers in this fight for fair treatment and our two London Assembly Members, Jenny Jones and Darren Johnston will not be going to work on 30th November, as a statement of solidarity with those taking action. There is a march in London, starting at 12.00 noon from Lincoln Inns Field to a rally at Victoria Embankment, plus a protest at the GLA building at 12 noon also. There are hundreds of events planned all over the country on the day, check here for details.

Locally, there will be a rally in support of the industrial action at the College Of North East London (CONEL) at 10am on the day and Haringey Alliance for Public Services (HAPS) is intending to visit picket lines around the borough, to give support to striking workers. Please join them as it is good for morale when the public shows support for their cause. There is also a protest at Haringey Civic Centre, beginning 12.00 noon.

How to Save the Economy: A One-off 20% Tax on the Richest 10%

2011-11-24T14:02:00.000-08:00

Britain faces the biggest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s, including the potential for economic meltdown and a second Great Depression lasting a decade or more.

The government's Business Secretary, Vince Cable, has suggested that we are facing a crisis similar to wartime, with our national future at stake. In these circumstances, we need bold, imaginative and radical measures to fix the economy.

Britain has a national debt of around £950 billion and a government deficit heading towards £200 billion. The government's solution is swingeing cuts in public services and consequent massive job losses. It even claims that cuts are the only option left.

Not true. There are serious alternatives.

As well as closing tax avoidance schemes, which could raise an extra £20 billion a year, there is a strong case for a national emergency tax on the fabulously wealthy, which could raise staggering sums - enough to clear the government deficit, pay off most of the national debt, kick-start the economy and avoid the need for damaging, painful cuts in jobs and public services.

The current economic crisis is so grave that it merits a 'save the nation' one-off 20% tax on the personal wealth of richest 10% of the population, as proposed by Professor Greg Philo and the Glasgow Media Group.

The wealthiest 10% of the population have combined personal assets totalling £4 million, million pounds. This is a million pounds multiplied 4 million times. These are the people who have five plus million pound homes (often several of them), plus private yachts and jets and vast art collections. They can easily afford a once-only 20% tax on their immense wealth. Selling off one of their six houses, a Lamborghini or a Jackson Pollack painting won't cause them to suffer.

Such a tax would raise a massive £800 billion. This is enough to pay off the entire government deficit more than four times over - or it could be used to clear most of the national debt.

A reduction in the national debt would dramatically cut the government's huge debt interest payments, which amount to around £48 billion a year. This is a vast sum of money that would be better spent on schools, hospitals, pensions and job-creation.

Alternatively, and even more useful in terms of reviving the economy, the £800 billion (or part of it) could be used to fund the proposed Green New Deal.

Modelled on Roosevelt's 1930s New Deal, which got America back to work and ended the Great Depression, this Green New Deal would create lots of green jobs in energy conservation, renewable energy, public transport and affordable homes; simultaneously helping remedy climate destruction and kick-starting economic recovery.

The Green New Deal could ensure that Britain leads the world in sustainable economics and green technologies, opening up new export markets and boosting our economic revival for many decades to come.

According to a YouGov poll in June 2010, 74% of the public favour a one-off tax on the richest people in Britain. Only 10% oppose it.

With great wealth comes great responsibility. The mega rich have the capacity and responsibility to help the country out of the mess we are in. They benefited disproportionately from the boom times. Now that times are tough they should contribute disproportionately to get the British economy back in shape.

Put bluntly: The super rich have a patriotic duty to help save the economy by paying more tax. If they love Britain, they will be willing to do this, in order to help us win through the current economic crisis.

Contributing more tax is in the interest of those with huge wealth. If the economy fails, their losses will be even more than the greater tax they are being asked to pay. By giving more to the exchequer now they would be doing the morally right thing for the country and its citizens. They would also, by helping save the economy, also save most of their own riches. It's enlightened self-interest.

Written by Peter Tatchell and first published at The Huffington Post

For more information about Peter Tatchell's human rights and social justice campaigns: www.petertatchell.net

Shell Death Rope - In Memory of Ken Saro-Wiwa

2011-11-18T01:38:00.000-08:00

Shell Death Rope - In Memory of Ken Saro-Wiwa from You and I Films on Vimeo.

On the 9th of November 2011 at a Shell-sponsored awards ceremony in the swanky corporate offices of the CBI (Britain’s biggest business lobby group), young entrepreneurs are looking towards a bright future.
Sixteen years ago, Shell made sure that Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other young Nigerian activists had no future. On 10th November 1995, Shell was complicit in their execution at the hands of the Nigerian military government for campaigning against the devastation of their homeland the Niger Delta by oil companies, in particular Shell.

And every day, all over the world – from building dodgy pipelines in Rossport, Ireland, to mining the world’s most polluting oil from the Canadian tar sands – Shell’s oil exploration and extraction activities undermine our collective future by pushing us ever closer to the brink of climate catastrophe. At the same time, it rakes in billions in profit every month, while the rest of us struggle to get by.

Shell doesn’t want us to remember these horrific things. So it channels a miniscule fraction of its obscene profits into sponsoring events like Livewire – not to mention most of the major arts and cultural institutions in London.

That’s why we’re here tonight: to remember – and to resist.

Nigeria: Shell’s dirty secret

The hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his Ogoni colleagues – whose only crime was to speak out for environmental and social justice – caused shock and outrage around the world. But whatever we might like to think, the human rights abuses perpetrated by Shell continue to this day. Shell’s routine payments to armed militants exacerbate armed conflict, and oil spills and gas flaring continue to devastate the fragile environment of the Niger Delta and the lives of the people who live there. But resistance continues as well; the UN has issued a damning report on the ecological impact of oil spills in Ogoni, and Shell was recently forced to admit liability and pay out millions of pounds in compensation for two massive oil spills after a lawsuit filed in London.

Sponsorship: buying us off

Sponsorship of events like Livewire is one of the most important ways Shell tries to protect its reputation and buy our acceptance. By sponsoring a social 'good' like an award to help young entrepreneurs, the oil giant is able to represent itself as a responsible organisation, and distract our attention from its environmental and social crimes around the world. By being here tonight, we strike a blow to Shell’s precious brand, chip away at Shell’s powerful position in our society, and move towards the day when Big Oil – like Big Tobacco – is no longer seen as a socially acceptable.

Remember climate change?

Climate change may have disappeared from the news recently, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is already claiming 300,000 lives a year. Glaciers, permafrost and sea ice are disappearing. Sea levels are rising, seasons changing and extreme weather becoming more extreme. As temperatures rise, we’ll see more flooding, more drought, more disease, more famine and more war, creating hundreds of millions of refugees and causing the destruction of entire ecosystems and species.

We can’t afford to forget about climate change – or the fact that companies like Shell are at the heart of the problem.

For more information and to get involved:

risingtide.org.uk
Twitter: @shelldeathrope and @risingtide_UK

French Citizens Abroad – Electoral Changes

2011-11-17T09:22:00.001-08:00

London holds the largest French community outside France, with over 300,000 people and there are currently four Green MP’s in the French parliament. Do you know any French people in your neighbourhood? The French Greens (Europe Ecologie/Les Verts or EELV) need to reach as many Green French people as possible, because next year, for the first time ever, French citizens based abroad will be electing eleven MP’s to represent them.

As a long term resident of Britain I am delighted, but many of my compatriots are not registered at their consulate and would therefore be missing out. So, please tell all the French people you know, or meet, to register at their general consulate by 31 December 2011.

We have a real chance to get a Green MP for northern Europe: our candidate for this constituency is Olivier Bertin. Based in London since 1992, Olivier is 43 and was a candidate for the Green party in last year’s local elections in London. He worked as a PE teacher and started a bilingual infant school last January. Since 2001, he has been the elected representative of the UK’s French People Abroad (AFE). He is especially interested in people’s rights and civil liberties and is regularly involved in Amnesty International’ campaigns.

French citizens in London (and elsewhere abroad) should contact their consulate to register. EELV’s UK’s secretary is Alexis Baudon, who you can email at alexisbaudon@yahoo.fr.

Written by Yvan Maurel
Cardiff Green Party and EELV UK

Green Party Leader Addresses Occupy LSX

2011-11-14T01:22:00.000-08:00

A rousing speech by Caroline Lucas, Green Party leader to the Occupy London SX at St Paul's last week.

Caroline has set the pace amongst politicians in embracing the Occupy movement, which has taken the establishment politicians by surprise.

The movement offers hope, for all those people who have lost faith in contemporary politics, let's take this movement forward.

Poppies and Anti War Sentiment

2011-11-11T04:45:00.000-08:00

The wearing of a red poppy at this time of year, in the approach to Remembrance Sunday, is a well-established practice in Britain. It is virtually impossible to see anyone on television who is not wearing a poppy, so ingrained has become the convention. Indeed, it seems to me that there is a kind of moral bullying of people, especially if they are appearing on television, to conform to this national ritual.

In recent years, the wearing of a white poppy has grown in popularity amongst those (mainly on the political left) as a way of showing respect to the war dead, whilst at the same time as making an anti-war statement. Personally, I have worn both red and white poppies, but tend not wear any poppy at all, but I do sometimes buy one or the other, and put it in a drawer. I am anti-war, of course, but I don’t see the motive of those displaying a red poppy as pro-war, rather they are bowing to convention with some vague notion of showing respect for those who fought and died, and in the case of the World War 2, in a noble cause.

We have had the ridiculous spectacle this week of the media being saturated with the story of the English and Welsh football teams being denied permission by FIFA, to wear a red poppy emblem on their shirts in football matches this weekend. We must never have played international games on this weekend before, because I can’t ever remember this being an issue before. The Prime Minister even vented his fury in Parliament at the decision, when surely this country has more to worry about at the moment than this issue?

I have to say, I have some sympathy for FIFA’s decision, to ban all political and religious emblems from football shirts. Whatever detractors say to the contrary, the poppy (red or white) is a political symbol. Although most people would agree that World War 2 was a ‘just war’, what about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Falkland Islands? These wars were highly political and controversial and are seen as so, and in large parts of the world this would cause offence. What if the Argentine football team wanted to wear some emblem associated with their claim for sovereignty of the Falkland Islands?

A compromise was achieved, and the football players can now wear the red poppy on a black arm band, though how this differs from the front of the shirt is difficult to see.

The wearing of red poppies began after World War 1, as a fundraiser for injured soldiers and to show remembrance for those fallen soldiers, in what was a disgusting slaughter of mainly young working class men, sent to their deaths by an uncaring military and political establishment, in the cause of imperial domination. A war that, after four years of millions of casualties on both sides, the winning Allies side, had advanced by less than twenty miles, and inflicted unimaginable horror on those involved and which scarred a whole generation across Europe. It still amazes me that only in Russia, did the people rise up and remove those responsible for this most unjust of wars.

Wear your poppies, red or white, or don’t wear one at all, but remember the conflicting nature of whatever you do. I’ll leave the final word to the great Wilfred Owen, whose poetry did most to inform a nation of the true horror of modern warfare.

The Last Laugh

'Oh! Jesus Christ! I'm hit,' he said; and died.
Whether he vainly cursed or prayed indeed,
The Bullets chirped-In vain, vain, vain!
Machine-guns chuckled,-Tut-tut! Tut-tut!
And the Big Gun guffawed.

Another sighed,-'O Mother, -Mother, - Dad!'
Then smiled at nothing, childlike, being dead.
And the lofty Shrapnel-cloud
Leisurely gestured,-Fool!
And the splinters spat, and tittered.

'My Love!' one moaned. Love-languid seemed his mood,
Till slowly lowered, his whole faced kissed the mud.
And the Bayonets' long teeth grinned;
Rabbles of Shells hooted and groaned;
And the Gas hissed.

How is Money Created?

2011-10-30T10:49:00.000-07:00

This video gives much food for thought. The magical nature of 'money' is exposed as scam by the corporate banking system.

This system means that most people get screwed, and the banks' carry on making huge profits, and paying their management massive salaries and bonuses.

It is nothing short of a scandal. So, why do we, the people put up with it?

Answers on a postcard etc, etc....

The video was produced by Postive Money.

Is the environmental crisis caused by the 7 billion or the 1%?

2011-10-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

This article was first published here

The United Nations says that the world's population will reach 7 billion people this month.

The approach of that milestone has produced a wave of articles and opinion pieces blaming the world's environmental crises on overpopulation. In New York's Times Square, a huge and expensive video declares that "human overpopulation is driving species extinct." In London's busiest Underground stations, electronic poster boards warn that 7 billion is ecologically unsustainable.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich's bestseller The Population Bomb declared that as a result of overpopulation, "the battle to feed humanity is over," and the 1970s would be a time of global famines and ever-rising death rates. His predictions were all wrong, but four decades later his successors still use Ehrlich's phrase -- too many people! -- to explain environmental problems.

But most of the 7 billion are not endangering the earth. The majority of the world's people don't destroy forests, don't wipe out endangered species, don't pollute rivers and oceans, and emit essentially no greenhouse gases.

Even in the rich countries of the Global North, most environmental destruction is caused not by individuals or households, but by mines, factories, and power plants run by corporations that care more about profit than about humanity's survival.

No reduction in U.S. population would have stopped BP from poisoning the Gulf of Mexico last year.

Lower birth rates won't shut down Canada's tar sands, which Bill McKibben has justly called one of the most staggering crimes the world has ever seen.

Universal access to birth control should be a fundamental human right -- but it would not have prevented Shell's massive destruction of ecosystems in the Niger River delta, or the immeasurable damage that Chevron has caused to rainforests in Ecuador.

Ironically, while populationist groups focus attention on the 7 billion, protestors in the worldwide Occupy movement have identified the real source of environmental destruction: not the 7 billion, but the 1%, the handful of millionaires and billionaires who own more, consume more, control more, and destroy more than all the rest of us put together.

In the United States, the richest 1% own a majority of all stocks and corporate equity, giving them absolute control of the corporations that are directly responsible for most environmental destruction.

A recent report prepared by the British consulting firm Trucost for the United Nations found that just 3,000 corporations cause $2.15 trillion in environmental damage every year. Outrageous as that figure is -- only six countries have a GDP greater than $2.15 trillion -- it substantially understates the damage, because it excludes costs that would result from "potential high impact events such as fishery or ecosystem collapse," and "external costs caused by product use and disposal, as well as companies' use of other natural resources and release of further pollutants through their operations and suppliers."

So in the case of oil companies, the figure covers "normal operations," but not deaths and destruction caused by global warming, not damage caused by worldwide use of its products, and not the multi-billions of dollars in costs to clean up oil spills. The real damage those companies alone do is much greater than $2.15 trillion, every single year.

The 1% also control the governments that supposedly regulate those destructive corporations. The millionaires include 46 per cent of members of the U.S. House of Representatives, 54 out of 100 senators, and every president since Eisenhower.

Through the government, the 1% control the U.S. military, the largest user of petroleum in the world, and thus one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases.

Military operations produce more hazardous waste than the five largest chemical companies combined. More than 10 per cent of all Superfund hazardous waste sites in the United States are on military bases.

Those who believe that slowing population growth will stop or slow environmental destruction are ignoring these real and immediate threats to life on our planet. Corporations and armies aren't polluting the world and destroying ecosystems because there are too many people, but because it is profitable to do so.

If the birth rate in Iraq or Afghanistan falls to zero, the U.S. military will not use one less gallon of oil.

If every African country adopts a one-child policy, energy companies in the U.S., China, and elsewhere will continue burning coal, bringing us ever closer to climate catastrophe.

Critics of the too many people argument are often accused of believing that there are no limits to growth. In our case, that simply isn't true. What we do say is that in an ecologically rational and socially just world, where large families aren't an economic necessity for hundreds of millions of people, population will stabilize. In Betsy Hartmann's words, "The best population policy is to concentrate on improving human welfare in all its many facets. Take care of the population and population growth will go down."

The world's multiple environmental crises demand rapid and decisive action, but we can't act effectively unless we understand why they are happening. If we misdiagnose the illness, at best we will waste precious time on ineffective cures; at worst, we will make the crises worse.

The too many people argument directs the attention and efforts of sincere activists to programs that will not have any substantial effect. At the same time, it weakens efforts to build an effective global movement against ecological destruction: It divides our forces, by blaming the principal victims of the crisis for problems they did not cause.

Above all, it ignores the massively destructive role of an irrational economic and social system that has gross waste and devastation built into its DNA. The capitalist system and the power of the 1%, not population size, are the root causes of today's ecological crisis.

As pioneering ecologist Barry Commoner once said, "Pollution begins not in the family bedroom, but in the corporate boardroom."

The authors of this piece are:

Ian Angus is co author of Too Many People?

He is editor of the ecosocialist journal

Simon Butler is co author of Too Many People?

He is editor of the Australian based Green Left Weekly

Clean Energy Future Can Happen

2011-10-26T03:03:00.001-07:00

A new report by The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) shows that almost all of our energy needs could be met without recourse to nuclear power, by tapping renewable power resources, developing carbon capture techniques and sharing energy across Europe.

Renewable sources of energy could meet between 60-90% of the UK’s electricity demand by 2030. That’s a key finding of our new Positive Energy report, widely welcomed by businesses, individuals and organisations as a valuable contribution to the energy debate. More here

The report is further covered in The Guardian newspaper….

"This report is inspiring, but also entirely realistic. It shows that a clean, renewable energy future really is within our grasp," said David Nussbaum, chief executive of WWF-UK. "Failure to commit to a high-renewables future would leave us facing the prospect of dangerous levels of climate change and high energy prices." More here

Occupy London SX TV Debate

2011-10-25T01:38:00.000-07:00

This is a short discussion on the Occupy movement, between an oaf from the Tax Payers Alliance, which is a right wing pressure group, close to the Tory party, and Guardian journalist, Polly Toynbee. In my view, Polly spoils it a bit with her talk of 'good' capitalism, which is rather a contradiction in terms, but she shows up the bloke from Tax Payers Alliance as a shallow apologist for corporate capitalism.

Electoral Registration and Boundary Changes are Blatant Gerrymandering

2011-10-22T05:08:00.000-07:00

The ConDem government’s proposals to reduce the number of Parliamentary constituencies from 650 to 600 in total have been published by the Boundary Commission, and there is still time left for the public to have their say.

The government is spinning that this will save money and make MP’s work harder, coming as it does after the 2009 MP’s expenses scandal. They also claim that constituency boundaries need to be ‘equalised’ in terms of numbers of voters registered, as the present boundaries favour the Labour party, because many inner city constituencies have fewer voters than some of the larger rural constituencies, which predominately vote Conservative (or in some cases, Lib Dem).

There are sound geographical and cultural reasons for drawing boundary lines where they are in many areas, but this objective is to be scrapped by and large, with the overriding imperative now to equalise the numbers of registered voters in each constituency. This is a cynical attempt by the government to reduce the number of seats winnable by the Labour party, on the back of public disgust associated with the MP’s expenses scandal, and so make it more difficult for the Tory dominated coalition government to be kicked out of office.

Estimates of the number of seats to be lost across the UK by each of the political parties under the proposed changes, are that the Labour party will lose 25, the Tories 16 or 17, and the Lib Dems 10. This potentially would give the Tories an absolute majority in the House of Commons, if voting is the same as at the 2010 general election, in the next general election planned for 2015. So, it is easy to see why the Tories are keen to see these changes take place.

In Haringey, at present, the borough is divided into two Parliamentary constituencies, Hornsey and Wood Green, which has a Lib Dem MP, and Tottenham which has a Labour MP. The proposed boundary changes will see Hornsey and Wood Green lose Stroud Green ward to Tottenham but gain Bowes ward which is currently in Enfield Southgate constituency and in the borough of Enfield. Tottenham constituency will also gain Upper Edmonton (from Enfield) and lose Seven Sisters ward, which will become part of Hackney North constituency, and is in the borough of Hackney.

All of this will probably make little difference to who wins these seats at the next general election, as Tottenham is probably one of the safest Labour seats in the country, although it may be more difficult for the Lib Dems to retain Hornsey and Wood Green, given that the constituency will lose Stroud Green ward, which has three Lib Dem councillors, and gain Bowes ward, which has three Labour councillors, at local government level.

In a further twist, it is proposed that the law pertaining to electoral registration is also to be changed. At the moment, it is an offence for households, liable to a maximum fine of £1,000, to fail to comply with a request for information from electoral registration officers (EROs) or to give false information. This proposed change, will make voter registration ‘individual’ and also voluntary. Whilst this is being couched in terms of modernisation, i.e. doing away with the notional concept of ‘head of the household’ and leaving the responsibility to ‘individuals’, the voluntary nature of registering, is likely to reduce the number who do register. Local authorities will no longer be required by law to attempt to maximise the amount of registered voters, and voters will no longer be required to respond to requests about registering.

This policy has been described by Jenny Russell, the chair of the electoral commission, as the biggest change to voting since the introduction of the universal franchise. Russell warned: "It is logical to suggest that those that do not vote in elections will not see the point of registering to vote and it is possible that the register may therefore go from a 90% completeness that we currently have to 60-65%."

As many as 10 million voters, predominantly poor, young or black, and more liable to vote Labour, could fall off the electoral register under government plans, the Electoral Commission, electoral administrators and psephologists have warned.

