Spokesman Books

THE TRICYCLE GOES NUCLEAR

2012-01-27T04:14:00.000-08:00

The Tricycle in London has established a reputation for groundbreaking political theatre, and their upcoming season, which will run across the theatre,cinema and galley will continue this, exploring the Nuclear Bomb and its proliferation from 1940 to the present day, and the dangers we face.

The season includes ten short plays by some of Britain and America's best playwrights performed in two parts, an extraordinary international film festival (with cult classics like Dr Strangelove and insightful documentaries like Countdown to Zero), exhibitions with talented artists including Ralph Steadman, and talks including 'How to split the Atom'. More details can be found on the website: http://bit.ly/p7gTB5

SPECIAL PREVIEW OFFER: We have a limited number of £10 tickets (usually £14) for February performances for each blast of THE BOMB – a partial history. Be quick to get yours! Book in advance either online or via the box office with the promotional code: NUCLEAR

(Offer excludes 20 Feb, 23 Feb, 28 Feb & 29 Feb. Only a limited number of ticket are available at this price)

Box Office: 020 7328 1000 http://www.tricycle.co.uk/

In Place of Austerity by Dexter Whitfield

2012-01-24T02:43:00.000-08:00

A review by Nick Grant in Socialist Review, January 2012

Understanding the real reasons for the assault on public sector workers is a first crucial step in calibrating our best response, especially if we hope to win some battles in this prolonged war.

Dexter Whitfield systematically aids our task in this essential handbook for all those engaged in resistance from within unions as well as community and national coalitions. Whitfield argues that even with equitable taxation providing increased revenue for public health, education, welfare, housing and other services, the prevailing neoliberal consensus forces all recent UK governments to provide the political petri dish for four capitalist objectives.

Firstly, the marketisation and privatisation of services provide "new opportunities for capital accumulation". Governments create self-abolishing markets that lead to the transfer of functions to private enterprise. Business takes an ever larger role in public policy making.

So we have, for example, Michael Gove announcing on 1 December the entrance of US education privateer Edison into the UK "free" school game, despite it's abysmal track record in school provision and management. Secondly, "power thereby shifts from state to capital", from employees to employers, from service users to private contractors.

Deregulation weakens unions, and employees' basic entitlements. Council-based trade union facility agreements, for example, could end up in the dustbin of history in 2012 if the Taxpayers Alliance and the Daily Telegraph get their way.

Thirdly, "risk, cost and responsibility are transferred from the state to individuals". Most services are thus provided by private contractors working to contract as agents of the state. Veolia, the world's biggest water utility, for example, probably empties your bins, paying employees less than before on worse hours and conditions.

Fourthly, as a contradiction "capital can reduce the role of the state, yet safeguard corporate welfare". Tax breaks, subsidies and regulatory concessions increase both secrecy and business involvement in public policy making. Together these approaches amount to a deconstruction of democracy at all levels from your town hall via Westminster, Holyrood and Cardiff to Brussels. Whitfield then notes, crucially, the massive contradiction for such neoliberalism in the post-2008 recession. It failed.

Deregulation, marketisation, competition and debt-driven consumerism brought about the erosion of transparent, democratic accountability and withthem came shameless greed, profiteering and illegal and corrupt practices.

There is a vast amount of data and analysis here to arm most of us in our daily fights with bosses of all kinds. There is a blind spot, however. Both socialism in general and the Labour Party in particular, despite much talk of social need, are beyond Whitfield's scope, despite his concluding note that, "The deconstruction of democracy will not be defeated by trade unions, community organisations, civil society organisations or political groups acting alone." This crucial question of the agency of change is one we cannot duck.

In Place of Austerity is published by Spokesman, £18

NUCLEAR POWER -- NO THANKS!

2012-01-06T05:20:00.000-08:00

Dear friends,

We hope this letter finds you all well, and wish you all the best for new year.

As you are of course aware, the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, and the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, have both had a dramatic impact around the world. In response to this massive disaster and its tragic consequences to people's lives and environment, the people of Japan are trying to take steps towards recovery. Meanwhile, the nuclear power plant is still unstable and workers are forced to continue working in life-threatening conditions. As the radioactive contamination spreads, many people including children are forced to suffer from prolonged radiation exposure, unable to evacuate due to lack of support from the government.

It is vital that we do not continue to make the same mistakes. It is now time for humanity to put an end to the nuclear age that started with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Japan, well over half the population now supports the goal of breaking away from nuclear power. However, many people question whether it is practically possible to bring nuclear power to an end. For these reasons and more, as you may have heard, a coalition of Japan-based organizations will hold the Global Conference for a Nuclear Power Free World (http://www.npfree.jp/english/) in Yokohama, Japan on January 14-15, 2012.

Lack of recent media coverage threatens to diminish public attention to the dangers of nuclear power. For this reason we are writing to ask for your support. We would greatly appreciate your help to encourage individuals, organizations and companies to help, take action and participate in this vitally important conference as a positive step towards the future.

- This conference will create a venue for people from all around the world to gather in Japan and respond to the reality of Fukushima.

- We will bring together the voices of people who suffer from radiation exposure all around the world, whether by nuclear power or nuclear weapons - "Global Hibakusha". We will learn from each other's experiences to illustrate the human and environmental consequences of the nuclear chain.

- The conference will also aim to demonstrate that it is realistically possible to create a society that is not dependent on nuclear power.

- Through learning from experiences from around the world, we aim to create a road map for the safe removal of existing nuclear power plants, and from there, present alternative policies based on renewable energy and propose action plans that can be implemented by Japan and other countries.

People from Japan and around the world are encouraged to join the Conference through any of the following ways:

- Provide an individual or organizational message and photograph in support of the Conference (email to global@npfree.jp)

- Participate in the conference here: http://www.npfree.jp/english/ticket.html

- Share information about the conference with your network

- Donate to support the organization of the conference here: http://npfree.jp/english/donation.html

This event will be an important and positive step for Japan and other countries towards taking action for a nuclear power free world. The presence of both organizations and independent citizens will show that efforts since the disaster to learn from Fukushima have not gone unnoticed. It is also a chance for us to show the people of Fukushima, many of whom feel despondent about the future, that positive action is being taken.

The Organizing Committee is made up of the Citizens' Nuclear Information Centre (CNIC), FoE Japan, Green Action, Greenpeace Japan, the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies (ISEP) and Peace Boat. While the Organizing Committee is now striving to raise the funds for the conference, we would also like to ask for any suggestions for funding or publicity. If you have any suggestions or ideas, please contact us at any time.

The input of individuals and organizations such as yourself is vital to the success of this conference. Please support us in taking these steps towards a sustainable, nuclear free world!

Thank you for your attention. We look forward to your support.

Kind regards,
Akira Kawasaki
Executive Committee, Peace Boat Organizing Committee, Global Conference for a Nuclear Power Free World
http://npfree.jp/english
global@npfree.jp

Ayse Berktay

2011-12-12T07:54:00.000-08:00

There is still no word of Ayse Berktay's release from prison in Turkey. Guardian online has just published this article by her friend, Ayça Çubukçu.

"There is a growing disjuncture between those who promote modern-day Turkey as a democracy and those who experience Turkey as a land of arbitrary detentions, political repression and military destruction.

In the past two years, the Turkish state has imprisoned thousands of its citizens under the sweeping rubric of counter-terrorism operations. The recent wave of arbitrary detentions known as the KCK operations has cast such a wide net that participation in a single protest or petition could constitute evidence of an intention to commit terrorism – if not directly, then certainly by association.

Today, even relatively privileged academic colleagues in Turkey face the prospect of sharing the fate of Professor Büşra Ersanlı of Marmara University, whose detention in October 2011 as an alleged terrorist was proudly defended by the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development party (AKP).

Professor Ersanlı's imprisonment has received considerable attention in Turkey and beyond, prompting petitions, protests, and academic initiatives by her colleagues and others concerned with the deteriorating prospects of democratic politics in Turkey. Organisations such as Human Rights Watch have issued statements condemning Ersanlı's arrest as "part of a crackdown on people engaged in legal political activity with the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy party".

A political scientist by training, Professor Ersanlı is one among thousands of Peace and Democracy party (BDP) members – including elected parliamentarians, mayors, students and intellectuals – who have been imprisoned on account of their activism in support of the rights of Kurdish citizens in Turkey.

Some "progressive" commentators insist that Turkey, compared to many other states, at least in the Middle East, is an example of a successful democracy. Just observe, they suggest, the booming economy in the midst of a global recession, the popular wedding of "moderate Islam" and "secular" parliamentary politics and the emergence of an independent Turkish foreign policy critical of Israel and supportive of democratic forces in the Arab spring.

But is this the most that the peoples of Turkey, the Middle East and the world could hope for? Why should contemporary Turkey constitute the limit of our political imagination? Why should a state that parades its "development" through drones it purchases from the US, a state that imprisons professors, journalists, translators, lawyers, workers, and students and treats as terrorists the members of a political party representing millions of citizens – why should such a state be one to promote or follow?

Last summer, at a cafe near Istanbul's Taksim Square, I met a dear friend, Ayşe Berktay, a renowned translator, researcher and global peace and justice activist. Having not seen each other for months, we chatted as usual for a few hours about our families, lives and politics.

I am not sure when, if ever, Ayşe and I will meet at a cafe again. She is now imprisoned for an unknown period of time.

My colleague Professor Büşra Ersanlı and dear friend Ayşe Berktay are only two women among many other members and supporters of the BDP who were imprisoned as suspected terrorists in October. Another wave of arbitrary detentions followed in November, and yet others will certainly come. Whether one chooses to call them "ordinary citizens" or "activists", increasingly, politically engaged people in Turkey are expecting that strangely familiar, five o'clock in the morning knock on their doors.

This is only one reason why the widening gap between those who promote contemporary Turkey as an example to be followed by the democratic forces of the Arab spring, and those who experience the Republic of Turkey as a threatening agent of political repression, is increasingly troublesome.

At this historical moment, when daring political energies and creative imaginations are at work worldwide – from Tahrir to Taksim Square, from Damascus to Diyarbakir – we can demand much more than the example officially offered by Turkey. To do otherwise would risk betraying not only the future of democratic politics in Turkey and beyond, but all those who have already paid dearly for that future through the imprisonments, deaths, wounds and disappearances they have endured, even welcomed, during long periods of military rule and parliamentary politics alike."

In Place of Austerity

2011-12-09T06:00:00.000-08:00

Public sector workers must work together to prevent privatisation

Dexter Whitfield calls on public managers to ally themselves with those opposed to privatisation, in order to protect democratic, flexible public services
Guardian Professional, Thursday 8th December 2011

The financial crisis has created opportunities to accelerate the privatisation and marketisation of public services - but the policies of transformation are designed to destablise services and deconstruct democracy.

We must draw on the lessons learned in opposing marketisation and privatisation over the past three decades to promote action strategies that can stop, slow down and/or mitigate the negative consequences of neoliberal policies.

Public managers committed to radically improving in-house provision will be important allies. More systematic trade union and community intervention in transformation and procurement is required, to organise new strategies, to forge strong alliances, to combine industrial and community action, and to advance alternative policies.

The financial consequences of market failure continue to take centre stage with drastic consequences for economies, services, jobs and living standards. However, neoliberal transformation of public services and the welfare state is accelerating apace, masked in part by the debt crisis ...

Full article available from The Guardian

Global Auction of Public Assets by Dexter Whitfield

2011-12-05T02:26:00.000-08:00

Reviewed by Hugo Radice, University of Leeds, UK for Capital & Class

Ten years ago, Dexter Whitfield's Public Services or Corporate Welfare? gave us the first detailed critique of the growing use of private resources to 'finance' public infrastructure projects. With Global Auction, he provides a comprehensive account of just how far and wide these forms of privatisation have now spread. A movement that seemingly began as a technical innovation in project financing now threatens to transfer the design and implementation of infrastructure projects entirely from public to private hands, with taxpayers and service users footing the bill. If this continues, the consequence will be to dramatically restrict the scope of democratic decision-making in this vital part of the economy, while simultaneously redistributing income from the poor to the rich. And as with so many innovations in the history of capitalism, successive UK governments have been the most enthusiastic pioneers and promoters of this process.

Whitfield shows how high levels of public debt, a major argument for 'private' finance, can be tackled by such measures as reducing tax avoidance, sensible use charging and cutting military spending. He then outlines a positive programme of change, based on a return to close and globally coordinated regulation of the financial services sector, the revitalisation of public management, and better techniques of project evaluation. This would require an extensive worldwide campaign by public service users, community and civil society groups and trade unions ... This book is an excellent guide to this largely invisible part of the neoliberal revolution, providing us with the detailed understanding that we so urgently need if we are to combat it effectively."

(Read the full review at Spokesman Books)

Global Auction of Public Assets: Public Sector Alternatives to the Infrastructure Market and Public Private Partnerships by Dexter Whitfield is available in paperback and as an eBook from Spokesman Books.

From Hiroshima to Fukushima

2011-11-21T03:52:00.000-08:00

‘A nuclear explosion [dubbed ‘Little Boy’] was detonated some 600 metres above Hiroshima at 8.15 on 6 August 1945 … a second, over Nagasaki three days later, was a plutonium bomb, dubbed ‘Fat Man’. It is 66 years since those terrible experiments, which instantly killed hundreds of thousands of people, many of them civilians. Tens of thousands more suffered lingering deaths due to their injuries, caused by intense heat, blast, and radiation sickness … As the nuclear disaster at Fukushima continues to unfold, Japanese perceptions have probed more deeply. Sumiteru Taniguchi survived extensive injuries suffered during the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and, at 82 years of age, maintains a lively presence on behalf of the Nagasaki Council of A-Bomb Sufferers (or Hibakusha, in Japanese). He recently observed that

‘Nuclear power and mankind cannot co-exist. We survivors of the atomic bomb have said this all along. And yet, the use of nuclear power was camouflaged as “peaceful” and continued to progress. You never know when there’s going to be a natural disaster. You can never say that there will never be a nuclear accident.’

There is a rising tide of opposition to nuclear power in Japan. In response to all this, something is moving in Japan. It was reflected in this year’s World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, which we report in this issue of The Spokesman.’

Tony Simpson, from his Editorial
The Spokesman 114

CONTENTS:
Editorial: From Hiroshima to Fukushima - Tony Simpson
Hibakusha and Fukushima - Terumi Tanaka
Fukushima’s Quagmire - Hachiro Sato
Fukushima’s Radioactive Elements - Helen Caldicott
Black Rain - Seiji Takato
A world without nuclear weapons - Hiroshi Taka
Declaration - World Conference Against A & H Bombs
***
Occupy! - Naomi Klein
Academic Freedom? - Noam Chomsky
Apartheid in South Africa and Palestine? - John Dugard
The ‘great game’ in Syria - Alastair Crooke
Iraq Report X - Brian Jones
Building Bridges - Stephanie Sampson
The Country and the City - Raymond Williams
Collier - A poem by Mike Harding

Reviews: Ken Fleet, Michael Barratt Brown, John Daniels, Daniel Jakopovich, Stan Newens, Barry Baldwin, Ghadi Al-Hadi, Abi Rhodes

ISBN: 978 0 85124 8097 Price £6.00

You can read the contributions by Terumi Tanaka, Hachiro Sato, Seiji Takato and Hiroshi Taka on our website.

Available to BUY NOW from Spokesman Books

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine can promote peace, truth and reconciliation

2011-11-04T03:48:00.000-07:00

The Israel-Palestine situation demands truth and reconciliation. We hope to aid that process.

By Desmond Tutu and Michael Mansfield guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 November 2011

Opportunities to break seemingly intractable and deadlocked situations are rare – especially on a scale which has rapidly developed this year from the beleaguered cries of citizenry across North Africa and the Middle East. There is a palpable consensus that the provenance of this movement is lodged firmly in the fundamental prerequisite for meaningful democracy: self-determination. All conventions on human rights have this tenet as a core rationale. Where it is repeatedly denied and suppressed there will never be peace or justice, let alone stability.

On Saturday the Russell Tribunal on Palestine will open its third session: after Barcelona and London, this session will take place in South Africa, the location of a seminal struggle for self-determination by a community oppressed by apartheid. Partly as a result of this courageous and persistent protest by thousands of ordinary people, who were regularly demonised as terrorists by political opponents within the South African regime (and by certain world leaders, including the UK's), there was a concerted international effort to bring international law to bear upon an entrenched position.

Between 1948 and 1990, the UN regularly condemned apartheid as a crime. The South African regime paid little or no attention to such censure. The pressure for change, however, could ultimately not be contained. There is no doubt that this could not have been achieved without the consensus of international support. Major factors in the turning tide were the roles played by the convention on suppression and punishment of the crime of apartheid, and the resolutions by the general assembly (1966) and the security council (1984) to categorise apartheid as a crime against humanity.

This has been replicated in the Rome statute 2002 article 7(1), where it is described as "inhumane acts carried out in the context of an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime". This is a crime engaging universal jurisdiction.

The evidence, the intrinsic features, the painful experience of what is involved in the practice of apartheid are still reverberating indelibly in the minds of the people of South Africa, some of whom will be called before the tribunal, alongside reputable experts. There are, of course, racial groups in other parts of Africa and elsewhere which will recognise the same pattern of suppression.

We have visited Israel/Palestine on a number of occasions and every time have been struck by the similarities with the South African apartheid regime. The separate roads and areas for Palestinians, the humiliation at roadblocks and checkpoints, the evictions and house demolitions. Parts of East Jerusalem resemble what was District Six in Cape Town. It is a cause for abiding sadness and anguish. It revolves around the way in which the arrogance of power brings about a desensitisation. Once this has occurred it permits atrocious acts and attitudes to be visited on those over whom power and control are exercised. What such people are doing to themselves just as much as their victims should also be of concern.

As part of a South African religious delegation to Israel in the 1980s, Michael Nuttall, the bishop of Natal, pointed out that there were things happening in Israel that did not even happen in South Africa – forms of collective punishment. This has special resonance in the light of Richard Goldstone's attempt to pre-empt the tribunal in the New York Times this week by an assertion that nothing in Israel comes close. His analysis is simplistic. No one is suggesting the two situations are identical.

These are all matters the tribunal will be assessing in order to ascertain what parallels and comparisons can be drawn. Whatever they may be, the ultimate objective is to consider the Israel-Palestine situation on its own facts and apply the norms of international law to identify three major issues. Have there been violations? If so, what are they and who is responsible? And thirdly, what are the legal ramifications and processes which should ensue? It is hoped that this process may contribute and not detract from the urgent need to progress understanding and peace, truth and reconciliation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/03/russell-tribunal-palestine

Image: Children play outside a peace mural in the West Bank. Photograph: David Levene

Raymond Williams in Japan

2011-10-27T04:20:00.000-07:00

Key Words 9: A Journal of Cultural Materialism

Much of this issue of Key Words has to do with border crossings. Five of the essays are the result of the willingness of colleagues in Swansea and in Tokyo to cross international borders in order to engage in a transnational discussion of Williams’s work. Three contributions focus on questions of language. While this issue is primarily about Raymond Williams’s work, his ideas and influence, this section brings two other key thinkers into the dialogue – Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Terry Eagleton, who is perhaps Williams’s foremost disciple.

Contents:

Editors’ Preface

Signs, Socialism and Ethics: Eagleton on Language - Tony Crowley

Terry Eagleton, Postmodernism and Ireland - Edward Larrissy

Williams and Wittgenstein: Language, Politics and Structure of Feeling - Ben Ware

Border Country: Then and Now - Simon Dentith

Raymond Williams in Japan
Essays by contemporary Japanese critics, edited and introduced by Daniel G. Williams

Guest Editor’s Introduction - Daniel Williams

Soseki Natsume, Raymond Williams and the Geography of ‘Culture’ - Shintaro Kono

Translation and Interpretation: Raymond Williams and the Uses of Action - Takashi Onuki

‘To Feel the Connections’: Collectivity and Dialectic in Raymond Williams’s Loyalties - Yasuhiro Kondo

The ‘Far West’ after Industrialization: Gwyn Thomas, Ishimure Michiko and Raymond Williams - Yuzo Yamada

‘A Narrative of Unsolved Cases’: A Reading of The Fight for Manod - Yasuo Kawabata

Afterword: Found in Translation - Dai Smith

Debate: Dai Smith responds to Lucas and Matthews

978 0 95315 036 6 Price £15.00 Buy now from Spokesman Books

The Country and the City

2011-08-26T05:54:00.000-07:00

Raymond Williams influenced generations. He was an academic, novelist and critic whose writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature laid the foundations for the modern discipline of cultural studies.

