TOWARDS A SOCIAL ECONOMY: SOME IDEAS FROM THE LONDON OCCUPATION AND WORK IN PROGRESS
(Updated in light of latest survey returns)
What’s radical about the London occupations is not, or not yet, an outspoken manifesto but a common recognition that our ‘social democracy’ is neither social nor democratic and a shared determination to do better. A statement agreed at an early General Assembly outside St Pauls described the current system as ‘unsustainable, undemocratic and unjust. We need alternatives and this is where we work towards them…This is what democracy looks like, come and join us.’
This was not good enough for many press commentators and passers-by. ‘You know what you don’t want, but what DO you want?’ they asked. While groups were forming for the serious work, I took it on myself to list some possible answers. I drew on leaflets, posters and discussions I took part in or overheard. I boiled the list down to nine options and set them out in no particular order on a survey form, with a tenth box empty for suggestions. At the top of the form were a couple of positive aims based on the agreed initial statement:
• to build a just, sustainable and democratic economy, putting the good of the majority and the earth before corporate interests and profit for a few
• to practice and promote democracy, deciding between us how we live and work together.
Respondents were asked to tick, cross or query each of the nine options, add amendments and write their own suggestions in box no. 10. I handed out about 450 forms, of which about 100 went to passing visitors. Fifty completed forms were returned to a box-file marked ‘Social Economy’ in the information tent. That’s about 20% of the camp population.
After collating the results, I reordered the options in order of preference. Most respondents (in this small, self-selecting sample) ticked most of the boxes. All the first nine options won majority support. The results below surprised me by their moderation, especially in the light of latest pay figures for top CEOs. Perhaps I should I have included ‘Smash capitalism’ and harvested the ticks for that.
The following list includes respondents’ amendments (underlined). In joint first place were:
1. Alternative economy: individual and collective food-growing, building, making and mending, recycling and exchange (becoming more important if full employment is no longer possible)
2. Support for unions, co-operatives, mutuals, partnerships, profit-sharing and social enterprise - organizations that challenge or improve on conventional capitalism.*
3. Use our stake in bailed-out banks to build affordable homes, schools, sustainable industry and energy, essential services and foreign aid. ‘Quantitative easing’ (printed money) to go to this program, not back into bad banks. Buy out RBS as a National Investment Bank and put QE into new Green Bank.
4. Tax reforms: a) Land value tax to tap underlying wealth and redress basic inequalities; b) One-off wealth tax to pay off national debt and save interest costs; c) Tobin tax on financial transactions to discourage speculation and raise funds for better use; d) Closure of tax havens.
5. Reclaim unused land for food-growing, empty buildings for living or working in. Fight enclosure, take back commons.
6. Corporate reform: to make companies accountable for social and environmental outcomes as well as profit and loss; tighter regulation of banks, private equity and hedge funds. Companies to lead annual reports with statements of social/environmental objectives, pay-differentials and worker-involvement in decision-making.
7. Take individual responsibility for our own actions, spending and savings. Make banks, pension-funds etc tell us how they spend and invest our money.
8. Citizens’ Assemblies, to bring direct democracy to bear on local government, public services and community action.
9.. Social and Environmental Audit (on a par with current Credit ratings) to inform investors, savers, employees and general public of company performance (an alternative to top-down regulation, and involving unions, NGOs, progressive companies etc)
10. Workers councils and support for workers’ buy-outs (combining two write-ins).
Other write-ins included:
- reclaim bankers’ bonuses, base future payments on long-term performance.
- stop privatization of health and education
- tax and cut from top, not bottom. 90% tax for top 1%,
- general strike
- citizen-volunteer force
- replace capitalism (‘transitional program’)
- boycott banks and stop paying tax
- abolish money
- end unsustainable Growth
- international ‘Declaration rights for Mother Earth’ and law against ecocide
- outlaw food speculation
- promote moral/spiritual debate (interfaith and no-faith, including ‘outspoken socialism’)
- bail out the people, nationalise the banks.