So there we have it. A systematic attempt is being made to give us a permanent Conservative government, by manipulating the rules around the setting of election boundaries and the voter registration process. There is a word for this type of behaviour, gerrymandering, which is meant to be illegal, but the Tories seem to have found a way around the law. Don’t let them get away it, write protest letters, blogs, and anything else you can think of. Otherwise, we’ll be stuck with these bastards forever.

Green Party Achievements on the London Assembly

2011-10-19T16:53:00.000-07:00

The elections for the London Mayor and London Assembly are on the 3rd May next year (2012). The Green Party campaign for these elections has begun, with a leafleting operation across London, and we in Haringey are in the process of leafleting our five best Green voting wards. Come the new year, the campaign will get into full throttle, in what promises to be very important elections, not only for London, but by reflection, for the rest of the country too. These elections can set the tone and context for national elections, to some extent.

So, it seems appropriate to list some of the key achievements of the Green Party Assembly Members over the last eleven years:

2000 Civil Partnerships

At the first ever Mayor’s Question Time Darren Johnson called on the Mayor to introduce a registration scheme for same-sex partners.

What happened next? A successful scheme was introduced, paving the way for civil partnerships legislation at national level.

2001 Thames Gateway Bridge

Greens began campaigning against Ken Livingstone’s plans for a new six-lane road bridge. As a price for supporting the Mayor’s 2005 budget the Greens called for the mayor to fund the objectors in order that the environmental case could be properly presented at the public inquiry.

What happened next? The public inquiry failed to give the go ahead for the bridge and the new Mayor Boris Johnson then abandoned it altogether.

2003 Climate change budget

Greens criticized Mayor Ken Livingstone’s budget for devoting just £300,000 per year to making London’s homes and buildings greener.

What happened next? In a series of budget deals with the then Mayor, Green AMs got the climate change budget at the London Development Agency increased to £8 million per year.

2004 Living Wage

As part of a budget deal Greens called on the Mayor to establish a Living Wage unit to tackle poverty pay in the capital.

What happened next? The GLA and a growing number of public and private sector bodies now pay the London Living Wage as a minimum.

2005 Leaking water mains

An investigation led by Darren Johnson highlighted the fact that a third of London’s drinking water was lost through leaking mains pipes.

What happened next? Following pressure from the Assembly Thames Water began a major mains replacement programme.

2006 Cycling budget

Jenny Jones commissioned a report which led to the setting of a target to increase cycling by 400% through the introduction of cycle hire, cycling superhighways and cycling hubs in outer London.

What happened next? The Greens AMs secured budget commitments from Ken Livingstone which led to a tripling of the budget for cycling and walking.

2008 Opposing Heathrow expansion

Darren Johnson led the Environment Committee investigation into Heathrow expansion. The report showed that the economic benefits were exaggerated and the environmental impacts understated.

What happened next? In 2010 the new Government abandoned Heathrow expansion, the Assembly’s all-party report playing an important role in establishing a broad political consensus.

2009 Road safety

Jenny Jones fought the closure of the Metropolitan Police Commercial Vehicle Education Unit, which instructs HGV drivers on road sharing and awareness of vulnerable road users.

What happened next? This unit has now been reinstated within the traffic police section.

2010 Protecting small shops

For the Assembly’s Planning and Housing Committee, Jenny led an investigation looking at what could be done to protect London’s small shops.

What happened next? Mayor Boris Johnson agreed to put policies for the protection of small shops in his new London Plan, the overall planning document for London.

This is an impressive list, especially considering that the Greens had only two AM’s for most of this time. What more could be achieved with another two or three Green AM’s?

Green Party Leader Gives Support to Occupy London Stock Exchange

2011-10-17T08:42:00.001-07:00

Caroline Lucas, MP for Brighton Pavilion and leader of the England and Wales Green party, will today attend the protest by ‘Occupy London Stock Exchange’, which has continued for the last three days, with hundreds of demonstrators camped outside St Paul’s Cathedral, close to the heart of the City of London financial district.

Initially, the police had tried to disperse the crowd on Sunday, but were stopped by the Rev Dr Giles Fraser, canon chancellor of St Paul’s, who was happy to see the peaceful protest continue.

The Green party leader said, “As awareness increases of the injustice and unsustainability of the global economic system, more and more people are taking to the streets in opposition.

"The camp that has been set up a stone's throw from the London Stock Exchange is an opportunity to explore a different kind of future to the one the mainstream political parties have constructed.

"The authorities must now respect the right to peaceful protest.

"If they have any sense, they will also start to listen to the voices of those ordinary - and extraordinary people - who want to invest in a greener, fairer future rather than the stocks-and-shares house of sand that sustains corporate capitalism."

The demonstration was inspired by the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement in the United States, and spread to many cities financial districts all around the world, with the same aim, of calling for an end to the disastrous corporate capitalist system which is ruining lives everywhere, and is the effective cause of the worldwide financial crisis.

The London group have released this statement about why they are protesting:

The current system is unsustainable. It is undemocratic and unjust. We need alternatives; this is where we work towards them.

We are of all ethnicities, backgrounds, genders, generations, sexualities, dis/abilities and faiths. We stand together with occupations all over the world.

We refuse to pay for the banks' crisis.

We do not accept the cuts as either necessary or inevitable. We demand an end to global tax injustice and our democracy representing corporations instead of the people.

We want regulators to be genuinely independent of the industries they regulate.

We support the strike on 30 November and the student action on 9 November, and actions to defend our health services, welfare, education and employment, and to stop wars and arms dealing.

We want structural change towards authentic global equality. The world's resources must go towards caring for people and the planet, not the military, corporate profits or the rich.

We stand in solidarity with the global oppressed and we call for an end to the actions of our government and others in causing this oppression.

This is what democracy looks like. Come and join us!

Liam Fox and the Best Man Scandal

2011-10-14T09:23:00.000-07:00

So, we won’t have to wait until next week for the findings of the investigation, conducted by Sir Gus O'Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, into whether Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, has broken the UK government’s Ministerial code and what his fate will be. Fox has bowed to the inevitable and announced his resignation from the government.

Over the last few days, more and more stories have been published on a daily basis by the media, about the extent of Fox’s involvement with his ‘best man’ Adam Werritty, and the numerous official overseas trips they have been on together. This use of the term ‘best man’ is mildly amusing, given that it has clearly been used to send an unambiguously ‘I’m not gay’ signal, rather than just saying ‘friend’. This betrays the homophobic tendency on the right wing of the Tory party, of which Fox was a leading light, whatever the Prime Minister, David Cameron says about a new, un-bigoted Conservative party.

It does seem pretty clear that Fox had broken the Ministerial code, as by his own admission he apologised to the House of Commons this week for ‘giving an impression of wrong-doing, and ….having given the misleading impression that Mr Werritty was an official adviser, rather than simply a friend’. 1.2 and 7.1 of the code says that Ministers must ensure that no conflict arises, or appears to arise, between their public duties and their private interests. Amongst all the weasel worded spin from Fox about ‘blurring’ the distinctions between his public and private life, he has admitted to at least giving the appearance of a conflict of interest.

When senior civil servants report on these types of investigations into ministers, they couch the language in a very diplomatic way, deliberately leaving open the interpretation of their words, and so passing the verdict to their political masters. So, it was always really down to the Prime Minister to decide Fox’s ultimate fate, in the absence of Fox taking a loaded revolver into his study, and doing the decent thing.

Important though the Ministerial code is, to my mind that’s not the whole point, and I hope the investigation continues and examines what exactly Werritty was doing on all of these official British Ministry of Defence visits to foreign defence ministries and their armed forces. Werritty is said to have a range of business links in the defence field, so it seems obvious to me that he was on these visits to try and win arms contracts, on the back of official British government defence visits. I do not believe that Fox was unaware of this situation, and if this is not corrupt, and it sounds like it is, it is certainly inappropriate and demonstrates extremely poor judgement on Fox’s behalf, which is enough for him to be removed from such high government office.

Michael Portillo, ex Tory Defence Secretary, said on Thursday on the BBC’s, A week in politics show, that he couldn’t see how Fox could keep his job in the circumstances, and surely this chimed with public opinion.

But there is more to this situation than the Defence Minister’s involvement in dodgy arms deals. Fox (and Werritty) have contacts with American neo con politicians and business men, and The Times newspaper reports that some of Werritty’s business trips to Israel have been paid for by a pro-Israeli lobby company. Fox is on the neo con wing of the Tory party and has had much support from right wing Tory backbenchers, who have been very vocal in defence of Fox’s actions, both in Parliament and in the media this week.

All of which probably explains why the Prime Minister hadn’t sacked Fox already, for what is quite clearly behaviour inappropriate for a minister of state. This makes Cameron look weak, and calls into question his own political judgement, not to mention integrity. At the general election last year, Cameron was constantly making speeches about cleaning up politics in the wake of the MP’s expenses scandal, and here we are again. Minister’s lining their own pockets, and that of their friends, whilst passing the bill onto the public. Nothing changes it seems, except the scam itself and the empty rhetoric employed by our leaders in trying to justify it.

Fox tried desperately to hang on to his job, but his position was open to increasingly ridicule, as more of the facts have been revealed. This was not the resignation of an honourable man, it was a calculated act to leave the door open to some future return to a Cabinet post. How long will it be before he is back? There is no shame for our leaders these days, that can’t be swept under the carpet after a year or two on the backbenches.

Photo from The Telegraph

The Party Conference Season Ends – Which Leader Impressed You Most?

2011-10-06T11:55:00.000-07:00

David Cameron, Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative party, gave a speech to his party’s conference on Wednesday which brought the political party conference season to an end. It was a surprisingly upbeat speech from Cameron, coming as it did on the day that growth figures for the UK economy were revised downwards, to a paltry 0.1% for the second quarter of 2011. He called on the British people to fight our way out of the dire economic situation we find ourselves in, saying we must have a ‘can do’ attitude. This is particularly hypocritical, given the way the government refuses themselves to do anything positive to aid economic recovery. As I reported here the only thing the government is going to do, other than making deep cuts in public services, is to print more money, which was swallowed up by the banks to improve their balance sheets, the last time this tactic was tried. No can do, seems to be the government economic policy, so why should the public listen to all this patriotic rhetorical nonsense?

The more I see of Cameron, the more I am minded of the Flashman character in the novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays. It is ironic that Flashman the public school bully, turned out to be a coward in the end, and surely people will see through Cameron, as the public relations man he is. Cutting benefits and public services for the most vulnerable in society, while throwing more money at the banks who caused our problems, and of whom he is scared to death of upsetting.

At least Ed Miliband, uninspiring a speaker though he is, talked about the need to change the current neo liberal economic consensus and strike a ‘new bargain’ in the way the capitalist system operates, particularly attacking the ‘asset strippers’ who wait vulture like to devour the carcases of the businesses and workers that their casino type behaviour have laid low. I think it is too early to say whether Labour really has changed under Miliband’s leadership, he said some interesting things, but he also praised Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government for curtailing worker’s rights and for selling council houses, without replacing this social housing stock. He needs to up his presentational game too, as he comes across as a bit nerdy. Unfortunately, these things matter in modern politics.

And so to the Liberal Democrats. Nick Clegg saw his party’s poll ratings soar in the wake of the leadership debates at the last general election, and this was mainly down to his performance in the debates. The problem for the Lib Dem’s is that many, probably more than half of the people who voted for them, are aghast that this led to a Tory government. Their conference was full of speeches by ministers telling everyone that it was the Lib Dem’s that were putting a brake on the Tory juggernaut, but they bear just as much responsibility for the damaging economic approach taken by the government, raising tuition fees for students, harassing benefit claimants and reducing workplace rights for employees. No amount spin changes this basic position.

The video above is Caroline Lucas, Green party leader, speaking to the Green party conference in September, and she has plenty to say to Lib Dem voters particularly. She has excellent presentational skills, charisma even, but compare the message to what you have heard from the other party leaders. She outlines a genuine alternative to the failed policies of the last thirty odd years, where people are put before profit, where principles are stuck to rather than abandoned for expediency, and where the good society can be become a reality. No contest really.

Tottenham Riots – Public Consultation with Police and Haringey Council

2011-09-26T08:34:00.001-07:00

It looked good on paper: a public meeting at the College of North East London (CONEL) on 21 September, arranged by the head of Haringey Council at which the recent riots in Tottenham would be discussed, and suggestions welcomed for how to heal the area. I went with my neighbour - K - who was delighted on our arrival to see a packed hall containing so many of her old friends, activists she'd known and worked with when she lived at Broadwater Farm in the eighties.

The meeting began in a sedate and respectful manner, as we heard the first two speakers: Symeon Brown, who is involved with the excellently-named HYPE (Haringey Young People Empowered), and Sharon Grant, who spoke of the hostility often encountered by her late husband Bernie, and also referred to the possibly dangerous effects of the cuts favoured by our millionaire ConDem masters. The third speaker was Council leader, Claire Kober, to be followed by questions from the body of the hall. It was after Ms. Kober's few anodyne remarks that the feeling in the hall abruptly changed.

First of all, the "Chair" who was in charge clearly had his own agenda i.e. to prevent anyone saying or asking anything remotely embarrassing or challenging. He (one 'Fred Ellis' - who he?) spent the entire time interrupting and barracking questioners; secondly, the vast numbers wishing to pose questions were selected by the handing over of a microphone, which mostly DIDN'T WORK (!!!) so they could barely be heard anyway, unless they shouted.

The first questioner was a woman seated immediately behind us, so we could hear her perfectly. She was also so angry that she could probably be heard in Ealing. Her challenge to Claire Kober was that Haringey Council bore some responsibility for the events of August because of their swingeing cuts to youth services, such as the closing of number ten Broad Lane, which had been a centre for youth-oriented groups, but had been re-assigned by Haringey as commercial offices, thereby hurling the youths onto the street.

Claire Kober stated that the woman was wrong, and that there had been no such closure. The woman erupted in fury, "How can you say that, I WORKED there!" Oops.

Ms. Kober, clearly thinking on her feet, or maybe using them for thinking, suggested that she 'would be around' after the meeting, and would discuss the matter with the woman privately.

Hm. Except this is an alleged public meeting, and the woman's perfectly legitimate question had not been answered, or even addressed, just lied about, while she herself was accused of lying.

And now, suddenly, there was anger in the room. Perhaps Ms. Kober was demonstrating to us how to start a riot? She was fortunate that the hall was filled, not with disaffected youth, but veterans of community spirit and action, and that they were determined to force the 'top table' to confront the underlying causes of the disturbances of August. There were dozens of hands up after this, people wishing to ask questions, but they were all ignored, as the Police Acting Assistant Commissioner got up to make his contribution. Steven Kavanagh (pictured above) looked and sounded like he'd been educated at Eton. He was immediately challenged by a man behind us, who said that he was a 'people's reporter', and that he'd gone to the scene of the riots to witness them for himself. It was self-evident, he said, that the police were only interested in protecting the police station, but that the rest of Tottenham could burn to the ground, for all they cared. There was no response to that either.

Stafford Scott is also involved with HYPE and, despite the attempts of the Chair to subvert his speech, managed to make a very eloquent one, saying that he had not been surprised one bit by the riots, as the young people he worked with had become ever more marginalised by recent policy, both of central government and the council. Stafford had made a similar argument in The Guardian just after the riots. It is worth a read.

He also referrred to the iniquitous 'Stop and Search' laws, and the fact that the rules have now changed so that when exercising it, the police no longer have to indicate the race of their prey. So we will not know in future that 85% of those stopped and searched are black.

My friend K managed, after about an hour of waving her hand in the air, to get to speak, and she challenged the police representatives about their collusion with the media. She pointed out that the story about Mark Duggan shooting at them appeared in the media before even his family knew what had happened. She also pointed out that the story is of dubious veracity anyway, and was nothing but propaganda.

The late and unheralded arrival of Lynne Featherstone MP, and even later one of David Lammy MP, convinced me that the entire farce was a PR stunt, an attempt to pretend that the authorities cared a whit about the riots, or their effects on Tottenham.

I decanted to the foyer outside the hall, and met a fellow who had missed the contribution of the original speaker. He was furious when he heard what had happened, and vowed to accompany the speaker if she wished to confront Ms. Kober later, as he knew well that HYPE had been turfed out of the same address she was referring to. I also met a woman who had recently gone back to work as a nurse after having children and, in the fifteen years of her absence, could not believe the degree to which the NHS has been privatised, "everything", she said, "has already been outsourced". Then there was the elderly gent who came out of the hall saying to me that he had one fervent wish before he died - to see the end of the forty-year domination of Haringey Council by Labour. They think they're untouchable and can do what they like, he said. Yes, I agreed, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Too right, he said.

I got back to the hall just in time to see Lynne Featherbrain on her feet addressing the crowd. Fortunately, however, she was given the non-working microphone, so nobody heard a word.

On the way home, K asked me what the point of the meeting had been. I didn't know. Why, she said, were we obliged to sit there as if we were in school assembly while we were lectured by the staff, instead of having several 'workshop' groups which might have been more productive. I didn't know that either.

I know that it was a shameful waste of time, and I don't hold out much hope for the achievements of the Haringey Community and Police Consultative Group, if this was their idea of consultation.

Written by ANNIMAC (nom de plume)
Haringey Activist and Green Party Supporter
Photo from the Hornsey Journel

Tottenham People Speak Out About the Recent Riot

2011-09-20T05:08:00.000-07:00

Tottenham people speak out in this video about the fatal killing of Mark Duggan by the police, the subsequent IPCC cover up, police harrassment in the area, and the riot that spread across London and numerous English cities.

Why do we have to wait until the end of the year for the IPCC investigation into the shooting? An attempt to brush things under the carpet, I think.

Please share this video with as many people as possible, we need the truth about what happen to Mark Duggan to come out. No whitewash.

Cost of the War in Afghanistan

2011-09-18T11:34:00.000-07:00

Great video, narrated by Tony Benn, with music by Brian Eno. It puts into perspective the money spent on this long running war, with no end seemimgly in sight. Considering the spending cuts domestically in the UK, how can these costs continue to be justified? Let's leave Afghanistan to the Afghani's.

Book Review - Planet Dancing by Patrick McCusker

2011-09-17T11:10:00.000-07:00

I was recently sent a free copy of this book by the author’s public relations firm, and offered the opportunity to interview the author for publication on this blog. I read the book and sent off some interview questions, but have been met with a stony silence. I guess my questions rather gave away the fact that I didn’t like Planet Dancing, and here are the reasons why.

Patrick McCusker is an academic, writer of short stories and producer of radio features. He clearly has a profound love of nature which comes through in his writing, and so, a sincere concern for the planet’s ills, but his remedies lack credibility I’m afraid.

This short book is illustrated throughout with colourful sketches, many depicting happy dancing children. The first section of Planet Dancing is written as a series of short stories or tales, parables even, highlighting various ecological problems, which are moderately entertaining. The second part of the book advances the author’s prescriptions of how to put things right, and it is here that I found the book to be very disappointing.

One idea, that children be given ‘nature names’ rather like native north American peoples, is well meaning, but to then claim that this will inevitably lead to children, when full grown adults, respecting nature more, is a huge leap of faith in my opinion. Indeed, the author puts great faith in children to protect our environment, and has seemingly largely given up on adults being able to change their ways.

McCusker further pursues this theme with his suggestion that a ‘children’s nature reserve’ be set up by collecting small amounts of money from the children of the world. He also suggests that the great religions of the world should set up a second reserve. Even if these ideas came to pass, and there are many practical hurdles to overcome, it would not have any significant impact on species depletion worldwide.

Strangely, there is no mention in this book of man-made climate change, which is surely the biggest threat to all living things on the planet, and we get some insight into the reason for this, in the author’s attitude to multi-national corporations. He suggests that people like Bill Gates could be persuaded to contribute large amounts of cash to alleviate world poverty, and goes further with his recommendation that corporations be ‘induced financially’ to provide work in factories, on meagre wages, in poor countries, to get people off the land. Incredibly, there is no acknowledgement that these same corporations are the root cause of the ecological crisis. In one astonishing passage, McCusker advocates that ‘professional bribe fixers’ be employed to utilise the endemic corruption in many poor countries.

Until we got to these later chapters of Planet Dancing, especially looking at the illustrations of animals and children, I was put in mind of a children’s book. It may well have been a better idea to write a purely children’s book given the author’s faith in children saving the planet, and target them directly. As it stands, this book, well-meaning though it is, is shallow and somewhat naïve.

McCusker’s philosophy seems to be a combination of deep ecology and eco-capitalism, which he advances in this book. At best, this type of thinking is pretty irrelevant, when it comes to providing answers to the ecological crisis, and at worst, down-right dangerously complacent. The only way to save the planet is to radically transform the way we organise our economies along the lines of an eco-socialist approach, but you’ll find none of that here.

Naomi Klein - Capitalism and Climate Change

2011-09-11T05:44:00.000-07:00

This is an excellent video by Naomi Klein, author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrain. It puts the blame for climate change squarely where it belongs, on the free market capitalist system. Says it all, really.

ConDem Government’s Economic Recovery Do Nothing Strategy

2011-09-10T06:54:00.000-07:00

The BBC reports that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is forecasting growth in the UK economy will be below 1% (at best) for the next twelve months. At worse, the UK economy could contract by as much as 1%, bringing about the long feared ‘double dip’ recession. Even if technically the UK economy does not go back into recession, it seems the best that can be hoped for is a ‘flat lining’ almost stagnant performance over the next year.

