Broke-back Democracy

Like this old Liberty ship, western democracies now seem to be falling apart. The SS Richard Montgomery broke its back on a sandbank off the coast of Kent c1944 with a cargo of explosives on board. What sometimes scuppers our so-called social democracy is the deeply unstable – undemocratic and anti-social – economy on which it habitually rests. But in this case the sandbank is not the work of inhuman nature but corporate wealth and the very rich few, mostly men, who shape it in their own interest. Or what they imagine that to be.

The current break in political formation across UK, US and EU reflects this underlying economic instability. Relatively prosperous politicians and fellow-professionals are left clinging to the superstructure, while those they were meant to represent and managed are left to sink or swim. A motley crew regroup on improvised rafts, shake their fists at elites and kick out at more-unfortunates to try to get on board. Whoever, wherever, whatever... 

New Pied Pipers, old tunes... Fairy tales and nautical images apart, I've tried to get the gist of it in a Castro letter to the Guardian Weekly. An earlier version was spiked by the Observer, but the Weekly is often more progressive, international and cheaper than its Guardian/Observer stablemates.

To the Editor

Guardian Weekly 06.12.2016

Fidel Castro didn't set out to be a Stalinist dictator, he got pushed. How could Cuba not have turned to the Soviets when the US blocked its sugar crop? How could a new leader countenance loyal opposition with the CIA breathing poison down his neck? Hadn't impeccable parliamentarians,Mossadegh in Iran and Allende in Chile been killed in coups prompted by London and Washington?

Democrat or not, Fidel made most of his people healthier, prouder, more educated and - for a long time - better off.  We sometimes hear the truth about ourselves from enemies and Castro was right that  'capitalism has neither the capacity, nor the morality nor the ethics to solve the problems of poverty'.

The same now goes for the 'social' democracy that overlooks and oversees our anti-social, top-down economy. Long before cold war or globalisation, US founding fathers and the UK mother of parliaments had a lot to answer for. From plantation to wage slavery, enclosures to company law, property ruled. Down the ranks of private industry and public services, we do what we're told and take what we get from bosses you dont elect...Or else. This duress,by cash not lash ensures that power and prosperity, education and opportunity trickle up.

When things come unstuck, endemic cruelties surface in repression and revenge, the worst of both worlds. Now it ca n no longer be a choice between democracy and economic justice by other means. Democracy itself must look to other means. Representative democracy, whether in elected government or company boards, must be grounded in a more direct democracy wherever we live and work. We all need time and space to meet, discuss, decide and act for ourselves, find commonsense in commonwealth.

GW

Swansea

PS 'Equality rules' says Dame Louise Casey in a race report for Mrs May, only to focus her findings on Muslim women, burkas and the Muslim Men who keep them down: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04k6v58

What's missing in this talk of social equality, as in most talk about social democracy, is any clear recognition of the economic inequality underpinning it.

What separates Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims from their more liberal whiter brothers and sisters is not so much religious prejudice - on either side - as the economic divisions that so effectively keep us apart. 
It so happens that most Muslims in the UK are also among the poorest people in the UK, with all that goes with it: poor housing, poor schools, poor jobs and little prospect of upward mobility. 
Race and class lines often correlate. Poor Muslims like many poor whites and so-called JAMs fall back on old instincts and traditions and make a virtue of necessity. It's not only Muslim men who are more likely to take it out on their wives if they can keep up themselves:  the more you're put down outside, the more important to be Master at home.

Social inequalities - race, gender and class - play out the economic injustices underlying them. In posher parts of Ireland, South Africa and central London, racial and religious differences may not disappear, but many of the tensions around them melt away, and people more often work together. Shared prosperity is the best mixer.

Bullying still hurts, and inequality still rules.

To the Editor

South Wales Post 18.11.2016

Cheers to Newton schoolchildren for their Red Card Racism banner. Now we could do even better. Racism is only one front for the bullying that makes life a misery for many at school. And now, with widening fault lines across society, and social media always to hand, humiliation and despair can follow children home.

When it comes to bullying, it's not just a matter of reporting, punishing and healing wounds. Clear rules are needed and recognised procedures for reporting, sanctions and redress. And a respected referee.

I'm sure a lot's already being done, and it's a long time since I taught in schools  But more recently I have met children who felt put down and ostracised, with nobody to turn to. Safe at home, I looked around for clues on current remedial action, and found this headline 'Swansea Council to show bullying the red light.'  But about bullying among teachers not children. On a link to Llangefelach Primary I found a detailed anti-bullying policy. As I write 'Children in Wales' have an Anti-bullying Week, while an Anti-bullying Roadshow tours the UK.

Back to the Newton Red Card, the football reference makes sense. The new approach could be rolled out in a clear-cut, enforceable rule-book on bullying and mutual respect. Not just Red Cards, but Yellow for lesser offences, and a Sin-Bin as last resort. Yellow for abuse, obstruction and harassment, straight to Red for violence. The referee (Care and Conciliation Officer?) would be a recognised figure in every school or year, keeping watch and making friends, taking up reports from victims and witnesses, intervening, mediating and enforcing.

The Sin Bin sanction would not be pain-for-pain but time for reflection, an opportunity to uncover motives and promote redress. Isolation is already a punishment. On BBC news the other night (R4 PM 16.11.2016) a former school-girl bully said 'If your own life's a mess, you can make a mess of someone else's.... Bullies need care as well.'.

Prevention is better than cure. Schools must give prime time for the discussion of ongoing personal and social issues that are often nearer to children's heart than exam subjects. Better understanding among children, and between children and teachers, would reduce tension and distress, free up concentration across the curriculum. Basic human communication is too important to be left to chance and not-so social media.

GW

THREE RESPONSES:

1. From (not so) old friend May Magee  22.11.2016

For over thirty-five years I worked in Play schemes, Youth Clubs, School, Out-of-school, and Out-of-work groups, probation service, drugs projects, mental health, etc. This was mostly in what are now described as ‘disadvantaged areas’. There were usually volunteers, along with poorly paid workers. When bullying was noticed or reported, it was often recognised, by the volunteers and workers, that the bullies were in need of support and that they might have problems at home. Poverty and hardship does not make people nice, although not all people who live in such circumstances turn to bullying, there are nasty and nice people in all walks of life.

Sometimes those who grow up in ‘disadvantaged’ circumstances even develop an acute sense of injustice and set out to change society. It is quite clear that those who gave their time to talk with and support ‘disruptive’ young people realised that it was their impoverished life circumstances compared to how they saw others live, that influenced their behaviour. ‘Inequality’ was not a word that was used; neither was ‘empowerment or ‘capacity building’.

When people gave up their time, often after a long day’s work, to help set up activities such as bicycle building/maintenance, sports, scouts, ramblers, brownies and so on, it was because they realised that it helped people to have something to focus on, to work with others, something to be proud of, to have ideas recognised, and to be listened to, talked with, (not at), and get to know each other. These activities benefited the individuals and fed back into the communities in which they lived.

This is just one lifetime experience, for generations, and throughout history it was recognised that the differences between those who had more and those that had little fostered bullying. Roman slaves, prisoners of war to those living under occupation, house maids, refugees etc. History and literature is littered with examples. From talking with others engaged in social work, housing projects, drug projects, education, community police, and other face to face employment it is clear many of them realised that impoverished life circumstances made a difference to people’s behaviour, especially when there was obvious wealth and privilege beyond reach.

My recent experience of voluntary engagement with young people, schools and refugees does not show any great difference in the lives of people who have a great deal and those who do not. The well-paid jobs, money and power are still at the top, while those employed to engage with ‘disadvantaged’ people and the people they are engaged with have proportionately as little as forty years ago. There have been improvements in pay and expectations of living conditions but not enough. There are still people living in conditions that foster bullying, and still vulnerable people who have no hope of escaping their environments.

Over the years so many people, even from ‘underprivileged’ backgrounds have recognised the need to redress the imbalance of life experiences and expectations. Volunteers and paid workers realised that bullying stemmed from the feeling of injustice created by the difference between rich and poor. Over thirty years ago I wrote an essay on the effect of lifestyles presented on television and advertising on those who could not afford to enjoy the holidays, activities, goods. This is likely to fuel the sense of inadequacy and failure to have or provide for a family. Borrowing money is an option, being in debt compounds negative feelings about self.

It is great that eminent people on the radio and in print point out that there is more bullying in societies where there are big differences in income, environments and lifestyles. It hard to believe that well brought up, well educated, well paid, academics and researchers were the first to notice this. However, the hundreds of thousands of pounds that have gone into salaries, research, publications, and presentations have not been wasted if their findings prompt positive changes for those who have little. Hopefully a change is going to come, there can be a better life for everyone, and it can be done by example by those who have as well as by the continuing devotion of those who give their time freely and the over-stretched, underpaid, face to face workers. Those who have little might recognise and respect the change of wealthy lifestyles, reducing their resentment and sense of injustice and creating an atmosphere where people flourish and act more kindly to each other.

2. From youngest brother Richard (Spirit Level) Wilkinson 22.11.2016It's not academics and researchers who first recognise relationships between bullying and inequality, unemployment and poor health, etc, but the recognition tends to seem more like a private opinion or hunch until demonstrated in a form which is easier to share publicly. When relationships are demonstrated in hard data, they become more than just a private perception easily denied by those with a different view, and that should increase people's confidence in their intuitions.

The graph below comes from Frank Elgar in Canada [Elgar FJ. et al. School bullying, homicide and income inequality.  International Journal of Public Health 58, 237-245, 2013.]  The numbers up the side are the percent of 11year olds who bullied others at least twice in the previous month. Along the bottom is a measure of income inequality - less inequality on the left, more on the right.The percentage of kids bullying others varies from around 2% in the more equal countries to around 20% in the less equal ones - a ten-fold difference!  And rarely in discussions of policy to reduce bullying do people talk about reducing income differences across societies as a whole, but a good deal of this kind of statistical work suggests, what many would expect, that smaller income differences weaken the grip of status and status insecurity on us all.

see also
 www.equalitytrust.org.uk

3. From (middle) brother Martiin 22.11.2016

The big pattern about differences in power and wealth that lead to many kinds of cruelty,is not the whole story. As May M shows in her examples of smaller groups of people doing more constructive things together, how things are done on the small scale can exemplify or oppose what’s s going on more generally. So even in an unequal society, there will be working groups or maybe whole companies where people listen to one another, and enjoy working together.

