Tag: news

Chagos : picking up the tab for the USA.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The headline in Monday’s Daily Telegraph was Starmer hid costs of Chagos surrender, with the strapline Official figures reveal total cost is ten times higher than the Prime Minister claimed.

Even in the Telegraph, which could have most of its headlines summarised in an emotional digested read as HRUMPH! this is almost poetic. A veritable broadside of misdirected kneekjerk reactions.

Lets start with Chagos surrender. What they mean by this is the return of the Indian Island archipeligo of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. For Telegraph readers it is a no brainer that an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean is more appropriately administered by the remnants of the Colonial Office in London than another island nearby, let alone, perish the thought, the people who actually live there; because where once a British colonist has stood, the Union Jack should fly forever.

Surrender implies some shame, as the emotional freight of all those retreats from direct imperial control all through the 20th century gets concentrated on this tiny island far, far away; of which their readers know very little.

The notion of the cost of handing back the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is suspicious. Why would it cost anything to relinquish control? It sounds like reparations – the horrifying notion that countries that got rich from exploiting the resources of countries they conquered, keeping them in poverty for the duration, might actually owe them something. Hrumph, indeed! Can’t have THAT!

But as there is no cost to let go of Chagos, what is the cost actually for? Read the article and it admits that the cost is not for giving bup the island, but for leasing back the airbase that Britain expelled the Chagos islanders to build in the 1960s. This base, formally British, is actually used by the United States as a strategic centre for B2 bombers to range across Africa, West, Central and South and South East Asia, China and the Pacific.

Like the agreement to a 5% target for “defence” spending and the meek acceptance of Trump’s tariffs, any contribution to the costs to Britain of keeping this base going – this “terrible deal with huge costs to hard pressed British tax payers”, as Dame Priti Patel put it – is a financial tribute to the United States, so they can bomb half the world with impunity.

Any resentment at this should therefore be directed across the Atlantic, not at Mauritius. But that would involve 1. being honest and 2. punching up.

Their argument that these costs have been misleadingly reported is itself misleading. They argue that methods often used by the Treasury on long term costs to take account of inflation and the “Social Time Preference rate” is an “accountancy trick”. Not an argument they deploy in other contexts.

They then go on to say that the “nominal” cost £34.7 billion over 99 years would be equivalent “half the annual schools budget”. So, a salutory comparison of wasteful military costs with costs of schooling, unusual in the Telegraph, and only made because they have painted the price of subsiding as US air base as an act of reparation, but still comparing an annual cost (in the case of schools) with a cost spread over 99 years – so, not a strictly reasonable comparison.

They are operating more to type when they say that the cost of leaing the base is also equivalent to building “10 Elizabeth class aircraft carriers”; conjuring up a real wet dream of military nostalgia for all those retired Commodores who write them letters; for the days when the Royal Navy had mighty ships of the line and Scapa Flow was full of battleships; instead of being, as it is, a tiny, niche auxiliary force for the US Navy. Oddly enough, playing the same sort of subordinate role as the Air Force does for the Chagos Island base (and other bases here too).

The Wingco at “RAF” Burtonwood.

I had direct experience of the fiction involved in this in the mid 1980s, when a delegation from Greater Manchester CND travelled down to the Burtonwood Air Base to hand in a letter to the base commander pointing out that any nuclear weapons stored there would put the population of Manchester, and the whole North West, at serious risk.

When we asked to see the base commander, a Royal Air Force Wingco came out. He looked a bit like Kenneth Moore, which I don’t suppose damaged his job application any. Everyone else in view was in US uniforms. When we said we wanted to see the actual base commander, he said “I’m the base commander. Its an RAF base”.

So we said, “Really, whats THAT?” pointing to the enormous stars and stripes fluttering on the flag pole behind him.

Previous

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This morning, instead of the Guardian flopping onto the doormat at 4 in the morning, the great, grey, grim, gruesome masthead of the Daily Telegraph was visible poking through the letterbox like an ultimatum in Gothic.

The Telegraph is a gloriously reactionary paper, whose columnists barrage its readers with nerve edgy variations on the theme of “we’ll all be murdered in our beds” to keep them scared and angry, and its news sections are barely calmer. It was ever thus. When I worked permanent nights in a choclate factory many years ago, I used to read the Telegraph to keep me awake; because a mind that is boggling finds it hard to drift off.

