Off the Page - Current Affairs Books, Comment & Debate

A Tough Start for Brown

2007-08-31T15:07:21+01:00

Gordon Brown waited so long to finally take over from Tony Blair, but I bet he wishes he'd left it another couple of months. Since his inauguration, he has had to deal with, as the Guardian puts it, the three Fs - floods, foot & mouth and fundamentalism.

Within his first week Brown had a series of terror alerts to deal with, followed by the worst flooding this country's seen for 150 years and then an outbreak of a potentially costly disease. He has had to learn a very swift lesson in crisis management.

So how well has he dealt with these unfortunate situations?

Click here for the Guardian's analysis and leave your thoughts below.

Or why not try reading The Future of Socialism by Anthony Crosland and Gordon Brown - according to The Times "it provides the classic formula for relating the ideals of social democracy to the realities of the modern world"

Shouldn't Good Food Come Before Cheap Motoring? By Graham Harvey

2007-08-16T11:56:59+01:00

Graham Harvey won the BP Natural World Book Prize for The Killing of the Countryside in 1997. In his next book We Want Real Food he tells how modern food production has brought us to the brink of disaster, and sets out how we can fight for food that will stop us being overfed and undernourished. His new book is out in January, watch this space for more information. You can watch an interview with him here. In this exclusive article he writes about the link between the decline in quality of farm produce and the drive for cheaper road transport...

If you eat meat or dairy products, the healthiest foods come from animals grazing fresh green grass. Human beings have been producing some of their finest foods this way for more than 5,000 years.

Strange, then, that policy-makers of both the European Union and the United States seem hell-bent on destroying this form of traditional, healthy food production. Even more extraordinary, they want to sacrifice it for the benefit of the motoring lobby and the clamour for cheap road transport.

Where I live on Exmoor, farmers used to produce some of the finest beef in the world. It came from a local breed, the chestnut red Devon, known locally as the “Red Ruby”.

The production system was simplicity itself. The animals were merely turned out on the wild moorland grazings for three years or so, and that was it. Provided the butcher knew his job the joint that appeared on the Sunday lunch table was succulent, tender and full of flavour – truly the roast beef of old England.

The steaks most of us buy at the local pub – or as economy packs at the neighbourhood supermarket – are from animals that seldom see herb-rich pastures. They spend too much of their lives in yards or sheds where their natural, leafy forage rations are supplemented with cereal grains and soya.

These foods are not healthy for cattle. Cattle and sheep are ruminants adapted to eating and digesting low-energy fibrous foods, particularly grass. Too many starchy foods such as cereals make them unhealthy and prone to disease. Yet many of today’s intensively-managed beef animals are forced to chew their way through more than two tonnes each during their short lifetimes.

New research confirms that traditional pasture-fed beef contains more health-giving vitamin E, omega-3s and a substance called conjugated linoleic acid, CLA, a powerful cancer fighter. If the pasture happens to be full of herbs and wild flowers – as on the traditional moorland grazings of Exmoor – these disease-busting nutrients are even more plentiful.

By contrast the inclusion of even modest amounts of grain in the animal’s diet produces meat severely depleted in these essential nutrients. Instead it contains more saturated fats, the kind that are likely to give you heart attacks.

So why do today’s farmers go to the trouble of feeding cereal grains when they could produce a far better product by simply keeping their cattle out on natural, species-rich grassland? As always the answer’s a mixture of political incompetence and corporate greed.

Under the criminally-idiotic common agricultural policy a generation of farmers have been paid inflated prices to grow wheat and other cereals. With such an inducement most farmers have long abandoned the traditional “mixed farm” which maintained a sensible and sustainable balance of livestock and cash crops. Instead they mobilise an arsenal of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to produce grain crops the country doesn’t need.

It’s this chronic surplus of subsidised industrial grain that has destroyed good, healthy British beef. Almost half Britain’s inflated cereal harvest now goes into animal feed. The mountain of second-rate beef it produces has undermined the market for the traditional, grass-fed product. In effect cereal subsidies have robbed us all of healthy, pasture-fed beef just as it has robbed us of real milk, real poultry and a host of other good, natural foods.