Same with schools. Jean, a friend during my education training year in 1966, spent her working life after that in primary schools.  After some years of experience, she told me about a way of working with her primary class not only to avoid bullying and teasing, but to get the children to care for and look after one another.  So if a child had a problem, or a new child with a difficulty or difference was coming in to the class, there would be ‘circle time’ with the others to think how they could help.  They were aware of the child’s needs, and engaged in meeting them. I take from this the idea that while we certainly should have policies and practices to spot bullying and prevent it continuing, we should also be more optimistic, and help people to know they have power to help as well as to hurt.

And while I long for people to understand the big picture, and to change it, there’s plenty of scope for small action too.

Martin

Bullying within the family? 

May M's response above speaks for itself. In my own family, I was the eldest with a built-in advantage over two younger brothers and sister. Younger brother Martin felt that, not so much because I hit or abused him but because I was bigger, stronger and more likely to win (especially if I named the games, made up the rules). Richard the youngest of three brothers was in his early teens when I left home, felt eclipsed when I came back to stay. Whereas I did alright and Martin very well at school, Richard was judged more suited to practical than academic pursuits, and clever enough to know what that implied. Susan was not just the youngest but a girl. She felt it when she was sent to a less expensive school, but did alright both there and afterwards. That said, it was good-with-his-hands Richard who won acclaim with ground-breaking research and big books on inequality. And the damage that does, not only to the poorest but most or all of us. 'Eclipsed' was his word, not mine, but most of us know what it means and how it feels. In our family, I was eldest, but that also put me first in line for our mother to get angry with...  We made up at the end of each day, and again towards the end of her life.

In some traditional societies, most people can look forward to a measure of respect and authority as they get old. When nothing much changes, those who live longest may often know best. Now that things change faster and most of us live a lot longer, we have more time to forget and what little we know may no longer apply, unless....

Last call for Swansea Tidal Lagoon

The Chancellor's Autumn statement next Wednesday November 23 may decide future of Swansea Bay Lagoon. Here's a response to a piece by Observer science-editor Robin McKie last summer, suggesting that only nuclear energy could fill the energy gap)

 

Observer 07.08.2016

'Big Issue – Hinckley Point'

Fusion or fission, nuclear power is not the only reliable alternative to fossil fuel (Robin McKie 'If not nuclear power then what?'). Sunshine, wind and waves vary with the weather, but tides still rise and fall and the flow can be safely harnessed in and out.

With nuclear fission not yet in sight, this simpler seapower could be a better bet than rejigged EPR at Hinkley Point C. In his Aurumn budget last year, George Osborne flagged up the prospect of a tidal lagoon power project in Swansea bay, only to put it out for review when the price of oil and gas came down..

This much we may already know. The start-up cost for Swansea Bay stands at £1.3 billion as against £18 billion for Hinkley Point. The planned productive life of a lagoon is more than 100 years compared with 60 years for Hinkley Point C.  Over the years, with rising output from larger lagoons around the coast, tidal input to the national grid could match Hinkley nuclear in cost and quantity.

The modest Swansea Bay venture is set to pilot a fleet of bigger enclosures with two-way turbine arrays to harness an exceptional tidal range, extending from Welsh and British coasts across the channel to France. The technology of lagoon-wall dykes and low-speed turbines is relatively simple. Lagoons carry no heavy overhang of radio-active waste and decommissioning. They are most unlikely to blow up and In case of major breakdown the damage would not be insupportable.

A government decision on funding for Swansea Bay now awaits the outcome of an independent review later this year. With luck and common sense, this could be ready in time for Philip Hammond to give the go-ahead for this first tidal lagoon in his first Autumn budget, opening the way to a wider raft of private investment and jobs along a supply chain in waiting.Better a Swansea sprat to catch an eco-friendly mackerel than a dubious go-for-broke upstream in Somerset. With Swansea Bay as my back yard, would say that, wouldn't I. Though it doesn't have to be either/or.

Greg Wilkinson

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/06/the-big-issue-nuclear-power-tidal-power-hinkley

Brexit Britain waltzing with titanic Trump?

First response 09.11.2016

'Another day' – group email as news came in of surge for Trump

Nightmare coming true as day dawns. Brexit Britain drifting into orbit round a Trump America. Two drunks dancing in the debris of democracy. A lopsided, ill-founded democracy collapsing under its own weight. Trump, Farage and Johnson are no Samsons pulling at the pillars of the temple....

Our 'social democracy' is not social at all. Liberty, equality and fraternity do not prevail in the reality of working life as most of us know it. What we actually experience, across all the hierarchies of corporate business and public service is a top-down system of authority, reward and privilege. And this is reflected in our stripped out 'communities'.

Individual and collective efforts and rewards are misdirected. Minds misinformed by charlatans who turn us against other enemies to save themselves.For the past generation, since the end of the 1970s and the blurring-out of the red peril, the proceeds of commonwealth have been shifted out of jobs and wages into profits and top salaries. While a few at the very top got very rich, money chasing money over the rainbow, most people have fallen behind, if not actually poorer then struggling to keep up – another day older and deeper in debt. Reality, not fantasy.

The people who voted against the present system are right in that at least, although their rage is misdirected and their supposed saviours contemptible.Those of us who think we know better, and in many ways do, have only ourselves to blame. Our wisdom, like the proceeds of our knowledge industries, has been largely kept to ourselves.as it trickles our way.

Now, like the people in Mosul, Aleppo or what used to be Calais, we must somehow regroup and rebuild wherever we find ourselves... Another day, another tide, another freer, fairer commonwealth, if only we have time.

Greg

Kevin Otoo's response from Manchester:

I guess we don't get to choose who our Samson(s) will be. Most of all I like the two drunks dancing...

Here at the corner

Where the daylight bends

Into the darkness

Where the night begins

This is the place

The place we make amends

In this chance encounter

Between two old friends

This danse macabre

Where each life depends

On the one beginning

Where the other ends.

Ps.  Don't forget Delilah's contribution! Best wishes to you and Ada as always

South Wales Evening Post 12.11.2016

Race for the bottom?

Trump and Farage hobnobbed on their treks to the White House and wilderness respectively. Now I wonder what's to stop our Brexit Britain, cut loose of the EU, from drifting into a  new role as cannonball to a loose-cannon USA?

What could that mean to us?

Trump says he wants to bring basic industries back to US rust-belts, derides the outsourcing of carmaking to Mexico. Might he not want to repatriate GM from Luton or Ford from Bridgend?
But perhaps he would prefer to subsidise some kindred spirits in British politics and get the RAF flying in sync with US missiles and drones to 'bomb the shit out of Isis' ?  Who else might get hit? Would that have to go through parliament this end or could Mrs May cite royal prerogative again?

If Trump carries out his threat to wind NATO down, while the UK turns its back on joint EU defence, will the British government cling more tightly to a lop-sided 'special relationship'?  Already we depend on US warheads and guidance systems for our 'independent' Trident defence. Our intelligence networks are shared. Who calls the tune? Can we be sure that Britain wont serve as forward base or catspaw if things turn sour between Putin and Trump? With us in line for any counterblast?

The people who voted for Brexit and Trump were rightly fed up but wrong to fall for the lies and scapegoats fed to them. 'Shooting ourselves in the foot' may be one way of putting it. Except that the tommies who put bullets through their boots were set on getting out of bloody mud not into it.

If the dollar collapses, will sterling go with it? How low, and at what cost in prices, jobs and pensions?

If the US reopens coal seams to revive old mining towns, will UK or Welsh leaders be tempted to follow suit, and forget about climate change? A race for the bottom is hard to stop, A new Atlantic cynicism could sink the Swansea Tidal Lagoon as it waits for government funding, and a whole new range of forward-looking jobs.

Greg Wilkinson

To Observer 14.11.2016

Written in response to Will Hutton's lurid Trumph lament https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/13/america-trade-deals-donald-trump-nafta-isolationism

Can it be correct that 'free trade' as we know it 'spreads democracy, peace and capitalism' Or does this assertion reflect the contradictions, confusion and complacency that have brought the process to a momentary halt?

Wasn't globalisation spread by capitalism as well as spreading it?  Was capital ever democratic? Does it not thrive on war as well as peace? Can a system that transfers global wealth from those who have less to those who have most have 'underpinned our collective prosperity.'

How social is a social democracy that ends where real work begins? Who voted to automate or export their own jobs, or redouble pay for bosses and bankers to 'compensate' for the damage they do to others?

If 'trade is the lifeblood of humanity,' that blood is liberally shed in several sorts of frontier war. At home the conflict resonates across fault-lines of race, religion and class, as climate chaos goes unchecked..

The choice now is not between more of the same and 'a new dark age of closure, protectionism and nationalism'. If 'trade and exchange are foundations of civilisation', then the nature of the goods on offer and fairness of the deals must also count. Civilisation, national and global, has other golden rules. 'Do as you would be done by' and 'nothing human foreign to me' hold good in many languages. Now's the time for humankind and commonwealth to reconnect across the fragile space we share. Greg Wilkinson

20.11.2016 That letter was NOT included in  today's Observer, all though they made that Hutton article Big Issue on their letters page. Some other good letters, though none of them went for the central contradictions in a 'social democracy' that oversees and/or overlooks a self-serving authoritarian economy. Perhaps I was wrong to make such a direct attack on  the doyen of Observer columnists, and to clutter up my letter with direct quotations (two reasons why a letters-editor might prefer easier reading.)  And I didnt make it clear enough that growth CAN create more wealth for more people even as it increases the depth and pain of inequality between them. What hurts about poverty, once you've got enough to eat, is precisely its relativity.  Still my radical squib may have helped to shift the balance of selection left
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/nov/20/big-issue-economics-free-trade-wealth-benefit-globalised-crash-2008

BACK TO BREXIT

South Wales Evening Post 28.06.2016

The swing from Labour to Leave in South Wales and other old industrial heartlands was a cry of pain and anger. For more than a generation aging Labour voters have put up with the loss of well-paid jobs and dignity as heavy industries collapse, and low-paid services cant fill the gap.Talk of economic recovery falls flat on bleak experience. EU-funded schemes may seem like adding insult to injury. The leave vote, like many other cries for help, is a deeply damaging own goal, but UKIP and the leavers didn't get everything wrong.

