The last three governments - two Tory, one New Labour, have been handing over housing to the private market with no awareness of the extent of the homelessness this would cause. The overspending on housing benefit has come about because it was a short-term method of preventing the homelessness which is now about to overtake the country. There will be more sleeping on the streets, crowding into the hostels and bed and breakfasts as rents become unaffordable.
New Labour did nothing to stop the sale of council flats, and these were often bought by speculators whose only intention was to sell them on at higher rates. "Buy to let" became a recognised way of making money. As recounted in the excellent Fabian Society handbook "In the Mix" by James Gregory, private developers and the housing associations which took over public housing have used market profit to cross-subsidise public housing. "The collapse of the market has now left us with a complete collapse of public housing supply," he says.
While New Labour concentrated obsessively on encouraging"aspiration" and getting the workers off the jobs vital to the country and into university education, they turned their backs on the need for either a replacement of, or a return to, the old council housing provision. They failed to withdraw the rights to sell council housing. The ludicrously high property prices can be traced directly to the shortage of housing in the country as a whole. This suits landlords and developers interested only in making huge money out of selling homes.
Both the Tories and LibDems now speak openly of places "where people cannot afford to live". Oh - so their parents and grandparents could afford it, but not the present generation? In the 'sixties, a Tory government took all restrictions off rent, and places like Notting Hill became sinister sites of evictions, with dogs and whips being used to turn out residents from leaking flats if they could not pay higher rents. Mandy Rice-Davies, a witness in a case involving the Tory minister John Profumo having shared the prostitute Christine Keeler with a Russian during the Cold War, spoke of her relationship with a Mr. Rachman. This started a deluge of investigations, resulting in the discovery that he was a ruthless rent racketeer, terrorising tenants. There were revelations of housing scandals, published first by the Insight column in the Sunday Times. Eventually, rents were brought under control, Rachmanism was stopped, and new housing, and council flats were built near Notting Hill and other places in London where rents had outstripped people's ability to pay.
Now the squares and streets where Rachmanism flourished are fashionable districts said now to be "too expensive" for low-income people to expect to be able to live in, and where the Prime Minister, who lives in Notting Hill, will be capping the housing benefit payments which enable some still to do so.
The Thatcher period saw the introduction of the idea that to be a proper grown-up, you had to own property, and New Labour did not dispel this.
Probably the best example in London of the new millionaire's bolthole is Hampstead near the Heath, where houses can now be priced at £15m. In the 'sixties, the original Hampstead residents were turned out of the picturesque cottages near the high street, now unaffordable except by the very rich. But there were some consciences around in those days. Both Tory and Labour in the old Hampstead town councils, built large council estates near the centre and preserved the big tenements provided in the previous century by charities. They also offered mortgages to first-time b uyers. The same went for other areas of London, including Westminster. The estates and tenements are still there - but for how long will people be able to afford to live in them? ends
Friday, 29 October 2010
Friday, 6 August 2010
Factory farming
The British are " animal lovers." The organisations for rescuing dogs, cat, horses, and donkeys are swamped with almost more money than they can handle. The international rescue organisations have a ready response to their appeals for dogs killed in the Phillipines, for African animals maltreated for a profit.
Yet they do not care about cows, hens, sheep, ducks, pigs, continuing to eat them though they know they have been kept in what have been called concentration camp conditions and killed barbarically? To this must now be added the sufferings of horses, transported hundreds of miles by rail and sea to be slaughtered for cheap food. According to the British government's shadow environment secretary, Mary Creagh, up to 70,000 Irish horses are sold for £10 each and then resold for meat to dealers for £500 - horses which have had hard, long lives of work. An estimated 65,000 horses are transported back and forth across Europe, mostly from Romania. The final agonies of the horses, intelligent, sensitive animals whose lives are closely linked to humans are now being recognised. "The fact that animals belong to other species ought not to disqualify them from our compassion.....raising them for our food we cause animals more pain than we gain by eating them.....Unlike scientific knowledge, which is cumulative, moral knowledge can be lost just as easily as it is gained. Historical progress means a reduction in suffering and increase in happiness for sentient beings everywhere. ...abolishing slavery, giving women the vote and legalising gay marriage fall into this category," wrote Amol Rajan in the Evening Standard in one of the most intelligent columns on this subject.
It took a long time for Britain to persuade the rest of the European Union that farm animals were sentient beings, not machines, and worthy of being treated as such. Pigs are intelligent and sociable, and like ducks and hens caring and responsible parents - in fact more responsible than many humans. We can all see the sheep caring for their young, while there are still some left out free on the fields before being exported live in appalling conditions. People will encourage their children to coo over lamb and calves. No one will tell them what the future holds for them, apart from the few farms where the welfare of the animal is still put first - cows left to graze, pigs kept outdoors, able to feed and mother their young, hens able to roam freely, ducks able to be in their natural habitat on water.
The RSPCA insists that it makes its views on factory farming clear, and has set down guidelines for the proper treatment of farm animals. But they are not obviously effective. In fact, only Government legislation could work to ensure better conditions for farm animals and so far there is no sign of this appearing. When New Labour first came in, they had an excellent manifesto for animal welfare - but they worked only on a ban on foxhunting. (At least foxes escaped being factory farmed.) At one time live exports were banned, but started again by the Conservatives way back in the 'seventies, and are still going on.
Imports of food from countries like the United States with even worse farm animal conditions would still go on even if legislation stopped cruel practices here. In his landmark book "Eating Animals", Jonathan Safran, exposing the tortures and horrors of factory farming in the United States made the point that the same things went on in the UK. There were some important differences, but "A British reader who cares about the issues raised in this book should not find any peace in being British. Approximately 800m chickens, turkeys and pigs are factory farmed in the UK every year - more than 10 animals for every human." And this did not include cows and fish.
Organisations like Viva and Compassion in World Farming have been fighting for many years to achieve change, and have had some success, particularly in the on-the-spot research by brave members which have produced painful scenes of the processes of factory farming.
Chickens can think and feel, they enjoy dust bathing, nest building and roosting, look after their young, form friendships and pecking orders - when they can. Pictures taken by Viva show chickens locked up, often up to 40,000 of thems in foul-smelling, windowless sheds with no room even to turn around or sit. The space they have is roughly an A4 sheet of paper. This is the only life they will have. Then they will appear in chicken sticks, chicken dinners, cat food
and endless chicken menus in the supermarkets. Over 850m are killed every year,hanging down from lines on the factory floor.
The latest horror are the new plans in several areas for huge cow prisons, known as "zero-grazing farms." Already planning for one in Lincolnshire includes 16 sheds housing 500 cattle each, with 8000 cows working all day and all night, being milked three times a day and meant to produce 250,000 litres daily. With no access to grass, the cattle will be forced to feed through metal bars, kept standing in metal stalls, their calves taken from them after just a few days, and with the prospect of endless calving so they will produce more milk, still with no chance to care for the calves. Still want to drink cheap milk?
Or to eat duck? Viva has filmed major duck producers and claims duck sales have dropped by 2m since the media coverage of their investigations. Certainly an impact on takeup of chicken is at last to be spotted in some supermarkets as chickens stay on the shelves, though most cookery writers still take chicken as one of the main ingredients for their recipes without any mention of whether these were free-range chickens or had gone through the hell of the factory sheds. One or two celebrity chefs have certainly taken up the case for going back to natural farming, and have had some success, but in the cheap takeaways, burger bars and most supermarkets, the message is largely ignored.
Every year in the UK, Viva reported that most of the 19 million ducklings raised for meat each year spent their short lives imprisoned in "a filthy windowless shed with up to 10,000 others." They have to fight for every drop of water." They had filthy, matted feathers and caked eyes. Yet people ordering duck in a restaurant probably thought this a compassionate choice, picturing the duck bobbing along on a lake, living happily until it was killed for human food.
Yet the saddest pictures of all for many have been of the imprisoned mother pigs, with no straw, standing on slatted bars, unable to reach their babies These are intelligent and aware creatures with individual personalities, condemned to a life of uncomfortable imprisonment. Young pigs are bundled together by their thousands in large sheds.
