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Changing what you buy won't save us

George Monbiot — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:59:37 PST

Small actions allow people to overlook the bigger ones and still claim they are being environmentally responsible

How many times have you heard the argument that small green actions lead to bigger ones?

I've heard it hundreds of times: habits that might scarcely register in their own right are still useful because they encourage people to think of themselves as green, and therefore to move on to tougher actions.

A green energy expert once tried to convince me that even though rooftop micro wind turbines are useless or worse than useless in most situations, they're still worth promoting because they encourage people to think about their emissions. It's a bit like the argument used by anti-drugs campaigners: the soft stuff leads to the hard stuff.

I've never been convinced by this argument. In my experience, people use the soft stuff to justify their failure to engage with the hard stuff. Challenge someone about taking holiday flights six times a year and there's a pretty good chance that they'll say something along these lines:

I recycle everything and I re-use my plastic bags, so I'm really quite green.

A couple of years ago a friend showed me a cutting from a local newspaper: it reported that a couple had earned so many vouchers from recycling at Tesco that they were able to fly to the Caribbean for a holiday.

The greenhouse gases caused by these flights outweigh any likely savings from recycling hundreds or thousands of times over, but the small actions allow people to overlook the big ones and still believe that they are environmentally responsible.

Being a cynical old git, I have always been deeply suspicious of the grand claims made for consumer democracy: that we can change the world by changing our buying habits. There are several problems with this approach:

• In a consumer democracy, some people have more votes than others, and those with the most votes are the least inclined to change a system that has served them so well.

• A change in consumption habits is seldom effective unless it is backed up by government action. You can give up your car for a bicycle - and fair play to you - but unless the government is simultaneously reducing the available road space, the place you've vacated will just be taken by someone who drives a less efficient car than you would have driven (traffic expands to fill the available road-space). Our power comes from acting as citizens - demanding political change - not acting as consumers.

• We are very good at deceiving ourselves about our impacts. We remember the good things we do and forget the bad ones.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't always try to purchase the product with the smallest impact: you should. Nor am I suggesting that all ethical consumption is useless. Fairtrade products make a real difference to the lives of the producers who sell them; properly verified goods - like wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council or fish approved by the Marine Stewardship Council - are likely to cause much less damage than the alternatives. But these small decisions allow us to believe that our overall performance is better than it really is.

So I wasn't surprised to see a report in Nature this week suggesting that buying green products can make you behave more selfishly than you would otherwise have done. Psychologists at the University of Toronto subjected students to a series of cunning experiments (pdf). First they were asked to buy a basket of products; selecting either green or conventional ones. Then they played a game in which they were asked to allocate money between themselves and someone else. The students who had bought green products shared less money than those who had bought only conventional goods.

The researchers call this the "licensing effect". Buying green can establish the moral credentials that license subsequent bad behaviour: the rosier your view of yourself, the more likely you are to hoard your money and do down other people.

Then they took another bunch of students, gave them the same purchasing choices, then introduced them to a game in which they made money by describing a pattern of dots on a computer screen. If there were more dots on the right than the left they made more money. Afterwards they were asked to count the money they had earned out of an envelope.

The researchers found that buying green had such a strong licensing effect that people were likely to lie, cheat and steal: they had established such strong moral credentials in their own minds that these appeared to exonerate them from what they did next. Nature uses the term "moral offset", which I think is a useful one.

So perhaps guilt is good after all. Campaigners are constantly told that guilt-tripping people is counterproductive: we have to make people feel better about themselves instead. These results suggest that this isn't very likely to be true. They also offer some fascinating insights into the human condition. Maybe the cruel old Christian notion of original sin wasn't such a bad idea after all.

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George Monbiot

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Will Tories delay Human Rights Act repeal?

Sunder Katwala — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:29:28 PST

The Conservatives may not complete the repeal of the Human Rights Act and the introduction of a new British Bill of Rights in their first term in office if they were elected to government. And it is also becoming increasingly difficult to work out what substantive difference the policy would be intended to make.

“I would like to think we could do it in the course of a parliament”, shadow Justice Secretary Dominic Grieve tells Joshua Rosenberg in an interview for his Standpoint magazine column.

Perhaps the more important part of the policy is that Britain will not pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights – so British citizens will keep the right to appeal to Strasbourg. (Tory Eurosceptics like to grumble about this, but in doing so they are usually appealing to the public’s inability to tell the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Union apart).

More broadly, he makes it perfectly clear that Britain will not pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights. We will not be able to send people to countries where they will be tortured, he promises. Whatever else happens, individuals alleging breaches of their human rights will still be able to take the British government to the European Court in Strasbourg

And so the new “British Bill of Rights” will seek to protect the convention’s rights British law, to prevent British citizens having to go to Strasbourg to protect those rights. Rather as the Human Rights Act has sought to do, it seems to me.

He outlines several options [for the new British rights bill]. One would be a completely new text. Another would be to use the existing convention while “glossing” it with new interpretation clauses. “But we have to end up with something that is compatible, in broad terms, with the European Convention.”

It seems very difficult, too, for the Conservatives to identify anything in the current HRA (as opposed to in the mythology of the HRA) which they would want to scrap.

What once looked like it might be a rather dangerous and regressive policy increasingly looks like a pointless one.

James Forsyth of the Spectator is unimpressed by the foot-dragging over the timing.

But Rosenberg concludes that Grieve may also face pressure over the content of his policy from those on the Tory right, and in the media, who wanted calls to “scrap the Human Rights Act” to be more than rhetorical.

The real problem Grieve faces is rebalancing his long-standing commitment to human rights against the instincts of his political supporters.

Indeed.

Why growing virgin vegetable oil to burn is crazy | George Monbiot

George Monbiot — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:47:09 PDT

The chief executive of Blue-NG implies he's greener than the Greens – but the argument for his grotesque trade falls flat

What makes more sense, burning virgin vegetable oil in car engines, or burning it in power stations? The answer is neither. In both cases you are snatching food from people's mouths.

