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Yearly Archives: 2015
Gunships ahoy!
The Guardian reports today (see link below) on the result of the EU summit on the Mediterranean disaster. I will comment here on the EU’s plans for military action (see previous two blogs for other issues).
Not surprisingly, senior EU officials “refused to be drawn on the details” of their plans to “identify, capture and destroy” vessels used by traffickers. It is, though, a “military operation” (can these people think of nothing else?), largely focusing on Libya and its surrounding waters. “Diplomats” seemed to be a bit miffed about the politicians’ plans, saying they were “sketchy and imprecise” and had been “hastily announced in a kneejerk response to last weekend’s tragedy”. Then, as if realising how undiplomatic that sounded, they helpfully suggested some details of their own: “Apache helicopter gunships attacking traffickers’ vessels from a range of up to 2 km would be the optimal way to operate”, they said, but argued against “boots on the ground”. This may not have been the day to make this suggestion: almost as they spoke, President Obama was apologising for the fact that his drone strikes on an Al-Qaida camp had ignorantly killed its hostages by mistake.
But step forward Federica Mogherini (EU foreign and security policy coordinator): she has been entrusted with the job of drawing up a “military mission blueprint”. So they seem to be going ahead with these plans for military action. Diplomats, though, are still a bit grumbly, but for a different reason this time: it could take several months or a year to get off the ground, they say. It may require a UN Security Council mandate. It may be vetoed by Russia.
Let’s hope something stops the EU in its tracks. Any real solution is going to take time, but this is not a real solution. Like all such “solutions” (haven’t we learned this yet?) it will only make matters worse. But recent history suggests that once they’ve thought of the helicopter-gunship solution, or the bombing solution, and once they’ve thought of a catchy phrase like “identify, capture and destroy”, these people can ignore the need for a UN mandate and neatly sidestep a veto, wherever it comes from.
Let’s hope I’m wrong.
[Guardian report: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/23/migrant-deaths-eu-funding-rescue-ships-mediterranean?CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2%5D
Nothing new – and their faces don’t deserve to be saved
Our EU leaders have had a summit on the Mediterranean disaster (see previous blog). A confidential draft summit statement has been leaked to The Guardian. Our leaders seem to have made a promise, or perhaps have set themselves a target: about 5,000 resettlement places will be offered to refugees who have survived the Mediterranean.
Sounds good? No. These are European politicians posing as benefactors. Because what it means, as The Guardian puts it today, is that
“the vast majority of those who survive the journey and make it to Italy – 150,000 did so last year – will be sent back as irregular migrants under a new rapid-return programme co-ordinated by the EU’s border agency, Frontex.”
Sent back. To the persecution, war, abuse and poverty that they fled from. Plus, the UK, and other European governments, will collaborate with their persecutors and abusers in their attempts to prevent their fleeing citizens from leaving. The EU will be “cooperating with the countries of origin” to this end. It’s not clear how new this is though. To their shame UK governments have for years been sending “Airline Liaison Officers” to “refugee-producing countries” to do this very job.
What else? EU governments will operate a new “rapid-return programme”, coordinated by Frontex. We’ve been here before too. The UK Border Agency has long had a fast-track system which gets refugees through the asylum-application process at such a rate of knots their feet hardly touch the ground. That’s the point of it. There’s little chance that their asylum applications will get what Home Office propaganda calls “a fair hearing”. There’s no time for that. Just go, is the message. The result has been that many have returned to imprisonment or death.
One more thing. The EU summit statement will try to assure us that search and rescue efforts will continue, despite the abandonment of the earlier system last year. It will say that the EU is to increase the funding of the existing border-survey operation (Triton) and that this “should increase the search and rescue possibilities within the mandate of Frontex.” We may not be persuaded, particularly since the head of Frontex, Fabrice Leggeri, has made it quite clear that, in his view, “Triton cannot be a search and rescue operation.” He continued:
“I mean, in our operational plan, we cannot have provisions for proactive search-and-rescue action. This is not in Frontex’s mandate, and this is, in my understanding, not in the mandate of the European Union.”
So that’s about it, really. Except, perhaps, for the intervention of a joint letter to EU leaders. It’s signed by more than 50 former European prime ministers, former foreign ministers, and others. It calls for an increase in search and rescue operations, “with a mandate and a level of funding that match the humanitarian emergency that confronts us.”
Fine words. Chris Patten is one of these former persons. He is a former EU commissioner and a former Tory Party chairman. He says that the EU leaders should address “the drivers of migration, from conflict to human trafficking, climate change to human rights abuses.” The trouble is, Chris, none of you former government persons ever seriously set out to “address” any of those issues when you had the chance. That was your failure. So your letter and your advice are nothing but hypocrisy. Please go away.
