A Ugandan soldier serving with the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) holds a rocket-propelled grenade at sunrise, on the frontline in Maslah Town, on the northern city limit of Mogadishu, 30 April 2012 (Photo: Stuart Price)

Since the intensification of armed conflict between government forces and clan-based opposition groups in 1988, Somalia has played host to some of the most horrific violence in East Africa. After thirty years of independence the Somali state collapsed in January 1991, bringing with it the fall of the militant Siad Barre and his efficient divide and rule policy for the nation’s clan systems (after having received generous support from the US and Western Europe in the ‘70s and ‘80s, thanks to the country’s strategic value and neighbouring shipping lanes).

As Somalia fractured further after the major clans declared themselves rulers of autonomous states, the northwest regions announced their independence as the Republic of Somaliland in May 1991, yet to be recognised by any international body. In March 1998, the northwest region declared independence as the Puntland State of Somalia. Then, in April 2002, the Southwest Somali State followed suit.

In August 2004, representatives of Somalia’s clans appointed 275 members of a new parliament – after holding numerous conferences in Kenya – electing Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed as president of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government. After consistent disagreements and confrontations with parliament, Yusuf resigned in December 2009, with Somalia being classified a ‘collapsed’ or ‘failed’ state, lacking a system of taxation, public schools, a public health system or social services (with a ‘successful’ state presumably being what the social philosopher John Dewey called ‘the shadow cast on society by big business’).

Writing for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Ken Menkhaus commented in 2004:

‘The virtual proxy war which Ethiopia and the Arab states have played out in Somalia has been especially damaging. Arab states seek a strong central Somali state to counterbalance and outflank Ethiopia; Ethiopia seeks a week, decentralised client state, and is willing to settle for ongoing state collapse rather than risk a revived Arab-backed government in Mogadishu. Both have provided military and financial support to their Somali clients, reinforcing the tendency towards violent political stalemate’ (Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism, London: Routledge, 2004, p. 9).

Referred to in the past as Britain’s ‘Cinderella of Empire,’ David Cameron recently called Somalia ‘a failed state that directly threatens British interests’ – where the term ‘Britain’ refers not to the people but to the leading financial, oil and arms corporations deemed crucial to ‘the health of the economy’ (a self-serving notion which has changed little since William Langland spoke of ‘the common profit’ of the landed gentry in the medieval classic Piers Plowman).

Following the standard script of previous fruitless conferences, to his satisfaction Cameron held his own on February 23rd, inviting representatives of 40 governments and organisations to propose ‘peacekeeping’ measures. Included was Hilary Clinton who urged non-negotiation with anti-government forces, al-Shabaab, who have repeatedly engaged in human rights abuses such as beheadings and torture. Suicide bombings have also, on one occasion last October, taken the lives of over 100 students, parents and ministers outside a compound housing numerous government departments, such as the Ministry of Education. But, as with the Kony 2012 campaign, a closer look is useful.

Following a three-year civil war, in April 1992 the UN Security Council authorised a series of ‘peacekeeping’ operations under the umbrella UNOSOM. After the US sent its own force in December, UNITAF, a ceasefire was signed in March 1993 by the dominant warlords. Soon after the US was forced to pull out due to a number of devastating defeats, most notably the ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident of October 1993 during the Battle of Mogadishu, involving the death of 18 US soldiers and with various estimates putting the number of Somalis killed at over 1,000. But as the commander of the operation, Marine Lieutenant General Anthony Zinni, commented to the press regarding Somali casualties: ‘I’m not counting bodies … I’m not interested.’

Ethiopia intervened in 2006 and pushed back the Islamists, who had, despite their al-Qaeda connections (since strengthened after repeated Western-backed interventions) nevertheless succeeded far more efficiently than the TFG in renovating the nation, trade and the main national airport and seaport, restoring public service to the extent that ordinary people felt safe doing business on the streets of Mogadishu (suggesting the unfit nature of the European nation-state in Somalia – a system of domination and control imposed on the global south by the European powers since the days of Columbus). The top UN official for Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, regarded the six months of Islamist rule as Somalia’s ‘golden era,’ the single peaceful period in decades.

BBC Swahili’s Kevin Mwachiro wisely omits this crucial fact in a recent short video summary ‘Somalia’s future: What you need to know’ – a title with fitting overtones of the New York Times’ motto ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print.’ Indeed, the way he pronounces ‘Transitional Federal Government’ just after one minute into the video (in a manner of ‘impartiality’ the BBC prides itself on) makes it sound like he’s promoting an alternative to the Avengers rather than a government. Al-Shabaab’s actions are doubtless deplorable, but they maintain strong grassroots support from both Somalis and clan elders, such as the Hawiye. Most are in fact calling for al-Shabaab to be included in peace talks, since waging a war with them has only made life considerably worse for majority of the population.

With his impeccable choice of misleading words, Cameron touchingly revealed to his conference the tale of a fateful encounter:

‘Earlier this week I met with some of the Somali Diaspora here in Britain. Many had fled from fighting and famine and had grave concerns for their relatives left behind. Of course, it’s natural to want to help any country in such distress. But there’s another reason for the international community to help the Somali people. These problems in Somalia don’t just affect Somalia. They affect us all. … If the rest of us just sit back and look on, we will pay a price for doing so’. (foreign office)

Not worth consideration was the view of over half the residents of Mogadishu who, according to a UN-sponsored poll, believe foreign nations have in the past intervened in Somalia purely out of self-interest.

If we remembered to start the day with our ‘hypocrite’ pill, the prime minister’s concern for human rights will sit comfortably next to his repeated winks to our ally Ethiopia after its invasion into Eritrean territory in mid March (with Whitehall simply adding satirically that it was ‘deeply concerned,’ declining to censure Addis Ababa), with daily outrages over al-Shabaab’s crimes being a more popular topic for the media. Eritrea, supporting al-Shabaab, uses the failed state as a theatre for its proxy war against Ethiopia.

We spend our time well when we recall how the US takes an even more charitable approach to autocracy in the continent, supporting such ‘local cops on the beat’ as Paul Kagame of Rwanda (accused of war crimes in the Second Congo War), Idriss Déby of Chad, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Paul Biya of Cameroon (whose 28 years in power would fail to impress Cameron’s closest ally in the Gulf, the self-appointed guardian of global virtue Sultan Qaboos bin Said al Said of Oman, who has been in power for almost 42 years and whose family have ruled since the mid-eighteenth century).

As things currently stand, al-Shabaab fighters have retreated from the capital and Kenyan troops control territory in the south (having entered the conflict last October in support of the TFG). The group have also lost control of key strategic areas in Deynile on the outskirts of the capital, such as an airstrip and hospital. In early April they moved north into Puntland in an effort to strengthen ties with al-Qaeda, having merged with the militant Islamist group in February.

Britain is also rumoured to be considering joint airstrike operations with the US on al-Shabaab, launched from its Djibouti base at Camp Lemonnier. Two days after Cameron’s conference, four al-Shabaab fighters were killed 60km south of Mogadishu by a US drone strike, destroying two vehicles in a convoy and a white Kenyan ‘civilian’ – evoking Noam Chomsky’s observation that, whereas George W. Bush’s favourite tactic was to torture people, Obama just kills them.

The likelihood of more ‘collateral damage’ in Somalia by the most ‘precise’ weapons in history is also rapidly escalating. In an innocent, perhaps even adorable expression of commitment to state violence, the CIA’s general counsel Stephen Preston suggested in a speech at Harvard Law School on April 10th that his agency is not legally bound to the laws of war, but will rather act ‘in a manner consistent with the … basic principles’ of the those laws.

As the legal and policy director at Human Rights Watch James Ross observes, Preston cautiously and purposefully generalises international law to make it seem more like a rough guideline than a set of legally binding constraints: ‘When the CIA general counsel says that the agency need only act in ‘a manner consistent’ with the ‘principles’ of international law, he is saying the laws of war aren’t really law at all’.

Human Rights Watch’s most recent annual ‘World Report’ also points to the ‘indiscriminate fire on civilian areas’ conducted by ‘TFG-affiliated militias in the border areas of Dhobley and Baardhere during clashes with al-Shabaab’. In late January TFG forces also fired into a crowd of bystanders in Mogadishu, killing up to 20 people and wounding 30. There have presently been no attempts to hold those responsible to account, a level of conscious ignorance which results in Addis Ababa, Washington and Whitehall feeling content, with Preston nodding sagely.

During the recent Libyan campaign (largely the effort to secure, alongside regional ‘stability,’ what the US ambassador Gene Cretz confessed to be ‘the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources’ – oil), NATO managed to extend its considerable list of war crimes by bombing universities, hospitals, schools and homes, giving a boost of confidence to Cameron and Foreign Secretary William Hague. It’s of no surprise (and of little moment to the media) that a World Bank and UN report ranks Somalia as the second most important country for unexploited oil reserves in North East Africa after Libya.

As a recent ‘Hands off Somalia’ campaign video revealed, Bauxite deposits have also been found in Mana Daimur, 250,000 tonnes of untapped atomic minerals exist in Alio Ghelle and the Bur region, and an estimated 10 million tonnes of Titanium reserves lie in the Jubba River. Charles Chinweizu adds that the ‘British firms BG Group, Tullow Oil, Premier Oil and Cove Energy, have acquired oil interests in Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania since 2010’ (‘Oil corporations rush to carve up Somalia,’ Revolutionary Communist Group, 6 February 2012).

Drawing on the nation’s economic history, Ioan Lewis of the London School of Economics (no dove) explained in his careful and illuminating Understanding Somalia that Siad Barre had exercised ‘a policy of state control of the economy. The export of the banana crop grown in the riverine areas south of Mogadishu was controlled by a state agency not greatly different from the monopoly established by previous civilian governments. Similarly grain production was controlled, farmers being allowed to keep a small quantity of grain for their own use and obliged to sell the rest at fixed prices to the Agricultural Development Corporation which stored it and arranged for its distribution and sale to the public. Imported goods were similarly regulated through a state agency.

The major local industries, the sugar factory at Jowhar and the meat processing plant at Kismagu, were likewise state enterprises’ (London: Hurst & Company, 2009, pp. 40-1). But if the Somali economy was so heavily centralised and regarded as ‘communist’ during its period of Soviet influence from the late ‘60s to the early ‘70s, why did the label disappear when Barre became an ally in the mid-‘70s, receiving a high degree of western ‘advise’ and arms? Barre himself regarded his Somali Democratic Republic as a ‘communist regime.’

An explanation can perhaps be found by drawing a parallel with Chile: The West regards Chile as a fine model of the free market, and yet its main export was nationalised in 1976. The Codelco corporation, the largest copper producing company in the world, is by far the country’s greatest export, from which the economy gains most of its strength. But there’s a difference between Chile and the likes of Venezuela and Cuba: Chile doesn’t step on the toes of the US or any other major western power, and so it escapes being branded ‘communist,’ ‘socialist,’ or any other scare-word the public relations industry decides to drain of all meaning.

The official goals of Cameron’s conference were to stop the spread of piracy in the Indian Ocean (created largely by Western firms dumping barrels of their nuclear waste in the seas of impoverished Somali fishermen), relieve the nation’s famine and end the civil war. Having in the past dedicated up to four frigates to Somalia in the battle against piracy (something which, like corruption, is the enemy of any multinational corporation seeking resourceful, streamlined profits), cuts to the Royal Navy have forced it to drop its anti-piracy policy, with only two frigates now being assigned a ‘part-time’ attention to the issue.

The tactics agreed to at the conference are to send in US drones (with their thirst for peace well testified by hundreds of ‘collateral’ Afghan civilians) and to provide the Transitional Federal Government with large international funds. But as Lewis recognised past intervention, as from 1993-5 and in early 2007, has been ‘costly and ineffective’ (p. ix). During the latter intervention, the commander of the small Ugandan-manned African Union mission in Somalia observed that the ‘peacekeeping’ intervention was premature since it presupposed the existence of peace and a visible government.

With the direct conflict decreasing in scale in the capital, signs of regeneration are to be found in Mogadishu, with house prices escalating and reconstruction beginning. Bakara, once the epicentre of violence, is in the process of revival. But ‘the scars of war remain clear, with hundreds of thousands of displaced people living in and around Mogadishu, many in basic rag-and-plastic shelters, some in the crumbling ruins of roofless houses. … As land prices increase and repairs are made, the cost of living rises too, a problem for many in this grossly impoverished city’.