Spokesman Books' new edition of The Country and the City makes available, once again, a seminal work. We also distribute Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, published by The Raymond Williams Society.

Price: £19.95 ISBN: 978 0 85124 7991

Call for 2011 World Conference against A&H Bombs

2011-07-29T04:29:00.000-07:00

This year's World Conference against A&H Bombs will gather in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the wake of the devastating nuclear disaster which is still unfolding at Fukushima. Understandably, this is one of the main themes running through this year's Conference. Tony Simpson addresses some of the questions raised by Fukushima in the paper he will present to the Conference.

To mark the 66th anniversary of the nuclear bombardment of these two Japanese cities, on 6 August, the Russell Foundation is publishing a new edition of THE LEGACY OF CHERNOBYL by Zhores Medvedev. In his preface to the new edition, Dr Medvedev descibes how, in 1987, he met with members of the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum. At that time, he had already started to study the available information about what had happened at Chernobyl the previous year, as he was not satisfied with the Soviet report to the International Atomic Energy Agency. His Japanese hosts were not interested in too many details. "We do not find Chernobyl relevant to Japan," one of them told him. "Such accidents can never happen here."

***

http://www.antiatom.org/

Peace activists arrested in South Korea

2011-07-18T04:04:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

There is worrying news to report from Jeju Island South Korea.

At the crack of dawn on Thursday, undercover police officers came to Gangjeong village and arrested three major leaders of the peaceful resistance to the US naval base being built there. They are: Village Chief Kang Dong-Kyun, renowned peace activist Brother Song Kang-Ho, and base opposition leader Ko Kwon-Il.

The South Korean Navy (ROKN) and Minister of Justice Lee Gui Nam also issued a notice to Gangjeong village leader Kang Dong-Kyun and 76 other villagers and peace activists. This notice is a threat to these 77 individuals and civil society organizations for disturbing the construction of the naval base. It specifies the following:
(1) These 77 individuals are banned from getting into the public water or land near the Joongduk coastline where the naval base will be constructed.
(2) The notice bans the staff and volunteers from five civil society organizations – Peace-Life Association, Jeju Environmental Association, SPARK, Frontiers, and Gangjeong Village Association – from entering the water and land near the naval base site.
(3) It orders the removal of all facilities from the resistance site within seven days.
(4) In the case that the facilities are not removed, the Navy and Minister of Justice will charge the village leader Mr. Kang for removing these facilities.
(5) The village leader Mr. Kang will be responsible for paying the Navy 5,000,000 Won ($5,000 US dollars) for each case of violation.

The South Korean military is trying to quash the resistance by arresting its leaders and inciting fear among the peaceful villagers who are fighting for their land, community and livelihoods. As one of the activists wrote, “I feel the martial law atmosphere here.”

The truth is: the villagers and their leaders are not alone. There is a growing tide of people from throughout the Korean peninsula and around the world who are behind them.

Please forward this to the media and as many people as possible to update them of what is happening. For those in the United States, please call the South Korean Embassy in Washington, DC and let them know the repression against the villagers communicates to the world that South Korea has returned to the era of authoritarian rule. Please also send an email to U.S. Ambassador Kathleen Stevens and let her know that U.S. Forces in Korea oversee the South Koran military, and as American citizens we won’t stand for more military destruction in the name of so-called national security. Email Ambassador Stevens: EmbassySeoulPA@state.gov. Call the South Korean Embassy in Washington: (202) 797-6343

For those in the United Kingdom, please call or write to Ambassador Choo Kyu-Hoo, Embassy of the Republic of Korea, 60 Buckingham Gate, London SW1E 6AJ - 020 72275500 - koreanembinuk@mofat.go.kr

For more information on the Save Jeju Island effort please visit: www.savejejuisland.org

Shannon Airport Demonstration Sunday 10 July 2011

2011-07-08T06:08:00.000-07:00

On Sunday 10/7/2011 at 2.00pm Shannonwatch are holding their monthly demonstration at the Shannon Airport Roundabout in their continuing protest against the growing number of Imperial wars by the EU/US/NATO military axis. The new FG/Labour government, despite its commitment in its programme to ensure that its use would be in accordance with international law has not stopped the flights by US in accordance with international law as laid down in the Hague Convention of 1907. It is amazing that the Irish government and all the other governments of the EU/US axis can still find millions of Euros to fight wars while cutting health, education and social services.

PANA urges people who can to attend, to spread the word via social media (the corporate media largely ignore us) and help in any other way they can. Please use the contact details below if you have any queries.

Roger Cole, Chair of PANA, Tel: 00 353 (0)87-2611597
http://www.pana.ie/

***
Gallows and Other Tales of Suspicion and Obession
by John Arden

The title-piece is a ghost story set in contemporary Galway which features the ongoing misuse of Shannon Airport: a nightmare of ghastly slaughter resurfacing from the era of the Penal Laws.

Available from Spokesman Books.

Excessive PFI profits

2011-06-15T06:05:00.000-07:00

HM Treasury 'in dark' over 'excessive' PFI profits
By Rob Cave, BBC News

HM Treasury is failing to monitor "excessive" profits from the selling-on of PFI (private finance initiative) equity, the BBC has been told.

One industry analyst says its "inadequate" records do not reflect the billions of pounds made in the so-called secondary PFI market.

Critics, including some MPs, say the taxpayer should benefit from a share of these additional profits.

In a statement the Treasury said it had some information on most sales.

Criticism about the lack of information held by the government comes as two influential parliamentary committees prepare to take an in-depth look at PFI.

Today the Treasury Committee will hear evidence in its ongoing inquiry into the future of PFI, asking whether it has been value for money for the taxpayer. The following day, the Public Accounts Committee will look at the lessons learned so far from the roll-out of PFI.

More than 700 hospitals, schools, prisons and other public sector projects have been built under the PFI scheme.

But in many cases, the construction and investment companies involved have sold on their equity shares to infrastructure funds on the secondary PFI market.

HM Treasury keeps a database of such transactions, but according to analyst Dexter Whitfield, it is out-of-date and contains just a fraction of the information it should.

In a report produced by the European Services Strategy Unit think tank, Mr Whitfield said: "Government monitoring of the sale of equity in public private partnership companies is inadequate, infrequent and underestimates the scale of transactions.

"Meanwhile, banks and construction companies are ratcheting up large profits extracted from what is ultimately publicly-financed investment."

In a statement, the Treasury said: "The Treasury collects and updates data biannually from departments on changes of PFI share ownership, and this information is published on our website."

"We now have some form of equity holder information on around 81% of PFI projects."

In the case of the Calderdale Royal Infirmary in Yorkshire, Mr Whitfield said the Treasury database held no information at all on secondary equity sales.

But after scouring company accounts and other documents, he found shares in the hospital had changed hands nine times since 2002.

The BBC asked five of the companies which had sold equity in Calderdale Royal to disclose the profit they had made from the deals, but was told the information was commercially confidential.

'Wealth machine'
As part of a comprehensive piece of research into the market, Mr Whitfield discovered the average profit margin on PFI equity sales was more than 50%.

Analysing a sample of 154 projects, he found profits of more than £500m. If the same level of profit had been achieved by all PFI equity transactions, he estimates private sector profits would stand at £2.2bn.

Describing the profits as "excessive", he said: "It's a wealth machine. It's not necessarily printing money, but it's virtually that, given the scale of these profits."

His call for a clearer picture of the market was echoed by the chair of the influential Public Accounts Committee, Margaret Hodge, MP.

"There has to be transparency around the system, so that if there is some profit over time in the funding of these PFI contracts, that profit can be shared between the taxpayer and the private investor," she said.

Another Public Accounts Committee member, Ian Swales, MP, said the large profits made raised serious questions about whether the deals to finance, build and maintain hospitals and schools under PFI were good value for money for the taxpayer in the first place.

"By definition, that means the taxpayer got a bad deal at the start, or there wouldn't have been these super-profits to be made."

David Metter, chairman of the Public Private Partnership Forum, an industry body for the PFI industry, said the profits made were a fair reflection of the risks taken on by the financiers and builders of the projects.

"The private sector is efficient and has demonstrated in the past 15 years that it can deliver 700 projects on time and on cost," he said.

"It would be extremely surprising if the government decided to do it another way."

File on 4 is on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday 14 June at 2000 BST, and Sunday 19 June at 1700 BST. Listen again via the BBC iPlayer or download the podcast.

The ESSU Report, The £10bn Sale of Share in PPP Companies, can be purchased from Spokesman Books. It follows on from Professor Whitfield's previous study, Global Auction of Public Assets: Public sector alternatives to the infrastructure market and Public Private Partnerships

Urgent Request from Jeju Island

2011-06-14T06:47:00.000-07:00

Call South Korean Embassy - No Navy Base on Jeju Island

The latest word from Jeju Island is that Professor Yang has resumed his hunger strike and has left the hospital in Jeju City and has been taken to a Buddhist monastery. Sung-Hee Choi is still in jail (waiting for her trial to resume on June 22) and she is hunger striking again in solidarity with Professor Yang.

We ask you now to please make another round of phone calls to South Korean embassies in your country. This time Mr. Ko (in the photo below) asks that you give feedback to the village on the response you get when you call. Even if they refuse to talk with you please pass that information to me at globalnet@mindspring.com and I will send it to MacGregor Eddy who is now in Gangjeong village and she will give it to Mr. Ko.

We ask that you tell the South Korean embassy that you want them to stop building the Navy base because it is leading to the destruction of the soft coral reefs offshore and will destroy the farming and fishing village of Gangjeong. The Navy base, which will be a port of call for U.S. Navy destroyers and other warships, will become a lightening rod for conflict with China.

In the U.S. you can call the South Korean Embassy in Washington DC at 202-939-5600 and/or you can call the South Korean office at the United Nations in New York City at 212-439-4000.

Thanks very much for your effort. I am certain the villagers will be encouraged to know you have made the call.

Bruce K. Gagnon
Coordinator
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
globalnet@mindspring.com
http://www.space4peace.org/
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ (blog)

Mr. Ko, chair of the Committee to Stop the Naval Base, in Gangjeong village on Jeju Island, South Korea. This is what they must do every day in one way or another to stop the Navy base construction.

Defend Irish Neutrality

2011-06-08T02:56:00.000-07:00

The use of Shannon Airport by US troops on their way to and from the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan has gained a good deal of coverage recently, primarily thanks to the wikileaks stories in the Irish Independent.

In Ireland, the new programme for government says Shannon Airport should be used only in accordance with international law. As the Hague Convention of 1907, which has been a cornerstone of international law, says neutral states cannot allow their territory to be used in a war (no US army planes land in Zurich airport), PANA expects the new Fine Gael/Labour government to live up to its promises. In the meantime, please support the Shannonwatch demonstration at Shannon Airport on 12 June 2-3 pm.

Also see www.globalintelligenceforum.com which promotes a conference on global intelligence on the 11-13 July in Dungarvan. The speakers include a former director of the CIA and many others.

Since the decisive majority of the people of the US and GB want to see the end of these wars, in opposing them since 2001, PANA sees itself as pro-US and pro-British (their peoples, that is).

Roger Cole,
Chair of the Peace & Neutrality Alliance
www.pana.ie
http://www.shannonwatch.org/

Missile offence at sea: protest fasts in US and Korea

2011-05-26T01:09:00.000-07:00

STANDING AT BATH IRON WORKS

Coastline of Gangjeong village on Jeu Island ... imagine these rocks covered with cement

At BIW yesterday as workers left the shipyard

I was able to hand out six leaflets yesterday as the hundreds of workers walked past me and hundreds more drove past my little spot on the corner in front of Bath Iron Works (BIW).

I plan on going back again today, and every weekday, as long as I continue with this fast (now 3rd day) in support of the extraordinary people of Gangjeong village on Jeju Island.

They build the Navy Aegis destroyers at BIW that are outfitted with missile offense systems and will be deployed at the base on Jeju Island and at other bases in the Asian-Pacific thus forcing China to expand its military in response.

I am grateful to Dennis Bernstein at KPFA in Berkeley who yesterday interviewed me about this story. I was touched by the sincerity of Dennis about Professor Yang Yoon-Mo who today is on his 51st day of hunger strike. You can hear the interview here.

Global Network board member MacGregor Eddy (Salinas, California) is working non-stop to create Facebook support for Yang, fellow GN board member Sung-Hee Choi (who is now on her 7th day of hunger striking while in jail), and the seven other villagers now in detention. It appears that the Navy has picked out many of the key leadership of the non-violent resistance to the base construction and put them in the slammer. So this is where we all come in - we have to internationalize this struggle in order to pick up the slack.

Last night I had an email from one of our supporters here in Maine. He told me he had called the South Korean embassy in Washington DC and they told him he had to call Boston to lodge his complaint against the treatment of the Gangjeong villagers. So when he called Boston the person there said they knew nothing about the Jeju story. It seems to me that the South Korean embassy in Washington must be getting tired of the phone calls and are trying to divert and frustrate those who are making the call. I take this as a good sign that they are trying to deflect the growing public support.

So my response is - step up the emails and phone calls! You can write to the South Korean Defense Attaché assigned to Washington DC. at this email and demand an end of the Navy base construction, defenattache@yahoo.com or you can call the South Korean Embassy in Washington at 202-939-5600 to show your solidarity with the Gangjeong villagers. Or call the South Korean embassy in your own country.

If you haven't yet watched the video interview with Professor Yang you must do so and help us get others to see it as well. More than 6,400 have seen it since it got posted on May 20. You can see it here.

Keep checking my blog for regular posts about the situation on Jeju Island. Your support is urgently needed and appreciated.

Bruce K. Gagnon
Coordinator
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
globalnet@mindspring.com
http://www.space4peace.org/
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ (blog)

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Two reviews of Imperialism

2011-05-25T03:19:00.000-07:00

Imperialism: A Study
by J. A. Hobson

Introduction by Nathaniel Mehr
Foreword by Jeremy Corbyn MP

First published in 1902, Hobson’s seminal work was among the first to make the link between political economy and the imperialist expansionism of the advanced capitalist nations at the turn of the 20th Century. A devastating moral critique of the murderous cynicism of imperialism, Hobson’s book paved the way for the influential Marxist theories of imperialism advanced by Lenin and Bukharin and others. It provides an invaluable framework for understanding militarism and war in the 21st Century.

Two reviews of this classic work are available from: Morning Star and Socialist Review

Wapping - An Exhibition and a New Book

2011-05-17T01:22:00.000-07:00

On 24th January, 1986, Rupert Murdoch's News International group moved production of its four national newspapers to Wapping in London's Docklands.

Over 5,000 production and clerical workers were sacked overnight. The journalists were not sacked but more than 100 - the "refuseniks" - took a stand on principle and walked out of their jobs.

Wapping 25 Years On, is an exhibition of the dramatic images and accounts of the dispute and the challenges for print and media workers. The exhibition is being held at the Marx Memorial Library, 37A Clerkenwell Green, London, EC1R 0DU, until 31 May.

The latest podcast from Radio Free Press features a tour of this exhibition. Nicholas Jones talks to a number of Wapping veterans, including the exhibition organiser, Ann Field, a former official with the print union SOGAT and a union activist on The Times, John Bailey, a chapel father for the NGA print union at the Sun, and Graham Dodkins, former library worker at The Times and co-author with John Lang of a new book, Bad News: The Wapping Dispute.

The podcast lasts 18 minutes and can be listened to via the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom website.

Bad News: The Wapping Dispute by John Lang and Graham Dodkins can be purchased direct from Spokesman Books.

Bad News – The Wapping Dispute

2011-04-20T07:02:00.000-07:00

Press launch Thursday 28 April at 3pm, at the Marx Memorial Library, Clerkenwell Green, EC1R 0DU (Farringdon tube)

Bad News – The Wapping Dispute tells the poignant and timely story of an ordinary group of people who were thrown into extraordinary circumstances, and the effects these circumstances had on their lives.

By Graham Dodkins and John Lang

Foreword by Tony Benn

Published by Spokesman on 1st May 2011

On 24th January 1986, some 5,000 workers employed by four of Britain’s national newspapers were sacked: The Sun, News of the World, The Times and The Sunday Times were owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International Limited, and the bitter industrial dispute that followed was to last 13 months.

As the 25th anniversary of the dispute nears, Bad News – The Wapping Dispute is published at a time when there is renewed public anger at a Conservative-led government, and unemployment, police handling of demonstrations, and Rupert Murdoch’s hold over the British press and media dominate the headlines.

"The way to Dock Street was along narrow, cobbled streets between imposing Victorian warehouses. It was dark and deserted, except for the police... The News International complex was a disturbing sight: Huge, square buildings bathed in orange-yellow floodlights and surrounded by high spiked railings topped with razor-wire. Surveillance cameras peered over the top....."

In the year following the strike the authors of this book, themselves previously librarians at The Times and The Sunday Times and active participants in the dispute, interviewed many of the clerical workers involved in an effort to document their experiences.

Having spent more than a year recording these testimonies and transcribing the tapes onto the backs of discarded fast-food delivery menus using a portable typewriter (money was tight and paper expensive), the project was reluctantly abandoned, the victim of an acute need to earn a living.

The manuscript gathered dust in a loft until, in 2009 (with the 25th anniversary of the dispute fast approaching) unemployment, ironically, provided an opportunity to finish the job.

Tony Benn says: "What comes out in this book is the courage and determination of those who fought for their jobs and their rights against a government that was bitterly hostile to both. But more important than that, this book is being brought out at a time of renewed attacks which has also produced a strong and broad campaign by those who would suffer if the cuts went through. It is relevant to those in current struggle and will I am sure give them encouragement. This is a book that should be very widely read"

An exhibition to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the dispute starts on Sunday May 1st and will run for 1 month at the Marx Memorial Library.

The press launch for the exhibition and book will take place at the Marx Memorial Library on Thursday 28 April at 3pm.

Graham Dodkins was a Times/Sunday Times Librarian, sourcing information for journalists and the general public, when the dispute began and was a member of the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades Clerical Chapel. Like many others, he was a foot soldier, picketing News International buildings, attending meetings and taking part in demonstrations. As time went on, he developed a facility for public speaking and edited Hard Times, the Chapel newsletter. The publication of his book Working Boats, which chronicled the demise of commercial carrying on Britain’s canals and its effect on the families that lived and worked on the boats, coincided with the end of the dispute. He later worked as a local authority Sports Development Officer and managed a long-term project for disadvantaged young people at West Ham United Football Club and across the East End of London.

John Lang worked as a librarian in the Business News section of the Times/Sunday Times mainly collating and supplying information for the journalists. He was actively involved in the trade union and was Deputy Father of the Chapel of the SOGAT clerical chapel. At a very early stage of the dispute, he became the acting Father of the Chapel for the clerical chapel, and was appointed Support Group Co-ordinator on behalf of the strikers. As well as the numerous meetings with strikers and union officials, he spoke regularly at meetings that had been organised by supporters of the strike across the country and attended the demonstrations and picketing at the News International buildings. A few months into the dispute, he was elected as a local councillor in the London Borough of Newham. Since the dispute ended, he has worked as a Housing Officer for a local authority, set up and managed a comedy club, worked for a project supporting asylum seekers and spent around a year backpacking in various countries. He is currently employed as a Maintenance Manager for an arts organisation which provides studios for artists.

OBAMA'S VISIT TO IRELAND

2011-04-11T02:52:00.000-07:00

AN APPEAL FOR SIGNATURES

Dear Friends,

President Obama visits Ireland on May 20-22.

Since 2001, the Peace & Neutrality Alliance (PANA) has campaigned against the use of Shannon Airport by US troops en route to Afghanistan and Iraq. We are seeking to ensure this is the major issue during his visit.

We would therefore appreciate support for the following statement: "We support the Irish Peace Movement's campaign to terminate the use of Shannon Airport by US troops on their way to and from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."

Please email your support to: info@pana.ie

Thanks

Roger Cole,

Chair

Peace & Neutrality Alliance

http://www.pana.ie/

Nuclear New Build?

2011-04-07T06:02:00.000-07:00

A review of the issues
Christopher Gifford's timely pamphlet critically probes the case that is made for new nuclear reactors in Britain. Its relevance is highlighted by the continuing scramble to contain contamination from six reactors at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.

