In February this year, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, walked into a storm of controversy when he made a very thoughtful speech about the relationship between Sharia law and English law. I discussed this before here..

Within Islam, Christianity and Judaism there is a tension between those who hold a conservative view that rites and traditions that have built up through the centuries are sacred, and those more liberal reformers who wish to separate out what they regard as being fundamental to God’s word, from socially constructed practices that derive from earlier - and no longer relevant - political, cultural and social environments. So the misconception that sharia law is always inherently socially repressive and conservative has some echo in the current disputes within the Anglican Communion over the admission of women to the episcopacy. [The fact that for atheists like myself the “Divine” bits of the argument are also socially constructed is neither here nor there]

For example within Anglicanism, liberals like Dr Giles Fraser president of a group called Inclusive Church insist on contextualising what they regard as unchanging Divine principles in a changing man-made world. Dr Fraser is quoted in the Independent:

“If you read the Bible as a whole rather than just quoting selective bits, it tells the story of how at the beginning God was thought to be there just for a narrow band, the Chosen People, and it then shows how God gradually breaks down that narrow understanding to reveal that he is there for everyone; the idea that only men can represent God cuts against the whole of the Bible story.”

Similarly within Islam, while some conservative scholars regard sharia as a set of codified judgements, more liberal Islamic jurists regard the law as fundamental principles that must be referenced when dealing with the specific and changing particularities in society.

 Indeed as the eminent sociologist Ernest Gellner explained in his key textbook “Islamic Societies”, the criticism of Islam that it has “never had a reformation” unlike Christianity is misplaced, because the lack of central and hierarchical authority is a defining feature of Islam, indeed as Gellner argues “the cultural history of the Arab world and of many other Muslim lands during the past hundred years is largely the story of the advance and victory of reformism, a kind of Islamic Protestantism with a heavy stress on scripturalism and above all a sustained hostility to spiritual brokerage, to the local middlemen between man and God”. The liberal tradition of interpreting Islam in the context of the issues of contemporary society is at least as strong as that of the primativists, and there is constant and shifting debate among that loose trans-political and trans-ethnic network of scholars, lawyers and theologians who comprise the ulama.

But the misconception exists - and is promoted by islamophobes - that Islamic society is intolerant of pluralism, based upon a comparison with particularly obscurantist exceptional cases, like Taliban Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. This is not true of more mainstream Islamic thought.

A few days ago, Lord Phillips, the Lord Chief Justice, returned to the theme at a speech to the East London Muslim Centre, on the subject of Equality Before the Law. as he explains:

In February this year I chaired a lecture given by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Royal Courts of Justice on the topic of Civil and Religious Law in England. It was a profound lecture and one not readily understood on a single listening. It was, I believe, not clearly understood by all, and certainly not by sections of the media which represented the Archbishop as suggesting the possibility that Muslims in this country might be governed by their own system of Sharia law. That is certainly not what he was suggesting. On the contrary he made it plain that there could not be some subsidiary Sharia jurisdiction which, I quote, “could have the power to deny access to rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights”. Speaking more specifically of apostasy he said “In a society where freedom of religion is secured by law, it is obviously impossible for any group to claim that conversion to another faith is simply disallowed or to claim the right to inflict punishment on a convert”.

A point that the Archbishop was making was that it was possible for individuals voluntarily to conduct their lives in accordance with Sharia principles without this being in conflict with the rights guaranteed by our law. To quote him again “the refusal of a religious believer to act upon the legal recognition of a right is not, given the plural character of society, a denial to anyone inside or outside the community of access to that right”.

The Archbishop went on to suggest that it might be possible to contemplate, and again I quote, “a scheme in which individuals retain the liberty to choose the jurisdiction under which they will seek to resolve certain carefully specified matters”. He suggested by way of example “aspects of marital law, the regulation of financial transactions and authorised structures of mediation and conflict resolution”.

Dr Phillips’s whole talk is actually quite interesting as a historical overview of how English Law has evolved over the last century to have an increasing emphasis not only on liberty, but also specifically on equality. He explains how his maternal grandparents fled to England as Sephardic Jews from Egypt a century ago because they perceived England as a place where they would gain freedom from discrimination.

British law has, comparatively recently, reached a stage of development in which a high premium is placed not merely on liberty, but on equality of all who live in this country. That law is secular. It does not attempt to enforce the standards of behaviour that the Christian religion or any other religion expects. It is perhaps founded on one ethical principle that the Christian religion shares with most, if not all, other religions and that is that one should love one’s neighbour. And so the law sets out to prevent behaviour that harms others. Behaviour that is contrary to religious principles, but which is detrimental only to those who commit it, is not, in general, contrary to our law. A sin is not necessarily a crime.

