Posted by alex Tue, 26 Dec 2006 23:26:00 GMT
UKWatch.net is currently experiencing some unexpected technical problems. As we were in any case moving towards launching a new version of the site we will not be resurrecting the original site. Once the new site is launched the archived articles will be available once again.
Posted by Tim Fri, 08 Dec 2006 21:10:00 GMT
EDM 335: Immediate Withdrawal From Iraq
From Stop The War (via Craig Murray)
Close to 4000 Iraqis were killed in October, the highest figure since the 2003 invasion. November is going to record an even higher figure. The United Nations says 3000 Iraqis flee the country every day. Another 9,000 flee their homes every week to become internal refugees. US troops are being killed at a rate of close to three a day, with many more seriously injured. Six British soldiers have been killed this month, the second highest monthly figure since the beginning of the war.
Against this backdrop, the clamour to find an “exit strategy” dominates discussion of the war. Except, that is, in the British parliament. This week a cross-party attempt by over 100 MPs to give parliament the opportunity to discuss how Britain can extricate itself from the Iraq catastrophe was blocked by the Speaker of the House of Commons.
Two anti-war MPs, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, have now tabled a parliamentary motion calling for the immediate withdrawal of all British troops. Stop the War is calling on all its supporters to lobby their local MP by letter, email or at MP’s weekly surgeries to urge them to add their name to the following motion:
That this House notes with alarm the conclusion of the October 2006 Lancet report that coalition forces in Iraq have been directly responsible for the deaths of at least 186,000 Iraqis since the start of the 2003 invasion; recognises that according to a September 2006 Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) poll, 78 per cent. of Iraqis believe that the US military presence in Iraq is provoking more conflict than it is preventing; recalls the conclusion of the April 2006 US National Intelligence Estimate on global terrorism that the Iraq conflict has become the cause celebre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement; further notes the recent statement by the Head of the British Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, that British forces should be withdrawn from Iraq soon because their presence exacerbates the security problems; further notes that there have been over 118 British military deaths in Iraq since the 2003 invasion; and calls on the Government to withdraw all British forces from Iraq immediately.
LOBBY YOUR MP TO GET THEIR SIGNATURE ON PARLIAMENTARY MOTION EDM 335: IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ. Writing by post is the best way to get a response but you can also contact them through the web-site http://www.writetothem.com/ or by visiting them at their weekly surgery and raising the issue face to face.
Posted by Jo Thu, 30 Nov 2006 14:54:00 GMT
The UK government is currently debating changes to the Freedom of Information Act. In short, these changes will make it even harder to get politically inconvenient information into the public domain. Changes to costing, and limitations to the number of requests an organisation may submit, threaten to make the act totally unusable for public purposes.
Our (already hamstrung) ability to hold our government to account is under attack. To petition the government against this change please go to http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/freeinformation/
jo@ukwatch.net
Posted by Tim Tue, 28 Nov 2006 18:35:00 GMT
Peace News (www.peacenews.info) alerts its readers to an e-petition posted on the No 10 website, which calls on the government “to champion the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, by not replacing the Trident nuclear weapons system.”
The petition continues further:
”The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is the greatest defense humanity has against a world in which many countries seek to acquire nuclear weapons, and in which the probability of nuclear accidents and even nuclear terrorism is unacceptably high.
However, this treaty is greatly under threat. Kofi Annan has said: “If we want to avoid a cascade of nuclear proliferation, we need a major international effort to strengthen the regime before it is too late.”
The UK could lead this international effort. To do so, we would have to renounce our nuclear weapons system, Trident.
This would be an historic decision; it would rank among the few truly moral actions ever carried out by a nation-state; and it would give the UK the moral standing needed to champion the Treaty and help turn the world back from possible catastrophe.
This petition therefore calls on the Prime Minister not to replace the Trident nuclear weapons system, and so to champion the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.”
As both George Monbiot and Medialens cogently point out in articles published today, not only does there seem to be negligible defensive value in pursuing the replacement – quite apart from the unimpeachable legal case against it – but considering the potential value such an exorbitant sum (an estimated £76 billion) could have in human terms, if spent on poverty relief or projects to reduce Britain’s contribution to climate change, there seems to be a pretty unimpeachable moral case against it as well.
You can sign the petition here.
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UPDATE:
Voices in the Wilderness UK have issued the following call to their mailing list – another action which is well worth participating in.
ACT NOW TO STOP THE NEXT GENERATION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS
On Monday the government is due to publish a white paper on Britain’s next generation of nuclear weapons. The White Paper will include the government’s proposals for a successor to the Trident warhead system and outline its preferred option.