Earlier this year, Viva investigators randomly visited three pig farms in the north-east. At one, worn-out sows were housed on bare concrete, the word "cull" crudely sprayed on their backs. They found dead and rotting pigs and decaying piglets uncollected outside units, sows with open sores imprisoned in metal farrowing crates, pigs in concrete pens with no bedding or environmental enrichment, even though this is now illegal. On one of the farms they found tiny piglets, huddled together, covered in flies, without their mother. One was so badly crippled that he dragged himself across the floor by his front legs. Two of the farms were signed up to the Farm Assured scheme, supposedly a guarantee of better welfare. The footage was passed on to the Government department, yet two of the farms were still given a clean bill of health.
How much longer are we going to let these concentration camps and the cruelties of thousands of miles of transporting animals go on? How will future generations view our indifference and greed? And we don't even need to eat meat, or to drink milk.
Yet they do not care about cows, hens, sheep, ducks, pigs, continuing to eat them though they know they have been kept in what have been called concentration camp conditions and killed barbarically? To this must now be added the sufferings of horses, transported hundreds of miles by rail and sea to be slaughtered for cheap food. According to the British government's shadow environment secretary, Mary Creagh, up to 70,000 Irish horses are sold for £10 each and then resold for meat to dealers for £500 - horses which have had hard, long lives of work. An estimated 65,000 horses are transported back and forth across Europe, mostly from Romania. The final agonies of the horses, intelligent, sensitive animals whose lives are closely linked to humans are now being recognised. "The fact that animals belong to other species ought not to disqualify them from our compassion.....raising them for our food we cause animals more pain than we gain by eating them.....Unlike scientific knowledge, which is cumulative, moral knowledge can be lost just as easily as it is gained. Historical progress means a reduction in suffering and increase in happiness for sentient beings everywhere. ...abolishing slavery, giving women the vote and legalising gay marriage fall into this category," wrote Amol Rajan in the Evening Standard in one of the most intelligent columns on this subject.
It took a long time for Britain to persuade the rest of the European Union that farm animals were sentient beings, not machines, and worthy of being treated as such. Pigs are intelligent and sociable, and like ducks and hens caring and responsible parents - in fact more responsible than many humans. We can all see the sheep caring for their young, while there are still some left out free on the fields before being exported live in appalling conditions. People will encourage their children to coo over lamb and calves. No one will tell them what the future holds for them, apart from the few farms where the welfare of the animal is still put first - cows left to graze, pigs kept outdoors, able to feed and mother their young, hens able to roam freely, ducks able to be in their natural habitat on water.
The RSPCA insists that it makes its views on factory farming clear, and has set down guidelines for the proper treatment of farm animals. But they are not obviously effective. In fact, only Government legislation could work to ensure better conditions for farm animals and so far there is no sign of this appearing. When New Labour first came in, they had an excellent manifesto for animal welfare - but they worked only on a ban on foxhunting. (At least foxes escaped being factory farmed.) At one time live exports were banned, but started again by the Conservatives way back in the 'seventies, and are still going on.
Imports of food from countries like the United States with even worse farm animal conditions would still go on even if legislation stopped cruel practices here. In his landmark book "Eating Animals", Jonathan Safran, exposing the tortures and horrors of factory farming in the United States made the point that the same things went on in the UK. There were some important differences, but "A British reader who cares about the issues raised in this book should not find any peace in being British. Approximately 800m chickens, turkeys and pigs are factory farmed in the UK every year - more than 10 animals for every human." And this did not include cows and fish.
Organisations like Viva and Compassion in World Farming have been fighting for many years to achieve change, and have had some success, particularly in the on-the-spot research by brave members which have produced painful scenes of the processes of factory farming.
Chickens can think and feel, they enjoy dust bathing, nest building and roosting, look after their young, form friendships and pecking orders - when they can. Pictures taken by Viva show chickens locked up, often up to 40,000 of thems in foul-smelling, windowless sheds with no room even to turn around or sit. The space they have is roughly an A4 sheet of paper. This is the only life they will have. Then they will appear in chicken sticks, chicken dinners, cat food
and endless chicken menus in the supermarkets. Over 850m are killed every year,hanging down from lines on the factory floor.
The latest horror are the new plans in several areas for huge cow prisons, known as "zero-grazing farms." Already planning for one in Lincolnshire includes 16 sheds housing 500 cattle each, with 8000 cows working all day and all night, being milked three times a day and meant to produce 250,000 litres daily. With no access to grass, the cattle will be forced to feed through metal bars, kept standing in metal stalls, their calves taken from them after just a few days, and with the prospect of endless calving so they will produce more milk, still with no chance to care for the calves. Still want to drink cheap milk?
Or to eat duck? Viva has filmed major duck producers and claims duck sales have dropped by 2m since the media coverage of their investigations. Certainly an impact on takeup of chicken is at last to be spotted in some supermarkets as chickens stay on the shelves, though most cookery writers still take chicken as one of the main ingredients for their recipes without any mention of whether these were free-range chickens or had gone through the hell of the factory sheds. One or two celebrity chefs have certainly taken up the case for going back to natural farming, and have had some success, but in the cheap takeaways, burger bars and most supermarkets, the message is largely ignored.
Every year in the UK, Viva reported that most of the 19 million ducklings raised for meat each year spent their short lives imprisoned in "a filthy windowless shed with up to 10,000 others." They have to fight for every drop of water." They had filthy, matted feathers and caked eyes. Yet people ordering duck in a restaurant probably thought this a compassionate choice, picturing the duck bobbing along on a lake, living happily until it was killed for human food.
Yet the saddest pictures of all for many have been of the imprisoned mother pigs, with no straw, standing on slatted bars, unable to reach their babies These are intelligent and aware creatures with individual personalities, condemned to a life of uncomfortable imprisonment. Young pigs are bundled together by their thousands in large sheds.
Earlier this year, Viva investigators randomly visited three pig farms in the north-east. At one, worn-out sows were housed on bare concrete, the word "cull" crudely sprayed on their backs. They found dead and rotting pigs and decaying piglets uncollected outside units, sows with open sores imprisoned in metal farrowing crates, pigs in concrete pens with no bedding or environmental enrichment, even though this is now illegal. On one of the farms they found tiny piglets, huddled together, covered in flies, without their mother. One was so badly crippled that he dragged himself across the floor by his front legs. Two of the farms were signed up to the Farm Assured scheme, supposedly a guarantee of better welfare. The footage was passed on to the Government department, yet two of the farms were still given a clean bill of health.
How much longer are we going to let these concentration camps and the cruelties of thousands of miles of transporting animals go on? How will future generations view our indifference and greed? And we don't even need to eat meat, or to drink milk.
Wednesday, 16 June 2010
Compass
The achievement of Neal Lawson in founding the Compass organisation as a direction for the democratic left, and as a critic of many New Labour policies, is immense. From its small beginnings, it was able last week to muster - according to the Compass estimate - a conference gathering in London of around a thousand, produce a debate among the Labour leadership candidates, and organise17 workshops and seminars.
In his opening speech, Neal Lawson acknowledged that a good part of his audience were "people who had left Labour". But hey had still been willing to come back and discuss ways of what Lawson called a New Hope agenda. They showed they were no longer imprisoned in a New Labour groove, in spite of the presence of the Milibands and Ed Balls. An opening speaker was Caroline Lucas, the new Green party M.P. The workshops and seminars included ones on ending child poverty, how to make economic cuts fair, global poverty, climate change, moving housing up the agenda, a new foreign policy, immigration, tax dodgers, an equal voice for women, and other worthy subjects.
Many people resigned from Compass as well as New Labour in recent years. Those radicals who voted LibDem instead at the election know it was their anger against Labour which made them do this. The LibDem manifesto was actually more radical. The situation was much as it was when Labour lost the election under Harold Wilson in 1970, mainly because supporters were angry about his moral defence of the Vietnam war and the fact that he had almost decided to send troops to back the Americans.