- ban arms trade
- Enforce MAXIMUM wage
Clearly this survey is neither objective nor comprehensive. I am part of the movement I describe and cannot reach the whole of it. This is only a snapshot of some work in progress but I hope it helps to focus discussion in and around the occupation. None of us has the answers, but we can all help find them. Besides this survey, I have been encouraged by comments in the Occupation visitors’ book in the Information Tent). Again, not a random sample, but the views of those who care and dare to step inside. With almost no exceptions the entries are positive:
‘Stay strong, warm, safe… Rock and roll around the world…Keep it up, wish I could join you, from a very worried student nurse…I’m so proud of you young people…Even my nan likes it…Total soutien d’un camarade syndique CGT…I work for a business on its knees, banks want our money now, but the big guys take months to pay…I’ve brought my children to show them how democracy works…So happy I came here…People connecting, about time…Let’s occupy the world…This is the end of the world as we know it. I feel fine…Too little, too late…At least you’re TRYING…Female, 50, fed-up, (and now) inspired…DON’T LEAVE.
The main banner at the entrance to the St Pauls reads ‘Capitalism IS Crisis’ but a recent General Assembly agreed that this, though perhaps true, did not properly reflect the Occupation as a whole. Two other big posters once attached to the railings of the Victoria statue, have now been removed – by bad weather or official good taste? One read RESPECT EXISTENCE OR EXPECT RESISTANCE, the other said REVOLUTION but with the L reversed, pointing backwards to make LOVE.
*NOTE: The initial statement agreed by the General Assembly outside St Pauls 16.10.2011 gave
support to the November 30th union strike against cuts and student action on November 9th
Sunday, 5 February 2012
Observer, Times and Guardian, October 2011-January 2022
JUST THE ONES THEY PRINTED
To The Observer
Sent: Sunday, 5 February 2012, 10:52
Subject: vested interests
Yes (Ed Milliband on NHS) workers do have vested interests, but not only in how much they get paid. When I worked in an engineering factory, the pride and joy of the shopfloor was not in aircraft or weapons components, but a shining, perforated alloy disc called the Blood Machine. It was destined for the NHS.
On the walls of the same factory were notices that showed two workers talking behind their hands. The motto was 'Dont tell him, tell us,' with 'us' meaning management. More telling was the subtext: workers tend to know and care what they do, how it's done and for whom.
Labour rightly calls for employees to join remuneration committees. This will lead naturally to discussion of what people at all levels are doing for their money. Why not fast-forward the democratic process and get employees properly represented on the boards where working decisions are made and working lives shaped?
It would help everyone concerned if companies were also obliged to state their social objectives on a par with reward for shareholders (as is already happening among some companies in California).
Greg Wilkinson
To The Observer
Sent: Sunday, 22 January 2012, 19:45, printed 29.01.2012
Subject: political economy
If capitalism is unstable (Will Hutton ‘Words wont change capitalism’), it’s not just because it deals with unknowable risk but because it lives by that risk and makes it more unknowable.
Capitalism disconnects wealth, profit and growth from any material or social measure of benefit or improvement. Hutton calls for daring deeds not words, but fails to get much beyond the chimera of monetary growth and GDP. His bold measures treat mainly symptoms not causes, symbols not substance.
The task of government is not simply to quantify and manipulate financial targets, but to enable us to define and deliver the goods and services we most need. Not just to turn the tap marked Growth, but determine what is to be grown, and how.
Human wellbeing is never totally knowable or quantifiable. But we do know we all need health, housing, education, useful employment, peace and care in old age. And a world fit for our children and theirs.
This real market – or political economy - is all our business, central to good life and good government. Our future is not reducible to 'Profit' and 'Loss', or to be left at the door of ‘Good Capitalism.’
Greg Wilkinson
To The Observer
Sent: Tuesday, 17 January 2012, 15:11 (printed 22.01.1012)
Subject: millennium village
In drought-stricken West Africa, John Mulholland describes a joined-up programme to save a single village. Resources and expertise, government and community combine in a co-ordinated approach to health, education, agriculture, infrastructure and economic development.
Why didn't we think of that, in our corner of debt-stricken West Europe?
Instead, we get empty incantations: Cut-more, grow-more, Us-more, them-more. As the global village begins to bake, our tribal leaders bow to mysterious Market forces and our future hangs on the omens of Standard and Poor.
