[First printed in The Morning Star, 28/04/2012]

“It’s not a day centre,” Ray Dearman booms. “I had a bloody hard job.”

The former forklift driver is close to tears, but the small crowd of disability campaigners and trade unionists cheer him on: “Our people rely on working in Remploy factories because they’re treated with respect.”

Dearman would know. He was cut loose after twelve years when the state-owned enterprise’s Brixton factory shut up shop in 2008. He says he hasn’t been the same since.

Between rising unemployment and employers’ prejudices against his learning disability, his career in the four years since has consisted of a single three-week work experience scheme at Asda.

Meanwhile the dehumanising nature of long-term unemployment has brought on bouts of suicidal depression, he says: at one point a decorator’s firm offered him 1p a day to deliver their rubbish to the local tip.

“Since December I’ve been told to write poetry. But that’s not a job. Remploy was a job and I was proud of it.”

Ray Dearman’s job is long gone. But thousands of workers just like him face the same bleak future under Con-Dem plans to close the country’s entire network of Remploy centres over the next two years.

The first wave announced in March will see 36 of its 54 centres shut down within months, a move that would leave around 1700 workers – 88 percent of them legally disabled – on the dole during record levels of unemployment.

Tory minister for disabled people Maria Miller has insisted the cuts are about moving disabled people towards independence: the factories currently run at a loss, while money saved could be spent on employment support services.

While trade unions have dismissed the scheme as farcical – laying off people so the government can help them look for jobs – some of Britain’s bigger charities have surprisingly backed the move: Radar’s own chief executive Liz Sayce shored up support for the closures in June with a report assuring a “total consensus among disabled people’s organisations and charities that the factories were not the model for the 21st century” [PDF].

But grassroots activists like Disabled People Against The Cuts say the report’s high-minded ideals leave no room for the real-world ramifications: mass unemployment, widespread employer discrimination and swingeing cuts to both benefits and social services.

Consider Dearman, one of more than 1600 Remploy workers caught in a 2008 cull when Labour’s then-work and pensions secretary Peter Hain shut down 29 factories. Looking to assuage public anger, Hain promised that “all those disabled workers who move into new employment will have all their terms and conditions, including membership of their final salary pension scheme, protected.”

But that promise turned out depressingly easy to keep, as a survey by the GMB, Unite and Community unions found.

Canvassing the axed staff a year later, the results were predictably appalling [PDF]: of 735 respondents, just 26 percent said they had landed another job in the intervening year. Only 14 percent said Remploy had supported them to find new work, compared to 69 percent who said they had no help at all.

And even those who had found work were seemed no better off: just five percent reported better pay; 4.5 percent better leave arrangements. Just six percent said their new job came with a pension scheme, and fewer than one in ten reported a sick pay scheme — a crucial requirement for workers with disabilities.

Bear in mind these figures were reported in March 2009, when the Office for National Statistics pegged unemployment at 2.03 million – the highest it had been in over a decade. Three years on, that figure has risen again by more than a quarter to 2.65 million, according to last week’s official figures. And when workers with disabilities have barely half the average employment rate, the prospects for Remploy’s remnants are grim indeed.

Noone – shop stewards like Ray included – doubts that the current business model isn’t working, with the quango running at a loss and contracts few and far between. But where politicians see the congenital dull torpor of public funding, trade unionists blame a bloated management structure and successive governments’ failure to push it as a source of public sector procurement.

Despite the 2008 layoffs, a commons committee heard last year that Remploy still retained 1.6 managers for every 10 workers on the shopfloor – and paid them a combined £1.8m in bonuses last year alone.

And in November the union’s researchers reported nearly half Britain’s local authorities did not have contracts with Remploy factories, despite a 2004 EU directive that specifically allowed them to reserve contracts for that purpose.

Whatever the solution – purging the management, reinvention as a mutual or co-op, re-electing an actual labour movement – the sentiment on the shopfloor is clear. ‘Supporting individuals’ is simply ‘divide and conquer’ by another name.

[A piece fleshing out my previous post — first printed in The Morning Star, 17/03/2012].