Those who come to live in this country must take its laws as they find them. British diversity is valued and the principles of freedom and equality that the law protects should be welcomed by all. Laws in this country are based on the common values of tolerance, openness, equality and respect for the rule of law. Whilst breaches of the requirements of any religion in the U.K. may not be punished by the law, people are free to practise their religion. That is something to be valued.

I said that the law sets out to prevent behaviour that harms others. In a modern society there are many ways in which the behaviour of some can harm others, and there have been passed thousands of laws and regulations that are designed to try to prevent such behaviour. These laws and regulations can run into conflict with the freedoms that I have been discussing. The law can sometimes, quite unintentionally, have an adverse impact on a particular minority. Where this happens we will sometimes be able to make exceptions in order to prevent this.

Principles of Sharia prohibit the earning or paying of interest. This means that a conventional mortgage offends the principles of Islam. The banks managed to devise an alternative system of financing house purchases that did not offend Sharia principles. This involved the bank itself buying the house and then reselling it to the Muslim purchaser. There was one problem with this. English taxation law charges stamp duty on a house purchase and under this system of mortgage stamp duty had to be paid twice, once on the sale to the bank and again on the resale to the purchaser. This was not fair and so the law was changed in April 2003 so that stamp duty only had to be paid once on an Islamic mortgage.

This example brings me onto the topic of Sharia law. It is not a topic on which I can claim any special expertise, but I have been reading quite a lot about it in preparation for this talk. I have also recently been on a visit to Oman and discussed with lawyers there the manner of the application of Sharia law in that country. It has become clear to me that there is widespread misunderstanding in this country as to the nature of Sharia law. Sharia consists of a set of principles governing the way that one should live one’s life in accordance with the will of God. These principles are based on the Qu’ran, as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad and interpreted by Islamic scholars. The principles have much in common with those of other religions. They do not include forced marriage or the repression of women. Compliance with them requires a high level of personal conduct, including abstinence from alcohol. I understand that it is not the case that for a Muslim to lead his or her life in accordance with these principles will be in conflict with the requirements of the law in this country

What would be in conflict with the law would be to impose certain sanctions for failure to comply with Sharia principles. Part of the misconception about Sharia law is the belief that Sharia is only about mandating sanctions such as flogging, stoning, the cutting off of hands, or death for those who fail to comply with the law. And the view of many of Sharia law is coloured by violent extremists who invoke it, perversely, to justify terrorist atrocities such as suicide bombing, which I understand to be in conflict with Islamic principles. There can be no question of such sanctions being applied to or by any Muslim who lives within this jurisdiction. Nor, when I was in Oman, did I find that such penalties formed any part of the law applied there. It is true that they have the death penalty for that intentional murder, but they do not apply any of the other forms of corporal punishment I have just listed.

It remains the fact that in Muslim countries where the law is founded on Sharia principles, the law includes sanctions for failure to observe those principles and there are courts to try those who are alleged to have breached those laws. The definition of the law and the sanctions to be applied for breach of it differ from one Muslim country to another. In some countries the courts interpret Sharia Law as calling for severe physical punishment. There can be no question of such courts sitting in this country, or such sanctions being applied here. So far as the law is concerned, those who live in this country are governed by English law and subject to the jurisdiction of the English courts.

This is exactly correct. Noone is suggesting a parallel legal system that would remove legal safeguards or that could be used to reinforce repressive power relationships. Dr Williams himself quoted the Jewish legal theorist, Ayelet Shachar,who raised the problem that any model that ends up ‘franchising’ a non-state jurisdiction could reinforce its most problematic features and further disadvantage its weakest members: ‘we must be alert’, she writes, ‘to the potentially injurious effects of well-meaning external protections upon different categories of group members here – effects which may unwittingly exacerbate preexisting internal power hierarchies’

But that isn’t the end of the story. We should also recognise that people who choose  to self-identify with a religious community, and its associated laws and ethics have a right to do so. The actual, and so far relatively successful, experience of multi-culturalism and convergence towards consensual liberal values in British society has not been on the basis of any campaign for secularism, but has succeeded by offering choice and empowerment.

But in those areas like contract law, inheritance and family law, sharia courts could be incorporated into the English Legal System in the same way that Jewish Beth Din courts already are. In this way, we could engineer a situation where individuals can choose which code to adopt. Of course any choice to use religious arbitration would have to be mutual and based on free and informed consent.

This encourages the secular legal authorities to respect the plurality of our society, and recognise people’s different senses of identity; and simultaneously it puts pressure on the religious communities to evolve towards the wider norms of society.

Recognition of Jewish, Islamic or other religious arbitration by the law of the land means that communities do not rely upon extra-judicial pressure. At the same time, recognition and incorporation of religious courts means that the state’s civil courts institutionalise their right of supervision over those religious courts to ensure natural justice, and that their use is consensual.