Greg Wilkinson
To The Times
Sent: Tuesday, 25 October 2011, 16:05
Subject: St Pauls
(in answer to report which used night scans to demonstrate that most of the tents outside St Pauls were not being slept in, and accused occupiers of damaging local businesses. Printed a day or two later, and flagged up on front page – the first thing I’ve written for a Murdoch paper)
Sir
I’m one of ‘the nine out of ten campers’ who quits my tent outside St Paul’s from time to time. I do so because like many others occupying the forecourt I have family, jobs and commitments elsewhere. I have spent several nights away from my tent seeing my family in Swansea and arranging a Prince’s Trust event on a community woodland in Carmarthenshire.
During my absence I lent the tent to a couple who decorated it with a poster about sleeping all week in London’s freezing streets – not my choice, but freedom of speech. My ‘tentants’ were not eager to leave when I returned but now I’m back.
During my week hereabouts I have also talked to staff in a café isolated by police railings round Paternoster Square. I asked the police if they could move their barriers to let more customers through. By contrast, the nearest café outside the barriers is doing an unusually brisk trade. ‘There are winners and losers’ as one café manager said.
We campers have no more closed the small businesses than we closed the Cathedral. We regard both closures as quite unnecessary and regret the difficulties caused to staff, customers and visitors
Like the trustees of St Pauls we are very concerned with health and safety, our own and that of everyone on the planet threatened by global warming and social unrest brought about by widening inequality.
Greg Wilkinson
To: The Guardian
Sent: 19.10.2011, printed day or two later
Subject: Between Mammon and old Religion
Some of us camped on the slabs and cobbles outside St Pauls have Capitalism in our sights, others are as reluctant as the Labour party to use the C-word. But we know which direction we're heading in, it's up and this is a sort of base-camp.
Other commentators, less sympathetic than your editorial, have ridiculed our lack of detailed manifesto or demands. But actions may speak louder than words. We're learning as we go and anyone with insight or expertise to share is welcome to join us. Meanwhile - and this we have spelt out in a general assembly - we all know that the present political economy is unsustainable, undemocratic and unjust. It's got to be changed and our presence is a step in that direction.
Like the globalised market, this movement is global. We stand with the others who have come into the streets around the world, and with the millions more who suffer and starve in silence. We support our UK unions as they strike against cuts in pensions, jobs and service.
Camped here between Mammon and old Religion - given sanctuary by the Cannon of St Pauls - I have spent several days talking and listening to strangers who seem like friends. The fact that we're all sorts of people adds to the joy of it.
One slogan on the railings says 'Respect our existence or expect our resistance'. Whatever words we happen to use, we will not let our lives and world be used and spoilt in service of a wealthy few. Nor do we trust politicians who find it easier to play along with corporate interests than stand up for the people who elected them.
We want a more direct democracy. Here nobody pays us, tells us what to do or puts words in our mouths. When the tents are blown down or flooded - as happens elsewhere in the world - we bail out and reconstruct as best we can. We are not dismayed by the stony faces of traders and brokers on their way to work and take heart from the people, local shops and businesses, who come in with food and offers of help.
Between us we can find better ways of doing things.
Greg Wilkinson
19 Trafalgar Place, Swansea SA2 0BU (and/or a dark green tent immediately opposite the Nat West bank outside St Pauls) 01792 455335 07895063030)
PS Ed: The last occupation I took part in was at the British Institute in Paris, May 1968. Cobblestones were for barricades and throwing at CRS, not sleeping on.
To The Observer
Sent: Sunday, 5 February 2012, 10:52
Subject: vested interests
Yes (Ed Milliband on NHS) workers do have vested interests, but not only in how much they get paid. When I worked in an engineering factory, the pride and joy of the shopfloor was not in aircraft or weapons components, but a shining, perforated alloy disc called the Blood Machine. It was destined for the NHS.
On the walls of the same factory were notices that showed two workers talking behind their hands. The motto was 'Dont tell him, tell us,' with 'us' meaning management. More telling was the subtext: workers tend to know and care what they do, how it's done and for whom.
Labour rightly calls for employees to join remuneration committees. This will lead naturally to discussion of what people at all levels are doing for their money. Why not fast-forward the democratic process and get employees properly represented on the boards where working decisions are made and working lives shaped?
It would help everyone concerned if companies were also obliged to state their social objectives on a par with reward for shareholders (as is already happening among some companies in California).