The farming lobby would have us believe that the damaging subsidies are on the way out. They’re being slowly replaced by environmental payments which should have encouraged cereal growers to switch back to pasture farming. Sadly the motoring lobby seems to have hijacked this healthy development. Subsidies for biofuel production have replaced the former farm subsidies and given chemical grain growing a new lease of life.

In the US corn prices have shot up by 60 per cent as supplies are channelled into ethanol production, part of the government’s drive to reduce the country’s oil dependence. In Britain a twenty-fold increase in biofuel production is planned. The National Farmers’ Union – spying a life-line for its commodity-growing members – is urging the Government to pour fresh subsidies into the new technology.

If the lobbying is successful the animals will stay in their sheds and consumers will continue to be fobbed off with second-rate foods. Without the subsidies on grain growing, much of the land would have gone back to healthy grassland. But under the new energy subsidies it’ll continue in chemical commodity production. Instead of being sent to “animal factories” the crops will simply be diverted to bio-fuel factories. And over-worked crop land that should have gone back to pasture will continue getting its deluge of farm chemicals.

Alongside our house on Exmoor we have a few acres of steep, gorsy grassland that has never – to my knowledge – received chemical fertilizers or sprays. As well as a dozen or more different grass species the pasture contains plants like salad burnet, rough hawkbit, meadow vetchling and bird’s foot trefoil. Our small flock of Exmoor Horn ewes seem to do well on it, and their lambs have grown at a tremendous rate.

Scientists at the North Wyke research station near Okehampton, Devon, confirm that, like beef, lamb produced on these moorland grazings has more of the vitamins and healthy fatty acids that protect against heart disease and cancer. Yet these healthy foods are no longer available as they were to our parents and grandparents.

Getting them back will take a concerted effort from all of us. For the sake of the next generation we need to reverse the damaging industrialisation of the countryside. The job of Britain’s farmers is to provide healthy, nutrient-rich foods for the people of these islands, not to produce cheap feedstocks for the global energy markets. Shouldn’t good food come before cheap motoring?

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Featured Topic - A British Summer

2007-08-08T12:09:20+01:00

With so much going on in Britain this summer, from the devastating floods to the Foot & Mouth outbreak, over the next few weeks Off the Page will focus on a variety of these key home issues.

Expect an exclusive article on the decline in standards of farm produce written by food expert Graham Harvey, author of We Want Real Food.

We will also have another exclusive article by Andrew Alderson, author of Bankrolling Basra, on the UK government's decision to force the Iraqi interpreters that helped the British military to apply for asylum as anybody else would.

As soon as any news breaks, we will track down a suitable expert on the topic and provide you with exclusive content, updated regularly. You won't find this content anywhere else. We will also continue to follow our past Featured Topics, look at the category cloud in the sidebar for a list.

Foot & Mouth Disease - a profile

2007-08-08T11:54:43+01:00

Foot & Mouth Disease (FMD) is a virus which affects animals with cloven hooves such as cattle, pigs, sheep, goats and deer. Contrary to popular belief, the virus is not a risk to the health of humans either through contact with an infected animal or consumption of meat or milk from it. The last human case recorded was in 1966 and needed no medical attention. It could, however, have serious impact on the economics of animal farming.

There are many ways the disease can spread from animal to animal: direct contact; contact with shared foodstuffs; airborne spreading; and the movement of objects & humans is also thought to contribute.

Whilst not fatal for adult animals, it causes a drastic drop in productivity meaning milk yields would be badly affected. The animal may also become lame, jeapordising its ability to produce quality meat and even reproduce.

When a case is confirmed in the UK, a perimeter zone is set up and all infected or susceptible animals in the area are slaughtered.

This time round there are suspicions as to how the virus was transferred to the affected farm in Surrey.

For further information on the current outbreak, click here.
To see what Prime Minister Gordon Brown has to say on the matter, click here.

Check back later on in the week for an exclusive article written by food expert Graham Harvey on the impact of the outbreak.

The Blair Years - reaction

2007-08-02T11:25:47+01:00

A few weeks have passed since the release of the much-hyped diary of Tony Blair's master of spin, Alastair Campbell. Wherther you've read the whole book, just the highlights or not at all, it may prove interesting to take a look at how the book has been received.

