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A world that fits
Brilliant!
In the lands of my imagination
There exists a nation, wise,
That’s built on ethical foundations
For to see its people – all its people
Meaningfully thrive
With Integrity and Honesty,
Equality and Liberty,
Its cornerstones on which
All other bricks look and rely.
There, the atmosphere is friendly
And the population wild but kind
For they have made Society’s priority
Achieving peace of mind.
They recognise you cannot
Put a price on individuals
Who see themselves fulfilled
Through their own eyes;
That a populace that’s confident,
Is not inclined to rush
To crush each other;
Even less to jump to judge
And moralize.
For they have learned a treasure
Through the measurement of time:
They understand true freedom starts
In one’s own heart and mind.
And no one dreams to mess with it
Because their own shoes, comfy, fit;
There, everyone’s a valued peer
And so respect and trust…
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For some pounds
Excellent!
There is so little room to move
Here on the common ground:
Can’t climb up quite high enough;
Can’t slip that much further down.
A life in limbo with no window,
Ground to powder for some pounds
By banks of think tanks flanking clowns.
But surely the economy
Should fit to our Society:
To you and me;
For you and me
And not this crazy other way around…
Stony silence ended – Alan Johnson replies
Alan Johnson has now replied to my email on TTIP. I have put the letter below, but here are a couple of points:
My first reaction on reading the letter was “and if not?”
Johnson seems to share concerns “about the impact that TTIP could have on public services – particularly the NHS.” He believes “the NHS should be exempt from the agreement and that the Government should now push for this exemption.”
And if not, Alan, what will you, the two Eds, Harriet and all your mates actually do?
He seems to share concerns that TTIP wants foreign investors to have the right to sue sovereign governments before ad hoc tribunals for loss of profits resulting from public policy decisions. “I believe”, he says, “that governments should be able to legislate in the public interest and that this should be protected in any dispute resolution mechanisms.”
And if not?
Johnson also says, “It is … crucial … that the benefits of TTIP filter down to employees, small businesses and consumers …” – what’s it mean, “filter down”? It is apparently also crucial “that the deal is open and accountable …” “Open and accountable” is usually just jargon. It goes with (I’m surprised he didn’t use it) “transparent”. Once you’ve seen that word you know it’s going to be as opaque as can be. And remember, of course, that the negotiations are being held in secret, so that’s already a blow to openness, accountability and transparency. They’ve clearly started as they mean to go on, but he didn’t mention that.
But anyway – just in case I’m being too suspicious-minded – let me ask of these pious wishes too: and if not?
I think the answer is “If not – we won’t do anything.” After all he begins the letter by saying, “I support the principles behind TTIP – the free trade agreement that is currently being negotiated between the USA and the EU.” And he supports them because the EU and the USA “are, of course, the UK’s two largest markets …” It’s the market that’s crucial. That’s why the rest of the sentence isn’t worth the e-space it’s typed on, the bit about the benefits of TTIP (“removing trade barriers, boosting growth and creating jobs”). Because all promises of benefits – especially the creation of jobs – will be broken if market considerations dictate. Likewise any promise that governments will “be able to legislate in the public interest” without getting stamped on – sorry, taken to a tribunal!
He promises at the end of the letter to “continue to follow this issue closely”.
Us too, Alan.
Anyway, here’s the letter:
“Dear Mr Mouncer,
Thank you for your email and apologies that you did not receive a response to your original email, this was an oversight on my part.
Let me start by saying that I support the principles behind TTIP – the free trade agreement that is currently being negotiated between the USA and the EU. These are, of course, the UK’s two largest markets and I believe that TTIP has the potential to bring significant benefits, including removing trade barriers, boosting growth and creating jobs.
It is also crucial, though, that the benefits of TTIP filter down to employees, small businesses and consumers, that the deal is open and accountable and that it raises or at least maintains labour, consumer, environmental and safety standards.
I also share the concerns that many constituents have raised about the impact that TTIP could have on public services – particularly the NHS. I believe that the NHS and public services need to be more, not less, integrated and I am concerned at the worrying fragmentation of health services that is taking place under this Government. That is why I believe that the NHS should be exempt from the agreement and that the Government should now push for this exemption.