Immigration was never the root of our problems, but successive governments of centre-left and right have allowed or assisted a remorseless transfer of wealth from industry to finance, wages to profits, poor and middle incomes to the super-rich. As ever, the working majority earn less than the average wage, and economic statistics since 1980 confirm the experience of people who never see them. The media, who repeat lies or balance them with half-truths should hang their heads.

The trickle up of wealth and income is not just a local problem. In or out of Europe, and round the world, we're up against is a systematic misappropriation of the commonwealth. Global markets, banks and corporations exist not to feed the people or do good, but to make money for those who already have it. The EU might have given us a better chance of turning this noxious tide. Wasn't it the UK that blocked some EU curb on tax havens, and tariffs on Chinese steel?

But the die is cast, we are where we are. Now is the time for liberals and socialists, reds. greens and nationalists to combine forces for economic and social justice. We should also reach out to those who turned to UKIP for some good as well as bad reasons. It's worth remembering that Hitler's Nazi divisions set out as 'National Socialists, including many former Communists.

Boris may boast of 'bringing back democracy' but it's up to people like us to walk the walk. Democracy begins at home and where we work. Whatever happens to the UK economy, petrol, food and house prices, we can all buy British, or Welsh. We can transfer such savings as we have from casino banks to more democratic building societies and help fund mortgages. At work we can join unions for fairer shares and demand a place in the boardrooms where decisions are made and cakes are cut.

Among ourselves, as well as in party-politics, UK or EU, we can still do more together than apart. For common sense and human kindness, in the only lives and world we've got.

Greg Wilkinson

Meanwhile...

Observer 19.06.16

'Workers must be given say in how businesses are run'

(their headline, set beside a joint letter from Labour, Liberal and Trade Union leaders warning on consequences of a Brexit vote)

If capitalism isn’t good, that’s no accident. Capitalism is not about doing good but making money from human or other resources (“Capitalism’s claim to do good looks shaky if there’s little to prevent it being a force for bad”, Business). It’s the core of capitalism, not just the culture that needs to change. Parliamentary democracy has bypassed or incorporated old pyramids of wealth and power. Unreformed career ladders of promotion, reward and authority span private and public sectors – finance, industry, media and education, political parties and government.

To counter this convergence of wealth and power requires more than strong unions. What working people need is their own voice in the direction, management and reward of companies and industries that depend on them.Greg Wilkinson

https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2016/jun/18/letters-capitalism-give-workers-a-say

Guardian Weekly 12.08.2016

Exploitation is the culprit (their headline)

No it is not globalisation that causes “less affluent, less educated, mainly white people” to feel themselves marginalised (29 July). Poor whites feel marginalised because they are poor and marginalised, not by globalisation but by the exploitative economy that drives it at whatever human cost.

The beggar-your-neighbour system that its friends and foes call capitalism enables those with wealth to buy up whatever human and other resources they can turn to profit, and drop them when they can’t. Dead simple: buy cheap, sell dear, keep the difference and do the same again.

Capitalism may be globalised but it’s a very British disease. Fourteenth-century peasants revolted against serfdom, only to find themselves marginalised by sheep and enclosures. Luddites smashed the machines that made their manual skills redundant. Rebecca rioters in Wales attacked new toll gates rather than pay to use old rights of way.

Scapegoating of foreigners and immigrants is nothing new either; it’s sometimes prompted by those who might otherwise feel the heat themselves.

High talk of globalisation helps fuel fears of immigration. It distracts from the real case in need of treatment: a dysfunctional economic order that still evades the logic and law of social democracy.Greg Wilkinson

Bullying: inequality hurts

Email to sons, brothers, sister and wife... 16.11.2016

More Inequality, more bullying

So said Professor Dieter Wolke in BBC R4 discussion on PM news today.  Looked him up and paged down to this:

'...In some societies it has been found that bullying increases when the resources get scarce and even more interesting is the comparison between different levels of socio-economic status: the greater the discrepancy....

'The same mechanism works in schools, where for example classrooms that have a clearer developed social hierarchy, bullying rates are higher....'

(A reformed bully who took part in PM discussion said 'if your own life's a mess, you mess up other people's'. Bullies too needed caring for, she stressed.)

http://www.escap.eu/research/bullying

To younger brother Martin who may have been bullied by me:

The Wolke piece also notes that causes of bullying go back a long way and effects are long-lasting, though more so for bullied than bullies. Now I wonder if the bullied may not also be bullies, who give as good as they get to others downstream or roundabout. This sort of take-and-give is welcome when it's kindness, not cruelty that's passed around. Better a favour passed on than a favour repaid?

Perhaps I passed on my difficulties at school to you. I remember Mum saying her elder brother was hardened by his treatment at public school, blaming her long hard labours on on him pulling out a chair from under her.

Was I like that?

I dont remember being bullied at school, just isolated – tense and on my guard, keeping my end up, trying to make some mark on people and events around. One night I leaned out of bed, put one hand flat on the floor, picked up a shoe and hit the outstetched fingers with the hard heel.
Didn't Buzzard II pull out tufts of his own fair hair? And what, if anything, had that to do with his father becoming an admiral and knight of realm? At our school, all the male teachers were Sir, though I dont remember any titles for female staff. For Miss Dunkley (who taught us music, arts and crafts, nature, gardening and French0 we only had her name. She probably deserved a title for teaching us to make things, grow things, sing in tune. Instead we laughed at her heavy cord skirts, clipped manner and hair wound round her head.

Greg

And this from youngest bro:

Nice to know link between bullying and inequality got an airing on PM.  Glad to be able to say that we were the first to show this link and also the one between reduced social mobility and inequality - both have now been demonstrated by other people on larger and quite separate data sets than the ones we used.

Richard Wilkinson

Brexit, Trump and left in disarray. Time to reopen 'Wot's Left' blog after several years neglect. Meanwhile life goes on, mine and others that matter just as much to those who live, love and often fear for them. The left as I understand it is a broad spectrum from liberal through socialist, communist, anarchist and of course Green, the relatively new kid on the old reddish block. I say spectrum, because these definitions are quite arbitrary and in theory and practice overlap, some stronger here others there... Horses for courses, but more in common than apart in the human race,

PRISON VISIT

Heard on BBC this morning that prison officers were out in England and Wales. Then went out for routine bloodtest at Singleton. Parking space free near Phlebotomy door, my number already up on the little screen when I pulled my yellow ticket out...So much for waiting lists, so I took a turn down Oystermouth Road to see what was doing outside the jail

Heart sinks when I pass that place on my free bus-pass. Strange how what was once a seaside holiday promenade has become a last resort for the unworking class. No Oysters or even cockles on Oystermouth, but lots of benefit BNBs and full board for deserving cases at HMP.

Outside the heavy front gate, but inside a forecourt fence, a cheeerful posse of some 40 officers. Most were in uniform, a mix of what looked to me like older men and younger women. The 'guard' on the gate seemed reluctant to let me in and reluctant to talk to me himself, though he did say he'd worked at a London prison I knew from visiting a friend inside.

'Do you get the same mix of prisoners in here?'

'Just a cross section.. ' and why did I want to know?

I said I'd been curious, passing by in the bus,. Now that they were out seemed a good time to ask what brought them out..

'Union policy, it's there in the press.'

'So what's in like for officers and inmates here?'

'The government decides and we do what we're told.'

'Can I talk to some of the others in there?'

'I suppose so,' he said and let me by through the forecourt gate. Everyone seemed busy talking to each other. When a young woman turned and looked my way, I said:

'I was wondering what it's like in here....' She seemed nonplussed, but not unfriendly.

Is there anyone who could talk to me?'

'Him over there,' she said.

'The big man by the door?' She and others laughed, and I walked over to him. He and a colleague with him were only a little more forthcoming than the man on the outer gate. But yes, most of the prisoners here were short term, and more likely to be young. The problem was the shortage of staff. I asked about numbers of staff and prisoners, but he could not tell me that.

'What's the ratio of prisoners to staff?'

'About 30 to one, I think.'

'Like kids and teachers at school, ' I ventured and he smiled. 'Except that you have them round the clock.'

I asked if they had problems with drugs and drones,

That as well. You cant get away from it in a city... Cant stop them getting in.'

'So what about health and safety?'

'We haven't the staff to follow regulations.'

I didn't ask about self-harm and suicides, or attacks on officers.Instead I asked if they had time to let prisoners out for exercise and education, and to my surprise he said ' No, they're out most of the time.'

Then he cut me off. 'We've got a meeting now,' he said. And I was obviously not expected to attend..

As the meeting was just inside the prison courtyard, not in public space, I left it there. I'm not surprised they didn't want to talk. Who was I ? Would anything they said be used against them? At the same time I was sad that people didn't feel able to speak for themselves. Instead they took shelter behind higher authority, the government, the union, even the press..

The last 'open' union meeting I had to leave was in Algiers 1967, when Israel had just begun its Six Day war around Palestine. I cared about Algeria and the Middle East, but I could understand that. As Reuters man in Algiers, I would surely be for Israel. But I was glad that the union man who led me out put his arm round my shoulder, sorry it had to be like that.

More recently, just before and after the Brexit vote, I found similar unwillingness to talk among leave-voters when I questioned people in the park or street. I asked quite neutral questions and was quite ready to understand... My accent may have soken for itself, and so-called hardworking people dont ask questions. 

No wonder the pollsters got it wrong in both US and UK...If they bring back the double decker 224 bus in Swansea next year, I'll sit upstairs and see if I can get a peep over the prison wall.

From the gospel of St Wikipedia:

Swansea is a Category B/C prison for adult males remanded into custody from the local courts, as well as convicted and sentenced prisoners.

Prisoners are employed in the prisons workshops, kitchen and recycling units. Full and part-time education is also provided. Other features include a Prisoner And Liaison Support Scheme, a Swansea City A.F.C. Social inclusion officer scheme, Prisoner elected councils, Job Centre Plus, Housing Officers and Community Chaplaincy.

In the early 1980s, Swansea started the Samaritans trained 'Prisoner Listener Scheme', that has now been developed in most prisons in the UK.