Just received this from SBS:

Southall Black Sisters

Demonstration 17^th and 18^th July 2008 from 9.30am onwards at the

High Court on the Strand

Many of you are already aware that SBS has been locked in struggle against Ealing Council with regard to its decision to withdraw funding for our domestic violence services for black and minority women. On 17^th and 18^th July 2008, the High Court will hear a challenge brought by our users against Ealing Council for its failure to have proper regard to existing equality legislation, especially the Race Relations Act, in reaching its decision on our funding. The Council will seek to justify its decision on the grounds that a generic domestic violence service will be better placed to meet requirements of the equality legislation and the so called ‘cohesion’ agenda.

Equality, Cohesion and the Right to Self Organisation

This is no longer simply about the funding of SBS. The case represents a key moment for the third sector. In one of the first challenges of its kind, the Council will be required to account for the way in which the confused and contradictory ‘cohesion’ agenda is being cynically used to cut essential life saving services to black and minority women in particular. Specialist services likes ours are needed, not only for reasons to do with language difficulties and culture pressures, but also because we have considerable experience in providing advice and advocacy in complex circumstances where legal aid is no longer easily available and where immigration and asylum difficulties make some women much more vulnerable than others. In addition, we will seek to challenge the Council for its failure to take account of how and why groups like SBS, were set up in the first place: to challenge racism and gender inequality as well as religious, caste and ethnic divisions within our communities.

The Council has made much of the need to reflect the racial diversity of Ealing (meaning the white majority population) in the interests of ‘cohesion’. In the process it seeks to argue that the very existence of specialist groups like SBS is unlawful under the Race Relations Act! Ealing Council has also withdrawn funding for key refugee and race equality projects in Ealing. This approach is not unique to Ealing. Evidence from around the UK suggests that organisations in the firing line tend to be the more progressive black and minority and feminist projects. At the same time, reactionary, sometimes fundamentalist religious organisations are being given financial support to provide ‘welfare services’, even at the risk of undermining the human rights of the most vulnerable in our communities. The subcontracting of third sector services is also contributing to the decimation of groups like SBS. What this demonstrates is a political attack on the notion of positive action and on the right to self organisation underpinned by secular, anti-racist and progressive values.

Our Tradition: Struggle not Submission

These are immensely worrying developments for all those concerned about the threat to progressive notions of equality and justice. We therefore urge you to join our demonstration on the 17^th and 18^th July at the High Court on the Strand. Nearest Tube Holborn (Circle & Piccadilly Line) or Temple (District & Circle Line). Please bring musical instruments, whistles and banners.

For further details contact SBS 0208 571 9595

Email: Southallblacksisters@btconnect.com

Must admit to being ever so slightly envious of Louise and the Dr Who watchers, it’s something we don’t get on Spanish tele, but I can hopefully get my own back. I don’t usually do the ‘privilege’ thing but last Thursday I was happy to be one of only three hundred ticket holders at a special homage to Federico Garcia Lorca and Fred, or Fredrick, Smith. It was held in the garden of the Lorca family’s summer house the Huerta de San Vicente.

The woman on the small stage dressed in ornate cowboy boots, jeans that had seen better days, white shirt and a black jacket reading her own and Garcia Lorca’s poetry was someone, if you were into music around 1976 you may well remember, Patricia Lee or better perhaps as Patti Smith, rocker, punk rocker, extraordinaire. For those that remember the “Horses” album this was quite a different Patti Smith, at least on the surface, but she had lost none of the fire and drive of the punk days it was just a slightly more sophisticated approach. Patti blended her own poetry with that of Lorca in a seamless style that brought the best of both. Her tribute poem to Fredrick her husband who died in 1995 was called “Saint Fredrick” that of course could so easily have been “San Federico” and a homage to Granada’s favourite son – well for the majority with the exception of the few gay bashing fascists that we have to face here.

Interspersed with the poetry we were treated to tributes to Jim Morrison, Lou Read and Joe Strummer, we were also treated to a brilliant rendition of Neill Young’s “Helpless” and an emotive rapport with an audience ranging from twenty to seventy, she joked about needing glasses and competing with the dogs barking in the background, audible even though some distance away. As the night drew to a close we were all pulled into an unaccompanied “Because the night” that was pretty good considering the mixture of nationalities, ages and tongues that were the audience.

On the way to the event my friend Chris had said “I hope she sings Gloria” , the lights went down and we pleaded for more in true Spanish style, the rhythmic hand clapping that builds to a crescendo … a light came up Patti re-appeared pointed a finger skywards and shouted
“Give me a G, Give me an L, Give me an O” …..Gloria! Gloria! Rang out into the gradually cooling night air, a fitting climax

STEPPING INTO THE EAST END’S BATTLES OF THE 1930s
The dramatic story of how the people of the East End blocked the path of Oswald Mosley’s fascists in the 1930s is being told once again but this time the events are also being physically retraced. David Rosenberg will be leading a series of walks called “ANTIFASCIST FOOTPRINTS” between July and September this year.

