The New Slave Labour

Who would think that in 2013, the situation of domestic workers would be no better  than in Victorian times? The UN Agency The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has just produced a report entitled Domestic Workers, which is the first of its kind looking in depth at working conditions and the extent of legal protection enjoyed by domestic workers worldwide.  At least 52 million domestic workers worldwide experience poor working conditions and insufficient legal protection, according to the report.

The report also reveals that these domestic workers (a person who is employed in a private household carrying out domestic work such as cleaner, gardener and elderly carer) of whom 83% are female, account for 7.5% of women’s wage employment worldwide - and a far greater share in some regions, particularly Asia, the Pacific region, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Despite the size of the sector, many domestic workers experience poor working conditions and insufficient legal protection.  Sandra Polaski, ILO deputy Director General, said: “Domestic workers are frequently expected to work longer hours than other workers and in many countries do not have the same rights to weekly rest that are enjoyed by other workers - combined with the lack of rights, the extreme dependency on the employer and the isolated and unprotected nature of domestic work can render them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.”

The ILO report showed that only 10% of all domestic workers are covered by general labour legislation to the same extent as other workers. More than a quarter are completely excluded from national labour organisation.

More than half of all domestic workers have no limitation on their weekly normal hours under national law and approximately 45% have no entitlement to weekly rest periods.  Just over half of all domestic workers are entitled to a minimum wage equivalent to that of other workers.  Lack of legal protection increases domestic workers vulnerability and makes it difficult for them to seek remedies. As a result they are often paid less than workers in comparable occupations and work longer hours.

The report showed that live-in domestic workers are particularly vulnerable to exploitation since they are often paid a flat weekly or monthly rate irrespective of hours worked. In practice, that means a domestic worker is available whenever needed.

Sandra Polaski added: “ The large disparities between wages and working conditions of domestic workers compared to other workers in the same country underline the need for action at the national level by governments, employers and workers to improve the working lives of these vulnerable but hardworking individuals.”

The report also showed that between the mid-1990s and 2010, there was an increase of more than 19 million domestic workers worldwide.  Many migrate to other countries to find work.  The ILO suggests it is likely that the figures contained in the report underestimate the true numbers of domestic workers worldwide, which may in reality be tens of millions more.

The figures also exclude child domestic workers below the age of 15 that are not included in the surveys used by the report.  Their number was estimated by the ILO at 7.4 million in 2008. 

The report, published recently by the ILO covered 117 countries and had an employment coverage of 88.7% within those countries.

A little bit of history of this very effective UN agency: The ILO was founded in 1919, in the wake of a destructive war, to pursue a vision based on the premise that universal, lasting peace can be established only if it is based on social justice. The ILO became the specialized agency of the UN in 1946.  It is now the international organisation responsible for drawing up and overseeing international labour standards.

One of the great strengths of the United Nations is its global reach.  No other organisation could conduct such a wide-ranging survey with authority. It is also in a position to put pressure on national governments to make sure that they introduce humane laws to protect workers in their country. 

The position of the British Government on the issue of domestic workers is interesting.  On 12^th December 2012, the Kate Willingham of Anti-Slavery International wrote to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills as follows: “Today, 12 December 2012, is being marked globally as a day of action for ratification of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention No. 189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers, which has now entered into force following its formal adoption by four countries. On this occasion, we urge you and your colleagues to promote and protect the rights of domestic workers by ratifying the Convention and its accompanying Recommendation, as well as restoring essential protections for migrant domestic workers in the UK.” 

Convention No. 189 is a ground breaking treaty which establishes the first global standards for the estimated 50 to 100 million domestic workers worldwide, the vast majority of whom are women and girls, who clean, cook, and care for children and the elderly in private households. Despite their contributions to the global economy, domestic workers are vulnerable to a wide range of abuses. These include excessive hours of work with no rest, non-payment of wages, forced confinement, physical and sexual abuse, forced labour and trafficking.  Convention No. 189 provides desperately needed and long overdue protections, including special protections for child domestic workers and migrant domestic workers.

Despite this the UK Government has publically stated in an explanatory memorandum laid before Parliament on 27 April 2012, that whilst the UK supports the principles behind the Domestic Workers Convention, it does not think that ratification of the Convention is appropriate for the UK because of the burdens that implementing the health and safety provisions would impose on UK business and citizens.

This very short-term view will store up future trouble for the UK Border Agency, the Home Office and most of all for thousands of UK domestic workers themselves.

Random Harvest?

By Marguerite Finn

I wasn’t sure whether to write this column or not – but it is an important story and it should be told. Last week I attended a meeting in Norwich and learned for the first time about the outlawed and persecuted Falun Gong movement in China. So I looked into it some more and found out some very disturbing facts about which we all should be aware. What follows is what I understand to be the case. It has not been possible to obtain the view of the Chinese Embassy here because I did not want to risk the confidentiality and vulnerability of my sources of information.

What is Falun Gong? The short answer is that Falun Gong is a spiritual practice based on truth, compassion, tolerance, and includes five sets of meditative exercises. In July 1999, the communist regime in China began persecuting people who practiced it – by which time its practitioners numbered about one hundred million.

Falun Gong is quintessentially Chinese – an ancient self-improvement practice whose roots stem from China’s 5000-year-old cultural traditions. It combines the practices of meditation, special techniques of breathing and slow moving qigong exercises and emphasises morality and the cultivation of virtue through its central tenets of Truthfulness, Tolerance and Compassion.

Through moral rectitude and the practice of meditation, practitioners of Falun Gong aspire to better mental and physical health and, ultimately, spiritual enlightenment. It was first introduced into China in 1992 by Li Hongzhi. The practice spread quickly by word of mouth, as people saw the lives of those around them changing for the better. Sickly grandmothers were transformed into the epitome of health. Couples nearing divorce saved their marriage. The impact extended beyond the immediate family circle. Policemen who learned Falun Gong would stop taking bribes and workers would stop stealing from their factories. Members of the Chinese Communist Party started taking it up. The party recognised that better health for the community would mean less drain on the state budget for medicine and health care. It was considered to have a stabilizing influence on society ( http://www.faluninfo.net/).

So what went wrong? When Li Hongzhi gave his first public seminar in May 1992, he presented Falun Gong as part of a “centuries-old tradition of cultivation” but he suggested that the purpose of the practice should not primarily be physical health, nor the development of extraordinary powers, but rather it should be to purify one’s heart and attain spiritual salvation. Adherents of Falun Gong were encouraged to abandon negative thoughts, desires and behaviours such as greed, profit, lust, killing,violence, theft, deception, jealousy etc. They also refrained from drinking alcohol, smoking or drug taking, with the aim of refining the body into a higher form. The Chinese Government and the Communist Party took fright at the movement’s popularity and started to portray it as a religious sect or cult with “superstitious” views and saw it as a potential threat, outside of its control.