When Invisible Children’s Stop Kony 2012 campaign exploded onto the internet last week, it was just a matter of hours before critiques of every colour followed suit. [You can read Invisible Children's counterpoints here.]

The Californian not-for-profit’s slick viral video recounted their efforts to convince the US government to send US forces into central Africa to depose the Lord’s Resistance Army general Joseph Kony — arguably the world’s most infamous wielder of child soldiers.

But African bloggers and journalists decried the video’s depiction of Africans as “victims lacking agency, voice, will or power”, while international relations experts warned of its overly simplistic narrative: the LRA left Northern Uganda six years ago and is reportedly on the wane; meanwhile re-igniting the conflict would necessarily mean fighting and killing the very same children the Stop Kony campaign sought to protect.

Still others cast a wary eye over Invisible Children’s own operations: A self-described “advocacy and awareness organization”, just 37 percent of its budget went to programmes in Africa compared to 43 percent spent on ‘awareness’ — projects like last week’s video. It appeared Invisible Children had never been externally audited, and for some reason had an offshore account in the Cayman Islands.

But the Morning Star can reveal a previously unknown wing of the organisation here in Britain — with ties to an international private intelligence agency.

While the spotlight up until now has fixed firmly on Invisible Children’s operations in the US and Uganda, a search of the UK companies office turns up an Invisible Children here as well: company no.06679805, first incorporated in 2008 and still active, based out of Baldon House in Oxfordshire. All but one of its directors - Robert “Bobby” Bailey, Margie Dillenberg, Ben Keesey, James McMurtry, Laren Poole Jason Russell – are current or former staff at the US organisation’s San Diego headquarters.

But the sole remaining director, one David Kelly DePauw Young, gives the same address as the company listing: Baldon House, Baldon Marsh, Oxford. That’s not so strange in itself; plenty of people work from home. But Baldon House is no cottage, or even an office complex – English Heritage lists it as a seventeenth-century grade II* manor in a part of Oxford where the average house price is more than half a million pounds.

So who is David Kelly DePauw Young? Could he be the son of David R. and Suannah “Suzy” Young, directors of private intelligence agency Oxford Analytica? A 2004 Reuters lecture given by Mr Young Sr. seems to confirm it:

“Finally, from our own home, Baldon House, here in England, carved in the marble fireplace 200 years ago is the motto of the family that lived there at the time. It reads, “Verite sans peur” — ‘Truth without fear.’”

Presumably Young the Elder would not be afraid for you to learn that he is a big name in intelligence circles: appointed to the Nixon administration’s National Security Council in 1970, he was an administrative assistant to Henry Kissinger and founder of the White House Special Investigations Unit — the original ‘plumbers’ charged with hushing up the Watergate conspiracy. Barely a year after the administration’s collapse, Young launched Oxford Analytica, the world’s first ‘overt intelligence’ agency — a mix of media monitoring and private bulletins based on academics’ regional expertise in international relations, politics and economics.

A 2004 article for Oxford’s Said Business School boasted around 35 governments as Analytica clients – “among them, all the G7, plus China and Brazil – as well as the World Bank, the EBRD, the UN, and the EU Commission.” Today Analytica claims more than 1,400 network members: “most” are from universities or research institutions; all but the regional heads are anonymous. Its client roster has grown to more than 50 governments, while private sector patrons include financial institutions, hedge funds, energy, mining and technology firms.

Meanwhile David “Davy” Young seems to have followed in his father’s footsteps: an MA in intelligence and international security from Kings College London, his online CV lists him as a consultant in Dad’s firm and as a senior consultant in Booz Allen Hamilton’s ‘Modeling, Simulation, Wargaming and Analysis’ department before joining Invisible Children in 2008 as its ‘European Director’ and ‘International Strategy Advisor’.

Why did Invisible Children – an organisation which urges supporters to “stop at nothing” in the push for Western intervention and military aid to the Ugandan army – hire a man whose family fortunes are founded on a private intelligence agency selling information on regional instability? Where did the UK organisation’s money come from, given the absence of any public profile in Britain? And what was the office even there for?

Its next return due in April may help, but in the meantime there are no answers. Davy Young could not be reached for comment, while Invisible Children’s publicists did not answer our emailed questions or return our calls. Invisible Children’s operations in the UK are at the time of writing a big black hole. A heart of darkness, if you will.