‘This paper attempts to describe the present state of affairs, in particular the issues facing the new Coalition Government. In February 2007, the then government was described in judicial review as having behaved ‘unlawfully’ in consulting on energy policy with information ‘wholly insufficient for the public to make an intelligent response’. Since then, thousands of pages have been published in further consultations and some in response to freedom of information requests, and it has become clear that much detail remains to be provided on matters that may not be decided until licences to build and operate nuclear stations are granted, if at all. The material is usually technical, but there are ethical issues which demand political decisions after the involvement of an informed public. Meaningful information has been slow to emerge, and it is not surprising that, so far, few members of the public have become involved.’

Christopher Gifford

Pamphlet ISBN: 978 0 85124 7878 - Price: £6.00

ePub ISBN: 978 0 85124 7984 - Price £4.99

Appeal to the World Public

2011-03-24T04:58:00.000-07:00

The Russell Foundation has today received an important appeal from a friend in Turkey who has requested its wide dissemination. Today, in Diyarbakir, Kurdish activists commence a sit-in as part of their long campaign for political rights (see below). Our Turkish friend also urges us all to keep a close eye on developments in Turkey.

Appeal to the World Public

Mothers for Peace have erected Democratic Solution Tents in all cities of the Kurdish region on 18 March 2011. Kurdish people, embracing the Democratic Solution Tents and keeping watch over them 24 hours a day have directly and most powerfully displayed the determination and the will to put an end to war.

Kurdish people have declared their demand and will for peace, democracy and freedom once more in a most splendid fashion to the world in the Newroz demonstrations of 2011. Millions of Kurds holding freedom marches from Newroz fields to Democratic Solution Tents scores of kilometers away have shouted out their democratic demands for all ears to hear.

AKP government that keeps misleading Turkish and world public with its “democratic initiative” rhetoric has once more reacted with grave intolerance to the Democratic Solution Tents and freedom marches of the Kurdish people. State “security” forces have, using high dose gas grenades, pepper gas and trucheons, most flagrantly attacked our mothers, elected representatives and Kurdish people who were trying to exercise their universal democratic civil rights. They have detained our elected representatives, members and people.

AKP Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who offers counsel and advice to the dictators of the Middle East, here in Turkey once more threatens the representatives of the Kurdish people and the Kurdish people as a whole saying “we will do what is necessary”.

As BDP (Peace and Democracy Party) we wish to once again share our concern that these attacks will further aggravate the political crisis and social chaos in Turkey and escalate violence. The solution is NOT to attack the Kurdish people itself and its political bodies and representatives, BUT to recognize and acknowledge the will brought out by the people. We believe it is our responsibility to inform the public in Turkey and world public of the situation. The AKP Government’s mentality of solving the Kurdish issue without the Kurds is dragging Turkey into a deadlock and war.

The Kurdish people who have been resisting and struggling against policies of denial, assimilation and liquidation for 30 years will continue to exercise its rights to democratic civil resistance deriving from international law, in order for the war to end and for the creation of a democratic and free country.

In this context, we once more list below the demands of the Kurdish people that have already been declared several times to the whole public:

1. Immediate end to military and political operations

2. Constitutional guarantee for the right to education in mother tongue and the right to use mother tongue in the public sphere

3. Cancellation of the 10 per cent election threshold that blocks Kurdish people’s representation in the parliament

4. Freedom to all political prisoners without discrimination

At 12.00 o’clock on Thursday, 24 March 2011, we will start a sit-in at Diyarbakır, the stronghold of resistance, peace and freedom that will continue until we get a response to our demands.

We call on the international public to act in solidarity with the Kurdish people against these unjust and unlawful attacks and to support the Kurdish people’s legitimate demands that find clear expression in the watchword: “Freedom or Freedom”.

BDP - Peace and Democracy Party

March 23, 2011

Japan: An Appeal

2011-03-16T02:36:00.000-07:00

The Russell Foundation has received the following appeal from our friends in the Japan Council against A and H Bombs (Gensuikyo).

Dear friends,

Thank you very much for your warm messages and support to us. Your messages are of great encouragement to us and all victims of the disaster. We have translated your messages into Japanese and passed them on to the victims and all Japanese people.

The damage caused by earthquakes and subsequent tsunami is so horrible. All buildings were swept away. Thousands of bodies are found every day. The number of those dead and are missing is expected to be more than 11,500. The evacuees have increased more than 450,000. They are forced to stay at shelters with not enough food, water, cloths, oil for heaters and gas for cars, etc.

In addition to that, the frightening accident of Fukushima power plants is threatening the safety of people and their uneasiness is growing.

The municipalities and citizens of the damage struck areas have so far given strong support to our signature campaigns for abolition of nuclear weapons, our peace marches and the World Conference against A and H Bombs. We have to help them when they are suffering.

Japan Council against A and H Bombs (Gensuikyo) set up an account and called on Japanese people to donate to help the victimized people and areas.

Postal Money Order
Account No.: 00110-9-1780
Account Name: Japan Council against A and H Bombs (Gensuikyo)

If you wish to donate or send support to the victims, we can accept your donation at the above account. We will transfer your donation to the victims or/and we will send necessary goods and services to the victimized people and areas.

Thank you in advance for your support and cooperation. If there is any questions/requests, please do not hesitate to ask us.

Sincerely,

Yayoi Tsuchida
Assistant Secretary General
=============================================
Japan Council against A & H Bombs (GENSUIKYO)
2-4-4 Yushima, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8464 JAPAN
phone: +81-3-5842-6034
fax: +81-3-5842-6033
Email: antiatom@topaz.plala.or.jp
URL: http://www.antiatom.org/
=============================================

Victory for Peace Movement

2011-03-09T01:46:00.000-08:00

Press Statement 8/3/2011 - Peace & Neutrality Alliance

Victory for Peace Movement in new Programme for Government

The Peace & Neutrality Alliance (PANA) welcomes the statement in the new Labour/Fine Gael Programme for Government, promising to implement international law in terms of the use of Irish airspace and airports by foreign powers. Under the section Foreign Affairs, ODA and Defence, the Programme says: "We will enforce the prohibition on the use of Irish airspace, airports and related facilities for purpose not in line with dictates of international law."

PANA Chair, Roger Cole, a delegate to the Conference, asked for clarification of this statement in the Programme for Government. He pointed out that a key part of international law governing the behaviour of Neutral States is the Hague Convention of 1907 which prohibits the use of a neutral state's territory to prosecute a war. Switzerland quotes the Hague Convention to explain why no US planes land at Zurich Airport on their way to and from their wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mr. Cole asked: " Does this mean the termination of the use of Shannon Airport by US troops in these permanent ongoing wars?" citing Afghanistan and Iraq.

Eamon Gilmore in his closing speech to the Conference, replied to Roger Cole's call for clarification. The Labour Party Leader stated that: "Yes, Roger Cole has pointed out an area where there is a difference" and "that it may be hard to believe" but that the statement in the Programme for the Government "does mean what is says".

In the context of the question asked and the reply given, this means the new government will, like the Government of Switzerland, implement the Hague Convention, and terminate the use of Shannon Airport by US troops on their way to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We would hope the new incoming government would do so on Easter Monday, the 95th anniversary of the 1916 Rising. PANA will also seek an early meeting with the new Minister for Foreign Affairs.

For more information contact Roger Cole, Chair of PANA Tel: 087-2611597 or Seamas Ratigan Tel: 086-8369793

Appeal for a Total Ban on Nuclear Weapons Petition Launched

2011-02-24T02:53:00.000-08:00

On the Start of the New Signature Campaign in Support of “Appeal for a Total Ban on Nuclear Weapons”

February 15, 2011 in Hiroshima, Nagasaki & Tokyo

Dear friends,

First of all, I want to express my gratitude to you and all the other friends in Japan and overseas who have given us support in preparing to launch the new signature campaign.

At present, when we will soon see the 66th Summer of the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world is rapidly changing in terms of nuclear weapons. With our actions in New York, or in many other cities around the world, the NPT Review Conference in May last year declared it as its goal “to achieve the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”, and called on all states to make “special efforts” to establish a framework for it, focusing on the proposal of UN Secretary General Ban KI-moon for the start of negotiations on a convention banning nuclear weapons.

The outcome of the session of the UN General assembly towards the end of the last year also showed a change. Nearly all member states voted in support of a resolution that urges full implementation of all past agreements on nuclear disarmament. The resolution calling for the start of negotiations on a nuclear weapon convention, put forward by Malaysia and many others, enjoyed support from 133 countries, including China, India and Pakistan, which possess nuclear arsenals, and even North Korea.

Now that the voice calling for a ban on nuclear weapons represents the majority in international politics, and that the Secretary General of the United Nations is appealing that we should, with Hibakusha, “celebrate the end of nuclear weapons”, the peace movements around the world should rise up in action in solidarity to make next steps forward, and the initiative for it should be taken here in Japan the only A-bombed country, with the Hibakusha - this is what we have thought. Thus, we have planned a new signature campaign in support of the “Appeal for a total ban on nuclear weapons”, which we are now launching in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and here in Tokyo.

Having drafted the appeal, we have sent it to leaders and influential people in different fields both in Japan and around the world to seek their endorsement and comments. Their responses were wonderful.

Internationally, we have received supports and messages from, first of all, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and his High Representative Sergio Duarte, Nobel laureates Jody Williams and Mairead Maguire, and international networks and national and grassroots peace groups, such as the International Peace Bureau, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and its International Campaign. The number of leading people overseas who have endorsed the “Appeal” has reached 170, representing 12 international networks and 118 peace organizations operating in 31 countries.

We are also receiving endorsement from prominent people in many different fields, leaders of organizations, and mayors, governors and local council leaders. Eleven prominent personalities willingly agreed to our request that their names and portraits appear in a campaign poster. They are Mr. Sumiteru Taniguchi, a leader of the Hibakusha movement, Messrs. Tadatoshi Akiba & Tomiichi Taue, the mayors of Hiroshima & Nagasaki, Nobel laureates Kenzaburo Oe and Toshihide Masukawa, Yoji Yamada, the film director, Isao Harimoto, a baseball player who has the record of 3000 hits, Jakucho Setouchi, a leading Buddhist nun and writer, Dr. Shigeaki Hinohara, popular singers of Kumiko and Chitose Hajime, all that we know for their prominence. There are many more prominent personalities whose names every one of us knows.

Many local governments leaders with nuclear-free declaration municipalities and/or Mayors for Peace also support the campaign. The endorsers now include 4 prefectural governors, 123 mayors and 73 municipal council chair- or vice-chair persons. The number of municipalities they represent is 162 in 31 prefectures. This represents already nearly 10% of all Japanese municipalities.

What is delightful for us, above all, is that among the endorsers there are Hibakusha and many citizen movements leaders who have supported with us the Japan’s anti A-and H-bomb movement in its long history. Please find the names of all endorsers in the distributed to you to day.

We will promote the signature campaign, which we are launching, in solidarity and in cooperation with all the other campaign in Japan and overseas that stand in support of a ban on nuclear weapons, such as Mayors for Peace and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

To achieve a world without nuclear weapons, the citizens around the world must exercise pressure on their own governments, both in nuclear and non-nuclear powers, in solidarity and cooperation with one another. We must also urge the Japanese Government to stand in the forefront in the same endeavor, as one that represents the only A-bombed country.

Placing the desire of the people in the signatures, we will send a delegation to the United Nations around the beginning of October every year, when the UN begins disarmament deliberations, to submit them to the United Nations.

The key word of our action is, as it was at the time when our nationwide movement against A and H Bombs was founded as response to the tragic incident wrought by the Hydrogen bomb test at the Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954, “With All People in the Region”.

Now, by reading out the text of the “Appeal for a Total Ban on Nuclear Weapons”, I declare the start of the international signature campaign that will form our next step in achieving a world set free of nuclear weapons:

Appeal for a Total Ban on Nuclear Weapons

In August 1945, two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki instantly turned the two cities into ruins and took the lives of about 210 thousand people. Even now, more than 200,000 Hibakusha, or A-bomb survivors, are carrying with them scars. Their tragedy should not be repeated anywhere on earth.

The call for the elimination of nuclear weapons is becoming ever widespread across the world. Citizens are taking actions, and many governments are endeavoring to reach this goal. The surest guarantee against there being another Hiroshima, or Nagasaki, is a total ban and the elimination of nuclear weapons.

In May 2010, the 189 parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), including the Nuclear weapons States, agreed “to achieve the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”. Now is the time to act to accomplish it.

We call on all governments to enter negotiations without delay on a convention banning nuclear weapons.

Japan Council against A & H Bombs (GENSUIKYO)
http://www.antiatom.org/

P.S.
We are now constructing the signature campaign page in our website. Please go to http://www.antiatom.org/sig-press/ From there, you can make online signature and download the English version of signature form. A French and Korean versions will be up soon. Please make a link and host the campaign page in your website.

If you go to the page of special message, you can read the messages from U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Ambassador Sergio Duarte to the campaign. If you go further, you will see the list of endorses and messages, but we just want to remind you that it is still under construction. we are going to put more pictures, etc and names. Thank you. (Yayoi)

“Projecting Peace: The Perpetual Search for the End to All Hostilities”

2011-01-31T07:37:00.000-08:00

The first of our "Projecting Peace" talks is on Wednesday 2nd February 2011 at 3pm. To be held in Room SR 2.06A, The Old Mining Building, Leeds University.

Speakers include: Kate Hudson (Gen Sec CND) and Ashley Wood (Consultant and Project Manager for 'Making Peace' Nobel Peace Prize anniversary exhibition International Peace Bureau, Geneva)

All are welcome.

***

'Last year we applied for and were awarded a small grant from the British Association for a project to bring academics and others together around the theme of “Projecting Peace”. The proposal grew from a concern that advocates of peace are often accused of being out of touch with the harsh realities of political life and human nature and are often caricatured as well meaning visionaries who simplistically and ineffectually dream of a return to a non-violent golden age. In the face of such criticisms, we propose to establish a network for “Projecting Peace” - to provide an interdisciplinary forum for exploring the complexities, ambiguities, ambivalences and varieties of peace-making and peace-thinking with the aim of addressing how these varied academic disciplines and schools of thought can address, in some practical way, perhaps the greatest challenges in history – anthropogenic climate change and nuclear proliferation.

The ‘scramble’ for sustainable natural resources within a technologically-changed and -challenged climate is an increasingly important source of global conflict. The self interests of governments for national survival run counter to the evident necessity for collaboration and cooperation on an unprecedented scale. Therefore, our main focus in this interdisciplinary research project will be on the practicalities of applying and maintaining ethical, ecological, and humanitarian considerations beyond national boundaries in the fragile economies of emergent cultures of peace and security. By so doing we will be contributing to the current interest in “cosmopolitics”, i.e. a politics which reaches beyond - or even supersedes – the nation state and to whatever form - pacific or otherwise - this might take in the future.

It is widely recognized that the future of our planet is threatened by two man-made dangers – nuclear proliferation and the effects of climate change. These self-inflicted problems have generated the necessity for an elaborated strategy of global cooperation. The question therefore becomes - how can academics and activists join together to contribute to the debates and strategies that are developing around these issues? Our future survival may indeed require us to better understand the underlying human aspects of our past and current predicaments in an attempt to achieve Kant’s idea of “perpetual peace”.'

Diane Morgan (University of Leeds) and Dave Webb (Leeds Metropolitan University)

See: www.projectingpeace.info for further details

Raymond Williams

2011-01-21T04:21:00.000-08:00

Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism

Key Words is committed to developing the tradition of cultural materialism derived from the founding analysis of culture and society in the work of Raymond Williams.

The journal provides a forum for radical thought on history and politics, and explores the role of literary, media and cultural forms in the contemporary global era. Each issue addresses a selected theme of relevance to the arts, media, politics and everyday life.

Further details can be found on the Raymond Williams Society website.

Issue 8, Labouring-Class Writing, has just been published and is available to buy now from Spokesman Books (£15).

CONTENTS:

Editors’ Preface

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Retrieval and Beyond: Labouring-Class Writing

Tim Burke and John Goodridge

Brute Strength: Labouring-Class Studies and Animal Studies

Donna Landry

Close Reading Yearsley

David Fairer

Not So Lowly Bards: Working-Class Women Poets and Middle-Class Expectations

Florence Boos

Genre Matters: Attending to Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Labouring-Class Poetry

William J. Christmas

Ecocriticism

Anne Milne

The Rise of Robert Bloomfield

Scott McEathron

The Foresters: Alexander Wilson’s Transatlantic Labouring-Class Nature Poetry

Bridget Keegan

‘Tracing the Ramifications of the Democratic Principle’:

Literary Criticism and Theory in the Chartist Circular

Mike Sanders

Labour History by Other Means

Jonathan Rose

Graphic Bric-a-brac: Comic Visual Culture and the

Study of Early Victorian Lower-Class Urban Culture (with illustrations)

Brian Maidment

* * *

Language and Locale: John Locke, Somerset and Plain Style

Olivia Smith

Institutional Culture as Whiteness: ‘a complex argument’

John Higgins

Reviews

Raymond Williams Foundation

****

Back issues are also available from Spokesman Books.

New title book launch at Housmans - January 12th 2011

2011-01-05T05:08:00.000-08:00

Hobson’s Imperialism presented by Jeremy Corbyn MP, Alex Callinicos and Nathaniel Mehr

Wednesday 12th January, 7pm at Housmans,

5 Caledonian Road, King’s Cross,London, N1 9DX

£3 entrance, redeemable against purchase

This January, Spokesman Books will be re-publishing J.A. Hobson's 1902 classic Imperialism: A Study. Hobson's book was among the first to explore the links between political economy and imperial expansion. It inspired a number of Marxist critiques of imperialism, and was quoted extensively in Lenin's famous pamphlet, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

The new edition will feature an introduction by Nathaniel Mehr and a foreword by Jeremy Corbyn MP. At the event Jeremy Corbyn and Nathaniel Mehr will be joined by Professor Alex Callinicos, who has written extensively on economics and imperialism, to discuss the significance of Hobson's book in today's world.

The 2011 Olof Palme Memorial Peace Lecture

2010-12-16T05:51:00.000-08:00

The Praxis Centre, Leeds Metropolitan University and Leeds City Council Peace Links Group present: The 2011 Olof Palme Memorial Peace Lecture

Olof Palme, World Interests - and what Wikileaks tells us about diplomacy as an institution Century by Professor Johan Galtung

Johan Galtung is founder and Director of TRANSCEND - A Peace and Development Network for Conflict Transformation by Peaceful Means, with more than 300 members from over 80 countries around the world and Rector of TRANSCEND Peace University (TPU).

Professor Galtung has published more than 1000 articles covering a wide-range of fields, including peaceful conflict transformation, deep culture, peace pedagogy, reconciliation, development, peace building and empowerment, global governance, direct structural and cultural peace/violence, peace journalism, and reflections on current events, and more than 100 books translated into dozens of languages.

The lecture will take place at Leeds Civic Hall on Sunday 23rd January from 6.00pm.

***

Johan Galtung's article United States, the West and the Rest of the World features in War is Peace, issue 73 of The Spokesman.

Looking for something different this Christmas?

2010-12-02T04:06:00.000-08:00

The Levellers and the English Revolution
by H.N. Brailsford and edited by Christopher Hill

NOW at the festive price of £12.50 post-free

'To our generation fell the good fortune of re-discovering the Levellers. To the classical liberal historians they meant rather less than nothing. This neglect is puzzling. At the crisis of the English Revolution it was from the Levellers and not from its commanders that the victorious New Model army derived its political ideas and its democratic drive.' H.N. Brailsford.

'One can see why Brailsford devoted to the the Levellers the last years of his dedicated life. He thought of this book not as a mere history, but as a profoundly political study, which would convey a message from him to the younger generation.' CHRISTOPHER HILL

For more information about Brailsford's seminal work and other relevant titles, please visit: http://www.spokesmanbooks.com/acatalog/The_Levellers.html

736 pages Indexed

“No Peace Without Justice”

2010-11-12T02:02:00.000-08:00

The London Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine

By Frank Barat and Michael Mansfield QC

Countless United Nations Security Council and General Assembly resolutions have been passed and violated; The Goldstone Report has been attacked and dismissed and the recent UNHRC fact finding Mission on the Freedom Flotilla incident, condemning Israel’s actions in the strongest possible terms, has been rejected as biased by Israel and was hardly mentioned in the higher spheres of the UN. The reason most often given to explain this lack of political action being that ‘it will harm the peace process.’

