WOTS LEFT = Love Equality Freedom Truth, and Us...

Swansea Occupation reads Rights

2012-02-05T09:52:00.000-08:00

Here are some often-forgotten human rights, as itemised in the UN General Assembly's Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10th,1948.
A shortened version of the Universal Declaration was read by the General Assembly of Occupy Swansea outside the Swansea Guildhall on December 10th, 2011:

Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948

Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Articles 23-7
Everyone has the right to work, to rest and leisure, to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being, to education, cultural life and share in scientific advancements
Article 28
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

(Signed by 48 countries, with 0 against and 8 abstentions including Soviet bloc countries, Saudi Arabia and white-ruled South Africa)

We also noted some outdated references to 'brotherhood', 'mankind' etc, and an emphasis on individual as distinct from communal rights to property etc. These failings are far outweighed by a determination to make basic rights a reality for all, and by the remarkable prescience of clause 28.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-CuHO-sKE0

Social Economy Survey from London LSX October 2011

2012-02-05T09:19:00.000-08:00

TOWARDS A SOCIAL ECONOMY: SOME IDEAS FROM THE LONDON OCCUPATION AND WORK IN PROGRESS
(Updated in light of latest survey returns)

What’s radical about the London occupations is not, or not yet, an outspoken manifesto but a common recognition that our ‘social democracy’ is neither social nor democratic and a shared determination to do better. A statement agreed at an early General Assembly outside St Pauls described the current system as ‘unsustainable, undemocratic and unjust. We need alternatives and this is where we work towards them…This is what democracy looks like, come and join us.’

This was not good enough for many press commentators and passers-by. ‘You know what you don’t want, but what DO you want?’ they asked. While groups were forming for the serious work, I took it on myself to list some possible answers. I drew on leaflets, posters and discussions I took part in or overheard. I boiled the list down to nine options and set them out in no particular order on a survey form, with a tenth box empty for suggestions. At the top of the form were a couple of positive aims based on the agreed initial statement:
• to build a just, sustainable and democratic economy, putting the good of the majority and the earth before corporate interests and profit for a few
• to practice and promote democracy, deciding between us how we live and work together.
Respondents were asked to tick, cross or query each of the nine options, add amendments and write their own suggestions in box no. 10. I handed out about 450 forms, of which about 100 went to passing visitors. Fifty completed forms were returned to a box-file marked ‘Social Economy’ in the information tent. That’s about 20% of the camp population.

After collating the results, I reordered the options in order of preference. Most respondents (in this small, self-selecting sample) ticked most of the boxes. All the first nine options won majority support. The results below surprised me by their moderation, especially in the light of latest pay figures for top CEOs. Perhaps I should I have included ‘Smash capitalism’ and harvested the ticks for that.

The following list includes respondents’ amendments (underlined). In joint first place were:
1. Alternative economy: individual and collective food-growing, building, making and mending, recycling and exchange (becoming more important if full employment is no longer possible)
2. Support for unions, co-operatives, mutuals, partnerships, profit-sharing and social enterprise - organizations that challenge or improve on conventional capitalism.*
3. Use our stake in bailed-out banks to build affordable homes, schools, sustainable industry and energy, essential services and foreign aid. ‘Quantitative easing’ (printed money) to go to this program, not back into bad banks. Buy out RBS as a National Investment Bank and put QE into new Green Bank.
4. Tax reforms: a) Land value tax to tap underlying wealth and redress basic inequalities; b) One-off wealth tax to pay off national debt and save interest costs; c) Tobin tax on financial transactions to discourage speculation and raise funds for better use; d) Closure of tax havens.
5. Reclaim unused land for food-growing, empty buildings for living or working in. Fight enclosure, take back commons.
6. Corporate reform: to make companies accountable for social and environmental outcomes as well as profit and loss; tighter regulation of banks, private equity and hedge funds. Companies to lead annual reports with statements of social/environmental objectives, pay-differentials and worker-involvement in decision-making.

7. Take individual responsibility for our own actions, spending and savings. Make banks, pension-funds etc tell us how they spend and invest our money.
8. Citizens’ Assemblies, to bring direct democracy to bear on local government, public services and community action.
9.. Social and Environmental Audit (on a par with current Credit ratings) to inform investors, savers, employees and general public of company performance (an alternative to top-down regulation, and involving unions, NGOs, progressive companies etc)
10. Workers councils and support for workers’ buy-outs (combining two write-ins).

Other write-ins included:
- reclaim bankers’ bonuses, base future payments on long-term performance.
- stop privatization of health and education
- tax and cut from top, not bottom. 90% tax for top 1%,
- general strike
- citizen-volunteer force
- replace capitalism (‘transitional program’)
- boycott banks and stop paying tax
- abolish money
- end unsustainable Growth
- international ‘Declaration rights for Mother Earth’ and law against ecocide
- outlaw food speculation
- promote moral/spiritual debate (interfaith and no-faith, including ‘outspoken socialism’)
- bail out the people, nationalise the banks.
- ban arms trade
- Enforce MAXIMUM wage

Clearly this survey is neither objective nor comprehensive. I am part of the movement I describe and cannot reach the whole of it. This is only a snapshot of some work in progress but I hope it helps to focus discussion in and around the occupation. None of us has the answers, but we can all help find them. Besides this survey, I have been encouraged by comments in the Occupation visitors’ book in the Information Tent). Again, not a random sample, but the views of those who care and dare to step inside. With almost no exceptions the entries are positive:

‘Stay strong, warm, safe… Rock and roll around the world…Keep it up, wish I could join you, from a very worried student nurse…I’m so proud of you young people…Even my nan likes it…Total soutien d’un camarade syndique CGT…I work for a business on its knees, banks want our money now, but the big guys take months to pay…I’ve brought my children to show them how democracy works…So happy I came here…People connecting, about time…Let’s occupy the world…This is the end of the world as we know it. I feel fine…Too little, too late…At least you’re TRYING…Female, 50, fed-up, (and now) inspired…DON’T LEAVE.

The main banner at the entrance to the St Pauls reads ‘Capitalism IS Crisis’ but a recent General Assembly agreed that this, though perhaps true, did not properly reflect the Occupation as a whole. Two other big posters once attached to the railings of the Victoria statue, have now been removed – by bad weather or official good taste? One read RESPECT EXISTENCE OR EXPECT RESISTANCE, the other said REVOLUTION but with the L reversed, pointing backwards to make LOVE.

*NOTE: The initial statement agreed by the General Assembly outside St Pauls 16.10.2011 gave
support to the November 30th union strike against cuts and student action on November 9th

Observer, Times and Guardian, October 2011-January 2022

2012-02-05T08:29:00.000-08:00

JUST THE ONES THEY PRINTED

To The Observer
Sent: Sunday, 5 February 2012, 10:52
Subject: vested interests

Yes (Ed Milliband on NHS) workers do have vested interests, but not only in how much they get paid. When I worked in an engineering factory, the pride and joy of the shopfloor was not in aircraft or weapons components, but a shining, perforated alloy disc called the Blood Machine. It was destined for the NHS.
On the walls of the same factory were notices that showed two workers talking behind their hands. The motto was 'Dont tell him, tell us,' with 'us' meaning management. More telling was the subtext: workers tend to know and care what they do, how it's done and for whom.
Labour rightly calls for employees to join remuneration committees. This will lead naturally to discussion of what people at all levels are doing for their money. Why not fast-forward the democratic process and get employees properly represented on the boards where working decisions are made and working lives shaped?
It would help everyone concerned if companies were also obliged to state their social objectives on a par with reward for shareholders (as is already happening among some companies in California).

Greg Wilkinson

To The Observer
Sent: Sunday, 22 January 2012, 19:45, printed 29.01.2012
Subject: political economy

If capitalism is unstable (Will Hutton ‘Words wont change capitalism’), it’s not just because it deals with unknowable risk but because it lives by that risk and makes it more unknowable.
Capitalism disconnects wealth, profit and growth from any material or social measure of benefit or improvement. Hutton calls for daring deeds not words, but fails to get much beyond the chimera of monetary growth and GDP. His bold measures treat mainly symptoms not causes, symbols not substance.
The task of government is not simply to quantify and manipulate financial targets, but to enable us to define and deliver the goods and services we most need. Not just to turn the tap marked Growth, but determine what is to be grown, and how.
Human wellbeing is never totally knowable or quantifiable. But we do know we all need health, housing, education, useful employment, peace and care in old age. And a world fit for our children and theirs.
This real market – or political economy - is all our business, central to good life and good government. Our future is not reducible to 'Profit' and 'Loss', or to be left at the door of ‘Good Capitalism.’
Greg Wilkinson

To The Observer
Sent: Tuesday, 17 January 2012, 15:11 (printed 22.01.1012)
Subject: millennium village

In drought-stricken West Africa, John Mulholland describes a joined-up programme to save a single village. Resources and expertise, government and community combine in a co-ordinated approach to health, education, agriculture, infrastructure and economic development.
Why didn't we think of that, in our corner of debt-stricken West Europe?
Instead, we get empty incantations: Cut-more, grow-more, Us-more, them-more. As the global village begins to bake, our tribal leaders bow to mysterious Market forces and our future hangs on the omens of Standard and Poor.

Greg Wilkinson

To The Times
Sent: Tuesday, 25 October 2011, 16:05
Subject: St Pauls

(in answer to report which used night scans to demonstrate that most of the tents outside St Pauls were not being slept in, and accused occupiers of damaging local businesses. Printed a day or two later, and flagged up on front page – the first thing I’ve written for a Murdoch paper)

Sir

I’m one of ‘the nine out of ten campers’ who quits my tent outside St Paul’s from time to time. I do so because like many others occupying the forecourt I have family, jobs and commitments elsewhere. I have spent several nights away from my tent seeing my family in Swansea and arranging a Prince’s Trust event on a community woodland in Carmarthenshire.
During my absence I lent the tent to a couple who decorated it with a poster about sleeping all week in London’s freezing streets – not my choice, but freedom of speech. My ‘tentants’ were not eager to leave when I returned but now I’m back.
During my week hereabouts I have also talked to staff in a café isolated by police railings round Paternoster Square. I asked the police if they could move their barriers to let more customers through. By contrast, the nearest café outside the barriers is doing an unusually brisk trade. ‘There are winners and losers’ as one café manager said.
We campers have no more closed the small businesses than we closed the Cathedral. We regard both closures as quite unnecessary and regret the difficulties caused to staff, customers and visitors
Like the trustees of St Pauls we are very concerned with health and safety, our own and that of everyone on the planet threatened by global warming and social unrest brought about by widening inequality.

Greg Wilkinson

To: The Guardian
Sent: 19.10.2011, printed day or two later
Subject: Between Mammon and old Religion

Some of us camped on the slabs and cobbles outside St Pauls have Capitalism in our sights, others are as reluctant as the Labour party to use the C-word. But we know which direction we're heading in, it's up and this is a sort of base-camp.
Other commentators, less sympathetic than your editorial, have ridiculed our lack of detailed manifesto or demands. But actions may speak louder than words. We're learning as we go and anyone with insight or expertise to share is welcome to join us. Meanwhile - and this we have spelt out in a general assembly - we all know that the present political economy is unsustainable, undemocratic and unjust. It's got to be changed and our presence is a step in that direction.
Like the globalised market, this movement is global. We stand with the others who have come into the streets around the world, and with the millions more who suffer and starve in silence. We support our UK unions as they strike against cuts in pensions, jobs and service.
Camped here between Mammon and old Religion - given sanctuary by the Cannon of St Pauls - I have spent several days talking and listening to strangers who seem like friends. The fact that we're all sorts of people adds to the joy of it.
One slogan on the railings says 'Respect our existence or expect our resistance'. Whatever words we happen to use, we will not let our lives and world be used and spoilt in service of a wealthy few. Nor do we trust politicians who find it easier to play along with corporate interests than stand up for the people who elected them.
We want a more direct democracy. Here nobody pays us, tells us what to do or puts words in our mouths. When the tents are blown down or flooded - as happens elsewhere in the world - we bail out and reconstruct as best we can. We are not dismayed by the stony faces of traders and brokers on their way to work and take heart from the people, local shops and businesses, who come in with food and offers of help.
Between us we can find better ways of doing things.
Greg Wilkinson
19 Trafalgar Place, Swansea SA2 0BU (and/or a dark green tent immediately opposite the Nat West bank outside St Pauls) 01792 455335 07895063030)

PS Ed: The last occupation I took part in was at the British Institute in Paris, May 1968. Cobblestones were for barricades and throwing at CRS, not sleeping on.

More shots in the dark

2011-09-05T04:16:00.000-07:00

To the Guardian
08.09.2011
NO TO 'FERAL UNDERCLASSS
...BUT IF THE FACE FITS

Nice that a police chief rejects talk of a 'feral underclass.' Not so good that your report, like most others, takes at face value Ken Clarke's announcement that 75% of those sentenced for riot offences had previous convictions.

That begs an important question, especially with police investigations so reliant on CCTV evidence. How many of those brought to court were identified and arrested BECAUSE of their previous convictions?

As I know from my own experience, it may not even take a conviction: you only have to be charged for your picture, fingerprints, DNA and address to be taken and stored for future reference.

In my case, I was arrested and charged for a protest action. Although the charges were then dropped, I was rearrested a couple of months later following a similar protest in another town, by persons unknown either to the police or me. With my data to hand, our house was searched, papers and computers seized.

No charges this time and the case was dropped for lack of evidence. I was lucky. There had been no public hue and cry, I was half a century older than last month's likely suspects and much more expensively educated (though prison costs as much as university).

However nonsensical many of the recent sentences, and however we apportion responsibility, hundreds will be guilty as charged. It remains unjust that while previous convictions are not usually admissible as evidence in court, previous charges can effectively determine who gets identified, arrested and brought to court.

To Independent on Sunday
04.09.2011

TALKING TOUGH

You call for a 'tough demand that those at the top of society show responsibility' to match the 'tough response to the looting and stealing' on the streets. But this easy equivalence breaks down when it comes to policing and enforcement.
Rioting is visible in a way that boardroom crime and misdemeanor can never be. Insider-dealing may be indistinguishable from casual conversation and a financial trade, unlike betting on horses or roulette, easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Companies - and other people's livelihoods - can be shut down, stripped or exported within a legal framework that largely ignores moral, social and environmental priorities.
Tweaks and taxes can make a difference, loopholes can be closed, but the root problem is in the structure of capitalist enterprise. The corporate executives, traders and investors who rip us off are working within a legal framework that empowers them to make money for themselves and each other at our expense.
Comprehensive regulation and monitoring would require an independent mirror-world of virtual corporations to match and mark main players in the global market, with inevitable revolving doors for poachers turning gamekeeper and vice versa.
The only alternative is more representative regulation from within, but with the circle of decision-makers extended to those whose lives and businesses are most involved. Capital hardly needs representation, its needs can be met in interest or a share of profits and it can vote with its winged feet. Structural regulation requires inclusion of the other groupings and interests essential to economic enterprise: employees, consumers, suppliers and community.
A long haul, but for a start we could do worse than develop a form of social-environmental audit - with listings (SEAL?) comparable to the now-fashionable credit ratings. The listing process would focus public scrutiny. The necessary research and monitoring could involve existing social and environmental groupings - unions, consumers, greens etc - as well as academics, economists and politicians.
And, yes, bankers, of whom there are many who would be happy to work in a better cause.

To Guardian Weekly
27.08.2011

A FINE BALANCE

You print three stories about the August flare-up between Israeli and Palestinian forces on the Gaza border. Two of them trace the fighting back to an attack/ambush by Palestinian militants, and the third is a close-up of fear and horror at the killing of an Israeli security official by a Palestinian rocket.
Every killing, whether of civilian or militant, is a tragedy. Your main article has eight Israelis killed in the Palestinian attack, and 15 Palestinians in the fighting that followed. A Palestinian body-count for the months of July and August names 45 'martyrs,' including six children. On August 1st, the first day of Ramadan, an Israeli raid on the Qalandia refugee camp near Jerusalem left two young men dead. One of them was found by his mother, his brains blown out on the road outside his front door.

To the Observer
21.08.2011

PROFOUNDLY DYSFUNCTIONAL

Tony Blair attributes rioting to a minority of ‘profoundly dysfunctional families.’ But family dysfunction, like criminality, does not spring from nowhere. Nor is it confined to certain classes or districts: if most dysfunctional families don’t turn to looting, it is because they can get what they want over the counter.
When I left school, aged 17, in 1954 I had no difficulty getting jobs. Most boys my age had already been working for a year and we all got paid. Just as importantly we felt grown up. At work we were eager to win the respect of older workmates and when we got home we were tired.
And then there was national service…
My family was not poor and when I failed my 11-plus, my parents sent me to a private school. Like many post-war professionals, they voted Labour. They counted on better schools and conditions for everyone, a gradual equalling-up to end class privilege and segregation. It never occurred to them that by this century, nearly half all children would leave state schools without the 3 Rs, with little prospect of ‘worthwhile jobs.’ Or that one bank-trader could earn as much as 1,500 teachers, or 3,000 of the carers who helped look after them in their last years.
It took Thatcher to kill their dream of a natural movement towards equality, opportunity and mutual respect for all. And Blair to bury it.

2011-07-21T03:39:00.000-07:00

'Outraged OAP' or what?

To the editor, South Wales Evening Post
Thank you for drawing attention to our picket at Barclays Bank in Swansea (June 27-July 2). But what matters is not the ‘outrage’ or otherwise of one Swansea OAP. It is the facts that count, and what we do about them. What my age and pension give me is free time for what I tried to do in my job as foreign correspondent years ago: to get at the facts and bring them home to people they concern.

I'm not just on about arms, or bosses bonuses as such. Today, after teachers and others have stopped work in protest over government cuts, it's important to remember that it was the folly of big banks that prompted the cuts. And that they are now back to business as usual: the pay-package of one Barclays bank-trader, at £40+ million a year, could employ 1,800 teachers, nurses, police – or junior bank staff (Barclays recently closed one Swansea branch). The same money could pay 6,000 pensions like my own, or 3,000 carers to look after us when we become incapable. This grotesque inequality comes to roost with us in Swansea, where people in the poorest parts of town die 13 years younger than people in richer neighbourhoods.

That is why I’m picketing Barclays, as leader among piggy banks. With my wife I have made a Golden Pig Bad Bank Award, for presentation at mid-day on Saturday. The plaque on the plinth reads ‘for contributions to warfare, greed, inequality and pillage of the global village.’

Greg Wilkinson

Nightmare drones: nouveaux jeux sans frontieres

2011-07-20T08:54:00.000-07:00

Guardian on drone-stike sites in West Pakistan:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/17/us-drone-strikes-pakistan-waziristan

A local journalist goes from one drone hit village to another, detailing damage. A dangerous business because people taking pictures and asking questions may be suspected of helping CIA prepare next strike. What he finds suggests civilian casualties much higher than official accounts admit. An own goal for war-on-terror as local populations rage at US etc.
Obvious, really.
Less obvious but just as dangerous, this form of warfare is relatively cheap for those with the know-how, and leapfrogs old legal and geographical boundaries. Drones are now used by US, Israeli and more recently UK forces for surveillance and or missile strikes, not only in the acknowledged war-zones of Iraq and Afghanistan but Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and Gaza - wherever conventional forces cannot reach, or would rather not be seen to reach.
UK Watchkeeper drones are adapted from Israeli Hermes drones as perfected over Gaza. The UK version has been tested at Aberporth not far from us.
Drones can fly at 10,000 feet, for hours, days or nights, unseen and unheard from the ground, watching, reporting back to base or waiting to get a target in sights. US Predator drones, as seen on a CNN documentary (check Youtube), are controlled by more or less human 'pilots'at playstation consoles in a desert base, Arizona perhaps. The risk-free piloting is one reason why drones are relatively cheap: training pilots costs as much as making planes, and in conventional airwars too many get lost in crashes and combat stress.
One reason for my recent picket of Barclays is that the bank is a lead investor in the Israeli company, Elbit Systems, that makes the drones now adapted for UK use.
The former US President and WW2 supreme commander General Dwight Eisenhower one warned against what he called the 'military-industrial complex' intruding on politics and public life. Now the complex that threatens us is more complex still: military-industrial-political-financial, with funders often deciding what gets off the ground. And its global, no longer confined to one superpower.
The current light being shed on Murdoch's Newscorp web gives us a glimpse of what must also be happening between military, intelligence, political, industrial and financial power centres across continents, picking, mixing and making what suits themselves at our expense.
A recent New York Times report described experimental drones modelled on dragon-flies, and no bigger than insects, able to settle on a window ledge. With poison stings? No more need for human agents with umbrella tips...
One problem in this new form of airwar is the cost and complexity of decoding such a mass of detailed information. Imagine a continual feed from hundreds of spies in the sky, having to monitor so many monitors, fit and analyse the images.
One thing the roving reporter in Pakistan notes is the difficulty of putting together the casualties, not in the image, but in the flesh, on the ground, in what's left of walls, trees etc.

2011-07-20T03:58:00.000-07:00

‘PIG BRICK’ BAD BANKS AWARD
2011
to
Barclays bonus bosses
for
contributions to warfare, inequality and
pillage of the global village

Piggy Banks Anthem

2011-07-18T08:29:00.000-07:00

They've got the whole world in their hands
They've got the whole wide world in their hands
They've got the whole world in their hands
And they dont give a shit
For us
Or it

Letters to and from Barclays Head Office and local staff

2011-07-18T04:28:00.000-07:00

July 6th 2011
Bob Diamond
CEO Barclays Bank, 1 Churchill Place
Canary Wharf, London E14 5LN

Dear Mr Diamond

The above image is of a golden pig, mounted on a brick (see previous), an award that your Swansea branch refused to receive or deliver to you. That was last Saturday, after a weeklong picket of the branch. As I explained in a letter to your local staff, my protest was not directed at them but at the behavior and policies of their bosses. My aim was to draw attention to the bank’s national and global efforts, and to encourage customers to transfer their accounts to less disreputable banks – in this case the Co-op and a Nationwide with branches just across the road.
I am not interested in moral finger-pointing, or demonizing people like you. If we grumble about ‘greedy bankers’ then we should look to our own investments, take more care of how our money is spent, not just what interest we get. At the moment, it’s almost impossible to find out what’s done with our savings. Apart from ringfencing high street banks, government should legally enforce our RIGHT TO KNOW. Just as government is bound by freedom-of-information law, and retailers by product-description rules, so banks – which control more wealth than governments - must be obliged to tell us what they do with our money.
In my citation for this Pig Brick Award, I make a link between inequality, warfare and ‘pillage of the global village.’ Banks like yours, at the top of the economic food chain, set the pace in widening inequalities both within and between nations. The resulting competition and conflict is destructive in itself. It also distracts from the need for common action in face of even greater threats, as unsustainable growth depletes essential resources and triggers climate chaos.
I am writing to you assuming that we are more like each other than not. I assume that you too would rather do good than harm. Profit is worse than worthless unless it translates into common good. Profit, and the process for making it, can only be good if it benefits those who contribute and bear the cost in their lives…
That’s so obvious, it cant wait on governments to turn it into law. Slavery and child-prostitution were not all well and good until laws were passed against them. The same goes for other sorts of exploitation. Meanwhile, although you may get 100 times more than I do to live on, we are equally responsible for what we do in the positions we find ourselves in. This is still the only life and world we’ve got, and we’re bound to share it. That word commonwealth was highjacked by crowns and colonies but still means what it says.
Time to come down from your tower and rejoin humanity. You’ve so much more to gain than lose. Football and bicycles may be a step in the right direction or a mockery (like the coin thrown out of the carriage window in the Tale of Two Cities). For now, the issue may not be that sort of revolution, but whether the world as we know it keeps turning. We badly need your banks and skills to save it for our children, all our children, and to make a better life all round.

