Jim Jay's shared items in Google Reader

Why Ralph Fiennes is wrong about short words dumbing down language | Michael Rosen

2011-10-31T14:00:01Z

Words are just mere splashes of ink or sound waves. It's the meaning we ascribe to them that is crucial

Is it true that short words wreck our brains? So says Ralph Fiennes. Can we say that if we spend our lives not using long words, we will end up not being as clever as Fiennes?

First off: no one knows, no one can know. It might be fun or it might be a tease to make a guess like this, but in truth, no one knows what words do, because words don't "do" or "act". It's our minds and bodies that "do" things and words and texts are a part of the doing, woven into the doing. This may be seamless, but that's no excuse to say that words act. Purely on their own, words are inert splashes of ink, sound waves, blips on a screen and the like. Our minds perceive these and make meaning and our minds are part of living in the real world. I think Fiennes has lapsed into that old error of thinking that the real world is made by words.

Has he got a point about Shakespeare? I would guess not. When I was a boy, Shakespeare was no more a mass art form than it is now. In fact, a case could be made that with film, TV and mass schooling till 16, Shakespeare is more read, more known than before. I've worked with young people doing Shakespeare and I find that after a short while they get it. As one drama teacher working in schools told me: "When we do Shakespeare, it seems like it's the quickest way to get to the 'big stuff' – love, death, hate, power, rich, poor – all that."

To be fair, though, Fiennes's comments come after meeting young people in the context of his work – which I greatly respect, by the way. (The English Patient is in my top 10, and much of that is down to him.) Sorry, I digress. Let us return to our sheep, as Voltaire put it. Fiennes's comments are a response to what he has seen and heard. What we should ask here, though, is if he embarked on his work with a bias against young people and the way they talk, or if this was really something he learned about them on the day and over time as he worked with them.

We can't rid ourselves of bias, but we can build into our minds a crap spotter, a kind of third eye that checks what we do, how we think and what we say on matters such as this. Put it this way, it's so easy to make big statements about the decline and fall of the human race, to bemoan the state of youth, and this fits neatly into a wider story of a downward rush to chaos, which can only be checked by a return to old values. The odd thing here is that the appeal to go backwards nearly always means a plea for staying put, a vote for the status quo. There are plenty of ways to resist change and this is just one of them.

My hunch is that such talk is a way of hiding the fact that some older people think that the world isn't in a good state, yet they had some part in making it. This proves, they think, that the status quo is good and nothing must change.

(Written with words of one or two syllables, apart from the word "syllable" used here.)

Michael Rosen

Most sex workers 'not trafficked'

2011-10-31T13:15:54Z

The large majority of interviewed migrant workers in the UK sex industry are not forced nor trafficked, says a report.

Feminism, journalism and practicing what we preach

2011-10-30T14:00:12Z

How good are organisations that are committed to gender equality at getting their own house in order? Left-wing organisations, without exception, formally accept the basic ideas of gender equality and often go far further in their rhetoric. They have a long history of talking the talk on gender but are they walking the walk?

Inspired by the Atheists’ Guide to Christmas which advertises six of its contributors, all men, on the jacket I decided it was time to do a little light empirical research. Incidentally, readers may be pleased to hear that women are allowed to be atheists as, of 46 contributors, the editors did make room for 13 women, even if none of their names made it onto the front cover.

In the spirit of the Electoral Reform Society’s ‘Counting Women In‘ campaign that is highlighting the fact that there are four times as many male MPs as female, as well as the excellent F-Word pieces on gender representation in comedy I thought I’d join in with a quick and dirty analysis of the UK’s left press.

It doesn’t look too good I’m afraid.

As we can see from the snapshot (below) in nine left-leaning print publications that produce 243 articles only 73 were written by women. In other words more than twice as many pieces were written by men as women.

It’s interesting that the ‘worst’ half of the table includes the explicitly Marxist papers and the Labour Party affiliates who are often keen to promote gender quotas in various elections. Perhaps it’s time to introduce some quotas in their publications?

Perhaps it’s unfair to pick on Tribune, who are reportedly struggling to stay afloat, but there may be a connection between having more than seven times as many pieces written by men than women and struggling to find a paying audience.

Of the ‘better’ half special mention must go to the New Internationalist who were alone in having more pieces by women than men. Interestingly all four come from a more pluralist, less traditional leftism. Pacifism in the case of Peace News, the Green Party in the case of the in-house magazine Green World and the explicitly pluralist left for the New Internationalist and Red Pepper.

Mind you, before we start back slapping and giving out cigars, it comes to something when having twice as many pieces by men than women puts you with the angels. What’s clear is that the left in general needs to up its game and the more traditional sectors of the left doubly so.

This isn’t necessarily about taking women’s issues seriously but more about taking women themselves seriously, no matter which subject they are writing about. Without a real space for women’s voices when dealing with the red meat of politics rather than just ‘women’s issues’ then the left is falling far short of its formal aspirations for gender equality.

A note on methodology

The table represents how many articles were written by male and female authors and in a few cases where articles had identifiable authors of both sexes. I’ve left out entirely all articles and editorials that have no attribution. The ratio column refers to the number of men to women – ie if the ratio is 2 that means that for every female author there are two male authors.

I’ve left out the (even more) obscure publications sticking to print publications from the progressive left. I’ve deliberately not included explicitly feminist or women’s press as if they don’t get women to write for them the mind boggles. In both cases this was to avoid distorting the figures.

In each case I’ve taken a single issue of each publication. To be truly comprehensive you would really need to take a year or more of back issues – but my life’s a little too short to get quite that obsessive!

On that note I’ve also gone for the number of articles written by men or women. Alternative approaches could have been to count the number of authors (a number of publications had single writers who produced a numerous articles) or by column inches / pages. The latter would have quite a significant impact because some of these publications do seem to favour women reviewers (a third of a page each) and male article writers (one, two or more pages per piece). Again, that ups the work load a touch too far for me.

My aim was to get a useful impression of where we are and I hope this snapshot does just that. I’m sure this method could be extended to other kinds of publication or over a longer time period. Feel free to your counting hats on!

1. www.newint.org

2. www.greenworld.org.uk

3. www.peacenews.info

4. www.redpepper.org.uk

5. www.labourbriefing.org.uk

6. www.socialistworker.co.uk

7. www.cpgb.org.uk

8. www.newstatesman.com

9. www.tribunemagazine.co.uk

An alternative world history, with the nation state on the outside

2011-10-30T13:14:24Z

A shorter version was published on Blogcritics

A foundation of the “academic method” in the Western world is contradiction, turning established knowledge and ways of things on its head, challenging established assumptions. It’s something that James C. Scott does in spades in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.

At its heart is one region of the world, one of the last areas of the world to be brought into the nation-state system. “Zomia is a new name for virtually all the lands at altitudes above roughly three hundred meters all the way from the Central Highlands of Vietnam to northeastern India and traversing five Southeast Asian nations (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Burma) and four provinces of China (Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, and parts of Sichuan). It is an expanse of 2.5 million square kilometres containing about one hundred million minority peoples of truly bewildering ethnic and linguistic variety.” (p. ix)

And there’s huge amounts of fascinating detail there – from the role of the New World crops of maize and sweet potato in allowing what I was taught of at school as “traditional” slash and burn (what Scott calls swidden) agriculture, to the egalitarian politics of the Lisu, which on Scott’s account is strongly anti-authority and built around many stories of the felling of over-mighty, over-ambitious headmen.