The walks will start at Aldgate East – or Gardiners Corner as it was known then – where many tens of thousands stood to block Mosley’s path. They will wind their way to Cable Street, where the Jewish and Irish communities united to build barricades that prevented the fascists from invading the East End and terrorising its inhabitants.

There will be several stops along the way where David will tell the stories of ordinary people who became significant through this struggle and he will describe the role of organisations such as the Jewish People’s Council, the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party in mobilising people to defend their communities. He will talk about the incidents they were caught up in and the actions they took and will locate the places where they organised their fight against fascism.

David says: “The fight against Mosley’s Blackshirts took place in so many arenas – on the streets, on housing estates, in the workplace, in youth clubs, in the press and through community institutions. Mosley was defeated then but fascism remains a live threat in Britain today. I believe that the experience of the 1930s provides lessons for the present.”

David’s grandparents came to the East End as immigrant children in the early 1900s. He worked there in the mid-1970s and the late 1980s, and published a study of how Eastenders responded to Mosley’s fascist movement, which was researched principally at Tower Hamlets Local History Library.

ANTIFASCIST FOOTPRINTS walks will take place on Sundays: 20th July, 24th August, 7th September and 28th September. Places on each walk are limited to 30 so advance booking is essential. Visit www.eastendwalks.com  for booking information.

As a short follow up to my recent review of the TUC’s interesting pamphlet on democratising public services, I took a look at the CBI’s press release demanding the pace of public service reform (i.e. the transformation of more services into money-making opportunities) be sped up. Usually they prefer fiscal arguments peppered with warnings about the credit crunch, economic slow down and the need to rein in public spending to try accelerate reform. But now the public are demanding it too, or so the CBI claims.

Richard Lambert, the CBI’s director-general (pictured) claims a recent YouGov survey commissioned for the bosses’ organisation makes uncomfortable reading for the government and anyone opposed to the great public services sell off. In fact, the CBI boasts “both the unions and the ministers they are targeting need to recognise how out of kilter with public mood any anti-reform stance is.” And there’s more. Only a minority of the public think the government’s reform programme has improved public services over these last 11 years, and around 59% have no objection to the private sector delivering services. Attached to their release is an Excel spreadsheet with the results.

To be honest, if a student handed in these bold conclusions on the basis of the CBI’s data, any self-respecting sociologist would hand them a big fat fail. Let’s take a look at these claims more closely. Take the claim about private sector delivery. The question YouGov asked its sample of telephone respondents was “Currently public service providers include organisations from the public (i.e. state), private and voluntary (i.e. charitable). Assuming they are of equal quality does it matter to you who provide your public services?” Talk about a leading question! Of course, the truth is that on the whole, the intrusion of the private sector into public service provision costs more, produces more bureaucracy and offers no appreciable improvement in the service in question. The waste of PFI schemes, the internal market in the NHS; the targets cultures in schools, colleges and universities; the drip-drip privatisation of Royal Mail; the sell off of local council services - the evidence just keeps piling up. Small wonder the CBI neglected to include this in the question!

Then there is the pace of public services reform. YouGov invited respondents to give their opinions on the pace of reform, ranging from ’should be much faster’ to ’shouldn’t be any reform’. Why should we be surprised that 66% that the pace needed speeding up in the context of a question that says nothing about the content of the reforms taking place? It is a meaningless question that elicits an equally meaningless response. To add to the illiteracy YouGov reports only 32% think public services have gotten better since Labour have been in power (45% said worse). Hold on a moment, didn’t John Cridland, deputy director of the CBI note in their January report, The Market for Public Services in the UK that “over the last twenty years, private sector involvement in providing public services has been growing.” Has it not occurred to our captains of industry that there maybe be a link between this deepening involvement of capital and dissatisfaction with the outcomes of their increasing interference?

What the CBI has done is not commission a serious piece of research. This is ideological foil for their warmed over neoliberalism, nothing more. But allow me to put a more credible and positive spin on one piece of data the survey helpfully provided. YouGov asked “which if any of the following ways would you like to be involved in deciding how your local services … are delivered?” Only 15% said they wouldn’t be interested in the decision-making process, while (60%) indicated a preference for customer satisfaction surveys. However, the preferences were not mutually exclusive. 62% of respondents indicated a willingness to participate in some way - 32% favoured panels, 22% public meetings and 8% some kind of councillor/volunteer role, all of which is the lifeblood for the Public Value approach and poison to markets. It’s not surprising the CBI ignores this data, but despite themselves they have gifted us an argument that strengthens the socialist case for democratically accountable public services.

This is crossposted at Union Futures and A Very Public Sociologist.

Justice for Iraq is a call to action – a campaign that demands a complete policy reversal of those countries who have invaded and occupied Iraq since 2003. Ending the military occupation remains the most urgent priority. But Iraq will remain a broken nation without urgent measures aimed at delivering lasting peace and justice for its people and healing some of the wounds caused by this disastrous war.