Mediterranean massacre – job done?
There have been fifteen times more deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean so far this year than in the whole of 2014.
Migrants who make this hazardous trip do so in rickety, overcrowded, easily capsized boats provided by people traffickers. The migrants come from dozens of countries. On Channel 4 News last night a Gambian migrant in a camp in Sicily told Matt Frei they included Somalis, Gambians, Libyans, Pakistanis, Iraqis and Nigerians. That wasn’t an exhaustive list. They are fleeing war, persecution, human rights abuse and poverty. They are looking for shelter, work, respect. Many of the survivors will head for Germany, Sweden, France and the UK.
In a camp in Calais an unnamed African migrant translated into English what he’d written in French on a whiteboard he’d set up by the roadside:
“We have altogether to learn to live together. Without this we will die altogether like idiots.” (« Nous devons tous apprendre à vivre ensemble … sinon nous allons tous mourir ensemble comme des idiots. »)
Paraic O’Brien asked him, “Why have you written that there?”
“Because”, he said, “I do it [for] people – they thinking we are animals, some people here think we are idiots, but we show the people here … that we are human beings, we are not animals.”
A year ago the coalition government, together with other EU states, decided to replace the search and rescue programme off the coast of Italy with a coastguard service. They did so, they said, because the knowledge that they would be rescued was a “pull” factor on migrants, encouraging them to make the journey. If the programme stopped so would the migration. The migration of desperate people didn’t stop – and the death toll rose: there were about 800 deaths this week.
Jon Snow took advantage of an election interview last night to ask LibDem leader Nick Clegg whether he “regretted” the government’s decision to abandon the search and rescue programme. Clegg replied: “I actually think, funnily enough, with hindsight that was not the right decision …”
I immediately wondered why he said “funnily enough” – I could see nothing funny about the subject or the way the interview was conducted. But, more importantly, he slipped the words “with hindsight” into his answer. Why, I wondered, did he need hindsight? Everyone concerned about the welfare of forced migrants knew it was a wrong decision as soon as it was made, and most of them said so out loud. Why did he need a year’s hindsight?
Anyway, having used hindsight to distance himself from his support of the policy, he then attempted to widen that distance: even if there was a return to the old search and rescue programme, said he, “that still doesn’t provide you with a solution – a European solution – to a very real problem.”
And what was that problem? It was
“thousands of people, in wretched circumstances, travelling huge distances, exiting ports in North Africa in the hands of illegal human smugglers and traffickers, and perishing on the high seas in the Mediterranean.”
So faced with that, what did the leading politicians in our oh-so-advanced European civilisation decide to do? They abandoned desperate migrants and left them to drown.
Jon Snow attempted to get Clegg to take some responsibility for his actions: “The issue is that you supported it, and the consequence is what we are seeing now.”
Clegg took another distancing step away: “No, no, no, that’s a nonsense. The idea that—”
Snow: And let them drown.
Clegg: No, that’s nonsense. I’m afraid—. I’m afraid they were drowning whether you had a search and rescue operation or not. The solution to this is not to be found at sea. That’s the point.
Ultimately, of course, that is the point. There are issues of economic development to be addressed. There is the question of Western support for dictators who keep their people poor and abuse human rights. There is the question of Western arms sales to such states, who then use them on their own people. There is the question of whether Western military intervention is ever a solution to international problems. After all, two of the countries from which the Mediterranean migrants come were invaded (Iraq) or bombed (Libya) by the West, with no thought given to what would happen afterwards. What happened was division, chaos, ISIL and increased forced migration.
But a year ago Clegg and his coalition didn’t address any of those issues. They didn’t even think about addressing them.
They simply decided to leave people to drown. Job done then, eh Nick?
Insubstantial pageant
Joel Hames puts this quote from The Tempest at the start of his novel Bankers Town, to be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00I53L4NQ
I also think the politicians should take heed of these words:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1
Two election promises, more smoke and mirrors
An envelope drops through my letter-box and I start a blog. I haven’t blogged for a while. I’m in political hibernation. I’m depressed by politics. I’m particularly depressed by the general election pantomime. So I haven’t blogged.
In this morning’s envelope is the election edition of the Unite union’s magazine Unite Works. On the first page the union’s General Secretary, Len McCluskey, tells me “Seize this day. Vote Labour”. Then the rest of the magazine tells me about Labour’s election promises, including quotes by the Labour leader Ed Miliband.