We haven’t seen the White Paper, but according to press reports, the government will choose between scrapping nuclear weapons, extending the life of the existing system, ordering a replacement for Trident or buying an entirely new system. The most likely option is an extension of the existing system. Irrespective of the options outlined, the government has made repeated statements that parliament will only get to vote on the government’s preferred option.
We vote for the the “ no thank you, no Trident replacement” option.
Please write TODAY to Tony Blair – who is determined to get this through parliament before he leaves – and let him know that we don’t want any more nuclear weapons. Please write now and pass this on so he is inundated with letters.
If you celebrate Christmas, send him an early but appropriate card?
Suggestions for letter writing:
It’s always best to write your own letter, rather than send a standard letter, but to make it easier; we’ve included some points you could make. You could suggest that Tony Blair:
Tell Tony Blair
You could also add:
Send letters to
We will send out a new alert as soon as we have seen the White Paper. It seems that there will be a vote on the White Paper within three months. All Labour MPs will be thoroughly whipped to make sure they toe the party line. In the next alert we will ask you to write to your MP, and ask her/him – if you had a free vote, how would you vote?
This alert comes from the “stop the next generation of nuclear weapons” TNG” alert list. If you received this from a friend, please email info@aldermaston.net to join the TNG alerts email list.
Aldermaston Women’s Peace Campaign: http://www.aldermaston.net info@aldermaston.net
Posted by Tim Wed, 15 Nov 2006 17:45:00 GMT
Fans of the phenomenon that has come to be known as “corporate social responsibility” will be interested in the latest masterstroke from Dove, the leading purveyor of “cleansing and personal care” products. Dove have recently launched their “campaign for real beauty”, including a “self-esteem fund”, aiming, in their words, “to educate girls and inspire women on a wider definition of beauty”.
“Low self-esteem is a serious issue among girls” according to the campaign’s website – indeed 92% of girls apparently “want to change at least one aspect of their appearance”. Scandalously, Dove tells us, a recent UK survey found that “6 out of 10 girls thought they’d “be happier if they were thinner.”“
Why might this be? As the website points out, “Whether it’s models that wear a size 2 or movie stars with exceptional curves, beauty pressures are everywhere. And when young girls find it hard to keep up, low self-esteem can take over and lead to introversion, a withdrawal from normal life, and a waste of potential”; “For too long, beauty has been defined by narrow, stifling stereotypes.”
It would be hard to disagree with that – and there can be little doubt about the considerable role the advertising industry plays in contributing to these pressures. As Clive Hamilton puts it in his book Growth Fetish, “Advertising long ago discarded the practice of selling a product on the merits of its useful features. Modern marketing builds symbolic associations between the product and the psychological states of potential consumers, sometimes targeting known feelings of inadequacy, aspiration or expectation and sometimes setting out to create a sense of inadequacy in order to remedy it with the product.” (G.F., Pluto, 2004, p. 81)
Jean Kilbourne, in an article published yesterday on UK Watch, points out the particularly harmful effects advertising has on self-image in particular: “The self-esteem of girls,” she writes, “plummets as they reach adolescence partly because they cannot possibly escape the message that their bodies are objects, and imperfect objects at that.”
But rather tellingly, as a friend recently pointed out to me, Dove is owned by Unilever, also the owners of Lynx – which, as anyone familiar with the “Lynx effect” ad campaign will know, is hardly a company to distance itself from manipulative “beauty pressures” and “stifling stereotypes”. So much, then, for this latest example of corporate social responsibility: apparently Unilever is profiting twice over from mopping up (or at least from its claim to be mopping up) a fraction of the social pollution to which it contributes daily, without compunction.
Posted by alex Fri, 03 Nov 2006 11:23:00 GMT
John Pilger DVDs are now available to buy in the UK. Released on DVD for the first time and personally chosen by John Pilger, the Documentaries That Changed The World box set brings together twelve of Pilger’s most hard-hitting and inspirational films – Vietnam: The Quiet Mutiny (1970), Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979), Burp! Pepsi v Coke in the Ice Cold War (1982), Nicaragua: A Nation’s Right to Survive (1983), Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1994), Flying the Flag: Arming the World (1995), Inside Burma: Land of Fear (1996), Welcome to Australia (1999), Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq (2000), Palestine Is Still The Issue (2002), Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror (2003) & Stealing A Nation (2004).
You can also buy John’s Australian and American DVDs. More
Posted by Tim Mon, 23 Oct 2006 08:23:00 GMT
The website and blog of the UK’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray(www.craigmurray.co.uk) is one of the many excellent resources out there for snippets of news and commentary that are often, alas, too brief for us to post on UK Watch. Recent items posted recently on this site, which should be of interest to our readers, include a couple of interviews (mp3 format) with the man himself, along with an illuminating and impassioned speech to the US-based group World Can’t Wait (also mp3).