The foreign policy workshop at Compass covered some of those reasons for disenchantment with New Labour. Seumas Milne from the Guardian made the point that NATO should now disband, the Cold War being over, the Warsaw Pact dissolved and there being no good reason for its continuation. This may seem controversial, but was in fact a stand taken 16 years ago( in a long article in our magazine the New Reporter) by Professor John Erickson, as director of defence studies at the University of Edinburgh. "... the defence of Europe, Europe at large (and very large at that) does not appear to fit within the confines shaped by NATO." The argument still continues.
Most of the Compass conference seemed to be preaching to the converted. What was lacking was the fire and anger which lost New Labour its support - that people's taxes had been used for the illegal war in Iraq, for the hopeless quest to keep "streets safe from terrorists" in an Afghanistan run by competing warlord, where foreign armies had been hopelessly beaten in the past; used for the illegal capture of people sent to the Guantanomo Bay concentration camp without hope of proper trial; rendition flights illegally taking people out of this country; the bringing in of ID cards; the mostly unreported horrors of what went on in the immigration camps; the invitations to people to spy on their neighbours and the build-up of regulations which was starting to share the ethos of Soviet or pre-Nazi societies.
And there were no outbursts, either, about the iniquity of a few big nations ruling the world, armed with enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the planet several times, and threatening intervention if any other country tried to get them. There were only calls for Trident to be reviewed or to be included in the defence review.
And, no workshop on the disgrace of the inhumanities of factory farming. Animals were pronounced to be sentient beings by the European Union years ago, capable of feeling the same physical and mental pain as humans. So what is the excuse for herding ducks where they never get near any water, imprisoning pigs on iron grids, away from the fields, and taking away their piglets at birth; cramming thousands of chickens into sheds with no room to move, exporting live animals thousands of miles without space, food or water, just so we can get cheap chicken, pork and duck for our fancy recipes? And forcing cows to have non-stop births of calves so they will produce unending supplies of milk.
Women make up roughly half of the world's population, do two-thirds of the work, but take only a tiny part in the decisions of the world's governments. If they had a half-share in making the big decisions, might the human occupation of the planet become less threatening?
Compass needs to shout louder and more bravely.
ends
In his opening speech, Neal Lawson acknowledged that a good part of his audience were "people who had left Labour". But hey had still been willing to come back and discuss ways of what Lawson called a New Hope agenda. They showed they were no longer imprisoned in a New Labour groove, in spite of the presence of the Milibands and Ed Balls. An opening speaker was Caroline Lucas, the new Green party M.P. The workshops and seminars included ones on ending child poverty, how to make economic cuts fair, global poverty, climate change, moving housing up the agenda, a new foreign policy, immigration, tax dodgers, an equal voice for women, and other worthy subjects.
Many people resigned from Compass as well as New Labour in recent years. Those radicals who voted LibDem instead at the election know it was their anger against Labour which made them do this. The LibDem manifesto was actually more radical. The situation was much as it was when Labour lost the election under Harold Wilson in 1970, mainly because supporters were angry about his moral defence of the Vietnam war and the fact that he had almost decided to send troops to back the Americans.
The foreign policy workshop at Compass covered some of those reasons for disenchantment with New Labour. Seumas Milne from the Guardian made the point that NATO should now disband, the Cold War being over, the Warsaw Pact dissolved and there being no good reason for its continuation. This may seem controversial, but was in fact a stand taken 16 years ago( in a long article in our magazine the New Reporter) by Professor John Erickson, as director of defence studies at the University of Edinburgh. "... the defence of Europe, Europe at large (and very large at that) does not appear to fit within the confines shaped by NATO." The argument still continues.
Most of the Compass conference seemed to be preaching to the converted. What was lacking was the fire and anger which lost New Labour its support - that people's taxes had been used for the illegal war in Iraq, for the hopeless quest to keep "streets safe from terrorists" in an Afghanistan run by competing warlord, where foreign armies had been hopelessly beaten in the past; used for the illegal capture of people sent to the Guantanomo Bay concentration camp without hope of proper trial; rendition flights illegally taking people out of this country; the bringing in of ID cards; the mostly unreported horrors of what went on in the immigration camps; the invitations to people to spy on their neighbours and the build-up of regulations which was starting to share the ethos of Soviet or pre-Nazi societies.
And there were no outbursts, either, about the iniquity of a few big nations ruling the world, armed with enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the planet several times, and threatening intervention if any other country tried to get them. There were only calls for Trident to be reviewed or to be included in the defence review.
And, no workshop on the disgrace of the inhumanities of factory farming. Animals were pronounced to be sentient beings by the European Union years ago, capable of feeling the same physical and mental pain as humans. So what is the excuse for herding ducks where they never get near any water, imprisoning pigs on iron grids, away from the fields, and taking away their piglets at birth; cramming thousands of chickens into sheds with no room to move, exporting live animals thousands of miles without space, food or water, just so we can get cheap chicken, pork and duck for our fancy recipes? And forcing cows to have non-stop births of calves so they will produce unending supplies of milk.
Women make up roughly half of the world's population, do two-thirds of the work, but take only a tiny part in the decisions of the world's governments. If they had a half-share in making the big decisions, might the human occupation of the planet become less threatening?
Compass needs to shout louder and more bravely.
ends
Monday, 17 May 2010
why so few women in politics?
"Where were all the women?" asked a Guardian article on the lack of women standing for Parliamentary seats. There was a stinging attack from Julie Etchingham, the ITN news presenter who anchored the election coverage. During it, she said she had "despaired of this male political club" which was testosterone fuelled. It surprised even me, an old-time feminist from Simone de Beauvoir days, who had spent years pointing out to "post feminists" that the big decisions of the world were being taken by small groups of men in suits or traditional robes. "Just turn on the TV and watch the news, and you will see them," I used to say. At last, at this election, women have begun to notice.
So why are there so few women in British political life? At least some other countries, notably Germany and the USA, have them, with successful Merkel and Clinton. The answer in this country has to be that there are few women in politics because few women want to be there. Politics, like the City, like journalism, like other fields, is highly competitive. No one is going to hand Parliamentary seats to women on a plate. They will have seriously to want them, like the male candidates. Men are stronger than women - but only physically. Hand to hand fights for the seats are not required, but enthusiasm is. Apparently, women are too little turned on by the prospect of long and boring hours in Parliament to put up a struggle, and content themselves with whining that men are not handing them power. The story of how Margaret Thatcher stood unsuccessfully for one seat after another is a tale of unremitting endurance. Few would want to emulate her record, but it is a lesson in the determination that is needed.
Twenty years ago, after much research, I wrote a full-page feature for the Guardian which shocked some of my colleagues, who were nearly all men. It recorded how hugely men overtook women in the statistics for alcoholism, crime and prison sentences and psychotic disorders. They still do. There are no reasons for women to feel inferior. They don't actually have to pay a fortune for handbags and makeup or wear totteringly high heels to prove their worth. It's already proved. A woman has won the round the world yacht race. A young Australian teenager has defied authority to win another dangerous world yachting race, A North Korean woman is the first to climb the 14 highest mountains in the world. They can compete and win on the biggest physical hurdles. And they can, also, on the intellectual ones. Girl pupils are coming out with the best school exam results in this country, giving rise to alarm that the boys are doing comparatively badly.
It is not so very long ago that the 11-plus results were weighted to give a better chance to boys, on the grounds that girls matured earlier ( a decision no doubt taken by men). That influence is still around, though it is also true that men are often the main encouragers to women having a go at the biggest challenges. These are the best men.
I remember working in the 'fifties as a reporter. You were sacked automatically if you were pregnant and from some newspapers (mine) if you married. If you drove a car, it was routine to be shouted at constantly as "a bloody woman driver" just for being on the road. It took me years to start being helpful to male drivers in
letting them turn or block the road, as I took revenge for the past. In those days a woman had to prove herself twice as good at a job as a man to be recognised. In journalism, that was simple and quite enjoyable - you could "scoop" them and land on the front page ahead of them.
Women in this country now are in the top league - in the City, in journalism, with the first national newspaper editors making their mark, in the highest realms of international political writing, with Naomi Klein shaking the market establishment and Lucy Prebble disclosing financial corruption in her revelatory City play "Enron", and women in the highest legal and medical establishments. There are women delivering the post, driving the trains, on building sites and in the Army and Air Force and Naval front lines. There is no doubt of their equality now. In many fields they are emerging as superior.
