Fluffy G20 protest largely uneventful

Squaring up to the Square Mile

Click on the map to enlarge.

Architects of the crisis

Gordon Brown
UK Prime Minister and former Chancellor

1997-2007: "No more boom and bust."

1997: "I will not allow house prices to get out of control and put at risk the sustainability of the future."

2005: "The new model we propose is quite different. In a risk-based approach there is no inspection without justification, no form-filling without justification, and no information requirements without justification. Not just a light touch but a limited touch. Instead of routine regulation attempting to cover all, we adopt a risk-based approach which targets only the necessary few."

2007: "Over the ten years that I have had the privilege of addressing you as Chancellor, I have been able year by year to record how the City of London has risen by your efforts, ingenuity and creativity to become a new world leader … So I congratulate you Lord Mayor and the City of London on these remarkable achievements, an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London …

"So let me say as I begin my new job, I want to continue to work with you in helping you do yours, listening to what you say, always recognising your international success is critical to that of Britain's overall and considering together the things that we must do - and, just as important, things we should not do - to maintain our competitiveness … [such as] enhancing a risk based regulatory approach, as we did in resisting pressure for a British Sarbannes-Oxley after Enron and Worldcom …

"The financial services sector in Britain and the City of London at the centre of it, is a great example of a highly skilled, high value added, talent driven industry that shows how we can excel in a world of global competition. Britain needs more of the vigour, ingenuity and aspiration that you already demonstrate that is the hallmark of your success."

David Cameron
Conservative Party Leader

2006: "The growth of the modern City as we know it was shaped by three critical Conservative decisions. First, because of our attractive tax regime, in the 1970s, US bonds were traded in London - the so-called 'euro-bond' market. Then the big bang of the 1980s removed a huge swathe of regulation that allowed the City to expand and removed restrictive practices. And by being open to competition from banks from anywhere in the world, we injected an enterprising spirit into the City.

"The success of the City helps to drive the UK economy and provides huge benefits for our wider society... It is also highly innovative. You cannot simply set in stone a tax or regulatory regime for the City as it is today because it's always changing, adapting and mutating.

"[We need] to build a flexible economy with low tax, light regulation and open markets...

"Many on the left-of-centre still seek to solve problems through more taxes, more laws and more regulations… But we, on the centre-right, prefer to step out of the way of business."

2007: "When I studied economics, 20 years ago, arguments raged about the most basic principles of how to run the economy [and]...there was a vast gulf between left and right as to how this could best be achieved. The left advocated more intervention and government ownership. Those on the right argued for monetary discipline and free enterprise. That debate is now settled. Over the past 15 years, governments across the world have put into practice the principles of monetary discipline and free enterprise. The result? A vast increase in global wealth. The world economy more stable than for a generation...

"Our hugely sophisticated financial markets match funds with ideas better than ever before."

Put Gordon Brown First?

As the London G20 summit of world leaders fast approaches, it might be worthwhile to cast our minds back to 2005 and to the warning by George Monbiot that protests at the G8 summit at Gleneagles, the focus of the mobilisation by the popular ‘Make Poverty History’ (MPH) campaign, would be “far too polite”. He argued that by following the agenda set by Bob Geldof and the millionaire tax-avoider Bono, to “turn the political campaign developed by the global justice movement into a philanthropic one,” there was a real risk that MPH would be “sell us down the river.” Like Monbiot, others were warning that a number of the aid agencies, notably Oxfam, and the TUC were complicit in allowing the co-option of MPH by Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, leading to campaign demands that largely mirrored the issues that the government wanted to press. And so it proved: protests in July 2005 were overshadowed by the Live8 concerts and by Bono and Geldof’s praise for the world’s leaders for promises that turned out to be completely bogus.