It’s a provocative headline, but I’m entirely serious when I say that at least one Invisible Children staffer has ties to a multinational private intelligence agency. Skip to the bottom if you like, but please read it.

I was pretty busy with one thing and another last week so I didn’t get a chance to chime in on Invisible Children’s incredibly sus Kony 2012 campaign. If you miraculously haven’t heard anything about it, you can start with the excellent riposte at Visible Children, then some Actual African People, then the DSG’s heirs apparent at Demand Nothing.

As you’ll see one of the things that’s now coming out is the organisation’s … unorthodox approach to budgeting, with more money going to ‘awareness programs’ than actual operations in Africa. And unusually among non-profits, they seem to have an offshore account in the Cayman Islands.

Well, I finally got around to digging locally (with a tip from a friend) and found there’s an Invisible Children in the UK too — company no. 06679805, first incorporated in 2008. Its directors are Robert Bailey, Margie Dilenberg, Ben Keesey, James McMurtry, Laren Poole, Jason Russell – all staff listed on the US non-profit’s website – and one David Kelly DePauw Young, a UK resident.

Their paperwork with the UK Charities Commission is nearly a year overdue, but here’s what appears to be their return for the year ending June 2010, courtesy of Naadir Jeewa.

It’s pretty dull reading in and of itself – the worst is some sloppy bookkeeping in the itemised travel section – but I had some questions about the £39,518.47 in donations and £10,000 in grants at the very top of the table. Because the thing is, Invisible Children clearly doesn’t do any door-to-door fundraising in the UK and its website channels all online donations through a third-party, StayClassy. Nor is there any mention of any UK operations in Invisible Children’s 990 filing for that year in the US — even the section explictly asking “At any time during the calendar year, did the organization have an interest in, or a signature or other authority over, a financial account in a foreign country (such as a bank account, securities account, or other financial account)?”

And of course there’s the question of why they have a UK office in the first place. Which is where things got really interesting.

Invisible Children in the UK is registered to Baldon House, Marsh House, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX449LS — which just happens to be the same address given by David Young, the director we mentioned earlier. That’s not so strange in itself; plenty of people work from home. But just look at the home - a seventeenth-century grade II listed manor in a part of Oxford where the average house price is more than half a million pounds.

So now the question becomes, who is David Kelly DePauw Young? Could he be the son of David R. Young, founder of private intelligence agency Oxford Analytica? Young Sr.’s 2004 Reuters lecture seems to confirm it:

“Finally, from our own home, Baldon House, here in England, carved in the marble fireplace 200 years ago is the motto of the family that lived there at the time.  It reads, “Verite sans peur” — ‘Truth without fear.’ 

So presumably Young the Elder would not be afraid for you to learn that his biggest claim to fame is as a member of the Nixon administration’s National Security Council back in 1970 — one of the original ‘plumbers’ charged with hushing up the Watergate conspiracy.

All of which makes his son’s involvement in an organisation urging military aid in central Africa even murkier than before. A heart of darkness, if you will.

Photo by freelance journalist Stacey Knott.

[First published in the Morning Star, 02/03/2012.]

And because he was of the same craft, he abode with them, and wrought: for by their occupation they were tentmakers. — Acts 18:3

“OCCUPIED 137 DAYS, CLEARED IN 137 MINUTES” blared Wednesday’s Evening Standard as cleaning crews quite literally scrubbed Occupy London Stock Exchange from existence.

The capital’s exiled activists have refused to be cowed, rallying at their sole remaining camp in nearby Finsbury Square. But the loss of St Paul’s Square is only the latest in a string of setbacks: with a grim inevitability, the movement has been ceding ground since December. The repossession of public spaces has been a key image for the movement, with more than 20 outdoor sites across Britain at its height — but four months on, Nottingham, Norwich, Kent and Finsbury Square are all that remain.

The refrain among critics and commentariat alike is that the camps have outlived their relevance — as if the centuries-old predations of capital vanished the moment Miliband and Cameron parroted identical platitudes about ‘responsibility’.