See also this film by South Wales fireman with colleagues in Palestine and Israel. 'Firefighters in Palestine' was shown at Swansea Cinema Co last week. Worth seeing and we could do with more inside views of working life in hard times:

Film: Firefighters Under Occupation - Palestine Solidarity Campaign
   

More letters to myself or anyone

Here's another year's crop of letters-to-editors. So few are printed that it sometimes seems a waste of time. But the writing keeps me thinking and responding to the news and views that come my way. If I'm agile with words, it's probably because I got an early start in answering my mother back and pestered teachers at school. Couldn't I have just swallowed my reactions or let them float away? Would I or the world have been happier? Now that the letters are composed and hanging about in email form, it's easy to gather them up in a single blog - an open file, with my love, for anyone who cares to look.

South Wales Evening Post

02.07.2013

Swansea - that's us - now has an important choice to make, not just for ourselves but for our children and theirs. We're being offered, or threatened with, two radical new sources of future energy. Both options have been floated over the last couple of years, but now the pressure is building up with dire threats of nationwide power cuts and mouth-watering promises of jobs and prosperity if we strike lucky.

On the one hand we have two new tricks for tapping fossil fuel ever-deeper under ground: hydraulic 'fracking' with chemicals to release shale gas, or gasification to burn out the gas from coal in the seams where it lies. On the other hand, a new sort of seapower: no Severn barrage but a relatively unobtrusive tidal lagoon between the Neath and Tawe estuaries, a marine reservoir with turbines driven by the tidal ebb and flow.

Drilling companies with names like Clean Coal, Coastal Gas and Eden Energy talk of billions of tons, trillions of cubic feet and a £70 billion boost for the Welsh economy. But they need a lot more test drilling to find out if those figures are fact or fiction. If not pipedreams, then a nightmare according to opponents of the drilling plan and they cite an earthquake in Blackpool, mysterious illness around US drilling sites and water catching fire at kitchen taps. Although shale gas is already replacing foreign imports in the US, conditions and prospects here are much less clear.

On the seapower side, what's on offer is a world first: a five-mile loop of seawall offshore from Swansea docks with a walkway round the top and turbines at the seaward end. and an underwater cable to feed current to the national grid at Baglan. No promise of megabucks or megajobs here, just gigawatts. With all the uncertainties that go with such a new venture, the the lagoon company hopes to generate enough power for 120,000 homes for 120 years.

It's a choice between the fossil-fuel devil and the not-so-deep blue sea. For some of us, the choice is already clear. By drilling deeper and giving fossil fuels a new lease of life, we help prolong our potentially fatal addiction to carbon waste. Unless we change course now to more sustainable energy, we condemn our children and grandchildren to irreversible climate change.

Already food prices are rising as worldwide drought, hurricanes and floods meet ever-rising rising population, consumption and inequality. Icecaps are melting, sealevels rising. In the past two centuries, we've burnt the stored up carbon of a million years. The world's population has more than doubled in our lifetimes. Although it's hard to believe in this chilly neck of the jet-stream,11 of the past 13 years have been the hottest on global record.

If we let rip on a new rush for gas, we dig ourselves a deep black hole. If not a grave for our grandchildren, the end of life as we know it in the natural world.

If you're interested in the lagoon project, the company behind it is organising a month of public events and consultation meetings from St Thomas to Mumbles. (see www.tidallagoonswanseabay.com)

The Observer

30.06.2013

CHOICE OF TWO:

ANSWER TO DAVID REED

What can we older people do with surplus savings? Wasn't that what banks and building societies were for, to borrow from those with money and lend to those without? 

It's time we went back to basics, including democracy. A good bank or building society would be owned by stakeholders - savers, borrowers and staff - and legally committed to useful investment for a reasonable return all round.

SNOOPER-TROOPERS

If we're not all terrified by overmighty Intelligence, this may not be because we've nothing to hide or trust Big Brother to have our interests at heart. Rather we doubt the state's capacity to sift and process the internet trawl. Granted, such limited competence has its own dangers, in misidentification of suspects etc. And a disproportionate increase in intelligence budgets means less for more productive services. 

But as snooper-trooper forces multiply, so will the minority of dissident clerks and analysts who leak and whistle-blow the game away.

Less an omnipresent threat than a paltry, self-defeating waste of time and money.

The Observer

16.06.2013

ONE FIST OR IRON, AND THE OTHER OF STEEL

If the right one dont get you then the left one will... That's from Sixteen Tons, the anti-corporate US hit of the 1950s with its chorus 'St Peter dont you call me, cos I cant go, I owe my soul to the company store.'

Last Sunday the Observer bared two fists for common humanity in the twin attacks by Andrew Rawnsley and Will Hutton on corporate alienation of public funding and public space.

Bravo both!

The Observer

04.06.2013

SOCIAL ECONOMY

Yes, mankind's survival requires a great leap forward, but it's not just a matter of controlling new technologies. The threat to our future and natural world lies not in technology as such - nor even in human nature - but in a  particular 'social economy' that is neither social nor economic.

It's more than half a century since President Eisenhower marked his retirement with a solemn warning against 'unwarranted influence... by the military-industrial complex.'  As with gun-control in the US today, the risk to human life lay not in weapons technology but the power of corporate interests to subvert the will of society and government. 

The danger was never not confined to defence industries and Big Guns are joined by Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Banks etc. As Andrew Rawnsley's indictment of UK lobbying makes clear, the 'insidious subversion of democracy' comes nearer home.

The danger is real and global, but human nature and technology are not inherently catastrophic. The necessary leap forward will also be a picking up where we left off, to make 'social democracy' mean what it says in society and within essential industries. Failing that, our votes and words mean less and less as cynical 'Free Markets' give license to a cohort of the super-rich to gamble with our common destiny. 

The Observer

17.05.2013

NOT JUST MADNESS

The Woolwich murder was not, as your editorial suggests, simply the act of a mad individual, nor is it best addressed (Nick Cohen) by ritual condemnation of violence from left and right. 

Granted that madness is never far away and violence triggers violence, it makes sense to reduce the sort of systematic provocation and alienation most likely to give rise to it. 

At a time of economic, social and environmental stress, it makes no sense to finger claimants, immigrants, Muslims or blacks, adding insult to the injury of those who already often know the worst. Much better focus on another small minority, those with the money, power and position to preserve or change an unstable structure of their own making.

Gross inequality feeds tensions and resentment from top to bottom. Widening differentials open up faultlines of race and creed, and distract from the real threats to all of us of overhanging debt and climate change.

Meanwhile the hacking to death of a soldier in a London street is no less intolerable than the dismembering of bodies unseen (by us) in a far-away drone attack. And it makes no more sense to call every dead soldier a hero than to call every dead 'terrorist' a martyr.

The Observer

13.05.2013

ZOMBIES

There's plenty of Peter Preston's 'zombie territory' in South Wales, even where the coal seams did not run out. Many valley homes were never fit for the heroes dislodged from underground, or the wives who  put up with them. But any home is better than none if you can eke a living.

In and around the valleys, public services and benefit have mostly secured the survival of people and settlements, but the welfare state never quite lived up to its name. What was not forthcoming was the investment, opportunity and work essential to wellbeing.

Without the state, many Welsh towns and villages would have disappeared. Even their names, perhaps, since Glyncorrwg and Ystradgynlais trip less easily off English tongues than Bonanza or Silver Creek. With a better combination of state rations and investment, who knows what these places might have, might still become? 

Tied up with jobs and benefits are house-prices, which remain cheap in limbo because those who can afford to choose dont want them. And because it's cheaper for a metropolitan state to keep the poor contained, away from jobs already in short supply. Out of sight and mind.

The crippling disparity in  house-prices is not just a function of market forces. Or rather it was state policy that let those market forces rip. Thatcher's enforced sale of council houses combined with a ban on equivalent new build. Before that, in 1973, another Conservative government had forced councils to raise their rents in line with private sector rates. With the public sector anchor cut, the property balloon took off.

No miners' strike but a tenants strike that time. Clay Cross councillors led the resistance. and Dennis Skinner, bless him, sits on in the House at Westminster, a living caution as the Queen comes up with another poisonous prescription.

The Observer

30.04.2013

EQUALITY FOR UNEQUALS

In his plea for benefits to women, Nick Cohen nails a common conservative ploy: the invocation of freedom and equality to serve the opposite. So parents are to be left to choose - freely and equally - between themselves which shall receive a tax credit. The predictable result -  until patriarchy is truly dead and buried - is that men will often benefit at the expense of women and children. 

Cohen extends this reasonable caution from homely to Holy family, to include the twinning of atheism and religious bigotry as equal and opposite ideological vices. Although atheists as well as bigots have sometimes destroyed their enemies' churches, they do not claim for themselves the authority of one true God.

More importantly in the present economic climate, Cohen might have noted how our social democratic presumption of equality in a divided society combines with Free Market and Free Press to perpetuate the subjugation of the poorer many by a richer few. 

South Wales Post

09.04.2013

HEAVY LIFTING

I'm 76, in favour of recycling and glad of some physical challenge in the process. But I do wonder why the Derwen Fawr site sets us an assault course on the way to the skips for timber, furniture and garden waste: up a flight of open steps, along a catwalk, and then a head-height lift over the side of the skip.

I arrived with a neatly-loaded builder's bag that I had just been able to lift into the hatchback of our car. When I realised I might have problems getting it into the high skip, I asked a site worker if he could give me a hand. He told me politely that this was not allowed for safety reasons, in case the lifting damaged backs. Then he relented, took one side of the bag and helped me up with it.

Our backs survived and I was grateful for his help. Now I wonder why things should be made un-necessarily difficult in what should be a good cause. Recycling should be as easy as possible, for all sorts of people who may not benefit from hauling and heavy lifting.

For now, and as a rule of thumb, it should be no more difficult to download rubbish at the civic site than it is to upload it to a car at home. Otherwise there will be more pressure on council collection services and more fly-tipping. There will also be more strain on global climate and resources, not to mention people's backs.

(Since this was published, the recycling company has made a ramp up to the highest skip)

The Observer

10.02.2013

TAKE YOUR PICK:

DEREK AT RBS

What should Derek say when he goes for a job at the RBS? Perhaps he could ask his interviewers the questions raised by Carole Cadwalladr. 'How does the company square concern for community and the poor with duty to to shareholders and customary generosity to senior executives?'