Justice for Iraq will pressure Iraq’s occupiers to:

• withdraw their troops and privatised security forces;
• restore Iraq’s full economic, legal and political sovereignty;
• dismantle the Green Zone and the other occupation walls;
• clean up toxic and unexploded weapons of war;
• release and compensate detainees;
• assist refugees and displaced persons;
• help Iraq to relieve dire shortages in food, water, energy and medical supplies;
• agree to pay reparations for waging a war of aggression;
• ensure that war criminals face justice.

These demands do not represent a complete or final list. This campaign is in the process of emerging and we are reaching out to build a network of organisations and individuals who share a similar goal. Join us on 19th July to be a part of debating, building and launching this campaign.

Speakers confirmed so far:

• Hans von Sponeck, Former UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq
• Haifa Zangana, Iraqi writer and activist
• Sami Ramadani, Iraqi Democrats Against the Occupation
• Kamil Mahdi, Senior lecturer in Middle East economics at University of Exeter
• Mazin Younis, Iraqi League
• John McDonnell MP
• Greg Muttitt, PLATFORM
• John Hilary, War on Want
• Jehangir Jilani, Public Interest Lawyers
• Liz Davies, Iraq Occupation Focus
• Marion Birch, Medact
• Milan Rai, Justice Not Vengeance / Peace News
• Sarah Parker, Coalition to Stop Deportations to Iraq

11.00-17.00, Saturday 19 July 2008
United Reformed Church
Buck Street, Camden (close to Camden Town tube)
London NW1 8NJ

Entry by donation (suggested amount: £7/£5 unwaged)

Please see the Justice for Iraq blog for more details.

James Purnell looks like he would be comfortable at a pop concert according to the Times. He is also a right wing Bliarite.

In Purnell’s view the poor are to blame for their predicament…the only failure of capitalism is the benefits system that has been drafted onto it. Instead he wants to give people “the incentive to do the right thing instead of giving them the incentive to be dishonest”. This speaks more of Mr Purnell than anything about the benefits system.

In fact the Secretary of State repeats the old one that Incapacity Benefit goes up the longer that you are on it.

This is only true for the first year. It only rises with inflation after that, as do all benefits. The current top rate is £84.50 a week: although you get a massive cash injection of £17.75 a week if you become too ill to work before your 35th birthday. There is no incentive to stay on it year after year.

People on Incapacity Benefit live in grinding poverty. This compares with the £158 a week that research from the Joseph Rowntree Federation suggests that a single adult needs to maintain a basic standard of living.

Apparently Purnell is being tipped as a future PM. His plans for the public sector seem to revolve around complete privatisation of all services with the hope that the feather-bedded private companies make a fortune.

A kick down kiss up kinda guy.

From the No! G8 Legal Team July 6, 2008

* Arrestees are still in jail and face years in prison
* Local organizers may face arrests
* Arrestees and organizers friends and families are facing harassment and
possible house raids by police

Activists and organizers are asking local groups and individuals to call,
e-mail, visit and protest at Japanese embassies over the unjust arrests,
detentions, deportations, and repression occurring around counter-G8
mobilization in Japan.

Japanese police continue to escalate repression against protesters of the Group
of 8 Summit. This is part of a growing trend of the suppression of human rights
in Japan. Yesterday’s demonstration of approximately five thousand was lined
with, and sometimes boxed in by, several thousand police in full riot gear. At
least four people – including a Reuters reporter – were arrested.

In one arrest, the police shattered the window of a sound truck and dragged out
the driver. Hours after the demonstration ended the legal team had already
received numerous reports of police misconduct.

This latest action comes after weeks of repressive activity on behalf of the
police and government. Activists throughout Japan have been arrested at
demonstrations and in their homes, often on “technical” charges, such as not
registering a change of address. Overt surveillance of activists, academics and
reporters has been taking place for months, and with some local activists for
years. International conference participants and protesters have been
interrogated for hours at the border and many have been denied entry into the
country without warrant. The legal team sees this as a violation of people’s
right to freely exchange ideas.

“What we have witnessed in the streets of Sapporo is part of an ongoing and
escalating campaign to suppress the movement for real democracy in Japan,” said
Marina Sitrin, professor and member of the National Lawyers Guild, a US based
human rights organization that is a part of the No! G8 Legal Team.

“We were surprised by the excessive force used by police in today’s
demonstration,” said Ko Watari, of WATCH, a Japanese legal network created to
document police and government misconduct during the anti G8 protests. “This
was a non-violent demonstration where no acts against property or people took
place, or even appeared likely to take place.” The arrested Reuter’s cameraman
was standing on a public sidewalk when seized by plainclothes police; his video
camera was confiscated and has not been returned. The arrest of the sound truck
driver followed immediately thereafter. Footage of the driver’s arrest shows
him screaming in pain as the police pulled him out of the truck, his foot stuck
in the steering wheel.