Unmentioned at the conference, however, were the TFG’s human rights abuses. ‘International supporters of the TFG,’ Human Rights Watch reported a few days before the conference, ‘have not paid sufficient attention to human rights violations by the government, including recruitment and use of children as soldiers’ – something they share in common with al-Shabaab. The TFG ‘has also detained children perceived to be supporters of al-Shabaab instead of providing them with rehabilitation and protection in accordance with international standards’ (‘Somalia: Warring Parties Put Children at Grave Risk,’ HRW Report, 21 February 2012).

Last November Human Rights Watch also urged the Kenyan minister of state for defense that his government should ‘promptly and impartially investigate recent incidents in which Kenyan forces may have violated international humanitarian or human rights law,’ such as attacking unarmed fishermen and an internationally displaced persons camp killing respectably four and five ‘unpeople’ (to use the term of the diplomatic historian Mark Curtis) (‘Kenya: Respect Law in Somalia Military Operations,’ HRW Report, 19 November 2011).

The focus of the conference was instead drawn laser-like on the crimes of the official enemy, al-Shabaab – a common theme, as history is well aware. Ken Menkaus comes to similar conclusions, and he comes to them for the right reasons: ‘The most egregious crimes (if measured in value stolen or lives lost) are committed by many of the country’s top political and business leaders, whom the international community convenes for peace conferences. This includes inciting communal violence for political purposes, the embezzlement of foreign aid funds, the introduction of counterfeit currency (which, by creating hyperinflation, robs average Somalis of most of their savings), huge land grabs, the export of charcoal (illegal under the past government and highly destructive environmentally), and involvement in piracy.

This criminal behaviour tends to get less attention than street crimes such as carjacking, murder and kidnapping, which are usually perpetuated by gangs or individuals. These crimes are at epidemic proportions in some places, but pale in comparison to the cost of ‘white-collar crimes’ by the political and business leadership’ (p. 33).

The TFG is expected to step down when its mandate expires in August, being replaced with a new, more representative government, with 30% of its members being female. Nevertheless, to stress Menkaus’ observation, ‘external mediation tends to focus on state-building, despite the fact that the average Somali needs – and benefits more immediately from – a state of peace than a revived central government’ (p. 31).

According to Alex de Waal, one of the leading experts on the conflict, the more popular self-governing regions of Somaliland and Puntland have succeeded ‘by turning their communities’ dynamic business sectors and traditional values – the clan system and Islam – into forces for stability. Partly because neither Somaliland nor Puntland is internationally recognized, they don’t get official foreign aid or military cooperation. But they’ve done pretty well relying on themselves’ (‘Getting Somalia right this time,’ New York Times, 21 February 2012).

Cameron’s focus on sending aid to the TFG’s disgraced politicians – who, writes Chinweizu, ‘have helped themselves to millions of dollars in tax revenues from Somalia’s air and sea ports, whilst millions suffer and die’ – should instead be replaced, de Waal suggests, by support for the functioning northern territories and the empowerment of ‘Somali businessmen with lines of credit and an improved system to regulate money transfers; Somalia needs a chamber of commerce before it needs a cabinet.’ But ‘whether the discussion is about the central state or sub-national administration,’ adds Menkhaus, ‘an enormous gulf separates foreigners and Somalis in the consideration and conception of central government’ (p. 28).

These concerns become especially vivid when we do what Whitehall and Washington failed to do in Afghanistan or Iraq; consider the position of the natives, as de Waal does: ‘Many Somalis don’t want a central government. Or, to be exact, they are so embittered by their experience of centralized power that they would rather have no government than the type that their African neighbors and the West have designed for them.’

Important lessons on the nature of state construction (or deconstruction) could be learnt, as always, from the anarchist peasants in the Spanish Civil War. A study of the anarchist collectives was published by the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, the anarcho-syndicalist labour unions) in 1937. The study describes the village of Membrilla in the province of Siudad Real, fraught by the destruction of Republican forces: ‘In its miserable huts live the poor inhabitants of a poor province; eight thousand people, but the streets are not paved, the town has no newspaper, no cinema, neither a cafe nor a library.

On the other hand, it has many churches that have been burned … Food, clothing, and tools were distributed equitably to the whole population. Money was abolished, work collectivized, all goods passed to the community, consumption was socialized. It was, however, not a socialization of wealth but of poverty’ (Collectivisations: l’oeuvre constructive de la revolution espagnole, 2nd ed. Toulouse, Editions C.N.T., 1965, cited in Noam Chomsky, ‘Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship,’ Chomsky on Anarchism, Edinburgh: AK Press, 2006, p. 73).

For Chomsky, ‘An account such as this, with its concern for human relations and the ideal of a just society, must appear very strange to the consciousness of the sophisticated intellectual, and it is therefore treated with scorn, or taken to be naive or primitive or otherwise irrational. Only when such prejudice is abandoned will it be possible for historians to undertake a serious study of the popular movement that transformed Republican Spain in one of the most remarkable social revolutions that history records’ (Ibid.).

If current scholarship and journalism continue on their current path, the same fate may befall any forces (militant or not) which attempt to direct Somalia away from the path Cameron’s conference hoped to direct it in: to be a source of enjoyment for BG Group, Tullow Oil, Premier Oil and other economic tyrannies. If the world’s most precious resources happen to be on the other side of the planet, it’s purely accidental – the US and Britain are native everywhere. The idea that the primary beneficiaries of a country’s resources should be the people of that country is outrageous to elite opinion. Democracy is a fine thing, the sensible man understands, so long as it accords with Western business interests.

Repeating standard colonial practice, the UN’s repeated ‘experiments’ of imposing a western-style nation-state on Somalia have given no serious thought, writes Lewis, ‘to considering how appropriate these would prove in the local setting, or above all in conjunction with the highly decentralised nature of transitional Somali political institutions’ (p. 34).

As numerous other analysts over the past two decades have stressed, unless these considerations are put before the needs of state-corporate power (a virtual impossibility, since corporations have a legal obligation to solely pursue profit, with the nanny state loyally protecting them from market forces), Somalia may continue to be little more than a ‘geographical expression.’

May Day workers protests in Lapaz, Bolivia (Photo: Ali Sargent)

Since Evo Morales’s ascent to power, an important Workers´ Day announcement has been customary. Past announcements have fulfilled significant campaign promises, such as the part-nationalisation of the hydrocarbons industry in 2006. In this year´s address the president sought to face a recent surge in strikes, marches and social unrest from workers´ unions.

An extra day of national holiday was declared for April 30th, doing little, however, to soothe workers. The news of a salary increase of 8% for members of the health and education sector, armed forces and the national police was widely rejected as insufficient. The minimum wage rate will also go up by 22%. The inflation rate is currently around 6%.

Fronting both last week and this week´s workers´ marches – the former of which was condemned for its levels of violence – the Central Obrero Boliviana (Bolivian Workers´ Association, COB) announced its intentions to “radicalise” pressure on the government.

In late 2011, the COB publicly advised the government to begin negotiations, rather then wait for conflict to erupt. Dynamite – a routine feature of many Bolivian marches – shook the main streets as the government´s ineffectiveness with respect to workers finance appeared a widespread sentiment.

It is not easy to ensure stable economic improvements that will reach all in Bolivia´s burgeoning economy; a significant proportion of which is informal and involves people working in jobs such as shoeshining, market selling, domestic work or in mining cooperatives (a form of less regulated mining business).

Figures released by Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Laboral y Argrario (Study Centre for Labour and Agragarian Development) state that, of the 1,050,000 people in employment across the country, only 17% are in formal employment. For those in informal or temporary work, accessing benefits such as the 8% salary rise will be very difficult.

Not all of the population is supportive of some of the workers´ demands. For the past six weeks, health workers have marched numerous times and declared an indefinite strike in opposition to the raising of compulsory working hours from six to eight. This provoked hunger strikes from sex workers in El Alto demanding a swift resolution be found so that their important routine healthcare checks are not be disrupted.

Waiting on suspended operations and appointments, patients at La Paz´s Hospital Obrero (Workers´ Hospital) took to the streets; they too demanding resolutions. A gas grenade was thrown into the Universidad Mayor de San Andres´ Faculty of Medicine, where health workers are conducting a hunger strike.

In a positive return to his promises to Bolivian workers, Morales followed his trend of Mayday nationalisations. Bolivia will nationalise the Transportadora de Electricidad SA, a subsidary of Red Eléctrica Espanola (REE, Spanish Electricity Network).

The Transportadora de Electricidad SA has 1.961km and 22 substations, Bolivia’s main electricity grid. It is also the second Spanish energy company to be nationalised by a Latin American country in recent weeks, following Argentina´s nationalisation of Repsol.

Morales´ address also included a change in paternity leave policy, giving three days to new fathers, as well as a plan to offer financial compensation to Bolivian victims of political violence.

[Photo credits: Ali Sargent]

200 000 march against tuition hikes in Montreal on March 22nd (Source: Hera Chan)

Quebec is a place where people fight for the things that matter to them. That’s something you don’t see very much any more in North America, and it, along with Quebecers’ stubborn insistence to go on speaking French while surrounded by Anglo-American cultural dominance, is what makes this Canadian province (or nation, as it often refers to itself)  unique.

Right now, the battle is centred around the importance of public funding, as Quebec’s Liberal government, led by premier Jean Charest, has decided to raise tuition rates in public universities by $1 625 over five years, so that in, 2017, a year of undergraduate studies will cost $3 793, still the lowest among all Canadian provinces, each of which set their own rates.

With beloved social democratic institutions and a strong tradition of collective action, Quebec society is at a turning point. There is a loud, tense and very public discussion going on about what exactly Quebecers’ priorities are: should they continue to invest collectively and provide comparatively inexpensive education to everyone? Or give it up for what is being billed by the government as the only practical  choice: the commercialisation and capitalisation of public goods?

A majority of Quebecers say they support the hikes. But if there is anything to be learned from the events of this past month, it’s that this fight is far from over.

The Quebec Student Movement

On a typical walk through just about any neighbourhood in Montreal, Quebec’s largest city, one notices a large number of residents, young and old, with red squares pinned to their lapels, a show of support for the fight against tuition hikes.

The movement has been incredibly active and astoundingly well-organized. In Montreal alone, more than 150 protests have taken place since the beginning of the year, and an estimated 200 000 people attended the now-infamous Manifestation Nationale on March 22. The hikes are a constant subject of conversation, as newspaper headlines frequently feature updates on the crise étudiante,  and many believe that the conflict will leave a lasting impression on Quebecois society, much like the Oka crisis or the events of October 1970.

April, which marked the end of the winter term at most schools, was a particularly tumultuous month, with ongoing student strikes, increasingly radical protests and the failure of talks between student associations and the provincial government.

Around 36%  of Québec’s 485 832 university and cégep (college) students are currently boycotting classes across Québec, many for as long as eleven weeks. Strikes are decided upon by democratic vote in individual student unions, meaning that within each school, only a certain percentage of students are on strike at any given point.

The hikes they oppose were not voted upon in Quebec’s national assembly, but instead inserted into the 2011 budget by Charest’s Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ) majority cabinet. The budget provides for $530 million dollars in additional funds over five years for Quebec’s seventeen universities, and also includes increased corporate-funded research, something the movement also opposes. In all, the hikes represent only a 0.2% savings in the provincial budget, causing many to believe that the decision to raise tuition fees was not a pragmatic but an ideological one.

The debate has made its way onto campuses themselves, where green or white squares are worn by anti-strike or pro-hike students who would prefer to just be able to go to class. The use of hard picket lines to block classes has been a major cause of division among students, with some going as far as petitioning Quebec’s superior court to outlaw students from blocking classes, or to force their administration to restart courses that were cancelled because of the boycotts.

The courts are proving to be a significant obstacle to strikers. On April 12, the administration of Université de Montréal (U de M), where nearly half of 40 000 students are on strike, was granted an injunction prohibiting hard picket lines on campus. This news provoked a fierce reaction among students, who held an impromptu protest that evening in U de M’s central pavillion, breaking windows and throwing red paint. A group then tried to gain entry into the administration building using an improvised battering ram.

Université de Montréal students try to break down administrator’s door (Source: Laurent Bastien-Corbeil)

The next morning, a group ransacked the conscription office of education minister Line Beauchamp, who along with Charest is a frequent object of strikers’ derision. Beauchamp has referred to the incident several times over the following weeks, as the Liberals have tried to paint those in the movement as violent criminals, presumably to win public support for the hikes.  Beauchamp has also put pressure on universities and cégeps this month to keep giving courses on schedule and to make sure students can access them.