But Andrew Mercer, chief executive of Blue-NG, the company which owns the UK's first power station running on vegetable oil, appears to believe that he is doing the world a favour.

In arguing the case for his grotesque trade, Mercer begins by maligning the Green party. He contends that "The Green party toured the country this summer during the European elections campaign in a bus fuelled by UK-sourced rapeseed biodiesel". Because this is a less efficient use of virgin rapeseed oil than burning it in power stations, he is greener than the Greens (or so he says). That someone else has allegedly done something even more damaging is hardly a persuasive justification. But is it true?

I spoke to the Green party this morning, and discovered that Mercer had left out a crucial piece of information. The biodiesel used in its bus was made from waste cooking oil, not virgin oil. As I've been arguing since I first started attacking the practice of feeding cars rather than people, used cooking oil is currently the only sustainable feedstock for biofuel: once it is unfit for human consumption it can only be dumped or burned. It makes sense to burn it in place of fossil fuels. The Green party has now published a response in the comment thread and is requesting a correction.

Burning virgin vegetable oil is an entirely different matter. In doing so, you are directly commissioning farmers to do one of two things: divert cropland which would otherwise have been used to grow food, or break land which would otherwise have been left fallow. In either case you are harming people or the environment.

Mercer says: "There are millions of hectares of land lying idle across the EU". Another way of putting it is that there are millions of hectares currently supporting wildlife and storing carbon. If farmers bring them back into production to fuel power stations like his, there would be dire consequences for wildflowers, butterflies, songbirds and other wildlife. Were it a choice between preserving this wildlife and feeding the hungry, I could understand the need for a pay-off. But the only reason that it's commercially viable to burn virgin vegetable oil in power stations in this country is that the government is perversely offering a massive subsidy. It gives generators two renewable obligation certificates for every megawatt hour of electricity they produce, which is twice as much as you get for onshore wind. I refuse to accept that the EU's wildlife must be sacrificed for what looks like a grant-harvesting operation.

As two papers published last year in Science show (here and here), the carbon released by ploughing idle farmland to grow biofuels takes many years to repay. If we're to have a high chance of preventing climate breakdown, the major cuts must be made today, so this policy makes no sense at all.

When you consider the other greenhouse gases produced by growing crops it looks even dafter. The Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen has estimated that emissions of nitrous oxide – a greenhouse gas arising from the use of nitrogen fertilisers – wipe out all the carbon savings biofuels produce (pdf), even before you take the changes in land use into account. It's significant that Andrew Mercer talks only about CO2. Even then he doesn't say how he has produced his figures – I strongly suspect that he doesn't take land use change into account. Were he obliged to consider all greenhouse gases from all sources, I suspect he would discover that burning virgin vegetable oil is far more polluting than burning fossil fuel.

Mercer then contends that oilseed rape is roughly the same price as it was 10 years ago. This isn't true either, as you can see from the IMF figures reproduced here. In October 1999, oilseed rape cost $398/tonne. Last month the average price was $857. Prices this year have consistently been about twice those of prices ten years ago. The idea that oilseed rape is just a "break crop" is risible. It is a major international commodity, grown because it makes money.

The notion that you can draw any conclusions about commodity trends from a single year's production in one small country is equally daft. It's as stupid as saying, for example, that a cold snap in the United Kingdom shows that global warming isn't happening. And no one would be dumb enough to do that, would they?

The reality is that whenever there's a global shortfall in rape production, as there was last year, palm oil helps to fill the gap. Compare this graph of palm oil prices to this one of rape oil prices and you'll see that the price trends are almost identical.

So while Mercer boasts that he is not burning palm oil in his power station, whenever his trade helps to cause a shortfall in rapeseed stocks, the result is likely to be an increase in the sales of palm oil. Growing rapeseed to burn is crazy, growing oil palm to fill the gaps is madness on a different scale altogether, in view of the massive impacts on climate, indigenous people and wildlife when the forests of Indonesia and Malaysia are cleared to plant it.

Like Biofuelwatch and other green groups, I will keep putting pressure on the government to drop its perverse subsidies. I'm offering Andrew Mercer a £10 bet that if we succeed, Blue-NG will stop burning virgin vegetable oils. This is what happened in the Netherlands: as soon as the Dutch government stopped paying companies to make electricity from food, the business ground to a halt. Let's bring this obscene, subsidised trade to an end here too.

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George Monbiot

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Be scared, be very scared

Paul Sagar — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:32:37 PST

The busier you are, the faster time passes. So right now it feels to me like we’re hurtling towards the day David Cameron will be in Number 10. And i’m increasingly scared.

I’m scared because of the Conservative’s rhetoric on economic policy. Tory grassroots have already launched an attack on the Financial Times (that renowned bastion of worker solidarity) for allegedly being biased against Cameron and Osborne.

But it’s not just the FT that’s sounding alarm bells about Conservative economic rhetoric.

Think tank Centre:Forum last week released a report on Tory economic proposals. Despite having many political differences with CF, over the past few months I’ve come to respect their economic output – and in particular, their chief economist Giles Wilkes – a great deal.

I’ve not had time to read the “Slash and Growth?” report yet, but I have read part of the conclusion posted on Free Thinking Economist:

It may seem odd to urge a future government to care about economic growth. But the Conservative’s extreme aversion to public debt risks producing policies that prioritize deficit reduction over all other objectives. Public debts have risen largely to allow private indebtedness to fall without producing catastrophic consequences for the economy. The prior rise in private indebtedness passed unnoticed by the same Conservative opposition that is now almost hysterically worried about a similar rise in public debt. This makes no sense; if the past few years tell us anything, it is that Britain’s macro-economy can be at far greater risk to private debts than public. …

If the next government is to take economic growth as seriously as the deficit, it should consider taking an economic path that allows for slightly more consumption. Japan’s experience during its long struggle against deflation is highly pertinent; twice (in 1997 and 2001) it introduced fiscal reforms to tackle the deficit, and twice achieved the precise opposite.27 Despite being an export-champion, its last fifteen years have been dire. If the next British government proceeds upon the basis of deficit reduction before growth, it risks achieving neither.

