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No funding, no justice: Legal aid at inquests

Deborah Coles — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 11:00:03 +0000

The government recently decided not to extend legal aid funding to grieving families at inquests. This was wrong on many fronts but the fight continues.

Whether it is the death of a child in a mental health setting, the self-inflicted death of a prisoner, or a death as a result of neglectful state services, bereaved families experience a profound, yet unnecessary, injustice.

In our daily work with bereaved people, INQUEST sees how access to justice is hindered by an inequality of arms, where the interests of powerful institutions prevail over the access of bereaved people to the truth and transparency over how and why their relative died.

At a time of traumatic upheaval, families face insensitive and often adversarial inquest processes. The inquest into Connor Sparrowhawk’s death, an 18-year-old who drowned in a locked bathroom in an NHS unit, was a prime example of the evasive and combative approaches deployed by state bodies. Connor’s mother, Sara Ryan, said:

“We were told we didn’t need legal representation because inquests are ‘inquisitorial’ hearings. This couldn’t have been further from the truth. The coronial process is an intricate, law-drenched and adversarial journey in which families without expert legal representation are too easily silenced. From the moment Connor died, it felt like a well-oiled state machine was cementing a wall of denial.”

The battle for legal aid

While state bodies receive automatic legal representation at inquests, families have to go cap in hand to the Legal Aid Agency for support.

To have any chance of funding, families have to jump through multiple hoops to qualify. They face a distressing and protracted process, answering extensive, intrusive questions about their finances. Some are lucky to obtain legal aid, but many do not or they face paying large sums towards legal costs. Some families are forced to represent themselves in complicated legal hearings while others resort to crowdfunding for their lawyers’ fees.

This inequality of arms has been exacerbated by the outsourcing of state services to private companies, meaning bereaved families can face several lawyers representing varying state and corporate bodies. Well-funded legal teams representing multiple state bodies use public money to close ranks and support each other. Their approach is too often about damage limitation: trying to restrict the scope of an inquest, close down questioning, resist disclosure and minimise their responsibility and defend their policies and procedures. In giving evidence to parliament, the brother-in law of Joseph Phuong who died in police custody described the family’s battle for answers: “those [state] parties and those barristers or advocates are trying to shift the blame from them to someone else…. they have an agenda to remove as much blame as possible from their client.”

The struggles and campaigns of bereaved families for truth provide a counterweight to state secrecy and a lack of formal accountability, particularly where people die in closed institutions.

Families have played a crucial role in challenging inequality, discrimination and unacceptable practices. Without this ongoing, critical oversight from below, the abuses of power and neglect uncovered at many of these inquests would remain unchallenged and hidden from public view.

Momentum for change

Whenever the inquest system has been reviewed, or contentious deaths and their investigation examined, there has been a recognition that the current funding arrangements for inquest representation needs fundamental reform.

INQUEST has been involved in a series of Government commissioned reviews and inquiries in an advisory capacity. We have ensured the family voice is heard directly, on their experiences of the current investigation and inquest process. The emotional and physical impact of state related deaths on generations of families should not be forgotten, nor the way it is exacerbated by state denial and defensiveness, secrecy, insensitivity, delays, funding problems and lack of accountability.

Without funded representation, families are denied access to justice. They are voiceless, isolated and alienated from the process without any meaningful role. Families have a key interest in uncovering the full circumstances of the death and in ensuring that inquests do not merely sanction the official version of events. The absence of representation weakens investigations into state action, denying opportunities to interrogate the facts and ensure that mistakes or harmful practices are brought to light. Their function in seeking the truth, as well as exposing wrongful action and unsafe practices, serves a vital public interest in addressing the adequacy of systems for safety and welfare. It can save lives.

Momentum for change

The past few years have seen unprecedented focus on how agencies investigate and scrutinise contentious state related deaths. Momentum for change is now overwhelming, with our call for funding echoed from every possible quarter – Dame Elish Angiolini, Bishop James Jones, Lord Bach, two Chief Coroners, Baroness Corston, Lord Harris, the Joint Committee on Human Rights, the Independent Review of the Mental Health Act and from agencies including the Independent Office for Police Conduct.

The 2017 landmark review by Dame Elish Angiolini on deaths and serious incidents in police custody and Rt. Rev James Jones’ report on the Hillsborough families’ experiences both made wide-ranging recommendations for change. Central to both reviews was the voice of families and their testimonies about the impact of the investigation and inquest process on their physical and mental health and well-being.

The importance of families’ representation was articulated powerfully by Dame Angiolini. In her review, she recommended non-means tested, publicly funded legal representation as a pivotal component to the state fulfilling “its legal obligations of allowing effective participation of families in the process that is meaningful and not “empty and rhetorical””.

Families ‘betrayed’

This groundswell of support for reform led the Ministry of Justice to launch a review of legal aid for inquests, issuing a ‘call for evidence’ in July 2018. INQUEST and the families we work with were assured that this was the first step towards change and that coming out of the evidence review would be a consultation on new guidelines for legal aid funding for inquests.

However, on 7 February, the Ministry of Justice published a final report, stating that “we have decided that we will not be introducing non-means tested legal aid for inquests where the state has representation”. This was a crushing betrayal of those who submitted evidence and engaged in the Ministry of Justice’s review in the hope of securing meaningful change.

The proposals set out by the Ministry of Justice largely focus on improving guidance and signposting for families and their representatives to make the process easier to “understand”. Families, the report says, “need better awareness of when legal aid is available”. This ignores the evidence that it is the system and processes are at fault. Leaflets and information will not address the power imbalance faced by families where legal processes are stacked in favour of state and private providers.

The proposal to allow provision for the backdating of the ‘legal help waiver’, will fund early legal advice for bereaved families that are entitled to funding. This is one small concession in what is a dishonest and patronising report. It is seemingly written by someone with very little grasp of the available evidence and issues that have been clearly documented in multiple reports as well as submissions to the review.

Families will not be silenced

On 26 February, INQUEST launched our family led Now or Never! Legal Aid for Inquests campaign in parliament and opened a petition calling on the government to reconsider their conclusions, listen to families and introduce automatic non-means tested legal aid funding for bereaved families following state related deaths.

At the parliamentary meeting chaired by Rt Rev James Jones, Justice Minister, Lucy Frazer faced a room of frustrated families, MPs and peers. There was a palpable sense anger and frustration in the room. When speaking about the Ministry of Justice’s proposals to provide better information, the Minister was interrupted by one family member who said “We don’t want guidance, we want funding!”.

Richard Burgon, shadow Justice Secretary, also spoke at the meeting, pledging that a Labour government would provide automatic legal aid at inquests for the families of those who died in state detention.

The petition gathered 2,000 signatories on the first day and has formal backing of Liberty, Grenfell United, Mind, United Families and Friends Campaign, The Bar Council, Cruse Bereavement Care, Legal Action Group, Legal Aid Practitioners Group, AvMA, Runnymede Trust, Criminal Justice Alliance, Operation Black Vote, Article 39 and INQUEST Lawyers Group.

The issue of contentious deaths, their investigation and the treatment of bereaved people is firmly on the political agenda. The power imbalance between bereaved families and the state is the most significant injustice of the coronial process. Removing the barriers to accessing legal representation will not only create a fairer and more just inquest system, it will protect lives.

INQUEST and the families we work with refuse to be silenced. We call on the government to act now and urgently introduce fair public funding for legal representation at inquests, to end this unequal playing field.

To find out more about the campaign and to sign the petition, visit https://www.inquest.org.uk/legal-aid-for-inquests

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Stalemate for Trump and Kim, as India and Pakistan risk nuclear war over Kashmir

Rebecca Johnson — Thu, 28 Feb 2019 13:20:43 +0000

Through aggressive rhetoric and miscalculations nuclear war can happen by accident. As the Trump-Kim circus founders, escalating military action between India and Pakistan suggests urgency for global denuclearization.

Through aggressive rhetoric and miscalculations, nuclear war can happen by accident. As the Trump-Kim circus founders, escalating military action between India and Pakistan shows why global denuclearization is necessary.

This is how nuclear wars get started – two or more nuclear armed countries, a political flashpoint like Kashmir, an attack, a retaliation, mutual blame and threats, and then – whoosh – someone launches a nuclear weapon. Will it happen in South Asia? We have to hope not, but need to recognize that this latest military conflict between India and Pakistan has many of the ingredients that make nuclear war probable, sooner or later.

Meanwhile, the summit between US President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has ended in failure, purportedly over sanctions, a frequently used weapon in US diplomacy. Trump was prepared for small reductions but Kim wanted more, as the price for dismantling North Korea's nuclear programme. Their failure to make progress also carries a high price, along with renewed risks.

As Trump flies home to face allegations made by his former partners in crime, it will be up to Kim and the president of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, to take forward the regional security, denuclearization and peace treaty that Korean people ardently desire. Proposals from networks such as #KoreaPeaceNow and Women Cross DMZ provide ideas and support for making tangible progress. While US involvement is important, Trump's problems cannot be allowed to block or derail these hopes.

With regard to denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) published a useful roadmap in which the necessary denuclearization steps are underpinned through existing treaty obligations, through the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), and the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Between them, these multilateral treaties have the authority and resources to ensure implementation, verification and accountability.

Even as efforts were being made to resolve Korea's security problems, another nuclear flashpoint reminded us of the terrifying risks attached to nuclear weapons.

With arsenals of around 130-140 nuclear weapons each, packing explosive yields of between 12 kilotons (similar size to the Hiroshima bomb) and 50 kt, India and Pakistan have been running a dangerous nuclear arms race since they both conducted nuclear tests in 1998.

They are close neighbours with deep levels of distrust, who were divided in 1948 in ways that have exacerbated religious and cultural differences. Both have violent extremists and populists who whip up public hatred of the other, fomenting problems for the respective governments, and constituting volatile sources of instability. They blame each other in familiar narratives, and keep on making and refining nuclear weapons, claiming that these are necessary to deter the other. But neither is being deterred, not from military conflicts or unbridled arms racing.

In public statements reported after both sides undertook air strikes on each other's territory in Kashmir, Pakistan's president Imran Khan was shown on the BBC acknowledging that "given the weapons we both have", the two nuclear armed states could not afford miscalculations. Even as he called for both sides to "sit down and talk", Khan found it necessary to justify Pakistan's military strikes on the grounds that they were "to let them know that just like they intruded into our territory, we are also capable of going into their territory". India's foreign minister Sushma Saraj similarly warned about the dangers of escalation, while describing her country's military actions as carried out "with responsibility and restraint". Therein lies the central challenge. They know that they can't afford to escalate or miscalculate, but both have to appease their hard-liners.

In wargames and exercises used for training and strategic planning by most if not all of the nine nuclear-armed militaries, these kinds of conditions light the fuses that lead to nuclear war.

Deterrence theories were developed to justify nuclear possession with promises of safety and war prevention. In reality, these cannot be delivered. In its 2014 report "Too close for comfort", Chatham House analysed cases of "near nuclear use" and concluded that from 1962 to 2002, there were at least a dozen. For years these were minimised or kept quiet by the affected governments, but their military planners took the facts into consideration.

While publicly espousing nuclear deterrence, which relies on accurate interpretations of data and an adversary's intentions and signals, as well as foolproof systems of communication (human and electronic), the military planners recognised that nuclear war is more likely to happen by accident than intent, fuelled by aggressive rhetoric, arrogance and foolish mistakes.

As long as such weapons of mass destruction exist, they can be detonated through human and electronic authorization, error or – of increasing concern – cyber actions. The logic of arms racing combined with "use them or lose them" fears (dressed up as military doctrine) mean that if one nuclear weapon is detonated, more are likely to follow thick and fast. Whether authorized or not, nuclear weapons use doesn't come with much warning or an off switch.

Chatham House identified two occasions of near nuclear use in South Asia, in 1999 and 2001, not long after India and Pakistan started overtly developing nuclear weapons in 1998. These were triggered by conflicts over Kashmir and Kargil. Despite hurling nuclear threats at each other's cities, both governments managed to pull back. Having shocked themselves as well as each other, they instituted confidence-building measures and "hotline" communications systems for key members of the military-political leadership, as the US and Soviet Union had done after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

They also took credit for not escalating into nuclear war, and from then on justified having nuclear weapons for deterrence. Declaring themselves to be "responsible nuclear weapon states", they sought nuclear technologies that were supposed to be denied to them, since they have refused to sign the NPT. Over time, many have colluded in accepting the self-proclaimed status claimed by India and Pakistan, with some governments even supplying missiles and other technologies to boost their growing nuclear arsenals.

As these nuclear-armed neighbours once again teeter on the brink of war, their first priority should be to end their nuclear arms race and establish bilateral and regional dialogue to resolve their mutual security threats and disputes. The conflict over Kashmir and most of today's ongoing grievances and hostilities originated in the toxic legacy of Britain's colonial mistakes and mismanagement, but adding nuclear weapons just makes everything worse. The clock cannot be turned back, so new thinking is required to move beyond that tragic history and find sustainable arrangements that avoid nuclear war, strengthen regional security, and meet the needs of people living on both sides of the line of control.

No-one underestimates the difficulties, but India and Pakistan have to become partners in constructing sustainable solutions, since they cannot risk going to war with each other. As the Chatham House report analysed, deterrence (which, in non-nuclear strategies has been practised for millennia) is not failsafe. Mistakes get made, and at the interface between people and nuclear weapons, those mistakes can be very costly.

Imran Khan appeared to acknowledge that if the conflict in Kashmir escalates, it could quickly move beyond the leaders' powers and abilities to control. Both sides know they have the capability to bomb each other to smithereens. But their rhetoric suggests they are in denial.

They need to pay attention to the scientists and medical professionals from India and Pakistan who participated in the TPNW negotiations, along with many others. Dr Arun Mitra, Co-President of International Physicians for Nuclear Weapons, a co-founder of ICAN, yesterday called on the governments "to take immediate steps to reduce and eliminate the threat that their nuclear weapons pose to all humanity".

Dr Mitra referred them to recent studies that demonstrated that if less than half of these two nuclear arsenals are used against cities they will kill millions of their own citizens through blast, heat, fire and radiation. Even more catastrophically, the nuclear strikes would create toxic dust clouds in the upper atmosphere. These would encircle the Earth for years, darken our skies and cause years of climate disruption and "nuclear winter". The consequence would be agricultural collapse, famine and death for up to two billion people around the world.

The TPNW was negotiated in 2017 by the majority of UN Members to prevent such horrors and create a new framework of non-discriminatory prohibitions, obligations and steps to end reliance on nuclear weapons and oversee their safe elimination. India and Pakistan participated in many of the meetings as the humanitarian disarmament process got underway, but then chose to prioritise nuclear status over security by boycotting the UN's multilateral negotiations.

They know the facts, however. Instead of risking nuclear war every time extremist violence is perpetrated against one of them, these two nations have other choices. They should seize the opportunity to sign the TPNW and other relevant agreements, pull back from the brink and lead towards greater regional and global security.

From North Korea and the "P5" nuclear armed states to India, Pakistan and Israel, the fundamental truth is that there are no safe hands for these profoundly unsafe weapons. Since nuclear capabilities are the major risk factor, denuclearization is the direction we all have to take, sooner rather than too late.

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It’s about time MPs started talking about climate change again, our lives depend on it

Sophie Sleeman — Thu, 28 Feb 2019 11:39:57 +0000

Climate breakdown is a global emergency, yet the UK parliament hasn't debated it for two years

Image: Brighton and Hove Young Greens

Today, MPs from across the House of Commons will convene to talk about climate change for the first time in two years. It feels unbelievable to me as I write this, but it really has been two years since those tasked with leading our country have officially talked about climate change in our Parliament. Many will say other issues such as Brexit have been more pressing. Yet, as I look at the world around us, as report after report spells out danger as we enter the age of climate breakdown, I struggle to agree.

Given the lack of attention climate change - or more appropriately, the climate crisis - has received in the House of Commons, I’m naturally led to ask, why now? What has changed that’s led to this? Well, there’s the terrifyingly abnormal heatwave that’s rippled across the UK, seeing temperatures soar to over 20°C in multiple places, ensuring we’re breaking all the wrong records. Hottest February day on record, check. First winter day to reach over 20°C, check.

There’s also the wildfires that have been raging in not one, but three different places in the UK. In February! This is seemingly as a result of the unseasonably hot, and therefore dry conditions. Saddleworth Moor in North Yorkshire, Arthur’s Seat hill by Edinburgh and woodland in West Sussex have all been ablaze, characterized by ‘tinderbox-like conditions’ brought about by the hot weather. Not only is it terrifying that three parts of the UK have literally been on fire in the winter, but this seems to be a continuation of events that transpired last year, perhaps indicating wildfires may become a more common fixture in the UK. Just last year, Saddleworth Moor experienced a devastating blaze that burned for over a week, destroying vast swathes of peat moor. This resulted in the Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham declaring a major incident with the UK military on standby. Given the close proximity to large urban areas, wildfires on Saddleworth Moor and similar locations present a very real climate-related threat to human life in the UK.

These manifestations of our changing climate only add further weight to our argument that governments and those in positions of power need to act radically, and urgently to address the climate crisis. That’s why we saw over 15,000 students and young people take to the streets in more than 60 towns and cities on 15th February demanding sweeping environmental reform, calling on the government to declare a climate emergency. We’re seeing our planet and future change before our very eyes, yet those elected to lead don’t appear to understand the severity of our current situation. That’s why we want a change to the voting system to enfranchise younger voices by lowering the voting age to 16. This would allow someone like me - who can’t even vote yet - to have a say in electing someone who best represents my views.

Unbelievably, the climate crisis hasn’t been treated with the respect and fear it deserves while it’s been on someone else's doorstep. Will the UK start waking up to the very real and present dangers of climate change now it’s on our doorstep like never before? I’m not sure.

That today is the first time in two years the House of Commons is talking about climate change is evidence enough to show that our “leaders” don’t seem to care. They don’t care about the environment, they don’t care about bringing about change, and they certainly don’t care about our futures. That’s why I’m striking again on the 15th March as part of a globally coordinated day of action, and I urge you to join me. It’s so important that increasing numbers of us take to the streets on 15th March to show that young people are willing to fight to have a future. We’re joining tens of thousands of students in over 40 countries around the world all crying out for climate justice. We need to show those that have betrayed us that we see a positive vision for how the world can be. We need to keep on marching, demonstrating, and disrupting the status quo. We will change the course of history. Our lives and futures depend on it. See you on the streets on 15th March.

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MP accuses former Tory official of being a ‘fraudster’ and ‘cowboy’ who exploited legal loophole to hide source of ‘dark money’

James Cusick — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 18:57:33 +0000

The Scottish Tory vice chair Richard Cook, who helped channel £435,000 to the Democratic Unionist Party was branded a “fraudster” and “cowboy” who deliberately masked “cancerous dark money” pumped into British politics ahead of the Brexit referendum.

In a Westminster Hall debate, the SNP MP Martin Docherty-Hughes called for an urgent review of current laws which allowed Cook, the chair of the Glasgow-based Constitutional Research Council (CRC) to exploit a legal loophole and avoid publicly stating the source of the record donation to the DUP.

The CRC is legally defined as an unincorporated association, permitted to donate money to political parties, campaigns and individuals in elective office.

Opposite of open democracy

Although the Constitution minister, Chloe Smith, told the debate that responsibility for unincorporated associations lay with the Electoral Commission, and that data held by them was a “treasure trove of information”, Docherty-Hughes said the way the DUP donation was organised was “the exact opposite of open, properly-functioning parliamentary democracy.” He questioned whether anyone in the DUP knew the source of the cash that was largely used to fund pro-leave campaigning on the UK mainland, and whether any “requisite due diligence” was done ahead of the money being accepted.

Under previous Northern Ireland electoral laws, donations to any of the major political parties were protected. The exact origins of £435,000 could have been revealed if the government had honoured its promise last year to back-date legal changes to the time of the 2016 referendum. This did not happen.

Poster boy to cowboy

Doherty-Hughes said Cook, a Tory candidate in the 2010 general election in East Renfrewshire, who had been photographed alongside the former prime minister, David Cameron, and with the current leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Ruth Davidson was “a poster boy for the way in which unincorporated associations have been used to funnel vast swathes of dark money into our political process."

However by “letting cowboys like Richard Cook effectively mark their own homework”, Doherty-Hughes said the probity of major political donations could not be assured.

Details of Cook’s business history – largely uncovered through openDemocracy investigations – were given to MPs. A waste-management consultancy Cook was involved with appeared to fit well with a “Green Tory” image. But this was described as a “scam” involving the illegal shipment of waste tyres round the world. Cook had submitted false evidence to authorities in India and the UK, said Doherty-Hughes.

The SNP MP said Cook’s track record in business “pulls apart the Conservative candidate’s carefully managed public persona.” He said another company connected to Cook owed UK tax-payers £150,000 and was involved in a Californian court case brought by an international haulage form which alleged unpaid bills of $1.5 million.

Other questionable connections revealed in the debate included a company set up by Cook, Five Star Management, where 75 per cent of the shares were held by a former head of Saudi Arabia Intelligence. Another partner had previously been involved in a gunrunning scandal in India.

Cancer in our political system

Refusing all attempts by Tory MPs to interrupt his speech, Doherty-Hughes accused the government of failing to address major failures in the way political donations were being monitored by the relevant authorities. “Dark money is a cancer in political system and unincorporated associations – like Cook’s CRC – are the most prominent way in which this cancer enters the bloodstream.”

Smith, replying for the government, said there were no plans to amend electoral donation laws. She said the current legal framework “allows us all to be transparent.”

She said the government had made changes to the law in Northern Ireland last year which allowed “greater transparency” on who donated to political parties, adding that the accusations described by the SNP did not fit.

Richard Cook has previously denied any wrongdoing in his business dealings. Mr Cook told the Sunday Herald: “The CRC is regulated by the Electoral Commission. We operate solely in the UK. We accept donations only from eligible UK donors. We donate solely to permissible UK entities. Any suggestion that we have done anything else is basically defamatory. I’m not going to get into the donors, like I am not going to get into the members.”

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We owe it to young people to let Shamima Begum return home

Anjum Peerbacos — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 17:30:40 +0000

As a British Muslim woman, parent and teacher, I’m horrified by the home secretary’s handling of the Begum case.

Renu, eldest sister of Shamima Begum, 15, holds her sister's photo. Image: PAHome Secretary Sajid Javid clearly does not have faith in our judicial processes, and in the case of Shamima Begum, has decided to take matters into his own hands. Last week, Javid announced that Begum was being stripped of her British citizenship, making her stateless. Javid has effectively made himself Begum's judge and jury.

Once again, the home secretary is pandering to the far right – and in so doing, abusing his powers in furtherance of his political ambitions. As William Schabas, professor of international law at Middlesex University, explains, “by obstructing her right to return, the government is violating international law.”

“The UN international covenant on civil and political rights, which the UK has ratified, declares: ‘No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country’... Even deprived of her citizenship, there can be no doubt the UK remains Shamima Begum’s ‘own country’ as she has no other.”

This horrendous breach of international law sets an extremely dangerous precedent.

This horrendous breach of international law sets an extremely dangerous precedent. For Shamima Begum herself, at 19, she has already experienced a marriage of sorts, and the deaths of two children, all away from the support of her family, and loved ones. One can only assume that she is in a state of shock and denial. She could be suffering from postnatal depression and post-traumatic disorder. Pregnancy and childbirth alone are difficult and challenging times for any woman. To experience those things in an alien environment can be incredibly traumatic.

Sajid Javid has left a young woman isolated and alienated even further. Bangladesh have stated clearly that Shamima is not their problem. By removing Shamima’s citizenship we have abdicated all our responsibility towards this teenager, and left her at the mercy of the likes of ISIS and other groups. This can only be an awful alternative for her and her newborn baby. And what of the baby? He is a British citizen, Javid has confirmed, but case law suggests there is a very real threat he could be taken from his mother.

As a child of migrants all this makes me incredibly nervous. Could this mean that I could have my citizenship stripped of me because my parents were both born abroad? And what about my children? Their grandparents are from India, but they have never been.

The Windrush Scandal is still fresh in our minds. The Begum case only reconfirms the problematic attitude the Conservatives have towards immigration, race and people of colour. Are all children of migrants now to be deemed second-class citizens? Were our parents right all along? Is this not my home, not my children's’ home? Can those of us from a different country of origin now have our citizenship revoked without a trial or due process?

As a parent of a teenager and a teacher of teenagers I know all too well that often they think they are in-charge and know what they are doing, when they don’t.

And finally, Javid’s handling of the case is letting down other young people. As a parent of a teenager and a teacher of teenagers I know all too well that often they think they are in-charge and know what they are doing, when they don’t. Fifteen-year-olds are impressionable. They are vulnerable to being groomed online. That is what happened to Shamima.

Parents want their children to be safe at all times, including online. We can take some measures as parents to ensure their safety – we can keep screens, tablets, phones and computers in communal areas, rather than bedrooms. We can try to ensure our children only engage with people online that they know in person. We can try to ensure they are not spending every waking hour in front of screens and tablets, but have other activities in their day.

But ultimately, some children are more susceptible to being groomed online. Shamima was one of them. She became a victim of grooming – and we need to find out why. Why was Shamima so disconnected with her immediate family and immediate society – disconnected to the point that she felt a pull from thousands of miles away? Why did she feel the need leave her home and family and all that was familiar to her, to go and become a bride in a foreign land with foreign people?

Was the entire experience romanticised for her? Only when we ask her can we know and prevent others from becoming prey to the same grooming process. Only when she returns can we learn from her experiences.

But while stripped of her British citizenship Shamima is stateless and ideal prey for other predatory groups like ISIS. I dread to think what the future holds for this abandoned teenage mother and her newborn baby.

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A second Brexit referendum is getting more likely. Here’s 3 things that must happen first.

Adam Ramsay — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 13:19:54 +0000

We can prevent a rerun of the abuses that dogged the 2016 vote. Here’s how.

Arron Banks and Nigel Farage. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

Last month I asked Carole Cadwalladr a question. “Do we have an agreed figure for how much Arron Banks claims to have spent on Brexit?”. She thought about it. And then she agreed that we don’t.

Now that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has indicated his party will support another Brexit referendum, this ongoing mystery should worry us enormously.

Most journalists say Banks spent £8 million: already the biggest known gift in British political history. But I’ve gone through all of the various donations and documents uncovered over two years of our collective investigations into “the man who bought Brexit”, and it adds up to £15m. Is that the real total? It’s not totally clear.

However much it is, the National Crime Agency is now investigating Banks, on suspicions that a “number of criminal offences may have been committed”, and that there are reasonable grounds to suspect Banks was “not the true source” of the cash. Who is? We still don’t know.

We also don’t know who gave the DUP a huge donation for their Brexit campaign – via a secretive front group that’s still open for business.

We don’t know what Cambridge Analytica’s chief executive meant when he said, knowingly, “we don’t talk about” Brexit whilst bragging about a string of campaigns his mercenary propaganda spin off company ran. Or how many companies like Cambridge Analytica are now in the business of ‘election stealing’ – through running secretive voter suppression operations, setting up fake grassroots campaign groups and targeting voters online with misinformation.

And we don’t know what’s happened to the investigation of the official Vote Leave campaign by the Met: it seems they’re too busy buying plastic bullets.

We also don’t know who’s currently pasting adverts pushing a no-deal Brexit all over Facebook. And we don’t know who all the donors backing a People’s Vote are, either.

We do know, thanks to Carole Cadwalladr, a whole load more about how data is driving modern propaganda. And we know that both Leave.EU and Vote Leave broke the law – the Electoral Commission has confirmed that. And that they were fined, respectively, £61,000 and £70,000: piffling percentages of the totals they spent.

We know, too, as Leave voters often point out to me, that the bad behaviour ran both ways: while there’s no evidence Remain broke the law, Cameron’s government spent £9.3m on those awful brochures making their flavour-free case for Remain.

Of course, Jeremy Corbyn’s announcement doesn’t mean a second referendum will happen. But it does make it substantially more likely. And if such a vote goes ahead, it must not be a rerun of the last. We can’t allow the result to be shaped by dark money, secretive firms and offshore interests – or, for that matter, insipid government propaganda.

We can’t allow the result to be shaped by dark money, secretive firms and offshore interests – or, for that matter, insipid government propaganda.

Britain’s electoral rules need a serious overhaul. The 2000 Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act was written before MySpace and Bebo were launched, when Channel 4’s Big Brother was the new thing and we were all obsessed with hanging chads. But getting such laws right will require time: time to consult and to think and to close loopholes and to persuade MPs. And time is the one thing the Brexit process doesn’t have.

So if there is another referendum, there are three things that need to happen right away.

1. Let the fines match the crimes

First, the government should increase the maximum fine the Electoral Commission can issue. It’s currently a paltry £20,000: less than you can be charged for ticket touting or for claiming more from the complex social security system than you’re entitled to. The Information Commissioner, on the other hand, can fine up to £500,000. One quick swipe of the parliamentary pen could alter this discrepancy, and keep future referendum campaigners firmly on their toes.

2. Fund the policing our politics – properly

The Electoral Commission urgently needs far greater resources. I’ve often been frustrated by its failure to investigate various indiscrepancies, but in all honesty, they’ve been inundated: a string of votes across the UK in recent years and a collection of scandals from the Tory overspend in 2015 onwards. Of course, the government will resist giving the Electoral Commission the resource they need to police money in our politics properly. But if there’s to be a further vote, we must demand it.

3. Pay for journalism

Finally, we need proper funding for investigative journalism. The long-term collapse of newspaper revenues means their teams are shrinking, squeezing out the deep, forensic reporting that can require months for just one story. If we want serious journalism, we’re going to have to pay for it.

Fortunately, more and more people are realising this – and this shift is what is making our own work at openDemocracy possible. It’s allowed us to investigate the dark money and data involved in the last referendum, and to get deep into the question of who’s shaping our politics now. Our reporting has helped to trigger law change and criminal investigations, and has fed into multiple lawmaker inquiries. But we need ongoing support from readers to keep going, and to build a stronger network of investigative journalists working on these issues.