One might think that this news would sting Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne into action, and so bring forward some plan for stimulating the UK economy. President Obama announced this week a $450bn such package to help recovery in the US economy (which the OECD predicts will grow by over 1% in the coming year), but no such action appears to be forthcoming from the British government.

Instead, we can expect a further round of ‘quantitative easing’ (The Bank of England printing more money) and little else. The problem with this is that it has been tried twice before, and what happens is, the banks swallow up this extra money to boost their reserves, with a resultant marginal effect on the economy at large. On top of this, the only idea doing the rounds, as suggested by a group of British economists, is to cut the top 50% rate of income tax for those earning in excess of £150,000 per year.

This ‘trickle down’ theory of neo liberal economics has it that, high earners will work harder, creating work for those in the middle and at the bottom of the wealth league table, and so the economy will rise phoenix like from the ashes and we can then bask in the sunny uplands of national prosperity. This is a highly dubious theory and I’ve never understood why rich people need to be paid more money to encourage them to work harder, but poorer people need to be paid less to encourage them to do the same thing.

The problem with the global economy at the moment is a lack of demand. Most people have less money, because of unemployment, short working hours, pay freezes and employment insecurity. People are cutting their spending for these reasons, and it must be remembered that Value Added Tax (VAT) is now 5% higher than it was under the previous Labour government, who reduced it to 15%. Higher prices further depress demand.

What is needed is a package of government spending, like the Green New Deal which will pay for useful work such as home insulation and expanding public transport, and help us to reduce our carbon emissions whilst providing jobs for people. VAT should be cut, perhaps by 10%, welfare benefits should be increased and income tax on the highest earners should be increased, not reduced.

This is all very reminiscent Conservative Chancellor Norman Lamont saying in the early 1990’s recession, "If higher unemployment is the price we have to pay… then it is a price worth paying." Essentially, the ConDem government is ideologically compelled to do nothing, and let the market sort itself out eventually, however long that takes, and however painful that will be for people struggling to keep their heads above water financially.

I think it was Albert Einstein who defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”, and this is an accurate description of ConDem economic policy in 2011.

Responsible business: how to manage a CSR strategy successfully

2011-09-05T01:25:00.000-07:00

By Manfred Pohl and Nick Tolhurst (eds). Wiley 2010.

There is a important debate to be had about the role of Business in general, and corporations in particular, in the transformation to a more sustainable society. There are many who believe that the phrase 'corporate social responsibility (CSR)' is an oxymoron, and that it is folly to hope that the very institutions which have created the mess that we are in can be trusted to lead us out of it. But there are others, sincere environmentalists all, who genuinely think that the power, energy and ingenuity of corporations, and the mechanisms of the market and the profit motive, can be harnessed for good.

Sadly, those interested in this debate will find not much of relevance in this collection of essays. As the introductory chapter says, “...it unashamedly steers clear of most of the theories and academic debates surrounding the subject.” Rather, it is aimed at those who “...are looking to pursue a career in a CSR-related field” and “deals with the nuts and bolts of how to run a CSR strategy successfully”.

The book is a publication of the Germany-based Institute for Corporate Cultural Affairs. The point of the Institute, and the book, is partly to fly the flag for the German model of stakeholder capitalism, and there's a reasonable chapter on how that works that would be useful to those who don't know anything about it. Other chapters cover things like how to run a company volunteering programme, or the benefits of sports sponsorship. There are lots of checklists, and guidance on reporting and auditing supply chains. There is a more reflective chapter on the evolution of CSR which gets close to asking what it is actually for.

Ultimately, though, this is a book for those who do believe that corporations, with a little prodding from the right kind of CSR professional, can be and do good. There's not much reflection on what it means for a corporation to be 'responsible'; RBS gets several positive mentions because it lends money to some renewable energy projects. The word 'tax' appears only once, in the context of a suggestion that filing online might save carbon emissions – the suggestion that responsible businesses don't try to avoid taxes has no place here.

Written Jeremy Green
Haringey Green Party

Solutions after the riots – what now ?

2011-08-15T12:51:00.001-07:00

The aftermath of the riots has seen Cameron authorise use of water cannon and plastic bullets, and an alarming public endorsement of these measures notably by 90% of the sample in one opinion poll.

Most people probably think water cannon just make a crowd unpleasantly wet. Actually, the water comes at a force which can knock you over – or even blind you, if a jet hits you in the eye. If you can bear it, see a photo here of someone blinded in Germany when struck by a water cannon in the face. This weapon is indiscriminate, potentially hitting bystanders and people trying to escape from the scene as well as rioters. Early in this debate, the Green Party called for rejection of water cannon and Jenny Jones’ statement on the web site can be found here.

Rubber and plastic bullets or ‘baton rounds’ have caused around 17 deaths, and some blindings, in Northern Ireland. Children are particularly vulnerable to both, and again, innocent bystanders have been amongst the victims, for example a middle aged woman looking out of a window.

There are calls not just for lethal weaponry against teenagers, but for collective punishment of their families. Wandsworth Council already began eviction proceedings against the mother of a ‘rioter’ – but he had not even been convicted, merely charged! Homelessness is likely to drive people further into crime and joblessness.

No-one doubts that theft and arson deserve to be punished. But in courts sitting through the night, with both magistrates and lawyers reported last week to be falling asleep ? What kind of ‘fair trial’ is that ?

There are calls from Duncan Smith and his ilk for daily persecution of ‘gang members’ by tax authorities, job centre, DVLA, etc. No doubt this would exacerbate the situation and punish the innocent along with the guilty, just like the excessive use of stop and search powers which are one of the main grievances which youth, especially black and Asian youth, have against the police. Indeed the riots in Mare Street and in the Kingsland Road are said to have been provoked at least partly by street searches last weekend.

The Network for Police Monitoring has spoken out against authoritarian policing, saying

‘Tensions created by incessant stop and search operations and aggressive policing have undeniably contributed to the conditions which have led to widespread rioting. Young men from working class communities, especially black communities, have consistently taken the brunt of the ‘harassment style policing’ implemented by the Labour party and continued under the present government.

They have also taken the brunt of police violence. The experience of a police monitor from the Network, who was repeatedly punched to the face and head in the back of a Metropolitan police van after a stop and search, is sadly not an isolated one. What would help is not more ‘robust’ policing, but a police force that does not act in a disproportionate, vindictive or discriminatory way.’

How could that happen if police numbers are cut ? Police have already been working up to 20 hours and more without sleep in the last week. That’s hardly conducive to good decision-making or good tempers, let alone fair working conditions. Cuts in police numbers will also make ‘capital intensive’ solutions like more weaponry seem inevitable. Against the gross injustice of firing first against Mark Duggan and the attack on a 16 year old woman outside Tottenham Police Station, must be set the police mindfulness of Ian Tomlinson’s death and that fact that so far, neither riot control weapons nor horse charges were used. Cameron seems intent on reversing the better parts of recent police tactics.

The University and College Union, with Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, have called for reinstatement of youth services and the Educational Maintenance Allowance, a large increase in JSA, and repeal of the ‘stop and search’ laws, as measures to tackle some of the root causes of the riots. Their petition to the government can be signed here.

In a resolution rejecting both police violence and the ‘cuts’ affecting youth, the Stratford (E.London) branch of the RMT says:-

‘The police killing of Mark Duggan…is not an isolated incident. Violence in custody, predominantly against black people, is routine….Stop and search is used as a daily form of humiliation. Police brutality against demonstrations and any form of political dissidence has increased.

The savage spending cuts imposed upon us by the Coalition Government weaken our communities and create anger and despair, and have fallen disproportionately on the young, the vulnerable and the unemployed. Meanwhile, in the last year alone, the combined fortunes of the 1,000 richest people in Britain rose by 30% to £333.5 billion.’

So these people’s pay rise alone would halve the public sector deficit and allow most of the ‘cuts’ to be reversed. Why is nobody but the Green Party and the far left calling for a serious tax hike on the super-rich ?

We all want justice – against obscene inequality, against thieves and arsonists, for proper compensation of residents and businesses, especially small ones, who suffered in the riots. Long prison sentences for rioters will benefit mainly the private prisons industry – they will introduce those convicted to the university of crime, but not rebuild homes or shops or give people their property back. Long community service orders could be used to help rebuild and clean up. And if the police can offer an amnesty for knives as they did in 2006, which resulted in 100,000 being handed in over five weeks, why not an amnesty for goods stolen in the riots ? Or for guns ? Last but not least, sale of guns, including air pistols and replicas (like the one Mark Duggan converted) should be absolutely banned.

Written By Anne Gray
Green Party Parliamentary Candidate for Tottenham 2010

Riots, Recession and Resistance

2011-08-13T08:22:00.000-07:00

This is a video of a speech by Merlin Emmanuel, nephew of the late singer/rapper Smiley Culture. People should watch this video and listen to the speech, because he says some very uncomfortable things about the society we live in, and how this contributes to the explanation of why riots broke out across England last week. The meeting was organised by the Coalition of Restance in London.

Reflections on Recent Social Unrest

2011-08-12T01:17:00.000-07:00

Much ink has recently been spilt over the London riots originating in Tottenham.

The usual arguments have been trotted out about 'feral' youths, engaged in 'mindless' 'yobbery'; the usual harsh prescriptions have been advocated from water cannon, to punitive public disorder sentences, to, incredibly in one tabloid newspaper, apparently 33% of people in a survey saying they wanted the police to be issued with, and to use, live ammunition.

Let us be crystal clear: the Green Party condemns violence, condemns the looting and condemns the destruction of property we have seen.

However, we depart from other political parties in seeking to be completely serious, rather than just posturing, on the underlying causes of these outbreaks; for it seems to us that these events did not simply come out of nowhere. It seems likely that the tragic death of Mark Duggan lit the blue touch paper for the explosion we have seen; if it wasn't Mr. Duggan, it would have been somebody else, somewhere else, triggering similar events.

But don't just take our word for it. Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of the children's charity Kids Company, and who has spent years working with young people in deprived communities, wrote in the Independent on Tuesday that these young rioters are not just thoughtlessly burning down their communities, as Tottenham and Hackney MPs David Lammy and Diane Abbot would have it, they have withdrawn almost totally from the communities most of us would recognise. Worse, they have created parallel communities, outside of mainstream society, where gangland values, crass consumerism and hatred of authority are rife. How do we tackle such deep-seated problems?

Certainly not, as most of London seems to have done, by clamouring for David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Boris Johnson to come back from their summer holidays to 'do something'. What, in all likelihood, can these posturing, vain, and ideologically blinkered individuals do by yanking on ineffective levers at the top tiers of government? The UK is now so centralised, with such an empty wasteland where local democracy should be, that all these politicians can do is frown, furrow their brows and make sonorous, but platitudinous, speeches before the TV cameras. Not a whit changes on the ground as a result.

Only the Green Party truly believes in resurrecting Local Democracy. And only vibrant, empowered, local democratic bodies have a hope in hell of knitting together the various services - community youth workers, police, healthcare, educational workers - with local civil society and business to try and weave together a future of hope for these raging, self-destructive, nihilistic young people marooned in an amoral universe of their, and our, making.

Yes, the causes of, and issues at play in, the recent riots are much more complex and multi-faceted than I’ve allowed for above, but surely two of the biggest solutions are those referred to: the need to properly tackle the parallel communities and the absolute necessity for true local democracy to be restored.

Our young people, and we their family members, friends and fellow citizens deserve nothing less. No more platitudes and posturing; we need real, integrated, solutions – and we need them now.

Photo from The Guardian

Written by Andreas Andreou
Haringey Green Party

Riots Spread Across London and Other English Cities

2011-08-09T09:20:00.001-07:00

The shooting by armed police of local man Mark Duggan in Tottenham last week, which sparked violent scenes and widespread looting of shops in north London, has now spread to several areas of the capital, and to Birmingham, Liverpool, Croydon, Nottingham, Bristol and Leeds. Police have arrested hundreds of people on Monday night, the third consecutive night of unrest.

The situation has got so bad that the Prime Minister, David Cameron, the Home Secretary, Theresa May and London Mayor, Boris Johnson, have cut short their summer holidays and returned to the UK. Parliament has been recalled for one day on Thursday so that MP’s can debate the situation and 16,000 police officers are on standby for deployment in London tonight (Tuesday). The England versus the Netherlands football match due to be played on Wednesday at Wembley, has been cancelled.

In the part of London where I live, you can sense that people are scared, they have seen that the police cannot cope with the sheer numbers and the mobility of the young people involved in these disturbances. The corner shop in my area was robbed by five men at around 1am on Sunday morning, injuring two of the shop workers. This attack was obviously perpetrated in the knowledge that the police had their hands full in Tottenham at the time, and they were right.

Whether it is worthwhile the politicians cutting short their holidays is open to debate. Of course, they need to be seen to be concerned about events for public relations reasons, but if all they do is to make speeches full of platitudes, criminality, thugs, law and order, blah, blah, blah, then they may as well have stayed on the sun lounger.

It is important that we try to understand what is going on here, and I think we have a combination of complex reasons behind what is happening.

Firstly, in Tottenham where this unrest started, there was a spark, a catalyst, in the killing of Mark Duggan at the hands of an already distrusted Metropolitan police force. As far as I can tell, the people in the original demonstration where not involved in the subsequent riot, but the anger generated by the killing itself, and the police’s apparent disregard of the family’s request for true information about the incident, spread like wildfire through the young people of the community.

Reports from other parts of London and parts of the rest of the country appear to show no direct link to the Tottenham shooting, but in many of these communities they have a similar opinion of the police, and these areas have common problems of deprivation and unemployment (particularly youth unemployment). Put all of this together with the greedy consumerist society that has been rammed down our throats since the 1980’s and a feeling of general alienation felt by many young people, and you have fertile ground for the type of disorder that we have seen over recent days.

The BBC reports an interview with two young women from Croydon, who took part in the rioting there last night. They boasted that they were showing the police and "the rich" that "we can do what we want". I heard a young man from Hackney being interviewed on the radio where he complained of bankers bonuses and the MP’s expenses scandal, as a justification for the riotous behaviour in that area yesterday. Shocking though it is, these interviews give an insight into the mind-set of the people involved in the disturbances.

I’m not trying to make excuses for what has gone on in the past few days, but to brand it as merely criminal behaviour shows just how out of touch our politicians have become. We need a period of calm, so everyone can simmer down, so I hope that this disorder will fizzle out, but then we need to analyse what has led us to this sorry state of affairs, and act on this analysis. Don’t hold your breath though, the politicians don’t see anything wrong with the way we live these days and it is reminiscent of the denial displayed by the same people when trying to formulate economic policy at the moment.

The Tottenham Riots – Part 2

2011-08-08T12:38:00.000-07:00

The plot thickens. According to Sky News (12:22pm UK, Monday August 08, 2011):-
‘Fresh questions have been raised over the shooting of Mark Duggan amid speculation a bullet found in a police radio could have come from an officer's gun. However, The Guardian newspaper has quoted a source saying initial tests suggest the bullet was police issue.’ (see http://news.sky.com/home/uk-news/article/16045599 and http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/07/police-attack-london-burns)The Guardian report adds that although a non-police gun was found at the scene, ‘one community organiser suggested the handgun recovered was found in a sock and therefore not ready for use.’ Perhaps these facts explain the very guarded and uninformative explanations of the incident so far given by the IPCC, in the face of a desperate need for some justification of another sudden death at the hands of the Met Police. Colin Roach, Cynthia Jarrett, Roger Sylvester, Jean-Charles de Menezes, Ian Tomlinson and more besides – the list is of innocent victims is long and unsurprisingly arouses the kind of anger that led to Saturday’s protest at Tottenham Police Station. Whatever the Daily Mail may have found out about the dead man’s alleged involvement in drug dealing and gang violence (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023556/Mark-Duggan-Violence-drugs-fatal-stabbing-unlikely-martyr.html?ito=feeds-newsxml) the police would need to show that he did fire first to have any excuse for shooting at him.

Stafford Scott, veteran of the Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign of the 80s, explained to Sky TV the reasons why anger mounted on Saturday as the police apparently stonewalled Mark Duggan’s family and friends (see http://youtube/8a3F3aG9RGw). They then cruelly attacked a 16 year old girl with riot shields, pushing her to the ground, because she shouted that the protestors wanted answers. (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/07/tottenham-riots-peaceful-protest)

A horrible history is repeating itself. We have been here before – in 1981, 1982, 1985 (the Broadwater Farm incidents). And even though fortunately no officer has been killed – so far at least – the consequences of the Tottenham riot 2011 are going to be far worse, in several ways, than those of the riot in 1985. Now, almost 25 years on, the police have not learnt their lesson. They and the IPCC need to come clean – and quickly – before the anger worsens. ‘Fuck the police’ was painted on the tarmac of Tottenham High Road on Saturday night.

Having moved to Tottenham in 1983, and lived ever since in a flat not half a mile from Broadwater Farm, I followed the events of 1985 at close quarters. Who can forget the hundreds of arrests over several months as the police sought PC Blakelock’s killer. The rough handling and alleged beatings in the cells. The traumatizing search of a middle-aged mother’s bedroom at dawn as the police combed her home for evidence of what her son might (or might not) have done. The young people on benefits deprived of their winter clothing for several weeks as the police trawled through mass forensic searches for traces of blood or petrol bombs. The continued insults and stigmatization of a whole community, amounting to a form of collective punishment. Weeks of being kept awake by helicopters and screeching sirens. The negative ‘labelling’ of Tottenham as the home of crime and disorder, the sharp fall in house prices and in owner-occupation, the arrival of an ever-changing population of short-term tenants who can’t stay long enough to join in local organizations or participate in local politics. The loss of businesses and jobs.

All this we will face again. But this time, worse. Worse firstly because whereas the main target of the riot in 1985 was the police themselves, August 2011 has started a wave of looting and destruction of shops and offices. So insurance premiums, particularly on business premises, will rise and small shops will suffer. The percentage of Tottenham’s population on the dole in June was 8.3%, less than half what it was in 1985. But whereas the unemployed of the 80s could try for the Community Programme, a job creation scheme that provided a three day week, albeit for a rock-bottom wage, for around 3000 people in Haringey in 1987, the present government has axed the Future Jobs Programme. Today’s claimants are forced by job centre rules to compete ever more frantically for a dwindling number of vacancies – currently about one job per 54 jobseekers, and hardly any are offered real skills training, whereas in 1985 they could have done a year’s course in construction trades, computing, or motor repair. Today’s Tottenham youth face a grim future – with cuts in the Education Maintenance Allowance, in further education courses, and the poorest prospect for decades of an affordable university education. When Haringey Council made cuts in youth club services some months ago, many predicted a rise in crime would result.

During the 1981 Toxteth riots, which saw 70 buildings burned, 470 police injured and 500 arrests, the chair of the Liverpool police authority made a connection between unrest and ‘cuts’ which was echoed by Ken Livingstone’s and Jenny Jones’ comments yesterday. Lady Margaret Simey remarked in 1981 that local people would have been 'apathetic fools' if they had not rioted in response to the conditions they then faced - chronic unemployment, racism, bad housing and poor education - all aggravated by police harassment. The current generation of youth faces all these things and worse – a drastic collapse in public services and in funding for the voluntary sector, greater inequality and greater insecurity in the few jobs they can look for at the bottom of the ladder.

In the west of Haringey it is hard for people to grasp the depth of social malaise which grips Tottenham’s council estates. Postcode turf wars between gangs made it dangerous for the youth campaigning against youth club cuts to join protest marches against the cuts last autumn. A project to give free recycled bikes to teenagers found parents saying ‘don’t give one to my kid – the drug dealers look for kids with bikes to run errands for them’. The drug and gang culture which according to some media reports appears to have given rise to coordinated, planned looting here and in other districts has its roots partly in the bad jobs, bad education cycle. But it also may be a response to the fact that white collar criminals generally get away with it. As bonus-seeking bankers and city traders remain unpunished for economic sabotage, as MPs get away with expenses fiddling, as inequality has soared to Victorian proportions in the last 25 years, role models for honesty and hard work are increasingly hard to find.

What is clear is that no solution can wait till the next elections, local or national. The local community needs to be working together on solutions now. Investment in better housing and ‘green’ sector jobs are part of that solution. The campaign against Britain’s ‘feral elite’ launched by Compass and supported by Caroline Lucas, is also a part (see http://www.potteye.co.uk/?p=1956). But Greens and other left forces in Haringey need to come together to develop a local strategy to salvage Tottenham’s economy and community.

Tonight (8th August) a group of Christian ministers called a ‘Vigil of Hope’ at High Cross, attended by about 200 people including their congregations, some supporters of local groups like the Ward’s Corner Coalition and HAPS, and at least one councilor. It was a good start, and an impressive call for unity across faith, ethnic and political boundaries. But we will need more than hopes and prayers, we need concerted action over a long period. Dave Morris of the Haringey Federation of Residents’ Associations distributed a leaflet with a list of suggested actions and demands, which you can see on here. It’s time to mobilize.

Written by Anne Gray
Green Party Parliamentary Candidate for Tottenham 2010

Police Shooting Sparks Tottenham Riot

2011-08-07T14:14:00.000-07:00

A peaceful demonstration against the shooting to death on Thursday of a twenty nine year old local man, Mark Duggan, turned into a full scale riot on Saturday night in Tottenham. Two police cars, a bus and several shops and residential buildings were set on fire on Tottenham High Road. Shops were also looted on the High Road as well in Wood Green and at Tottenham Hale retail-park. The area of Tottenham High Road where the worst rioting took place was still cordoned off on Sunday evening. Police said that forty eight people had been arrested.