But even the campers themselves have been divided on the issue: even as the eviction was underway, defender Pedro Lima told me they had “spent enough time with the 1 percent”. The week before, regular spokesman Ronan McNern had lamented their legal battles as “a major energy drain — sometimes you just want to get back to the cause itself.”

But a look back at the battle over St Paul’s shows the conflict has, if anything, only served to highlight Occupy’s discontent with the status quo.

Even the camp’s name invites pointed observation: despite more than 2000 protesters on day one, four lines of officers in riot gear, mounted police and attack dogs prevented them from ever occupying Paternoster Square, the privately-owned land on which the London Stock Exchange sits. As with the ban on protest camps in Parliament Square, so injunctions forbid protest in Britain’s other seat of power. In today’s parlance, a public forum is simply a corporate conference venue, sanitised by spin doctors and civil servants. When confronted with a genuinely public forum, UK plc recoils in horror.

And in turn, the Cathedral’s tacit support for eviction and the calculated silence of Labour (Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell being two notable exceptions) has only reinforced many activists’ belief that the era of any meaningful liberal establishment is over.

The Church of England – its very birth an overtly political act – seemed to have rediscovered its social conscience under Archbishop Rowan Williams. But even after the Cathedral dropped legal action against the camp in November, both Williams and the Cathedral took great pains to distance themselves from the action — figuratively and physically.

“There is still a powerful sense around – fair or not – of a whole society paying for the errors and irresponsibility of bankers,” Williams conceded in one column. But it was the protesters – not Williams or the Church – who were “frustrated beyond measure at what they see as the disastrous effects of global capitalism”. The two cathedral occupations – in London and Sheffield – were relegated purely to the status of administrative matters.

Likewise the resignation of two senior clerics did nothing to prick the Cathedral’s conscience beyond reopening for business and asking a Christian investment banker to organise a panel discussion. In fact despite its earlier assurances, the Cathedral played a key role in expunging the occupation entirely: registrar Nicholas Cottam testified on the City’s behalf before the high court in December, complaining of graffiti “desecration” and a 50 percent drop in earnings from gift shop sales and corporate events. Many campers sought solace in the fact that the Cathedral grounds proper were not covered by the court order — but that hope evaporated on the night when an officer in riot gear informed Christian activist Jonathan Bartley that St Paul’s had secretly issued a trespass order against them.

Meanwhile union solidarity has largely failed to materialise – at least among the leadership – with Unite’s Len McLuskey being the only general secretary to publicly back the occupation back in October. Yet that support was rewarded in droves less than a fortnight later when 10,000 students marching to the camp halted and refused to budge until police ended a kettle of 150 striking Unite members nearby.

Those might be the two biggest object lessons, but even tabloid sniping has only illuminated the cause. The most common criticisms levelled against the camp simply reiterate old and deeply entrenched prejudices against the people they had come to represent. To quote the Daily Mail’s Tom Rawstorne, those whom Britain’s 20 percent youth unemployment rate had left with nowhere else to go were “professional protesters”; while those who still clung to jobs or study were merely filling “a part-time camp with part-time protesters”. The camps were attracting homeless people, others warned, as if this was not the explicit point of the movement’s ‘99 percent’ rhetoric. The camp was unsightly, as if people should grumble respectably behind closed doors. And the most common jibe, that the protesters didn’t have a coherent message — as if “our society’s obsession with individual wealth is literally destroying people’s lives” wasn’t self-evident from the projects, life experiences and stated views of every member of the camp.

With the eviction of the world’s longest-running Occupy camp, its stalwarts are already promising new plans afoot. But it is worth remembering that there is nothing inherently wrong with the old plan. To quote a 2009 ruling on a similar protest camp outside Aldermarston’s nuclear weapons base:

“This ‘manner and form’ may constitute the actual nature and quality of the protest; it may have acquired a symbolic force inseparable from the protesters’ message; it may be the very witness of their beliefs.”

With a name like Occupy, what else could it be?