Mass Mobilization

On April first (April Fool’s Day), students participated in the “March of Super-Rich Students of Québec”, ironically calling for higher tuition. Despite the protest’s oddball message, it was typical of many that have happened in Montreal this month. Day after day, thousands of enthusiastic students braved cold weather and heavy police presence to march for hours across large swathes of the city. Protest-goers, known as les carrés rouges (the red squares) have formed a special culture of anti-establishment comradery, complete with chants like À qui la rue?  À nous la rue! (Whose street? Our street!).

In addition to inconveniencing motorists, the mostly-peaceful marches have at times included broken windows, paintballs, pyrotechnics and other forms of vandalism. Some of the trouble has been attributed to non-students, including black-blockers, joining in on protests. Police brutality has also been an element of the conflict, although a highly-publicised incident in early March, involving serious wounds to a cégep student’s eye, seems to have resulted in police taking more care when dealing with demonstrators.

Economic Disruption

Though most students limit their involvement to peaceful protests, the movement has also included targeted actions of economic disruption. These have largely been organized by the Coalition Large de l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Etudiante (CLASSE), which represents nearly 100 000 University and cegep students and is known as the most radical of the student groups. CLASSE generally tries to keep the nature of these actions secret before they happen by posting ambiguous call-outs on its website that ask students to meet at a particular place and time, where organisers then lead them in a collective action aimed at putting economic pressure on the Quebec government.

One such action took place on April 11th, when students blocked the entrance to the Montreal office of Banque Nationale, Quebec’s largest bank, until police forcibly removed them using batons and pepper spray. A similar scene happened on the 19th, when a mass attempt to “shut down” downtown businesses was responded to with large amounts of chemical irritant.

Police and protesters face off in front of Banque Nationale headquarters (Source: Nicolas Quiazua)

Salon du Plan Nord

On April 20th, already-tense relations between protesters and the government were further stretched as protesters attempted to “cancel” the Salon du Plan Nord, a jobs fair meant to promote Charest’s initiative to invest in resource extraction and development in northern Quebec. Clashes between protesters and police began inside the Palais des congrès, a downtown convention hall where the protest was being held, and continued for hours once protesters had been pushed outside, with heavy property damage, 6 people wounded, and 17 arrests.

Inside the Salon, the day’s events continued, including a speech from Jean Charest, during which the premier made light of the situation, saying that his event was, “so popular, people are running from everywhere to get in”, and that “those who were banging on the doors this morning, we can give them jobs in the north, as far as possible!”

The Plan Nord initiative  has come under criticism from many groups, including environmental and indigenous rights activists, but the student movement’s main complaint is that the development plan is designed not for the public good, but to profit private companies, or as CLASSE’s flyer for the event read, “No to free mining, yes to free education”.

Protesters assembled again on the second day of the Salon, but were soon kettled in a nearby stairway by riot police and carried away in city busses. Seventy-one people had been arrested by early afternoon, when the Salon was indeed declared cancelled.

Chaos at the Salon du Plan Nord Credit: Nicolas Quiazua

The violence was not restricted to Montreal that week, as students at Université de Québec en Outaouais (UQO) were wounded and pepper-sprayed as they barricaded their institution in response to an injunction. The conflict resulted in over two hundred arrests.

Toward Negotiations

In the period surrounding the Plan Nord incidents, Line Beauchamp let it be known that the government was now willing to sit down at the negotiating table with student groups, provided that they denounce violence.

This caveat seemed to be directly aimed at CLASSE, which had gained notoriety in previous weeks for refusing to “condemn or encourage” the increasingly violent acts of some protesters, while the two other major student groups, Féderation étudiante collégiale du Québec (FECQ) and Féderation étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ)  had already denounced violence.

CLASSE, which operates under direct democracy, met on the 22nd, and, after many hours of debate, its member associations voted to issue a statement condemning “deliberate violence against the physical integrity of individuals, except in the case of self defence”, still refusing to denounce vandalism or property damage.

Wider-society worries

Beauchamp’s willingness to negotiate was a sign of strain perhaps, as the strike seems to be wreaking havoc as intended. Cégep administrators have issued a statement saying that the costs of the strike could soon eclipse the revenue from the first round of hikes, and many have already cancelled summer studies programs, as the current semester will have to be extended. City finances are also feeling the strain, as the average intervention unit police officer in Montreal has worked 300 hours in overtime already this year to deal with protests, at a total cost of 3 million dollars to Montreal taxpayers.

A group of prominent public figures, including a Liberal ex-minister, has publicly called for the government to reach a compromise with students, and others  have showed their disapproval of the Liberals’ actions by wearing red squares in parliament and on television. Eager to join their older siblings’ movement, a handful of secondary schools have also gone on strike.

As the conflict drags on, it has turned CLASSE’s charismatic co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois into a quasi-celebrity, somewhat in spite of himself. He refuses to grant personal interviews, but has appeared on multiple Québecois talk shows to promote the cause. Both he and Beauchamp seem to be engaged in a battle of hearts and minds to win over Quebec’s population, while the stakes get higher and higher.

The Long Week

The final full week in April proved a tumultuous one for the province, as the student movement took centre-stage. At its beginning, Beauchamp begrudgingly accepted CLASSE’s denouncement of violence, but placed a second condition on the group: for talks to go forward, all participating student associations would have to comply with a forty-eight hour truce in which no social or economic disruptions could be held. CLASSE accepted the terms, saying that as they hadn’t planned any such actions over the next two days, a de-facto truce was already in effect.

When negotiations got under way, late on Monday April 23rd, the government predictably refused to budge on the hikes themselves, but did offer a boost to the provincial loans and bursaries system.

Things ended prematurely, however, when on Tuesday night, a group of anti-truce students organised a night-time protest in Montreal which turned into a riot. Because the demonstration, while not organised by CLASSE itself, had been publicised on the group’s website, Beauchamp barred CLASSE from talks the next [Wednesday 25th] morning, saying that the group had “excluded itself”. The FECQ and FEUQ also left the negotiations in solidarity with CLASSE. Students showed their anger in that night’s Ostie de grand manif [The F%!@ing Big Protest], where vandalism and clashes between protesters and police led to 85 arrests, as marchers were circled at an intersection and taken away by public buses.

Protesters display their anger after negotiations fall through (Source: Nicolas Quiazua)

Similar protests took place every night for the remainder of April, drawing thousands but largely remaining peaceful, with protesters booing and even physically restraining troublemakers. Protests in Québec City, though also peaceful, were marked by 81 arrests.

With little hope for the continuation of talks, Charest presented a new offer to the public on Friday, which includes an adjustment to the hikes’ duration (spreading them over seven years instead of five, but indexing them higher for inflation), and additional funds for the province’s loans and bursaries program. It also used the occasion to re-publicise previous decisions to offer income-based repayment (something student leaders reject, saying that it will lead to higher fees and more debt), and to establish a committee to evaluate university spending.

Although student leaders admitted that aspects of the proposal, such as the loans and bursaries boost, were promising, they rejected it, saying that it was insulting for the government to bypass student associations in hopes of winning over the general public.

What next?

With strikes dragging on into their twelfth week, no one is quite sure what will happen next. The crisis has caused a schism within the Liberal caucus, where deputies from Montreal conscriptions want to negotiate a fast settlement, while those from other regions want Charest and Beauchamp to maintain their hard line, calling protesters “spoiled children” and saying that giving in would be a sign of weakness. Meanwhile, the Parti Québecois (PQ) opposition has sided with the student movement,presenting its own plan for tuition rates indexed to the cost of living.

Looking for a way forward, FECQ and FEUQ presented a counter offer on May 1st that, including a tuition hike freeze and cost-cutting measures, bumps up against not only the Liberals’ vision, but that of the universities themselves.

Today, (May 3rd), CLASSE is expected to present an offer of its own that calls for free tuition in the next five years, demonstrating its members’ radicalisation. In all, the possibility of a swift resolution looks doubtful.

Meanwhile, night protests continue, and, on the night of May 2nd (the 9th consecutive night of protests), came to include a visit to Jean Charest’s lavish Westmount residence. There is heavy speculation that the conflict will trigger an election, and soon.

London 2012: an overlap between homeland security and corporate profiteering

More than any other sporting spectacle, the Olympic Games have a recurring tendency to mirror the political dramas and expectations of the societies in which they take place and of the wider world.

Hitler’s attempts to racialise the 1936 Olympics and their subsequent incorporation into Leni Reifenstahl’s combination of fascist aesthetics and propaganda; the massacre of students that preceded the Mexico City Olympics in 1968; the kidnapping and killing of the Israeli athletics team at Munich in 1972 – in all these episodes the Games were transformed into political arenas in ways that were drastically at odds with the celebration of sporting innocence and fraternal competition that the Olympic ideal supposedly embodies.

The 2012 London Olympiad is no exception.  But perhaps no other Games have so completely mirrored the  most morbid political tendencies of their era, before they have even begun.

Police and military have just begun joint exercises involving Lynx helicopters, HMS Ocean, RAF fighter jets, Navy air assault troops, and Territorial Army units, in preparation for the Games.

In total 13,500 soldiers and army reservists will form part of a quasi-wartime security operation that will outstrip the numbers of British soldiers currently deployed in Afghanistan, in addition to 7,200 private security guards and 3,000 volunteers.

For first time since World War II, surface to air missile batteries will be deployed in various locations in the metropolitan area, including two missile launchers on blocks of flats in Tower Hamlets and Walthamstow.

RAF Typhoon fighters will provide additional protection against what Scotland Yard’s assistant commissioner Chris Alison calls ‘ a large 9/11 type of threat’, while snipers in helicopters will fly over London in the event of ‘low and slow’ threats.

The security arrangements are also international, with FBI and Israeli security experts also on board.   According to the website Israel Defense, several Israel security consultants have been providing advice on security at the Games, particularly at British airports.

The website also notes that the UK lacks its own missile defense system, and has ‘shown considerable interest in the interception results of the Israeli-developed Iron Dome system’ that was introduced in response to short-range rocket fire from Lebanon and Gaza.

All these efforts form part of what the Ministry of Defence calls a ‘multi-layered defence plan for the Olympic Games’ that is not based on any specific intelligence, but constitutes contingency planning for worst-case scenarios that includes not just suicide bombs or Mumbai-style commando attacks on Olympic installations,  but Occupy-style protests and attacks on the Olympic torch.

On 19 May, the Olympic torch will begin its journey, accompanied by 52 police officers, due to fears that the torch may  be ‘targeted by radicalised protest groups’ or dissident Irish republicans, since according to the Telegraph ‘ experts on the IRA are warning the torch relay is vulnerable to attack.’

Other threats include ‘public disorder’ – a possibility that was identified as a risk after last August’s riots by assistant police commissioner, Chris Allison, the national Olympic security co-ordinator.

To eliminate these threats, the military/police ‘ring of steel’ around the Olympics will be buttressed by security infrastructure that includes  an £80 million, 11-mile, 5,000-volt electric fence around the Olympic Zone, and a range of new surveillance and monitoring technologies in London itself.

The largest peacetime security operation in British history cannot be simply attributed to paranoia and an overzealous desire to protect the public. On the one hand it reflects an overlap between homeland security and corporate profiteering that has become a feature of the post 9/11 world.

As the urban geographer Stephen Graham has observed, the Olympics are ‘the ultimate global security shop window through which states and corporations can advertise their latest high-tech wares to burgeoning global markets while making massive profits’.

The Games also represent a more general marketing opportunity for their corporate sponsors. In 2006 Parliament passed the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act, which upgraded the level of brand protection to Olympic sponsors and made any unauthorised marketing or commercialism connected to the Olympics a potentially criminal offence.

According to the Guardian

‘Expressions likely to be considered a breach of the rules would include any two of the following list: “Games, Two Thousand and Twelve, 2012, Twenty-Twelve”. Using one of those words with London, medals, sponsors, summer, gold, silver or bronze is another likely breach.’

Under the new legislation, Olympic spectators will not be allowed to post videos of Olympic events on social media, and a special ‘brand police’ has been empowered to scour bathrooms at Olympic facilities and remove logos of all non-sponsored brands from sinks, toilets and soap dispensers.

In addition pub owners face fines if they advertise the fact that they are showing the Olympics on television, and even Olympic athletes will be obliged to follow regulations that prohibit them from Tweeting about brands that are not corporate sponsors.

Last month Sally Gunnell was stopped by a member of the Locog (London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games) marketing team because she waved a Union Jack over her shoulders during a PR photoshoot for Easyjet in Southend.