When I went for my first big job, at Reuters, I left the questioning to them, taking for granted that the name of the game was objective reporting. Only later, when I complained about our unbalanced cover of the Vietnam war, did I get the answer from the horse's mouth.  'We're not in the business of discovering the truth, whatever that may be,' said the then managing-editor (ed Brian Horton) 'but providing our subscribers with the information they pay for.' 

A few months later, I got my first posting.

If Derek poses hard questions, that could get him the job, though that may not be the end of the story. In my case, it was only as foreign correspondent in a poor country that I found how true my boss had spoke. Success lost its savour and I quit.

LIBERAL BACKLASH

If there's one thing more dangerous than international terrorism, it's international counter-terrorism. Extra-judicial killings, torture and covert action sans frontieres are more dangerous because they're backed by state resources and the power of the executive to suppress the truth - it's the CIA not the more accountable Pentagon that runs the US killer-drones. Worst of all, the undermining of liberal law and democracy from within leaves us all with less to build on or worth defending.

HEALTH CARE AND HUMANITY

Compassion, like charisma, is hard to train for. On and off over the past 60 years I have worked, been treated and visited  in hospitals. Standards and morale varied from time to time, hospital to hospital and ward to ward. What often struck me was how much difference one person could make, whether a nurse, a porter, doctor or patient. Obviously the success or failure of a system cannot be reduced to individual personalities or instances - gestures or jokes, insight or action beyond the call of duty. 

But too much emphasis on training and technique, procedure and professionalism - with the hierarchy and specialist division that entails - can block out the confidence, compassion and pleasure of common humanity.

The Observer

14.01.2013

PENSION PERKS

Like Henry Porter I have sometimes felt uneasy about the free travel and other perks - winter fuel and now TV license - I get on top of my state-pension. On the bus, as I repocket my plastic, I see a parent with young children paying good paper.

I guess that unlike me this family has no car at home. Surely I could afford at least £1 a ride... But on second thoughts it would be better if  these childen too could ride free, the cost of our bottom-up benefits met by more progressive taxation from the top.

Once in thinking mode - another perk of pensionable age - I see this may still be shifting scraps around the plate: we should be looking to how real fortunes are made and commonwealth abused. Not just tax-havens. How is it that most of us are routinely taxed on necessary transactions, from income tax and VAT to stamp duty, when trillions of speculative dealings go untaxed?

Why is capital gains tax not graduated over time - regressive/progressively - so as to encourage productive investment at the expense of short-term profit taking? How can old landed wealth remain not only untaxed but unregistered? And why have we no democracy at work to give us a voice in what we do and how the proceeds are shared?

The Observer

10.12.2012

FRACKERS

Hurrah, this once, for Hutton and Rawnsley. Rawnsley exposes our government's gas-brain frackers as a threat to energy-stability, green industry and a habitable world. Hutton reasserts the values of equality and a social contract at a time when Labour seems to be reconsidering its demeaning focus on deserving poor and 'squeezed middle'.

Hutton didn't quite say it, but a fairer deal for the poor, in our out of work, would benefit the whole economy. Tax credits to those at work are a subsidy, like it or not, to low-pay employers. And poor people, unlike banks and corporate beneficiaries, spend all the money they get, thus helping to keep the rest of us in work and paying tax.

As with benefits, so with economic equality more generally: it is not just the poor who suffer from widening differentials in wealth and earnings and would gain from narrowing them. Social security and social cohesion go together. As the rungs of the ladder pull apart, the strains within and between us increase. Effects on health and well-being become measurable the whole way up.

Rawnsley rightly condemns the rush for shale oil as a diversion from green investment, but neither he nor Hutton makes clear the link between their respective arguments. A society riven-driven by competition, fear of failure and destitution, may be fatally diverted from the more inclusive threat of climate chaos, and from what can still be done to avert it.

In the Britain of WW2, civilian health and morale were improved by rationing and a sense of common struggle. What we're up against now is not a foreign invader but the global impact of business-as-usual. By burning up what's left of our fossil fuels in pursuit of short-term profit, we corrupt the whole fabric of life as we know it. For our children and grandchildren that promises a fate far worse than debt. For them, the material world that has cradled us will stand as implacable enemy.

The Observer

25.11.2012 

                           (sorry, but this section's got stuck in bold type)

NO ALIBI 

Yes (Ian Birrell) I was one of those distracted by the latest blitz on Gaza from that other bloody attack on Goma, and how can the killing of 160 people in the Congo count for less than a similar number of Palestinian deaths in more or less the same few days?

But if sanctions are the proper response for Rwanda's disregard of human life, rights and international law, the same goes for Israel. Without radical redress the Gaza ceasefire cant hold.

The prolonged seige of 1.5 million people is nothing if not collective punishment,  Israel's military occupation and settlement of the West Bank have always been illegal, as is the annexation of Arab East Jerusalem. Ditto the arbitrary detention of suspects, assassination of resistance leaders and disproportionate use of force as evidenced this month in the death of about 30 Palestinians to every one Israeli.

From the inception of Israel, Jewish democracy and security have been allowed to serve as alibi for violent subjugation of native Arab Palestinians. To exempt Israel from the rule of international does no favours to Israelis. If the present government completes a greater Israel with what's left of West Bank Palestine, that will saddle Jewish democracy with an Arab majority and a truly existential choice between indefinite apartheid, ethnic cleansing or self-dissolution.

For Britain, waiting on Obama is not good enough. As former mandate power, we bear special responsibility. The 1917 Balfour declaration which licensed the Jewish national home in Palestine made it a condition that 'nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.'  

There can be no peace without a measure of justice, and one obvious sanction at our disposal  is implicit in the EU agreement of Association. This governs access of Israeli goods and also includes a human rights clause. Meanwhile, Palestinians deserve a stronger voice in determining their own destiny. Britain should support, not obstruct, the current Palestinian bid for recognition at the UN General Assembly.

Weekly Guardian

23.11.2012

ONE LAW FOR ALL

The latest blitz on Gaza solves nothing and the same goes for the latest ceasefire. Jonathan Freedland is right that there's no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but both he and your report from Cairo focus too narrowly on power play in the Middle East.

Just as important, for Palestine, Israel and the rest of us, are the credibility and effectiveness of international law and human rights. We all have an interest in the rule of law - one rule for all around the world.

As former Mandate power in Palestine, the UK bears special responsibility . In 1917 Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour licensed a Jewish national homeland in Palestine on condition that 'nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.'  These rights were endorsed by the League of Nations and spelt out in more general terms by the UN Declaration of Human Rights and Geneva Conventions after World War 2. 

Despite such solemn undertakings, Israel was allowed to shape and extend its boundaries by force, expropriation and expulsion. Since 1967, the Security Council and World Court have affirmed, but failed to prevent, the illegalities of military occupation and settlement in the remainder of Palestine, and the long seige of Gaza is nothing if not collective punishment. Arab East Jerusalem, with its holy places, is unilaterally annexed while resistance leaders are routinely detained without trial, if not assassinated.

Israel has been effectively exempted from international laws, conventions and agreements drawn up to prevent that sort of thing. Western guilt over pogrom and genocide have combined with fears of a monstrous Other - Red Peril or Evil Axis - to indulge and arm a prodigal state. Jewish democracy has become an alibi for the oppression of indigenous Arabs.

The US and emergent Arab states may be key players, but Britain and its European partners had better honour the international commitments we are party to.  The EU Association agreement that gives privileged access to Israeli goods is subject to a human rights clause: it should be suspended, not reinforced, until those rights are realised. Since the Oslo acccords nearly 20 years ago, Britain and other European governments have been committed to a viable Palestinian state including Gaza and the West Bank on 1967 lines. We should now support, not obstruct, a Palestinian bid for recognition at the UN General Assembly. This would at least give Palestinians a firmer platform and clearer voice in determining their own future.

South Wales Evening Post

19.12.2012

THEIR WARS AND OURS

'Let's not repeat war history' was the message atop today's letters page, and earlier in the paper you carried picture and report of a Swansea protest over yet another war in Palestine.

No British soldiers or children dying in the Israeli blitz on Gaza, but a closer look at history makes clear the link between their wars and ours.

Palestine was taken from the Turks by the British in World War 1 and it was Britain who gave the go-ahead to a Jewish national home, without consulting the existing Arab population. After World War 2, as the state of Israel was extended by conquest and expulsion, Britain played a leading part in German war-crimes trials, the Declaration of Human Rights, Geneva Conventions and UN resolutions - all designed to stop that sort of thing for ever.

Back in 1917, the Balfour Declaration which licensed the Jewish colonisation of Arab land, also guaranteed that 'nothing shall be done which prejudices the religious and civil rights of the non-Jewish population.' 

How, we must now ask, does all this square with Israeli military occupation and illegal settlement in West Bank Palestine, with the annexation of Arab East Jerusalem and its holy places, with the long seige of a refugee population in Gaza or the assassination of their leaders?

And why does Britain sit for ever on the fence, aping the US and blaming the victims rather than holding Israel accountable like any other country to international commitments signed by their government as well as ours?

Four years ago, after the last invasion of Gaza, I joined another protest meeting in Castle Square. I carried, or rather wore, a placard painted on a cardboard box. . Last Saturday I found it behind a cupboard, no need to change the words (as shown in your picture) SAVE GAZA, STOP ISRAEL, FREE PALESTINE. 

Nothing learned, nothing changed. The least our government can do now is support a Palestinian bid for recognition at the UN General Assembly, and hold Israel to the human rights condition written into its favoured-nation trade association with the European Union.

The Observer

18.11.2012

ONLOOKERS

Izzeldin Abuelaish, the doctor who lost two daughters in the last blitz on Gaza, asks how many more massacres we onlookers can tolerate, and the Observer urges Obama to insist on an Israeli pull-back.

But what, if anything, can British onlookers do about it? Britain, as the former Mandate power which licensed a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, has a special responsibility. Commendably, William Hague was quick to caution Israel against a ground invasion, only to slip back into line by heaping blame on Hamas.