But it’s the overarching frame of this book that really makes it a must-read for those who like finding new ways of looking at history and the shape of the modern world. Scott points out (unarguably) that the state is a very recent arrival on the human scene, and that most humans, through almost all of our history, have lived in far smaller, freer, often anarchic and flexible units.

We can’t now, however, know what they were like, for contrary to the view (established by people writing from within, and usually in support of the nation state) the usually independent, often anarchical groups in Zomia are not some historical hangover, “primitive” people who couldn’t manage for one reason or another to “modernise”, but groups who chose to avoid the restrictions of the state, the “discipline” of padi farming, and choose the freer (and almost invariably better nourished) life of the forest and hill. (Scott comprehensive rebuffs the traditional tale of Malaysia’s orang asli “original people” once thought to have been descendents of earlier waves of migration less technically developed than the Austronesian populations who followed. They are not genetically different, he says, but part of a “political series”. p. 183)

And they’re not tightknit “tribes”, but highly flexible groupings that can change identity for practical advantage almost at will, and absorb a huge range of disparate incomers, from runaway slaves, peasants and soldiers to adventurous traders and general malcontents.

It doesn’t quite deliver, but hints at an alternative world history in which the nation state, rather than its traditional portrayal as “civiliser”, “developer”, “stabiliser” is in fact a destroyer of rights, a deliverer of poor health and nutrition, a veritable Kali of woes. And one where the non-state societies are the defenders of functionality, freedom and hope.

There are critical things you can say about this book – definitely overlong and annnoyingly repetitive, and also frustrating in that it begs at least a brief exploration of more small-scale, modern attempts to create “new Zomias” – and an exploration of what this might mean to, say, the Occupy movement (although perhaps being published in 2009 it was a little early to see the desperate hunger for new ideas so evident today.)

But it’s generally highly readable, and absolutely fascinating in detail. And great at debunking well-established myths.

So tribes aren’t some pre-existing, fixed genetic entity (at least in most cases), but very often a creation of states trying to control their non-state peripheries, by creating “chiefs” and “sub-chiefs” that can mimic – and they eventually hope become – state structures. He quotes Leach on an event in the Shan hills of Burma in 1836: “All my example really shows is that the Burmese, the Shans, and the Kachins of the Hukawng Valley … shared a common language of ritual expression; they all knew how to make themselves understood in this common ‘language’. It doesn’t mean that what was said in this ‘language’ was ‘true’ in political reality. The statements of the ritual in question were made in terms of the supposition that there existed an ideal, stable, Shan state with the soahpa (ruler) of Mogaing at the head of it and all the Kachin and Shan chiefs of the Hukawng Valley his loyal liege servants. We have no real evidence that any real aopa of Mogaing ever wielded such authority, and we know for a fact that when this particular ritual took place there had been no genuine soahpa of Mogaing at all for nearly 80 years.” (p. 115)

People, even large groups of people, choosing to opt-out of “civilisation” and run for the freedom of the hills was common. So much so that the Han Chinese empire had a term for them – “Han-traitors” (Hanjian). In times of dynastic decline, natural disasters, wars, epidemics, and exceptional tyranny, what was a steady flow of adventurers, traders, criminals and pioneers might become a population hemorrhage.” (p. 126.)

Scott skips around the world to look at parallel examples, citing Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrain’s Regions of Refuge on Latin America and regions that evaded control by the Spanish colonisers, and subsequent research which showed these were almost all not “indigenous”, but once cultivators living in highly stratified societies that had chosen to flee the Spanish (and/or their epidemics) and re-form their societies in forms emphasising mobility and adaptation. He also cites the Marsh Arabs of Iraq, the sea gypsies of much of Southeast Asia (for whom mangroves were a refuge), and the nomads of central Asia.

So what did such societies look like? Scott admits there are many variations, but is clearly drawn to the relatively egalitarian ones, citing the words of a forestry officer visiting the Tengger Highlands (“the major redoubt on Java of an explicitly non-Islamic, Hindu-Shaivite priesthood, the only such piresthood to have escaped the wave of Islamicization that followed the collapse of the last major Hindu-Buddhist kingdom (Majapahit) in the early 16th century”): “You couldn’t tell the rich from poor. everyone spoke in the same way to everyone else too, no matter what their position. Children talked to their parents and even to the village chief using the ordinary ngoko. No one bent and bowed before others.” (p. 135)

And, after Geoffrey Benjamin, he sees these societies as often practicing dissimilation – positioning themselves ecologically, economically and culturally as oppose to the state societies. e.g. “We are the foragers; we do not touch the plough.” And the Akha (now some 2.5m strong across southern Yunnan, Laos, Burma and Thailand): “A key figure in their legends is the would-be Akha king of the 13th century, Dzjawbang, who instituted a census (the iconic tax and state-making move!) and was slain by his own people. His son Bang Dhzui is an Icarus figure whose shamanic horse with wings mended with beeswax flies too close to the sun and is killed. Both stories are cautionary tales about hierarchy and state formation.” (p. 177)

Among the biggest groups he follows is that known to the Han as the Miao, some of whom call themselves Hmong. “It appears that around the sixth century, the “Miao-Man” (barbarians) with their own gentry were a major military threat to Han valleys north of the Yangzi – fomenting more than 40 rebellions between 403 and 610. At a certain point they were broken up and those not absorbed were then thought to have become a dispersed, ununifed people without a nobility….For the past 500 years, under the Ming and the Qing, campaigns for “suppression and extermination” were nearly constant. Suppression campaigns following insurrections in 1698, 1732 and 1794, and above all the rising in Guizhou in 1855 dispersed the Miao in many different directions throughout southwest China and mountainous mainland Southeast Asia. Wiens describes these campaigns as ones of expulsion and extermination comparable to ‘the American treatment of the Indians’.” (p. 140)

Many societies, he says, maintained some or even extensive knowledge of the settled past – citing for one example the Ganan, now numbering some 8,000 at the head of the Mu River in Sagaing Division in Burma.”They were, or had become, it seems a lowland people and an integral part of the Pyu paid state until its centers were sacked and destroyed by Mon, Burman and Nan Chao state forces between the 9th and 14th centuries. They fled up the Mu river watershed because it was ‘away from the battlefields’; there they became, and remain, swiddeners and foragers.They have no written language and they practice a heterodox variation of Buddhism.”(p. 149)

Others took a different approaching – taking to the hills, but preferring to remain sedentary, so building hugely labour-intensive terraces on steep slopes. “Edmund Leech wondered about terracing in the Kachin hills and concluded that it took place for military reasons: to protect a key pass and control its trade and tolls, which required a concentrated and self-provisioning military garrison…. A successful defence against slave raids required both a relatively inaccessible location and a critical mass of concentrated defenders who could prevail against all but the largest and most determined foes.” The Hani in northern Vietnam are another example cited. (p. 193)

This was an effect that seems particularly pronounced in Southeast Asia, where war was, Scott says, particularly destructive on civilian populations, in both victory and defeat.”The demographic impact of the two successful Burmese invasions of Siam (1549-69 and the 1760s) was enormous. The core population around the defeated capital vanished; a small fraction was captured and returned to the Burmese core and most of the rest dispersed to areas of greater safety. In 1920 the population of the Siamese core had only just recovered to preinvasion level.” (p. 146) But in Burma after 1581 the effects of this war, and subsequent ones with Arakan, Ayutthaya and the Burmese court at Taung-nga “turned the territory near Pegu into a ‘depopulated desert’.” (p. 146)

