Mike Marqusee | Red Pepper
In Act IV Scene i of King Lear, the blinded, humbled, suicidal Earl of Gloucester hands his purse to the naked madman, ‘Poor Tom’ (actually Gloucester’s ill-used son, Edgar) and as he does so observes, “So distribution should undo excess, / And each man have enough.”
Shakespeare’s 400 year old wisdom has proved far too advanced for the Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition, whose plans for the next five years involve a redistribution of wealth from the have-littles to the have-more-than-enoughs of historic proportions. The new government’s first budget slashed spending on benefits for the unemployed, the disabled, childcare and housing, froze public sector workers’ pay for two years, raised regressive VAT to 20% - while cutting corporation tax by 4% and reducing employers’ national insurance contributions.
At one and the same time, the government plans to force hundreds of thousands off benefits, eliminate 500,000-700,000 public sector jobs, sacrifice another 600,000 private sector jobs dependent on public spending, and curtail the expansion of university places. Inevitable result: a much-enlarged reserve army of the unemployed which will undermine wages, conditions and security across the board. On top of that, the public services on which both employed and unemployed rely will deteriorate in quantity and quality. Poverty, however measured, will increase and will become harder to escape or ameliorate. The inequality which already blights British society will intensify. The lives of the majority will grow more precarious. Overall, there will be a drastic reduction in the social wage without which paid wages and benefits do not amount to a livelihood.
This is necessary, we’re told, so that the deficit can be paid down. Yet, in the absence of substantial economic growth spurred by private sector investment (since the state has withdrawn from that function), the costs of unemployment will cancel out reductions in the deficit. All that pain will have been for nothing – though not for the rich, who will see their rates of profit protected and their share of national income increased. The pain is not being shared. In fact, the recession is being exploited by the government to alter the balance of wealth and power in British society in favour of the elite.
In resisting this sweeping attack, we will have to confront and overcome the legacy of more than thirty years of relentless propaganda for the primacy of individual self-interest. Working class people have internalised the measuring rod of neo-liberalism, the shame of “failure” and the worship of “success”. To respond effectively to the coming onslaught, we will have to engage with a deep crisis of working class confidence. To do so requires not only vigorous, unapologetic counter-propaganda, but collective action, which remains the most salutary antidote to the sense of powerlessness.
Being a “coalition” makes it easier for the government to claim it’s acting in “the national interest”. The presence of the Lib Dems, even their reversals on VAT and the like, strengthens the pretence that there is no alternative: the cuts are necessitated by the state of the country’s finances. On the other hand, a coalition is obviously more unstable and more vulnerable to popular protest. If, as seems likely, the government’s economic package pushes the economy back into recession, the coalition could unravel and the government could be toppled or forced to change course. But that will only happen if, in the meantime, we have built a movement that insists on an alternative.
Our campaign against the cuts has first and last to contest their “necessity”. This involves a challenge to the dictatorship of “the markets”, which we need to identify as a modern form of despotism. We have to strip the mask from the financial elite, whose self-interest is dressed up as the public interest, who disguise self-serving policies as mere obedience to impersonal economic “laws”. In this consumer society we are offered “choice” in everything but what matters most: the determination of our common priorities and the disposition of our common resources. When it comes to taxing and spending, we are told there is no choice. So the struggle against the cuts is also a struggle for democracy and should be framed that way.
Extreme wealth exercises an undemocratic sway over our economy. Redistributing that wealth is not a luxury, but the only means of building a sustainable recovery. The public sector is our most precious long-term investment, not an optional extra or a burdensome debt to be disposed of. It’s the necessary basis for economic activity and social development. The fight against the cuts is a fight against waste: waste of resources, skills, labour power. It is a contest over fundamental social values, not a dispute between expert economists.
The case for the cuts rests not on arithmetic but on ideology, a series of linked assumptions that can only be sustained because they are protected from scrutiny. It’s time for everyone to become an economist, to apply their own moral sense to public priorities, and to bear in mind that those who publicly pontificate about the need for cuts belong largely to the minority who will benefit from that policy. Commentators who preach austerity with the same air of scientific sagacity with which they once endorsed the financial sector’s speculative shenanigans should be treated not with respect but with mockery and derision.