We are made to believe that the Israel/Palestine conflict is a never ending one and that, when it comes to this issue, International Law is irrelevant.

But civil society knows better. This conflict is about International Law and nothing else. Not harming the peace process means not harming more than 17 years (from the Oslo agreement in 1993 until now) of settlement building, bombing, murder and assassination, Israeli army aggression, land grab, US vetoes, dispossessions and humiliation of the Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel.

Civil society also knows that under a facade of bland statements ‘condemning’ Israel’s actions, the EU, the USA and the whole international community are in fact actively complicit in those crimes.

That’s where the Russell Tribunal on Palestine (RToP) comes in.

The RToP is a popular tribunal that intends to expose third parties’ complicity in Israel’s violations of International Law. Its first session was held in Barcelona (1) and focused on EU complicity. After 3 days of testimonies and expert analyses, it was proven that the EU was not only passively complicit but also pro-active in supporting Israel. How else can we explain that the EU-Israel Association Agreement has still not been vitiated, that Israel is accepted by Europe in all major European sports and cultural activities denied to Palestinians?

The Second Session of the RToP, which will take place in London on 20-22 November at 113 Chancery Lane, (2) will focus on corporate complicity in Israel’s violations of International Law. A simple set of questions will be asked to a prominent panel of Tribunal members including: the author Alice Walker, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Maguire, the Former UN envoy to Israel-Palestine John Dugard, the Spanish judge Martin Pallin, the former ANC official Ronnie Kasrils, Malian former Culture Minister Aminata Traore, former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and the British barrister Michael Mansfield QC.

In 2004 the International Court of Justice in The Hague declared in unequivocal terms that the building of a ‘Separation Wall’ was illegal and that therefore those contributing to it were acting unlawfully. The Court went on to place an obligation on the international community to end this illegality and not participate in it. Therefore the kinds of questions that will be posed at the Tribunal are: ‘how do corporations which have provided building materials for the Wall explain their actions?’ and ‘how can they be held to account on the basis of international legal liability?’

Over 2 days, experts and witnesses from all over the world (including Palestine and Israel) will testify and give legal analyses about various corporations, including Alstom-Veolia and Caterpillar.

The RToP has a new dimension over all previous Russell Tribunals (on Vietnam 1967 and Latin America 1973) – and that is empowerment. Not only will it be identifying those complicit in Israel’s illegalities but also ways in which citizens in their respective countries and in Palestine might initiate legal redress. Following the Freedom Flotilla incident, some legal actions have already been undertaken in Belgium, Greece and Turkey. Survivors of the attack have presented Luis Moreno Ocampo, the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor, with a comprehensive dossier, claiming that there is an “overwhelming” case for prosecution. Will the ICC respond favourably to this request? Will the US and the EU support such actions?

President Obama said in July, during an interview with the South African Broadcast Corporation (3): “No peace without justice in Sudan” and he urged cooperation with the ICC. The day the same standards are applied to Israel and the Western powers, democracy will regain its original meaning and the oppressed around the world will finally be able to breathe a sigh of relief.

In the meantime, it is left to us, living in relative comfort and privilege, to fight for equal rights for those imprisoned in poverty and denied a voice; to demonstrate solidarity and above all, not to remain silent before injustice.

__

Frank Barat is the coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine.

(1): http://www.russelltribunalonpalestine.com/en/sessions/barcelona-session

(2): http://www.russelltribunalonpalestine.com/en/sessions/london-session

(3): http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article35670

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine - London Session Registration

2010-10-29T03:06:00.000-07:00

INVITATION

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine is an International People’s Tribunal created by a large group of citizens involved in the promotion of peace and justice in the Middle East. It was launched in Brussels in March 2009, and held its first public session in Barcelona a year later, when the Tribunal found European Union member states in breach of international and internal European Union law with respect to protecting the human rights of Palestinians.

The Tribunal will hold its second public session in London at the Law Society in Chancery Lane during the weekend of 20-21 November. The theme of this session is Corporate Complicity in Israel’s Violations of International Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law.

You are cordially invited to attend. Places are limited so we recommend early registration to avoid disappointment. Tickets cost £15 each and are valid for both days . Please advise when registering if you will be attending only on one day. It will then be possible to offer places to more people.

Due to the high number of people who wish to attend, please note that not everyone will be able to be seated in the main chamber of the Law Society. To accommodate as many people as possible we have provided an additional viewing room at the Law Society where the Tribunal can be followed on large screens. We cannot guarantee a place in the main chamber, and spaces will be on a first come first served basis on the day.

You can register for the Tribunal here: http://www.russelltribunalonpalestine.com/en/register-for-the-london-session

The agenda for the London Session can be viewed here: http://www.russelltribunalonpalestine.com/en/770/london-session-agenda-published

What Price Austerity?

2010-10-27T05:49:00.000-07:00

The Spokesman 110
Edited by Tony Simpson

‘Whilst still in opposition, in August 2009, the then Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, argued for what he called ‘progressive’ and ‘fundamental’ reform of public services. The alternative, according to the Chancellor in waiting, was ‘deep cuts in the quality of those services’. Praying in aid Tony Blair and Alan Milburn, who were by then advocating something similar, he said that what was true ‘in the years of plenty’ was doubly true in an age of austerity.

Now installed, Chancellor Osborne has set about his austere task with a will. As the comprehensive spending review looks to slice further tens of billions from departmental budgets, the cuts are already scything through public services round the country. Local government workers in their tens of thousands have received Section 118 redundancy notices, as have their counterparts in the Civil Service and sundry quangos. Public service, and all its outworks, is being chopped hard. Osborne shows little awareness of how adversely his cuts impact the private sector. The likelihood of a double-dip recession, not to say a full-blown slump, seems to worry him hardly at all.’

Tony Simpson, from his Editorial

CONTENTS:
Tony Simpson - Editorial: What Price Austerity?
Mark Serwotka - Not a single job has to be lost
PCS - There is an alternative
Stuart Holland - Demythologising 'Old Labour'
Brian Jones - Failing Intelligence
Hans von Sponeck - Scared of the facts
Caroline Lucas MP - Afghanistan - Nail the Myth
Bertrand Russell - Prevent the crime of silence
Richard Falk and David Krieger - The Middle East
Rep. Dennis Kucinich - What we have to do
Carmel Budiardjo - West Papua's Plight
Jimmy Reid - We're not rats
Michael Barratt Brown - Is there not an alternative?
Stuart Holland - Act and Survive

Reviews: Gareth Carrol, Abi Rhodes, Christopher Gifford, Stan Newens, John Daniels

London concert (benefit for Russell Tribunal on Palestine). Reminder.

2010-10-06T06:34:00.000-07:00

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine, with the help of the French Institute, is organising a concert in honor of Stephane Hessel.

Stephane Hessel will introduce the Russell Tribunal on Palestine during a reception following the concert.

You can book tickets here: http://www.institut-francais.org.uk/music-events/violin-and-piano-duet-by-clara-cernat-and-thierry-huillet or by phone: 0207 073 1350

Looking forward to see you on Monday 11 October.

Warm regards
Frank Barat
Coordinator
Russell Tribunal on Palestine
http://www.russelltribunalonpalestine.com/en/
http://www.facebook.com/russelltribunal

"Not to believe in the possibility of dramatic change is to forget that things have changed, not enough, of course, but enough to show what is possible. We have been surprised before in history. We can be surprised again. Indeed, WE can do the surprising" (Howard Zinn)

Vanunu on Facebook - 30th September action

2010-09-29T05:01:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends and Supporters,

Just a quick update and a suggestion for an action you can take as outlined below. Since our last circular and Mordechai's surprise release from prison, two weeks early, he has left Jerusalem and moved to Tel Aviv. With help from friends he has found a simple place to live, and he tells us he greatly enjoys swimming at least once every day in the sea.

Also, a new appeal, the fifth, regarding Mordechai's restrictions has just been sent to the Supreme Court, but no date has yet been set for the hearing.

Now, for all of you on Facebook we would like to encourage you to take up Mordechai's novel suggestion - below - as well as to circulate the idea as widely as possible with sympathetic groups and people.

Message from Mordechai:
I have a mission for you and others, to ask world wide facebook people, to write on their page on September 30th: "FREEDOM FOR VANUNU NOW," This is 24 years since I lost my freedom 1986-2010. "FREEDOM FOR VANUNU NOW".

Thank you to all who post on their Facebook page/wall, and forward onto others, to appear on 30th September 2010: FREEDOM FOR VANUNU NOW.

Also, check out Mordechai's Facebook - his Friend count is increasing rapidly - this is another way to keep in touch with him and express your support.

For and on behalf of the Campaign for a Nuclear Free Middle East, our best wishes,
Ernest, Hope, David, Marie, Adeline
--
Campaign for a Nuclear Free Middle East
cfnfme@gmail.com

HOUSING: Did it have to be like this?

2010-09-24T06:30:00.000-07:00

A socialist critique of New Labour's performance
By Cathy Davis & Alan Wigfield

'If New Labour had abolished the Right to Buy and instituted a large scale local authority building and modernisation programme, if it had created a sector of good quality affordable rented housing that a wide range of citizens might be proud to live in and that was democratically accountable, we would now be looking at a completely different scenario. As it is, they failed collectively to recognize the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity presented to them by their election in 1997. In doing so, thirteen years of New Labour have made it much easier for the Conservatives and Liberals to cut and transfer and abolish.'

Dr Cathy Davis, University of Salford
Alan Wigfield, Sheffield Hallam University,
Chair, Sheffield City Council Housing Committee 1986-92

Socialist Renewal no. 53
978 085124 782 3
£6.00 36 pages Pamphlet

Energetic and Fascinating Revival

2010-08-23T06:16:00.000-07:00

Oi for England
Not Too Tame Theatre Company with RWCMD, Venue 13, Edinburgh Fringe
August 19 - 29, 2010

“Right, f--- it!” Trevor Griffiths' opening line sets the tone for his punchy 1982 one-act play. Skinhead band “Ammunition” has been offered an election night gig for the fine sum of £30. For the four of them, “doleboys “ all, the sum is a fortune. The drama picks at the splits between the band members over what is intended to be a massive Nazi event.

Outside on the Manchester streets gangs of Asians are out for blood in response to an assault on one of their own. As it unwinds Trevor Griffiths’ structure is a writing master class in compression and texture, rounded off with a brilliant and unexpected twist.

“We're for our own kind” may be the motif but the politics of identity are always fissiparous. Just like this month’s falling out within the BNP the band is split by the fact of one of them, Finn, being a mick. Left on his own his relationship with landlord’s daughter Gloria (Jess Hayles) is warm. As shaven-headed and monkey-booted as the others, he has access to a deeper narrative, both musical and historical. He sings to himself the lilting “Raglan Road” (“let grief be a fallen leaf/ at the dawning of the day.”)

Like Eddie Waters, the stand-up veteran in “Comedians”, Finn's grandfather has been present at a concentration camp liberation. Finn knows that Nazi lies are just that. When Griffiths’ climax comes it is cunningly all the more surprising and milked for all its energy by Stephen Bisland.

Anthony Wright Wilson’s character is known only as the Man. Almost lugubrious in his attitude to the band at first he mutates into a maelstrom of menace. His searing speech of loathing of “chocolate England” is without equal.

The text has an occasional reference which is now most likely lost. “Anderton's puffballs” probably does not mean a lot now. (On a personal note I had an encounter once with a couple of them and did not care for it much.) But the play fascinates in depicting just how much has changed in a generation.

The band’s anthem is “Sod the law and pass the ammunition”, or maybe “sod the Lord”. Jack Brown’s Swells drives it on drums and Lewis Reeves' Napper gives it great gritty vocals.

Oi for England is not to going to play a major venue again. Scan the impossibly vast list of Fringe productions and political theatre seems thin to invisible; all credit to Jimmy Fairhurst, assistant director Hannah Jarman, and the company for getting it out and up from Cardiff to Edinburgh.

Reviewed by: Adam Somerset in Theatre in Wales, 19th August, 2010.

This show runs until 29th August 2010, at Venue 13 in Edinburgh. For more details and to book tickets visit The Edinburgh Festival Guide.

The script of Oi for England appears in Theatre Plays Two published by Spokesman Books

Vanunu update

2010-08-18T02:25:00.000-07:00

Dear Friend and Vanunu supporter,

It is a long time since we last sent you any news of Mordechai for which we apologise. It has been a complicated and difficult period particularly with Mordechai not wanting the campaign for his freedom to continue. However, we thought now was the time for an update, because if you hadn't seen the relevant issues of the Morning Star, Scottish Herald or, just this week, The Guardian, you probably wouldn't be fully aware of what Mordechai had been suffering, once again, at the hands of the vindictive and malicious Israeli authorities.

For some while Mordechai has been threatened with a return to prison for speaking with foreigners; including friends, supporters and journalists. For breaking this restriction he was eventually sentenced to six months in prison. He appealed against this and at a hearing of the Supreme Court, some months ago, this sentence was reduced to three months. As an alternative Mordechai was offered to do a period of Community Service in West Jerusalem. Mordechai declined fearing for his safety - we all know he has received a number of death threats - and proposed he work in East Jerusalem, where he has been restricted to live. At his most recent court hearing the authorities refused this compromise and sent Mordechai to Ayalon prison on May 23rd. ( Ayalon is known to be one of the most notorious prisons in Israel, and the section Mordechai was held in was about the most violent).

Mordechai's brother, Meir, reporting on his visit on July 11th said, "He is in a cell by himself 24 hours a day. There are no windows, only a small metal-net crack in the top part of one wall. He is allowed one hours walk in a tiny yard. Shabak - the Israeli security agency - simply threw him into a cell, locked the door and let him suffer there."

Amnesty International reacted quickly, fearing for Mordechai's safety, and declared him a prisoner of conscience and his treatment to be contrary to international law, particularly the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Israel has signed.

Mairead Maguire and the Irish Peace People organised an appeal letter/petition to President Obama and other international leaders for Mordechai's freedom, supported by a large number of celebrities, only one or two papers reported this latest outrage against Mordechai. Then suddenly, without warning, Mordechai was released last Sunday, August 8th, two weeks early. He is now staying at the Ambassador hotel for a few days, supported by his many wellwishers, friends and supporters. We invite you to sign the petition and forward as widely as possible: http://humanrights.change.org/petitions/view/release_mordechai_vanunu.

On his email auto reply Mordechai declared unbowed, "Hi, this is Vanunu. Today August 8th 2010 I am free from Israel 3 months prison, I survived one more hard life in Israeli prison, in isolation, in Humiliations. I am now staying in Ambassador hotel for a few days until finding my new place, I will be waiting for my total freedom, to be free to leave this jewish state. Thanks you for your support. VMJC. If you wish to email Mordechai his email is still the same: vanunuvmjc@gmail.com

That's all for now. We hope you will want to be kept on the list for Vanunu updates, but if not let us know by replying to this email, at our new email address: cfnfme@gmail.com. If you know of anyone who would like to be kept in touch please send us their email, and, of course, do forward this update as widely as possible. For the future we can't promise to send out regular updates but we will try to keep you in touch when we can.

For and on behalf of the Campaign for a Nuclear Free Middle East,
our best wishes, Adeline O'Keeffe, David Polden and Ernest Rodker

--- - -
Campaign for a Nuclear Free Middle East
cfnfme@gmail.com

Two reviews of The Wages of Thin

2010-05-05T04:07:00.000-07:00

Two reviews of
The Wages of Thin
An early play by Trevor Griffiths

At the Old Red Lion Theatre,

418 St John Street,

London EC1V 4NJ (Angel Tube),

until 15th May 2010

Review by Theo Bosanquet,
What’s on Stage, 2010

In 1969, six years before Comedians brought him international acclaim, Trevor Griffiths wrote this one act black comedy, which sat gathering dust in a filing cabinet for over 30 years before it was published by his wife in a recent anthology of his plays.

Set in a public toilet, it centres on Alfred Rimbaud Thin, a white collar worker who finds himself accosted by two violent and shady 'detectives'. Telling him he's being questioned in relation to a murder case (the dead body happens to be in one of the cubicles), they proceed to press this ordinary man into laying bare his private life, most notably the fact that he's gay.

Written in the wake of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalised homosexuality, it ruminates on the issue of sexual privacy, and feels remarkably contemporary in its humour and tone.

Like Goldberg and McCann in The Birthday Party, the identity of the inquisitors (known simply as Number One and Number Two) remains shrouded in mystery. But, as with Pinter, it doesn't matter who they are – the point is who, or what, they represent.

As the perpetually terrified Thin, Richard Sandells finds just the right balance of meekness and inner strength. Despite disclosures of some deeply disturbing secrets, including an incestuous liaison, he emerges as a likeable everyman, a dignified fossil in the ongoing erosion of privacy rights.

As his interrogators, Ryan Gage (One) and Alan Francis (Two) make a fine double-act, with Francis particularly strong as a dour Scottish stooge. “You can't defend democracy with kid gloves” he snarls in defence of his violent approach, one of the countless sharp one-liners peppering the dialogue.

This is a gem of a play, and full credit to director Prasanna Puwanarajah and his company for unearthing it. Deftly realised on designer James Cotterill's impressively rendered public convenience, it provides a fascinating insight into the early workings of one of our finest contemporary theatre minds.

****

Review by Vera Liber (2010), British Theatre Guide

Let's put aside for a moment, but not forget, Trevor Griffiths's working class northern background, his left wing stance, and let's delight in his language and erudition, for this is what the young creatives of the Congo Red Company have done with their revival of Griffiths's first play written in 1969, just two years after the flawed Sexual Offences Act. It rings with youthful fervour.

Authority-challenging plain-speaking fellow northerner Alan Sillitoe has recently died. 75-year-old Griffiths is one of the last of that ilk, and at last he is being rediscovered. Comedians, a play that stunned me in my youth with its aggression and put Jonathan Pryce on the map in 1975, was revived at the Lyric Hammersmith last year, and A New World: A Life of Thomas Paine was produced at the Globe, also last year, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Paine's death. The play was originally commissioned in 1989.

Griffiths has had his vicissitudes and been out of favour, but it seems this is his time. He has mellowed, apparently, but the fire still burns. And is being rekindled by a new generation.

The Wages of Thin shows its influences: Pinter, Beckett, Ionesco, Orton to a degree, and of course Kafka, but the dynamic and verbal energy is all his own. The crescendoing list of synonyms, the French wordplay - this is a confident young man showing his mettle.

I was sceptical but curious about seeing his first play, a play that has languished in a filing cabinet for thirty years. I had read it but never seen it performed. And how wrong I was. The taut production is excellent. Trafalgar Studios ought to seize it, as they did Theatre503's The Mountaintop. Gems can be found in the fringe and this is one.

Alfred Rimbaud Thin (now there's a name), an insignificant little man, a clerk in an export company, is entrapped and interrogated in a urinal underneath a railway by two men - yes, the double act, the good cop and the bad cop, used to chilling effect by Pinter, but here One and Two are less Pinter-sinister and more Orton-lite. And Ionesco-absurd. A 'comedy of menace' with the emphasis on comedy.

Beautifully cast by Janine Snape, intelligently directed with wit and insight by Prasanna Puwanarajah (who wears several useful hats in his life already - director, actor and medic), and well performed by Ryan Gage (suave One), Alan Francis (shirt and braces podgy Two), and Richard Sandells (in the difficult reactive role of Thin). If anyone out there from casting is reading this, Gage with his death head grin, is an absolute synch for a young Tony Blair. Francis is a Scottish stand-up comedian in real life - his laconic timing serves the intense Gage (in razor sharp suit and estuary accent) perfectly.

The set by James Cotterill is exact, David Gregory's sound design and Matthew Pitman's lighting complement each other - when a train passes overhead the central light rattles and dims. The grubby venue gives off its own sordid smells and vibrations. And the young audience, drinks in hand, think the play hilarious. I must confess they laughed more than I did - but not because I didn't like it. Au contraire.

Producer Natalie Eskinazi has chosen the venue well - in the cramped hot room above the Red Lion pub we sweat it out with poor Thin. Three white porcelain open stalls, flushing intermittently, face the audience, there's a closed cubicle to the side with a dead body, maybe incriminating, maybe a plant, and a metal cupboard through which the two interrogators pass to fetch the tea tray (teapot and tea cosy so very reassuringly British), tape recorder and mugs of water.