[A ridiculously long postscript to my interview with Radio New Zealand's Kiwi Summer (listen here)]

I love radio, but every time I do a spot I always come away kicking myself because there’s a million more points or stats or clarifications overlooked without which I’m convinced I’ll sound like a blithering idiot. Luckily Charlotte and Sonia of Radio New Zealand’s Kiwi Summer have kindly offered to repost this on their Facebook page so I can completely undermine the point of a radio interview with a massive wall of text. So let’s get cracking.

Occupy & The August Riots Are Rooted In Dispossession
While Occupy and other protest groups have been frequently portrayed in media as a public menace, even the most right-wing media outlets have been wary of associating them with the ‘feral youth’ narrative that immediately sprang up in the wake of the summer’s week-long riots. Many Occupy activists I’ve spoken to have outright rejected any notion of common ground: we are Peaceful Protesters with Placards; they were just Violent Looters. Certainly there’s almost no demographic overlap — and there is an ethnic component to this which is delicate but vital — but it seems blindingly clear to me as an outsider at least that both Occupy and the riots could only have burst upon the country in the way they did because of a backdrop of political disenfranchisement and massive social deprivation.

Shared Experiences: The British Public Are Basically Broke And Parliament Doesn’t Care
That might seem obvious given 2009′s financial meltdown, but it’s really, really important to recognise that this was the case even before the crisis. Median wages didn’t change between 2003 and 2008, even as GDP skyrocketed 11 percent. So while unemployment was historically low, people weren’t necessarily getting a living wage out of it. And when the economy imploded, the resulting layoffs and pay freezes and hiring moratoriums only exacerbated an already grim situation. Inflation has more than doubled the annual average increase in wages, assuming you’ve managed to actually keep your job. We have 2.6 million people – eight percent of the labour force – looking for work and finding nothing, while youth unemployment – a canary in the coalmine for future economic conditions – has a rate of one in five. New Labour’s response was to simply try and shuttle people into low-paid work (thereby keeping them off the books), and this disregard for actual living standards has only accelerated under a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition — to the point where private contractors are drafting beneficiaries into an unpaid menial labour scheme which is literally being legally challenged as a form of slavery. So those are the material conditions we’re talking about when we look at people seizing shoes and clothes and groceries from high street chains. While I don’t want to marginalise the police shooting of Mark Duggan as a flashpoint, it only takes a moment’s critical reflection to realise the riots gripped neighbourhoods who never knew him, but knew poverty and oppression — Hackney and Croydon, but never Kensington and Mayfair (stats for the skeptics). To horribly bastardise Marx for a moment, we saw a systemically impoverished proletariat – who would be working class if there was any work going – decide to seize the means of consumption instead.

Meanwhile Occupy  concerns itself with the exact same material conditions that made these riots possible, and channels the exact same public anger — even as it embraces a radically different segment of society.

Differing Experiences: Ethnicity, Education & Activism
It’s worth noting that the rioting in Tottenham began not with the police shooting of a young black man in unexplained circumstances, but with a six-hour standoff between police and protesters outside the station several days later. ‘Race riot’ is a pretty loaded term, but ethnically diverse neighbourhoods like Tottenham have long complained of racially discriminatory policing. The London School of Economics’ own study last month found around half of those involved in the riots identified as black; meanwhile three -quarters said they had been subjected to a ‘stop and search’ order by police in the last twelve months — around eight times the rate for the general population. Meanwhile, poverty being what it is, these communities are typically characterised by high unemployment and low educational achievement. The daily struggle to survive on such meagre means and under such an intrusive police presence quickly saps any burgeoning social activism, making it exceptionally difficult for people of colour to engage in the kind of ‘legitimate’ political activism that liberal democratic standards demand — let alone the kind of confrontational theatre that Occupy thrives on.

This is not to say that Occupy protesters are simply playing at radical politics – those I’ve spoken with are deadly serious – but that as a predominantly white, relatively (and only relatively) affluent group, they can better afford to engage in highly visible protest actions without the same fear of marginalisation or outright reprisal. Nor is this to dismiss the exceptional people of colour I’ve met who have been deeply involved in the Occupy camps; the point is that they are all the more exceptional for doing so. As far as level of education is concerned, a university degree is pretty typical — but rather than a student movement, many are graduates who had agreed to major personal debt and begun their careers four years late on the advice that life without a degree would consign them to a life of flipping burgers, only to find they were now expected to flip burgers anyway. Still others – from Catholic nuns to community organising imams – appear to be part of the 2.5 million people who have simply stopped voting since 1997, the year Blair’s New Labour turned general elections into a choice between three flavours of neoliberal apologia.