Your editorial recalls Obama's Cairo promise of a new beginning in 2009 and our own Foreign Secretary should recall the conditions set by his predecessor Lord Balfour in his Jewish homeland declaration of 1917: 'nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.' 

These rights, spelt out in later Geneva Conventions and UN resolutions, are incompatible not only with the continuing blockade of Gaza, but with Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem and the gunpoint colonisation of West Bank Palestine. 

With legal rights go duties for signatories. To apply them in dealings with Israel and Palestine is not to be antisemitic, to disregard Nazi genocide or condone the rocketting of civilians. It is in the interest of Israel as well as Palestinians to reassert the rule of international law in the Middle East. 

Jewish democracy cannot be an alibi for the expulsion and subjugation of Arabs. Among Palestinians of all parties and faiths, the mantra 'No peace without justice' is at once an observation from experience and an urgent demand for change, in cruel facts on the ground and the wider hypocrisy that allows them.

Britain should support, not obstruct, the current Palestinian bid for recognition at the UN General Assembly, if only to give Palestinians a firmer platform and more equal voice. We cannot tell the US or Israel what to do but we can decide with our European partners to suspend the EU Association agreement that governs trade with Israel until its human rights conditions are met.  The same goes for arms deals and military co-operation as long as Israeli forces are deployed in military occupation, the advance of illegal settlements, summary executions and a seige that amounts to collective punishment for 1.5 million people in Gaza.  

London Review of Books

30.10.2012

ON THE STREETS

David Runciman makes a fair job in demolishing Occupy claims to stand for the 99%. If only things were that simple. For all the statistics, strong ties and weak, our little camps on Wall and other streets have not as yet ignited wider protest or effective change.

It's some consolation, as he notes, that some of us who coincided on the cobbles DID discover real and unexpected attinities. Students, academics and pensioners like me bivouacked with people more accustomed to homelessness, including ex-soldiers and a former trader or two. Mostly we got along alright. The same was true of those who met on the cobbles of Paris 68: I admired the voyoux who already knew about setting cars alight and turning busses on their sides.

In his search for more plausible statistics and potent common interests, Runciman settles on a more manageable 5%. From a US campaign among the older unemployed of the 1930s - bypassed by the New Deal - he shifts the focus to a forgotten younger generation in Europe today, our so-called NEETs - under 25, uneducated and unemployed.

'They are the 5% and we should do something about them.' Of course we should, but Runciman somehow misses two other important points: the point of occupations, and subject of his piece, is what people can do for themselves; and, in the UK at least, the riots of summer 2011 found his target cohort on the streets with a vengeance.

To our shame, the rest of us united in condemnation of what we should at least have understood. We nodded as young people who might have been our children were picked up by matching CCTV images with previous police mugshots - petty criminals of course - to be vindictively locked up.

This summer 2012, police expected the worst but rain intervened. Instead we watched new fusions on screen from torrid Greece and Spain. We aint seen nothing yet?  As recession and climate change close in, people of all ages even here may find themselves unemployed, under-paid, unable to keep up or living in hopes. Survivors of occupation and riot could find themselves on the streets again, the mob multiplied by more general bafflement, in common cause or common sense. 

The Observer

28.10.2012

INEQUALITY MATTERS

Upward-mobility becomes more possible, as Will Hutton suggests, if the rungs of our social and economic ladders are not too far apart. He's also right that 'inequality matters,' and if we begin with a presumption of equality, then the ladders themselves are a problem.

Do we go for a Good Capitalism and Public Service to offer access and promotion to more of us, or seek alternative models that might include us all? Or both?

Faced with 'soaring costs of childcare', Labour looks to co-operative models, collective provision for common need with profits shared. If this is good enough for (mainly) women and children in the margins, why not the rest of us?

State socialism is dead, but why no more concerted move to common ownership in mainstream businesses, employment and finance? 

Some of us will always be more able than others at this or that, so ladders will remain, but they might then lean towards and not away from common goals.

Most of us would prefer to work with and for others as well as ourselves, towards a better - at least habitable - world for our children. (As a foretaste, some will have seen 'The Choir: Sing while you work' on BBC2, though spoilt by the knock-out competition at the end.)

The Observer

22.10.2012

WASTE OF ENERGY

In your exposure of the government's energy shambles, you highlight the need for longterm clarity and commitment in government policy and private investment.

The two are linked, and the short termism of recent government is not just the product of an electoral cycle and ministerial merry-go-round. Convential politics, and social democracy, are trivialised when all major parties are wedded, resigned or sold-out to the myth of a Global Free Market.

In conceding economic sovereignty to corporate plutocracy, our political class has thrown away the plot, condemning themselves and us to a dispiriting routine of knee-jerk reaction and quick-fix change.

As capital is geared to quick profits, so current politics is geared to the quick success of electoral point-scoring and personal promotion (as our education is geared to marks and degrees). What's missing is any longterm concept, strategy or deeper commitment to social well-being and sustainable growth.

State socialism is dead, but somewhere between old Red and new Green, we may find the outlines of a more liberal vision. To make sense of our lives and world, we must re-join the spheres of economic and social development. We share a finite, fragile planet, and our social democracy is hamstrung without effective ownership: from the power of capital to the land we call 'our country' and the everyday practice of working life.

Most of us would like to be working for ourselves, each other and a habitable world for our children. We need to know what we're doing and why, that it's not just a waste of energy.

The Observer

15.10.2012

VOTE CANUTE

If British political leaders are 'failing to reach the electorate' this could be because they have so little purchase on the financial and economic decisions that most effect our lives.

Yes, a better government might set a living wage a bit above the minimum, tax from the top and make life more tolerable at the bottom. Milliband's one-nation Labour contrives at once to give the poor some hope and reassure the rich while Cameron cashes in on Olympic victories and grooms Britain as off-shore base for predators in Europe.

What none of these decent chaps dares admit is that no party line of theirs can deliver most of us decent jobs, steady prices, a secure future or realistic expectations in a global market that is beyond the control of any one nation or democracy.

Europe's in a mess, but the main threat to national well-being does not come from Brussells, and a reworked European Union might still turn out to be our best defence.

If British politicians have little to offer, this is because a growing global super-class has more money, land and resources to hand than any government. The financial and corporate institutions of plutocracy have no commitment to national government. Except to maintain and punish any threat to business as usual. Since those who pay the piper call the tune, their tunes are what we get and our leaders offer variations on a theme.

Foreseeable British governments can no more redirect global cashflows in our common interest than reroute the jetstream. No Good Capitalism or Good King can cure our ills, as Canute had the common or comic sense to recognise when he set his throne against the tide.

The Observer

07.10.2012

BRITISH DISEASE

Capitalism gone mad? Was Midas Money ever sane? We can still thank the Observer for an ongoing diagnosis of what may sometimes seem like a British disease.

Here are some symptoms noted in the past two weeks: Britain's real economy, the goods and services we produce and use, is largely owned by foreign companies while a national government trumpets independence; British business leaders tell government that things are looking up, while refusing to reinvest company hoards in industry and employment; top British companies yet afford to bet on favourites in US elections.

Who and what are they betting on in Britain? Patriotism apart, the underlying nonsense is global: just as broadsheet Business pages are set apart from news-in-general, so the real business of our lives - what we do for a living, and how the proceeds are distributed - is formally not our business. Social democracy, along with legal ownership, stops short of working life and essential resources.

As in company law, so with 'our country.'  Real ownership is, quite legally, out of our hands. It is not just in the US that our bosses buy power in the name of companies constructed from our lives. Nor should we depend on redistributive government, even our own, to give us back in tax and benefit what we've already earned and paid for as workers and customers.

'Predistribution' is not a pretty word, but yes need it, and that does require a 'revolution in ownership.'  At stake is simply the grounding of top-down social democracy, a re-joining of human will and agency in the core-purpose of companies in which we combine.

South Wales Evening Post

02.10.2012

B for Botanical

The Glyn Vivian gallery has been closed for repairs all summer, now, with autumn closing in, I'm told that the Botanical Gardens are to be shut down at weekends over the winter. I hope I'm wrong, because that's just when the glass-houses offer a bit of fragrant warmth and shelter from the rain.

Of course buildings have to be repaired, and Swansea cant escape the cutting craze. But this looks like a cut too far, wrong place, wrong time.

Unless it's a false alarm, we have less than a month before the weekend lockout's set to start. Before November, we need a U-turn, a Plan B for Botanical gardens. It's one of Swansea's loveliest places, a site of scientific interest to visitors as well as us with the luck to live nearby.

Maybe the Parks department, or whoever makes these decisions, could follow the example of many galleries and museums. If cuts in opening hours are unavoidable, let's close the gardens on Mondays and keep them open on Saturdays and Sundays when working people, grown-ups and children, are free to enjoy them. Whose gardens are they anyway?

(After publication of this letter, the weekend closure order was withdrawn)

Weekly Guardian

28.09.2012

SALT IN WOUNDS

Yes (Seumas Milne) the uproar over an abusive little film can only be explained by real injury to Arabs and Muslims, not just in a promiscuous war on terrorism but over centuries of colonial occupation, economic exploitation and political corruption.

This theatre of cruelty is ongoing, most bitterly in Iraq and Afghanistan, drone strikes on Pakistan and annexation of Jerusalem. Symbolic insults are blown up world-wide media and fall as salt in open wounds.

If we look to an Arab Spring or Moderate Islam for balanced responses or transformation from within, the best we can do is pull back, put our own houses in order and make amends where our help is most widely sought. A good starting point would be respect of international law and human rights in Palestine.

The Observer

23.09.2012

PLEBS

Who are the new Plebs? Somewhere between the 50% who stand to lose even if growth returns and the 90% of us who earn less than £45,000 a year and own less than half a million. Either way, that looks like a clear majority for the sort of changes recommended by the Resolution Foundation.

The alternative, as made clear in your report, is a deepening trickle-down of poverty and corresponding trickle-up of wealth. The prospects of the wordy and the working classes diverge, the middle is squeezed to vanishing as skilled production jobs are replaced by casualised catering, caring and leisure.  

Suggested remedies include the raising of minimum and women's earnings, affordable childcare, more and better vocational education. All these measures are amenable to government action if only we could be induced to vote in our common interest.

Other measures, also open to legislation, might enable us to even things up within companies, with joint decision-making where wages, salaries and profits are distributed.