A characteristic article this morning headlined Hunter gored to death by buffalo he was stalking explains how “a millionaire trophy hunter…was killed almost instantly by ‘a sudden and unprovoked attack’ by the animal”.

They write this with no sense of irony; after all, all he was doing was stalking it to shoot it. The natural order of things. No provocation at all. There’s a whole world view in that.

Doing its bit to calm down tensions over “migrant hotels”, their lead article on p4 is headed Migrants in hotels linked to hundreds of crimes, with the strapline, in case anyone misses the point, Residents have been charged with violence, child abuse,domestic assault and shoplifting and a little highlighted indent gives the figure 425 for the “number of offences people living in hotels the Home Office use to house migrants have been charged with”.

Many of their readers, happy to have their prejudices confirmed, that “they” are a threat to “us”; and that this is a characteristic that can be freely atributed to all “migrants”, will read no further. But the tortuous use of language in the headlines, for anyone paying attention, is explained by sentences buried deep in the story, but which explode it from the inside out, again, for anyone paying attention.

First, these are figures for people charged, not people convicted. So, this will be the highest possible number.

Second, “Not every defendent who lists one of these hotels as their place of residence is necessarily an asylum seeker. It has not been possible to establish how many of the offenders identified by the Telegraph are currently applying for asylum in the UK”. So the highlighted number is bollocks. They know it. But they print it anyway.

Third, “The court records show that a significant proportion of these offences are alleged to have been perpetrated against other apparent asylum seekers”. Its notable that they don’t specify a figure, or proportion for this, though doubtless they could. Possibly because it draws the sting from the implication that “they” are a threat to “us”.

Showing the same inversion of reality that they deploy in the Big Game Hunter vs Buffalo story, they state “…police are under pressure to routinely disclose the nationality and migration status of suspects to protect community cohesion and to address a perception among some groups that asylum seekers are carrying out a disproportionate number of offences”. Note the unspecified character of “some groups”. Who might they be, I wonder?

Perish the thought that papers like the Telegraph, in its own revealing words, offering “a sense of the numbers involved”, and doing so by playing them up, could be promoting that “perception among certain groups” the better to whip them up, while retaining implausible deniability with weasel words.

On this issue, as on so many others, like so many of those arrested in the racist riots last summer, the Telegraph definitely has previous.

Please note. If you like this blog please pass it on to anyone else who might find it interesting or useful. These blogs are blocked on Facebook because they “look like spam” incidentally.

“Island of Strangers” my arse! Labour List’s apologetics for Starmer’s dive into the gutter

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

On my way back from the shops yesterday, I passed two neighbours chatting in the street outside their houses. A woman in a hijab with her small child was bantering about ice cream with the bloke next door, who was audibly Eastern European. They obviously knew each other well, and got on. Friends, not starngers.

This is in Thurrock, an area that was Brexit central, with a 72.6% leave vote in 2016. I find that, nevertheless, this is an area that is converging with Brent, where I normally live, the most ethnically diverse borough in the country. My neighbours in both places are not simply diverse, they are also ethnically mixed. As is my family.

When I used to analyse the ethnic monitoring stats for the school I used to work at in Islington, the fastest growing group was “mixed”. So, far from immigration making us an “island of strangers” many of us are getting on well enough to be as intimate as you can get.

In this context, and in the wake of Keir Starmer’s pedestrian dog whistling about immigration on Monday, Labour List’s article Local elections: Reform took four times more Labour seats than other parties is disingenuous. It implies, without stating it, that the loss of SEATS to Reform must mean that there is a loss of VOTES to them. And what follows from that is that there is a need – in the framework of the sort of electoral pragmatism that cares not what platform a Party stands on so long as it wins on it – to “address the concerns” of Reform voters in order to win those votes back.

This is a fallacy for three reasons and one principle.