Whether or not there is a referendum on the final Brexit deal, this work will continue to be vital. Millions of pounds are being funnelled into our politics to not only to shape the outcome of Brexit – but to influence what we see, hear and think in myriad ways. We need to keep tracking where it’s coming from, what it’s buying, and to make a forceful case for greater transparency.

If you agree this is important, please contribute to our crowdfunder today and spread the word - we’ve nearly hit our target with just two days to go. Thank you.

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Who’ll protect children’s rights as we leave the EU?

Jen Persson — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 13:27:24 +0000

From privacy-busting surveillance to poverty-inducing cuts, childrens’ rights are being trampled on – and as young people reach voting age, they won’t forget.

We’ve heard more about the impact of EU withdrawal on the rights of the UK's 11,700 active fishermen, than about its impact on our 11.5million children, including the half a million non-British European national children living here (38% of whom were born here).

“Let them eat spam,” said someone on Twitter in response to the no-deal Brexit guidance on food for school meals in England, issued by the Department for Education last month. The guidance suggests that there are “significant flexibilities within the school food standards,” to accommodate change. There’s no mention of new funding, and it made less press than Theresa May’s mouldy jam, but the no-deal statement is clear, “where the pupil meets the criteria for free school meals, the meal must be provided, free of charge.”

Heads are already topping up the gap between the amount they receive for each child in the infants’ universal free school meals programme, and what they have to pay their contracted providers. How much more will they be expected to find from budgets already in the red, when food costs go up from April?

Children’s charities and advocates appealed to MPs during the autumn 2018 reading of the Withdrawal Bill, to put safeguards in place to protect children’s rights in future, as they exist today within the EU legal framework.

Ministers at the Department for Education then made a statement on World Children’s Day in November to, "reaffirm the value that this Government places on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)” and ensure “children’s rights are further embedded in policy and law making."

The government says children’s rights are already fully protected in domestic law, but the reality is that as we pull out of the EU, the government continues to pull out ever more of the support structures in children’s daily lives.

The outlook for their education, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights to which all children everywhere are entitled, regardless of their ethnicity, gender, religion, language, and abilities, is neither strong nor stable.

For example, parents of children with special educational needs, are having to fight cuts to Special Needs education provision in the courts across England, most recently in Hackney. Local authorities are accused of failing to meet their legal duty to “have regard to the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of children when taking a decision to significantly reduce funding for services for a group of highly vulnerable children.”

To take another example, predominantly Muslim children find their rights to freedom of expression, family life and privacy (all protected rights under UNCRC) routinely curtailed by the Prevent programme. School children are viewed through the lens of terrorism, profiled using software designed to find signs of radicalisation, without risk assessment or independent regulation or oversight. The new one-wrong-click-and-you’re-criminal law could be catastrophic for children subject to online monitoring in school and at home.

Then there’s the young people who have been locked out of student funding and abandoned courses, because the Student Loans Company surveilled their social media, and made mistakes while looking for evidence of fraud in relation to family estrangement. But rather than safeguards, the government brought in new laws in May last year, to give the loans company even more new powers and more access to students’ and staff personal information in Higher and Further Education through the Office for Students.

And then there’s the toxic Home Office spill into education policy since 2010. Young people who have spent their whole childhood in England are regularly refused access to student loans or attend university, through oppressive Home Office checks, and can expect to pay over £10,000 in making multiple applications for indefinite leave.

Secretary of State for Education Nicky Morgan “had to ‘fend off ideas’ from Downing Street” in 2015 including to deprioritise undocumented children in the school admissions system, but as a compromise, the Departments began a secret policy using national pupil records for immigration enforcement which continues today.

After a successful boycott, campaigners at Against Borders for Children are calling on the Department to destroy the nationality data collected since 2016 and end the use of all school records in immigration enforcement. There’s no safeguards in place to stop this misuse by the Home Office post-Brexit. On the contrary, the exemption for immigration the UK government put into law in May 2018 actively infringes on rights set out under the GDPR - another encroachment that is being challenged in the courts. And in parallel, the Windrush scandal demonstrates, there is often no adequate route to redress when things go wrong.

That list is long and getting longer - even before sorting out settled status for non-British children, lack of access to legal aid, or the fact that every British child is about to lose their future rights to work, live and travel freely in the EU.

Children’s right to be heard in decisions about them is routinely ignored in all sorts of ways, but the absence of their voice in this decision about their future and long term wellbeing of the country will have long term political significance. Seeing the PM dismiss young people campaigning for action on climate change prevention to protect their future, was astounding. They will not forget that at the polls, when their time comes to express how they feel about their bleak outlook and being let down across so many aspects of everyday life.

The common thread in many families’ lives, as Helen Barnard, deputy director for policy and partnerships for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has described, is a “rising tide of work poverty sweeping across the country.”

Cuts to library services, schools, public transport, housing, and police, and well-documented Universal Credit welfare changes and job instability, all affect family life and pull out the infrastructures children need growing up.

At the same time, support services in Child and Adolescent Mental Health have been withdrawn.

Government ministers decry children joining gangs, but have cut youth services by over 60%. They passed laws used to ban children from being outside in a park, but seem surprised to find children increasingly into gambling on computers. Then there’s mixed messages and inadequate solutions, telling children don’t be obese, but don’t access pro-thin social media sites. Scrap Sure Start Centres and if children are struggling to read? There’s an app for that, says the Minister for Education.

The age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales is 10 years old and yet Ministers have decided children cannot use social media safely alone until 13. They demand national screen time limits, without evidence of any causal relationship in mental health problems. Yet where children need mental health support, from as young as 5, what does the Minister for Health propose, not properly funded human care, but another austerity driven app.

There is no obvious holistic vision of what children need set out in policy and delivery of it across government.

If the Department is serious about delivering the intent of the statement Ministers have put their names to, to "give due consideration to the UNCRC when making policy and legislation” and “across government” then they must put words into real action. Stop trying to use software to solve social problems. Stop undercutting the infrastructure that supports children’s well-being, blaming everyone but yourselves and wringing hands, when children show the symptoms of its effects.

The Children’s Commissioner believes that “we are failing in our fundamental responsibility as adults to give children the tools to be agents of their own lives.” Those tools are not apps, but respect for children’s human rights, to protection and prevention of harm; to privacy, to education, to participation in political, economic, social and cultural life, and to enable their freedom to flourish.

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The access to justice crisis and what Labour will do about it

Charlotte Threipland — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 11:25:15 +0000

Shadow Justice Secretary, Richard Burgon MP and openJustice's Charlotte Threipland discuss problems facing access to justice and what Labour plans to do about them.

Richard Burgon MP. Photo credit: Wikimedia/CC0 3. Some rights reserved.

Massive cuts to legal aid, an austerity mindset and the loss of skilled, dedicated human rights lawyers are just some of the issues causing widespread injustice in England and Wales. In conversation with the Shadow Justice Secretary, Richard Burgon MP, openJustice looks more deeply at the issues underlying the access to justice crisis. We wanted to know if Labour is taking these problems seriously and how they plan to address them.

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The government must restore funding for free TV licences for the over-75s, urge campaigners and experts

Alice Enders and Claire Enders — Sat, 23 Feb 2019 06:00:01 +0000

The government has off-loaded responsibility for funding – or withdrawing – free TV licenses, onto the BBC. Media experts Enders Analysis urge a re-think in their submission to the consultation.

Image: Elliott Brown/Flickr, CC 2.0

The BBC’s consultation on rescinding free TV licences for all those aged 75 and over, in whole or in part, has sparked a heartfelt petition from key stakeholder Age UK to restore Government funding for the elderly, which we support.

The Government has put the BBC in the intolerable position of choosing between funding the remit, whose delivery is regulated by Ofcom, and free TV licences for the over-75s, a lose-lose for the BBC, its viewers and listeners. In our submission to the BBC we highlight the human impact of reduced services and/or higher monthly expenses on the 2 million single-income households, 75% headed by women, for whom the BBC is a lifeline.

The BBC Board is being required to decide how to address the £745 million loss of Government funding for free over-75s TV licences from June 2020, which is 18% of the £4.1 billion the BBC currently spends on its services. Our submission to the BBC’s consultation on what concession should be in place for older people from June 2020 is contained below. Its purpose is to support the petition of Age UK: Together, we must demand the Government takes back responsibility for funding free TV licences for everyone over 75.

The end of Government funding for free TV licences for the over-75s was abruptly decided by Chancellor Osborne in 2015, separately from the remit contained in the Charter for 2016-25 overseen by Secretary of State (SoS) John Whittingdale of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The package of funding and remit for the BBC was not subject to an evidence-based and consultatory policy-making process engaging viewers and listeners, which were thus ignored. The Act of Parliament making the BBC responsible for the exemption to the licence fee tax that funds it and free-to-air TV looks to be an illegitimate exercise of power.

The BBC Board has ruled out keeping the current regime, consulting on three options, e.g. Option 1 is to give over-75s a 50% discount, each of which would make some or all of the existing beneficiaries worse off. We have not opined on these options in order to bring to the fore our profound opposition to a policy that prima facie reduces funding for services and contributes to pensioner poverty, and notably that of elderly widows living alone and surviving on the state pension.

The BBC might expect a licence fee hike in 2021/22. We worry it will increase the affordability challenge for pensioners under each of the BBC’s three options, as well as encouraging even more licence fee payers to cancel their TV licences.

Key thoughts

1. Parliament has illegitimately conferred on the BBC responsibility for deciding the exemption to a tax. The transfer to the BBC of the funding of free TV licences for over-75s coincides with the halt of the funding for the exemption provided by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). The underlying Act of Parliament is illegitimate in conferring the power of taxation on the BBC via its responsibility for the exemption for all those 65 and over. The licence fee is a tax borne by households meeting the conditions of payment, and it is properly the role of the Government or legislator to decide any departures from its payment. The TV Licensing Authority confirms the statutory position of the BBC: “The TV Licence fee – including concessions and payment amounts – is prescribed by Parliament under the Communications (Television Licensing) Regulations 2004 (as amended). The BBC is not responsible for these matters. [bold italics added] You may wish to contact the government agency responsible for broadcasting in the UK – the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) – to raise any issues you may have about the legal framework for the licence fee. The Department’s address is 100 Parliament Street, London SW1A 2BQ.”(1)

2. Parliament’s decision broke the promises to pensioners made by the Conservative Party in the manifestos for the 2010, 2015 and 2017 General Elections:

1) In the 2010 manifesto it is stated: “That is why we have made a pledge to pensioners to re-link the basic state pension to earnings, and protect: the winter fuel payment; free bus passes; free TV licences; disability living allowance and attendance allowance; and, the pension credit.”

2) In the 2015 manifesto it is stated: “If you have worked hard during your life, saved, paid your taxes and done the right thing, you deserve dignity and security when you retire. We want Britain to be the best country in which to grow old. We will: take the family home out of Inheritance Tax for all but the richest by raising the effective threshold for married couples and civil partners to £1 million; continue to increase the State Pension through our triple lock, so it rises by at least 2.5 per cent, inflation or earnings, whichever is highest; reward saving by introducing a new single-tier pension; give you the freedom to invest and spend your pension however you like – and let you pass it on to your loved ones tax-free; protect pensioner benefits including the free bus pass, TV licences and Winter Fuel Payment; ensure Britain has a strong economy, so we can continue to protect the NHS and make sure no-one is forced to sell their home to pay for care.”

3) In the 2017 manifesto it is stated: “We will maintain all other pensioner benefits, including free bus passes, eye tests, prescriptions and TV licences, for the duration of this parliament.”

3. A deeply flawed policy-making process by DCMS led to the illegitimate Act of Parliament to transfer the authority to the BBC to decide on the concession to over-75s TV licences. The end of funding for the free TV licences for over-75s was abruptly imposed by Chancellor Osborne, while DCMS Secretary of State (SoS) John Whittingdale proceeded with the Charter’s renewal for 2016-25 laying out the remit. The reduced funding of the remit of the BBC was not subject to the usual process of consulting stakeholders, namely BBC viewers and listeners. They required evidence on the decided policy and the trade-off that would be implied in terms of the level and quality of service enjoyed by BBC viewers and listeners in performance of the remit contained in the Charter for 2016-25. Many viewers and listeners would equate an implacable reduction in services to the detriment of the remit under the scenario where the BBC is forced to “fund” the exemption from TV licence revenues, in whole or in part, and would have expressed firm opposition. Had DCMS consulted on the policy, the cost to BBC services from amputating DWP funding would have become clear, and DCMS would have been called out for damaging irrevocably the BBC’s mission as a universally accessible public information and entertainment service.

4. Protecting the concession for the elderly is essential. The households directly affected by the over-75s TV licences constitute 18% of the TV licence universe. Who are these 4.5 million households? (2) About 2.5 million are people of 75 and over living with other people. The particularly vulnerable households include women living alone, those with sight loss, in poverty, and suffering from other medical conditions. According to Age UK:

4.1. “2 million people over 75 live alone; 1.5 million of these are women.” (3)

4.2. Sight loss: “35% for those aged 75+”, which makes them heavily dependent on radio services

4.3. “In the last reported year (2015/16), the average (median) net income for single pensioners in the UK was £250 a week before housing costs and £205 after housing costs. Averages don’t tell the whole story. For example, the poorest fifth of single pensioners had median net incomes of £106 a week after meeting housing costs (2015/16 prices), while the richest fifth had £408.”

4.4. “The average weekly expenditure for one-person households mainly dependent on state pensions is £168”

It is absurd that the BBC is being forced to consider imposing these households by the removal in whole or in part of the free TV licence fee. It is absurd that the TV Licensing Authority will be forced to pursue non-payers of the TV licence should the concession lapse in whole or in part, subjecting the elderly, the poor and women living alone to enforcement by the TV Licensing Authority. This can include paying a £1,000 fine, and those refusing to do so, including if they lack the means, may endure a prison term. We support the petition of Age UK calling for the Government to restore DWP funding for the policy, at least until 2022 in our view. (4)

5. Protecting performance of the remit is essential. The Government has not explained how the BBC can deliver the remit despite the elimination of DWP funding for the free TV licences; the best-case for the BBC under its own proposals is to lose ‘only’ 28% of its funding (Figure 1). When DWP ends the funding, it will cap a decade of Government efforts to axe BBC funding, already costing roughly 20% in real terms: the licence fee was frozen between 2010 and the start of the new Charter in January 2017 (and will increase in line with inflation until 2021/22); and the BBC’s budget was ‘top-sliced’ through the funding of various services/projects (S4C, BBC World Service, BBC Monitoring, rural broadband roll-out, and local TV). True, the BBC may seek a higher level of the licence fee as of 2022, but that will simply increase the affordability challenge for pensioners under each of the options for reform.

Figure 1: Selection of Frontier Economics’ assessments of reform options
	Alter the value of the concession: 50% discount	Raise age threshold to 80	Link to Pension Credit, age threshold 75
Economic rationale	Remaining equity / efficiency rationales would apply to partial discount.	Better alignment with other benefits that begin at age 80. Over 80s are more likely to live alone than younger pensioners.	Low income households are less able to pay for a TV licence. Pension Credit is a government-defined measure of need.
Financial impact in 2021/22 relative to reinstating the current concession	56% (i.e. a 44% saving)	65% (35% saving)	28% (72% saving)
Distributional impact	Small regressive impact among over-75 population (smaller effect for discount). No improvement in targeting.	Very slightly regressive impact but costs are small on average. Minor targeting improvements.	Improves targeting, though low take-up of Pension Credit an important factor.
Feasibility (technical)	Existing precedent for 50% discount. Continued use of DWP data would require new secondary legislation (because moving to a discounted licence would represent a change of purpose for data access relative to the current situation).	No significant implementation issues. The same DWP data can be used to verify date of birth so there would be no significant changes to existing processes. Current recipients of the concession would have to be contacted and asked to start paying again, leading to administrative and compliance costs.	Relatively straightforward to link to additional administrative information, though some legislative process needed. Additional complexity in handling queries. BBC could also verify eligibility internally, although this would be associated with a higher cost.
[Source: Frontier Economics]

6. The BBC will be blamed for falling short on the remit. The BBC’s performance is vetted by Ofcom, based on surveys of viewers and listeners. Inevitably, as the BBC is forced to reduce its panoply of services and/or programming expenditure to accommodate the funding gap, surveys are likely to report a lower level of satisfaction with the BBC, which will lead Ofcom to castigate the BBC. Keeping the funding of the BBC intact is essential to preserve audience satisfaction and performance of the remit. Ofcom stated in its 2018 review of the BBC: “The BBC is generally delivering on its remit for audiences through the breadth and quality of its output. It provides a significant volume of news and current affairs, a wide range of learning and educational content, as well as high-quality distinctive and creative content for all audiences across its mainstream and specialist services. Audience satisfaction continues to be relatively high: three-quarters of people say they are satisfied with BBC radio and with BBC online, and two-thirds with BBC TV.” (5) It is implausible to expect the BBC to continue to deliver its public purposes well at the same time as Parliament has determined it is to be responsible for funding free TV licences.

7. Parliament has condemned the BBC to a morally ambivalent position. It has to choose between funding the remit and funding the over-75s TV licence regime, in whole or in part, a situation that can only be to its detriment. The BBC is also required for the first time to pick the “winners” and “losers” of the regime change, a situation at odds with its unique position as the publicly owned provider of information and entertainment services above the political fray.

Notes

(1) TV Licensing, Licences facts and figures

(2) House of Commons Library, TV licence fee statistics, briefing paper number CBP-8101, published 10 January 2019.

(3) Age UK, Later Life in the United Kingdom, April 2018.

(4) Age UK, Switched Off: Save Free TV for Older People.

(5) Ofcom’s annual report on the BBC, p4. Published 25 October 2018.

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The BBC should stand up to the government’s hypocrisy over free licence fees for over-75s

David Elstein — Sat, 23 Feb 2019 06:00:00 +0000

Perhaps there is a very British compromise to be found?

Image: Pixabay

The BBC has been holding a consultation about how – or whether – it should maintain the current provision of free TV licences for the over-75s. It offers a number of different options, with different costings, and Enders Analysis has kindly agreed to allow openDemocracy to publish its submission to the BBC: in effect, an impassioned plea for the government to “do the right thing”, and take back responsibility for an important piece of social provision, rather than undermine the BBC’s public service offerings.

This bomb started ticking four years ago when the BBC and the newly-elected Tory government came face to face over the broadcaster’s future funding. George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was determined to deliver what he had failed to achieve five years earlier, when the BBC board and management refused – to the point of threatening resignation – to take on the cost of providing free TV licences for any household containing someone over the age of 75.

That giveaway had been one of Gordon Brown’s wheezes when he had been Chancellor, in 2001, and was becoming increasingly expensive as the number of people living to 75 increased, and as their survival beyond that age also extended. In 2010, the BBC – which had unwisely boasted of how it had delivered savings of £600 million a year from internal efficiencies – accepted a settlement that effectively swallowed those savings, leaving the licence fee frozen, but absorbing within it the cost of the World Service (saving the Foreign Office over £250 million a year), the Monitoring Service at Caversham and the Welsh language channel S4C, along with a subsidy to local TV and a contribution to the cost of rolling out rural broadband.

How legitimate these expenditures were as a charge to the licence fee was questionable: but the principle that the licence fee should only be used to fund BBC broadcast services had been breached years earlier, when the BBC agreed to allow hundreds of millions of pounds a year to be allocated to helping vulnerable households manage the switch from analogue TV to digital TV. The BBC’s calculation was that the increase in the licence fee that was authorised in order to cover this expense would accrue to the BBC once digital switchover was complete: but dangerous precedents had been set. Governments could express their preferences as to how the licence fee should be spent, and social projects could qualify as suitable for licence fee funding.

In 2015, with the surprise election of a majority Conservative government, Osborne and his colleague, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, John Whittingdale, reversed the 2010 strategy. Instead of freezing the licence fee, they would agree that it could be restored to an index-linked basis, which was something the BBC had long desired: but only on condition that the cost of funding the over-75s concession was shared during the period of the licence fee settlement, on a progressive basis. This had the merit of fulfilling the Conservative election manifesto promise of maintaining the concession until at least 2020 (renewed, as the Enders paper correctly notes, in the 2017 manifesto), but providing a route whereby its cost to the Treasury had a finite end date.

It is important to make two points about this deal. The first is that the BBC itself accepted that it was balanced, in that it had been granted concessions that matched in value the cost within the licence fee settlement period of the BBC’s requirements to contribute to the cost of the over-75s obligation.

In addition to annual rises in the licence fee, there would be reduced obligations to fund S4C and broadband rollout, and a long-sought change in the rules whereby the licence fee could be “modernised” – in other words, that it could become compulsory for users of the iPlayer, thus closing a loophole that was starting to drain away licence fee income, in the case of households that simply watched TV on playback rather than live.

Not for the first time, this was a “front-loaded” settlement, with the BBC’s upside in the early years only being overtaken by the downside in the last 18 months. Put another way, even in 2021/22, the annualized benefits for the BBC from the concessions granted will be only £50 million less than the full cost of the over-75s concession (expected to have reached some £750 million a year by then): or 1.25% of the value of the licence fee.

So it is hard to have much sympathy for the BBC as it decides what to do next. The analysis by a think tank, the public consultation, the setting out of different options and the ritual hand-wringing cannot obscure two key facts: that the BBC entered into this agreement voluntarily and that Osborne and Whittingdale made explicit that the BBC would be entitled, in 2022, to eliminate the over-75s concession entirely.

The Enders Analysis response to the public consultation is passionate, not least in its excoriation of the Conservatives. It is certainly hypocritical in the extreme for the Tories to have washed their hands of the licence fee concession, and then to urge the BBC to maintain the concession. Technically, I suspect that (contrary to the Enders document) the Tories have not actually breached their manifesto commitments to the over-75s, in that their free licences will last almost to the scheduled date of the next election (and certainly well past 2020, which was the extent of the 2015 commitment). Indeed, the 2017 manifesto argues for the Winter Fuel allowance (which is worth more than a free TV licence) to be better targeted, rather than handed out to millions of people who do not need it.

As for the hardship argument, it is hard to see why impoverished single mothers should so regularly be pursued for non-payment of the licence fee (tens of thousands every year), when wealthy pensioners are exempt (it is estimated that 20% of pensioners are millionaires). Nor can there be a serious argument that the elderly face being cut off from information and public debate: radio – which continues to be provided free – is a far more prolific medium than television in providing news, current affairs and discussion.

All the options canvassed by the BBC as an alternative to cancellation or full maintenance of the concession are unattractive, for similar reasons: the BBC should neither be deciding which group of people, if any, should be exempt from paying the licence fee, nor involved in implementing any system created to enforce such discrimination. Any modifications to the household obligation – such as lower payments for black and white TVs or for people who are registered as blind, or special arrangements for hotels or care homes – should be the responsibility of governments, not the BBC.

If there needs to be a means test to ensure that really poor over-75s who want to watch television but might struggle to find the required £3 a week to do so legally can so do, then the Department for Work and Pensions, not the BBC, should set the test and implement it: and, of course, fund the cost. The BBC needs to bite the bullet, and announce that it would be wholly unfair to the 20 million households where no-one is over the age of 75 to have 20% of all BBC investment in content sacrificed in order to maintain the over-75s concession. A poorer service for everyone is the wrong answer to this conundrum.

There would still be an element of discretion for the BBC if it decided to abolish the concession. Enforcement of the licence fee remains in the BBC’s hands (even if outsourced to Capita). The odium of dragging thousands of over-75s through the courts for non-payment is something the BBC could well do without, so it might covertly introduce a process of failing to prosecute where it was deemed prudent to avoid negative PR. Of course, word could get around such that many over-75s decided to call the BBC’s bluff when the letters stamped “TV licence dodger” started landing on doormats. In effect, for the over-75s, payment of the TV licence might become largely voluntary, which would be a very British compromise. Who knows, maybe the idea might extend to the rest of us in due course.

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MPs mustn't allow Fox free range to negotiate an ‘America first’ trade deal

Nick Dearden — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 15:33:18 +0000

Liam Fox wants to offer Trump everything from agriculture to the NHS in exchange for getting the City of London greater access to the US economy – and most government MPs seem completely relaxed about that.

Remember all that talk about parliamentary sovereignty a couple of years ago? Remember being told that a key reason for Brexit was having control of our own trade policy? And that Brexit would mean we wouldn’t have to sign up to any undemocratic trade deals like TTIP?

Well it turns out it that those arguments were about as much hogwash as the £350 million extra a week which Boris Johnson desperately wanted to spend on the NHS. We saw that yesterday, when MPs debated Britain’s post-Brexit trade deals with countries including the United States, Australia and New Zealand, as well as signing, however geographically improbably, the Transpacific Partnership.

Or at least, some MPs debated those deals. The government benches contained no more than five MPs. Which is extraordinary given that this is possibly the only guaranteed debate MPs will get before a standard-slashing “America first” trade deal is brought back for them to approve. And approve such a deal they will have to do, because yesterday government ministers confirmed that in Brexit Britain the mother of parliaments will be effectively unable to stop any trade deal, however much they dislike it.

In a democratic country, Thursday’s debate would have been the point at which parliament saw Liam Fox’s negotiating objectives for the trade deals under discussion. They would have been able to question his red lines (assuming he has any), and to apply some sort of framework which lays out the type of trade deal Britain wants. They would have seen scoping documents and impact assessments, laying out what such deals would mean for different parts of the country, for different industries, and for our ability to protect public services, our environment and our welfare. They would have been promised access to all the negotiating documents so they could keep the Secretary of State on the straight and narrow. Scrutiny committees would have been established. Consultations with the public would have been launched. Devolved nations would have been given a specific say on what they wanted and didn’t want from a trade deal.

But, as Barry Gardiner, Labour’s trade spokesperson commented: “Today’s debate certainly cannot be considered to constitute that important discussion. It is a general debate on a Thursday, in a week that was intended to be recess, talking about potential agreements before Parliament has even debated the whole process of consultation, impact assessment, negotiating mandate, parliamentary debate, transparency of negotiation, ratification and subsequent review and periodic appraisal that should constitute a framework within which the Government intend to bring such agreements into being.”

As the SNPs trade spokesperson Stewart Hosie summed up: “Current procedures are such that this could be the only opportunity MPs have to debate four major trade deals. That would be woefully inadequate.”

Yesterday’s debate was a sham, which exposes the democratic black hole at the heart of Brexit. A hole which the government plans to fill with numerous trade deals which will affect everyone in the country, but which we are allowed no voice on. To be clear, MPs were told yesterday that there was no guarantee of another debate, of a written mandate to guide trade deals, of them being allowed to access any papers, of a proper scrutiny process or of a final meaningful vote.

Huge public concern

To be fair, there has actually been a public consultation. It was even accessible online. And a massive 600,000 people and organisations took part. That’s a record for such a consultation, and shows very clearly how interested and concerned the public are by trade policy. The majority of respondents are believed to have raised concerns that these trade deals could change the sort of food of we eat for the worse, could threaten the livelihoods of farmers, could undermine the NHS, and could introduce a “corporate court” system which would open our government up to being sued – in secret – for introducing perfectly reasonable environmental protection, public health standards and improving workers rights.

Yesterday, Liam Fox simply dismissed most of these concerns. But in any case, the consultation wasn’t in any way ‘meaningful’: it didn’t set out the type of deal the government wanted to do with these countries, or make any assessments of the changes the deals might bring about. It did little more than ask the anodyne question: Is trade with these countries a good thing?

But too bad. That was your chance. There won’t be another one.

Why does all this matter so much? Well in just over five weeks time, Fox can head to Washington to face the most experienced negotiating team in the world, determined to force Britain to accept chlorine-washed chickens and allow big business to get its hands on the NHS. This is not scare-mongering. We know precisely what US multinationals want because they told us last month: standard-slashing policies that includes allowing meat filled with antibiotics and steroids onto our shelves, as well as vegetables covered in chemical residues and milk with more pus in it. And less labelling on that food. It includes more expensive medicines, costing the NHS billions of pounds, and new data rules allowing Big Tech to use and abuse your data at will. It includes more GMOs, and worse chemical standards, and a corporate court which can be used by US multinational to challenge government decisions. By and large, the US administration agrees with this wish list.

The threat to the NHS is mostly that posed by the corporate court system. And it is not made up. Stewart Hosie pointed out how it might affect government decisions yesterday in parliament:

“In Scotland, when cleaning was contracted to the private sector, hospital-acquired infection rates went up. We then took a decision to bring back NHS cleaners, and hospital-acquired infection rates came down. Had that contract been won under the terms of one of these agreements, we could have been sued and challenged.”

He’s quite right, which is why many campaign groups launched a campaign against these awful courts, known as ISDS, this week. Such a system is already part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Fox wants the UK to sign after Brexit. The deal has been widely criticised by trade unions and campaign groups across the world for entrenching deregulation and liberalisation. Signing this deal would also move us away from the EU “precautionary” system of trying to prevent harmful products coming onto to the market, to one which says, “let’s not worry until something really bad happens”.

Most of this won’t concern Fox, who seems to know “the price of everything and the value of nothing”. His belief is that the free market will work its magic to provide us with cheaper goods, and that will be beneficial for consumers. No matter that consumers are largely also producers – and that some cheap clothes made in appalling conditions doesn’t make up for losing your job. Fox is full throated in his support of ISDS, and yesterday said that the EU-Canada deal CETA was a great basis for future UK deals. CETA also includes ISDS.

So things are now serious. In fact it’s always been the case that many hard Brexiteers see trade deals as a way of entrenching deregulation and privatisation in the British economy. Fox told business leaders a couple of weeks ago, that in the event of a no-deal Brexit he was favourable to applying zero tariffs to all goods coming into the country. It’s astonishing this didn’t generate more headlines given that it would decimate British farming and lay waste to large parts of industry. But then again, that’s not a problem to those who see Brexit as a means of completing the Thatcher project.