The natural reaction to this worrying conclusion about Tory plans is to think “but surely they can’t be so stupid; surely this is all just rhetorical posturing to garner votes, that will be abandoned post-election?”

But then if one reads Hopi Sen, such comforting thoughts quickly evaporate. It’s time to start getting worried.

Just what exactly is the O2 data limit?

ian.morris@cnet.co.uk (Ian Morris) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:06:02 PST

We're going to give you a cake, but you can eat only a certain undefined amount, and if you eat more than that, we'll fine you -- confused? You should be, this is about O2 data allowances

ConHome threatens civil war with Cameron over EU

Sunny H — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:05:24 PST

In anticipation of David Cameron’s u-turn on Lisbon, Tim Montgomerie has mounted what could charitably be described as a face-saving operation at ConHome, while trying to extract his own pound of flesh for the support.

He says:

Unless Vaclav Klaus u-turns again, the Lisbon Treaty is about to be ratified. The Conservative leadership will say that, if elected, there’ll be no attempt to ‘unratify’ it via a referendum. Lisbon is not the only problem in our relationship with the EU, goes the argument, and it would be a referendum that cannot undo Lisbon. I’m 99% certain of this position having worked the phones over the last 24 hours.

So far so unexpected. In fact Peter Oborne earlier predicted this with an article in the Observer: ‘Cameron has only himself to blame for this mess on Europe‘.

Tim Montgomerie then proceeds to counter expected criticisms with headers such as:
‘DAVID CAMERON PROMISED A REFERENDUM ON AN ‘UNRATIFIED’ LISBON TREATY, NOTHING ELSE’
and
‘DAVID CAMERON DESERVES THE CONTINUING SUPPORT OF EUROSCEPTICS’
and
‘THE NEXT CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT WILL SEEK A ‘MANIFESTO MANDATE’ FOR RENEGOTIATION’.

Again, so far so unexpected.

But David Cameron promised to The Sun in 2007 that:

Today, I will give this cast-iron guarantee: If I become PM a Conservative government will hold a referendum on any EU treaty that emerges from these negotiations.

That “cast-iron guarantee” is in tatters. As Cameron himself said in the same article:

Small wonder that so many people don’t believe a word politicians ever say if they break their promises so casually.

But what’s most interesting in Tim Montgomerie’s defence of Cameron’s new position is this:

If Britain’s relationship with the EU is fundamentally the same after five years of Conservative government the internal divisions that ended the last Tory period in government will look like a tea party in comparison.

That sounds rather like a thinly veiled threat to me. Put his favoured MPs David Davis or John Redwood MP or else…

Tim Montgomerie has written a good article but its main purpose seems to be to try and neutralise a Tory grassroots revolt while giving a clear signal to Cameron that a battle is nevertheless looming.

Unfortunately the Eurosceptics may not be as easily neutralised as Montgomerie hopes.

Paul Waugh reports:

Dan Hannan, who has tried his best not to give the leadership difficulties over all of this, was blunt today however about the idea of abandoning the referendum. Speaking on BBC’s Politics Show, he was asked what would happen if Cameron’s “cast-iron pledge” was dumped:

“That’s a question you’d have to put to him. I mean, it’s he who’s given his word, not me.” [my italics]
…
“My own view remains that there must be a referendum and the case for a British referendum does not depend on what happens in the Czech Republic or Ireland or Poland or anywhere else.”

That’s a pretty stark rejection of the Cameron and Montgomerie position.

Over at the Wall Street Journal Iain Martin is similarly scathing:

David Cameron gave British voters a cast-iron guarantee on a referendum on Lisbon and that guarantee is being broken. That may be because circumstances have changed, but still it’s a pledge that’s being abandoned, discarded or torn-up. As a consequence, the word ‘betrayal’ is going to be bandied about rather a lot.

More importantly, he pours cold water on the strength of the Eurosceptic movement.

Euroscepticism in the UK is in serious trouble. It is said the next Tory intake is overwhelmingly Eurosceptic and perhaps it is, but I suspect that will mean diddly-squat in the long-run. The other two main parties are signed up to the EU consensus. As a movement, Euroscepticism is a mess.

After the sceptics won the battle on a single currency (which had as much to do with Gordon Brown’s opposition as it did with their efforts) the movement effectively decommissioned intellectually. No enduring institutions or think-tanks were built to advance ideas for reform of the EU. Beyond endless calls for a referendum, and the important interventions of a few figures such as Dan Hannan MEP, there was virtually nothing of any value.

Ouch! Let the civil war commence.

Nokia N-Gage enters its endgame

richard.trenholm@cnet.co.uk (Rich Trenholm) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 09:33:02 PST

It's game over for N-Gage, as Nokia is killing off the N-gaming platform

Economist criticises Cameron over Kaminski

Newswire — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 06:25:25 PDT

THE lands between the Baltic and Black seas endured a 20th century of almost unimaginable horror: it brought war, genocide, famine, invasion, occupation, fascism, communism, economic turmoil and corruption. The politics and parties that emerged have been warped and confused by that awful past. They cannot fairly be judged by the standards of long-established democracies. But that does not mean, as Britain’s Conservatives almost seem to think, that they cannot be judged at all.

Earlier this year, David Cameron fulfilled a pledge to pull his Conservative members of the European Parliament out of the European People’s Party (EPP), the block to which they formerly belonged. Instead the Tory MEPs now form the core of a cobbled-together new group, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). One of their new partners is a mainstream centre-right party from the Czech Republic. But some of the others are less respectable. They include the Law and Justice Party of Poland, and in particular Michal Kaminski, a controversial MEP who has made remarks about homosexuals, and about a wartime massacre of Jews by Poles in Jedwabne (a town he once represented in the Polish parliament), which many find alarming.