  1. Reform has the momentum on the Right, and cannibalised the Conservative vote. Whether they will eat the whole Party before the next General Election is open to speculation, but it seems likely. These elections were held for the most part in Tory held areas that have been Conservative since the Jurassic and have now voted for a different, even worse, kind of Conservative Party (in the hopes of getting back there).
  2. The Labour vote did not migrate to Reform in a big way. It mostly stayed at home. Feedback from the doorsteps in the Runcorn and Helsby by election was that it was the cuts to winter fuel allowance that was the biggest demobiliser; so people who voted for a change from austerity and “hard decisions” taken at the expense of the poorest last Summer, were now less than enthused by what the Party had to offer.
  3. The government has been trying to cosplay Reform for some time, even to the extent of putting out ads boasting about how many people they have deported in Reform colours (which would be taken by most people as a Reform ad anyway, so self harm in more than one respect). The week of the elections saw announcements on a tougher line on immigration from Yvette Cooper on the presumption that the approach “Reform is right about immigration, we are trying to stop it, vote for us to stop Reform” would do anything other than legitimise them; and demoralise anti racist Labour voters. And, so it came to pass…

Tony Blair remarked after the 2017 General Election that if Corbynism was the way to win, he didn’t want to take it. Given the interests that have made him an extremely wealthy hollowed out husk of a man, this is hardly surprising. But the point applies in the opposite direction. Anyone even pretending to be on the Left who starts trying to exploit – and create – false divisions in our communities is doing the Right’s job for it. For the Labour Party, a lurch onto Reform’s xenophobic turf is a jump into quicksand.

The next lot of local elections will be in the cities. Reform is likely to still make the running on the Right. Labour, if it carries on trying to compete with it on its own terms, while presiding over austerity and an arms drive, instead of making a sharp turn to wealth taxes and investment in infrastructure, public services and green transition, will shed a collosal number of votes, to the Greens, to Independents (especially purged former councillors) even to the Lib Dems in some places, and many will stay at home.

Apologetics of the type that Labour List just published, will help drive that outcome.

Trump is proof that the World can’t survive another “New American Century”

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

My speech at the “Trump Climate Disaster” Rally outside the US Embassy (11/1/25).

The new US Ambassador that Trump is installing in that Vice Regal fortress behind us – and, I’ve got to say that that’s a very wide moat they’d got there, which makes you wonder what they are anticipating – is a guy called Warren Stephens.

Stephens is an investment banker from Arkansas, whose company holds huge oil concessions in the Gulf of Mexico (which Trump wants to rename the Gulf of America). He is also a climate smartarse – someone who likes to use pseudo scientific one liners to deflect from the seriousness of climate change, which are only convincing for those determined to be convinced and unwilling to ask any questions to puncture their own delusions.

He will have two jobs above all.

One will be to push the UK government off its agenda for green transition.

Trump wants “no windmills” in the USA and “no windmills” in the North Sea.

If renewables are abandoned, the limited reserves in the North Sea means that, even if they were maxed out, they would be unable to fill the gap in energy needs; which would have to be made up by very expensive imports of US Liquifid Natural Gas, which we now know has a carbon footprint 33% worse than that of coal.

If the government succumbs to that pressure -which is being pushed “patriotically” by the Conservativbes and Reform now as Trump’s Fifth Column, with the media in a screaming descant in support – it would be a spectacular act of self harm that will impoverish people on a grand scale and make climate damage a lot worse.

His other main priority will be to push the US militarisation drive.

Trump wants NATO allies spending 5% of their GDP on their militaries. Thats more than double the current average.

Neil Kinnock seems to think that 4% is “reasonable”.

This is NOT because they are under any threat militarily. Direct US allies account for 2/3 to 3/4 of global military spending already (depending on what estimates you use).

This collosal concentration of coercive power polices the transfer of $10 Trillion from the Global South to the Global North every year.

This is why countries want to join NATO. It makes them part of the imperial core. As Anthony Blinken put it, “if you are not at the table with us, you’re on the menu”. The problem now though is that being at the table with the US is a bit like having dinner with “the late, great Hannibal Lecter”, as Trump might put it. You can never be sure when the host is going to trun round and take a bite out of you. But you can be sure that he will do so at some point.

Doubling that level of expenditure cannot be seen as a defensive measure. It only makes sense if they are planning wars of aggression.

That is explicitly proclaimed by the UK Defence Review, which talks of being in a “pre war situation”, and there is overt talk of the British Army having to be ready to fight a major land war in Europe within the next ten years. This is completely mad and suicidal.