Frank Dobson of the Camden New Journal believes that "Alastair Campbell’s doctoring helped win peace in Northern Ireland but too often...it distracted from good government." He goes on to argue that this ability to distract perhaps ended up serving Blair well, "that way, he served as a lightning conductor or human shield to protect his boss. It wasn’t part of his original job description, but that’s how he ended up."

To read the full review, click here

Steve Richards of The Independent starts by calling the book "'Friends' meets '24' at No 10" and ends up saying that by the time he put this "highly readable book" down he was left with the thought that "it is a miracle that this emotionally overwrought group won one election, let alone three."

To read the full review, click here

The general consensus seems to be that The Blair Years provides the reader with compelling entertainment for most of its lengthy duration, although it is clearly censored at key points. The most commont emotion the book seems to have caused is surprise - I don't think anyone was expecting it to be an enthralling, well-written emotional rollercoaster.

Alternative reading:

The Blair Years - the inside story of his rise to power

2007-07-10T15:18:21+01:00

Sorry for the recent lack of posts, I have been unwell. Off the Page will now be updated much more regularly.

For the past decade, Alastair Campbell has been as close to Tony Blair as anyone. Campbell was a key figure in Westminister and, by the end of his eight-year relationship with Blair, the most powerful spin-doctor this country has ever seen.

Now Britain has entered a so-called 'new-era' under Gordon Brown and this has been chosen as the time to release The Blair Years - Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries. This hefty tome was plonked on my desk this morning and I was asked to feature it. Thankfully, I wasn't asked to read it cover to cover. At nearly 800 pages, I suspect many of those brave souls that have purchased it will flick through it focusing on what interests them, as I have.

The Independent has condensed some of the highlights to give you a taster of what to expect - a candid, revealing account of one of the most important periods in our country's political history.

If that isn't enough, the BBC is promoting the book heavily with a three-part series on BBC2 starting tomorrow (Wednesday July 11) at 8pm and continuing on Thursday and Friday.

To watch Campbell get attacked on Newsnight by the then leader of the opposition Michael Howard, during which Campbell is accused of "bullying and lying his way across our political life", click here.

As the book is digested by the blogosphere, we are sure to see an unprescedented level of opinion from all corners. Prepare yourselves.

Blair, Brown and Britain's Energy Consumption

2007-06-06T12:29:35+01:00

Paul Middleton, author of A Brief Guide to the End of Oil, has written this piece for us about how Britain's attitude towards energy consumption has changed under Blair's governance; and what the future holds for Britain under Brown.

So Mr. Blair is off, a man determined to watch the sun go down on his decade in power with a cheesy grin and a firmly held belief that Britain, and indeed the rest of the world, is better off than when he started. And while it is true that we have – and here the royal we refers only to Brits – enjoyed a sustained period of economic growth does it follow that Mr. Blair’s legacy will be un-ending economic joy? Of course not. Legacy is not so much about the past but the future; it is something that is handed down to the next generation. But what is it that we’re getting?

Well, when it comes to energy what we’re getting is oil, gas and coal dependence. That’s not say that there hasn’t been a good deal of rhetoric about ‘green alternatives’ and the need to diversify out of hydrocarbons; there’s been lots of that. But the truth is that our consumption of oil is growing and not diminishing. We’re flying more, driving more and generally living out the dream of a high energy consumption lifestyle.

But how much of that is Mr. Blair’s fault? Well not a great deal if I’m honest. Mr. Blair and the Labour party inherited our highly developed and very expensive energy and transport infrastructure and changing it, even with the best will in the world, takes at least four times longer than Mr. Blair’s been in power. And legislating against things that people believe is their God-given-right (owning a car, flying all over the world, and the like) is hardly a vote winner.

Neither of course is being best mates with a Texas oil man who happens to be in charge of the most powerful country in the world, particularly when he decides its time to ‘secure’ the second largest oil reserves in world by invading a sovereign state.

Having said all that Mr. Blair has had some success, the climate change bill will, for example, make the UK government's long-term goal of a 60% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 a legally binding target. And the "Carbon Committee", set-up to ensure the target is met, sounds like a jolly good idea.