I’m getting a bit polemical, so maybe I’ll stop here for now. But there’s still a bunch more to be said: about the anarchist traditions that underpin a group of people who’ve largely claimed to reject the ‘anticapitalist’ moniker, about radicalising experiences within the protest camp itself, about Occupy’s relationship to trade unions and other traditionally left allies, its rejection of party politics and the future of the movement itself. I’ll get to that soon enough. But in the meantime, thanks for listening.

[First published in The Morning Star, 17/12/2011. See my previous post on the issue in March here.]

The wheels of Justice Leveson grind slow but fine — and last week was no different as News Of The World ex-editor Colin Myler took the stand.

With nearly a decade’s worth of skullduggery to draw on, the senior judge’s inquiry into media ethics has always risked falling prone to the same sensationalism it set out to investigate: from high-profile victims’ statements to the Watergate-like machinations of Murdoch’s most trusted executives, media coverage has favoured individual scandals over the systemic intimidation of journalists that spurs them.

But with Myler in the spotlight, barrister Robert Jay plodded on with an even more vital investigation: the workaday world of today’s tabloid reporter. How, in the most literal sense, do these people live with themselves?

More than anything, the inquiry has highlighted the pressure that publishers and editors can exert on reporters to abandon their professional integrity in pursuit of some other agenda. That kind of coercion is hardly unique to journalists, but the fallout is: a dishonest or misleading story does more than just injure your pride or your relationships with sources; it can, as we’ve seen from the inquiry’s endless parade of witnesses, destroy people’s lives.

But by the same token, refusing to work on such stories can mean destroying your own career. Job security has always been an unfunny in-joke among journalists – this esteemed organ included – and has unsurprisingly worsened post-recession. Meanwhile the Tories’ red-tape crusade has given our bosses the ability to essentially fire at-will during a reporter’s first year of service (with current plans to double it), and foisted the cost of an unfair dismissal lawsuit – estimated at £2,300 – onto us, assuming we last long enough to be eligible for one. Such moves have left a reporter on deadline and on probation with almost no protections whatsoever.

Not surprisingly the National Union of Journalists has been trying unsuccessfully for years to get a mandatory ‘conscience clause’ in reporters’ contracts. Which brings us back to Colin Myler’s appearance this week and his spirited defence of the Press Complaints Commission’s Editors’ Code of Practice — the professed industry standards at the heart of the Leveson inquiry.

When quizzed on the issue, Myler insisted journalists had a right to refuse an assignment if they believed it breached the Press Complaints’ Commission’s code of conduct: staff had already been required to observe the code as part of their employment contracts, but on his arrival Myler had rewritten the clause to make it “abundantly clear”.

“If you fall foul of it, you could be dismissed,” he said.

But were Myler’s staff as clear on that right as he was? There Myler hesitated.

The company had introduced workplace satisfaction surveys and held executive seminars on the issue, he said — but “probably, then, I don’t know the honest answer to that.”

Yet if his staff weren’t clear, they were all either saints or extraordinarily lucky. For all his hardline approach, not a single person was officially disciplined for breaching the code during Myler’s entire four-year tenure — and this at the News Of The World, for Neville’s sake.

But one jaded former freelancer appearing the fortnight before told a very different – and much more familiar – story about life in Britain’s fourth estate.

Richard Peppiatt, who quit the Daily Express with an explosive open letter in March, spoke of the daily pressure he came under to spin at the Express.

“Reporters, including myself, were often unhappy about some of the stories we were pressured to write. Certain executives would often overplay the strength of a story in editorial conference to please the editor, but would then lean on the reporter tasked with writing it to make the story fit what they’d pitched.”

“This was the case with the infamous ‘Muslim-only loos’ story, where a strong news line was decided before the facts were known; i.e. that there was only one ’squat’ toilet and it wasn’t paid for with taxpayer money. When later in the day these facts did become clear, they were simply ignored.”