Do we really want to give this man royal powers to negotiate our future relationship with the world? It’s actually turned out to be the House of Lords who have most firmly stood up to Fox. Peers have put Fox’s Trade Bill on hold until he outlines his proposals to give parliament a proper role in overseeing trade policy. They will certainly be disappointed with his response, and it’s to be hoped that at that point, expected to be reached in the next two weeks, they use their powers to radically amend the Bill and force the government to implement a democratic system for holding the secretary of state to account for his trade policy.

If we fail in this task, then we need to prepare for a long campaign ahead. It’s been more than two years since we beat the dreadful EU-US trade deal known as TTIP. What we’re looking at now is TTIP on steroids. We must defeat this threat.

The government’s strategy, away from the scrutiny of parliament, is to give in to the US on agriculture, in return for the US letting the City of London run amok in the American economy. Finance and services are the bit of the British economy Fox seems to really care about, in his desire to create a low-tax, low-regulation Singapore-on-Thames. This would be bad for British workers, bad for creating a more equal country, and bad for the rest of the world which needs to deal with the damage of our financial giants. We need to stop it.

Join the campaign against corporate courts: https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/join-fight-against-corporate-courts

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Protecting protest - fracking campaigners challenge Ineos' "anti-democratic" tactics

Tamasin Cave — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 14:19:07 +0000

As people around the country take to the streets against inaction over the climate emergency, campaigners are challenging corporate efforts to shut down front line protests.

“We’re in this kind of war against an industry that knows it's on its way out, but is clinging on as long as it can,” says Joe Corré of anti-fracking group, Talk Fracking.

In the next few weeks, Corré will find out whether his efforts to challenge a wide-ranging injunction brought by petrochemical giant, Ineos, against protestors have been successful. Ineos is one of the main companies pushing to frack in the UK.

“If we win, it will be another major blow to the fracking industry,” says Corré. “If we don’t, then it's going to be a really big thing for protest.”

What is at stake, and the reason why Corré decided to take the case to the Court of Appeal, is the nature of the injunction granted to Ineos, which has been described as “draconian” and “anti-democratic”.

Granted by a private court in 2017, it tells campaigners they will be in contempt of court if they cause any obstruction to the firm’s fracking operations and may be put in prison, fined or have their assets seized. It adds severe penalties to existing laws, such as trespass, and covers tactics such as “slow walking” in front of vehicles. What is unusual about this particular injunction, though, is that it is addressed to “persons unknown”, meaning that it covers anyone who engages in the injunction's “prohibited conduct”, whether they are aware of the injunction, or not.

“What it has done is put the frighteners on people,” says Corré of the injunction, which has now been in place for 18 months. “It has curbed their right to peacefully protest.” This is the basis of Corré’s appeal: that, by applying the injunction to everyone, it is incompatible with people's legal right to protest. Ineos disagrees and states that the injunction “does not prevent anyone effectively exercising their rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of expression”.

What is clear is that the case represents an escalation on Ineos’s part to tackle what it describes as “mounting opposition, threats and unlawful conduct faced by shale gas operators.” It is right on at least one point: fracking is increasingly opposed by the public, despite the vast amounts the industry has spent on public relations to win over opinion.

Ineos’s wide-ranging injunction has also, inevitably been adopted by other fracking companies to shut down protest. “They’ve all copied the “persons unknown” thing,” says Corré, although he says that if campaigners win the appeal, they will be able to “take big chunks off” these other injunctions.

“I’m quite used to going to court these days,” he says, and is both proud to be challenging the injunction and ashamed that it takes someone with his personal wealth to do it. Corré is the founder of Agent Provocateur and son of Vivienne Westwood. In this context, though, he is David to Ineos’s Goliath. Its founder and chair, Jim Ratcliffe, is a billionaire and Britain’s richest man.

People who are now out protesting against the climate crisis should be clear, however, where the power lies in this battle. “These local communities affected by fracking,” says Corré, “have spent god knows how many weeks, months, years writing letters to their MPs, finding out information, talking to each other, fighting off all attempts by the fracking companies, at every opportunity.”
For years they have successfully held back fracking operations in this country and kept the gas in the ground. Corré’s case is trying to make sure that they – and all “persons unknown” protesting against fossil fuel companies – can continue doing it.

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Revealed: How dark money is winning ‘the Brexit influencing game’

Peter Geoghegan and Jenna Corderoy — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 00:07:00 +0000

As Tory MPs resign in protest at the malign influence of hardline Brexiters, documents show the “unfettered” access to ministers and senior politicians enjoyed by secretive think tanks such as the IEA that are “marching the country” to a no-deal Brexit.

The three departing Conservatives MPs pulled no punches. In a joint resignation letter that rocked Westminster on Wednesday, the trio said that the Tories were “in the grip” of the pro-Brexit European Research Group who were “now recklessly marching the country to the cliff edge of no deal".

The ERG is a secretive organisation. No one knows for certain how many members it has. Many already call it a “party within a party”. But when it comes to ideas on Brexit, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s group of Tory MPs has often looked outside its own ranks. And to one place in particular – the Institute of Economic Affairs, a right-wing think tank that does not declare its funders, and the IEA’s trade advisor, Shanker Singham.

Last month, on the same morning that Theresa May’s aides were furiously trying to corral Conservative MPs to back her doomed withdrawal bill vote, active ERG supporter Dominic Raab was holding a press conference in a quiet corner of Westminster outlining an “alternative vision” for leaving the EU. Sitting alongside the former Brexit secretary at a short wooden table was Shanker Singham.

Singham, until Brexit an unheralded trade lawyer who had spent most of his career in the US, was on stage again this month at another Westminster press conference. This time another one-time Brexit secretary, David Davis, was telling journalists that Britain could do a minimal deal with the EU then cut all tariffs to zero on goods, agricultural and food products. The event was being held by Competere, Singham's private political consultancy.

Singham, his employers – the IEA – and their anonymous financial backers have gained remarkable influence at a crucial moment in modern British history. With Westminster in chaos and Whitehall paralysed, an unelected lobbyist working for a think tank funded by dark money has come to play a pivotal role in pushing ideas for a hard break with the EU into the heart of government. Many of those who say ‘no deal’ is ‘no problem’ cite Singham’s work.

Now, documents obtained by openDemocracy show in new detail the depth of the personal and professional connections between the IEA and the ERG and senior government ministers. The IEA is a registered charity but despite censure from the charity regulator for its pro-Brexit work the think tank’s influence on the Conservative right, especially the ERG, is huge.

Emails we’ve uncovered also show that Singham personally arranged for interest groups to meet with then Brexit minister Steve Baker and senior IEA staff had easy access to cabinet ministers. Commenting on these findings, Labour’s shadow minister for the cabinet office Jon Trickett said that the “unfettered access to decision-makers” showed that “a complete overhaul of politics is needed”.

‘The Brexit influencing game’

Just hours before the February press conference that argued for zero tariffs after Brexit, the Charity Commission had issued a formal warning to the IEA over Singham’s Brexit work. The former Washington lobbyist was invited onto Sky News afterwards all the same to explain his trade plans. That evening he appeared on Channel 4 News, where presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy described Singham’s proposals as “unicorns and nonsense”.

Image: Faisal Islam

Singham's calls for the UK to elimate all tariffs are backed by many in the ERG but most economists believe such a dramatic move would lead to widespread job losses, economic damage and a serious reduction in standards across. The Times this week described the idea as "voodoo economics". Even Patrick Minford, a pro-Brexit economist and IEA trustee, has admitted that removing tariffs would mean that British car manufacturing would have to be "run down".

Nevertheless, Singham has been a near-constant presence in British media in recent weeks, often dismissing concerns about a no-deal Brexit. And as well as a constant stream of broadcast media invites for a man who refuses to reveal his paymasters, Singham has enjoyed “extraordinary” access to government ministers including Michael Gove and Boris Johnson.

Earlier this month, Singham attended a meeting at the Cabinet Office between senior ERG figures, Brexit secretary Steve Barclay and officials “from all arms of government” to discuss “alternative arrangements” for the Irish backstop. Theresa May was said to be “clearly taking this exercise seriously”.

Between them, influential, dark-money-funded lobbyists like Singham and pro-Brexit MPs have sought to play down fears about Brexit, and particularly a no-deal departure from the EU. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of pounds of dark money has poured into social media ads warning MPs not to “steal Brexit” and promoting the UK leaving the EU on WTO rules.

Support for a no-deal Brexit appears to be strengthening. It’s not known who is paying for either the lobbyists or the adverts, nor whether the same people or businesses are behind both.

Singham’s Brexit work has not escaped the scrutiny of regulators. The Charity Commission’s formal warning in February stated that the IEA’s alternative to May’s white paper, ‘Plan A+: Creating a Prosperous Post-Brexit UK’ – which Singham co-wrote – breached charity law by calling for Brexit to be used to deregulate finance, weaken rules on hazardous chemicals and remove rules protecting agency workers. The regulator said that the IEA risked being seen as “politically biased” after Jacob Rees-Mogg, David Davis and other pro-Brexit Tories attended the report’s launch. The charities watchdog is still investigating the IEA.

This was not the first time that Singham has been rapped over the knuckles. Last May the Charity Commission found that a Brexit paper he wrote in his previous role as trade advisor at the think tank Legatum had ‘crossed the line’ and did not meet its charitable objectives. That summer Singham was also forced to quit international trade secretary Fox’s ‘committee of experts’ after openDemocracy revealed that he had taken a job with a lobbying firm.

But rules and regulations designed to ensure political transparency are easily circumvented.

The Charity Commission forced the IEA to take down ‘Plan A+’ from its website but it is still available on the website of a political consultancy owned by Singham. When openDemocracy alerted the Charity Commission to this the watchdog said it had “issued the charity with a serious warning and expect the trustees to be cautious of any links to this publication”.

Losing his place on Liam Fox’s committee doesn’t seem to have limited the unrivalled access that Singham – and others – have to the political process. Last summer, the IEA’s director Mark Littlewood was filmed apparently boasting to an undercover journalist from Greenpeace’s investigative unit Unearthed that he could avoid having to record Singham’s presence on official data by using his name instead of the trade advisor’s on government transparency registers.

Littlewood told Unearthed that his outfit was involved in the “Brexit-influencing game”. IEA staff regularly appear as independent ‘experts’ in the British media, and have decades-long relationships with senior figures in right-wing politics on both sides of the Atlantic.

The IEA, which does not disclose its funders, is rated “highly opaque” by the accountability group Transparify. The think tank has previously received money from gambling and tobacco companies, and for promoting privatisation of the NHS. Last year, the IEA was accused of pushing “paid-for propaganda” after openDemocracy found its free schools magazine had carried articles arguing against tobacco taxes and climate change science, and in favour of NHS privatisation.

‘A Better Deal’

The 15 January press conference where Singham sat alongside Raab and Davis was held to promote the release of ‘A Better Deal and a Better Future’, a Brexit policy document written by former minister Steve Baker with the help of, among others, Shanker Singham. Within weeks ‘A Better Deal’ had had a major impact on the Brexit debate within the Conservative party: it formed the basis for the ‘Malthouse compromise’, drafted by Baker in attempt to unite warring factions of the Tory party.

That Baker and Singham were working together on Brexit was not new. The pair had been friends since the EU referendum, often meeting to talk about trade and economics while the ardently Eurosceptic Baker chaired the ERG and Singham worked for the Legatum think tank.

As Buzzfeed revealed last year, after Baker was appointed as a minister in the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) in June 2017 he frequently had meetings with Singham that were not disclosed in official government transparency records. Also present was Singham’s former Legatum colleague Crawford Falconer, who works for Liam Fox’s department of international trade.

Now documents released to openDemocracy show that Singham even arranged for lobby groups to meet Baker.

The Automated Customs and International Trade Association, a trade body primarily focused on the use of computerised customs systems, wanted to talk to government after the Brexit vote. A committee member suggested that Singham could help. “He knows a lot of people,” recalls ACITA director general Des Hiscock, speaking to openDemocracy.

In January 2018, Singham emailed Baker saying “ACITA, the association of Customs Professionals would like to meet with you… Could you let me know when you can meet?” In a follow-up correspondence, Singham told the then Brexit minister that “we are working with ACITA” and requesting that he also attended the meeting.

Less than three weeks later, Baker met the ACITA alongside officials from HMRC and the Treasury. Singham, who was also present, was not employed by the trade group but he said that he had access to other government ministers.

“Some promise was made that we would see David Davis. [Singham] was trying to see David Davis to push this idea of ours forward. There was some indication that Shanker had seen him and would be able to arrange a meeting for us. Then it was ‘you know Steve Baker could see us,’” recalls Hiscock.

In July 2018, Baker resigned from government in protest at May’s Chequers plan. For ACITA nothing concrete came out of the meeting with Baker. “A lot of promises were made but by the time that we were close to getting anything, Steve Baker wasn’t there,” says Hiscock.

“[Singham] put us in contact with strange people promising wonderful things that never come to any type of fruition,” he recalls.

The Epicenter mystery

Singham’s access to Tory ministers and other leading politicians is so great it’s easy to forget he’s not himself on the government or Conservative party payroll. In fact his home base is a secretive network of right-wing think tanks.

Singham joined the free-market Legatum Institute before the EU referendum, but on 9 March 2018, after months of negative headlines about the think tank, including a series of newspaper stories about its founder and main donor Christopher Chandler’s links to Russia, it was announced that Singham had been “poached” by the IEA, taking a team of three analysts to set up a new trade and competition unit.

Two days earlier, Brexit minister Steve Baker had had dinner with an Italian libertarian think tank called the Bruno Leoni Institute. Baker's meeting with the Leoni Institute was disclosed as part of the government transparency data, but when openDemocracy asked for further information about attendees, DExEU said the minister attended in his “personal capacity”.

Quite how a minister could have dinner with representatives of a right-wing think tank in a “personal capacity” is not clear. The Bruno Leoni Institute is part of Epicenter, a grouping of European right-wing think tanks that includes the IEA. The day after Baker had dinner with the Bruno Leoni Institute, the Italian think tank gave a talk at the IEA’s headquarters in London.

Epicenter has long been accused of being opaque about the origins of its funding. Following repeated complaints by European watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory, Epicenter declared in January 2018 that it was entirely funded by the IEA. Though, of course, we don’t know where the IEA gets the money it gives to them.

In May 2018, Baker also met with politicians from a libertarian think tank based in Oklahoma, the E Foundation, which promised to raise donations for the IEA, including from farming interests keen to ensure the UK drops EU-level regulations after Brexit. IEA director Mark Littlewood told an undercover reporter for Unearthed that Singham was “unbelievably well connected” to Brexiteer cabinet ministers including Brexit secretary Fox and environment minister Michael Gove.

Steve Baker, Turning Point and the ‘the Brexit prize’

Steve Baker has re-emerged as a powerful voice in the ERG – a group he never fully left when he became a minister – and has been among the most vocal supporters of ‘no deal’ in British politics. He has links to more radical, fringe groups, too.

In December 2016, Baker received £6,500 from the secretive Constitutional Research Council (CRC) to fund what appeared to be a Christmas party for ERG members and staff. As openDemocracy previously revealed, the CRC funnelled £435,000 to the DUP’s Brexit campaign, and its only known member, Richard Cook, was involved in illegally shipping waste internationally. Cook is also a member of the influential ERG WhatsApp group.

Baker recently described right-wing student group Turning Point UK as “the angels against the darkness of socialism” just days after one of its founders said Hitler would have been “fine” if he “just wanted to make Germany great”. (IEA digital manager Darren Grimes, who was found guilty of breaking electoral law during the Brexit referendum, is reportedly also involved in Turning Point, which is a branch of the eponymous dark money-funded US organisation.)

Baker and Singham were listed together at the Conservative party conference in September speaking on a panel about “how to create a prosperous and global Britain”, organised by the IEA and another think tank funded by anonymous sources, the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Baker also attended the launch of the IEA’s ‘Plan A+’ proposal to “deliver the Brexit prize” through radical free-trade deals and deep cuts to regulation with countries including the US.

British right-wing think tanks, including the IEA, have received millions from anonymous US donors. In October, Singham wrote to the international trade secretary saying that the UK “should take advantage of this moment” to secure a free-trade agreement with the US that would include access to “agricultural markets”. Farmers have warned that a trade deal with the US would reduce UK food standards.

David Davis and ‘errors’ in transparency records

Singham’s arguments for ‘no deal’ are gaining ground. Senior Tory Eurosceptics have said that there is ‘nothing to fear’ from leaving the EU without a deal. But none is more blithe at the prospect than former Brexit secretary David Davis. In November, Davis rejected warnings about the consequences of ‘no deal’ as “proven nonsense” and suggested that Britain could trade “more successfully” under World Trade Organization rules than as an EU member. This argument closely echoes the ‘Plan A+’ document that Singham co-authored for the IEA.

As Brexit minister, Davis was close to Singham too, often having unminuted meetings with the then Legatum trade advisor. Now new documents released to openDemocracy reveal that Davis personally invited Singham to a round table at DExEU in December 2017 – but the minister did not declare this meeting in official government transparency records.

A DExEU spokesperson confirmed that both Davis and Singham attended the event, adding: “David Davis’s name was not included in the transparency report due to an error. Since then, processes have been tightened to ensure that information is properly disclosed.”

Steve Goodrich of Transparency International said that the failure to record the meeting in Davis’s in official records “does nothing for confidence in their probity. Whether these omissions are the result of mishap or conspiracy, neither engender trust that government is truly operating out in the open.

“In the same month this engagement was not published, the prime minister had personally reminded departments of their obligations to disclose all meetings between ministers and lobbyists. Given the frequency with which this happens, one could be forgiven for thinking that they're more than just a mistake.”

Since Davis resigned as Brexit secretary over the prime minister’s Chequers proposals, Singham has remained close to him. The IEA trade advisor accompanied Davis on a six-day trip to Oklahoma to meet US agribusiness interests in November. Davis’s trip was part-funded by US agribusiness lobbyists, keen to water down the UK’s food and farming regulations after Brexit. It’s not known who paid Singham’s costs.

In the same month, Singham appeared alongside Davis and Owen Paterson, a former Tory environment secretary, at the right-wing Heritage Foundation in Washington DC to discuss ‘Brexit and the opportunities for the US-UK trade relationship’. Last month, Edwin Feulner, the founder and former president of the Heritage Foundation, argued on its website that the UK should “pursue a no deal Brexit” to “help facilitate a highly anticipated bilateral trade deal between the United States and Britain”.

Travels with the ERG

Singham has emerged as an eminence grise for Brexiters on this side of the Atlantic, too. When the ERG’s Iain Duncan Smith and Paterson, and former Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble, visited Brussels last October “to discuss the Northern Ireland border” with European Commission chief negotiator Michel Barnier, Singham was by their side.

Documents released to openDemocracy show that the Brexiters presented Barnier with a copy of the ERG’s paper on the Irish border, which included no text on the backstop. The Brussels negotiator told the ERG group that he could “only negotiate with the UK government”, according to contemporaneous notes.

After the meeting, Paterson wrote to EU deputy chief negotiator Sabine Weyand asking for a follow-up meeting. Paterson said he was “more convinced than ever” that he had a “long term practical solution” to the Irish border. Almost two weeks later, Weyand replied saying that the European Commission did not believe there was any alternative to the backstop. There is no record of any subsequent meeting between the ERG and Michel Barnier.

Separate communications released to openDemocracy suggest that Singham’s relationship with the influential ERG caucus is long-standing. In November 2017, Singham wrote to Steve Baker suggesting that the then Brexit minister could come to “a session of ERG and other parliamentarians” that the Legatum trade commission was holding the following months.

openDemocracy has also mapped ERG room bookings and noticed that a number overlapped with when Singham was in proximity of Parliament and meeting government ministers. We have asked Singham whether he was also attending ERG meetings but have yet to receive a response.

‘Best wishes, Esther’

The IEA’s access to the highest levels of the British government is not confined to Singham, or to Brexit ministers. Just days after Esther McVey was appointed as minister for work and pensions, in early January 2018, the former television presenter received a handwritten congratulatory letter from Mark Littlewood. “We’re very happy to be used to bounce ideas off, to be set a problem to solve or to advise on etc,” the IEA chief wrote.

McVey replied a few days later. The new minister’s typed response was typical departmental boilerplate about “transforming lives” and “wonderful achievements”. But the letter was signed off with a far more personal tone. In her own looping handwriting, McVey’s suggested she “catch up” with Littlewood to “discuss some of the ideas you might have”.

True to her word, on 19 April 2018, McVey met with the IEA to discuss “employment-related issues”. The think tank, whose ideas greatly influenced Thatcher’s governments, has often called for sweeping cuts to social welfare and been publicly supportive of the controversial Universal Credit scheme.

Esther McVey resigned from the cabinet in November in protest at Theresa May’s Brexit deal. Many economists warn that leaving without a deal would hit the poorest regions of the UK worst but McVey and other Conservative Brexiters, many with links to the IEA, have decried such warnings as “Project Fear”.

A few days after May’s withdrawal bill defeat, McVey announced that she was launching an online advertising campaign “to explain why no deal is nothing to fear”. Meanwhile Nigel Farage’s campaign group, Leave Means Leave, has spent thousands of pounds on adverts for talks featuring the former pensions minister. We do not know where this money comes from.

McVey said of her connections with the IEA: “Any suggestions of ‘cosy relationships’ would be untrue and an incorrect description by you and openDemocracy.”

Who profits from a no-deal Brexit?

The UK’s right-wing think tank world is relatively small. Most are based in and around Westminster and hold regular meetings to agree strategy. Few give any details of who pays for their work.

These secretive organisations have played a crucial role in making the case for a ‘no deal’ Brexit – in Westminster, in the media and, by extension, across the country. Many are staffed by people who have spent years pushing for deregulation, privatisation and for the UK to leave Europe and embrace the US.

Many of those lobbying for a no-deal Brexit appear set to profit from the UK leaving the EU without a deal. ERG chair Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Somerset Capital Management investment fund opened a Dublin office last year to take advantage of an EU base. Vote Leave donor Crispin Odey, who made a fortune shorting sterling on referendum night in 2016, is betting on the pound plunging ahead of 29 March.

Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski is being paid £6,000 a month by American billionaire Tom Kaplan’s Electrum Group to give advice on gold and other resources. The price of gold is expected to rise in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Last year it was revealed that Steve Baker had invested heavily in a firm advising clients to buy gold to avoid the impact of a no-deal Brexit. Singham’s own personal political consultancy offers advice on opportunities arising from Brexit.

The IEA was founded in 1955 to promote the free-market ideas of the economist Friedrich Hayek. At the time, one of its founders, Oliver Smedley, wrote to the other, Antony Fisher, saying it was “imperative that we should give no indication in our literature that we are working to educate the public along certain lines which might be interpreted as having a political bias”.

Over the decades, the IEA has often influenced Tory policy. Brexit, and particularly the prospect of no deal, offers the think tank and its anonymous backers the ultimate opportunity: to remake Britain in line with its ideological and corporate interests.

Tamasin Cave of transparency advocacy group Spinwatch said: “We know next to nothing about the corporate lobbying activity that's taking place around Brexit. When it comes to Shanker Singham, not only is there little public scrutiny of his contacts with ministers, we have no idea which corporate and financial interests he is working for. Who is funding his lobbying for the hardest of Brexits?”

Shanker Singham told openDemocracy: "I moved back to the UK in 2016 after spending more than 20 years in the US working on international trade policy. Given the size of the challenge before us as the UK leaves the EU, I am pleased to be able to offer my expertise in trade policy to the government and parliament."

IEA spokeswoman Nerissa Chesterfield said: “Our Director General and other IEA representatives will happily meet with any ministers, MPs, policymakers and stakeholders of all stripes and persuasions, who wish to hear our ideas.”

Chesterfield added that “because of the quality of our research we are regularly asked by policymakers of all kinds from all parties for our thoughts and advice on relevant subject areas… it would be extraordinary if we were to decline these requests. Whether the policymakers in question take up our ideas is down to them.”

This article was amended on 22 February 2019 to note that the second Westminister press conference referred to in this piece was hosted by Competere, a private consultancy owned and run by Shanker Singham.

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An inevitable division: the politics and consequences of the Labour split

Jeremy Gilbert — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 18:44:58 +0000

It’s the changing nature of class and capital that’s caused this split – and should shape the Left’s response to it. But discussing class meaningfully is the last media taboo.

This week’s split of several MPs from the Parliamentary Labour Party comes as no surprise at all. It’s been clear since the moment of Corbyn’s election as leader that a section of the most right-wing and/or most ambitious MPs would simply never be able to reconcile themselves either to his leadership or to a Labour Party composed mainly of his supporters. This is probably a large section: about a third of the current PLP would be a reasonable estimate.

This isn’t just because of the political differences between them. It definitely isn’t because Corbyn is an anti-semite, or indifferent to antisemitism. It has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the leadership’s stance on Brexit. It has everything to do with the fact that that stance has not been dictated by the City of London and the CBI.

The politics of the Labour Right

It’s interesting to try to parse the precise political affiliates and character of the eight. The collection of MPs who have left might seem to come from notionally different strands of the Labour Right. Although he has flirted with a Blue Labour, anti-immigration position (as he has with many others), Chuka Umunna has had most success at convincing Blairite true believers that he is their natural leader: cosmopolitan, pro-business and rich. Mike Gapes, by contrast, belongs to that strand of the traditional, Gaitskellite Labour right that has never really got over its disappointment at the end of the cold war, and tries to compensate by hating pro-Palestinian campaigners and millennial Corbynites as much as they once hated the USSR. But they both nominated Blairite candidate Liz Kendall for the leadership: as did all of the eight apart from Luciana Berger and Chris Leslie.

In fact what seems apparent is that the notional difference between an ‘old right’ tradition represented by the Labour First organisation and the Blairite faction represented by Progress has now almost entirely broken down. Since the moment of Corbyn’s leadership election the two networks have been acting entirely in concert in their efforts to prevent Momentum from gaining influence in constituency parties and to undermine Corbyn and his supporters at every available opportunity. There is no longer any clear or stable ideological difference between them, and it seems evident that the clearest way of understanding their position is in basic Marxist terms. They are the section of the party that is ultimately allied to the interests of capital. Some may advocate for social reform and for some measure of redistribution, some may dislike the nationalism and endemic snobbery of the Tories more than others; but they will all ruthlessly oppose any attempt to limit or oppose the power of capital and those who hold it.

One reason for the erasure of difference between them is the changing composition of the British capitalist class itself. Going back to the 1940s, the old Labour Right was traditionally allied to industrial capital: manufacturers and the extraction industries. The Blairites have always been allied to the City and the Soho-based PR industry. But the long decline of British manufacturing, and the financialisation of the whole economy, has left a situation in which industrial capital is now an almost negligible fraction of that class. Today, in the UK, all capital is finance capital. So on the Labour Right, they’re all Blairites nowadays. A very similar process can be observed taking place in the centrist mainstream of US politics right now, as anti-Trump neocon Republicans and Clintonite, Third Way Democrats increasingly converge upon a common political agenda (this observation was made very persuasively by Lyle Jeremy Rubin on the latest episode of the Chapo Trap House podcast).

Whatever their political lineage, most MPs and their supporters on the Labour Right are therefore not just reluctant to engage in any radical project of social transformation. They are deeply and implacably opposed to any such project. This isn’t to say that they are bad people. It’s a perfectly reasonable position for anyone to take, in the Britain of 2019, that there is simply no point making vain efforts to limit or oppose the awesome power of the City and the institutions that it represents. In the era of globalisation, of China’s rise and the Trump presidency, anyone could conclude that it can only be counterproductive to try to work against it. Many of us take a different view, believing that without severely limiting the power of capital, and soon, the planet itself is probably doomed. But a difference of view is what it is. It shouldn’t lead to moral condemnation.

Appalled and disgusted?

A good example of the latter is the model motion circulated earlier this week by the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (a long-standing, small, Bennite factional organisation) for their supporters to take to their local party meetings. The motion begins with the line “This Constituency Labour Party is appalled and disgusted that seven MPs elected by Labour voters have rejected our party and crossed the floor to assist our opponents.”

I regard myself as sharing almost all of the politics, objectives and analysis of CLPD. But this is unhelpful. Apart from anything else, it is disingenuous. We all know that the Blairites simply have a completely different conception of politics, of the useful function of the Labour Party, and of the kind of role they want to play, than do we on the Labour Left. No supporter of Corbyn or CLPD wants to have these people representing us in parliament. To claim that we are disgusted is to imply that somehow, we naively imagined that we were all on the same side. This is, at best, to admit to profound naivety and stupidity. At worst, it is simply dishonest. Why pretend? Why not just accept, calmly and clearly, that these perspectives simply cannot be contained within the same party, and wish the splitters all the best in pursuing their own agendas?

By all means, we should be pointing out that the splitters, and the allies who have just joined them from the Tory Party, are clearly servants of a very particular set of class interests and a very narrow conception of what progressive politics looks like in the 21st century. But the language of outrage only makes us look like we don’t understand the situation.

As I’ve pointed out before most of the Blairite MPs became Labour MPs on the basis of a particular implicit understanding of what that role entailed. According to this understanding, the purpose of a Labour MP is to try to persuade the richest and most powerful individuals, groups and institutions to make minor concessions to the interests of the disadvantaged, while persuading the latter to accept that these minor concessions are the best that they can hope for. That job description might well entail some occasional grandstanding when corporate institutions are engaged in particularly egregious forms of behaviour (such as making loans to very poor people at clearly exorbitant rates), or when the political right is engaged in explicit displays of racism or misogyny. But it doesn’t entail any actual attempt to change the underlying distributions of power in British society; and in fact it does necessarily, and structurally, entail extreme hostility towards anybody who proposes to do that.

It is crucial to understand that what I’m describing here is not a moral or ethical disposition. It doesn’t make you a bad person to have taken up the role I’ve just described. It’s the simple logic of having a particular place in a system of social relationships, and being allied to a particular set of interests within it.