They have won maternity leave, costly settlements after legal claims of gender bias in the top jobs, care for young children provided while they are at work. Harriet Harman, if she chose to, could give the best account of why there are so few women in politics, as well as why she does not want to stand as leader of the Labour Party (too many years working close to Gordon Brown perhaps being the reason.)
In the Congo, and throughout Africa and numberless countries in the world, women are disempowered, raped, controlled, killed, regarded as no higher than animals in male reckoning. But this is a matter of physical superiority only. A man can always overpower a woman, unless she is specifically trained in martial arts. It will still be up to the African women, however much they are helped from outside, to rise up and take their rightful place.
Too much prominence is given here, in discussions about political life, about women being in politics to facilitate "women's issues" in fields of health and education. These are not women's issues, but issues for all the population. Women minimise their standing by concentrating only on matters which they regard as affecting them directly. Imagine a man seeking to get into Parliament because he wanted a higher emphasis on "men's issues."
As the international campaigner for equality, Lesley Abdela, has long spelt out, women are half the world's population and should therefore have a 50% share of the international decisions taken over war and peace and the struggle between economic stability and chaos. But they will have to want that share, and be prepared to put it first in their lives.
ends
So why are there so few women in British political life? At least some other countries, notably Germany and the USA, have them, with successful Merkel and Clinton. The answer in this country has to be that there are few women in politics because few women want to be there. Politics, like the City, like journalism, like other fields, is highly competitive. No one is going to hand Parliamentary seats to women on a plate. They will have seriously to want them, like the male candidates. Men are stronger than women - but only physically. Hand to hand fights for the seats are not required, but enthusiasm is. Apparently, women are too little turned on by the prospect of long and boring hours in Parliament to put up a struggle, and content themselves with whining that men are not handing them power. The story of how Margaret Thatcher stood unsuccessfully for one seat after another is a tale of unremitting endurance. Few would want to emulate her record, but it is a lesson in the determination that is needed.
Twenty years ago, after much research, I wrote a full-page feature for the Guardian which shocked some of my colleagues, who were nearly all men. It recorded how hugely men overtook women in the statistics for alcoholism, crime and prison sentences and psychotic disorders. They still do. There are no reasons for women to feel inferior. They don't actually have to pay a fortune for handbags and makeup or wear totteringly high heels to prove their worth. It's already proved. A woman has won the round the world yacht race. A young Australian teenager has defied authority to win another dangerous world yachting race, A North Korean woman is the first to climb the 14 highest mountains in the world. They can compete and win on the biggest physical hurdles. And they can, also, on the intellectual ones. Girl pupils are coming out with the best school exam results in this country, giving rise to alarm that the boys are doing comparatively badly.
It is not so very long ago that the 11-plus results were weighted to give a better chance to boys, on the grounds that girls matured earlier ( a decision no doubt taken by men). That influence is still around, though it is also true that men are often the main encouragers to women having a go at the biggest challenges. These are the best men.
I remember working in the 'fifties as a reporter. You were sacked automatically if you were pregnant and from some newspapers (mine) if you married. If you drove a car, it was routine to be shouted at constantly as "a bloody woman driver" just for being on the road. It took me years to start being helpful to male drivers in
letting them turn or block the road, as I took revenge for the past. In those days a woman had to prove herself twice as good at a job as a man to be recognised. In journalism, that was simple and quite enjoyable - you could "scoop" them and land on the front page ahead of them.
Women in this country now are in the top league - in the City, in journalism, with the first national newspaper editors making their mark, in the highest realms of international political writing, with Naomi Klein shaking the market establishment and Lucy Prebble disclosing financial corruption in her revelatory City play "Enron", and women in the highest legal and medical establishments. There are women delivering the post, driving the trains, on building sites and in the Army and Air Force and Naval front lines. There is no doubt of their equality now. In many fields they are emerging as superior.
They have won maternity leave, costly settlements after legal claims of gender bias in the top jobs, care for young children provided while they are at work. Harriet Harman, if she chose to, could give the best account of why there are so few women in politics, as well as why she does not want to stand as leader of the Labour Party (too many years working close to Gordon Brown perhaps being the reason.)
In the Congo, and throughout Africa and numberless countries in the world, women are disempowered, raped, controlled, killed, regarded as no higher than animals in male reckoning. But this is a matter of physical superiority only. A man can always overpower a woman, unless she is specifically trained in martial arts. It will still be up to the African women, however much they are helped from outside, to rise up and take their rightful place.
Too much prominence is given here, in discussions about political life, about women being in politics to facilitate "women's issues" in fields of health and education. These are not women's issues, but issues for all the population. Women minimise their standing by concentrating only on matters which they regard as affecting them directly. Imagine a man seeking to get into Parliament because he wanted a higher emphasis on "men's issues."
As the international campaigner for equality, Lesley Abdela, has long spelt out, women are half the world's population and should therefore have a 50% share of the international decisions taken over war and peace and the struggle between economic stability and chaos. But they will have to want that share, and be prepared to put it first in their lives.
ends
Monday, 3 May 2010
Can coalition bring freedom?
Journalists held a rally during the election campaign protesting at the number of arrests while they were working, and carrying Press passes. The National Union of Journalists has set up a new branch for photographers because so many of them have been arrested. Writing journalists who have also been hammered by Labour's misuse of the anti-terrorist laws (so misused that they were even used against the Icelandic banks during the financial crisis.)
One of the founders of the new branch told how she had been arrested while taking pictures of police action against demonstrators, hauled off to the station, strip-searched and held in a cell.
"Hands up anyone who has been arrested under section 44?" she asked, and it looked as though half the audience of several hundred were putting up their hands. Mine also went up.
But it hadn't been an arrest under anti-terrorist law. It was at Greenham Common, back in the early 'eighties. A small group of women were preparing to climb through the perimeter fencing to protest inside the base, planned as the home for American Cruise nuclear missiles. One of them had an arm in plaster, broken during a similar protest in Italy. The police spotted the group and started to rough them up and drag them away. One got hold of the broken arm and started
pulling and hitting it. I was watching from about 30 yards and took a picture on my small hand camera. Two policemen raced up the hill, grabbed the camera, and arrested me and I was marched off with the demonstrators to a holding centre inside the base. Once you are arrested, there is not much you can do. The Greenham women laughed at what they thought was a police error. I didn't. I stood at the door and shouted until someone came and I demanded to be let out because I was a journalist carrying the official identity card. In the end, I was freed. I got my camera back, but not the film.
These days, presumably I would have been taken down to the police station and strip-searched.
In Moscow around this time, the KGB had attempted to haul me off a train and take me away to an unknown fate because I had been interviewing a Russian dissident author's wife while he was in prison. I was actually in the middle of covering a Scandinavian women's peace march across Russia, which President Brezhnev had said would be given freedom to travel (as long as they carried the right banners.) The Norwegians, though not the Swedes, made such a fuss about this that the KGB gave up and let me stay on, though they tried again later. It's not quite as bad as the Soviet Union here - yet.
Henry Porter, the writer who spoke at the NUJ rally, has given the most dramatic and powerful space in the Observer to what he describes as a Britain "less free, less equal, less private and less just."
The destruction of our civil liberties during the New Labour government has been a prime reason for voters saying they will desert that party. Yet how much time has been given to civil liberties by the leaders in the election campaign? It's pensions and taxes, nearly always, appeals to the pocket and to revenge on bankers' bonuses, not to ID cards or, the expensive renewal of Trident nuclear warheads, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lack of housing and any serious attempt to increase it (compared with the huge building programmes of the 'sixties.)
The rally gave us a series of statistics about the way we have lost our freedom and these were given by Henry Porter in his article - 15,000 people wrongly identified as criminals by the Criminal Records Bureau; stop and search measures up by 182% last year; a rise of 66% in the use of the Section 44 terror law, weird use of Asbos for preventing eccentric behaviour. Over 3000 new criminal offences have been created by Labour and the prison population is the largest in Europe, bigger than it has ever been in living memory.
