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Memo to Clinton: US ain’t top dog

July 23rd, 2009 | No Comments

The US doesn’t necessarily lead the pack in world affairs – something Hillary Clinton should remember on her Asian tour

Speaking in Washington before embarking on this week’s Asian tour, Hillary Clinton set out the most definitive version yet of how the Obama administration intends to deal with the world. The US secretary of state spoke of “a new era of engagement based on common interests, shared values, and mutual respect” and of a foreign policy “blending principle and pragmatism”.

Contrasting this collaborative approach with the “for us or against us” stance of the Bush administration, Clinton said the US would opt for diplomacy first when dealing with Iran, North Korea and other nations or adversaries. There were no guarantees of success; and dialogue did not imply acceptance of repressive regimes. But “we cannot be afraid or unwilling to engage … as long as engagement might advance our interests”.

Clinton’s call for a “multi-partner” rather than a multi-polar world is the diplomatic equivalent of police brutality victim Rodney King’s famous (and unsuccessful) plea for mutual tolerance at the height of the 1992 Los Angeles race riots. “People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?” asked King. Clinton’s similar, less eloquent call for international amity and understanding may also have limited impact. Today North Korea’s hothead leadership lambasted her, saying she resembled “a pensioner going shopping“. So no breakthrough just yet.

More surprisingly perhaps, Clinton’s visits this week to India and Thailand, where she met leaders of south-east Asian nations and her Chinese, Russian, South Korean and Japanese counterparts, suggested to some that the US may struggle to maintain constructive partnerships with its allies, let alone its enemies. These tensions are only partly attributable to George Bush’s toxic legacy and resulting anti-Americanism. They have more to do with perceived changes in the global balance of power, principally a post-crash decline in US clout and a parallel expansion of Chinese and Indian influence.

In Delhi, Clinton was publicly slapped down over pre-Copenhagen pressure from Washington and others for binding caps on carbon emissions, with environment minister Jairam Ramesh complaining about mooted carbon tariffs on Indian exports. At the same time, she acquiesced in Bush’s nuclear technology deal with India, which drove a coach and horses through the international non-proliferation regime, and gave a green light to massive future US arms sales to India, hardly reassuring prospects for Pakistan.

Clinton also appears to have tip-toed around the issue of divided Kashmir, mindful perhaps of British foreign secretary David Miliband’s bruising experience in Delhi earlier this year. This is odd, given the high importance Washington attaches to its Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy and its wish that Pakistani troops, currently deployed along the Line of Control facing India, be redirected into the battle against the Taliban and Islamist militants. These and other strains are certain to resurface once the jolly bonhomie surrounding Clinton’s visit, more resembling a campaign trail meet-and-greet than a diplomatic summit, dissipates.

“Obama is committed to ratifying the comprehensive test ban treaty and strengthening the non-proliferation treaty [India is party to neither] … He also intends for the US to be part of the international effort to replace the Kyoto protocol with a treaty-based climate control regime including India, China and other emerging powers,” noted Strobe Talbott of the Brookings Institution thinktank in a recent article. Such fundamental differences do not bode well for the strengthened, strategic partnership with India that Clinton enthused about.

Clinton’s declaration in Thailand that the US was “back” in south-east Asia, and intended to give greater priority to its friends in the region, also elicited mixed responses. Her ever tougher line on North Korea, coupled with US pressure on Asean members to do more to confront the Burmese junta, makes many countries nervous.

This cage-rattling could yet prove counter-productive. Old ally Japan, for example, may be about to elect a party pledged to re-examine the role of the US military in the Asia-Pacific region. Others, such as Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, are increasingly drawn towards Beijing’s powerful economic orbit. For its part, China itself may no longer be a US enemy – but it remains unclear whether, on a range of international issues, it can really be classed as a friend. Mostly China suits itself. These days it can afford to.

Yet possibly the biggest obstacle to the “new mindset” partnerships Clinton envisaged in her Washington speech is of her own creation – her very old-fashioned assumption that, in all such arrangements, the US will naturally be top dog and pack leader. This is what Iranian conservatives term the “global arrogance”. Memo to HC: it ain’t necessarily so.

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Will you call the swine flu helpline?

July 23rd, 2009 | No Comments

A national swine flu help service is being launched today to allow more access to Tamiflu. Do you trust others not to abuse it?

The national swine flu helpline is being launched today and it will enable anyone with the checklist of influenza symptoms to get a coded number for a prescription of Tamiflu. You will also be able to use a website that provides a voucher number for an individual dose of the drug.

Andy Burnham introduced the initiative, hoping it will ease the workload of staff in doctors’ surgeries and hosptials. He has stressed that the service will use an “encryption code” which will only allow one prescription per person.

Would you use the service, rather than making a trip to see your GP? And do you trust others not to abuse the system, visiting the website to get a Tamiflu prescription when they don’t really need it?

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Will you call the swine flu helpline?

July 23rd, 2009 | No Comments

A national swine flu help service is being launched today to allow more access to Tamiflu. Do you trust others not to abuse it?

The national swine flu helpline is being launched today and it will enable anyone with the checklist of influenza symptoms to get a coded number for a prescription of Tamiflu. You will also be able to use a website that provides a voucher number for an individual dose of the drug.

Andy Burnham introduced the initiative, hoping it will ease the workload of staff in doctors’ surgeries and hosptials. He has stressed that the service will use an “encryption code” which will only allow one prescription per person.

Would you use the service, rather than making a trip to see your GP? And do you trust others not to abuse the system, visiting the website to get a Tamiflu prescription when they don’t really need it?

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Happy Maybe Day

July 23rd, 2009 | No Comments

Join me in celebrating a day of not being sure about anything. But don’t expect the Certain to thank you for it

Today is Maybe Day, a day inspired by the late writer Robert Anton Wilson. It was his hope that on this day people of all creeds and beliefs would come together and chant, “Jesus is the only son of God, maybe” “Hear O Israel, the Lord thy God is one, maybe” and “There’s no God but Allah, maybe, and maybe Mohammed is his prophet.” At this point the world would suddenly become a far saner place.

Of course, it is not necessary to congregate to celebrate Maybe Day. It is not even necessary to say those words out loud. Simply reading the words in a newspaper or a blog is enough to participate, and in that spirit may I personally thank you for joining in and making Maybe Day 2009 such a success.

But be careful: the Wars of the Certain rage around us. As Wilson pointed out, “certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude.” By celebrating Maybe Day you risk abuse from those people, the Certain, who object to the unsure, the sceptical or the deeply confused. In The God Delusion, to give one example, Richard Dawkins engages with the monotheistic viewpoint with argument, but he dismisses agnostics with insults. They are, in Dawkins’ view, the theological equivalent of the Lib-Dems, “namby-pamby, mushy pap, weak tea, weedy, pallid fence-sitters.”

To sympathise with the Certain for a moment, they do not have it easy. There are billions of people on this planet and they all have wildly differing ideas about politics, ethics, theology, art and science. It is very hard for the Certain to insist that their own position is the only right, true and undeniable one, especially if they posses a basic knowledge of mathematics and probability. You can rationalise away this problem by deciding that the rest of the world is basically composed of idiots, but it is rarely a good idea to admit this publicly. We live in a culture where megalomania is frowned upon.