But movement was the peasant norm in both lowland and highland Southeast Asia, Scott says, including in groups that continued to grow irrigated rice. That reflected its role as a “shatter zone” (p. 143), a place of refuge. (although he says that commentators were wrong when they assumed that running for the hills meant harder labour and a poorer diet – it was quiet the reverse, which was a powerful attractive force. “So long as there was plenty of open land, as was the case until fairly recently, swiddening was generally more efficient in terms of return on labour than irrigated rice. If offered more nutritional variety in settings that were generally healthier. Finally, when combined with foraging and hunting for goods highly valued in the lowlands and in international commerce, it could provide high returns for relatively little effort. One could combine social autonomy with the advantages of commercial exchange.” (p. 162)

The choice of crops was important, Scott says. “Cultivars that cannot be stored long without spoiling, such as fresh fruits and vegetables, or that have low value per unit weight and volume, such as most gourds, rootcrops and tubers, will not repay the efforts of a tax gatherer. In general, roots and tubers such as yams, sweet potatoes, potatoes and cassava/manioc/yucca are nearly appropriation-proof. After they ripen, they can be safely left in the ground for up to two years and dug up piecemeal as needed. There is thus no granary to plunder. If the army or the taxman wants your potatoes, for example, they will have to dig them up one by one. Plagued by crop failures and confiscatory procurement prices for the cultivars recommended by the Burmese military government in the 1980s, many peasants secretly planted sweet potatoes, a crop specifically prohibitted. … the crop was easier to conceal and nearly impossible to appropriate. The Irish in the early 19th century planted potatoes not only because they provided many calories from the small plots to which farmers were confined, but also because they could not be confiscated or burned and, because they were grown in small mounds, an [English] horseman risked breaking his mount’s leg galloping through the field.” (p. 196) (Well, maybe, I sometimes think Scott’s romanticism gets away with him.)

And the arrival of New World crops in the 16th-century — most notably maize and cassava — created many new opportunities, making hill areas previously untenable possible homes. “The opportunity was seized by so any people that it prompted a significant redistribution of population. .. The reasons for moving away from state space could vary dramatically – religious division, war, corvee, forced cultivation under colonial schemes, epidemics, flight from bondage 0 but the availability of maize was a new and valuable tool for potential runaways.” (p. 205)

Cassava can’t go as high into the hills, but has the “undisputed status as the crop requiring the least labour for the greatest return. For this reason it was much favored by nomadic people who could plant it, leave, and then return virtually any time in the second and third years to dig it up. … Colonial officials tended to stigmatise cassava and maize as crops of lazy natives whose main aim was to shirk work. In the New World, too, those whose job it was to drive the population into wage labour or onto the plantations deplored crops that allowed a free peasantry to maintain its autonomy. Hacienda owners in Central America claimed that with cassava,all a peasant needed was a shotgun and a fish hook and he would cease to work regularly for wages.” (p. 206) Additionally, little community cooperation is required for such crops. “A society that cultivates roots and tubers can disperse more widely and cooperate less than grain growers, thereby encouraging a social structure more resistant to incorporation and perhaps to hierarchy and subordination.” (p. 207)

And when under most pressure, some groups chose to resort to a wholly foraging lifestyle – as did the Semang of the Malay Peninsula – was a sensible adaptation for a small, militarily weak minority group that did not wish to join a strong group of agriculturalists. (p. 185) Scott cites the historical case of the Siriono of eastern Bolivia, who have been written up as Paleolithic survivors lacking the ability to make fire or cloth, living in rude shelters, innumerate, having no domestic animals or developed cosmology. Actually “we now know beyond all reasonable doubt that the Siriono had been crop-growing villagers until roughly 1920, when influenza and smallpox swept through their villages, killing many of them. Attached by numerically superior peoples and fleeing potential slavery, the Siriono apparently abandoned their crops, which, in any event, they did not have the numbers to defend. Their independence and survival in this case required them to divide into smaller bands, foraging and moving whenever threatened. They would occasionally raid a settlement to take axes, hatchets and machetes, but at the same time they dreaded the illnesses the raiders often brought back with them. They had become non-sedentary by choice – to avoid both disease and capture.” (p. 189)

It make sense of an early manual of Chinese statecraft which urged the king to prohibit subsistence activities in the mountains and wetlands “in order to increase the involvement of the people in the production of grain.” Otherwise “the common people who detest farming, are lazy, and want doubled profits, will have nowhere to find something to eat.” (p. 72) Scott adds “the shrill tone of the advice suggests that the policy was not a complete success.”

Sounds familiar today!

Also interesting is Scott’s take on the loss of literacy. If they were at one time in the lowlands, it is likely the groups had at least some degree of literacy, but most had lost it. In part he says it would only – taking the example of the Han Chinese – have only been found in a thin strata of society, a small number, and these would have been the most likely to assimilate with the lowland, mainstream cultures, and they’d probably be able to find a high place within them. Also it is probably a “logical consequence of the fragmentation, mobility and dispersal of social structure entailed by migration to the hills”. (p. 226) Also, a flexible, easily altered history is convenient if you need a flexible, easily altered identity (p. 234)

And his view of the charismatic, frequently millennarial leadership that commonly emerges in many of these groups. “Monks, ex-seminarians, catechists, healers, traders and peripheral local clergy are vastly overrepresented in the ranks of the prophets. They are, in the Gramscian sense, the organic intellectuals of the dispossessed and marginal in the premodern world. … Marc Bloch notes the prominent role of the country priests in peasant uprisings in medieval Europe…. ‘their minds could better encompass the idea that their miseries were part of a general ill’”. (p. 310)

Other takes: Reviews in History, New Mandela, H-Net.

Giles Fraser is never taken in by establishment self-delusion | Andrew Brown

2011-10-27T14:32:34Z

Fraser wasn't so foolish as to imagine the City takes more notice of a bishop than the Occupy protest – unlike some Anglicans

How is it that an organisation as full of clever people who believe that they must love one another can manage to behave with the monumental stupidity and pettiness of the Church of England? The resignation of Giles Fraser, the canon chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral, is a loss to everyone concerned: he loses his job, his family lose their home, the Church of England loses respect and sympathy, the cathedral loses a cogent and attractive advocate. The dean may believe he saves face.

Fraser has his faults. He's far too fond of ecclesiastical politics, until now as a spectator rather than a piece on the board. As a journalist I can't think this is a vice, but as a friend and human being, I do. None the less, he is one of the very few people in the Church of England who can think about important questions out loud in ways that are comprehensible to the outside world.

Conversation with him always feels like watching a fast-burning fuse in a cartoon. It's exciting in itself, and you know there will be explosions from which everyone will, miraculously, emerge unscathed. He loves to shock, but he also loves to think and the simple pleasure he takes in life is quite remarkable. Time in his company makes me feel better about being alive.

I remember the night I introduced him to the poetry of John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester. We were sitting outside a noisy wine bar in the smokers' courtyard: Fraser, for once with a dog collar on, which made him more impressive when he approached a complete stranger to bum a cigarette for me, and more impressive still when he started to read with noisy relish from the screen on my laptop:

"So when my days of impotence approach,
And I'm by pox and wine's unlucky chance,
Driven from the pleasing billows of debauch,
On the dull shore of lazy temperance …

When we got to the verse that starts "Nor shall our love fits, Cloris, be forgot" there were people looking as they had never looked at a vicar before.

He enjoyed that. The delight in shocking is part of his character but it is also connected to his most valuable gift to the Church of England. He actually notices the audience reaction. So much of the church's energies are taken up in make-believe about its position in society that Fraser is really shocking to anyone used to professional Anglicans.

There was an example of this just this week in the Bishop of London's statement about the protesters explaining that they could go away now because the grown-ups had taken over: "The St Paul's Institute has itself focused on the issue of executive pay and I am involved in ongoing discussions with City leaders about improving shareholder influence on excessive remuneration."