Now, in response to the economic crisis and the forthcoming G20 summit, we have a new campaigning coalition that, like MPH, seems impressively broad. ‘Put People First’ is organising a protest on 28 March in London and has 100 organisations supporting it, predominantly trade unions and development NGOs. Unlike MPH, the ‘celebration of celebrities’ seems to have been avoided this time, although once again, many of the ‘12 key policies’ for the UK government proposed by Put People First – particularly on ‘governance reform of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’ or ‘a green new deal to build a green economy’ – are unlikely to greatly trouble Gordon Brown. What we do know is that the G20 summit is enormously important to the UK government, one of the last opportunities before a general election to present Brown as a potential ‘saviour’ of the global economy. For his Labour Party allies in the TUC, this is enormously important too. That’s why it is hardly surprising that two separate sources have now told me that the TUC comrades within Put People First are busy vetoing any speaker at the Hyde Park rally on 28 March who may be tempted to utter damning criticism of Brown or his efforts to bail out free-market capitalism with our money. So no change there then.

What seems to be completely missing from the Put People First initiative is any reflection on the causes of the disaster we face. Its website says, “the world has followed a financial model that has created an economy fuelled by ever-increasing debt, both financial and environmental.” But it makes no mention of the fact that it has been the politicians from the ideologically dominant players within the G20 – particularly Gordon Brown during the decade when he was Chancellor – who have helped create the crisis by vigorously defending this model, which for the sake of argument, let's call "capitalism". This failure to point the finger at those who are guilty of leading us into the global financial and ecological crisis goes to the heart of the dilemma facing the ‘polite’ campaigners: the crisis is not simply a natural disaster, but the result of the actions of governments. The banks acted in the way that they did because state governments favoured ‘light touch regulation’. The World Bank and WTO are undemocratic and accountable because it has suited state governments to maintain them this way. Multinational corporations are neither transparent nor answerable to global citizens because state governments have no interest in challenging their power. And efforts to combat climate change have been undermined by the desire for continued growth - or now, in a recession, the desire for a rapid return to growth. "There can be no return to business as usual," say Put People First. But governments have other ideas and the campaign is more concerned with how we can talk to them, not how we might stop them.

If there is one lesson to take from the experience of MPH, politely suggesting to the arsonists that they put out the fire simply doesn’t work. It's one that Put People First seems not to have even considered.

There will be a 'militant workers bloc' on the Put People First protest and other demonstrations in the Square Mile - see G20 Meltdown in the City

Jacobson: You're All Racists!

It was hard to know whether to bother to plough through Howard Jacobson's prodigious output in defence of Israel, across two full pages of Wednesday's Independent.

Such Stakhanovite effort, so many words expended, so that the loathsome Jacobson, a man who disgracefully described the Justice4Jean campaign as 'ghouls' back in 2005, could find a way to insult the readership of his newspaper without simply blurting out the crude essence of his position: that if you were shocked by the bombardment of Gaza and criticised Israel for its actions, you are a racist.

Jacobson particularly rails against the use of the words 'slaughter' and 'massacre' to describe the war inflicted on Gaza. This brought to mind world reaction to the murderous US assault on Fallujah in Iraq in November 2004 - another example of the collective punishment of civilians by an overwhelmingly powerful army, justified in the name of defeating opponents described as terrorists. Notwithstanding the fact that most anti-war activists would find the ideological beliefs of Muqtada al-Sadr repellent, the indiscriminate killing of a trapped and terrified civilian population, with hundreds dead or wounded, was rightly described as a 'massacre'. But at no point was this critique of US military policy ever described as a racist position. Such an accusation would have been absurd.

But writers like Jacobson have no problem with embracing the absurd. It is the basis for preventing discussion about Israel's actions and is cynically targeted at the liberals who read newspapers like the Independent, those who are most likely to react with alarm at being called 'racist'.

It is also dangerous: there clearly has been an increase in anti-Semitic attacks in Britain and anti-racists should not only condemn them, but be able prepared to act in solidarity with those facing these attacks. However, as long as absurdists like Jacobson insist that first you must express no opinion whatsoever about Israel's actions, or you will be placed in the enemy's camp, then such solidarity becomes almost impossible to achieve.

To read an interesting response to the issue of 'the left and anti-semitism', see this from Brian Klug.

Happy Birthday Zainab

It's hard to believe that nearly a year has passed since last year's magnificent F22 birthday party in Camden.