Then there was the relentless march against certainty that took place in the 20th century. The work of Einstein, Joyce, Picasso, Heisenberg, Leary, Jung, Lorenz and countless others showed that we do not possess a single model of our universe that can account for all that we find around us. Instead, we have a number of contradictory models, each with their own strengths and flaws, and we must decide which is the most practical to adopt for our current needs. Our task, therefore, is to keep testing those models, to evaluate probabilities and to reject once-treasured ideas when more suitable replacements are found. This is not to say that all models are equally valid; rather, it is to say that all models should be recognised as incomplete, flawed and useful only to a point. To quote Robert Anton Wilson again, “I don’t believe anything, but I have many suspicions.”

Maybe Day allows us all to cast off our certainties, if only for one day. It is a day when you are can allow yourself to be sceptical of your favoured models without any danger of damage to your ego. The Certain are invited to climb up on the agnostics’ fence and join them for a cup of their famous weak tea and a plateful of mushy pap. By sitting up on the fence, they’ll be able to see the whole territory. Maybe the Certain will be surprised by this view. Maybe they will see that the important question is not which side of the fence they should defend, but what idiot put the fence there in the first place, and exactly who benefits from leaving it up?

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The stealth of Starbucks

July 22nd, 2009 | No Comments

Focusing exclusively on market excesses distracts us from the inbuilt flaws of corporate globalisation

First, a confession. I’m writing this in a coffee shop. I spend a lot of time reading and writing in them. Worse, in Cambridge where I live, I frequent the Clone Street branch of Café Chain. In the absence of viable independent alternatives, it has become my default local, lent distinctive charm by the friendly and appallingly paid young people who work there. Right now, however, I’m in one of the many “locally-owned” coffee shops that dot North American university towns. Ironically, in many parts of the nation that invented gonzo multinational chains, it has long been possible to find sturdily unique cafes, independent bookstores, artisan-run bakeries and farmer co-operatives.

But perhaps not for much longer, and not because the local is inevitably pulverised by the global. On the contrary. Starbucks’ new stealth strategy sees it “rebranding”, or de-branding, stores to give them different names and more local “community personality”. A victim of its own success—161 branches within a five-mile radius in Central London and the famous promise to open a new one every fortnight— Starbucks has been hit by the recession and, in different ways, both by the turn to less expensive caffeine hits and a reawakening of interest in local economies. Even before the downturn, its legendary CEO, Howard Schultz, fretted about what he called the ‘watering down of the Starbucks experience’ and the loss of ‘the soul of the past’ in ‘the warm feeling of the neighborhood store’.

Nothing, obviously, that couldn’t be sourced and commodified in due course. The transformation of the quirky, the unique and the countercultural into mainstream commodity culture is not new, and Starbucks is hardly alone in enacting this relentless corporate logic. As the ubiquitous HSBC adverts insist, global success is dependent on exploiting local knowledge and cultures. Coca-Cola came to India in the 90s waving the national flag and insisting, in local languages, on its indigenity; McDonald’s succeeds in Asian countries by serving variants of local cuisines. Don’t be too surprised if fast-food joints begin to cater to the “slow food” movement, just as gigantic petroleum corporations now sport bright “green” logos.

What can be done, and is it an issue? If every human desire, including a commitment to the distinctively local can be repackaged with such global panache, perhaps this is further evidence of the futility of resisting the gigantic enclosure that is corporate globalisation.

Then again, we might reflect on how we enable corporations to play stealth games with our expectations. While consumer activism has undoubtedly brought about some limited good in relation to environmental and trade justice concerns, sometimes change itself seems to have dwindled into a set of consumer choices whereby fairness, for instance, is just another “option”. Starbucks’ conscience-soothing “fair trade” range invited the question of whether everything else it – and others with similar options – had on offer was tacitly unfair trade. While there is a real debate to be had about whether consumer campaigning for “fair”, “green” and “local” choices offers limited or substantive change, the truth is we have lost the ability to imagine economic alternatives to neoliberal fundamentalism. The more the focus remains exclusively on market excesses and abuses, the less we think about the inbuilt flaws of corporate globalisation.

Of course, when dissident alternatives enter the discussion from areas such as Brazil and Venezuela, where there have been concerted efforts to reclaim the local from private corporations, they too are subject to rebranding as “lost regions”, troublespots that threaten the stability of the world mocha order. Conversely, there is admiration for India or China when the local is appropriated, privatised and patented, actions that have worse consequences for the vegetable-cart vendor and small farmer than for coffee shops and bakeries in affluent countries. As long as we place our resolute faith in a global economic system that has shown itself to be rickety and ruthless, we remain susceptible to believing “the world is flat”, a world where, Thomas Friedman notes happily, our “choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke – to slight nuances of taste, slight nuances of policy, slight alterations in design”. Is another world still possible?

Priyamvada Gopal teaches postcolonial studies at Cambridge University pg268@cam.ac.uk

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Cruel truths from Basra

July 22nd, 2009 | No Comments

Abuse of Iraqi prisoners reveals a lack of discipline among UK troops and arrogance at the MoD

In the summer of 2002, as British troops were preparing to invade Iraq, a senior army officer emailed a colleague about a meeting that had taken place on how to handle prisoners. The officer noted that the meeting was addressed by a US army captain “who told us all about what they were doing in Bagram [in Afghanistan] and Guantánamo“. The British officer continued: “It did enable me to remind the assembled crowd … not to get too wound up in prisoners’ rights at the expense of intelligence.”

This telling exchange is among many heard over the past two weeks at the thinly attended public inquiry, adjourned today until the autumn, into the death of Baha Mousa, a Basra hotel receptionist, in the custody of British soldiers in September 2003. The inquiry has already painted a picture of a military chain of command either unsure of what interrogation techniques are prohibited under domestic and international law, or willing to ignore them. As far back as 1965, the joint intelligence committee issued a directive to military interrogators. Apart from moral considerations, it said: “Torture and physical cruelty of all kinds are professionally unrewarding, since a suspect may be persuaded to talk, but not to tell the truth.”

British and US military interrogators and security and intelligence agencies chose to forget this axiom as they captured suspected insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were also ignorant, we are told, of past controversies. After evidence of abuse in Northern Ireland, Edward Heath told the Commons in 1972 that five techniques – wall-standing, hooding, subjection to noise, sleep deprivation, and deprivation of food and drink – would be banned “in any future operations worldwide, unless parliament decided otherwise”. A hitherto secret document released at the Baha Mousa inquiry heard that senior British officers responsible for the conduct of military operations claimed they were unaware of the ruling “until it was raised in the last two weeks”. The document was dated 17 May 2004, well after Mousa’s death but a few days after another incident involving allegations of abuse of Iraqi civilians.

The inquiry heard how a British soldier screamed at hooded Iraqi prisoners, and others made Iraqis cry out in an “orchestrated choir”. According to hitherto unreported evidence at the inquiry, one soldier who happened to be passing a room in the British detention centre in Basra described seeing an Iraqi detainee “kneeling on the floor with his legs crossed behind him and his hands tied behind his back. He was hooded and had his head bowed. There was a soldier beating him really hard. The detainee had his hands tied behind his back, he couldn’t fight back.”