Compared to the in-coming Mr. Brown, Blair looks positively pro-oil. He was the champion of the 10% supplementary tax imposed on UK oil producers in 2002, stating when criticized by the industry that, “the fact of the matter is that over the last two years, the oil price has moved from an average of $25 to $55. That has meant that the oil producers have had a huge increase in the profits that are available to them," Nice one.

Mr. Brown has also stated that he wants to bring the environmental challenge – and that means the oil and energy challenge - to the centre of policy. Britain has just called for the first global emissions trading scheme to cut carbon emissions at the UN in New York and has proposed a new $20bn (£11bn) facility for diversifying the supply of energy to developing countries funded by the World Bank. Mr. Brown clearly supports higher energy prices too and the idea that this will encourage the development of new cleaner sources of energy and conservation of existing resources. Quite a change from Mr. Blair, and that, to me, sounds like a legacy worth having.

Off the Page - News and Events

2007-05-25T15:08:36+01:00

Here is a digest of a couple of news items this week that relate to Off the Page's featured topics. They include the resurgence of nuclear power on our agenda; global warming and the first few steps towards a greener Britain; and the health of the nation.

Also included are highlights of the Institute of Contemporary Arts season, which features several of the issues we here at Off the Page have also been discussing.

Nuclear Power

Tony Blair has worked very hard to ensure that when he finally leaves his post, the country will not have forgotten his stance on nuclear power: ‘the issue is back on the agenda with a vengeance’, he said. Critics, however, have described Britain’s nuclear energy plans as a ‘dangerous, dirty white elephant’.

For the BBC Action Network's definitive guide to nuclear power, click here.

Over the next few weeks we will have for you a number of experts giving their opinions on this issue, including Paul Middleton, author of the upcoming A Brief Guide to the End of Oil.

Global Warming

Despite failing to flex his parliamentary muscle sufficiently in order to influence George Bush’s stance on global warming, this week our government took a significant step forward in laying the foundations for all our homes to be kinder to the environment.

For The Independent's summary of these new government proposals, click here.

Over the next few weeks we will have yet more experts on yet another issue. This time, Stephen Law and Jessica Wilson, co-authors of A Brief Guide to Global Warming, will give their opinion on how Blair’s government has dealt with this issue.

Events

This and next month, the ICA has plenty of events on the issues Off the Page has been featuring recently and will be featuring in the future. Central to this is a memorial to the Iraq war, featuring talks, tours and performances. Of particular interest is a discussion of Fallujah - a panel of activists and journalists with first-hand experience look back with a critical eye on the 2004 siege of Fallujah. This is especially interesting for those of you that have read/seen Fallujah by Jonathan Holmes, a play based on these experiences.

Another interesting topic is the ethics of our food. Ethicist Peter Singer is giving a talk arguing that how and what we eat is a central issue of our times, and that we must stop factory farming now. Coming soon on Off the Page we have Graham Harvey, author of We Want Real Food, who is going to write a piece for us on what Tony Blair has done for the state of the nation’s dietary health.

For details on these and the rest of the ICA’s upcoming events, click here

Being Fair to Tony Blair by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, authors of Fantasy Island

2007-05-22T12:03:43+01:00

Having written Fantasy Island, Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson have one more thing to add...

Books have beginnings and endings, in terms of their production as much as of the narrative they contain. Our book, Fantasy Island is gone now, printed, packed into crates, despatched here and there, unalterable.

For most people, that will sound a statement of the blindingly obvious. But for both of us, who started our national journalistic careers on a wire service, it goes against the grain. There is no chance now to put right anything that is wrong. The process has the finality of the little red Royal Mail van disappearing down the lane on the last posting day before Christmas - if it isn't in there now, it is too late.

So, as the air is thick with commentary on Mr Blair's 'legacy', is there anything we would have put it or taken out?

Probably not, although perhaps we could have made just one final point more in favour of the outgoing Prime Minister.

That may sound odd, on the face of it. After all, the first full chapter of Fantasy Island is devoted to making the 'maximum' case for the Tony Blair years, in terms of economic stability, public investment, principled military action abroad and a general feel-good factor.