Greg Wilkinson

PS The golden pig began with the brick in its plinth. I was going to deliver the brick, with this message, through one of your Barclays windows. I would have made sure nobody got hurt then explained myself in court. No mere malicious damage or breaking and entering, but a timely warning, prompted by personal and corporate behavior likely to cause a breach of the peace (as in Greece, though I’d not forseen that). As it happened, younger, wiser heads prevailed and what came your way instead was the rampant pig. Since no Barclays manager cared or dared speak to me, I kept the pig and handed the brick to a security guard for safekeeping. The pig may appear again. In it’s mouth is a human figure, clutching at a diminished globe.

Barclays' reply (extracts) 11.07.2011
'I am sorry you felt it necessary to organise a protest outside our Swansea branch to show your disapproval of Barclays and high street banks in general. I agree with the branch's decision not to forward your 'award' to Mr Diamond, as I believe this is distasteful and inappropriate...
In terms of bonus awards...we see compensation as a means of supporting the implementation of strategy in a way which best serves the interests of our shareholders...we must attract and retain the best people...
Barclays strategy...gives primacy to return on equity...
Barclays takes its responsibilities as a corporate citizen very seriously and this includes open and transparent engatement with tax authorities worldwide..Barclays paid tax in the UK of over £2 billion in 2009...
As a global organisation, Barclays should be measured by reference to its global tax contribution rather than one type of tax in one country... Barclays and its employees are proud to by making a significant contribution...to the UK economy and all the other countries where we do business.
yours sincerely
Mark Bailey
Customer Relations Manager

Reply to Barclays 13.07.2011

Dear Mark
Your reference: 100G37M2
Thanks for troubling to reply and I wish I were expert enough to take up more of your points about tax and pay. Instead I rely on commonsense and some principles we may well share. You say Barclays ‘takes its responsibilities as a corporate citizen very seriously,’ and it is as a more-or-less responsible individual citizen that I write to you.
You use the word ‘compensation’ to describe a bonus strategy ‘that best serves the interests of (Barclays) shareholders’ and to ‘attract and retain the best people.’ In normal usage, ‘compensation’ is something we get to make up for damage done to us, and now I wonder what damage is done to your top people by the work they do.
Perhaps it has something to do with the contradictions buried between those uses of the word ‘best’ and your ‘responsibilities as citizens’, whether of one country or the world (you say you have operations in 50 countries).
What, for instance, if the best interests of your shareholders are not fully met by a ’strategy which gives primacy to return on equity’? Shareholders will suffer like the rest of us if resource-depletion and climate change continue unchecked, if growing inequalities lead to social tension and breakdown, and if global poverty and ignorance keeps driving population growth.
Shareholders might also be happy just to know that they are helping rid the world of hunger and preventable disease, rather than supplying arms to keep the lid on discontent. And if top bankers are really to be ‘the best people’ they must be working with good people everywhere to prevent avoidable suffering and safeguard life on earth. ‘Return on equity’ is not good enough, unless by equity we mean fairness and equality in the older and more general sense of the word. Bonus also means good.
When I spoke of Bob Diamond ‘rejoining humanity’, it was not just rhetoric. I firmly believe that he, and you, would rather be doing good than harm, along with the rest of us, as fellow citizens in a world at risk. I’m not sure how this applies to, say, corporate standards in the Cayman Islands, but I am clear that here and round the world we cant wait for laws and governments to tell us what to do and not to do.
Corporate responsibility, and Profit in its fullest sense, has everything to do with common good, working for a better life for all and a world fit for our children. I trust you will agree with some of this at least. I realize that it does not only apply to Barclays, or bankers, but hope that you will get the message through to Mr Diamond and others whom it may concern.

Yours sincerely
Greg Wilkinson

PS You found the Golden Pig award ‘distasteful.’ I agree in the sense that no person or class of people should be dehumanized (we’ve seen where that can lead). On the other hand, we all know what we mean by ‘greedy pig’ and when we use it, perhaps to our children, in irritation or in jest, we wish them no harm. And, in the other sense of Piggy Bank, what’s meant is perfectly acceptable: somewhere safe to keep our pennies for when we need them, not to be raided for other purposes.

Letter to Barclays Swansea staff before picket

Friends
Our presence at your door this week is not an attack on you. We’ve no doubt that most of you will be doing reasonable jobs as best you can. Our action is directed at the Barclays bosses who make the decisions. And reward themselves so generously.
Our aim is not to inconvenience you but seek your help in getting through to the decision-makers in your company. Here are the main points of a leaflet we are handing out to customers and passers-by.
• Barclays CEO takes £9 million this year, with top dealers grossing over £40 million (as tax-payers face cuts in jobs and services thanks to them)
• Bankers set pace for deepening inequality. Top 100 CEOs averaged 30% increase last year while median real incomes flat-lined
• Barclays practices and encourages corporate tax-avoidance, leaving rest of us to fill the gap
• Barclays and other high street banks serve as fronts to global casino operations • Unelected bankers control more money than governments
• Wealth of nations is squandered regardless of human need, mass hunger and impending climate chaos.
• UK Government climate change targets are doomed for lack of investment
• Barclays leads UK banks in finance for arms-makers, supplying Arab tyrants and Israeli occupation
• We can do better with our money.
• Co-op Bank has an ethical investment policy and is controlled by its members
• Mutual building societies are accountable to savers and invest mostly in affordable housing.
• On Saturday July 2nd, we plan to present an award for you to pass on to your CEO in London
(To check facts, go to http://wotsleft-greg.blogspot.com)
I closed my own Barclays account some years ago because of the bank’s support for apartheid in South Africa. Now the bank supports other equally unpleasant regimes. As a tax-payer and pensioner I still have an interest: Barclays tax avoidance increases the burden on the rest of us and my income is about 0.1% of CEO Bob Diamond’s £9 million. For the reported £47 million amassed by a top Barclay’s trader, we could have 2,000 more teachers, nurses, police or high street bank staff. At my age, it concerns me that the same money could employ 3,000 carers.

Greg Wilkinson (dgregwilkinson@yahoo.co.uk)

PS Did you know that an early director of Barclays came from a Swansea Quaker family? In the early 19th century, the bank was known for a time as Barclay, Bevan and Co.

BARCLAYS, BANKS ETC - FACTS AND REFERENCES

2011-06-14T02:31:00.000-07:00

BARCLAYS QUAKER ROOTS

The bank that became Barclays was founded by a Quaker goldsmith in London towards the end of the 17th century. Quakers, as dissenters, were barred from university and high office, but known for their simplicity and business integrity.
http://assets.cambridge.org/97805217/90352/sample/9780521790352ws.pdf

Barclays included Swansea Quaker family, and was once known as Barclay, Bevan and Co.
http://bevan.rth.org.uk/Family-history

BANKING ON GREED

Barclays top earners paid up to £47 million, with over £500 million to top 200
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1363790/Barclays-bosses-47m-head-pay-bonuses-Bob-Diamond-says-greed-good.html

'Too big to fail and socially useless’
Bob Diamond video interview with Wall St Journal
http://online.wsj.com/video/too-big-to-fail-and-socially-useless/A9DA0E6A-FC38-44A9-9BBB-93F1CC9035AF.html

Bob Diamond CEO before Treasury select committee
American-born Mr Diamond, 59, who has raked in £75million in the past five years, will also face tough questions on Barclays’ use of tax havens.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/2011/01/11/barclays-boss-bob-diamond-to-be-grilled-over-8million-bonus-115875-22840313

Barclays bows to courts over insurance mis-selling, plus Diamond pic
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/city-news/2011/05/09/barclays-follows-lloyds-in-dropping-ppi-legal-challenge-115875-23117321/

BANKING ON BLOODSHED

http://www.waronwant.org/attachments/Banking%20on%20Bloodshed.pdf

War on Want report ‘Banking on Bloodshed’ (2008) said Barclays led British banks in bankrolling arms industries. About 90% of people killed and wounded by armed conflict are civilians. Barclays investments included cluster munitions (now banned) and depleted uranium warheads (birth defects etc), plus arms for Saudi Arabia, Libya and Israel.

Barclays and Israeli drones
Barclays is a leading investor in Elbit Systems (Haifa) which makes Hermes 450 drones that were tried and tested in Gaza. Adapted and renamed Watchkeeper, these are used by UK forces in Afghanistan, with a test site at Aberporth.
http://www.nasdaq.com/asp/holdings.asp?symbol=ESLT&selected=ESLT
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3975540,00.html

Barclays and US drones
According to the WoW report, Barclays funds Boeing and Northrop Grunman. These US companies help build the Predator drones used in Afghanistan, Pakistan etc. Where drones are used outside conventional war-zones, it is usually by the CIA, to escape public scrutiny.

(See also: US extends drone strikes to Somalia (Guardian 30.06.2011), after Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Libya. In Pakistan drone strikes have killed an estimated 2,500 people since 2004. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/30/us-drone-strikes-somalia
Drones, some as tiny as bugs are poised to alter conflicts (NYT 20.06.2011) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/world/20drones.html

Arming Gadafy
Barclays beneficiary General Dynamics (UK) reported supplying battlefield communications equipment and training to Gaddafy troops in Libya. As a UK subsidiary to a US company, GD(UK) escaped US ban on supplies to Libya.

Military-industrial-financial complex?
In 1961 outgoing US President and former WW2 supreme commander warned of
"unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex." Now it’s here, says former US Defence Department official on RTE
http://americasfailureiniraq.com/2011/05/20/the-military-industrial-complex-warned-of-in-1961-now-were-there/

BANKING ON INEQUALITY

Top 100 UK bosses get 32% payrise while most of us lose out, May 2011
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13588114

OECD reports widening gap between top and bottom paid: with UK fourth after Mexico, US and Israel
http://econfix.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/oecd-countries-see-a-widening-inequality-gap

UK Pay gap widening to Victorian levels
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/may/16/high-pay-commission-wage-disparity
High pay commission forecasts top earners' slice of national income will rise from current 5% to 14% by 2030

Bank lending to UK small business falls again – Bank of England report April 2011
http://realbusiness.co.uk/news/bank-lending-to-small-firms-falls-again

UK mortgage lending slumps by 14% in April 2011 (5% down on 2010)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/may/20/mortgage-lending-slumps

'Squeezed middle' the big losers when the economy recovers (Resolution Foundation, Observer, 11.05.2011)
Low-to-middle income households will see their living standards continue to fall far behind the more affluent.
http://www.resolutionfoundation.org/articles/2011/May/22/why-squeezed-middle-here-stay-observer/

Inequality in Swansea
People in East Swansea can expect to die 13 years younger than people in West Swansea according to Council Strategy Report.
http://www.thisissouthwales.co.uk/Shock-life-expectancy-gap-east-west-divide/story-12387293-detail/story.html

Why inequality is bad for most of us and more equal societies work better
http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/ Or ‘The Spirit Level’ (Allen Lane) by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

BANKING ON EXTINCTION: wealth of nations laid to waste

The years 2005 and 2010 were the hottest in recorded history. Weather more extreme and less predictable. Flood and drought, water short in food-source areas. Food and fuel prices already rising. World population to double in next 50 years. While banks, as main distributers of world resources, act only for themselves.
At the top of the foodchain, banks set the pace in widening the inequalities between rich and poor, within and between nations. The resulting competition and conflict is damaging in itself. It also distracts us from the even greater threat of continued unsustainable growth, exhaustion of natural resources and chaotic climate change.

What UK could and should be doing
Government’s Renewable Energy Review says UK should be investing in offshore wind and marine energy as least-cost strategy for meeting carbon targets. But...
http://hmccc.s3.amazonaws.com/Renewables%20Review/Executive%20summary.pdf

Massive shortfall in UK private investment prospects torpedoes climate change targets.
New Green Investment Bank barred from competing.
http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/environmental-audit-committee/news/report-published-green-investment-bank/

Oxfam says world food prices set to double due to climate change, growing population and consumption.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-13597657

Banks bigger than governments, unaccountable and committed only to profit: Vince Cable on over-mighty banks ‘global in life but national in death,’ with balance sheets larger than UK economy.
http://www.bis.gov.uk/news/speeches/vince-cable-mansion-house-speech-2011 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13480971

‘Disaster capitalism’?
How governments, wars and markets combine against people and world
See Naomi Klein ‘The Shock Doctrine’ (Penguin)

WHAT WE CAN DO

Eric Cantona called for mass withdrawal from banks December 2010 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11811238
It didn’t work. Too few responded, effects too scattered and big banks don’t depend mainly on personal accounts.

Now for Cantona-Plus: target and transfer
Concentrate withdrawals on ONE bank (e.g Barclays) and transfer accounts to more useful and accountable alternatives (e.g Co-op Bank or mutual building society.) This would not break a big bank or empty cash machines, but work incrementally, in a positive as well as negative way strengthening the best while weakening the worst.
To review alternatives: http://www.yourethicalmoney.org/

Commonsense revolution, direct democracy…
Not an alternative to political protest or government action, but doing what we can with what we’ve got. Our savings for a start. Our money and the life time it represents are too important to be left to unaccountable banks and bosses. Especially when what's at stake is our children’s future and the world as we know it.

Demand the RIGHT TO KNOW
Of course the government should cut high street banks free from the vagaries of global investment banking. But that still leaves the bigger problem of what to do about those casino operators who between them control more money than governments and waste the wealth of nations, our common wealth. Meanwhile, the least we can expect is for banks to comply with the principles embodied in government freedom of information law and requirements of product labelling. Before we can make responsible decisions about our own investments, banks must be forced to tell us what they spend our money on.

DYING UNEQUALLY IN SWANSEA

2011-06-14T02:20:00.000-07:00

The South Wales Evening Post (04.04.2011) reports that people in East Swansea can expect to die 13 years younger than people in West Swansea. The figure was drawn from a strategy report to the City Council. Apparently these post code death rates were reflected in figures for crime, obesity and teenage pregnancy.
Whoever put the report together must have read the Spirit Level, and found what they looked for: given the idea, we find the evidence to match.

http://www.thisissouthwales.co.uk/Shock-life-expectancy-gap-east-west- divide/story-12387293-detail/story.html

In Swansea, East can be shorthand for poor and West for rich. I tried to put that straight in a letter to the editor, which appeared a week later, when I’d nagged a bit.

The rich live longer than the poor, that’s the bitter truth behind the death-rate difference between Swansea East and West. What matters most is not so much which part of Swansea we live in, but how much money we have to live on.
Of course, education, local services and diet make a difference, but councilor Tregoning is right when he focuses on wages and benefits – something the council cant do much about.
It is not just crude poverty that kills, or we would be hearing about starvation, not obesity, in our poorest wards. The real damage to health and happiness stems not from absolute poverty but from INEQUALITY. Recent research (in The Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett) shows how inquality brings insecurity, stress and distrust; then sickness, breakdown, crime and suicide. The damage is not confined to the poor but felt all the way up the differential ladder.
Inequality increased under Labour and is set to increase again under Coalition cuts. And just as local government is not in control of local wages and benefits, so central government is not in control of the wider economy.
The emperor has no clothes: the wealth of nations – investment, employment and income distribution – is not directed by elected authorities in the public interest but by private individuals and corporations in their own interest. Bankers bonuses are the tip of the iceberg.
Meanwhile, the Post is right to say ‘Don’t tolerate this inequality’ and the council does have some power to redress the unfairness of government cuts. Yes, it can help ensure take up of benefits. And if poverty is concentrated in certain parts of town, then these parts of town should be protected from cuts wherever possible, even at the expense of richer ones.
These important issues need proper discussion. I would be glad to hear from anyone who would like to help set up a suitable forum – for us!
Yours
Greg Wilkinson

Since writing that letter, I have been urging the university adult education department and ‘Communities First’ teams to help me organize discussion. No luck yet, but it would be good if these things could be turned over with the people who have most to gain from change.

LETTERS TO OBSERVER, GUARDIAN ETC 2010-11

2011-06-14T01:55:00.000-07:00

(to Observer unless otherwise indicated. Some printed, some not)

10.06.2011

Tale of Two Democracies (Weekly Guardian)

Pankaj Mishra's Tale of Two Democracies makes an important link between Israeli and Indian repression in Palestine and Kashmir respectively. He exposes a Western hypocrisy that talks up non-violent resistance while arming tyranny and colonial domination. While recognising the force of 'moral challenge,' he fears the worst as 'mountains of tyranny' bear down on further popular uprisings. .
But hypocrisy is a double edged weapon, democratic pretensions can be turned against those who are seen to abuse democracy. We didn't hear much about the Kashmiri summer of 2010, but the blitz on Gaza and more recent flotilla killings offshore could not be hidden (although - as in Syria today - the media were kept out). International opinion swung sharply against Israel and its US backers, often prompted by brave Jewish dissidents in Israel, Europe and the US.
In highlighting the Israel/India links, Pankaj Mishra contributes to this wider awareness and connection. This will serve to amplify the tragedy and contradiction if/when more faraway protests are gunned down, perhaps with weapons supplied by us.
Challenge and outrage may combine to turn political tides and change the course of events.

17.05.2011

Good capitalism
Will Hutton still hopes for a 'good capitalism' to restore our economy and head off the racist right. But capitalism is not good, it's drive is not for a better world or even a sustainable economy. Capitaliism makes money out of money for the people with most. It exploits whatever aspect of human or non-human nature can most easily be turned to profit. In this cynical system, greed, stupidity and vice with cash to hand are a better investment than hunger, wisdom or virtue without.

09.05.2011

Meltdown
Will Hutton looks to a 'good capitalism' to save us from economic meltdown, with a nudge from Keynesian good government. In this fairytale, the invisible hand of the market, judiciously regulated by elected authorites, will transform private greed into social wellbeing and sustainable development.
But capitalism is not good. The profit that drives it is found in the gap between buying cheap and selling dear. The marketplace is not a free and fair exchange but an unequal contest between rich and poor, big and small, organised and atomised.. Owners and employers, as individuals or shareholders, have legal control of production, pricing and reward. Workers and customers have none. Nor have the communities and the natural world that suffer the collateral damage.
This exploitive process may ratchet up total wealth and turnover, but only by extending inbuilt inequalities. A good employer or investor is quickly overtaken by others who go with the flow. Winners take all, and the losses are born by the rest of us and the natural world.
There is no invisible hand to redeem this cynical economy, only the hands, hearts and minds of people like ourselves. Salvation, if any, will be found in common humanity and the extension of social democracy into the business of everyday work and investment. The aim no longer an amassing and division of spoils between winners and losers, but a balance of mutual give and take.
Another fairy tale? Not quite, the models for reform are already here, in the political democracy of our public life, in the small but growing number of co-operatives and mutuals, and, above all, in the informal practice and aspirations of so-called private life among family and friends.
Good capitalism does not exist, social democracy must include a socialised economy or fail itself and us.

07.05.2011 (Guardian)

Vengeance
With the US killing of Osama Bin Laden, you say ‘Vengeance was theirs, but not theirs alone.’
Turning to ‘carnage’ in Sri Lanka, you opine that ‘One country’s ability to bury the evidence of war crimes endangers how civilians are treated in all other conflicts. A single failure of international justice is also a collective one.’
That must include the vengeance killing of an unarmed captive on orders from a US government that shuns the International Criminal Court.
If this vengeance is indeed partly ours, then we’re a party to the denial of international justice.
How much essential evidence on war crimes was buried at sea with bin Laden? And how does this singular killing chime with the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths that we and our allies have failed to properly log in Iraq, Afghanistan and more recently Pakistan?

03.05.2011 (Guardian)

No dignity
No dignity at Ground Zero, nor in the more restrained crowing of politicians nearer home. We dont have to approve of Osama Bin Laden to realise that what he stood for will not be lightly swept away by the 'Arab Spring,' nor dissolved by his death and burial at sea. He has been, and will be, followed less for his unlikely theology than for his uncompromising opposition to a western imperialism. (As a veteran US commentator, Mike Hedges, has noted, the al Qaeda repertoire draws heavily on the shock and awe violence of its adversaries, before and after 9/11)
Summary killing of killers is not justice. Eliminating terrorists does not eliminate the causes of terrorism, but raises the stakes. No good will come of the bin Laden killing unless the show of strength provides an opening for redress, with obvious starting points in withdrawal from Afghanistan and curbing of US-funded Israeli aggression in Palestine.

01.05.2011

Labour snubbed?
Labour snubbed at fairy tale wedding? As in Sleeping Beauty, when the uninvited fairy avenged herself on the issue of the union?
Better for now, that once and future Labour voters take the non-invite as a compliment, assume that even former Labour leaders might have more important social commitments.
The 'Big Society' perhaps, since slogans like fairy tales are more easily turned round than laid to rest.
A Big Society worth the name would cut through not just royalist flummery but the folklore of ‘local community’ to the everyday obstinate reality of labour and capital, what we actually do with our lives, and what is done with the money we earn and save.
Volunteering and donating are no substitute for that basic social economy. Are we content - 'in this day and age' - that most of our work and savings should still be directed by unelected powers to making rich men richer?
If we believe in fairytales like social democracy and self-determination, it's time we rescued them from corporate greed and its courtiers.