The inquiry heard how another detainee “was struggling to maintain the stress position and [a British soldier] was screaming at him, ‘Sit up, Grandad!’. A large soldier was kneeing this detainee hard in the back … All of the detainees were in a state of distress. They were shaking, whimpering and crying, and they had soiled themselves. He says there was a really strong smell and there were pools of faeces and urine.”

As the inquiry was getting under way in London, the Ministry of Defence was being forced in the high court to concede a separate independent inquiry into allegations that British soldiers mutilated and murdered civilians in Amara, north of Basra, on 14 May 2004. It was forced to do so after it infuriated senior judges by withholding from the court vital evidence, including correspondence with ministers, about the incident.

These incidents, and there may be more, reveal a worrying lack of discipline among British soldiers and arrogance among senior defence officials. The good thing is that lawyers, judges and human rights laws are subjecting their activities to unprecedented scrutiny.

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Apple’s Tim Cook Knocks Netbooks, No Comment on Tablet Rumors

July 22nd, 2009 | No Comments

Apple COO Tim Cook used Apples earnings call to talk down mini-notebooks – known popularly as netbooks – that have buoyed earnings for the rest of the PC market. According to Cook, price point and computing power are major factors in Apples decision to stay out of the space. However, he also refused to comment on rumors that Apple is developing a tablet PC that would bridge the product gap between the iPod Touch and Macs.
–
Despite rumors of a mini-notebook in development, Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook took some time during the companys July 21
earnings call to disparage the devices – although he also refused to comment on
whether Apple was developing a tablet computer that would serve a similar
function….


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Arguments the left has to win

July 22nd, 2009 | No Comments

We must settle our differences on issues from nuclear weapons to healthcare if we are to exert pressure on the policy makers

This week James Purnell launched a Demos project, Open Left, which is asking what it means to be on the left today. To understand the difficulties that face the left you have to start way back. For almost 10 years a consensus has developed within the three main parties inspired by the Thatcher counter-revolution, which argued that government should keep out of industry and leave everything to the market.

It was that very policy that led to the present economic crisis and which has had a dramatic effect on the level of Labour support in two ways: a falling turnout for Labour and the emergence of the BNP.

The present government has many achievements of which we can be proud, not least on the environment, but the party is seen as offering management rather than representation. Policies worked out on the sofas in Whitehall will not, in my opinion, make much of a contribution to the rebuilding of confidence among the voters.

Nor indeed will sectarian strife on the left help.

More and more people worldwide now see that the basic conflict is between the majority who create the wealth and the handful who own it and want jobs and homes, good healthcare and education, decent pensions and peace.

From where I see it now, outside parliament, the reconstruction of a strong left has to begin by developing powerful campaigns centred on the issues that concern people, which can bring in support from across the whole political spectrum.

The Stop the War movement, which has been one of the most successful in my lifetime, enjoyed the backing of conservatives, liberals, greens, as well as those on the left, and will ultimately win a majority for a policy of withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Now some generals are coming out against nuclear weapons at the moment when we are being told we may have to spend billions to upgrade them. This project is the most obvious candidate for a cut in public expenditure.

Housing is another example. We see a long housing waiting list and unemployed builders who cannot be financed because the money is going to the bankers, some of whom are getting huge bonuses, paid for by taxation.

Similarly there is great anxiety about the deliberate privatisation of the public services – which we have seen in academies and the private financing of hospital building – which leaves them outside any democratic control.

It is the same with civil liberties that have been eroded and state pensions which are still dropping behind the earnings with which they were once linked.

Then there is taxation – where the modest increase announced for wealthier people has been denounced by the City but it is nothing compared to the highest level when Churchill left office in 1945 – 95%, justified on the grounds that the money was needed to fight the war and that the rich should share the burdens that others had to bear. These arguments apply to the present economic crisis.

We have to win these arguments if we are to retain power next year.

And that means there has to be much more pressure from below on the policy makers in Downing Street. Out of such pressure will come a revitalised left renewing its commitment to serve those it has always sought to represent.

For the first time in my life the public is more progressive on all these issues than New Labour.

Democracy is the buckle that links the streets to the statute book and to renew the left, democracy must be strengthened in a world increasingly dominated by forces we do not control.

Letters to my Grandchildren, by Tony Benn, will be published in October by Hutchinson

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Irish Catholics want accountability

July 22nd, 2009 | No Comments

Continued revelations of abuse by priests in Ireland has left many Catholics in despair at the slow pace of reform

A mere two months after the Ryan Commission report on sexual abuse of children in religious run institutions revealed sickening brutality and depravity, the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland is facing yet another report on clerical sexual abuse.

Set up in March 2006, the state-appointed Dublin Archdiocese commission investigated how child sex abuse allegations against a representative sample of 46 priests in Dublin were handled by 19 bishops between 1 January 1975 and 30 April 2004. Although the commission’s report has been delivered to the minister for justice, publication may be delayed because three abuse cases involving priests or former priests are currently before the courts.

The report is expected to be harshly critical of bishops who appeared to focus on protecting the church’s reputation at the expense of children’s safety. Since his appointment, the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin‘s cooperation and openness has been considered to be exemplary, in stark contrast to some bishops. Early this year, the church’s own child protection body revealed that some other dioceses were still not fully following child protection guidelines, despite repeated assurances that they were doing so.

Unlike most of his episcopal colleagues, Archbishop Martin worked in Rome during the period under investigation, but mere absence from Ireland does not explain his stance. Aside from being personally horrified at the scale of abuse, it is likely that he has realised that until every last appalling detail is in the public domain, and until it is clear that there is a new, rigorous and child-centred approach in place, the Irish church cannot hope even to begin to regain any credibility.

The scandals have revealed divisions in the Irish church, once thought of as monolithic. Some religious orders were allegedly upset that Archbishop Martin reported to the Vatican on the Ryan Commission findings without consulting them, and by his suggestion that religious orders should pay more in compensation. Some of Archbishop Martin’s priests also report feeling extremely vulnerable because of a belief that any complaint, no matter how obviously false, will result in the accused priest being asked to “step aside” from ministry, sometimes for years.

The damage to the Catholic church has been incalculable. From the beginning, there has been a heartfelt desire among Catholics to see real leadership and accountability. Many have simply walked away. Even devout Catholics are losing patience with an institution that does not seem capable of sufficient reform. At the same time, there is sympathy for the many priests who have never abused.

Whatever the internal woes of the Catholic church, the most important thing, as one clerical abuse victim, Andrew Madden, has said, is that we do not have children of today telling their stories of clerical abuse in 20 or 30 years time. While the Catholic church will never return to its former position of power in Irish society, if it is to have any credibility as a moral commentator, it will have to demonstrate that there will never be a repeat of the darkest days of the past.

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Can I be in your pre-Raphaelite gang?

July 21st, 2009 | No Comments

Enduring anxiety about being part of the in-crowd fuels our appetite for TV like Desperate Romantics

The idea of the group – artistic, intellectual or just plain old social – has always exercised a potent pull. Think of Bloomsbury, the Algonquin Round Table and, more recently, the Young British Artists. Stories of their internecine squabbles circulate endlessly in every kind of cultural context, from lavish feature film to scholarly monograph.

The latest gang to fall under the spotlight is the pre-Raphaelites, who last night began a BBC2 six-part drama, Desperate Romantics, promising attractive young men and women romping, sprawling, brawling and deliciously reconciling. While doing a bit of painting too. As single subjects it would be hard to see how William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais or Dante Gabriel Rossetti could muster even a BBC4 half-hour documentary slot devoted to their life and work. But put them together, and you’ve got prime-time dynamite.