Greg Wilkinson
To The Observer
Sent: Sunday, 22 January 2012, 19:45, printed 29.01.2012
Subject: political economy
If capitalism is unstable (Will Hutton ‘Words wont change capitalism’), it’s not just because it deals with unknowable risk but because it lives by that risk and makes it more unknowable.
Capitalism disconnects wealth, profit and growth from any material or social measure of benefit or improvement. Hutton calls for daring deeds not words, but fails to get much beyond the chimera of monetary growth and GDP. His bold measures treat mainly symptoms not causes, symbols not substance.
The task of government is not simply to quantify and manipulate financial targets, but to enable us to define and deliver the goods and services we most need. Not just to turn the tap marked Growth, but determine what is to be grown, and how.
Human wellbeing is never totally knowable or quantifiable. But we do know we all need health, housing, education, useful employment, peace and care in old age. And a world fit for our children and theirs.
This real market – or political economy - is all our business, central to good life and good government. Our future is not reducible to 'Profit' and 'Loss', or to be left at the door of ‘Good Capitalism.’
Greg Wilkinson
To The Observer
Sent: Tuesday, 17 January 2012, 15:11 (printed 22.01.1012)
Subject: millennium village
In drought-stricken West Africa, John Mulholland describes a joined-up programme to save a single village. Resources and expertise, government and community combine in a co-ordinated approach to health, education, agriculture, infrastructure and economic development.
Why didn't we think of that, in our corner of debt-stricken West Europe?
Instead, we get empty incantations: Cut-more, grow-more, Us-more, them-more. As the global village begins to bake, our tribal leaders bow to mysterious Market forces and our future hangs on the omens of Standard and Poor.
Greg Wilkinson
To The Times
Sent: Tuesday, 25 October 2011, 16:05
Subject: St Pauls
(in answer to report which used night scans to demonstrate that most of the tents outside St Pauls were not being slept in, and accused occupiers of damaging local businesses. Printed a day or two later, and flagged up on front page – the first thing I’ve written for a Murdoch paper)
Sir
I’m one of ‘the nine out of ten campers’ who quits my tent outside St Paul’s from time to time. I do so because like many others occupying the forecourt I have family, jobs and commitments elsewhere. I have spent several nights away from my tent seeing my family in Swansea and arranging a Prince’s Trust event on a community woodland in Carmarthenshire.
During my absence I lent the tent to a couple who decorated it with a poster about sleeping all week in London’s freezing streets – not my choice, but freedom of speech. My ‘tentants’ were not eager to leave when I returned but now I’m back.
During my week hereabouts I have also talked to staff in a café isolated by police railings round Paternoster Square. I asked the police if they could move their barriers to let more customers through. By contrast, the nearest café outside the barriers is doing an unusually brisk trade. ‘There are winners and losers’ as one café manager said.
We campers have no more closed the small businesses than we closed the Cathedral. We regard both closures as quite unnecessary and regret the difficulties caused to staff, customers and visitors
Like the trustees of St Pauls we are very concerned with health and safety, our own and that of everyone on the planet threatened by global warming and social unrest brought about by widening inequality.
Greg Wilkinson
To: The Guardian
Sent: 19.10.2011, printed day or two later
Subject: Between Mammon and old Religion
Some of us camped on the slabs and cobbles outside St Pauls have Capitalism in our sights, others are as reluctant as the Labour party to use the C-word. But we know which direction we're heading in, it's up and this is a sort of base-camp.
Other commentators, less sympathetic than your editorial, have ridiculed our lack of detailed manifesto or demands. But actions may speak louder than words. We're learning as we go and anyone with insight or expertise to share is welcome to join us. Meanwhile - and this we have spelt out in a general assembly - we all know that the present political economy is unsustainable, undemocratic and unjust. It's got to be changed and our presence is a step in that direction.
Like the globalised market, this movement is global. We stand with the others who have come into the streets around the world, and with the millions more who suffer and starve in silence. We support our UK unions as they strike against cuts in pensions, jobs and service.
Camped here between Mammon and old Religion - given sanctuary by the Cannon of St Pauls - I have spent several days talking and listening to strangers who seem like friends. The fact that we're all sorts of people adds to the joy of it.