The impulse for this is partly that the US is losing ground to China very fast economically, but also because, in the context of the climate crisis, US society as it currently stands – and the wealth of the feral billionaires who are running its government – can only be sustained if they can put the Global South in general, and China in particular, back in its box.

They are fully aware that the climate crisis is real. All the denialist stuff is just prolefeed. An example of this is the US Army Report from 2019 that argued that,

  • left unchecked, the climate crisis would lead to a social collapse in the US itself at some point this century
  • the US Army had to be ready to intervene to make sure that the new oil and gas reserves revealed by melting polar ice caps would be under the control of the US – annexation of Greenland anyone?.

This would be extreme cognitive dissonance if they did not have a perspective where they could maintain a per capita carbon footprint the size of a Diplodocus, so long as most of the world barely has one at all.

So, the United States can no longer pretend to be anyone’s elses future, not even its own.

The problem they will have with this is that the costs of carrying through this massive shift of resources into militarisation will lead to massive economic and political crises.

To be specific. For the UK to spend 5% of its GDP on its military would cost an additional £60 -70 billion a year. Mark Rutte of NATO has very kindly suggested that this could come from Health and Pensions. Nice. We can be absolutely clear that it would also have to come from green infrastructure investment.

Flood defences? Why would we need those when we can trust to luck?

Ditto investing in fire prevention, because there’s no problem with wild fires is there?

Insulating homes? That would have to go. People can stay patriotically cold.

Electrified railways and affordable public transport? Who needs that when there’s weapons to buy?

So, if the government capitulates to this pressure we will face

  • extinction from climate breakdown in the long term, because they won’t have invetsed enough to stop it or limit the damage
  • extinction from nuclear war in the medium term, because they are investing in preparing for that and seem oblivious to the risks
  • misery and impoverishment in the immediate term to pay for it.

All to defend a “rules based international order” in which – as we’ve seen this week with the US sanctions on the International Criminal Court as punishment for the Gaza indictments – the US makes the rules, and the rest of us are expected to follow the orders. The US is not interested in global leadership, it is interested in global domination.

You can’t build a wall to keep this out.

Millions across the world will resist this – including in Europe and the US itself. Trump’s polices are likely to blow up in his face. His tariffs, if imposed, will be ruinous.

People do not want to be poor. They do not want to be killed in a war. They want more action to keep us safe from climate breakdown. Let’s mobilise that majority, with the trade union year of action from this September as a lever.

I’ll end with an advert. Just down the road from here, on Clapham Manor Street, is the only trade union owned pub in the World, called, perhaps inevitably, Bread and Roses. On 23 January at 7pm it is hosting a showing of the latest Reel News film about the inspirational GKN Firenze factory occupation, and another supporting Vauxhall workers resisting Stellantis closing their plant.

Everyone is welcome.

Up Yours Elon Musk!

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The current TV advert for the Citroen e-C3 – which looks as though it was directed by the same team as set up the synchronised singing decapitated Marie Antoinette heads at the Olympic opening ceremony this summer- is a funny, elegant French finger gesture to Tesla and Elon Musk.

With David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” pounding in the background, a pair of “artisan” looking young men drive a column of four e-C3s (in a possibly conscious genuflection to the Italian Job) over and through a banquet being held in a chateau by caricatured ancien regime types – all giant bouffant wigs, beauty spots, silk frock coats and enormous dresses – disrupting it and causing operatic shock horror to the assembled aristos. Big, blunt letters announce THE REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN…ELECTRIC IS NO LONGER FOR THE ELITE before the two drivers go racing away looking perplexed at each other as one of the aristo women appears in the back seat, while other artisan styled “revolutionaries” run aongside with a red flares, red flags and – just to be politically broad church and incorporate that little bit of French bourgeois revolutionary tradition -a tricolour.

This is one in the eye not only for Tesla’s model of high cost, high end, high profit EVs that can only be afforded by the wealthy – which explains why Elon Musk can be so comfortable with Donald Trump, as EVs for him are not for everyone, the poor can be left to drive old bangers, so the Chinese are guilty of “overcapacity” in wanting electric people’s cars – but also neatly skewers his political posture of being the richest man in the world and also “anti elite”.