Initial reports of casualties have been confined to the number (26) of police officers injured, but it is almost certain that the number of civilians injured will exceed this figure, as tends to happen in disturbances of this nature.

The police have said that a pre-planned attempt to arrest Mark Duggan on Thursday night, when he was traveling as a passenger in a mini cab, resulted in a shot being discharged from inside the mini cab, and armed police responded with two shots, killing Mr Duggan at the scene. But this version of events has been questioned by members of the dead man’s family and friends, which has led many people in the local community to be sceptical about the police’s version of events.

Tottenham, of course, has a history of community/policing problems, with the Broadwater Farm estate riot in the 1980’s the most dramatic example. Feelings of harassment and mistreatment by police have simmered for years amongst the mainly Afro-Caribbean community. At the 2005 General Election, the RESPECT party stood a candidate, Janet Alder from Birmingham, whose brother had died in police custody, and she got almost 8% of the vote.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission will investigate the circumstances surrounding Mr Duggan’s death, so hopefully we will get the true story eventually. Metropolitan police press releases in the immediate aftermath of deaths at the hands of its officers are to be treated with some caution. When Ian Tomlinson was killed at the G20 protest in the City of London in 2009, much misinformation was put out to the media, and we probably would never have known the truth if the incident hadn’t been captured on a mobile phone. Similarly, when Jean Charles De Mendes was shot to death in the wake of the London tube bombings, the Met’s media team set about sullying his name and spreading false reports of his behaviour on the day he was killed.

Why on earth do the Metropolitan police need around fifty press officers, as was revealed by inquiries into the News of the World phone hacking scandal? The police now seem to spend much time and money on media operations and playing politics, when they should be concentrating on policing and building links to communities.

Condemnation of the rioters has come from all of the establishment politicians and of course riots generally are not a good idea, for communities as much as anyone else, but let’s just get the facts about what happened first, before we jump to the conclusion that the police are in the right. We’ve seen so many times before that the Met don’t tell the truth about these type of incidents.

Pinkham Way Waste Plant Public Meeting

2011-07-22T01:45:00.000-07:00

A packed public meeting organised by Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Green parties at Hollickwood School close to the proposed waste processing plant, attracted over a hundred people on Thursday (21st July) last night. As recently as this Tuesday, Haringey Council ‘put on hold,’ the plan because as they say on their website, the North London Waste Authority (NWLA) has failed to provide enough detail on the proposals. A decision on planning permission for the development will now be delayed until April 2012, by which time the NWLA should have submitted a more detailed plan.

The speakers at the event were, Colin Parish, a local resident and founder of The Pinkham Way Alliance, Darren Johnson, Green party London Assembly Member, and Quentin Given, Coordinator of Tottenham and Wood Green Friends of the Earth.

Quentin said in his statement to the meeting, "the problem existed because we have too much residual waste. The government had failed to seriously address this in its recent waste review. We should be asking our local MPs, if they support this campaign, to go back to government and get a more ambitious waste reduction policy; and asking councillors to improve recycling facilities. On the development itself, he said that we should not be making fuel from waste containing plastic – in effect a fossil fuel – and we should scrutinise the application to see what its impact on traffic overall would be.”

Colin, in his statement said, “This factory, will be seventy five feet high, with a chimney almost double that size. The NWLA say that this site is an ex sewage works, but that was fifty years ago, it is now lovely woodland. The plan is for over one thousand vehicle movements a day, in and out of the plant, twenty four hours a day, and we must fight it. This is the worst traffic junction in London in the daytime, and these plans will make this situation even worse.” He also made an appeal for donations to help his group’s legal costs, which he said was the best way to stop the plan going ahead.

Darren agreed that the legal challenge was very important but said “Local residents are a force to be reckoned with, and this had had an effect on Haringey Council’s action in delaying a decision.” He went on to say, “The politics is also important, the Mayor of London can, at the end of the day, decide on whether this plant is built, and with the decision delayed until April 2012, this makes it a big issue at the Mayoral and GLA elections in May next year, which is brilliant timing. This plan is based on the low levels of recycling which we have in London, but we could be achieving over 80% recycling, like they do in many countries in Europe. If we recycled more, we wouldn’t need such large plants as are being proposed. I noticed on the way here to this meeting that the recycle boxes are tiny compared to the big grey wheelie bins. It is also unfair on the people of this area to be expected to take the waste from several boroughs.”

A lively questions and answers session followed the speeches, with general opposition to the plan from all parts of the room. The meeting resolved to continue the fight against this massive scale waste plant, which would have a devastating effect on people’s quality of life in this part of north London.

Released from Israeli jail

2011-07-16T11:09:00.001-07:00

Well I spent yesterday trying to chill out after a rather expensive long weekend in an Israeli jail. I guess most people already heard that from the media reports - if not check out http://www.scottishpsc.org.uk (see item; welcome-to-palestine-israel-arrests-jails-and-expels-internationals-en-route-to-bethlehem)

The plan originally was to spend a week with various Palestinian NGOs as part of a deliberate challenge to the Israelis' constant attempts to prevent people visiting the West Bank for any kind of political or cultural dialogue with Palestinian people. If people say they are Christian pilgrims or that they have come as 'innocent' tourists with a hotel booking, the border authorities will probably let them through passport control. But if you're on a human rights fact-finding tour, or a town twinning visit, let alone any kind of volunteering mission, you are very likely to waste your air fare unless you conceal the real motives for your trip. I did this twice. The first time in 1989, when this 'tourist' visited the West Bank talking to prisoners' support groups, advice centres, and so on with a group of (mainly Jewish) lawyers who later founded Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights. The second time I was a volunteer English teacher for a few weeks, after a visit to my former art teacher now living in Jordan, and again presented myself at the Allenby Bridge as a 'tourist'. The third time, July 8 2011 at about 3.45pm, I had the following interesting conversation with passport control:-

First passport official; why have you come to Israel ?
Anne: to go to Bethlehem to visit Palestinian friends.
Official; Are you going to the conference ?
Anne; What conference is that ?
Official; stand aside.
Second official; Where are you going?
Anne; Bethlehem
Second official: where will you stay and what will you do ?
Anne: I have an invitation to visit the Al Rowwad arts centre - it's a theatre, arts and educational centre,with various children’s projects. They will arrange accommodation.
Second official (indicating waiting room);go in there please .

That was enough to get me four days in jail, and as I learnt only after being put on a plane back to Luton, an 'access denied' stamp in my passport.

After an hour, there was another bigger waiting room, EXCLUSIVELY for the 40-50 people (many French) who had arrived that afternoon to join the Bethlehem trip organised by several Palestinian NGOs (see http://www.palestinejn.org). There was no further questioning at all, not like they usually do if they are seriously considering your request for an entry visa. Just waiting, until after about two hours the border police boss said he wanted to take us to a 'hotel' one by one. I instantly had a feeling that this would be more like Harmondsworth than the Hilton. Our passports were visible in a pile, each with some kind of dossier attached. But we weren't getting them back, and if we wanted to go to the toilet, it was with a police escort. Eventually 23 uniformed men, some army, entered the room and grabbed the first person to drag him out - a French guy who looked of Algerian parentage. We linked arms to protect each other and stay upright. But several people didn't and got bruised as people, hard chairs and luggage all fell about in chaos. Eventually we all filed out and were led downstairs to the toilets, hand luggage searched, patted down, chivvied out to a waiting vehicle. No explanation at all. No chance to say anything. Some people, mainly men, got handcuffed - starting with a brave Scot who shouted, as one of the soldiers got up on a desk with a video camera; 'this is all a put-up job so they can show the media WE are being violent'. Which we certainly weren't! It was all them.

The vehicle might be called the Black Hole of Ben Gurion. We sat in it from shortly after sunset -maybe 8.30 at the latest? - until well after 11. It was all metal and had been sitting in the sun with the fan off, at least 30 celsius inside. Twenty eight women in 23 hard metal seats. The men, and the last four women, were in little box-like compartments, some handcuffed - see photo on
http://www.swanseapalestine.org , look for 'more uk citizens to be released tonight'. After an hour, they turned the fan on intermittently, but kept turning it off as it was clearly linked to the cattle-truck battery. A bit later we banged on the doors and shouted for water. They brought 2 litres for 28 women. (We might have had the odd bottle in our hand luggage but they had taken that away.)

Dehydrated and very hungry, we finally got to the Giv'on prison after midnight. Another couple of hours of waiting with hardly any access to our hand baggage. We could see it in a corner with a guard standing over it. They brought a water urn, a box of apples and a few take-away-like containers of rice and chicken, enough for only one between 2 or 3 women. We were searched again and phones, cameras, money, belts and so forth confiscated for the prison safe. Finally to bed in cells with 6 bunks each, a stinking squat toilet cubicle and filthy floor, and lock down till the British consul arrived to see us at 9 am.

Well treated, claimed the Israeli press releases. Well if you call it that, with about 3 hours in the exercise yard over 4 days, and locked in the cells (so that we couldn't even move around the corridor)for about 16-17 hours each day. I'll grant the Israelis could teach HM Prisons (whose catering I fortunately never suffered) a thing or two about food - with raw peppers, tomatoes, cucumber, apples and yoghourt even a fussy veggie like me didn't complain. Though by 10 am Saturday, having had a few spoons of rice and two apples since landing, I was like a wolf and barely wanted to say hello to my French cellmate till I had eaten breakfast. Horrifying what jail does to life's small courtesies - I kept thinking of a certain Primo Levi novel.

The legal (or any other basis) for our detention remained a mystery. Our consul reckoned at first we would get a deportation notice, our Palestinian lawyer (working pro bono for I think the Red Crescent)said there was a right of appeal, but it rarely got anywhere. Later the story was we were 'in another dimension' as one prison official put it, or 'in transit' as the consul was told. So we didn't have the rights even of immigration detainees pending deportation - who according to the notice in the corridor, could have cellphones and money with them, and a right to a court hearing. We clamoured for permission to make one phone call, but got it only by Monday.

The men's block was incommunicado from us until 4pm Monday, when all the UK citizens met with a British consular representative. Only then did we learn from the men about three important developments:
1. On Monday morning the men had started a hunger strike, demanding an explanation for why they were detained -- though they never received an official explanation.
2. On Sunday evening they had been told they would be allowed to make phone calls on Monday morning, but then this offer was restricted to those who would eat -- i.e. break the hunger strike.
3. On Saturday afternoon a couple Israeli border officials visited the prison to offer that the over-55s could go to Bethlehem if they signed a document saying they would not approach zones where there was conflict with the Army -- e.g. Bi'lin, Silwan, Jayous, etc. After much discussion, the older men agreed to accept the travel restrictions -- if the offer was extended to all the men, regardless of age. They made that proposal to the border officials, who gave no response.

Why the age limit? It was probably a proxy for 'We do not want these young Arabs in our country on any terms', since most of the French and Belgian youths were of North African descent. By analogy, in 2009 Israeli ruled that only the under-15s and the over-50s males could go pray in Al Aqsa during Ramadhan and for a few weeks afterwards. Insidiously, age was being used as a marker for ethnicity. The border officials' offer aimed to instrumentalise the older men to isolate and stigmatise the younger ones.
On Tuesday we were locked in cells most of the time and called out in twos and threes to get ready for the airport. The Luton flight was the last - all accepted it except for four brave Welsh women who wanted to have a go at an appeal, but they never got it. They are now back - see http://www.swanseapalestine.org/2011/07/bbc-welsh-palestinian-activists-put-on.html for their story.

And a wonderful welcome at Luton from several of my friends and local Green party people who had come out at midnight to meet us. Thanks everybody!

Was it worth it ? The Palestinians who had invited us thought so. It's highlighted how impossible is the cultural and political future of a country where if you leave, you may not be allowed back in, and if you have visitors, they may be arrested. Rather like a giant prison, in fact. Activities that would support any peace process like educational and cultural exchanges, town twinning visits, aid and human rights work are all made far more difficult by these kind of restrictive immigration practices. Since the Israelis won't say if they will let you in till you get to the airport, they're not even really immigration 'rules'.

Should people feel sorry for us ? Probably the people to feel sorry for are the Palestinians themselves. When they go to jail, it's often for weeks, months or years of arbitary detention with no trial, or a perfunctory military court, and quite a few beatings attached. And all over the West Bank, there are constant attacks on unarmed civilians with tear gas, rubber and plastic bullets and sometimes live ammo, sometimes against people who throw stones but very often against people who have done nothing violent at all. Even during the time we were in jail, some horrendous things were going on; see for example
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-14134711

The Palestinian academic who coordinated the 8th July 'Welcome to Palestine' week, Mazyn Qumsiyeh, is sure that non-violent resistence is the key to advancing the Palestinian cause. Look at the web site, http://www.qumsiyeh.org/ and do read his books. They will inspire you, as they did me.

Written by Anne Gray who has a blog here.

Anne Gray Returns Home After Israeli Jail Ordeal

2011-07-13T09:36:00.000-07:00

Veteran peace and Green party activist Anne Gray , one of twelve Britons arrested and jailed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport, Tel Aviv last Friday 8th July, was released late last night and placed on a deportation flight from Tel Aviv after spending five gruelling days of incarceration in a filthy cramped cell. Six other British activists were also aboard the flight which landed at Luton airport around midnight last night.

Ms Gray, who is well known in Haringey for her tireless community activism and campaigning as the Green Party parliamentary election candidate for Tottenham last year, had planned to stay in Palestine until July 16th, as part of an international 'Welcome to Palestine' initiative, working with Palestinian NGOs to support and improve the daily lives of local people.

Just hours after arriving back in London, Anne Gray said:
“As soon as we said we were visiting Palestine, the airport authorities branded us, and several hundred other travellers, as troublemakers intent on demonstrating and disrupting the airport. We were given no chance of explaining who we were and the purpose of our trip.

“Our mission was entirely peaceful. We simply wanted to study and work with Palestinian NGOs, listening and observing and lending support with things like negotiating checkpoints and taking children to school through areas with hostile settlers. The organisations we were planning to visit do cultural activities like dance, theatre, and education in human rights law, drawing youth away from stone throwing into other forms of political expression.

“I’m furious at the way we have been treated. We were denied entry to Palestine for no good reason at all – it was all stereotyping, a total smear campaign by the Israeli government and media.”

Deputy Leader of the Wales Green Party, Pippa Bartolotti, is still being detained in Israel with three other women from Wales after refusing to be deported. The British consul in Tel Aviv was speaking with them in the jail when Anne Gray and others were taken to the airport yesterday.

So, at least for Anne and the majority of British activists, their ordeal is over. They have succeeded in publicising the plight of the Palestinian people and the belligerent attitude of the Israeli authorities to peaceful protests.

Anne Gray is available for interviews.

For further information please call Anna Bragga on 078616 77343

Green Activists Arrested in Israel

2011-07-11T03:51:00.001-07:00

It has been reported on the Socialist Unity blog that twelve British political activists have been arrested and detained at Tel Aviv airport, for the ‘crime’ of intentionally entering Israel for political purposes. Amongst those arrested are two Green party activists, Pippa Bartolotti, Deputy leader of the Welsh Green party and Anne Gray (pictured) a member of Haringey Green party.

Anne flew out of London on 8th July as part of an international protest by hundreds of people inspired by Mazyn Qumsiyeh, a Christian political activist and academic from Bethlehem, and author of two books, ‘Sharing the Land of Canaan’ and ‘A history of popular resistance in Palestine’. On his trip to the UK to launch the second book in March, he called for people to come to Tel Aviv on the same day, and demand to visit the West Bank without pretending to be ‘tourists’.

At the time of writing, it appears that the twelve British activists and six Israeli activists who had gathered at the airport to welcome the international visitors, are still being detained by Israeli security forces. Despite the best efforts of Haringey Greens to make contact and find out more information on the situation, the British and Commonwealth office, whilst admitting knowledge of the arrests, refuse to divulge anything further. These activists are now entering their fourth day of incarceration and we are now very worried about their wefare.

Before she left the UK, Anne Gray explained the purpose of the group’s mission thus: ‘We plan to be in Palestine till 16th July, listening and observing, maybe lending support to Palestinians as they do things like harvesting crops, negotiating checkpoints or taking children to school, which often gets them harassment by soldiers and settlers.’

What threat to Israeli state security does peaceful behaviour like this pose? Of course, Israel has plenty of history of paranoid over reaction to peaceful protests of this nature. Still fresh in the memory is the violent attack launched by Israeli commandos on an unarmed Turkish boat that was trying to breach the blockade of Gaza with humanitarian aid last year.

Anne is an experienced political activist, comrade and friend, and she knew the risks associated with making this trip, but all right minded people should be appalled at the way she and the other activists have been treated by the Israeli authorities. Write letters of condemnation to your MP and to the Israeli embassy, and demand their immediate release from custody.

The latest but unconfirmed news from Israel is that the British activists will be put onto a flight back to the UK due to land at Luton airport at 23.55 Monday 11 July.

UPDATE 12 July. Two of the detained activists Mick Napier from Edinburgh and John Lynes form London landed at Luton airport last night. There is no word of when the other activists will be returned to the UK, including Green party members Pippa and Anne. There is another flight from Tel Aviv tonight, so we are hoping they will be aboard it. Meanwhile The Morning Star reports that an Al Jarzeera reporter Daniel Poort arrested with the activists said this, 'immigration officials appeared to detain passengers on suspicion, including two young Dutch tourists with no connection to the protests.Those arrested were not questioned until they arrived at a prison in Bir el Saba, more than 60 miles away, he said. The bus was very crammed and 10 men were packed in about three and half square feet area. It was claustrophobic, infested with cockroaches, hot and stuffy and they kept us in the bus for six hours. We were treated like dogs.'

UPDATE 13 July. Anne Gray together with six other British activists were deported from Israel yeaterday. They landed at Luton airport around midnight last night, and appear to be all well. Pippa was not amongst them. Anne will issue media releases when she's had a rest.

Banker's Hold the Country to Ransom

2011-06-22T07:04:00.000-07:00

So, according to last week’s economic headlines, George Osborne wants to “ring-fence” retail from so-called investment banking, does he?

Sounds to me very much like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted or – if you’ll forgive the elaboration of the metaphor – more like having the weary public slaving away to rebuild the stable which has burned down while the bankers are on the horse’s back prancing away and having a whale of a time.

These self-proclaimed “Masters of the Universe” scratch each other’s backs on remuneration committees and persist in their games of ‘Red: we win’ or ‘Black: you (the public) lose’ in the casino merry-go-round that passes for modern banking these days.

It makes you almost want to tear your hair out that no Government, whether Blue, Rose-Red or even Blue-Yellow has the guts (Vince Cable I’m looking at you) these days to take on the vast vested interests in the City of London.

It never ceases to amaze me how often right-wing commentators trot out that old chestnut about how Margaret Thatcher was needed in the 1980s to “tame the dragon” of over-mighty unionism and “unleash” the country’s spirit of free enterprise. Whatever you may believe about whether the unions were a baleful influence in the 1970s (and it is a documented fact that in the 1970s levels of inequality were much lower than at present, national well-being levels at least as high as now and the proportion of GDP that went on wages as opposed to profits the highest ever), the arguments of economic conservatives can now be turned against them with a new twist:

For are not the banks the new “dragons” that now need taming? Are they not a bunch of “financial unions” in bed with what whatever Government comes our way in Westminster? Do they not pervert the course of our democracy – if not over beer and sandwiches in smoke-filled rooms then maybe in the gleaming corporate boardrooms of glassy towers in the Square Mile? Who will be brave enough to come up with tough legislation to save the public from this latter-day breed of robber barons and oligarchic parasites?

For the truth of the matter is that we need the utility parts of modern banks – the parts from where we pay our direct debits and everyday transactions – entirely separated from the casino-habits of the investment banks not just “ring-fenced” within the same mega-institutions (clever bankers and their lawyers will just find cunning ways around that as usual).

When we have a banking sector broken up into smaller units then several things can happen:

1. No more banks “too big to fail”;
2. Many more banks on our high streets competing for our business;
3. The return of local banking: with a traditional Bank Manager who knows local businesses in her area making a comeback and being willing to provide fair loans to businesses down the local high street;
4. If you’re a rich man with money to burn you can still go to a specialist merchant bank and make a risky investment; if your pin-striped stockbroker then loses the lot by overpaying himself and gambling on US sub-prime mortgages well, it’s a tough life, but nobody except you in this scenario has to pick up the pieces.

Chances of seeing the above? Small and receding as I type. But there are things we can do. We can educate ourselves in the principles of a Green economy by reading works such as ‘Prosperity without Growth’ by Professor Tim Jackson. Above all, we can urge our friends to think seriously about changing the habits of a lifetime and voting Green for the first time. We have our first MP and our first Green Council. It doesn’t have to be the same old, same old. We don’t have to settle for Tweedledum, Tweedledee or the Tweedle-Dems. Together, armed with the facts, we can persuade, influence and grow strong. Otherwise, what are the odds that in another 10 years we’ll be glumly hosing down with our taxes the smouldering remains of another burned-down stable, a horse with a grinning banker on his back prancing nearby?