Another attention-grabbing piece from the 18th of October concerns the question of the extent to which Iraq owes its sectarian strife to a deliberately conceived and implemented plan on the part of the US - albeit one currently running amok. Murray recalls the press reports from early 2005 – almost entirely neglected in the mainstream media since then, it seems – on the proposed implementation of the “Salvador Option” in Iraq, which planned to pit Kurdish and Shia militas against the Sunni insurgency (and their supporters amongst the civilian population). In El Salvador, the policy resulted in the financing of human rights abuses on a horrendous scale, an effect that there is some evidence death squads are currently replicating in Iraq. Murray’s brief but compelling line of argument is therefore highly recommended reading on a very important subject – and one which deserves a lot more attention.
Posted by Milan Rai Fri, 20 Oct 2006 16:23:00 GMT
How do you grow activists? People have been wondering about this since the beginning of civilization.
The history of all existing society is the history of power struggle, and the development of people willing and able to challenge exploitation and domination and replace it with something better.
I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing recently because I’ve been helping Maya Anne Evans write a book about her experiences of being arrested for participating in an unauthorized demonstration without police permission – under the Serious Organized Crime and Police Act, and about her life leading up to that point.
I’ve known Maya since she was a teenager, and we’ve been working together in Justice Not Vengeance for several years now. But I was amazed by how much I learned about her in the course of writing the book together.
Back in 2002, when I went to Liverpool to do a talk about the oncoming Iraq war, at a meeting Maya had helped to organize, she was just starting out on the road of activism, after a pretty apolitical, uninvolved life (apart from being a vegan on animal rights grounds).
It was a period volunteering with Voices in the Wilderness in Chicago that really fired her up to be more committed, and she came back to the UK deciding to devote a lot of her time to Justice Not Vengeance.
But she was still not in any way thinking of engaging in civil disobedience herself. It was only very slowly that this dawned on her as a possible option for her.
One key event in the summer of 2005 was doing a peace walk with a lot of fine folk, including a Japanese hibakusha, whose personal story of Hiroshima helped to inspire her to join in with an attempted blockade of NATO headquarters during the walk, leading to her first ever detention by the police (not a ‘proper arrest’ leading to a criminal record) – and a strip search.
The demonstration Maya was arrested at was a two-person remembrance ceremony with just the two of us participating (and several friends acting as legal observers), and both of us knowing that arrest was likely and fines were probably down the road.
That was her first arrest in the UK, and her first conviction. Next Sunday she’s risking arrest again, and breaking a conditional discharge into the bargain, by participating in No More Fallujahs.
What amazed me most, doing the interviews with Maya and then merging them with her written accounts, was the amount of fear that she overcame to take part in these events.
I had no idea, despite knowing her for such a long time, and working alongside her throughout these events, of how afraid she was of public speaking and personal confrontations.
I don’t know a whole about how to grow activists, but bizarrely I’ve learned quite a bit by being so involved in Maya’s book.
Building close-knit communities with mutual respect and trust, having inspiring exemplars, and meeting the truth about the world face to face, all of these seem to be important in deepening commitment.
I hope that other people who read Maya’s book will also feel inspired to stretch themselves as well, to do the things that they are frightened to try. There are a lot of people who’ve heard of her, who may feel inspired by her, who may, after reading the book, think, ‘Well, if she can do it…’
Incidentally, the book’s called Naming The Dead – A Serious Crime.
Posted by Milan Rai Fri, 20 Oct 2006 15:23:00 GMT
I’ve just realised that Michael Albert has been in the UK the past week or so, on a speaking tour, and his last stop is tomorrow, Saturday 21 October, at the Anarchist Bookfair in London.
His talk is at noon, entitled: ‘Anarchism and the Future: Economic & Social Vision & Strategy for Creating a New World & its Relation to the Heritage of Anarchism’, and it’s at the Anarchist Book Fair, Voluntary Sector Resource Centre, 356 Holloway Rd, London, N7 6PA. (Holloway Road tube) (the bookfair site has a pdf of the whole schedule.)
I’m planning to go to it, and hoping to speak to people who’ve been involved in the speaking tour, and report back here afterwards.
Michael’s been in Edinburgh at the Independent Radical Book Fair, at Strathclyde University and Glasgow University, at the University of Nottingham, the University of Hertfordshire, he’s been in Birmingham and tonight he’s in Oxford.
The tour has been organized by Zed Books in conjunction with Project for a Participatory Society UK, which existed before the ZSVS events in the summer (see earlier posts), but which has been given a new name and a new set of connections by that gathering.
