[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.

[First published in The Morning Star, 29/07/11. Image by nrkbeta under a CC licence.]

[I want to preface this piece by pointing out that Breivik's killings, just like September 11 and 7/7, were politically motivated. If anything, the political aims were even more obvious. Far from cheapening their suffering or fuelling Breivik's narcissism or scoring political points from a national tragedy, an analysis of the political landscape which fuelled him is the only way to ensure his victims - of whom many were Norway's next generation of left-wing leaders - did not die in vain.]

A right-wing extremist publishes a manifesto promising armed resistance against Muslims, ethnic minorities and “cultural marxists”, blows up the offices of a centre-left government, then guns down literally dozens of young party activists, as young as 14, at a nearby summer camp.

Perhaps the only good – if it can be called that – to come out of such a horrific crime is the way Anders Behring Breivik’s murderous campaign drew out the very media narrative which fuelled him, only to stop it dead with an object lesson in media bias.

Within the hour papers around the world had attributed the attacks to the possibly fictional Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami: a claim founded solely on a series of tweets by professional talking head Will McCants, attributed in turn to a user on an internet forum only he could access.

Regardless of its doubtful provenance, the claim fitted the accepted narrative of Muslim terrorists against the West — so much so that the BBC’s Jorn Madslien seemed unable to conceive of terrorism without Muslims involved: “If the bomb blast in Oslo turns out to be a terror attack,” he began his report, “it will mark a 9/11 moment for Norway.”

By the time Breivik’s name emerged the Sun already had its Saturday edition sorted: its headline, ‘AL-QAEDA’ MASSACRE; its lead story, warning of a “homegrown al-Qaeda convert” and an editorial solemnly declaring Norway’s clear lesson: “the tentacles of al-Qaeda, and groups linked to it, spread deep into the heart of Western nations.”

But the Sun quickly and silently rewrote their editorial overnight once Norwegian police confirmed the killer’s identity as a 32-year-old white Christian right-wing nationalist: now acts of terror were “an easy resort for any loner who believes their own personal grievance against the state is justification for indiscriminate violence.”

It’s easy to single out the Sun’s as the most egregious example of right-wing revisionism, but it’s far from the only one. Even the original narrative – that Islamic extremists are the usual suspects – is utterly false: EuroPol statistics suggest they account for less than one percent of terrorist plots in the region. Less than one percent. That means it was statistically more likely to be a Stalinist purge. [Update: Europol's figures for 2011 only show a startling increase in Islamic terror plots... to 1.2 percent.]

But the new narrative that has sprung up to replace it is equally conflicting and self-serving, fed mostly by those whose own warmongering  rhetoric found its way into Breivik’s 1500-page handbook for continental fascism.

Consider Canadian demagogue Mark Steyn, who penned a 2005 Telegraph column predicting “Eurabian civil war” by 2010. Mark Steyn, whose 2006 book America Alone hinged on a “Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia”. The same Steyn, who made it into Breivik’s own manifesto with his claims of “the first welfare-funded jihad in history”, solemnly declared in this week’s National Review that “any of us who write are obliged to weigh our words, and accept the consequences of them.” But in the very next breath, Mr Steyn insisted he had nothing to answer for.

“When a Norwegian man is citing Locke and Burke as a prelude to gunning down dozens of Norwegian teenagers, he is lost in his own psychoses. If Norway responds to this as the Left appears to wish, by shriveling even further the bounds of public discourse, freedom will have a tougher time.”

Melanie Phillips went even further — she whose Daily Mail column detailing a Labour conspiracy “to destroy for ever what it means to be culturally British” was deemed so worthy of Breivik’s cause, he reprinted it in full in his manifesto. Phillips, who the very day before the attacks updated her blog with “Is Londonistan Turning Into Lemmingland?“(subheading: ‘Is Britain finally about to go over the cliff into official Islamisation?’)

Yet for Phillips, any suggestion that Breivik’s actions were spurred by her or others’ writing was “frankly itself an opinion in need of treatment”.

The man was either psychotic or a psychopath, she offered by way of explanation: “What he himself says about his own opinions or state of mind therefore does not bear examination.”

Of course Breivik is a psychopath — terrorism is psychopathic by definition. But it’s a feeble evasion of the fact that Phillips and her ilk, in op-eds and blogs across the Western world, were the ones who conjured up those phantoms for him.