Written by Andreas Andreou, Haringey Green party

Demonstrate Against Public Service Cuts in Haringey

2011-06-21T06:16:00.001-07:00

Unfair, unacceptable, unnecessary cuts

The people of Haringey are suffering major cuts to all our public services.
The NHS is being privatised. Tottenham has the highest unemployment in
London but further education jobs and courses are being slashed. Welfare and
housing benefits face massive cuts. There have been £41m cuts this year
alone from Haringey’s libraries, schools, youth centres, public service
jobs, elderly facilities, parks & voluntary projects.

This will hit the most vulnerable the hardest – those on low incomes, single
parents, migrant communities, women, elderly & disabled people. And all
workers face attacks on pay and conditions because of rising inflation and a
wage freeze.

This is a wealthy country, but the Government has chosen to take away
££billions of public funds from our vital public services whilst propping up
greedy and irresponsible banks with public money. It also sanctions massive
corporate tax evasion and obscene bonuses. We don't have to accept this!

Opposition is growing everywhere!

In Haringey, thousands have joined in a wide range of local protests,
rallies, public meetings and petitioning over the last year, and on March 26th
over half a million people took part in the national anti-cuts demonstration. Now many public sector Unions are planning coordinated strike action on June 30th. The Government has been shaken on a number of fronts. Together we can force them to reverse their cuts programme. Join in with us!

Haringey united against the cuts – join the march!

SAY NO TO CUTS!

Join the Haringey residents and workers march to defend our vital local public services, Saturday June 25th.

Assemble 12 noon: Haringey Civic Centre, High Road N22. March to Tottenham Town Hall,or join us as we pass Turnpike Lane or Seven Sisters tube stations.Bring your own placards and banners, and things to make a BIG noise as we pass by places under threat!

Organised and supported by the Haringey Alliance for Public Services. Supporters
include: Haringey UNISON, Haringey Federation of Residents Associations,
Haringey Trades Union Council, Haringey Friends of Parks Forum, Better Local Healthcare Campaign, Haringey Forum for Older People, CONEL University,College Union and Haringey Green party.

The Haringey Alliance for Public Services is a local network for those
living or working in Haringey. Why not sign up for updates?
www.hapsnews.net

Pinkham Way Statement

2011-05-27T03:12:00.001-07:00

Haringey Green party took the decision this week to formally oppose the North London Waste Authority’s (NLWA) plans for a large scale waste management plant at Pinkham Way just off the A406 North Circular road at Bounds Green.

The plant aims to cater for refuge from at least seven north London boroughs although the NLWA may be scaling this back, to just three boroughs to begin with. The plan is lodged with Haringey council’s planning committee now and I’ve just heard that consultation has been extended to 8th July this year (which fulfils to some extent one of the party’s criteria for opposing the site at this stage).

Local people have formed the Pinkham Way Alliance (PWA) to oppose the plan, and if you wander around the streets closest to the proposed siting of the plant, you will be left in no doubt that opposition is strong. Although fifty years ago it was a sewage works, the site itself is a grade 1 conservation site now with rare plants and bats in residence. This piece of wild land is a buffer for residents from the pollution spewed out by heavy traffic on the North Circular and is in effect the lungs of the area. This plant will not only take away this buffer, but will also add to traffic emissions and some incineration and Mechanical Biological Treatment (MBT) methods will make matters even worse.

Haringey Green party, whilst welcoming some of the treatment technology and recycling facilities proposed in the NLWA plan, as being better than current landfill methods of dealing with our waste, has set out seven criteria which need to be met before any such development should receive planning permission. They are as follows:

1. The plant is on a much smaller scale, such as the MBT facility in Salford.

2. Air quality is rigorously monitored, and this is incorporated into the contract.

3. There is no incineration.

4. Workers are all paid a London Living Wage.

5. A full environmental impact assessment is carried out before the plant is approved.

6. Reduction of waste arising from households, businesses and fly-tipping, year on year, needs to be a contractual requirement (that is, they have to devise some mechanism perhaps by paying the waste collection companies or the local authorities to do intensive and successful public education work, whereby the MBT plant operator doesn't just pass the buck by sending the waste somewhere else, or meeting a pseudo-target to cut household or business waste which happens in practice to mean more of it gets fly-tipped instead).

7. There should be full and transparent public consultation before any planning permission is granted. The consultation process should be agreed with local concerned community groups and should include public meeting(s) with the opportunity to question the waste authority.

It is hard to see NWLA or the private contractor who will run the site meeting these requirements as the pressure will be on to maximise profits and claims will be made that the plant would be ‘uneconomic’, but we will see in due course. Ideally, each borough (or perhaps two neighbouring boroughs) should have their own waste management centres, to cut transportation distances and so traffic emissions. But at the end of the day, it will take a huge cultural transformation in the way we package consumer items and a return to reusing bottles, jars, bags etc to have a truly sustainable waste policy.

Lib Dem MP Suspended Over Expenses Claims

2011-05-13T13:46:00.000-07:00

Another day and another set - back for the embattled Lib Dems. David Laws, MP and former ConDem coalition Chief Secretary to the Treasury, is likely to be suspended from Parliament after the Parliamentary Commissioner on Standards investigation found that he was ‘guilty of a series of serious breaches of the rules, over a considerable time’.

Laws has apologised to the House of Commons and paid back over £50,000, whilst continuing to insist that he was not motivated by financial gain, but wanted to keep secret that he was having a gay affair with, incredibly, a political lobbyist, James Lundie. This excuse is a bit far fetched, when these days even Tory MP’s are quite open about their sexual orientation. Who really gives a damn about what Laws does in bed?

The issue is not about secrecy anyway, it is about making fraudulent claims on the public purse, after all the bad publicity of recent years, here is another MP with his snout in the trough. John Lyon, the Standards Commissioner ruled that over seven years Laws deceived the Commons authorities by submitting claims to pay a ‘landlord’, James Lundie, with whom he had a relationship. Basically, he was claiming, and above the market rate by the way, for staying over night at his lover’s house. Laws also claimed for other costs, such as maintenance work, that would normally be included in the rent of a genuine lodger.

Despite all the expense scandals of recent times, MP’s just don’t seem to get it.
The public are quite rightly furious over this type of behaviour, but MP’s just seem to try and shrug it off, with pathetic excuses. All of this after the clear out of corrupt politicians at the General Election last year, and promises from the new government of a zero tolerance policy to breaches of integrity by MP’s.

Laws of course is desperate to get back into the Cabinet, and Nick Clegg is equally desperate to have him back, to try and shore up the Lib Dem side of the coalition, but this is just another grave error of political judgement from Clegg, who can’t seem to get anything right these days.

The very thought of Laws being allowed back into the government after his behaviour, a government that is slashing public services left right and centre, with the mantra ‘we’re all in it together’ is an insult to the British public. I suppose they could give him the job of cutting people’s benefits when they cohabit a couple of nights a week but claim single separate benefits?

Laws should not be allowed back into government, and he should get more than seven days suspension from Parliament, he should be arrested and charged with fraud, and probably sent to prison. Then justice would be seen to be done, but instead we will likely have to put up with his whinging about privacy, until he is rehabilitated back into the government in year or so. Here’s a government that is hypocritical and rotten to the core.

Lib Dems Elections Disaster

2011-05-09T13:56:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday was a voting extravaganza for the people of Britain, with national elections in Scotland and Wales and local elections in much of England (except here in London) and the nationwide referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV) voting system for General Elections.

Scotland sprang the biggest shock, electing a majority Scottish National Party (SNP) government in the Scottish Parliament, under an election with a proportional element, designed to specifically stop a majority government being elected. It was a personal triumph for Alex Salmond the SNP leader, who is far too crafty for Labour’s second division politicians in Scotland. A referendum will now be held on Scottish independence but if it were to be held tomorrow, it would undoubtedly be defeated. But Salmond is too skilful a politician to fall into that trap, and the vote will not be held for at least two years, by which the time the full horror of an English Tory government will be apparent, and with the election boundaries changed in the Tories favour, the Scots may conclude that they will be better going it alone. It will be interesting to watch how this situation develops.

In Wales, Labour did pretty well at the expense of Plaid Cymru and the Lib Dems but fell just one seat short of an overall majority on the Welsh Assembly. The Green party failed unfortunately to land a first Assembly Member that was hoped for.

Local elections in England went surprisingly well for the Tories, gaining councils and seats, when they were expected to take losses because of the austerity programme introduced at national level. Their gains though were almost entirely in the south of England, and they didn’t have much to defend in the north. The Green party continued its modest progress with a net gain of 14 councillors and the Greens are now the largest party on Brighton and Hove council.

But the big story in England (and Wales and Scotland too) was the collapse of the Lib Dem vote. The scale of their losses is truly staggering. They lost almost 700 councillors which is over a third of the seats they were defending. They will take some comfort from gaining 15% of the vote in England, but it has to be remembered this was on a low turnout, so they would be highly unlikely to get this high a share in a General Election.

All of this was compounded by the decisive loss of the AV referendum (by a 2 to 1 majority) which the Lib Dem leadership had hoped would be seen as vindication of their entering of the coalition government with the Tories. The decision to go into coalition now looks to be a terrible error of political judgement and they have been well and truly stitched up by the Conservatives, useful as whipping boys for unpopular policies, but utterly without influence over the government’s direction.
Of course the Lib Dems will try to assert themselves more within the government now, but why should the Tories allow them any influence when they are so unpopular with the voters? They are destined for wipe out at the next General Election and who can say that they don’t deserve it?

The only way that I can see for them making any kind of recovery is if they ditch Nick Clegg as leader, and with a new leader (Charlie Kennedy, perhaps) bring down the coalition over differences in policy. Then they might be able to reduce their losses and even lay the groundwork for a coalition with Labour post election. The alternative will be a slow, painful death, with the reversion of thirty years of incremental gains and a return to the political wilderness.

Photo from The Guardian

The Monarchy, The Wedding and Shifting Public Attitudes

2011-04-26T09:36:00.001-07:00

The Guardian newspaper reports a survey in which only 37% of the British public say they are interested in the royal wedding this week.

I should first state that I have been a lifelong republican and that the Green party is a republican party, but this doesn’t mean that I have any feelings of animosity towards Prince William and his future wife, Kate Middleton. I wish them a happy day on Friday, and hope they will have a happy marriage, much as I would do any couple about to embark on such a partnership. Indeed, they have taken their time to get to know each other, since they first met at university, and do seem to genuinely like each other, which has not always been the case with recent couplings.

Republicans are against the institution of hereditary monarchy, which in the twenty first century is a complete anachronism in any democratic nation. It reeks of privilege and the private enclosure of national assets and although the powers vested in the monarch are mainly theoretical and ceremonial, these powers have no place in a modern democratic state.

The Guardian/ICM survey also shows that those people surveyed are still in favour of the monarchy, with 63% saying that Britain would be worse off without the royal family, so there doesn’t seem to be any great clamour for a republic, but attitudes do seem to be shifting if not for abolition, then to a kind of ambivalence towards the royals.

As far back as the 1947 wedding of the current monarch, Queen Elizabeth to Prince Phillip, I have read that the government, in the midst still of public war time rationing, were worried about how the British people would view the opulence of a royal wedding, but it passed off generally as a celebration. I well remember the 1981 marriage between Prince Charles and the then Diana Spencer, and it was everywhere. Millions watched the wedding on TV and there were many street parties and there was a sort of shared national experience about the event. There were quite a few of us proudly sporting ‘stuff the wedding’ badges and I took part in an early morning raid on the street bunting and the strategic planting of anti-monarchy stickers on the day of the wedding. But this small act of defiance was a minority affair, and most people I knew were captivated by the whole thing.

As this survey shows, public opinion has shifted considerably over that time, and future historians may conclude that Diana, Princess of Wales, and the treatment she received at the hands of the royal family, was the greatest republican influence Britain has ever had. Now most people have little interest in the royals, and I don’t expect to see any street parties in this part of north London. The media of course will report millions lining the route of the procession (whatever the turn out) and will manage to find a few street parties amongst the 60 million population, but in reality things have changed for ever.

Most people seem to be more pleased with a having a day off work, and many more people than those celebrating the wedding, will go to the pub, the DIY store, garden centre or supermarket. I shall find a republican event, or maybe I’ll just go to the pub.

Vive la Republic, and all that. I think it’s getting closer.

March 26 Demonstration

2011-03-29T14:19:00.001-07:00

I marched proudly in London this Saturday, on the TUC organised demonstration against the reckless cuts in public services that the ConDem government has inflicted on the people of this country, in their ideological push to minimise the state. The gathering had a carnival atmosphere, with lots of families and pensioner groups, as well as the heavy union membership turn out. Unison and the GMB were particularly noticeable in the cavalcade of protesters with their banners and airborne balloons, as far as the eye could see.

The authorities accepted that at least 250,000 marched and the organisers claimed 500,000, and being a veteran of marches in recent years, I would put the figure at much nearer half than a quarter of a million people on this demonstration. The police worked closely with the TUC on arrangements for this march, so it was no great surprise to me that it passed off peacefully. At times though, I felt as though the TUC stewards were forcing us to walk on this side or that, when there was no real reason I could see for doing this, but I complied with their wishes quite happily.

I didn’t see all of the speeches at Hyde Park, and missed Ed Miliband, the Labour party leader’s contribution, but when I saw it later on television, he didn’t seem to capture the moment very well, and it seemed to fall a bit flat to me. At one point, when he said that there needed to be some cuts, he was actually jeered by the crowd.

Of course, events away from the main march have made all the headlines, with direct action type protests by maybe a thousand or so people unleashing a torrent of condemnation from mainstream media outlets and the Home Secretary herself, Theresa May, labelling these events around the main march as ‘violent’ and ‘mindless’.

Violent is something of an exaggeration, with no one seriously injured, but there was damage to property, with many smashed windows around the west end of London. Whilst I do not condone this behaviour, it is wrong to describe it as mindless. Banks and other corporate interests were targeted for their symbolic value, drawing public and media attention to tax avoidance practices and the way that government policies pander to these companies.

It is also important to draw a distinction between the actions of some who caused this damage to the likes of Starbucks and HSBC, and members of UK Uncut, who peacefully occupied commercial premises such as Fortnum and Mason, many of whom were arrested and charged with ‘aggravated trepass’, and spent twenty four hours in police cells. This type of protest is perfectly legitimate, and probably more effective than just marching from A to B.

Obviously, the ConDem government has ignored this demonstration, but this is just the start of a massive campaign to win over public opinion to reverse these damaging cuts. I hope the unions call coordinated industrial action, which they can do legally over changes to occupational pensions, but this should be seperated from community campaigns to save public services, which should include more peaceful direct action protests.

Everyone who values our public services and the welfare state itself, must support whatever demonstrations and protests that are organised in the coming months. What is at stake, is the very fabric of our society, and we must not let this deeply reactionary government get away with it.

Rapper's for the NHS

2011-03-23T17:45:00.000-07:00

Topical rap by NxtGen about the perilous future of the NHS under the ConDem government.

Good that the younger generation appreciates the threat to and values the NHS, which was founded over sixty years ago. I was reminded when speaking to an older person recently of the situation before the NHS was formed, when if you had to go to a doctor, you needed to have the money to pay for it.

A situation quite unthinkable nowadays, or is it?

NxtGen's facebook page is here.

War in Libya

2011-03-21T10:17:00.001-07:00

US, British and French air and sea forces have begun to impose a ‘no fly zone’ over Libya after the United Nations, with regional support from the Arab League, authorised this and further to ‘use all necessary measures’ to protect civilians from attack by military forces. This phrase is very similar to the widely recognised UN language of ‘all necessary means’, which is code for military action. The resolution does though specifically prohibit the use of international ground troops.

Colonel Gaddafi has responded by declaring two ceasefires so far, but reports from Libya say that fighting has continued in a number of cities, and western air and missile strikes have targeted Gaddafi’s forces and air defence systems, with over a hundred Cruise missiles being fired at Libya, causing widespread damage to air defences and almost certainly involving civilian casualties, or ‘collateral damage’ as the military likes to call them.

I think everyone who has watched the scenes unfold in Libya, has been shocked by the brutality of Gaddafi’s forces, firing on unarmed protesters and shelling residential areas where the opposition have taken over towns, with hundreds and maybe thousands of civilian deaths the result. But this move by the west is an extremely dangerous one, as Gaddafi has been quick to use foreign attacks on Libya to rally support for his regime in Tripoli particularly.

In the east of the country much of which is under rebel control, foreign intervention has been welcomed, indeed the town of Benghazi, the centre of resistance to Gaddafi, would probably have been overrun by now, without the action to take control of Libyan airspace. These situations can escalate though, and ‘mission creep’ is common once military action is taken, although I do not think that there is any great appetite amongst western governments for a ground invasion. It is difficult to know what the west thinks it can achieve by its actions.

It seems to me that there are three possible scenarios resulting from western forces controlling Libyan airspace. Firstly, it will limit Gaddafi’s army’s mobility, as any columns of military vehicles will be subject to air attack, and given the huge distances involved between Libyan cities, this is a severe handicap to Gaddafi. The hope appears to be, that his regime will implode as those around him see that they will be unable to win the war, and either defect or even assassinate the leader. There are no signs of this happening yet.

Secondly, once the situation in the east of the country is stabilised, it may be envisaged that the rebels will be able to march towards Tripoli without fear of their convoys being attacked by Gaddafi’s forces, and eventually take the west of the country. If this does happen it will be a slow process, and much intense fighting will take place in those towns held by Gaddafi. It is hard to see how the UN resolution will allow western forces to support the rebels when they are attacking these towns, as in effect, they will be causing civilian casualties, and should according to the resolution, be stopped by western forces from doing this.

Thirdly, and I think this is the most likely outcome; Libya will be in effect partitioned with Gaddafi holding the west and the rebels the east of the country. This would mean that western forces will have to stay in Libya (or whatever the east decides to call itself) for the long term, which is a highly undesirable and costly situation. Of course the east contains most of Libya’s oil reserves, and so it could be that the western powers will settle for this state of affairs, and try to throttle Gaddafi’s regime in Tripoli through economic sanctions, but Saddam Hussein managed to cling onto power for over a decade in Iraq under similar circumstances.

It is clear to me that western governments want Gaddafi gone, but the UN resolution does not authorise regime change, and there appears to be cracks already surfacing in the coalition that has backed foreign invention. Liam Fox, British Defence minister, has said that Gaddafi might be targeted himself by war planes or missiles, the US Defence secretary Robert Gates, has disagreed with this statement, saying it would be ‘unwise’ to set goals that might be unachievable. Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League, has said that he doesn’t support the missile strikes, and didn’t think that this would be part of applying a no fly zone.

Whilst it is understandable to want to protect civilians from Gaddafi’s brutal tactics, western intervention in Muslim countries has an unhappy history, and the situation in Libya has all of the ingredients, for another long term disastrous foreign policy intervention by western governments.

Photo from Al-Jazeera

Nuclear Power Plant Crisis in Japan

2011-03-15T01:56:00.001-07:00

If it wasn’t bad enough for the people of north eastern Japan, that the strongest earthquake in the country’s history, and the second strongest recorded anywhere in the world, followed by a devastating ten metre high tsunami, with probably thousands killed, now two of the country’s nuclear power plants have exploded. Reports are coming in that a third reactor has over-heated and exploded adding to radiation emissions that have led to an exclusion zone being created, and an evacuation of the population in a 20 kilometre radius of the power plants.

Whether a 20 kilometre exclusion zone is large enough has to be called into question, as the US navy has reported detecting low level radiation 160 kilometres off shore from these nuclear installations. Unfortunately, governments and nuclear authorities do not always divulge the full truth about nuclear leaks, with the old USSR supressing accurate information for years about radiation emissions from their nuclear plants, and I remember reading in Tony Benn’s diaries, that when he was Energy minister in the 1970’s, he was informed, by ironically, a Japanese diplomat, that there had been a leak at Britain’s Windscale (now renamed Sellafield) nuclear plant, when he had received no such information in the UK.

Why nuclear power plants were built so close to seismic fault lines as they have been in Japan, defies all sense, and I have read in the British press that some Japanese scientists’ have been warning the authorities about this for years. Japan has been very enthusiastic about nuclear power, and has a plan to increase their capability from a third to a half, of electricity generation over the next few years. But, at what risk?

The whole nuclear power debate in the UK has gone rather quiet lately, with the Lib Dems doing one of their numerous U turns, and now backing the ConDem government’s stance on increasing nuclear power capability here. The last Labour government, also did a volte face and started looking more favourably on the nuclear industry, once it dawned on them that reducing carbon emissions, and so slowing climate change, would be extremely difficult without recourse to nuclear power.

Even some greens like James Lovelock and George Monbiot have sided with nuclear in an effort to halt climate change, and some in the English Green party itself have become advocates of this approach. But nuclear is not carbon free and stocks of uranium, needed to power these plants, is estimated to be fairly low, whilst non uranium based nuclear power is at least fifty years away, if indeed it will ever become feasible.

This debate needs to be reopened, and potential risks need to be reassessed, as well as costs and the disposal of waste. Although the UK is not particularly susceptible to earthquakes, these nuclear installations are always built on the coast, and if the oceans rise as a result of climate change, which seems to be highly likely, the same sort of problems experienced in Japan as a result of the tsunami, could be coming to a town near you.