Protesters are organizing various events in the upcoming days of the G8 Summit,
between the 7th and 9th of July. The No! G8 Legal Team will be paying close
attention to the behavior of the police and government. “Labor and peace
movement leaders are concerned that the police will arrest them for organizing
these protests, search their homes and interrogate their family members,” said
Dan Spalding, Legal Worker Vice President of the National Lawyers Guild.

Japanese law permits police to hold and interrogate suspects in the police
station for 23 days without formal charges. They can interrogate suspects for
up to 12 hours at a time. While detained arrestees can be forced to sit on
their knees the entire time they are awake, not being able to move, even to use
the bathroom without asking permission. This permission is not always granted.

“We take all arrests very seriously, and the specifics of the procedure, such as
the 23 day detainment in the police station, the absence of lawyers to oversee
the conditions of process, the physical violence involved in the
interrogations, not being allowed medication, the fear of putting friends,
family, and affiliations at risk are only a part of the damage. Its also about
the anger and sense of shame which stays and creates more damage. It’s the
humiliation of not being able to take care of your own.” Commented Gen, a
participant in the counter G8 protests.

He continued: “I am personally grateful for the presence of activists from
throughout the world. The spirit and experiences, levels of militancy they
bring, for just being here in solidarity. Overall it has been a very energizing
experience, and we are in high spirits. I am grateful for your continued
presence and support. It is what authorities have tried to prevent through
repressive measures. International solidarity and pressure at this moment will
bring us to another level.”

International pressure can help prevent more people being arrested.

* Link to footage of brutal arrest of sound truck driver:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frfl_qdi2Y8

* Link to footage of Reuters reporter arrest, the truck driver and some of the
demonstration: http://blip.tv/file/1052811/

See embassies list: http://www.gipfelsoli.org/Repression/5318.html

 ”It was late in the evening when we came at last to our journey’s end.” (Journey’s End, RC Sherriff).

Well, the suspense is now over. It was the best of times, worst of times for Donna Noble. And who woulda thought it…the temp from Chiswick saves the universe from that pesky Davros and the Daleks…and what a boost to her self-esteem and confidence. The Dr didn’t regenerate. Sarah-Jane Smith was saved by Mickey and Rose’s mum. Martha Jones has the mysterious Osterhagen key in her hands.

Tardis is clapped in irons known as a temporal prison and transported to the Daleks place known as the Crucible. The Tardis is destroyed with Donna inside but ….. due to some clever science fiction she is able to clone a Dr. He’s half time lord and human and she the same. And time to kick Dalek ass. Davros wants to destroy all forms of matter, or as he shrieks with joy, “Destruction of reality”..by something called a reality bomb. 

You see, it is all about destiny, sacrifice and prophecy. And all the Dr’s assistants all plan to stop Davros and the Daleks with violence (either using nukes or blasting holes in the universe) much to the time lord’s consternation.

Davros exposes the heart of the Dr and his loathing of violence, violence begets violence. With the help of Dr Donna and the cloned time lord, they defeat the Daleks by destroying them. Davros is betrayed by Dalek Caan who has had enough of the ways of the Daleks and has been indirectly helping the Dr. But Dalek Caan warns the Dr (the real one) that one of his assistants will die. They are able to realign earth …hooray..

In a nutshell, none of them do die, well, in the human sense. They all go their separate ways. The Dr sends Rose, her mum, and cloned Dr back to this alternate universe as he’s a war criminal because he destroyed the Daleks (wonder if there’s room for Messrs Bush and Blair?). Rose gets her Dr, well half human and half time lord with one heart. Oh well, better than nothing….

Dr Donna’s brain is being fried by this overload so the Dr clears her mind and sends her back to earth. She recalls nothing. And can I be bovvered to retell the rest? It got all drippy saccharine like, running out of steam (it was tugging at the heartstrings background muzak) towards the end and with stating the obvious…the Dr is alone.

There was a deep and meaningful truth in the story somewhere but I was too busy being distracted by the fast frenetic action…though they really do need to spend some cash on decent special effects. But, like I said, it was all ’bout the lexicon of being human, sacrifice, destiny, prophecy, loneliness, courage and …Donna winning the day. And that there was more to Donna. Though in saying all of that, it was a damn good jolly romp nevertheless.

I was disappointed that even though Donna was centre stage, the other women were still in the background. They all played their part and were significant but they could have been utilised better. It was a bit of a wasted opportunity especially for strong and vibrant characters like Martha, Rose and Sarah-Jane.

