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.
Monday, 18 July 2011
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
BARCLAYS, BANKS ETC - FACTS AND REFERENCES
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
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.
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
(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.
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.
Thursday, 25 March 2010
MUCH ADO ABOUT DATES
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
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
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.
(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
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.
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.
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