One slogan on the railings says 'Respect our existence or expect our resistance'. Whatever words we happen to use, we will not let our lives and world be used and spoilt in service of a wealthy few. Nor do we trust politicians who find it easier to play along with corporate interests than stand up for the people who elected them.
We want a more direct democracy. Here nobody pays us, tells us what to do or puts words in our mouths. When the tents are blown down or flooded - as happens elsewhere in the world - we bail out and reconstruct as best we can. We are not dismayed by the stony faces of traders and brokers on their way to work and take heart from the people, local shops and businesses, who come in with food and offers of help.
Between us we can find better ways of doing things.
Greg Wilkinson
19 Trafalgar Place, Swansea SA2 0BU (and/or a dark green tent immediately opposite the Nat West bank outside St Pauls) 01792 455335 07895063030)
PS Ed: The last occupation I took part in was at the British Institute in Paris, May 1968. Cobblestones were for barricades and throwing at CRS, not sleeping on.
Monday, 5 September 2011
More shots in the dark
To the Guardian
08.09.2011
NO TO 'FERAL UNDERCLASSS
...BUT IF THE FACE FITS
Nice that a police chief rejects talk of a 'feral underclass.' Not so good that your report, like most others, takes at face value Ken Clarke's announcement that 75% of those sentenced for riot offences had previous convictions.
That begs an important question, especially with police investigations so reliant on CCTV evidence. How many of those brought to court were identified and arrested BECAUSE of their previous convictions?
As I know from my own experience, it may not even take a conviction: you only have to be charged for your picture, fingerprints, DNA and address to be taken and stored for future reference.
In my case, I was arrested and charged for a protest action. Although the charges were then dropped, I was rearrested a couple of months later following a similar protest in another town, by persons unknown either to the police or me. With my data to hand, our house was searched, papers and computers seized.
No charges this time and the case was dropped for lack of evidence. I was lucky. There had been no public hue and cry, I was half a century older than last month's likely suspects and much more expensively educated (though prison costs as much as university).
However nonsensical many of the recent sentences, and however we apportion responsibility, hundreds will be guilty as charged. It remains unjust that while previous convictions are not usually admissible as evidence in court, previous charges can effectively determine who gets identified, arrested and brought to court.
To Independent on Sunday
04.09.2011
TALKING TOUGH
You call for a 'tough demand that those at the top of society show responsibility' to match the 'tough response to the looting and stealing' on the streets. But this easy equivalence breaks down when it comes to policing and enforcement.
Rioting is visible in a way that boardroom crime and misdemeanor can never be. Insider-dealing may be indistinguishable from casual conversation and a financial trade, unlike betting on horses or roulette, easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Companies - and other people's livelihoods - can be shut down, stripped or exported within a legal framework that largely ignores moral, social and environmental priorities.
Tweaks and taxes can make a difference, loopholes can be closed, but the root problem is in the structure of capitalist enterprise. The corporate executives, traders and investors who rip us off are working within a legal framework that empowers them to make money for themselves and each other at our expense.
Comprehensive regulation and monitoring would require an independent mirror-world of virtual corporations to match and mark main players in the global market, with inevitable revolving doors for poachers turning gamekeeper and vice versa.
The only alternative is more representative regulation from within, but with the circle of decision-makers extended to those whose lives and businesses are most involved. Capital hardly needs representation, its needs can be met in interest or a share of profits and it can vote with its winged feet. Structural regulation requires inclusion of the other groupings and interests essential to economic enterprise: employees, consumers, suppliers and community.
A long haul, but for a start we could do worse than develop a form of social-environmental audit - with listings (SEAL?) comparable to the now-fashionable credit ratings. The listing process would focus public scrutiny. The necessary research and monitoring could involve existing social and environmental groupings - unions, consumers, greens etc - as well as academics, economists and politicians.
And, yes, bankers, of whom there are many who would be happy to work in a better cause.
To Guardian Weekly
27.08.2011
A FINE BALANCE
You print three stories about the August flare-up between Israeli and Palestinian forces on the Gaza border. Two of them trace the fighting back to an attack/ambush by Palestinian militants, and the third is a close-up of fear and horror at the killing of an Israeli security official by a Palestinian rocket.