The e -C3 is one of several cheaper EVs put on the market this year by European car manufacturers, in an attempt not to be overwhelmed by the competition from China. It is notable that the EUs negotiating position on tariffs against potential Chinese imports demands technology transfer as part of the price not to impose them. This concedes that the Chinese companies have more advanced technology and the Europeans are playing catch up. Whether this succeeds in rescuing these companies in the short term, which it may not because it is still a struggle for them to produce EVs profitably, this is projected to reverse the downward tick in EV purchases peculiar to Europe last year, which in turn will have a knock on effect on oil demand in the way that the EV boom in China already has.

US Presidential Election Final Score: what comes next?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

My last blog did not take account of just how slowly votes are counted in US presidential elections. While the result has been obvious from the grey dawn of Nov 6th, and the outlines of the vote equally apparent, a precise accounting has had to wait until now. Even now (Nov 27th) the vote count stands at 99.7%, so there’s roughly another few hundred thousand votes to tot up, but these won’t make much difference to the broad conclusions that were reasonably obvious, and therefore broadly misrepresented in the media, from day 1.

First of all, contrary to my initial blog, Trump did gain votes from 2020. But not many. His total was just over 77 million this year, compared to just over 74 million in 2020; so, a gain of just under 3 million votes.

Similarly, Kamala Harris lost a lot of votes on Joe Biden’s total in 2020, down from just under 81.3 million to just over 74.4 million; so a total loss of 6.9 million votes.

Turnout was down overall by about 3 million votes.

So, the core conclusion that this was more a Democrat slump that a Trump surge still holds. This matters because some of the conclusions coming from Democratic Party reinforce the strategic choices that led them to lose. There are basically three strands to this.

  1. They are in denial about “the economy”, arguing that people under $100,000 a year, whose real wages were lower at the end of the Biden term than the beginning were suffering a delusion because “economic indicators” were going so well. Putting this across as people not “feeling” how well they were doing, when they were actaully doing pretty badly, is a form of gaslighting that, evidently, doesn’t work.
  2. They seem to think that the problem with Kamala, campaigning with the Cheyneys, “I own a Glock”, “border state prosecutor”, “Israel has a right to go after the terrorists” Harris was that she was too “woke”.
  3. They are having a tactical discussion about whether Biden should have withdrawn earlier – obviously he should – and whether they should have had a primary process – neither of which addresses the fundamental problem that any candidate wedded to the same strategy would have faced the same defeat.

This denial is designed to move the Democrats onto the same ground as the Republicans on the spurious argument that there was a significant shift towards them. There wasn’t. It is not a strategy to remobilise their lost voters, let alone an attempt to pose answers that meet the needs of working class voters. Quite the opposite.

It reflects a deeper reality that – their protestations that Trump is a fascist nothwithstanding – they would prefer to lose than contradict the demands of their donors, let alone challenge core US imperial imperatives; which is the fundamental purpose of both parties and the reason why the US political structure is set up the way it is; to squeeze out any genuine challenge that might express the popular progressive majorities that exist for, for example, Medicare for all, Abortion Rights, Serious action on climate, raising the national minumum wage, ending US support for the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza and opposing a wider war involving Iran.

Polling showed, for example, that taking a harder line with Israel would have won Harris significant votes in the swing states.

What we had instead from the Biden adminstration was a performative 30 day ultimatum – due to expire conveniently after the election – for Israel to allow more aid into the Gaza strip on pain of having (some) arms cut off – because even in performative ultimatums, you wouldn’t want to go too far in case the wrong signal gets picked up – in the hope that this gesture would bring back some of the votes that their single minded support for Israel had alienated.

Needless to say, when the 30 days were up, in the middle of Israel’s most ruthless offensive yet – implementing the “General’s Plan” to completely clear the whole of Northern Gaza of its Palestinian population, making it a free fire zone and totally shutting down of any supply of food, water or medicine – the US declared that enough aid was being allowed in for them to keep praising Netanyahu and passing the ammunition.

The psychological shock to a lot of people in the mainstream of politics is that 2020 was supposed to be a “return to normalcy” from the insane aberation of four years of Trumpian excess, after which the Pax Americana could be reasserted on its customary tried and tested basis, with all its familiar landscape intact. The problem is that it can’t, now that the US is no longer the world’s largest and most dynamic economy, the old rules won’t work anymore, so what people thought Biden was now looks like an interegnum in a “new normal” in which the US takes off its masks and stands before the world in all its hideous nakedness as a climate denying rogue state, reduced to having to bully its allies to increase military spending and banking on increasingly overt threats to try to bluff its way out of decline.