In the 80s, Thatcher made a virtue of not turning back. That boast became a self-fulfilling prophecy largely thanks to concessions made by her opponents. If we repeat the mistakes of the 80s, we will lose the coming battle. Back then, the labour movement succumbed to division; there was a failure of solidarity and a failure of vision from the movement’s leadership. The intelligentsia endowed every setback and justified every compromise with the weight of historical inevitability. Those who weren’t cowed or seduced were isolated.
We have to be alert to and staunch in opposing attempts to create divisions between deserving and undeserving poor, private and public sector, productive and unproductive workers, the poor and not so poor. We have to appropriate the government’s slogan – “we’re all in this together” – and use it to consolidate a movement of the majority. Our campaign has to foster interchange between workforces and service users. We have to organise locally, nationally and internationally, drawing strength from the struggles against cuts already underway elsewhere. We have to employ a wide variety of tactics, including cultural interventions. The London Olympics may well be held amidst social turmoil and we should prepare now for the opportunities it offers.
In the end, wide-scale industrial action will be necessary. For the trade unions, the next few years are do or die. Either they re-establish themselves as effective champions of working class people or sink into marginal irrelevance. At the moment, the rhetoric from the leadership is militant but there’s not much evidence of strategic planning. In the meantime, momentum has to be supplied by community campaigns. These have emerged in some localities but need to become ubiquitous. They are indispensable vehicles for disseminating the arguments and recruiting activists.
Unity and solidarity are the watchwords. They have to be not just lofty sentiments but constant practise. The movement as a whole, trade unions and local campaigns, needs to rally to every flashpoint, widening (not isolating) local or sectoral struggles as they emerge. The more confident people are that they will receive support, the more likely they are to take action. The key here is that the government will only retreat if we do not. In the 80s, every tactical retreat, every concession, left Thatcher et al hungry for more.
It’s time we returned to Shakespeare’s wisdom, and perhaps even further back to the first century Rabbi Hillel, whose ethical catechism should be pondered by all public sector workers and service users: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself alone, what am I? If not now, when?”
“Contending for the Living” is Mike Marqusee’s regular column for Red Pepper. For more see www.mikemarqusee.com
Nick Dearden | Jubilee Debt Campaign
The Afghan ‘war leaks’ have revealed in stark detail the mistrust and tension that lies at the heart of the West’s relationship with Afghanistan and Pakistan. But this mistrust is not merely the product of a nine-year war, but of decades of economic control which have sewn the seeds of inequality, injustice and appalling governance across the Muslim world.
Indeed for Western governments to lecture countries like Pakistan about democracy and stability, as David Cameron did this morning, must seem a cruel joke to many in that country. Our part of the world has a long history of generously lending money to fuel violence, prop up undemocratic, often brutal regimes and exacerbate poverty.
Pakistan is a country with only 54% literacy and where 38% of small children are underweight, yet spends nearly $3 billion a year servicing its debts – almost three times what the government spends on health care.
Loans have flowed freely into Pakistan in order to keep favoured military governments in power. Under the most recent military regime of General Musharraf, Pakistan’s debt increased from $32 to $49 billion.
A more recent $7.6 billion International Monetary Fund loan, needed so the country can keep paying off its old debts, is instructive. The conditions applied to the loan include reducing budget deficits, eliminating fuel and electricity subsidies and increasing indirect taxation. So as usual, ordinary people will pay for the West’s ‘largesse’ which kept in power governments subservient to Western interests, regardless of how little they did for these same people.
Of course such injustice doesn’t stop at Pakistan. Consider Indonesia, supposedly a leader of the developing world, with a booming economy. But Indonesia still has 61% of its population living on less than $2 a day.
Like India, as Mr Cameron reminded us this morning, fighting poverty in Indonesia will be central to the success of the Millennium Development Goals. But just like India, this seems a second priority compared to selling scores of Hawk fighter jets to the country. Indonesia is still paying for similar ‘generosity’. The country pays over $2.5million every hour servicing its massive $150billion debts, much of this debt based on loans given to the brutal dictator General Suharto.
Suharto was guilty of crimes against humanity by any standard, killing up to 1million political activists in his first year in office, not to mention mass murder in his suppression of islands such as East Timor and Aceh. He borrowed heavily throughout.
Indonesia still owes the UK over $500 million for Hawk jets, Scorpion tanks and other military equipment sold to Suharto, the subject of our new ‘Dodgy Deals’ campaign. These weapons were used against civilians, for example when suppressing university students and during attacks on Aceh. Today, these loans are being repaid by the very people who suffered their effects.