This image was deemed too similar to the iconic photo of Gunnell waving the flag after her 400 metres win at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.  As a result she was ordered to swap her tracksuit for an orange t-shirt and pose without the flag.

Locog claims that such ‘brand management’ was necessary to gain the support of sponsors like Samsung,  Coca Cola, Adidas, BP, MacDonalds and Acer, and prevent the taxpayer from footing any more of an Olympic bill that has already reached £11 billion and may get higher still.

But these measures also reflect the pervasive corporatisation of the Olympic ideal – and of British society itself – that has reduced a popular spectacle to a global marketing opportunity.

The official slogan of the London Olympics is to ‘inspire a generation’.   But it is difficult to imagine who can be inspired by this dystopian marriage of corporate profiteering and a paranoid and overwheening national-security complex.

The organizers have even established special ‘Games lanes’, on 30 miles of London roads, where athletes, official and corporate VIPs will have privileged fast-track access to Olympic facilities. All this takes place in a city with huge youth unemployment, whose stark social inequalities were revealed so brutally by last year’s riots.

Last month council officers from the London borough of Newham approached Stoke-on-Trent council to sound out the possibility of transferring 500 families on benefits who it could not afford to accommodate in private housing.

This initiative was partly due to the government’s cap on housing allowance, but the council also cited high private rents due to the ‘onset of the Olympic Games and the buoyant young professionals market’.

In this sense then, the Games are once again the mirror of our times – and perhaps something else – an indicator of the panoptic metropolis of the not-too distant future, in which the lines between peace and war are blurred, and the continual anticipation of worst-case scenarios acts as a lubricant for ever-more intrusive forms of national security governance, surveillance and control.

So welcome to London 2012,  and may the odds always be in your favour.

See Also:

Special Report | Want to cleanse your city of its poor? Host the Olympics

Special Report | #London2012: an Olympian exercise in corporate greenwashing

Bertie Ahern

March 22nd 2012 will go down in Irish history as the day when old style politics died a gruelling yet expensive death. It was the day which saw the publication of the results of the Mahon tribunal, a fifteen year investigation into political corruption that has cost the Irish state upwards of 300 million euro. Many high profile figures in Irish political life were named and shamed in the report though none stood out as much as the former prime minister, Bertie Ahern.

From the 1990s until his resignation in 2008, Bertie Ahern and his party, Fianna Fail, had dominated the Irish political landscape. The man who won three elections in a row while spending a weekly average of 500 taxpayer euros on cosmetics became a symbol of the rotten politics that turned Ireland into a slush pile of corruption.

The planning and payments tribunal headed by Judge Mahon was set up fifteen years ago with the aim of investigating political corruption in the planning process and, without any surprise, it found that politicians were bought by developers in various Dublin land deals. The 3,270 page report is packed with so many findings that on the morning of its release I was waiting NASA reports confirming it could be seen from space. It took a total of 600 witnesses over 1,200 days of public hearings to come to the conclusion that dodgy dealings of land re-zoning occurred epidemically against the advice of many level-headed planners.

While Ahern was Taoiseach he played the international leader, the bringer of peace to the north and the creator of a booming economy in Ireland but the reality is that it was all a mirage. Ahern did not singularly bring peace to the north, those on the unionist and nationalist sides came together over years of peace negotiations to bring the north of Ireland to its (relatively) peaceful state today. Ahern did not create a booming economy in Ireland, it was a brief burst of prosperity brought about by a worldwide technological boom in the 1990s. We had a boom and we splurged on it, now we are suffering from a depressing recession. The ordinary person on the street knew Bertie Ahern wasn’t a truthful politician and there always seemed to be an air of corruption hang about him, but since the publication of the Mahon report, it is now clear where we stand and history can judge the rest.

The end for Ahern began when former government Press secretary Frank Dunlop testified about cash being paid to politicians in exchange for re-zoning lands. The payments were, he claimed, made in pubs and hotel car parks; it was beginning to sound rather murky. A high profile developer called Tom Gillmartin made allegations that Bertie Ahern was paid off by rival developer, Owen O’ Callaghan, an allegation which was the start of a long and at times astonishing money trail leading all the way to the then-Taoiseach. While giving evidence against Ahern, Gillmartin quipped that ‘Fianna Fail make the mafia look like fucking monks!’

The Mahon tribunal duly started gaining attention from the public, and as queues started forming to gain admission to the public hearings, it became, or so it seemed, the only show in town. During the fifteen days that Bertie Ahern was called to give evidence, between 2006 and 2008, an amazingly murky world of corrupt political dealings came to light. Ahern was linked to dig outs, numerous bank accounts, whip-rounds, bags of money, secret handovers and currency swaps. Ahern’s excuses were just as bizarre, from winning copious amounts of cash on horses to not having a bank account even as he served as finance Minster in the early 1990s, always denying he ever dealt in other currencies. All came to a head in 2008 when his own secretary broke down in the witness box.

Grainne Caruth was once Bertie Aherns’s faithful secretary but after two gruelling days of questioning she caved in and revealed the truth about lodging sterling cash for her then-boss, contradicting Ahern’s claims that he had never dealt in other currencies. Up until then Ahern had been dubbed the ‘Teflon Taoiseach’ by the media due to the fact no sleaze allegations could stick to him. That term is no longer in use.

Ahern resigned shortly after his secretary’s testimony. On the day of his resignation, whispers around parliament buildings were reminiscent of the days of Charles Stewart Parnell. The fact of the matter is that it was Bertie Ahern himself who knotted his own noose; and when the Mahon report was released on the morning of March 22nd, that noose was well and truly tightened.

Although the tribunal report stopped short of calling Bertie Ahern corrupt it did state he had failed to tell the truth regarding 165,214 Irish pounds that had passed through various bank accounts linked to him. The Mahon report has now been forwarded to the director of public prosecutions as well as the revenue commission. The tribunal may be over but the fall out is only beginning. Now the tribunal is over, those it had named and shamed have gone to ground, waiting for a call from the revenue police and/or the gardai.

Still, I have to ask: why did it take fifteen years and 300 million euros for a report to tell us what everyone already knew? We already knew Ireland was rotten to the core with corruption, we all knew Fianna Fail was a political party drenched in dodgy dealings and we all knew that Bertie Ahern was a man who couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth. Fianna Fail might soon expel the former Taoiseach from its ranks, but some stains are hard to remove. Some even stick around for eternity.

The central tenet that forms the basis of ‘social security’ is an attempt to provide security for people to live in society with the same inherent freedoms enjoyed by the rest of the populace.  The UK, as part of a commitment to these principles, recognises the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), including Article 19, which ensures the ‘equal right of all persons with disabilities to live in the community, with choices equal to others’.

As part of the uprooting of the benefits system, there is set to be substantive and unprecedented changes to Disability Living Allowance (DLA).  The proposals seek to replace the existing system with a new Personal Independence Payment (PIP), which will include both a more rigorous assessment procedure and an overall cut of 20% of its previous budget of £12.6bn.

The government has claimed that this is the ‘best way forward’ for a ‘failing system’.  However, the evidence for this has been less than forthcoming, with a consultation resulting in a 74% rejection of the proposal.  What is significant about these figures, when responses are analysed, is that the majority recognised the shortcomings of the current system, and there is a grounded acknowledgment that reform is necessary.  Why then, should a consultation on the proposed PIP come back with such overwhelming rejection?  In a report headed by Dr S J Campbell (Responsible Reform – ‘A Report on the proposed changes to Disability Living Allowance’), it seems many of the respondents deemed that the changes were not driven by a desire to improve the efficiency and efficacy of the system, but by cutting the costs of the benefit.

The changes to DLA can be seen in the context of massive cuts to the benefits system, partly in response to the supposed unfettered abuses of the existing system by ‘benefit scroungers’ and fraudsters.  Such an argument is curious, especially in relation to DLA, when considering evidence revealing that fraud cases have resulted in costing the DWP 0.5% of its overall budget for DLA, disproportionate to the proposed 20% cut.

In reality, the consultation period – a process whereby individual’s affected by changes to legislation have the chance to respond to government proposals before they reach parliament – was wildly insubstantial, creating what the report calls a ‘trust deficit’, and a feeling among respondents that they have no stake in legislation that affects them in the most direct sense.  The result of this is that the government risks falling short of due democratic process, part of which is placing person centeredness at the heart of any changes to DLA.  Equally worrying, by placing reforms to DLA in the same basket as others benefit cuts, it leaves open the possibility that people living with disability will be labelled benefit scroungers, the latest demographic in a long line of scapegoats (after migrant workers, assylumn seekers and the unemployed) of an imploding socio-economic system.

A key element of the proposed introduction of PIP is the adoption of a new assessment procedure in line with the infamous Work Capability Assessment (WCA) developed for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA).  This much derided procedure has been proven to be intrinsically flawed from both a financial perspective and, crucially, a human one.

The Democratic Deficit

Consultation is a mechanism usually used to legitimise proposals before being presented as bills in parliament.  However, in the case of DLA reforms, the consultation period took place during a hectic Christmas period, where responses were likely to be low, and was cut two weeks shorter than the recommended period.  Crucially (when assessing ‘legitimacy’), the Bill was presented to parliament before the consultation was over, meaning responses could not be taken into account when drafting legislation for the new PIP.  This has compounded a feeling (felt across much of the UK and especially by those living with disabilities) that proposed legislation is not taking into account the opinions of those it will affect, but are in fact castrating them from the legislative process all together.  This ‘trust deficit’ is quantifiable by the fact the government deemed the consultation period redundant enough as a mechanism that it did not wait for the responses before presenting the Bill.  Either that, or there may have been one or two influential figures within the DWP expecting negative feedback.  Without doubt, the responses were negative – 74% against the proposal for PIP, with a mere 7% in full support of it.  These figures become more powerful when considering at no point during the consultation was the 20% reduction in expenditure mentioned.

I currently work in a Social Housing Project where the primary diagnosis’s for its resident’s are schizophrenia and personality disorders.  It was unsurprising to find out that there wasn’t one resident aware of these proposed changes before a workshop was set up on the subject.  It is of no surprise that in a mental health system that often maintains a person’s subservience to diagnosis, medication and benefits, that there is little information offered on changes to how that subservience manifests.  Following on from this workshop, a group was established with residents to develop personalised letters expressing their concerns about the changes, which are to be sent to Maria Miller MP, the Minister for Disabled People.  Whilst being an example individual’s taking control, it is a depressing reality that this was only facilitated by a workshop put on by the Project.  Thousands of other’s will still be unknowing of the Government’s intentions.

For those living with mental health disability, the introduction of PIP could well have a deciding influence on their abilities to recover with any level of autonomy and independence.  One of the key proposed changes is a cutting of the current 3 tiered system of DLA applications to 2, in an attempt to ‘make the benefit easier to understand and administer’, which is to be based on the desire to reach those ‘with the greatest need’ (those for whom living with a disability is costly).

While sounding reasonable, this misses a central understanding of disability, an understanding that need is not always equitable to overall cost.  This is especially the case with mental health, where issues are less pronounced and thus cost less overall, but those costs are essential for recovery and independence.  Some of the resident’s that I work with are on the lower rate (3rd tier) of DLA.  A prominent element in people’s letters was recognition of how this DLA gives them the opportunity to develop their lives in ways they want to, and offer them a chance to escape from the overall confines of the mental health system.  Many responses focused on DLA giving them the chance to enrol on university and college courses, which offers structure and incentives for future jobs, as well as the chance that most basic and rewarding of human feeling – achievement.  One resident wrote:

“I use my DLA for expanding my book collection and university fees, as I am currently studying Mathematics at Birbeck.  This allows me not only to learn and explore my academic interests, but also develop new social networks and friendships”

Another response mentioned that DLA has helped him save for a holiday, a very tangible example of breaking from those confines, if only momentarily.  The overarching message though, was that on the most modest of receipts they have the chance to live with a element of freedom and autonomy, helping them escape stigma and offering up a different existence to the one consumed with meetings with psychiatrists and care teams.  This is essential for the recovery of those with mental health disabilities.  This is in accordance with the Recovery Model of disability, the premise of which is based on asking individuals to step out of the ‘sick role’ and recognise themselves as autonomous people with the capacity to live freely and fully despite mental illness.  What was expressed in the letters written was that DLA can facilitate the beginning stages of that autonomy and independence, and can help engender a belief that a mental health diagnosis does not have to define a person.

Further, taking away the 3rd tier of DLA is a false economy, and no real cost effectiveness was dissected.  For those who will be taken out of the DLA threshold as a result of this, they face being thrown on to a 17 year high unemployment scrapheap, or falling back into mental health services.  Both eventualities are extremely costly.