Most reporters, in Peppiatt’s words, “aren’t comfortable with constantly walking the conceptual tightrope between telling the truth and lying, and certainly not with breaking the law.”

Peppiatt pinned the blame partly on the Press Complaints Commission’s lacklustre efforts to enforce their own code — but also on the legislated culture of corporate bullying that let those stories get into print in the first place. Peppiatt himself was on employed on a casual contract, where the prospect of dismissal at any moment was “a powerful deterrent against sticking your head above the trench if you disagree with something that is occurring.” In either case the conclusions are the same.

“Is it any surprise that newspapers push the boundaries, hacking phones, bribing police, pursuing their own commercial and ideological aims under the cloak of journalism, with reporters used as the foot soldiers?”

No big bloated essays for now – just a notice that I’ve been talking to Ryan of the Occupied Wall Street Journal about putting together an unofficial network of correspondents at occupations worldwide. In the same way that the papers are reflecting the issues in each individual community, a bit of international coverage would offer an unfiltered view of daily life in the camps.

I’m not camping full-time, nor would I expect anyone else to, but you would need to be visiting/camping at least 1-2 days a week and get along to the main events since the point is to source these stories from protesters on the ground. If you are living there full-time, even better.

And best of all would be if you’re covering an occupation in a non-English speaking country (or where English is not the language of choice). This is an international movement and it would be a shame if our readers didn’t hear about all the important things going on in Europe and Asia and the Middle East and Central America.

Are we after the next Watergate? No (although that’d be nice), but it’s partly about reminding readers that their camp is just part of a broader picture and that there are many many more activists beyond London and New York. It could be a quirky ‘Occupiers in Quebec form lacrosse team, no away games’, or a puff piece where some prominent local speaks out on a core issue or a straight report of campaigns and conflicts with authorities.

So if you’re a reporter or consider yourself able to report events with a degree of objectivity, email me here and let me know your name, where you’re based and any disclosure about any conflicts of interest (mostly other roles in the camp).

Likewise if you’ve got a rag you’d like to sign up to the Occupied newswire, again email me and let me know so I can sign you up to the Google Docs folder, where you can steal and share copy with everyone else. If everyone tries to crank out even just one piece a week, I’m sure we’ll be swamped

UPDATE: Even as it is, I’m getting more fantastic copy than I can actually cram into the Occupied Times, so until we get our online publishing sorted I’m just going to repost some of it here. Stay tuned!

My job at the Morning Star has trucked me off to all sorts of events this year: anti-war demos, anti-cuts marches, the defence of Britain’s biggest Irish Traveller camp, a student occupation up at Glasgow University and of course a bunch of trade union conferences. But Occupy London Stock Exchange is the only one so far where they’ve actually started their own newspaper instead — and I’ve somehow found myself on the editorial team.

Issue 1 of The Occupied Times of London is out today: 2000 free print copies floating around central London and an online version here. It’s an independent weekly paper, with no control or influence from the camp’s Media Working Group (which handles press releases and all that sort of thing). The staff are all unpaid volunteers, as is the printer Aldgate Press, and contributors and content are anyone from camp residents on daily life to international commentators on the occupation movement as a whole (rumour has it Noam Chomsky is working on something for the next issue).

I’m still covering the occupation as a paid reporter for the Morning Star, but so long as the paper retains its independence I don’t see any conflict of interest. That said, I can’t count myself a member of the protest and so will probably steer clear of injecting my own opinions into it, just to be safe. After all, that’s what this blog’s for.

Check out The Occupied Times website
Follow The Occupied Times on Twitter
Like The Occupied Times on Facebook
And of course our forebears, the Occupied Wall Street Journal

[First published in the Morning Star, 22/10/11.]

“When is a lobbying scandal not a lobbying scandal?,” asked spin doctor Gill Morris in a Huffington Post blog earlier this week.

Ms Morris, whose firm Connect Public Affairs bills everyone from Age UK to health workers’ union Unison, was adamant the Werritty affair of the last fortnight simply didn’t count.

“The fact is, Werritty is not a lobbyist, nor is he like any lobbyist I know,” she wrote. “So why the usual knee jerk reaction?”