Furthermore, our starting point has always been that the Blair years will seem for quite some time to have been a whole lot rosier through the eyes of ordinary people than one may imagine from listening to grand personages in politics and the media.

But in this instance, we mean something quite different. It is to the so-called 'wasted opportunities' of which he stands accused that we refer, all those times he allegedly ought to have used his huge Parliamentary majorities to move decisively in one direction or the other: joining the Euro, 'reforming' the welfare state, introducing proportional representation for national elections, building a new generation of nuclear power stations, re-introducing the 11-plus...and so on.

But might there not have been something rather admirable about all this opportunity-wasting? After all, none of the aforementioned propositions was anything like universally popular. It was perhaps Mr Blair's genius to manage to keep these issues alive (as far as policy wonks, MPs, journalists and senior bureaucrats were concerned) while never allowing any of them to reach the point of decision.

Imagine the first 20 minutes or so of a classy Inspector Morse-type police drama, with all the scene setting, all the clues and all the red herrings: the shifty looking man on the edge of the crowd; the red car parked outside the country pub one minute and gone the next; the telephone call from a remote phone box; the angry voices from behind an office door.

Then imagine that, as the programme draws on, it becomes ever-clearer that they were all red herrings. There has been no crime. Nor is there going to be.

That kind of programme would go down rather badly, one suspects.

By contrast, Mr Blair has been, overall, remarkably popular. You could argue that only when his foreign affairs and military ambitions caused him actually to do something did he find himself in terrible trouble.

By Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, authors of Fantasy Island, ISBN 978-1845296056

Tony Blair - Legacy and Lies by David Craig

2007-05-21T11:38:48+01:00

David Craig, author of Plundering the Public Sector, has written this article about what he thinks of the country Tony Blair is on the brink of leaving behind. Do you agree with him? Or is there another way of looking at it? Have a read, leave your comments below and David Craig will get back to you.

SO, Blair is finally off and millions of words will be written by hordes of pundits, self-styled insiders and the man himself about his legacy.

On the plus side, of course, we finally have something looking like peace in Northern Ireland – an achievement that should be recognised. However Blair’s ambition to be seen as an international statesman was wrecked by the Iraq debacle and his European strategy hit the rocks when he was comprehensively outmanoeuvred by Chirac – the French keep their agricultural subsidies, we start losing our rebate. So, apart from Ireland, that just leaves the so-called ‘transformation’ of public services as Blair’s potential legacy.

So do we have schools, prisons and hospitals that are the envy of the world?

The answer is not hard to find...

Blair has given over £70 billion of our money to management and IT systems consultants to develop and implement New Labour’s public sector reforms. These consultants run the two key Downing Street policy bodies – the Strategy Unit headed by David Bennett from McKinsey and the Delivery Unit run by Ian Watmore from Accenture. And in department after department, Blair’s favourite consultants have been busy implementing complex reorganisations and developing massive computer systems.

We have seen administrative chaos and billions wasted on failing reorganisations and worthless computer systems at the Home Office, Child Support Agency, Passport Office, Inland Revenue, Customs and Excise, Ministry of Defence, Education and throughout local government.

But it is, of course in the NHS that Blair’s consultants are causing the greatest devastation.

Under the Blair/Hewitt ‘reforms’, around 13,000 NHS employees have lost their jobs while the number of managers and senior managers has doubled from 20,000 to 40,000. The new NHS computer system was scheduled to cost about £2.3bn and take three years – we are now told it will cost £12bn, take at least 10 years and may never work at all. Meanwhile according to the NHS’s own estimates, around 34,000 people die unnecessarily in NHS hospitals each year and another 25,000 are unnecessarily permanently disabled. Compare this to Iraq where 35,000 people died in violence in 2006 and we call that a ‘civil war’.

As £70bn of our money disappears into the offshore bank accounts of Blair’s fair-weather friends from the consultancy industry, one could almost feel sorry for the man as he realises how easily and comprehensively he has been fleeced out of our money. But rather than admitting any mistakes, Blair’s natural reaction has been to twist, spin and lie to cover his own Government’s managerial incompetence. All governments lie, but none have lied as flagrantly and as consistently as Blair’s New Labour. This is Blair’s real legacy – complete contempt for the truth in the belief that with sufficient PR you can fool all of the people all of the time.