Every killing, whether of civilian or militant, is a tragedy. Your main article has eight Israelis killed in the Palestinian attack, and 15 Palestinians in the fighting that followed. A Palestinian body-count for the months of July and August names 45 'martyrs,' including six children. On August 1st, the first day of Ramadan, an Israeli raid on the Qalandia refugee camp near Jerusalem left two young men dead. One of them was found by his mother, his brains blown out on the road outside his front door.
To the Observer
21.08.2011
PROFOUNDLY DYSFUNCTIONAL
Tony Blair attributes rioting to a minority of ‘profoundly dysfunctional families.’ But family dysfunction, like criminality, does not spring from nowhere. Nor is it confined to certain classes or districts: if most dysfunctional families don’t turn to looting, it is because they can get what they want over the counter.
When I left school, aged 17, in 1954 I had no difficulty getting jobs. Most boys my age had already been working for a year and we all got paid. Just as importantly we felt grown up. At work we were eager to win the respect of older workmates and when we got home we were tired.
And then there was national service…
My family was not poor and when I failed my 11-plus, my parents sent me to a private school. Like many post-war professionals, they voted Labour. They counted on better schools and conditions for everyone, a gradual equalling-up to end class privilege and segregation. It never occurred to them that by this century, nearly half all children would leave state schools without the 3 Rs, with little prospect of ‘worthwhile jobs.’ Or that one bank-trader could earn as much as 1,500 teachers, or 3,000 of the carers who helped look after them in their last years.
It took Thatcher to kill their dream of a natural movement towards equality, opportunity and mutual respect for all. And Blair to bury it.
08.09.2011
NO TO 'FERAL UNDERCLASSS
...BUT IF THE FACE FITS
Nice that a police chief rejects talk of a 'feral underclass.' Not so good that your report, like most others, takes at face value Ken Clarke's announcement that 75% of those sentenced for riot offences had previous convictions.
That begs an important question, especially with police investigations so reliant on CCTV evidence. How many of those brought to court were identified and arrested BECAUSE of their previous convictions?
As I know from my own experience, it may not even take a conviction: you only have to be charged for your picture, fingerprints, DNA and address to be taken and stored for future reference.
In my case, I was arrested and charged for a protest action. Although the charges were then dropped, I was rearrested a couple of months later following a similar protest in another town, by persons unknown either to the police or me. With my data to hand, our house was searched, papers and computers seized.
No charges this time and the case was dropped for lack of evidence. I was lucky. There had been no public hue and cry, I was half a century older than last month's likely suspects and much more expensively educated (though prison costs as much as university).
However nonsensical many of the recent sentences, and however we apportion responsibility, hundreds will be guilty as charged. It remains unjust that while previous convictions are not usually admissible as evidence in court, previous charges can effectively determine who gets identified, arrested and brought to court.
To Independent on Sunday
04.09.2011
TALKING TOUGH
You call for a 'tough demand that those at the top of society show responsibility' to match the 'tough response to the looting and stealing' on the streets. But this easy equivalence breaks down when it comes to policing and enforcement.
Rioting is visible in a way that boardroom crime and misdemeanor can never be. Insider-dealing may be indistinguishable from casual conversation and a financial trade, unlike betting on horses or roulette, easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Companies - and other people's livelihoods - can be shut down, stripped or exported within a legal framework that largely ignores moral, social and environmental priorities.
Tweaks and taxes can make a difference, loopholes can be closed, but the root problem is in the structure of capitalist enterprise. The corporate executives, traders and investors who rip us off are working within a legal framework that empowers them to make money for themselves and each other at our expense.
Comprehensive regulation and monitoring would require an independent mirror-world of virtual corporations to match and mark main players in the global market, with inevitable revolving doors for poachers turning gamekeeper and vice versa.
The only alternative is more representative regulation from within, but with the circle of decision-makers extended to those whose lives and businesses are most involved. Capital hardly needs representation, its needs can be met in interest or a share of profits and it can vote with its winged feet. Structural regulation requires inclusion of the other groupings and interests essential to economic enterprise: employees, consumers, suppliers and community.
A long haul, but for a start we could do worse than develop a form of social-environmental audit - with listings (SEAL?) comparable to the now-fashionable credit ratings. The listing process would focus public scrutiny. The necessary research and monitoring could involve existing social and environmental groupings - unions, consumers, greens etc - as well as academics, economists and politicians.