A Narnia behind that door? Well, there's a phone in the cistern, and listening and spying bugs behind a sign, so who knows what's behind the door. Evening dinner suits? Mislaid accents?

Thin doesn't know what's hit him. They know everything about him, his sexual preferences, his pervy friends abroad (check out their silly names), and that he 'loves' his mother. This is more than sexual entrapment - this is laying the ground for future projects.

It's a job well done. Is Griffiths extracting the urine? In a pissoir. What do you think? Entertaining, worrying, and, like Posh at the Royal Court, a reflection on the establishment's unchallenged authority. They know best.

A judicious revival. And a talent showcase.

****

The Wages of Thin is in Theatre Plays One by Trevor Griffiths, published by Spokesman Books.

A Special Relationship ... with Truth?

2010-04-16T03:16:00.000-07:00

The Spokesman 108

Edited by Ken Coates

‘… If one studied official American military doctrine, one could be excused for failing to find any relationships, anywhere, but those of subordination. ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ is still the official credo of the American military-industrial complex, and there, it might be thought, is an end of it. But Britain is perhaps unique among the dominated in seeking actually to celebrate its subordination. That is why it was so refreshing to hear Clare Short testifying before the Chilcot Inquiry.

When Sir John asked her if she had any comments to make on the re-evaluation of her experiences, which she had described with some candour, she said that she thought that her old Department of International Development had not been adequately involved; that the machinery of Government ‘has broken down quite badly’; and that the role of the Attorney General must be adjudged unsafe following his various pronouncements on the legality of the war. But then she added a fourth comment, braver than all the others, which broke new ground for the Inquiry. The fourth problem, she said: “is about the special relationship. We really need a serious debate in our country about what we mean by it, whether it is unconditional poodle-like adoration and do whatever America says, or whether we have bottom lines and we sometimes agree and we sometimes don’t and we use our influence responsibly, and I think we have ended up humiliating ourselves and being a less good friend to America than we could have been if we had stood up for an independent policy.

But that’s a bigger question, because you should see, when America asks for something, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor all get terribly excited and love America asking us to do something, and we really need to rethink that.

Those are my lessons.” …’

Excerpted from Ken Coates' Editorial - READ MORE

Contents:
Editorial: Special Relationship? - Ken Coates

Lord Goldsmith and Iraq – The Rt. Hon. Sir Edmund Thomas QC

Parade of the Old New – Bertolt Brecht

Another Agenda – Bob Marshall-Andrews MP

Demockracy – Bob Dixon

Britain Can’t Handle the Truth – Scott Ritter

Writing Principia – Bertrand Russell

Kurt Is up in Heaven Now – Kurt Vonnegut

Farewell Michael Foot

Judgment – The Rt Hon the Lord Judge, The Rt Hon the Lord Neuberger

Spooks Sold down the River - Clive Stafford Smith

The Chilcot Enquiry – Alexis Lykiard

Carnage in Gaza – Nurit Peled Elhanan

Dossier – Russell Tribunal on Palestine

Reviews: Christopher Gifford, Henry McCubbin, Bill Hagerty, Tony Simpson, Nathaniel Mehr,

Ken Coates, John Daniels, J.E. Mortimer, Frank Barat,
Graham Hallett, Abi Rhodes

The Spokesman 108 is available to BUY ONLINE

New book challenges privatization claims

2010-04-09T06:14:00.000-07:00

CUPE
Mar 31, 2010

One of the world’s leading authorities on the privatization of public services has published a new book dismantling the corporations’ sales pitch.

Professor Dexter Whitfield has assembled his wide-ranging work on privatization into a new, intensively researched and detailed book. Global Auction of Public Assets outlines how over the last three decades major international corporations have fought to turn public services that meet basic human needs into commodities to be traded.

Whitfield is the director of the European Services Strategy Unit, an agency committed to the provision of good quality public services by democratically accountable public bodies.

In 2008, Whitfield made an engaging presentation to CUPE New Brunswick’s P3 Summit. He set Canada’s work to keep services public in the context of the global push by corporations to turn public services into profit-making ventures.

His book traces the history of privatization and public private partnerships from the time of Margaret Thatcher. It provides a detailed description of the companies that play a leading role in Canada, South Africa, England and Australia.

Whitfield documents the growing importance of infrastructure around the world, because of both the “infrastructure gap” and future infrastructure needs that will be brought on by climate change.

He challenges the myths used to sell privatization, identifying that “[n]early 1,000 PPP and privatization projects have failed, were distressed or have been renegotiated.” Where failed P3s have been renegotiated, he finds that overwhelmingly the companies are the winners.

When services are privatized, the public loses both transparency and accountability. Whitfield writes that with P3s, everything is determined by contractual relationships, “yet a complete or perfect contract does not exist, any more than perfect competition or procurement.”

That sentiment was recently echoed in the business case for sewage treatment in Victoria, B.C. which found that P3s must rely on the operating contract “to force private sector parties to respond to difficult situations with customers.”

Whitfield disputes claims of private sector efficiency quoting an International Monetary Fund study that found the empirical evidence for this is, at best, mixed.

Whitfield outlines how corporations reap outrageous profits from building and operating P3s, then refinance their borrowing, and finally resell their equity to other P3 consortia.

Whitfield makes the case that these multinational corporations are determined to undermine the role of the state in meeting the needs of its citizens. Citizens pay the price of privatization through lost public control; increased taxes tolls and tuition fees; and other out-of-pocket costs for education and health care.

He calls for a radically different approach to public infrastructure procurement. That means closing the financial casino that is the global infrastructure market and recognizing that public debt is needed to deliver public services. It means recognizing that we can’t have excellent public services and very low taxes. And it means looking at new kinds of taxes on highly-mobile capital. Regional infrastructure funds can help. Pension funds need to change their priorities to a combination of reasonable return and social benefit.

Whitfield gives a shoutout to CUPE for its work in building coalitions. He writes, “The Canadian Union of Public Employees’ work with the Council of Canadians on water, energy and trade campaigns is a good example of alliance building.”

Global Auction of Public Assets can be ordered online.

Inside the Left by Fenner Brockway

2010-04-01T06:31:00.000-07:00

Morning Star, Monday 22 March 2010
Reviewed by John Green

Many today will not remember the legendary Labour MP Fenner Brockway, who died in 1988.

Hopefully, this reissue of the first volume of his autobiography by Spokesman Books will make him better known to a new generation.

Like Tony Benn, Brockway was one of those rare figures who started early on as a principled socialist and remained so to the end of his life.

His political career spanned the bulk of the 20th century and for most of that time he was at the centre of progressive politics nationally and internationally.

He was a founder member, among other organisations, of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the Movement for Colonial Freedom - now Liberation - War on Want and CND.

He became an MP for the ILP at a very young age and, after its demise, for the Labour Party. Vehemently anti-war, he spent several years in various prisons as a conscientious objector during the first world war.

His description of the treatment he and other "conshies" endured makes gruesome reading.

They were subjected to draconian and petty rules, bread and water punishments for the slightest infringement and were so brutalised a number of them didn't survive.

His reporting of the General Strike is a masterpiece of historical documentation.

Brockway writes with eloquence and commitment. This is history seen through the eyes of a courageous, deeply humanitarian, perceptive and intelligent man who fought all his life on behalf of working people and for peace and justice.

But Brockway was not just a journalist. He took an active part in organising and supporting the strikers.

He campaigned lifelong for unity of the left and was never blindly loyal to his party. The people he met and knew intimately reads like a political Who's Who of the great, the good - and not so good.

His portrait sketches of Ramsay MacDonald, Oswald Mosley, Gandhi, Nehru, Keir Hardy, Bernard Shaw, James Maxton, Lenin, Trotsky, Kautsky and many more are fascinating and illuminating.

But with an election looming, this book should be made compulsory reading for all prospective Labour MPs because Brockway's detailed portrayal of the political process, parliamentary manoeuvring and international shenanigans is still as insightful as ever.

His chapter on the role of Parliament is a masterpiece of political writing.

He reports how most elected Labour MPs soon succumbed to the seductive luxury of parliamentary life and signed up all too readily to the comfortable club that Parliament was - and still is - with its all-night bars, cheap food and expenses culture.

It took a person with strong discipline and clear principle to resist the allure of an easy life and very few managed to do so.

Doesn't that sound incredibly contemporary?

Brockway excoriates the numerous vain, power-hungry opportunists who have always bedevilled the movement by selling out when crunch time came.

He himself refused dinner invitations from the Establishment, not out of vindictiveness or inverted snobbery but "due to a realisation of the way in which social life associated with Parliament blunts the sense of identity with the working class in their struggle," as he so succinctly put it.

His description of the second Labour government in 1929 as "being afraid to offer a real socialist programme and kow-towing to the bankers" and "preferring to manage capitalism instead of financing popular social legislation" sounds all too familiar.

As a result, Labour suffered a humiliating electoral defeat shortly afterwards.

Could we see history repeating itself in a few weeks time?

So despite being a history of the 20th century, Brockway's work has such a timeless feel to it that his views and outlook are as relevant today as they were then.

He would have liked to see communists and other socialists working together rather than scrapping with each other and he highlights many of the weaknesses and how they came about.

The most tragic result of such divisions was seen in Germany, where Hitler was able to gain power while socialists and communists fought each other on the streets.

If you want to experience a vivid journey through recent history and learn from it, this is the book to read.

Inside the Left: Thirty years of platform, press, prison and parliament

is available to BUY NOW from Spokesman Books.

Selling off the family silver

2010-03-12T04:56:00.000-08:00

Global Auction of Public Assets
Dexter Whitfield

Dexter Whitfield is Director of the European Services Strategy Unit as well as being attached to the University of Adelaide in Australia. He has written widely on the privatisation of public services in the UK and undertaken commissioned work for trade unions fighting privatisation in a number of local authorities, including the London borough of Barnet, where the Tories are piloting ‘shrinking the council’. His new book is the first critical analysis of Public Private Partnerships across the world.

It is an impressive study which demonstrates the extent to which the selling off of public infrastructure has become common practice. The study includes the US, France, Ireland, Germany, Canada, Russia, Australia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa as well as the UK.

Whitfield derives from this comprehensive survey a strong critique of privatisation. He demonstrates that Public Private Partnerships (PPPS) are not an alternative to public investment and do not reduce public debt as they are financed entirely by the government or users. He argues that partnerships being based on market criteria are vulnerable to market fluctuations and consequently endangered by the current global financial crisis. The book traces the establishment of an international market in infrastructure, dominated by sovereign wealth funds and private equity funds who trade schools, hospitals, roads and even prisons as commodities.

The book demonstrates the extent to which privatisation projects fail not just in terms of job losses but in terms of failure also for the investor. He shows the extent to which financial assessments to demonstrate value for money of PPSs are fundamentally flawed. PPS tend to be costly, poor value and lack innovation and do not generally involve significant transfer of risk from public sector to private sector. They also undermine democracy and public accountability.

Whitfield’s conclusion is that little can be achieved by reforming the PPP model. He sets out a framework for regulating existing PPPS but his main argument, which I would strongly endorse is what we need is a structure of public sector led investment, based on priorities set through an accountable process and where plans are developed collaboratively between civic, community and trade union organisations.

This may at first appear to be a fairly dry book, stuffed with facts, figures and schedules of PPP projects, but this kind of evidence based research is important if we are to rebuild a system of service planning and infrastructure delivery which is based on public needs rather than private profit, whether in the UK or in other countries. Gordon Brown is not the only person who might benefit from reading this book.

Duncan Bowie
Chartist, March/April 2010

Global Auction of Public Assets

is available to BUY NOW from Spokesman Books

Trevor Griffiths, Bill Brand And Political Television Drama

2010-03-08T04:35:00.000-08:00

The Genesis of Bill Brand.

“The political mini-series is by no means foreign to television as examples such as Washington Behind Closed Doors (1977), Blind Ambition (1979), The West Wing (1999-2006), and the 1975 Granada TV British television series The Nearly Man (featuring Tony Britton as a right-wing Labour MP) all show. But rather than interrogating political elements influencing individual lives they often focus upon personal melodramatic issues. In this way they fall within familiar conventions of the type of television drama that Griffiths sought both to utilize and subvert. Personal relationships do occupy key levels of Bill Brand but they are never divorced from the historical and political context of a society that attempts to control individual lives and from which some form of different alternative direction is needed. Since Griffiths has spoken of the significant “detail of the lives of the characters” in this series, it is important to analyze how each episode functions according to this particular type of dramatic process. Transmitted during the summer of 1976 within the 9pm slot following the news program World in Action and preceding News at Ten, the series developed a contrast first sketched in Griffiths' early 1974 BBC One Play for Today “All Good Men” between the reformist tendencies of the Labour Party’s version of Parliamentary democracy and another alternative radical tradition constantly betrayed by this party whenever it gained power. Could any form of significant change occur within Westminster on the part of a progressive individual who has left the International Socialists to attempt change from within the system? Alternatively, should other forms of personal and political struggle become preeminent? Such issues dominated every episode and are still relevant today perhaps explaining why this series has never been repeated since its original broadcast or available on DVD in England.”

Excerpt from Tony Williams review in The November 3rd Club

The full review can be read at: http://www.november3rdclub.com/2010/02-2010/nonfiction/williams.html

Bill Brand is available to BUY NOW from Spokesman Books

Second Time Around: A classic revisited

2010-02-26T03:50:00.000-08:00

Herald Angels

Bill Hagerty

The Miracle of Fleet Street: the Story of the Daily Herald, by George Lansbury (Labour Publishing Company, 1925, price unknown; republished by Spokesman Books, 20009, pp168, £15.00)

This is not exactly the whole story of what, in the early 1930s, was to become Britain's biggest-selling daily newspaper. Those wishing to learn about the ferocious pre-Second World War circulation battles, or the anguished slide that saw the paper metamorphose into the short-lived IPC Sun before being given garish new clothes and soaring away under the control of fledgling emperor Rupert Murdoch, must look elsewhere.

Having been born in 1911 as a daily strike-bulletin when London print Unions came out for a 48-hour working week, and resurrected the following year with capital of around £300 as a co-operative Labour venture, the Herald had been publishing consistently for only 13 years when Labour leader-to-be Lansbury recounted its trials and tribulations — there were many —on the way to relative stability.

An editorial published on October 26, 1912 told of the campaign to put the paper on a sound financial footing and how a woman had visited the House of Commons to tell Lansbury: “My husband has sent me with this message. ‘We have only saved a little, but here is £50. Do not let the Daily Herald die’ .” A Socialist parson presents a cheque for £150, while “another man” said: “Let the landlord go hang for his rent. I am sending it to you.” “Was there ever a daily newspaper that had such wonderful support as we are getting?” asked the editorial.

Probably not. But never before or since has there been a similar David of a newspaper struggling, against the Goliath of capitalism, on behalf of which most newsprint manufacturers later refused to supply a paper that was pro-women’s suffrage and supported both the Russian revolution and trades union strikes. Agents scoured the country to buy paper secretly.

Having been able to publish only weekly during the First World War, the Herald campaigned on behalf of workers both in print and with a series of rallies, another of which was planned, to support Labour and to announce that daily publication would shortly be resumed, in November 1918 at the Royal Albert Hall. Four days before the meeting, with 19,000 people having requested tickets, the Hall management cancelled the contract, citing “demonstrations of a revolutionary nature” at previous meetings. Time for the workers of the world to unite: the Electrical Trades Union removed all the fuses from the Hall and suggested that unless permission to use it was restored the whole of Kensington might be plunged into darkness. Oh, and no trains would stop at local stations and taxi drivers would not ply for hire near the Hall. Thousands had to be turned away from the two meetings that subsequently took place.

From its very beginning the Herald produced challenging journalism — the headline “Women and children last!” swiftly followed the loss of the Titanic, which sank and drowned more than half the children travelling in steerage as the first issue of the paper was going to press. Observed the Herald of the White Star Line’s profits: “They have paid 30 per cent to their shareholders and they have sacrificed 51 per cent of the steerage children.”

Most opposition papers remained hostile to the Herald, and after Lansbury visited Russia in 1920, Lloyd George’s Government proclaimed it had evidence that diamonds brought to London by a Russian delegation had sold for between £40,000 and £50,000 and the “Bolshevik gold” donated to the paper. The Herald famously insisted that “NOT A BOND, NOT A FRANC, NOT A ROUBLE”, though confirming that £75,000 had been offered and pointing out that “if we accepted the offer from Russia (with which this country has been technically at peace since 1855...), we should have done nothing dishonourable and we should not be at all ashamed of ourselves”. Such intrigue, such drama; what a movie the early years of the Herald would make.

Lansbury, an MP and the chief shareholder early on, became editor by accident, pitchforking himself into the role for a nine-year tenure in1913 after several predecessors had lurched from one calamity to another. “How many more years of life remain for me, it is impossible to say,” he wrote, “but whatever the future may be ... nothing can happen to me which will bring me more satisfaction or more joy than the memory of these great years spent in company with, and service for, the readers and friends of the Daily Herald.”

The paper was owned from 1922 by the TUC and the Labour Party, with Odhams Press obtaining 51 per cent in 1929. Lansbury lived to see sales top two million in1933 and died seven years later, long before his dreams were shattered by savage decline and the beginning of the end with the 1961 takeover by IPC, then a publishing giant dominated by Mirror Group. In republishing Lansbury’s long-neglected book — a love story encumbered only by too much detail of political skirmishes — Spokesman has restored an important chapter of newspaper and social history.

© Bill Hagerty, British Journalism Review December 2009

Public cost of private benefit - A review

2010-02-19T02:32:00.000-08:00

Global Auction of Public Assets
Dexter Whitfield
£18.00

Dexter Whitfield has been one of the most well-informed and effective critics of the whole programme of privatisation of Britain's public services, begun by Margaret Thatcher and continued by New Labour. He is the director of the European Services Strategy Unit, continuing the work of the Centre for Public Services, which he founded in 1973, and has more recently sought to spread his critique worldwide, as more and more countries have begun to move their social infrastructure from a public service into private profit-making businesses. This new book is the result of this extension of his interest. It is, as were his earlier books on the attack on UK public services, both thoroughly researched and immaculately presented.

What began as a specifically British exercise by Thatcher to strengthen the power of capital in relation to labour has been taken up by giant corporations of capital operating in both the developed and developing world. It is the claim of all the new forms of infrastructure organisation that they are public private partnerships is generally a very unequal one.

Dexter Whitfi eld describes it as 'public cost and private benefit'. In this book he presents detailed accounts ot PPPs not only in Europe, where his new strategy unit is based, but in the US, Australia, South Africa, India, Brazil, Russia and even
China. As the PPPs spread across the world, more and more of the giant international finance and commercial corporations become involved. Whitfield concludes that, because the relative scale of manufacturing in the g1oba1 economy is declining, investment in the infrastructure becomes of increasing interest for international capital.

The privatisation process began with the physical infrastructure the railways and roads, energy supplies and telecommunications. But Whitfield shows how it is being extended into social provision. The privatisation of social infrastructure has been seen by many commentators simply as a means for governments to finance projects, especially buildings, without increasing their capital expenditure beyond their budget limits. The PPP private partners, however, have begun increasingly to take over more responsibility for whole projects – not just for the building, but for the governance management, consultancy, employment of staff, receipt of revenues, and reinvestment of funds.

This has the effect of removing from national or local public control and accountability the operation of social services. Health and education are key examples, where Whitfield shows particular cases of the shift in responsibilities for a social service.

The analysis in this book is closely related to the latest developments in the worldwide financial crisis and in governments' responses to the dangers of climate change. Whitfield is able to show the extent to which the private ownership of public assets, and the income streams flowing from them, are used by financial institutions as leverage for further profitable lending. The state guarantees that are generally present in social infrastructure provide a base for private speculative activity in what has become a casino of public finances.

At the same time, the effects of climate change are demanding increasing expenditure from governments on national infrastructure that can provide some degree of protection against rising sea levels, more and more damaging storms, heavier rainfall in some areas, drought in others. Extended investment to meet these demands cannot be left to a casino,

The arguments that have been employed in favour of privatisation are shown by Whitfield to be largely spurious. The chief of these is that the costs in the public sector are higher than in private provision. Whitfield shows this is manifestly untrue when all costs incurred in the long run are taken into account.