One day in 1999, some 15,000 Falun Gong practitioners took part in a demonstration to complain about some press reports that were unfavourable to the movement. They quietly sat down on the pavement and surrounded a government compound called Zhongnanhai in the centre of Beijing, which housed the places of residence and work of the Chinese leadership. Premier Zhu Rongji agreed to see a delegation from the protestors and instructed three members of staff to hear their complaints more fully. By 9pm that evening, the protestors had quietly made their way home. They did not shout slogans, carry banners or give out leaflets.The protest had been peaceful and non violent throughout. It is reported that they even collected their litter before they left. Nevertheless, many of them were arrested in the following days and taken to labour camps to be‘re-educated’. This was because one Chinese high-ranking official and former head of the Communist Party, by the name of Jiang Zemin, felt that Premier Zhuhad dealt with the protestors too leniently and he initiated a programme of persecution. Jiang Zemin forced officials at all levels to participate in eradicating Falun Gong.

Thousands of people were imprisoned and tortured for their belief and continue to be so to this day. A special government department called the “610 office” was set up to oversee and co-ordinate the persecution. Using the media and internet, the 610 office organised a propaganda campaign against a “heritical organisation” and the rhetoric in the state-run press escalated to include charges that Falun Gong was colluding with foreign,"anti-China" forces – no doubt helped by the fact that the Falun Gong founder, Li Hongzhi, in 1997 applied for asylum in New York and left China for good.

In the years since the suppression campaign began, the Falun Gong adherents have emerged as a prominent voice in the Chinese dissident community, advocating greater human rights and an end to the Communist Party rule. So it seems that the Chinese Government’s bizarre over-reaction brought about the one thing they feared most – political dissent on a large scale.

But, there is an even darker side to this story – and it concerns the harvesting of human organs for use in transplants. Organ transplanting in China is a booming trade. The numbers of organ transplants performed in China – and the speed at which organs become available – has raised international concern about the source of organs. The Chinese Communist Party admits that organs are harvested from executed prisoners – but insist that they have given their consent.

The practice is now so widespread and streamlined that enquirers are promised a transplant within one or two weeks –as opposed to the many months and even years that it takes in Western countries. To be able to do this, they have to have access to a huge stock of living organ “donors”. There is mounting evidence that thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have been killed for their organs, which are sold and transplanted at enormous profit. The perpetrators are officials of the Chinese Communist Party acting in collaboration with surgeons, prison authorities and military officials. The recipients are predominantly those travelling internationally for health care. Strong circumstantial evidence points to adherents of Falun Gong being arrested in their tens of thousands in order to correct their way of thinking. When they are arrested they are given blood tests, ultra scans, and extensive medical tests – the results of which are recorded on a data base. This testing is not to their benefit as most are subsequently tortured for their belief – but blood matching is critical to organ donation.

Since 2006, witnesses have come forward and several international investigations have been carried out – the most widely publicised has been the report entitled “Bloody Harvest” http://organharvestinvestigation.net/ by two Canadian lawyers, David Matas and David Kilgour and another by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Dr Manfred Nowak. Both investigations concluded that somewhere in the range of 40,000 to 65,000 Falun Gong practitioners had been killed in this way from 2000 to 2006. An international group of doctors, including transplant surgeons, have formed an organisation “Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting” (DAFOH) to protest the practice and promote ethical practices in medicine. (www.dafoh.org). It is important to remind ourselves that, as Human Rights Watch said in a statement: “None of the tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners detained, arrested or convicted, have been held in connection with violent actions or threats of violence. Instead, their “crime” is their belief in Falun Gong.”

These innocent victims are being held without trial in labour camps until their blood happens to match that of a prospective organ transplant recipient. The Falun Gong prisoner is then taken away and his organs are removed while he/she is still alive. Their bodies are quickly cremated to cover up the traces of organ removal.

The DAFOH are examining the fact that the distinction between life and death has been redefined, specifically for the benefit of transplantation. They say: “For heart transplantation to succeed, death has had to be redefined as brain death.Transplantation unquestionably pushed the boundaries of what doctors would and would not do and, in turn, society accepted the new definitions. For multiple organ donation to be achieved, something that would have been horrific in another time became not only tolerable but laudable under the new rules. The blunting of our visceral responses and the redefining of ethical boundaries are steps that could lead us, if we are not careful, to the ethicists’ slippery slope and must be recognized as such.”

If you think that the horrific situation in China could never happen here, I would like to mention a small article that I found at the bottom of page 16 in The Guardian on Saturday 28^th July 2012. It said that the: “NHS moots a shake-up of organ transplant rules” and went on to say that the NHS is considering prolonging the lives of people who have no chance of surviving in order to harvest their organs. They are also thinking of making people opt out rather than in to the donor register– meaning that they would presume consent to organ removal unless people have actively opted out. It seems that the Welsh assembly has formally adopted this possibility.

One sentence sent a shiver up my spine. It talked about “New financial rewards for intensive care units for every organ they provide”. This conjured up a vision of market-driven competition between hospitals to reach targets for the number of organs harvested. Ethically, we could be standing on the tip of a very slippery slope.

The subject needs much debate and openness. We may not start persecuting Falun Gong in the UK, but the public needs to be constantly vigilant where the question of medical ethics is concerned. And of course, there is the other ethical question about using transplants to prolong life, when there are already too many of us on this planet – but that is a column for another day!

Some other sites of interest are: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/nine-commentaries-on-the-communist-party-introduction-225078.html

http://www.nla.gov.au/benjamin-perry/the-past-present-and-future-of-falun-gong

http://mike-servethepeople.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/cult-that-is-falun-gong.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulun_Gong

Occupying the Conversation

This week's column is cross-posted from the Transition Norwich blog, This Low Carbon Life and is an on-site report of a local march and rally for the public sector workers' strike on Wednesday, organised by Lowestoft Against the Cuts (for a video of the Norwich 'Fair Pensions for All' March and Rally by former teacher Ken Hunn see end of post)

Wednesday 30th November, Lowestoft I've just got back from the High Noon Rally and public sector workers' strike march up Lowestoft High Street and the meeting afterwards where I sat with Kate and Rita and Charlotte in the packed United Reform Church, listening to people speak about the effects of the government’s austerity measures on their lives, pensions, families and future prospects.

Teachers, therapists, cooks, retired gardeners and trade unions representatives all spoke about how the government (and the system) was ennabling more than ever the richest to rob the poorest, pushing mercilessly for privatisation, for fewer and fewer workers’ rights or job security and longer hours for less pay. For YEARS to come. How it considers ordinary people as being of no value whatsoever. Like the starlings Jon wrote about on Monday.

A woman who had worked as a public gardener for thirty years told how her annual pension of £2,500 was officially considered ‘gold-plated’. Another who had been a teacher for twenty years said she loved her work, it was all she had ever wanted to do, but the prospect of having to wait until she was 68 to retire made her feel like she was being squeezed of all her life force and there would be nothing left by then. And how that marred the love she felt for her job.

“It’s as if [the people running the system] want you to die so they don’t have to pay you any pension,” said someone from the floor. Everyone cheered.