The crisis of the political class

In wider British society, the immediate political base for the centrist MPs is obviously wider than City millionaires; though not much wider. It is in fact very narrowly rooted in the managerial class: very senior managers in the public and voluntary sectors, a larger section of affluent, property-owning salaried employees in the private sector. Any anthropological investigation of a local Labour Party branch is likely to confirm this claim: it is precisely the people from this narrow demographic who are still the most enthusiastic about Blair, or Umunna, and the most vitriolic in their detestation of Corbynism. Of course there are many exceptions to this characterisation (there always are), but the general tendency is clear and unsurprising. The narrow professional political elite of journalists, lobbyists and politicians is, in a certain sense, the leading cadre of this wider managerial class; so it is natural that the latter look up to the former.

Again: there’s nothing wrong or morally reprehensible about this. There’s nothing wrong with being a senior manager, with a vague commitment to an ideal of social mobility and a dislike of the Tories’ explicitly reactionary politics, who really admires Chuka Umunna. There’s nothing wrong with being that, and with violently disliking the people to your left, who probably wouldn’t do that much to limit your own wealth and immediate institutional power if they got into office, but who wouldn’t let you or people like you or the people you most admire run the country to quite the extent that you are used to.

The problem is that in British public life (well, English public life in particular), there is a strong prohibition on ever acknowledging that there are such things as class differences and class interests. And no social group dislikes thinking in such terms more intensely than the professional and managerial classes (and this includes most journalists and political pundits). It is absolutely central to their specific view of the world that such vulgar realities never be acknowledged or discussed, and to assume that only Communists or violent right-wing populists could possibly want to break this liberal taboo.

This is arguably quite different from the perspectives of actual full-blooded capitalists for example: who, when pressed, will often admit that their only aim in life is to make money and keep it, and that they really don’t give much of a damn about ideology, or about the question of who gets hurt. The political elite, along with its most enthusiastic followers in the managerial class, cannot make any such admission to others or to themselves, partly because their whole job is to come up with clever stories about the world and to mediate between the interests of different social groups. If they can’t present themselves as neutral, honest, professionals just trying to make the world a better place, then just what good are they for anything? (This is why the fantasy narratives of Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, are such a key element of their culture: Sorkinism presents a universe in which political wonks, journalists and tv personnel are all just honest, hard-working professionals doing their best to make the world a better place, and doing a damned good job of it. Again, see Chapo Trap House’s several dedicated episodes for the best critique available of this phenomenon.)

This is also the political elite who cannot acknowledge even to themselves that what is motivating their politics right now is a defence of a set of elite privileges. Which is why they need a narrative like the one about ‘Labour antisemitism’ in order to justify their actions to themselves and others. It would be very difficult indeed for any objective observer to concur with Joan Ryan's claim today that Tony Blair and all previous Labour leaders unstintingly "[stood] up to racism in all its forms", and that antisemitism "simply did not exist in the party before [Corbyn's] election as leader" (as Ryan should presumably know if she’s actually spoken to Luciana Berger). It would be clear to an objective observer that the right has been using the claims that Labour is "institutionally anti-semitic", and blind and inactive where issues do arise, in a cynical and shameless fashion to try to justify their implacable hostility to Corbyn.

For months, campaigners on the Right insisted that the only way Corbyn could demonstrate his commitment to fighting antisemitism was by accepting the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism in full, despite the fact that even the original author of that definition had publicly disowned it as not fit for purpose, and Labour’s modification of it was a clear legal improvement. No sooner had the Labour NEC finally accepted the definition, then campaigners switched to claims that ‘complaints of antisemitism were not being properly investigated’, despite the evidence that complaints were now being investigated considerably more thoroughly than they were whilst the Right, under McNicol, retained control of the party bureaucracy.

So it is important to understand why a certain section of the public are so willing to believe this narrative. The reason is that they are members of a particular social group that crystallised and came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, as the traditional professional classes declined (having been subsumed into the public sector during the post-war years, then battered into resentful compliance along with the rest of that sector by Thatcher and her successors). It is this group - the professional political elite and their most loyal followers amongst the wider managerial class - that is now suffering a traumatic and disorienting existential crisis.

Neither the professional elite nor the managerial class ever enjoyed much authentic legitimacy amongst the wider public. The broader public deferred to their new bosses for as long as they got the compensations offered by an ever-expanding consumer culture, enabled by cheap credit and Chinese imports. Since 2008, fewer and fewer members of that wider public have been offered the same compensations, and so the authority and legitimacy of the political / managerial class has been in terminal decline. Both Corbynism and the Brexit vote are symptoms and examples of the public finally refusing their authority.

That is why Brexit represents such a traumatic existential crisis for these elites, and why they cannot separate it from Corbynism in their collective imagination. It is clearly absurd, in objective historical terms, to blame Corbyn for Brexit, or to keep demanding that he ‘come out’ against it when his doing so would make no difference at all to the parliamentary reality (there is no majority in the house of commons for a people’s vote). But the members of this declining, delegitimated social elite have experienced both Brexit and Corbynism as part of exactly the same process; the process by which the people that they have governed and managed for a generation have turned around and rejected their authority and their world-view. Embracing the idea that Labour is institutionally antisemitic and racist, and that Brexit is Corbyn’s fault, are understandable psychosocial responses to the experience of this historical trauma. (And again, Chapo Trap House’s excellent recent analysis of the way in which claims of antisemitism have been mobilised against the Left in the US is pertinent). Such a response allows the members and partisans of this elite to tell themselves that they are defenders of liberal values, so that they do not have to face up to the fact that, in opposing Corbyn, they are defending nothing but their own sectional privileges and those of their corporate liege lords. What these stories are not is rational, descriptive accounts of any kind of objective social reality, that can be reasoned with politically or morally.

What do we do?

For the Labour left, the political conclusions to be drawn from this analysis are stark, but important. As I’ve already suggested - we should not be responding to the behaviour of the centrists with simple moral indignation. Their entire project is to wrap up their defence of their own elite interests in a language of moral indignation – accusing the Left of racism, of being responsible for Brexit, of ‘bullying’ (ie expecting elected representatives to be accountable to members and constituents). But the more that we respond to them with our own language of outrage and betrayal, the more that we legitimate these fairy-tales, rather than exposing them for what they are.

By the same token, it is crucial not to fall into the sentimental trap of imagining that if only we are nice enough to them, then we will be able to prevent the Right from doing everything in their power to prevent the success of Corbynism. The split was always going to happen, and the only thing we could truly do to stop it would be to let the neoliberal centrists have control of the party once again. Tom Watson’s recent interventions make this very clear. He calls movingly for a kinder and gentler approach to politics, expressing moral outrage over the horror of antisemitism. But what he wants is a shadow cabinet reshuffle to represent ‘the balance of opinion in the Parliamentary Labour Party’. Presumably he doesn’t want one that would actually represent the politics and views of the current membership: if it did, then it probably wouldn’t include Tom Watson.

Either we’re going to give them what they want - full control of the party once again - or we’re not. And if we’re not, then they will do everything in their power to damage our cause. Because there can be no real doubt that this is the aim of the split, and that the long-term split is planned to come in waves rather than all at once, and this has been planned not because it is the most effective way to launch a new party, but because it will maximise the long-term damage to Corbyn’s Labour.

This is a surprisingly unpopular view amongst mainstream Corbynites. The caricature of Corbynites is that they are all wild-eyed sectarians, hell-bent on deselecting every MP to the right of Chris Williamson. This isn’t true at all. Frankly, I think it isn’t true because many Corbyn supporters are actually rather naive about the political character of the Labour Right. They, like Corbyn himself, do not actually see the world in terms of Marxist (or Gramscian) political sociology; rather they see it in moral terms, as a conflict between decency and justice on the one hand, greed and militarism on the other. They know that the majority of even the most right-wing Labour MPs are not Bad People, and so they assume that sooner or later they will come round to supporting Corbyn, if only he shows willing to address their legitimate concerns on Brexit and antisemitism.

This is just a categorical analytical mistake. Corbyn could convert to Judaism, apply for Israeli citizenship and call for a People’s Vote tomorrow: their attacks on him would not relent for one second unless he agreed to give up control of the party; or at least to commit to a policy agenda approved by Merrill Lynch.

The view that there is no point trying to prevent the right from splitting is also unpopular because, for all of its radicalism and democratic potential, mainstream Corbynism remains a left-wing version of Labourism. Labourism is the ideology that assumes that the Labour Party and only the Labour Party must be the vehicle to bring socialism to the UK, and that the only route to that objective must lie through the securing of a parliamentary majority for Labour in the House of Commons. The problem now is that if there is a significant split in the party, then it will put Labour back in the position it seemed to be before the 2017 election: unable to realistically aspire to a parliamentary majority of its own, forced to face (if not to answer) uncomfortable questions about its possible future relationships with the SNP, the Greens, even the Liberal Democrats, in a complex ecology of parties, factions and tendencies. The Labourist imaginary abhors this vision. It wants to live in a world in which the Labour Party, alone, united under a relatively progressive leadership, can win a large parliamentary majority against a once clearly-defined opponent (the Tories), and implement a progressive programme. It wants, very very much, to live in 1945.

The trouble is we don’t. We don’t live in 1945, and the ideological differences between the Blairites and the Corbynites are of a different existential order to the ones between Bevanites and Bevinites in the 1940s. They may have hated each other, they may have had entirely different attitudes to both capitalism and communism. But they didn’t represent social constituencies whose interests simply could not be reconciled even in the short term. The miners, the skilled engineers and even the manufacturers all stood to make immediate gains from the success of Labour’s programme, as did all their leaders.

This is unlike the current situation in some key ways, although it is similar to it in others. Many of the managerial class in fact have a great deal to gain from a Corbyn victory, because their own children are suffering so badly from labour-market precarity and unaffordable housing (and this, as much as Brexit, is why so many of them voted Labour in 2017). But if they are going to achieve those gains, then they will have to make some significant concessions to groups lower down the social hierarchy. In the public sector, for example, senior managers may well have to accept some relative reduction in their salaries and some increase in the autonomy of those they manage. This potential loss puts them in an ambivalent position, potentially supportive of Corbyn’s agenda, but anxious about what it might cost them. But their symbolic leaders in the media and full-time political elite have absolutely nothing to gain, and can only lose, from the success of Corbynism. For this reason, they simply will not stop trying to do everything in their power to drive a wedge between their followers and the rest of the Labour Party. There’s no point pretending that they might.

At the same time, there is no point pretending that in the volatile world of 21st century politics, the political divide between those inside the party and outside of it is the most important one that matters. There are members of every other party - even the Tories - who have more in common with Corbyn’s ideological agenda and more sympathy for his political programme than do those MPs who are reported to be considering joining the split. More importantly, there are members of every other party - even, indeed, the Tories - who are less clearly aligned with class interests that are inimical to Labour’s project.

Political success is always about leading complex coalitions of interests. The Labourist fantasy is that all elements of such a coalition can always be contained inside the Labour Party. As the split deepens, it will become apparent that Labour’s remaining vote and support will not be enough on its own, or even after another period of considerable growth, to win the battles that Labour needs to win.

Labour must seek to lead a coalition of progressive forces. All parts of that formula are important. It cannot keep pretending that all sections of the Labour Party are even potentially progressive in character. It cannot afford to ignore the existence of progressive forces outside of Labour or the need to make common cause with them. It must seek to lead that coalition. Nobody is suggesting that it submerge its identity or dilute its programme: that isn’t what leadership means.

But Labour must also be alive to the specific political objective of the ‘Independent Group’. There is a clear international precedent for the path that they are taking, in trying to establish a centrist party that could only ever be small, only ever appeal to the managerial class, and never hope to command a mass base, while pursuing a pure neoliberal agenda. In Germany, the Free Democratic Party conforms to precisely this description, only ever winning around 10% of the vote. From this position, it has held the balance of power in almost every West German and German parliament since 1948.

It’s always been logical that the legatees of the Third Way would eventually opt for this as their ideal political model. Labour, the traditional party of the organised working class, was always a strange and uncomfortable home for them in many ways. The problem for Labour is that if this group manage to establish this position for themselves, then they will pose a permanent obstacle to progressive government unless a very broad-based movement can be built to stop them. In 2016 and 2017 many of us hoped that the dream of Labour becoming a million-member party might be realised. There seems little chance of that now. Ultimately the social and political terrain of 21st century Britain is still too complex and too variegated for any one organisation to unite that many people. But we still need a million-member movement, if any chance of real progress is going to come onto the horizon. This is the movement that Labour must seek to lead, and must accept that it can never entirely contain.

If the Labour leadership really wanted to engage with the current situation meaningfully, this is what it would do. It would not retreat into ideological purism. It would not lift another finger to prevent the Blairites from leaving the party. It would convene a national conference, inviting Greens, social democrats, communists, socialists, liberals, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, trade unionists, NGOs and others to discuss the political and social crisis facing the country. The explicit aim of the conference would be to find an inclusive and effective road-map to take the country beyond neoliberalism. Those who share no such commitment need not be included. But everyone who shares it should, including those stalwart social democrats of the old Labour right who retain some authentic commitment to a political objective other than defeating Corbynism. This would be a meaningful way of neutralising the charge that Labour is not a broad church, and would help to isolate those elements who want to claim the mantle of diversity in order to sustain the neoliberal order.

Is this exactly the right solution? I don’t know. Maybe there are many other possible answers. But I know that the question is the right one: how do we assemble all of the potential allies at our disposal, to build an alternative to neoliberal hegemony, without getting bogged down in pointless debates with those who only want to defend it? That’s the question that the party and the leadership must now answer, if the splitters – who want nothing more than to maintain neoliberal hegemony – are not to get their way.

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Why a focus on "fake news" and Facebook misses the internet's real problems - and solutions

Jennifer Cobbe — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 12:34:51 +0000

MP's new 'fake news' report largely ignores other platforms like Google and YouTube, and surveillance capitalism itself – and risks sending regulation in the wrong direction.

Yesterday morning, the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee published its long-awaited final report into disinformation and ‘fake news’. The report – which follows a long and at times dramatic investigation – is full of interesting and insightful details about political microtargeting (the targeting of political messaging to relatively small groups of people) and the spread of disinformation.

But the report’s myopic focus on one company – Facebook – means that it misses the bigger picture – including the internet’s dominant variety of capitalism.

It is of course welcome that attention is being paid to these problems, and there is much in the Committee’s report that’s good. The report is undoubtedly right to find that Britain’s electoral laws are woefully inadequate for the age of the algorithm and are badly in need of reform. Its recommendation that inferences drawn from analysis of other data about people should be more clearly considered to be personal data likewise seems eminently sensible.

Is it ok to manipulate people to extract their money, just not for politics?

But there are also clear shortcomings. Focusing on disinformation itself as a target for regulation brings an obvious problem. By calling for interventions based on ‘harmful’ content, the report asks the Government to step into the dangerous territory of regulating lawful political conversations between people. Are private companies to be mandated to police these communications on the Government’s behalf? There are numerous good reasons why this is deeply undesirable (not to mention incompatible with human rights laws).

The biggest oversight, however, is in diagnosing disinformation as essentially a problem with Facebook, rather than a systemic issue emerging in part from the pollution of online spaces by the business model that Facebook shares with others: the surveillance and modification of human behaviour for profit.

‘Surveillance capitalism’, as it’s known, involves gathering as much data as possible about as many people as possible doing as many things as possible from as many sources as possible. These huge datasets are then algorithmically analysed so as to spot patterns and correlations from which future behaviour can be predicted. A personalised, highly dynamic, and responsive form of behavioural nudging then seeks to influence that future behaviour to drive engagement and profit for platforms and advertisers. These targeted behaviour modification tools rely on triggering cognitive biases and known short-cuts in human decision-making. Platforms and advertisers extensively experiment to find the most effective way to influence behaviour.

Without looking at surveillance capitalism, it’s impossible to understand microtargeting in its wider context. It’s impossible to understand the desires for profit and market position driving these practices. And it’s impossible to understand that the same behaviour modification tools are sold to advertisers, political parties, and anyone else who’s willing to pay. Without considering these practices within surveillance capitalism more generally, the report seems to implicitly accept that manipulating people through psychological vulnerabilities is fine if you’re doing it to extract their money, but not if you’re doing it for politics.

Notably, both Google and YouTube, its subsidiary, were largely omitted from the report. They get the odd mention, but it’s clear that the Committee was too fixated on Facebook to pay them sufficient attention. Google invented surveillance capitalism and remains arguably its foremost practitioner, with significant influence over the world’s access to information. And YouTube (also running on a surveillance business model, naturally) has serious problems of its own in terms of promoting violent extremism, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. This led the academic Zeynep Tufekci, writing in the New York Times last year, to describe YouTube and its video recommendation system as “[maybe] one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century”.

It's not “fake news” that’s the problem, it’s the algorithms that disseminate it

This brings us to the second aspect missed by the Committee: the increasingly prevalent algorithmic construction of reality. Take disinformation. As noted above, the report focused on false content itself. This seems to have missed one of the key routes by which an individual piece of content can become a systemic problem worthy of attention. In the grand scheme of things, a YouTube video about a wild conspiracy theory doesn’t really matter if it’s only seen by 10 people. It matters if people watching relatively innocuous content are driven towards it by YouTube’s recommendation system. It matters if it’s algorithmically promoted by YouTube and then seen by 10 million people.

Platforms might argue that they can’t be held responsible for the content they host or for the actions of their users (outside of things which are clearly illegal). But recommending content is not simply hosting it, and it is not a neutral act. Platforms selectively target content (including advertising) through their recommender systems so as to show us what they think will keep us engaged with their services, bring them revenue, and help them build market share. Make no mistake – through these platforms we do not get a true picture of what’s going on in the world. The spaces we inhabit online are viewed through the lens of corporate desires. What we encounter is algorithmically mediated to suit the platforms’ interests. While microtargeting is increasingly recognised as manipulation, this is a softer, perhaps more insidious form of corporate algorithmic influence.

Unsurprisingly, various actors have learned how to game these systems to boost the audience for their content, including conspiracy theorists and extremists. And bots and other fake accounts are often being used to take advantage of the algorithmic construction of online space to manipulate content rankings. This allows them to game trending topics so as to shape discourse more generally, and drive fringe ideas into the mainstream (a common misconception of bots holds that they are usually intended to change the opinion of real users with whom they come into contact).

The influence wielded by surveillance platforms through personalisation gives them significant means to shape the online public sphere. They are, of course, motivated by profit and duty to shareholders rather than by public good and duty to wider society. You might think that this is fine – they are, after all, private corporations. But while television, mass media, and the advertising industry have long shaped our world, never before have private companies had such influence over the construction of the everyday reality we inhabit. Never before have they exercised such influence over the private activity of individuals talking to other individuals about their lives. They do so without any democratic legitimacy, and with little transparency over their processes or accountability for their actions.

To properly address the problems of manipulation, disinformation, and violent extremism fermenting on online platforms, future regulation must properly acknowledge the role of surveillance capitalism – not just through targeting tools but in the algorithmic construction of online spaces. Future regulation should recognise that content isn’t necessarily the problem in and of itself. It must consider the active role of platforms in promoting content, and establish minimum standards for doing so (in the form of paid-for advertising or otherwise). This approach benefits from largely sidestepping much of the content regulation debate. Regulating the use of technical systems by corporations rather than intervening in communications between individuals means that people should still be free to post, view, or share anything that is not illegal. Freedom of expression demands nothing less.

Surveillance companies’ exorbitant profits and their influence on the construction of our reality is in large part driven by their use of recommender systems. That must come with responsibility in some form for what they’re algorithmically disseminating. They will argue that being more careful with recommender systems could result in lower revenues. In 2018 Google brought in $136 billion; Facebook took $56 billion. They can afford to take the hit. Perhaps that should be understood as the cost of doing business in future. This industry wouldn’t be the first to have its practices and its profits reined in by regulation for the good of society.

Because of its restricted focus, the usefulness of many of the solutions proposed in the DCMS Committee’s report is somewhat limited. That’s disappointing. But all is far from lost, and there are other directions for progress. To get there, we need to think bigger than Facebook. It’s time to acknowledge the role of surveillance capitalism in these systemic issues. It’s time to recognise that the problem isn’t just content – it’s dissemination and amplification by algorithm to maximise profit at all costs.

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Commons report on “fake news” says failing electoral laws are putting UK democracy at risk

James Cusick — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 09:11:35 +0000

Report from MPs builds on openDemocracy’s work exposing unaccountable ‘dark money’ and influence on our elections

DCMS chair Damian Collins. Image: Damiancollins.com

Britain’s electoral law is “not fit for purpose” with regulations governing elections “hopelessly out of date for the internet age”, according to a damning Commons report on “fake news”.

The report from the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee responds to work done by openDemocracy, the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr and others into the dark money and data influencing the Brexit vote and British politics more widely, calling for significant changes to the way elections and referendums are run in the UK.

Damian Collins, chair of the Committee responsible for the new report, said its investigations over the last 18 months points to democracy being “at risk” from the “malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalised ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the major social media platforms we use every day.”

Among the numerous recommendations in the report are calls for the government to urgently reform current electoral communications laws and to address the issue of overseas agency involvement in UK elections, including Russia.

Much of the 108 page report covers the territory of “dark money” and the unidentifiable sources of influential political campaigning, which have been highlighted by openDemocracy investigations over the past two years.

Russian interference

Collins repeated his committee’s previous demand to the government to reveal “how many investigations are currently being carried out into Russian interference in UK politics.” He said the government needed to order an independent inquiry into the “impact of disinformation and voter manipulation” in recent elections, including the 2016 UK referendum and the 2014 Scottish referendum.

Key sections of the lengthy report will make for uncomfortable reading for Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. In no unclear terms, the MPs accuse two senior Facebook executives of “deliberately” misleading their committee. Zuckerberg’s own claim that Facebook has never sold user data is dismissed in the report as “simply untrue.”

Collins himself takes aim at Zuckerberg, saying that although the Facebook boss may believe he is not accountable to the UK Parliament, “he is to the billions of Facebook users across the world.” The report pulls no punches stating: “Companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like ‘digital gangsters’ in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law.

The report directly accused Facebook of “deliberately” seeking to frustrate the work of the DCMS committee by giving “incomplete, disingenuous and at times misleading answers.”

Commenting on the report, Collins said: “The big tech companies are failing in the duty of care they owe to their users to act against harmful content, and to respect their data privacy rights.”

Arron Banks

Alongside its focus on social media platforms, the committee’s analysis of fake news also examined recent political campaigning and funding.

How the pro-Brexit campaign Leave.EU operated and was funded has been the subject of openDemocracy probes. The report says that from evidence received from the Information Commissioner's Office and from the Electoral Commission, “it is clear that a porous relationship existed between Eldon Insurance [a company controlled by Arron Banks] and Leave.EU.”

openDemocracy were the first news organisation to reveal that staff and data from Eldon was augmenting the work of the pro-Brexit campaign co-founded by Banks, Leave.EU.

The report says that Banks and his deputy, Andy Wigmore, showed a “complete disregard and disdain for the parliamentary process” when they appeared in front of the committee. “It is now evident that they gave misleading evidence to us… They are individuals, clearly, who have a passing regard for the truth.”

Data misuse

The operations of the Canadian political consultancy and tech company, Aggregate IQ, are also examined in the report. AIQ have worked on both the recent US Presidential primaries and for Brexit-related organisations, including the designated VoteLeave group during the 2016 referendum. The report says that the way AIQ operates “highlights the fact that data has been and still is being used extensively by private companies to target people, often in a political context, in order to influence their decisions.”

The report offers a stark warning, saying, this “is far more common than people think.”

On the issue of targeted advertising and the control of political campaigning, the report is equally stark, stating: “Electoral law is not fit for purpose and needs to be changed to reflect changes in campaigning techniques.”

openDemocracy has consistently argued that a new era of absolute transparency is necessary if our democracies are to survive. The report echoes this, saying the era of physical leaflets and billboards has effectively moved online to utilise micro-targeted political campaigning. Collins’ committee says the government should now carry out a “comprehensive review of the current rules and regulations surrounding political work during elections and referenda.”

This adds to the pressure on the government to address the inadequacies of current electoral laws that have previously been identified by the Law Commission in 2016 and more recently by the Electoral Commission itself.

The DUP-CRC connection

The lack of transparency in political advertising – addressed in-depth by openDemocracy in our work on “dark money” – is illustrated in the DCMS committee report by an examination of the Constitutional Research Council, the Glasgow-based unincorporated funding organisation. The CRC, whose sole office holder is its chairman, Richard Cook, donated £435,000 to Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party. The money, the biggest political donation in Northern Ireland’s history, was largely spent on pro-leave advertising during the 2016 referendum.

openDemocracy broke the story on the financial connection between the CRC and the DUP cash.

The report reveals that the DCMS committee twice wrote to Cook asking him to reveal the source of the £435,000 donation. Cook replied that he was “greatly amused” by the committee’s letter before accusing Collins and his colleagues of “spreading fake news and disinformation about him.” He has still not revealed where the money came from.

The report concludes that “there is an absence of transparency surrounding the relationship between the CRC, the DUP and Vote Leave.” The committee accuses the CRC of “deliberately and knowingly” exploiting a loophole in electoral law to funnel money to the DUP.

Although the government had an opportunity last year to confirm its previous promise to change Northern Ireland’s electoral laws on donations which would have revealed the identity of the individual or group behind the record donation to the DUP, the promise was never kept.

The report however recommends that the government extend the transparency rules around political party donations in Northern Ireland from 2014. It states: “We urge the government to make this change in the law as soon as is practicable to ensure full transparency...”

On foreign influence in political campaigns in the UK, the report says that while the government accepted evidence of Russian activity in the Skripal poisoning case, it has been “reluctant to accept evidence of interference in the 2016 UK referendum. It states: “The UK is clearly vulnerable to covert digital influence campaigns and the government should be conducting analysis to understand the extent of the targeting of voters, by foreign players during past elections.”

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Johnson & Davis claim chemicals industry will be Brexit winners – so where are the firms clamouring to leave?

Brendan Montague — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 11:57:25 +0000

Part one of a three-part-series: Will Brexit mean a toxic chemicals BREACH?

Image: Sunset over chemical works, UK. Credit: Geograph, CC 2.0.Ask a leading Brexiteer what Brexit is actually for and they tend to extol the virtues of rolling back regulation to liberate UK businesses. Take Boris Johnson, for example, who set out in his Telegraph column My plan for a better Brexit that the “one size fits all EU model of regulation” had lost the equivalent of “about 7 percent of GDP” and sometimes appeared “expressly designed – and at the behest of continental competitors – to make life difficult for UK entrepreneurs and innovators.” Johnson concluded: “regulatory divergence [is] one of the key attractions of Brexit”, echoing the Institute of Economic Affairs’ controversial ‘Plan A+: Creating a prosperous post-Brexit UK’ report, which said that regulatory divergence was essential to “capture the Brexit Prize”.

But it’s often been wryly observed that if you ask a Brexit supporter to actually name an EU regulation they object to, they often struggle to do so.

A Rapporteur at the Council of Europe, Geraint Davies, asked Boris Johnson that very question. Davies reports that, “after complaining about bananas, [Johnson] named REACH” (REACH being the EU’s main chemicals related regulations, the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals rules).

And similarly, David Davis, the former Secretary of State in charge of the Department for Exiting the European Union, told millions of BBC Question Time viewers that the UK chemicals industry would benefit from Brexit.

So if leading Brexiteer politicians are holding up the UK chemicals industry as one of the best examples of an industry that’s being strangled by the EU’s regulatory regime - then presumably, the industry itself is desperate to escape the clutches of REACH?

Well - not at all, actually. But we’ll get on to that in a moment.

Why REACH matters to our jobs, health and environment

Firstly, let’s have a look at why REACH matters for everyone, not just those directly involved.

The chemicals business is Britain’s second largest industry, and chemicals our second biggest export to the European Union, after cars. The industry has a £32 billion a year turnover, with £10 billion ‘gross value added’. Kate Green, a backbench Labour MP, told Parliament there were 1,250 jobs in chemical companies - and 7,000 manufacturing jobs dependent on them - in her constituency alone. The industry has been identified as one of the five most impacted by Brexit.

And it matters in terms of health. More than 30,000 chemicals bought and sold in Europe are now registered under REACH. This includes “coating on a non-stick frying pan, flame retardants in sofas, carpets and curtains, and medicines”. Britain is second only to Germany in the number of different chemicals now being regulated.

The chemicals causing concern include phthalates, which have been linked to “asthma, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, breast cancer, obesity and type II diabetes, low IQ, neurodevelopmental issues, behavioural issues, autism spectrum disorders, altered reproductive development and male fertility issues.” Bisphenol A, used in packaging, is now linked to “obesity, diabetes and fertility problems”.

Dr Philippe Grandjean, of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, was quoted in the Daily Mail back in 2014 warning of a “pandemic of neurodevelopmental toxicity” from chemicals now banned by REACH, affecting children in particular.

And of course, there is the environment. Blueprint for Water has estimated that 27 percent of total ecosystem losses are due to chemical pollution. Kerry McCarthy, the Labour MP and former shadow secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, told a Parliamentary committee: “Reduced [regulatory] capacity could further expose humans and animals to numerous cancers, disrupted reproduction, immune dysfunction, DNA damage and deformities, to name just a few concerns.”

So this is yet another example of industry in Britain wanting carte blanche to pollute, with the Tories supporting them and environmentalists and health professionals freaking out? If the chemicals industry in the UK is clamouring to leave the European Union and REACH, then the free market think tanks and pro-Brexit MPs should easily be able to identify British chemicals companies that want to scrap REACH – right?

Well, no.

If the chemicals industry really wants to leave REACH, why aren’t any of them saying so?

I asked Shanker Singham, the director of the IEA’s international trade and competition unit and author of its report to name a company that favoured divergence from REACH. Silence.

I asked the co-author, Radomir Tylecote, named as a senior research analyst at the same unit, if he could put me in touch with any such companies – and he said he couldn't.