…

But if this interpretation—charitable but plausible—mitigates the foolishness of Mr Cameron’s past decisions, it also raises an awkward question about his future.

It is this: if this shoddy, shaming alliance is the price he was obliged to pay his party for the changes needed to make it seem modern and compassionate, what sort of party is it that Mr Cameron leads? What else will its members demand, and what else—when his popularity and authority wane—will he be obliged to give them, after he becomes prime minister?

…more at The Economist

Kibera survived ethnic violence; now the water's running out

Paul Mason (BBC News) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:58:15 PDT

We are at a point in history where social crises keep crashing into environmental ones and a call out of the blue from contacts in Nairobi illustrates how rapidly.

Kenya, right now, is in the middle of a drought. In the rural north the drought is already destroying the nomadic way of life (see this report from the Observer, and this from the BBC).

But it is also impacting on the fragile social infrastructure of Kenya's urban slums.

I've reported several times from the Kenyan shanty town of Kibera - well known for its starring role in John Le Carre's The Constant Gardner. In the troubles of early 2008 it was ripped apart by inter-ethnic violence. Now the same community activists who tried to hold things together then are preoccupied with a more fundamental issue. Water.

Technically the 700,000 strong population of Kibera is supplied by the Nairobi water company. In reality, allege community activists there, they are reliant on "water mafias".

"There are so many water mafias in Kibera," says Marcy Kadenyeka, a worker with local NGO the Hakijami Trust. "It's done by individuals. People are disconnected without the knowledge of the water company and then a group of rich people dominate the water supply; they get the bad guys to disconnect your water and then you have to pay to reconnect."

The main water supply for Nairobi comes from two dams, one of which - Sasumua - is, in one of the poorest years of rainfall on record under repair as part of a project begun in 2007 and entitled the "Emergency Physical Investment Project". At the remaining dam, Ndaka-ini, the failure of the so called "short rains" to arrive in June meant that all of Nairobi had to go on water rationing. With some parts of the city reduced to one day of clean water supply per week, the government began digging boreholes to find alternative supplies.

Doris Moseti, a counsellor with the Mukuru Serving Network, another NGO, takes up the story:

"Now, with the drought the government is trying to dig new boreholes. But what's happening is the people who come to the boreholes are the rich ones, with their trucks and big tanks: they can afford to buy 10,000 litres of water and then they sell it to the poor people."

A combination of drought and this broken social structure has spiked the water price to between 20 and 50 Kenyan Shillings for 20 litres, for the past two months. Though 20 shillings this is only 16p, it is too much for many of Kibera's residents and is, they say, placing a new strain on household incomes.

Kibera's water supply is a mixture of piped water to a few owner-occupied dwellings and a stand-pipe system, controlled by "kiosks". Though the UN opened the first phase of a water sanitation scheme last year, and this year saw the first phase of slum clearance, replacing low-rise shacks with high-rise buildings.

This weekend slum-dwellers from across Nairobi are going to be rallying in Kibera as part of a global campaign to demand the constitutional right to clean water. Marcy reads me out a list of their demands over the phone. One sticks out:

"Extend regulatory remit of government beyond formal network to the informal market and poor people - that means ensuring rules on water quality."

Basically, the water system, say the residents, needs to be managed as it actually is, not as it appears in the official accounts. Since the residents groups say 68% rely on informal water sources - mafias, cartels, private water bowser trucks - it is impossible under the present system to ensure clean water.

The newspaper report on this in Nairobi's Daily Nation ends with the following hopeful phrase:

"Weather experts have given an assurance that the on-going rains will be enhanced since they are associated with the El Nino phenomenon."

But today's report by eminent scientist Sir Gordon Conway, into the impact of climate change on Africa, gives a lot less hope in the medium term. Conway says the science is so imperfect that we have no certain knowledge of how climate change will affect Africa, other than it will make it worse. East Africa will probably see rainfall increase over time, due to the El Nino phenomenon:

"In general the best assumption is that many regions of Africa will suffer from droughts and floods with greater frequency and intensity. The implication is that we have to plan for the certainty that more extreme events will occur in the future but with uncertain regularity. Adaptation thus depends on developing resilience in the face of uncertainty."

If East Africa's rain patterns do undergo permanen change, life in Kibera becomes worse for another reason - to do with sanitation. Like all visitors to the shanty town I have been introduced to the concept of the flying toilet: the plastic bag in which faeces are wrapped and thrown over the nearest wall, if possible avoiding hitting somebody passing by. Rivers trickle through Kibera, carrying much of its effluent. When there is heavy rain the rivers become the streets and the streets become open sewers.

Sir Gordon's report for the Grantham Institute shows how, within a few years, the social structure of many African countries will come under threat from climate change impacts that are not only bad but unpredictable. The local churches and NGOs, who are already waging an uphill struggle on issues of poverty, ethnic violence and corruption, will now find themselves on the front line of the climate change issue. Because, basically, Kenya - along with many other fragile democracies in Africa, is proving very slow at developing resilience.

If I think of all my encounters with Kibera, it goes like this: the first time I met the local organisers, in 2006, they were fighting to stop unjust evictions using mobile phone text messages; the second time they were trying to hold the line, unsuccessfully, against ethnic disintegration; the third time they were trying to get justice for victims of rape and violence and now they are down to the basics: there is not enough to drink. It would depress you unless you could hear the indomitable optimism in the voices of the people on the front line.

Back to basics

noreply@blogger.com (donpaskini) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:50:00 PDT

Last week, the Tories selected as one of their parliamentary candidates someone who is Deputy Director of an organisation which thinks we should scrap child benefit, means test pensioners' and disabled people's bus passes and privatise the state pension as part of a project to take more than £30 billion per year out of the pockets of people on modest and average incomes.

Since this candidate's selection, there has been a massive outcry and backlash, and the local Conservative association has decided to review the whole selection process...

...because she had a relationship with a married man four years ago.

It's a really rather sad insight into the weird world of internal Tory politics and priorities.