And, yes, bankers, of whom there are many who would be happy to work in a better cause.
To Guardian Weekly
27.08.2011
A FINE BALANCE
You print three stories about the August flare-up between Israeli and Palestinian forces on the Gaza border. Two of them trace the fighting back to an attack/ambush by Palestinian militants, and the third is a close-up of fear and horror at the killing of an Israeli security official by a Palestinian rocket.
Every killing, whether of civilian or militant, is a tragedy. Your main article has eight Israelis killed in the Palestinian attack, and 15 Palestinians in the fighting that followed. A Palestinian body-count for the months of July and August names 45 'martyrs,' including six children. On August 1st, the first day of Ramadan, an Israeli raid on the Qalandia refugee camp near Jerusalem left two young men dead. One of them was found by his mother, his brains blown out on the road outside his front door.
To the Observer
21.08.2011
PROFOUNDLY DYSFUNCTIONAL
Tony Blair attributes rioting to a minority of ‘profoundly dysfunctional families.’ But family dysfunction, like criminality, does not spring from nowhere. Nor is it confined to certain classes or districts: if most dysfunctional families don’t turn to looting, it is because they can get what they want over the counter.
When I left school, aged 17, in 1954 I had no difficulty getting jobs. Most boys my age had already been working for a year and we all got paid. Just as importantly we felt grown up. At work we were eager to win the respect of older workmates and when we got home we were tired.
And then there was national service…
My family was not poor and when I failed my 11-plus, my parents sent me to a private school. Like many post-war professionals, they voted Labour. They counted on better schools and conditions for everyone, a gradual equalling-up to end class privilege and segregation. It never occurred to them that by this century, nearly half all children would leave state schools without the 3 Rs, with little prospect of ‘worthwhile jobs.’ Or that one bank-trader could earn as much as 1,500 teachers, or 3,000 of the carers who helped look after them in their last years.
It took Thatcher to kill their dream of a natural movement towards equality, opportunity and mutual respect for all. And Blair to bury it.
Thursday, 21 July 2011
To the editor, South Wales Evening Post
Thank you for drawing attention to our picket at Barclays Bank in Swansea (June 27-July 2). But what matters is not the ‘outrage’ or otherwise of one Swansea OAP. It is the facts that count, and what we do about them. What my age and pension give me is free time for what I tried to do in my job as foreign correspondent years ago: to get at the facts and bring them home to people they concern.
I'm not just on about arms, or bosses bonuses as such. Today, after teachers and others have stopped work in protest over government cuts, it's important to remember that it was the folly of big banks that prompted the cuts. And that they are now back to business as usual: the pay-package of one Barclays bank-trader, at £40+ million a year, could employ 1,800 teachers, nurses, police – or junior bank staff (Barclays recently closed one Swansea branch). The same money could pay 6,000 pensions like my own, or 3,000 carers to look after us when we become incapable. This grotesque inequality comes to roost with us in Swansea, where people in the poorest parts of town die 13 years younger than people in richer neighbourhoods.
That is why I’m picketing Barclays, as leader among piggy banks. With my wife I have made a Golden Pig Bad Bank Award, for presentation at mid-day on Saturday. The plaque on the plinth reads ‘for contributions to warfare, greed, inequality and pillage of the global village.’
Greg Wilkinson
Wednesday, 20 July 2011
Nightmare drones: nouveaux jeux sans frontieres
Guardian on drone-stike sites in West Pakistan:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/17/us-drone-strikes-pakistan-waziristan
A local journalist goes from one drone hit village to another, detailing damage. A dangerous business because people taking pictures and asking questions may be suspected of helping CIA prepare next strike. What he finds suggests civilian casualties much higher than official accounts admit. An own goal for war-on-terror as local populations rage at US etc.
Obvious, really.
Less obvious but just as dangerous, this form of warfare is relatively cheap for those with the know-how, and leapfrogs old legal and geographical boundaries. Drones are now used by US, Israeli and more recently UK forces for surveillance and or missile strikes, not only in the acknowledged war-zones of Iraq and Afghanistan but Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and Gaza - wherever conventional forces cannot reach, or would rather not be seen to reach.