This is unlikely to work, but is extremely dangerous and damaging nonetheless.

Beyond the grotesque and demeaning soap opera of his cabinet picks, like putting the former head of the Worldwide Wresting Federation in charge of Education, which could be filmed by Hollywood as the Joker taking control of the Gotham City Mayor’s office.

  • If Trump imposes 60% tariffs on China and 20% tariffs on everyone else “on the first day” the knock on effect on the world economy will be severe – causing an economic squeeze and political turmoil among allies as well as opponents, sharply rising prices in the US itself and a hard hit to living standards. Those who voted for him under the impression that they would be better off – and many did despite misgivings about his other policies – a response identified as a definite trend by exit pollsters – are in for a shock and are likely to turn.
  • The same applies to mass deportations, if they are carried out. Removing hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, from the workforce would be seriously disruptive economically, even discounting the immensely divisive and traumatic social and political impacts across communities.
  • If Trump carries out his promise to reverse major US climate policies passed during Joe Biden’s presidency, this could push $80bn of investment to other countries and cost the country up to $50bn in lost exports, according to a new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University.
  • The required ramp up of military spending among allies, in the context of an economic squeeze generated by the tariffs, would also create increasingly febrile and feverish politics even within the US’s core supporters; as we are already seeing in Japan.

The decline of US power has entered a bumpy and perilous period and the election of Trump is a symptom of that. Standing on much thinner ice than the media is suggesting, the harder he tries to grip, the more things will slip through his fingers; the harder he tries to assert US power, the more he will expose how much it has already slipped.

The Unbearable Racist Chutzpah of the Observer: Two Letters arising from today’s edition

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The Massacre of Children in Gaza is not a Libel

Howard Jacobson’s article (Tales of infanticide have stoked hatred of Jews for centuries. They still echo today Observer 6/10/24) is evidence of an inability to reconcile support for Israel with a belief in himself as a moral person who would “never dream” of doing what the IDF is actually doing.

The deaths of children in Gaza is not a malevolent racist fiction, like the blood libel he refers to, but a horrific reality that is going on and on and on. When the names of all the people killed in Gaza that it has been possible to identify were published, the first fourteen pages were children under one year old. He knows this. Which is why it is so unbearable to see it night after night on the news; as he says “what you cannot bear to see done”.

But, lets be clear, “Jews” are not committing the genocide in Gaza. The Israeli state is. A growing number of Jewish people around the world oppose it, organise against it march against it. Howard Jacobson does not, chooses to identify himself with the state that is doing it, and that sets up the psychic stress between what that state is doing and how he sees himself. If Howard cannot bear to see this, he should oppose it.

Editorial

A year ago, in response to your first editorial about October 7th, I wrote you the following letter.

Since the turn of the century the casualty rate from the conflict in Israel Palestine has been twenty Palestinians killed for every Israeli. Given that the suffering on the Palestinian side is so much higher, why does your editorial find calls for violent vengeance from Israel “understandable”, but consider that violent actions from Palestinians “defy comprehension”? 

Perhaps you should write another editorial explaining the asymmetry of your empathy.

Your editorial this year, describing the “unfathomable hatred” of Palestinians, and the questions that Israelis ask “reasonably enough”, begs the same question.

Carer’s tales

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

There are rhythms to the deployment of carers. Some arrive according to a rigid timetable set by tablets. If a certain medication has to be taken at regular intervals, with no more than a 10 or 15 minute variation, the carer has to turn up at those times.

This tends to mean that the carer who arrives is more often than not the same one. They have their regulars and a regular schedule so they can get from one client to the next on a predictable timetable. They are, of course, not paid for travel time and the pressure to get from one job to another can lead to road accidents. One we know was trying to save a second or two and crocked her car gliding into the one in front, damaging it enough for it to be out of action for a week. She was unable to get work until it was fixed because they are all dependent on cars to get from one job to the next. She now drives very carefully because the pressure isn’t worth it.