So happy birthday little sister, relaxing halfway across the world. Have a great birthday and, to celebrate, I've dug out a really tasteful picture from 2008.

This year, get as drunk as this if you dare!

LEFT: Julie (slightly drunk)
RIGHT: Zainab (sober as a judge, apparently)

Why 'The Reader' is better than 'The Wrestler'

One of the best things about cinema-going in January and February is the surge of film releases in time for voting for the Oscars. And this year my local cinema, Stratford Picturehouse, with a summertime reputation for piss-poor programming, suddenly had not one but three heavyweight films on show, all nominated for Academy Awards.

Danny Boyle's triumphant Slumdog Millionaire has received almost universally positive reviews, with good reason. I think it will win on Oscar night But it shows that, like the critic Mark Kermode’s bizarre championing of Mamma Mia! and High School Musical 3, reactions to films can be very different and very personal. Critics loved Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, a film I hated (more below) and whilst praising Kate Winslet’s performance in The Reader, have dismissed it as a shallow film with a questionable message. Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian said that “under the gloss of high production value, under the sheen of hardback good taste, there is something naive and glib and meretricious. It left a very strange taste in my mouth.”

For those who haven’t seen it, The Reader is the story of Hanna, an older woman who has an affair with Michael, a fifteen year old boy, but then suddenly vanishes. Michael encounters Hanna again as a West German law student visiting a war crimes tribunal, when he discovers that Hanna was an SS guard at Auschwitz concentration camp. Michael finds out that she liked to pick "favourites" from among the prisoners to read to her, just as she had asked him to do in the midst of their affair, and that her shame at her hidden illiteracy means she is prepared to admit to writing a damning SS report rather than admit to her inability to read and write. Michael has the power to stop Hanna from receiving a life-sentence by revealing what he knows, but is unable to do so. He carries the guilt he feels for not speaking out into adulthood.

Perhaps I have misunderstood the film completely. Bradshaw criticises “the dramatic and emotional structure of the film” that “insidiously invites us to see Hanna's secret misery as a species of victimhood that, if not exactly equivalent to that of her prisoners, is certainly something to be weighed thoughtfully in the balance, and to see a guilt-free human vulnerability behind war crimes.” But that’s not the way I saw the story at all.

For me, what makes The Reader impressive is casting a likeable actress like Kate Winslet in the role of a monster who has, from start to finish, absolutely no redeeming qualities. Where a critic like Bradshaw got the idea that we are supposed to sympathise with her, I don’t know. Hanna’s embarks on her affair with Michael only after discovering that he likes to read: she manipulates him just as she has used the prisoners she previously guarded. As soon as the prospect of a promotion from tram ticket collector to an office job threatens to reveal that she is illiterate, she simply abandons Michael without a word or concern. She admits that she never thinks about the past and far from being, in Bradshaw’s words, “the only honest defendant among the guards on trial”, she is so amoral that she is the only one lacking the shame to try and lie in the dock.

Michael, I thought, was motivated not by misguided sympathy for Hanna after she is imprisoned, as Bradshaw suggests. His guilt stems from his own inability to speak out or act when he knows it is an injustice to condemn one former SS guard as worse than the others - complicity by silence that is also the burden of many who lived through the war and one that the next generation of young Germans would like to have believed they could have overcome.

The Reader is a thought-provoking film but enthusiasm for Mickey Rourke’s Oscar-nominated film The Wrestler, meanwhile, bewilders me. The film, about a washed up former wrestling champion, has a central character who is not, as some have suggested, a loveable character. He’s a steroid-filled loser who has spent a lifetime providing staged entertainment to an audience baying for blood, who has abandoned his daughter and, when finding himself alone, tries to buy his way back into her favours but still manages to ruin everything through his narcissism. The character played by Marisa Tomei, that of an stripper with a heart of gold, is an exasperating cliché familiar from so many other, less-praised, films. And the final speech given by Rourke’s character is just awful.

But this is the film that the critics love. Unbelievable…

After the BBC - Target British Gas?

I'll return to comments left by friends on my post about the BBC at some point soon, but I wanted to flag up a piece by Robert Fisk in Saturday's Independent.