Never mind that the St Paul's Institute was run by Giles Fraser, who the bishop must have known was about to resign. There is one huge shrieking question about a press release like that: who is it meant to fool? Does anyone really think that the City takes more notice of a bishop than of a genuine popular demonstration? Does anyone in the wider world think that the bishop's words count for as much as the protesters' acts, or that they mean anything at all?

Fraser was never taken in by that kind of establishment self-delusion, in part because as a former private-school boy and an Oxford don, he knows it from the inside. There are precious few others like that where it matters in the church.

Still there may be one glint of hope in all this. For the first time in perhaps 50 years, the public has seen that Christians can act on principle in a disagreement that has nothing whatever to do with sex. Is it too much to hope this will go on?

Andrew Brown

Occupy London is cleaning up the big bang's mess | Andrew Simms

2011-10-27T08:15:22Z

A quarter of a century after deregulation of the City, the St Paul's protesters are highlighting the results of deference to finance

Oddly, the era of modern, triumphal, deregulated finance was much shorter than the lifespan of its apparent antithesis, the old Soviet Union. Here were two systems, very different, yet equally centralising of power and privilege, and arrogantly certain of their own mission. Both, also, left an awful mess behind.

Twenty five years on from the "big bang" in the City of London we can survey how the period of great deference to finance reshaped our landscape. Consequences are everywhere in the results of an economic scorched earth policy, still unfolding in business failures, instability, unemployment, loss of public services and recession.

But as well as the way in which untethered finance fuelled expansion and divergence in the global economy, it equally re-engineered society and the environment. Alongside the financial explosion have been others in debt-driven over-consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and inequality. New Scientist magazine last week reported that "our current emissions trajectory is close to the worst case scenario of the intergovernmental panel on climate change".

Twenty five years ago the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 347 parts per million (ppm); today it is 389ppm. The level in 1986 just happens to have been almost exactly the safe concentration that Nasa climate scientist, James Hansen, argues we need to return to. At the moment, however, we are heading towards 1000ppm, or higher, by the end of the century. That's a level generally considered so bad from a human point of view, it is beyond apocalyptic, if such a state is imaginable.

Just as finance loosed its moorings from the real economy, the economy has loosed its moorings from the real world. The other great destabilisation over the last quarter of a century has been the growth of inequality. In the large majority of OECD countries inequality rose from the 1980s. Inequality matters, pushing up a wide range of social costs, weakening the social fabric and producing less convivial places to live. While things have been bad in English-speaking countries such as the United Kingdom and United States, the negative trend has caught up with traditionally more equal countries such as Denmark, Germany and Sweden. Here, inequality grew more over the last decade, according to the OECD, than anywhere else, and it rose in 17 out of 22 countries for which comparable data was available.

Globally, the share of the benefits of economic activity reaching the poorest – those on less than $1 per day – fell dramatically between the 1980s and 1990s. Inequality also rose even in the major developing countries, India and China, which fared economically much better than, for example, did most of Africa.

As well as within countries and the global population as a whole, intergenerational gaps are opening up too, as recent ILO figures revealed young people making up a disproportionate share of both the unemployed and the working poor, and youth unemployment hitting a record high in the UK.

Ironically, it took the US comedian Jon Stewart, on his spoof news programme, the Daily Show, to point out that no one in the business media, who filter our understanding of finance, either called the economic crisis before it happened, or championed the need for reform of the banks and financial institutions.

As nature abhors a vacuum so, it seems, does culture and politics. The Occupy movement has, almost by accident, taken on the role of self- and public education about the financial system. Here are unpaid amateurs attempting a necessary critique of finance that paid professionals woefully failed to provide. And, of course, they are being damned for doing so.

The recent riots and lootings were a dark reflection at the economic bottom of society of the excessive, and often criminal, sense of entitlement displayed by those at the top, whether in MPs' expenses scandals or bankers' highly paid, publicly underwritten reckless bets. It must be confusing to be young, seeing rioters rightly condemned, but then to witness others intimidated and kettled for constructively protesting in favour of a more stable and fair economy.

"Have you got a bank account?" sneered the BBC Radio 4 Today programme journalist at a protester at the occupation outside St Paul's cathedral – as if having one, without which it is almost impossible to function in society, invalidated any proposals they might have for reform of a system brought to the point of collapse by speculative investors.

It's fashionable to say that the protesters' demands are too broad and vague. Yet, what they are achieving is to reclaim a public realm for debate and engagement, one that the privileges given to finance have done so much to destroy. If nothing else, practising a different kind of politics and calling for finance to be made subservient to useful social, economic and environmental purposes, to make things better rather than worse, is enough for one demonstration. And, in contrast to government policy, I'm fond of JM Keynes's observation that it is it is better "to be broadly right than precisely wrong". I can think of no better, more appropriate place to mark the anniversary of the big bang today than at the occupation outside St Paul's. And that is where I will be.

Andrew Simms

If the Libyan war was about saving lives, it was a catastrophic failure

2011-10-26T23:06:33Z

Nato claimed it would protect civilians in Libya, but delivered far more killing. It's a warning to the Arab world and Africa

As the most hopeful offshoot of the "Arab spring" so far flowered this week in successful elections in Tunisia, its ugliest underside has been laid bare in Libya. That's not only, or even mainly, about the YouTube lynching of Gaddafi, courtesy of a Nato attack on his convoy.

The grisly killing of the Libyan despot after his captors had sodomised him with a knife, was certainly a war crime. But many inside and outside Libya doubtless also felt it was an understandable act of revenge after years of regime violence. Perhaps that was Hillary Clinton's reaction, when she joked about it on camera, until global revulsion pushed the US to call for an investigation.

As the reality of what western media have hailed as Libya's "liberation" becomes clearer, however, the butchering of Gaddafi has been revealed as only a reflection of a much bigger picture. On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch reported the discovery of 53 bodies, military and civilian, in Gaddafi's last stronghold of Sirte, apparently executed – with their hands tied – by former rebel militia.

Its investigator in Libya, Peter Bouckaert, told me yesterday that more bodies are continuing to be discovered in Sirte, where evidence suggests about 500 people, civilians and fighters, have been killed in the last 10 days alone by shooting, shelling and Nato bombing.

That has followed a two month-long siege and indiscriminate bombardment of a city of 100,000 which has been reduced to a Grozny-like state of destruction by newly triumphant rebel troops with Nato air and special-forces support.

And these massacre sites are only the latest of many such discoveries. Amnesty International has now produced compendious evidence of mass abduction and detention, beating and routine torture, killings and atrocities by the rebel militias Britain, France and the US have backed for the last eight months – supposedly to stop exactly those kind of crimes being committed by the Gaddafi regime.

Throughout that time African migrants and black Libyans have been subject to a relentless racist campaign of mass detention, lynchings and atrocities on the usually unfounded basis that they have been loyalist mercenaries. Such attacks continue, says Bouckaert, who witnessed militias from Misrata this week burning homes in Tawerga so that the town's predominantly black population – accused of backing Gaddafi – will be unable to return.

All the while, Nato leaders and cheerleading media have turned a blind eye to such horrors as they boast of a triumph of freedom and murmur about the need for restraint. But it is now absolutely clear that, if the purpose of western intervention in Libya's civil war was to "protect civilians" and save lives, it has been a catastrophic failure.