The cameras are watching us everywhere, our medical records are about to go on a public data base, and there are, as often in the past, plans to cut down on trial by jury, our greatest right through the ages. The cameras are watching you in the street.
The designer Vivienne Westwood was right when as a protest a few years ago she designed that T-shirt with its inscription "I'm not a terrorist, so please don't arrest me." I bought one as soon as they came out. But the truth is, I've never dared wear it.
ends
One of the founders of the new branch told how she had been arrested while taking pictures of police action against demonstrators, hauled off to the station, strip-searched and held in a cell.
"Hands up anyone who has been arrested under section 44?" she asked, and it looked as though half the audience of several hundred were putting up their hands. Mine also went up.
But it hadn't been an arrest under anti-terrorist law. It was at Greenham Common, back in the early 'eighties. A small group of women were preparing to climb through the perimeter fencing to protest inside the base, planned as the home for American Cruise nuclear missiles. One of them had an arm in plaster, broken during a similar protest in Italy. The police spotted the group and started to rough them up and drag them away. One got hold of the broken arm and started
pulling and hitting it. I was watching from about 30 yards and took a picture on my small hand camera. Two policemen raced up the hill, grabbed the camera, and arrested me and I was marched off with the demonstrators to a holding centre inside the base. Once you are arrested, there is not much you can do. The Greenham women laughed at what they thought was a police error. I didn't. I stood at the door and shouted until someone came and I demanded to be let out because I was a journalist carrying the official identity card. In the end, I was freed. I got my camera back, but not the film.
These days, presumably I would have been taken down to the police station and strip-searched.
In Moscow around this time, the KGB had attempted to haul me off a train and take me away to an unknown fate because I had been interviewing a Russian dissident author's wife while he was in prison. I was actually in the middle of covering a Scandinavian women's peace march across Russia, which President Brezhnev had said would be given freedom to travel (as long as they carried the right banners.) The Norwegians, though not the Swedes, made such a fuss about this that the KGB gave up and let me stay on, though they tried again later. It's not quite as bad as the Soviet Union here - yet.
Henry Porter, the writer who spoke at the NUJ rally, has given the most dramatic and powerful space in the Observer to what he describes as a Britain "less free, less equal, less private and less just."
The destruction of our civil liberties during the New Labour government has been a prime reason for voters saying they will desert that party. Yet how much time has been given to civil liberties by the leaders in the election campaign? It's pensions and taxes, nearly always, appeals to the pocket and to revenge on bankers' bonuses, not to ID cards or, the expensive renewal of Trident nuclear warheads, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lack of housing and any serious attempt to increase it (compared with the huge building programmes of the 'sixties.)
The rally gave us a series of statistics about the way we have lost our freedom and these were given by Henry Porter in his article - 15,000 people wrongly identified as criminals by the Criminal Records Bureau; stop and search measures up by 182% last year; a rise of 66% in the use of the Section 44 terror law, weird use of Asbos for preventing eccentric behaviour. Over 3000 new criminal offences have been created by Labour and the prison population is the largest in Europe, bigger than it has ever been in living memory.
The cameras are watching us everywhere, our medical records are about to go on a public data base, and there are, as often in the past, plans to cut down on trial by jury, our greatest right through the ages. The cameras are watching you in the street.
The designer Vivienne Westwood was right when as a protest a few years ago she designed that T-shirt with its inscription "I'm not a terrorist, so please don't arrest me." I bought one as soon as they came out. But the truth is, I've never dared wear it.
ends
Thursday, 22 April 2010
The Bomb - how many Hiroshimas do we need?
Over 50 years ago, I pushed a large, old-fashioned pram on the long road from the Aldermaston nuclear weapons establishment to London with the CND Easter demonstrators. My baby daughter was in it and I was teaching her to sing "Please ban the bomb" to the tune of Three Blind Mice. I called in at a pub to ask for hot water to heat her bottle. She loved it, looking round at the other marchers who were smiling and liking her company. It wasn't a brave journey. We started long after Aldermaston and my husband and his mother picked us up in the car after the last big roundabout into London. But it was one I had to make.
Later, I made others, joining a march down Fleet Street to St. Paul's and Canon Collins, leader of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, while Yorkshire Post colleagues cheered me on from their newsroom balcony, and there were many Trafalgar Square demonstrations. Most famous of these were the ones which saw a multitude of arrests and figured famous names like the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the historian E.P. Thompson. This was the Committee of 100, more dramatic and law-breaking than CND.
The Cuban crisis over Soviet missiles sited there, seemed to make a war inevitable between the United States and the Soviet Union. A friend phoned me to complain that there were no government instructions on how or where we should shelter with our young children. I told her that shelters were useless anyway. Another friend said she had dug up stones in her garden and hidden tins of food under it in case of a poisonous nuclear explosion and clouds. I thought they were both naive. As I saw it then, along with many others, we were all doomed to a nuclear war and wouldn't survive the 'sixties. I started breaking every strict parental rule to give the children anything that would at least give them some happy years because there was no point in preparing them for the future.
Journalists exposed the hidden and secret nuclear shelters built for the government. The nuclear-armed submarines carried instructions about what to do if the UK disappeared under atomic bombs - four was the number required to wipe it out, according to Professor Patrick Blackett, the Nobel prizewinning atomic scientist who became a leading opponent to the bomb.
By the 'seventies, the fears had receded, I was back at full-time work as a journalist and a chance visit to a CND Easter demonstration showed that their supporters had dwindled completely. Because of this, I suggested to the Guardian features editor I should do an investigation about what had happened to the anti-nuclear movements. "Yes, but make it international," he said. So I did. And that was how I met my heroine, Petra Kelly, leader of the Green movement, anti-Communist and anti-capitalist, who got her party into the German Parliament and proceeded to educate me, not only about the Bomb, but on how to be a feminist. "Have you been to Greenham Common?" she asked. I hadn't even heard of it. But already there for some time were a group of women dedicated to keeping American cruise missiles away from the base that was being prepared for them there.
I went to Greenham, wrote about it and kept on writing. And the Cruise missiles were, in the end, stopped, after hard winters of endurance, arrests, beatings-up, lives given over completely to stopping the nuclear arms race. Glasnost had arrived. The Russians were able to come over and visit the site and the West went there in turn. The Greenham women are still around, leading figures now either protesting at the Yorkshire American spy centre, or engaged on academic research and anti-nuclear projects.
Now, anti-nuclear protest has gone into the background, as it did in the 'seventies. When did you hear about it in this election campaign, except as a desire by the Liberal Democrats for the updating of the Trident nuclear weapons programme to be included in the defence review? How many people know that the British stock of nuclear weapons is equivalent to 1000 Hiroshima bombs, as spelt out by the human rights lawyer Baroness Helena Kennedy? The Russian and American stocks, in spite of recent agreements to cut them, are large enough to blow up the planet many times over, yet we still are embarked on recyling schemes to "save the planet" in spite of the world being run by a powerful clique of nuclear armed governments and their arms salesmen.
If we seriously want it as a deterrent, why not have just one or two? Now British general have come out against the Trident warheads, saying they would rather have the billions needed to update it for conventional defence forces, because Trident is useless for any forseeable operation. What we are really concerned about is belonging to the "nuclear club" and being part of its economic and defence conferences - which is why other countries, like Iran, want to join. How sane is that?
A world governed by fear of plans to blow it up, in the hands of men who don't even appear to realise what they are handling?
But the protest movement is stirring again. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has been founded and is launching a nuclear weapons abolition day on June 5. The Flames of Hope carried along the south coast by the World Court Project which succeeded in getting them declared illegal, are going over to New York for the May meeting of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty partners to remind them that they really have to stop the proliferation and possible use of the weapons.
Don't expect this to figure in the election campaign. It is the word that is not allowed to cross the politicians' lips. Don't mention nuclear weapons, is their secret rule, it might lose votes. I left the Labour Party when I heard Gordon Brown casually mention that he would, of course, keep the independent nuclear deterrent, in a speech to a City audience. It was the casualness of it that did for me. And Pakistan is nuclear-armed, with the Al Quaida supporters in easy reach of the weapons' location and doubtless with no qualms about using
one.