The simple fact is that the Tories' approach to the European Parliament is quite mad

noreply@blogger.com (Conor Ryan) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:37:00 PDT

Iain Dale is demanding that those who criticise the Polish MEP Michal Kaminski should apologise because the Chief Rabbi of Poland has been prevailed upon to say that the man is not an anti-semite these days and to criticise a headline run by the New Statesman suggesting he was asking the UK Tories to ditch their alliance with him.

Yet, as Toby Helm points out, Rabbi Schudrich said in an email to the New Statesman that he has not retracted:

"It is clear that Mr Kaminski was a member of the NOP, a group that is openly far-right and neo-Nazi...Anyone who would want to align himself with a person who was an active member of NOP and the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne, which was established to deny historical facts of the massacre ... needs to understand with what, and by whom, he is being represented."

Moreover, Helm explains that the new comments come as a result of 'enormous pressure ' - bullying in plain terms - from Kaminski's Law and Justice Party to retract, but he has not done so. As Helm says:

I suspect that if one really wants to get to the heart of what Schudrich thinks, one should stick to the statement he originally gave to the New Statesman, before the row really got going. Cut through the political mud-slinging, go back to the time when he gave an opinion under no pressure at all. Then he raised questions about Kaminski's past association with a neo-Nazi leaning party, and said people needed to think clearly before getting alongside such individuals. The Tories want to portray Schudrich as a great supporter of Kaminski because they are in a mess over their new EU allies. The truth, I reckon, is rather more complex and less helpful to David Cameron's party.

However much the defenders of Cameron's mad Euro-policy may grumble, the simple fact is this: at a time when the Tories could (and if they were rational, should) have continued in the EPP, the party of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, they instead chose to ally themselves with a motley crew of fringe parties and MEPs well outside even the right-wing mainstream. They did this purely to satisfy a bunch of Eurosceptic fanatics who had backed Cameron as leader. And they were quite happy to ditch their own respected leader at Strasbourg in the process, preferring to see Kaminski as their leader.

That some of their new allies have pretty unsavoury pasts (to quote Rabbi Schudrich "Mr Kaminski was a member of the NOP, a group that is openly far-right and neo-Nazi") adds to the oddity of it all. And no amount of huffing and puffing can detract from the sheer idiocy of such positioning, both for the Conservatives and for a Britain they hope to govern again.

Threshers goes into administration

Zoe Wood — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:03:16 PDT

Private equity owner First Quench appoints KPMG as administrators as it looks to sell 1,300-shop off-licence chain

The hunt is on to find a buyer for the troubled company behind the off-licence chain Threshers after the formal appointment of KPMG as administrators tonight.

The retailer's parent company, First Quench Retailing, confirmed that it had gone into administration and issued a statement confirming that its 6,500 staff would be paid until at least the end of next week.

"The board's discussions with KPMG confirm that the best prospects for the business is a sale as a going concern thereby preserving as many jobs as possible," said the company.

The group, which trades as Threshers, Wine Rack, Haddows and The Local on the high street, has 1,300 shops. KPMG said it would continue to operate the business as normal while seeking its sale as a going concern. Staff are due to be briefed tomorrow morning.

On Wednesday the business, which is owned by the private equity firm Vision Capital, said it was "actively considering" restructuring and its strategic options, adding: "It is no secret that the credit crunch has made a very competitive marketplace even more challenging."

Despite substantial investment by Vision Capital, the retail group fought a losing battle with its supermarket rivals, making a £30m loss last year.

Zoe Wood

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Halloween needn't be a nightmare

Tim Dowling — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:25:09 PDT

A personal guide to getting through Halloween by our expert Tim Dowling (hey, he's American)

There came a point when, as an American, I abandoned my cautious optimism regarding the steady rise of Halloween in Britain. I think it was the year I saw two costumed schoolchildren being chased down the road by a grown man armed with a stick. Their crime, apparently, was having the temerity to push his doorbell, although I'm sure there was more to it than that. There always is.

Before that night, I had harboured some small hope that Britain would one day grasp the true nature of Halloween, but now I realise my mistake. Halloween here is just a different thing. You have taken the tradition and given it your own twist, adding an element of threat and a general air of resentment at being coerced into participating.

But don't worry, I'm not going to try to convince you that trick-or-treating is not a form of extortion, nor that dressing up can be fun, even for adults. And I won't tell you to relax and enjoy Halloween (the way you do it, I don't enjoy it either). Instead I offer some simple advice on how to survive Halloween, since it doesn't appear to be going anywhere.

How should I prepare for Halloween night?

Participation in Halloween is not mandatory, but opting out won't stop it happening. Don't try to pretend that you're not at home; sitting in the dark listening to the doorbell go every 10 minutes will only make you feel more resentful. If you don't wish to be at home to trick-or-treaters, just go out.

And if you're staying in, you are better off joining in. Buy some cheap sweets and shove them in a bowl. If you resent having to provide treats for marauding hordes of masked children, console yourself with the idea that you are contributing to the ruination of their teeth. Don't put all your sweets in the bowl straightaway, though – it encourages snatching and you'll run out too soon – and don't give out anything too desirable. You don't want word of your exceptional generosity to get round.

I'm ready. Now what?

A lit pumpkin in the window signals your participation and, to some extent, allows you to set your own hours – 6pm to 8pm, say. A pumpkin on the doorstep also works, and while it may attract vandals, it's actually just distracting them from vandalising your bins. In your mild, damp climate, a cut pumpkin only lasts about 12 hours anyway.

Is there anything else I should do in order to avoid instilling the sort of ill-feeling that can lead to criminal damage?

It's more what you shouldn't do: don't give out fruit or pencils; don't criticise children for slapdash or inappropriate costumes; don't hint that 19 is slightly too old to go about begging for fun-size Mars bars while dressed as a burglar.

How many children should I expect over the course of the evening?