I also asked Professor David Collins at City University, who is acknowledged in the report, if he could point to any companies who want divergence from REACH. He responded: “[U]nfortunately I don’t know anyone who fits this description.”

I went beyond the IEA to other hard line free market think tanks who have supported Brexit. Tim Worstall, a senior fellow of the Adam Smith Institute, was blunt. He said in an email: “I think that REACH is a disaster myself, an entire, a complete disaster...But admittedly, I'm an extremist. As to industry people willing to say such things, sorry, not a scoobie.”

So have politicians themselves been deluged with lobbying materials from chemicals companies attacking REACH? I contacted the offices of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg but thus far there is no response. Julie Girling, an MEP who was effectively kicked out of the Conservative party over Brexit, did respond. She told me: “I have no knowledge of any company that wants to leave REACH. On the contrary most companies feel that they have made significant investments and want to reap the benefits of the REACH system in the future.”

Ms McCarthy, who sits on the Environmental Audit Committee, said: “I’m not aware of any companies that have said things would be better out of REACH.” She added: “I met with a company in my constituency yesterday, which is one of the world leaders in producing clingfilm. Apparently US clingfilm is banned in the EU, as possibly carcinogenic, so that’s something else we have to worry about post-Brexit, along with chlorinated chicken!”

Angela Smith MP, an environment, food and rural affairs committee member, agreed: “As for I know and from the conversations we had with the industry bodies and companies all want to maintain regulatory alignment and the best way to achieve that is by keeping REACH.”

Professor Ragnar Lofstedt, of the Kings Centre for Risk Management at Kings College, London, was writing about REACH in 2003, before it was introduced. His article, Expert View: A toxic shock for manufacturers quoted sources claiming it would lead to 150,000 to 2.35 million job losses in Germany alone. Perhaps he could name a UK company that now wanted to leave REACH.

“I have reached out to a number of individuals and as you note I have not heard from any UK chemical company who wants to leave REACH post Brexit,” he said. “It seems that they have invested a lot of resource in complying and don't want to reverse this. That said I would think that small chemical companies who only produce for the UK market could consider moving away from REACH post Brexit - but I haven't heard from any of these.”

Curiouser and curiouser….

So – the pro-Brexit politicians and think tank crowd would have us believe that the UK chemicals industry itself wants divergence from EU regulations, but presumably are too shy to say so in public.

Except when I actually spoke to the chemicals industry itself, I got a very different story. It’s just not a story that suits the Brexiteers narrative – because the industry is more than willing to talk about how much they actually want to stay in REACH, and how bad leaving the EU’s stable regulatory regime will be for their business, as I’ll explore in my next article in this mini-series. And I’ll conclude the series with a look at what interests are really driving the Brexiteers’ opposition to REACH – including those on the other side of the Atlantic.

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The left has quietly won the debate about EU regulation. Now we must do the same for migration

Christine Berry — Tue, 12 Feb 2019 18:43:55 +0000

Since the EU referendum the left has successfuly shifted the terms of the debate on regulation. Now we must have the courage to defend freedom of movement against the anti-immigration politics of Brexit.

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One of the fascinating and under-remarked twists in the topsy-turvy course of the Brexit debate has been the quiet rehabilitation of regulation in general, and EU regulation in particular. In the Commons debate of 29 January, Theresa May stood up and said: “The government will not allow the UK leaving the EU to result in any lowering of standards in relation to employment, environmental protection or health and safety."

Whether you believe her or not is one thing. With the balance of power shifting towards the no-deal disaster capitalists on the Tory backbenches, it seems highly likely that Brexit will in fact result in deregulation – whether directly, or indirectly through new trade agreements with the likes of Donald Trump. But the mere fact that May now feels that promising to keep EU regulations is a political necessity rather than a political liability is nothing short of astonishing.

Misleading propaganda about “red tape” from “barmy Brussels bureaucrats” was a key weapon in the arsenal of the Leave campaign, and had been a mainstay of the tabloid press for years before the referendum, stoking anti-EU sentiment. Much ridicule was heaped on a woman in the Question Time audience who said she had decided to vote leave after seeing straight bananas in the supermarket, because she’d had enough of “silly rules that come out of Europe”. But she was merely repeating one of the key attack lines of the Leave campaign.

the mere fact that May now feels that promising to keep EU regulations is a political necessity rather than a political liability is nothing short of astonishing.

Even the Daily Mail joined the pile-on, wondering with impressive chutzpah where ‘EU banana lady’ could possibly have formed such an eccentric view. Maybe from its own back catalogue of cheap bendy bananas stories? Maybe from Boris Johnson, who in an impromptu speech launching the Vote Leave battlebus said it was “absolutely crazy that the EU is telling us how powerful our vacuum cleaners have got to be, what shape our bananas have got to be, and all that kind of thing”?

Or possibly from the Daily Express, which in June 2016 published a listicle entitled “REVEALED: The EU’s top ten pointless decisions the UK can now get rid of” – which repeated the myth that the EU had banned bendy bananas, alongside other outrages like supermarkets being “encouraged to avoid confusion” between turnips and swedes, and the “soaring” price of washing up gloves after they were subjected to “rigorous testing … to stop people being injured.” (Those pesky Brussels bureaucrats, sitting at their desks thinking up new ways to stop ordinary people being injured!) One of the items screamed that “eggs CANNOT be sold by the dozen”, while the text beneath quietly admitted that yes, as anyone who has been in a shop recently will have noticed, eggs are in fact still sold by the dozen.

This sort of thing has been part of a sustained, years-long campaign to paint not just EU regulation but all regulation as pointless red tape dreamed up by time-wasting bureaucrats, rather than essential protections designed to save lives and safeguard the environment. Domestic regulation has been subject to the same assault, as Stephen Devlin and I documented in a 2016 report for the New Economics Foundation. David Cameron’s ‘Red Tape Challenge’ encouraged people to suggest pointless regulations that should be scrapped. Government issued press releases that read a lot like Daily Express listicles, encouraging people to laugh at stupid rules about Christmas crackers, squirrels and jam. The initiative’s website boasted that 84% of health and safety regulation had been “scrapped or improved” – an indication of the extent to which ‘health and safety’ had been made a dirty word.

So what’s changed? Domestically, there is one obvious answer: Grenfell Tower. It’s hard to imagine any government boasting about slashing health and safety rules now, after it was revealed that cuts to fire safety protections had helped cause a horrifying inferno that killed 72 people. Grenfell was a stark reminder that regulation saves lives, and that governments who slash it in the name of boosting corporate profits are doing something morally reprehensible. It’s hard now for the champions of deregulation to pose as champions of the common people.

Grenfell was a stark reminder that regulation saves lives, and that governments who slash it in the name of boosting corporate profits are doing something morally reprehensible.

When it comes to EU regulation, something has happened that has echoes of the Red Tape Challenge. It turns out that when people are asked what they think about specific, real-life regulations – as opposed to the abstract red tape bogeyman – they actually kind of like them. What the left has done very successfully since the referendum is shift the terms of the debate onto the actual regulations we stand to lose when we leave the EU – things like our rights at work, the safety of our food and toys, and measures to cut pollution. Labour, the unions and civil society have pushed this message to the point where May now feels obliged to say that these things won’t be at risk.

In all the furore over the Irish backstop, this has gone relatively unnoticed. But it’s an absolutely huge turnaround. The political debate has done a full 180, with social and environmental regulations swinging from something we need to escape to something we need to protect. In a world where it often feels like the right controls the political narrative, this is a significant reframing victory for the left, one that we should claim and celebrate. It also holds lessons for a Labour party which is currently tying itself in knots over how fiercely to defend freedom of movement against the anti-immigration politics of Brexit. If a bold and unapologetic left can change the political weather on one key issue in the Brexit debate, surely it should be on the front foot seeking to do the same for this one too.

Again, a reframing victory is not the same as a policy victory, and this is certainly no time to rest on our laurels. The political agenda of hard right Brexiteers remains aggressively deregulatory, premised on the UK reinventing itself as the tax haven of Europe. In 2016, international trade secretary Liam Fox gave a speech in my adopted home town of Manchester talking in ludicrously grandiose terms of the “great task” of stripping away barriers to trade (otherwise known as regulations). He began (what else) by invoking Adam Smith, attributing to him the somewhat chilling view that “it is a moral right for people to buy whatever they want from those who sell it to them the cheapest.” He ended with a rousing call to arms: “If other nations are hanging back, then the UK will happily lead the charge for global free trade” – and Brexit is a “glorious opportunity” to do this.

Make no mistake: such ideologues are still shaping the Tories’ Brexit agenda, and they must be resisted to the hilt. But the signs of the debate shifting in our favour may just make this Great Task a little easier.

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Is there a route to an English Parliament?

John Denham — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 15:55:42 +0000

Could the current limited and muted support for an English Parliament could become a pressing demand? (An edited version of a talk given at the seminar ‘Routes to an English Parliament’ on 11^th January 2019 at University of Winchester.)

Credit: Crabchick/Flickr CC 2.0

More people support the idea of an English Parliament than oppose it, surveys consistently show. But almost as many ‘don’t know’. This YouGov survey is fairly typical:

Source: BBC/YouGov, March 2018

Voters tend to be more supportive of the principle that English laws should be made by MPs elected from England, than for the establishment of a new institution.

Significantly, support varies considerably between those who identify most distinctly as English and those who are more British. The ‘more English than British’ already support the idea. Scepticism comes from the ‘more British than English’.

Source: BBC/YouGov, March 2018

So – leaving aside arguments about the pros and cons of such a Parliament, how could one become a reality?

The demand for an English Parliament would need to grow in two, different, ways. Firstly, the current but muted demand amongst English identifiers would need to become more insistent. And secondly, support would need to develop amongst those for whom British identity is more important and for whom the appeal of a parliament based largely on national identity is much weaker. To these voters the appeal of an English Parliament will need to be as a civic and democratic institution that offers better government for all the people of England.

It seems unlikely that either change will come about through public campaigning alone. Change is more likely in the context of events that force a debate about the constitution or governance of England.

Some see the relatively modest levels of support for an English Parliament as evidence of little demand for change. But the idea retains consistent support even though it has few prominent national political advocates and when England and its governance are largely unreferenced and excluded from the national political conversation. It is quite possible that this resilient base of support for a more democratic England would only rise in a national constitutional debate, with some form of English Parliament (whether a freestanding parliament or a ‘dual-mandate’ Westminster) is emerging as part of the preferred solution.

So what events might provoke such a debate? Events that force a wider UK constitutional debate, in which the position of England has to be addressed; or demand the recognition of England as a political entity.

Predicting exactly when these events might occur is difficult – but there are three main pressures – constitutional (the formal legal relationships governing the union and its component parts), governmental (the way in which the current practical distribution of powers renders the government of the UK or its nations inefficient or ineffective) and political (the problems arising from the electoral and parliamentary politics of the current system).

There is no sharp divide between these categories, and they are likely to work together, but they are a useful framework for analysis.

A common factor is that England has no constitutional, legal or political status. Many tensions arise because England is absent from the constitution, governance or politics of the UK.

A second common factor is that Brexit is a driver for change as it brings to the surface weaknesses in the governance, politics and constitution of the UK that might otherwise have taken decades emerge.

To explore briefly these points of tension:

Asymmetric constitution

In the UK’s asymmetric constitution, England alone is subject to the UK government on domestic policy and the extent of devolution varies across Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland’s status has also been underpinned, uniquely, by international treaty.

This distribution of power is far from settled, and unplanned change – such as implementing ‘the pledge’ made during the Scottish referendum – leads to pressure for further measures (including additional powers for Wales and the introduction of a limited form of English Votes for English Laws) that have inherently unpredictable and destabilising consequences.

The EU has provided a supranational framework helped devolution whilst minimising these tensions. This has been important for the Northern Ireland peace process and for maintaining a UK internal market despite the devolution of regulatory powers. The Brexit may remove that that cohesive framework and the process has seen the UK

government reassert its authority even on issues that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland had thought were devolved.

The return of powers creates serious anomalies – symbolised by UK ministers like Michael Gove (DEFRA) having to act both as the UK government for UK and England. The UK government’s actions have been challenged in the Supreme Court which is edging its way, quite unplanned, towards becoming a constitutional court for a country with no constitution.

There are also, of course, the more obvious threats to the union from potential Scottish secession and growing support in Northern Ireland for Irish reunification.

Government, efficiency and inclusiveness

Recent reports on the UK economy, including the IPPR’s Commission on Economic Justice, and the Independent Commission on Industrial Strategy, have concluded that effective and inclusive economic growth is incompatible with the current levels of Whitehall centralisation. These reports typically do not explicitly recognise England as a unit of government, but once a serious debate about governance opens the English dimension will inevitably emerge alongside moves to decentralise England.

At the same time the distortion of English local government finance away from the poorer communities towards wealthier areas (by the UK government) is unsustainable as councils come close from social care costs. Criticism is growing of the relatively privileged position of London, a by-product of it being the seat of a UK government not subject to an England wide-polity.

The design of devolution emphasised the transfer of powers to the nations but paid less attention to the need for practical cooperation between them. Outside the certainties of the EU, new coordination mechanisms will be needed but there is currently no adequate means to represent England in that process.

Political legitimacy

The UK has four national political communities with distinct debates in which different parties compete and win. Uncertain electoral outcomes increase the possibility of governments whose legitimacy to govern both England and other parts of the union is questioned. Not only may the UK government to have a different colour to the devolved administrations but it may rely on non-English party support. In 2015, fear of SNP influence on a Labour minority government helped to deliver a Tory majority. The current polling suggest that Labour could face the same questions at the next election. Conservatives dependence on DUP support has attracted less public attention but were Labour widely seen as the government-in-waiting the legitimacy of the current arrangement (and its cost to English taxpayers) would be more widely questioned.

‘English issues’ are also likely to come to the fore. The large minority of English residents who are politically important. They played a large part in the Brexit decision and most English ‘swing’ constituencies have a higher proportion them. English parties will be under pressure to engage with English voters and to ensure that a healthy democracy includes the ‘excluded’ English.

England needs more than a sticking plaster

‘Work-arounds’ and sticking plaster responses are possible to these pressures and, in the first instance, quite likely. But the more that arise and they combine together, the greater the pressure for coherent constitutional change. What will be striking is how many could be more easily resolved if England nationhood were recognised. It would ensure that England enjoyed its own democracy and place within the union. At the same time, it would remove the confusion between English and UK government and circumscribe England’s pretensions to speak for the UK as a whole.

Labour is already committed (if somewhat vaguely) to a constitutional convention that might embrace a federal UK. Others, perhaps for different reasons, may also see the value in change.

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How neoliberalism is normalising hostility

Couze Venn — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 15:05:16 +0000

From working conditions to welfare policies, from immigration to the internet – this zero sum game of winners and losers benefits only the far right.

Image: Homeless man with commuters walking past, Waterloo Station, London. Credit: Jessica Mulley/Flickr, CC 2.0.

The hostile environment is not just about the Windrush generation in the UK, or the harassment of migrants at the Mexican border in the USA, or the unwelcoming treatment of refugees trying to reach Europe. It has become ubiquitous and widespread. We encounter it in many aspects of daily life. In worsening conditions at work such as zero-hour ‘contracts’. In obstacles to accessing social and health services due to cutbacks, making people’s lives more precarious. Online threats and trolling are other signs of this normalisation of hostility.

The normalisation of hostile environments signals a worrying and global shift in values of tolerance, empathy, compassion, hospitality and responsibility for the vulnerable. It’s a normalisation that was criticised recently in the UK by UN Poverty Rapporteur Philip Alston, who described how “punitive, mean-spirited, often callous” government welfare policies were contributing to an “increasingly hostile and unwelcoming society”.

There's a pattern to hostile environments that harks back to the 1930s and 40s. As we know, at the time, those targeted were considered as the enemy within, to be subject to expulsion, exclusion and indeed, genocide, as happened to Jews and other so-called ‘inferior races’. In more recent time, the iterations of this discourse of the alien other who must be expelled or eliminated to save the 'pure' or 'good race’ or ethnicity and reconstitute the broken community have found traction in Europe, the USA, Rwanda, India, parts of the Middle East. In its wake, refugees have become asylum seekers, migrants are labelled illegal or criminal, cultural differences become alien cultures, non-binary women and men are misgendered, and at the extreme, those targeted for violence become vermin. It marks a shift in political culture that inscribes elements of fascism.

Why has this atmosphere of hostility become the default position in politics? What have been the triggers and what are the stakes in this great moving rightwards shift? One may be tempted to identify the change in mood and attitudes with recent events like the election of Trump in the USA. But the far right has been on the rise in Europe, the UK and the US for some years, as seen in movements like the Tea Party, UKIP, or the National Front in France. They have been given a boost by the flood of refugees generated by wars in the Middle East, Afghanistan, parts of Africa, as well as by the spread of fundamentalist religious creeds that have an affinity with forms of fascism.

Why? Two related sets of developments that from the 1970s have gradually altered the political terrain. Economically, globalisation emerged as an integral part of a transnational corporate strategy aimed at securing advantageous conditions for the consolidation of global capital at a time of risky structural changes in the global economy. And politically, neoliberalism took hold when the crises of the 1970s started to undermine the postwar consensus in the Keynesian mixed economy and the role of the welfare state.

Globalisation saw the systematic deployment of outsourcing production in countries offering cheap labour, minimised corporate tax burdens and other incentives for transnational corporations, and the invention of the trade in derivatives (financial mechanisms intended to leverage the value of assets and repackaged debts). They contributed to the 2008 crash. The general public were made to bail out the banks through increased taxation and the establishment of policies across social services that produce hostile environments for claimants seeking state support.

As Ha Joon Chang has shown, by the 1990s, financial capitalism had become the dominant power, prioritising the interest of shareholders, and incentivising managers through share ownership and bonuses schemes. The disruptions due to this recomposition of capital have been a global squeeze on income, the creation of a new precariat, and the debt society. People who feel insecure, abandoned to forces outside their control become easy prey to demagogues and prophets of deceit who promise the return of good times, provided enemies and outsiders who wreck things are expelled.

Meanwhile, neoliberal political economy gradually became the new orthodoxy, increasing its impact through right wing thinktanks and government advisors and spreading its influence in academia and economic thought. Its initial success in terms of growth and prosperity in the 1990s and turn of the century consolidated its hold over the economy until the crash of 2008.

What is important here is the radical shift in values and attitudes that recall utilitarian values in the 19th Century. In particular, it is reflected in the neoliberal hostility towards the poor, the weak, the destitute, the ' losers', expressed in its denial or abnegation of responsibility for their plight or welfare, and its project of dismantling the welfare or providential state.

This pervasive atmosphere of hostility is the real triumph of neoliberal political economy. Not the economy – privatisation, monetisation, deregulation, generalised competition, and structural adjustments are immanent tendencies in globalised capitalism anyway. But neoliberal political economy reanimates attitudes and values that legitimate the consolidation of power over others, evidenced for example in the creation of an indebted population who must play by the dominant rules of the game in order to survive. It promotes new servitudes, operating on a planetary scale. What is rejected are ideas of common interest and a common humanity that support the principle of collective responsibility for fellow humans, and that radical liberal philosophers like John Stuart Mill defended. They were the values, along with the principles of fundamental human rights, that informed major reforms, and inspired socialism. The establishment of the welfare or providential state, and programmes of redistribution, enshrined in Beveridge or New Deals, draw from these same principles and values.

Neoliberalism has promoted a self-centeredness that pushes Adam Smith-style individualism to an extreme, turning selfishness into a virtue, as Ayn Rand has done. It is a closed ontology since it does not admit the other, the stranger, into the circle of those towards whom we have a duty of responsibility and care. It thus completes capitalism as a zero-sum game of winners and ‘losers’. Apart from the alt-right in the USA, we find its exemplary advocates amongst leading Brexiteers in the UK, backed by dark money. It is not the social democratic compromise of capitalism with a human face that could support the welfare state. Seen in this context, there is an essential affinity between alt-right, neoliberal political economy and neo- fascisms, punctuated by aggressivity, intolerance, exclusion, expulsion and generalised hostility.

There are other important stakes at this point in the history of humanity and the planet. We tend to forget that support for fundamental human rights, like equality, liberty, freedom from oppressive power, has long been motivated by the same kind of concern to defend the vulnerable, the poor, the destitute, the oppressed from the injustices arising from unequal relations of power. We forget too that these rights have been hard won through generations of emancipatory struggles against many forms of oppressions.

Yet, it is sad to see many institutions and organisations tolerate intolerance out of confusion about the principles at stake and for fear of provoking hostile reactions from those who claim rights that in effect disadvantage some already vulnerable groups. Failure to defend the oppressed anywhere and assert our common humanity is the slippery slope towards a Hobbesian state and great suffering for the many.

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A missed opportunity to confront the access to justice crisis

Charlotte Threipland — Sat, 09 Feb 2019 14:22:18 +0000

This week, the UK's Ministry of Justice published its review into the legal aid cuts. For the many people now unable to access justice, it doesn't go far enough.

After a nine-month delay the Ministry of Justice has now published its post-implementation review of the legal aid cuts that came into force in 2013.

To address the chaos that these cuts have caused in our justice system, the government needs to take decisive and dramatic action. Despite some welcome recommendations, the review falls very short. Although the Lord Chancellor acknowledges in the foreword that "the ability of individuals to resolve their legal issues is vital for a just society" the remainder of the review fails to address the reality that, since the cuts, most people simply cannot afford to seek justice.

The cuts, introduced in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO), have resulted in an almost £1bn reduction in legal aid spending. Legal aid is now unavailable for most types of cases. Many thousands are being denied support, causing untold suffering and having knock on effects elsewhere. We've reported on how the cuts have created unnecessary homelessness and, in combination with the 'hostile environment', have resulted in the Windrush scandal. The impact on families and children going through the court system is enormous.

The MoJ review focuses on whether or not LASPO has succeeded in meeting its own objectives, namely “delivering significant savings… by focusing legal aid on the highest priority cases”. But as anonymous blogger and barrister, the Secret Barrister points out, the “Ministry of Justice obsession with restricting legal aid to ‘those who need it most’ (defined so narrowly as to exclude the very people it was intended to help), as opposed to simply those who need it, flies in the face of the original purpose of legal aid."

Thanks to extensive input into the review from some of the heroic organisations who continue to fight, against all odds, to help vulnerable people access justice, the MoJ was unable to ignore some of the most important issues affecting our justice system since LASPO. Some of these so-called ‘wider themes’ (which should have been the ‘central themes’) address the everyday problems that people experience when seeking legal advice.

For example, even when an individual's situation is within the scope of legal aid funding, people often find they are unable to pass the financial eligibility rules. The threshold has always been difficult to meet but LASPO made it harder. Some of those living below the poverty line can’t pass the test and people have been forced to sell their homes to pay the legal fees.

openJustice recently spoke to Mary-Ellen, a severely disabled woman who needed to challenge punitive cuts to her care. She could not pass the financial eligibility test because she owns equity in her home. In response to such criticisms, the government has committed to a “comprehensive review” of legal aid eligibility by summer 2020. The people being affected by these unfair rules can’t wait that long.

There are large regions of the country, particularly in rural areas which, since LASPO, simply don’t have any housing or immigration legal aid lawyers left at all. These ‘advice deserts’ mean that even people who are theoretically entitled to legal aid are physically unable to access the advice and support they need.

This patchy legal advice coverage has developed partly due to a reduction in the (already very low) fees paid to social welfare lawyers. As one lawyer told us: “for legal aid lawyers working in community care law, the hourly rate for attending a judicial review hearing, for example, remained at £36.40 (a fraction of commercial rates) for nearly twenty years. With the ushering in of the 2013 legal aid changes, this rate was reduced by approximately 10% to £33.30”

The MoJ refused to commit to paying legal aid lawyers a reasonable wage. Instead it merely stated “there are clearly areas where we need to look further at remuneration”. As a result, invaluable expertise and experience will continue to be lost as a whole generation of lawyers shift to other areas of work. As the Shadow Justice Secretary Richard Burgon MP told openJustice, "within 10 years we might actually see the virtual extinction" of legal aid lawyers.

In its review the MoJ did make some welcome recommendations. These include abolishing the rule that people seeking to bring a case in debt, discrimination or special educational needs must first go through a mandatory telephone ‘gateway’ before they can be referred for face-to-face advice (it had previously been revealed that not one discrimination case had been referred to a lawyer via the gateway in an entire year). They have also committed to expand the scope of legal aid in some very limited family law cases. Although not insignificant, these changes are, as Richard Burgon points out, “tinkering at the edges”.

Finally, the MoJ committed to a cash investment of £8m to pilot an early advice scheme and invest in supporting people who, since the cuts, are forced to represent themselves in court. This is a fraction of the almost £1bn that has been cut and will not result in the overhaul that our justice system needs.

openJustice has been campaigning on the issue of legal aid. We heard from Eleanor, a victim of the Windrush scandal, who was left in limbo for two years when some legal advice would have resolved her problem quickly. We also heard from Nicholas who had to fight the two biggest battles of his life without the help of legal aid – by selling his home and taking out a large loan. And we heard from Ian who, upon being dismissed from his job, suffered mental health problems from the stress of having to represent himself in court.

None of the people we spoke to had originally expected that they would need a lawyer. But we never know when a crisis might suddenly hit us. And in this time of great political change and uncertainty, the potential for personal crisis and the need for legal support will only increase. Barrister Sarah Langford describes the law as “human justice, designed and enforced”. But without fair and equal access to justice, the law cannot always be enforced. Individual rights are rendered meaningless and democracy is undermined.

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It’s not just medical staff and medicines that Brexit threatens, but the core principle at the heart of our NHS

David Rowland and Tamara Hervey — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 06:00:00 +0000

The toxic Brexit debate has often wrongly characterised the NHS as a “British NHS for British people”, rather than championing it as a service based on healthcare as a matter of human dignity.

Image: Poster in Guys & St Thomas's Hospital, London. Credit: Docs Not Cops.

The toxic debate about Brexit has inevitably spilled over into discussion about the future of the NHS. But have we fully assessed the risks to the NHS’s founding principles?

The main concern which has featured in the media and in Parliament is that the NHS – across the whole UK – will suffer significantly if the current arrangements with the EU are not in some way maintained in the future. Chief among these concerns is that the NHS’s heavy reliance on doctors, dentists, nurses and care workers from within the European Economic Area means that anything that limits this form of free movement will exacerbate existing workforce shortages.

Without doubt these are substantial risks to the day-to-day functioning of the health service. In addition, a failure to reach an agreement on the terms of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU has the potential to significantly disrupt the supply of medicines and medical devices, which in turn will put lives at risk and cause unnecessary chaos and worry for patients and healthcare workers.

But while the focus is on how Brexit will impact on the day-to-day functioning of the NHS there are other threats to the founding principles of the NHS which have yet to be fully considered. These are not a direct consequence of the terms of the UK’s withdrawal, but they form a crucial part of the post-Brexit political environment.

The Overseas visitor charging regulations, first introduced in 2011, can be seen as part of a more general move away from the idea of the NHS as a publicly-owned and collectively-funded service that provides care on the basis of need. Instead, the NHS is now mandated by law to issue charges for certain healthcare procedures if some individual patients are not able to demonstrate that they are “ordinarily resident” in the UK.

These charges apply to anyone seeking non-emergency based hospital care (but not primary care) and mandate NHS Trusts to charge 150% of the cost of providing an NHS operation. In 2015-16, NHS hospitals levied charges of £69 million on overseas patients, with unpaid debts being handed over to debt collection agencies. Some NHS hospitals are charging upfront before care is provided – 2000 patients over a 9 month period have been asked to pay for their care in advance, which often means that much needed treatment is not received.

Because of the difficulty of distinguishing who is and who isn’t entitled to free NHS care, mistakes are inevitably made, particularly as NHS staff are required to exercise their judgment based on the “demographic data” available to them.

The case of Albert Thompson a UK citizen and resident for 44 years who was wrongly required to pay a £54,000 bill before the Royal Marsden Hospital would commence his cancer treatment is the most high profile example of how this shift in entitlement and access has the potential to affect anyone. Indeed, mistakes about entitlement go beyond the “Windrush” generation – the campaign group Maternity Action recently reported the case of an EU citizen who was wrongly given a bill of £4000 by the NHS after giving birth.

Irrespective of the form of Brexit that emerges over the next few weeks there is a very real risk that EU citizens who live and work in the UK will be affected by this new charging regime and a related risk that increasing numbers of NHS patients will be mistakenly billed for their care.

If the Withdrawal Agreement enters into force, it will protect the rights of EU citizens and their families who are in the UK or move to the UK before December 2020 (the end of the transition period). They will be able to access the NHS in the same way as now, and be able to rely on that right under the Withdrawal Agreement. Those who have been continuously resident in the UK for 5 years will be granted “settled status”, others will be granted “pre-settled status” until they have been resident for 5 years. As the rules currently stand, assuming settled and pre-settled status encompasses “ordinary residence”, those EU nationals and their families will be able to show they are entitled to access the NHS without paying a surcharge.

If the UK leaves the EU without a Withdrawal Agreement, the relevant law from 29 March 2019 will be UK immigration law. The current information about the settled status scheme envisages that it will apply even in the event of ‘no deal’. In that case, applications will need to be made by end December 2020 in order for EU citizens currently here to be able to demonstrate the “ordinary residence” that guarantees free access to the NHS. But unlike under the Withdrawal Agreement, the government could change these rules at any time, with only minimal parliamentary oversight.

And for anyone who comes to the UK after end December 2020, only UK immigration law will apply. The recently published Immigration White Paper (heralding new immigration law which the government insists will apply to the whole of the UK) indicates that the Immigration Health Surcharge could be applied to EU citizens who come to the UK after the end December 2020.

The Immigration White Paper describes ‘resetting the conversation’. EEA migrants’ position will change from one of ‘rights’ to one of conditional ‘permission’; based on skills, rather than on a shared EU citizenship. The government’s current estimate of the cost of providing NHS care to EEA citizens is £200m a year and so this is the financial burden which could be transferred to patients as a condition of permission to reside in the UK.