However, the changes are qualified by government by pointing to those who abuse the current system, and place this abuse under the greater culture of worklessness in the UK.  Since the DLA was established in 1992, there has been a clear rise in receipts.  This, in itself, is not surprising when considering it was established with the aim of expanding the failing coverage of disability benefits.  However, the DWP has deemed this inconsequential, and it would appear that growth in the DLA caseload and expenditure count in themselves as evidence that the benefit is being awarded inappropriately.  In relation to mental health, this argument falls apart as soon as figures are subjected to routine analysis.

It can be noted that even with this continuous growth in receipts since 1992, just over 1% of the working age population is receiving DLA for mental health associated reasons, a far lower figure than estimates of the population prevalence of more severe mental health problems.  In the NHS Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Study 2007, the prevalence of common psychiatric disorders with a ‘level of severity high enough to require treatment’ among working age adults was between 6.5% and 8.7%.  Therefore, when reflecting on the 1% that do receive DLA for mental health reasons, the question surely isn’t why have the amount of receipts grown, but why it has taken so long to reach this level, and what can be done to reach further individuals in need of treatment and support?

Human Rights Abuse

The report issued by Dr Campbell also expressed concerns that the DWP may abuse the Human Rights of its citizens living with disabilities.

The argument lies in the proposed adoption of a new assessment procedure (more rigorous and regular than under the existing DLA format), which is designed in the style of the WCA.  The system seems to apply heavy weight to the medical model of disability, the main premise of which states that a disability, which is intrinsic to the individual, may reduce the individual’s quality of life.  In other words, it rejects the societal effects on disability.  Under this procedure, those with mental health disabilities are at an inherent disadvantage as the criteria are very much weighted towards recognition of physical disability.

By its very nature, mental health is far less visible, often invisible, during physical assessment or in everyday life.  It is often only identifiable by trained mental health professionals, with whom initial diagnosis rests.  The issue of fairness arises when considering that the assessments are set to be conducted by ‘General Healthcare Professionals’ – ‘general’ being very much the operative, and in many cases these can be nurses or physiotherapists.  In the majority of cases people living with mental health disability set to be assessed on their right to DLA by people with no necessary history or expertise in the complexities and intricacies of mental health, or the individual.  Such is the level of concern on this measure, that the Office of the Mayor of London released this statement:

“Supporting evidence (for DLA eligibility) should only be sought from healthcare professionals who are familiar with the individual, for example their GP or consultant…It would be difficult for a healthcare professional, in a one-off meeting to elicit a comprehensive response about the daily reality for each claimant”.

In the consultation that took place over Christmas, the greatest response was to the proposed change to the assessment process.

From my own perspective, as someone who has only been working in mental health for a short period, it seems blindingly inappropriate to conduct the same assessment for those with ‘invisible’ or ‘fluctuating’ conditions as the ones set for disabilities where the effects have a degree of permanence and consistency.  This is in stark contrast to the person centred, individually tailored path of recovery that is so essential for those suffering with mental health, and indeed physical health disability.

Further, and no less significant, was a grounded fear from respondents about the possibility of an objective assessment when considering the assessors have already been charged with cutting the cost of the benefit by 20%.

The issue of Human Rights comes into focus when considering the UK’s recognition of the Equality Act 2010.  By recognising this, it is deemed illegal for government legislation to treat one group of disability less favourably than another.  In setting up a blanket assessment procedure for all DLA recipients, that holds a heavy bias towards recognising physical and visible disability, the DWP risks contravention of the 2010 Act.

The proposal for PIP has shown blatant disregard for the UN CRPD, and for the ideals of social security that formed the basis of the DLA in the first place.  The journey the proposal has taken to parliament has led to a democratic deficit and given rise to anger amongst people with disabilities and their representative organisations, as well as a feeling of under-representation.  This has been created by the apathetic approach by the DWP into the concerns the introduction of PIP raises, namely its attempt to indiscriminately slash 20% of its budget, and install an assessment procedure that is not compatible with judging peoples needs, and has a pre-requisite to enable these cuts.

That the UK government seems in danger of contravening major human rights legislation in order to save approximately £2bn from the budget seems absurd, but is testament to a state system intent on maintaining a failed economic system, where neglecting and scapegoating vulnerable people is the keystone.

Why are McDonalds and Coca Cola the official food and drink partners of the London 2012 Olympic Games when these companies represent the antithesis of both healthy and sustainable food and drink? Why has BP been selected as one of six “sustainability partners” when its business assumptions imply a world of runaway climate change?

The apparent unwillingness to apply any of the Olympics’ supposed ethical principles to the selection of corporate sponsors, brushing aside numerous civil society complaints and campaigns, is certainly one thing that the games can claim to be consistent about. Official sportswear partner Adidas produces its goods in sweatshops. Communications partner BT has links with Bezeq, which provides telecoms to illegal settlements on the West Bank. Coca Cola is accused of draining and contaminating groundwater in a drought-prone area of India. And so on.

Why is the London Olympic organising committee (LOCOG) breaching its own Sustainable Sourcing Code? and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) breaching its own Code of Ethics? The former promises to “place a high priority on environmental, social and ethical issues when procuring products and services for the games”, while the latter states that the support of sponsors “must be in a form consistent with the rules of sport and the principles defined in the Olympic Charter” which defines Olympism as “seeking to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example, social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles”.

These are serious questions for the respective committees as well as for the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012 (CSL) and its standards and ethics expert David Jackman. Because, as with other forms of cultural sponsorship, these company donations aren’t magnanimous acts of philanthropy, but calculated acts of public relations. At their recent AGM, the BP board outlined how they had made a business case internally for their sponsorship of the Olympics, the costed returns for which included building and protecting their brand. Inside the industry this is understood as maintaining the “social license to operate”.

In a very real sense then, the Olympics are colluding in the public relations campaigns of corporations who are engaged in large-scale environmental and human rights abuses, many of which are the subject of legal actions. The IOC and LOCOG are therefore complicit in normalising and cleansing the image of some of our most heinous corporate criminals and CSL is failing to properly address this.

To spotlight this in a playful way a number of campaign groups have joined together to launch an online vote for the worst Olympic sponsor. Should BP, Dow Chemical or Rio Tinto receive the Greenwash Gold medal? Here are some of the chilling testimonies from community representatives that I collected at last week’s launch to help you decide.

Benny Wenda of the Free West Papua campaign

Indonesia has illegally occupied my country from 1963. Rio Tinto hired Indonesian military to guard their mines, then Indonesian police and military create the violence around the mine and then blame the local people. They destroyed our mountain, our forests, our rivers. You cannot go to the BP area because they say it is sensitive. Local people have been removed from their local areas.

BP and Rio Tinto, are amongst the biggest taxpayers in Indonesia. The Indonesian government is using that money to buy weapons, ammunitions, hot jets and tanks which are being used to intimidate especially my people in West Papua. No-one really knows what happened in my country because the media is not allowed. Amnesty International are banned. Red Cross are banned. International Peace Brigades are banned. That’s why I say Indonesia has committed a secret genocide.

When I was a child, the Indonesian military bombed my village. Then I grew up in the jungle for five years and my leg didn’t grow properly because of the bomb. Later I found out that my uncle was killed by the Indonesian military and my mum and auntie were raped. In 2000 I mobilised the biggest demonstration in memory, and every West Papuan came out to ask for independence. Indonesia didn’t like me mobilising so they sentenced me to 25 years in prison. Three times they wanted to kill me. I escaped and came to the United Kingdom where I was given political asylum.

For me it’s an insult, when you fear these companies considering what they are doing to my people, to then see them showing the world they are good companies. People should know the truth about what these companies are doing – not just in West Papua but around the world.

Cherise Udell, founder and president of Utah Moms for Clean Air

When most people think of Utah they think of mountains, blue skies, powdered sugar snow and clean living Mormons. Yet the American lung association regularly gives us an F grade for our air quality and Forbes magazine rated Salt Lake City the ninth most toxic city in America. On a really bad “red air” day it’s virtually equivalent to being forced to smoke a half a packet of cigarettes and that applies even if you’re a baby or someone with a heart condition. Rio Tinto are the number one point source emitter in our state. From their own numbers, they are responsible for 30% of the pollution in our air shed.  The consequences are premature heart attacks, sudden infant death syndrome, sudden asthma attacks that can lead to death or brain damage. We estimate that between 1000 and 2000 people die prematurely in Utah because of our air pollution.

I was surprised that the Olympic committee – which is touting itself as trying to achieve the most sustainable Olympics ever – is choosing to use newly mined metals for its medals rather than upcycling or recycling metal and that that metal is coming from Rio Tinto which is one of the least green mining companies. The Olympic committee clearly deserves no medals on this one.

Clayton Thomas-Muller, tar sands campaigner with the Indigenous Environment Network

BP has invested millions of dollars in building the infrastructure for a massive 250,000 barrel per day tar sands project called Sunrise. Tar sands projects have affected Canadian First Nation peoples through loss of clean water, food security and the fundamental violation of their constitutionally protected treaty rights to hunt and fish.

BP’s tar sands investments are “in-situ” projects which use six barrels of water for every barrel of oil produced. Tar sands projects are poisoning everything from the groundwater all the way up the food chain. Moose have been found with arsenic up to 600 times the acceptable levels. They’re filled with tumours and so entire kills are being left uneaten.

If any one of these amazing athletes was to violate the ethical code of being an athlete, they would be kicked out. So why doesn’t the same thing apply to a company that is destroying ecosystems around the world? We need to snatch away BP’s sustainability gold medal.

Derrick Evans, of the Gulf Coast Fund for Community Renewal and Ecological Health

Two years on from the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the oil still washes ashore daily. Dead dolphins, sea turtles and other marine life are washing ashore quite constantly. Very large numbers of people who live near the water, work on the water, even some of BP’s own clean-up workers have reported symptoms that seem to indicate the effects of toxic exposure: shortness of breath, short-term memory loss, rashes, nose bleeds.

BP made the very horrible – and I believe illegal – decision to keep bombing the oil slicks with this product called Corexit which sinks the oil and breaks it into smaller particles that can be ingested by smaller plant and sea life. This basically guarantees that at the bottom of the ocean, there’s this toxic contamination which will gradually work itself up the food chain.

When a fourth or fifth generation shrimper tells you that he wants to fish but he doesn’t want to sell anything that might make anyone sick, the people who have the most to gain by lying are refusing to lie and to fish. The fish, the aquatic life, and the seafood have been decimated. Even the oysters that people eat on the Gulf Coast are all imported now.

Frankly most of the people on the Gulf Coast are not even aware that BP are an Olympic sponsor of any kind, never mind a sustainability sponsor. When I heard that, I didn’t know whether to fall on the floor laughing, ‘cos it must be a joke, right? BP has been – not only in the Gulf Coast, but also globally – one of the most adverse players in respect to sustainability.

Farah Edwards-Khan, from Bhopal

I was ten years old when the accident at the Union Carbide factory happened in Bhopal in 1984. It was very late at night and we were all asleep. There was a great banging on the door and my cousin was outside wearing dark glasses. He took off his glasses and his eyes were really red and burning. He said, ‘just go inside, shut the doors, because there’s a terrible gas leak’. We went outside and felt this terrible burning of the eyes and smelt something really awful and my father immediately dragged me back. The next morning as my father drove me to school, we saw people lying all over the pavements and the road. We just looked at each other and realised, ‘my god, these people are dead’.

I was lucky because I was three miles away from the factory. But I know people who were part of the exodus. I know women who aborted while they were running, people who died because they couldn’t run any more, people who lost children who they later found in the morgue, people who woke up in the morgue because they were declared dead.

The ones who survived always say it would have been better if we were dead. The factory hasn’t been cleaned up. The water is full of poison. People get skin problems, growth retardations, gynaecological problems and cancers. The £630 that people got from Union Carbide has all been spent on healthcare costs. I know that Dow Chemical has paid off Union Carbide liabilities in other countries so why the discrimination against the people of Bhopal?

How dare Dow put a wrap around the Olympic stadium which has the blood of Bhopal on it. The sponsorship should be dropped and there should be an apology.  If Dow really wants to clean its image it should give remediation to the people of Bhopal.