Where does this pull of the group on our imaginations come from? Why do we endlessly rehash the narratives attached to the coming together (and falling apart) of the Lakeland poets or the Beatles? Because we are stuck in the playground, that’s why, forever rehearsing the dramas of our own relationship with the collective. After all, who hasn’t spent a chilly lunchtime on the edge of the action, watching longingly while a gang of cooler kids holds centre court?

It carries on into adulthood, this anxiety about whether one is “in” or “out” of some notional and ever-shifting group. It’s an unusual 40-year-old who doesn’t experience a twinge of anxiety about striding over to a canteen table where a gaggle of colleagues has already set up a cosy camp. Although you know your co-workers are not about to tell you to get lost, there’s always that split second when you imagine a terrifying scenario of expulsion and abandonment.

The irony is that in real life a group is only identifiable from the outside. When you’re inside it, you can’t see it and, what’s more, you really don’t care. The Bloomsberries and the pre-Raphaelites may have gone in for a lot of self-mythologising, but they remained essentially a set of individuals, each with their own distinct tastes, beliefs and allegiances. When Rossetti woke up in the morning, he was Rossetti, singular. As the day wore on he might have experienced himself fleetingly as Lizzie Siddal’s husband or Christina Rossetti’s brother or William Morris’s friend but, even as his head fell on the pillow at midnight, it’s unlikely that the thought “I am a founding member of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” trotted through his head. It was only to jealous outsiders and fascinated posterity that he became fixed in aspic at the centre of a golden gang of clever, beautiful people, forever gathered in a shabby-chic studio somewhere off Chelsea.

It is to assuage these panicky feelings of anomic individualism that we continue to need stories about coherent cohorts. Take the smashingly successful Friends, Cheers and Sex in the City. According to their formatted rules of engagement, a group of friends may endlessly row, sleep and make up with one another. They can even travel to the other side of the world for a couple of episodes, or get het up about a wacky sibling or a new boyfriend. Heck, they can even star in their own spin-off series. But what they must never ever do is grow bored or disillusioned or wander off to find someone else to play with. For what keeps us watching repeats of these programmes is the delicious fantasy that somewhere – in Boston or New York – there is a group of individuals that has found the secret to holding together, week after week. Here is a world where no one ever decides that, actually, just for tonight, they’d really rather be by themselves.

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A fleet for the future

July 21st, 2009 | No Comments

Britain’s national security depends on our efforts at sea – on well-equipped, versatile naval forces

Strategy is often misunderstood; it is about consequences and outcomes, the plan by which all the instruments of national power – diplomatic, intellectual military and economic – are to be employed in achieving identified goals in support of the national interest. That necessitates making choices and setting priorities, now and for the future, because ours is an uncertain world characterised by a rapid, often confounding rate of change – pandemics, climate change, resource constraints, conflicts fuelled by ideology, ethnicity and more, all of which present security challenges, some novel.

Last month’s update to the government’s national security strategy – Security for the Next Generation – affirms the commitment to agile, deployable armed forces as vital contributors to the nation’s security, at home or overseas. The government recognises that the UK’s interests are governed by geostrategic truths: we are an island nation with global trading interests, we have many UK overseas territories and nationals living abroad, and we very much depend on our ability to influence events through multilateral engagement. Those truths inform and define the UK’s interests. The role of strategy, which has to be sufficiently adaptable to accommodate the uncertainties of a changing world, is to determine where the priorities for protecting and promoting our national interests lie.

Current operations have to be the priority. The armed forces are doing a remarkable job conducting joint operations in Afghanistan, while continuing to meet a range of standing commitments that contribute so much to the defence and security of our country by dealing with threats at arm’s length.

Our focus on enduring campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan should not blind us to the longer-term implications of the UK’s geostrategic reality. Our ability to deploy globally and use the seas in support of operations is key to the success of the armed forces in war and time of tension; whether it means dropping Royal Marines into Iraq from carriers in the Gulf, as we did in 2003, or using warships to evacuate UK nationals from Lebanon in 2006. The sea can be a barrier or a highway, depending on who controls it, so the Royal Navy can shape future events as well as determine them.

But, even more fundamentally, the global sea lanes are the arteries along which the economy of this island nation flows. We are increasingly and heavily reliant on imported raw materials, goods, food and especially energy. We live in a “just enough, just in time economy” – if the sea lanes are denied to us, the supermarket shelves fall empty and the lights go out. The strategy for the UK has to be a balanced one, to offer the government the greatest possible range of options. There is an important maritime dimension to this and it is a dimension to which all of our armed forces, alongside other instruments of national power, can contribute strongly. First, global interdependence and our reliance on the sea mean that the potential for conflict between other states to directly affect the UK has grown. At the same time, the scramble for resources and valuable raw materials is increasingly being played out at sea: the “cod wars” of the 1970s have given way to disputed maritime boundary claims as states vie to establish their access to the sea and the mineral and food wealth beneath it. In the Pacific and Indian oceans, states are expanding maritime forces and establishing strategically positioned naval bases to promote and protect their growing influence and wealth.

For those prepared to think longer-term, the UK’s national interests will continue to rely in large part, as they always have, on a Royal Navy that is sufficiently capable of underwriting the country’s security and prosperity.

That means a fleet, not of extravagant size, but big enough to have a meaningful presence, and with a balance of capabilities that give it global reach and the ability to guarantee the delivery ashore and protection of land forces. A globally capable fleet brings many benefits to the UK. Key among them are, first, the ability to act strategically with low political overheads, to deliver influence, support or military force without having to commit land forces. Second is the ability to build alliances and trust as a hedge against an uncertain future through multinational operations at sea with the maritime forces of many other countries. As a nation, you can surge military forces in response to a developing crisis, but you can’t surge familiarity, trust and co-operation.

In the final analysis, a capable fleet is as much about deterring aggression and influencing friends as it is about delivering combat power at sea or from the sea. While we will always need to fight and win if necessary, when it comes to the future we shouldn’t overlook the value to this country of the wars we won’t have to fight as a result of using the Royal Navy strategically as an instrument of national power.

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Can you call for the abolition of the monarchy without risking the noose?

July 21st, 2009 | No Comments

As long as pabloquema isn’t plotting the Queen’s death, Anna Fairclough is confident he can avoid prosecution for treason

pabloquema asks:

As a subject of the British crown, how do I call for the abolition of the monarchy without risking the noose?

To keep this reply reasonably short, I am going to assume that you are not actually advocating or plotting the Queen’s death, which could amount to treason, carrying a penalty of life imprisonment (in addition to the penalties for any other offences you may commit).