28.03.2011

Drawing lines
Peaceful protest, then violence - without which a march against cuts would not have won your two-page spread. And by Monday morning, BBC Today was talking to an anarchist about the meaning of the A-word.
But your big report, like most others, failed to distinguish between the different performances it lumped together under 'violence'. To occupy is not the same as to smash windows, attacks on property are not the same as attacks on people, and paint is not the same as ammonia or bits of iron.
Most of these distinctions are clear in law. They may be even more important in morality, politics and good reporting. In our conduct and judgement we have to draw these finer lines. Between 'property is sacred' and 'property is theft', 'respect for authority' and 'respect for human life/dignity.'
For my own part, I feel that property cannot forever trump fairness and equality: to tax the poor and let the rich off free is so clearly wrong that some counter-action is justified. To occupy a Top Shop or Fortnum's seems fair to me and to break the windows of a bonus-bank forgivable. Proviso: due care for safety and feelings of shop and bank workers who neither make the rules or bless themselves with bonuses.

15.03.2011

Incomprehensible stupidity?
Your report on the knifing-to-death of an Israeli settlement family refers back to the killing of four adult settlers by Palestinians six months ago. Meanwhile, William Hague describes the latest killings as ‘incomprehensible cruelty.’
Cruel, unconscionable, but not quite incomprehensible in the light of some more balanced background figures. The Israeli human rights organization B’tselem lists more than 50 Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the two years to this January (that's excluding the hundreds killed in the Cast Lead attack on Gaza). According to B’tselem 19 of those killed since then were ‘minors’, or children.
In the week before the Sabbath killing in Itamar, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights reported 42 Israeli incursions into Palestinian communities. Eleven Palestinians, including four children, were injured by soldiers and settlers. Ten civilians, including two children were arrested.
A couple of days before the Itamar killing, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu condemned rightwing settlers for harassment of Palestinians in protest at Israeli government curbs on settlements. Now, in response to the weekend attack, soldiers and settlers are trashing Palestinian villages and the Israeli government has promised 500 more homes in and round existing settlements.
04.03.2011 (Guardian)

Anti-anti-semitism
Galliano's racist abuse (Freedland G2) is intolerable, vicious if not insane. Assange's remarks do no good to his cause. And yes anti-semitic 'conspiracy theory' is alive and well, a dangerous conflation of truth, half-truth, fantasy and lies.
But Freedland does not help to clear the air by himself conflating sense and nonsense, tumbling in more or less justified criticism of Israel and Zionism with Jew-spotting, dark excesses of 'blood libel' and a silly kosher crack in the New Statesman. Oddly, he draws a single thread through several sorts of real and imaginary children: Christian victims of 'blood libel', Jewish characters in a Churchill play and school children (he only mentions the Jewish ones) who now fear abuse or attack in Britain.
Both conspiracy-theory and counter-conspiracy thrive on this sort of free association. The knot that Freedland strains would be easier to untangle if Israel itself did not embody a confusion of race, religion, democracy and military excess.
As a European I have a part in the horrors of our common history. As an Englishman, I'm glad that my country does not - mostly - emphasise its archaic Anglo-Catholic credentials in the conduct of unconscionable wars.

13.02.2011

BIG SOCIETY
If the Cameron coalition wants a Big Society, they should do what the top brass in Egypt are being asked to do: confront the structures that brought them to power.

The great black hole in our social democracy and personal freedom is not in local authorities or public services – however imperfect they may be - but in the unaccountable private sector on which Camerons and Cleggs depend for their fortunes and rely for economic recovery.

Local authorities, unlike the boards of private companies, are elected by a cross section of the public that includes most of those who work for them, pay for them and benefit from their services. (And top public sector pay, though occasionally higher than the prime ministers, is dwarfed by the salaries and bonuses of bankers and CEOs)

Public services, even quangos, are also subject to elected authorities: how else could coalition axe-men break them up and cut them down while banks escape unscathed?

In the private armies of ‘free enterprise,’ we routinely sacrifice personal autonomy, along with any claim to a democratic voice, the moment we set foot on employers’ premises. Big of us, or stupid?

12.02.2011 (Weekly Guardian)

Inequality and racism
If state 'multiculturalism' is dead, so is state 'integration': what we want is neither to be separated by our differences nor united in sameness. Uniformity is neither possible nor desirable and 'separate but equal' never works: equality requires an overlap in which we meet and mix. Without mutual understanding, mutual respect is polite hypocrisy. We all benefit, in life as in Ms Bunting's street market, from the freedom to pick and choose between our stalls.
As Madeleine also suggests, the obstacles to free interchange have as much to do with economic inequality as with racism. The more unequal a society, the further apart the rungs on the social-economic ladder, the harder it becomes to move between them. And the less chance we have to transcend stereotypes of race, religion and class, the more divided and mutually mistrustful we become, and the less at home among ourselves.

16.01.2011

Community woods
The Observer opposes privatisation of British forests and Andy Wightman calls for community ownership. As a joint owner of a community woodland in Wales, I agree.
But it is not, in our experience, a simple case of state vs private vs community. Half a century ago, our 80-acre paradise of wood and stream was acquired and replanted by the Forestry Commission on what had previously been privately-owned ancient woodland. In the 90's it was sold to a private consortium in England which agreed to open permissive footpaths
In 2006, this Troserch Wood, was put up for sale again. A group of neighbours and local residents organised a buy-back campaign to keep the woods open to all and secure the riverside paths. The money for our community buy-back came from the Forestry Commission, or its Welsh arm Cyd Coed.
Having bought the wood from the body that had planted it and sold it off, we went back to Cyd Coed for operating costs, and in particular a heavy-duty bridge. We already had our own footbridge, but DEFRA would no longer allow us to move plant and timber across a rocky streambed. Nor would it allow the sort of improvised log bridge that previous contractors had used.
We depended on state funding to meet state conservation regulations. We also depended on both public and private expertise. Our elected committee includes local landowners, a senior county councillor, a Forestry Commission ranger and a private woodland-owner who acts, unpaid, as clerk of the works.
Our first commitment is to free public access, wildlife conservation and restoration of mainly broadleaved woodland. Some of us dream of an extended riverside pathway from sea to source, some of a more integrated economic set up: in an area of high unemployment, it would make sense to link forest management to felling, sawing and local wood-working. But our 80 acres would not support full-time foresters, sawmill or timber works. To make that viable, we would need to combine with other woods, in either a co-operative or decentralised state enterprise.
The important thing is not to set private, community and state enterprise at odds with each other, but to see how all can be combined for a common good. And that demands some radical reform in all three sectors.

09.01.2011
PolarisationAs Imran Khan says in his despairing commentary, the murderous polarisation of religious and political life in Pakistan would not have arisen without our ‘war on terrorism.’ This goes both for the murder of a liberal politician and the calls by Muslim villagers for the hanging of a Christian woman accused of blasphemy.
The polarisation that Khan laments is not confined to Pakistan but sweeps across much of the Muslim world as one response to serial military adventures by western powers, from crusades through colonial wars and the imposition of Israel to current interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and ‘tribal areas’ of Pakistan.
Oddly, another report in the same Observer features another Muslim village, Bil’in in West Bank Palestine. Here, as a Muslim mother mourns the death of her daughter in a protest at the Israeli ‘separation fence’ the polarisation follows different lines.
The Muslim villagers who defy lethal gas-shells and liquid filth are joined by Jews and Christians. People of several religions or none are united by a commitment to human rights and international law. In this naive view, a wall that cuts a village from its land is unacceptable, as is the use of armed force against unarmed protesters.
At her daughter’s funeral, the bereaved mother quoted by your reporter also said she did not seek revenge. That was a matter for God, but she called on ‘the people of Israel to take a firm stand against the occupation ...because only together will we be able to put an end to the tragedy of our two peoples.’

19.12.2010
Correct remuneration
CBI ‘president in waiting’ Roger Carr does no service to Country or Company by his standard definition of company rights, duties and responsibilities. It is not enough for companies to ‘ensure that shareholders are correctly remunerated and act in the right way for the organisation.’
If ‘correct remuneration’ for shareholders means maximising profit at the expense of jobs and customers, if ‘tax efficiency’ means leaving others to pay your share, then correctness and efficiency are worse than useless (the language itself rings warning bells).
When, as now, our social economy and physical environment is under threat, with a lot of people facing cuts and losing jobs, it is not right or responsible for companies to reward bosses and shareholders regardless of consequences or comparisons.
It’s time for companies to up their game, to gear their private working definitions to fairness and public interest. Self-respecting workers don’t work mainly to enrich their bosses, and responsible investors don’t invest only for self-enrichment.
Without a broader social commitment, a limited company is too limited for its own good, its ‘rights, duties and responsibilities’ ring hollow. It is time to write social objectives and a measure of fairness into Company Law, before the word ‘company’ becomes a dirty word (again?)

21.11.2010
On its headA.C.Grayling unearths secular roots of religion and Samia Rahman talks of constantly re-intepreting religious texts (presumably in the light of contemporary human observation and experience.)
Good, but what nobody in your discussion quite makes clear is that religion is no more nor less than human aspiration stood on its head. We, men and women, have created gods, not vice versa, in the light of our lives on earth.
Once we recognise this, religion – or religions – can be wonderfully helpful, as long as we are free to move, and pick and choose between them. But children sent to faith school risk being trapped. Confusion of a Church and State, as in British public life and media, obscures other possibilities and common ground.
And yet some of us send children to faith school because almost any liberal religion seems preferable to ‘standards’ that grade and degrade for marks and cash.
We need the best out of religion - flights of imagination, depths of emotion and commonsense - to humanise a global market that does justice to none of us.

07.11.2010

Work-shy shocktroops for Big Society If the unemployed are made to do community work for less than the minimum wage, this will tend to drive down wages and/or deter the creation of new jobs in the community.
If the government’s Big Society is to be fair and inclusive – and not a two-faced diversion - it must bear equally on Big Business, employers and employees.
Why should the unemployed not be greedy – maximising income for minimum outlay – while this remains the guiding principle of a market economy, and a government that relies on it to replace state services?
Why should those with least work for the community, while those with most make as much as they can for themselves? In either case, the rest of us must pay.

24.10.2010

COME ON, ED
Ed Milliband wants fewer, fairer cuts as part of a plan for economic growth and accuses the government of crying Bankruptcy to mask their project for a smaller state.
The Tories are pessimists, he says, and not about to build a good, green, childfriendly economy. But then, instead saying how that might be done - outlining some more optimistic project of his own - he falls back on defensive rhetoric about 'protecting values and ideals..the basics of our social and economic fabric.'
If Tories have a project, Labour must match it. Instead of rolling back the democratic state, why not roll back unaccountable corporate greed? If that sounds Old Labour, put some sense into that free-floating thought-balloon, the Big Society.
The goal? To root the remote representative structures of national and local government in a more direct and face-to-face democracy, beginning wherever we live and WORK. The project, a Red and Green New Deal, sound social basis of Ed's 'good economy'.

19.09.2010

Cut from the topA couple of weeks ago your editorial backed David Miliband as a middle-ground Labour leader while Will Hutton called for action on Murdoch. Now you are calling for action on Murdoch while Hutton backs David Miliband – for fear a rightwing press writes off ‘Red Ed.’
Murdoch wins without a shot. To face up to economic crisis, climate chaos and a rightwing press, we need a braver, more honest approach, a common sense less bound by an imposed concensus that serves to keep things as they are, or worse.
It is NOT commonsense for the wealth of nations to be highjacked by a few rich men making global fortunes. It is not commonsense for our savings to serve as gambling chips - money making money - while public service jobs are cut, people lack homes, productive industry is starved of investment and infrastructure rots.
It IS commonsense to redirect public and private funds into a ‘Green New Deal’ that would regenerate industry and create jobs in a more sustainable economy.
If we entrust production and services to private enterprise, it’s sensible to require that companies, including banks, commit themselves to social objectives as well as profit. Social democracy makes no sense if it stops short at employment, where most of our effective time and energy is spent, and the proceeds are so unevenly shared.
If cut we must, then - in an increasingly unequal society - common sense says ‘cut from the top’ (and make up in quality of life what we lack in quantity).

02.09.2010 (Weekly Guardian)
ODA own goal
If British development aid is to be geared towards British security (as Nicholas Watt reports), then those in most need of it had better pose a real threat.

01.08.2010

Docile labour and other natural resources
Scorched earth as peatbogs burn around Moscow (McKie’s ‘dark ideology’), thousands swept away by floods in a NW Pakistan still ravaged by military surge against the Taliban (pace, Cameron).
In Greece , with strikers cutting off fuel supplies, a new ‘revolutionary sect’ picks targets among police, politicians and journalists, threatens tourist trade.
What – I wonder on a blue-sky Sunday afternoon in Wales – if climate chaos and incipient class war are NOT coincidental? In a globalised market, committed to growth but not social justice or sustainable ecology, it seems likely that docile labour and other natural resources will run out more or less in parallel.
And if, for the first time in history, the customary beneficiaries of an exploitive economy have nowhere clean and safe to escape to?
What if business-as-usual is, literally, a dead end: an unsustainable system set to shut down in a vice of its own making?

17.05.10

Employment may be bad for us
Mind and the European Heart Journal (Fear of Mondays, Binge Working) remind us of the obvious: overwork’s not good for us. The researchers cite overtime and pressure of recession, but the root-cause goes deeper.
Employment as we know it is not mainly concerned with workers’ health, or consumer welfare or common good. Capitalist companies are committed in law and practice to a cash return for their owners. When the going gets tough, other considerations fall away.
Current demand for financial redress ignore toxic anomalies in ‘normal’ working life: rights or expectations of democracy and self-determination stop short of employer’s premises.
If we want we want a satisfactory working life, or sustainable world, we must rebalance Company Law that limits democracy to shareholders, freeing owners and executives to exploit the rest of us.

06.05.2010 (Guardian Weekly)

Black hole
Madeleine Bunting (Financial Deluge) predicts ‘the savage dismantling of social democracy’ but overlooks the black hole at the heart of our present social fabric: self-determination and democratic accountability stop short where organised work begins. In public services as in private finance and industry, we drop any claim to personal autonomy or collective responsibility as we enter employers’ premises.
It shouldn’t require a savage dismantling to fill this obvious gap and reclaim our social sovereignty at work. But I fear it may, as old Capital does its worst to prevent the sort of reform New Labour should have been about.

22.01.10 (Guardian Weekly)

Abhorrent
Gordon Brown (News in brief) finds it abhorrent and offensive that a Muslim tearaway should plan a counter-demonstration in Wootton Basset where British soldiers are mourned and honoured on their return from Afghanistan. Of course we can all feel for the bereaved and it is natural enough for them to resent any distraction or challenge at what is becoming an all-too-familiar routine.
But because we can share in the grief of families and comrades we can also feel for the much greater number of bereaved on the other side.
'Islam4UK' sounds like rubbish to me, and you only gave the story a paragraph. But I'm bothered by the unanimous, unquestioning condemnation by British commentators when a dubious character threatens to confront us with the truth: we send our sons, brothers, and husbands to kill as well as die, in what is at best a dubious cause.

17.01.2010

International emergency force
No more the Caste Lead' and 'Shock and Awe' of Gaza and Baghdad! What we need now is an international concentration of forces for effective intervention in natural and/or man-made disasters. For emergency relief, reconstruction and longer-term prevention.
In Haiti we've watched precious days wasted as emergency aid efforts stalled on the brink of chaos. It's impossible not to compare this with the speed and directness of recent military strikes.
We need a truly international emergency force that can act fast, far and wide, with an eye also to disasters-in-the-making.
This will require many of the skills and logistics now tied up in national armed forces. But, as military commanders have come to realise in Afghanistan, co-operation is vital, as civil and social objectives take precedence over bombing and shooting.
More than 55 years ago I refused military service in favour of several years in an optimistically-entitled Service Civil International (International Voluntary Service). Even then, on our various relief and reconstruction projects, we realised how inefficient, under-trained and under-resourced we were (though it still did us a power of good!)
What matters now is not the voluntary or antimilitary, but the urgency of pulling together human and technical resources worldwide. For peacekeeping, as ever, but more importantly to match the impending horrors of famine and flood, earthquake and drought.
This will be just as costly as military arrangements but less likely to be wasted in mutual destruction or disuse. Geared to building hope out of misery, the future force will serve to unite not divide the millions who serve and benefit. It may also help secure the survival of the rest of us.

MUCH ADO ABOUT DATES

2010-03-25T10:17:00.000-07:00

Article for Quaker online economic forum

Last year, Greg Wilkinson was arrested for shoplifting following his ‘citizens’ seizures’ of dates imported from Israeli Settlements. Here he explains why he got involved and how he continues to campaign against settlement goods. Although not a Quaker, Greg previously served on the UK Quaker group that served as pilot for the current Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine & Israel.

When the Israeli assault on Gaza began, I didn’t know what to do. The Israeli embassy, and our own dissembling government, were too far away from Swansea, and I’d become bit disenchanted with marches in London. Then, early last January, I got a Palestinian appeal for ‘Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions,’ forwarded by an Israeli friend.

On a weekly Tesco shopping trip, I spotted a rack of ‘West Bank’ dates. From my limited knowledge of West Bank geography, and the obstacles in the way of Palestinian exports, I guessed they were from Israeli settlements. I slipped a few packs into my baggage, took them out past the till and wrote to Tesco’s head office to say what I’d done and why. I offered to refund the price if they could show the fruit were NOT from illegal settlements.
In the course of a long e-mail exchange, I repeated my ‘citizen’s seizures’ and Tesco avoided both the settlement issue and any move to prosecute.

To break the stalemate, a group of local activists combined in a more public event. With a decoy rally in the carpark, we walked two trolley-loads of ‘West Bank’ dates and herbs out through the main entrance. (Youtube ‘Tesco arrests’).

D. Murphy, the woman with the other trolley, was charged with theft but I was not ‘for lack of evidence’. What more could they want? I’d marked my load of dates with red paint, so I was literally red-handed. (D used Tesco value ketchup on hers). At least, we thought, the case would now be tried, and the nonsense of government policy exposed: ‘settlements illegal, obstacle to peace, trade with them OK.’

The Swansea judge must have been unwilling to preside over political theatre, a play of natural, national and international law (Justice in short). He dismissed the case.
Instead, we got a sideshow. Several of us were arrested, had houses searched, computers and papers removed ‘on suspicion of conspiracy to racially aggravated criminal damage.’ Nothing to do with dates or Tesco or Swansea however. Some bodies unknown – to us as well as the police - had painted green peppers red at Sainburys, Bridgend. Not far down the coast, but we’d never been near the place. The racial aggravation turned out to be a slogan ‘Boycott Israeli Goods’. That case too was dropped, and we got a police apology.

Now, on advice from a ‘Lawyer for Palestinian Human Rights’, we’re working on another tack. Instead of courting prosecution why not prosecute? With a legal advice from Matrix counsel, we’re pressing Swansea Trading Standards to act on our behalf. Our argument: Tesco’s - and other stores – are importing and selling goods from an illegal source, ‘West Bank’ labels are misleading - disguising the illegal source - and the imports benefit from EU-Israel duty exemptions that do not apply to goods produced outside Israel.
(Ed: note clarification in last sentence)

D.Murphy, of the value ketchup, recently returned from the seige-breaking Viva Palestina trek to Gaza. Last month, at a meeting to hear that story, 100 people signed a call for action by Trading Standards. This was delivered, with samples of liberated dates, to Swansea Guildhall, in a presentation to coincide with the city’s ‘Fair Trade Fortnight’. The Trading Standards officer who met us said he’d investigate, but confine himself to compliance with UK regulations. We said that what mattered was not so much the regulations, even international law, but the rights that laws exist to defend. Behind those dates and dealings, land is still being stolen, lives and liberties in Palestine curtailed. As routes are opened up to settlement trade, they are closed to Palestinians. Palestinians who protest, even non-violently, face raids, detention, even death.

Tesco has now updated its 'West Bank' labels, in line with recent advice from the government. The new labels indicate that the dates are from Israeli settlements, but not that the settlements are illegal.

Find out More:
For more information on settlement goods see: www.quaker.org.uk/settlement produce

For legal advice about the labelling of Israeli and West Bank goods, see: http://www.lphr.org.uk/publications/advice/Labelling_Advice_Beal.pdf

Commonwood

2010-03-25T09:51:00.000-07:00

TROSERCH WOODLAND SOCIETY NEWSLETTER 2009-10

(Troserch Wood is an 80 acre patch of woodland up the Morlais valley from Llangennech, near Llanelli, in South Wales. It was bought by a specially formed community association with a grant from the Forestry Commission, former owners of the land, who had sold it off during the privatisations of the early 90s)

What’s the Troserch Woodland Society for? I was asked that today for a Forestry Commission survey. The man on the phone didn’t know which box to tick: ‘conservation’ or ‘community regeneration’? What about both, I said, with some misgiving: how DO communities regenerate? So ‘conservation’ got the tick, with ‘community’ in brackets beside it.
What has been regenerating is the newly-felled east bank of the Morlais: more than ten acres of little broadleaved saplings, rooting and budding in the gaps between the fellers’ brash. Gorse and birch, rushes and foxgloves seed themselves. Birds and animals are drawn into the light and space in what was once a dark crypt of conifers.
The felling also revealed old mine buildings, and tall, spindly clumps of oak and ash that had somehow survived the plantation. We had working parties to extend the machine tracks into new footpaths and plant more trees in gaps, alders for damp places, copper beach and scots pine for colour and variety.
A second picnic site was opened up near the river, and we’re building a roundhouse - rough timber with a turf roof - to provide shelter and a base for activities.
How many people visit the wood? No way of knowing without turnstiles or monitors, but we do have 150 (???) paid-up members and their families. We meet more people in the woods and see more cars in the carpark since logpiles were replaced by a notice board with information, map and bench. Horses and bicycles leave their marks on the tracks, also motorcycles – less welcome but hard to keep out. To prevent fourwheel access we’ve put in swinging barriers (off-road vehicles tear up tracks, consort ill with wildlife and walkers). We’ve also wasted time (ours) and money (yours) picking up old tyres and getting a burnt-out car removed..
We’d like more people who share our aims to visit and enjoy the place. If people have activities they’d like to organise, let’s know and see if we can help. By summer we hope to have a roundhouse built, a timber structure with a turf roof to serve as shelter and base for group activities. Last year Llangennech schoolchildren came up for a walk, this year a little group came up for a Christmas tree. In November we joined a table-top sale at the Community Centre, recruited new members and made decorations with children. A calendar with pictures of the wood sold well. For more pictures, history and information visit website www.troserchwoods.co.uk (???). If you’d like to submit a picture for next year’s calendar, contact…..(???)
We were grateful for a donation from Llangennech Bowling Club in memory of….. (???) Another memorial, a bird-cherry near the upper picnic site is doing well.
Wildlife thrives, except perhaps for grey squirrels which seem to have disappeared since goshawks took up residence. We see foxes, badgers and rabbits, hares in adjoining fields. Besides goshawks, there are kites, merlins and sparrow hawks. There may or may not be dormice: an experiment with prefab dormouse houses (dormice hice?) was inconclusive. Dippers nest by the river, sightings reported of otter and kingfisher. Herons fly in to fish. Apart from small brown trout, there may also be sewen or salmon coming up the river to spawn (expert advice welcome).
There’s always work to be done. Besides the roundhouse, there are windfall trees across one path and several more in the river. We’re linking up with other commonwoods in Lais y Goedwig (sp???). We’re in touch with Permaculture magazine and the Heart of Wales railway. New ideas and activities welcome. Committee meetings open to all members, 7pm first Wednesday every month at Llangennech Community Centre. Thanks for the support we’ve had, and to whoever planted daffodil bulbs along the new track. When you’ve an hour or two to spare – take a walk on the wildside, and mind the little trees.
PS If you wonder why there are two bridges within a few yards, it’s because we had to put a bigger one in for the felling machinery. Ideally we would move the footbridge down stream, to make a newer circular path. For now we’ve made the planks less slippery with chicken wire.

lifework

2010-03-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

How people work, and how employment as we know it doesn’t

Introduction

Lifework df
Whatever we have to do, or choose to do for ourselves, each other and the world. As distinct from employment: other-directed work for money, boss or institution (public services mostly adopt top-down model of capitalist companies).