Because they travel by car, they come from quite a range of places, from Forest Gate in the West to Canvey Island in the East. One had moved from a flat off Tottenham Court Road in the heart of London down to Purfleet – because the housing is more affordable – and taken the job for the excitement; explaining that “Nothing ever happens in Purfleet”.

Pay for each visit is presumed to match the half hour or 15 minute slot that the company is paid for. This does not always match reality. If a client has a medical emergency it can take longer, so there has to be a scramble to fill the slots that are down the line. If all goes well, the routines of getting a client onto the commode, sorting all that out, getting them washed, dressed and chatted to can be done more quickly. In the case of housebound people with no family support, the last job is the only social contact and conversation they will get all day and is a crucial part of the job.

One that came to ours a few days ago said that she has a core of bedbound people who are her regulars. Somehow she has got into the habit of singing to them, and taking requests. Some of the old ladies like the Ronettes, and bands like that, but she has one old gentleman who is into heavy rock and usually wants something by Metallica – which is truly above and beyond.

Some carers are chatty, some quietly get on with things and converse functionally. Most are pretty upbeat. Most of them are women. Many are black. Most of the white ones have tattoos. There is a high turnover. A core of veterans keep things going while newcomers either adapt or, finding it too much, leave.

Some of them wear fans around their necks because, even during a heatwave, some of the clients have their heating on, and cranked up high.

None of them are in a union.

I complement one on her pair of colouful converses and she says that she loves them, has 14 pairs, but is now boycotting them because of Nike’s sponsorship and partnership deals with Israel.

Several have said they like coming to us because we are friendly and take an interest. Many of the clients have dementia, so can be terrified and aggressive. Some are racist and don’t hold back about it even though they are being looked after – possibly because they are being looked after and resent it. This is sometimes the case with relatives too.

If the family is covering meds and, to a lesser extent, food, the schedule for visits can swing quite wildly, with the getting up arrival ranging from slightly before 7am one day to well after 9am the next. During the Summer holidays schedules get stretched because carers with children have them on their hands, but as Winter approaches they also get harder to fill because its getting dark, dank and miserable and, people get ill.

Some of the overnight crews, who are always in twos and arrive in the wee small hours to give bedbound people a turn, or deal with pads, can be loud – car door slams, a conversation that would be loud for the middle of the day erupts up and down the path to the back door, a scrabble for the door lock, the door goes crunch and the loud conversation imposes itself on the living room downstairs for a while, before the whole thing repeats itself in reverse on the way out. Others arrive with the stealth of Ninjas, but greater consideration. Some of them close the side and front gates on the way out. Some let them swing in the breeze.

Barbarism

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

I originally wrote this in December, shortly after Refaat Alareer was killed by the IDF, in the spirit of his poem If I must die but didn’t publish it at the time because I thought it didn’t do him justice.

But, now Netanyahu has repeated the line “We are in a battle of civilization against barbarism” in his deranged rant at the US Congress calling for more weapons to “finish the job faster”; so, time to fly the kite.

On the day this was written, Palestinian casualties stood at 18, 412. Today, it is more than twice that. What price “civilisation”?

Barbarism

In the battle of civilisation against barbarism

It is necessary for the civilised

To bomb the schools of the barbarians and kill their children

To bomb the homes of the barbarians and kill their families

To bomb the hospitals of the barbarians and kill their doctors and nurses

To stop the barbarians’ sources of fresh water, so they thirst

To stop the barbarians access to food, so they hunger

To cut off the barbarians’ access to medicines, so they sicken

To kill the barbarians teachers and poets to still their stories

To bulldoze the barbarians olive groves to empty their land

so you can say later that they were never on it

To flood the ground water with salt so nothing can grow

To bomb the barbarians libraries and archives to erase their history

in the futile hope that, this time, “the young will forget”

To drive the barbarians away from shelter

Make them move, again and again

To make sure that they despair

To strip barbarian prisoners to their underclothes and make them kneel in the dust

To kill a hundred or a thousand barbarians for every civilised casualty

So everyone knows that order is restored

Because every civilised mother knows

That their children can only sleep safely

When the barbarian children are all safely dead.