Probably more to the point is section 3a of the Treason Felony Act 1848, which makes it an offence for any person (British subject or not) to call for the abolition of the monarchy. The wording of the act is as follows:

. . . If any person whatsoever shall, within the United Kingdom or without, compass, imagine, invent, devise, or intend to deprive or depose our Most Gracious Lady the Queen, . . . from the style, honour, or royal name of the imperial crown of the United Kingdom, or of any other of her Majesty’s dominions and countries, or to levy war against her Majesty, . . . within any part of the United Kingdom, in order by force or constraint to compel her . . . to change her . . . measures or counsels, or in order to put any force or constraint upon or in order to intimidate or overawe both houses or either house of parliament, or to move or stir any foreigner or stranger with force to invade the United Kingdom or any other of her Majesty’s dominions or countries under the obeisance of her Majesty, . . . and such compassings, imaginations, inventions, devices, or intentions, or any of them, shall express, utter, or declare, by publishing any printing or writing, . . . or by any overt act or deed, every person so offending shall be guilty of felony, and being convicted thereof shall be liable, . . . to be transported beyond the seas for the term of his or her natural life . . .

The section can be explained in reasonably plain English as prohibiting:

1. compassing (contriving) etc generally; and

2. compassing (contriving) by publication, in order:

(a) to deprive the monarch of the Crown; or

(b) to levy war against the monarch; or

(c) to encourage foreigners to invade the UK.

It remains an open question whether calling for abolition of the monarchy by peaceful means would fall foul of (a) above, or whether only those calling for abolition by the use of force would be caught. That question came before the House of Lords in a 2003 case brought by the Guardian’s editor Regina v Her Majesty’s Attorney General (Appellant) ex parte Rusbridger and another (Respondents) but the Lords declined to decide it because, since no prosecutions under section 3 have been brought since 1883, and none were threatened, the court felt that the question was purely theoretical, and it was not the function of the courts to bring the statute book up to date.

Section 3 above would certainly appear to prohibit peaceful political debate on the virtues of republicanism. Whilst refusing to decide the point, Lord Steyn in the Rusbridger case explained that “The part of s3 of the 1848 act which appears to criminalise the advocacy of republicanism is a relic of a bygone age and does not fit into the fabric of our modern legal system. The idea that s3 could survive scrutiny under [the Human Rights Act 1998] is unreal”. If such a case were ever to be prosecuted, then, it is very likely that section 3 of the 1848 act would be reinterpreted using the Human Rights Act 1998 so as to give proper weight to the rights protected by article 10: the right to freedom of expression.

Article 10 is not an absolute right, so interferences with freedom of speech can be justified provided they meet the criteria laid down in article 10(2). Broadly, this means that interferences need to be governed by a clear and accessible law; pursue one of the legitimate aims listed in 10(2) (such as national security, public safety, the prevention of disorder or crime, the protection of health or morals, the protection of the reputation or rights of others); and be proportionate to the aim pursued.

A comparison might be drawn with the fairly recent case of R (on the application of Green) v City of Westminster Magistrates Court (2007) in which a Christian group sought unsuccessfully to bring a private prosecution for blasphemous libel – another archaic offence – against the BBC and the production company of Jerry Springer – the opera. The court considered whether the existence of the offence of blasphemy breached article 10, and decided that it did not, but only because blasphemy should be understood to be criminal only “if what is done or said is such as to induce a reasonable reaction involving civil strife, damage to the fabric of society or their equivalent.” It would not be enough to show that “some people of particular sensibility are, because deeply offended, moved to protest.” Rather, “what is necessary to make such material a crime is that the community (or society) generally should be threatened.” The test here is set so high that it is hard to envisage what behaviour would be criminal – and the offence of blasphemous libel was in any event promptly repealed following this case.

Finally, you might be relieved to see from the wording of the section above that the penalty for calling for the abolition of the monarchy is not the noose, but merely being transported beyond the seas for the remainder of your natural life. Whilst that might not sound so bad, unfortunately successive legislative changes mean that the penalty would now be life imprisonment. Even if it were the noose, you could rely on the Human Rights Act again, because, by incorporating article one of the thirteenth protocol, the death penalty is prohibited in the UK.

So to sum up: if you are unlucky enough to be the first person prosecuted for calling for the abolition of the monarchy since 1883, you could argue that your prosecution breaches your right to freedom of expression, and if your campaign is peaceful you are virtually certain to succeed. If youadvocate the use of violence, or some particularly heinous means of deposing Her Majesty, you might face more difficulty as well as potentially committing other offences at the same time, including sedition (vilifying or degrading the Queen with intent to cause violence). Whatever happens, you won’t face the noose.

Do you have a civil liberties or human rights question for the Liberty lawyers? Post it in our Liberty Clinic open thread.

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Nanny NCT should leave us alone

July 21st, 2009 | No Comments

The National Childbirth Trust’s misguided advice about swine flu, epidurals and breastfeeding is insulting to women

We women are so irresponsible and selfish. First we refuse to breastfeed. Then we scream out for drug relief during childbirth which, as we all know, doesn’t really hurt that much at all. Now the National Childbirth Trust (NCT) wants us to think about our babies-to-be and delay getting pregnant until the swine flu pandemic is past. No longer is the state trying to nanny us. (Health Secretary Andy Burnham has said we should go about business as usual, including trying to conceive). It’s Nanny NCT that’s telling us – or rather, women – what to do.

The NCT, which organises ante natal classes, has a history of hectoring. Epidurals, they instruct, should be “used sparingly”. Instead, we should try rocking, walking, massage, aromatheraphy, hypnotherapy and something called “visualisation” while pushing. This is despite the fact that, earlier this year, a Swedish study showed that learning relaxation – exactly what happens at every NCT coffee morning up and down the country – does not reduce the need for an epidural. Even the proportion of natural births and emergency Caesareans was the same between those who took long breaths and those who took drugs during birth. But the NCT is interested in dogma, not evidence. They dismissed the Swedish report on the grounds that it “only” surveyed 1000 women.

Now another NCT dogma is being challenged by an expert. This week, Professor Michael Kramer, an adviser to the World Health Organisation and Unicef, has said that much of the evidence used to persuade mothers to breastfeed is either wrong or out of date. New formulations mean that a bottle is as healthy an alternative as a breast. Yet Nanny NCT continues to try and bully us into breastfeeding, insisting a mother’s milk is the counter to a child developing a whole range of conditions, from obesity to asthma, with allergies and heart disease thrown in.

It’s not only insulting to presume that we aren’t sensible enough to make up our own minds about when we get pregnant, how we give birth and if we breastfeed. It’s also dangerous. Such a superstitious approach presumes that if we just do everything Nanny NCT says – get pregnant outside a pandemic, give birth without painkillers, and breast feed for the first six months at least – then our babies will flourish. These are little more than old wives’ tales. Our actions alone cannot determine how our children turn out. They may have less brains, legs and breath than us, and no amount of conception planning or mother’s milk will make the slightest bit of difference. It’s not the mother’s fault if they have a child who has asthma or heart disease.

One of the most terrifying, as well as most wonderful, aspects about childbirth is that it takes us to a place we can’t control. It makes us realise that, however much we may think we can manage and plan, we can’t really. Having children brings it home how serendipitous the world really is. Nanny NCT may parade itself as a supporter of new parents. In fact, it blames them for things they cannot change.

Let’s hope, with mounting evidence against their various mantras, the NCT will keep its misguided advice to the few believers who attend its coffee mornings. It certainly doesn’t make pregnancy and baby rearing any better. It just makes us feel worse.

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Rafsanjani raises the stakes

July 21st, 2009 | No Comments

Rafsanjani’s speech was the most dramatic in recent history. It gave the lie to those who think the opposition is finished

In the most dramatic Friday sermon in the history of the Islamic republic of Iran, former president Hashemi Rafsanjani slammed the results of the presidential elections, called for the release of political prisoners and set out the most formidable challenge to the leadership of Ayatollah Khamenei.