By David Craig, author of Plundering the Public Sector, ISBN 978-1845293741

Featured Topic - The Legacy of Tony Blair, the future of Britain & much more

2007-05-18T11:01:00+01:00

Over the next few weeks, Off the Page is going to focus on Tony Blair and his legacy, and the role Gordon Brown has played in it. We have gathered several expert writers from different backgrounds, each of whom is going to contribute ideas and commentary to the subject.

First up are Larry Elliott & Dan Atkinson whose book Fantasy Island and the related article posted below try to draw attention to mistakes they believe Blair has made beyond the Iraq issue, and how Gordon Brown has played a big part in all this. Will Britain under Brown therefore be any different?

We also have David Craig, author of Plundering the Public Sector, a book about how in attempting to modernize public services, New Labour are wasting billions of taxpayers' money on consultants and 'experts'.

The Blair Legacy - more than Iraq?

2007-05-18T10:31:48+01:00

The hot topic of the moment is Tony Blair's legacy. What will he be remembered for? What would he like to be remembered for? Everyone's talking about Iraq - will it be the soon-to-be-former Prime Minister's defining moment? Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson argue in their book Fantasy Island that Tony Blair should not be remebmered solely for mistakes made over Iraq. Instead light should be brought to the countless other mistakes he has made, leaving behind him a seedy dreamworld mired in debt, drifting into a crisis of unemployment with a diplomatic and military role it cannot afford.

Here is an article written by Fantasy Island authors Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson:

HE was the Prime Minister with the Scottish surname and the posh English voice, a man with a touch of the actor and a reputation for slipperiness who presided over a consumer boom, committed Britain to buying American missiles and hankered after deeper British integration in Europe.

For his critics, he was someone whose reputation for creating a balmy economic climate came at a price to be paid in the years to come.

But enough of Harold Macmillan. What of Tony Blair’s legacy?

Funnily enough, the era of ‘Supermac’ may provide intriguing parallels with the Blair years beyond those mentioned above. In both cases, it was the pundits and the grand personages of politics who tutted about the corrosive effects of consumer debt (hire purchase then, credit cards now), of workplace rigidities (trade union restrictive practices then, employment rights now), of gambling (Premium Bonds then, super-casinos now) and cosying up to the US president (John Kennedy then, George Bush now).

By contrast, in both cases, it could be argued, ordinary working people have experienced a golden age. Like Mr Macmillan, Mr Blair came to power in the second half of a decade in which affluence took the place of austerity and rationing (early 1950s) and of unemployment and house repossessions (early 1990s).

The public is rather less impressed by high-minded criticisms of Britain’s low moral tone.

But Mr Blair is unlikely to be satisfied with a domestic legacy dominated by surging house prices, a consumer boom and some modest redistribution from rich to poor. Furthermore, from the Scottish perspective, it would appear unlikely that he would wish to be remembered primarily for the Scottish Parliament, given his ability to keep his enthusiasm for that institution firmly under control.

Unfortunately, to venture beyond this, as Mr Blair and his apologists are wont to do, is to leave the real world for one of fantasy. On this strange planet, ever-increasing levels of personal indebtedness are nothing to worry about, prices can fall while earnings rise, wars can be fought on a peacetime budget, a ‘knowledge economy’ can emerge from an education system marked by low standards and workers can be urged to be more ‘flexible’ while paid employment becomes ever more legally protected and regulated. And that is without mentioning the costly bureaucratic restructurings that have passed for ‘reform’ in the public sector, or the illusion that environmental protection is entirely compatible with limitless economic growth. Scotland, of course, has experienced a subsidiary, tailor-made Tony Blair fantasy of its own, in which the devolved parliament was simultaneously an essential constitutional reform and a development of no real importance.

But then, that was the essence of the ‘third way’ that its critics rarely grasped. It was not a question of splitting the difference, but of pretending there was no difference to split.

Of all Mr Blair’s illusions, this was the greatest.

By Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, authors of Fantasy Island, ISBN 978-1845296056