Things are better than the 'sixties. Or, given the chance of accidental use, might they just not possibly be just as dangerous?
Later, I made others, joining a march down Fleet Street to St. Paul's and Canon Collins, leader of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, while Yorkshire Post colleagues cheered me on from their newsroom balcony, and there were many Trafalgar Square demonstrations. Most famous of these were the ones which saw a multitude of arrests and figured famous names like the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the historian E.P. Thompson. This was the Committee of 100, more dramatic and law-breaking than CND.
The Cuban crisis over Soviet missiles sited there, seemed to make a war inevitable between the United States and the Soviet Union. A friend phoned me to complain that there were no government instructions on how or where we should shelter with our young children. I told her that shelters were useless anyway. Another friend said she had dug up stones in her garden and hidden tins of food under it in case of a poisonous nuclear explosion and clouds. I thought they were both naive. As I saw it then, along with many others, we were all doomed to a nuclear war and wouldn't survive the 'sixties. I started breaking every strict parental rule to give the children anything that would at least give them some happy years because there was no point in preparing them for the future.
Journalists exposed the hidden and secret nuclear shelters built for the government. The nuclear-armed submarines carried instructions about what to do if the UK disappeared under atomic bombs - four was the number required to wipe it out, according to Professor Patrick Blackett, the Nobel prizewinning atomic scientist who became a leading opponent to the bomb.
By the 'seventies, the fears had receded, I was back at full-time work as a journalist and a chance visit to a CND Easter demonstration showed that their supporters had dwindled completely. Because of this, I suggested to the Guardian features editor I should do an investigation about what had happened to the anti-nuclear movements. "Yes, but make it international," he said. So I did. And that was how I met my heroine, Petra Kelly, leader of the Green movement, anti-Communist and anti-capitalist, who got her party into the German Parliament and proceeded to educate me, not only about the Bomb, but on how to be a feminist. "Have you been to Greenham Common?" she asked. I hadn't even heard of it. But already there for some time were a group of women dedicated to keeping American cruise missiles away from the base that was being prepared for them there.
I went to Greenham, wrote about it and kept on writing. And the Cruise missiles were, in the end, stopped, after hard winters of endurance, arrests, beatings-up, lives given over completely to stopping the nuclear arms race. Glasnost had arrived. The Russians were able to come over and visit the site and the West went there in turn. The Greenham women are still around, leading figures now either protesting at the Yorkshire American spy centre, or engaged on academic research and anti-nuclear projects.
Now, anti-nuclear protest has gone into the background, as it did in the 'seventies. When did you hear about it in this election campaign, except as a desire by the Liberal Democrats for the updating of the Trident nuclear weapons programme to be included in the defence review? How many people know that the British stock of nuclear weapons is equivalent to 1000 Hiroshima bombs, as spelt out by the human rights lawyer Baroness Helena Kennedy? The Russian and American stocks, in spite of recent agreements to cut them, are large enough to blow up the planet many times over, yet we still are embarked on recyling schemes to "save the planet" in spite of the world being run by a powerful clique of nuclear armed governments and their arms salesmen.
If we seriously want it as a deterrent, why not have just one or two? Now British general have come out against the Trident warheads, saying they would rather have the billions needed to update it for conventional defence forces, because Trident is useless for any forseeable operation. What we are really concerned about is belonging to the "nuclear club" and being part of its economic and defence conferences - which is why other countries, like Iran, want to join. How sane is that?
A world governed by fear of plans to blow it up, in the hands of men who don't even appear to realise what they are handling?
But the protest movement is stirring again. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has been founded and is launching a nuclear weapons abolition day on June 5. The Flames of Hope carried along the south coast by the World Court Project which succeeded in getting them declared illegal, are going over to New York for the May meeting of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty partners to remind them that they really have to stop the proliferation and possible use of the weapons.
Don't expect this to figure in the election campaign. It is the word that is not allowed to cross the politicians' lips. Don't mention nuclear weapons, is their secret rule, it might lose votes. I left the Labour Party when I heard Gordon Brown casually mention that he would, of course, keep the independent nuclear deterrent, in a speech to a City audience. It was the casualness of it that did for me. And Pakistan is nuclear-armed, with the Al Quaida supporters in easy reach of the weapons' location and doubtless with no qualms about using
one.
Things are better than the 'sixties. Or, given the chance of accidental use, might they just not possibly be just as dangerous?
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
Racism in the election.
The night train pulled into Waterloo Station and scores of black faces, tired but hopeful, looked out. We were the only ones to meet them - myself and the Daily Mirror's reporter, and we had less than half an hour to file our stories for the midnight editions.
The arrivals were from the Caribbean, shipped on boats normally carrying bananas, to work on London's Tube trains and buses. They had sold homes and parcels of land to get on the boats, answering advertisements from a London transport system in 1951 short of labour.
An arm clutched mine, and a young woman asked "How can I get to Birmingham?" Another appealed to me: "Can you tell me way to south London?" We were surrounded by calls for help and directions to places where the arrivals knew West Indians were already settled. Both the Daily Mirror and the Yorkshire Post carried front page stories about how no one from the government or the London Transport authorities were there to meet and guide the new arrivals.
Nearly 15 years later, Melbourne Good, a 45-year old immigrant from Jamaica, now with a house, job and family in south London, told me of the racist persecution he had endured to get there since those days. A general election was coming up, with Harold Wilson and the Labour Party hopeful of winning, but he said that most of his friends had torn up their Party cards and sworn they would never vote again. They had contracted out of English life. They said England was not only more deeply colour-prejudiced than most of America, but also more hypocritical about it, which made prejudice harder to fight.
"Harold Wilson has been cowardly and a coward can't win. He's tried to please everybody to catch votes, but he's ended by pleasing nobody. You have to fight for what you believe in, not be frightened of the consequences."
Now he had a shell so tough that no white rejection, no cry of "nigger" in the streets could move him any more.
Yet he had been reared in a climate of unquestioning patriotism in Kingston, where many had gone to defend Britain in the war and wore their medals proudly at every opportunity. Britain was the mother country. Unfortunately, it seemed the mother didn't love them any longer.
"My, what we thought of the British," said his wife. "Looking back, I can't believe it. They were everything wonderful to us." She pinches her arm and stares at it. "That bit of epidermis. Could you believe it would make so much difference?"
How much difference does it still make? It is now illegal to cry "nigger" in the streets, but the British National Party is having a relatively successful election campaign and guaranteed air time. White racism has been added to black, if immigrants come from eastern Europe or Asia. The white ones arrive with the same idealised notions of Britain as the former black immigrants had of the "motherland" and learn quickly how wrong they were.
Melbourne Good said he had learned to be careful, not to trust the English, and to keep out of their way. Now, thousands of others doing the street-cleaning, caring, hospital and building jobs others don't want to do, are learning the same. In the "illegal immigrant" detention centres abuse and neglect go on in our name, almost as little reported on as the concentration camps in Nazi Germany.
The LibDem's forward-thinking election agenda calls for a review of the immigrant restrictions and a review of the system. But the Tory Party have made a major attack on their proposals. And the British National Party has a freedom and acceptance it could never have had in 1951, so soon after the war against fascism. Black people are stopped and searched far more often than white and a white immigrant mending a roof without the correct papers is arrested and sent to detention. We have not changed.
ends
The arrivals were from the Caribbean, shipped on boats normally carrying bananas, to work on London's Tube trains and buses. They had sold homes and parcels of land to get on the boats, answering advertisements from a London transport system in 1951 short of labour.
An arm clutched mine, and a young woman asked "How can I get to Birmingham?" Another appealed to me: "Can you tell me way to south London?" We were surrounded by calls for help and directions to places where the arrivals knew West Indians were already settled. Both the Daily Mirror and the Yorkshire Post carried front page stories about how no one from the government or the London Transport authorities were there to meet and guide the new arrivals.