It is also said that public projects frequently over-run their budget in time and cost. Whitfield shows that such claims are seriously flawed and cannot always be checked because so-called commercial secrecy can be invoked by private suppliers to prevent publication.

Finally, there is an argument about innovatory design and managerial efficiency, which is said to favour privatisation. This can be easily refuted by the large number of PPP projects that Whitfield lists as abandoned, distressed or failed.

It is a pretty well unanswerable case that Whitfield mounts in defence of the public sector – and well worth quoting for its wide-ranging assembly of the evidence.

Michael Barratt Brown in Red Pepper, Feb/March 2010

BUY ONLINE NOW

Regime Changers Anonymous

2010-02-05T04:15:00.000-08:00

Spokesman 107
Edited by Ken Coates

'The Security Service was officially launched in 1909 with a staff of two, who were supposed to defend the realm against Germany. Later they made a painless adjustment and began to defend it against Russia. As the two engaged ever larger numbers of accomplices it became clear that the realm which they defended consisted of ever smaller tracts of establishment England, setting its bounds somewhat short of the area occupied by the masses of the British common people …

… What can be done to clip the wings of all these spooks? Well, first of all, as far as the junior members of the team are concerned, substantial cuts can be made in their budgets. What precisely is all this intrigue for? How is it to be justified? It should surely be possible to control the expenditures of this kind of service in such a way as to reduce them to a minimum.

Then we shall be told that we need an intelligence service to apprehend terrorists. There are, unfortunately, numerous problems which the anti-terrorist services closely share with the warriors against subversion ... At the very least, there is a case for a close enquiry into this aspect of intelligence work. To learn the lessons of the wave of student arrests in Lancashire early in 2009 might be to discover some arguments for stringent budgetary controls.

But, disturbing though the activities of junior officials may be, the huge and overriding question which hangs over our political system, is how to get the spooks off the Downing Street sofas and to put politics in command.'

Ken Coates, excerpts from his Editorial. The full text can be read here.

CONTENTS:
Regime Changers Anonymous - Ken Coates

Fixing the Intelligence? - Tony Simpson

Law and War - Lord Goldsmith

The legality of the invasion of Iraq - Lord Steyn

Who killed David Kelly? - David Halpin

****

Haiku - Alexis Lykiard

Gallows - John Arden

The US and Israel - Noam Chomsky

Al Rabweh - John Berger

The Dice Player - Mahmoud Darwish

Reviews: Bruce Kent, Stan Newens, John Daniels,
Michael Barratt Brown, Romy Clark and Abi Rhodes

You can buy this issue or subscribe to The Spokesman from our website.

Bill Brand the screenplays by Trevor Griffiths

2010-01-08T06:49:00.000-08:00

Tribune - 8th January 2010

Bill Brand: The Screenplays
by Trevor Griffiths
Spokesman Books, £18

"Trevor Griffiths is best known for stage plays such as Thatcher’s Children, Oi for England and the recently revived Comedians, as well as his screenplays for such films as Reds and Fatherland. But 30-odd years ago he wrote Bill Brand, an ambitious television series broadcast on ITV at peak time – 9pm – in 1976. It starred Jack Shepherd as an idealistic young left-wing MP who finds himself at odds with the pragmatists in a party which wants to hang on to power. Bill Brand showed, once again, the ability of this talented political playwright to dramatise the ideological conflicts of the left during those tumultuous years. Here, in all their glory, are his original scripts."

Keith Richmond

Availble to BUY NOW from Spokesman Books

Bill Brand – the screenplays.

2009-12-11T02:36:00.000-08:00

This latest volume in the Trevor Griffiths series contains all eleven episodes of the celebrated 1976 Thames TV series Bill Brand, which was the fictional account of a young left-wing Labour MP entering Parliament for the first time and attempting to influence the policies of his largely right-wing Labour government.

The series was conceived on election night in 1974, written and produced over the following two years and transmitted in 1976. This was a time of great political and industrial unrest in Britain; it produced the first minority government (under Harold Wilson) since 1931, and Bill Brand was watched with extreme interest by both the political classes and the wider population. At times it seemed almost uncannily prophetic; and many of the issues it dealt with remain of great contemporary relevance.

The series starred Jack Shepherd as Bill Brand, Arthur Lowe as the Prime Minister, Alan Badel, Peter Howell, Lynne Farleigh, Cherie Lunghi and many other distinguished actors.

Bill Brand has never been shown again, nor is it at present available commercially on dvd. This book is therefore a unique record of a unique television event.

‘… tells us more about Parliament, constituency politics and the Labour Party than the combined writings of most of the Westminster drama critics who masquerade as political commentators.’ New Statesman

‘The most remarkable serial ever seen on the box.’
Sunday Times

978 085124 763 2 - £18.00 - 300 pages - paperback - Available to BUY NOW.

*****
In April 2009, Trevor Griffiths attended a screening of his 1997 BBC film, Food for Ravens, at Side Cinema in Newcastle upon Tyne. Exploring the difficulties in making this wonderful drama about Aneurin Bevan, his talk became an impassioned critique of the way British television has gone.

To watch this video (December 2009 only) please go to http://www.sidetv.net/.

The Elephant at the Iraq Inquiry

2009-12-04T04:29:00.000-08:00

On 23 July 2002, the Prime Minister called a high-level meeting about Iraq. It took place in Downing Street. The minute taker noted that his record was "extremely sensitive". It does indeed contain confidential information about preparations for war on Iraq. Blair's comments are recorded, as are those of the Chief of Defence Staff, Sir Michael Boyce, among others. On 4 December 2009, Boyce appeared before the Iraq Inquiry, and was rather candid about the frustrations of trying to prepare a major military campaign without being able to tell his head of logistics. (Defence Secretary Hoon had told him not to.) Boyce was not asked about his precise comments about military options and critical requirements for the US (basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus), as recorded in the memo of the meeting of 23 July '02. Next week, John Scarlett appears before the Inquiry. He had opened the discussion in Downing Street with an account of intelligence and the latest Joint Intelligence Committee assessment, according to the memo. He made no mention of weapons of mass destruction. Will the Inquiry ask him about the contents of what has become known as the Downing Street Memo? It's the ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM.

***

SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY

DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02

cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.
This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.

The two broad US options were:

(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).

(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.

The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:

(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.

(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.

(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.

John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.

The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.

Conclusions:

(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options.

(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.

(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.

(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.

He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.

(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.

(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.

(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)

MATTHEW RYCROFT

(Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide)

***

This and other key leaked documents about preparations for the war on Iraq are all available in THE DODGIEST DOSSIER.

2009-11-23T04:07:00.000-08:00

The Dodgiest Dossier

Essential reading as the Chilcot Inquiry into the war on Iraq begins its public hearings in London, 24 November.

These key secret documents include the notorious Downing Street Memo of July 2002, which recorded the candid assessment of the head of MI6, in the presence of Prime Minister Blair, that in the United States 'the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy'. The documents were leaked in 2005, during the run-up to the General Election of that year. Their authors are amongst the first witnesses to be called by the Inquiry.

A useful and informative independent commentary on the Iraq Inquiry is available online (www.iraqinquirydigest.org).

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Price £4.00 - 80 pages

A New Book by Dexter Whitfield

2009-11-12T01:28:00.000-08:00

Global Auction of Public Assets

Public infrastructure in the 21st century is confronted with new challenges; adapting to climate change, meeting the economic, energy, water, transportation and social infrastructure needs of megacities in Asia, megaregions in North America, European city regions and older industrial areas.

Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and the global infrastructure market, financed by investment and pension funds, are fuelling a new era of public asset sales. This first critical global analysis of PPPs examines projects in the UK, France, Ireland, Germany, US, Canada, Russia, Australia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. Over US$500bn of PPP projects have failed, most have little or no democratic control or transparency. They are costly, poor value and lack innovation. Ultimately, they are entirely publicly financed by government and/or user charges.

Global Auction of Public Assets proposes a new strategy for public investment. It sets out new priorities, radical changes in global financial markets, abandonment of PPPs and neo-liberal ideology, new controls on existing PPPs and public management renewal. This is a definitive analysis and an invaluable resource for all those concerned about the future of the public domain.

Dexter Whitfield is Director of European Services Strategy Unit and Adjunct Associate Professor, Australian Institute for Social Research, University of Adelaide. He has a unique, extensive track record of research, policy analysis and strategic advice to public bodies, trade unions and community organizations (www.european-services-strategy.org.uk).

Global Auction of Public Assets

is available to buy online from Spokesman Books.

Gerrard Winstanley 400th Anniversary Meeting

2009-10-28T04:58:00.000-07:00

A celebration of the work and ideas of
GERRARD WINSTANLEY

7pm, Thursday 19th November 2009,

Speakers: Thomas Corns, University of Bangor, co-author of a biography of John Milton, and Ann Hughes, University of Keele, author of “The Causes of the English Civil War” (1998)

Venue: Russell Room, Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1 (Tube: Holborn).

“Fortunately for posterity, there was among the Diggers a man of rare talent and originality, Gerrard Winstanley, who has left behind him in his voluminous writings a record of the faith and beliefs with which he inspired this movement … Suddenly, in this year [1648], his interest turned to politics and he wrote the most characteristic of his books, The New Law of Righteousness, which is in reality a Communist Manifesto written in the dialect of its day. Throughout the next year, 1649-50, he was the life and pen of the Diggers' adventure. When that failed, after writing Fire in the Bush, a defence of his ideas addressed to the churches, he published in 1652 the most mature of his books, The Law of Freedom in a Platform. It was dedicated, in an eloquent and plain-spoken address, to Cromwell, whom it summoned to lay the foundations of a communist commonwealth. The sketch of a classless society that follows is a deeply interesting blend of the radical democracy professed by the main body of the Levellers with the communism of More's Utopia and a secularism that was Winstanley's own.”

Source: The Levellers and the English Revolution by H. N. Brailsford (Spokesman, £18)

Tom Corns and Ann Hughes, two of the editors of a comprehensive new collection of Winstanley’s writings, will speak about Winstanley’s ideas and their relevance today.

The event is entirely free. Refreshments will be provided.

For further information see:
http://www.socialisthistorysociety.co.uk/
http://www.conwayhall.org.uk/

Visit our Levellers page for more of our titles on the English Revolution

Comedians at the Lyric, London

2009-10-19T04:24:00.001-07:00

"Set in a Manchester working-class evening centre in the mid-1970s, the date of its writing, Comedians eschews political theory, professional ideologues and historically sourced discourse on political revolution – all the perceived hallmarks of my earlier pieces – in favour of a more or less unmediated address on a range of particular contemporary issues including class, gender, race and society in modern Britain."

Trevor Griffiths writing in Theatre Plays (published in two volumes by Spokesman Books, price £15 each)

An acclaimed new production of Comedians , directed by Sean Holmes, continues at the Lyric Hammersmith until 14th November 2009. Some reviews can be read via our Trevor Griffiths page.

Theatre Plays One includes Comedians, The Wages of Thin, Occupations, Sam Sam, Apricots, Thermidor, The Party, The Cherrry Orchard

Theatre Plays Two includes Oi for England, Real Dreams, Piano, The Gulf between Us, Thatcher’s Children, Who Shall Be Happy?, Camel Station

Also available:
These Are The Times: A Life of Thomas Paine (price £15). This screenplay gave rise to the theatre play A New World, which recently finished its highly successful run at Shakespeare's Globe.

Sons and Lovers: Screenplay of the novel by D.H.Lawrence (Price £7.95)

Responsibility to Protest

2009-10-09T03:31:00.000-07:00

After Lockerbie - The Spokesman 106
Edited by Ken Coates

"There has seldom been such unanimity in the British political class as has come about in the last half of August 2009 with the release of the Libyan prisoner, Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi, on compassionate grounds. This was announced by the Scottish Secretary for Justice, Kenny MacAskill, after medical reports forecast that the Libyan was at death’s door, having advanced prostate cancer which probably gave him a maximum life expectancy of three months.

Megrahi had been sentenced by three Scottish Judges to life imprisonment, following a highly contentious trial in which the Scottish Courts sat in an American airbase in The Netherlands to hear the case of the Lockerbie bomb. A Pan American passenger jet had been blown up on the 21st December 1988, while flying over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie en route for the United States. The evidence showed that a bomb had been secreted in passenger luggage. It had exploded in mid-air, killing all 259 passengers. A giant fireball fell across the town, killing eleven more people on its way. This was a huge disaster, the largest in British aviation history. Who could have conceived such an atrocity? The intelligence agencies of the world were not at a loss for an explanation. But they were flummoxed by the problem of how to present what they knew, or indeed, whether to present it."

Ken Coates
From his Editorial

‘If there is any chance of the truth coming out, it will be through the persistent efforts of civil society. The Russell Foundation is doing a great service to all those who do not accept the establishment's "manufacture of consent".’
Hans Köchler

Contents:
Lockerbie and the Law - Robert Black

Unfair Trial - Hans Köchler

Lockerbie – the Cover-up - Marcello Mega

The Crime of Lockerbie - Tam Dalyell

****

The Party of Criminal War - John Pilger

Responsibility to Protest - Noam Chomsky

Pirate’s Charter - Tony Blair

Benign Whitewash - Ken Coates

****

Kidnapped on Diego Garcia - Reprieve

A New World at The Globe - Ann Talbot, Trevor Griffiths

Reviews:

Bruce Kent, Michael Barratt Brown, Christopher Gifford,
Graham Hallett, Tony Simpson, Henry McCubbin

AVAILABLE NOW FROM SPOKESMAN BOOKS for £6 plus postage.

'Constructive Bloodbath' in Indonesia

2009-09-11T03:04:00.000-07:00

Spokesman Books have published 'Constructive Bloodbath' in Indonesia: The United States, Britain and the Mass Killings of 1965-66, by Nathaniel Mehr, with a foreword by Carmel Budiardjo.

It is receiving postive reviews, as these two notices show:

Joyo Indonesia News - David Jardine

Jakarta Globe - Armando Siahaan

Tom Paine Remembered - 8 June Old Red Lion London

2009-06-03T08:31:00.000-07:00

THESE ARE THE TIMES – TOM PAINE REMEMBERED

Readings and Discussion to mark the 200th anniversary of Tom Paine’s death

9 – 10.30pm, Monday 8th June 2009, Old Red Lion Theatre, Angel, London.

With Tony Benn, sculptor Michael Sandle, publisher Tony Simpson, musician Elizabeth Green and Neil Sheppeck of Love and Madness Theatre, alongside contributions from actor and playwright Jack Shepherd and writer Mike Marqusee.

*

An intimate event, on the 200th anniversary itself of Tom Paine's death, to celebrate and discuss the enduring legacy of one of the most influential radical writers and thinkers in history, at Islington's Old Red Lion Theatre, where Paine actually wrote some of his profoundly important work The Rights of Man.

Featuring a rehearsed reading, directed by and featuring Neil Sheppeck of Love and Madness Theatre, of Jack Shepherd’s play In Lambeth, imagining a meeting between William Blake and Tom Paine.

*

Tickets: £7, £5 (concs. Please provide or bring evidence when booking).

Box Office: 020 7837 7816; www.oldredliontheatre.co.uk

Note: there is a strictly limited capacity. Please book early and arrive promptly.

Old Red Lion Theatre, 418 St John Street, London, EC1V 4NJ.

*

Spokesman Books will run a bookstall featuring:

These Are The Times: A Life of Thomas Paine - an original screenplay by Trevor Griffiths, which follows Tom Paine from persecution in England, to the American War of Independence, to Revolutionary France. It has recently been adapted for theatre and A New World makes its world premiere at Shakespeare's Globe later this year (29th August - 9th October).

Thomas Paine: In Search of the Common Good - edited by Joyce Chumbley & Leo Zonneveld, includes a photo tour in the footsteps of Tom Paine.

And, the new issue of The Spokesman, featuring Peter Linebaugh's article, Tom Paine ... Two, Three, Many Revolutions, which picks up where President Obama left off in the unattributed quotations from Thomas Paine that concluded his inaugural address in January.

James Kirkup

2009-05-15T06:00:00.000-07:00

James Kirkup has died, aged 91.

In 2004 he sent us a copy of No More Hiroshimas. He had originally collected together this volume of hia A-bomb poems in 1983, but it took twenty years before we published it 'as a real book'. James recounts 'My A-Bomb Biography' in his preface.

Here are the opening lines of the title poem, No More Hiroshimas.

At the station exit, my bundle in hand,
Early the winter afternoon's wet snow

Falls thinly round me, out of a crudded sun.

I had forgotten to remember where I was.

Looking about, I see it might be anywhere -

A station, a town like any other in Japan,

Ramshackle, muddy, noisy, drab; a cheerfully

Shallow impermanence: peeling concrete, litter, 'Atomic

Lotion, for hair fall-out', a flimsy department store;

Racks and towers of neon, flashy over tiled and tilted waves

Of little roofs, shacks cascading lemons and persimmons,

Oranges and dark-red apples, shanties awash with rainbows

Of squid and octopus, shellfish, slabs of tuna, oysters, ice,

Ablaze with fans of solied nude-picture books

Thumbed abstractedly by schoolboys, with second-hand

looks.

There will shortly be a memorial event for James Kirkup in his home town of North Shields.

The Spokesman and Palestine

2009-05-06T05:07:00.000-07:00

Following on from Spokesman 103, Unholy Land, our new issue, Revolutions, continues with the Palestine question.

John Dugard writes on Apartheid in Palestine.

Richard Falk (UN Special Rapporteur on the situationof human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967) reports on the 'Human Rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab Territories.'

Nurit Peled, co-founder of Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Parents for Peace, encourages people 'to arise and go to Gaza ... or to any other city of oppression in Palestine to see with their own eyes the horrifying ghettoes ... '

Ken Coates situates the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in the context of earlier Russell Tribunals.

George Galloway MP dissects the Charity Commission's obstruction of his remarkable efforts to provide help fpr Gaza.

The Spokesman is available to buy now through our website or any good bookshop.

Unholy Land - The Spokesman 103

2009-03-06T05:12:00.000-08:00

‘The first King Herod was born in 73 BC and followed a military career, starting out as a general … his fame among present generations is attributable to the Gospel of St. Matthew, which tells us that the King sent for the wise men who famously came from the East to Jerusalem and asked them where the Christ should be born. They told him that He would arrive in Bethlehem of Judaea, whereupon Herod sent them to search diligently for the young child ‘that I may come and worship him also’. But the wise men were too wise to fall for that one, although according to Matthew they had the advantage of being ‘warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod’. Be that as it may, ‘they departed into their own country another way’. At this point, an angel told Joseph to take the young child and his mother ‘and flee into Egypt … for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him’.

With his victims holed up safely in Egypt, Herod ‘was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under’. Herod’s mercenaries would have found it a painfully difficult labour to slaughter all the infants of Bethlehem and its environs. Today’s Herod has not been dependent on old-fashioned butchery with its exhausting exertions involving swords and knives, but can instead call up massive assistance, … which supplies unlimited numbers of bombs containing phosphorus and depleted uranium, and augments them with DIME munitions and F-16s.

It was with such amenities that the modern Israelis were able to massacre 1,380 people in Gaza, of whom 431 were children. We must admit that these will prove to be provisional figures, although they have been provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Five thousand three hundred and eighty people were known to the Palestinian Ministry of Health … as having been injured. Eight hundred of these were women and one thousand eight hundred and seventy two were children. All this damage was inflicted during the first phase of the recent war. That future phases may well follow seems highly likely. But the world has not yet fully digested the horrors unleashed upon it in early January 2009.’

Excerpts from Ken Coates’ The Second Coming of King Herod

CONTENTS:
The Second Coming of King Herod – Ken Coates
Ref: An Official Memo – Alexis Lykiard
‘Exterminate all the Brutes’ – Noam Chomsky
Israel’s War against Hamas – Avi Shlaim
Gaza and the Law – Richard Falk
Steadfast before Goliath – Mustafa Barghouti
A letter from Hamas – Mousa Abu Marzook
‘Not simply war criminals’ – Gerald Kaufman MP
The Gulf Between Us – Trevor Griffiths
Covering up Torture – Shami Chakrabarti Geoff Hoon MP
At the Crossroads – Adrian Mitchell

Dossier:
Elbaradei Boycotts BBC over Gaza
Gilad Schalit, Hamas and Olmert

Reviews:
John Daniels – A Palestinian’s Journey (Abdel Bari Atwan)
Stan Newens – Endless Conflict
Bruce Kent – Human Action
Chris Gifford – In Common
Abi Rhodes – Destructive Democracy

Cover: With grateful acknowledgements to Steve Bell

Advertising in the London Review of Books and elsewhere.