This is a difficult question. One thing I have learned while living in London is that it's impossible to make any sort of prediction based on last year's figures. Some years you get dozens, some years you get none. A lot depends on whether you're in a block or a terrace, a flat or a house, or whether you live in the centre of a residential area or at its edge. Even the weather makes a difference. Put it this way: if you haven't seen more than two kids by 7.30pm, you can probably start eating the sweets.

What if my own children want to go trick-or-treating? How do I stop them?

You can't. Kids love Halloween. They've seen ET, they've heard about the sweets and nothing, not even, in my experience, a man chasing them down the road with a stick, will put them off the idea. You'll just have to grit your teeth and take them.

Don't get me wrong: going from door to door in a street where participation in the whole grim charade is running at less than 20% is nothing short of excruciating, and it doesn't get any easier with practice. But there are ways to make the experience shorter and less painful. Dress your children in costumes that are uncomfortable and hard to walk in. It's tempting to start by visiting close neighbours and the corner shop, but it's best to save these until the end as bait to lure your children back towards home. Don't be afraid to get on a bus that goes to a nicer neighbourhood or a known American enclave. When you get to the door, stand well back and let the children handle the awkward transactional phase of the operation. After half an hour of this, consult your watch and remind them of something they're missing on television.

I've been invited to a grown-up Halloween Party. What should I go as?

In the US, of course, the answer would be: anything you like. I once met a man at a Halloween party who was wearing a big grey box with windows all over it and a large silver "4" on the front. When I asked him what he was supposed to be, he said "4 Park Plaza", and after I stared at him in blank incomprehension for a few seconds he said, "It's the building where I work."

In Britain, the choices are starker – and simpler. You can either put in some vampire teeth or wear a mask of Munch's The Scream with a hoodie over it. But in the end you probably won't be punished for not wearing a costume, and you certainly won't be rewarded for trying too hard. If, like me, your first instinct on receiving such an invitation is to stay home, I would stick with that.

At what point can I consider Halloween to be officially over?

When you have eaten the entire economy bag of Haribo, or 9pm, whichever comes first – although in some areas it's advisable to wait until the police have given the all-clear.

Tim Dowling

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Top Tory blogs all global warming deniers

Newswire — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:53:13 PDT

None of the top ten Conservative bloggers believes the theory that man-made global warming is an established fact; all ten reject David Cameron’s view that the issue should be an urgent priority if the party were in government.

Party leader David Cameron has said that “the dangers of climate change are stark and very real. If we don’t act now, and act quickly, we could face disaster”.

The Tory blogs could hardly disagree more. The scale of the Tory netroots revolt over climate change is revealed by Next Left’s survey of the climate change views of this year’s top 10 Conservative blogs, as identified by Total Politics magazine’s blog awards poll.

Indeed, Next Left can now declare that the unlikely winner of ‘greenest top Tory blogger’ is John Redwood MP, who had never previously been mistaken for Zac Goldsmith. Redwood’s combines his own scepticism with the argument that it would be prudent to take some steps to adapt to possible negative consequences, while welcoming the benefits of global warming too. This would appear to mark Redwood out as a deep green when compared to his fellow Tory top bloggers.

….more at Next Left

Aggression can pay

claudecarpentieri@hotmail.com (claude) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:58:00 PDT

The debate on the crumbling of teachers' authority continues.

On Monday we wrote about the changes in dynamics inside state schools. It's swung from one excess to the other: from the days of corporal punishment to the relentless rise in violence from pupils.

Last week's two court cases involving teaching staff attempting to restrain aggressive pupils reminded society of the pariah status recently acquired by state schoolworkers.

Some commenters made the argument that pointing at this deteriorating situation is none other than "jumping on yet another populistic bandwagon", as the rate of teachers experiencing physical assaults is a mere "4,1%"- one in twenty-five.

But can you imagine if the same blase' approach was applied to any other area of public life? Walk around a museum and count the assistants. Imagine you found out that one in twenty-five was whacked in the face last year. Would you argue that it's not that bad and you should put it in a context, perhaps because "it never happened to me"?

And would you do the same with one in twenty-five bus drivers (experiencing, incidentally, the same assault rate as teachers'), nurses or firemen? "Populistic bandwagon" or totally unacceptable violence to be stamped out with no ifs and no buts- especially as it concerns our schools?

Just to give you a reference point, last year Derbyshire police recorded a rate of assaults on their staff of around 9%. Not that far off, are we? And consider that is the one job that most directly deals with violence- crimes, fights and assaults, the like.

Today Jenni Russell in the Guardian points out the dangers of this "inversion of power" in our state schools: "It serves no one", she adds "not the children who cannot learn in chaotic classes, or the teachers hamstrung by our anxieties. It is, ironically, a deep disservice to the disruptive pupils themselves, who discover that aggression can pay".

You can read Russell's full article here.

Symbian App Store Goes Live

Gordon Kelly — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 05:04:00 PDT

Facebook, Twitter and Qik apps on the 'Horizon'.

The BBC, The BNP and No Platform

Chris H — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:53:51 PDT

Yes I know I'm a bit late to the party on this but what the hell!

The appearance of Nick Griffin of the BNP on a recent edition of Question Time on the BBC has ruffled a few feathers in the political and activist landscape, particularly among those who subscribe to a concept known as 'No Platform'.

No Platform is a political position that actively opposes allowing alleged fascists to express their views in public. It basically means that the propogation of fascist ideas and concepts shouldn't be allowed to be vocalised using publicly funded platforms or in areas where the left controls the platform, such as student unions, trade unions and also the media organisations such as the BBC. Leastways that's what I can pin this concept down to.

So the BBC offering a platform to people like Nick Griffin goes against the principle of No Platform and will generate protests and action. Which is what happened at the BBC studios.

The supporters of No Platform include some surprising personalities such as George Carey, ex-Archbishop of Canterbury as well as a huge swathe of the left.

As for me I'm finding it very difficult to support the principle of No Platform. There are a number of reasons why.