Fisk highlights a Global Research paper by Canadian ecomonist and anti-war campaigner Michel Chossudovsky that argues that the "military invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israeli Forces bears a direct relation to the control and ownership of strategic offshore gas reserves.

According to Chossudovsky, British Gas Group and its partner, the Athens-based Consolidated Contractors International Company, were granted 25-year oil and exploration rights off the Gaza coast by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority in 1999. However, "the death of Yasser Arafat, the election of the Hamas government and the ruin of the Palestinian Authority have enabled Israel to establish de facto control over Gaza's offshore gas reserves."

Israel has negotiated directly with British Gas Group to bypass both the Hamas government and the Palestinian Authority, insisting that the Palestinians be paid in goods and services and that no money go to the Hamas-controlled government. A proposed agreement, under which Palestinian gas from Gaza would be channelled via undersea pipelines to the Israeli port of Ashkelon, would have effectively transferred the control of gas sales to Israel.

British Gas Group withdrew from talks in December 2007, but in June of 2008, just as Israel began its invasion plans for Gaza, the company was asked by Israel to resume discussions about the purchase of natural gas from the Gaza offshore fields. Following Israel's invasion, guess who now controls Gaza's coastline?

As Robert Fisk says, "if the Israelis can continue to violate international law by seizing Palestinian land in the West Bank, why cannot they seize the sovereignty of Palestinian gas fields off Gaza? If Israel can annex Jerusalem, why not annex Gaza's maritime areas?"

I still think that the main issue for everyone outraged by Israel's bombardment of Gaza is punishing the Israeli state through a consumer boycott and through disinvestment. So if you see Sid, tell him - British Gas Group has negotiated with Israel for what amounts to the daylight robbery of precious natural resources from the Palestinians. It's time its headquarters at Thames Valley Park in Reading were occupied.

Blair's Man Becomes Met Commissioner

A change at the top of the Metropolitan Police? Hardly. There can be little suprise that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith approved the appointment of Sir Paul Stephenson as the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner, but perhaps raised eyebrows that the increasingly bewildered London Mayor, Boris Johnson, should offer such an enthusiastic endorsement.

For 'Rusty' Stephenson, so named by London's police officers for his strangely permanent tan, has consistently been the most loyal supporter of his predecesor, Sir Ian Blair, during one of the most disastrous periods in the Met's history.

Let's not forget that it was Stephenson who vigorously defended Blair in the aftermath of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, backing his boss' claims that he did not know the Met had shot the wrong man until 24 hours after Jean's death.

Brian Paddick, in his book 'Line of Fire', alleges that Stephenson attempted to force him to issue a statement saying he had misrepresented the Met, after Paddick gave evidence to the Independent Police Complaints Commission in which he claimed that two of Sir Ian Blair's closest advisers believed Jean's killing was a fatal mistake many hours before Sir Ian himself claimed to have found out. After Paddick refused to be bullied and sought legal advice, he received an apology and Stephenson was publicly obliged to say the Met did not intend to imply that Paddick had misled the IPCC. Paddick has also claimed that Stephenson's secretary told him she had known the Met had shot the wrong man by 4pm on the day that Jean died. And if she knew, how come her boss claimed ignorance?

Let's not also forget that it was Stephenson who went to the Metropolitan Police Authority and demanded that then Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur face suspension after he had made an allegation of racial discrimination - and that it was Stephenson who told Ghaffur (in a public statement), "it is long past time we shut up, stop making public statements about a private dispute and get on with the job we are paid to do." It was this comment that helped drive the London branch of the Black Police Association to call for a boycott by potential black applicants to the Met.

As a senior member of Sir Blair's inner circle, Stephenson is as tainted by the most controversial elements of the Met's recent history as his former boss. Forget the glowing profiles and the spin - his appointment as Commissioner represents a continuation of the discredited Blair era, not a break with the past.

The 43 Group - Stand Up to Hatred

An interesting article and video in yesterday's Guardian on the 43 Group, the militant post-war anti-fascist organisation of Jewish ex-servicemen who fought Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts.

See also Morris Beckman's brilliant book