UK Watchkeeper drones are adapted from Israeli Hermes drones as perfected over Gaza. The UK version has been tested at Aberporth not far from us.
Drones can fly at 10,000 feet, for hours, days or nights, unseen and unheard from the ground, watching, reporting back to base or waiting to get a target in sights. US Predator drones, as seen on a CNN documentary (check Youtube), are controlled by more or less human 'pilots'at playstation consoles in a desert base, Arizona perhaps. The risk-free piloting is one reason why drones are relatively cheap: training pilots costs as much as making planes, and in conventional airwars too many get lost in crashes and combat stress.
One reason for my recent picket of Barclays is that the bank is a lead investor in the Israeli company, Elbit Systems, that makes the drones now adapted for UK use.
The former US President and WW2 supreme commander General Dwight Eisenhower one warned against what he called the 'military-industrial complex' intruding on politics and public life. Now the complex that threatens us is more complex still: military-industrial-political-financial, with funders often deciding what gets off the ground. And its global, no longer confined to one superpower.
The current light being shed on Murdoch's Newscorp web gives us a glimpse of what must also be happening between military, intelligence, political, industrial and financial power centres across continents, picking, mixing and making what suits themselves at our expense.
A recent New York Times report described experimental drones modelled on dragon-flies, and no bigger than insects, able to settle on a window ledge. With poison stings? No more need for human agents with umbrella tips...
One problem in this new form of airwar is the cost and complexity of decoding such a mass of detailed information. Imagine a continual feed from hundreds of spies in the sky, having to monitor so many monitors, fit and analyse the images.
One thing the roving reporter in Pakistan notes is the difficulty of putting together the casualties, not in the image, but in the flesh, on the ground, in what's left of walls, trees etc.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/17/us-drone-strikes-pakistan-waziristan
A local journalist goes from one drone hit village to another, detailing damage. A dangerous business because people taking pictures and asking questions may be suspected of helping CIA prepare next strike. What he finds suggests civilian casualties much higher than official accounts admit. An own goal for war-on-terror as local populations rage at US etc.
Obvious, really.
Less obvious but just as dangerous, this form of warfare is relatively cheap for those with the know-how, and leapfrogs old legal and geographical boundaries. Drones are now used by US, Israeli and more recently UK forces for surveillance and or missile strikes, not only in the acknowledged war-zones of Iraq and Afghanistan but Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and Gaza - wherever conventional forces cannot reach, or would rather not be seen to reach.
UK Watchkeeper drones are adapted from Israeli Hermes drones as perfected over Gaza. The UK version has been tested at Aberporth not far from us.
Drones can fly at 10,000 feet, for hours, days or nights, unseen and unheard from the ground, watching, reporting back to base or waiting to get a target in sights. US Predator drones, as seen on a CNN documentary (check Youtube), are controlled by more or less human 'pilots'at playstation consoles in a desert base, Arizona perhaps. The risk-free piloting is one reason why drones are relatively cheap: training pilots costs as much as making planes, and in conventional airwars too many get lost in crashes and combat stress.
One reason for my recent picket of Barclays is that the bank is a lead investor in the Israeli company, Elbit Systems, that makes the drones now adapted for UK use.
The former US President and WW2 supreme commander General Dwight Eisenhower one warned against what he called the 'military-industrial complex' intruding on politics and public life. Now the complex that threatens us is more complex still: military-industrial-political-financial, with funders often deciding what gets off the ground. And its global, no longer confined to one superpower.
The current light being shed on Murdoch's Newscorp web gives us a glimpse of what must also be happening between military, intelligence, political, industrial and financial power centres across continents, picking, mixing and making what suits themselves at our expense.
A recent New York Times report described experimental drones modelled on dragon-flies, and no bigger than insects, able to settle on a window ledge. With poison stings? No more need for human agents with umbrella tips...
One problem in this new form of airwar is the cost and complexity of decoding such a mass of detailed information. Imagine a continual feed from hundreds of spies in the sky, having to monitor so many monitors, fit and analyse the images.
One thing the roving reporter in Pakistan notes is the difficulty of putting together the casualties, not in the image, but in the flesh, on the ground, in what's left of walls, trees etc.
Monday, 18 July 2011
Letters to and from Barclays Head Office and local staff
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.
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.
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