During the reformist presidency of Khatami the idea of “red lines” was a mainstay of Iranian political discourse. The press, arts, and political comment were all free up to a point. But red lines were drawn around the legitimacy of the basic tenets of the Islamic republic and they and the person of the supreme leader were deemed to be above the cut and thrust of political debate. Although we all suspected the sympathy of the leadership for more conservative political elements, on the surface and in mixed company Khamenei managed to maintain a degree of even-handedness that allowed him at least the illusion of non-partisanship. By his unreserved, premature and unconstitutional endorsement of the results Khamenei threw his hat into the political ring. By siding with the Ahmadinejad clique, he finally stepped off his apolitical pedestal.

If Rafsanjani’s criticism was biting in its rhetorical sharpness, its real power came in the context of its delivery. At the inception of the Islamic republic Friday prayers were instituted and led by Ayatollah Taleghani on what used to be the football pitch of Tehran University. It was designed to be a means of bringing together the brains of the revolution represented by the university students and its heart in shape of the religiously devout who flooded in from impoverished neighborhoods. Taleghani was the last Ayatollah who commanded almost universal national support across the political spectrum, whose legitimacy if not seniority could only be rivalled by Khomeini himself. Imprisoned and tortured by the Shah, he was elected to parliament as first deputy for Tehran in a landslide and was one of the most influential authors of the constitution whose very principles are now being contested in the streets of Tehran.

Ayatollah Taleghani, whose sudden death deprived the revolution of a counterweight to Khomeini’s power, was to many Iranians the conscience and soul of the revolution. It would be a mistake to regard him now as some obscure historical figure, as those participants in the Friday prayers who carried his portrait, prompted by instructions on opposition websites, testify. His deployment as the latest symbol for the green movement at the site of Friday prayers delivered a withering blow to the stature of the supreme leader on the subject and at the place where it might hurt him most. The slogan “Where is my vote?” seems to have extended its remit to “Where is my revolution?” and “Where are my Friday Prayers?”

Rafsanjani’s long sermon ended with 10 devastating minutes that went to the heart of the matter: the government of the Islamic republic can’t stay Islamic if it stops being a republic. He quoted both the founder of Islam as well as the founder of the Islamic republic. The gist of both the hadith from the Prophet Mohammed and his recollection from a conversation with Ayatollah Khomeini (coming as it does from Khomeini’s most consistent and trusted lieutenant), made the same point. Leadership in Islam isn’t a matter of force, not even a matter of who has the best qualifications. In Islam, without popular mandate, leadership is meaningless.

The people who surrounded his car on his arrival at the prayers were chanting “silence is betrayal”. He didn’t disappoint them, and according to many who I spoke to he delivered over and above what they had hoped for. The blood if not the resolve is slowly draining from organisers of the election fraud. The coup’s leaders are slowly coming to the realisation that they may have established order, but that is far from being the law.

The most formidable coalition of forces is lining up behind Mir Hossein Mousavi in recognition of his position as the legitimate president of the republic. A green grassroots movement is growing, based on a denial of the legitimacy of Ahmadinejad and the orchestrators of the coup. Though it lacks familiar characteristics, a potent political force is on the march. At times the movement itself seems to be leading its leaders and prompting them to action. Those who thought that the opposition had failed will surely see now that we are still in the opening stages of this drama.

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The politics of hope

July 20th, 2009 | No Comments

Why I am on the left: Because I trust the better side of human nature to prevail against selfishness and greed

What is it about your political beliefs that puts you on the left rather than the right?

To live on the left is to live optimistically, believing in progress despite setbacks, hoping despite frequent disappointment, urging progress against rightwing nostalgia for illusory “better yesterdays”. Life on the left means trusting that the better side of human nature can prevail against selfishness and greed. Good argument can always persuade enough people to see that a more socially just society is in everyone’s best interests. Life on the left means an instinctive defence of the underdog against the over-privileged, rooting for the have-nots against the power of the have-yachts.

To be a social democrat is to understand the value of good government as the best expression of collective social success against rampant anti-state individualism. Paying taxes towards good government is not a “burden” but the most communitarian thing we do – and it buys the good life, all the things we care most for, such as health, education, safety and a pleasing environment. Yet we are wary too of any government’s potential for stifling freedoms and crushing individual initiative, seeking that delicate balance between liberty and equality. The right regards freedom to seize unjust rewards as party of human nature. The left resists all claim of “nature” as justification for winner-takes-all, eat-what-you-kill capitalism, while understanding the dynamic power of well-regulated markets.

Life on the left is a perpetual journey where definitions of social justice shift with the times. Social democrats have no ultimate egalitarian end-game, only the constant pursuit of better, fairer, kinder, more honest, more democratic ways to live together.

What do you consider made you left wing?

My parents, and as many generations before them as I know about: I can’t claim a personal discovery of leftwing verities. Gilbert and Sullivan’s song seems to be true:

That every boy and every gal

That’s born into the world alive

Is either a little Liberal

Or else a little Conservative

Set yourself down in any faraway place and it takes only a short discussion on local issues to find that same universal human fault line. Perhaps these are two sides to the human brain and societies need some of each – though a little conservatism goes a long way.

How would you describe the sort of society you want Britain to be?

Closer to the Nordics, further from American political culture, with a short and busy ladder from bottom to top as people travel more easily up and down the social rungs, without too much concern either way. That only happens in a country where lives are less sharply divided by education, class and money. Talent, enterprise, perseverance and hard work must always be rewarded, but more equally. The hard-working care home assistant deserves to be well rewarded and well respected. The FTSE CEO now earning 100 times their average employee’s wage needs to be taken down some rungs to make that possible.

What one or two changes would make the biggest difference to bringing that about?

If Labour, all of whose members and ministers believe these things, would only stand up and proclaim them, they would find far stronger social democratic support than they fear. A whole generation has never heard these basic precepts laid out fair and square, without cautious triangulations strangling the simple message about what the good society might look like. There is nothing to lose now everything is nearly lost, so why not give it a try?

Second, in the remaining 10 months, the cabinet should just do everything they ever wanted but were afraid to try. Go for broke – we’re broke already. Nail down the minimum wage by pegging it in perpetuity to average earnings, plus some, improving every year. Chase corporate tax dodgers with the same vigour they chase small-time benefit cheats – and put up posters in City wine bars to say so. Give a college place to every young person who wants one this year, or unemployment will lose another generation. Give every child the same right to music, drama, art or sport sessions out of school as middle-class children have.

What most makes you angry about the way Britain is now?

That Labour is about to lose, through their own cowardice, bungling, prevarication and lack of imagination.

Which person, event, era or movement from the past should we look to for inspiration now?

Lloyd George’s People’s Budget, and his act of parliament to push it through – both revolutionary, and successful.