Whether we like it or not Griffin and Brons are democratically elected MEPs. Together with other BNP candidates in the Euro elections they garnered the support of just under a million voters in the UK.
Those who try and implement a No Platform stance are in a way guilty of censoring free speech and debate in the public arena. The disgruntled right would cry discrimination as well. The left can claim it's not censorship but the general public are going to read it another way.
We set a precedent for denying a platform on political grounds when there may come a time when the boot is on the other foot. Then we'd have to struggle under the banner of hypocrisy.
We create right-wing martyrs. Martyrdom is very powerful.
We set ourselves up as arbiters of what the public should be hearing in terms of democracy and the democratic process. The public hate the attitude of 'we know best' politicians, guaranteed to lead to an unwelcome reaction come polling time.
To my mind it's an extension of what I've seen the left do in other public situations, such as with Rocco Buttiglione - the disenfranchisement of people because their particular beliefs don't fit in with what some see as acceptable.

So I do grudgingly support Griffin's appearance on QT but I think the way they prepared the event was atrocious and carried out in the worst possible way. There are a number of things which went very badly which gave succour to the BNP and their supporters

First off, QT became the Nick Griffin Show. Worse than that it became the Let's Beat Up on Nick Griffin Show. He was subjected to a lot of attack but it left him looking like the victim of bullying. At the start of the show it seemed they were all queuing up to smack him with a verbal brickbat whilst Dimbleby as head boy pinned him down. Chalk one up to the fascists there.

Secondly the choice of guests seemed designed to poke every facet of Griffin's fascism: Jack "I'm Not Going To Catch Eye Contact With Griffin" Straw, with Jewish descendants, Baroness Warsi, a muslim, Bonnie Greer, an African-American and Chris Huhne, well Chris Huhne.

Thirdly the inability of Jack Straw to actually respond to any question without doing his "I hate Nick" speech. It left him looking like a twerp at one point, with Warsi actually following on and answering the question. One down for the establishment.

Fourthly the stupid, stupid decision to limit the debate to things revolving around BNP policies. Where were the questions on Europe and the damned Constitution, where were the questions on Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq?

Were there any good points to the programme? Yes, Bonnie Greer showed that it is possible to make fascists look stupid within a democratic framework.

So to sum it up I can't support the No Platform principal but God help us if we can't get together and show the policies of the BNP for what they are - fascist and racist.

The spotter cards police use

(author unknown) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:51:31 PDT

This kind of highly confidential document – pictured above – is rarely seen by the public.

These so-called "spotter cards" are issued by police to identify individuals they consider to be potential troublemakers because they have appeared at a number of demonstrations.

The photographs are drawn from police intelligence files. This card was apparently dropped at a demonstration against Britain's largest arms fair in 2005.

H is Mark Thomas, the comedian and political activist. Asked why it was justifiable to put Thomas, who has no criminal record, on this card, the Metropolitan police replied: "We do not discuss intelligence we may hold in relation to individuals."

Thomas had been acquitted of criminal damage after attaching himself to a bus containing arms traders at a previous fair.

The Met said: "This is an appropriate tactic used by police to help them identify people at specific events … who may instigate offences or disorder."

The arms fair "is a biannual event that is specifically targeted by known protest groups, who in the past have stated their intention was to shut down or disrupt the event." As the cards are "strictly controlled", the officers who lost it were "dealt with".

On Comment is Free today Thomas writes: "Protesters – or, as the police call them, 'domestic extremists' – are the new 'reds under the bed'."

• Are you featured on the card? How do you feel about it? Let us know by emailing news.desk@guardian.co.uk

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Angry feminist Tuesday

noreply@blogger.com (Penny Red) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:46:00 PDT

I get angry when debates are skewed by lies and weasel words on both sides, as is happening right now with the debate around prostitution, trafficking and the Policing and Crime Bill currently going through the House of Lords. I get angry when the people whose side I'm nominally on, the people out to protect women first and foremost, the good guys goddamnit, make up, distort and exaggerate statistics. And I get angry when media outlets use that exaggeration to dismiss the whole debate - in this case, to claim that there are almost no trafficked sex-slaves working in Britain today , a claim which has led other commentators to alledge that trafficked women are not worth public funds and anyone suggesting otherwise is -and I quote - 'hysterical'.

I get angry when punters, bystanders and sex worker organisations claim that it's not okay to criminalise men who rape sex slaves, because that might make it a little harder for non-coerced prostitutes to earn their money, or even - shock, horror! - make it harder for yr average punter to get his no-strings fuck.

I get angry when groups that pretend to be supporting women try to push through illiberal clutches of contradictory laws based on bad statistics. And I get angry when I see clusters of people tearing each other apart over laws that, even if they are put into place, will leave us with exactly the same situation: namely that prostitution, an industry in which the overwhelming majority of sellers are women and nearly all buyers are men, will not actually be legal or illegal - it'll be just about illegal enough and just about stigmatised enough that those who sell sex get almost no protection or support from the law or their local communities, whilst still just about legal enough that 10-15% of men are free to pay for sex without having to consider the humanity of their partner whenever they so choose.

I get angry, too, when I make the mistake of reading my words twisted by idiots online, my feminism rubbished, my ideals mocked. I get angry when I hear, time and time again as my profile as a feminist writer grows, that I'm a prude, a frigid bitch, that I hate sex, that I believe in a sterile female supremacist state, that my sisters and I believe all heterosexual sex is rape. I get angry when I am lied about. No other kind of political writer gets their very selfhood, the deepest most intimate parts of themselves, trampled in the most malicious of ways by total strangers - only the few bloggers, journalists and authors who are brave enough to tackle feminist issues in the public sphere.

I get angry when I'm told that I am not allowed to take offence when women are objectified and served up as pieces of meat by the media, when I'm called a prude for hating the prevalence of lap-dancing clubs and wanting those clubs to be properly designated and licensed, when I'm called a crazy, bitter bitch for hating the fact that I can't leave my fucking house or even open a goddamn webpage without seeing pictures of unreal female bodies served up as the ultimate ideal that I should aspire to, when I hate being told to buy more things so that I can look perpetually young, odourless, hairless, shaved, de-sexed and dehumanised. I get angry when I'm ridiculed for wanting to own my sexuality, and wanting others to be allowed to own theirs.