Why I write: no special qualification, but experience, conviction and faith that others are more like me than not. I cant ignore the elephant in the room: wage-slavery’s alive and well. Our ‘social democracy’ fails to include the main productive business of our lives; we routinely drop all claim to self-determination and mutual accountability as we enter employers’ premises. At the core of our organised ‘social’ activity we resign ourselves to powers and purposes outside our control..

What turned me against employment? Maybe it seemed a bit too like school: at home my parents made most of the decisions, but they’d ask me what I wanted, let me choose. I knew they loved me and could, mostly, answer back; none of which applied at school. After school, before university and instead of military service I spent a couple of years in voluntary work-camps: no pay, often badly run, but friendly, doing the best we could, mostly manual work in what seemed like a good cause. Unlike a string of ‘proper’ jobs where, even in a ‘public services’ it was often impossible to do a good job well: that didn’t seem to be the main aim, and we workers had little say in what we did or how: that went for an NHS hospital, Reuters, the Victoria Line tunnel, schools and colleges, adult education and community work.

Public service? Private industry? In neither are workers and managers primarily concerned with what they’re doing for its own sake, for community, society or the wider world, Not even what they’re doing for themselves – apart from money and promotion (nothing to do with the job in hand, any more than marks or coming top of the class at school) In private enterprise, under capitalist company law, the reason is obvious: doing good is not the name of the game at all; the goal is not the welfare of workers, society or a better world; the goal is no more or less than profit for owners and shareholders. In public services, although broad goals are set by more or less elected authorities, the working structure closely parallels that of private enterprise, with power at the top and decisions imposed on those below.

Wage slavery’s alive and well: official!
Although we have a choice of employers, once in the rules of the game are broadly the same: do what you’re told or else. If we’re sacked, we don’t have five acres and a mule – the space and resources to fend for ourselves. And government benefits, ‘social security’ is made conditional on our efforts to get back on the treadmill: democratic authorities funnelling us back into undemocratic employment.

Freedom TO work, freedom AT work
We need work, for a living and as a living. We need the income, our part in making and doing the things we need, and our share in the product. We need the company and recognition of others who know us, not just by appearances or titles, but in action, by what we do. Work is also self-expression. We need a say in what we do, how we do it and to what purpose. If democracy means anything, it’s about how we organise ourselves: who does what, and how, for whom, and who gets what? We should all have a say in how the process and product are allocated, shared. To make sense of what we do, commit ourselves and understand each other, we need a common purpose we can believe in. ‘Do what you’re told’ and/or ‘whatever makes most money for the boss’ is just not good enough.
With no credible personal or shared commitment – if human wellbeing and a better world are not on the agenda for our daily work - how on earth do we expect to live happily, build a community or save the world?

Work is too important to leave to Employers
We don’t just sell our labour, we sell a part of ourselves, the only lives we’ve got, time and energy we might have spent differently. We learn, and unlearn, by doing: not just picking up skills, but shaped in ourselves, transformed, or deformed. It’s easy just to focus on what we’re doing, the immediate object, or – if that gets too monotonous – on what we hope to get for it, the money and what we might spend it on. All work, every action, has both motives and consequences.

Human work, human purpose, is as good as human consciousness:
In human work, we like to know what we’re doing and why. Our motives will be more or less recognised, by ourselves and others; our purposes will include at least some of the consequences - if not the goods or service we produce, than the wage we hope to get for it. Some of our own motives, as well as other people’s, remain obscure. And for every intended consequence, there will be others unintended: collateral damage or lucky break.
People used to say ‘what’s your game’ when asking about someone’s job. If we’re lucky we may actually enjoy what we do for a living. In a game, or hobby or art, the process may become an end in itself – the joy is in the music or the game as it’s played, not just the final score, applause etc. Human work at best is both vocation and game, our main purpose and joy in life. Everything in play, and to play for.

High and low, rare and commonplace
Mechanical work, evolution, plant and animal life, these all come into what we do. Not beneath us, but part of us. As we move and move things in the world, making and breaking, meeting and mating, so we are moved: we feel what we do, inside and outside ourselves; we are touched by what we touch. What goes on in our heads, and socalled ‘hearts’ is part and parcel of the world it reflects, and serves to change.
The images and affections of our inner life are as real and effective as the process and pattern of the world around. The world goes through us as we go through it. The human ‘spirit’ is no more separate from our bodies in the world than matter and energy are separate in physics and chemistry.

Genius of capitalist employment:
- Uses us against ourselves and each-other, subordinating co-operation and common interest to competition and greed (note: we need all sides of our nature – aggression and appropriation are also essential – but not to exploit one side at expense of others.)
- Sets dead labour – capital and finished product - over living labour, past over present. Capital a millstone round the neck of vital time and energy.
- Substitutes wants it can satisfy for the needs it cant: turns old needs into new wants, to keep us producing the things it can supply, distract us from the things it cant – freedom, love etc
- Addicts us to more of the same and jumps the points at which priorities change: survival once secured, what matters most is not what we can get or how much we have but what we do with our lives, what we make of ourselves, each other and the world..
- Entrenches inequality, in its own power-relations and in its distribution of earnings and profits . Depends on hierarchy, differentials, setting one over and against another. In society, as in work, we’re classed, divided and ruled.
- Capitalist employment substitutes goods for good, images of wealth and success for the experience and process of human happiness; blots out our vision of the world, and the damage we do to it, with…Disneyland.

The alternatives?
- People work better, live better when they co-operate, by choice, in a common cause, when they know what they’re doing, who with and who for.
- We enjoy working for ourselves and each other, the self-satisfaction and mutual respect that comes with doing something useful in the world.
- We already manage a lot for ourselves - at home, in childcare (who teaches our children to walk, talk and feed themselves?)’ at leisure and in emergencies.
- Even at work, a lot of the management is left to us (which is why working-to-rule has sometimes been an effective weapon in industrial disputes); and why employers’ requirement of subservience is balanced, or contradicted, by demand for teamwork and initiative.
- A bit more ambition, a will to connect: to take back our own lives, reach out to each other and into ourselves, come to grips with the world as it is, make the most of what we find, reclaim the only time we’ve got..

Capital and Commonwealth.
Of course we NEED capital, all our capita, fairly and functionally shared
- Commonwealth could mean what it says: resources – land and plant as well as cash – to be owned by those who work, enjoy and depend on them..
- capital is our personal and social inheritance, the lasting product of our own and our forbears’ work, what we save and build on, pass to our children
- what matters is who produces and commands that capital, how it’s shared, and the purposes to which it’s put: as it stands we get the pay, but not the product, profit or plant.
- working companies in need of outside capital must pay for it, with interest or product share, but NOT at the price of power. Voting shares for active stakeholders, those who pay with their lives. If I have savings to invest, that is money I can live without, though I want it safe and welcome a return on it.
- In capitalist employment, the product, profit and power of decision belong not to those who produce, nor to those who gain or suffer most directly from the
- process. Who pays the piper calls the tune: the players, the dancers and the neighbours do as they’re told, take what they get.
- Decision is divorced from experience, thinking from doing and suffering, word from deed, orders from reality. As workers we have no say in what most concerns us: what we do and how our time is spent; those who give the orders cant know what they’re talking about.
- Company law gives ownership and decision-making to shareholders, those with disposable cash, not those who invest their lives. (In a social democracy we can all vote for local councils and parliament, but in employment, where so much of our daily life and energy is spent, a property-owners democracy still prevails: absentee investors may vote, but workers don’t.).
- Within companies, the higher you get, the nearer to the owners and their way of life, the more your status and condition resembles theirs; crossovers are common, mutual consultation and respect built in – a semblance of democracy, equality. The further down the ladder, the more clear-cut the difference and subordination rung to rung.
- Public services, though accountable to government and electorate, have adopted the capitalist model of employment in their internal functioning: with the exception of senior executives and professionals, employees are hired to do as they’re told and fired if they don’t.
- Unions mostly confine themselves to wages and conditions: a bigger slice of the cake for workers, rather than a say in what sort of cake or how its baked. They accept the employer’s right to buy our lives, to haggle on the price.
- Markets and money, nothing wrong with them in principle; as with capital, the problem lies in ownership and control. A free market, and a free currency, is one that is shared on more or less equal terms by all its users.

Time for a change
- To extend social democracy into the economic sphere, company law and employment - the theatre of working life
- To commit companies, collective enterprise, to social as well as economic goals, to democratic management, accountable to workers, customers and community
- To re-root conventional representative democracy in working life, a direct democracy of people deciding and acting for themselves on the job.
- effective human interaction, mutual responsibility and self-determination, people living and working together face to face.
- To transform the vertical structure - pyramid of ladders, heads only meeting at the top - into an open network, enabling contact and movement in all directions

Competition?
We are competitive by nature, but also co-operative, inclined to share. Life is a survival of the fittest BUT fitness has as much to do with fitting in, working together, as it has to do with domination, let alone extermination
- We need structures that allow for competition as part of a broader co-operation, not vice versa as in conventional employment.
- Love thy neighbour as thyself and do as you would be done by are also part of human nature, empathy, companionship and mutual care built in.
- Our economic arrangements should reflect this balance, structuring in the range of qualities we need.

Human work – lifework – too important to be left to employers
Not just what we do FOR a living but what we do AS a living, central to what we are, what we make of ourselves as well as what’s made out of us. A subject in its own right, and worth a closer look. That’s what I want to do now, with your help perhaps. I’ll draw on my own experience – as jack of many trades and master of none – and welcome help from you and yours. How it will all fit together I don’t yet know: if I did, if I knew the answers in advance it wouldn’t be worth going on.. I’d be bored and so would you.

In my next section, I’ll give some headings, to prompt recall and reflection, some fields to put our stories in.

P.S. Of course not everything is work
Not all or only work, and that goes for this writing – and reading. The joy of work includes the moment when you stop, don’t have to any more. Times when or things just happen, get given you, by others or by chance. Work can become a game, and play sometimes turns out to have been useful. When Archimedes got into his bath, he wasn’t thinking weights-and-measures, just wanting to relax and float.

2009-11-13T04:51:00.000-08:00

INEQUALITY HURTS: SO WHAT?

How to build on findings of The Spirit Level: a process for change

Aim: to open up discussion between those with most to gain from greater equality, those with most to lose (or give) and the majority in between. To record and diffuse that discussion as a stimulus to wider debate and action.

Objective: to get different class/income groups talking among themselves and between groups, to address differences and areas of agreement. With input from experts/thinkers and an opportunity to address their questions and conclusions to political parties.

Method

1.Select three focus groups drawn from
wealthiest 10%
poorest 30%
middling 60%

2. Focus: bring all groups together, intermixed as individuals, for outline of issues defined in Spirit Level: the damage done by inequality and the widening gap.

3. Discussion: Focus groups meet separately to discuss four questions:
why are the rich rich and the poor poor?
why has the gap widened?
c. what should be done?
what can WE (people in our position) do about it?

4. Confrontation: bring groups together to address points of difference and agreement.

5. Input: bring groups together with panel of experts and thinkers (who will have
previous session, either live or video) for questions and answers, in both directions.)

6. Review: reform focus groups, so each includes cross section, to see what has been learned, how views have changed and what can be done.

7. Demands: bring all participants, groups, experts etc together with a panel of
politicians from wide spectrum of UK parties (Ireland might have its own
version.)

8. Edit and diffuse video record: ideally a TV or film production company would
be involved from the start. This (as with BBC Choir series) could give
importance and urgency to the whole process. A film- or programme-maker might also want to follow some participants home.

Which leaves open several questions, apart from whether the process could work: who selects groups, who organises and chairs meetings, which producers/chanels might be interested, and who PAYS?.

Swansea 'City of Sanctuary'

2009-11-13T04:42:00.000-08:00

Ada's involved in a move to make Swansea a 'City of Sanctuary' to counter the nastiness of immigration controls and/or BNP. I was asked to do a piece on a dance-show called 'Oyster Bay' in which some asylum seekers had a hand:

What have asylum-seekers got to do with oysters? If Swansea still had oyster-beds, it might be a job, like cocklepicking. But overfishing and pollution killed the oysters, so there are no jobs in that. For anyone. Unless oysters can be helped to grow again. For the moment, oysters are Heritage, and Heritage is nothing if not Art.

Including Dance. Last summer Tandance – a local powerhouse I only heard about this month - did a show called Oyster Bay. All sorts of people were involved, from primary schools to colleges and several local, and not so local, dance groups. Tandance is funded to promote ‘education, integration, community engagement and social change.’ A tall order! But with research into once-and-future oystercatching went a widening net of local involvement, along the coast to Port Talbot and up the Swansea and Neath valleys.

One of the dance groups involved is Dynion, all male, another is Arabic, and behind the scenes, making boats and sails for props, asylum-seekers from several continents came and went. How many of them had their own experiences of setting sail? And getting washed up… And why dance, why art at all, for people just surviving?

Maybe it’s when you’re worst off that you most something to get you out of the rut. Unlike most other social activities, visual arts, music and dance don’t depend on language. In the Oyster show, these artforms went together. If asylum-seekers worked mainly on the artwork side, that’s because the long process through rehearsal to performance needs regular attendance. Which depends on a stability that most asylum seekers can only pray for.

Does it work, that little bit of distraction? Or does it just feel worse when you turn back to a painful past and uncertain future? Feedback was positive from the few asylum seekers who were able to see the show and report back. And some of us will know from our own hard times that a moment of warmth and light can go a long way. Sometime, somehow, somewhere, something better might be possible!

And for us, relatively secure in our ‘host community’, what’s in it for us? Walking along Swansea beach, I’ve often wondered about those oyster shells, and bits of coal that get washed up. Did somebody eat those oysters? Who dug the coal, did it fall in the sea, or was it pushed? In town, or on the bus, I wonder what’s behind different faces, darker skins.You can never tell what’s going on in someone else’s head, but the more sorts of people you get to know, the better you can guess, the more comfortable you feel in your own skin.

Carol Brown, the Arts Director of Tandance, recalls some little turning points over the past ten years or so. A white person saying. ‘That’s the first time I’ve touched a black skin.’ Like finding you can float! And a Townhill woman in a women’s yoga class who asked a Muslim woman - who’d somehow managed the session under her hijab - ‘What’s it like in there?’

Of course we’re different, Maybe the highest education of all is reaching out, exploring our differences together. Nothing human is foreign to me! Or as Carol put it when we talked in her Baglan office the other day ‘We are one whole…You cant be safe by closing your borders.’

2009-11-09T04:47:00.000-08:00

‘TROOPS OUT’ AT SWANSEA REMEMBRANCE EVENT

(Piece asked for by Quaker journal 'The Friend')

The banner said ‘Stop the war in Afghanistan. Remember the dead . Respect the living. Troops out!’ Holding the banner, standing in silence at the gate of St Mary’s Church, Swansea, were three people, two of them from Swansea Quaker Meeting.

Beside the main text of the banner were the words ‘welcome home’ and ‘peace’ (salaam) in Arabic. Round the border were scattered four black coffins and 40 white bundles – each standing for 50 dead. 200+ British servicemen and women, and about ten times as many Afghans. Another coffin was pinned to the fabric, representing the 30 soldiers killed since the banner was made.

The formal procession, marching band, uniforms and regimental banners, campaign medals and mayoral chains, unravelled in the street beside the church. As soldiers, families, ex-servicemen and local dignitaries passed through the lychgate on their way to the service, most of them averted their eyes, a few muttered ‘disgraceful’ or ‘shame on you.’ Several others said ‘quite right’, ‘I agree’ or even ‘Congratulations!’ A weeping woman, with her husband and young son, said ‘Please take it away.’ I tried to say that I was sorry, but that saving lives might be as important as mourning them. She said ‘If you were sorry, you would go.’

We didn’t, but that was why my wife had not wanted to join us. We had contacted the British Legion, the vicar of St Mary’s and the police beforehand to let them know what we planned, and to reassure them that the aim was not to oppose or disrupt. No answer from the Legion, the vicar said he was all for freedom of conscience but not on his turf, and the police said ‘thank you for letting us know, we have no problem with that.’ The local newspaper had already taken pictures of the banner which they published with a few paragraphs of explanation: this war is unwinnable, prolongs the agony of the Afghan people and is more likely to provoke terror attacks than prevent them.’

We plan a similar silent presence, with a few more people, at the Swansea Cenotaph, at the 11th hour of the 11th day… I’m thinking of adding a placard reading: ‘Spare them from their leaders’ lies!’

To the woods

2009-10-26T03:45:00.000-07:00

A piece for the Llanelli Star to report on progress in our commonwood:

Welcome to Troserch Wood, but leave your motor at the gate! Troserch Wood is a strip of ancient woodland, along the Morlais river north of Llangennech. The 80-acres of former Forestry Commission plantation was acquired three years ago to secure it for public access and wildlife. The aim was to keep an unspoiled wooded valley in the public domain – a greenwood and a commonwood! - while gradually replacing conifers with native broadleaved trees
.
The woods are managed by the Troserch Woodland Society (TWS), a voluntary association open to anyone with £5 to spare who shares these aims. An elected committee doubles as a not-for-profit limited company.

When we succeeded in getting the wood, with a grant from its former Forestry Commission owners (renamed Cyd Coed), we hadn’t really thought what to do with it. Luckily, the committee includes two foresters. With their advice and expertise, we organised the felling and replanting of about ten acres east of the river. Now, at last, the woods are free of heavy machines and the tracks more or less clear of mud. Gone are acres of dark pines. In their place, between lines of stumps and brush, several thousand newly planted ‘whips’ are sprouting leaves: oak and ash, rowan, elder and wild cherry.

With the felling and replanting, as with the original purchase of the woods, we’ve been very lucky with Cyd Coed and other grants. A new bridge and improved tracks serve to open up an area that had been effectively out of bounds for a generation, too steep, dark and dense for man or beast.

Now the landscape is revealed and sunlight flooding in. Dormant acorns, roots and bluebell bulbs have sprung to life, birds returned to nest in the brush left by the felling. Among the outcrops, springs and streams are manmade features, the outlines of old walls and tracks, spoiltips and ruins of old mineworkings…

Please heed the WARNING sign on the fences around old mine openings!
We hadn’t envisaged telling other people what to do or not to do. But with the property come responsabilities, and liabilities (and it will take some time before the Coal Authority makes good the caps on all the old drifts and shafts.)

We must also find our way through conflicts of interest. Forest tracks draw motorbikes and fourwheel drives, but we cant square that with wildlife commitments and the desire of most visitors for peace and quiet. In the event of a collision, who suffers, and who picks up the costs?

So the decision was taken to ban all motor traffic - motorbikes, quadbikes and fourwheel drives – from the forest paths (they’re already illegal on rights of way, though NOT on the ‘Roman Road’ that forms the western boundary). Mountain bikers and horseriders are welcome, on the understanding that wheels and hooves give way to traffic on two feet.

It’s hard to keep a proper balance between over-caution and irresponsibility. We don’t want to turn a wildish river valley into a bland pleasure park, or litter the place with warning signs and notices. The proceeds of timber sold may cover basic woodland management, but not the construction of immaculate footpaths or rangers to patrol or empty litter bins. Instead we rely on goodwill and common sense, we trust people to look after themselves and each other, respect the nature of the place and the feelings of other visitors.

So, come and have a look if you haven’t already. To get to the main carpark, at the north-west end of the wood, follow the Troserch Road north from Llangennech. Cross the A4138 roundabout and head up the hill. After a mile-and-a-half, where the road swings sharp left, turn right, heading north towards Llannon. After another half mile, and you’ll see a carpark on the right, with signboard and map of the woods and paths. There’s a picnic site nearby.

We also welcome proposals from groups and organisations for new activities – camping, orienteering, forest-school or woodcraft skills. School groups, scouts, you name it (whatever happened to the Woodcraft Folk?): get in touch.

For contacts and information on wildlife, history, see www.troserchwoods.co.uk . All TWS members are welcome to management meetings, first Wednesday every month, at 7 pm in Llangennech Community Hall.

Stolen fruit: a date for lawmakers and enforcers

2009-10-26T03:01:00.000-07:00

Latest round in the date war, this letter below went to a selection of ministers, law officers and local police. With each letter went a single stolen date, removed by me from the Swansea Tesco store.

Dear Peter Mandelson

FREE SAMPLE: CONFISCATED TESCO ‘WEST BANK’ DATE

You are now in receipt of stolen goods and whoever is in charge of import regulations may need to decide who’s responsible and what should be done.

I have recently removed this date among others, in packets labelled ‘Origin: West Bank,’ from the shelves of Tesco’s Swansea Marina store. Since last January I have confiscated a number of similar packets and written to Tesco CEO Terry Leahy explaining why. I offered to refund the price in full if he could show the dates were not the product of illegal Israeli settlements. In the ensuing correspondence, Tesco neither addressed the settlement issue nor took up my refund offer. I was banned from their stores but not prosecuted.

A more public ‘citizen’s seizure’ was then organised at the same Tesco store. Filmed and reported in the press, aYoutube clip of the event drew 50,000 hits. Although a woman accompanying me was charged, for some reason I was not. When the woman’s case came to Swansea Crown Court in June, the judge dismissed it.