Overall, the series has been patchy and inconsistent. We have seen the Adipose (the potato shaped aliens), Pompeii burning, the Ood, warmongering Sontaran versus pacifist Dr, ass kicking terraformed acrobatic Jenny, daughter of the Dr (the extra twist is that Jenny is played by Georgia Moffett who is, fifth Dr Who, Peter Davison’s real life daughter). Awfully fun jolly japes, along with Agatha Christie with the murder of Professor Peach in the library by some gigantic wasp. An invisible entity possessing a passenger on the shuttle bus to Midnight that leads to deep psychological fear, mistrust and suspicion of the unknown.

 And my favourite two-parter, solving the mystery of the disappearances in the universe’s largest library with the Vashta Narada lurking in the shadows along with space suited scientist who seems to know the Dr and a populated virtual world that Donna literally falls into. I found that the Steven Moffat written episodes are reminiscent of his previous award winning story, Blink.

The Journey’s End episode is also a reference, possibly, to the fact that Russell T. Davies is handing over the executive producer role to Steven Moffat but he hasn’t gone completely and is still involved. Well, with Steven Moffat at the fore and with some sparkly gems under his writer belt, I hope that this is the shape of things to come…..

The Optimum Population Trust includes such well known environmentalists as Jonathon Porritt and Sara Parkin.

Probably the best critique of this stuff comes from Amartya Sen who in my opinion is about the most interesting conventional economist out there.  Spotted this on Climate and Capitalism and thought I would paste it up.  I am not suggesting that the OPT is racist but there is certainly a racist discourse around some discussions of this nature.  And they do get quite excited about immigration which is never frankly a good sign.

June 27, 2008Population control — the ideology of the green right

Related reading:

• Population Control and Climate Change, Part One: Too Many People?
• Population Control and Climate Change, Part Two: The Socialist Alternative

“We’re not left or right, we’re green.” That phrase has been repeated ad nauseum by green politicos who think they are being clever, but constant repetition doesn’t make it true. The green movement can’t escape politics — there are eco-socialists and eco-anarchists and eco-liberals and eco-capitalists, and many subdivisions in each current.

A particularly nasty current in the eco-capitalist camp are the eco-racists, people who blame foreigners — especially foreigners with dark skins — for ecological problems.

Fred Pearce, an environmental writer for New Scientist magazine, has several times recently devoted his blog (Fred’s Footprint) to what he calls Green Fascism. He, like everyone else who writes or speaks on environmental issues, is regularly asked: “Should we be trying to stop others having babies, especially people in poor countries with fast-growing populations?”

“I must say I thought this kind of illiberal thinking had been banished from the environmental movement. But it keeps seeping back. When I give public talks on climate change, I am often asked if all the efforts in the rich world won’t be wiped out by rising populations in the poor world.

“Isn’t overpopulation more dangerous than overconsumption? I say no. But the unpalatable truth is that a lot of environmental thinking over the past half century has been underpinned by an unhealthy preoccupation with the breeding propensity of Asians and Africans.

“They were, it was often held, polluting the human gene pool as well as the planet. Such thinking was not fringe: it involved some of the great names of the environment movement. …

“No matter that the average European or North American has carbon emissions 10 times greater than the average Indian or African, somehow it is those pesky breeding foreigners who are really to blame.”

In a second column he added:

“Every time greens stress “over-population” among the poor as an environmental threat, they are denying the much greater threat to global resources from over-consumption among the rich.

“I do not really believe in the idea that the planet has some fixed “carrying capacity”. How many it can sustain depends on how we live on this planet rather than absolute numbers. Mahatma Gandhi wasn’t far wrong when he said there is enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed.”

Pearse’s Green Fascism articles echo important issues that were discussed in more detail by Betsy Hartmann, author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The global politics of population control (South End Press, 1995), whom he interviewed for New Scientist in 2003. The interview, headlined “The greening of hate,” is online here (subscription required).

The following are excerpts.What do you think is going on among environmentalists? Is the right wing taking over?
Hartmann: I first realised that the right wing was attempting to penetrate the mainstream environment movement when I sat on a panel at an environmental meeting in the University of Oregon in 1994. Beside me was a professor and environmentalist, Virginia Abernethy of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. She seemed to me to blame immigrants for overpopulating our country and destroying our environment. Some of the audience liked her ideas but I thought they were racist.

I started to investigate and found she wasn’t alone among conservationists. She was a leader of the group called the Carrying Capacity Network, which sounds like a benign environmental organisation but its main campaign is to halt what it calls mass migration to the US. They blame migrants for destroying pristine America. For instance, they blame Mexican migrants for starting fires in national forests near the border. This group has prominent environmental scientists on its advisory board. People like biologist Tom Lovejoy, the green economist Herman Daly and the ecologist David Pimental.

I call this the greening of hate.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory

Hartmann: Well, it seems to me that the anti-immigration movement in the US has a strong green wing. For instance, they formed a group within the Sierra Club — a prominent nature protection organization — trying to push it into a policy of immigration restriction and population reduction. Abernethy has spoken at conferences of the right wing Council of Conservative Citizens. And some of these people are getting funding from groups such as the Pioneer Fund, whose aims, as set out in its charter, are to fund research into genetics and study into “the problems of human race betterment”.