Nearly 15 years later, Melbourne Good, a 45-year old immigrant from Jamaica, now with a house, job and family in south London, told me of the racist persecution he had endured to get there since those days. A general election was coming up, with Harold Wilson and the Labour Party hopeful of winning, but he said that most of his friends had torn up their Party cards and sworn they would never vote again. They had contracted out of English life. They said England was not only more deeply colour-prejudiced than most of America, but also more hypocritical about it, which made prejudice harder to fight.
"Harold Wilson has been cowardly and a coward can't win. He's tried to please everybody to catch votes, but he's ended by pleasing nobody. You have to fight for what you believe in, not be frightened of the consequences."
Now he had a shell so tough that no white rejection, no cry of "nigger" in the streets could move him any more.
Yet he had been reared in a climate of unquestioning patriotism in Kingston, where many had gone to defend Britain in the war and wore their medals proudly at every opportunity. Britain was the mother country. Unfortunately, it seemed the mother didn't love them any longer.
"My, what we thought of the British," said his wife. "Looking back, I can't believe it. They were everything wonderful to us." She pinches her arm and stares at it. "That bit of epidermis. Could you believe it would make so much difference?"
How much difference does it still make? It is now illegal to cry "nigger" in the streets, but the British National Party is having a relatively successful election campaign and guaranteed air time. White racism has been added to black, if immigrants come from eastern Europe or Asia. The white ones arrive with the same idealised notions of Britain as the former black immigrants had of the "motherland" and learn quickly how wrong they were.
Melbourne Good said he had learned to be careful, not to trust the English, and to keep out of their way. Now, thousands of others doing the street-cleaning, caring, hospital and building jobs others don't want to do, are learning the same. In the "illegal immigrant" detention centres abuse and neglect go on in our name, almost as little reported on as the concentration camps in Nazi Germany.
The LibDem's forward-thinking election agenda calls for a review of the immigrant restrictions and a review of the system. But the Tory Party have made a major attack on their proposals. And the British National Party has a freedom and acceptance it could never have had in 1951, so soon after the war against fascism. Black people are stopped and searched far more often than white and a white immigrant mending a roof without the correct papers is arrested and sent to detention. We have not changed.
ends
Tuesday, 20 April 2010
No homes for the Election
" The single issue which could lose the Government the election is the failure of its housing policy....no Government will have so deserved a defeat.....Now we have a Cabinet with the Minister of Housing left out and a Chancellor who has said publicly that he thinks housing needs are of no more importance than education and other calls on his department."
I wrote that in a Guardian column in October, 1969. Has anything changed? No, except to become worse. Council housing has stopped, and there is no separate ministry to deal with housing any longer.
Houses are no longer regarded as homes, vital to a family's welfare ("hardworking" or not), but as a quick source of profit as the price of housing has gone out of control. In London, no one on an average salary can now afford to buy a house, and low family finances generally are crippled by high mortgage payments which in 40 years ago would not even have been procurable.
Then, the Labour government was promising 500,000 homes by 1979 - a target which was not achieved, but which at least was an aim.
Now, the Minister of State for housing and planning, who is allowed to attend Cabinet even if he is not a member, is suggesting only that there could be 100,000 new homes on surplus local authority land.
There is no air of urgency, as there was in the past, no prime place in the political speeches. Yet the lack of a suitable place to live is experienced by most people on low or average incomes in both the country and the city It is a matter of shame for recent governments , Labour as well as Tory. The high rise flats were often a design disaster of the 'sixties, but at least they represented a sense of urgency in getting people into a home with modern equipment which they could afford.
Housing shortage is a prime cause of poverty and bad living conditions. When shall we see an end to housing being simply a route to profitable investment instead of the provision of homes for all who need them?
I wrote that in a Guardian column in October, 1969. Has anything changed? No, except to become worse. Council housing has stopped, and there is no separate ministry to deal with housing any longer.
Houses are no longer regarded as homes, vital to a family's welfare ("hardworking" or not), but as a quick source of profit as the price of housing has gone out of control. In London, no one on an average salary can now afford to buy a house, and low family finances generally are crippled by high mortgage payments which in 40 years ago would not even have been procurable.
Then, the Labour government was promising 500,000 homes by 1979 - a target which was not achieved, but which at least was an aim.
Now, the Minister of State for housing and planning, who is allowed to attend Cabinet even if he is not a member, is suggesting only that there could be 100,000 new homes on surplus local authority land.
There is no air of urgency, as there was in the past, no prime place in the political speeches. Yet the lack of a suitable place to live is experienced by most people on low or average incomes in both the country and the city It is a matter of shame for recent governments , Labour as well as Tory. The high rise flats were often a design disaster of the 'sixties, but at least they represented a sense of urgency in getting people into a home with modern equipment which they could afford.
Housing shortage is a prime cause of poverty and bad living conditions. When shall we see an end to housing being simply a route to profitable investment instead of the provision of homes for all who need them?
Wednesday, 17 February 2010
Who are Falun Gong?
Truthfulness, compassion, tolerance. It's difficult to argue against these ideals. But the Chinese government do.
They are the watchwords of Falun Gong, a Chinese movement stemming from the ancient practice of meditation and exercise of Qigong. Started in 1992, it spread so quickly, its membership running into millions, that the government saw it as a dissident movement and the persecution began.
Among them are the Falun Gong artists, who are having major exhibitions in the West. There are two in London and two in Scotland, in Dundee and Aberdeen, with 40 works displayed. The New York Art Centre has assembled 61 works.
These are highly figurative artists and most of the works, visitors are told, are prints because of the difficulty of transport. But it's impossible to ignore the way the paintings glow with the certainty and belief of the artist, as well as a high technical ability. The faces catch and hold the attention, and, at best, can be reminiscent of the power of an El Greco face.
Many of the artists' work is concentrated on the imprisonment and torture inflicted on Falun Gong members since 1999, when it was outlawed,and since when an estimated 3000 have died in prison. The East Asian team of the Amnesty International international secretariat confirms this persecution, adding that it has grown greatly since the Olympic Games were held in Bejing. This is attributed to a growing feeling of insecurity in the Chinese government because of the opening up to global influences, even though they are now seen as one of the major economic powers. Perhaps that growing power in the world is one reason why little is known or heard either of Falun Gong or its artists and the unrelenting torture and rape in the prison cells of its members.
The paintings, seen in one exhibition, can unexpectedly hit the heart. An oil on canvas, by Xiqiang Dong, "My Son", has a mother's eyes peering into ours, asking why. In one arm she holds the dead body of her son and in the other a medical release slip. Prisoners are usually sent to die at home.
Another oil on canvas by Xiaoping Chen shows a young woman singing to her captor, drawn from the story of an American woman who supported Falun Gong and was arrested in Tiananmen Square
Yuan Li's "A Tragedy in China" shows a young woman sitting on a bed with her dead husband beside her with in one hand a torn, unsigned paper that reads "brainwashing papers" with his ankles still in iron hackles and with a wounded, bloodstained abdomen.
Not all deal with the persecution. Xiqiang Dong's "After the Parade" shows a woman gazing in fulfilment after the days' events, wearing traditional clothing, with a lotus flower cupped in her hand. Falun Gong followers have been returning to their roots, going back to the time before Communist rule and searching for the renewal of their proud and ancient culture.
But they have a hard fight ahead, in which many are likely to die. There are also reports of a massive trade in transplanted organs from victims, hard to verify, but which are under intense investigation. It is a huge industry in China. Amnesty International neither discount nor confirm them, but the European Parliament Vice President, Edward McMillan Scott, has condemned it saying there is enough circumstantial evidence to alert the international community to what amounts to genocide.
Amnesty International finds there is little international attention focused on this and on the high level of persecution in China of Falun Gong. Guards are given forms for each prisoner with instructions to get them to sign to their guilt, motivating guards to abuse the prisoners in any way they want.
In the past two years, there has been an increase in the crackdown on human rights in China, and no let up in the persecution of Falun Gong both before and after the Olympics. There was a very high level of persecution last year, according to Amnesty International, and the growing fear in the government of groups claiming freedom is likely to lead to higher levels this year.
The persecutions in 1999 brought with it accusations by the government of conspiracy with the US. But it is now the freedom of the movement which the Chinese government fears. With the artists now exhibiting freely in the West and with its own art organisation in Britain and an application for charitable status, Falun Gong and its art is now likely to thrive overseas, at least. When will the Chinese follow and stop the persecution?