David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy won the authorisation to use "all necessary means" from the UN security council in March on the basis that Gaddafi's forces were about to commit a Srebrenica-style massacre in Benghazi. Naturally we can never know what would have happened without Nato's intervention. But there is in fact no evidence – including from other rebel-held towns Gaddafi re-captured – to suggest he had either the capability or even the intention to carry out such an atrocity against an armed city of 700,000.

What is now known, however, is that while the death toll in Libya when Nato intervened was perhaps around 1,000-2,000 (judging by UN estimates), eight months later it is probably more than ten times that figure. Estimates of the numbers of dead over the last eight months – as Nato leaders vetoed ceasefires and negotiations – range from 10,000 up to 50,000. The National Transitional Council puts the losses at 30,000 dead and 50,000 wounded.

Of those, uncounted thousands will be civilians, including those killed by Nato bombing and Nato-backed forces on the ground. These figures dwarf the death tolls in this year's other most bloody Arab uprisings, in Syria and Yemen. Nato has not protected civilians in Libya – it has multiplied the number of their deaths, while losing not a single soldier of its own.

For the western powers, of course, the Libyan war has allowed them to regain ground lost in Tunisia and Egypt, put themselves at the heart of the upheaval sweeping the most strategically sensitive region in the world, and secure valuable new commercial advantages in an oil-rich state whose previous leadership was at best unreliable. No wonder the new British defence secretary is telling businessmen to "pack their bags" for Libya, and the US ambassador in Tripoli insists American companies are needed on a "big scale".

But for Libyans, it has meant a loss of ownership of their own future and the effective imposition of a western-picked administration of Gaddafi defectors and US and British intelligence assets. Probably the greatest challenge to that takeover will now come from Islamist military leaders on the ground, such as the Tripoli commander Abdel Hakim Belhaj – kidnapped by MI6 to be tortured in Libya in 2004 – who have already made clear they will not be taking orders from the NTC.

No wonder the council's leaders are now asking Nato to stay on, and Nato officials have let it be known they will "take action" if Libyan factions end up fighting among themselves.

The Libyan precedent is a threat to hopes of genuine change and independence across the Arab world – and beyond. In Syria, where months of bloody repression risk tipping into fullscale civil war, elements of the opposition have started to call for a "no-fly zone" to protect civilians. And in Africa, where Barack Obama has just sent troops to Uganda and France is giving military support to Kenyan intervention in Somalia, the opportunities for dressing up a new scramble for resources as humanitarian intervention are limitless.

The once savagely repressed progressive Islamist party An-Nahda won the Tunisian elections this week on a platform of pluralist democracy, social justice and national independence. Tunisia has faced nothing like the backlash the uprisings in other Arab countries have received, but that spirit is the driving force of the movement for change across a region long manipulated and dominated by foreign powers.

What the Libyan tragedy has brutally hammered home is that foreign intervention doesn't only strangle national freedom and self-determination – it doesn't protect lives either.

Seumas Milne

Instead of harrying migrants and the elderly, why not just build homes? | Zoe Williams

2011-10-27T10:14:00Z

All suggestions to solve Britain's major housing crisis seem to have significant, even terrifying, downsides. Except one

The conversation around housing in the UK has suddenly turned radical, despite the fact that the situation hasn't changed that much: it is true that 2009 and 2010 saw the lowest peacetime level of new houses built for a century (118,000, down to 102,570), but home building was never sufficient to meet demand throughout the 1990s.

And even during the building boom between 2004 and 2007, the fabled period of sunshine when we should have been mending the roof, there were still not enough roofs going up (a high of just over 200,000, set against 230,000 new households each year). The welfare reform bill, which promises to force a housing crisis of epic proportions by capping housing benefit without apparently making any reference to how much housing costs, has yet to be passed.

Yet over the past fortnight suggestions have been floated that are all either terrifying or hilarious, depending on how far up the property ladder you are. The Intergenerational Foundation, established to promote fairness between generations, suggested that the elderly be taxed, or in some other way (maybe just supertax their stairlifts?) forced out of large properties. Even though there's reference in the report to extended families, it's still a bit rich, from a foundation whose aim is to build a bridge between generations, to ignore the fact that this home-owning generation already shoulders a huge amount of the burden of our skewed housing market. According to Shelter, a fifth of 18- to 34-year-olds have had to live with their parents because they couldn't afford rent or a deposit.

Anyway, like a lot of housing policy, the idea runs aground on the fundamentals of personal liberty. As Profes sor Henry Overman, director of the London School of Economics' spatial economics research centre, notes: "Rationing housing on the basis of space sounds like a good idea until you're on the receiving end of it. Then, it suddenly involves very intrusive questions – do you work from home, do you have your grandchildren to stay, who else do you have to stay?" It sounds a bit Stalinist; and that's before we've even found any answers, that's when we're just feeling our way around the problem.

To put that in context, Overman was talking about how this housing shortfall has come about. How much did it have to do with Thatcher selling off the council housing stock? In a way that's immaterial, because that solution – "go back in time and eradicate Margaret Thatcher" – is not on the table.

But Overman's conclusion is that, while council houses did ration property on space, up to a point – accommodating people according to their need – their sale inarguably redistributed wealth to the poorest. So even though the effect in some cases has been that three-bedroomed flats disappeared into the pocket of private landlords, to be rented to affluent couples, wasting shelter and ratcheting up rental prices in one go, it would still be wrong for a progressive to decry it. People on low incomes got on the housing ladder who never – certainly not now, and probably not before – would have been able to otherwise.

This week a BBC website article suggested more radical solutions. Among them: contain population growth (a veiled way of saying "halt migration", given that its main proponent was Andrew Green from Migration Watch); and ban second homes (to which property TV presenter Sarah Beenie responded, "it doesn't fall that far from banning people from having a second child". I think we might look back on this as the tipping point, when humanity went from being a bit myopic to irredeemably mad – when we could no longer distinguish between leaving a genetic imprint and being able to go to Cornwall without having to use someone else's towels).

The Resolution Foundation found last month that it would take a low-to-middle income couple 31 years to save enough for a deposit on an average home (by which time, of course, they'd be too old for a 25-year mortgage). The question of how to get on the housing ladder is no longer even in their sights: they're now concentrating on how renting can be made more liveable and more permanent.

What nobody has so far suggested is an old-fashioned rent cap, so that instead of those on housing benefit being charged swingeing amounts and then being penalised for it by local authorities, the landlords are asked to rein it in a bit instead. I love the idea, but economists laugh in its face. A small number of people are grandfathered into some cheap flat, the market is driven down, movement freezes as the few people who have a good deal don't want to lose it, and soon housing stock diminishes. "Under the most generous interpretation, it might help this generation and screw the next one," Overman notes.

So we don't want a rent cap, but we don't want an entire generation under the thumb of rental rip-offs. The most radical answer is also the simplest: more houses need to be built, and they need to be in public hands, so that private landlords are kept honest. The market only looks like this because it's all demand and scant supply.

We can argue about the nuts and bolts – the major argument, more of a door or a window, being "should the public sector build them or the private?" – but we can do that later. Setting young against old, indigent against migrant, even second homeowners against the rest: none of that is going to help.

Zoe Williams

London Fire Brigade services should be under public ownership - Darren Johnson

2011-10-25T15:39:00Z

Acknowledgements to Martin Francis' blog Wembley Matters http://wembleymatters.blogspot.com/

London Fire Brigade services should be under public ownership - Darren Johnson

Responding to the FBU, UNISON, GMB joint report ‘Privatisation of London’s fire service training and control centre report published on October 24th, London Assembly Member Darren Johnson said:

“I don’t believe that

Are the St Paul’s protesters part time?