It’s certainly true that the way Adam Werritty cultivated his relationship with former defence secretary Liam Fox was fairly unorthodox: a “personal friend” who dropped in on Dr Fox at work 22 times since he took office, accompanied him overseas on 18 known occasions – several of which involved government business, during which Werritty organised private meetings with foreign politicians and senior officials – and even bandied around faux-House of Commons business cards describing himself as “Advisor (sic) to the Rt Hon Dr Liam Fox MP.”

Meanwhile Werritty, whose three companies managed a return of just £20,000 between them, maintained to maintain this jet-setter lifestyle with a whopping £147,000 in donations of indeterminate purpose. These donations came from G3, a private intelligence agency with projects in Sri Lanka – the destination of several of these trips – and several backers of BICOM, a British-Israeli lobby group whose calls for sanctions against Iran mirror Fox’s own rhetoric on the subject and whose founder Poju Zabludowicz happens to have interests in a string of developments in illegal Israeli settlements.

Of course noone will ever know what was took place in those friendly chats but Dr Fox and Werritty himself. And Cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell has apparently taken it on faith that Werritty was “neither a special adviser nor an official unpaid adviser, but a personal friend.”

But the fact remains that a small group of very, very wealthy people with a pressing interest in foreign policy gave Werritty a lot of money for a remarkably low-profile and ill-defined “charity”, with an equally remarkable lack of interest until recently in where that money went. It is simply a matter of public interest to ask the questions O’Donnell’s report didn’t: how much did they pay into Werritty’s accounts, when, and why?

But to return to Ms Morris’ spirited defence of ‘real’ lobbyists, even some of the most prestigious and influential agencies in Westminster have been found to muddy the waters on occasion.

Take for instance the case of Hume Brophy earlier this year: a PR firm which has been lobbying hard against a ban on tobacco retail displays — ostensibly on behalf of the National Federation of Retail Newsagents, but it turns out the firm also touts for British American Tobacco.

Hume Brophy’s spin doctors strangely forgot to mention this when they wrote to MPs warning of the ban’s ”devastating effect on the small business sector”, nor did they mention that British American Tobacco was actually bankrolling the Newsagents’ campaign.

By the time the news came out, the government had already redrafted the legislation to grant newsagents an 18-month exemption — Parliament had unknowingly tweaked legislation in the tobacco industry’s favour as a direct result of covert lobbying.

It’s also worth noting that this scandal has apparently not prompted Hume Brophy to join the UK Public Affairs Council’s voluntary register, launched at the beginning of this year to stop exactly this sort of thing from happening. The Council continues to claim however that the register “promotes and upholds effective self regulation.”

Or consider the words of Bell Pottinger Public Affairs chairman Peter Bingle. Bell Pottinger is the largest lobbying consultancy in the country — and to their credit they have joined UKPAC’s register, listing weapons developers BAE Systems, Imperial Tobacco and the Sri Lankan government as clients. But back in 2009 when a Commons select committee investigated calls (even then) for a statutory register, Bingle told the MPs point-blank that the public had “no right to know” who their clients were.

“What we are saying is that there are instances when sometimes a company has a global policy for their suppliers not to make public that they work for that company. We respect that.”

Perversely, Bingle argued that forcing all professional lobbyists to sign a statutory register “would find law firms developing public affairs practices because they would not have to disclose their clients.” For the record Bingle currently maintains, like Morris, the Werritty affair had “absolutely nothing to do with lobbying.” [Postscript: Bingle's blog, The Dispatch Box, mysteriously switched its access settings to invite-only within three days of this piece being published.]

So what of this statutory register — hopefully expanded in light of Werritty’s weirdness to include pretty much anyone who isn’t a civil servant?

The government is not exactly making great headway at the moment: even their existing commitment to publish quarterly reports of ministers’ external meetings is running seven months behind schedule.

Meanwhile the register itself was supposed to be introduced next month, and the aforementioned Cabinet Office records note just a single meeting last July between Parliamentary secretary Mark Harper and the Public Affairs Council.

Asking whether Werritty’s exploits count as a lobbying scandal misses the point: the scandal is the state of lobbying itself.