Support the TUC Demonstration – 26th March

2011-03-09T00:50:00.000-08:00

From what I hear about advance coach and train bookings, it appears that the TUC demonstration on Saturday 26th March is going to be very well attended, with some predictions that a million people will join the march through central London. But, let’s not be complacent, and everyone who can possibly attend this event should resolve themselves to do so. A huge show of opposition to the ConDem government’s attack on public services and the welfare state itself, is necessary to display for all to see, the strength of feeling aroused by these damaging slash and burn policies. This is no less than an attempt to turn back the clock to Victorian era social policies.

I know that there is some cynicism amongst the public about single set piece demonstrations after the massive anti-war march in 2003 was pretty much ignored by the Labour government, but a low turn-out will be easily dismissed as a ‘vested interest’ protest by public sector employees. Communities (service users) need to show solidarity with the unions on this, and to be quite frank, to encourage the often ‘conservative’ minded union leaders to escalate the battle and call coordinated strikes which they can do legally, over things like the proposed changes to occupational pensions.

I also expect this protest to be a bit different from other large scale marches, in that I expect there will be perhaps hundreds of smaller direct action type protests surrounding the main demonstration, where organisations like UKUncut have led the way with sit ins at high street banks. It is important that large numbers attend the main protest to make the smaller flash mobs more difficult for the authorities to contain. There are hundreds of legitimate targets for protest in London which given a large main demonstration, will be impossible to police.

The establishment has been busy lecturing the population that there is no alternative to the cuts, but there is indeed an alternative to this devastation of our communities, it just doesn’t get much publicity from the mainstream media, so we must make them listen, and this protest can be the beginning of the process.

We could start by ditching the ridiculous white elephant that is the Trident nuclear weapons system, saving billions of pounds. Then there is increasing income tax and National Insurance contributions for high earners (those on more than £44k per year pay only 1% NI on earnings above this figure, whilst everyone working pays 11% below this amount). It is further estimated that £120 billion is lost in tax revenue from wealthy individuals and corporate bodies to tax avoidance and evasion, these loop holes should be closed. Investment in energy efficiency measures like insulation would save millions of pounds. And the tax exemption for private schools must end and the savings be channelled into state schooling. That’s a starter for ten anyway.

The UK deficit is not even all that large by historical standards and we have the sixth largest economy in the world as measured by GDP, so why the urgency to cut public provision so savagely? Well, that’s because these cuts are ideologically driven by a government that wants to shrink the state, whatever the level of public debt, and they want to try and get the pain out of the way now. So in four years’ time they can call a general election and hope everyone has forgotten what they did to country.

Now is the time to stop the ConDem government dead in its tracks, and we should demand a general election immediately, because this government doesn’t have a mandate to inflict these policies on the people, since most were not in the Tory or Lib Dem manifestos at last year’s general election. Mubarak said there was no alternative in Egypt, and look what happened to him.

Activists from Haringey Alliance for Public Services are meeting at 10am on 26th March at both Turnpike Lane and Seven Sisters tube stations to travel to the protest.

Voters Desert Lib Dems in Barnsley Central

2011-03-05T12:34:00.001-08:00

Dan Jarvis (Lab) 14,724 (60.80%, +13.53%)
Jane Collins (UKIP) 2,953 (12.19%, +7.53%)
James Hockney (C) 1,999 (8.25%, -9.01%)
Ends Dalton (BNP) 1,463 (6.04%, -2.90%)
Tony Devoy (Ind) 1,266 (5.23%, +3.58%)
Dominic Carman (LD) 1,012 (4.18%, -13.10%)
Kevin Riddiough (Eng Dem) 544 (2.25%)
Howling Laud Hope (Loony) 198 (0.82%)
Michael Val Davies (Ind) 60 (0.25%)
Lab majority 11,771: Turn out 36.5%

The opinion polls have been foretelling it, but in the Barnsley central by election, we now have solid evidence of the collapse in the Lib Dem vote. Their vote plummeted by over 13% compared to the general election here less than a year ago, finishing in a humiliating sixth place, behind not only Labour and the Tories, but also UKIP, BNP and an independent candidate, and losing their deposit with only 4.18% of the vote.

To set this result in historical context, it was the Lib Dems third worst result in an English by election ever and the worst since 1976, and it was the first time they have sunk to sixth place in a by election anywhere in the UK. Furthermore, I can’t remember a party that is in government ever losing its deposit at any election in this country.

The Lib Dems have tried to make much of the low turn out, and at 36.5% it was low, but not unusually so when set against recent by elections. There is no doubt about it, this was a very bad result for the junior partners in the coalition government, before public spending cuts have even been fully felt by the voters. The portents are not good for the Lib Dems in the English local authority, Scottish and Welsh Assembly elections in May this year, and perhaps the AV referendum too. It does look, in northern England, London, Scotland and Wales that the Lib Dems will incur heavy losses, for propping up a Tory government.

This result was also bad for the Conservatives, falling over 9% from the general election, and the good performance of UKIP claiming second place, may explain the dwindling share of the vote for David Cameron’s party. The BNP, although they saved their deposit, had a poor result, down almost 3% on the general election, and this may be down to the divisions within the party recently.

For us Greens in London, this result is very encouraging (although we didn’t stand a candidate in Barnsley), and indicates that we could gain at the Lib Dems expense in the London Assembly elections in May 2012, and increasing our representation on the Assembly from two to three members is a perfectly realistic goal now.

The only hope for the Lib Dems, is that if they can hang on in the coalition government for a full term, and if the economy has picked up by then, all will be forgotten and they can claim that the austerity policies they helped force on the country, came good in the long term. This is possible, but I have a feeling a lot of Lib Dem voters at the 2010 general election will not support them ever again, because they thought voting Lib Dem would improve a Labour government, not land them with a Tory administration, hell bent on dismantling the welfare state.

Wood Green Civic Centre Occupied by Angry Crowd

2011-03-02T06:27:00.000-08:00

Several hundred people protested outside the budget meeting at Wood Green civic centre on 25 February. The building was occupied, and more than twenty people managed to break through a small police line and enter the council chamber, where they delayed the council meeting by nearly two hours. Two were arrested after 3 van loads of TSG officers were called in to clear the building. A solidarity vigil was quickly organised outside Hornsey police station where they were taken.

Haringey councillors were due to pass cuts of £87 million over three years, with more than a thousand jobs to go and three quarters of the youth service being destroyed. The cuts will also hit the elderly with care homes and drop-in centres being targeted.

After some speeches from local activist organisations and an open mic, the crowd moved into the building, and at first queued politely for the public gallery, but soon decided to attempt an occupation of the council chamber.

A Haringey Green party member who took part in the occupation, gives here her account of what happened next. “Those of us who weren't occupying the chambers ran off to break into the secret council meeting that was being protected by the police, someone smashed a fire-alarm so that the swipe-card doors to the canteen where the council were would open! Needless to say it was a bit chaotic we were mostly trying not to get bundled by the police and shouting ‘Whose Town Hall, Our Town Hall’ at the top of our voices!”

“It was good to exercise some civil disobedience in the face of these outrageous cuts - at least better than being on yet another demonstration where you don't make any sort of impression. Still - I would also have been happier to know that there had at least been some engagement of potentially anti-cuts councillors (if indeed there are any), and to know that there was some comprehensive campaign - I've been randomly attending a few local demos over the last few months and always left thinking - is there any other campaigning? What is the strategy here?”

Meanwhile, in the chamber, the activists were told by a councillor that they must leave the building or that he would ask the police to arrest them. After some discussion, a consensus was reached, and while people on the ground floor were being forcibly removed from the building by TSG officers, the occupiers and the people in the public gallery walked out together as a group. Noisy protesting continued outside the chamber, and then a group headed down to Hornsey police station for a solidarity protest over the two who were arrested.

Almost immediately, the councillors, who it seems had been waiting outside the back of the building, then poured in through the back door and up to the council chamber. There, starting their meeting two hours later than scheduled, they proceeded to vote through the devastating cuts.

Last year Haringey’s director of children and young people’s service received a salary and pension contribution of £282,670. Tonight, he voted to pass a 75% cut to Haringey’s youth service.

Bulk of the report from Indymedia. More on the demonstration and other resistance to the cuts can be found on the Haringey Alliance for Public Services website.

Gaddafi: ‘I Blame the Parents’

2011-02-28T15:45:00.001-08:00

As the violent struggle for control of Libya continues, rebel forces opposed to Muammar Gaddafi’s regime seem to make progress on almost a daily basis. A torrent of Libyan diplomats have resigned and declared their allegiance to the ‘Libyan people’ as the eastern part of the country is now beyond the control Gaddafi and increasing numbers of towns in the west and south fall to the rebels. Senior figures from Gaddafi’s government and military as well as soldiers on the ground, have also joined the people in what appears to be an unstoppable momentum towards regime change. Much of Libya’s oil and gas industry is under the control of the rebel factions now, thus starving the regime of foreign revenue.

Forces loyal to Gaddafi still control most of the capital Tripoli and some other towns, most notably Sirte, birthplace of the dictator, and they are mounting counter attacks on some of the towns that have been taken over by the opposition. It is difficult to know whether the rebels can complete the revolution and take the remaining areas still in the regime’s control, as they are heavily defended by well-armed fighters, many of whom are African mercenaries and the fear is of a bloodbath should the rebels march on Tripoli to try and liberate the city.

The United Nations and the international community generally have condemned the regime’s use of lethal force against unarmed protesters, with sanctions announced and the determination to pursue those responsible for ‘war crimes’ through the International Criminal Court. Tony Blair, ex UK Prime Minister, has revealed that he has twice telephoned Gaddafi to urge him to step down; in what must have been a ‘one war criminal to another’ chat. Much of the western response to the crisis smacks of hypocrisy; nevertheless, the pressure is mounting on those in the regime surrounding Gaddafi, if not the tyrant himself.

Meanwhile, the Colonel has made public appearances making speeches in his rambling, ranting style, where he blames a mixture of al Qaida terrorists and the country’s parents for not controlling their off spring. This shows the deluded state of mind of a despot who has brutally ruled his country for over forty years, and just cannot understand that his people have had enough of his tyranny. Al Qaida has been notable by the lack of any comment from its leadership whatsoever on the wave of anti-government protests across the Arab world, and clearly they must know that these uprisings are not orchestrated by or favourable to militant Islam.

At the same time, Gaddafi accuses Bin Laden of running around dishing out acid tabs to the young people of the country. It would be almost comic, were it not such a serious situation, that the uprising in Libya could be stopped dead in its tracks by parents clipping their sons and daughters around the ears, and telling them to behave themselves and stop making trouble for the ‘great leader’.

The genie is out of the bottle now, the people have tasted victory and freedom in large parts of Libya, and there is now surely no going back. It looks to be only a matter of time and horribly much bloodshed, before Gaddafi’s regime falls completely. He has stated that he will fight to the last bullet, and I think he means it. He may well get his wish and die on Libyan soil in the near future, and only then will the people be truly free.

Photo from Reuters

Green Party is the Real Opposition

2011-02-27T08:05:00.000-08:00

This is an excerpt from Green party leader Caroline Lucas’ speech to the party’s spring conference in Cardiff. She lays into the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems as all pursuing the much the same policies. Thanks to Tower Hamlets Greens for the footage.

Oil, Arms, Blood and Hypocrisy

2011-02-23T04:23:00.000-08:00

As the people of North Africa and the Middle East rise up against their despotic leaders, the British Prime Minister, David Cameron,has flown into Abu Dhabi where the Index 2011 arms fair is taking place, to perform his salesman act on behalf of British arms and ‘security’businesses. Aerospace Defence Security(ADS)the body that promotes UK arms companies calculates that this market is worth £7.2 billion a year to the British economy, half of which goes to the Middle East.

Liam Fox, the British defence secretary, is reported in The Daily Mail (not a newspaper I normally read, but I received a tip on Facebook) as saying the UK needs a ‘healthy slice’ of this Middle East market. He went on to say 'I want to make sure the United Kingdom - within the limits that we set ourselves ethically on defence exports - is getting a healthy slice of that.’ Well, that depends on what kind of ethics you have, but I can’t see how any right minded person can justify selling the means of violent repression to undemocratic authoritarian regimes.

Denis MacShane, Labour MP and well known apologist for ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair, has been quick to criticise the ‘timing’ of Cameron’s visit to the arms fair in the region, and crass it certainly is, with a hastily arranged detour to Egypt, in an attempt to bathe in the feel good publicity atmosphere surrounding the deposing of autocratic President Mubarak. This mention of ‘timing’ is of course an attempt
to throw a cloak over the last Labour government’s enthusiasm for the same trade, and largely follow the same approach as the present government. The truth is, the UK has long been involved in supplying arms, security and torture equipment to these despotic regimes, all in the name of ‘stability’ in the region, despite the last Labour government’s self- proclaimed ‘ethical foreign policy’.

Which brings us to oil (and gas). Stability of energy supply and therefore price, has been sought by all Western governments so as to facilitate growth in their economies, after the energy crisis in the 1970’s caused ‘stagflation’ and recession, and if that means supporting autocratic authoritarian regimes, so be it. Now that joyous scenes of the people throwing off their chains in the Middle East have been transmitted by Western media, the politicians have been making speeches about freedom and democracy, but we have been instrumental in oppressing these same people for generations.

Indeed, the world oil price has reached a two and a half year high, at over $100 per barrel as this crisis has developed, and Western government’s like our own, are more worried about the effects that this will have on the fragile economic recovery, than anything else that is happening, bar perhaps the rise of ‘Islamist’ governments in the region. There has been remarkably little appetite for a move to this type of regime amongst the rebellious Arab people, but if we did end up having to deal with governments of this persuasion, we no doubt would, to keep the oil flowing. After all, the US government was quite happy dealing with the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990’s, when they wanted to build a gas pipeline across the country. Nothing is allowed to get in the way of the business of making money.

You can sign Amnesty International’s petition against the arms trade here.

The Unemployed Blamed for Rising Unemployment

2011-02-18T00:23:00.000-08:00

A day after it was announced that unemployment had risen by 44,000 to just under 2.5 million, or 7.9% of the workforce (rising to over 20% for 18 to 24 year olds), the government has launched its Welfare Reform bill plan, with the mantra ‘make work pay’. The plan aims to amalgamate several benefits into a new ‘universal benefit’, although it is not entirely clear which benefits, or how exactly the new benefit will operate.

Plans to reduce Housing Benefit by 10% for those claiming Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) for over twelve months, which I reported here on this blog, have been scrapped though, and the government insists that no one will be worse off under the new arrangements. I think this is a highly dubious claim, but it is difficult to prove one way or the other at this stage, with details of the changes being too vague to make accurate calculations.

One definite proposal is that those ‘refusing to work’ face a maximum three-year loss of benefits, although how people are meant to survive in this event is less clear, but I think we can expect an increase in crime as one of the consequences. This particular proposal, which will no doubt attract plenty of popularist support, with phrases like ‘workshy’ and ‘scroungers’ doing the rounds, is not as black and white as it is being portrayed.

I worked on a short term (15 month) contract at Jobcentreplus which expired just before Christmas last year, which took in the Labour government and now ConDem government regimes, so I am well placed to compare the two administration’s approaches to unemployment.

Under Labour, the service was largely target, rather than customer focused, but the targets were mainly based around getting people off JSA and back into work. They did though arm the Jobcentre Advisors with some tools to help people get into work. Things like work focused training courses at local colleges were available, free of charge to claimants, and a daily lunch allowance for those who undertook ‘work trial’ opportunities with employers. There was also a discretionary fund which could be used to pay for things like security badges for those wanting to work in security, which is a minimum requirement for work in that sector.

Under the ConDem government, all of the advisor’s tools were systematically taken away, to the point that I felt there was very little I could offer clients in the way of positive help. The target for getting people into work was incredibly abolished, but new targets, of taking people’s benefit off them for not trying hard enough to find work, were introduced. We were encouraged to find jobs that clients could do, and print them off for them. Then we were told to check whether they had applied for these jobs, and if they hadn’t, they were to be referred for ‘not actively seeking employment’, and ran the risk of having their benefit stopped for a maximum then of two years. There might be good reasons why the person didn’t apply for a particular job, maybe when they thought about it when they got home, they reflected that they didn’t have the skills or experience for the job, but that wasn’t an acceptable excuse.

The regime became much more negatively sanctions focused, rather than positively helping claimants, all stick and no carrot under the ConDems. It sounds as though the regime is about to get more brutal, at a time when the government’s own policies are to blame for the lack of job opportunities, not those claiming JSA. At the same time this government is reducing tax inspectors and increasing benefit fraud investigators, although vastly more is lost to the public purse in tax evasion than in benefit fraud.

Same old story I’m afraid, make the rich richer, and the poor poorer. The nasty party are back in government.

The video/song above is ‘One in Ten’ by 1980’s UK reggae band UB40.

Bail Ins not Bail Outs

2011-02-17T09:21:00.000-08:00

This short guide from UK Uncut on how to start a protest is useful and shows just how easy it is to plan and execute highly effective protest campaigns.

We need thousands of these type of mini protests up and down the country to make a real impact on the public consciousness, ahead of the TUC demonstration on 26 March in London.

Hat tip to the Coalition of Resistance for the video link.

The Revolution Will Be Televised

2011-02-14T02:47:00.000-08:00

I’ve spent the last few weeks dropping in and out of Al-Jazeera’s live streaming news of the Egyptian revolution. Quite amazing footage has flashed across my computer screen of this exciting and moving event, which shows the irresistible force of people power, when the masses unite in solidarity and even the most brutally entrenched governments can be toppled. Great credit goes to the demonstrators, for their bravery, determination and largely peaceful behaviour throughout the eighteen days of passionate struggle.

One of the most interesting aspects of this revolution and the preceding one in Tunisia, has been not only the older media coverage of events, but the widespread use of new media to connect and spread the protests. Blogs, Facebook and Twitter have been used by activists to impressive effect, and the authorities were so afraid of this tactic, that they tried, unsuccessfully, to close down access to
the internet, and we now see why.

Egyptian protesters got around this government tactic, by using old dial up connections and using proxy servers, and so stayed one step ahead of the authorities. That at the forefront of the revolution, it was the young people, who never having known any other government than Mubarak’s, but were crucially encouraged by, and were savvy enough to know the possibilities of new media, helped immeasurably the eventual magnificent success of the people.

They will need to be watchful of the interim military government, and may need to bring people onto the streets again in huge numbers, just to keep the generals honest in their stated intentions to move quickly to a democratic society, but I think they are aware of this, and again new media will play its part in that mobilisation.

What lessons does all of this teach us about protest in the UK then? Well, of course it is already happening. It is doubtful whether we would have found out the truth about the police’s involvement in the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests in London in 2009, without the intervention of ‘citizen journalism’ footage of the events leading up to his death.

The website Indymedia, is a hub for activists who are organising direct action protests, and social networking sites, blogs and email lists are widely used in communicating information to and in between activists. I have also heard of plans to make laptops mini portable internet hubs, so information can be communicated amongst demonstrators, even when the authorities close down the regular internet and mobile phone provision in areas where protests are taking place. Tactics are changing too, with smaller ‘flash mobs’ appearing suddenly, and taking the police by surprise, like the UK Uncut protests over corporate tax evasion. And climate activists often operate in a semi- autonomous, horizontal network, that is difficult to monitor and contain.

Internationally, the Wikileaks ‘hactivists’ who closed down corporate websites for hours, and obtained secret information on the true thinking behind our politician’s actions, have changed investigative journalism forever.

The establishment in the UK has much to worry about now, and we can follow up the student demonstrations of last year about tuition fees, by staging even bigger, though more nimble at the same time, protests about the public spending cuts, beginning with the TUC march on the 26th March this year. Look at what the Egyptian people have achieved, the ConDem government should be easy to topple.

Cracks Begin to Appear in ConDem Coalition Government

2011-02-11T10:34:00.000-08:00

Turmoil within the ConDem government has become increasingly apparent in recent days. 88 Lib Dem councillors, with some 17 council leaders, in a letter to The Times newspaper, complain that the government’s cut to local authorities’ budgets are too deep saying, "These cuts will have an undoubted impact on all frontline council services, including care services to the vulnerable." They also accuse Eric Pickles, the Local Government Secretary of State, of “letting down” users of council services and of refusing to work with local councillors.

This mini rebellion comes a day after the Lib Dem peer Lord Oakeshott resigned as the Lib Dem’s treasury spokesperson, after criticising the government’s pitifully weak deal with the bankers, branding treasury negotiators as “incompetent”, for “not being able to negotiate themselves out of a paper bag”. Furthermore, Oakeshott is known to be close to Vince Cable, the Business Secretary and deputy leader of the Lib Dems, whose fate now looks to hang on the outcome of the government commission on the future of banking, under the chairmanship of Sir John Vickers, which is due to report later this year.

I also noted with interest, that Francis Maude, Cabinet office minister, was heckled on BBC television Question Time, when he was trying blame the last government for the public spending cuts that are being enforced by the coalition. He also seemed to lose it the previous night on BBC Newsnight, when he was debating the cuts.

The Labour leader Ed Miliband advised the Prime Minister, David Cameron, at PM’s questions in Parliament this week, “not to get so angry,” when responding to questions. Of course Cameron specialises in the ‘Flashman’ role of public school bully, but it does seem to me that both the coalition government’s parties are getting rattled. This should come as no great surprise, opinion polls continue to show a draining of support for the Tories and particularly the Lib Dems, and the bulk of the public spending cuts have not even been felt fully by the voters yet.