One primary schoolteacher had left a well-paid media job in London to come and teach in Suffolk after he discovered that all the money he was paying into his private pension would bring him almost nothing when he retired.

“I keep hearing this one word,” he said. “It just keeps speaking to me - solidarity. Now more than ever we need to stick together. We can’t afford not to. Solidarity.”

The atmosphere of the march and the meeting in the church was alive, attentive and engaged. People were listening to each other. I wondered whether I should “stand up to speak” something about Transition or Occupy, mention fossil fuel depletion and energy constraints and the preparations we are making in our local initiatives in the face of these along with climate change and economic instability. After all, Transition is where most of my attention has been focussed for the past four years.

But I felt a bit tongue-tied (even though I hadn’t said anything), and there didn’t seem to be an opening. I thought, well I’ll write about the rally tomorrow and bring in the links with Transition and Occupy then. Better go and get on with that Transition Norwich bulletin. So I tapped fellow Sustainable Bungay transitioner Kate on the shoulder and mouthed “Got to go, see you soon…”

At that moment a woman stood up and brought Occupy into the meeting. I sat back down. She’d been to OccupyLSX and Occupy Norwich. It was really important to consider this movement, she said, because its presence in all these cities of the world brings constant attention to the vast economic and social inequality which exists and is exacerbated by the present gormengahst of the global financial system. Because of Occupy more and more people are seeing what they didn’t see before. And as Arundhati Roy once said talking about the social and environmental ravages of dambuilding in India, once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it.

And take care not to just side with the mainstream media when they talk about finding drug needles and the presence of alcohol at the London Occupy site, the speaker reminded us. This is the middle of London. Every day food is provided free and there are tents to sleep in. Of course you’re going to get homeless people, maybe even people on drugs. That’s what’s going on in our society. “I’ve been there a couple of times and I’ve noticed that the homeless are included. Maybe included for the first time in a long time. Not everybody here may agree with the protesters but it is a non-violent movement, with a lot of young people concerned about a future with few prospects. Just like we are here."

The people in the room cheered again and the retired gardener with the ‘gold-plated’ pension stood up and exhorted everyone to make sure their trades union leaders supported Occupy.

This was the cue for Kate and me. We put our hands up. Kate went first, introducing both of us and Sustainable Bungay and a few core Transition concepts around building community resilience. This is the woman who a few years ago at one of our core group meetings stood up and delivered a two minute talk on Peak Oil and Climate Change with no props and you just got it. It was also Kate who stood up at a climate conference in Bungay in 2007 and exhorted the people in the room to get together to come up with some solutions. That was the beginning of Sustainable Bungay. So she had to speak first! And it made me feel far less nervous about standing up to speak.

I said one of the most important things about Occupy was how it opened up and held a space for conversations to happen which aren’t normally granted any space at all, certainly not in the mainstream public discourse.

And what could be more mainstream than the vast and growing social inequality wrought by a small elite via an oppressive machine-like system that ultimately has no one’s best interests at heart? This is a time when our very humanity is at stake. We need to be talking with each other.

Pete then said how at OccupyLSX he had witnessed an intense conversation start up amongst a group of besuited city workers visiting the site. They were talking about it, too.

I‘ve visited OccupyNorwich a few times now and experienced this openness, both in listening to what other people have to say about our human situation and in being listened to myself. And I've encountered warmth and intelligence each time.

As I left the rally for the library yesterday a young woman at the door offered me a ticket for the Murphy's Lore gig later in the evening. I'd have loved to, I said, I really like Murphys Lore. But I have to write an article and help prepare a bulletin. Help keep the spaces open for those conversations... Mark Watson

Pics: High Noon Rally in Lowestoft; Marching up the High Street; Occupy Norwich general assembly; It's the private sector too; You don't have to be a Socialist Worker to read the Socialist Worker, Kate and I at the public sector strike meeting

Read the original article here

Video of Norwich March - November 30

The ignored report sitting on the Met’s website that indicates the possible consequences of Operation Trident: why these riots are really happening…

By Rupert Read

It was very striking in Cameron’s first speech responding to the riots and looting (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/8690895/David-Cameron-condemns-sickening-riots-across-UK.html ) that there was not one word – not one – about why this violence may be happening. Cameron was happy to enunciate very clearly that “If you are old enough to commit these crimes, you are old enough to face the punishment”, which appears to me to be an incitement to jail children however young they be; but he said literally nothing about why these crimes are taking place.

This is a complete failure of thought and of leadership. Come back Lord Scarman and ‘Hezza’, all is forgiven?…

Here in East Anglia, thankfully, we have been spared the riots. But let’s not forget that there are pockets of extreme poverty in East Anglia… How easy it is to forget that relatively wealthy counties can disguise some appalling relative poverty (in rural areas, and especially in town and city estates) ...which should not go forgotten while the focus – because of the violence -- is on big cities.

Why is the violence happening and spreading? Why is so much criminality so easily sparked? As has been argued fairly convincingly over at LeftFootForward (http://www.leftfootforward.org/2011/08/a-crowd-psychology-analysis-of-the-riots/ ), it is simply not enough to talk about ‘copycat’ violence. Why is the copying occurring? And what exactly is being copied?

Hypothesis: Part of the copying is not just of other rioters and looters. It is of the rich. As Sunny Hundal put it, here (http://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/08/09/only-poor-people-go-looting-and-other-silly-claims/): “rich people do go out looting; they just do so in otherways.” Some of the copying that is going on, I would hypothesize, is of massively wealthy law-breakers and corrupt individuals and companies, be they in tax-evading corporations, in the media, (in) the banks, in Parliament itself, etc. . A society that projects unattainable images of wealth and opulence and then is surprised that, at a time of government cuts to community centres etc., there are lots of young people prepared to risk jail or worse to get their hands on a plasma-screen TV -- or just to thumb their noses at society at large, at get their 5 minutes of fame -- is a society that deliberately is refusing to know itself.

This is how and why a respectable protest against police brutality can morph into a far bigger wave of disorder and disaster.

My philosophical colleague Dr. Phil Hutchinson made some of these points 7 years ago, in a report (see the Appendix to this Met Police report) which you can still find on the Met website!:

http://www.mpa.gov.uk/downloads/committees/cop/cop-040206-04-appendix01.pdf

His argument that Operation Trident – the London police operation against ‘black-on-black’ (sic.) guncrime in London, responsible it would seem for the death of Mr. Duggan, which began this whole imbroglio -- is racist made the front page of the Indy at the time (albeit the reporting on his arguments there was of very poor quality); but his report and his recommendations were greeted with great hostility by the police, and were ignored by politicians.