Open Left, a new project at the thinktank Demos to provide a forum for rethinking political values and ideas, is launched today. What does it mean to be on the left at a time of economic and political upheaval? Read responses from Jon Cruddas, Philip Collins, Stuart White, Alan Simpson, Harry Brighouse, Rachel Reeves, Tom Bentley, Julia Gillard, Jess Asato, James Purnell, Sunder Katwala, Lewis Iwu Brian Brivati and others and add your own at www.openleft.co.uk

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Straw has wasted his chance

July 20th, 2009 | No Comments

We’ll never get a clearer constitutional moment – yet this bill is mere fine tuning. The last hope is to launch a new localism

On becoming prime minister in June 2007, Gordon Brown insisted that constitutional reform would be a major theme of his administration. Recession made it appear a luxury, but the expenses scandal has made reform, for the first time since the era of the suffragettes, a genuinely popular issue. We are as near as we will ever get to a constitutional moment.

Yet Jack Straw, the justice secretary, in the constitutional reform bill, produced not a reformer’s broom but a dustpan and brush to tidy up anomalies. He proposed that the civil service code be given statutory force; that there be an end to restrictions on protests in Parliament Square; and that parliament be given greater powers over declarations of war.

This last measure is less radical than it seems. In practice, no government can take Britain to war without the consent of parliament, which can always withhold the funds needed. Every war Britain was engaged in over the 20th century, with the exception of the 1956 Suez expedition, had the support of the opposition as well as the government. So did the Iraq war. Tony Blair was the first, in 2003, to seek explicit parliamentary approval before taking Britain to war. But that, like the current measure, was a recognition of political reality.

The position of the attorney general – also a matter of contention during the Iraq war – will not be altered. This means the government’s law officers will remain ministers, collectively responsible with other members of the government for public policy, yet also agents of the state, in which capacity they cannot be responsible to anybody. It is a peculiarly British compromise.

The main emphasis of the bill, however, is on the House of Lords. But, in place of root and branch reform, there are a series of necessary, yet minor, changes. Elections to replace hereditary peers, when one of the 92 dies, will be abolished; the hereditary peerage will atrophy until it entirely disappears. Measures will be taken to expel peers, such as Lord Archer, found guilty of serious crimes. In addition, life peers will be given the right, which the hereditaries have had since 1963, to renounce their peerages. This would enable Lord Mandelson to resign from the Lords, seek election to the Commons, and become a candidate for the premiership.

The constitutional reform bill is more interesting for what it leaves out. There is nothing on an elected second chamber, electoral reform, or a written constitution. Perhaps these matters are too difficult for a government in its last year of office, with legislation subject to the 12-month delaying power of the Lords. The government, so it seems, can put constitutional issues on to the political agenda, but cannot put them into effect.

Yet there is one area of reform where Labour could ensure improvement even at this late stage – improvement that would mean more to the ordinary voter than such glamorous issues as proportional representation or a written constitution. The government could make a reality of the new localism that all parties claim to support.

As long ago as 1992, Brown claimed in a Fabian pamphlet that “in the past, people interested in change have joined the Labour party largely to elect agents of change. Today they want to be agents of change themselves.” That should be the leitmotif of the next phase of constitutional reform – giving people greater control over public services at local level.

Labour has begun this process through the creation of directly elected mayors in London and a few other local authorities. That has enabled people of genuine independence to be elected, free of the constraints of tribal politics. The extension of the mayor system has been resisted by local councillors, fearful it will undermine their prerogatives. But there is a case for Labour to impose mayors on the large conurbations – Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle. In a recession, independent-minded figures are far better placed than traditional council leaders to secure the investment the inner cities badly need.

In 2000, Labour gave 5% of registered electors the power to require a referendum on whether their authority should have a directly elected mayor. This was the first provision for the initiative in British politics. But, if 5% of the voters can be entrusted with choosing a mayor, why should they not be entrusted with making wider decisions about the nature and scope of local services, even of services such as the NHS, which are not administered by the local authority? That would be a real example of double devolution – not just from central government to local authorities, but from local authorities to the people.

The Brown government is rather like a cricket team whose wickets remain intact, but which is yet to build a large innings. In the Commons , Straw played some sound defensive strokes. But it is time to score some runs.

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Grandmother brings war home

July 20th, 2009 | No Comments

We must debate and define our objectives in the increasingly disastrous fight against the Taliban

A grandmother’s piercing cry as the coffin of her grandson moved in front of her sounded of more than the anguish of one family. It heralded, I believe, the end of the government’s current strategy in Afghanistan.

The grandmother’s cry, which was carried on the news broadcast two weeks ago, has done more than all the groups campaigning against the British strategy in what Neville Chamberlain would have called a “faraway country”. The intensity and drama of the pain has made the bringing back of soldiers’ bodies a media and hence a political event of real significance.

What began as a politically thought-out campaign to overthrow a Taliban government has become a war that dictates the politics. Putting the politics back into the war is urgent.

Tony Blair managed, as usual, to confuse the issue. A new government that did not support or give cover to al-Qaida was required. The Taliban government was overthrown by invading forces.

This key issue of a non-supporting al-Qaida government was wrapped up in the most daring of liberal agendas. The war was also being fought for the equality of women; although that is a goal that is yet to be fully achieved in our own country.

The Taliban-enforced inequality is symbolically represented by the burka. But what can those soliders make of this kind of campaign when we allow such symbols to reign in some areas of our own country?

The most urgent task is to give our troops the very best equipment, including helicopters, pilots and more troops, but this must only be a holding operation.

Politics must now come to the fore. How much longer can we go on supporting a corrupt government that cannot even deliver order? Sooner rather than later we need to talk to the Taliban.

There is a huge difference between our wish to impose a western-type democracy of Afghanistan and of the political tradition of that country being able to respond positively. The one objective on which we should have majored is a Taliban that would attack al-Qaida as effectively as they have been fighting us.

We owe it to those Afghans who have supported us to take some time in letting them know that a change in policy might be on the way. They must be given the chance to make their own deals long before we cut and run.

Those chilling pictures of the South Vietnamese struggling to get on the last helicopters leaving Saigon are a reminder of how a withdrawal should not be accomplished.

Those who criticise this idea argue that the front line in fighting al-Qaida is clearly drawn in Afghanistan. I agree with them. The debate, however, has to be how we defend that line.

How many more coffins will have to come home before the political class realise that our strategy is losing this very war?

The chief of staff should argue rigorously for resources. But it should be the politicians who dictate the politics of the wars. At the moment the two sides are playing out each other’s role.

In another context the poet RS Thomas wrote of nailing our doubts to an untenanted cross. That single piercing cry of pain from one grandmother has ensured that a growing concern about the war is now being nailed to that cross. It cannot be long before British politics responds to the sounds that nailing.

www.frankfield.co.uk

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Don’t let them in to watch them sink

July 20th, 2009 | No Comments

Lowering university entrance grades won’t help working-class children. They need more educational opportunities earlier in life

There is something very easy and rather lazy about denouncing universities for their elitism, and suggesting (as Alan Milburn does in a report to be released tomorrow) that a lack of basic education can be made up for, by lowering entry qualifications for working class children. Universities are by their very nature elitist. They take the students who have prospered through 14 years of schooling and then give them a three-year period for, as my own a college, Goldsmiths, University of London, puts it: “a transformative experience, generating knowledge and stimulating self-discovery through creative, radical and intellectually rigorous thinking and practice”. If they have not prospered at school, young people enter university with a massive disadvantage, which will not disappear as they walk through the hallowed gates.