Available to buy online and in all good bookshops

ISBN: 978 0 85124 7658 Price: £6.00

Spokesman Books New Title

2009-01-16T06:17:00.000-08:00

The Shape of Things to Come

The EU Future Group

By Tony Bunyan of Statewatch

£2.00 - Order Online

The Shape of Things to Come examines the European Union’s plans for justice and home affairs, and warns that the Union is embarked on several highly controversial paths. These include: using the ‘digital tsunami’ to create a surveillance society for law enforcement purposes by gathering personal details on the everyday lives of everyone living in the European Union; allowing law enforcement and security agencies, in collaboration with multinational companies, to determine new technologies to be introduced – including recording details of all phone and mobile phone calls and internet usage; removing ‘obstacles’ (judicial authorisation) to the exchange of intelligence between all European Union agencies; and the outrageous idea that a Euro-Atlantic area of co-operation with the United States should be set up to decide on policies fundamentally affecting the rights and liberties of the people of Europe.

Also questioned is the undemocratic decision-making procedure under which 27 EU governments will agree the ‘Stockholm Programme’ that will set in stone the measures to be introduced. The book ends with a warning that, unless we have an open and meaningful debate now, we never will, because it will already be too late.

"well-researched and very credible and frightening."

Tony Benn, Jan 2009

Slump and War

2008-12-22T08:31:00.000-08:00

Slump and War
The Spokesman 102
Edited by Ken Coates

The election of Barack Obama came as the culmination of a profound surge of optimism in the United States, and of hope against hope in large parts of the rest of the world. Widely detested, the Bush administration was the most unpopular in living memory.

Obama had fought an audacious campaign, calling in question not only the war in Iraq, but the train of events which had brought the United States into contempt all around the world. The American military, far from exercising full spectrum dominance, was arousing full spectrum detestation. Its symbols were Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, water boarding and extraordinary rendition.

As the American economy raced from recession to slump, Obama’s campaign seemed to gather momentum. Earnest crowds of young people were seen on television singing the anthem of Woody Guthrie:
‘This land is your land, this land is my land,
from California to New York Island.’
Would that it were so.

This land creaks with every conceivable injustice, with loss and despair, with cruelty, oppression and contempt, by no means all of which have been exported to the numerous theatres of war. If he were bent upon cleansing the Augeian Stables, the labours of Obama would be Herculean indeed. And yet, the mobilisation of millions of formerly excluded voters, of the young, the blacks, the many minorities, must now be a moment of hope. They could indeed make light work of removing the accretion of filth from the Bush years and earlier. Will they be allowed to do so? Early signals from those with whom the President Elect is surrounding himself may promote doubt rather than hope.

CONTENTS:
Meltdown Election – Noam Chomsky
South Ossetia – Roy and Zhores Medvedev
From A to X – John Berger
Weapons for Pensions – Richard Minns
The Crisis – Oskar Lafontaine
Edward Carpenter, Unsung Hero – Michael Barratt Brown

Dossier:
Human Rights Watch Continues False Cluster Bomb Accusations
Nigel Potter on Honduras

Reviews:
Ken Coates – Asiatic Mode
Chris Gifford – Denying Denial
John Daniels – Neoliberalism Dissected & Viva Cuba
Michael Barratt Brown – The Economics of Inequality
Stan Newens – TomDispatch
Tony Simpson – John le Carré’s Espiocracy
Henry McCubbin – No More Spin & Forgotten Democracy
Peter Jackson – Wilfred Burchett – Contentious Figure
James Jones – What About Israel?
Abi Rhodes – Twenty Thousand Saints

Cover: With grateful acknowledgements to Steve Bell

Order online at www.spokesmanbook.com

The Levellers and The Devil's Whore

2008-12-03T06:58:00.000-08:00

The Levellers and the English Revolution
H.N. Brailsford
Edited by Christopher Hill

'To our generation fell the good fortune of re-discovering the Levellers. To the classical liberal historians they meant rather less than nothing. This neglect is puzzling. At the crisis of the English Revolution it was the Levellers and not from its commanders that the victorious New Model army derived its political ideas and its democratic drive.' H.N. Brailsford.

The Levellers continue to inspire public interest. John Lilburne and Thomas Rainsborough are central to Channel 4's current production, The Devil's Whore. The four part series about the English Civil War continues tonight at 9pm, repeated Saturday.

For more information about Brailsford's seminal work and other relevant titles, please visit:

http://www.spokesmanbooks.com/acatalog/The_Levellers.html

Price: £18.00 816 pages Indexed

Ending War: A Recipe

2008-11-07T06:13:00.001-08:00

Ending War: A Recipe

By Robert Hinde

'Not this year, not in my lifetime, perhaps in yours, and with a strong probability in my grandchildren's lifetimes, war will be seen as an unacceptable way of settling disputes between states. The aim of this book is to hasten the day.'

Robert Hinde, British Pugwash Group

The author was a Coastal Command Pilot, flying Catalinas and Sunderlands, in World War Two. After the war he worked as a biologist/psychologist at Cambridge University. He was appointed a Royal Society Research Professor in 1963, and was Master of St. John's College, Cambridge from 1989 to 1994. He is Deputy Chair (recently Chair) of the British Pugwash Group, Patron of the Movement for the Abolition of War, and Patron of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Awareness Programme. The British Pugwash Group is an affiliate of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, recipient of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize.

Available from Spokesman Books

Price £4.00 - 48pp - ISBN 978 085124 759 5 - pamphlet

Tom Paine's Bi-centenary Celebrations

2008-10-17T05:02:00.000-07:00

An early start to celebrations to mark Thomas Paine's bi-centenary (he died in 1809) begin in November at Diss Corn Hall.

At 8pm on Friday 7th November Mark Steel kick starts the festivities, which continue through to June 2009, when Trevor Griffiths will read from his screenplay These Are The Times: A Life of Thomas Paine. Further details of this nearer the time.

For tickets to see Mark Steel contact Diss Library or Tourist Information Centre.

Community Development Journal Seminar

2008-10-08T01:26:00.000-07:00

The Politics of Community 40 Years on

To celebrate the Community Development Journal's 40th Year Anniversary, we have commissioned an International Reader of articles featured in the Journal during this period, which represent the richness and diversity in community development theory and practice, and its changing focus.

We are celebrating the Reader's launch with a free seminar, to be followed by refreshments. All are welcome, including students, practitioners, academics, policy-makers and anybody interested in the politics of community.

Friday 10 October 2008 2 - 4 pm

London South Bank University, Manor Lecture Theatre, London Road Building, 110 London Road, SE1 6LN

Panel: Tony Benn
Amanda Greenwood, Community Development Xchange
Akwugo Emejulu, University of Strathclyde
Gary Craig, Co-Editor Community Development in Theory and Practice: An International Reader

Chair: Mandy Wilson, Community Development Journal

To book a place, please send your completed booking form to Sally Eserin at LSBU on eserins@lsbu.ac.uk

Please note, Elephant and Castle is the nearest tube station.

Truth and War - John Pilger

2008-10-01T06:23:00.000-07:00

New Statesman - 29 September 2008
John Pilger writes:

… Two years ago, Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian Studies at New York University, wrote a landmark essay in the Nation which has now been reprinted in Britain.* He warns of “the gravest threats [posed] by the undeclared Cold War Washington has waged, under both parties, against post-communist Russia during the past 15 years”. He describes a catastrophic “relentless winner-take-all of Russia's post-1991 weakness”, with two-thirds of the population forced into poverty and life expectancy barely at 59. With most of us in the West unaware, Russia is being encircled by US and Nato bases and missiles in violation of a pledge by the United States not to expand Nato “one inch to the east”. The result, writes Cohen, “is a US -built reverse iron curtain [and] a US denial that Russia has any legitimate national interests outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin former republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. [There is even] a presumption that Russia does not have full sovereignty within its own borders, as expressed by constant US interventions in Moscow’s internal affairs since 1992 ... the United States is attempting to acquire the nuclear superiority it could not achieve during the Soviet era.”

This danger has grown rapidly as the American media again grow US -Russian relations as “a duel to the death – perhaps literally”. The liberal Washington Post, says Cohen, “reads like a bygone Pravda on the Potomac”. The same is true in Britain, with the regurgitation of propaganda that Russia was wholly responsible for the war in the Caucasus and must therefore be a “pariah”. Sarah Palin, who may end up US president, says she is ready to attack Russia. The steady beat of this drum has seen Moscow return to its old nuclear alerts. Remember the 1980s, writes Cohen, “when the world faced exceedingly grave Cold War perils, and Mikhail Gorbachev unexpectedly emerged to offer a heretical way out. Is there an American leader today ready to retrieve that missed opportunity?” It is an urgent question that must be asked all over the world by those of us still unafraid to break the lethal silence.

*Stephen Cohen's article, “The New American Cold War”, is reprinted in full in the current issue of The Spokesman, published by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.

This is an exerpt from John Pilger's article. The full text is available at: http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2008/09/pilger-russia-british-britain

Covention of the Left

2008-09-19T05:39:00.000-07:00

From Saturday 20th to Wednesday 24th September 2008 the Convention of the Left gathers together in Manchester under the banner 'Another World is Possible', at the same time as the Labour Party comes to town.

"This bold venture comes as a result of people from different left and radical traditions – or none – getting together in Greater Manchester to say that there IS an alternative ... "

Commencing at 12.30pm on Saturday with the Stop the War/CND demonstration, which assembles at All Saints, Cavendish Street, Manchester, the first session of the Convention follows at 3.00pm in the Friends Meeting House in Mount Street.

The Final Programme for the many events, meetings and discussions which are taking place over the five day Convention is available from www.conventionoftheleft.org. Wednesday is 'Peace' day and is a must for those who want to give Peace a chance.

Spokesman Books will attend the Covention. Copies of the new issue of The Spokesman - Tskhinvali: Shock and Awe will be on sale at the bookstall.

The Spokesman 101 - Tskhinvali: Shock and Awe

2008-09-12T04:48:00.000-07:00

The latest issue of our journal The Spokesman is now available and below is the accompanying editorial written by Ken Coates.

Tskhinvali: Shock and Awe

Georgia’s war

On 7th August 2008, President Saakashvili of Georgia launched an all-out military assault on the capital town of South Ossetia, Tskhinvali. The town was partly destroyed. Estimates of civilian deaths vary, between fifteen hundred and two thousand. Precise figures may become available quite soon, now that it is possible to recover and bury the dead. Thirty-four thousand South Ossetians fled to the neighbouring territory of North Ossetia, which is part of the Federal Russian State, and they can all talk. They have been doing so incessantly, telling stories of untrammelled brutality.

Tskhinvali was left without water, electricity or gas. The bombardment was continuous, not only from the air, but also by salvoes of Katyusha type rockets based in lethal batteries close to the Georgian town of Gori. When the children of Tskhinvali thought that it was safe to crawl out of the basements into the streets, looking for food, all too often they were shot by Georgian forces. These had also killed many Russian peacekeepers who had been based in the town under the Treaty that settled the previous civil war, which broke out with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent abrogation of South Ossetian and other autonomies by the newly proclaimed Republic of Georgia.*

The population of South Ossetia was mainly Russian speaking, and identified more strongly with Russia than with Georgia. It had been located within the Georgian Soviet Republic as a result of the 1936 Stalin constitution, which no doubt reflected the needs of the Soviet power at the time. Once the Soviet Union was destroyed, now that the successors of Mr. Beria were gone, South Ossetian residents had no reason to trust a purely Georgian Government, which was, for them, under permanent suspicion of ethnic hostility. They had promptly been told by Georgia’s first President, Ghamsakhurdia, that there would be no more autonomy for minorities in the new Georgia. ‘Georgia is for Georgians,’ he proclaimed. When they (inevitably) rebelled, the Russian Government of President Yeltsin understood their predicament, and resolved to issue Russian passports to all those in the disputed areas who wished to have them. Russian pension entitlements were superior to anything available locally, so that many older people would be influenced in their choice of nationality. Estimates vary, but it seems likely that by 2008 some ninety-five per cent of the inhabitants of the area had opted to hold Russian passports, rejecting Georgian ones. After Saakashvili’s barbaric onslaught this August, the near unanimity of the South Ossetian public is assured.

The short war that was waged with such total ruthlessness was also brought to a paroxysm in the Western media, which bought all the lies dispensed by Mr. Saakashvili’s propaganda machine as if they were the very milk of the gospel. Whilst the killing and burning was raging, the news media in the West found it impossible to be in any way specific about who was killing whom, who was applying the torch. Normal viewers of the TV channels were very likely to form the impression that it was the Russians who were responsible for all that destruction, all those deaths. A veritable wave of hysteria was launched, in which, for a short time, the real culprits succeeded in offsetting their responsibilities, laying all blame at the feet of their victims.

In the beginning, undoubtedly, the Georgian propaganda machine was in control of its lies. It was very effective, and its numerous friends in the Western media did their duty. But with the arrival of the Russian army to support their beleaguered citizens and murdered peacekeepers, everything rapidly changed. Firstly, there were Russian news media, widely suspect in the West, but, given a strong case, bound to penetrate the fog of what were clearly blatant lies. But secondly, the Georgian army did not expect to stand up to a proper army, one that might fire back, and after a brief indecision, it ran away. Indeed, it surpassed the Olympic runners. As it ran, the force of rumour became a tidal wave.

Meantime, the other contested province, Abkhazia, had seized the opportunity to drive out Georgian forces that had previously occupied the Kodori Gorge. So the Georgian army was in flight from several directions. As it ran, the news travelled that the Russians were coming. Perhaps the Russians were not coming. But the Georgians were certainly going. When they reached the town of Gori there were ferocious disputes about who would snaffle which vehicles. To whom would go the fastest cars? In fevered flight from nonexistent Russians, all headed for the capital, Tbilisi. There they were advertised as the phantom Russians. It seems likely now that at least some of the deserting soldiers have taken off their uniforms and melted into the landscape. After all that excitement, the Russians did arrive. Their first action was to restrain Ossetian irregulars who had gone on the rampage, and seek to restore the civil authority of Gori’s mayor.

Of course, part of the American trained Georgian army had been deployed in Iraq, where it comprised the third largest contingent of the occupation forces. The Americans obligingly flew them straight back to Georgia so that they could do their duty in defending Tbilisi and Mr. Saakashvili’s regime. We do not know whether they got home in time to join their invasion, or whether they arrived a little later, during the rout. In either case, it cannot be excluded that they will join the backlash of Georgian opinion, which will probably hold their President responsible for a disastrous military adventure.

Saakashvili’s helpers

But this disaster did not occur for want of careful preparation. For several years the Georgian Government had been energetically preparing for a war, lavishing millions on various kinds of weaponry, with the highest average growth rate of military expenditure in the whole world, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. From $18 million in 2002, this rose to $900 million in 2008. This was accompanied by a prodigious diplomatic effort to build what they hoped would be military support. The support of the neo-cons in the United States was buttressed by the provision of a pro-Georgian lobby which placed one of its people in a close advisory role to Presidential candidate John McCain.

His top foreign policy adviser, the neo-con Randy Scheunemann, is said to have had a long-term financial relationship with President Saakashvili, as a lobbyist for his American interests. According to the Wall Street Journal:

‘In 2005, Mr. Scheunemann asked Senator McCain to introduce a Senate resolution expressing support for peace in the Russian-influenced region of South Ossetia that wants to break away from Georgia, the records show.

Such resolutions of Senate support are symbolic but helpful to countries in their diplomatic relations. The Senate approved Senator McCain’s resolution in December 2005, and the Georgian Embassy posted the text on its Website.

Senator McCain has endorsed Georgia’s goal of entering Nato, a matter for which the country hired Mr. Scheunemann to lobby. In 2006, Senator McCain gave a speech at the Munich Conference on Security in Germany in which he said “Georgia has implemented far-reaching political, economic, and military reforms” and should enter Nato, a text of his speech on the conference Website shows.’

Writing in The Nation, Mark Ames reported:

‘Scheunemann … also worked for recently-disgraced Bush fundraiser Stephen Payne, lobbying for his Caspian Alliance oil business. The Caspian oil pipeline runs through Georgia, the main reason that country has tugged the heartstrings of neo-cons and oil plutocrats for at least a decade or more. In 2006, McCain visited Georgia and denounced the South Ossetian separatists, proving that Scheunemann wasn’t wasting his Georgian sponsor’s money. At a speech he gave in a Georgian army base in Senaki, McCain declared that Georgia was America’s “best friend”, and that Russian peacekeepers should be thrown out.’

There was another best friend. The Israelis established a private company called Defensive Shield, run by Gal Hirsch, previously a General in the Israeli army. This obtained a contract to train Georgian troops. Gal Hirsch arouses a particular interest in the Lebanon, where the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, has kept a close eye on his progress since his downfall after the abortive Israeli onslaught on the Lebanon in 2006. Nasrallah might be forgiven a modest gloat when the Georgian armed forces came a similar cropper in 2008. ‘Israel exported failed generals in order to train the Georgian armed forces’, he said, comparing their victorious progress into and out of the Lebanon with that of their Georgian apprentices into and out of South Ossetia.

But the true story of Israeli involvement seems to be quite complicated.

Misha Glenny maintains that:

‘The Russians … knew all about Defensive Shield and the tens of millions of dollars worth of Israeli military equipment that Georgia had been purchasing. Just over a week before the conflict erupted Putin put in a call to the Israeli President, Shimon Peres. His message, according to a Western intelligence source, was simple: pull out your trainers and weapons or we will escalate our co-operation with Syria and Iran.’

Glenny says that Peres does not suffer from the same illusions as Georgia’s Ministers, ‘and the Israeli set-up left Tbilisi within two days’.

But President Saakashvili denied on Wednesday 13th August that Israel had suspended its aid to the country. ‘I have not heard anything about that’, he told Haaretz. Saakashvili said that he was aware of difficulties with the supply of pilotless drones that had been ordered by his army, but not of the stopping of any other shipments of military aid. ‘The Israeli weapons have proved very effective’, he said. A reporter asked him about the Jews who had fled the fighting and gone to Israel. Saakashvili replied:

‘We have two Israeli cabinet ministers, one deals with war, Defence Minister David Kezerashvili, and the other with negotiations, State Minister for Territorial Integration, Temur Yakobashvili, and that is the Israeli involvement here: both war and peace are in the hands of Israeli Jews.’

According to Haaretz, Yakobashvili is not actually an Israeli citizen.

‘Saakashvili’s statements are part of his Government’s attempt to bring other countries into its war against Russia. During the briefing, he noted that he is in constant contact with US Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.’

Be all that as it may, none of it stopped the Russians from capturing very large numbers of Israeli weapons. They also seem to have impounded considerable stocks from Ukraine, to say nothing of those that had been provided by the Americans. There has been some speculation about what the Russians will do with these mountains of weaponry which have fallen into their hands, and which, it was said, they might destroy, or take back into South Ossetia. One Russian officer demurred from these proposals. We shall send them back home, he said, so that we can use them where they remain useful.

Thus, in short order, ended years of intensive preparations by President Saakashvili. Perhaps he will set off again to climb the same mountain: but his survival cannot be guaranteed, since it seems at least possible that the Georgian people may tire of these dreams of military grandeur.

It being difficult for the Americans to find another expeditionary force to throw into the Georgian fray, diplomatic weapons have been chosen. Mrs. Merkel has been suborned into promising that Georgia can join Nato. But Georgia might seem a modest liability with no weapons, not much army left, and two festering military defeats. All these might well constitute an inoculation against the military contagion.

There hasn’t been much the Americans could do about all this. True, President Bush decided to send a contingent of American troops to Georgia on Wednesday 14th August. The American military were to carry out a humanitarian mission. A C-17 transporter, said to be carrying medical supplies and tents for thousands of people displaced by the fighting, was the first American plane to arrive in Tbilisi from Germany. The second flight was due to arrive the following day.