In all likelihood Indonesia would have already repaid these loans were it not for the South-East Asian crisis of 1997, in which financial speculators devastated the country and the Western-controlled International Monetary Fund urged a toxic recipe of privatisation and austerity as a medicine. As millions of people were made unemployed, and thousands of companies declared bankrupt, the debts to the same institutions giving the wrong advice, kept on climbing.
Is it surprising if Indonesians think their lives matter less than the financial and strategic interests of the West?
Then there’s Lebanon, a country which spends 50% of its budget servicing debts run up while the country was being torn apart by civil war and occupation – this is more than twice what Lebanon spends on education and health combined.
Lebanon is considered an upper middle income country, but has large pockets of poverty. Almost 300,000 individuals are unable to meet their basic needs, and they tend to be concentrated along religious lines, further fuelling tension and mistrust amongst the Shia population.
Even Afghanistan itself, rushed through the debt cancellation process to prevent any embarrassing examination of past lending, has been forced to privatise its banks as a condition of its debt write down. Even so, Afghanistan will return to the same point of heavy indebtedness in years to come – it serves the government which needs the finances to hold onto power, and it serves the West which need the debts to keep control after the soldiers leave.
These are just some of the reasons why the talk of democracy, stability and fighting poverty ring hollow throughout most of the ‘Muslim world’ – and indeed beyond. Control can be maintained through this same deeply unjust economic system, through playing one faction off against another, through fighting when everything else fails to work. But it is impossible to see how democracy, stability and trust can be built on such a basis.
That would require something far more radical, but not impossible. It is possible to stop lending in such deeply unjust ways, imposing different standards on when we lend and when we don’t. It is possible to cancel debts based on loans that should never have been lent in the first place. It is possible to stop forcing countries to pay what they are unable to afford or to force them to make their economies work in our interests simply because we can.
As repayments on deeply toxic debts continue to drain Muslim countries of their wealth – from Indonesia to Afghanistan, Lebanon to Pakistan – we need to realise that the debts, or reparations if you prefer, which our governments owe the Muslim world are vast and rising. Trust will not be possible until they are paid.
You can view Jubilee Debt Campaign’s new report, ‘Fuelling Injustice: the impact of third world debt on Muslim countries’ at:
www.jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk
Mike Marqusee | MikeMarqusee.com
This article also appears in ‘Level Playing Field’, Mike’s column for The Hindu
In an effort to mitigate the global outrage that followed its attack on the Gaza aid flotilla, Israel has (ever so slightly) eased its blockade on Gaza. However minimal, this step has only been taken because of the pressure applied to Israel by the international grass-roots protest movement. The primary aim of the Gaza aid missions has been to alert the world to the criminality of the blockade, and in this it has succeeded, though the price has been heavy: 9 killed (mostly with shots directly to the head and neck) and 700 others violently abducted, detained and abused.
Unfortunately, President Obama and others have seized on the Israelis’ gesture as an excuse to issue them a renewed license to proceed with their assault on Palestinian lives and rights. While now permitting some consumer goods to enter Gaza, Israel continues to block chemicals, medical instruments, construction tools, aluminium, steel and cement, making it impossible to rebuild the homes, schools, hospitals, offices and factories destroyed by Israel in Operation Cast Lead of 2008-2009.
Sealed off by Israel since 2007, the people of Gaza are not only starved of imports but denied the freedom to trade or seek work, education or healthcare. They have been plunged into an entirely human-made humanitarian crisis. The World Health Organisation reports that malnutrition is rife: 66% of infants and 30% of expectant mothers suffer from anaemia. Material assistance is desperately needed in Gaza and the only way to deliver it involves breaking the Israeli blockade.
Israel’s assertion of an extraordinary right to assault and detain citizens of other nations in neutral waters is of a piece with its persistent disregard for international law and elementary standards of justice.