It is likely that Operation Trident played a substantive hand in starting this trouble in Tottenham, as a BBC reporter put directly to Simon Hughes on TV earlier today. But it did this not just by being a racist targetting of black people, but also, more broadly, by sequestering off 'the black community' as a ‘them’ and not part of ‘us’, thereby making it easier for their problems and aspirations (e.g. for what society tells us all is a desirable level of material wealth) to be ignored … at the same time as our society has ruthlessly stoked materialism and generated the fantastic levels of inequality whose natural consequences (in terms of alienation, desire to emulate the rich in terms of material consumption, reduced levels of trust and mutual care, etc.) have lately been documented for instance in THE SPIRIT LEVEL (see my http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/rupert-read/philosophical-and-political-implications-of-spirit-level-response-to-gerry-ha ).

Take a look at the key relevant sections of Hutchinson’s report: e.g. p.73 (3.11 & 3.12); p.74 (3.16 & 3.17(; p.85f. (Section 7 as a whole). Operation Trident has long been a repugnant mistake, an open wound, an accident waiting to happen: waiting to light a tinderbox.

In sum: Racism seems to have played a significant role in the police shooting that started all this off. Racism and social exclusion is endemic to Operation Trident in a far-wider sense too; in this sense, indeed, Operation Trident is simply symptomatic of elite ideas and practices in a society whose materialism and race- and class- hierarchies generate widespread cynicism and a sense that the only principle that needs respecting is the pursuit of personal profit, whatever the wider costs. The police, the government, and all those who have stoked a rampantly inegalitarian materialist culture bear in that sense some responsibility for the disgraceful and repellent looting and destruction that is at present consuming several parts of our country.

‘Consuming’: much as in rampant out-of-control consumerism…

With the Indignados of Norfolk - and Thessaloniki

by Trevor Phillips

The hundreds of local people attending a demonstration in Norwich on Thursday, in defence of public service pensions, were good humoured and enthusiastic. They heard excellent speeches from local trade unionists and campaigners.

Many similar UK demos will have heard similar messages: the Con-Dem government’s attack on public sector pensions - as on public services such as the NHS – is simply based on Tory dogma, not practicality; public sector pensions are mostly not in a drastic state - and if they were the government should first collect the billions of pounds of high-earner and corporate tax which is evaded or avoided; this is all really a plan to shrink the British state, diminish democracy and open the door to privatisation and easy corporate profits.

I agree with this view and a few weeks ago I recounted it to hundreds of citizens of Thessaloniki, the second city of Greece, when I visited the camp of indignant, anti-austerity campaigners - 'Indignados' - near the city's famous White Tower.

Each evening, many hundreds of people attend an open-microphone session to share solidarity and ideas.

I managed only a brief description of the UK disease and ran out of time to describe UK anti-cuts responses: trade union and national , Norfolk’s contribution and the imaginative and popular UKUncut

The White Tower events were inspiring, with many young people involved, but lacked ideas for coherent alternatives to the government’s vicious austerity plans. As someone said, the big question remains: if the Greeks resist and reject the oppressive 'rescue' deals: what happens when public servants don't get paid? Nobody, it seemed, knew how to deal with this. But even this may not stop the Greek people from rejecting the impoverishing deal struck with the EU, IMF and European Central Bank. There is a widespread mood of anger, proud resistance and a desire for independence, alongside a sense of betrayal. And for some the certainty of forthcoming suffering has overcome their fear of its unknown detail.

On another evening I stumbled upon a massive procession along Egnatia street (the ancient Via Egnatia from Istanbul to Rome). It was 10pm and many thousands of people were parading against the austerity programme. There were virtually no banners, no party symbols, placards or signs of political allegiance. But many knew the slogans and songs. It really was The Masses: ordinary families, many with children on shoulders. They passed grannies banging cooking pots. One woman stopped to kiss and hug a tiny elderly lady, thanking her for her noisy expression of solidarity. It was very moving to be amongst it. It felt totally honest and proud and defiant and even hopeful.

When I asked who the organisers were, I was firmly told this was not led by any political group and the implication was that nobody trusted such forces. I didn't have enough conversations or experiences to grasp a fuller picture, but there is certainly enormous anger and a massive willingness to resist the rotten deal being cooked up to protect banks at the expense of the Greek people. People are uncertain about what to do except to express their opposition. But they would probably do more if a coherent leadership amongst this resistance could describe a strategy.

To some young idealists, this lack of leadership is refreshing and a chance to experiment with their fantasies of a world without states and politicians or the filters of political management, which - in Greece and elsewhere - somehow reduce the finest intentions of social democrats to the role of bouncers outside capitalism's casinos. One young activist asked me what I thought of Direct Democracy? This idea, intended to circumvent politicians and the failures of representative organisations, is enthusiastically promoted by some younger elements. I said I thought it had some local applications worth exploring but was not on its own a solution for running a complex economy and a nation of millions. I am not sure if his resulting expression was of disappointment or pity.

The anti-austerity resistance movement in Greece surely needs to link the energy and imagination of the young optimists and the millions of concerned families with the experience and networks of established left groups and unions. But the latter need to win back lost trust and it’s hard to see any future progressive role for the governing, social-democratic (Labour-like) PASOK party, now it has pushed through the new austerity deal. And to succeed, resistance cannot just happen in Greece, though Greece may yet create momentum for a broader response. This is surely what is feared by national and EU political leaders and the big business interests they represent.

Why are the governments of Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain not discussing a joint response to their collective punishment? As the old adage says: ‘If you owe the bank a thousand pounds you have a problem. If you owe the bank a million pounds, the bank has a problem’. Sadly, most or all of these governments favour the market ideology being rammed through by the EU. The IMF and EU are therefore able to impose ‘rescue deals’ on a country-by- country basis rather than within a European Recovery Plan. Would a collective solution anyway be permitted by those who profit from division – and who even bring down elected governments by conducting or threatening ‘capital strikes’ ?

Yes in Greece, the UK and elsewhere – the biggest strikes are not currently by workers but by capital. Finance capitalism is on strike – refusing to fund recovery until it is guaranteed the interest terms it demands to secure its customary usurious margins.

In the absence of a response to this process by their own governments, the people of Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland - and the UK - must try to organise their own resistance, including strikes of labour with popular support. After the Arab Spring, this is no longer a ridiculous idea.

So it was immensely satisfying to be outside the Forum in Norwich, cheering the disability groups, ‘Defend the NHS’ campaigners, teachers, civil servants and students. And to see that amongst these ‘Norfolk Indignados’, some unions are playing a significant role and commanding respect. It is not yet the Via Egnatia, but it is certainly the route to somewhere better.



See also

Decentralised ‘Yes to AV’ campaigning moves into action

By Rupert Read

Living in Norwich, I am all-too-aware of what a bad system ‘First past the post’ is. For the MP elected in Norwich South last year won just 29% of the votes cast.

The great thing about Alternative Vote (AV) is that it ensures that in virtually every seat the winner will have the majority of the votes cast behind him or her.

To help explain and communicate this and more, in visual user-friendly ways, a new ‘Yes to AV’ site has just been launched.

This is a new, independent site with loads of Yes2AV e-postcards to choose from. You can send the appropriate postcard to the appropriate person you know, in a bid to enthuse them about voting Yes on May 5.