In a grave

Still digging…

12/12/23

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

In Colin Welland’s 1989 adapatation of Andre Brink’s novel A Dry White Season, the barrister played by Marlon Brando comments “Justice and law, Mr. Du Toit, are often just… well they’re, I suppose they can be described as distant cousins. And here in South Africa, well, they’re simply not on speaking terms at all.”

Judge Christopher Hehir, in his conduct of the case against the Just Stop Oil defendants, Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, and Cressida Gethin, who he has just sent down for 4 to 5 years in prison for “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”, has done his best to make people realise just how true that is of the UK too.

His summing up is almost beyond satire in its sophisticated mulishness. Talking of the breakdown of the climactic conditions needed for human civilisation to survive, this bewigged buffoon said, “I acknowledge that at least some of the concerns are shared by many, but the plain fact is that each of you has some time ago crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic”.

Lets break that down. “some of the concerns are shared by many”. The issue is not “concern” at climate breakdown it is the FACT of climate breakdown. This is not in serious dispute. Even the outgoing government’s “Impartiality guidance” for teachers noted that climate denial is not serious science and should not be taught.

Parliament has voted that we are in a “climate emergency”. This does not seem to have got through to Mr Justice Hehir.

So, this is not about opinions. Nor is it about how “many” people share them. It is a matter of UK law that the government has to decarbonise society by 2050. The last government’s plans to meet this target have been ruled inadequate by the UK High Court TWICE in the last two years. The consequences of a failure to meet this target will be considerably more severe than the £750,000 worth of disruption that the M25 protest is estimated to have caused. Would the Judge think it reasonably therefore to bang up Rishi Sunak, Claire Countinho, and the “Net Zero Scrutiny Group” (now happily depleted by the democratic process) for “conspiring” to put the UK well off course for reaching them, as they did in the more salubrious surroundings of the Cabinet Office, and probably on a few zoom calls as well?

It is also a matter of International legal obligation under the Paris Agreement that countries are working together to make this work. Except that the course taken by the last government clearly, in the judgement of the Climate Change Committee – the cross Party body set up to hold government to account for its actions, “signalled a slowing of pace and reversed or delayed key policies” which put the UKs progress below the curve.

In the context of an emergency that has not not been treated as an emergency, in which a lackadaisaical business as usual laziness was passed off as “pragmatism”, any “concerned campaigner” might reasonably conclude that more serious action was needed to make it plain that this is not OK, that the majority opinion, that wants more action on climate not less, should be heard. A “fanatic”, on the other hand, is someone who holds a view unreasonably and in the face of evidence to the contrary. The “plain fact” is that there is no evidence to the contrary in the case of climate breakdown. We can feel and see it happening around us. The consequences of failing to act to limit the damage will be catastrophic. Providing the protection of the law to, for example, banks that finance climate wrecking fossil fuel investments and making an example of people who, for example, take a demonstrative hammer to one of their windows, with punitive multi year sentences for a bit of cracked plate glass shows the same sense of proportion that, 220 years back, hanged Luddites for smashing stocking frames.

A keen advocate of crushing dissent on climate or Palestine by criminalising it has been the last government’s “Security Adviser”, Lord Walney, or plain old John Woodcock MP as he used to be. An acid test for whether the new government will continue down this path will be whether Walney retains his role and continues to be given credence. He should be sacked.

A basic principle of common law is that, for it to retain consent, it has to be seen to be “reasonable” to “the average man (or woman) on the Clapham onmibus”. The lengths to which the judge in this case went to silence the defendents in court, ruling that defendents were not allowed to speak to the jury about why they had done what they did, underlines his fear that the judgement of their 12 peers would be that this was a reasonable and proportionate response to the scale of the crisis and the paucity of action taken to address it. Defendents allowed to put this kind of public interest defence, however unpopular many of the JSO actions have been, have tended to be aquitted by Juries in the last few years. Can’t have that. Where will it all end?

When a judge orders the arrest of people standing outside the court holding placards affirming the rights of juries to hear the whole truth, for contempt of court, it is clear that the legal process as an arbiter of justice is being held in contempt by such a judge; which invites popular scorn for “the rule of law”, “Fundamental British Value” or not.

Mae West put it rather well in 1927.

Judge: “Miss West, are you trying to show contempt for this court?”

Mae West: “On the contrary, your Honor, I was doin’ my best to conceal it.”