Zanaa Jurmed, director of the Centre for Citizens Alliance and chair of Oyu Tolgoi Watch

Rio Tinto announced that the Olympic medals would be made from Mongolian gold from their Oyu Tolgoi project in the Gobi desert. Many hundreds of families have been moved away from their livelihood areas for this project and sometimes they don’t even give compensation. Dozens of families are protesting the contract. Many active people have been made silent because maybe they bribed or threatened them. Oyu Tolgoi has a lack of workplace security and safety, a lack of protection from sexual harassment and gender discrimination. Many people and livestock are being killed in the area.

The project is diverting the Huang He (Yellow) River – the sole surface water source in the region – without government authority and in the face of huge protest from local people. The area contains at least four rare plant species and is the main habitat for two threatened large mammal species. The natural ecosystems are highly susceptible to environmental degradation and are slow to recover from environmental shocks and pollution.

As a sportswoman I participated in the world archery championship twice in 1970s. So my message to London Olympic committee is: please honour the best sportsmen and women by awarding them medals made by honest businesses.

For more information and to vote in the Greenwash Gold award visit www.greenwashgold.org

See also: Special Report | Want to cleanse your city of its poor? Host the Olympics!

Jeff Halper

Jeff Halper, a Jewish Israeli, is an anthropologist, former university lecturer, political activist and author. He has published numerous articles and books including his autobiographical work entitled “An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel”, and is currently working on a book entitled “Global Palestine”. 

However, Halper is best known as the co-founder and Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), an NGO that actively resists the Israeli government policy of demolishing Palestinian homes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). ICAHD has recorded that about 25,000 homes have been demolished in the OPT since 1967. For the past 15 years, ICAHD has run a summer rebuilding camp which brings international peace activists together to rebuild a demolished Palestinian home, an activity Jeff Halper maintains is purely political in scope. 185 houses have so far been rebuilt. The purpose is to non-violently challenge the occupation and refuse to remain passive in the face of injustice.

Jeff Halper was recently in London for the ICAHD UK yearly conference. Ceasefire’s Livia Bergmeijer sat down with him to discuss his views on the recent developments in Israel/Palestine and on possible prospects for the future.

Livia Bergmeijer: You’ve written extensively recently about your support for the one-state solution, arguing that the possibility of a two-state solution has long been dead. Why do you believe that a one-state solution is the only possibility to create a just peace in Palestine?

Jeff Helper: First of all the facts on the ground – the settlements, the wall, the highways and the fragmentation of the territory – are all just so massive and so permanent and are constantly being expanded that there’s no more place for a coherent, functional, viable, sovereign Palestinian state. And second of all, there’s no political will in the international community to force Israel out of the Occupied Territories. Israel’s certainly not going to leave voluntarily, so there have to be massive international pressures on Israel to get out and that’s completely missing. So, if you take those things into account there’s no way in which a two-state solution is viable, and we simply need to stop talking about it.

Now, we’re in a situation where a two-state solution is gone but there isn’t a ready alternative. The one-state solution is a possibility but it isn’t necessarily the default. There are two possible one-state solutions: one is a democratic state with one person, one vote. The problem with that is it ignores the national component. We’re talking about two national groups: Palestinians and Israelis. It’s a bi-national reality. So the other alternative is a bi-national one-state. The problem with that is that bi-national states don’t work very well because the whole point of being a nation is to have self-determination and national identity. And in Israel/Palestine it’s hard to see how that would happen especially because there’s no geographical distinction between the two peoples. They’re completely mixed up.

I’m actually considering an alternative solution that people haven’t talked about very much because everybody’s kind of stuck on the one-state/two-state binary, and I’m not sure if either one of them will work. What I’m talking about is more of a regional approach. I say that the problems facing Israelis and Palestinians and everybody else in the region are really regional in scope, they’re not localised. Israel/Palestine is too small a unit to cram everything into. If you take security, for instance, that’s a regional issue. Economic development, water, the refugees, these are all crucial regional  issues. Even if there’s a beautiful Israeli-Palestinian peace and the country is prospering, if it’s in a region that’s poor and autocratic and unequal it’s not good for anybody.

You need what’s called “even regional development.” I’m playing with the idea of a Middle Eastern Economic Confederation that looks something like the European Common Market of 30 years ago. Not the European Union, that’s too much, but more of a looser confederation of countries whose economies become integrated because Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon all make up the historical, natural, cultural and economic unit of that part of the world. What we see with the Arab spring is the desire for greater participation of people and communities in the political process and I think Europe could have a role in harnessing that. The United States is so pro-Israel that it has taken itself out of the political game. But Europe has a model, which is certainly not perfect, but which works better than most other models, and could therefore help promote something similar in the Middle East.

The vision is a model that allows people to participate in the region as a whole, move around freely, and yet have their citizenship rights protected to preserve their national identities, whatever they may be (this could include national identities but also religious, ethnic, and other identities). In other words, if Palestinian refugees want to come back and live in the Galilee, they can come home, and they come home as Palestinian citizens.

Israelis that really want to live in Hebron can live in Hebron as Israeli citizens living in Palestine. In this sense it’s similar to Europe whereby you keep your citizenship but nevertheless you’re free to live and work throughout the region. I think that’s a better model than even the one-state solution, because of all the structural problems inherent in the one-state model.

LB: You’ve argued in favour of the dissolution of the Palestinian Authority. Do you see this happening any time soon and what would the Israeli government’s reaction be?

JH: I have called for the dissolution of the PA. I wrote an article saying that the Palestinian Authority has got to get out of the way. Maybe I shouldn’t have, because I’m not Palestinian and I’m here to support their struggle and not tell them what to do. But nevertheless I do live here, and I can see that the Palestinian Authority is what is keeping the lid on everything. The presence of the PA has allowed Europe and the United States to keep the pretence going that negotiations are the only way out, and so playing the game as if there’s a sovereign Palestinian government and therefore two equal negotiating sides.  And of course the Palestinian Authority is very oppressive to its own people. They’re arresting journalists and activists, they’re certainly arresting members of Hamas, and so it’s not a friendly liberation government for its own people, and Israel uses that to its advantage.

The PA is trying to develop a Palestinian entity within the framework of a Bantustan, and is feeding into this Apartheid idea. The real problem here is the occupation, and the occupation has “disappeared” under the Palestinian Authority because of the idea that there’s a government and negotiations. If the PA would leave the scene, occupation would come back to the forefront and in that situation Israel would have to reoccupy the Palestinian cities, hopefully with a minimum of violence, but in a way that would be a good thing because it throws the whole occupation back into the lap of Israel and it becomes completely unsustainable.

Israel couldn’t support 4.5 million impoverished people. It relies on the world to do that. It would highlight again the fact that this is an occupation, and would inflame public opinion especially in the Muslim world. If Israel was to re-occupy, it would just create such an intolerable political situation that something would break. Israel would simply not be able to sustain it. The ending of the Palestinian Authority should be a precondition to any move forward.

LB: Resistance is now coming from all angles and using all different kinds of strategies: from weekly protests against the Separation Wall in Palestine, to the international BDS campaign, to putting pressure on politicians around the world. In your opinion, which strategies should international solidarity activists focus on and why?

JH: Well we, at ICAHD, have been doing a lot of international advocacy, with a lot of other organisations as well. The problem is that we’re in a bad marriage with governments. Governments have the mandate and the power, they’re the ones that negotiate, they’re in the backrooms getting the deals, the ones that sign the treaties, and so we need them. But they’re not going to do the right thing on their own; governments are not the friends of the people. So we have to keep pushing them, which is often frustrating because we don’t have any real status with them, we’re just a bunch of people, some of us are pretty marginal for them, so it really is a prolonged struggle. The problem is that this issue is urgent – people are suffering, houses are being demolished, the land is being lost – so it’s got to end tomorrow. But at the same time, it’s a process by which you have to educate the public and begin to build pressures from below that trickle up. Governments don’t lead, they follow public opinion. So only if there’s a shift in public opinion will we get a shift in government policies. So that’s part of it.

The other part is to work with Palestinian civil society, and to strategise. We all do good work, but we’re not very strategic. And there’s a lack of Palestinian leadership. It’s hard for them to organise because they’ve been completely fragmentised and their leadership has been eliminated by Israel, either killed or imprisoned. But at the same time we have to have a Palestinian agency because they have to lead the struggle, we cannot do that. So its like a two-pronged thing: we have to be strategic and we have to try to work with Palestinian civil society to try to develop a Palestinian leadership that we can follow, and at the same time we have to continue working to change public opinion abroad.

Activism is important and it keeps the struggle alive, but its not going to liberate Palestine on its own. There has to be a connection between the activism and saying, “What are the issues? What should we be tackling? How can we recruit more people into this struggle? Where are we going?” And those are things only Palestinians can tell us. So to some degree we’re a little bit dependent on a Palestinian leadership that still has to develop, against all odds, because Israel will do everything it can to prevent that from happening, and so will the PA.

LB: People often compare the struggle in Palestine to the one in South Africa several decades ago. Do you think this is a useful comparison to make and can one learn from the successes in South Africa and use those same strategies in Palestine?

JH: We use the South African analogy a lot because we argue that Israel has developed a system of Apartheid. And you can define Apartheid by two elements: one is the separation, which is what Apartheid means, when one population separates itself from the other. Second is when that population then creates a regime of permanent institutionalised domination over the other, strategically, institutionally, structurally, and that’s certainly what you have in Israel.

So from that point of view it is an Apartheid system. The difference is that South Africa had a very strong leadership, under Mandela and Oliver Tambo, amongst others. Another advantage of South Africa was that from the very beginning, the ANC was building the state simultaneous with the struggle for liberation. They had a constitution for the country before Apartheid ended which was inclusive and everybody knew that when it ended, the vision was for everybody to remain, including the Afrikaners. That hasn’t happened with the Palestinians. Arafat decided to build the state after liberation, and liberation got stuck because there wasn’t a clear-cut vision.

So I think there are lessons the Palestinians could draw from South Africa as well as international activists. But certainly in South Africa the ability to gain international support was really crucial and it was done in a very strategic way. Oliver Tambo in particular was responsible for working with churches, governments and trade unions around the world. An equivalent leader does not exist in Palestine largely because Israel was very successful in eliminating all Palestinian leadership over the last 70 years. Ilan Pappe writes in his book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” that the Israelis had, in 1948, detailed lists, village-by-village, of who the activists, the educated people and the leaders were, and they systematically eliminated them one by one.

Then came the campaign of elimination of the PLO leadership following the war of 1967 through assassinations and imprisonments. The Israeli regime has been much more systematic and brutal than the South African regime was. Even Desmond Tutu has said that the situation the Palestinians find themselves in is much more brutal and violent than it was in South Africa. The big difference is that the Apartheid regime couldn’t garner the international support it needed to survive. The black African struggle had all the justice on its side, and nobody could at all justify supporting the Apartheid regime. Israel, on the other hand, has succeeded in convincing everybody that this is part of Jewish history, that the Jews are the victims, that the Jews are Europeans, so it has become an “us versus them” situation with all the negative stereotyping that entails.

And as a result, the Palestinians have a much greater a task in explaining their struggle, in a way that the ANC never had to do. So there is a whole PR campaign that the Palestinians have to mount because Israel has been much more successful than the South African Apartheid government ever was in terms of garnering international support. For instance, 80% of British MPs belong to their respective party’s Friends of Israel group; there never was any such thing as a ‘Friends of Apartheid South Africa’ group.

LB: Many argue that change will only come about in Israel/Palestine if the international community puts enough pressure on their policy makers to take action. Do you not think there is any chance of change coming about from within Israeli civil society itself?

JH: No, I don’t think so. Israelis have really insulated themselves from the Palestinians who are kept away in the West Bank and Gaza – areas completely off the cognitive maps of Israelis. The Israeli economy is doing very well, people are living the good life, there haven’t been any attacks for years so people are feeling personal security, and Israel’s international status is very good with the support of the EU and the USA. At the same time, I think Israel has convinced its own population that peace is impossible. Israelis have grown up for generations with the idea that the ‘Arabs’- for we don’t use the word ‘Palestinians’ in Israel because it gives too much distinctiveness and legitimacy to a collective that we don’t want to recognise – are our permanent enemies.

So in a sense, Israelis will say, “Look, we’d like to have peace, but we can’t because they won’t allow it.” And what this has done is it has immunised Israeli Jews from even dealing with ‘Arabs’ because there’s no point even trying to make peace. For Israelis, the only job of the government is to bring them their personal security and keep the ‘Arabs’ under control and far away. I think the Israeli government has succeeded in doing so, and now that everything is quiet and normalised, there’s no motivation to make peace. In other words, I think most Israeli Jews would say today that they have the best of all worlds: prosperity, normalisation, life is good, and their permanent enemies are at bay and have been pacified.