Obviously, if the NHS did begin to charge nationals from EEA countries this is likely to affect the UK’s ability to negotiate continuity of the current free healthcare entitlements of the 1 million or so British citizens who are living in Europe and so there will be a strong incentive for the government to avoid this. It is for this reason that the government has recently tabled legislation to allow it to make reciprocal healthcare agreements with other countries.

But we should not underestimate the extent to which the toxic debate about Brexit has started to corrode the NHS’s founding principles. Those who exploited public support for the NHS during the referendum campaign wrongly characterised it as a “British NHS for British people”. Rather than championing it as a health service based on healthcare as a matter of human dignity, or a shared set of European values, they painted it as a service which was under threat from immigration and appealed to the voters to give “our” money to “our” NHS rather than to “them” in Brussels/the EU.

And if the economic impact of Brexit does hit the public finances in the way that has been predicted this will make it even more difficult to fund the NHS properly. And if the conversation continues along these lines, this is likely to add to calls to restrict free healthcare to only those who can easily demonstrate their “Britishness”.

As a result, maintaining the founding principles of the NHS in the face of the post-Brexit political turmoil will be a much bigger challenge than sorting out disrupted medical supply chains, though we do not wish to diminish that risk. The potential risk of harm to both individual and population health if the NHS charging regulations are extended to European citizens in the UK is significant. It would signal a significant change in understanding about whom the NHS is for and entrench the idea of healthcare in the UK as permissive entitlement rather than a fundamental matter of human dignity.

This article is republished with kind permission from CHPI and its research was made possible by funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/R002053/1 AND ES/S00730X/1).

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UK human rights defenders escape jail for stopping deportation flight

Amy Hall — Wed, 06 Feb 2019 15:29:45 +0000

Defendants slam ‘vicious immigration system’ as disputed charter flight deportation continues to Jamaica.

All 15 of the anti-deportation protesters who blocked a government-chartered deportation flight in 2017 are likely to avoid immediate prison sentences.

The judge has indicated that three will be given suspended sentences and 12 community service.

The news that they would not face prison was met with loud cheers from the hundreds of people gathered for a solidarity demonstration outside the court.

On the night of 28 March 2017, in a corner of Stansted Airport they locked themselves on the runway around a Titan Airways Boeing 767 plane due to deport around 50 people to Nigeria and Ghana. Using arm tubes and tripods, they stayed there for over eight hours, stopping it from taking off.

After a grueling trial which ran from 1 October until 10 December 2018, 15 members of the campaign group End Deportations were found guilty by a jury of “intentional disruption of services at an aerodrome”.

The conviction, under the 1990 Aviation and Maritime Security Act – a law passed in response to the 1988 Lockerbie bombing – centred around the apparent danger posed by the Stansted 15. But, it was the need to prevent danger that led to their actions that night.

The 15 are appealing their conviction and have called for their terror convictions to be quashed and hostile environment dismantled.

In a statement, the Stansted 15 said: “The convictions will drastically limit our ability to work, travel and take part in everyday life. Yet, people seeking asylum in this country face worse than this: they are placed in destitution and their lives in limbo, by the Home Office’s vicious system every single day.

“When a country uses draconian terror legislation against people for peaceful protest, snatches others from their homes in dawn raids, incarcerates them without time limit and forces them onto planes in the middle of the night, due to take them to places where their lives might be at risk, something is very seriously wrong. Every single one of us should be very worried about our democracy and our future.”

Raj Chada, Partner from Hodge Jones & Allen, who represented all 15 of the defendants said: “While we are relieved that none of our clients face a custodial sentence, today is still a sad day for justice. Our clients prevented individuals being illegally removed from the UK and should never have been charged under counter terrorism legislation. We maintain that this was an abuse of power by the Attorney General and the CPS and will continue to fight in the appeal courts to get these wrongful convictions overturned.”

Danger for who?

When they ran onto the runway, wearing pink hats, carrying banners and chanting, it was because they knew that the safety of several people who were on the plane would be under threat if the deportation was successful. They knew that the ex-husband of one woman on board had said he would be waiting for her when she arrived, and that he was planning to kill her. She had tried to claim asylum in the UK because of her sexuality, but had spent the last six months imprisoned in Yarl’s Wood detention centre.

Many of the Stansted 15 had been involved in working for migrant rights, or had known people who had been deported or otherwise suffered at the hands of the border system. They had all heard or read testimonies from people in detention.

Through their own varied experiences and research, they also knew that the people on the plane were at risk of violence from security guards, as well as likely to be subject to verbal abuse.

Each had taken measures – such as wearing hi-visibility jackets – to ensure that they reduced danger, not caused it. Protests, petitions, strongly worded letters, calls to the police, the Home Office and airlines, were just some of the campaign tools that the 15 had tried to stop previous charter and commercial deportation flights from taking place, but none had worked.

But, in summing up towards the end of the trial, Judge Christopher Morgan told them that they could not rely on a defence of acting to prevent human rights abuses. He also told the jury that they must disregard any evidence given that supported a defence under “duress of circumstances”.

Lasting impact

Eleven of the people on the halted March 2017 flight are still in the UK and have been able to keep fighting their cases. The Stansted 15 have been described as ‘heroes’ by one of those people, a man who has lived in the UK for over a decade.

As he sat on the flight, waiting for it to leave, his mother and two children were also in Britain, as well as his pregnant partner. The delay to the flight meant that he was able to successfully appeal against his deportation and be at his partner’s side while she gave birth to their daughter.

He wrote for the Guardian: “Without the Stansted 15 I wouldn’t have been playing football with my three-year-old in the park this week. It’s that simple. We now have a chance to live together as a family in Britain – and that is thanks to the people who laid down in front of the plane.”

I attended court several times throughout the trial and witnessed the defendants speaking powerfully about their motivations and why they took action.

I was immensely proud of my friend, Emma Hughes, as I watched her give evidence while eight months pregnant. She summed up why she was there that night: “I did it because people’s lives were in danger if that flight had left – I knew it was going to be safe”.

While many people would be reading parenting books and tying up loose ends at work, she was spending every day sat in a court room, facing the prospect of giving birth in jail and being separated from her new baby and family at the very time they needed to be together.

Emma gave birth to her son just after Christmas – less than three weeks after the end of the trial.

For one of those convicted, 30-year-old Alistair Tamlit, it has been hearing about the impact of the action, particularly on the people who are still in the country two years later, that has helped him keep going.

“It’s just incredible to know that, to hear how things are going for them,” he told me on Friday. “None of the actions that I’ve been involved in in the past have had such tangible results.”

The high-profile nature of the Stansted 15 case has helped bring the practice into the spotlight again. Since the 2017 action, chartered deportation flights have started to leave from s maller airports such as Biggin Hill in South London, and from military bases like RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. Stansted airport has reportedly banned the Home Office from using its runway for deportation flights due to the high risk of direct action against them.

As the Stansted 15 arrived at Chelmsford Crown Court, to a solidarity demonstration of around 400 people, a chartered deportation flight carrying around 35 people took off for Jamaica from Birmingham Airport. It is thought to be the first chartered deportation flight to Jamaica since the Windrush scandal.

A chilling effect

The terror related conviction of the Stansted 15, along with the imprisonment and subsequent release on appeal of the Frack Free Four – found guilty last September of Public Nuisance after occupying lorries delivering drilling equipment to the Preston New Road fracking site – has raised significant concerns about the erosion of the right to protest in the UK.

Amnesty International UK Director Kate Allen said: “The decision not to jail these brave human rights defenders is a relief, but not enough. They should never have faced this very serious terrorism-related charge in the first place.

“They remain convicted of an offence which simply doesn’t fit their actions and their trial could have a dangerous chilling effect on peaceful protest in this country.

On Tuesday, human rights organisation Liberty wrote to the judge to urge him to consider proportionality in sentencing.

Liberty’s acting director, Corey Stoughton said: “The excessive charges brought in this case were an attack on the right to protest that threatens activists, campaigners and anyone who cares about the need for dissent.

“Whatever the judge decides, this case has already broken our long tradition of honouring and respecting peaceful protest and civil disobedience as necessary tools for defending our values and challenging abuses of power.”

The Stansted 15 case is the first time this terror related charge has been used against peaceful protesters. In fact, they were originally charged with aggravated trespass, a much lesser charge that would have been dealt with in a Magistrates court and which carries a much smaller potential prison sentence. This charge was suddenly changed a few months after they were arrested, at the request of the Crown Prosecution Service.

Lead defence lawyer in the case, Raj Chada, has said that this is the first time in his 20 year career as a lawyer that he has experienced a charge being changed from one carrying a maximum sentence of a few months in prison, to a potential life sentence.

Meanwhile, the Stansted 15 faced a real threat of being sent to prison today, particularly Alistair Tamlit, Mel Strickland and Edward Thacker, who were previously convicted of aggravated trespass for an environmental protest at Heathrow airport.

I spoke to Tamlit five days before the sentencing as he was made preparations to go to prison – speaking to people who had been incarcerated, reading what he could about what it would be like. He told me that he has been “trying to demystify” the prison experience but was feeling anxious about the prospect.

“There's been a huge outpouring of support since the verdict came which has been amazing and we’re really lucky in that. Most people who go through the court system or who go through immigration procedures don't have that level of support, so I've got to keep it in perspective.”

Stolen away

Charter flights are a secretive and efficient way to remove a planeload of people from our communities, often tearing families apart by deporting loved ones who have been in the UK for decades.

They are just one sinister aspect of Britain’s growing border industrial complex – an excellent example of how state violence and corporate power collude to take away people’s liberty, and too often their lives. Any further restrictions to freedom of movement and migrants’ rights after Brexit can only bolster this system and line the pockets of the corporate interests involved, including airlines and private security companies.

In 2017 the UK deported more than 12,000 people, including people whose asylum claim had been refused.

While most deportations happen on commercial passenger flights, up to 2,000 people a year are removed on flights chartered by the government, like the one stopped by the Stansted 15. People are often shackled in “waist restraint belts” or “leg restraints” and escorted by private security guards.

Many people are deported before they are able to pursue all legal avenues to remaining in Britain, or while their case is still being decided.

In 2017, 42 charter deportation flights removed 1,664 people – with the top three destinations being Albania, Pakistan and Nigeria/Ghana. Flights have also removed people to Kosovo, Romania, Czech Republic and Jamaica. These are countries where the UK has been able to make a deal with each respective government, often as part of wider trade and ‘aid’ negotiations.

The danger for those being deported is not only waiting for them when they land. The violence experienced during the deportation process has also been well documented, such as the death of Jimmy Mubenga, who died while being restrained by G4S ‘escorts’ on board a commercial British Airways flight to Angola from London Heathrow in 2010.

The Independent Monitoring Board for charter flight deportations have expressed concern about the continued excessive use of restraints, the long periods of detention on coaches, and people being denied dignity and privacy whilst using toilet facilities. On a June 2017 Dublin flight, everyone being sent to Germany was put in restraints from the start, regardless of individual risk assessments.

One example was documented in the Board’s annual report: “A young woman did not want to go. She refused to stand up and leave the coach to board the aircraft. She was cuffed to get her off the coach. She stood on the tarmac weeping. She was asked whether she was willing to walk and allowed a matter of seconds in which to decide. She did not appear to make a decision.

“She was put into a WRB [waist restraint belt], then into leg restraints as she continued to weep and say “You cannot take me this way” and then carried on board. She was not fighting, just weeping.”

The fight continues

“We just have to get a bit creative,” said Tamlit who is worried that the use of terror related legislation in the Stansted 15 case could cause people to be more apprehensive about taking similar action in the future. “People would be justified in feeling that way. I just hope in our appeal that we can quash it or get it changed to something more appropriate and that will help.”

Despite the weighty conviction of the Stansted 15, there is a growing campaign against airlines that carry out deportations.

In January, activists from Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants (LGSMigrants) crashed a gala event hosted by Airlines UK at the Park Plaza Hotel in London, handing out sick bags which read “deportation contracts make us sick” and storming the stage with a banner. Guests included government aviation minister Baroness Liz Sugg and British Airways CEO Alex Cruz. In December, they replaced London Tube adverts with posters encouraging people to stop deportations.

Activists also took action against British Airways last summer when they locked themselves inside the i360 – an observation tower attraction on Brighton seafront sponsored by the airline. The action took place during the annual Pride celebrations, which was also sponsored by British Airways.

Tamlit says the use of disproportionate powers against the Stansted 15’s peaceful protest showed that direct action was working: “It’s because we’re effective that they have to clamp down on us, and we just have to adapt to those circumstances. I can’t say I regret doing it, even after all this. I think it was the right thing to do.”

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Trust, trauma and intransigence – psychoanalysing Brexit

Susanna Abse — Wed, 06 Feb 2019 12:01:23 +0000

Leavers want autonomy and a sense of control, Remainers want intimacy and closeness – and both are traumatised by a decade of shocks and loss of faith in government.

As a psychoanalytic psychotherapist who often works with couples, I regularly witness intransigent and extreme states of mind. The way the Brexit debate is being conducted seems to mimic these conflicted couples. So, I am now wondering if psychoanalysis and its application to understanding conflicted relationships might enhance our understanding of our current divisions and, perhaps, lead us back to a politics that feels more consensual and collaborative?

At the root of Brexit, as writers such as Anthony Barnett have observed in The Lure of Greatness, are betrayals of trust that date back to the deceptions around the Iraq war to the 2008 crash and the 2009 expenses scandal. These shocks led to a loss of faith in government. Added to this, austerity from 2010 onwards meant more people began to experience real hardship in their daily lives; money was short, job security was lost and services that had been depended on, disappeared. Could we think about these events as a national trauma?

As we know, trauma isn’t good for people. It produces a lack of trust and creates fear and then anger. Trauma increases our wish to be self-sufficient and not depend on others. Trauma makes it hard for us to work out where our best interests lie. Trauma makes us retreat and avoid collaboration with those on the outside; those who are other and therefore at times of insecurity felt to be a potential threat. It pushes people into polarised positions; it makes it more challenging for people to tolerate ambiguity. In psychoanalytic terms we would say that it is likely to generate paranoid-schizoid ways of thinking, which is a state of mind where rigid beliefs dominate and where it becomes harder and harder to stay in touch with empathic, generous feelings. It’s a dog eat dog state of mind. And one could propose that this state of mind has arisen because we have become a dog eat dog society.

Driving this less tolerant, less empathic and less generous state of mind is a feeling of insecurity. When we feel we have little ourselves, sharing with others can become tricky. And while the consequences of the global 2008 crash were very serious, what followed was worse. Just when people needed to feel secure, government enacted policies which did the very opposite.

When I talk about security here, I’m emphasising that we cannot separate seemingly external pressures such as financial security and physical safety from the internal feeling of emotional security. When we feel threatened or are actually threatened, we need a sense that there is someone to turn to who will take care of us. Government can provide that underpinning confidence and good leaders can serve as parental figures who, in times of heightened anxiety, we can turn to in our minds. Governments can help people accept suffering; they can encourage us all towards the common good and can create solidarity around hardship.

But when we feel that the common good is replaced by self-interest and manipulation, then trust is lost and the establishment becomes not a protective parent but rather a rapacious and neglectful one to be distrusted and resisted. This blending of inner and outer realities is going on all the time inside each of us, and when we are calm and secure, we can usually distinguish between the two. However, when times are not calm, nor secure, helping people to distinguish what is real and what is felt, is the task of mature leadership and this is something that seems to be sorely lacking.

In response to the crisis of 2008, the coalition government failed to provide this assurance, rather it went about undermining the services and institutions that underpin that felt sense of security; cutting children’s centres, thereby destabilising ordinary families (a very effective way to help people feel more secure is to strengthen services that support relationships and families) and reorganising and commercialising our most important institution, the Health Service.

Thinking about the way traumas affects whole societies is a relatively new concept in public health. Mostly, it has been applied to more grossly traumatising experiences such as slavery, war and genocide. But it seems to me that our politics needs to include more understanding that undermining felt security has an impact on whether we remain tolerant, inclusive and yes, sane as a society. Politicians, in my view, undermine felt security at their peril.

Vamik Volkan, a Turkish Cypriot psychoanalyst who is internationally known for his work on bringing together conflictual groups for dialogue and mutual understanding, has described how after large group societal trauma individuals can feel a sense of victimisation and a feeling of being dehumanised. As a result of trauma, people can, at first, feel a sense of humiliation and hidden shame about their circumstances and can find it difficult to be appropriately assertive. It is interesting to note therefore how little overt protest we saw after the 2008 crash and how long it took for a sense of injustice to crystallise. Perhaps, many people felt more ashamed than angry about their reduced circumstances, and the rhetoric about “the underserving poor” compounded this.

Volkan also says that in response to large group trauma one can see an increase in projection. In projection, we tend to place blame outside ourselves and see the “other” as responsible for our misfortune. In the face of the shame and humiliation that is created such as when you need help from a system (the DWP) that is contemptuous and toxic towards that neediness, projections that blame “others” can increase as a way of protecting and defending oneself against a pervasive feeling of failure. The sense that “others” were bringing the nation down and were the source of individual and societal problems was most stark in the increasingly hostile attitude to immigrants and refugees.

And, Volkan reminds us, trauma also increases the need for an investment in a large group identity as a way of shoring up the inner sense of fragility. The feeling of being small and powerless can be eased by identifying with a large group and this large group can then be invested with strength, nobility and pride. Englishness perhaps? Here Englishness becomes the repository for all the good, and “others” carry the unwanted and discarded “bad”.

So, could we understand the vote for Brexit as a reaction to trauma? If so, then this view could seem to be pathologising leave voters, rather than seeing their stance as an ideological choice. And this kind of attitude, that the leave vote was essentially pathological in nature, no doubt compounds the sense of outrage and division that we are seeing.

In fact, the demographic analysis of the leave vote shows that lots of people voted for Brexit who probably weren’t particularly traumatised by the economic crash. So, if trauma and insecurity isn’t the whole story, what is?

An answer might come from my work with couples. One of the universal issues that couples bring when they come to see me is the often-challenging struggle between dependence and independence. It seems to me that it’s hard for most humans to manage this dichotomy between our need for, and dependence on others, and our need to be autonomous and self-governing. Mervyn Glasser, a psychoanalyst who worked at The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in the 1970s investigated this human experience and called it the “core complex”. Other clinicians have described a similar idea as the “agoraphobic- claustrophobic dilemma”, describing how the deep-seated longing for intimacy and closeness and the need autonomy and separateness is in constant tension. The pulling away from the other to become separate arouses fears of abandonment and survival anxiety (remain voters?) which then pushes us back towards closeness. But the experience of closeness invites claustrophobic anxieties and fears of losing control, so we pull away again.

Whilst I believe these tensions are universal in relationships; in my practice it is clear that those couples whose individual identity is fragile and whose sense of self is poor, struggle with this dilemma more acutely. To be comfortable with being dependent and close to another, one has to a sense of confidence in oneself and a feeling that one’s individuality is secure. Primal fears are easily activated when identity and selfhood is weak, and whilst trauma makes them even harder to manage, anything that makes our identity fragile can also make us prone to issues around the core complex.

Several writers, including Anthony Barnett and Fintan O’Toole have argued that the English identity has been denigrated and devalued. That the unmourned loss of Empire and the more recent rejection of the concept of the Union, has led to a fragility and a sense of weakness in the English identity. The push from all parts of the union other than England towards greater autonomy and separation and the ensuing development of devolutionary policies, has, depreciated the sense of pride in Englishness.

In this context, did England need to assert itself? Has this led to the growing need to shore up the sense of Englishness and is this fragility at the heart of that compelling call to arms to “take back control”? Where identity is weak, then fears of a kind of colonisation are bound to be more to the fore. And, successive politicians have compounded this concern about colonisation by framing the EU in our imagination as an enormously controlling other. An enormous bureaucracy shaping our daily lives from which we have to constantly wrestle back concessions and deals.

And to give the other side of the core complex, (and perhaps better understand why the remain voice is equally shrill), where identity is weak, there are also acute anxieties about being alone, and very vulnerable in this aloneness.

But this issue with national identity has not only been an issue with the English part of the union. Scotland’s push for independence shows this clearly. The core complex and the drive for autonomy has been at work in both countries. Perhaps it’s just the solution to this problem that has been different?

This difference is expressed in how a sense of separation and autonomy is being developed by Scotland and England. In developmental terms, adolescence is usually the time when we forge a separate identity and adolescents generally do this in a state of opposition. We define ourselves by being different from our parents and establish our separateness by resisting their values, beliefs and injunctions. For Scotland therefore, perhaps identity is forged in opposition to England? Their wish to stay in the EU could be understood as separating from the “family” union with England and defining its identity as separate from England via its imagined relationship to the EU. For Scotland, the feared claustrophobic control comes from England, who is the dominating parent whilst the EU is seen as a protector, helping Scotland manage its English colonisation anxieties. For England, now equally uncertain of its identity and therefore also preoccupied with autonomy, the EU becomes the parental figure to be in opposition to. For England, it is the EU that raises the spectre of domination and control.

So, in relation to our current divisions, can we think about this as a couple problem? At the risk of being heteronormative and reinforcing gender norms, let’s imagine this as Mr Leave and Mrs Remain. Mr Leave desperately wants autonomy; he fears being colonised and prizes his independence and hates to feel needy and out of control. Mrs Remain, on the other hand wants closeness and intimacy and fears that without this attachment her survival is at stake. This kind of split, and the fight and acrimony it can generate between couples is what I feel I am witnessing in the divisions we see between leave and remain supporters. Between couples, this kind of difficulty can feel like a fight to the death and it seems that the current strength of feeling in the country is similarly polarised and desperate. Further, as we get closer to leaving without any plan or guarantees of security, unsurprisingly, difficulties with rational and calm thinking seem to be getting worse.

The way I try to help couples become less angry and polarised is twofold. Firstly, I try and build a sense of safety and containment in the therapy that builds trust both with me and between the couple and secondly, when feelings are more regulated and calmer, I work with Mr Leave and Mrs Remain to help them build a sense of self that feels strong and resilient. When this is established the polarisation decreases and collaboration becomes more possible. One can only hope that our leaders begin to understand this need for containment and security, so we can begin the process of understanding each other and concern and empathy, can re-emerge in our country.

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Captured states: when EU governments act as middlemen for corporate interests

Vicky Cann — Wed, 06 Feb 2019 10:38:21 +0000

It's easy to blame “Brussels bureaucrats” but national governments are often the biggest corporate lobbyists of all, a new report exposes today.

Image: German Chancellor Angela Merkel and then-French President Francois Hollande in a rare photo of the European Round Table of Industrialists, 2016. Credit: Markus Shreiber/DPA/PA Images, all rights reserved.

Do you know why your phone bill is still higher than it should be when you travel within the EU? Or why you and your food will still be exposed to the pesticide glyphosate in the coming years? Or why banks got their way after the financial crisis, while you shouldered the impacts of austerity?

It’s easy to blame those infamous-yet-anonymous Brussels bureaucrats for the decisions which come out of the EU, but in fact all member state governments - including our government’s ministers and officials, at least until Brexit kicks in - are around the table when EU rules and regulations are discussed and agreed. And – as a new report reveals today – too many governments take conscious and proactive decisions to support corporate interests over the wider public interest.

In fact member states are the missing part of the jigsaw - alongside the European Commission, elements within the European Parliament, and the EU treaties - which explain the pro-corporate bias of too many EU laws and policies. But the secrecy around how member states act at the EU level, as well as around which corporate lobbies they are talking to, contribute to creating myths and misunderstandings.

Remember how, in the UK Brexit referendum of 2016, TTIP, the proposed EU-US trade deal, was often cited as a reason to leave the EU, capitalising on very legitimate public concern that TTIP would lead to the further privatisation of the NHS? But what was lost in that debate was the way in which the UK Government had been proactively pushing for TTIP in Brussels, including supporting the inclusion of health services in the scope of the deal. And of course now the UK Government is touting for a post-Brexit trade deal with the US which would rival TTIP, and which would be negotiated without democratic scrutiny!

The new report from Corporate Observatory Europe exposes for first time how member states – the UK, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Poland and others - act as middlemen for corporate interests in EU decision-making.

For starters, elite corporate lobbies have access to EU leaders that NGOs and trade unions simply cannot match. Take for example the regular meetings of the European Round Table of Industrialists, which brings together 50 bosses of major European multinational companies such as Telefónica, Siemens, Total, and BMW, with the leaders of France and Germany. Or the cosy cocktails between member states’ trade officials and the European Services forum which represents Vodafone, HSBC, and Deutsche Telekom.

Combine this kind of privileged access with the lobby firepower of the corporate sector which massively outspends that of civil society, and it is not surprising that the progress or outcomes of a wide-range of dossiers, from ePrivacy to the Financial Transactions Tax, from climate change to chemicals regulation, suit corporate interests at the expense of the public interest.

Beyond specific dossiers, member states have collectively absorbed some corporate agendas and adopted them as part of the EU-wide agenda, such as on economic governance (strict fiscal rules and austerity), the so-called ‘innovation principle’ (undermining precautionary approaches to regulation), and investors’ protection in trade treaties (allowing corporations to sue states for billions in compensation when governments act to protect their people and the planet).

At its most extreme, some member states and national corporate lobbies have developed a symbiotic relationship whereby the national corporate interest has, wholly wrongly, become synonymous with the national public interest as presented by the relevant government at the EU level. This is often greased by revolving door exchanges of staff, political donations, and close personal relationships between key players. The Dieselgate scandal showed how the influence of the car industry on German politics led to weaker EU vehicle emissions’ regulations; the state-owned coal industry led the Polish Government to threaten to use its veto on climate targets; while the City of London, can consistently count on the UK Government to back its demands for the lowest possible financial regulation.

This corporate influence has been apparent for decades, especially since the inauguration of the EU’s single market in the 1980s, but as successive treaties have made the EU responsible for more and more issues and cemented the role and power of key member states institutions such as the European Council and Council of the EU, governments are increasingly acting as a channel for corporate interests.

The result is an accountability and democratic deficit. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Some parliaments like those in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Austria, and Germany have powers to review planned government negotiating positions on EU matters in advance; in Sweden the government can even check-in with Parliament “by email, text message or phone calls” on last minute additions to the Council’s agenda or in cases where the Swedish position needs to be adapted.

Meanwhile the regional Walloon Parliament in Belgium held dozens of hearings on the EU’s trade deal with Canada, CETA, which ultimately led to the active involvement of the Walloon Government in the CETA ratification debate. Across the EU, 2000 TTIP and CETA ‘free zones’ have been declared by regional and municipal authorities concerned about the impacts of these treaties on their local communities, and determined to stand up against corporate-influenced EU agendas.

The UK government has a strong voice to be able to articulate the public interest at the EU level. But the UK has rarely chosen to do that. And with Brexit looming, it seems too late to revisit how the UK feeds into EU decision-making. But elsewhere in the bloc, 2019 will be a really significant year with European Parliamentary elections due in May and a new European Commission to be appointed in the autumn. As a result pan-European debates on the role of the EU will only intensify and the role that governments play in the bloc must be part of the discussion.

Vicky Cann works for Corporate Europe Observatory, who expose and challenge the privileged access and influence enjoyed by corporations and their lobby groups in EU policy-making. She is co-author of “Captured states: when EU governments are a channel for corporate interests”.

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Revealed: The dark-money Brexit ads flooding social media

Peter Geoghegan — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 16:56:13 +0000

Facebook has new transparency rules on political ads. But in the last week pro-Brexit groups have spent tens of thousands pushing ‘no deal’ – without having to explain who pays for them.

Over the past week tens of thousands of pounds have been spent on Facebook adverts promoting a ‘no deal’ Brexit. It is not possible to find out who is funding these highly targeted campaigns, despite new regulations intended to make political messaging on Facebook more transparent.

Over the seven days to last Saturday, spending by campaigners pushing for ‘no deal’ far outstripped that of anti-Brexit groups. Some of these paid-for Facebook adverts described pro-EU MPs as “traitors” and “globalist scumbags”.

A single pro-Brexit group with almost no public presence spent almost £50,000 on Facebook. Britain’s Future – which does not declare its funders and has no published address – is running hundreds of very localised targeted ads pushing for ‘no deal’.

Politicians and campaigners have called for greater transparency of political advertising. Labour MP Ben Bradshaw said: “We have no idea who these people are or where their money comes from. It shows again how unfit for purpose the rules are that govern online campaigning and the use of data.”

‘Don’t let them steal Brexit’

Some of the adverts claim that a ‘no deal’ Brexit “will reduce barriers to world trade and cut prices”, a claim contradicted by most economists. Britain’s Future has also run over 100 adverts in the last week urging voters in specific Labour constituencies to write to their MP.

These targeted adverts include messages such as “Don’t let them steal Brexit” and include a link for voters to email their MP. Politicians have reported receiving a significant number of pro-’no deal’ messages in recent weeks.

Over the past week, anti-Brexit groups have spent far less money on Facebook adverts than pro-’no deal’ outfits, reversing a trend that had seen generally anti-Brexit groups spend more money on Facebook since last October.

Over the last four months, the People’s Vote and Best for Britain campaigns spent £266,369 and £183,943, respectively. Neither of these anti-Brexit groups is fully transparent either: both publish some details about themselves, such as addresses, but do not publish full details of all funders and donors. During the same time period, Britain’s Future has spent more than £200,000 on Facebook ads.

While anti-Brexit spending has slowed down in recent weeks, however, adverts pushing a ‘no deal’ Brexit have spiked. Britain’s Future has spent more than £110,000 on Facebook ads since mid-January. It is not clear where the money for this huge ad push has come from.

The only person publicly identified with the group is Tim Dawson, a former ‘Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps’ scriptwriter. Dawson is listed as editor on Britain’s Future’s website.