Condoleezza Rice announced that she was going to visit Georgia after calling off in Paris for a meeting with President Sarkozy. She told Foreign Minister Lavrov on the telephone about the relief operation and said that the presence of American troops would not only help the aid mission, but also allow the Americans to monitor how far the Russians were honouring the ceasefire. Ms. Rice then called a news conference of considerable belligerence, telling the Russians that this was not 1968, when Russia could ‘invade its neighbour, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it’. Apparently nowadays only America can do that. But the fact remains that the Russian Government is quite different from the Soviet Government of 1968, even if the Americans are seeking to persuade it to revert to type.

It is too early to say what is the meaning of this American humanitarian surge. Do they simply want to give tents to the victims of their proxy, who now find themselves homeless? Or are they looking for ways to provoke unpleasant reactions from their former ‘partners’ in Russia? All this rhetoric, whatever it means, has not gone unremarked in Moscow. Mr. Lavrov said: ‘We understand that this current Georgian leadership is a special project of the United States. But one day the United States will have to chose between defending its prestige over a virtual project or a real partnership’, with Russia.

What consequences?

But the Americans have speeded up their confrontational responses in other areas, starting in Poland with the installation of a missile interceptor programme, and some new Patriot missiles. The Russians have never been under any doubt about where all these will be trained, and nobody believes that this programme has been installed to defend against non-existent Iranian missiles. Of course, if the confrontation between East and West continues, and continues to escalate, it is not inconceivable that the Iranians might be able to obtain appropriate missiles. But why they should want to do so has never been explained. Iran would prove incredibly vulnerable in a nuclear confrontation, and is likely to be wide open to the proposal for agreements about nuclear-free zones for a long time to come. But nobody in the West wants to make such sensible proposals. They do not suit Israel.

However, Iran might take some small comfort from the possibility that the Nato allies might come to revise their commercial relations with Iranian energy suppliers in the light of these heavy military engagements. The same thing applies to those Nato forces which are deployed in Afghanistan. Not so long ago, they concluded a deal on the transit of nonlethal cargo through Russian territory to their forces deployed in Afghanistan. The deal mainly concerned food and non-military supplies, but did include some kinds of military equipment. The supplies were to be transported across Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
The Hindu reported on the 26th June 2008 that:

‘Two decades after it pulled out of Afghanistan, Russia is returning, at the request of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Moscow will allow land shipment of Nato supplies to Afghanistan across the Russian territory and will supply weapons to the Afghan army. There is a rich irony in the fact that the US, which fought a proxy war against the Russian forces in Afghanistan from 1979-1989, is now asking Russia to help Nato combat the same mujahideen who were armed and trained by Washington to fight the Russians.

Russia promised to resume defence supplies to Afghanistan at a meeting of the Russia-US Working Group on Counterterrorism in Moscow last week. This will greatly boost Nato efforts to rearm the Afghan army and enable it to stand up to the Taliban. Russian weapons make up almost 100 per cent of Afghan inventory, and are far more popular with local combatants than western arms.’

Over seventy per cent of all Nato supplies to Afghanistan go through Pakistan with the rest flown in by air. The route has recently proved extremely hazardous with the Taliban stepping up attacks on the US and Nato convoys. ‘The Russian corridor will greatly reduce Nato dependence on the violence-plagued Pakistani route.’

No one in Nato knows for sure what will be the effect of the resignation of President Musharraf on the Pakistani supply routes. So it might be thought a hazardous engagement to place the newly agreed Russian route in jeopardy. But when he visited Germany in May 2008, Russia’s new President Medvedev said that Nato should not jeopardise co-operation with Russia in Afghanistan by clinging to the inertia of bloc mentality. In
Bucharest, at the April Nato summit, Mr. Putin said that the alliance could not achieve anything in Afghanistan without Russian help:

‘Is it possible to succeed in Afghanistan without Russia, given its vast capabilities in the region? Negative. That is why we are being constantly urged to open transit, provide aid, etc.’

Meantime, the nuclear dimension to all this continues to be aggravated. Indeed, its shadow has already fallen across Georgia: press secretary Dana Perino and Ambassador Jeffrey reported on Sunday 10th August 2008 that President Bush had been immediately informed ‘when we received news of the first two SS-21 Russian missile launchers (in) Georgian territory’.

These launchers are capable of carrying warheads which are conventional, but it is not, from the military point of view, an optimal use to make of them. They are, of course, designed to carry nuclear warheads. The Americans did not have to spell this out to President Bush:

‘He immediately – this was at the Great Hall – he immediately met with President Putin. They had a discussion. The President then engaged with his national security staff continuously over the last two days. He has spoken with – again with Putin that evening. He then talked with President Medvedev yesterday evening, as well as President Saakashvili. Secretary Rice has spoken repeatedly with President Saakashvili, as well as with her Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Lavrov, and many European leaders.’

Subsequently, President Bush announced that there would be no American military intervention. Were the SS-21s a symbolic warning to the Americans? Were they intended to show that the Russians were serious, and meant business? Or were they real? Bush, universally derided as an impulsive hothead, wisely decided not to confront this matter further.

But immediately there followed the announcement about Polish deployment of an anti-missile system, and immediately thereafter, a flurry of lesser diplomats and presidents went to Tbilisi to announce the impending welcome of Georgia into Nato.

For their part, the Russians have not hesitated to escalate the nuclear deployments. There has been public speculation about fitting nuclear warheads to the missiles carried by the Baltic fleet. There has also been sustained discussion of the deployment of nuclear warheads in Kaliningrad, formerly Königsberg, the Russian outpost at the entrance to the Baltic Sea. None of this may happen, but all of it might.

The ghost at this lunatic banquet, however, is not in all these endangered territories. It is the giant threat of Ukraine, already a participant in the arming of Georgia, and a collaborator of President Saakashvili. President Yushchenko has already required the Russian fleet to report its movements in advance to their homeports, including Sevastopol, and they have already declared their lack of readiness to oblige. But of course, the outstanding applications for membership of Nato came both from Georgia and Ukraine. Perhaps there are some who doubt the significance of this. If Ukraine were to join Nato the minnow of Georgia would be replaced by a whale. If nuclear confrontation were to continue to escalate, would anyone be sure that we were not standing on the very brink of the Third World War? Can Russia possibly accept such a move? And Russia may not need to accept it, because although only one-third or less of the Ukrainian population are ethnic Russians, a vast proportion of the Ukrainian Orthodox population is closer to Russia economically and culturally than they are to Catholic Western Ukraine, and if that country were to break in two, as appears possible, then the anti-Russian part of the country may have no visible means of support.

Already this prospect has been borne in on Ukrainian leaders, so that we learn that President Yushchenko is seeking to explore how he might lay treason charges against fellow orange revolutionary, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Apparently she is alarmed by the virulence of Yushchenko’s espousal of the Georgian cause, and has refused to allow the Ukrainian Parliament to adopt an anti-Russian stance or to condone the eviction of the Russian fleet from Ukrainian waters. She also declined to join an official delegation to Tbilisi on August 9th. Why? Well, clearly she understands that Ukraine is heading for a split which could either result in a reassertion of Russian hegemony, or a division of the country.

When one examines the paroxysms of threats and demagogic blustering that have attended Saakashvili’s wars in Georgia, one is perhaps alerted to the very much worse consequences of an attempt to plant Nato in Kiev.

Ken Coates
With thanks to Tony Benn, Bruce Kent, Henry McCubbin,
Zhores Medvedev, Jan Oberg and Tony Simpson

* On 28 August 2008, South Ossetia’s Prosecutor General reported that 1,692 deaths resulted from Tbilisi’s August offensive. ‘We have information of 1,692 dead and 1,500 injured as a result of the Georgian aggression,’ Russian Interfax news agency quoted Teimuraz Khugayev as saying.

Revolutionising Tom Paine

2008-08-15T04:30:00.001-07:00

Recently These Are The Times: A Life of Thomas Paine, a screenplay by Trevor Griffiths, was broadcast in two parts as Radio 4's Saturday Play. The production has stirred up some disussion on Radio 4's Message Board. In an article for New Humanist, Trevor Griffiths describes its making and what the process revealed about Paine and revolution: "I’m in the gallery of a sound studio on a West London industrial estate, watching the recording of a play I began writing 20 years back and finished, in a form I was happy enough to see published, in 2005. Watching with me are producer, director, sound engineer and production coordinator. It’s our fifth day in. Time is tight. Today we’re trying a king ..."

Read the full article, Revolutionising Tom Paine.

No More Hiroshimas

2008-08-08T06:25:00.000-07:00

It is 63 years since the first atomic bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; on the 6th and 9th of August respectively. Around the world this week many commemorative events are taking place. They include events in Leeds, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Germany, Austria, the USA and Canada. For details of what is happening in your area please go to the ICAN website.

Spokesman Books commemorates these events with a collection of poems by James Kirkup entitled No More Hiroshimas. In the preface the author explains the genesis of this little collection: 'These poems all have their roots in one late afternoon at the land workers’ hostel outside Ponteland, Northumberland. As we entered the hostel we got the news that the first American Atom Bomb had been dropped on Japan, on the city of Hiroshima. It was the first time we had heard of that place that was to become a universal symbol of man’s inhumanity towards his fellow men.’

No More Hiroshimas, the poem which gives the collection its title, can be read here.

Tom Paine on Radio 4

2008-07-23T06:54:00.000-07:00

'These Are The Times reads like the greatest of novels and is the most thrilling read I’ve had in years!' Kurt Vonnegut

These Are The T ime s: A Life of Thomas Paine.

Trevor Griffiths's screenplay to be broadcast on Radio 4 beginning this Saturday.

Tom Paine arrives in America penniless just as the struggle for Independence is beginning. His ideas and his writings take him right to the heart of events and his words are read out to Washington's army. Jonathan Pryce plays Thomas Paine in the radio production to be broadcast in two ninety-minute parts on Radio 4's Saturday Play, beginning this Saturday and concluding Saturday 2nd August (2.30 - 4pm on each day).

The Fight In Britain Against Privatization: Lessons for Us All

2008-07-16T02:35:00.000-07:00

A view from the United States
by Mike Tolochko

New Labour’s Attack on Public Services
Dexter Whitfield
ISBN 13 9 780851 247151
£11.99

“Marketisation and privatisation is more advanced in Britain than any other European country. The precise application of these policies will vary between countries for political, legal and cultural reasons. Nonetheless, there are key lessons from the experience in Britain which should be drawn upon.”

Dexter Whitfield has given activists around the world a true primer on the ravenous, greedy attack on human services in general, but for health care in particular. His point-by-point description of the neo-liberal policies demanded by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization as they apply on-the-ground is nowhere else to be found. He is describing the situation in Britain, a country which has had the longest Labour Party run in the party’s history.

The Tory governments of Margaret Thatcher/John Major did major damage to the public sector’s infrastructure. And, their financing schemes have lasted long after they were voted out of office by very large percentages. The problem is that the Tony Blair Labour Party continued many of the privatisation schemes started by Thatcher/Major. Their supporters voted for a far different direction.

The US experience with Bill Clinton and his reactionary free trade agreement, NAFTA, and his equally reactionary anti-welfare revision, are our case in point. The lesson: beware of your friends.

What is Marketisation?

Whitfield defines the enemy:

1] Commodifying [commercializing] services are changed so that they can be specified and packaged in a contract, thus extending outsourcing and offshoring;

2] Commodifying [commercializing] labour – the reorganization of work and jobs to maximize productivity and assist transfer to another employer;

3] Restructuring the state for competition and market mechanisms – schools, hospitals and other facilities are compelled to compete against each other, funding is changed to follow pupils and patients, public bodies are reduced to commissioning functions creating opportunities for private finance and so-called partnerships;

4] Restructuring democratic accountability and user involvement – service users are treated as consumers; services and functions are transferred to quangos {see note}; arms length companies and trusts and privately controlled companies are established within public bodies;

5] Embedding business interests and promoting liberalization internationally – business is more involved in the public policy making process and promotes national, European and global liberalization of public services.

While Whitfield’s definition is Britain and European specific, it is quite easy to extrapolate to the U.S. situation. He makes the extremely important point that marketisation is not just the immediate impact on services, “It has a fundamental impact on local government, democratic accountability and the welfare state.” He goes into this aspect deeper in a later chapter of his book.

The brilliance of Whitfield is that he forces readers to understand the context of local, state and national privatization. “Neoliberalism is a conservative economic philosophy which revived in the late 1970s following the crisis in Keynesian economics, escalating inflation at the end of the post-war reconstruction boom, the soaring cost of the US war in Vietnam and the 1973 oil shock.” If this sounds familiar to the Iraq War and the present 2008 Oil Greed Crisis, it should.

He cites eight components to Neoliberalism:

“Liberalisation and competition---free trade and competition to determine who delivers services. Acceptance of globalization as a benign force and facilitating the internationalization of free inward and outward flows of money, goods, services and labour; Markets – a belief in the superiority of markets in allocating resources and organizing the economy; Deregulation of Financial Markets – permitting the free flow of capital globally and new opportunities for accumulation; Reconfiguring the role of the state – abandoning demand management, reduced intervention, restructuring and reorganizing service delivery by limiting the role of government to commissioning, coupled with withdrawal of public provision….;Privatization – of public assets and services, governance and democracy and the public domain; Consumerism – restructuring public services and the welfare state towards consumerism, individualism and personalization, shopping for services and the pursuit of self-interest, and the erosion of public, collective and community services; Labour market flexibility and deregulation – abandoning interventionist strategies to maintain full employment, expansion of casual and migrant labour, limiting trade union organization and activity, and reinforcing management’s ‘right to manage’; Increasing the power of business coupled with erosion of democratic accountability and transparency – partnerships, decentralization of functions but centralization of policy, depoliticalisation of civil society and voluntary organizations drawn into service delivery, citizens treated merely as consumers despite neoliberal rhetoric of participation and empowerment.”

Reading Whitfield is like stealing the playbook of Corporate American think tanks like the Brookings Institute. And, given our two political parties, both of which are more than willing participants, the next period of time will probably not change things too much. It certainly could get a lot worse if the Bush years are continued, regardless of who is in the White House.

Whitfield doesn’t leave us at death’s door with no mobilizing game book of our own. He directly states why public provision of services is essential:

Here are his nine points:
1] Improving community well-being;

2] Democratic accountability;

3] Equalities and social justice;

4] Sustainable development;

5] Protecting the public interest;

6] Financial advantages;

7] Corporate policies;

8] Better quality employment;

9] Capacity.

And, then he describes “Strategies to oppose marketisation and support alternative policies.” He lists then describes 6 strategies:

1] political support;

2] Mobilise against;

3] Coalitions and alliances;

4] Intervene in modernization process;

5] Promote alternative policies;

6] Prevent the extension of marketisation through the European Union and World Trade Organization.

Whitfield includes a welcome quote from Harold Pinter, the great British playwright activist and leftist from his Nobel acceptance speech. Pinter said that politicians “are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.”

Clearly, international solidarity will be needed to defeat the world forces of capital. The fight back has been underway for a while. In fact the international solidarity displayed at the demonstrations at the Big 8 Countries meetings has been a very good start. But, the institutions of imperialism won’t go away easily.

Books like Whitfield’s give us the ammunition to continue and increase the fight back.

[Note: quangos means; quasi, non-governmental organizations.]

source; www.politicalaffairs.net/

Democracy - Growing or Dying?

2008-07-04T05:29:00.000-07:00

Democracy Growing or Dying?
The Spokesman 100

This is the hundredth number of The Spokesman, so we are expected to have a birthday party. Nostalgia is in order at such events, and we have accordingly devoted quite a large part of this number to reproducing articles and features which involved us, with many of our readers, in a variety of campaigns to change things for the better. Sometimes these have succeeded, if only, say the sceptics, in provoking our old antagonists to find new ways to make them worse again.

Sometimes they have failed, only to stiffen our resolve to try again, when times may be more propitious for their success.

There are, of course, a number of key concerns which have continuously preoccupied us. There has been no possibility of forgetting, even temporarily, the desperate urgency of the struggle for peace and disarmament. It has been quite possible, but very regrettable, to forget the struggle for the widening and deepening of democracy, and this possibility has been amply brought into evidence by the progress of sundry statesmen, not to say less elevated tribunes of the people, some of whom have opted for popular emancipation, one at a time, me first.

This kind of apostasy does discourage people, if only temporarily. If hope springs eternal, so too does the aspiration for effective power over the terms and conditions of our own lives.

Politicians commonly tell us that the major social struggles are about power. ‘We need’ they say, ‘power to prevent the next war, or to save the environment from destruction, or to protect people from exploitation and domination.’ That is one way of putting it, but there are dangers wrapped up in it. Power does not come sanitised, prepacked only for good causes. Time and again there is contrary evidence. What we really need is the annulment of power, so that none can make wars, burn the atmosphere, or lower the people into misery. Yet if we are to avoid the charge of piety, toothless anarchism, empty promises, then we have to concede that the first step to a higher freedom requires that we learn the necessary arts to stop the various evildoers who breed for us all these wars, depredations and oppressions. But if such steps are truly to lead upwards, then the higher freedom itself must always remain in mind.

Fittingly, we have chosen a number of contributions by our founder upon which to thread the thoughts of our contributors on these matters. Bertrand Russell reviewed one of our books, Max Beer’s History of British Socialism, when it first appeared shortly after the First World War. He highlighted Beer’s acute perception that the English establishment could vainly attempt to school their people in the rites of caution and conservatism, but ‘in periods of general upheavals … the English are apt to throw their mental ballast overboard and take the lead in revolutionary thought and action. In such a period we are living now’. After a long and depressing lull in their energies, it could be that we may be about to see their strong renewal very soon ...

Excerpted from Ken Coates' Editorial

You can order Democracy - Growing or Dying? online.

Contents:

Russell as Industrial Democrat – John Hughes & Charles Atkinson
The Infancy of Socialism – Bertrand Russell
Market against Environment – Karl W. Kapp
Meeting Social Needs – Mike Cooley
European Nuclear Disarmament – Ken Coates
The Zhukhov File – Yuri Zhukhov & Ken Coates
Palestine Tragedy – Bertrand Russell
Left Parties Everywhere – Oskar Lafontaine
After Hiroshima – Kevin Rudd
The Surge: A Balance Sheet – William E. Odom

Russell Tribunal on Palestine
Obama on Cuba
Castro on Obama
War Crimes in Derry

Reviews – Bruce Kent, Christopher Gifford, Henry McCubbin, Michael Barratt Brown, Elizabeth Trapp, John Daniels & John Grieve Smith.

Some penguins, a monkey, John Major's Y-fronts and Steve Bell

2008-06-13T05:54:00.000-07:00

Steve Bell's cartoons have brightened the Guardian since 1981. We have long admired his work, and were chuffed to bits when he let us use his cartoons for the covers of Common Ownership: Clause IV and the Labour Party and a whole string of issues of The Spokesman, beginning with The Third Way to the Servile State. On Sunday 22nd June he will be at Lowdham to give an illustrative talk about his work.

The Lowdham Book Festival is in its ninth year. It runs from Friday 20th to Saturday 28th June 2008 and features a whole host of guest speakers, musicians and workshops. On Saturday 28th the largest book fair in the county will be in full swing and we at Spokesman Books will have a stall selling a range of our titles including many issues of The Spokesman which feature Steve Bell's cartoons.

For further information on the Lowdham Book Festival please visit www.lowdhambookfestival.co.uk.

We hope to see you there!

1968 and all that

2008-05-07T01:48:00.000-07:00

Rudi Dutschke's The Students and the Revolution (£2) and Andrée Hoyles' Imagination in Power -- The Occupation of Factories in France in 1968 (£6) are two early Spokesman titles which still figure in our back catalogue. We have just a few copies left of each. These will be available from our stall on Saturday, together with more recent titles, at 1968 AND ALL THAT, the book fair and happening at London's Conway Hall in Red Lion Square (nearest tube Holborn). The doors open at 10am and admission is free.

40 years on from the 'événements' in Paris during that eventful May, there is a rich progamme of events and speakers thoughout the day. They include:

Peter Gowan on the Prague Spring (in the Bertrand Russell Room at 3pm)

Maggie Torres on Anarchism in Spain at 7pm

Albert Beale on Militant Pacifism also at 7pm

Istvan Meszaros on the Credit Crunch and the New Capitalist Crisis at 8pm

More than 50 publishers and booksellers will attend the Book Fair.

A Guy Debord real ale bar will serve beers from the Milton Brewery in Cambridge.

The programme continues until 10pm.

Full details at http://www.1968andallthat.net/