The right’s dangerous new narrative tries to have it both ways: Breivik was a crazed man operating in a cultural vacuum — unlike Islamic extremists, who feed off a network of incendiary rhetoric and veiled threats by public figures which must be countered. Yet at the same time Breivik’s calculated acts are a warning, an appeal to hear Phillips’ “decent people who are boiling with rage at being disenfranchised by an entire political class which seems determined to destroy their civilisation.”

“Some of them are so angry they may join political groupings which resort on occasion to thuggery and hooliganism (the BNP, EDL or the anti-globalisation riots all come to mind).

“But violent as some of their behaviour may be, they would not travel to a youth camp, invite the teenagers to gather round and then open fire on them all with dum-dum bullets.”

Except when they do. But then they’re not ours, it seems.

[First published in the Morning Star, 01/07/2011]

It’s 8am on a Thursday morning in Manchester’s university quarter, smack in the middle of the summer break. But the streets are far from empty.

Teachers and lecturers stand clumped together on picket lines outside their classrooms, while across the canal librarians, parking wardens, civil servants and others are doing much the same. Manchester it seems is closed for business.

It’s only a slight exaggeration: with literally a third of Manchester’s workforce in the public sector, it’s hardly surprising that the government’s plans to raid public sector pensions has raised a bit of a ruckus. And with clear blue skies, a beaming June sun and the warm glow of camaraderie, it’s obvious people are glad to be out and about. But they haven’t forgotten why they’re here.

*****

I meet Neil Wilson on the steps of Manchester Metropolitan University’s John Dalton Building.

Neil is a tutor in computer-aided design at Manchester College a few blocks away, but says he thought he’d pop over to see how his friends at MMU are going.

He tells me he began teaching just three years ago, after his job at a company designing electronic whiteboards was outsourced to India.

“I thought that would be more stable,” he tells me with a rueful grin.

“You hit your forties, you feel scared. You could freelance but there’s no guarantee: you get sick, you take time off, you’ve got no money. You starve.

“[So] you come along and start working in education because you think it’s got decent pay and benefits.

“And then that’s taken away,” he adds quietly.

I ask him what his finances are like at the moment: the pension itself aside, many of his colleagues are worried how they’ll cope with the impact of increased contributions on their take-home pay.

At present 6.4 percent of their pay packet goes to their pension fund. But the Con-Dems’ fiddling will see that figure rise to between 9.5 and 9.8 percent by 2014.

For Neil, who “just about survives” on a gross £26,000 a year, that means either trimming an extra £55 from his monthly budget or forgoing his pension altogether.

As it is, he just about breaks even after rent, utilities, food and transport.

“I’m just scared of being really old and poor,” he says, as the picketers begin to hive off towards the rally down the street.

*****

For all the police presence and talk of inconvenience to the public, I encounter just one solitary voice of opposition throughout the entire day. It’s a balding man in a polar fleece and lanyard, leaning over the railing outside BBC Radio Manchester and evidently on his lunch break. The irony does not escape us.

“Boo,” he calls in a voice strangely drained of passion. “Boo.” The 3000-strong crowd cheers and surges on down Oxford St.

*****

As we round the bend into Castlefield Basin I find myself next to Barry Lingard, a former PE teacher who’s now the local branch secretary for the Association of Teachers and Lecturers.

The Association has never, ever gone on strike before: its last industrial action was an afternoon meeting in 1979. But Barry’s story is practically an object lesson in why they’re striking today.

At 57, he’s spent the last ten years as head of learning support in Smith Hills School in Bolton, teaching high schoolers with a reading age of eight.

He’s done the sums and was expecting a pension of £14,000 a year — hardly gold-plated by anyone’s standard. But now, he says, the union’s pension calculator has told him that nest egg will shrink 27.5 percent to a grand total of £195 a week. And between the rise in the retirement age to 68 and a Manchester male’s average life expectancy, he should have a good five or six years to enjoy it.

“For putting in 35 years at the coalface, it’s pretty grim,” he says.

But it’s not just his own pension he’s worried about. “This policy will destroy the very fabric of public education,” he says, without a glimmer of exaggeration.

Thirty percent of the teaching workforce are over 50, he says: “If they push the reforms, they’ll push a lot of us to leave and there’ll be a massive loss of skilled staff.”

It’s not just the oldies either, if the National Union of Teachers’ figures are anything to go by. A survey commissioned in April found nearly 72 percent of staff aged 30-50 said they were likely to quit if the pensions plan went ahead.

Perhaps the government is calling their bluff, I suggest: in this job market, it’s doubtful where else they could go. Barry shakes his head: “I don’t think they’ve thought this through at all.”