It’s a sort of http://www.mydavidcameron.com/ with the work already done for you…

The site is the product of Matt Wootton, with editorial help from myself; it is a 'Green Words Workshop' production. (See our joint blog on reframing and values, of which this new site is an offshoot).

We think that this is the kind of thing that could potentially be transformative, over the next several weeks. The Yes campaign needs independent support; it needs a bit of razzmatazz and innovation; it needs to go viral.

Go to http://www.yes.greenwordsworkshop.org/ and help this to happen.

Lastly: Matt and I don’t think what we’ve done is particularly ground-breaking, yet (and here’s the important thing) neither the Yes nor the No campaigns appear to have much like it. The No camp has postcard-like adverts on their front page (compared to the Yes site’s uncommunicative photos of people holding a placard saying “YES”). But they don’t allow them to be sent.

This is not just a technical issue, it’s a political issue, one of messaging, and one of public engagement. It’s not just that emailable postcards don’t exist. It’s not just that more tools for online engagement don’t exist. It’s that many of the political messages themselves don’t exist, because the campaigns are not creating them.

That’s where we’ve come in . . .

Norfolk’s unnecessary Valentine’s Day Massacre

by Trevor Phillips

Norfolk County Council met today, Monday 14 February, and adopted a Conservative inspired budget which slashed £60 millions of local services. This was its initial response to a £155 million funding reduction from the Con-Dem government.

On Valentine’s Day, mostly renowned for romantic love and swollen hearts - but also for the notorious gangster killings in Chicago - ruling Tory councillors chose to rip the heart out of Norfolk. A thousand service jobs will go and many others in the private sector will follow as a consequence.

The axe fell heavily on children, young people and the disabled. Services designed to keep children in a safe family environment will now be cut or reduced, increasing the risk that children will be taken into care. Foster and adoption services will be cut, even though keeping children in institutions is the least preferable and most expensive option. Sensory support services for deaf and blind people will be cut by nearly £½ million. Another £½ million will go from services which support those with mental health difficulties to live independently.

And if that wasn’t enough to turn a blue rinse pink, in a move which will cast eternal shame on its proponents, confidential expert advice services for young people are being ended in perhaps the most severe attacks on youth services anywhere in England. It will, of course, create future problems and greater funding needs as well as devastate lives.

This was another Valentine’s Day Massacre and the gangsters wore blue suits. And it was a massacre of the innocents. It is not ‘bloated local government bureaucracy’ under attack, but the very essence of what makes a society civilised: the real ‘Big Society’ of mutual support without an opt-out clause which requires all who can to contribute to the protection of the vulnerable - and to the promotion of what is valuable. UK local government services and the welfare state cannot depend on the often not-forthcoming charity of under-taxed ‘philanthropists’. Publicly funded services were created because of the inadequacy of Victorian charity.

What we are witnessing is an attempt to return to dependency on the overstretched generosity of the most caring - who already contribute more than their share to family, community and civic life. The funding of support services via taxation - national and local - is being destroyed under the guise of strengthening society. Given its council’s enthusiasm for this, Norfolk may have to change its boundary signs from ‘Nelson’s County’ to ‘The Heartless County’. Some local wags are already calling this destructive process – and perhaps its outcome – as ‘Norfolking services’.

This year is just the beginning. The council’s ‘Big Conversation’ consultation was a Big Con. It fell on deaf ears and next year’s county budget will see the Tory axe return for many services which mobilised public support this time round.

But such cuts are not taking place without resistance. If Norfolk’s Valentine’s Day Massacre lacked romance it did not lack tragedy and drama. Several hundred dedicated staff and service users, alongside ‘Norfolk Coalition Against the Cuts greeted axe-wielding Tory councillors with bloodstained banners and placards listing the victims of the slaughter: ‘youth services’, ’support for the disabled ‘.

Several people disrupted the council budget meeting and were ejected. Three were temporarily arrested then ‘de-arrested’. The campaign will continue to grow.

Throughout Eastern England, campaigns against the cuts are emerging with the Spring flowers. The Suffolk Coalition for Public Services hosted a meeting in Ipswich on 12 February, Cambridge Against the Cuts had a demonstration on February 12th and has a lobby on the 15th. A similar group in Southend meets on the 16th, with a platform shared by unions and students. Milton Keynes will see a meeting on the 18th, Harlow one on the 24th. A hundred Suffolk firefighters, their families, and supporters, marched through Ipswich on Saturday 12 February to protest against proposed cuts to Suffolk Fire Service.

And a national ‘March For The Alternatives’ is being organised by the TUC in London on Saturday 26 March, bring together hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens to demand alternative government policies. Dozens of coaches are already being booked by unions and local anti-cuts coalitions to take people from East Anglia.

There are alternatives to Con-Dem slash and burn, of course. The £81 billion budget deficit the government chooses to pay off in a few years is neither unprecedented - one of many such myths - or unfundable by more civilised means.

More than £100 billion a year is lost to the UK revenue from corporate tax evasion and tax avoidance: Vodaphone dodged up to £ 6 billion UK taxes by moving income to a Luxembourg subsidiary; Boots saw its UK annual tax payments drop from £131 million to £20 million upon moving its HQ to Switzerland; Cadbury’s - now based in Switzerland - will similarly avoid £ millions of UK revenues which could have funded the services of Norfolk County Council or others. Topshop, part of the Arcadia group run by Sir Philip Green, the Con-Dem government’s ‘efficiency adviser’, paid a record £1250 million dividend to its owner (Sir Philip’s wife, Tina Green) in 2005. She lives in Monaco so she avoided paying UK income tax of around £285 million – enough to pay the salaries of 20,000 UK nurses.

And of course there are the banks. Despite government rhetoric, massive bonuses continue. This recently forced the resignation of Lib Dem Treasury Spokesperson Lord Oakshot. HSBC transfers profits to the UK via Dutch subsidiaries avoiding as much as £2000 million in UK taxes. Norfolk’s budget is small beer compared to this.

And yet the Tory councillors of Norfolk have not screamed for tax justice instead of service slashing. And Norfolk’s MPs , all Tory or Lib-Dem, have not rallied to the defence of the county’s public services or demanded government action to raise revenues from rich tax dodgers instead of attacking the young, the deaf or the mentally ill.

This will not be forgotten and may well affect the outcome of the May 2011 local elections and local results in the next General Election. The Silence of the Lambs (North Norfolk’s Lib-Dem MP, Norman Lamb MP, that is) and his Westminster pals - Tory whip Chloe Smith and others - will be remembered by the young, the disabled, the unemployed and their families across Norfolk when it comes to the vote.

And in Norfolk on every 14 February from now on, families will remember the 2011 massacre of services which could have been avoided if Con-Dem politicians had put ideology and opportunism aside and, well, simply had a heart.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Looking on South Africa

By David Seddon

I spent the first two weeks of January 2011 with my daughter, visiting Cape Town, where my second son is currently working and living with his South African girlfriend. The trip was memorable for many reasons. For example, while Norfolk and the rest of the UK froze, Cape Town experienced its hottest period of the summer, with temperatures hovering for several days between 35 and 40 C. On the day I arrived, we spent the afternoon in the sweltering sun, at Newlands, watching Tendulkar bat against Steyn – the world’s best batsman against the world’s best bowler – in the India-South Africa test match series, against the backdrop of Table Mountain and a sharp blue sky.