What's holding us back, and what can we do about it? One problem is that the lower we are on the ladder, the more hand-to-mouth our lives and the more we're inclined to take the world as presented to us. Those who present it are better-placed to see for themselves, but also to to hide what suits them and keep us scrabbling.

Who owns the media, buys the advertising space and decides what's good for us? Who now plans to switch the focus of schooling yet further away from vocational, practical and creative activity and back to more exclusive O Levels?

The first 'Plebs' to catch my attention were not police but a bunch of rebel Ruskin students who declared, in a manifesto of 1909:  'We want neither your crumbs nor your condescension, your guidance nor your glamour, your tuition nor your tradition. We have our own historic way to follow, our own salvation to achieve...'

What became of them? Lost, almost, like the Lollards and Levellers, or the voice of the young virgin Mary. The god she praises in her Magnificat is one who brings down the mighty, fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich empty away.

These far-fetched stories have a point: electoral politics are futile unless they draw on deeper hopes and fears, shared image and experience. A clue as to how much may still be shared lies in your quote from the 'getting richer' PR manager, Candida, who says: 'There's not much joy in being successful if you are paranoid about those who are less successful.'

The Observer

16.09.2012

PRINCESSES AND PROPHETS

Monarchy, like prophesy, must be seen to be believed. Princesses and prophets are nothing without personal publicity and can afford to take the rough with the smooth.

The Prophet, bless him, may count on a merciful and compassionate God to deal with stupid insults. The Princess, blessed with much in this world, has little to forgive: in a country where fashionable women bear their breasts to sun and sundry she does the same.

As Catherine Bennet suggests, the speculation around Kate's womb is also par for the course. Perhaps the next time we see her unwrapped, she will be breasteeding. What's good enough for the Virgin Mary...

Heirs apart, this princess can help lay unhealthy taboos to rest. 

South Wales Evening Post

05.09.2012

NOT THE SAME

I still feel uneasy about the Paralympics. It's great to make the best of abilities and overcome disabilities. But that doesn't put the Olympics and the Paralympics in anything like the same league. This came home for me when the amazing Oscar Pistorius got beaten and complained about the winner's blades. Imagine ifI Bolt's sprinter mate and challenger had said 'Now measure that man's legs.' Not as odd as it sounds, as long as able-bodied boxers are sorted by weight.

The point is we've all got abilities and disabilities, some more obvious than others. If we believe in equality, as I do, that does not mean pretending we can be the same. The Olympics play on strength and speed, full stop. Paralympians juggle with a complex of strengths and weaknesses, new technology and fine definitions.

We all want and deserve respect, and we shouldn't have to jump through the fashionable hoops to get it. Because we're all different, and that's what being human means, there is no one-size-fits-all, no level playing field or perfect arena. To respect each other means recognising we've all got something, imperfect but unique. That's the scientific long and short and tall of it.

At school I became OK with words and found a niche for myself as hooker in the scrum because I was not fast or heavy enough to score in other ways. In maths, I got some satisfaction when at last I worked a problem through. But like everyone else I knew who was best and it wasn't me. I liked the maths teacher, because it wasn't his subject either. He was able to make things clear to me because he found them difficult himself.

But what I really liked about this teacher was that he seemed to recognise something else in me, and something more in life, than maths.

Come to think of it, the truth about one size not fitting all applies just as well to women's boxing or gay marriage. Men or women, gay or straight, abled or disabled, why should we all make promises we  cant keep, or hit each other in the face?  

The Observer

02.09.2012

BOYCOTT

There is nothing bigoted about a cultural boycott of Israel, any more than there is about Desmond Tutu's call for Bush and Blair to be prosecuted for warcrimes, or the disruption of a Condoleza Rice appearance in Tampa, Florida. In each case, legal and non violent means are deployed against systematic illegal force.

In Iraq the issue was an illegal invasion and occupation that has cost at least 100,000 lives and rising. With Israel, it's the illegal occupation, colonisation and seige of conquered territory in Palestine.

The fact that other states are also be guilty of violations does not preclude action in either case, rather the reverse,  or Tutu might have been calling for an end to pursuit of war-ciminals in Africa rather an its extension to US and UK.

Boycott is a blunt weapon, and it hurts. I was upset when Paul Simon broke the anti-apartheid boycott of South Africa with his Graceland sessions and when the Red Army went into Prague I tried to disrupt a Soviet orchestra's performance of Dvorak at the Albert Hall.

Jackie Kemp's old companion at Batsheva's Edinburgh gig was right when he said 'This is not Kristallnacht.'  A closer comparison might be Israel's everyday raids and demolitions in what's left of Palestine. As Jewish Israel extends remorselessly to enclose and dispossess a similar number of non-Jewish Palestinianss, what's at stake is no holocaust, but an implacable choice between apartheid, ethnic cleansing and/or the end of the Jewish state.

The Observer

26.08.2012

ARE THESE MEN A LIABILITY?

'Is this man a liability?' Your headline refers to George Osborne, and your editorial implies the same question about Prince Harry.

Some of us may find Harry's behaviour less offensive than Osborne's policy, but the two men are caught in the same cross-hairs: do they represent a hard-pressed country and its people, or a privileged class that floats above, even as it mimics commonness?

Floats? While the born-prince Harry drops his captain's pants in Las Vegas, a born-rich Osborne calls the shots that hit the poor. It's no good blaming or indulging these players.  As your editorial reminds us, it's we who write the script and this is not the sort of comedy we need.

The vice that really threatens us has nothing to do with nakedness and the fumblings of a novice chancellor signify little as the jaws of economic stagnation and climate chaos close in.

Between us we can vote and legislate to clear the way. From day to day, it's up to us to choose how best to live and save the only world we've got.

South Wales Evening Post

24.08.2012

See  http://education.gtj.org.uk/en/item1/36206

A 1944 edition of Picture Post from Swansea Museum, dedicated to the people of Swansea valley and edited by Tom Hopkinson. While UK was still at war, this mass circulation magazine was talking to people in the ruins about the the sort of reconstruction needed afterwards. Hopkinson was sacked by Tory owner Edward Hulton and moved to the daily News Chronicle. It was there, in 1955, that he printed my first newspaper piece on Algeria.

The Observer

20.08.2012

CHEAP KILLS

Peter Beaumont is right that to be killed by a drone is no worse than to be killed by a cruise missile or highflying bomber. And, as he says, drones may be less indiscriminate in their targetting.  

But in the current blossoming of drone warfare, we see another dangerous disproportionality: not in the quantity or quality of the carnage but in the cheapness and ease of delivery.

US drone pilots interviewed by CNN say it is easier to be accurate, less stressful when you can observe and target  the 'bad guys'  free from G forces and distractions of enemy fire. In effect, the drone attack is a leisurely hit-and-run, no screaming tyres or smoking gun. A drone may get written off but the driver is safe, and the cost in material and manpower much less than with a conventional aircraft or missile platform.

Effortless killing is morally repugnant. Was it Graham Greene who posed the question: what would you do if you could win a fortune by wishing the death of a stranger in China? More to the practical point, the ability to kill without detection or loss is an incentive to war criminals.

Drones are relatively cheap and may prove more easily replicable and transferable than more cumbersome offensive technology. Iran is reported to have secured a US model, and other less cautious customers will be lining up. The more weapons around, the more people of all sorts are likely to get killed by them.

Present practitioners are not confined to US and Israeli forces: I have a letter from a UK defence minister earlier this year confirming that RAF pilots are flying Reaper missions alongside USAF counterparts in the United States.

As Beaumont concludes, we badly need clarity on both the morality and effectiveness of drone warfare. Any review should take into account the warnings of Imran Khan on the damage done by drone attacks to secular democracy in Pakistan, a matter of life or death for him.

South Wales Evening Post

15.08.2012

PITY THE LOSERS

Here at home it was a shock to come across some of the news that got lost in the mayhem around Team GB. More soldiers dying for nothing in Aghanistan, and satellite images confirming the worst fears about melting ice-caps and climate change. Apparently, computer-modellers cried when their results came out, and higher food prices are promised after record drought in the US corn-belt.

In life and death, as in sport, losers mostly outnumber winners. The Afghan death toll is ten or a hundred times the number we rightly mourn when the bodies are flown home. For every price-rise at the supermarket, someone starves in India or Africa, which is why a man as young as Mohammed Farah invests his winnings in a foundation to feed children.

As I write, there's an unseasonal gale across Swansea bay, and I cant help feeling the weather's not looking good for the human race.  Last week, at risk of sermonising, I said the name of the most important game was life. It still is, we've only got one each, and the aim is not to be first past the post.  Come to think of it, this is a sermon, but with a difference: like John Lennon believe that heaven and hell are on earth, if anywhere, and of our own making.

Life is a serious game, and for all of us. The human race is a sort of relay and the older we get the longer the hand-over. As we pass the baton and slow down, or hang about and wait to pick it up, we may have time to wonder what it's all about and what comes next, for ourselves, our children and other people's.

I'm not bothered about dying, though it took me some years to get over my childhood fear of the dark. Now I sleep easy because I trust that things will carry on OK without me and the world will still be in good shape when I wake up.  Death is no great sting if I know that people I care for will still be around in a world that they can enjoy as much as I do.

But what if the best years are over, for everyone? What becomes of our world and people if those climate predictions are true, as most of the science suggests? How much of what we love best will survive chaotic weather as rising sea levels  cut out cities and fertile lowlands, and grainlands turn to desert round the world?  In my lifetime, the population of the world has more than doubled and we're all driven to consume as much as we can get?

Does it matter that there are fewer swallows every spring and this is the first year I can remember not hearing a cuckoo?

For me, the most moving moments in the Olympic closing ceremony were the inset videos of John Lennon and Eddy Mercury, with thousands of living voices round the stadium, and millions more at home, singing along with them. Imagine 'no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man.' And not just men, hardened muscles and minds. The Queen singer died young but his song ends on a different note:  'old man, poor man, pleadin' with your eyes gonna make you some peace some day.'

'We will rock you' is also a lullabye. If Eddy Mercury didn't hear his mother sing it to him, he learned it at his English school in India. You dont have to be a Christian to identify with a homeless mother and child: 'Mary's little baby, sleep, sweetly sleep,

          Sleep in comfort, slumber deep;

          We will rock you, rock you, rock you...'