The honeymoon period for this government, which has not been in power for a year yet, is well and truly over. Contrast this to the last Labour government, which was riding high in the opinion polls for several years after it was elected, and we can, I think, see the beginning of the end for the ConDem administration.

They have had some success with the ‘blaming the previous government’ line for everything for a while, but I think this is wearing a little thin now. People are coming to realise that this government is ideologically committed to hacking back the state, and with it, the welfare state, whilst lining the pockets of the rich at the expense of lower and middle income people.

If the referendum on the Alternative Vote is lost, and either way, this is bound to cause some turmoil within the coalition, we could well see the coalition torn apart later this year. A general election can’t come quick enough for me, and I look forward to 57 ‘Portillo’ moments as the Lib Dem MP’s are kicked out, and this odious government is ejected.

Tax Justice

2011-02-10T04:03:00.000-08:00

Tax Justice from PCS Union TV on Vimeo.

This video is from the PCS trade union. It challenges the myth put around by the government (and other establishment bodies) that ‘there is no alternative’ to draconian public spending cuts being imposed on the ‘little’ people, to tackle the budget deficit.

Government ministers are fond of referring to people who do not accept their prescription, as ‘deficit deniers’ but there is another way as this video points out. Tax avoidance and evasion costs the country billions of pounds, but there is no real attempt to stop this. Contrast this with the time and effort which goes into the relatively minor loss of revenue that is down to fraudulent benefit claims.

ConDem Government to Facilitate People Trafficking

2011-02-08T03:35:00.001-08:00

I read in The Independent on Sunday that the government is to scrap safeguards for people who are trafficked into the UK for use in the sex industry and elsewhere, and could not believe what I was reading. This government has really sunk to the depths of callousness. Below is a letter I have sent to Lynne Featherstone, Lib Dem MP for Hornsey and Wood Green and Minister for Equalities. When she replies, I will publish it here on this blog.

To: Lynne Featherstone MP, Minister for Equalities

Dear Ms Featherstone,

I am writing to you after reading a very disturbing story in the Independent on Sunday, about the coalition government’s plans to scrap safeguards on human trafficking into the UK.

The piece reports that some 4,000 people, mostly women are brought into the UK each year to work in the sex trade, and many more, including children, are smuggled in to work as domestic servants, farm hands and drug cultivators.

It goes on to say that government plans will:

Close The Gang Masters Licensing Authority

Close The Metropolitan Police’s Human Trafficking Unit

Close the government’s Human Trafficking Centre.

Cut funding by almost a half for The ‘Poppy Project’ which provides shelter for trafficked women

The Border Agency’s ‘reflection’ time for deciding whether a person has been trafficked is to be reduced from 45 to 30 days

The EU directive against trafficking has not been adopted in the UK

The Independent does say that there is some disquiet amongst Lib Dem MP’s and ministers, but is disquiet going to be enough to put right this disgraceful state of affairs?

I am asking you, as my constituency MP and Minister for Equalities, to use all the means at your disposal to reverse these planned changes, which would be a callous dereliction of duty to the abused people who suffer this abhorrent treatment.

Arrogance, Ignorance and Greed

2011-02-07T04:05:00.000-08:00

This video song is by UK folk band Show of Hands, and is about our old friends the bankers. The lyrics are reproduced below:

All I wanted was a home
And a roof over our heads
Somewhere we could call our own
Feel safer in our beds

There was a storm of money raining down
It only touched the ground
With a loan I took I can’t repay
And the crock of gold you found

At every trough you stopped to feed
With your Arrogance, your Ignorance and Greed.

I never was a cautious man
I spend more than I’m paid
But those with something put aside
Are the ones that you betrayed

With your bonuses and expenses
You shovelled down your throat
Now you bit the hand that fed you
Dear God I hope you choke

At every trough you stopped to feed
With your Arrogance, your Ignorance and Greed.

You're on your yacht, we’re on our knees
Through your Arrogance, your Ignorance and Greed.

Toxics springs you tapped and sold,
Poisoned every watering hole
Your probity, you exchanged for gold

Working man stands in line
The market sets his price
No feather bed, no golden egg
No one pays him twice

So where's your thrift, your caution
Your honest sound advice
You know you dealt yourself a winning hand
And loaded every dice

At every trough you stopped to feed
With your Arrogance, your Ignorance and Greed.

I pray one day we’ll soon be free
From your absolute indifference
Your avarice, incompetence
Your Arrogance, your Ignorance and your Greed.

What are Left and Right in Politics?

2011-02-03T03:21:00.001-08:00

I noticed a post on The Daily (Maybe) the other day, where Jim writes about a Yougov survey asking whether people consider themselves to be either left or right politically, and to what extent. Perhaps the most interesting finding is that 30% of the people surveyed were ‘don’t knows’. This got me to thinking is the left/right terminology out dated, and not particularly relevant to the politics of today?

Admittedly, there are many grey areas when trying to categorise a person’s views on a number of issues, for example something like being pro freedom and civil liberties could be a right or left wing position, but equally being authoritarian and in effect anti civil liberties could be a right or left wing position (think of Hitler and Stalin).

Concern for the environment tends to be a left wing position, for example if you asked people on the climate change demonstrations, the vast majority would say they are on the left. Karl Marx had a green side to him too, take this quote from his third volume of Capital as an example:

“From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.”

On the other hand, environmentalism has a right wing strain, the Nazi’s in 1930’s Germany extolled the importance of the soil, German soil particularly and the importance of working the land. The England and Wales Green party’s precursor party (PEOPLE and then the Ecology party) was started by the Tory Teddy Goldsmith (uncle of Zac, Tory MP) and Jonathan Porritt is a close friend of the Prince of Wales.

The Green party these days is a party of the left though, and I was amused whilst watching the Daily Politics show on the BBC last week, on which Green party leader Caroline Lucas was a guest. A man from the audience said, ‘you’re just green on the outside, but red in the middle’. To which Caroline replied, ‘do you have a problem with that?’

So things are not clear cut when trying to place people and opinions into convenient categories of left and right, but I think there is still something useful in the labels in getting a feel of where people are at. For me, an absolute left position must include a commitment to equality. Equality of opportunity, not discriminating on the basis of gender, race, sexual orientation, age etc, but more than this equality of income and lifestyle. I’m not saying everyone should be paid the same wage, but the gap between lowest and highest is now a scandal.

The scary thing for me is, that if 30% of people don’t see it this way, then politics just becomes a meaningless managerial exercise, no passion or belief, and I might as well pack up this blog and go and find another hobby.

Tory / Lib Dem Electoral Pact on the Cards

2011-01-29T09:42:00.000-08:00

The Independent newspaper reported on Friday 28th January here,that senior members of both coalition parties are thinking of entering into an electoral pact at the next general election.

When I first saw the Oldham East by-election result, I was struck by how well the Lib Dems had done, considering their plummeting opinion poll ratings. The Independent piece though, claims that Tory voters’ voted tactically for the Lib Dems as the best way to defeat Labour. As it happens, Labour won, with the Tory vote down sharply but the Lib Dem vote down only slightly. The reasoning for this put forward in The Independent was Tory voters switching to the Lib Dems, and thus avoiding wipe out for their coalition partners.

Figures in both governing parties are openly suggesting that they should give each other an easy ride in future by-elections and at the next general election, citing the low profile campaign in Oldham East by the Tories, as a template for the future. The thinking is that an anti-Labour electoral alliance could be constructed to keep the coalition government in power for the foreseeable future.

Furthermore, I argued here on this blog, that if the Alternative Vote referendum is passed into law, which is a big if at present, then this will help facilitate the Tory and Lib Dem strategy even more. That is, they will then be able to openly state that their voter’s second preference votes under AV, should be given to their coalition partner. Together with the government’s proposed boundary changes and the reduction of the number of constituencies (those that will disappear are all Labour held seats in inner cities) this could well keep the coalition in power for as long as Mubarak in Egypt.

So, why should the Green party be concerned about Labour being permanently out of government? Well, it is true that Labour are no ‘greener’ than the Tories or Lib Dems, perhaps even less so, and that their social policies were only slightly better than the current government’s when they were in office.

From a Green party electoral point of though, I can only see us getting any influence at Westminster in a coalition or such with a minority Labour government. Labour (members anyway) are closer to Green party social policy than either Tories or the new right wing Lib Dems, and personally I get on better with Labour people than Tories or Lib Dems in general. Despite the last couple of decades, a lot of Labour people still see themselves as on the left politically, which is perhaps more of a gut feeling these days than anything particularly demonstrable, but all the same I think it would make it easier for us Greens to connect with Labour than the other main parties.

As I explained in the previous post referred to earlier, AV would not significantly help a Labour / Green electoral pact, and the danger is that we will be stuck with the coalition in government with no realistic means of ejecting them from office. Also, it will encourage elements in the Labour party to tack even further to right, to try and win over right wing voters, which will lead to us having a permanent reactionary government, even if Labour does gain power again.

Are The Cuts Necessary?

2010-12-24T04:41:00.001-08:00

As Britain faces the biggest ever assault on the main planks of the welfare state – benefits, the NHS, education and local Council services, not to mention legal aid – a remarkable proportion of the public still think the pain is needed. The opinion polls disagree on how citizens are reacting to the October spending review. KPMG/Ipsos Mori, for the Times, found that two in three people agree that there is a need to cut spending on public services (59 per cent) compared to a third who disagree (32 per cent), a higher pro-cuts majority than in September. However, a Guardian/ICM poll in late October found that more people now oppose coalition plans for cuts than support them, with 48% of voters saying the cuts go too far, 36% thinking the balance is right and 8% wanting them to go further. That’s 44% pro cuts, compared to 47% in September and 55% in July. But, commented the Guardian’s Julian Glover, ‘there is no full-scale revolt against the coalition measures after last week's comprehensive spending review, with Labour slipping behind the Conservatives for the first time in the Guardian polling series since July.’ Unfair in the choice of what to cut, but overall, inevitable, is the public verdict according the pollsters. (They may be wrong if they fail to speak to those in crisis, the disabled, the homeless, and those who work 60 hours a week to pay their debts – but does the coalition care about those who often don’t vote ? Or indeed about anyone until they face the music in 2015, by which time the limited gains of two generations of the left will have been smashed ?).

But cuts are not necessary, says Caroline Lucas’ latest pamphlet, ‘Cuts, A Callous Con Trick’ (see http://www.financeforthefuture.com/TaxBriefing.pdf - co-authors are Colin Hines and Richard Murphy of Finance for the Future, which works to combat tax avoidance and evasion). The alternative to cuts is a fair, efficient, progressive tax system. By recouping unpaid and avoided tax, by closing many concessions and loopholes for the rich and the big companies, and by restoring rates of personal taxation on high incomes to what they were in the late 1970s, cuts could be avoided. Some of these proposals were already in the Green election manifesto; this pamphlet and a parallel one by Compass (‘In Place of Cuts: Tax reform to build a fairer society’ – see http://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/item.asp?d=1533 ) comes up with quite a few more.

And the spectre of the suspicious bond markets – or the gnomes of Zurich, as we used to call them in the 1970s ? Well, Lucas et al. note that 90% of British government bonds are held by companies and individuals IN BRITAIN. They probably include your pension fund and mine. And as Lucas shows, the level of UK debt, or the deficit (annual spending minus tax revenue) is not that large by historic or international standards.

The reality of course is that the Coalition just wants to scrap the welfare state. That’s including the right wing of the Lib Dems, who deceived many by preparing for a Tory alliance and Tory policies behind the scenes. The crisis is just a convenient cover and excuse. Britain is just one more instance of the ‘shock doctrine’ described by Naomi Klein in her book of that name – the use of an economic crisis by corporate lobbyists and free-market ideologues to manoeuvre a government into emergency measures that kill off the public sector.

So what to do ? By 2015 the NHS will have been dismembered, managed in effect by the big private healthcare companies and the SERCOs, Capitas, etc which will probably run the commissioning consortia for GPs. Several universities will have been starved into closure. Another generation of school kids will have grown up in poverty with shrinking family benefits, to become as workless as their parents became in 2008-10. Growth, yes, but of drug dealing and prostitution in the streets and parasitic private contractors taking over town halls, hospitals, and job centres. Can we afford to wait another four and a half years for an election ? ‘Building for the next election’ – national or even local – is inadequate; we need to find other and faster ways of stopping the institutional bonfire that is taking place.

Greens have jointed with other forces of the left in the Coalition of Resistance, which drew over 1400 people to a conference in Camden on 27th November (see http://www.coalitionofresistance.org.uk/2010/11/video-from-saturdays-coalition-of-resistance-conference/) . Trade unions, residents’ and health campaigns, and activists from several political parties came together to discuss how to stop the ConDems’ attack on the welfare state. Marches and occupations are becoming the order of the day and John McDonnell, MP drew applause when he suggested that the recent demonstrations to demand Vodafone pay their ‘excused’ tax bills of up to £6bn could be repeated for each of the worst 100 tax-avoiding companies.

Local Councils can play a key part in the resistance. Our Councillors need to be pushed by their workforce and by local residents to refuse to cut services. Thanks to a change in the law in 2000, they can no longer be surcharged as individuals for refusing to follow government directives on Council budgets. (See The Socialist, 18-24 November 2010, on http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/). As that article wisely argues, and as many activists said at the Coalition of Resistance conference, Councils can decide to spend more than the government ‘settlement’ permits, using their reserves and their borrowing powers to buy time and force central government to reconsider. Haringey for example has reserves of over £57 million – larger than the cuts they say they ‘have’ to make. But the reaction of the Coalition should not be under-estimated. The Tories abolished the GLC and other metropolitan councils for continually opposing what they did. Since the millennium, central government has acquired new powers to take over ‘failing councils’. Just as primary health care trusts (though never democratic and not particularly to be mourned!) are being abolished at the stroke of the Secretary of State’s pen, who knows what might happen to local government itself ? This is a struggle which will inevitably go beyond the everyday ‘democratic process’ because that process is itself liable to come under attack.

The danger is that ‘stop the cuts’ will become too vague and general a slogan unless we tell councillors clearly what we want. For a start, we can tell them:-

1) to avoid cuts by using Council reserves and by prudential borrowing. (We can also call upon all opposition forces to support a national position that 'if we are elected, we will work to eliminate debts incurred as a result of this borrowing')
2) to refuse to evict those in rent arrears because of Housing Benefit cuts and take appropriate action against other landlords who do so
3) not to reduce Council Tax Benefit if and when the ConDems’ new welfare proposals are enacted and permit this
4) to use their powers to 'call in' and refer local NHS re-organisation proposals, including GP commissioning consortia, foundation hospitals, cuts in important treatments, preventive services and hospital facilities
5) to reduce wasteful and/or ecologically damaging forms of spending; in short, to review use of energy and fuel, paper, advertising, and procurement generally. The important thing is to save jobs, and to invest in technologies which will create jobs and save the planet

Written by Anne Gray
Haringey Green Party

Usual Pathetic Response to Snow at Heathrow

2010-12-23T04:50:00.001-08:00

Well, I said that I wouldn’t be blogging for a month or so, but my travel plans have been severely disrupted by the snow at Heathrow Airport on Saturday. I was due to fly out on Sunday, 19 December, but am still here at home in London.

I should say, this being a green blog, that my addiction to flying has been considerably moderated in recent years, once I understood the effects of flying on climate change. But people shouldn’t avoid flying altogether, sometimes it is acceptable, to see loved ones etc. This trip was to celebrate 25 years with my partner, and had been planned for some time, and factored in with a fair amount of abstinence from flying over the last couple of years.

Anyway, we have now been rescheduled to fly from Heathrow on 27 December, a full eight days after our original booking. We had the offer of a bus to Paris and perhaps a flight from there, but my confidence that we wouldn’t be stuck there for days has been dented by the events of recent days.

Firstly, the airline, I won’t mention them particularly because I don’t think they have been any worse than other airline. On Sunday we couldn’t get any information at all from them on when we might fly. On Monday we got through to the telephone number we had been given, but no news. Tuesday was the offer of a bus ride to Paris and onward flight. Today, nothing new, except we noticed that they were still selling flights for 27 December, and enquired if we could be rescheduled for then? After much argument with the call centre, this was agreed, so hopefully we’ll be away then.

The travel agent seems to have closed down, because they never answer their phone. But I put the most blame for this fiasco on the airport authority at Heathrow. British Airports Authority (BAA) who own Heathrow, have been a complete shambles. The excuse is that we don’t get these weather conditions regularly in the UK, but it’s been this way for the last three winters.

The bad weather was forecast days in advance of Saturday, but no plans appear to have been put in place. Heathrow is still running below full capacity as I write on Wednesday night, but for two days hardly any aircraft moved in or out of the airport. Why they were able to get one runway working and not the other for two days is a mystery.

We had three inches of snow and the premier airport in the UK was completely shut down for days, and will take over a week to clear the backlog. Other countries manage perfectly well in these adverse weather conditions, but they put investment and planning into the operation, which BAA has clearly failed to do.

Perhaps a more pertinent example of how crap BAA has been is to compare it to Manchester Airport. Hardly any flights from Manchester have been cancelled, except those flying to an airport where they couldn’t land, like Heathrow. Manchester Airport is publically owned, by the local authority, and seems to have managed much better than the privatised, Spanish owned BAA. Manchester must have fall back equipment and plans that BAA just thought weren’t worth the investment, and would interfere with their main function, making profits.

This is like a microcosm of everything that happens in this country these days. The majority of the country is run by spivs, and everything about publicly owned services is derided as old fashioned and inefficient. Take a look at the fiasco at Heathrow and tell me how much better this is than a publically run airport like Manchester.

Photo from Sky News

Happy Xmas to all our Readers

2010-12-18T08:09:00.000-08:00

I will be travelling for the next month or so, and will not be posting for a while. Hopefully, my local party colleagues will post some stories in the meantime.

Happy Xmas and New Year.

Government Cuts Grants to Urban Local Authorities

2010-12-17T03:36:00.001-08:00

The Coalition government has announced the level of grant funding to be given to local authorities in England for the next two financial years. You can see the full council by council list here courtesy of The Guardian newspaper.

The figures for ‘revenue spending power’ are the amount each council will receive minus a local authority’s other income, mainly council rents. The ‘formula grant’ figure is how much (compared to this year) councils will get in direct grant from the government. Why the figures have been presented this way, is an interesting question, and the cynics amongst you may well conclude this has done to muddy the water somewhat, where drastic cuts in grant are being imposed.

With Council Tax being virtually frozen over this period, cuts in local services are inevitable. What is striking from even a quick look through the figures, is that local authorities in urban (generally Labour voting) areas will be cut by much more than rural (Tory and Lib Dem voting areas). Indeed somewhere like Dorset for example, will get a small increase (0.25%) and others such as Wokingham, Richmond upon Thames and Buckinghamshire, all get a less than 1% reduction. This is quite clearly a political move, and does fit in with the ConDem government strategy of encouraging comfortable areas, where they expect to win votes, and poor areas which they do not give a damn about, as they know they will never vote for the ConDem government anyway.

And so, to our own fair borough of Haringey in north London. Haringey is a fairly typical inner city area, certainly for London, but also reminiscent of many urban boroughs in England. Haringey will receive 11.30% less grant in 2011/2012 than it did this year, which is calculated as reducing the council’s ‘revenue spending power’ by 7.9% over the same period. This is in line with most urban areas, and will mean that the council here and in similar areas will need to cut front line services, and with it jobs. Talk of efficiency savings and the like are nonsense, to make cuts this deep something has to be sacrificed, and it seems likely that adult care and childcare sectors will bear the main brunt, and those workers doing very important work, will lose their jobs.

Haringey council is the largest employer in the borough, which already has one of the highest levels of unemployment in the country, so a cut of maybe 1 in 8 in its workforce, will have a devastating affect on employment in the area and of course the services that are being provided by the council. Even before the scale of the cuts were announced, Haringey council leader Claire Kober is quoted in the Hornsey Journal as saying, “It is not possible to remove upwards of £50million from our budget without significant job losses.”

Moreover, the fact the bulk of the cuts are to be ‘front loaded’, that is, will come in the next financial year, means a sharp reduction in the services Haringey currently provides, and is guaranteed pretty much immediately. This will prolong the economic recession, because the private sector is in no shape to make up the difference in employment in the short term, if at all.

The short term prospects for jobs and local services is therefore pretty grim, unless the people can force a change in government policy, or better still, throw them out altogether and elect a more compassionate and less reckless alternative government.

Rise up people, and overturn their plan (thanks to Captain Ska for the inspirational line).

Tuition Fees Protest Gives Inspiration to Resistance Campaign

2010-12-16T03:05:00.000-08:00

This is a video of a speech by fifteen year old Barnaby to a Coalition of Resistance meeting in Camden, after the recent anti tuition fees protest. The Green party fully supports the Coalition Of Resistance, and co-sponsored the meeting.

He makes the point, that contemporary thinking is that young people are not interested in politics, but demonstrates that this is not case.

The student protests have lifted the whole anti cuts etc movement, and gives us something to build upon. Well done to the students, this is just the beginning of resistance to this disastrous government programme of ending the welfare state.

The University Tuition Fees Vote in Parliament

2010-12-08T08:37:00.000-08:00

MP’s will vote in Parliament on Thursday 9th December on the ConDem coalition government proposals to raise university tuition fees from £3,000 to £9,000 per year, per student. This hike in tuition fees is bound to deter many people from taking up studies, at a time when work is scarce and we are constantly told that we need to have a high skilled economy and workforce, once the up turn does materialise.