In November, Dawson told the BBC that he was “raising small donations from friends and fellow Brexiteers” after it was reported that a paid-for Britain’s Future advert topped Google searches for “what is the Brexit deal” ahead of the UK government’s own site. Dawson has yet to respond to queries from openDemocracy about the source of his funding.

Dawson has written for The Spectator, Spiked and other right-wing publications. In last year’s local election, he ran as a Conservative candidate in Hulme, in Manchester. He finished a distant sixth.

During the 2016 EU referendum Vote Leave and other campaigns spent almost £4m on social media adverts, including erroneous warnings that Turkey was joining the EU. Britain’s Future’s adverts are far more geographically targeted than Vote Leave’s were, and appear to be focused on influencing Labour MPs not to back Theresa May’s withdrawal bill on 14 February, which would increase the chances of a ‘no deal’ Brexit.

Brexit Defence Force

Some paid-for pro-Brexit ads on Facebook are more sinister. A group called ‘Brexit Defence Force” paid hundreds of pound for adverts that included messages about “remoaner Globalist scumbags” and calling for a ‘no deal’ Brexit.

In one advert posted this week (below), John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, was described as “a Saboteur amongst us” and a “nasty little globalist scumbag”. Above a cartoon image of a witch in a long black hooded cloak a message says "Burkow must go".

It is impossible to find out who is actually paying for these adverts. Under rules introduced by Facebook last year, all political advertising in the UK has to be labelled and those placing the adverts to verify they are living at a UK postal address.

But Facebook’s new rules, introduced following concerns about social media campaigning during the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election, do not force an advertiser to declare the ultimate source of the money for any political campaign. For groups such as Brexit Defence Forces and others it is simple to place adverts without having to disclose who is actually paying for them.

Sam Jeffers, co-founder of Who Targets Me?, which tracks political adverts, said “While there are circumstances where anonymity for campaigners is necessary, we don't think any of these campaigns are performing a democratic service by hiding their true identity.”

Last month, Facebook removed threats of violence against pro-EU MPs made in response to a paid-for Brexit Defence Force advert. But Facebook ruled that the advert itself – which accused anti-Brexit MPs of “treason” – did not breach its community standards.

As well as paid for ‘no deal’ adverts, many popular pro-Brexit Facebook sites have shared images depicting the European Union as Nazis and Theresa May as a traitor. Others have even used iconography from 1930s Germany to spread a hardline pro-Brexit message.

Another obscure anti-Brexit outfit, We are the 52%, has spent more than £4,000 over the last seven days. We are the 52%, which has spent almost £25,000 on Facebook ads since October, has also been pushing for a ‘no deal’ Brexit.

We are the 52% appears to be affiliated with Nigel Farage’s Leave Means Leave. The only person publicly connected with the group is former Vote Leave activist Theodora Dickinson (below).

Dickinson also runs a website that offers political communications services including “social media solutions for candidates and elected representatives”. openDemocracy has contacted We are the 52% to ask what the source of the funding for its Facebook adverts is but has yet to receive a response.

Labour’s Ben Bradshaw said: “This is the latest example of shady groups that keep their identity secret pushing misleading and factually inaccurate hard-Brexit ads on social media. We have no idea who these people are or where their money comes from. It shows again how unfit for purpose the rules are that govern online campaigning and the use of data.”

Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake said: “There is a clear agenda from a clique of comfortable businessmen and donors to block attempts at preventing a chaotic No-Deal scenario – the very worst Brexit outcome.

“We must uncover the true nature of murky pro-Brexit groups like Britain’s Future, to help finally debunk their propaganda and lay bare the true devastation of the Brexit these secretive groups are desperate for.”

Sam Jeffers said: “People spending large sums to influence voters and MPs should be transparent by default. Equally, Facebook could implement stronger rules to force greater transparency on organisations who want to reach people through its service. As soon as possible, we want to see new rules for transparency of political campaigns, to reassure the voting public that the messages they see can be trusted – wherever they see them.”

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Tha Brexit, Tha Owns It

William Bolton — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 16:45:25 +0000

If North of England Labour MPs end up voting through a Tory Brexit, then the resulting decline and despair of the region will be their fault.

Image: Brexitometer in Cross Gates, East Leeds - a Leave stronghold.

The Brexit debate already has quite enough angry invective, especially from somewhat gammony middle-aged men. But unfortunately what the Westminster village is serving up now, with just 52 days left on the Brexit countdown clock, demands fury. So, with apologies to Lynsey de Paul for pinching her lyrics, here’s a blast of anger from the North of England.

If you break it, you own it. If North of England Labour MPs end up as the crucial votes to get Theresa May’s Brexit deal over the line, then the inexorable decline and despair of the region resulting must be hung around their necks like the albatross.

It’s not complicated. Tory Brexit offers not one single thing that will help fix any of the North of England’s problems in any way. It will just make all of them massively worse. For Labour MPs this should be absolutely basic.

Yet, last week in the House of Commons, Northern Labour MPs played a vital part in passing ‘the Brady amendment’, the bad taste joke that sends Theresa May back to Brussels to negotiate ‘alternative arrangements’ to the Irish border backstop that neither Brady, May nor anyone else can describe.

It’s a debacle that destroys what little remained of the UK’s international diplomatic reputation and – unless reversed - will in time destroy the United Kingdom itself.

It’s hard for anybody who gives a damn about our country’s future not to despair. But whilst there remains any slim chance of stopping Brexit, there is no better option than to soldier on. The indefatigable Brexitometer volunteers are an inspiration.

Our message is simple: in the North, the 2016 Brexit vote was never about the EU, it was about the state of us. So let’s take a long hard look at ourselves, and get serious about our choices. Amazingly, there is still time to drop Brexit and get on instead with addressing our actual problems - our society, our environment, our economy and our democracy. Or we can choose Tory Brexit and ruin.

This shit is our shit

Say what you like about Sir Graham Brady, but the Salford-born MP for Altrincham, Chairman of the Tory 1922 committee and former Chairman of the Durham University Conservative Association, is unquestionably a Northerner. As is Tadcaster-born former Yorkshire miner and Rother Valley MP Sir Kevin Barron. And Tynemouth-born former Northumberland miner and Blyth Valley MP Ronnie Campbell. And Beswick-born, global warming-denying Labour MP for Manchester Blackley, Graham Stringer. The three Labour MPs are all working class boys made good, and they are all well rooted in the communities they represent. They are also three of the Northern MPs who voted with Brady last week.

And it’s not just the pale, male and decidedly stale. Laura Smith, 34 year-old former schoolteacher and now Labour MP for Crewe & Nantwich, and Liverpool-born Labour MP for West Lancashire Rosie Cooper, are both unquestionably Northerners too. They were among the 14 Labour MPs who voted against the Yvette Cooper and Dominic Grieve amendments that would have wrestled control of the Brexit process away from Theresa May and her Tory minority administration, and given it back to parliament. These 14 Labour MPs exactly cancelled out the 14 Tory Remainer rebels and gave Theresa May all the votes she needed to retain power over parliamentary business. These 14 Labour MPs are personally responsible for an excited Boris Johnson being able to bounce onto live TV to tell the nation to rejoice for the great achievement of a reunified Tory party.

In other news in the last week, Nissan announced that it is not investing further in its Sunderland plant, Airbus as good as announced that it is leaving as soon as possible, and the European Medicines Agency left London for Amsterdam, which spells the beginning of the end for Britain’s competitive edge in pharmaceuticals. In a single week, we have seen the death sentence pronounced on three of the four remaining jewels in the North of England’s manufacturing crown. This will leave the North with one last world class manufacturing industry: warplanes and weapons.

Brexit. Call it the craziest own-goal in football history, call it a self-indulgent, weirdly camp, masochistic act of self-pity borne of a misplaced sense of both superiority and grievance (© Fintan O’Toole), call it what you like, but we Northerners own a big piece of this shit. The North of England voted for Brexit, by approximately 56%-44%.

If we’re honest with ourselves – and it is time to be honest with ourselves - it’s part of any Northerner’s comfort blanket to blame London for the misfortunes that befall the North. But although this colossal fuck up is being enacted in Westminster, it is being done by ‘England-outside-London’ for England-outside-London. For once, London didn’t do this to us; we are doing it to ourselves.

Every single one of those Northern Labour MPs, whether young and diligent, or old, tired and cynical, did what they did safe in the knowledge that they had enough voters in their own constituencies behind them. Some did it because they think their duty is to be their constituents’ voice even if they don’t agree with them, some did it simply to help their chances of getting re-elected. Some did it from a perfectly preserved 1983 ‘Lexit’ stance, some did it some did it because they are just dodgy old rogues. But in all cases it is absolutely wrong to say that what they did was not democratic politics in action.

Although there is good evidence that working class Northerners are among the people who have changed their minds the most on Brexit between 2016 and today, and although opinion polls show that the UK would vote by 54-46 to remain in the EU if another vote was held, the fact is that the vast majority of people have not changed their minds.

Such is the state of madness we have got ourselves into, that it doesn’t matter that neither these Labour MPs nor anybody else is able to describe what tangible good Brexit will do for anybody’s actual lives, because Leave voters themselves are not asking this question. All that seems to matter is whether the Leave vote, the will of the people, is being seen through to the bitter end.

An image-canny, ideologically flexible MP like Doncaster’s Caroline Flint can see this, and so prepares the ground for getting into bed with Dominic Raab by emoting about respecting the vote.

Pro- or anti-Brexit is now a political tribal identity as strong as ‘right wing’ or ‘left wing’. As strong maybe (whisper it) as Northerner or Southerner. And when someone accuses your tribe of being thick, or deluded, or even just honestly mistaken, the general tendency is not to examine the evidence behind the accusation but to fight back on the emotional level and double down on the original point of view.

Let’s admit it: we supposedly wonderful, honest, caring, funny, plain-speaking, well-meaning, hard-working, passionate but common sense-loving Northerners are not averse to a spot of tribalism.

Is God to blame?

Most Northerners who voted for Brexit did so in what for them was good faith. Yes, some Northern Brexit voters are nasty white supremacists, or absurd empire nostalgists. But most were good people acting in good faith.

Yes, they were conned and deluded by the shameless lies of the Bad Boys of Brexit. But they were conned and deluded partly because they wanted to be conned and deluded. They wanted to believe. They wanted to believe in their own country as a place that would help them and their families, rather than a country that would continually rip them off and ruthlessly attack their dignity in times of need. ‘Believe in Britain’ was as powerful as slogan as ‘Take Back Control’.

They wanted to believe so much, that they were willing to overrule the evidence of their own eyes that Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson were obvious shysters. Or to be more precise, they knew they were being lied to, but they chose to believe it anyway. It’s so similar to religious TV in the USA, it’s scary.

I am haunted by a conversation with a 20-something, working class, lesbian Yorkshirewoman, who told me that “Come Brexit”, deep rooted but austerity-ravaged community facilities in her neighbourhood were going to stop closing, and things in her life were going to get better.

Subconsciously she was harking back to a more religious Northern past, when people were happy to believe that “Come Glory” wrongs would be righted, the last would be first, and justice would be done.

On referendum day, she and millions of others took back control and promptly handed it to Liam Fox to hand over to Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and the rest of the vicious, banal, planet-destroying international kleptocrats, who are lying in wait to right royally do her, and the rest of us, over.

It was and is a giant mistake. Nobody likes to admit to a mistake. But it’s preferable to being screwed by Donald Trump.

Where are we? Rock Bottom.

Let’s be clear where we are now. We’re in the mire.

Labour and the Tory European Research Group have bullshitted on for months about going back to the beginning with the EU to renegotiate an exit deal, but back in November Theresa May got it dead right when she said there were only three possibilities still left in play: her deal, Brexit with no deal, and No Brexit.

What happened last week was that Theresa May disowned her own deal. The EU won’t renegotiate the Irish border backstop not only because - to their credit – they won’t sell the Irish down the river, but also because it is not meaningfully logically possible. If there is a border customs arrangement acceptable to both the UK and the EU that can be found, then it will be found during the two years of the transition period, and the backstop will be unnecessary. But if there isn’t, it won’t, and that’s why there needs to be a backstop.

Those who support sports teams prone to relegation will know well that point in the season where your fate is no longer entirely in your own hands. That’s what happened last week in the Brexit process.

Even if Theresa May comes home from Brussels with something that looks like a concession from the EU, and puts her vaguely amended deal back to parliament, there is now no longer enough time for a legally orderly Brexit on 29 March. There are too many pieces of legislation needing to go through the British parliament, never mind the vagaries of getting the amended deal through the 751-member European parliament. So we will shortly be going back to the EU27 on our knees pleading with them to extend the Brexit day deadline, not for a public referendum to ratify the original deal (which they might grant), but simply to help us out with some crummy amended version of the deal. They may extract a price. Or they may have lost patience with us and decide to toss us over the cliff.

The only action that is still entirely within our own hands is to unilaterally revoke our notification of intention to withdraw from the EU under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. And looking at last week’s parliamentary arithmetic, that looks like it is going to require a mathematical miracle. A point in the season that those who support sports teams prone to relegation will also be well familiar with.

Tragedies, we got ‘em

Brexit is going to go badly wrong. No Deal Brexit, particularly if it happens on 29 March, will be carnage from the off. By contrast, if we do sign Theresa May’s deal after all, then it won’t be so bad in the early days – there will be food on the supermarket shelves and medicines in the chemists. But the North’s economy will go into a steady, inexorable decline.

The trade talks with the EU, which only start when we leave, will be horrible, and will go on for ever. People tend to forget that the withdrawal agreement was the easy bit. The EU is waiting for the UK to become a third country before it really starts playing hardball with us.

The one great achievement of Maggie Thatcher’s economic policy, the selling of the UK to Japanese manufacturers and others as a stable, reliable base for them inside the EU single market, has now been killed and can’t be revived. With No Deal, most non-military advanced manufacturing will be gone within months. With May’s deal, it will be run down more gradually over a few years.

A truly impressive achievement of the New Labour years, the creation of the image of Cool Britannia as an open, welcoming country for international university students and researchers, has been profoundly damaged. The North’s university campuses, which have been doing so well even as much of the rest of the North has struggled, will cease thriving. Because universities are now over-leveraged businesses rather than groves of academe, many will go bust. Expect to see vice-chancellors and other professional administrators sprinting for the exits with holdalls full of cash. In some Northern cities, it’s going to be like the last chopper out of Saigon.

Meanwhile, the Trump White House is literally standing in line waiting to shaft us. Chlorinated chicken for tea will be the least of our worries. Northerners’ pensions and financial assets, and the region’s accumulated social and physical capital (for example, our NHS) will become a kind of financial strip mine for Wall Street. They will extract everything they can and then walk away, leaving behind penury.

But the thing we can be absolutely sure of is that when Brexit goes wrong, Rees-Mogg and Farage won’t be blaming themselves. They’re going to blame literally anybody and everybody else.

The tragic irony is that, deep down, a large proportion of Brexit voters don’t even really want to leave the European Union. Their comfort zone is to be inside the European Union, enjoying their pensions and Spanish holidays and fully-stocked supermarket shelves, with the luxury of someone else being to blame for betraying them, and keeping them in the EU against their will. That is most probably the real ‘will of the people’.

Remedy? Why don’t we rub it out and start it again

Lesley Riddoch wrote a fantastic opinion piece in The Scotsman calling on Northerners and Midlanders to direct their rage at Westminster, not the EU. (What a shame that we have to go to Scotland to get a decent newspaper independent of London.)

Representative democracy is the right answer, but we need a better version of it than the antiquated and unfit Westminster system.

The core of the problem is the single seat system with first-past-the-post elections. This creates the tendency towards a two party duopoly in which Labour conspire as much as Tory to deny real democratic choice.

Few want a general election - look at the Brexitometer results. One reason that a general election does not arouse much enthusiasm (contrast for example with the hundreds of thousands of people coming out to march for a fresh referendum) is that it is not really a very democratic exercise.

Westminster seats are all single member seats and the vast majority of them are safe for one of the two parties. Therefore the campaign only really takes place in the marginal seats. And even in the marginal seats, the experience is too often not about voting for a candidate or party you feel enthusiastic about, but rather about voting tactically to keep out the candidate of the party you are against. Negative campaigning dominates.

During the campaign, tactical voting is encouraged by the two main parties, squeezing the vote for independents and smaller parties - lend us your vote, don't waste it! But then as soon as the vote is in, those votes are presented by them to be genuine support, locking in the two party system. Theresa May delights to say that in 2017 80% of people voted for parties who promised to leave the EU. They did indeed, but she draws the wrong lesson from it.

We should reform to the Irish system for Westminster and local council elections, and for a new regional government assembly for the North. In the Republic of Ireland, each constituency elects 4 or 5 members, and voters list all candidates in order of preference (single transferable vote). This means that everybody’s vote counts, everybody gets to express a preference for the person as well as the party label, and every candidate has to give the voters a positive reason to vote for them. When the election is done, the support for each party is proportionally represented in parliament, and almost every voter feels that they are represented by a person they expressed a preference for. It is noticeable that the Irish appear to be much more content with their democracy and their politicians than we are.

Getting reform to the system won’t be easy, and Labour will be as much an obstacle as the Tories. The status quo is protected by the majority of MPs who have safe seats. This means that they have to fight a competitive election just once in their political career – the selection meeting of their local party for their candidate for the vacant seat – and then they can settle back, often for decades on end. The system does throw up some good people, but sadly, not enough.

Getting rid of the system may require destroying the Labour machine. This is what it took in Scotland, and nowhere was more solidly, reliably Labour than there. For Scotland, it’s been worth it, and things are looking up for communities across that country, although of course they will be hammered by Brexit too.

Maybe that will be no great loss, because it looks like the dream of a radical, reforming Corbyn government has died in recent weeks. Corbyn simply left his pivot from constructive ambiguity to loud ‘n’ proud backing for the young people of Britain (who are 80% for Remain) too late. It’s a tragedy and it’s also an irony: who would have guessed that, of all things, triangulation would be the ruination of Jeremy Corbyn! But that’s what a two party system does to everyone.

Maybe it’s not too late for Corbyn, but it feels like it is. Had he pivoted to Remain earlier, so many young people (and older citizens willing to pound the streets for votes) would have done anything for him. Now, it may well be that whatever he says, he won’t be able to get them to listen to him any more. Let’s wait and see.

Meanwhile, trusting the Labour party and trusting the existing electoral system is about trusting John Mann to negotiate with some random Tory minister to get serious new money for coalfield communities. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.

With sympathy – oh I get it. Harmony - you said it.

The prospect of Brexit is so bleak that there really is no point this side of 29 March in doing anything else than keeping fighting, and hoping for our miracle.

The Brexitometer volunteers are the heroes of the hour. Going out in all weathers, to engage the people in discussion and seek their views on the big Brexit questions of the day. Only they can save us now.

Here is the result from Cross Gates in East Leeds, a working class stronghold of Leave in the city of Leeds.

Here is the result from Wombwell, near Barnsley, pit village and former stronghold of Arthur’s Army, which voted massively for Leave in 2016.

Both a bit different from what you might expect listening to the BBC’s narrative of what is going on.

Back in July 2018 Eloise Todd told a public meeting in Manchester that the 10 Downing Street game plan was to disappear Remain as an option. The narrative would be, it’s either Theresa May’s deal, or the bloodcurdling prospect of No Deal.

The BBC has stuck religiously to those instructions through thick and thin. It simply blacks out news that doesn’t fit the narrative. Rest assured that the BBC will not be honestly reporting that revoking Article 50 is enjoying widespread and growing support, even in some of the most strongly pro-Leave areas. The Scots have been through all this before with the BBC.

But if the Brexitometer volunteers keep going, and keep getting information about the results they are getting out through social media, eventually even the BBC will be forced to play catch up and report what is happening. Here are the Barnsley Brexitometer volunteers’ takeaways from a chilly Saturday in Wombwell: Firstly, Barnsley folk are warm & friendly regardless. Secondly, no amount of evidence will change some views that we're scaremongering, or in any case "we'll be right, we've survived worse!". Thirdly, something needs to change in our political system. And finally - lots of support for Remaining!

Let’s take heart from that. There’s no future for England without bringing places like Wombwell with us.

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Three ways to stop the global economic system working for only rich white men

Stephen McCloskey — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 12:57:58 +0000

Women’s unpaid work is worth $10 trillion annually. Amazon's Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth dwarves the health budget of most countries. These facts are linked – and a new report from Oxfam suggests answers.

Image: Woman carrying water from standpipe in Lao. Credit: Jim Holmes/AUSAid/Flickr, CC 2.0.

A new report by Oxfam suggests that a generation of reckless financial deregulation, wealth accumulation by the world’s richest one percent and the rolling back of essential State services has resulted in extreme levels of social and economic polarisation. The report headline is that in the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis the number of billionaires has nearly doubled and their wealth has increased by $900bn in the last year alone, or $2.5bn a day. In the same period, the wealth of the poorest half of humanity, 3.8 billion people, has fallen by 11%. Put another way, this means that just 26 billionaires – down from 43 in 2017 - own the same wealth as the poorest half of humanity. To quantify this wealth in development terms, the report says that Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, has amassed a fortune of $112 billion. Just 1% of this sum equates to the entire health budget of Ethiopia. In summary, rich and poor are becoming increasingly polarised and wealth is concentrating in fewer hands.

Oxfam argues that one of the main reasons for this grotesque distortion of wealth distribution is the under-taxing of the super-rich who, it suggests, are secreting a sum in the region of $7.6 trillion off-shore. The report argues for ‘a new set of global rules and institutions to fundamentally redesign the tax system to make it fair’. But tax avoidance is just one factor underpinning inequality that is captured in Oxfam’s report; two other significant drivers of poverty are gender discrimination and the erosion of public services.

Women’s unpaid work is worth $10 trillion

Globally, women earn 23% less than men and in the United States single white men own one hundred times more wealth than single Hispanic women. Oxfam argues that where the poverty gap is greater between rich and poor so is the level of inequality between men and women. The report calculates that if all the unpaid work carried out by women and girls everyday such as caring, cooking and cleaning, was delivered by a single company, it would have an annual turnover of $10 trillion. That would represent a turnover 43 times greater than that of multinational giant Apple – but goes undocumented in the development indices and reportage of most multilateral development organisations that rely on the blunt economic instrument of Gross Domestic Product. What is also largely ignored is the stolen time from women, particularly on low incomes, who are denied opportunities to take-up education, political and economic opportunities that would support both individual and community development.

Oxfam make clear that disinvestment in public services as a result of neoliberal ‘reforms’ has also been a significant contributor to gender inequality. The report says:

“The economic rules have been written by rich and powerful men in their own interests. The neo-liberal economic model of today has made this worse – cuts to public services, cut to taxes for the richest individuals and corporations, and a race to the bottom on wages have all hurt women more than men”.

Investment in public services not only narrows the gender poverty gap but enhances the development prospects of communities on the coalface of neoliberalism in the global North and South. Health, education and social protection are identified by Oxfam as critical to overcoming the barriers to inequality and enlarging the life opportunities for the millions of people on low incomes. Today nearly half of the world’s people (3.4 billion) live on less than $5.50 day while the wealthy are persistently under-taxed. Just 4 cents in every dollar of tax revenue comes from the rich and in some countries, including the UK and Brazil, the poorest 10% are paying proportionately as much tax as the richest 10%. This situation is untenable as increasing numbers of the working poor are forced into poverty. As the UN Rapporteur’s report on austerity in the UK made clear last year, the decade following the 2008 financial crisis has been characterised by increasing poverty in the global North. For example, the Trussell Trust distributed 1.3 million three-day emergency food supplies in the UK to people in crisis between April 2017 and March 2018, a 13 per cent increase on 2017, with 484,026 of these supplies going to children. Our economy is broken, and Oxfam urges a realignment of taxes to ensure the wealthy pay their way. The report calculates that a modest 0.5% tax rise on the income of the richest 1% would raise sufficient revenue to educate all 262 million children currently out of school and provide healthcare for 3.3 million people.

Sustainable Development Goals – riven with contradictions?

Governments, civil society movements and development NGOs are pinning their hopes for a more equal society on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals agreed in 2015 “to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity” by 2030. But are the SDGs designed and equipped to address the fundamental questions about wealth accumulation and distribution raised by the Oxfam report and can they ensure that vital public services can be fully funded and available to all who need them? In short, can the SDGs resist the tide of neoliberalism and rein in the power of private companies and wealthy individuals? The Goals themselves suggest not and appear contradictory. For example, Goal 13 calls for “urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts” while Goal 8 seeks to “Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all”. As Hickel says of this apparent contradiction:

“All of this reflects awareness that something about our economic system has gone terribly awry. The pursuit of endless industrial growth is chewing through our living planet, producing poverty and threatening our existence. And yet the core of the SDG programme for development and poverty reduction relies precisely on the old model of industrial growth — ever-increasing levels of extraction, production, and consumption”.

There are significant doubts, therefore, as to whether the SDGs can bridge the current poverty gap while working within the same old tried and failed neoliberal economic model. There have been no indications to date that the wealthiest one percent is interested in more proportionate and fair tax contributions; that goes against their neoliberal grain.

Oxfam make three sensible key recommendations based on the evidence of their report. First, the delivery of “free universal healthcare, education and other public services that also work for women and girls”. Easier said than done – but made more possible with the implementation of the second recommendation to “end the under-taxation of rich individuals and corporations” which could potentially liberate billions more in revenue for the public purse. And, thirdly, to ease the millions of unpaid hours that women spend “caring for their families and homes”.

The stark alternatives are: deeper poverty among the working poor, particularly women; a greater disconnect between people and the politicians that represent them; more support for the populist right; and greater social upheaval resulting from the economic pressures of austerity and welfare reform. As the Oxfam puts it: ‘Today’s levels of inequality and poverty are a choice. We can continue to choose to reward those who are already rich or we can choose to fight inequality and end poverty’.

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How can we save British democracy from a Trump-style Wild West future?

Kyle Taylor — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 13:35:36 +0000

Until we close the loopholes that allow big money and big tech to warp politics, the only path forward is the American one.

Image: Demagogues, Flickr/Philip Hunt, CC 2.0.

If you are interested in a preview of what British politics could look like in 20 years without urgent reform, look no further than the United States.

In less than two decades, a system that was already controlled by moneyed interests and required constant fundraising (some elected representatives report spending 80 per cent of their time asking for donations) has spiralled beyond a point of no return where corporations have no limit on what they can donate. In addition, ‘non-partisan’ third-party groups can spend an unlimited amount of money as long as they do not ‘coordinate’ with official campaigns.

Sound familiar? We got our first taste of this in the EU referendum where we now know Vote Leave and supposedly unaligned groups coordinated their work, overspending to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds. While there has been little political will or desire to take action (mainly because of partisan vested interests), the need for reform is the most urgent issue of our time.

Democracy is already more unpopular with the citizenry than at any point since records have been kept. If our very way of life – the very foundation of how we ‘set up’ our society – falters, there is little chance we will be able to come back from the brink without some cataclysmic event.

Any type of electoral reform is almost immediately put into the ‘too hard’ basket as politicians and parties conflate a multitude of issues to discourage change and overcomplicate basic, simple problems. There are three areas where urgent reform is not only fairly easy, but already has broad support:

Re-democratise democracy by keeping big money out of politics.

The most powerful constituency in a democracy should be the voters themselves. This should be self-evident, but we are dealing with a democratic landscape where that is no longer the case. Historically, the strict spending controls in UK elections have ensured a level of fairness in elections. As a result of structural changes both to how spending rules work and the means by which campaigners campaign, this system is no longer fit for purpose.

While spending caps should remain (and be better enforced, below), the EU referendum and, in particular, the £8 million donation from Arron Banks have made it abundantly clear that our democracy also needs funding caps. These should not only limit the amount an individual, company, organisation or entity can give, but also require a clear trail to be certain of the source. These caps should be in place all the time, not just during an election campaign. There is no point restricting funding, if from five years to one minute before the regulated period someone can completely escape scrutiny.

Increase transparency by modernising reporting.

At present, election spending is reported offline consisting of a spreadsheet ‘top sheet’ and physical copies of individual invoices. These are often heavily marked up to represent ‘splits’ between local and national spending as well as ‘wastage’ or the percentage of a particular leaflet that was not actually distributed. In addition, there is no requirement to supply detailed evidence of online election spend – the fastest growing area of spending – beyond non-itemised receipts from digital platforms. These physical returns are then held by local councils for candidate expenditure and centrally for national expenditure.

There are countless cases of individuals and entities having to pursue freedom of information requests to gain access to what are obviously public documents. Election spending should be reported in near real-time on a national online database that is easily and publicly accessible and searchable. This should include copies of all leaflets and digital ads produced, alongside audience details (who received what and why) and detailed reports of spend, reach and so on, which can then be cross-referenced against publicly available records held by online platforms themselves. This is easily the simplest way to push for rapid rule-following.

Be 22nd century ready by closing digital loopholes.

At the moment we are roughly three decades behind in properly legislating for our election system. We not only need to catch up. We need to be decades ahead. While the broader digital space needs adequate regulation, driven and overseen by an independent regulator, there are immediate changes we can make to close digital loopholes.

The two most basic (and obvious) are firstly, applying the same standard of transparency to digital advertisements as is applied to physical leaflets in the form of an election imprint. This ensures that any ad no matter where it appears – can be traced back to a campaign and the campaign’s legally responsible party (the agent). And secondly making information on who’s targeting you in digital adverts available within “two clicks."

The above are not only sensible recommendations – they are actionable almost immediately. Regardless of whether we have a general election or referendum any time soon, the public’s trust in our democratic processes and outcomes will continue to decline unless we take these problems seriously. Without real change now, the only path forward is the American one. That is not the future we want nor one we deserve.

This is an edited extract from the Electoral Reform Society’s new report: “Reining in the Political ‘Wild West’: Campaign Rules for the 21st Century”.

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Who gains from Trump trashing the INF Treaty – Putin and Lockheed Martin!