One of them is about “fair wages” and, in part, the legal minimum wage. The national minimum wage is currently £6.50 an hour and Ed’s promise is to “raise the minimum wage to £8 an hour before 2020”. (I immediately wonder why we should have to wait up to 5 years, but anyway …)
Neither of these could be described as a living wage. And that brings me to the second Miliband promise. He will, he says, “encourage more employers to pay the Living Wage”. (I immediately wonder why he says “encourage”, not “oblige” or “compel” or “force”.)
Anyway, note the capital letters. The Living Wage is not to be confused with a real living wage. With capital letters it is the wage set by the Living Wage Foundation (LWF), and employers need to pay that wage if their aim is to get on LWF’s list of nice employers. It is, of course, a voluntary scheme. The LWF’s rate at the moment is £7.85 an hour. Once again, lots of people on hourly rates don’t work anything like a full week or even a full day. Even if they did, this is not a living wage.
The calculations to establish the level of the Living Wage are made by the Centre for Research in Social Policy (CRSP), funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Decisions are made on “how much income households need to afford an acceptable standard of living” – that is, on a calculation of the so-called Minimum Income Standard for the United Kingdom. These decisions, says LWF, “are made by groups comprising members of the public”. Unfortunately, I have not managed to identify who these “members of the public” are. It must be a secret. It is certainly not clear whether they include people who are on the minimum wage – people, that is, who know from experience what is “acceptable” and what is not.
Anyway, if we take the current national minimum wage, the current Living Wage and Labour’s proposed national minimum wage (if we’re lucky, some time in the next 5 years) – none of them amounts in fact to a real living wage.
No change, then.
Now for another promise: Ed also claims: “We will ban exploitative zero hours contracts to ensure workers who work regular hours get a regular contract.”
Note, this is not a promise to abolish zero-hours contracts, just the “exploitative” ones (I immediately wonder how anything called a “zero-hours contract” could be described as “non-exploitative”). Anyway, what this seems to mean is that if you’re on one of these contracts and you work regular hours you will get what he calls “a regular contract”.
With considerable sleight of hand, Unite approves of this: “Labour will ban zero-hour contracts – so if you work regular hours you will get a regular contract.” But if I’m not getting “regular hours”, but instead wait for the phone call each morning to tell me whether to come in for work or not I presumably stay with my zero-hours contract. I don’t call that a ban. And how many people on such contracts get to work regular hours? The joy of zero-hours contracts for bosses is that they don’t have to give regular hours.
In his editorial, Len McCluskey wants us to believe that a Labour government would “attack the evil of zero hours, hire and fire working”, i.e. that zero hours contracts will disappear under Labour.
But Labour’s promise is a tricky bit of wordsmithery that we’d better not fall for, eh Len. It will only be bad for our health. It will only make a bunch of disenchanted voters more bad-tempered than we are already when what we took for a promise disappears into thin air.
And how to vote? I don’t know. That’s why I’m going back to hibernation.
“We are Charlie Hebdo”, and that means we are against racism and Islamophobia
I used to live in France, so the Charlie Hebdo attack doesn’t seem far away. And coupled with the horror of the attack itself it looks as if the response (or, rather, the reaction) will be predictably bad too.
There is, as Tom Robinson sang in 1970s and 1980s Britain, “panic at the county hall” – and in the French government, and here, there and every place where politicians, police officers and hack journalists gather.
What we can be pretty sure of is that there will be an open season on Muslims, in France and across Europe, including the UK. In France Muslims already experience Islamophobic attacks, suffer social and economic inequality and are subject to discrimination. Ethnic minorities are not officially recognised in France (even if you’ve managed to become a French citizen, the message is “Forget where you came from: you’re French, and only French, now”). But the police, on the other hand, “recognise” your ethnic status so that they can stop you, search you and arrest you at the drop of a chapeau. In the Charlie Hebdo case there have been several arrests already, including an 18-year-old who “handed himself in”, according to The Guardian, though the reason he went to the police was apparently that he saw his name as a suspect on the social media and wanted to make it clear he was at school at the time of the attack and had nothing to do with it. As for the press, a number of gun incidents around the time of the shootings are being subtly linked with the Charlie Hebdo attack, while at the same time claiming that no link is intended.
One result of the Charlie Hebdo killings is that there have already been attacks on mosques and individuals across France. The far-right Front National led by Marine Le Pen, with its record of racist attacks, will seek to gain from the situation. And the mainstream right will keep up with their rhetoric, and form electoral pacts with them, and the mainstream left will be cowards.
Charlie Hebdo is against racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia. If “We are Charlie Hebdo” in the UK, let’s say that too and not join in the panic.
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