2011-10-25T10:05:02Z

A police helicopter hovering over the tented Occupy London protest group outside St Paul’s Cathedral has detected with infra-red cameras that in the early hours of the morning, only one in 10 of the tents had anyone inside. I’m indebted to the Daily Telegraph for this information.

If true, it certainly casts a new light on the nature of protest in the year 2011.

Clearly there is something somehow not quite right about a protest that gives the appearance of 24 hour dedication, but which in reality finds only 20 of the 200 tents actually occupied at 3.00 am. The whole issue somehow feels a little less urgent, a little less committed, than it seemed to boast.

But I’m more intrigued by the position of the church in the matter. The once permissive Dean and Chapter claim it is costing them tens of thousand of pounds a week to keep the place shut for “health and safety” reasons.

Attending a remote village church last Sunday, I heard the presiding cleric expressing her dismay at the attitude of the St Paul’s authorities in shutting the cathedral doors against the protest. She conjured the commandment “Love thy Neighbour”. Indeed the Dean’s initial reaction was to do just that and to tolerate the protest on his forecourt. Later, other counsels prevailed and he had the doors locked.

It begs the question: which neighbour to love? Should it be the banker, the financier, the hedge fundista, down the road in the Square Mile, or the neighbour on your forecourt ?

Christ, we are told, “cast out the money changers”. Have the Dean and his Chapter chosen the “money changer”, over the “common protester”?

On the other hand, when I “sat in” with hundreds of others, in a student protest in 1970, we never left, even for a shower, for six long and increasingly odour strewn weeks.

Now that it seems the protesters are not quite what they seem, is a blur developing with the bankers who claimed to be “doing God’s work?”

Follow Jon Snow on Twitter: @jonsnowC4

How the Occupy movement won me over | David Haack

2011-10-24T15:39:49Z

Occupy Wall Street has wisely resisted calls for 'demands'. This great democratic experiment is bigger than any programme

All of July, I worked at an awful exploitative job, for which I was paid $5 an hour under the guise of a "stipend". Disillusioned, in August, I found the general assembly. I was captivated by their plan to occupy Wall Street – with one major objection.

At the time, I was under the impression that without concrete demands, or even a concrete message of what the movement was, we would never succeed. Without demands, I thought, we would never get support of the unions or the general public.

I believed this so strongly that during the early days of the planning, a small group of activists and I introduced a resolution to the general assembly outlining some demands. Our resolution was struck down in late August. At that point, I became a little disillusioned, but decided to stick with the movement.

On the first day of the occupation, I attended expecting the whole thing to be broken up by early evening. But I was energised around 10pm when it became clear that the police would let protesters stay the night. Still, I was convinced it would not last past the weekend.

Yet, when I returned on Monday, the occupiers remained resilient and the movement grew and grew.

So what exactly is going on in the plaza and around the world? My personal interpretation is that this movement is leading to new populist leftism. My opinion does not represent in any way the Occupy Wall Street movement as a whole. The general assembly has many different ideas about its own significance. But because of Occupy Wall Street, I believe leftist economics has now re-entered American consciousness.

This was achieved because Occupy Wall Street has carved out a cultural space where people could talk about inequality without being tied to any one solution or ideology. Ideals rooted in anarchism or direct democracy have had a strong influence over many of the protesters. Without this ideology, people like me would have succeeded in August – and the movement would be far smaller. So it's good that, through a consensus system, I was voted down.

Although I stopped thinking demands were a good idea, I became involved again in the demands issue when a reporter from the New York Times overheard an argument I was having with a friend with whom I had worked to try to push through the original demands resolution. I told the reporter that I thought that the democratic process of the general assembly was central now and that demands should take a back seat.

Two days later, I heard about the demands working group and attended their meeting, where I tried to convince them that "goals" were better language than demands. Goals can be achieved through many means, while demands imply that you are asking for something from power. Then, I discovered there already was a "goals" working group. My hope is that through the democratic process, these groups find common ground.

The strengths of the movement's democratic process were illustrated to me when I heard that the facilitation committee was discussing the way that being a facilitator can give one too much power. The very fact that this is something the committee talks about shows how much hope there is for OWS's commitment to equality. Although there have been disagreements, I'm optimistic people will compromise over ideological differences for the greater good.

The movement's democratic process does pose new challenges. One proposal, which I opposed, was to bring in a lot of people who wanted demands to the general assembly on the days the issue was voted on. It's an interesting democratic question in their forum of direct democracy. Is it subversion to invite people in to vote? If every one is the 99%, can't anyone vote? I would answer this by using John Dewey's idea of democracy as an experiment and say that just because it can work within the system doesn't mean it's egalitarian. Trying to steamroller those who are against demands but who have put a lot into the occupation is not a good way to go.

Finally, I decided to leave the demands group for good. I believe that making a list of demands would be a tactical mistake at this point. My hope for Occupy Wall Street is that it will lead to the birth of a reinvigorated labor movement. This will create a source of power in America that is an alternative to corporations and that can be a new base of power and influence for the left. My worry is that something too concrete, too soon, will close the cultural space that OWS has opened up.

David Haack

UK riots analysis reveals gangs did not play pivotal role

2011-10-24T23:05:56Z

Official figures show those arrested came from deprived backgrounds, striking a blow to theory that tackling gang culture is key to preventing repeat of disturbances

Gangs did not play a pivotal role in the August riots, according to the latest official analysis of those arrested during the disturbances.

Official figures show that 13% of those arrested in the riots have been identified as gang members, rising to 19% in London. But even where police identified gang members being present, most forces believe they did not play a pivotal role.

The finding by senior Whitehall officials is a blow to the principal response to the riots being pushed strongly by the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith – that tackling gang culture is key to preventing any repeat of the .

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and Home Office background analysis shows that those arrested during the riots mainly came from deprived areas and had the poorest educational backgrounds. More than two thirds of the young people involved were classed as having special educational needs and one third had been excluded from school in the past year. More than 42% received free school meals.

The analysis of the ethnic backgrounds of those brought before the courts for riot-related offences varied significantly from the local population, with 42% of defendants white and 46% black. Only 7% were Asian.

The ethnic composition of court defendants was particularly different from the local area profile in three places: Haringey in north London, where 55% of defendants were black compared with 17% of young people locally; Nottingham, where 62% of defendants were black compared with 9% locally; and Birmingham, where 46% of defendants were black compared with 9% of young people locally.

The Home Office figures were based on 5,175 crimes recorded across 19 police forces – the vast majority in London, Manchester and Birmingham. More than 40% happened in town or city centres and 20% in shopping malls or other "defined retail cores". Half the crimes were committed against commercial premises. A total of 2,584 shops and other commercial premises were targeted in the riots.

The MoJ figures confirm that 90% of those arrested in the riots were male. More than half were under 20. They also confirm the more punitive nature of the courts, with 42% of those tried in magistrates courts sent to prison, compared with only 12% normally.

The analysis of arrests says that 13% or 417 individuals were identified as being affiliated to a gang by the 10 police forces who suffered the most extensive disorder.

"Outside London, the majority of forces identified fewer than 10% of all arrestees as gang members, and only two non-London forces estimated figures in excess of this – West Yorkshire (19%) and Nottinghamshire (17%). For these two forces, these percentages only represent relatively small numbers of arrestees (13 and 20 respectively)," says the Home Office report.

"In London, police reported that 19% of arrestees – 337 suspects drawn from 169 different gangs – were identified as gang members," the report adds. "However, even in London, the great majority of arrestees (81%) were not identified as being members of gangs." Home Office statisticians acknowledge that the way the 10 different forces identified gang members was not completely consistent but add: "Most forces perceived that where gangs were involved, they generally did not play a pivotal role."