There is something peculiarly distressing about watching a young person arriving, full of pride and confidence about getting into “uni”, who then sinks into despair because he or she doesn’t understand what is going on around them and feels intimidated by the confidence and knowledge of better educated peers. Some drop out, or become angry with the institution, for “failing” to provide what they had expected. Some stagger on from one year to the next just managing to pass their exams but becoming more and more demoralised. Occasionally a struggling student works out how to access the help he or she needs but even then it is often too late.

One delightful second-year student came to see me because she was upset about her marks. Her work seemed to me to be of sub-A-level standard. She had presumably managed to get the required grades to get on to the course simply by doing what she had been told to do, but she had little grasp of abstract concepts and was clearly floundering. The following year she worked on a group project. The contact with other, better-educated young people, rubbed off. She began to struggle out from the narrow thicket of her own educational disadvantage. Sadly that is when the three years came to an end. It just wasn’t possible in that short time, even with lots of individual encouragement (which anyway is at a premium in a university), to make up for the lack of breadth in her earlier school and home life. This young woman wasn’t stupid, nor was she uneducated in a narrow sense, but her education had not been rich enough to get her to a level where she could take real advantage of what was being offered.

Changing educational opportunities for working-class students must start a very long time before university entrance if it is to have any real impact. Educational privilege and elitism is built into the structure of society. The issue here is not just about the impact of private schooling either. A child who has newspapers and books at home, and hears conversation about politics over the kitchen table, is already privileged, irrespective of where he or she goes to school. Indeed, according to a report in the Guardian last year, the children of parents living in inner cities who sent their children to local comprehensives for “ideological” reasons, turned out to be over-represented in terms of Oxford and Cambridge places.

Given the same education as their working class peers, the hidden extra was simply supplied by living in an intellectually stimulating environment. But why can’t a school provide an intellectually stimulating environment for those who seek it?

Getting university lecturers into schools (as tomorrow’s reports will suggest) might help. Widening the primary curriculum as suggested in the Rose Report might help too. The government could look at the example in France of providing every secondary school child with a daily newspaper. The answer cannot be to lower standards in order to get working-class young people into university and then leave them to sink. It has to lie in offering broader and more abstract thinking skills in schools so that they can compete. Only that way will they arrive at university properly equipped to enjoy a truly “transformative experience”.

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Swine flu: have backbone, carry on

July 20th, 2009 | No Comments

On the NHS website, pregnant women are advised to “avoid unnecessary travel”, while the Observer concentrates on yet more extreme counsel: that women should think about avoiding conception until the pandemic is over. That was issued by Belinda Phipps, the chief executive of the National Childbirth Trust; before you run away with it, consider that it was immediately disputed by Professor Steve Field, chairman of the Royal College of GPs.

I am loth to be too strident, when there is clearly insufficient information, and equally clearly, pregnant women are at more risk than most.

The fact of having a compromised immune system – being thereby more likely to contract disease and slower to fight it off – is something most pregnant women grudgingly accept with the heft and hassle of it all. But other factors are more worrying: the possibility of miscarriage; premature labour; birth defects. Two of the 29 fatalities so far have been mothers who had just had their babies.

What strikes me is how typical it all is of advice to the pregnant, culminating in this beautifully meaningless line from the Department of Health: “We advise everybody to plan their pregnancy carefully but we are not advising women not to conceive”. Plan carefully for what, then? The weather? The social season? It all manages to be incredibly, uselessly vague, while at the same time, panic-inducingly severe.

What counts as “unnecessary”, in travel? Work? Or just parties? What’s a crowd, just the tube, or also a bus? If you shouldn’t be at work, should you even be dropping your other kids off at school? Children, for that matter, are hatcheries for viral illness, is there some way to get rid of them altogether?

For those who aren’t pregnant (on which well done, by the way), how long should you delay? The length of the entire pandemic, which could be two years? Or just until it’s out of the headlines? If you’re undergoing fertility treatment, should you stop? If you’re over 35, should you take your chances?

I think we could all cope with uncertainties if they weren’t underpinned by the constant message, tacit and spoken, that if you were just careful enough, deployed just common sense enough, abnegated your own convenience just enough, then congratulations, Madam, you and your lucky baby will be OK.

The truth is very different: the world can’t just end: perhaps some people can stay off work but you wouldn’t get sick pay for the entire gestation; besides which, you can’t preventatively avoid your existing offspring, you wouldn’t even want to avoid them if they had swine flu, you’d more likely want to look after them; you can’t unimpregnate yourself. All you can do is have some backbone and carry on. And that, by coincidence, is what these advisory bodies lack – backbone. They should admit the limits of their own knowledge, and stop this charade that everything’s under control, if only women would act responsibly.

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Without fear of trespass

July 17th, 2009 | No Comments

To remove the need for people to defend their privacy so doggedly, make the public square safe

ID cards didn’t do it. CCTV cameras didn’t do it. Not even the Terrorism Act could rouse the masses to indignant protest about the erosion of their privacy. But recently we learned something could: news that a company called Connectivity was to launch a new mobile phone directory so appalled the nation that the service’s website crashed under the weight of people opting out, and the service was suspended. “I’d find it quite intrusive actually,” said one woman stopped on the street by BBC’s Working Lunch, whose report ignited the protests. “I think whoever gets my mobile phone [number], I should be giving it to them.”

On the face of it, this outrage seems bizarre. Go back only 20 years, and almost everyone was happy to be in the phone book. Ex-directory used to be the exception; now an Englishman’s phone is his castle. Yet the same people who think it is an affront to privacy to give out a mobile number often think nothing of revealing their date of birth, relationship status, and much more intimate details on social networking sites.

What explains this paradoxical combination of opening up in some respects, and clamming up in others? An important part of the answer is that personal information is more ruthlessly commercially exploited than it used to be. You were in the phone book simply because you had a phone. You’re on Connectivity’s website, however, because someone was paid to hand over your number.

In the past we didn’t worry about ownership of contact details because they were not treated as property. Now they have become commodified, we quite naturally want to make sure that we, and not others, retain ownership.

On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data. In a strange way, social networks recreate a virtual version of what used to be the social reality, a place where we don’t mind people knowing how to get hold of us. But we are as paranoid in the real world as we are naive in the virtual one. Whereas we once trusted that information would not be abused, we now assume that it will.

The commodification of personal data is an often-overlooked factor in the erosion of community. It explains, in part, why society is becoming a collection of individuals vigilantly guarding their own individuality, suspicious of anyone who comes too close to it. This is the darker side of the cult of privacy, with its belief that privacy is a right that needs defending. That kind of privacy needs attacking. Privacy is indeed important, but if the private sphere grows, the public square shrinks. And as the etymology suggests, that is a privation.

That is why always focusing on defending privacy risks getting things the wrong way round. The priority should not be to defend the defence mechanism, but to neutralise the attack. We need solutions that go to the roots of the initial problem, ways of eliminating the fear that people have that, if they give an inch of personal information, someone will try to take a mile.

The priority should be to make the public square safe again, not to make the private realm more of a fortress. This means more robust rules on cold-calling and junk mail, which should both be explicitly on an opt-in basis only. It also means making it possible to go to physical public spaces without having to put up defence mechanisms: it should be illegal for anyone to accost you in a public area, for commercial or charity purposes. People should be enabled to put down their drawbridges without fear of trespass, not empowered to build more moats. We need to remove the need for people to defend their privacy so doggedly, and so address the cause, rather than the effect, of our private anxieties.

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