But the visit was also memorable for less hedonistic reasons. This was the first time in 15 years since I had last been in Cape Town, and the first time in more than 45 years since I lived there, as a young man, teaching African prehistory at the University of Cape Town and experiencing apartheid at its height. I recall, all too well, how, on the first day I arrived, in September 1964, the students at UCT were demonstrating against the introduction of 90-day detention-without-trial for suspected ‘terrorist’ activities, and also how, on the last day of my two-year period of living and working in South Africa, as I flew out of Johannesburg, Hendrik Vervoerd, the Prime Minister - often called the “Architect of Apartheid” for his role in shaping the implementation of apartheid policy when he was Minister of Native Affairs - was assassinated.

As I visited and re-visited, for example, the District 6 Museum - which recorded the brutal ‘clearance’ and effective destruction of a once vibrant local Cape community - Robben Island - where Nelson Mandela and so many opposition political activists had been confined for so many years - and some of the townships in the Cape Flats - where many square miles of shanty dwellings grew up under apartheid - I was struck first by how much had changed, since those days of White supremacy, when I lived in South Africa, in the relatively short time since Mandela was freed from jail (in February 1990, after 27 years in prison, mainly on Robben Island) and the African National Congress became the ruling party (in 1994).

Wherever we went, I was struck by the inter-mingling of South Africans of different colours, ethnic and linguistic groups, by a sense of vibrancy and activity, and by constant reference to ‘post-apartheid South Africa’. There is an emerging Black middle class and the once ‘White-only’ universities are now multi-coloured. Transport is de-segregated; shops and super-markets cater to different tastes and cultural traditions. The test match at Newlands, in a former ‘White southern suburb’, attracted people of all kinds, and the football match I struggled to get into, in the former World Cup stadium, was a heaving mass of fans of all descriptions. Those who have seen the film Invictus, with Morgan Freeman as President Mandela and Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar, the captain of the South African rugby team that won the 1995 World Cup, will recognise the uplifting experience of this new diverse nation united in a great sporting success – particularly those who also remember the sanctions previously applied – in the UK and elsewhere - against South African rugby under apartheid.

And yet, much remains to be achieved. Many are disappointed with the limited achievements of the ANC government and its presidents - first Nelson Mandela and then Thabo Mbeki, and now Jacob Zuma) – despite their iconic status as leaders of the liberation movement; and there is growing opposition, both formal (the main challenger to the ANC's rule is the Democratic Alliance - led by Helen Zille, a feisty woman of German parentage - which received 15% in the 2006 election and 17% of the vote in the 2009 election) and informal. The majority of the population, mainly Black, but significantly in the Cape also ‘coloured’, remains disadvantaged and deprived, with low incomes, poor housing and living conditions, limited access to health and education, and high levels of unemployment. There is a widespread problem of violence, domestic, intra- and inter-community, particularly in the townships.

But South Africa is a dynamic, rapidly changing place, in which – although there is poverty and deprivation – there is also great hope and optimism. It is, and will be, a major influence on the other countries of southern Africa and a symbol of transformation for Africa and the developing world as a whole. Let us hope that the hope and optimism is fulfilled, for we shall all benefit, directly or indirectly, from the fulfilment of the dream of Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela, the first president of the ‘new’ South Africa, of a democratic state, a harmonious, multi-racial society, and a sustainable developing economy, providing a good life and well-being for all its citizens.

Photo: Morgan Freeman as President Mandela and Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar, captain of the Springboks rugby team in the film Invictus

Land of Milk and Honey?

By Charlotte Du Cann

This winter like thousands of other people in Britain I came down with flu. I’ve spent days shivering and coughing and feeling creaky and low. I walk about slowly and feel cut off from life all around me. Last year there was a big panic about this “bug” and it grabbed headlines everywhere. It was called swine flu because it originated amongst pigs in North America.

This year something else about the global immune system went viral: the fate of the world’s honeybees. Since 2003 crops sprayed with systemic pesticides have been wreaking havoc among bee populations, some commercial apiaries losing up to 70% of their hives. In spite of widespread evidence and scientific proof that have led several countries in Europe to ban them, England and America still use these toxins (known as neo-nicotinoids). This weekend the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) is being challenged by its members to withdraw its support for the companies who make them. Without consultation, the BBKA board had endorsed the products of four pharmaceutical companies (including BayerCropScience), allowing them to be labelled “bee friendly”. They received £17, 500 p.a. for their compliance.

In the documentary, Vanishing of the Bees, a female worker bee forages for pollen on a sunflower in the diligent way she has done for millions of years. Trying to wash the toxic chemicals from her body, she loses her way along the natural spiral of the giant flower and falls. The narrator remains silent. Because in that moment none of us require rational explanation for what we can see so clearly. The pesticides attack the immune system of the brood and make the hive vulnerable to disease and parasites. The bees, one of the most highly tuned, social creatures of the planet, lose their sense of direction and cannot find their way home.

At what point do we wake up about our fate? At what point do we realise that what happens to pigs in a factory farm will happen to ourselves? When we put cows to work on a 24-hour schedule, shoot their calves at birth and never allow them to eat grass in meadows that it will affect the milk we give to our children? At what point do we wake up to the fact that the pharmaceutical companies with their billion dollar turnovers have no care for any creature, including ourselves (indeed are eager to make profit from our deteriorating immune systems). And at what point does something within us fight back?

At the London Bee Summit in December there was a moment when everything shifted.There were 13 organisations that came to speak – beekeepers, scientists, teachers, wildlife campaigners, organic gardeners and England's first community supported apiculture, Bungay Community Bees. As Lord Henley and Tim Lovett from the BBKA boasted how Britain was the most advanced in its modern methods of beekeeping, there was a great murmuring among the audience. There was a defiant mood in the room and barbed questions from the floor. We weren’t pesky individuals who were angry with the System, we were people who loved bees and flowers finding ourselves in convergence - rising up in defence of our greatest and most ancient ally on earth (90% of our crop species are pollinated by honeybees). “The bees give, give, give and we take, take, take,” said Heidi Hermann of the Natural Beekeeping Trust. “Don’t imagine science will save us, it’s our lifestyle that has to change”. Everyone stood and cheered.

In his book The Empathic Civilisation, Jeremy Rifkind suggests we are shifting our consciousness from its earlier forms (theological, ideological, psychological) towards what he calls the dramaturgical and the bio-spheric. These are ways human beings evolve their relationship with the world. The first is to do with action and the second to connecting with all lifeforms on earth.