Through my MP, Alan Williams I have written to government ministers urging them to bring UK law into line with the Geneva Conventions and UN Security Council resolutions to which we are signatories. Bill Rammell (then at the FCO) put the contradiction baldly in his reply: ‘…the building of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories is illegal under international law. However the import and sale of products from Israeli settlements…is not prohibited by law in the UK, and we consider this is consistent with the UK’s international law obligations.’

This week I learned that that the government is citing a Security Council resolution to justify an otherwise illegal freeze on suspects’assets. This prompts me to adopt a similar line in a further citizen’s seizure. Where a process is inadmissible, not to mention cruel, so is its product – whether settlement dates, ‘blood diamonds’, evidence obtained by torture, or lampshades made of human skin. Where government lawmakers and enforcers fail to uphold our commitments in international law, citizens have a right and duty to step in.

Import and sale of settlement produce amounts to handling stolen goods, it undermines international law and helps prolong a conflict for which Britain bears heavy responsibility. I have auctioned previous consignments of confiscated West Bank dates in aid of Gaza relief (at £1 per date). Unless you need this sample as evidence, you may care to do the same. Or eat it and serve justice in some other way.

Yours sincerely

Greg Wilkinson (dgregwilkinson@yahoo.co.uk, phone 01792 455335)

I want my DNA back

2009-10-26T02:46:00.000-07:00

This letter was prompted by Weekly Guardian articles on Justice and Civil liberties. A bit of unfinished business:

Ian Arundale
Chief Constable, Dyfed Powys Police
PO Box 99, LlangunnorCarmarthen SA31 2PF

Sir

Data Protection: please return or destroy DNA evidence taken from me in Llanelli, Spring 2003

One morning soon after the allied invasion of Iraq I was arrested, with one or two others, in the road outside Colleg Sirgar in Llanelli. I had joined students in a sit-down protest and remained seated when asked by police officers to clear the way.

I was lifted and manhandled. Although I did not resist, my arms were forced up behind my back, thumbs were pressed into the soft space under my ears, and my head banged down on the bonnet of a police car.

After a few hours in the cells, I was charged, then cautioned and released. I cant remember the exact charge, but I was asked if I agreed to a caution on the base of it. To get back to my family, I did, but only on condition that a reference to abusive language and behaviour was deleted.

In the presence of the desk officer, I asked the arresting officer to describe the abusive language and behaviour he accused me of. (This was the man who kept shouting ‘pressure points’ and sticking his thumbs under my ear; he also called me ‘a stupid old man’ and tightened the plastic cuffs until they hurt.) When he was unable to recall any abusive words or gestures I might have used, the desk officer agreed to delete the reference.

At the time, I did not object to the DNA swab and made no formal complaint about the manner of the arrest (as a young man I’d got used to some casual violence, both on the rugby field, and in protests over the Vietnam war). It was only later, when I discovered that the ‘abusive’ passage had not been deleted from the charge, that I felt a real injustice had been done: if I’d known the lies were staying in I would have refused the caution and fought the charge in court.

As it is, I was not convicted and did not accept the charge as given. Innocent of any crime, I ask you to destroy or return any DNA evidence retained by your force and ensure that related computer records are deleted.

I await your response - yours sincerely

David ‘Greg’ Wilkinson (formerly of Graig Fach, Llangennech, Llanelli SA14 8PX)

Remembrance Day: killing as we mourn?

2009-10-26T02:44:00.000-07:00

A letter/feature for the local paper, trying to pull together race and war, focussing on next month's Remembrance Day ceremonies. I wrote the piece partly to atone for not going to London for a big Stop the War demonstration on the same day.

Saturday Oct 24th
To the Editor
South Wales Evening Post

I missed the BNP debut on Question Time. That was partly because here in Wales the programme was pushed into a late-night slot, partly because I felt people had already put up a good anti-racist showing job in Swansea last week. My wife helped make a big banner saying ‘Equality, Welcome, Respect’ and I joined the crowd behind it for a while, across the road from the Swansea Mosque.

That silent protest was called by Quakers, a sideshow to the larger demo in Castle Square. What I’m wondering about now is whether there should be another silent presence alongside the usual Rememberance Day event at the Swansea Cenotaph.

Like Nick Griffin, I have a father who served, in the Second World War, and like Jack Straw’s father, I myself refused to join the army. Instead I did a three-year stint in voluntary work-camps. Earlier, when we lived in wartime London, we had our windows blown out, twice. I hardly remember that, but what does stand out is my mother getting the news of her younger brother’s death. An army engineer, he was blown up, not long after the allied landings, by what would now be called an IED. At that time, we were sharing our house with a family of Jewish refugees: during the V1s and V2s we children camped happily under tables in the basement.

In my father’s or uncle’s place, faced with Hitler’s attack, I don’t know what I would have done. But that wasn’t the sort of war facing me when my turn came. Self-defence is one thing, but that didn’t seem to be the issue in Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya, Aden or Suez. Then, as now in Afghanistan, it wasn’t clear who or what were we fighting for.

The BNP links war and race, but in the wrong way. Like Harry Patch, I believe there’s no such thing as a good war and I want to remember the dead on both sides, all sides. Since the Hitler war, most of our foreign engagements have set ‘us’ - mainly white – against ‘them’ in various shades of brown and black, with maybe 10 of ‘them’ killed to every one of ‘us’. Add religion, as in Iraq, Afghanistan and the ‘war on terrorism,’ it’s worse, and the wounds take longer to heal.

One of my first work-camps was in an Algiers shanty-town, at the start of the Algerian independence war. One workmate, an Algerian student, was later killed. Another, a young French officer, joined us when he could because he wasn’t happy in his army role. After that war, I knew another Algerian, ‘freedom fighter’ or ’terrorist’ who never quite recovered from the killing he’d done. In Egypt, soon after Suez, I shared a flat with a black, gay, former US serviceman. Later became press-spokesman for the militant Black Panthers, but in Cairo his presence was a talisman to me: a lot of Egyptians were still bitter about our Suez attack, and I was easy to pick out.

Earlier this year, an old Algerian journalist colleague came to stay with us in Swansea. He was more religious than I remembered him. We took him to the Swansea Mosque – to pray for us, he said – and we enjoyed the halal chicken and lamb we bought in St Helen’s Road.

So… The equation of Islam = extremist = terrorist makes no sense to me, and I cant make sense of a world divided on religious or racial lines. I may not have fought in wars, but I have got close enough to know and respect people who did. I want to show my respect and remember the dead. But can I stand in mourning for the dead while turning my back on the ongoing waste of lives in Afghanistan? ‘Organised murder,’ to quote Harry Patch again, or bloody chaos, oil on the flames, a gift to the enemy.

It’s a couple of weeks from Remembrance Sunday and I would like to know what other people think, in Swansea or further afield. Especially those who have fought and suffered themselves, lost family or friends, welcomed home the disfigured or deranged.

Yours sincerely

Greg Wilkinson
dgregwilkinson@yahoo.co.uk

Afghanistan: Swansea rally address

2009-10-26T02:42:00.000-07:00

This piece was written as an address to a Swansea 'troops out' rally. We made a banner and did all we could to promote it, but the Swansea Evening Post forgot to publish the piece advertising the event. Only about 100 people turned up, and we felt a bit lost in the crowd... So I didnt say all I'd intended, and I dont know how many people got the drift...

Friends, brothers and sisters – I can call you that because we’re all much like beneath our skins. Whatever the religion, race or language, we all laugh and cry, we all get wet when it rains. We all feel it when our people are attacked or someone dear to us is killed.

The first thing for us here now is to mourn the dead. Not just the 204 British servicemen and women, but all the people killed in Afghanistan. As Harry Patch reminded us, me must remember those on the other side of the line. For every coffin and flag carried off a plane in Wilthshire, there are ten white bundles in Afghanistan, bodies quickly buried in the ground they lived on..

As a child in the second world war, I was with my mother when she got the news of her brother’s death in Belgium. He was blown up by an IED, or boobytrap as they called them. And his widow came to live with us..

Some things ought to change, but don’t. Now again, we get public ceremonial, ritual mourning, then wives and families are left to their tears. Somewhere in Wales or Helmand a woman a woman will wake up at night, and believe for a moment it was all a bad dream, reach out in bed and find the empty space….

Let’s now take two minutes to remember ALL the dead and their families.

Our next task is even more important: to do what anything we can to stop this waste. Sacrifice is to fine a word. If we really respect our soldiers, we should bring them home, alive and in one piece. We’ve sent them on a fool’s errand: you cant impose democracy or free other people’s women by force. This war is unwinnable, it’s unaffordable and it does more to prompt terrorist attacks than stop them.

Our troops are doing the job we pay them to do. Bravely and as best they can. Not long ago, I heard a British para say the same about the Taliban: ‘They’re good,’ he saisd, and Jeremy Paxman blinked., ‘They know what they’re doing and they believe in what they’re fighting for.’ And a lot of the Afghan fighters, like are own, are doing what they do because there weren’t many other jobs around.

More than 40 years ago, as a journalist I helped cover dead-end wars in Algeria and Vietnam. Then too Western governments and generals kept saying ‘We’re winning: just one more push, more troops, a bit more time. Luckily we had a Labour prime minister then who refused to follow the US to Vietnam. Later we watched the route of Russian forces in Afghanistan and only recently, we heard a commander in Basra say that British troops in Iraq were part of the problem not the solution.

If you’re in a hole, stop digging, but our sad clown prime minister drops us deeper in it. There’s talk about talks with the Taliban, and we send more troops. To kill and die in our name as we foot the bill. Every other day, another one or two. And, you wouldn’t know it from the media, but people round the country are coming out to call a halt. When Gordon Brown comes back from his holiday, there will be a packet of 1000 signatures from Swansea waiting for him, demanding withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan.

TROOPS OUT! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW!

In two months time, on Saturday October 24th, the Stop the War coalition is planning a national troops out march in London. Maybe we could get some buses organised for that.

Afghanistan: troops out

2009-10-26T02:39:00.000-07:00

Here's a leaflet handed out in Swansea last month, when we took a table into town with a petition calling for troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan. A thousand people signed.

AFGHANISTAN: ANOTHER DEAD-END WAR!

The British death toll approaches 200, with about thirty-times as many Afghans killed by allied forces. For every death, several are disfigured or maimed…

The government says war will help stop terror attacks in this country. The truth is the opposite. Explosives and poisons can be made anywhere. The London bombers planned their action in revenge for British actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The more Afghans killed by US and UK troops, the more friends and relations join the Taliban.

You cant impose democracy or free other people’s women by force. The more you use, the more they cling to old ways (European Churches grew stronger under Stalin).

The war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, a cause of terror not the cure. Iraq and Afghanistan are dead-end wars. The real threats to our way of life are not from jihad but inequality, climate change and all-consuming, well-armed greed (aka Capital!).

TROOPS OUT: BRING THEM SAFELY HOME!

Swansea Stop-the-War 07792720667 / 07895063020

letter to observer

2009-07-19T04:45:00.001-07:00

Sir

Alan Milburn observes that the UK is ‘an unequal society in which class background too often determines life chances,’ with professions becoming ‘more socially exclusive, not less.’ And yet, in the dying days of New Labour, with no obvious contender on the left, he looks forward to a ‘great wave of social mobility’ in the near future.
Milburn rightly notes that greater equality would benefit many middle-income people as well as the poor and eschews ‘clumsy class-war politics’. But, while Barry Sheerman sees Harrovians who ‘walk around as if they own the world,’ a Fabian warns against ‘silliness about top-hatted toffs.’ The answer, he suggests, is not class-war, but a war against class.
From my own old public-school, Oxbridge and commonsense angle, it seems to me you cant have one without the other. We DO still live in an unequal class society, and most of us have an interest in freeing ourselves from BOTH the fine web of class divisions in and among ourselves AND the flexible domination of a self-selecting ruling class.
Wealth, class and income as we know them go together in a capitalist economy bound for nowhwere. Clumsy or silly as it may sound, I long for a credible alternative, a movement or party committed to joined-up human freedom, peaceful process and a sustainable world.

yours

2009-06-26T11:53:00.000-07:00

PRESS RELEASE 24.06.09: TESCO CASE DISMISSED

On Wednesday June 17th Judge John Diehl dismissed a charge of theft against Swansea campaigner d Murphy arising from removal of Israeli ‘West Bank’ goods from Tesco’s Marina store.

(I wasnt there but d said the judge layed into the CPS like Basil Fawlty with his hapless waiter. It was the judge who asked the defence to ask him for a dismissal... All very odd, a mixture of relief and disappointment, though there could still be a civil action for costs by Tesco, or the CPS might conceivably come up with a new charge of, say, criminal damage)

The protest action took place last January, in response to the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Ms Murphy was charged with theft after she and another protester, Greg Wilkinson, removed two trolley-loads of ‘West Bank’ goods from the shelves and wheeled them to the main entrance, marked them in red and dumped them as unfit for sale.

Outside the store, Free-Palestine protesters handed out leaflets explaining that goods labelled as ‘West Bank’, came from illegal Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory under military occupation. They argued that the British government recognises the illegality of both occupation and settlements, and that the import and sale of settlement goods is therefor unlawful: removal of the goods was comparable to a citizen’s arrest – serving to uphold the law, not break it.

In a letter to Swansea MP Alan Williams (May 14), the Foreign Office Minister, Bert Rammell, said ‘Mr Wilkinson…rightly notes that the UK considers the building of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories is illegal under international law. However the import and sale of products from Israeli settlements is not prohibited by the law in the UK and we consider that this is consistent…’

Consistent? One purpose of the Tesco action was to challenge this curious consistency in court, to argue that the sale of fruit and vegetables from illegal settlements amounted to the sale of stolen goods – grown on stolen land for the profit of the thieves who stole it. The protesters welcome the judge’s dismissal of the case last week as a technical victory, but it also forecloses a more important argument about the import and sale of settlement goods.

In preparing for the trial-that-never-was, the defence team, led by a young Palestinian barrister, also received information from Israeli sources that settlement goods were routinely mixed in by wholesalers with Israeli goods, to be exported and sold under Israeli labels (strengthening the case for a more general boycott!).

Tesco is now pursuing Ms Murphy for repayment of what the store claims was the cost of the action. Like Mr Wilkinson in an earlier written exchange with Tesco bosses, Ms Murphy might consider repayment if Tesco could show that the goods she took were NOT the produce of illegal settlements.

(A Youtube video of the Tesco arrests has attracted nearly 43,000 hits and more than 1000 more or less rational comments - some anti-Jewish, some anti-Arab, some anti-Women, and we’re sorry about that sort of silliness!)

2009-05-22T03:22:00.000-07:00

THINKING AROUND EQUALITY

Inequality hurts, equality heals! In their book The Spirit Level (Allen Lane) my brother Richard Wilkinson and his partner Kate Pickett demonstrate the damage done by economic inequality and the benefits to most people of greater equality. These thoughts of mine are not a substitute for research, but the sort of searching-about that sometimes precedes research, or action. I’m trying to pick up where they leave off: if what The Spirit Level says is true (and it is!) then what’s stopping us, where might we find the will and ways to change?

A will to change?

The poor may be inclined to equality, but they lack belief in themselves and the possibility of a fairer world. How to build belief and realise potential power?

To move corporations and governments to redistribute, there must be a more general belief in and will to equality, a shifting concensus. We have to look beyond platonic argument, statistics and the promise of longterm gains for those with most to lose. Even simple economic solutions require change on non-economic fronts: to maximise mutual sympathy and social solidarity; to minimise individual and sectional selfishness; to embolden the poor and soften the rich; to replace dependence on money differentials with other bases for social standing and self-esteem

Monetised inequality

Money – wealth and income – is the main driver and measure of inequality under capitalism. Or, to put it differently, capitalism is monetised inequality. Money is the main handle on contemporary inequalities; redistribution of wealth and income is the most obvious means of redress…

BUT human inequalities did not begin and wont end with capitalism and the money economy. Inequality has taken many forms as swords were beaten into ploughshares, crowns into coins… stocks and shares. Capitalism, like the old feudal order, is not geared to equality. Money will not redistribute itself. We cannot assume that capitalism is fated to self-destruct, nor can we rely on science and sweet reason to motivate governments and minorities with most to lose.

Structural change

Differentials vary widely within and between capitalist economies, leaving room for improvement and convergence on best practice. But capitalism breeds and feeds on inequality of income and wealth; sooner or later, a move to greater equality will require structural change, a systemic commitment to sharing, co-operation and the public good as against private profit and sectional advantage. The need for structural change does not begin or end with capitalist finance and industry: it applies also, and immediately, to the way we organise education, health and other public services. How long can we tolerate a two-tier division between public and private provision?

Obstacles to change

The rich, or relatively rich – have-mores with most to lose – include most of the decision-makers and opinion-formers. As the Spirit Level shows, many of them may also stand to gain from greater equality BUT a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush: the prospect of measurable short term loss – reduced income or higher tax - is likely to outweigh the prospect of less quantifiable future benefits.

This conservative bias MIGHT not preclude a more equitable government from closing gaps. Higher benefits, wage regulation or progressive tax might be ‘sold’ as cost-effective: the costs to be offset by savings on health, law and order etc. BUT note recent flutter in the dovecot when tax was raised to 50% on incomes over £150,000 (although this is about six times the national average, which is already more than most of us can reasonably expect!)

Awaking desire and belief

The poor have always hankered for greater equality, the rich have half-believed in it – before the law, perhaps, or in the eyes of God, anywhere but the bank-balance or Land Registry. For the poor – the have-less majority – the task is to translate desire into belief and practical determination. For the rich, to find the combination of stick and carrot that will melt or frighten them into shelling out.

(Bankers’ bonus payments were publicised in the wake of their credit crunch debacle, but though they were named and shamed most did not waive or repay their bonuses. MPs too were named and shamed for greedy claims, and soon began volunteering to repay: not because they were shamed, but because their shaming was a threat to their jobs and salaries: constituency parties have the power to deselect and voters not to.)

And the carrots? If not wealth, we’ll need to offer other grounds for self-esteem and source of happiness. How to offer a foretaste of something better, while ironing out inequalities in the existing system and piloting alternatives?

.
What if we’re wrong?

The relative equality of Japan has more to do with the survival of older fraternal traditions than with the capitalist structure and dynamic those traditions restrain. But could that sort of counter-current go further, transforming structures from within? Could capitalism survive the erosion of differentials, with difference of wealth and income becoming largely symbolic (like the split seconds between winners and also-rans on the race course)? Could other measures of status, power and success come to replace big gaps in property and earnings: barristers have traditionally taken a wage-cut to become judges; occasional bankers and entrepreneurs turn from private greed to public good: might this not happen more generally within existing hierarchies and practices? Might not an enlightened Market reward the goodness of a company’s product and social practice as much as its prices and profits? We need to ask these questions, if only to understand our enemy.

A surface office culture of first names and shared canteens may indicate a deeper wish. It wasn’t for nothing that Christian monarchs washed paupers’ feet, and Officers still serve Christmas dinners to Men… But what are straws in the wind without wind?

Another dream

The Labour Movement - Labour Party and Trade Unions – was to have mobilised the power of the poor and the better nature of the rich to reappropriate the wealth of land and industry. A newly conscious working class, with nothing to sell but its labour, was to take over the means of production and mastery of their own lives. The ruling class would be subsumed, the state wither away.

Social democracy did not, in that vision, stop short at the threshold of employment. Majority rule would be extended to where it mattered most: the direction of the business and industry that shape our lives and world. Long before Marxism, the ideal of commonwealth combined the economic with the social and political elements of community. Common humanity and common sense!

Nor did democracy in that vision lie primarily in election of representatives. More important was the power and freedom of groups and individuals to decide and act together in their own interests. Representative democracy would come into play where direct democracy fell short…

Facts of life

Somewhere between dream and ‘correct analysis’ lie facts of life. It is a fact that many men and women from different classes and cultures have agreed that things could and should be different, have shared a presumption of equality. Not just between friends, but between enemies:

‘If you prick us do we not bleed, if you tickle us do we not laugh…?’ Shylock may have been bent on revenge, but behind his pound of flesh is the simple symmetry of an eye for an eye. Our eye for symmetry is matched by a capacity for sympathy. Our individual mindsets are shaped and cross-cut by incoming signals and reflex responses. We are built to feel for each other and respond. In primates and other mammals, body-language works between us before we know it. The ‘limbic resonance’ in our middle brain is picked up on brainscans, and our responses can be observed in sympathetic reflex, from infectious yawning to the involuntary clenching of fist and raising of hand-to-mouth.. In the neo-cortex, the more specifically human bit of the brain, can be located a process of projection. Practical experiment indicates a corresponding ability to put ourselves in place of others, exchanging points of view.*

On that basis, through language, cross-referencing and generalisation we arrive at shared overviews, the best being those which correspond to the most varied viewpoints.

The processes of empathy, projection and overview stem from a common physiology, our evolution as a species in a shared world. Our genetic capacity for empathy and projection, interaction and co-operation is developed and extended through experience and practice, our families and a common culture developed as we live, work and play together (games have a special importance for human and some other mammals.)

Across divisions of class, occupation and gender, a shared animal life-cycle underpins a measure of common understanding: our lives describe a familiar arc from impotent infancy through capable prime, sage middle age and back into dependency. While men’s productive labour has become separate and specialised, women’s reproductive labour is more widely shared, the basis for a mutual sympathy denied to men.

The nearest we can get to objectivity, a balanced view, is not through detachment but the widest possible sympathy, which depends in turn on a range of shared experience, freedom to move and communicate, time to reflect.

*Thomas Lewis et al in A General Theory of Love

Biggest not best. A part or apart…

Fitness, as in the survival of the fittest, is not a matter of size, strength or even intelligence. Fitness means fitting in, adaptability.

Distinction, in the sense of dominating or standing out, may not be healthy. The tallest trees don’t stand alone or head-and-shoulders above the rest: they grow in woods, depend on their peers for support and protection from wind and frost; competition focuses their growth and draws them up. Ivy thrives because it does not overshadow or starve the trees on which it hangs.

Biological models do not apply directly to social development but patterns of thought derived from one sphere shape assumptions and attitudes in another. Our thinking is both anthropomorphic and a reflection of the world that informs it.

Why do we attach so much importance to the distinction between ourselves and other animals, to our own individual distinction and status in society rather than the qualities we can share and enjoy most widely?