The reason Zed is involved is because Michael is promoting his book Realizing Hope, which is a very intriguing and humane set of ideas about a possible future society. Well worth reading, I’d say. (And no, I don’t get paid to say that.)
So I’ll report back on impressions of the Albert tour later this weekend, I guess.
Posted by alex Thu, 19 Oct 2006 22:23:00 GMT
Each year the government now publishes a report on its human rights policy. An alternative to that report has just been published by six human rights groups- Burma Campaign UK, UK Chagos Support Association, Justice for Colombia , Free Tibet Campaign, Free West Papua Campaign and Western Sahara Campaign. The full report can be read here.
Below is a summary of the report…
An ‘alternative’ human rights report is published today to coincide with the publication by the British government of its annual human rights report. Analysing the government’s approach to six places with serious human rights problems – Burma, Chagos Archipelago, Colombia, Tibet, West Papau and Western Sahara – the report gives the government just 19 out of a possible 60 marks.
“As far as the British government’s foreign policy priorities are concerned, human rights have not just taken a back seat, but have been locked away in the boot,” says the introduction to the report.
The report argues that there does not appear to be a consistent approach to human rights issues from the government. Its human rights agenda appears to be driven more by media coverage and Parliamentary pressure than by an assessment of human rights concerns in individual countries. ’’The six countries covered by this report highlight the lack of priority given to human rights in general, and the disparity of approach. A consistent finding in the alternative report is the failure of the British Government to raise glaring human rights abuses with repressive regimes. This can be explained, at least partly, by the British Government’s glaring omission of human rights from its list of international obligations. Human rights have been sidelined under a general heading of sustainable development which comes a lowly seventh on the list.’‘
“Producing an annual report that highlights human rights abuses around the world is a welcome step,” says the report, “but human rights are still not a driving force in decision-making. This has to change.”
THE COUNTRIES COVERED BY THE REPORT
Burma – 7 out of 10 The British government has taken the lead within the European Union pushing for stronger measures against the regime, and worked hard to bring Burma before the United Nations Security Council. However, Burma is not given the priority it deserves given the scale of abuses in Burma, and the government inexplicably refuses to impose unilateral investment sanctions, despite the UK being the second largest source of approved investment in Burma. For more information contact Mark Farmaner, media & campaigns manager, Burma Campaign UK, 020 7324 4713.
Chagos Archipelago – 2 out of 10 The British government refuses to allow Chagossians to resettle their islands, despite a high court ruling, has not paid appropriate compensation for forcing the Chagossians to leave their islands, and has made no formal apology for their treatment. Robert Bain, Chairman, UK Chagos Support Association, mobile 07773 896 811.
Colombia – 1 out of 10 Columbia is experiencing a human rights catastrophe, with abuses being committed by government and non-government forces. The British government has not only failed to prioritise tackling human rights abuses, but actually provides military aid to the Colombian security forces, which are themselves responsible for many of the abuses. The British government also backs the deeply flawed paramilitary ‘peace process’ rather than endorsing United Nation’s recommendations for serious modifications. For more information contact Graham Copp, Justice for Colombia, 020 7794 3644.
Tibet – 4 out of 10 The British Government is engaged in both the UK and EU-China Human Rights Dialogues but these dialogues have failed to secure substantive improvement in protecting and promoting human rights in Tibet. Other channels for applying pressure on the Chinese Government’s rights record have been ignored and the British Government has consistently failed to make any public statement of concern regarding the dire human rights situation in Tibet during recent bilateral exchanges with President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. The government’s public silence is particularly damaging, coming at a time of increased repression in Tibet with monks and nuns targeted for particular persecution and when the opening of the Gormo-Lhasa Railway threatens to flood Tibet with Chinese settlers and troops, further marginalising Tibetans in their own country. For more information contact Matt Whitticase, Free Tibet Campaign, 020 73244605.
West Papua – 1 out of 10 Although the British government accepts that Indonesia’s annexation of West Papua in 1969 was flawed, it has taken to apparent action to address this issue. In addition it has ignored requests to raise human rights abuses with the Indonesian government, and continues to supply arms to the Indonesian government, despite evidence that British-made weapons have been used in repression of the West Papuan people. For more information contact Harri Seymour, Free West Papua Campaign, 077861 75841
Western Sahara 4 out of 10 Although it refuses to recognise the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara, the British government is very quiet on this issue, both in terms of human rights abuses being committed, and seeking a lasting solution to the occupation. The government priority seem to be to avoid offending Morocco, rather than standing up for the rights of the people of Western Sahara. For more information contact Imran Shafi, Western Sahara Campaign, 07751 508 355