In defiance of Article 49 of the fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the transfer of an occupying power’s civilian population into the territory it is occupying, Israel has colonised the West Bank with Jewish settlements which now control 42% of the territory. In total, across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, there are some 200 settlements, all of them illegal, all supported by Israeli funds and protected by Israeli arms. The settlers have appropriated not only land, but water. Last year, the 3 million West Bank Palestinians were allocated an average 83 cubic metres of water each, while the 500,000 Jewish settlers enjoyed 1450 cubic metres each. read more…
Saturday 5 June
End the Siege of Gaza: Freedom for Palestine
Assemble Downing Street, London • 1.30pm
March to the Israeli Embassy, 2 Palace Green, London W8 4QB
Speakers at the demonstration rally: • Sarah Colborne (flotilla survivor) • Ken Loach • Caroline Lucas MP • George Galloway • Kevin Ovenden (flotilla survivor) • Kate Hudson • Lowkey • Ismail Patel (flotilla survivor) • Salma Yaqoob • Daud Abdullah • Lindsey German • Tarik Ali • Jeremy Corbyn MP • John Rose • Yvonne Ridley • Mohammed Kosbar • Lauren Booth • Keith Sonnett • Sally Hunt
March Route: The demonstration assembles 1.30pm in Whitehall opposite Downing Street. The march will begin at 2.30pm and go up to Trafalgar Square, up Haymarket, down Piccadilly, round the Hyde Park Corner roundabout, down Kensington Gore, and end outside the Israeli Embassy [map].
Called by Stop the War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, British Muslim Initiative, CND, Friends of Al-Aqsa, Viva Palestina and Palestinian Forum of Britain
Photo: Louise Whittle
Mike Marqusee | MikeMarqusee.com
Wednesday’s Commons debate on Gaza was a remarkable illustration of just how weak Israel’s position has become in this country, as in others. Hague’s statement was probably more forceful than David Milliband’s would have been were he still Foreign Secretary. But it was strongly criticised as not going far enough by at least twenty MPs from nearly every party in the House. Defence of Israel was left to the DUP; even Louise Ellman and Denis Macshane, committed defenders of Israel, could not bring themselves to challenge the consensus that the assault on the Gaza flotilla was an outrage (they confined themselves to attacks on Hamas). The legion of MPs who’ve enjoyed expenses paid visits to Israel were silent.
Following Milliband’s strained effort to establish some significant difference between himself and Hague, more substantive responses came form Jeremy Corbyn, Caroline Lucas and others who called for sanctions against Israel. They pointed out that Israel had ignored international condemnation on numerous previous occasions, and that it was the failure of governments to move beyond condemnation that had led the Israelis to believe they could act against the Gaza boats with impunity.
James O’Nions | Red Pepper
Editorial from the forthcoming June/July issue of Red Pepper:
Back in April, Vince Cable said of public spending cuts: ‘Cutting too soon and pushing the economy back into recession will make the deficit worse, as tax receipts fall and benefit payments rise. The Conservatives’ so-called efficiency savings are particularly dangerous. They have no clue where or how these “efficiencies” will be made, making it likely they will be nothing more than a smokescreen for job cuts.’ Now he is part of a government forging ahead with £6 billion of cuts this year.
But public spending cuts are not just unwise policy, as Cable was right to point out; they are deeply unjust too. At the heart of the financial crisis that triggered the increase in the public spending deficit was an economy fuelled by consumer debt. This debt was due in part to the defeat of the trade union bargaining power that had maintained workers’ level of consumption throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Corporations wanted to both pay workers less in real terms, but also have them consume more in order to sustain growth and profits. Credit was the only way to square this particular circle, and of course offering credit was itself highly profitable.
With this critique missing from the public discourse across Europe (perhaps with the exception of Greece), governments from Latvia to Portugal are making ordinary people pay for a crisis of capitalism, with the firm hand of the International Monetary Fund or the credit ratings agencies at their backs. This would have been the UK’s fate whoever had won the election, but with the Conservatives in control we don’t even get the anaesthetic with the amputation.
When the state kills…
Liz Davies | Morning Star
On the day of the G20 demonstration in the City of London, April 1 2009, PC Stephen Harwood wore full riot gear, wielded a long baton, held a shield, had a balaclava over his face and a helmet on, and his police identification number obscured.
Ian Tomlinson was wearing two sweatshirts and had his hands in his pockets. PC Harwood struck Tomlinson from behind, on the back of his leg, and then pushed him over so that he fell face-first onto the ground. Tomlinson was helped up by a demonstrator, said something to the police and started to walk on, but shortly afterwards collapsed and died.
Imagine if the roles were reversed – if Tomlinson had struck a police officer and then pushed him over, he’d have been arrested on the spot and charged with a serious offence.
It is worth remembering the obfuscations that the police and other state authorities immediately engaged in after Tomlinson died.
On the night of Tomlinson’s death the Met issued an official statement. It did not say anything about Tomlinson having any contact with police officers. It stated that police officers and ambulance crews had tried to save his life after he had collapsed and that their efforts were marred by demonstrators throwing bottles.