Cyclical equality

A traditional tribal society may set sharp differentials between sexes and age-groups. Men’s and women’s roles are separate and correspond to a clear division of labour; but within each gender hierarchy, rights and responsibilities accrue with age, with rites of passage to mark transitions. Given a stable population in a stable environment, the lessons of experience hold good from one generation to the next and age confers authority. Most people, men and women, can hope to rise through the ranks from impotent infancy through productive/reproductive maturity to respected old age. Early subordination is compensated by later authority. The undeniable physiological differences between men and women combine with rigid demarcation of productive and reproductive functions to reduce the stress of inequality between men and women.

A choice of metaphors*

Thinking derives via metaphor from long experience in a concrete world. Conceptual understanding of the world is rooted in old interactions with nature and each other, preserved in language abstracted more or less unconsciously from familiar observations and routines.

Balance is important because we stand on two legs, and the word/metaphor re-emerges in justice, trade and finance, in scales and balance sheets. Manual labour, manufacture and management are all about how we handle things and each other. Evidence is weighed in court, to decide what this or that is worth, we weigh things up up among ourselves. What’s a life worth living, dying, killing for? We suffer highs and lows, psychological and meteorological. Investors seek high profits and low risks.

But what in the world – a spherical planet afloat in elastic space – do we mean by all this ‘high’ and ‘low’, up and down? Shouldn’t it be ‘in’ and ‘out,’ or roundabout? Was there ever a level playing field except in games? What do career ladders lean against? Each other? Odd that these metaphorical structures, convergent commanding heights can bring the great and good to actually touch, people much like ourselves, so close to each other, so far above our heads that they can whisper in each other’s ears.

Mental constructs arise from and return to physical reality and relationships. Their roots may be hardwired in our brains. But evolution is not monolithic, nor our brains short of alternative models and circuits: we’re not trapped in top-down pyramids.

* George Lakoff ‘Moral Politics’ etc

Competition and co-operation

Competition and co-operation are not mutually exclusive opposites but dynamic partners. The concept of equality involves comparison, measuring or balancing one AGAINST another. In games, as in life – though not quite a matter of life and death - we match, test and learn from each other. In play and in work, we learn to give and take, serve and return, win and lose. We may not always be equal, but we share a need for each other, in practice and for pleasure.

Some more equal than others

Disturbingly, some people – even peoples – prove more capable, more often, in more settings than others. Equality is an aspiration for the rest of us, a safety-net for high-fliers with the furthest to fall. If they survive their prime, they’ll grow old and need a hand. Meanwhile, if we’re lucky – given the choice and freedom to move around - we may recover on the swings what we lose on the roundabouts.

Barriers to empathy and mutual recognition

The more we can share and interact, compete and co-operate, recognise and communicate, the better our chance of mutual understanding: a combination of mutual recognition and informed fellow feeling. Our capacity for empathy and projection can only be properly developed if we can reach and see into each other’s lives in everyday day practice and exchange.

But, with divisions of income and wealth go divisions of occupation and class, environment, social status and real power. We are not just divided but ordered, segregated between richer and poorer, employers and employed, deciders and decided-for, those who can easily buy what they want and those who have to sell themselves. With segregation by income and class go other sorts of segregation: by age, race, gender and ability – not just discrimination against disability, but selection by ‘intelligence,’ the division of mental from manual skills.

The wider, more rigid and self-perpetuating the divisions, the less the social and practical basis for empathy and projection, the less free we are and the less able to feel for and recognise each other for what we are.

We don’t completely lose the capacity for empathy, the longing to bridge the gaps, but it’s a long shot. Separate but equal, apartheid, was always a delusion. Rich whites may applaud Zulu dances, rub noses with Maoris or swim with dolphins. Public schoolboys, and now girls go slumming. Aristos, actors and gangsters cosy up in clubs> But exotic fascination is no defence against mutual ignorance: noble savage turns to nigger-run-amok, good ole boys reveal themselves in lynchmob hoods; with phrases like collateral damage, deadpan officers contort the facts of death..

Equality and freedom

The wider the divisions of income and wealth, the steeper the ladders and wider the gaps between the rungs, the less freedom of movement and exchange between the occupations and lifestyles that the hierarchy separates. What’s obstructed is not just the capacity for empathy, mutual recognition and solidarity, but essential human freedom of movement and self-fulfilment, the possibility of getting beyond our given ladders, circles, fields and ruts. No blue-sky thinking from within the box!

How relative turns absolute

What we want, what we deem adequate - once minimal biological needs are met – depends on prevailing norms, so poverty is usually defined as less than 60% percentage of average wage.

Working on an isolated Manchester overspill estate in the early 1970s I was struck by the way relative translated into absolute poverty. Internally displaced persons spent on ‘luxuries’ and let ‘necessities’ slide. People came to Partington to escape homelessness or overcrowding, or because they had no job or family to hold them back. Transported from a more or less familiar old inner city to a maze of looping roads and empty grass, strangers took refuge in several sorts of brand-new council house, dog-packs beating tracks between the rubble and the grass. No gas meters, family and friends, second-hand shops…or jobs. But expensive central heating and free deliveries of HP furniture andTVs. Debts, rows, the need for drink or smoke more urgent than the will to cook or decent food. (I drank, smoked and rowed myself, but with more alternatives; job, wife and child, workmates and a van). Out of the remains of Tenants and Claimants groups came a People’s Rights Office. Where we learnt the worst of cut-offs, repossessions, fights and walk-outs, chip-pan fires, cot-deaths.

What’s changed, except for the worse? What better case or starting point for more equality?

Transparency

To expose the difference, to name and shame: following publication of Spirit Level, Dick Taverne introduced bill in Lords to make public company front their annual reports with an indication of the gap between top and bottom pay, the ratio of top salaries to wages of lowest-paid employees.

Equality worth fighting for?

Will information and reason do the trick? A combination of argument, naming and shaming, mutual understanding, altruism and enlightened self-interest?

Or will there have to be, a more direct confrontation between those with most to gain and those with most to lose? Are those who break the windows of banks and bankers’ houses to be condemned or applauded? Factory occupations? Wilful damage to 4x4s? Do we outlaw all violence, or distinguish between persons and property, between physical confrontation and killing people? Is the power of ‘reasonable force’ to be reserved to police (and unreasonable force to soldiers overseas) ?

As a community worker and adult educator, I found that aggression – in this case emotional - was an important element in mobilising ‘deprived’ groups in their own interest. Aggression, recognised, worked-through and laced with humour proved effective when it came to negotiations.

With our ‘Commonword’ writers’ workshop and publishing group in Manchester, the emergence of good new writing in a working class seemed also to involve an aggressive stand against some class conventions of prevailing Literature.

Expression, action and aggression are linked. Every outgoing and opening is also an assault, a challenge, displacement of what was before. Aggression, even violence, is not something to be suppressed and avoided at all costs. A fight that is not a fight-to-the-death is not the end of the story: peace is made, conflict tempered in negotiation, hard feelings softened and rewoven in mutual understanding.

What sort of stick will it take to shift a rich minority with much to lose? How can the poor majority unite in recognition of their rights, make themselves felt and undeniable? In assisting this process, we begin to recognise each other and ourselves, not just what sets us at odds but what we have in common and the pleasure of each other’s company.

Best of enemies?

Jeremy Paxman on TV interviewed war veterans about their experiences from the Falklands, Iraq and Afghanistan. In this company, including a woman reservist, Paxman was unusually polite. He asked one para, what he thought of the Taliban and the man said simply ‘They’re good..’ ‘What do you mean, good?’ said Paxman, taken aback. ‘They were good fighters... and they believed in what they were fighting for.’

In Palestine, I was struck by the writings of an early Zionist called Jabotinsky who argued for implacable action against Palestinian Arabs, because they, like the Jews, would keep fighting for their land as long as there was any hope…

The Algerian war was ended by General de Gaulle in what he called the ‘paix des braves.’ (Piaf’s ‘Je ne regrette rien’ was a theme tune for both FLN officers and French OAS).

(Class traitors: honourable profession! There has always been a small minority moved by compassion, discomfort, misadventure or objective reasoning to join the mob. They bring with them some weapons from the enemy, and an olive branch, the promise of more inclusive humanity to come.)

Common enemy: something to unite against

In the Second World War, civilian health in Britain improved and the mortality gap between rich and poor narrowed. Rationing boosted the diet of the poorest, morale was generally high, and the division and stress of social inequality were offset by patriotic solidarity. Does such unity require a dramatic enemy, and evil something and/or somebody to unite against?

Past radical strategies have often combined the two: monarchy and the king, feudalism and aristocrats, capitalism and the ruling class, bosses in bowler hats. If our focus is to be on inequality, who now best embodies this? Bankers, bosses, professionals, the wealthiest or highest-earning 10%...or 20% Anyone with more than us?

Or might it be possible to aim off, to find our unity – and will to equality – in face of some other common threat, for instance climate change? Or a combination of the two. Combatting climate change and inequality are closely linked: climate change, like wartime austerity, requires a general tightening-of-belts and sharing of resources: if only to keep the poor majority on side.

Objectively, the threat of climate change may be more real than the wartime risk to civilians of getting hit by bombs, but it’s not something we hear overhead like bombers at night, and – as with the threats of inequality – the enemy doesn’t come in recognisable uniform. If inequality or climate change do have a human face, it’s probably our own.

Simple redistribution

Simple the will were there, we could narrow differentials of wealth and earnings by:
progressive taxation on income, capital gains and inheritancestatutory minimum (and maximum?) earnings
compulsion on employers to publish pay and expenses as well as shareholdings and dividends
linking of pensions and benefits to average income (as distinct from ‘cost of living’)
incentives to employers to narrow pay differentials
tax incentives and encouragement for mutual,co-operative and community enterprise

Structural change
abolition or opening up of private sector services, particularly in health and education, which offer priority or privilege for cash
extension of social democracy to capitalist companies, the right of workers to vote and be represented in policy-making, appointments and remuneration
social contracts for companies and corporate bodies, including commitments to employees, customers, community, environment and the quality of goods and services they provide (including quality of media information!)
removal of distinctions and barriers between mental and manual disciplines in employment, education and training
a statutory year or two of community service/training (including art, sport and games) for young people between secondary and higher education, school and employment - to broaden experience, break down barriers and open up possibilities before lifetime choices are made.
citizen’s contracts for individuals, a formal coming of age, making rights and responsibilities explicit. On a par with commitments of mutual care and loyalty laid out in marriage vows and citizenship ceremonies for immigrants
an Equality Party might not come amiss, now Labour’s lost the plot (I might not join it, unless it were the other sort of party: Humanite, the French CP paper, used to run a street festival, with whisky and vodka to speed the ending of the Cold War. A big tent, perhaps?

Could the Equality Trust become or initiate a coalition of the poor and their representatives, unions, NGOs and other committed bodies?

PRECEPTS AND PRESCRIPTIONS

United we stand, divided we fall
Aesop(620-560 BC); picked up in US civil war Liberty Song by John Dickinson 1768 and later by patriots and trade unions around the world

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Various ancient Greeks and Luke 6:31, picked up in Charles Kingsley’s Waterbabies

Love thy neighbour as thyself:

Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself…. Leviticus 19:18

But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.
Leviticus 19:34

Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ St Matthew 22:39.

Magna Carta 1215
XXIX. No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.

When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?
John Ball, c1381
Ball, an unruly priest, declared that ‘from the beginning all men by nature were created alike’ He called on his followers to ‘cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty’ (killing great lords of the realm, slaying lawyers, justices and jurors). On trial for his part in the Peasants’ Revolt, he was given his say, then hanged, drawn and quartered.

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less…
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee. John Donne, Meditation, 1624

In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury... but not one word was spoken in the beginning, That one branch of mankind should rule over another.

Gerrard Winstanley and others in The Levellers Standard 1649

Church of England Marriage Vows 1662

I, ,
take thee .
to my wedded wife/husband,
to have and to hold from this day forward,
for better for worse,
for richer for poorer,
in sickness and in health,
to love and to cherish, to love, cherish, and to obey*
till death us do part,
according to God's holy ordinance;
and thereto I plight thee my troth.

*This obvious inequality is now mostly omitted. A Church report in 2006 said ‘obey’ might now be outdated and could be used by men to justify violence.

US Declaration of Independence
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
Thomas Jefferson 1776

Liberté, égalité, fraternité French national motto, from revolutionary slogan 1789

All for one, and one for all! ‘Un pour tous, tous pour un’
Alexandre Dumas, Three Musketeers 1844; unofficial motto of Swiss Republic

Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère! (hypocrit reader, my double, my brother!)
Charles Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal 1857

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need
popularised by Karl Marx in 1875 Critique of Gotha Programme

The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have…and everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for you.
Karl Marx again, from ‘Marx’s Concept of Man’ by Erich Fromm)

One man, one vote?
Corsica was the first European state to include women, from 1755 until 1769. In UK, women under 30 got the vote in 1928, and still have it today.

Four Freedoms
1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of religion
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear
Franklin D. Roosevelt 1941

Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948

…recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world (Preamble)

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate* for the health and well-being of himself and of his family… (Article 25)

*what’s ‘adequate’ must be relative, as is ‘want’ in freedom-from-want.

UK Equality Bill 2009

Its introduction stated: ‘The Government is committed to creating a fair society with fair chances for everyone. For society to be fair people must have the chance to live their lives freely and fulfil their potential. To achieve this we need to tackle inequality and root out discrimination.
Equality not only has benefits for individuals but for society and the economy too. A more equal workforce is a stronger workforce. A more equal society is one more at ease with itself.
To help us create the equal and fair society we all want to see we will introduce an
important new package of measures at the heart of which is a new Equality Bill’

‘Fair society with fair chances’? The draft bill pulled together anti-discrimination law on age, gender, race and disability. It seemed to overlook the elephant in the room, the widening gap between rich and poor (although the poorest happen to include a disproportionate number of women, blacks, disabled etc). Now an addition to the bill will ‘require Ministers of the Crown and others...to have regard to the desirability of reducing socio-economic inequalities.’

2009-04-27T11:39:00.000-07:00

SPARTACUS, AGAIN…

Watched bits of Bolshoi Spartacus on TV Friday night, because I remembered being moved by final scene nearly 50 years ago. I saw the same company do it, in a very similar production in Cairo. I was teaching in a government school, on a year out from Oxford, at a time when the Soviet Union was courting Nasser’s Egypt. Most people in Cairo were not that keen on Russian ballet, and nor was I. But I’d heard of Ulanova and now Plissetskaya, and tickets were cheap enough for me to risk it.

Seeing it again, I’d forgotten how formulaic it was, this Spartacus, with its alternating solos and choruses, virile slaves and camp legionaries, sincere young lovers and cynical coquetry. But the Cuban lead dancer believed in what he was doing, and at the end – after missing most of the battle scenes for Have I got News for You – I was moved again by the final set piece.

Spartacus dead, mourned by his lover and the remnants of his army. Earlier his body has been hoisted aloft, like a dead animal, on the points of Roman spears. Now he is lifted gently by his followers, raised slowly on a human pyre of upstretched arms. The light picks up the whiteness of the arms and fingers that almost hide the body they support. From behind, there rises the body of the bereft woman, vertical, eyes and arms raised in supplication, then folding forward over the body, head down, dark hair like a waterfall onto the bearers’ hands and arms…

Except that this production was not quite as I remembered it. The curtains closed while the woman was still reaching up with a halo of round shield behind her. I prefer to remember it as it was... Isn't memory always as it was?

Now I realise that this is one of several related images I bear in mind and recall from time to time. A couple come from other people’s art, a couple from my own life and this is the first time I’ve made the link between them all.

In the first London production of West Side Story there was a dance sequence marking the death of the young lovers, and what might have been their meeting again. The two bodies rise, as if flying in a dream, lifted, one from each side out of the dark wings. Their paths, orbits, cross, through a pool of light high above the middle of the stage and sink back into darkness. A rainbow drained of its colour and promise, no sweet sorrow, bottomless despair.

Antonioni, in Red Desert, I think, has a young woman driving through the desert inb an old car, hearing the radio report of her lover’s death as the police close in on a plane he’s hijacked then returned to base. Act gratuit… She stops the car by the road, switches the engine off and stands, back to camera, in silence at the side of the road. Beyond her is a scrubby bush, its tangled branches in contrast to the long, smooth hair that hangs down her back. She stands for what seems a long time, then her hair, and the wiry bush begin to move, stirred by a sudden breath of wind.

Only now it occurs to me that these images have engraved themselves on my mind in tribute to an actual memory. I remember, or have reinvented, the sight and sound of my mother as she heard the news of Tony’s, her younger brother’s, death not long before the end of the war. He, I learned later, was killed by a booby trap as the Germans retreated from the Ardennes. We were back in London, in the basement of our house, when she got the news on the phone, from her mother perhaps. All I remember is the wail or groan my mother made, unlike any sound I’d heard from her, and the way she slumped against the wall. It must have been a wall-mounted phone. If I’m not imagining it, she crumpled, slid down into the angle of wall and floor.

My mother had thick, dark hair and her name was Mary. Now I wonder if religious pictures – all those images of Virgin Mary and her crucified son – helped link that early experience of mine, and hers, to later images of stage and film. Images fresh images beget, or hook up like trucks on a train. We seem to need those images, to know what it is we might be feeling or have felt. The images can be received, or made up in our own heads, by mistake, as it were, in dreams or on purpose in words or paint or dance. And music? I’m never sure how that works, carrying so much feeling with no image to speak of…

I was going to say we may need some image between ourselves and a reality we cannot quite face head-on, and some mirror to catch and hold it in. Perseus was given a bright shield, looking into that he could see enough of the head with the snaky locks, to cut it off before it turned him to stone. Perhaps it’s not just monsters we need to contain in images, but things, people, we may have loved.

Not just mothers, or lovers snatched by death. I loved Beatrice, but we parted alive and in good health. She died very young, but it was nearly 20 years after we split up that I heard about that. I had written to her c/o her mother, in the hope we might meet. Not to pick up where we left off, but lay the ghosts of eternal youth, each other all those years ago. Malheureusement, Beatrice est decedee. Her mother's letter shocked me, although she wrote affectionately and enclosed pictures of her daughter's two teenage children. I was shocked not only that Beatrice was dead, but that she'd been dead for four years with me imagining her alive, since just before Will was born. Besides, grief was new to me. I remember walking out of our house in Swindon, going nowhere in particular, and seeing a woman with a child in a pushchair coming towards me. They looked nice, and I was half ashamed to find myself noticing that. Half a minute later, when they were ten yards away from me that I realised that the woman was Ada and the boy in the pushchair Will.

It wasn't long before I remember the story of the other Mary, Magdalen, walking desolate in the garden and mistaking the risen Jesus for a gardener. Religious images, romantic images, have a lot to answer for. What would we do without them?

2009-04-15T08:54:00.000-07:00

‘Wots left?’ Beginning with Love...

LEFT = Love, Equality, Freedom, Truth and Love comes first. So what might it mean?

A feeling for somebody or something. Need or desire for others, pleasure in their company. Seeking what’s best in and for them. Kinship and communion in a world we share. Love thy neighbour as thyself, do as you would be done by etc/

BUT what if we DON’T love ourselves, or cant count on others responding as we would?

Virtuous and vicious circles: given love, we learn to love; unloved, we don’t… Kinship, familiarity, goes with closeness, mutual understanding and sharing – looking after each other as we look after ourselves. Abused, we're inclined to abuse, but sometimes, mercifully, dont (a restorative mutation?)

Love’s not just a feeling, but a fact of life, a capacity built in. We are born dependent, survive only when cared for. Caring is at once physical and emotional. What we get becomes us, the feeling and responses along with the weight we gain from our mother’s milk.

From mothers and sons to sons and lovers, dependency mutualised. And daughters? More complicated perhaps... As sons become fathers and daughters mothers, we become each other as we become ourselves.*

We’re shaped by what's done to us and what we do. We understand each other – and the world - through our interactions. We’re formed, transformed, imprinted as we engage, reach out, take hold and register. Our hand takes the shape of what it can grasp and bears it to mind.

What we perceive, the image we recall, is not neutral or coincidental: we see what we’re looking for, what strikes or is shown to us. Five senses, plus one equals six. Seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching plus the stirrings inside ourselves - 'heart' or 'gut' feelings, an amorphous sixth sense, no less physical than the rest.

Infants depend on mothers and fathers, adults on a wider material world. As we grow up, we can no longer be rely on food and warmth being brought to us. But with our growing abilities, and a bit of luck, we can find more or less what we need. The world as we know it, need it and love it, is at once physical and human, economic and social and…

And what? Good? Beautiful? Loveable? I can neither dismiss those words, or know what to make of them, unless it’s a tautology – circular, with one leading to the other and back.

We don’t just see the world for ourselves, or as it is, but through the images and language of others. Some images are held up, over our heads as it were, for special reverence. Meanwhile we learn from each other and get to know each other as we make our living together. Our world-view, skills and circumstances, like our languages and landscapes, towns and villages, are common property.

Now we begin to realise that our world, like our parents, is not immortal. As we grow stronger, and our world in some ways weakaer, it too depends on us.... What am I saying? My parents are already dead, I am the endangered one! Which doesn't matter if people and places I love live on. My now, their then, if not quite interchangeable.

By nature and nurture, we have more in common than we have to set us apart. BUT that doesn’t make us identical. In our genes and upbringing, history and circumstances we are also, inevitably, different. Often we are encouraged to hide or ignore this difference – sometimes to exaggerate its importance, in ourselves or others. If familiarity breeds contempt, this is usually because we take each other, or the world, for granted, fail to register difference and change.

CONTRADICTION: I am me and you are you, a tree is a tree and a forest a forest. Although in fact none is the same, from one to another, or moment to moment, life is not long enough to mark the differences. We’re bound to label, class, prejudge, assume. We take what is to be as what has been, for granted...'til Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane.’ The unmoveable moves, or the worm turns, whatever that may mean, and we’re taken by surprise. For better or worse.

True love, like survival, treads a narrow and uncertain line between known and unknown, an act of faith or tentative presumption, between what we most fear and desire. Like driving at night, when what looks like a road ahead, a familiar pattern of light, could be almost anything.

Idolatry, Romantic love, and Hate. In romantic love, we idealise, imagine an other from afar. We may prefer a ready image to what we cannot, or will not face or handle in the flesh. Sometimes we carve up the world itself between imaginary Heaven and Hell, a higher Spirit and a load of material mechanics. Then, somewhere between these higher and lower orders, the baby is lost with the bathwater. As God is Good, Eveil - the devil as lived - becomes possesses some hapless neighbour. We tar and feather a class or race as Monsters, Beasts – anything to disguise the likeness to ourselves.