It’s hard to connect with climate change, to see how our carbon-intensive lifestyle results in the floods of Brisbane. It’s hard to connect this cappuccino on the café table with the milking sheds of the proposed Nocton superdairy, or the cod and chips in your hand with the thousands of dead fish being thrown back into the sea each day. But that is what is being required of us. An act of imagination, a reconnection with our fellow creatures, an awareness that every fierce, affectionate act we do in defence of our home counts. And it’s an ensemble act when we do.

Since the summit there has been a convergence of campaigns demanding the banning of the noxious neo-nicotinoids from the Co-op’s Plan Bee to Buglife's draft letter to MPs. Avaaz has collated 800,000 signatures within the space of a week. These might seem insignificant moves. But they aren’t. Because we are not just putting our names down, we're making contact with one of the greatest organisational forces on the planet. We’re tuning into the natural harmony of the earth, and deliberately breaking from the discord of an artificial, controlling power. A mindset that says nothing is valuable except the payroll of a tiny minority of dark-suited men. A mindset that rides like a varroa mite on the back of a honeybee.

Sometimes you get sick for a reason. Sometimes a whole nation has to get sick for a reason. You haven’t paid attention to something that needs changing. It’s the way your body tells you that things are out of balance and you have lost your way. And you’re going to need a medicine that no pharmaceutical company could ever manufacture.

Because it’s a sweet medicine - one that comes straight from the heart.

Further reading: Open letter to the BBKA by Barefoot Beekeeper, Phil Chandler,

Michael McCarthy's articles in The Independent, Have We Learned Nothing Since Silent Spring? and British Beekeepers Fume. . .

Nick Mole's speech at the London Bee Summit. Pesticide Action Network (PAN UK) http://www.pan-uk.org/

Charlotte Du Cann is a member of Bungay Community Bees.

Photo: Bungay Community Bees by Mike Southern; sunflower and marigold seeds by Mark Watson.

Plenty More Fish in the Sea

By Mark Crutchley

What was once a byword for plenty is beginning to look like a rather hollow saying thanks to the destructive power of the fishing industry. With modern radar and spotter planes to locate the fish; artificial islands to lure them into certain locations and nets and lines which empty the seas over great areas, we are not so much harvesting the world’s fish resources as waging a war against fish from which they may never recover. Some research has suggested that unless we change our policies then by the middle of this century far from there being plenty more fish in the sea, there may actually be none at all.

In the Northern seas, which have been intensively fished for the longest time, there is a clear trend away from catches being made up of larger, higher level fish, towards smaller, lower level ones. We have fished out the stocks of large fish such as cod in many areas and are now left catching what was once their prey. The extent of the decline is difficult to assess because there are no records of what fish stocks were before we began to harvest them. But studies on the Newfoundland cod fishery have indicated that by the time it was suspended in 1992, stocks had fallen to just one third of one percent of their original size.

As we move down the food chain we run the risk of destroying stocks of these fish too and leaving ourselves with nothing left to catch. When a fish stock collapses, it can do so with remarkable rapidity. In 1966 over 1.2 million tonnes of herring were being caught in the North Sea, but less than a decade later this had fallen to just 200,000 tonnes.

One of the most appalling wastes in the industry is the killing of sharks for their fins to make sharks fin soup. Just the fin is taken from the shark, which is then thrown back into the sea to die. Sharks have been the top predator in the oceans for over 400 million years but in the blink of an eye humans are in danger of wiping them out, with some populations having been reduced by over 99%. Globally up to 100 million sharks are being killed every year and many species are rapidly approaching critical levels. If we don’t take action now to stop the slaughter then extinction looms for many species. As a start, if we all boycotted any restaurant we see selling shark fin soup, and let them know that we were doing it and why, then perhaps we could begin to make it as unacceptable to sell this as it would be if we saw somewhere selling tiger steaks – it’s really no different. Supporting the work of the Shark Trust (http://www.sharktrust.org/) is another way to help tackle the problem.

We need to start bringing pressure to bear on those who can do something about this widespread destruction. The EU Common Fisheries Policy is in desperate need of reform so it favours the fish, rather than those out to catch them. The scientific evidence of decline has been evident for years yet still quotas are set well in excess of levels which will allow stocks to recover, or even just stabilise. We need to target the manufacturers of fish products and retailers too, to force them to raise their standards and use only sustainably caught fish.

If we want our children to have the chance to eat fish in the future, then we have to stand up and do something about this now, before it’s too late.

I wouldn’t normally want to use this column to publicise a television programme, but next week there is a series of three programmes on Channel 4 called the Big Fish Fight where well known chefs such as Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsey and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall investigate the devastating effects of the fishing industry on marine life. The programmes are on at 9pm on the 11th, 12th and 13th and promise to be well worth watching.

Happy New Year Mr Assange

By Trevor Phillips

It’s always nice to have prestigious visitors in the neighbourhood, so a belated welcome to Mr Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who has been resident in East Anglia for some days as a guest of Mr Vaughan Smith at Ellingham Hall near Bungay.

Mr Assange, of course, is the founder of WikiLeaks - which has provided five of the world’s most prestigious newspapers with extracts from US intelligence reports communicated via supposedly secret embassy cables.

The Swedish courts would like to interview Mr Assange about allegations regarding his sexual conduct. The US government wishes to entertain him for sharing with the world information which is so secret that reportedly only 3 million US citizens have clearance to read it. The US, according to Mr Assange, is hoping and probably plotting to use the first of the above to achieve the second.

The Guardian newspaper’s exclusive report of sexual accusations against Assange seem to dispel the notion that they are worthy of a credible rape charge - a matter which would rightly attract serious legal action. Certainly, some of the world’s most respected human rights lawyers and campaigners – including women unlikely to compromise on such an issue - have not found anything in the allegations to dampen their support for Assange. And the BBC ‘Today’ programme’s smutty questions to Assange about his number of sexual partners only elicited an impression of dignity which had escaped his interviewer.

Supporters of Assange share his fear that if he is extradited to Sweden it will be because that country’s government has done a dirty deal with the US to arrange his transfer to the US to face the music for the WikiLeaks role in the publication of the embassy cables. Assange fears extrajudicial execution.

It is true that one US presidential candidate has called for whoever leaked the files to be executed. And the farcical would-be candidate Sarah Palin – surely a bigger embarrassment to the US than the leaked cables – wants Assange tried for “the blood on his hands”. Presumably this is not the blood of the thousands of dead Iraqi and Afghan civilians revealed in the embassy cables to have resulted from US military action – or the blood of countless torture victims to which the US clearly turns a convenient blind eye. Or the victims of the secret US military operations in Yemen and Pakistan.

Should UK citizens be condemning Assange for revelations about confidential UK matters? I think not. Firstly there was little of surprise: who anyway thought Prince Andrew was fit for serious diplomatic responsibility? And it is no shock that Foreign Secretary William Hague promised the US that major UK arms contracts would go to US producers (though so much for the value-securing, competitive tendering procedures of these austere times). More shocking to some may be the way in which UK civil servants – whose identity the grateful US spooks were keen to protect - rejected any suggestion that then PM Gordon Brown meant what he said about possibly not replacing the Trident nuclear weapons system. Perhaps this tells us something about the ‘special relationship’ between the two governments.