Rebecca Johnson — Sun, 03 Feb 2019 13:04:27 +0000

As Trump suspends the 1987 INF Treaty, Putin retaliates. What can be done to prevent a new nuclear arms race from endangering Europe – and the world – again?

On 1 February the White House announced US "suspension" of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev signed in 1987. A day later Vladimir Putin announced Russia would suspend as well. Freed of the Treaty's restraints, Russia is now posed to deploy a new generation of medium-range nuclear weapons on its territory again.

Once again, Donald Trump has played into Putin's hands, to the detriment of US and European security. Unless wiser heads prevail in the next six months, the Putin-Trump team is set to destroy this successful Treaty that halted the US-Soviet arms race, pulled Europe away from the brink of nuclear war, and paved the way for the cold war to end.

Trump's excuse for suspending US compliance is Russia's apparent violation of the Treaty with tests on a new ground-launched cruise missile – designated 9M729. Moscow denies that the missile violates the prohibited range of 500-5,500 km, and counter claims that "Aegis Ashore" US missile defences in Romania could be adapted in the future to violate the treaty and threaten Russian cities. There are legitimate security concerns attached to both allegations. And both the US and Russia are worried about China's arsenal of intermediate-range missiles, which are currently exempt from the INF constraints that apply across Europe.

Instead of giving Putin what he wants by suspending the Treaty, a sensible US Government would have piled on the pressure diplomatically. If reconvening the Treaty's "Special Verification Commission" is not enough to resolve the problems – which as former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev noted in 2017 were more political than technical – there are other constructive ways to address the compliance challenges, rebuild confidence and develop a process to resolve and prevent future problems. If mobile land-based weapons return to Europe... the risks from violent extremists as well as miscalculation, mistakes and accidents would increase exponentially.

If mobile land-based weapons return to Europe, as would happen if Donald Trump, his "serial arms control killer" security adviser John Bolton, and Vladimir Putin succeed in trashing the INF Treaty, the risks from violent extremists as well as miscalculation, mistakes and accidents would increase exponentially.

Here in Britain we need to remember the Cruise Missiles based at Greenham Common and Molesworth in the 1980s. Authorised by NATO, these were driven by the US Air Force on huge "transporter-erector launchers" around the roads of Berkshire, Wiltshire, Cambridge (and beyond) at dead of night. Billed as "melting into the countryside", these nuclear convoys were in fact highly visible and vulnerable to accidents or attack. With warheads packing the equivalent of 25 Hiroshimas each, they were meant for "first use" and nuclear war fighting in the "European theatre", from the Atlantic to the Urals.

The Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, CND and Cruisewatch argued in the US and British courts that these inhumane and dangerous weapons should be banned. Equipped at most with porridge and paint, these protestors were nonviolent, seeking only to mark and expose the dangerous nuclear convoys on Britain's roads.

It is now known that when President Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavik in 1986, they were impelled by the years of public protests in Europe and information from scientists and doctors about the risks and humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons being used by intent or mistake, including "nuclear winter". They also had been told by then about the miscommunications and miscalculations that nearly turned the 1983 NATO exercise "Able Archer" into a real nuclear war. And both were militarily and fiscally overstretched, though at the time this was a much heavier burden for Gorbachev than Reagan. Is this what Trump and Putin want to go back to?

The INF Treaty was a big step forward. One of its major contributions to arms control were the on-site inspections whereby Soviet and American inspectors visited the relevant bases in each other's territory to verify that the silos were emply and the missiles eliminated. These on-site verification inspections were an important confidence-building measure, which was put to good use in several Treaties that followed.

Since then, US and Russian arsenals decreased from over 50,000 in 1986 to current levels of just over 13,000, with around 1,000 in the arsenals of the other seven nuclear-armed governments. Still far too many, of course, which is why the United Nations negotiated the multilateral Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), with the aim of drawing all the nuclear-armed and nuclear-free nations into a collective endeavour to stigmatise, ban and eliminate all nuclear weapons.

What can be done?

As usual, there are personal, political and financial reasons why leaders take decisions that heighten their countries' security and defence risks. In the slew of articles from US and European analysts following Trump's withdrawal, there are three major themes:

– US withdrawal from the INF Treaty would make Europe much more vulnerable;

– Putin and China would be the major beneficiaries of the Treaty's collapse (along with Trump's wilful destruction of other collective security and environmental agreements); and
– US military contractors like cruise and ballistic missile makers, Lockheed Martin, are licking their lips at the prospect of even bigger profits from a new arms race.

Under the INF Treaty, Russia eliminated some 1,800 missiles and the US eliminated around 800. The disparity is because INF weapons are more useful to Russia than to the United States (at least in theoretical and strategic terms). Giving carte blanche to an accelerated arms race, as Trump is doing, would therefore be more advantageous for Putin than for NATO. The INF range enables Putin to threaten or attack anywhere in Europe. From the US mainland, such missiles could nuke Canada or Mexico; or is Trump planning to deploy them in Alaska to hit Siberia and East Asia?

Trump may be hoping to foist a new generation of land-based nuclear missiles on Europe. If so, he needs to be told that this isn't going to happen. The UK and other NATO governments need to make clear that they would refuse to deploy medium range cruise or ballistic missiles in the future, or participate in providing facilities or assistance in redeploying further nuclear weapons in Europe in any form, for any reason.

There is already mounting pressure on NATO governments to remove US B61 bombs based in Germany, Turkey, Belgium, Netherlands and Italy, which Washington is trying to update. If the INF Treaty's vital prohibitions on medium range nuclear weapons in Europe are being eroded and threatened, the best security response is to multilateralise and strengthen the prohibitions on all nuclear weapons. Gorbachev has proposed a high level summit between Trump and Putin. Experts in the field argue that the INF Treaty should be expanded to include China and others with missile capabilities.

Gorbachev has proposed a high level summit between Trump and Putin. Experts in the field argue that the INF Treaty should be expanded to include China and others with missile capabilities. Recognising that the US, Russia and nuclear-armed counterparts are not yet ready to join the UN's international nuclear prohibition agreements, the UK – as a P5 Member of the Security Council – could at least propose bringing the major nuclear-armed governments together to discuss how to save and expand the INF Treaty prohibitions.

Remember US General Eugene Laroque's warning in 1982: "We fought world war one in Europe, we fought world war two in Europe, and if you dummies let us we'll fight world war three in Europe".

Time is of the essence to prevent those fears and dangers from taking root again. Unless sensible security leadership is exercised, the INF Treaty could be dead in six months, with disastrous consequences for all of us. Britain and Europe need to play a more active part in preventing the new arms race that is now poised to happen. The first step is to convene the relevant government leaders as a matter of urgency, to examine the evidence and drivers causing the US and Russia to suspend their participation in the INF Treaty, and to take appropriate steps to return them to compliance and reinforce international security and the rule of law.

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Labour and the trade unions can unite people against a no-deal and push for a radically reformed, social Europe

Michael Rafferty — Sat, 02 Feb 2019 16:14:33 +0000

The holding of the first referendum was the real boon to the far-right, and any outcome of the Article 50 process is one in which they gain ground.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the party's chief whip Nick Brown walk through Portcullis House in Westminster, London, to Prime Minister Theresa May's office. January 30, 2019. Stefan Rousseau/Press Association. All rights reserved.

Theresa May seems to be quietly benefiting from a bizarre, instinctual deference from wearied senior journalists covering Brexit, the political equivalent of an endless wait at baggage reclaim. The source of this deference possibly arises from a repetitious familiarity with all six lines of the script, or the vicarious predictability of her statements both to parliament and to the media, in all their patrician, pedestrian emptiness.

Whatever the explanation, this cap-doffing is becoming increasingly difficult to explain to inquirers on the continent, who rightly point to the untenability of May’s position and are exasperated at the gall of someone who denies that she faces undeniable checkmate within three moves. Jeremy Corbyn has astutely manoeuvred Labour into a position where he can illuminate an alternative outcome, but is both constrained by this deference and overshadowed by others more convincingly articulating unworkable silver bullets such as a second referendum. But an opportunity presents itself right now for Corbyn to set out a radical but realistic agenda to remain and reform the European Union. Offering socialist policies as solutions to Europe’s growing problems, it could unite a pragmatic coalition of Leave and Remain voices and oust a zombie Conservative administration.

The outcome of last Tuesday’s parliamentary votes will be quickly forgotten in the coming weeks, not least because they are likely to be rehearsed soon in some scantily disguised variation, but primarily because they only negligibly alter the choices the government faces. One positive outcome, however, is that the chorus for a second referendum was confronted with some cold facts from Brussels on Wednesday.

A second referendum would require an Act of Parliament, which would take months, assuming there is a government that can successfully deliver it. There must be around a dozen competing combinations of questions, responses and voting methods in contention. The small issue of actually having a campaign seems to have eluded scrutiny – are the most ardent Remainers actually confident the odds would be in their favour? The first referendum would be remembered as a paragon of transparent, evidence-based debate and considered, critical analysis beside the reductive, shouty binary of the second. Regardless of how many questions or ballot papers, the entire campaign would be a straightforward, grotesque brawl with immigration as the one and only item of debate, conducted with all the patience and finesse of a Westminster far-right protestor aggressively “just having a chat” with passing journalists and MPs. The thought of another referendum is a frightening prospect for some of the UK’s most vulnerable people – refugees and migrant workers and their families – yet from the moral uplands of Westminster it is thoughtlessly promoted as the only way out of the mess. What would happen if Leave won, again?

The presumptions around extending Article 50 also seem to go unchecked. It is hard to envisage any circumstances in which the EU would permit an extension to allow for the full second referendum process. The scope for extension is so short as to be pointless – a few mere weeks before the European Parliament elections present legal obligations in the event of continued UK membership. And if Brussels managed to fudge some kind of extension, they will surely be keen to avoid offering flexible and convenient Article 50 packages to Viktor Orbán and the Italian Five Star Movement. To what end? Europe is fed up to the back teeth repeating that the (UK-manufactured) backstop and the rest of the Withdrawal Agreement will not be reopened.

While UK commentators and parliamentarians opine on the inevitability of extending Article 50, it is not hard to see why there is opposition to it in the EU27. It is, in the end, a “hair of the dog” strategy designed only to delay pain. The second referendum argument might carry weight among Scottish and Northern Irish remainers, but it is now time to set it aside given its irrelevance to the task at hand, at a time when the indisputable priority across the broad liberal and left spectrum in the UK is to remove the no-deal billionaires’ utopia as an option.

The disappointment of Tuesday’s amendment votes in Parliament is outweighed by the opportunity for Corbyn to emerge from meetings with the Prime Minister eliciting the unavoidable conclusion that she is content to redraw red lines while the UK sails into the social emergency of a no-deal Brexit.

If parliament is still willing to indulge this histrionic spectacle, then the waves of popular support that saw him (re-)elected to the leadership of the Labour Party need to resonate in the country once more to jolt parliament into the real world, and to oust a no-deal government. General Strikes are already making a comeback in 2019, from Kerala to Paris. Corbyn, Momentum and the trade unions should get ahead of the curve and call one in mid-February if no-deal is not categorically taken off the table. Such situations might make for more winnable votes of no-confidence in Her Majesty’s Government, and produce the General Election that the Labour Party have been calling for. Were that election to elevate Corbyn to No. 10, the stark, inherited choice would be to revoke Article 50 or crash out without a deal – an impatient EU is not going to substantially reopen negotiations on May’s deal at this stage.

Think of the political capital PM Corbyn would accrue from revoking Article 50 in this Hobson’s Choice scenario. The European Union is a changed place since David Cameron embarked on his failed “reform” initiative preceding the referendum. The refugee crisis of 2015 has been compounded by a crisis of neoliberalism in 2018, instigated by resistance to Emmanuel Macron’s deepening of privatisation, austerity and labour market liberalisation. In France, at least, the gilets jaunes are winning. The EU’s top brass had thought until recently that austerity measures had weathered the 2008 financial crisis, that the rise of the far right is only a temporary wobble in an otherwise sound political economy. They have still not been disabused of this notion and meanwhile the far-right profit from the low-wage, debt economy proliferating in post-industrial urban centres across Europe for two decades. Attempts to conflate the various strands of Europe’s crises into ‘populism’ demonstrate this denial of reality quite clearly.

The result is precisely what conservative and liberal national governments in France, Germany and elsewhere are now contending with. Neoliberalism has reached its limit and is undermining the foundations of the post-Cold War political settlement. The electoral and street-politics gains of the far-right have shaken one pillar of the Union – free movement. Now the whole building is shaking.

Far from being aloof, Corbyn has identified the priority for the UK correctly – to understand why people voted Leave and address that through investment, instead of accepting the immigration rhetoric peddled by the far-right. This is not achieved by flashy tinkering with policy or a rehearsal of the losing arguments of the first Remain campaign – it needs transformative economic heavy lifting in everything from welfare to the NHS, energy to public transport. People voted Leave in 2016 as much out of having nothing to lose as for half-baked prescriptions for restoring sovereignty through restricting free movement. These are lessons with relevance to several of the EU27.

The risks? Revoking Article 50 would be seen as illegitimate and embolden and anger the far-right. Well, the same goes for every other option, including a second referendum. The holding of the first referendum was the real boon to the far-right, and any outcome of the Article 50 process is one in which they gain ground through waves of reaction on the street, goaded by the Brexiteer elite. The conversation needs to quickly move to interrupting their stride—and in this regard Labour’s putative programme of social investment is robust, fresh and timely.

What should his gambit be? Here’s one idea: a new EU Treaty for a Social Europe to replace Lisbon, not only democratising the EU’s institutions, but rolling back austerity dressed as “fiscal discipline” and the straitjacket of privatisation and outsourcing in public procurement (removing the perceived barriers to renationalisation of industries and services). And rolling out a realignment of the State’s role in the economy towards social security and environmental protection, with more power to harness industry to innovate towards social ends and to address serious threats such as climate change.

If Corbyn was rebuffed or obstructed by Brussels in his efforts to negotiate a new Treaty with other left and social-democratic EU Council allies, Article 50 would be the threat, this time not because of some Etonian playground fisticuffs spilling into national politics – rather for jumping ship before the EU disintegrates under the weight of its own inertia in failing to reform its way out of its growing problems.

European neoliberal hegemony is entering a major crisis in 2019, and the resulting opportunities for major reform need to be seized on. Corbyn could lead that charge and deliver to the UK electorate what Brexit simply cannot.

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Take One Leave One – a new way to help rough sleepers

Stefan Simanowitz — Fri, 01 Feb 2019 14:00:09 +0000

Homelessness needs political solutions. But as temperatures plummet, communities are also finding a new way to both immediately practically help, and connect with, homeless people.

Image: Take One, Leave One

At some point today, you probably walked past one of the 5,000 people who slept rough last night and temperatures across the UK plummet, the situation facing rough sleepers becomes more desperate than ever.

In October, research revealed that 449 homeless people had died over the previous year on the country’s streets. Since then, an average of three homeless people have died every week.

According to Crisis, there are currently 236,000 people across England, Scotland, and Wales who are experiencing the worst forms of homelessness: this includes people living on the streets, in cars and tents, in shelters, or in unsuitable temporary accommodation.

Their situation is a result of government policy which has led to the housing shortage, the lack of homelessness prevention schemes and a woefully inadequate benefits system.

This week, as Arctic winds bring snow and sub-zero temperatures to British shores, a new community-led initiative was launched in London to try and help rough sleepers.

On bitterly cold Tuesday morning, a clothes rail was set up outside the Holy Redeemer church on London’s bustling Exmouth Market beneath a sign that read: “If you are cold, take one. If you can help, leave one.” By the afternoon, the rail was filled with warm clothes – jackets, coats, hats, gloves, blankets and scarves – and homeless people were stopping by to take whatever they needed. “Actions like these make me feel hope” one woman tweeted alongside before and after photos of the rail.

As well as the clothes rail, a string of ‘pledge cards’ offer homeless people free food, drinks and other services. The pledge cards are either bought by locals from shops at a discounted price or donated by shopkeepers . More than a dozen businesses on the street have got involved and almost 100 meals and hot drinks were donated in the first day alone, in the form of pledges.

“This is a brilliantly simple idea and one we are excited to be a part of,” said Ellie Pamphilon who runs a barbershop on the street and has donated several haircuts and beard trims. “After their cut and blow-dry, our customers can buy a discounted pledge card to give a homeless person a haircut that they hang by the Take One Leave One Rail.”

If the pledge scheme takes off, it could give a much-needed boost to the local economy and could even be a model that could help struggling high streets across the country. There are also possibilities for the pledging principle to spill beyond the high street, with one person already offering to pledge a dinner for rough sleepers in their home and another looking into pledging rooms in local hotels.

The Take One Leave One initiative is not new. Similar clothes rails have been set up in other parts of the UK and around the world, and part of its beauty is that it can be replicated in any street. It is hoped the initiative will encourage others across the UK to be inspired and set up a clothes rail wherever they are. Those more ambitious could ask local shop keepers to get involved in a pledge scheme.

By doing so, they will not only help to ensure homeless people are warm and fed this winter, but will also help break down the barriers that too often make rough sleepers feel invisible in the communities in which they live.

Whilst Take One, Leave One may offer some respite for rough sleepers in the coming weeks, initiatives such as this can only have a small, short-term impact. What is needed is government action. In Finland, homelessness was eliminated through its "housing first" policy which offers people who need them permanent places to call home.

Last year, Crisis set out a plan to end homelessness within 10 years and called on all political parties to commit to working towards this goal. After all, ending homelessness is not a utopian dream. All that is needed the will to act.

To find out more about the project, check them out on Twitter and Facebook

To order a banner & pledge cards contact mail@adlephigraphics.com.

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The NHS Ten Year Plan neglects the human side of healthcare

David Zigmond — Fri, 01 Feb 2019 10:16:05 +0000

Markets, machines and micromanagement are turning healthcare into officious, insensitive practice that demoralises staff and patients.

Image: PIXNIO/rights free.

Early in this new year, on 7 January, the Prime Minister proudly announced a hopeful tonic for these troubled times: a Ten-Year Plan for our NHS, to transform it into a ‘world class service’. More money, better systems and state-of-the-art technology will all assure this, she said.

On the news channels doubt and dissent soon followed. Opposition spokespeople portrayed the extra funding as illusory; not even compensating for recent years of austerity, nor matching previous levels of funding nor, currently, those of comparable European nations.

Other pundits had other doubts and questions. How can even a reformed NHS deal competently with our burgeoning problems of ageing and mental health without an equivalently reformed Social Care service? And where is that? And how can the NHS possibly deliver these planned improvements when we have such massive, and growing, healthcare staff deficiencies? These questions led to many concerns and suggestions about how to train more staff and specialists, and then how to get their work better coordinated – Integrated Care was the buzzword heard several times, another panacea.

Yet some questions and challenges seemed remarkably absent. If substantial doubts were raised about the fitness of our marketised system to deliver such vaunted improvements, I did not hear them. In particular, the destructive relationship between the implementation of the Health and Social Care Act, 2012 (HCSA) and the consequent increasing loss of cooperative rapport and morale of NHS healthcare staff – and then their disintegrating career loyalty, tenacity and tenure. These were, remarkably, not mentioned by numerous tank-thinkers and pundits.

Why not? Do they not see how marketisation in healthcare fosters divisive and competitive fragmentation? And that these then erode and obstruct the kind of colleagueial trust and rapport that are essential to any viable integrated care? Have they not thought of how such human bedrocks are, necessarily, are the root-source of good staff morale, work satisfaction, health … and thus stable and adequate staffing levels?

Or do they think of marketisation, and its corralling HSCA, as a fait accompli, to be tacitly accepted as an immovable determinant?

There has been similar silence about other rapidly developing imperatives to healthcare management that further alienate, demoralise, intimidate and exhaust our NHS workforce. In particular are the varieties of micromanagement and gigantism: our proliferating devices to regulate, control and scale-up wherever possible.

In the last two decades successive governments, through their commissioned ‘experts’, have devised ever-more ways of monitoring, standardising and implementing machine-like compliance to ‘governance’. Scaling-up serves as another powerful lever.

But these devices are now, often, losing us far more than we can gain. For micromanagement easily turns healthcare into officious, insensitive practice; sapping any personal sense of agency, skill, pride, and the possibilities of more creative and nuanced judgements. Gigantism, too, disperses and destroys the human scale and personal familiarity that are necessary to spawn, nourish and contain our personal relationships and understandings.

If we destroy these things for our workforce, what are they then left with? And what kind of care can they possibly provide?

Almost all veteran GPs and psychiatrists, for example, will tell us that what largely motivated, sustained and guided their erstwhile better care has been the personal relationships and understanding they have developed with colleagues and patients. Yet they will also say that serial reforms have made such human elixirs almost extinct.

So money can’t buy you love. We cannot directly purchase or commission our human connection and resonance (though lack of money can starve these things): they must grow from more natural roots. This is something we have increasingly lost sight of.

We are seeing how the relationship between ever-tighter systems geared to ever-more technology, and the humanity it must care for, become easily misattuned, often hazardously so. For systems and technology are usually there to short-circuit or bypass the humanly complex and discrepant. Yet without great care they easily turn to human neglect: excessive or misplaced IT, for example, does not facilitate the human component of our work but distorts or displaces it. Hence as compliance-ensuring technology increases, so too does workforce personal dissatisfaction, and then exodus. This problem is now endemic across our Welfare services.

How, then, may we replant and sustain our better human sense in our large Welfare organisations?

Perhaps a different anchoring model will help: one that draws from the animate rather than the inanimate world. Rather than thinking of how machines work efficiently, we need to ask instead: what do complexly sentient and social living creatures most need?

Ecology and relationships need their own kind of understanding.

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Cuts to legal aid: a hidden factor in the UK homelessness crisis

John Gallagher — Wed, 30 Jan 2019 16:26:49 +0000

A lack of early legal advice is causing unnecessary homeslessness at huge government expense.

Figures show that homelessness has been increasing year on year since 2010. Lack of legal aid is a lesser known contributory factor. Photo credit: Pixabay/bluesbby. Some rights reserved/CC0.

Legal aid is the neglected arm of the welfare state. At Shelter, we depend on legal aid to advise and represent people facing court actions for possession of their homes or who are homeless but cannot get assistance from their local authority. But as a result of the cuts to legal aid made by The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2013 (‘LASPO’) there are now many housing problems we cannot help with. These changes have led to an increasingly crisis-driven approach to funding housing advice. As a result of LASPO, legal aid is no longer available for the preventative work that can stop a problem becoming a crisis.

An obvious example is the removal of legal aid for welfare benefits, which leaves people to fall through the net until it is too late to rescue their situation. This is despite the fact that such problems are often complex and caused by failing administrative processes, and that they are by their nature likely to affect the most vulnerable people in society. This problem occurs in its starkest form in cases where people have fallen into rent arrears because they have not received their full housing benefit or universal credit entitlement. Where the landlord takes possession action against tenants on the ground of rent arrears, we are often able to obtain an adjournment of the first hearing to buy time to investigate what has gone wrong with the client’s benefits claim. But legal aid is no longer available to fund this work – even though the fact that the tenant is not receiving their benefits entitlement is at the heart of the case. It will be of no avail if by the time of the next hearing there has been no progress in securing payment of benefit and a reduction in rent arrears.

Where people cannot resolve their benefits problems without assistance, the court will have little alternative but to evict. People may and do become homeless needlessly and unjustifiably, all for the lack of assistance in obtaining the housing benefit which is rightfully due to them. It is ironic that the Homelessness Reduction Act, which came into force in April last year, places great emphasis on the prevention and relief of homelessness. Yet, when work needs to be done to resolve a person’s benefit problems or other housing issues, there is often no one to do it because of the lack of legal aid.

Superficially, LASPO may have produced savings in the legal aid budget, but in reality, the effect has been to impose disproportionately greater costs on the justice system and on other public services. When a family are evicted who, with timely legal assistance, could have saved their home, or where people are compelled to continue living in unfit accommodation, this has the effect of imposing further costs on the courts, social services, educational authorities and the National Health Service. Quite apart from the human misery caused to families and individuals, the knock-on effects of homelessness and poor housing conditions will be felt by the state, possibly for years to come.

If advice is to have the best chance of preventing homelessness, it needs to be early enough to make a difference, and it must be holistic in addressing all the elements of a person’s situation – for example, one person’s case may involve elements of relationship breakdown, joint tenancy, housing benefit, rent arrears, homelessness and priority for social housing. Virtually any tenancy problem will ultimately lead to a breakdown of the landlord and tenant relationship and often to eviction if it is not dealt with at an early stage. There is no point in waiting until there is a threat of eviction and imminent homelessness, which is how LASPO currently works. There is a compelling need to bring early advice on housing and welfare benefit problems back within the scope of legal aid.

This article was originally published by the Bar Council as part of their Justice Papers series.

To hear the voices of those impacted by the legal aid cuts, see here: https://opendemocracy.net/openjustice/voicesforjustice.

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Stop calling ‘no-deal’ Brexiteers idiots. They know exactly what they’re doing

Adam Ramsay — Wed, 30 Jan 2019 14:30:59 +0000

This is not bungling, or delusion. It’s part of the Great British Asset striptease. And we need to know who’s bankrolling it.

Jacob Rees Mogg, chairman of the European Research Group. John Stillwell/PA Wire/PA Images

Britain has just moved dramatically closer to a no-deal exit from the European Union. If, as expected, Theresa May fails to renegotiate her deal with Brussels, Britain falls out of Europe’s institutions with no trade deal in a matter of weeks.

But what does ‘No Deal’ Brexit actually mean?

It’s usually characterised in one of two ways. For much of the media, it’s a national disaster: medicines running out and food supplies running low. ‘Hard’ Brexit is described as though its advocates are idiots. For others in the press, this is just fear-mongering. ‘No Deal’ is framed as a way to restore 'our' national sovereignty and “trade directly with the world”.

Both of these framings miss the point. Over the last two years, my colleagues and I have traced the dark money and data that drove the campaign to take Britain out of the EU. We’ve followed millions of pounds through Britain’s network of overseas territory tax havens.

As we’ve stalked the cash, we’ve found ourselves treading the very same paths that the world’s oligarchs hike when they wish to their hide money: the web of legal loopholes and constitutional quirks that have turned the UK into the world centre for money laundering.

As we’ve followed the data, we’ve found how it is tied directly to firms – like Cambridge Analytica – which specialise in tightening the grip of the mega rich on politics around the world. As Paul Hilder wrote on openDemocracy this week, the ‘black ops’ deployed by Cambridge Analytica and other secretive influence operations turn voters into “rats in the oligarchs’ maze”.

The same picture emerges from the network of dark-money funded organisations we’ve investigated. When the UK trade secretary Liam Fox founded Atlantic Bridge, funded by the billionaire hedge-fund manager Michael Hintze, proprietor of CQS Cayman Islands Ltd, he did so in order to fight against “European integrationists who would like to pull Britain away from its relationship with the United States”. At the other end of the ‘bridge’ was the American Legislative Exchange Council – a pro-privatisation, pro-gun, anti-environment US corporate lobby group.

The Institute for Economic Affairs – which refuses to reveal its funders but which has never been shy of promoting the interests of the very rich and of American corporations – has poured resources into defending a no-deal Brexit. Writing about it on the IEA website was Ryan Bourne, who holds a chair at the US-based, Koch-brother-funded Cato Institute. Cato supports abolishing minimum wage laws; opposes universal health care; has called for the privatisation of government agencies including Social Security, NASA, and the United States Postal Service; and for the abolition of child labour laws. He wrote “The Prime Minister therefore has a choice. Embrace a free-market outlook, and articulate a vision that will have consumer welfare at its centre, or back the establishment position that no Brexiteers supported and which goes against everything she said she wanted an independent Britain to achieve.”

In a sense, he’s right. What the oligarchs who drove Brexit understand is that the UK has a simple choice. Either it remains within the European-regulated space – with some protections for workers’ rights, consumers and the environment, some regulations of financial services and an elected parliament to mediate them. Or, like a colder Puerto Rico, it steps into the bullies’ playground of the American sphere, with a trade deal stitched up in back-rooms, accepting the US’s poorer standards on everything from food to medicine, as dictated by American businesses accustomed to the freedom to exploit who they please.

For the ‘hard’ Brexiteers, a long-term deal with the EU, maintaining European regulations, defeats the purpose of Brexit. As Daniel Hannan, now an MEP, has said, the goal when he founded the anti-EU European Research Group in 1993 was turn the UK into an “offshore, low tax haven”. The whole point was to sail Britain into the free-market high seas of the American sphere, extend Britain’s role as money laundry and service-provider to the MAGA-rich, and allow our public services to be flogged off on the global market – the next stage of the Great British Asset Striptease.

The empire delusions of Anglo-Britain helped people like Hannan to convince huge numbers of voters that we could all thrive in that unregulated space, that being British meant being the bully, not the bullied. But the reality is that it’s always the rich and powerful who thrive without regulation – at the expense of everyone else.

If Britain fails to secure a deal with the EU, it won’t be because of idiocy or incompetence. It will be because a powerful, elite network wants to turn Britain into even more of a low-tax, offshore haven than it already is, and make more money from it.

We can all make up our own minds about whether or not that is the future we want. But we should do so armed with all the facts. Britain has laws which are supposed to tell us who bankrolls our politics. But over the past two years, our investigations have repeatedly shown how broken this system is, and how little transparency we have. The UK is riddled with loopholes which allow political donors to remain anonymous. We have almost no oversight of how voters are targeted online. We have an elections regulator hopelessly ill-equipped to investigate and punish breaches of the law. We have spokespeople from from dark-money funded think tanks quoted as “experts” on the BBC. And we have a police force that won’t investigate suspected crimes committed by campaigners because of “political sensitives”.

In the midst of all this, investigative journalism has a vital role to play. Our stories have prompted changes in the law, criminal investigations and supported a small but growing network of reporters and researchers committed to uncovering the truth. And if Britain does sail off into the low-tax, low-oversight future that no-deal Brexiters seek, this work will become more important than ever.

Please support our work today – and if you already are, thank you, and please encourage others too as well.

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