And sex? How could I have got so far without it? Sex is central to love, where two become one, then three: as single cells meet, combine and multiply to become someone else. But sex may also be at odds with love in its other forms. Sex tends to be exclusive, while Love - as in Christian love - is open to all. That's a contradiction I've tried and failed to solve at least once in my life.

*QUESTION ARISING:

Women can bear and feed babies, men cannot. Where does that leave our aspirations to freedom and equality? For all the gender overlaps and cross-overs, men and women are different. And the same may go for races!) The point is not to deny the statistical evidence, the norms of male and female body and mind, but to see that those norms dont confine or subordinate un-necessarily. Contrary to the scripture, we are not created free and equal. Some are bigger, stronger, cleverer than others, just as some are gentler, more patient or imaginative (it's not either/or, the combinations and permutations are infinite!) The point is to recognise that no statistical generalisation need apply to any individual: the fact that most men are more like this, most women more like that, must not be allowed to prevent any man or woman from breaking free, diverging, combining and crossing imaginary lines. Nor must a generalised difference be translated into assumptions of superiority and inferiority: we may say, in the most general terms, that one sex or other may be better at this or that, in this or that setting; but not that one set of abilities or qualities outranks another over all. With the future uncertain, we cant know which of all those abilities and qualities we will most need. We may need all our options to survive, recognised, understood and freely available between us.

It may not even be a question of yours or mine: the dividing lines may run across us, not between us. The bit of my mind that registers arm or leg, or fear or pleasure may register and assimilate a movement observed before it registers it as yours or mine. Empathy doesnt begin with the heady business of Me imagining I'm You. It's a reflex rooted in the nature of perception and physiology. If I see a footballer kicked in the balls, my body reacts before I know it. Even men have phantom pregnancies.

We're not created free and equal, but the freer and more equal the better - recognising and drawing on all we've got.

2009-04-03T10:28:00.000-07:00

From waft to waft
Images that yet fresh images beget, if only smells. This time the leap is from gorse, coconut, to orange, from South Wales to Western Algeria. It's 1962, soon after the Algerian independence war, and I'm driving through the night from Tlemcen, near the Moroccan border, to Algiers. We've been told to get someone there by tomorrow. It's a long drive, after work, and I'm on a threadbare high, between coffee and exhaustion. There's nothing else on the road, economy flat and people still afraid, the line blurred between the freedom fight and banditry, the struggle to survive. I dont feel afraid, unless it's the fear of a rabbit, mesmerised by the beam of my own headlights and compelled along the long straight road ahead.
A bit of open window helps me keep awake, and suddenly I feel myself relax.
Orange blossom, the scent from unseen orange groves is everywhere. I can feel the trees nearby in the darkness and the same sweet air running through them, the car, my lungs and heart, whatever that may mean. On the wings of a smell, all's well.
In a few months the oranges will be ripe, then overripe, in piles beside the road. The colons have gone, and with them the markets that would have taken them, turned them into money, solid food not Midas oranges.

2009-04-03T09:24:00.000-07:00

HINDSIGHT

You should be reading this from the bottom up, because the poem below follows from the shooting reference in my last piece. It also links to a poetry-reading we went to in Swansea the other night, with a former US soldier Brian Turner reading from his book Here Bullet. One of his poems (In the Leupold scope) sees life in Iraq through the site of a gun and reminds me of mine from Bethlehem. It's addressed to an Israeli conscript. I call it Just Looking, but its power, if any, lies in the possibility of not just looking. In a village near Nablus two years earlier I was introduced to a little girl with a bandage round her head. Her scalp had been grazed by a bullet from an Israeli settlement high on the hill above. The bullet could not have come her way by chance. Not a ricochet, or crossfire: there had been no battle going on. I photographed the girl where she had been standing, in the back yard of her family home. Now it seemed like a game, but behind her I could also see the outline of settlement buildings atop the ridge. Someone up there must have found her in his sight, and pulled the trigger. As a child with an air rifle, I was shocked when I hit a robin perched high on a tree. I must have been about 15, old enough to know better, but the robin had seemed so small and far away, the odds against hitting it so high.

JUST LOOKING

My flat in Bethlehem looked down on a curious religious site called Rachel's Tomb. A small domed building overlooking a Muslim cemetery has been squared up and fortified as a Jewish pilgrimage venue. From my balcony I can watch the changing of the guard and soldiers taking up positions as coaches full of pilgrims pull up in the dust. One soldier covers the main road, another the smaller road that leads down past the cemetery to the Aida refugee camp. Sometime boys throw stones and the soldiers shoot teargas and soundgrenades to drive them off. On this occasion, a boy's head appears above the cemetery wall and a soldier raises his gun.

Just looking, you say,
And I,
In hindsight
Reply:

A cat
May look at
A queen
But not down the scope
Of an M16...

Soldier, reflect
As you watch
The boy
Behind the graveyard wall
Watch you.

Your gunsight sees
What he cannot.
His features,
Shaving mirror sharp,
So much
Like yours.

Eye for eye?

If looks could kill...
Your other self
He knows
A bullet
From a stone.

2009-03-30T03:54:00.000-07:00

FOOTPRINTS

A lovely sunny day, but cold. The tide was out and I walked with Ada down to Three Cliffs Clefts Bay, or Three Clefts Bay according to an old man who told us where and how to park, which path to take. From the wide, wet sandy beach we walked up winding paths of deep dry sand to the headland above. Piles of flowering gorse on either side, waves of scent across our path. Vanilla, I thought, but Will on the phone ‘Coconut’ and I think he was right. What’s in a smell?

Looking down from the headland, back onto the beach we’d walked across, we could barely make out our own footprints. What did stand out were two firm dotted lines of hoofmarks. We’d seen the horses ahead of us, turning when they reached the waters edge to splash along the line of the surf. The prints set me wondering. ‘Light footprint’ is a phrase in vogue, with the special reference to carbon emissions, and the assumption that the less mark we leave on the world the better. Does that go, I wondered, for the mark we leave on other people?

In the last Weekly Guardian, Monbiot gave a frightening forecast of global warming, which, he said, is now unpreventable. Too much talk – hot air – since Kyoto, and not enough action. Now temperatures likely to rise by 4 degrees, not the 2C maximum envisaged at Kyoto. And the hotting up will last another 1000 years.

I assume that the heating and drying will hit hardest in warmer areas, with deserts expanding north and south into more temperate grainlands of
Mid-West and Mediterranean. In our hemisphere, cultivation, if not cultivators, would be driven northwards. The developed, mainly northern, countries would expand food production, keep what they needed for themselves, export any surplus in aid or for profit, and combine to defend themselves against starving immigrants. As already happens, but less.
A terrible irony: those most responsible for famine best placed to survive it, while those who never did much harm are left to die. The northern peoples had to keep warm, turned to fossil fuels when the firewood ran out. The difficulties of making a living in a colder climate compelled them to innovate, industrialise.

Left to themselves, older, more relaxed economies might, but probably wouldn’t, have survived: even without colonial exploitation. New ways have ways of jumping gaps.

Apart from noting that, what would I do, what do I do? Drive less, heat less, foreswear cheap flights, or long journeys in general. Eat local, seasonal foods, fresh, not frozen (Polar bears are getting smaller, Ada read. Weigh one third less and eat each other when there’s nothing else in diminishing icelands)

If I assume that human populations will also have to shrink, how much to I care if this comes about through starvation, war and disease on other, unfamiliar continents?
We were talking over lunch a couple of days ago about the boundaries of empathy, how they expand and contract. How much can we feel for other people, over distances and differences? Or under pressure, in time of scarcity or frear. Primo Levi concluded from his concentration camp experience that great hardship did not breed solidarity, did not make people nice, and that it was not the good who survived.
What do I feel? Richard once had a dream of life breaking down at Fawler, our parents manor in what’s now Oxfordshire, after a nuclear attack on London: starving survivors fanned out across the countryside, breaking in, taking whatever they could. Why not? And what were we to do?
I remember the hardline Zionist, Zabotinsky, who warned that the Palestinians, like the Jews, would never give up their land, that there would have to be a fight. When I read that, it was almost a relief: not that he was showing mercy, but at least respect for his enemy. I can imagine feeling, even as I raised my gun to shoot, ‘My brother, my like…there but for the grace of God – what God? – go I.’

2009-03-29T02:59:00.000-07:00

About Mary, my mother...
updated six months after her death

Mary was born into the First World War and bore her own children into the Second. Between those times she followed her mother Elsie into the Society of Friends. Unlike her mother, she became and remained a pacifist.

Mary was the third of five children, born in Trinidad where her father Eric, was resident judge. Next born were twin boys. A year into the war, one of them, Christopher, died. Their mother took the other four children home to England, the advantages of modern medical care outweighing the danger of German torpedoes on the Atlantic crossing.

This was the first of several separations that marked Mary’s life, and later ours. Now I realise how much family break-up, like family fortune, stems from our traditional matrix of empire, war and class. (With the difference that marriages so divided by continents require no divorce.)

Mary’s father stayed in Trinidad and for the next ten years his children didn’t see much of him. When he came home, the family had learned to live without the gruff old bigot: an Ulster protestant, Eric walked out of any Sunday service that smacked to him of Papism; lipstick was for Scarlet Women not his daughters. Mary remembered having to kiss him, the porridge in his moustache, before leaving for school. Only later did she begin to feel for the poor old prodigal, returning as a stranger to his own family. She just remembered his big hands bathing her as a baby, before they left Trinidad. How many British judges bathed their babies then?

My own father George walked out when Mary grew fat with me. Men often fall in love with images, and now his image of her was spoilt. I wonder how much of her heartache then fed through to me. After days, or weeks – Mary never told me - George came back. When I was born, he liked me, though maybe I too was not quite what he expected. They’d chosen the name David, but, according to Mary, George looked at me and said ‘We cant call him David… Gregory, Gregory Grunt.’ His elder brother, Gerald, had called him Grunt when they were boys, and for years my father called me Grunt, which I still associate with his laughter and affection. George’s behaviour may have left much to be desired, for Mary at least, but for us children his was the lighter, happier presence. Perhaps he had the advantage of the prodigal, feted whenever he returned – from work, the war, or sailing holidays. She was fated to be always with us – except when we were sent away to school. Odd that parents of their class found it normal to put their children in care. Was it that they attached so little importance to childcare, or lacked confidence in their own abilities. My theory is that prep- and public schools were designed less for happy families than for nation-building: children were systematically removed from intimate family and local community, and the gap filled with more abstract vocation, institutional loyalties and duties. William of Wickham founded Winchester to produce reliable and competent functionaries, as distinct from clerics. And the system extended to a whole range of other professions, institutionalised substitutes for more direct humanity.

As young children in England, Mary and her brothers and sister spent a lot of their time in the nursery with scolding nannies and mutual bickering relieved by what Mary remembered as rather formal meetings with their mother in the drawing room. Elsie was a highminded and public-spirited woman, but little bodies – perhaps all bodies - bored her. She had little interest in day to day childcare, let alone childsplay. For Mary, getting away to Downe House, founded and run by her mother’s sister Olive, was a liberation. Elder sister Erica was already there and Anne Bradby, later Ridler, became a friend for life.

At school Mary was quite bright and read a lot. She regarded herself as hopeless at games and wanted to become a nurse. That was vetoed by her family, backed by her father’s doctor brother, Almroth Wright. Reasons given were poor pay and unsocial hours, but there may also have been fears for her health – when infections were more common and effective drugs more rare - or her virtue.

Were nurses easy game to doctors then, and is this something that her famous uncle would have taken into account?

Perhaps the great doctor should have known better, or perhaps he did, and a few years later George and Mary were married from his house in Paddington. By then, Mary had suffered another setback. She got to Oxford and read English for a year or two at St Hilda’s before announcing her intention to marry George. Then her father – who always felt poor in his big house on Blackheath – stopped paying her fees. ‘You’ll have a husband to support you and wont need a degree.’

This was a terrible come-down, and Mary felt it all her life, never quite confident of her own ability or social standing in a class where Oxbridge educations was the norm. What would she have done if she HAD gone on to get her degree? Would George have been any more willing to let her out to work, or she more able to overcome his opposition? As we knew them, Mary was always the more downright and forceful in her beliefs and opinions, but it seems to have been George who mostly got his way. And that was so from the start. Mary said she’d been incredulous when he asked her to marry him; she’d not taken him seriously at all. But he seemed quite undeterred and later remarked, in a matter of fact sort of way, ‘You will, you know.’

Mary always liked reading and read to us. As a teenager she and her friend Ann were spellbound by a writer, Charles Williams (precursor of magical realism? ) who they met on holiday at Aisholt in the Quantocks. Among Mary’s papers are several beginnings of journals, a first few handwritten pages in otherwise empty exercise books. Her sister had been secretary to TS Elliot, Ann Ridler became a respected poet, and Mary may have been too much in awe of Writing to believe in her own or keep at it. If so, I know how she felt.

But, unlike me, Mary kept reading. She read fast, and, in her later years at least, indiscriminately. I sometimes felt she never quite adapted to real life, the bitty mundanity of things, her own and other people’s inadequacies. In later life, again, gardens were an exception. She always loved flowers, but, once there were no more children to tend to, she took to the practical business of gardening with a new enthusiasm.

Perhaps Mary should have been a nurse. Just before the war, she had plans to open a children’s home and they rented a large house. But money ran out before the bombing and evacuations began. In my childhood memories, it was when we were ill, hurt or in danger that Mary excelled herself. She may have found everyday housework demeaning, but in emergency she was transformed. She was calm and capable, gentle and cheerful: with such a mother and nurse, how could we be upset or afraid or ill for long? Nor was it only when we were ill or in danger. Although Mary was often cross with us, especially me, her eldest, this was made up at bedtime. It wasn’t just the comfort of a story or nursery rhyme and prayers by the bed. Somehow I was also made to understand that whatever we’d argued over wasn’t all my fault. At the end of the day, Mary was humble, understanding and honest with us.

Later, when I got into trouble at school or gave up what looked like a good job, or brought back a partner who might have seemed unsuitable (that word again!), neither Mary nor George turned their backs on us. This wasn’t because Mary didn’t care about convention or what other people thought, but when it came to it – out of love for us or for underlying truth – she never sided with the enemy. The last time I saw her, a week or so before she died, I said I would like to tell her some of this, the nice things I remembered about her, rather than save it in memoriam. She was pleased, thanked me for thanking her. I also asked if she’d sometimes have been disappointed in me, and she said she had. But for once we were happy together, and it didn’t matter any more.

Mary often longed for a career in the wider world, but at home she was rarely just a housewife. In the war, once we got our own house, we shared it with a Jewish refugee family. Then, after the war, when the Wachters went back to Austria, their place was taken by the widow and children of Mary’s younger brother Tony. A succession of au pairs became friends, grannies and great aunts moved in next door and for some years, about when I was leaving home, Mary became a sort of foster mother to half a dozen nephews and nieces, sent back to school in England from overseas bases and colonies.

News of Tony’s death in the Ardennes came as a terrible shock. He and Mary had been very close, but when war broke out Tony joined up and had little time for her pacifism. Direct experience of war may have changed his mind, and his last letters from the front were thoughtful and affectionate. Mary had told him she was worried about losing George, to the enemy or other women. Now Tony told her not to worry, he knew how it felt, for both of them, and George would be back.

George came back and Tony didn’t. Tony’s Tanya came to live in our house with her two children. Tanya’s mother had painted the portrait of George that I now have on the wall. It was commissioned, Mary said, so that we would have something to remember him by if he was killed. As it was, George came safely home and – unless Mary imagined it – fell in love with Tony’s widow Tanya.

Whatever wounds the war opened up between them remained hidden from us. There must have been ideological differences too. Now I wonder how they felt, even before George was called up, when he brought home little boxes of sten-gun parts for us to assemble on the dining room table. (No wonder those guns were unreliable!) Later, I asked my mother why she had seemed so calm one afternoon in London when a flying bomb bumbled overhead. We were having a picnic tea in the big garden, the Kensington square behind our house, and we all stayed put. We may even have had malt bread. When I asked Mary, half a century later, why she’d taken it so calmly, she couldn’t remember the occasion ‘By then I may have felt we had nothing to lose,’ she said. For me that picnic stood out as a happy time with her, along with a bicycle ride in the country years later, when we stopped for a glass of cider, at a wooden table in the sun outside a pub.

After the war, ideological differences became less important. Mary remained a Quaker and a pacifist, George an agnostic with a shelf full of orange New Left Bookclub books – which disappeared as the Cold War set in. (Did the ripples of McCarthy extend this far?) George and Mary shared the outrage and pity of Suez and Hungary, Prague and Vietnam, and some of that got through to me. As time went on, they also shared more happiness. When George’s elder brother Gerald died, he left them enough for George to stop work and buy Fawler Manor. It was only now that George had given up his job that Mary felt able to go out to work. It may have been simply that with children gone she had more time, but it was also clear that they were now comfortably off; her voluntary work was acceptable, not like a paid job when people might have thought he couldn’t afford to keep her. Mary committed herself to Quaker business and Marriage Guidance.

She also took to gardening. As a child, I remember it was George who dug and planted vegetables at weekends. Now he’d retired, the vegetable patch slowly reverted to grass and it was Mary who took up spade and trowel, planting and weeding long herbaceous borders, head high with daisies and delphiniums.

When George died, 11 years ago, he left a letter with his will in which he said that Mary had made a better man of him. With him gone, after 60 years together, she often wished she too were dead. I found it hard to answer when she said that: how can such gaps be filled, such an intimate absence, large as life?

In her childhood, before meeting George, Mary didn’t get much tender loving care or playfulness. George brought a lightness and humour new to her. She had the courage of her moral convictions, but he had a more primitive confidence in his own feelings, impulses right or wrong. Without him, on her own in a ‘sheltered’ Oxford flat, there was little that we, the rest of her family, could do with our dutiful visits and telephone calls. Mary didn’t find it easy to make new friends – as distinct from Friends – or float on casual acquaintance.

Among Quakers, Mary was confident, capable, even authoritative. Perhaps it was the egalitarian simplicity of the Society of Friends that freed her, or a shared moral commitment absent in other social gatherings – in which Mary often felt ill-at-ease. Perhaps she also had a class advantage, even without an Oxford degree. People recalled her principled effectiveness in committee work, and the beauty of her voice in ministry… Whereas, as a teenager, I would hear her speak in meeting, serene, eyes closed, and think ‘If you could see her at home!’

Several times in the last few years of her life, Mary became seriously ill – a fall, a minor stroke or infection, sometimes all combined. Several times we thought she would die and talked of living wills, but each time she clung to life and revived. On one occasion, as she was leaving hospital in a wheelchair, a tall black male nurse called across ‘Hey, Mary, aren’t you going to say goodbye?’ She turned and they shook hands. She said ‘I hope you have a very happy life.’

Afterwards she remarked how strange it had been to be washed and changed by a big black man. I remembered her talking of her father’s big hands bathing her, and wondered if there were also black hands then, a nursemaid’s perhaps, in Trinidad. More recently, when Mary stayed with us in Wales, it was Ada’s Papist hands (do
these things come out in the wash?) On one occasion, when Mary was taken ill in Oxford, it was I, with help from Janet, her grand-daughter, who was privileged to do the washing and changing. Good for us, if not for Mary who was barely conscious.

Maybe Mary should have been a nurse, but it wasn’t just good nursing, in the technical sense – or even good NHS medicine – that brought her back to life, or helped her die so peacefully. I think what made the difference had more to do with kind hands and hearts, and that what she got from her carers in hospital and nursing home was a new, very basic, but life-giving confidence in her own existence

Mary’s class and upbringing had led her to believe that what mattered in life as how she performed and appeared. Not quite Manners makyth man – George’s Winchester motto – but righteous behaviour and belief. For 90 years she had
tried to do and think aright, to live up to high standards and ideals. Then, with old age and sickness… All fall down! Sick to death non-compos and fit for nothing, why should anyone care for such stinking mess?

Except they did, even strangers, who cared enough to feed, wash, change, bethere at her side to welcome her back. Smiling, embracing her.

It seems to me that Mary had a new lightness about her last summer at St Katharines in Wantage. I don’t think it was just a loss of memory that freed her to be happy, made her eager to get up, out and about again. What she’d learnt, or relearned, late in life was this: if people could bear and care for her at her worst, and greet her with a smile or caress when she opened here eyes, she MUST be worth something. If that was true, then life could be worth living too. Good enough to be going on with!

Greg Wilkinson 21.11.08
(with additions 29.3.09)

Blogger this!

2009-03-26T06:01:00.000-07:00

It's one thing to write a blog, what's hard work is reading them, especially other peoples! Like archaeology, you start at the top and go backwards in time... coming across bits and pieces it would have helped to know from the start.

2009-03-26T05:50:00.001-07:00

Cold turkey flying high

I cut down on my steroids a couple of days ago: 10mg to 7.5. No great pain or stiffness in arms or legs yet, but tingling hands and feet, raw nerves and funny dreams.
Last night we – who else? - were travelling in what might have been the Massif Central. We came out of a scrubby wood into the sun and found ourselves on a rocky headland, looking down, far down, into a deep ravine. Then we seemed to take off, not just us, but a thick wad of turf and soil from under us. We lay on our fronts and clung to this magic carpet or mattress s best we could, soaring and dipping. Far below were forests and fields, bare crags and lakes. I couldn’t tell how high we were, or what was the scale of the landscape below (looking close-up through long grass you can imagine yourself in a forest; look down into a clear pond and the forest is there below you in the weed.) So it was as we planed and dipped, though we seemed to be getting closer to the ground. Suddenly, quite gently, we were there, come to rest on the edge of a lake, our bed of turf half in and half out of the water, like a boat hastily drawn up on a sunny beach. I lay on my front, a foot in the water, face close to the gritty ground, and wept. With relief, and joy and gratitude, not just to be back on earth but for the gift of flight.
This freedom of the sky is one of the freedoms Nina Simone longs for in her song ‘I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.’ It’s a dangerous freedom, the tempting ambition of Neitzch’s superman and the plunging Icarus. Perhaps what I wept for was my luck.
This dream came in my sleep, but I feel the freedom it points to is not just the escape prescribed by Piaf in ‘Je sais comment.’ Dreams can be also be markers of a waking consciousness, or confidence. Freedom for, or freedom from… Another dream I had, perhaps 30 years ago, seemed important at the time and still does. It had less to do with ambition, more with Janis Joplin’s nothing left to lose – a freedom from fear. Before that memorable dream, I had often awoken with a start, as if to save myself. I would be falling, drowning, running away; the blow or the bullet would be aimed at my head. But always, at the point of impact – or death – I had woken up, as if to spare myself the worst. This time I fell, like Icarus, from a great height into a deep sea. As I sank I knew I wouldn’t make it to the surface. I held my breath as long as I could, then breathed in. Instead of waking, I dreamed on. The water that filled my lungs wasn’t deadly cold, but warm and light. Everything, including me, was light, weightless, bright as in dazzling sun. I surface, no longer a mortal lump but in a blaze of light. The dazzling sunlight tht was also me danced across the water, bounced off cliffs and echoed from headland to headland. The light that included me found its way into a great domed sea-cave, reflecting off the waves and dappling the dark walls and roof. And in the light was a sound, essential as the highest and clearest soprano voice. I couldn't have been happier.
A long-before-death experience.