I am a feminist. I am pro sex-worker, morally indifferent to the notion of a sex trade, fantastically opposed to the sex trade as it operates in Britain today - full of rape, abuse, sexual slavery, grooming, coercion and objectification. The voices of prostituted women who aren't having a good time are the only ones we don't hear - plenty of rape apologists, plenty of feminists getting it wrong, and plenty of people responding by telling us that those feminists are hysterical bitches who hate all men and all sex. A few brave people are trying to redress this balance: Rebecca is one of them. Go and read her blog before you read anything else.

All this anger makes me horny.

And when I'm horny and angry I need to get off if I'm to be any use to myself or anyone, not that masturbation is ever that much of a chore. So I go hunting online for a quick pornographic fix. But yknow what? All the porn I can find online involves raping, hurting, punishing and shaming women, endless thumping shots of cocks going into holes that just leave me cold and upset. I click on one that looks like it might be alright, only to watch thirty seconds of a young woman actually crying and screaming 'ow, ow, ow' whilst a disembodied cock fucks her in the anus. I hate it. It makes me want to throw up. Does that mean I'm a frigid bitch who hates sex? Apparently, yes.

The truth is that we have not even begun to tackle the sexual objectification of women in our culture. Slapping a ban on lapdancing clubs or fiddling around with the laws on prostitution will achieve sweet nothing unless it's backed up by cultural change - although it's always our right, as feminists and advocates of free speech, to object to the treatment of women in the sex industry or anywhere else, if we so choose. We are trying to hold back the sea, when instead we need to be building armoured submarines and diving into the water all guns blazing.

I am personally, right here and now, sick of being objectified by this culture, sick of denying my selfhood and performing for others and apologising for my wants and needs and desires. I'm only 23, and already I have starved my body into nothingness, I've nearly died from hunger and come out the other side, I've stripped on stage and felt no joy, I've experienced date rape and had sexual partners tell me I'm dirty and women tell me I'm a slut to my face, and every day I am forced to see thousands of pictures of how my body should look - plucked, shaved, starved, limp, white, pre-pubescent, drained, dead - and encouraged to beat myself into that mold - and yet people tell me that my experience is invalid, that my feminism is anathema, that I am 'bitter'. As a woman in my 20s I am told that I should constantly aspire to look sexy - but I shouldn't sleep with too many people, I shouldn't sleep with anyone on the first date, I shouldn't appear too keen, I shouldn't be 'slutty'. I am an object; I should aspire to be the best possible object I can be.

THAT is what objectification means. It's a denial of selfhood and sexuality and identity so absolute and all-encompassing that most of us don't even notice anymore that we've been duped.

Well, I'm sick of being an object. I'm sick of apologising for my 'frigidity', for my feminism, for my rage at not being allowed to express myself sexually and yet being expected to perform and bullied if I object to men, strangers or otherwise, treating me like chattel. There's something thundering inside me about to be unleashed, hemmed in by anger and the bawling of stupid, ignorant misogynists. I feel like my anger could howl away inside me and consume me if I don't let it out. I want to scream. I want to hit things. I want to climb on some high roof and yell that I'm a person, that all women are real people who deserve to be treated like human beings, until they come and drag me off for being 'hysterical'.

But don't mind me, I'm just your crazy neighborhood feminazi. Take me away before I upset somebody.

Stand up for the postal strikers

claudecarpentieri@hotmail.com (claude) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:20:00 PDT

Did you know that Royal Mail's chief executive takes home £3m a year- 166 times the salary of an average postal worker?

I wasn't sure whether the two-day strike announced by postal workers would be a good idea. I wasn't sure because a) I knew nothing about the details and b) at least nine news reports out of ten that I'd spotted or overheard fed a negative angle - mainly related to Christmas cards piling up.

It's very easy to be against a strike. Most are disruptive, inconvenient, dramatic - a pain in the arse, basically. But many people don't even bother to find out why walkouts are called. It doesn't involve Number One, does it? Reading about strikes is not a 30-second job either, it's taxing and, most likely, depressing.

Because if people bothered to find out, they'd simply register that the same may happen to themselves and their own job. Mounting pressure from bosses, unrealistic targets, pushy requests for overtime, subtle and not-so-subtle bullying practices, and so on, over a long period, until you've had enough.

All of the above justified by glaze-eyed soundbites and formulas that no-one quite fully understands: modernisation is one of them, and the other is "figures are down".

But if we always just think of Number One, who's going to stand up for us when it's our job that is put on the line?

When I finally had the opportunity to read about the Royal Mail dispute, it dawned on me that, most people -including myself- don't have the slightest clue of how postal workers are organised, and yet they pontificate. This excellent article, written by a postman, opened my eyes.

Very articulate, and very easy to read, it explains exactly what's going on in their offices: the myths about the dearth of 'traditional' mail; the understaffed sorting centres; the rising volume of work; the effects of today's part-privatisation (whereby Royal Mail does the work and private mail companies take the profit); the increased use of part-timers on 'flexible' contracts being used to undercut staff; the obsession with corporate customers.

Though I wasn't at all surprised, I also found out that bosses at the Royal Mail earn obscene amounts of money. I expected a lot, but not as much. Adam Crozier, the chief executive, takes home £3m a year, 166 times the salary of an average postal worker. It is estimated that his money alone could save at least 167 post offices around Britain. Just to give you a perspective, last year, total profits at Royal Mail tallied £321m. Staff got a pay freeze this year and managers got massive bonuses worth thousands of pounds.

And I thought, how can we -the public- become desensitised to such humongous salaries at the top while the same companies talk of redundancies and modernisation? Surely not giving out billions just like that should become the priority, right? Surely we can understand why postal workers have had enough?