The report says some incidents suggested "orchestrated offending related to gang activity", but stresses that clear examples of this were "few in number". They included targeting high-value property in Manchester and "diversion tactics". Gang members were also involved in a handful of more serious incidents including the shooting incident in Birmingham.

This analysis contrasts sharply with the picture presented to the Conservative party conference by Duncan Smith, when he said gangs played "a significant part" in the riots. An anti-riots tsar, Louise Casey, has been appointed to lead the drive against gang culture.

Instead, the MoJ analysis stresses the poor educational and socio-economic background of those arrested in the riots. "It is clear that compared to population averages, those brought before the courts were more likely to be in receipt of free school meals or benefits, were more likely to have had special educational needs and be absent from school, and are more likely to have some form of criminal history. This pattern held across all areas looked at," it says.

Alan Travis

How unions and economists could help UK #occupy movements

2011-10-24T08:05:05Z

I have a problem with the #occupyLSX protest – the big banners and posters are useless. By that, I mean they only preach to the already converted through sloganeering.

Many at the camp think ‘Capitalism is Crisis’ epitomises the protest, but I have a feeling most people going past will simply roll their eyes. People may feel uncomfortable with their squeezed standards of living but they simply aren’t aware of the scale of the crisis. Neither will most automatically blame the broader economic system for their troubles.

Here is where I think others can step in and help.

I’m not suggesting a take-over by outsiders to replace the existing banners.

But I think it’s pretty obvious #OccupyLSX lacks a wealth of information and easily accessible material on how bad things have gotten over the past few decades.

In contrast, over the pond magazines such as Mother Jones and Boston Review have put together flyers and posters with info in simple graphs that people can use (ht Stuart White).

Posters and flyers would be nice – but I think massive banners with simple info such as ’1950: top 1% controlled 20% of wealth; 2000: 65% of wealth’ would be much more thought-provoking for passer-bys (I made the figures up to use as e.g.).

Such banners would also be more inclusive than simplistic anti-capitalist messages and hammer the message home better than random interviews.

For example, the New York Times recently produced this (this is only a part of the big graph).

Why the unions? Because they have the expertise for the research and the money for big banners. They have also said they support these protests, so it’s time for them to put their money where their mouth is.

Note: I don’t mind collecting useful stats and graphs here on Libcon. Any pointers to getting started? Have you seen any useful stats for the UK? Post it below.

Hamid Karzai claims on TV his country 'will side with Pakistan if US attacks'

2011-10-23T23:06:09Z

Afghan president accused of hypocrisy and ingratitude over remarks made soon after Hillary Clinton's visit to the region

The US reacted with dismay on Sunday after the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said that he would side with Pakistan in the event of any war with America.

Karzai's remarks will be greeted with outrage by an American public already thinking him ungrateful for US military and financial support.

In an interview on Geo Television, Pakistan's largest satellite network, hours after a visit to the region by the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, Karzai said: "If there is war between Pakistan and America, we will stand by Pakistan." He put his hand on his heart and described Pakistan as a "brother" country.

The remark, which went further than other Karzai outbursts critical of the US, was viewed negatively not only in the US but in Afghanistan where opponents accused him of hypocrisy given Kabul's difficult relationship with Pakistan.

The US embassy in Kabul, responding to reporters' questions, said it was up to the Afghan government to explain Karzai's remarks. An embassy spokesman, Gavin Sundwall, tried to play down the row. He told the Associated Press: "This is not about war with each other. This is about a joint approach to a threat to all three of our countries: insurgents and terrorists who attack Afghans, Pakistanis and Americans."

A western diplomat, speaking anonymously, described Karzai's comments as unfortunate. "The phraseology could have been better," the diplomat said.

Karzai's words were being interpreted as an attempt to mollify Pakistan ahead of a US-Afghanistan military strategic agreement to be completed within the next few months. "[Karzai's remarks are] essentially reassurance to Pakistan that the US strategic relationship will not be used to threaten Pakistan," the diplomat said.

The statement was widely interpreted as a rhetorical flourish rather than as a significant offer of defence co-operation. Despite tension between Pakistan and the US, open warfare is a remote possibility.

Clinton on Sunday said there were no plans to put US troops into Pakistan but acknowledged differences with the country over securing an Afghan peace deal.

"We have to have a very firm commitment to an Afghan-led reconciliation peace process," Clinton told CNN, adding that Pakistan was not yet fully aboard. "We're about 90% to 95% in agreement between the US and Pakistan about the means of our moving toward what are commonly shared goals, and we have a work plan and a real commitment to making sure we are as effective as possible together."

Clinton's comments follow her warning to Pakistan that the US would act unilaterally if Islamabad failed to crack down on the Taliban-linked Haqqani network inside its North Waziristan sanctuary.

Karzai, who is scrambling to ensure his political future before the US military drawdown in 2014, needs Pakistani help to bring the Taliban to peace talks. In the event of a conflict, his army, which is dependent on US money and training, would be in no position to back Pakistan.

Nevertheless, the interview with Geo was at stark variance with the tone during the visit to the region by Clinton and David Petraeus, the CIA director. Clinton had flown to Islamabad and, in a four-hour meeting with Pakistan's top generals, called on the military to bring the Haqqanis to the negotiating table, destroy the group's leadership, or pave the way for the US to do so.

Karzai's interview with Geo was aired barely 24 hours after Clinton left. He said Afghanistan owed Pakistan a great debt for sheltering millions of refugees over the past three decades, and stressed that his foreign policy would not be dictated by any outside power. "Anybody that attacks Pakistan, Afghanistan will stand with Pakistan," he said. "Afghanistan will never betray their brother."

Karzai has wildly swung away from, and then closer to, Pakistan over the past 18 months as efforts to draw the Taliban into peace talks have gained momentum.

First he welcomed the Pakistani military chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, and the ISI spy chief, General Shuja Pasha, to talks in Kabul but then, this month, flew to New Delhi to sign a "strategic partnership" with India that strengthened trade and security ties between the two countries but infuriated Pakistan, where the movewas seen as a fresh sign of Afghan perfidy.

Karzai is trying to strike a balance, reaching a peace deal but also managing criticism from non-Pashtun groups and their political representatives, who accuse him of getting too close to Pakistan.

Ewen MacAskill

Declan Walsh

On demands

2011-10-22T14:11:00Z

Our own bat020 on this presently fraught subject six years ago:

...if we admit the possibility of a non-hysterical demand by the popular masses – a slogan, let us say – what would it look like? Here I'd suggest that the answer lies in the direct converse to the famous (and eminently hysterical) situationist graffito "Be realistic, demand the impossible!". Rather than formulate realistic but impossible demands, our "demands" must be unrealistic but nevertheless possible. And moreover they should be addressed diagonally, ie to both the ruling elite and the popular movement simultaneously, or more precisely, they should formally pose a demand addressed to the elite, but actually raise a slogan that engages and resonates with the movement – mobilising it and thereby subjectivating it from within.

A neat example of this was provided by an Independent front page last week. It was dominated by a table whose columns listed four "options" for the future of British troops in Iraq: what the option was, its pros and cons, who was calling for it and what its likelihood was. The leftmost column was "troops out now", called for by the Stop the War Coalition – and likelihood of this happening was, in the Independent's eyes – nil.