At the same time, I don’t think Israelis would be opposed to peace in principle, it would depend on what the solution is. The silent majority of Israelis is not right-wing and has never bought into the Begin-Sharon-Netanyahu idea of a greater Israel – they are not the settlers. That’s why we need some international force that comes to the Israeli public and says, “It’s over, you’ve got to get out of the occupation, or you’ve got to have a one-state emerging.” That’s one reason we put our efforts on the international community, because we have got to create those pressures on Israel. Once those pressures are there again, if Israelis are assured that their safety can be guaranteed, I don’t think they will be an obstacle to moving towards a just peace. But it has to come from the outside, they’re not going to rise up on their own and end the occupation.

LB: The Israeli government has been revving up its war rhetoric against Iran, to what extent do you think this is just a ploy to distract the media and international governments from talking about Palestine?

JH: It is a ploy, a successful one. A month ago, Netanyahu met again with Obama in Washington and Obama went again to the AIPAC conference. When he came back, Netanyahu’s spokesperson was interviewed on TV and was asked what was the big deal about this meeting, what happened that justified this trip? The spokesperson answered that it was the first time in memory that an Israeli prime minister had met with an American president and the Palestinian issue wasn’t even mentioned, it never came up.

So that’s where Israel feels that it’s winning because it has been able to normalise a situation to such an extent that there exists a real danger that this whole thing could just go by the boards and people will start focussing on hotter issues. So that’s one responsibility we have in civil societies to keep this thing alive, during this kind of period of limbo that we’re in. So yes, it’s been a successful ploy on the part of Israel to deflect attention from the Palestinian issue to other issues, and it can continue to do so as long as the Palestinians remain pacified, and this makes the struggle all the more difficult.

LB: Considering the recent past and current situation, is there any reason to be optimistic about the prospects of peace and justice?

JH: There is; simply because the present situation is completely unsustainable. It is no longer a localised issue. It impacts the global system and is so disruptive that we know it isn’t going to last forever. “Collapse with agency” (the PA) is something we should put into the equation, and that will happen sometime in the near future. We must organise and create stronger relationships with the young Palestinian leadership. Our role is to hasten the end of occupation, but the problem is not ‘67, it’s ‘48.

So we mustn’t just talk about occupation, we must end the oppression, the Apartheid system. We need to hasten its end, truly make it unsustainable through our organising with churches, trade unions, the UN. The BDS campaign is very good because it keeps people involved at a local level. We have to continue to keep the issue alive and eventually Israel will lose the moral war.

LB: Thank you for talking to Ceasefire.

As the Lords and Baronesses of the UK’s parliamentary chamber debated the government’s Health and Social Care bill, it was revealed by the Daily Mirror that 40 of these Peers had financial interests in companies involved in private healthcare. This number, though shocking, was just the tip of the iceberg. Further research revealed the true extent of the financial interests the unelected Peers of the House of Lords had in passing the Health and Social Care bill.

Carrying the Mirror’s research further, we at Social Investigations, went through the Lords’ register of interests with a fine tooth comb. In total, an extraordinary142 Peers were found to have financial interests in companies involved in private healthcare. These interests are, however, not the exclusive domain of a single party, but highlight self-interest that is endemic within every major party of every political persuasion, raising the question: Who are they actually serving?

In total 1 in 4 Conservative Peers were found to have these vested interests. The Labour Party had a total of 1 in 6, a number equalled by the Crossbench Peers, and the Liberal Democrat Peers, the coalition’s willing partners in passing the bill, had a total of 1 in 10 with such interests.

So what of these connections?

The mixture of the Peers’ financial interest and involvement varies. Some MPs have shares in healthcare companies set to benefit from the bill’s passing. Some are chairmen, partners, consultants, or are acting as senior advisers to investment groups funding the private companies, such as private equity firms, ready to swoop.

These interests, although indicative of where their priorities lie, would be less influential if the Peers were prevented from voting when they have a conflict of interest. At local government level, such conflicts come under a ruling of ‘prejudicial interest’, which requires the councillor to leave the room and take no further part in discussions or voting. No such safeguard exists in the House of Lords.

The subject of voting with conflicts of interest was put to the Peers after Social Investigations emailed all 142 with financial interests.

The email stated:

‘It is obvious that with these vested interests there is a conflict of interest and many who have seen this list are quite frankly shocked that this situation exists whereby those with vested interests can and are voting in favour of policies which could benefit those interests through the promotion of the further privatisation of the NHS.’

The response was notable in its silence, except for a single reply from Liberal Democrat Peer Baroness Barker, who ignored the issue of interests and simply stated:

‘Please supply your evidence that any of the people named below…have failed to declare their interests as they are required to do. Please supply your evidence that the individuals named below have furthered their own interests. Please supply as much detail as you have.’

Apparently a list of 142 Peers who have financial connections to private healthcare companies and are taking part in a bill that will hand more opportunities to private healthcare is not ‘evidence’ enough; but of course, by evidence, she means evidence that the Peers are not abiding by the existing rules, which simply require them to declare their interests, but do not prevent them from voting on issues that may directly benefit those interests. There is as of now no mention of preventing these conflicts of interest in the House of Lords reforms currently being put forward by the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg.

Take Lord Popat, a nursing and care home tycoon who has given the Conservatives a total of £319,641. The Ugandan-born dad-of-three has amassed an estimated £42million fortune as founder and chief of TLC Group, which provides services for the elderly. Prime Minister Cameron made the businessman a Peer shortly after entering No10 in May 2010. Lord Popat’s donations include a £25,000 gift registered a week after the Conservatives health reforms were unveiled in July last year.

This blatant money for power behaviour is matched by the actions of another Conservative Peer Lord Chadlington, who has been in the House of Lords since 1996. Lord Chadlington is the founder and chairman of a PR and communications company called Huntsworth plc. One arm of the group is Huntsworth Health, which operates globally, and here in the UK. Its website states that the company ‘provides a full continuum of consulting and communications services to the healthcare and well-being industry.’

In the same month as the white paper was released, Huntsworth Health acquired healthcare communications agency, ScopeMedical for £4.6m, thus expanding its health division. Lord Chadlington said of the takeover: “We are delighted to announce the acquisition…Healthcare is a major growth area and we are now very well positioned to take advantage of that growth.’

Not only do they have Lord Chadlington as their CEO, but up until last year, they also had Labour Peer Lord Puttnam as a Director, and from 2001-03 Conservative Peer Baroness Cumberlege was one of their non-executive directors. If that’s not enough, they have some finance provided via Liberal Democrat Lord Alliance, who has shares in the company, making four Lords, from three main parties, working for one company.

Huntsworth plc gave £15,500 to the Conservative party in August last year and has given money every year since 2008. Lord Chadlington and his wife have personally given more than £20,000 to the local party since 2007, including a sum of £10,000 for his leadership campaign. All within the rules that make it almost impossible to prove their actions will exclusively benefit his company. This ‘exclusivity’ part of the rules, is an important word, as found out when a complaint was put to the House of Lords Commissioner for Standards about Lord Chadlington, his company and its connections to the government and their Health and Social Care bill.

The response stated: ‘You have not supplied any evidence to suggest that any of Lord Chadlington’s votes in connection with this Bill, were designed to confer exclusive benefit on, as you suggest, Huntsworth plc.’

Why do so many companies ask Lords to sit on their boards, become chairman and advisors if it isn’t to access the highest levels of government and acquire an exclusive benefit?

However, private companies don’t just rely on a vote to get want they want; they want to be where the centre for information is too. The Associate Parliamentary Health Group (APHG), which was launched in November 2001 was set up with the intention to provide: ‘information with balance and impartiality on local as well as national matters, and is recognised as one of the preferred sources of information on health in Parliament.’

Four key members of the APHG have financial links to companies involved in private healthcare. The Chair of the APGH is Baroness Cumberlege, who runs a company called Cumberlege Connections. Her company is involved in running training programmes for medical staff, but also covers the topic of ‘Politics, Power and Persuasion’, in a tailored two-day programme which includes topics such as: ‘Managing the markets, the challenges of commissioning’, ‘who’s who’, and ‘brokering deals with other independent sector providers’; the latter programme is delivered by the Baroness herself.

In 2009, following a complaint from transparency campaigners Spinwatch, the Baroness was forced to admit that she had run her business from the House of Lords until it “took off”, and failed to declare her company’s interests in any debates. The disciplinary action involved nothing more than having to make an apology.

One of the key areas of the Health and Social Care bill involves handing over the purchasing power for services from Primary Care Trusts (PCTs), who were previously in charge of this, to local Commissioning Groups led by Doctors. In order to get these new Groups into a position where they can carry out the complicated duties of commissioning, a collection of ‘Approved Providers’ were formed to be part of a national framework from which the GP groups had to choose from. It is here that private business has already been making money from the reforms. The partnerships are largely made up of private companies, who bid for contracts to develop the new GP groups. Baroness Cumberlege placed her company into one of these Alliances led by management consultancy company PricewaterhouseCoopers, who were bidding for and winning contracts as she debated and voted on the bill, helping it pass into Act.

Another member of the APHG Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, acts as the groups’ treasurer and has received payment from Baroness Cumberlege for work as a trainer and consultant. His input makes up one of five Peers and four MPs who have worked for her company. Lord Harris of Haringey who is listed as an APHG advisor, has also been remunerated by Cumberlege Connections for ‘occasional participation in training events.’ In addition, he is a senior adviser to business services giant KPMG, who are one of the ‘approved providers’, winning contracts for the new commissioning groups.

Mark Britnell, head of global finance giant KPMG’s health division and an advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron had announced in a healthcare industry conference in 2010 that the NHS would be shown ‘No mercy.’ Adding: “…and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years.” A rather harsh choice of words for someone who was employed by the NHS for over a decade.

Finally, Conservative MP Mark Simmonds, who acts as Co-chair to Baroness Cumberlege on the parliamentary group, is paid £50,000 a year for 10 hours a month as a strategic advisor to Circle Health, the first firm to win control of an NHS hospital. The former shadow minister for health recently had to apologise to the House of Commons, for ‘inadvertently’ failing to declare his interest when talking in favour of the NHS reforms. Circle has connections to Health Secretary and the architect of the Health and Social care bill, Andrew Lansley. Christina Lineen spent two years as an aide to Mr Lansley prior to moving to Circle as head of communications.

In addition to the leading roles played by these parliamentarian’s, the APGH has a list of external associate members, all private health companies, who attend occasional meetings with the Group. The list, which currently sits at twenty-three members, must pay a subscription fee to be involved. The amount of members allowed is capped at 26 and they become a member on a first come, first serve basis, which according to the manger of the parliamentary group Ella Jackson, is the fairest and ‘most transparent’ way to operate the membership system. That however, is where the transparency ends.

The rules of All-Party Groups demands a record be held of all meetings, and that each Group must keep sufficient records to enable it to prove that the group meets at least twice a year. The APGH according to their manager goes further than this, by ‘audio-recording’ every meeting it holds. The problem is, we the public aren’t allowed to hear these recordings, because the meetings are held under something called ‘Chatham House Rules’.

The Chatham House rule, which doesn’t have to be held in Chatham House to apply, was created back in 1927 and has since been refined in 1992 and 2002, and exists according to the Chatham House website; ‘to allow people to speak as individuals, and to express views that may not be those of their organisations.’ It adds: ‘People usually feel more relaxed if they don’t have to worry about their reputation or the implications if they are publicly quoted.’ This lack of transparency applies to the list of attendees too, where it is forbidden to mention who attended.

In amongst the list of companies paying their subscription are: Alliance boots, Astrazeneca, and GlaxoSmithKline; who all have Lords and or MPs with financial links to their company. Pharmaceutical giant Astrazeneca has 9 Lords who are financially linked to them, including some who hold shares. GlaxoSmithKline has 17 Lords with shares in its company and Alliance Boots can boast having Lord Blyth as one of its former chairman, and former MP Patricia Hewitt, who took a consultancy job with them 7 months after standing down as an MP.

Ms Jackson of APGH explained: ‘It’s vital that parliamentarians and other speakers are able to speak freely in an open and frank exchange, without fear of having their thoughts reported out of context.’ What could both Peers and MPs with private healthcare interests and private healthcare companies be talking about that requires such secrecy? Why invoke a rule created over 80-years ago that prevents members of the public knowing who was in attendance and what was said?