There’s a cheer around us as we arrive at the amphitheatre. We’re right at the head of the crowd but it’s already a quarter full. As I turn and begin the long walk back up Liverpool Rd, I realise I can’t actually see the march’s end.

Maybe Barry’s right, I think to myself. They really haven’t thought this through at all.

[First published in The Morning Star, 25/06/2011]

The Con-Dem coalition were full of fine words last weekend, as NGOs across the country prepared for the launch of Refugee Week.

“The British tradition of welcoming genuine refugees to this country is a great one, and I hope we continue to show this generosity of spirit in the future,” David Cameron declaimed over the piercing shriek of a Daily Mail dogwhistle.

The PM – who just months ago accused refugee communities of “not really wanting or even willing to integrate” – even sent immigration minister Damian Green to go meet and greet with locals at the Northern Refugee Centre in Sheffield.

Green was of course “delighted” to attend. His hosts may have been less enthusiastic, given they are set to lose literally half their budget and paid staff to public funding cuts in the next three months.

But Green would have been hard pressed to find a warm welcome anywhere: despite Cameron’s talk of tradition, the Con-Dems’ cuts to public services amount to a systematic segregation of refugees and asylum seekers from the society Cameron supposedly wants them to join.

Most notably, from September the government will simply stop funding support services for people with refugee status, anywhere in Britain.

Since 2008 the Refugee Integration and Employment Services scheme has funded a national network of caseworkers who meet one-on-one with refugees for up to a year after they win their claim, helping them find a home, a job, and access benefits, health and education services exactly as Green described.

While local charities provided the expertise, the UK Border Agency provided the funding — but when George Osborne ordered the agency to shave half a billion pounds from its budget, the contract was one of the first to go.

Meanwhile the Agency has cut funding for the ‘One Stop’ service by 62 percent, leaving just £2m across the entire country to help Britain’s 18,000 asylum seekers each year with ongoing claims, housing issues and legal representation.

And the Initial Accommodations Wrap Around, which ensures newly-arrived asylum seekers get temporary accommodation and access to healthcare, has been slashed in half to just £726,000.

The agency’s contract renegotiations have been catastrophic for the sector: even the biggest organisation, the Refugee Council, relies on border agency contracts for 78 percent of its revenue.

The Council’s chief executive Donna Covey has warned they will have to lose around a third of their staff and close two of its centres just to remain solvent, while smaller charities like the centre Green visited are unlikely to fare any better.

But as shocking as that is, the cuts to border agency coffers are just part of the picture.

Take something as basic as English language lessons: further education minister John Hayes announced in a strategy document last November that funding had been “refocused”.

From September, only the 14 percent of ESOL students on ‘active’ benefits like the Job Seekers’ or Employment and Support allowances will see their course fees paid in full.

Asylum seekers on ‘inactive’ income support will have to wait at least six months from their date of arrival and then stump up half the cost‚ anywhere from £200 to £600.

It’s an all-but impossible demand when asylum seekers are barred from work and subsist on as little as £37.41 a week — and those who receive their payments in supermarket vouchers via the National Asylum Support Service will have no means to pay it at all.

Meanwhile the teachers themselves have mounted an ‘Action For ESOL’ campaign against cuts to their own budgets: in Tower Hamlets, where 44 percent of households speak English as a second language, City Gateway is facing a 50 percent funding cut for its entry-level ESOL programmes.

And in Enfield, a borough with one of the highest concentrations of asylum seekers in London, funding cuts led the College of North East London to consider axing 20 out of 27 ESOL lecturers before union members agreed to voluntary redundancies earlier this month.

And again, ESOL is just one dimension: from counselling to specialist health programmes, from youth groups to local authorities’ ethnic minority achievement teams, the cuts are gutting services which refugees and asylum seekers literally depend on for survival. Even cost-neutral programmes have been ransacked: last November the government quietly sidelined a £50m Migration Impacts Fund for topping up charities and public services in migrant communities, while keeping the £50 levy on non-EU migrants’ visas which paid for it.

It hardly needs be said that these cuts directly affect some of the most vulnerable people in Britain; traumatised by flight from their homeland, afraid they will be forced by circumstance to return to death or torture, isolated from society by a seemingly insurmountable language barrier and in many cases living on the streets at a level of poverty unimaginable for most people in Europe.

Those are the people Cameron blamed in April for creating “discomfort and disjointedness” in our society. Perhaps he and his cabinet ministers should look a little closer to home.