I don’t feel my liberties or the interests of my fellow UK citizens were damaged by the WikiLeaks revelations. In fact I feel we owe a debt of gratitude to such leakers. Let us hope they can be just as successful in revealing the misdoings of the corporate world: the banks, oil companies and speculators who show so little regard for the human consequences of their otherwise unaccountable actions. WikiLeaks has already given us a taster of some UK oil companies’ anti-democratic operations in Africa and promises more on the world of finance.

If there is really a ‘Cyber-War’ going on, as some say, between organisations such as WikiLeaks and the global forces which use secret diplomatic and commercial ‘intelligence’ to deceive and exploit humanity, wage war and rape our planet, then I hope the leakers continue to leak like a herd of incontinent elephants.

And next time you are in our backyard Mr Assange, or - as international boundaries or localities seem increasingly irrelevant - at least free of gagging restrictions, I hope you will be a Guest Contributor to the One World Column.

‘The world as seen from Bungay and Beccles’ suddenly sounds like a great headline!

Growth and death

By Rupert Read

Death. Death. Death… Have I put you off yet?

We don't like thinking about death. We'd rather think about life. But death is of course an inevitable feature of life.

At least: of individuals' lives. Our hope for our species, and for this wonderful living planet, is that it will go on and on. That our individual lives (and deaths) are just part of the story of that common life without end.

I've been reading a fine book lately: Jeremy Rifkin's The empathic civilisation. Rifkin argues, controversially, that human civilisation is marked by a gradually increasing level of empathy for our fellow beings. The problem is that this increasing empathy has tended to fuel and be fuelled by increasing energy-use, increasing pollution – what the physicists call increasing 'entropy'. Because, as people's fellow-feeling spreads from their local area further afield, they want to go to those places, to trade and communicate with them, and so on. The huge challenge now facing us, according to Rifkin, is to turn a corner never turned before: to increase levels of mutual empathy, while decreasing the energy-use, resource-use, and pollution that is killing our planet. We have to achieve a new level of empathy with people living in vulnerable tropical locales, with many many species of non-human animals whose well-being is tied inextricably to our own, and (most crucially and most challengingly of all) with future people, those generations not even born yet. Unless we achieve an empathy – a genuine solidarity - with them, we will surely not do enough to reduce the entropic burden we are currently producing, that threatens to snuff them out before they are born…

The biggest obstacle to doing what is necessary to achieving this solidarity with our own descendants is the 'common sense' that our economy must keep growing and growing. We need to ask the question: What is our economy growing into? Well, as the economy grows, it eats up more and more of the Earth, colonises more and more of its treasures, and turns them into (harmful) junk and waste.

Something that has to keep growing in order to survive – whether it be a capitalist economy, or a cancer – cannot be indefinitely sustained.

Why are we so reluctant to countenance an end to economic growth? Why aren't we thinking more, at this time of profound ecological (and financial) crisis, of creating a new, prosperous economy that can be sustained indefinitely, a 'steady-state' economy that is not like a shark, but more like a stable woodland or a peaceful people, changing without needing to grow, without needing to invade more and more of the planetary ecosystem?

Jeremy Rifkin has a fascinating answer to this question. He believes that the idea that 'You can't stop 'progress'', and the connected idea that 'Growth is good' are tacitly ways of trying to avoid death. If we invest our - secular, materialist - faith in the fantasy of endless material 'progress' and endless economic growth, then we can distract ourselves (at least temporarily) from the harsh truth: that nothing can go on growing forever; that we as individuals are destined to die; and that if our society tries to go on growing, then it will destroy itself, through killing off its 'host', the living Earth.

We don't like to think about death – so we escape into New Age fantasies about reincarnation, or materialist fantasies about endless economic growth / 'progress'. There is a better way. Through empathic feeling and solidarity-in-action with one another, and with those who have come before us and those who will come after us, we can be part of something deathless. A 'steady-state' society, which will be able – wonderfully - to go on, indefinitely, giving new life to our children's children, and new hope to our imperilled civilisation.

Resilient and courageous women

By Marguerite Finn

On the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom stall at the 5th annual Peace Camp in the Forum last Saturday I had an interesting discussion with a lady about Afghanistan. She remarked that despite it having claimed a multitude of British military lives over two centuries, we know relatively little about the country itself or what it is like for women living there.

I did a bit of research and found resilient and courageous women who knew exactly what they wanted from life. Take for example the secret girls schools, now emerging in Afghanistan. These small schools, some based in homes, are blossoming because girls are subjected to violence on their way to and from school. There is little security and threats come daily from either the Taliban or from kidnappers.

Female education was banned under the Taliban and school-going girls continue to be hassled by Taliban supporters. In response, a number of parents have set up underground schools to allow their daughters to continue studying despite the current escalating campaign of insurgent attacks around Kandahar. This is a particularly brave decision on the part of the parents, especially as districts in Kandahar are dotted with 'safe houses' used by Taliban insurgents infiltrating the city. The risk of being found out is great in areas where neighbour dare not trust neighbour. Nevertheless, the desire for knowledge and an appreciation of the benefits of education for women are even greater.

In another part of Afghanistan a similar spirit of defiance and creativity can be found. Parwan is a province to the north of the Afghan capital, Kabul, with a rich culture originally founded by Alexander the Great in 329BC. Today, Parwan is the site of a new skills centre set up with a grant from the Parwan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, to empower female breadwinners. There are 2,500 members of the Agricultural and Handicrafts Association of Parwan, a unique organisation which has helped pull women and their families out of poverty. What makes the association special is that from in 2007, when it was set up, it thought big and bold – not really what was expected from women in Afghanistan's male-dominated culture !

The female Director, Saleha Zarin, brought in 500 women with a broad range of existing skills and set about improving these and teaching them new, marketable ones. The activities include making jams, pickles and cakes, weaving carpets, tailoring, and farming saffron and livestock. The range has since been broadened to include new farming techniques. Membership costs around 80p for which the women become part of a ready-made cooperative. The association also takes on trainees with no existing skills and makes them self-sufficient in a matter of months.

At long last, things are beginning to improve on the ground for women in some parts of Afghanistan – but not everywhere. In Herat in the south of the country, officials report a 50 percent rise in female suicide over the past year. Many of these incidents involved women recently returned from Iran where they had fled to avoid the Taliban’s rule and where they had enjoyed a relatively better life. Returning in the hope that things had now improved, they found this was far from the case; they faced unemployment, poverty and violence.

However, this situation is not going unchallenged. Hamida Husseini, Director of the cultural department of the government’s directive for women's affairs in Herat, says they will be sending teams of people from house to house talking to young mothers and girls about their daily lives and problems, to learn how to support vulnerable families.

While the war in Afghanistan is unlikely to end anytime soon (especially now that 'vast, untapped mineral riches' have just been reported there), is it not encouraging to see Afghan women taking their lives into their hands?