The Green party would scrap these fees altogether, believing that higher education is a social good which benefits society as a whole, but the main political argument surrounding this issue has been the position adopted by the Lib Dems.

The Lib Dems campaigned against university tuition fees at this year’s general election, in quite explicit terms, with Nick Clegg their leader amongst them, even going as far as publicly signing a pledge to scrap the fees. Although reports have surfaced in the press that months before the election, the Lib Dem leadership had already decided to ditch this policy; so claims that this was a necessary compromise of coalition government is particularly dishonest, and quite frankly, shameful.

Students from wealthy backgrounds will be financially unaffected by this rise in fees, because their parents will cover the costs, and those from the poorest families will be exempt from paying, although the proposals will also end Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) for 16 to 18 year olds from these backgrounds, which reduces their chances of going to university in the first place.

It is students in the lower to middle income category that will be most directly affected, with the prospect of starting out in working life with something like £40,000 to £50,000 in debt, which is a daunting enough thought for anyone.

Will Lib Dem MP’s back these proposals, given that only six months ago they were completely against tuition fees? Some of these MP’s have said they will vote against the proposals, but the twenty that are government ministers have said they will vote in favour, and this should be enough with most Tory MP’s sure to vote in favour for the proposals to get a majority in the House of Commons, sadly. But, the arithmetic is pretty tight so it will be interesting to see the result on Thursday.

I think if the proposals are passed, it will be extremely damaging to the Lib Dem party, and this might just convince enough of their MP’s that they could save their own necks by voting against. The public at large, when politicians make explicit pledges to do something or not do something, then do the complete opposite when the votes are bagged, tend to punish these same politicians at the next electoral opportunity. Many unhappy voters will be students, and ex students, who thought they were voting against tuition fees, votes the Lib Dems can ill afford to lose. And quite right too, politicians bending the truth is one thing, telling barefaced lies, is quite another.

Photo from the NewStatesman

The London Bombings - The Need to Know the Truth

2010-11-25T01:16:00.000-08:00

The ConDem government has failed in its attempt to have part of the evidence at the inquiry into the London bombings of 7 July 2005, held in private. The High Court backed the decision of the coroner, Lady Justice Hallett, to allow bereaved relatives of the attack, to hear all the evidence. The government is expected to appeal the decision, claiming that it will compromise national security, which is the fail-safe argument used by the authorities when they want to cover something up.

At the time I was working close to Edgware Road tube station, where one of the four bombs was detonated, and it was at the usual time I arrived at the station. That I wasn’t there at fateful time is a matter of luck really. I arrived at my local Piccadilly line tube station at about 8.15am, only to find the station closed. An underground worker informed me that there was a ‘power failure’. I took an overland train to Finsbury Park station, intending to get onto the Victoria line to Kings Cross, but found the Piccadilly line was now working, so took that to Kings Cross.

As I was ascending the escalator at Kings Cross, to make my connection onto the Circle line to Edgware Road, the emergency sirens sounded, with instructions for everyone to evacuate Kings Cross station. This must have been around 9am. On exiting, I milled around with hundreds of other passengers at the front of the station, waiting for an all clear to continue my journey. At about 9.10am, a police officer rushed towards us, waving his arms, shouting ‘get away from the station’.

I decided to complete my journey to work on a bus, and managed to get onto one going to Marble Arch, where I could walk the rest of the way. I arrived at work at about 10.15am, and my colleagues there were still talking of power failures, but I had noticed a cloud of black smoke hanging over Edgware Road station. Then news started to come through of the bombings.

I feel extremely lucky that I wasn’t caught up in any of this, but have also reflected that the events I witnessed were suspicious. Why was the Piccadilly line closed at 8.15am, but open again around 8.45am? Why did the emergency alarm sound at Kings Cross some ten minutes before any of the explosions? And why was the story of a power failure put about by the authorities? Also, why have we seen so few photo images of the bombers on the day, when the London Underground has hundreds of CCTV cameras?

It has now come to light that at least two of the bombers were known to MI5 to be in contact with terrorists nearly a year and a half before the attack. This is not a conspiracy theory rant, indeed the holding of evidence behind closed doors only fuels these type of rumours. But we need to know what the security services knew and when, and why they failed to stop bombers. Not only the relatives of those killed in the bombings need to know the truth, but the public at large needs to have confidence in the security services, so this inquiry should be conducted in the open, for all to see.

Council Tax Benefit Goes Local

2010-11-13T13:53:00.001-08:00

The ConDem government has announced that the amount of Council Tax Benefit (CTB) from 2013 onwards will be decided by local authorities. This is being ‘sold’ by the government as part of its localisation agenda, allowing local councils to decide more policies for their areas. The Green party has long advocated transferring political power to its lowest, local level, but this policy is an extremely damaging one, and the government has another, barely hidden agenda in wanting to facilitate it.

Like everything that comes out of the ConDem government, this policy shift is all about saving money at the expense of the poorest people in the country. CTB is paid to the unemployed, and workers and pensioners on low incomes. This is how CTB will change if the ConDems get their way.

At present CTB is administered by local authorities but the entire funding comes from central government. The proposed changes will see local authorities getting a ‘grant’ from central government, similar to the present arrangements, but this grant will be 10% less than that which they currently receive. From there on in, it is down the local authority to pay this benefit.

Clearly, if local councils want to maintain payments at current levels, then they will have to find the money elsewhere in their budgets. This is not a realistic proposition for councils at present (or in 2013) as pressure is on them to make savings in all service areas, as part of central government’s budget deficit reduction programme. So it is pretty much nailed on that CTB will be reduced in most areas by at least 10%.

I say at least 10%, because it is likely to be reduced further in some local authorities because the change proposal also allows councils to set the amount of CTB that they pay to claimants. They can even pay no CTB if they so decide, and you can imagine Tory and Lib Dem run councils thinking that they can pass on savings in CTB by setting a lower Council Tax. Thus, yet again money will be transferred from those on the lowest incomes to those on higher incomes. It will make Tory and Lib Dem voters happy, and those on CTB who will suffer, well, they probably vote Labour or Green anyway, so who cares?

It is also likely to add to the social cleansing agenda that will reduce Housing Benefit (HB) which I blogged about previously here, with CTB claimants being forced out of areas that do not pay CTB, and into (poorer) areas that may continue to pay the benefit at anything like its full rate.

This very important change to the benefit system has gone hardly reported in the media, although admittedly there are many important benefit changes being proposed by the ConDem government, but these fundamental changes to a vital benefit must be opposed by all fair minded people. If they get away this, our nation will be divided and into comfortable areas and poverty stricken ghettos.

Anti Cuts Music Video, Liar Liar

2010-11-10T11:07:00.000-08:00

This is a fabulous video/song from Captain Ska (twitter page here). It feels like we are back in the 1980’s, Ska and reggae bands making political songs, Specials, The Beat, UB40 etc.

Let’s hope that the people do indeed rise up and stop these terrible cuts which will impact on the poorest in our society.

We’re All In It Together (Not)

2010-11-08T14:44:00.000-08:00

At a time when public and private sector final salary pension schemes are under attack, see my previous post here for an example, The Guardian newspaper reports that teachers in private schools such as Eton and Harrow, are having their pensions subsidised by the tax payer. Teachers at the Prime Minister, Chancellor and Deputy Prime Minister’s schools all benefit from this public subsidy to their pensions.

A Freedom of Information Act (FOI) request from the Green party to the Department for Education (DfE) reveals that more than 62,000 teachers, including 1,600 at the country’s top private schools at a cost of around £40m per year at the top 100 private schools to the public purse. The DfE deems it necessary to give this subsidy because private sector money purchase pensions are less reliable than public sector final salary schemes, as they are reliant on the vagaries of the financial markets. The taxpayer therefore has been topping up private school teacher’s pensions by around a 6% contribution per year.

Noel Lynch, Chair of the London Green party who initiated the FOI request said: “It’s scandalous that taxpayers are unknowingly paying towards the pensions of teachers at schools like Eton and Harrow. It will come as a surprise to a lot of people that these elite, private sector employers have access to the government’s Teachers’ Pension Scheme to the tune of over £40 million.

“It’s unfair that these schools are exempted from the risks of stock market fluctuations while other similar sized organisations must suffer the consequences of a volatile market.”

So, not only will teachers at the top private schools earn more but they also have a comparable pension to public sector teachers. On top of this, private schools such as Eton are allowed charity status, and so are exempt from paying tax, when by anyone’s estimation Eton is not a charity but an extremely privileged institution. This makes it easy for private schools to attract the best teachers and perpetuates the class divide in our society. At a time of public spending cuts, how can a tax handout from ordinary people to the teachers of children of the most wealthy people in the country be justified?

For most workers, there is trade off between higher salaries in the private sector or a potentially more secure pension in the public sector, but teachers in private schools can have it both ways, without ever having to work even a single day in a public sector school, all at the expense of the tax payer. Claims by the government about the financial crisis that ‘we are all in it together’ and ‘those with the broadest shoulders should carry the heaviest burden’ and such like are not borne out by government policy.

The Green Party believes that this money should be ploughed into more urgent areas within the education budget such as building new local schools in deprived areas and employing more teachers in the public sector to reduce class sizes.

Greenest Government Ever Claims Are Pure Spin

2010-11-07T05:54:00.000-08:00

Prime Minister David Cameron’s claim, that his would be the greenest government ever, are proving to be all words and no action. In the recent Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR), the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) had its budget slashed by 30%, considerably more than the government department average of 19%. Around 8,000 jobs will be lost.

Further savings will be made by reducing spending on flood defence by around a third and consideration is being given to the selling off of National Nature Reserves. The government has also announced that a review of the regulation of food and farming. This could well lead to less regulation in this industry, which has a history of damaging biodiversity and water pollution. Look at what less regulation did to the banking industry and our economy. Environmental standards need to be strictly enforced, or firms will neglect their duties to protect our natural environment when it suits them.

The ‘Warm Front’ initiative, which provides money to people for energy efficiency measures like home insulation, on a means tested basis, is to be ended after next year. By doing this, the government is turning its back on the poorest in our society, not for the first time, and condemning them to a future of fuel poverty. At the same time, they are cutting thousands of jobs of the workers who have been carrying out this work, at a time of mass unemployment. These energy efficiency measures would eventually pay for themselves as well as reducing the country’s carbon footprint, but the ‘greenest government ever’ is more interested in cutting the budget deficit, than expanding or even continuing this sensible policy.

Transport policy comes off no better in the CSR. From 2012 the cost of rail travel will increase by 30% over the next five years. Commuters will be particularly badly hit by these increases, with for example, a rise of £1000 per year for someone commuting from Brighton to London over this period. Bus fares across the country will also rise as there will be a 20% cut in the fuel subsidy that bus companies get by 2015. In London, bus and underground fares will rise by 2% above inflation, meaning a single bus fare will rise by 10p per journey from next year. This at a time when we should be encouraging people to use public transport, and so reduce traffic congestion and our carbon emissions.

So, how can Cameron make this ridiculous claim of being the greenest government? Well, its pure spin. A kind of feel good factor for the public, if you say you are green often enough, then people will think it’s true. The facts on the other hand, tell a completely different story.

Lib Dem U-Turn on Nuclear Power

2010-11-02T12:35:00.000-07:00

This video of Chris Huhne, Lib Dem MP and ConDem Coalition Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, outlines the Lib Dem policy on nuclear power BEFORE this year’s general election.

He now supports nuclear power, along with the rest of the coalition government, and this video has been removed from the Lib Dem’s website. But you can still see it here on this blog, in all its breathtaking duplicity.

How can you trust whatever the Lib Dems say in future?

Social Cleansing in London

2010-10-30T05:29:00.001-07:00

Boris Johnson, Tory mayor of London, has been courting controversy again with a comment he made in a radio interview about the coalition government’s proposed policies on Housing Benefit. Johnson said that he was not prepared to tolerate a ‘Kosova style social cleansing in London on his watch’. It is not the first time that he has made controversial statements in the media, but this time he has provoked outrage from government ministers, who have accused him off ‘making inflammatory remarks’.

It is perhaps a rather over the top comparison to cite Kosova, but he sure knows how to capture the attention of the media, and he is highlighting a very important issue. He may have been more accurate to compare government Housing Benefit changes to the enclosures and clearances of land in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain, where huge amounts of rural land was cleared of inhabitants who were forced into the burgeoning urban areas by wealthy landowners.

Make no mistake about it, these changes to HB will cause profound social upheaval. The particular policy of capping the amount of payments to a third of ‘market’ value (down from a half) from next year, was what Johnson had in mind. In wealthy parts of London, HB claimants will be unable to afford private sector rents, and so will be forced into cheaper areas of the capital or outside of London altogether.

The Guardian newspaper reports that Haringey will suffer from an exodus in the wealthy western parts of the borough and an influx into the cheaper eastern areas, from claimants within Haringey and from outside more expensive boroughs. All this will lead to more pressure on other services, such as hospitals, schools and social services in the east of the borough, not to mention housing overcrowding, making these parts of Haringey more deprived than they already are.

Another change to HB which will cause social problems is the twelve month rule. HB claimants will automatically lose 10% of their benefit after twelve months, whether they are on Jobseekers Allowance or in low paid employment. How are these people meant to make up the difference when they are already on the breadline? Inevitably, this will lead to evictions and homelessness which in turn will lead to health issues and probably an increase in crime, at a time when police numbers, prison places and probation officers are all being cut.

Clearly huge sums are being spent on HB at the moment, but why punish the claimants when the problem is caused by a lack of affordable social housing and astronomical ‘free market’ rents in the private sector, in London particularly?

We are moving towards the kind of problems we saw in the 1980’s with poor ghettos becoming increasingly unsettled and a powder keg which exploded into urban riots in these areas in the end.

This is the ConDem government future, and it’s not going to be pretty.

The End of the Universal Welfare State

2010-10-06T10:18:00.000-07:00

The announcement by George Osborne at the Conservative party conference this week, of the ending of Child Benefit for those paying higher rate income tax (earning of just under £44K), signals a break with the post war consensus of universal benefits in the UK.

On the face of it, why are people earning £44K getting handouts from the taxpayer, when savings need to made in public spending? Well, even leaving aside the anomaly that two parents earning £43K will still be allowed to claim this benefit, but a single wage earner on £44K will be disallowed, which raises questions of fairness, we also need to look a little deeper into this policy.

It is no coincidence that Child Benefit is paid at the same the rate to all parents, regardless of their income. The fact one partner, almost always the man, is earning a good wage, is no guarantee that this money will find its way to the child(ren). It has long been the view that direct payments to mothers is the surest way to get money to children, as unfortunately, fathers are not always reliable in this department. The problem of middle class child poverty is not uncommon, and this has been recognised in the universality of Child Benefit, ever since its inception.

Of equal importance though, is the very concept of universal benefits. If welfare benefits are seen by the middle classes as something that they have to pay for in tax, but are never going to claim, it undermines the whole basis of our welfare state. Prior to the second world war, what benefits did exists, were means tested, and therefore stigmatised, as a hand out from the wealthy to the poor.

The founders of the British welfare state in the post war period understood that the middle classes had to feel that there is something in the welfare state for them to want to continue contributing to the costs, and so designed welfare around the universal principle.

This is not the first time that Conservative and Labour governments have chipped away at universality, since Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979. It is hard to imagine, for example, that before this, unemployment benefit was paid at 55% related to earnings for the first twelve months of a claim, a situation which (although even better) still exists in France and other European countries. And, it will probably not be the last time, as the spotlight falls on free public transport and winter fuel payments for the retired, for example.

Considering the measly savings to be had by ending universal benefits like Child Benefit (around £1b savings), the price of tearing our society apart into haves and have nots, is too high a one to pay. Why not just tax the rich more, and make the banks pay their fair share of the costs to get us out of this borrowing crisis, that children in particular, had no part in causing.

Local Campaigners Slam Government Threats to Dismantle the NHS

2010-10-04T11:51:00.000-07:00

Open Letter to Secretary of State for Health about the NHS White Paper

Andrew Lansley MP
Secretary of State for Health
Department of Health

1st October 2010

OBJECTIONS TO THE WHITE PAPER

Dear Mr Lansley

We are writing in response to your public consultation exercise, which ends 5th October 2010, to express our alarm and deep opposition to the health reforms proposed by the White Paper.

The NHS is society’s most universally valued public service, and there is overwhelming support for the principle that it is publicly owned and provided, fully tax funded and available to all.

The profound organisational changes proposed by the White Paper represent the most serious threat ever to the existence of the NHS.

Despite the rhetoric of fairness, equality and mutuality, these proposals advocate a widespread privatisation of the health service, introducing a world where hospitals become businesses and where private companies compete in a potentially irreversible NHS market, effectively destroying the 1946 NHS Act.

From a patient’s perspective these proposals are truly frightening, resulting in extreme disruption, fragmentation, increasing health inequalities and extortionate administration costs, in place of patient care. It is clear that the public do not want consumer variety or a postcode lottery; just a seamless service across all regions.

From a GP’s perspective, we find it ominous. These proposals, which would force GPs to form consortia to commission local services and allow unlimited provision of private medicine, do not fit neatly into a GP’s mainstream workload. The majority of GPs are neither in favour of private sector involvement, nor do they possess the necessary skills for commissioning. It is likely that the chosen GPs will become token clinicians within a corporate monstrosity and that “unelected bureaucrats” will eventually be replaced by unelected global bullies.

From a health worker’s perspective the loss of tens of thousands of jobs is inevitable, massively increasing the workload of remaining staff, whilst employment rights across the NHS would be completely eroded, ending national pay agreements including sick pay and pension entitlements, and changing standards and terms of employment beyond recognition. Restrictions on GP commissioning budgets also present a serious risk of bed and ward closures, and of hospitals going bankrupt.

From the general public’s perspective we find the lack of consultation abhorrent, and the discarding of our national treasures in this way completely unacceptable.

With no evidence that the proposals would produce financial savings, public money for health would end up in the pockets of shareholders rather than being spent on patient care, whilst billions of pounds of tax payers’ money would be transferred to private companies, including huge multinational health corporations, many from the United States, with no public accountability.

It is clear to us that the changes you advocate in the White Paper are so profound that they represent nothing less than the dismantling of the NHS as we know it, developing a U.S.-style market-based health system and leaving an NHS only in name.

Yours sincerely,

Signatories

Shirley Franklin (Chair, Defend Whittington Hospital Coalition)
Andy Bain (TSSA President)
Ivy and Alan Beard (Save Chase Farm)
Sarah Boden
Emma Dixon (Islington Green Party)
Mick Gilgunn (Secretary, Islington Trades Union Council)
Katy Gold (Treasurer, Defend Whittington Hospital Coalition)
Sarah Cope (Haringey Green Party)
Gary Heather (Joint Chair, Islington Hands off Our Public Services)
Kathryn Dean (Haringey Green Party)
Jem Lindon
Dr Robert MacGibbon FRCGP
Kieran McGregor (Save Chase Farm)
Rich Moth (Deputy Convenor, Social Work Action Network)
Mike Shaughnessy (Haringey Green Party)
Steve Parry
Ian Shacklock
Angela Sinclair-Loutit (Islington Pensioners Forum)
Alasdair Smith (President, Islington National Union of Teachers)
Sean Wallis (Branch Secretary, University College London, Universities and Colleges
Union)
Kate Wilkinson (Save Chase Farm)
David Wilson

The Coalition Government Doesn’t Have a Mandate

2010-10-03T09:50:00.001-07:00

As the Conservative party gathers for its Autumn conference in Birmingham this week, I think we can expect a torrent of self righteous speeches on the need to cut immediately and deeply into public spending. No doubt the unions will come in for lectures on not standing in the way of the democratically elected government, by mounting demonstrations and strikes.

Protests across Europe against cuts in welfare and public services are spreading, and although they have not in the main been supported by large majorities of union members and public, they are gaining momentum, before the cuts have been introduced proper. It is crucial that the unions carry the public with them, so they need to be careful about exactly what action they take, although to an extent strikes will be unavoidable, given the government’s rhetoric so far on the matter.

It is perfectly democratic for unions or anybody else to protest against these cuts, the government has so far been keen to liberalise on civil liberties, so they should not be hypocritical about union members exercising their rights. But more to the point, this government doesn’t even have a mandate to introduce cuts at the pace they are proposing. The Tories only received 36% of the popular vote at the general election, which did not yield an overall majority for them, so they are reliant on Lib Dem MP’s for a majority; but the Lib Dems did not propose cutting so quickly in their election manifesto, and have had to do a U turn since.

The excuse that is being used to justify this change of heart, is that events have changed, particularly in Greece, so a re think became necessary. But the same re think does not seem to have been demanded by events in Ireland, where their economy has slipped back into recession, and the government’s policies here, are in danger of causing our economy to double dip too.

Of course, this is all just spin. Politicians argue whatever suits them, and it suits the Lib Dems to be in government, ministerial limos and all, so they will say whatever justifies them continuing being in government. If the coalition had any honour, it would call another general election, and try to obtain a proper mandate, but this would decimate the Lib Dems in particular, so pigs will fly before any election is called.

So, just remember when you hear all those pious speeches from Tory delegates, that this government doesn’t have a democratic mandate for their reckless and ruthless cutting agenda.