Truthfulness, compassion, tolerance. It's difficult to argue against these ideals. But the Chinese government do.
They are the watchwords of Falun Gong, a Chinese movement stemming from the ancient practice of meditation and exercise of Qigong. Started in 1992, it spread so quickly, its membership running into millions, that the government saw it as a dissident movement and the persecution began.
Among them are the Falun Gong artists, who are having major exhibitions in the West. There are two in London and two in Scotland, in Dundee and Aberdeen, with 40 works displayed. The New York Art Centre has assembled 61 works.
These are highly figurative artists and most of the works, visitors are told, are prints because of the difficulty of transport. But it's impossible to ignore the way the paintings glow with the certainty and belief of the artist, as well as a high technical ability. The faces catch and hold the attention, and, at best, can be reminiscent of the power of an El Greco face.
Many of the artists' work is concentrated on the imprisonment and torture inflicted on Falun Gong members since 1999, when it was outlawed,and since when an estimated 3000 have died in prison. The East Asian team of the Amnesty International international secretariat confirms this persecution, adding that it has grown greatly since the Olympic Games were held in Bejing. This is attributed to a growing feeling of insecurity in the Chinese government because of the opening up to global influences, even though they are now seen as one of the major economic powers. Perhaps that growing power in the world is one reason why little is known or heard either of Falun Gong or its artists and the unrelenting torture and rape in the prison cells of its members.
The paintings, seen in one exhibition, can unexpectedly hit the heart. An oil on canvas, by Xiqiang Dong, "My Son", has a mother's eyes peering into ours, asking why. In one arm she holds the dead body of her son and in the other a medical release slip. Prisoners are usually sent to die at home.
Another oil on canvas by Xiaoping Chen shows a young woman singing to her captor, drawn from the story of an American woman who supported Falun Gong and was arrested in Tiananmen Square
Yuan Li's "A Tragedy in China" shows a young woman sitting on a bed with her dead husband beside her with in one hand a torn, unsigned paper that reads "brainwashing papers" with his ankles still in iron hackles and with a wounded, bloodstained abdomen.
Not all deal with the persecution. Xiqiang Dong's "After the Parade" shows a woman gazing in fulfilment after the days' events, wearing traditional clothing, with a lotus flower cupped in her hand. Falun Gong followers have been returning to their roots, going back to the time before Communist rule and searching for the renewal of their proud and ancient culture.
But they have a hard fight ahead, in which many are likely to die. There are also reports of a massive trade in transplanted organs from victims, hard to verify, but which are under intense investigation. It is a huge industry in China. Amnesty International neither discount nor confirm them, but the European Parliament Vice President, Edward McMillan Scott, has condemned it saying there is enough circumstantial evidence to alert the international community to what amounts to genocide.
Amnesty International finds there is little international attention focused on this and on the high level of persecution in China of Falun Gong. Guards are given forms for each prisoner with instructions to get them to sign to their guilt, motivating guards to abuse the prisoners in any way they want.
In the past two years, there has been an increase in the crackdown on human rights in China, and no let up in the persecution of Falun Gong both before and after the Olympics. There was a very high level of persecution last year, according to Amnesty International, and the growing fear in the government of groups claiming freedom is likely to lead to higher levels this year.
The persecutions in 1999 brought with it accusations by the government of conspiracy with the US. But it is now the freedom of the movement which the Chinese government fears. With the artists now exhibiting freely in the West and with its own art organisation in Britain and an application for charitable status, Falun Gong and its art is now likely to thrive overseas, at least. When will the Chinese follow and stop the persecution?
Friday, 12 February 2010
In the final stages of the last war, what the British called "pilotless planes" terrorised London. The bombing blitzes of the earlier years of the war had passed. These could produce equal and even worse destruction.
Produced by the Nazis with slave labour, there were two types. The first was the VI. You could hear it coming, slowly, then the engine sound would break off, and a few seconds later there would be an almighty explosion. They were not, apparently, aimed at anywhere in particular. It might be a hospital, the Cafe de Paris, a school. The result was the same - total death and destruction.
The later type, the V2, arrived in 1945, the year the war ended. This was even more frightening. There was a short warning of the VI arrival, from the forces keeping watch on the coast, and from the noise of its engine. You only knew the V2 had arrived when its deadly cargo landed on its random target. I was in hospital in London, having a minor operation on my neck, during the V2 blitz. Recovery meant lying in bed and waiting for the next huge explosion,. There would usually be three or four each day - there may have been more, but these were the ones I heard from the hospital in Marylebone. It just meant that you lay there waiting for the next one to land on the hospital.
The US bombers were still taking off nightly from their bases 40 miles away at Newbury, and elsewhere in the West,sto bomb Berlin. But there was no protection against the V2's, no air raid warnings, no hope of getting to a shelter.
And now it is happening again. This time they are called Drones, and it is the Americans, not the Nazis, who are operating them. The Unmanned Ariel Vehicles, their formal name, are targeted and directed through space technology. In Afghanistan, hundreds of people have been killed by drone attacks and Israel, which also uses them, has been accused of killing Palestinians during the January attack. They are being used extensively in Pakistan.
Pilots in California operate the drones 7000 miles away over Iraq. They can see the results of the damage and death they have caused on their computer screens. They are said to be suffering battlefield type stress, and if they have any hearts, no wonder.
There has been high-level condemnation of drones, both in the US and here, where Professor Paul Rogers, the eminent peace studies academic, believes that drone deployments would be better termed as air raids. He thinks that the drone attacks in western Pakistan are actually helping and encouraging support for Al Quaeda. Lord Bingham, recently the senior law lord, has compared them to cluster bombs and landmines and said that some weapons were so cruel as to be beyond the pale of human tolerance.
Peaceful local gatherings have been massacred by the descent of a drone. Children are killed, homes destroyed. And, by the way, drones are developed, as well as in other places, in Staffordshire and Wales.
Produced by the Nazis with slave labour, there were two types. The first was the VI. You could hear it coming, slowly, then the engine sound would break off, and a few seconds later there would be an almighty explosion. They were not, apparently, aimed at anywhere in particular. It might be a hospital, the Cafe de Paris, a school. The result was the same - total death and destruction.
The later type, the V2, arrived in 1945, the year the war ended. This was even more frightening. There was a short warning of the VI arrival, from the forces keeping watch on the coast, and from the noise of its engine. You only knew the V2 had arrived when its deadly cargo landed on its random target. I was in hospital in London, having a minor operation on my neck, during the V2 blitz. Recovery meant lying in bed and waiting for the next huge explosion,. There would usually be three or four each day - there may have been more, but these were the ones I heard from the hospital in Marylebone. It just meant that you lay there waiting for the next one to land on the hospital.
The US bombers were still taking off nightly from their bases 40 miles away at Newbury, and elsewhere in the West,sto bomb Berlin. But there was no protection against the V2's, no air raid warnings, no hope of getting to a shelter.
And now it is happening again. This time they are called Drones, and it is the Americans, not the Nazis, who are operating them. The Unmanned Ariel Vehicles, their formal name, are targeted and directed through space technology. In Afghanistan, hundreds of people have been killed by drone attacks and Israel, which also uses them, has been accused of killing Palestinians during the January attack. They are being used extensively in Pakistan.
Pilots in California operate the drones 7000 miles away over Iraq. They can see the results of the damage and death they have caused on their computer screens. They are said to be suffering battlefield type stress, and if they have any hearts, no wonder.
There has been high-level condemnation of drones, both in the US and here, where Professor Paul Rogers, the eminent peace studies academic, believes that drone deployments would be better termed as air raids. He thinks that the drone attacks in western Pakistan are actually helping and encouraging support for Al Quaeda. Lord Bingham, recently the senior law lord, has compared them to cluster bombs and landmines and said that some weapons were so cruel as to be beyond the pale of human tolerance.
Peaceful local gatherings have been massacred by the descent of a drone. Children are killed, homes destroyed. And, by the way, drones are developed, as well as in other places, in Staffordshire and Wales.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)