[First published in the Morning Star, 28/05/2011]

When the BBC’s Question Time arrived at Wormwood Scrubs last week, justice secretary Ken Clarke was braced for battle: in the same day he’d managed to outrage feminists with talk of “the gradations of rape”, while incensing hardline authoritarians with a plan to dangle reduced sentences for prisoners who plead guilty.

But the lord chancellor was back to his breezy, avuncular self by the time inmate James Patterson got a chance to ask why Clarke’s clemency didn’t extend to allowing prisoners the vote — despite a landmark ruling on the issue in the European Court of Human Rights more than half a decade ago.

“Does denying all convicted prisoners the vote reinforce their alienation from society and discourage rehabilitation?” he asked.

Clarke’s response was unequivocal: so unequivocal, in fact, that he didn’t even need to qualify it with an argument.

“I don’t think it’s part of the rehabilitation of prisoners to give them the vote, and I have a strong feeling that part of the people making the claims are – I’m sorry to say – interested in compensation for failure to give them the vote rather more than they are the vote.

“The fact is, I don’t think it’s resettling prisoners,” he said.

His fellow panelist, professional froth-inducer Melanie Philips, quickly shifted the debate to the more palatably abstract realm of international jurisdiction, while Clarke’s predecessor on the Labour benches, Jack Straw, insisted he’d always opposed the ruling but had never found the right time to bring it up in public.

But not one of them managed in the ten-minute discussion to provide a single shred of evidence to answer Mr Patterson’s question: does denying prisoners the vote discourage rehabilitation? For that matter, what good is there at all in rescinding a prisoner’s right to vote?

Here in England it’s simply the status quo; a literal relic of a bygone age (the Victorians’ Forfeiture Act of 1870, to be precise). But even in New Zealand, where the government’s Disqualification of Convicted Prisoners Bill passed just last year, politicians were at a loss to justify it: Even the law and order select committee that recommended the bill noted in a minority view that “no substantive case” had been put forward in its favour, while Attorney-General Chris Finlayson protested that it was “unjustifiably inconsistent” with the Bill Of Rights Act.

Meanwhile Canada’s Conservative government seems to have grudgingly accepted a 2002 Supreme Court ruling that its own long-time ban had fundamentally breached the Canadian constitution.

Clarke and co. would do well to read Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin’s ruling on the case, which summarised Clarke & co.’s moralising as simply “bad pedagogy”.

The power of lawmakers flowed from voters, she said: therefore depriving people of that power in the hopes of ‘teaching them a lesson’ was more likely to undermine any respect for the law or democracy.

“It says that delegates elected by the citizens can then bar those very citizens, or a portion of them, from participating in future elections.

“But if we accept that governmental power in a democracy flows from the citizens, it is difficult to see how that power can legitimately be used to disenfranchise the very citizens from whom the government’s power flows.”

McLachlin’s ruling touches on another, more fundamental reason why voting aids rehabilitation: prisoners are the ultimate single-issue voters. The state by definition controls every aspect of their lives, and without democratic accountability the pressure to improve living conditions is minimal — conditions which are universally accepted as critical to inmates’ rehabilitation.

Imagine the outcry in Parliament if it was revealed the assault rate had risen by more than 60 percent in the past decade, or if the number of sexual or serious physical assaults had increased by more than two-thirds.

Imagine if it was revealed that police had investigated just 8.3 percent of assault complaints, and less than a third of sexual assaults.

If you’re in Her Majesty’s Prisons, you don’t have to imagine: that’s exactly what the Howard League for Penal Reform reported last year, to deafening silence in the Commons.

The League’s official information requests revealed that the prison service had failed to investigate an incredible 1,443 recorded incidents of violent and sexual assaults in 2008 alone. Out of 1,481 allegations of serious assault, the service investigated just 124 — and of 119 sexual assault allegations, only 33 investigations followed.

With around 85,000 prisoners in England, that’s a group larger than most constituencies. But in liberal democracies, political gamesmanship reigns supreme – and with no voters to court, this fundamental breakdown in the criminal justice system is at best an irrelevance. So both the government of the day and its loyal opposition frown for the respectable public and burnish their tough-on-crime credentials, while the problem continues to fester.

Voting rights then are not just a matter of principle: they are a key protection of other, more tangible rights, like personal safety and equal protection under the law. That’s the thing about universal rights: when you undermine one, you undermine all of them.

But surely the best rebuttal of this blasé myopia was delivered by Jack Straw himself, in the closing moments of Question Time:

“I don’t agree that prisoners should have the vote, and I’ve never had the demand from any of my constituents who end up in prison.

“And I’ve got a number for that.”