The Health and Social care bill is now an Act; the companies who have lobbied for the NHS to be privatised have taken one giant leap into its eventual dismantling. The openness, with which money is given to politicians through donations, highlights an assumption that such behaviour is acceptable. Baroness Barker’s response doesn’t question that 142 Lords having financial connections to private healthcare as a problem; but merely points out the technical rules have been followed.

Our politicians sit on the boards, they own the companies, they are the directors, and they are indefinable from one another. The Labour party has promised to repeal the bill, but as election time comes, will those Labour Lords and MPs with interests in private healthcare, work behind the scenes to water down any changes? What of the future? So long as Lords and MPs are allowed to vote on bills that are directly linked to companies they have a financial interest in, then they will always be open to representing the corporations for whom they work. They are meant to be public servants, yet the evidence points towards them serving another element of society, one that is hidden behind corporate confidentially and ‘Chatham House’ rules.

Our democracy is under threat and our parliamentarians are all in this together, and at the very least should be barred from voting when a prejudicial conflict of interest appears. Until then, such behaviour will continue and unelected corporations will continue to hold the reins of power.

Sign the petition below to try and stop the Lords from being allowed to vote with conflicts of interest  http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/31991 

Please also check out this excellent MediaLens alert on the subject.

As London prepares to host the 2012 Summer Olympics, startlingly little critique has surfaced in the mainstream press. With the exception of the trivial issue of ticket prices, most of the city remains transfixed, internalising the dominant narrative. This process precedes each Olympic games, one that is written and distributed by and for the real Olympic profiteers; a nexus of powerful interests that sees both short and long term gains in each host city.

This highly profitable, publicly subsidised, sporting event always attracts the major, and wannabe major, cities of the world, using any and all methods to entice an unaccountable Olympic committee, each flexing their political muscle to ensure theirs is the next chosen location. The Olympics take billions of pounds, yen, dollars of their host countries’ tax revenue to build magnificent stadiums and housing facilities, militarise the city, trample civil liberties and construct elaborate installations with shelf lives of a few weeks.

London 2012, originally expected to cost £2.4bn, is now projected at £24bn, with contracts going to some of the world’s most egregious employers and global human rights violators. Some on the left have been critical of the massive transfer from public to private at a time of austerity. The London overspend has been portrayed by officials as a one-off, but a glance at the history of the Olympics shows that underestimating the cost is a consistent part of the Olympic experience.

The 1976 Montreal Olympics took over 30 years to pay off the debt it accumulated as a result of its overspend; the 2004 Athens Olympics went almost one thousand percent over budget from €123m (£100m)  to €11.5bn (£9.5bn) in costs significantly contributing to Greece’s deficit, and the 2010 Vancouver Olympics ended up spending six times the original projection of $1bn. In fact, barring the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics – where bottom-up pressure meant zero public dollars were expended on the games, thus securing a $233 million surplus for the city – the Olympic games always exceed their projected expense, saddling cities with years of debt – often paid back through cuts in services, regressive taxes and increased fares.

But the real gains for the rich can be witnessed in the long-term implications, once the crowds have gone home. Contrary to popular belief, the devastation inflicted on the poorest and historically marginalised communities is not simply an adverse side-effect, but goes to the very essence of why cities battle to host the Games.

In recent days attention has been given to London’s policy of ‘cleaning the streets’ of sex workers and other undesirable elements in the lead up to the games. This should come as no surprise to students of history, and if the past two decades are any indication, this is only the beginning of a comprehensive strategy to restructure the character, makeup and politics of the city. Everywhere the Games injects itself, the story remains the same; beginning with the easy targets – sex workers and the homeless – the decision-makers soon move towards driving out ethnic minority and working class residents from their city.

A common tactic is to deny any connection between the policies themselves and the Olympics. As with the sex workers of London, who have been victimised by ten times the levels of raids in the five Olympic boroughs compared to the rest of London, the authorities have repeated the claim that the beefed-up efforts are ‘not related to the Olympics’ but to growing ‘community concern’.

The Olympics have always been utilised as a means to pursue what David Harvey calls ‘accumulation by dispossession,’ from visible policies of forced evictions to veiled ones such as gentrification. This violent process is intimately connected to reconfiguring the landscape for capital accumulation and, indeed, is a prime motivation for the very purpose of the Olympics itself.

The Games are not simply hosted to ‘clean up’ the city, but to fundamentally reconfigure it, to ‘cleanse’ it of its poor and undesirable; to not only make way for a city by and for the rich, but to expand the terrain of profitable activity.

Sanitising the City

In order to understand where London is headed it’s important to understand the history of Olympic games and the ways in which they have restructured the economic landscapes of their respective host cities.

In 2007, the UN-funded Centre for Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) released a report detailing the effects of the Olympics between 1988 and 2008. It concluded that the Olympic games, having evicted more then two million people in the past twenty years, are one of the top causes of displacement and real-estate inflation in the world.

The research details that the levels of forced displacement have increased in each successive city. The 1988 Seoul games witnessed the eviction of 720,000 people, where it was used by the military dictatorship to turn Seoul from a city maintained by and for its people into a corporate city owned by the privileged. The 2008 Beijing Olympics oversaw the eviction of 1.25 million residents to make way for the games.

Predictably, the report shows that the evictions disproportionally affect the homeless, the poor and ethnic minorities. Beyond forced displacement, the Olympics succeed in longer-term economic displacement of working class areas of host cities. The COHRE report shows that the Olympics significantly accelerate the process of inflating real-estate prices. For instance, in Sydney, host to the 2000 games, rents increased by an astounding 40%, between 1993, the year it was selected, and 1998. Whereas in the same period, neighboring city Melbourne saw only a 10% rise.

The 1996 Atlanta Olympics resulted in the demolishing of 2,000 public housing units – evicting 6,000 residents, in addition to the 30,000 residents who were displaced as a direct result of gentrification brought on by the Olympic ‘development’. Indeed, as if to say that the poor and black of Atlanta had not suffered enough, the city issued over 9,000 arrest citations for the city’s homeless population as part of a concerted ‘clean up’ effort, a kind of ‘two-week face lift’.

At the time, the New York Times reported that the Atlanta urban renewal projects saw ‘virtually every aspect of Atlanta’s civic life transformed’. In the Summerhill neighborhood adjacent to the Olympic stadium, for example, 200 slum houses had been levelled, while “clean, colorful subdivisions have risen in their place”. As one business owner candidly explained, speaking of the poor and homeless “even if it means busing these poor guys to Augusta for three weeks and feeding them, we ought to do it.  It sounds very brutal for me to say it, but they can’t stay here for the Olympics.”

A similar trend is found in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics in which the COHRE study found that, in addition to the 2,500 evictions, housing prices rose 139% for sale and 145% for rentals in the period from 1986, the year it was selected to 1993. The same period saw a 76% decrease in public housing availability. In addition, the areas surrounding the Olympic Village site witnessed the displacement of over 90% of its Roma population.

The 2008 Beijing Olympics saw the forced displacement of 1.5 million residents, impacting the poorest rural migrants  living in the city’s outskirts, with watchdog groups claiming that the relocation saw declines in living conditions by as much as 20%.  The 2010 Vancouver Games targeted the homeless, indigenous, and women with eviction notices, criminalising  begging and sleeping outdoors, and introducing a law banning placards, banners or posters that do not ‘celebrate’ the Olympics or ‘create or enhance a festive environment and atmosphere’.

Policies of ‘cleansing’ have already begun in the favelas that encircle the city of Rio de Janeiro. Already 6,000 poor residents have been forcibly evicted at gun-point, as part of the government policy of ‘pacification’ involving over 3,000 military personal invading to ‘take control’ of the slum areas. This has resulted in street battles and the death of more than 30 residents. The Associated Press has shown that in 2010 alone,  170,000 people were facing housing loss due to the double threat of the 2016 Olympics and 2014 World Cup.

The Right To the City

Harvey (2008) sees the right to the city as more than the liberty of individuals to access the resources of the city. It is the collective right to exercise power to shape, transform and remake the process of urbanisation. To Harvey “the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.”

Some tepid liberals have spoken in hushed tones about the billions bilked from the public purse, and Citizens UK, the country’s largest community organisation, has astonishingly traded the plunder of areas where many of its members reside for a few crumbs to entrench its trademark ‘living wage Olympics’. Few in the mainstream have taken issue with the crises of housing prices and evictions.

Harvey (2008) argues that the development of capitalism is intimately connected to the emergence of cities, which require a concentration and endless search of profitable terrains for capital-surplus product with a cycle of compounded extraction, reinvestment, and expansion, hence “the history of capital accumulation paralleled by the growth path of urbanization under capitalism.”

The border of the London Olympic Park crosses some of the most working class areas in the country, and it is by no coincidence that every Olympic city chooses to situate its site in its poorest neighbourhoods. The targeted areas, such as London’s East End, LA’s South Central or Chicago’s South Side are not only the poorest but also have the highest concentrations of non-white people in each city.

In London’s case the borough of Newham, home of the Olympic Village, is the most ethnically diverse district in the country. In London’s East End, the process of forced evictions began immediately after the bid was announced with the demolishing of Clays Lane Housing Co-op and the eviction of 450 residents. Red Pepper Magazine quotes one of the residents at the time, Julian Cheyne, who spoke of how ‘Compulsory purchase is a brutal process and from day one the Clays Lane community was lied to while promises were made and broken without a second thought.’

Short-term evictions and long-term gentrification go hand-in-hand. In some parts of the city, closer to the Olympic site, poor residents are being forced from their homes while beautification ‘development’ and ‘regeneration’ projects in areas as far out as Dalston Junction or Hackney’s Broadway Market have demolished a squatted social centre and theatre, whilst Council-appointed agents sell-off public land to be converted into luxury flats by developer cartels.

As with previous host cities, the displacement of residents is not limited to direct government policy. In some East London boroughs landlords have begun evicting tenants in places where rents are fetching fifteen times their standard rates, flats are now being advertised as “Olympic lets” and imposing hefty “penalty” clauses for tenants who refuse to leave.

Recently campaigners camped out in the Leyton Marshes refused attempts by the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) to convert the public space into an Olympic training facility. Indeed, in the past some campaigns against the Games have succeeded in their resistance. A notable example is the broad-based coalition of housing and labor activists of No Games Chicago, largely credited for foiling the city’s attempt to host the 2016 Olympics, even after pleas from Barack and Michelle Obama.

Anti-Olympics organisers in Chicago had been so successful, despite a multi-million dollar barrage of pro-Olympic propaganda to ‘cleanse’ the working-class South Side, that days before the Olympic Committee vote the Chicago Tribune found that a majority of the city opposed the bid and 84% opposed using public money to support the games.

In Rio de Janeiro, the thousands of slum dwellers who have been given eviction notices are refusing to go quietly; instead the poor have long prepared to fight and are now putting up a historic resistance in the courts and the streets. With unions holding strikes in at least eight host cities of the 2014 World Cup, and a nation-wide movement of 25,000 World Cup workers have threatened prolonged strike action. In a New York Times report, a resident, Cenira dos Santos, said of the Games, “the authorities think progress is demolishing our community just as they can host the Olympics for a few weeks, but we’ve shocked them by resisting.”

The story in each city remains almost identical.  Once selected, a city expends vast amounts of public resource to begin a program of forced displacement, rental speculation, urban renewal projects, demolition of public housing and gentrification. In fact, if there is one thread that runs through almost every Olympic event it is that the poor of each Games subsidise their own violent dispossession.

As money is pumped in to develop, regenerate and ‘clean’ the city, the ‘community’ is forced to flee, transforming an urban collective identity into an individualised consumer one, defined by a narrow homogenised racial, economic and ethnic suburban ego ideal. This process of gentrification and suburbanisation results in deep political and cultural insulation, alienation and detachment; detachment of families from one another and detachment from the commons.

Detachment shapes the way individuals are exposed to and think about themselves in relation to the world, living a life of separation protected from ‘difference’. Passive acceptance of inequality is now actively espoused. The gentrification of the Olympic host city, the withering away of an urban working class, social atomisation and the subsequent erosion of political consciousness is a planned outgrowth of a city seemingly waiting to be cleansed.

Any reading of Olympic history reveals the true motives of each host city. It is the necessity to shock, to fast track the dispossession of the poor and marginalised as part of the larger machinations of capital accumulation. The architects of this plan need a spectacular show; a hegemonic device to reconfigure the rights, spatial relations and self-determination of the city’s working class, to reconstitute for whom and for what purpose the city exists. Unlike any other event, the Olympics provide just that kind of opportunity.

You can also check out: Special Report | #London2012: an Olympian exercise in corporate greenwashing