The next day Dr Freddy Patel was commissioned by the coroner, Professor Paul Matthews, to carry out a postmortem. Dr Patel advised that Tomlinson had died from a heart attack. The coroner refused a request from the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) to attend the postmortem and is said not to have told the Tomlinson family when and where the postmortem was to take place, nor to have advised them that they or a representative could attend.
By April 7 2009 witnesses had come forward giving accounts of PC Harwood attacking Tomlinson. Crucially, an amateur photographer had sent the now-notorious footage of the assault to the Guardian which published it on its website. Two days later the Guardian published another video showing Tomlinson collapsing. Contrary to the Met’s official statement, police officers can be seen pushing away demonstrators who are trying to help Tomlinson. There is no barrage of missiles as had been claimed by the police.
Shortly afterwards the Tomlinson family were able to obtain a second autopsy by Dr Nat Carey. He concluded, as did a third pathologist, that Tomlinson had died as a result of serious internal bleeding, presumably caused by the attack. Dr Carey has said: “He sustained quite a large area of bruising. Such injuries are consistent with a baton strike.” Dr Carey and the third pathologist had to rely on Dr Patel’s records of the first postmortem and both of them condemned those records as inadequate.
All this information was known by the IPCC, the police, the family and their legal representative and, most importantly, by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) by the end of April 2009. The CPS then took another fifteen months to decide that it would not prosecute PC Harwood.
When the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) announced that manslaughter charges would not be brought, he also said that there could be no charge of common assault because that lesser charge had to be brought within six months of the offence, ie by October 1 2009, and the CPS had not met that deadline.
The DPP’s decision doesn’t stand up, except when put in the context of the history of cover-ups ever since Tomlinson died.
The decision not to bring manslaughter charges is said to have been because the medical evidence as to the cause of death is not conclusive. The short answer to that is “let the jury decide.”
There are two pathologists who do attribute the cause of the death to injuries from the assault. One pathologist, Dr Patel, thinks Tomlinson died from a heart attack. Dr Patel is currently suspended from the Home Office’s approval list of pathologists because he is subject to disciplinary proceedings from the General Medical Council for allegedly conducting four different autopsies incompetently. Which of these three doctors would the jury believe?
Having excluded the possibility of manslaughter, the DPP jumped straight to the alternative of common assault. Common assault is the lowest level of criminal offence involving violence. It can only be tried in a magistrates’ court and, because it is relatively unimportant, the charge must be brought within six months of the offence. It tends to be used where the victim has had some bruising or a black eye. It seems extraordinary that the DPP considered a low-level charge of common assault might be appropriate.
But if the CPS was seriously thinking of a common assault charge, why didn’t it lay the charge during the six-month period just in case?
More importantly, what about the intermediate offences? Grievous bodily harm (GBH) and actual bodily harm (ABH) are not charges confined to the magistrates’ courts. That means there would not have been a six-month time limit and PC Harwood would have had the right to be tried by a jury. He could quite easily be charged with ABH.
On Tuesday it was announced that PC Harwood will now face gross misconduct charges and a disciplinary hearing, and the Tomlinson family have called for those proceedings to be held in public.
The parallels with the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes are all too many. In both cases, the police lied – blaming de Menezes for suspicious behaviour, blaming the demonstrators for impeding medical assistance. In both cases the police sought to delay an investigation by the IPCC. In both cases the CPS decided not to prosecute. In short, in both cases all the arms of the state – the police, the CPS, the coroners – have obfuscated and, in the case of the police, have told downright lies.
In the case of de Menezes there is one silver lining. Two juries had the opportunity to scrutinise the evidence and both disbelieved the police. One jury convicted the Met of health and safety violations – the inquest jury rejected the police evidence that they had shouted warnings and rejected the argument that the shooting was lawful. De Menezes shows us that, while official agencies are keen to protect the police, the truth comes out when ordinary people get the chance to decide.
The Tomlinson family and their lawyers are now left in the invidious position that the Lawrences, the de Menezes family and others have all been through. But they shouldn’t have been left in this position by the state. A bereaved family has enough to cope with, dealing with loss and grief. Nobody wants to be in the extraordinary position of having to employ cutting-edge legal tactics that might take years and years in order to get to the truth.
The Tomlinson family has launched a fighting fund. Further information and details of how to donate are at www.iantomlinsonfamily.campaign.org.uk