But while calling for troops out now is certainly "unrealistic" within the framework of bourgeois politics, it is nevertheless clearly possible – nothing in principle prevents it from happening. And it is the very raising of this demand from the radical left that has exacerbated divisions in the elite about what to do re Iraq. The demand forces its own possibility and reconfigures the frame of what is considered "realistic". One only need recall that prior to Stop the War demanding troops out now, the question of withdrawal from Iraq was never openly discussed in the bourgeois media – why, to even entertain the possibility would be Giving In To Terrorism... now we are treated to the bizarre spectacle of Simon Jenkins calling for rapid withdrawal, with a string of MI6 "experts" in tow!

But more important than this slogan's effects on the ruling elite, its exacerbation of a "crack in the big Other", is the mass political subjectivity that emerges through this crack. "Troops out now!" acts as a rallying point for anyone repulsed by the lies and prevarication that have characterised Blair's imperialist theatrics. But it simultaneously consolidates the anti-war movement, forcing all those involved to discern where our power lies, what our strengths are, and how we can rely on those strengths and powers instead of those of any putative Master figure.

One final example, this one taken from Bolshevik lore. It was June 1917 and Kerensky had formed a provisional government that included the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries – but also representatives of the capitalist parties such as the Cadets. The Bolsheviks refused to join such a government. But what was their demand/slogan to be? Their choice was "Down with the ten capitalist ministers!" – and Trotsky later explained the rationale behind this choice:
The enormous role of the Bolshevik slogan "Down with the ten capitalist ministers!" is well known, in 1917, at the time of the coalition between the conciliators and the bourgeois liberals. The masses still trusted the socialist conciliators but the most trustful masses always have an instinctive distrust for the bourgeoisie, for the exploiters and for the capitalists. On this was built the Bolshevik tactic during that specific period. We didn't say "Down with the socialist ministers!", we didn't even advance the slogan "Down with the provisional government!" as a fighting slogan of the moment, but instead we hammered on one and the same point: "Down with the ten capitalist ministers!" This slogan played an enormous role, because it gave the masses the opportunity to learn from their own experience that the capitalist ministers were closer and dearer to the conciliators than the working masses.

The precision of this slogan is astonishing. It cuts like a chisel at a fracture that only an understanding of class struggle allows one to discern. It acts simultaneously as a populist demand and a mobilising slogan. It separates those who are willing to fight from those who are not, to use one of Trotsky's characterisations of the united front. And it is a model for what our response should be to the obscure face-off between popular movements and liberal political elites that increasingly characterises this conjuncture.

Copyleft of Lenin's Tomb

Watch: Mensch ridiculed on HIGNFY #occupyLSX

2011-10-22T14:39:15Z

Last night the Conservative MP Louise Mensch tried to make some jokes about OccupyLSX, and failed miserably. Then, Ian Hislop and Paul Merton tear her arguments apart.

It’s a brilliant piece of television.

Thanks to @latentexistence for the clip

St Paul's facing closure threat

2011-10-20T15:42:56Z

St Paul's Cathedral in London says it could be forced to close temporarily because of the size of the anti-capitalist protest camp outside.

Greek clashes amid general strike

2011-10-19T19:05:58Z

Greek protesters angry at the government's austerity policies clash with police, as a 48-hour general strike paralyses the country.

BBC London features Kings Cross road safety campaign

2011-10-18T19:49:29Z

Resident Sophie Talbot braved the Kings Cross gyratory on her bike for a BBC London news piece today on London's deadly road junctions with some hair raising bike cam footage. Tom Edwards the transport correspondent does a good job summing up the hazards at Kings Cross and Blackfriars with the customary BBC gravitas. To pick up the campaign see our original post and subsequent work.

Almost unbeleivably a TfL official Garrett Emmerson, 'Chief Operating Officer of Streets' says to camera:

'for the nature of the type of work we are doing three years is a typical time'

When you look at the tissue thin plans TfL has proposed it's almost inconceivable that these could have taken three years. The clue to the most likely explanation is in the joint presentation of these plans with the Olympic Delivery Agency. ie TfL has been given a kick up the backside by the Olympics who are keen to avoid pedestrian fatalities when large numbers descend on Kings Cross to get the Javelin to Stratford.

So TfL sketched out the simplest, quickest, palliative method possible

Final judgement on Greenwich’s law centre

2011-10-18T22:30:18Z

It won’t come as a surprise, but Greenwich Council’s cabinet voted tonight to uphold its decision to withdraw funding from Greenwich Community Law Centre on Trafalgar Road.

The decision was “called in” for review by Conservative opposition leader Spencer Drury, who voiced fears that the loss of the centre would leave the west of the borough with “little or no cover” for legal help, and that proposals for replacement services were short on detail.

Greenwich has decided to change the way it funds legal advice services, dividing up each area of welfare law into separate contracts that agencies can bid for. In the past, agencies had effectively acted as a consortium, which the council says costs too much money. GCLC won none of the contracts, and will lose its funding from November.

Barry Mills, who has worked at the centre for 21 years, told the cabinet that the centre is the only agency in the borough which provides free advice for all areas of welfare law, and is still getting referrals from the organisations that are supposed to be replacing it.

The centre’s work is complex, and so are the arguments surrounding this issue. But one particular aspect – immigration law – stood out. GCLC is the only agency in the borough with staff qualified to offer advice on immigration – it’s illegal to do so otherwise. But, despite having four staff who have passed the tests, it still lost out to Plumstead Community Law Centre, which currently has no such staff.

“No reasoning has been provided for this, nor explanation, and it is extremely surprising as the centre is the only provider of free immigration advice in the whole borough, and we have 137 open cases,” he said.

“We have been running the entire workload of immigration advice in this borough for at least a year now as the previous Plumstead worker was no accredited and did very basic advice only.

“Given the council’s commitment and agenda around equality and diversity, we believe it should be reconsidered in any event as it is woefully inadequate given that immigration clients are among the most vulnerable in the community, and in our experience often exploited by unscrupulous private practioners.”

He also added that losing the centre’s base on Trafalgar Road would leave clients without a familiar place to go – weekly “outreach” work was “rarely successful” while some clients were “not mobile, with some fearful of using public transport”.

Local mental health experts are among those who have spoken up for the centre.

“We are rooted in the local community and cannot be replaced by outreach and e-mails,” he said.

GCLC won more money in tribunal awards, welfare benefits in compensation than the grant allocated to it by the council, Mr Mills explained – raising at least £345,000 last year.

“Many successes are unquantifiable,” he continued. “Stopping deportations, getting repairs done, keeping families together, stopping deportations.

“All of these things result in harmonious living and assist in social cohesion.”

But Greenwich Council’s project director Mark Baigent – in evidence barely audible thanks to the council’s shonky sound system – insisted that a “consortium approach” to providing legal help had not worked, and it had been decided to provide a “centre of excellence in each field”.

Deputy council leader Peter Brooks said the decision was “an officer’s recommendation which we thought was the right decision to make”.

“We have to make a decision, times are hard,” he added.

Council leader Chris Roberts said legal services had acted as a “cartel” before, artificially inflating costs.

“In this current climate, moving to one provider in each [legal] area is more cost effective. The council has been doing it this way, and we expect it of the voluntary sector too. It was inevitable that somebody would not succeed.”

Centre management will meet on Friday to decide their next steps – if there are any next steps to take. But their supporters are furious, and cite what they say are numerous contradictions in the council’s arguments.

Indeed, the centre and the council – which has long wanted to centralise advice services – seem so far apart, it’s hard to imagine them ever being reconciled.

Conspiracy theorists might like to look at the centre’s offices themselves – a tidy corner shop on Trafalgar Road, which looks from the outside to be in good nick… and owned by Greenwich Council. The loss to people in the Greenwich area looks very much like a potential council accountant’s gain.