Maybe life is NOT a game.

South Wales Evening Post

10.08.2012

NOT JUST SPORT

The Evening Post Olympic panel was divided into Sports Lovers and Sports Haters, with me down as a hater who got converted. In real life, I never hated sport: fast running is like fast food, great until you get too much of it.

What your panel questions did was set me thinking. And, because I'm vain I bought a couple more papers than I might have otherwise.

We all like to shine, we would all love to do something really well, and it's great to see it when somebody else does. That goes not just for sport, but for a lot of other arts and skills from singing and dancing to cooking and gardening, to steel-erecting, brickaying or stitching up a wound.

In the Olympics it was a joy to see people of many races, nationalities, genders at the top of their games. I was proud when our lot won, and hurt with them when they failed. The trouble is that for every winner, there are ten, a hundred or a thousand also-rans. And millions more like me who only sit and watch.

But it's not quite as simple as that. Although I'm not a regular sports fan or follower of one team, I'm all agog if someone turns a big game on.  When Swansea got promoted, and earned its premier place, my spirits were raised.  This is partly because I live in Swansea, and partly because I have enough experience of various games to identify with those who do - even if they're overpaid.

I'm easily hooked because I was lucky to go to schools which gave me a raft of different games and skills outside the usual, often boring, syllabus. That was good for me because it gave me more choice, more chance to find something I could do well. It also gave me an insight into other people's games.To understand and feel for other people - in all walks of life, not just sport - you have to have some base of shared experience. It's the overlap of lives and activities that bind us an enables us to work effectively together.

As I said, I was lucky and able to try my hand at arts as well as sports, and offbeat things like glasswork, gardening and caving. Now that the Games are ending, there's a lot of talk about legacy and striking while the iron is hot. Remember that ring of molten metal in the opening show? The priority now, especially when the outlook is bleak, is to more opportunities to more of our children, not just in sport but in arts and other skills.

That's not just personal touchy-feely thing. We hear that our future lies in a so-called 'knowledge economy.' But knowledge is nothing unless it's grounded in practical skills and fired by imagination.

That's especially true now that the age of full employment and cheap food may be coming to an end. At the end of the day, as the saying goes, it's NOT all about winning and it may turn out to be about surviving. We'll all need our wits about us, with all the abilities and mutual support we can muster. The biggest, most challenging game may turn out to be life itself.

The gardening - grow your own - may come in handy too, along with some of the older people who still do it..

Weekly Guardian

09.08.2012

AKA ARMED CONFLICT

I wish I shared your confidence that Britain only deploys killer-drones where there is a UN mandate for force. In answer to my questions earlier this year, defence minister Nick Harvey confirmed that Reaper drones are 'remotely piloted by UK RAF pilots based in the United States.'

He also said, in his reply addressed to my MP, that UK forces in Afghanistan operated under Nato command, in accordance with International Humanitarian law - 'also known as the Law of Armed Conflict' - and UK rules of engagement.

What he did not say was whether RAF pilots working with USAF partners from US bases counted as 'UK forces in Afghanistan.' Nor what those British pilots might do if suspects crossed the unmarked border into Pakistan. It could be a case of 'Over to you, buddy?' And the buck might then be passed from the USAF to the CIA, more specialised in killing sans frontieres.

What about Yemen or Somalia where British and US interests may coincide and our military and intelligence be presumed to work together?

It may be reassuring that the UK, unlike the US - and Israel and Sudan - remains committed to the International Criminal Court: punishment of war criminals as distinct from extermination of those we may from time to time call 'terrorist'.

Criminals commit the crimes they can get away with. The main problem with drones is not that they are by nature indiscriminate or disproportionate, rather that they enable those with the resources and technology to pick, track and hit any target of their choice with little risk of direct reprisal or discovery. 

Drones leave more or less identifiable charred bodies and smoking craters but no smoking gun. And what a brazen United States may freely admit a more prudish UK government can just as easily deny. This is not the time for good journalists (or MPs) to take no for an answer.

The Observer

05.08.2012

STRANGE AND NEW

Can we now look forward to something strange and new arising from the murky water between Cameron's Big Society and WIll Hutton's Good Capitalism?

Could an expanded National Citizen Service combine dissident youth of Tottenham with Newnham's 'Personal Best' and the nationwide enthusiasm of Olympic volunteers?

Could that 'spirit of inclusion' harness and replicate the 'dedication and self-sacrifice' (not to mention resources and ambition) of Olympic medal-winners?

Can a scattering of charities and local partnerships now join and match the power and vested interests of Serco, a 'value-led' international company whose operations cover tagging and surveillance, probation services, prisons and detention-centres, GP services and NHS hospitals, local authority schools, atomic weapons research, ballistic missile warning systems and Barclay's bicycles.

As you say in your editorial, big societies need practical commitment, real understanding and political inspiration. For a truly brave new world, that commitment and inspiration must be found in and directed towards the wellbeing of all concerned.

The Olympics were not new, but rare and came to feel like common cause. There is nothing inspiring about more of the same: another tranche of private profit dolled up as public service by corporate Big Brothers in and out of government.

29.07.2012

The Observer

HAPPINESS

So happiness goes with Marriage, Jobs and Home-ownership...  If Labour's right and that's a statement of the bleedin' obvious, how do we explain that the happiest age-groups are 16-19 and 65-79 -  the cohorts least likely to tick all those boxes?

Your three examples give some clues. The Student likes sleeping, sunshine, and reading/talking/writing at university. She has friends who doodle on her face when she sleeps, and peaks on her written assignments (acclaimed by tutors and peers?). The Father, from a north Indian family, escaped the worst of UK racism and found a way out of menial work through education. He attributes present contentment to career, wife and children, values his parents' tradition and feels for friends and rioting youngsters whose prospects are less clear. The Octogenarian was twice widowed, brought up three children then got an O-level and office job. On retirement, she suffered depression. On doctor's advice she took up voluntary work and now chairs an elderly self-help group. After a fall and two operations, she counts herself a happy survivor. With loving family and friends, she plans to live to 100.

What comes through these sketches is not reducible to Marriage, Employment or Home-owner status. All three presumably have have enough to live on, but their confidence and energy - Happiness? - is also rooted in personal, social and practical engagement. They know and are known by what they do, who for, and who with, in a wider world of which they're all aware.

What that unlikely Olympic opening achieved was to make this commonplace dream a shade more real. (Not that we can all live happily ever after, or reduce all carbon emissions, eg breathing, to pretty pixels.)

The Observer

15.07.2012

GOOD KING?

Can Will Hutton's Good Capitalism cure the 'shocking divide that casts adrift the children of the poor'?  Could a Good King cure the plague? And what if Capitalism IS the plague?

Capitalism is by definition selfish and unfair, committed to the further enrichment of an owning few. If the 20^th century saw a narrowing of the gap between rich and poor, this had more to do with two world wars and the caution of Communism than any liberal dynamic in the economic system.

The real task for Labour is not simply to replace a flimsy Con-Lib coalition and bring unruly bankers to heel. The challenge is to overturn the unholy partnership of capitalism and social democracy. Social democracy must move in on the strongholds of corporate capital: big companies must be made accountable to the people who work in them and communities that depend on them; they must be committed in law and practice to clearly defined social objectives as well as to whatever profit is necessary to keep them in business.

Meanwhile, with economic and environmental crises converging, we dont need war and military service to bring together young men in common cause. With a million young men and women unemployed we could bring in a constructive work and training programme for ALL young people. Not only poor NEETs but those deformed by 'public' schools could benefit from a new mix of work experience, social interaction and self-management.

Weekly Guardian

07.07.2012

LABOURISM

I share George Monbiot's anger and sadness over the failure of the Rio earth summit. The negligence of our elected absentees may one day be seen as a crime against nature and humanity.

Monbiot rightly turns to what we can do in more immediate, practical ways to slow 'the planet-eating machine' of capitalist growth: between us we can create islands of sustainable practice and diversity  as bases for some future recovery.(*)

Like other distinguished analysts, Monbiot targets 'consumer capitalism' but the emphasis on market-driven consumption should not distract from the other side of the capitalist equation: our market-driven labour. What does the damage is not just the dubious goods we buy, but the working time we sell to produce them. We are as resigned to wage-slavery as we are addicted to consumption. As we set foot on employers' premises, we routinely drop any claim to democracy and self-determination.

This resignation was illustrated to me by a 2005 NOP survey cited in Tim Jackson's 'Prosperity without Growth.' A pie-chart of 'factors influencing subjective well-being' showed partner and family relationships at the top with 47% followed by health (24%) and money and finance (7%). Last, apart from dont-knows, came 'work fulfilment' with 2%.

However we interpret the figures, they indicate an intolerable waste of human time and energy.

The Observer

01.07.2012

WARPED

If 'our whole society has been warped by the City,'  why count on shareholders who are so much a part of that City to bring bankers to heel?

It is not just a case of cultural collapse in the financial sector. Banks and other city bosses work to the same ground rules as other capitalist corporations. They are accountable to their shareholders, including themselves, but their constitutional function - and culture that entails - is to make money for  owners. Capitalist enterprise has no built-in commitment to social justice or wider prosperity, let alone morality.

An early Barclays heir cast off his Quaker drab to be painted in hunting pink.(*) More recently, the movement has been in the other direction as sons and daughters of landed families joined street traders and greedy graduates in the City hunting grounds. Shareholders and bosses - with politicians never far behind - united in the chase.

Not only banks, but the national and global economy - and natural world -  is a hunting ground for the rich and those most able and eager to join them. To change that 'social market' requires not just regulation from above but a radical restructuring within, nothing less than the introduction of social democracy to the preserves of corporate economy.

Banks and other industries must be made directly accountable to customers, communities and society on which they depend - just as we all depend on them. Voting shares must include employees - whose life-shares include an intimate knowledge of process and an immediate interest in products and how proceeds are distributed.

I banked with Barclays before moving to the Co-op (Move your Money!), and recently met a group of Barclays local managers who were eager to talk about farming and industry in Wales, ashamed of high jinks at Canary Wharf. Casino banks could be broken up and brought back to earth, into the hands of people who know and care what money does.