2009-03-25T04:27:00.000-07:00

Troserch Wood Newsletter – April 2009
It’s three years since we launched the campaign to secure the Troserch Woods for public enjoyment, wildlife and restoration of ancient woodland. The Troserch Woodlands Society (TWS) was set up after a public meeting in April 2006. Nearly 200 people paid their £5 membership subs and a few months later we were lucky enough to receive a Cyd Coed (Forestry Commission) grant to cover the purchase of 80 acres, north of Llangennech, up the Morlais river valley. Oddly, it was this same Forestry Commission which, 15 years earlier, had sold off the same bit valley with its standing crop of conifers.
For us, it was one thing to buy a wood, another to know what to do with it. The woods were ours, a community asset, but the business of management, maintenance and insurance required funds and expertise. Luckily, the committee was soon to include a financial adviser, a forester and a woodland owner with management experience. To save individual members from liability, the elected TWS committee doubles as a not-for-profit limited company, Troserch Woodlands (Property) Ltd. None of the members are paid, and one of our first tasks was to beg and borrow the money we needed for immediate costs. The National Pipeline company, then working nearby, came up with one grant, and others covered wildlife surveys and disposal of accumulated rubbish. The Coal board was called in to start making safe the many mine-workings in the woods, but before that could be done, there had to be check for bats. Greater Horseshoe bats, as it turned out.
The TWS committee includes a wildlife group and a history group, and here as often the two came together. Forty birdboxes have been nailed to treetrunks and fold-out nestboxes strung to hazel branches for dormice (some of the little prefabs have been lived in, but it’s not yet clear what by!). Goshawks, another rarish breed, have begun nesting in the wood, and taking a neigbours’ hens. Buzzards and owls, badgers and foxes go about their daily and nightly business. There are trout in the river and an otter recently left the remains of a salmon on the bank.
The history group has compiled a history of the woods and tracked down people old enough to remember living and working in the valley - a family who lived in the mill and a man who worked as a boy with his father down one of the mines.
Human nature, and industry, have helped to shape the wood and the evidence is vsible here and there among the greenery. Trees were felled and coppiced, for building, fencing and burning, charcoal and tannin. The valley sides were reshaped by quarrying and mining, the river dammed and diverted for watermills.
After the timber shortages of the Second World War, the Forestry Commission felled most of the old broadleaved wood and planted conifers. This past winter has seen another round of felling, by us. This time it was the conifers' turn: nearly ten acres east of the river has been cleared, fenced and replanted with native broadleaved trees. This required improved tracks, a new bridge, payed for with more help from the Forestry Commission, which also subsidises replanting. The income timber sales, though reduced by recession, will help with future management and project costs. And the felling has enabled us to extend the network of tracks and paths around the eastern side of the river, linking up across the bridge to old rights of way.
It hasn’t always been sweetness and light. The byeway that runs along the top of the wood gives access to joy-riders and flytippers, burnt-out cars and piles of old tyres. When we suggested gates, there was an outcry: ‘They're closing our Roman Road.’ (though the legions managed without four-wheel drives and motorbikes). Now mechanised roughriders resent our decision to ban motors from the rest of the woods: in the interests of safety and wildlife and because most visitors say they value peace and quiet. Horseriders are represented on the committee and we welcome cyclists. We don’t keep anyone out for the sake of it, nor do we want to turn a wild wood tame and clutter it with bossy signs.
Troserch Wood is a rare wild space in an unspoiled river valley and we want to keep it that way. The recent felling has left a mess, but thousands of young trees have been planted and the churned-up ground will soon be green again. Now that the big machines have gone, we can restore the carpark and put up signs and maps at entrances.
We trust our members and visitors to the woods to take care of themselves, each other and the place as they find it. If anyone has time and energy to spare, we have working parties every few weeks, to improve the paths, clear rubbish and brambles, thin and plant young trees. We would also welcome groups with new ideas and skills for projects or activities. Get in touch! There’s more on our website http://www.troserchwoods.co.uk/, but no substitute for the real thing.

An earlier draft noted that the green wood could also be the dark wood, and mentioned the death of a young man on the road not far from the carpark. He had spent the evening in the woods with a group of friends, and we planted a tree for him, or his family, near the picnic site.... I cut the reference because some committee members felt it too offputting. I censored myself when it came to costs, particularly the £40,000 for a bridge. On environmental grounds, we were not allowed to haul timber across the river, or to improvise a temporary tree-trunk bridge - the traditional method. Although the cost was mainly covered by grants, I wonder if fish and animals could have survived at less public expense - especially since there's already a footbridge 20 yards upstream. Now we'll see if we can move that, to make a new circular walk.
Did I say dark wood? There's a new dark space, where the concrete cap has been broken on an old mine shaft. The story is that the mine closed down when a miner put some sticks of gelignite to dry on the boiler that powered the winding gear. And forgot it. Nobody was killed but the works were beyond repair. Now there's dark water a few yards under the concrete hole. How deep, or not?
That aside, the amazing thing about the felling is how much light it lets in, not just to the denuded ground but sidelong into the untouched woods along the river banks below. A brave new world, of our own making - except that it wasn't us, but the men we paid, with money that wasn't ours.

2009-03-19T04:07:00.000-07:00

Such a lot of things to write about:

my mother, again, now it's six months since she died and I'm troubled by the bland version of her life I produced, but didnt read out, for her memorial service. How to reconcile demands of love and honesty? Not that I have any problem loving her, but with other people who might be hurt by what I say. Love, to be worth anything, must embrace the worst as well as the best of us; and honesty requires that we dont skip or blur the bad bits. It might be interesting to take the rather formal eulogy as a framework, and cut into it with the things I didnt say...
Then there's Richard and his Spirit Level, my pride and jealousy, and the questions his book raises: if unequal wealth and incomes cause so many problems, what causes unequal wealth and incomes? To get things more equal we must get at the dynamics and structures that have widened the gap in countries such as ours. Will Hutton hinted at that when he suggested that our present government might find it difficult to redistribute when the most needy are also the most despised (though that bit of his Observer piece was left out when the Guardian Weekly reprinted it). Why do we, more than some other peoples perhaps, want to kick the people below us, not lift them up?
An annual newsletter for the Troserch Woodlands Society - since I'm a director of the not-for-profit company that manages the woods, and such a lot's been happening with felling, fencing and replanting. Pity most of the material I need are locked up in the computer the police took away.
Two songs: Janis Joplin's Freedom's just another word for nothing else to lose, and Nina Simone's I wish I knew how it would feel to be free: what's this freedom thing, and how does it relate to love, equality etc?

2009-03-19T04:01:00.000-07:00

Wide blue yonder: police cells and Tesco dates

The walls and ceiling are a pleasant sky blue, this police cell in Bridgend reminds me a bit of Azmi’s house in the refugee camp. Lebanon, 1956. Azmi was a Palestinian student, we worked together on an earthquake reconstruction site, he took us back to his home in the camp and his mother made a meal for us. Later Azmi gave me a book called ‘Palestine is our business,’ but that took some years to sink in.

It was nearly half a century later that I went to the West Bank as an observer for British Quakers (although I’m not one). I saw enough there to convince me that the business was seriously unfinished. Then early this year, a few days after the assault on Gaza, I got an email from an Israeli peace group, the text of a boycott-Israel call from a Palestinian committee in Ramalla.

Prompted by this, I went down to the nearest big Tesco store in Swansea and confiscated some ‘West Bank’ dates. ‘King Solomon’ dates, nine to a see-through container, each soft date in its own little crib of frilly white paper. I auctioned them, one by one, in aid of Gaza appeals from Oxfam and Islamic Relief. I wrote to Tesco CEO Terry Leahy telling him what I was doing and offered to refund the price of the dates if he could assure me that they were not the product of illegal settlements. In the correspondence that followed, Tesco stressed its commitment to ethics, legality and local sourcing but said nothing about settlements. They did not take up my refund offer, or prosecute.

To bring things to a head, this time with a group in support, I wheeled a trolley- load of dates out of theTesco store and into a little battery of press and TV cameras. A woman companion, D Murphy,followed with a trolley full of other West Bank and Israeli goods. We marked the goods in red emulsion and ketchup as ‘unfit for sale’ and D made a speech to people crowding round. In posters and leaflets we explained what we were doing and we also wrote to Tesco staff to apologise for any inconvenience.

D and I were arrested, charged and held for seven or eight hours at Swansea police station. I was amazed how quickly I lost track of time, stripped of watch, with nothing happening, nothing much to focus on, no daylight through the glass-tile window. At midnight, I was told the charge against me would be dropped for ‘lack of evidence.’ What more did they need? Embarassingly for me, my companion was formally charged.(She has since pleaded not guilty to theft at Magistrate’s Court and bailed to Swansea Crown Court on April 1st.)

In defence, we argue that sale of settlement goods in these stores is unlawful because the UK government is signatory to Geneva Conventions and Security Council resolutions that make both occupation and settlements illegal. Our removal of these goods is no more theft than a citizen’s arrest is assault; we are simply upholding the law in the absence of its professional guardians. As for other Israeli goods, they should not be on sale because the European trade agreement that governs their import is subject to a human rights and democracy clause.

Meanwhile we and other boycott activists have been picketing other Swansea stores. On a rainy vigil outside the Swansea branch of Sainsbury’s, police were called. There were only two of us there at the time, myself and a friend called Maggie. After a friendly discussion we agreed to leave at one pm, the time we’d planned on anyway.

Last Wednesday (March 11th) morning, as my wife Ada and I were finishing breakfast, the police came banging at the door, one vanload, then another with a plainclothes car or two. They brought a warrant to arrest me and search the house ‘on suspicion of conspiracy to commit racially aggravated criminal damage.’ What damage now? Not in Swansea, it turned out, but in Bridgend, where – unknown to us - another Sainsbury’s store had been visited with red paint. A hit and run job, not our style! And the racial aggravation? This, we were told, referred to the word ‘Israeli’ in the slogan ‘Boycott Israeli goods’ – as stencilled on the floor of the Bridgend store. D Murphy, my partner in the Tesco stunt, was not in when her snatch-squad knocked at the door, so her lot came on to join the others in our house, or chatting and laughing in the street outside - the Bridgend policemen and women having nothing better to do in Swansea that morning. My wife was still able to slip out with the mobile phone, while I was asked some questions and the searchers rummaged around indoors. I was then driven off to Bridgend, a place I’d often passed but never visited. My wife got back to find our visitors working through bank statements and underclothes, secure in their blue latex gloves.The other person arrested was poor Maggie, who had just dropped in to hand out leaflets in the rain. She too was whisked away to Bridgend. I didn’t know who else they’d got, but she guessed I was there from the shoes outside my cell.

I was angry about the racist slur. I told the CID men who questioned me that Israel was a state, not a race, and that lots of Jews, including some Israeli Jews, were supporting the boycott. I forgot to mention that it was an email from an Israeli anti-occupation group that prompted me to take the dates.The arresting officer’s notebook has me saying ‘I have many friends in the Jewish community.’

The men who questioned me showed a great interest in red paint.They picked up a sample-pot of red emulsion from our house, and some cardboard posters I’d made saying ‘Don’t buy Israeli goods’, ‘Israeli goods are bads’ and ‘Stolen goods from stolen land.’ Why red, they asked, and I really didn’t know, but was relieve when they showed me pictures of the Bridgend Sainsburys incident. The Israeli peppers and stencil on the floor were clearly done in spraypaint, not emulsion. Later I learned they’d take my wife’s craftknifes and cutting mat, in case we’d been making stencils with them. I asked why it needed a conspiracy for such a simple task, when the Swansea show with theTesco dates had been all over the local press and round the world on Youtube.

Back in my cell, I tried and failed to eat a microwave shepherds pie. It was kind of the Group 4 guards to think of it, but much too hot and horrible. I’m not usually fussy, but the potato-pulp topping was submerged in brown gunge, like dirty snow in a puddle. A ‘COMPLEAT’ meal, best before 2010 but already uneatable. Bring back Azmi’s mum, bless her sould, with her lamb with rice: we didn’t know at the time we were eating the family’s meat ration for two weeks. And Azmi, who hated to be thanked – brothers share, you said – are you still alive? On this other pale blue wall, in my South Wales cell, there’s a brown splashmark high up on the wall, just below the eye of the surveillance camera. Someone else’s shepherds pie? I used the box from mine to begin this writing on, with a paper and pen brought in at my request – after reading the card about my rights.

The desk sergeant had told me I would be allowed to ring Ada, my wife. But when I asked I was told they were too busy. On my way to and from questioning, I could see all the pairs of shoes outside cell doors, like an old-fashioned hotel corridor, but mostly trainers (mine were brown leather, which is what Maggie recognised) If the police had told me my solicitor had rung, alerted by Ada, I wouldn’t have said ‘No’ when they asked me if I wanted one for my recorded interview. I was worried about Ada and eager to get home; I felt I had nothing to hide and didn’t want to bring him all the way from Cardiff to Bridgend.

About five hours after the raid began, Maggie and I were released – though still not allowed to see or speak to each other – and driven home. She and Ada were more upset than I was by the invasion of our homes. I was more upset by the loss of my computer, with so much writing and other business unbacked up. On reflection, I’ve got angrier. We know they’ve taken a lot of papers about Israel and Palestine, but will only gradually discover what else is missing. Now I feel the Bridgend desk-sergeant was out of order with his crack about Viagra: he’d asked me about medical conditions and drugs, and I mentioned a muscular complaint. At the time I said ‘Not that localised,’ but on reflection it’s more like insult upon injury. What the hell were all those public servants doing? There must have been at least 20 on the day, in the cars and vans and back at the station. And then the paperwork, and fishing through hard-drives and emails. All over a bit of red on some fruit and veg, a harmless slogan on a floor! At what point does prudent policing become disproportionate, intimidation? What will they do with all the other addresses they pick up? Are we hearing, or imagining, new clicks and echoes on our phones? If the racially aggravated conspiracy doesn’t stick – and I got the feeling the detectives were beginning to have their doubts – will the claw back something else to charge me with?

If not undue force, can the police be prosecuted for wasting their own police time, and our public money? And when will I get my computer back, the tool of such trade as I have at my age? But who am I to moan? At least our houses were left intact and more or less tidy, not like some I’ve seen after raids in Palestine. None of us has been hit in the head, skull smashed open by a souped-up teargas shell.* Maybe that’s why I chose red paint: red for solidarity, real blood and bloody ridiculous.

*As happened to an ‘international’ last week, near the West Bank village of Ni’lin.
Every Friday for a couple of years now, villagers have been joined by foreign volunteers and Israeli anti-occupation groups in a demonstration against the separation Wall that divides the village from much of its land.

Imaginary Gods

2009-03-06T11:17:00.000-08:00

In her Magnificat, the Virgin Mary thanks God for lifting her from her low estate. The God she has in mind will pull down the mighty and raise the meek, feed the hungry and dismiss the rich. His mother's son, Jesus tells a rich questioner that if he wants to get to heaven he must give his money to the poor. But the rich man, preferring the bird in hand, walks sorrowfully away.

A lesson for those who rely on the generosity or enlightened self-interest of the haves. There are two sides to our common humanity: give and take. A generous understanding bv the haves is part of the equation, but that must be at least matched by the enlightened self-interest of the have-nots. The have-nots have numbers as well as right on their side: in the mathematics of an unequal society, those with less than the average are in the majority.

Rereading that story in the gospel of St Luke, I wondered if Mary could have refused God’s generous offer, or whether He would have caught up with her somehow, like Hardy’s poor Tess in the woods. Could Cinders have turned her back on the prince, could Tolstoy’s peasant girls have said ‘No thank you, sir’? Leo believed in peasant simplicity, would pluck a wench between meals and note it in his diary.

Noblesse oblige shades so easily into droit de seigneur! A half-amiable lordling doesn’t have to get away with murder, or even rape, when seduction comes so easily. With wealth and power to speak for him, the slave driver may not have to raise his voice.

In the 1830s, Fanny Kemble, a leading young English actress, was on tour in the United States. She fell in love with a courteous American lawyer, they married and had two children before he inherited his family’s estate in Sea Island Georgia. On the slave plantation, she watched her husband revert to type and realised that she too was a chattel. As a young mother, she felt especially for slave women, who she found giving birth in filth and sent back to work. But she also found that she too was powerless: to teach reading was a crime, for instance, but it would be her husband, who disapproved, not her who answered for it in court.

Unusually for a woman, Fanny Kemble was prepared to go out alone. Perhaps she felt freer away from the house. When she entrusted herself to a slave crew, in an open boat on a stormy river, they registered their astonishment. In another passage, she described the undercurrent of fear she discerned beneath the airs and graces of Southern society, fear of the dark majority. Frances Kemble was not above racism herself. She compares a crippled black boy running across a field to the legs of the Isle of Man. But sympathy overrides conditioning and she defies convention again when she invites the slaves, plantation as well as household workers, to join a Sunday service in the house. This time it is she who seems amazed. She notes a transformation in her unfamiliar guests. For a moment, under one roof with a common intent, all are equal in the eyes of God. Scales of deference and pretence fall away, and they can speak naturally, look each other in the eye.

Ms Kemble left her husband, the plantation, and – I think – her children. Divorced and returned to England, she admired Dickens, gave magisterial readings from Shakespeare and was admired by Henry James. Her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-9 was published years later in support of the anti-slavery movement. Like Dickens, Fanny Kemble saw free enterprise as a creative, liberating force. Now, recognising capitalism as a driver of new inequalities, we can also note how inequality drives much of 19th century literature. Heathcliff’s implacable revenge in Wuthering Heights has strong elements of class war as well as unrequited love. Dorothea in Middlemarch confronts a combination of gender, age and academic superiority. Across the ocean from Mansfield Park, behind a benefactor’a wealth and the dissolution of his son, lies another slave plantation. And in Mansfield Park, as in Jane Eyre, we have a problem with gratitude. Poor relation and governess-companion might agree that it’s better to give than to receive, as they sink ever deeper in moral debt.

In Dickens Tale of Two cities, repayment is instantaneious. A carriage is caught up in the Paris crowd, something happens - a child run over perhaps - and the aristos in the carriage toss a handful of coins into the crowd. A moment’s pause, then ping as a coin comes back through the carriage window… In Paris 1968, the streets were taken over first by students and intellectuals, then by young people from the suburbs. Cars and busses made better barricades than cobble stones, and the young voyous were good at that. About ten years before, in the battle of Algiers, young criminals rose quickly through the ranks of the FLN, rebels who’d found a cause.

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*Happily or unhappily, sex, even rape, is a longterm leveller, genes oblivious to inequalities of wealth, rank or race. Otherwise apartheid might have worked; slaves, other races or classes might be for ever separate, subordinate, condemned to perpetual servitude or extermination.

spirit level

2009-03-06T07:44:00.000-08:00

Richard’s Spirit Level book comes out this week. I’m proud and jealous. Proud because it’s a good, important, timely book, and because he’s my brother. Jealous because he’s made a name for himself and I have not… (Why this craving for distinction, when I know that’s not what matters most, for day to day happiness or in the long run of history – where big things sink without trace and any little straw may break the camel’s back?) This book of Richard’s, with his partner Kate Picket, is about inequality, and the damage that does to health and society. The publication, after thirty years of dogged research, comes at an opportune moment, what the old Left would call a Crisis of Capitalism. Rightly as often.

The book’s appearance also coincides with these first blogs of mine. No mere chance: although I’ve been wondering for a long time what to do with my writing, his book prompted me to launch a virtual counterpart. Not to be outdone, a case of inequality driving emulation, but in counterpoint, not counterblast!

Equality is crucial, but I don’t much like the word. Set among Love, Freedom and Truth, it stands out as a latin sore thumb: the first three translate into Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and I wondered about Fairness in place of Equality. But a lot of people think of themselves as fair – not to mention free and loving – without much movement towards Equality.

Fraternity? I’m happy with, and committed to, the broad thrust of my brother's argument. Any criticism - and what else would you expect from an overtaken elder brother? - is aimed at adding to, not taking from his work. What's needed now is:
1. To get the information out to those who have most to gain for it: have-nots and have-lesses, the people who do not keep up with social sciences, read the Guardian or listen to Radio 4.
2. To broaden the campaign medium beyond statistical reasoning to a more emotive - and motivating - range of experience and image, art and literature, comedy and song.
3. To nail Capitalism as main driver of economic and social inequality – setting haves over have-nots, dependent on differentials and binding us all to its rack of Profit and Loss. (We'll never all be equal, but Capitalism feeds and feeds on inequality.)

In this blog of mine, I will relate Equality to those other LEFT words above, not so much in argument as through my own life, and occasional other reading (but I read so slowly!). Maybe I’m like the Moliere character who suddenly realises he’s speaking Grammar, but it seems to me that I’ve been wrestling with Equality – or rather Inequality – for much of my life. Both in my work and in my family, where class and income differences come home to roost. I am White Anglo-saxon Protestant Middle Class. Ada, and my first wife Kath, both come from working class Irish families. How far can a Wasp change his stripes – to red and green for instance?

And Humour - GSOH? Like Beauty, that didnt get a mention on the banner, but may also pop up, if only by mistake.

just beginning

2009-03-03T11:06:00.000-08:00

Nervous, nothing ready yet. How to start, and who on earth would want to read it? Maybe I should have included Beauty in the title. Now she'll pop up unexpected, with her nose out of joint because she wasnt invited earlier. Like the fairy in Sleeping Beauty... When we left our smallholding in the woods a year ago, I felt a bit like Sleeping Beauty in reverse, a wrinkly old babe in the wood. We'd decided to get out before we got too old or lazy to cut the brambles back and stop them growing over us.
Now we live in town, a little terrace house overlooking the sea, happy as pigs in clover.