Aren’t these just political games?

Hartmann: It’s more than that. There is an academic journal called Population and Environment, published by Kluwer, which is edited by Kevin MacDonald, an evolutionary psychologist who writes about a Jewish plot to liberalize immigration policies. In 1999, MacDonald appeared in court in Britain to defend the historian and holocaust denier David Irving. The journal’s advisory editorial board includes famous environmental scientists such as Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb, Pimental again, and Vaclav Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba in Canada.

Sitting beside them on the board is J. Philippe Rushton, a psychology professor from the University of Western Ontario in Canada, who has a theory about how black people have small brains, low IQ, large sex organs and high aggression. What are environmental scholars doing getting mixed up with these kinds of people?

So how did you get involved in all this?

Hartmann: I was a feminist as a student. I got into development issues, learned Bengali and lived in a village in Bangladesh for a while in the 1970s. That was about the time when Henry Kissinger was calling the country a basket case, and international agencies like the World Bank were coming in and saying that population growth was the biggest problem. They were promoting coercive population control policies such as pressuring women to be sterilized. But I saw how poor people weren’t the main problem. In terms of environmental conservation, the peasants were the best practitioners. But government policies were stacked against them.

In the village where I lived, the largest landlord in the area was the person who got the World Bank aid money. I got involved in the politics of reproductive rights through that experience. I’ve been fighting for over 20 years against population-control programs, but from a feminist, pro-choice perspective.

How can you be pro-choice and anti-population control?

Hartmann: A lot of people find this hard to understand. But for me, family planning is about human rights and women’s health — not population control. It is about freeing women to have the number of children they want, not blaming them for a whole host of social problems.

* * *

Where did the environment come into your thinking on population?

Hartmann: I got concerned that conflicts over resources such as forests and land were being framed so that population pressure was seen as the main culprit. A variety of groups, including foundations that fund population work, were linking population and environment issues directly to national security. This seemed like a dangerous mix, especially when it got tied up with the growing anti-immigrant movement in the US, and maybe now in Europe, too.

But isn’t population pressure a real environmental issue?

Hartmann: It’s more than an issue, it’s an ideology. Ever since colonial times, Westerners have had what I call a degradation narrative. It says that poor peasants having too many children causes population pressures that degrade the environment and cause more poverty. It is the basic story that many Western environmentalists still tell. And it is now being extended to explain not just the loss of rainforests and species, but also migration and violent conflicts round the world.

You say that this degradation narrative is being used to explain foreign policy disasters. How?

Hartmann: From Afghanistan to Gaza to El Salvador to Indonesia to Somalia, some prominent environmentalists have blamed disorder on resource depletion and environmental decay. And foreign policy people have gone along with it. When the slaughter happened in Rwanda in 1994 and the rest of the world stood by and did nothing, we heard a lot about how it was inevitable because of the high population density that was causing land shortages and poverty. Even Timothy Wirth, Clinton’s undersecretary of state for global affairs and widely seen as an environmental good-guy, said it.

But even some of the theorists behind these ideas, such as Thomas Homer-Dixon, a writer on environmental and security issues, have acknowledged it wasn’t really like that. The massacres started where population pressure was least. It was about state-instigated racism, not environmental degradation. It’s not that population is always irrelevant, it is just that it gets overemphasised. Blaming poor peasants for deforestation is like blaming conscripts for wars.

Did this happen in the US?

Hartmann: Yes. In the US we had a great panic in the 1990s about Haitian boat people arriving on our beaches. The degradation story blamed their flight on population pressure that had destroyed their forests and dried up their wells and eroded their soils. I don’t deny that Haiti suffers from widespread environmental problems. But there were a lot of political issues that got conveniently lost, such as the decades of dictatorial rule by the Duvalier family, who were supported by the US, and an immense gap between rich and poor.

* * *

Do average Americans buy these ideas?

Hartmann: I find even well-educated and well-meaning acquaintances have alarming responses on population issues. They believe the poor create their own problems by breeding, and it absolves the rest of us from responsibility. Even some committed feminists will scapegoat poor women’s fertility for the planet’s evils. It is a kind of ideological schizophrenia. Phrases like the population bomb and the population explosion breed racism.

Few Americans know that, on average, woman round the world have less than three children each. They don’t breed like rabbits. And by 2050 a majority of the world’s population will be likely to live in countries with fertility levels below what demographers regard as replacement levels. It all avoids looking at the real issues on our own doorstep — of over-consumption, for instance. On climate change, we hype up fears of rising emissions in “overpopulated” India rather than looking at our own consumption patterns. Better a one-child policy there than a one-car policy here. We don’t understand that communities all over the world can and do live in sustainable relationships with their environments.