I know that there is also considerable concern about the proposed inclusion of Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions in the TTIP deal. I believe that governments should be able to legislate in the public interest and that this should be protected in any dispute resolution mechanisms. I also believe there needs to be far greater transparency in this area and that while the EU Commission has recently instigated some welcome changes on this, they can and must go further.
I hope that the Government now listen and respond to these concerns and ensure that TTIP delivers the jobs, growth and fairer deal for consumers that we all want to see.
Thank you once again for writing to me and sharing your views. I can assure you that I will continue to follow this issue closely and bear in mind the points you raise.
Yours sincerely,
Rt Hon Alan Johnson MP”
LA MÉDAILLE/THE MEDAL by Renaud Séchan
Another view of war to the one we’re getting in the commemoration/glorification events relating particularly to the First World War. It was called “the war to end all wars” but in fact led to 100 years of war. Patriotism does not allow us to say “My country was wrong”. Instead the most we can say is “My country, right or wrong.” Some years ago, the French singer Renaud expressed his own brand of anti-war feeling, and his words are worth hearing. Here he is on YouTube performing his song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYs-Xd2N3lE
and I’ve put the words below – with my own translation (apologies, but I am not a poet!):
LA MÉDAILLE
Un pigeon s’est posé‚
Sur l’épaule galonnée
Du Maréchal de France
Et il a décoré
La statue dressée
D’une gastrique offense
Maréchaux assassins
Sur vos bustes d’airain
Vos poitrines superbes
Vos médailles ne sont
Que fiente de pigeon
De la merde.
Un enfant est venu
Aux pieds de la statue
Du Maréchal de France
Une envie naturelle
L’a fait pisser contre elle
Mais en toute innocence
Maréchaux assassins
Le môme mine de rien
A joliment vengé
Les enfants et les mères
Que dans vos sales guerres
Vous avez massacres.
Un clodo s’est couché
Une nuit juste aux pieds
Du Maréchal de France
Ivre mort au matin
Il a vomi son vin
Dans une gerbe immense
Maréchaux assassins
Vous méritez rien
De mieux pour vos méfaits
Que cet hommage immonde
Pour tout le sang du monde
Par vos sabres verses.
Un couple d’amoureux
S’embrasse sous les yeux
Du Maréchal de France
Muet comme un vieux bonze
Il restera de bronze
Raide comme une lance
Maréchaux assassins
L’amour ne vous dit rien
A part bien sur celui
De la Patrie hélas
Cette idée dégueulasse
Qu’à mon tour je conchie.
THE MEDAL
A pigeon perched
On the braided shoulder
Of the Marshal of France
And he decorated
The upright statue
With a gastric offence
Marshals – assassins –
On your busts of bronze
Your superb chests
Your medals are nothing
But pigeon’s droppings
Nothing but shit.
A child came
To the feet of the statue
Of the Marshal of France
A natural need
Made him piss against it
But in all innocence
Marshals – assassins –
This unthinking child
Has nicely avenged
The children and mothers
You have massacred
In your dirty wars.
A tramp slept
One night at the feet
Of the Marshal of France
In the morning, dead drunk,
He vomited his wine
Like an enormous fountain
Marshals – assassins –
You deserve nothing better
For your misdeeds
Than this filthy homage
For all the blood of the world
Shed by your swords.
Two lovers are kissing
Under the gaze
Of the Marshal of France
The dumb old despot
Will remain set in bronze
Stiff as a lance
Marshals – assassins –
Love means nothing to you
Except, of course, patriotic love
That disgusting idea
That I, in my turn,
Cover with shit.
A stony silence – but anyway let’s sign the petition
You may remember that I wrote to Alan Johnson (Labour MP for West Hull) nearly two months ago to ask him about Labour Party policy towards the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the secret deal being negotiated between the EU and the US. I pointed out that TTIP, though
“posing as a traditional trade agreement, has as its goal the removal of regulatory barriers which, even now, serve to protect us in a number of ways, e.g. with regard to workers’ rights, food safety rules, toxic chemical use, digital privacy laws and the banking safeguards introduced after 2008.”
Moreover, I told him, it “wants to open up public services and government procurement contracts to competition from multinational companies”, thus threatening “even more privatisation in areas such as health and education”. I asked him what Labour party policy would be on TTIP if it won the 2015 general election, and I suggested that “TTIP, and the secret negotiations to get it, should be abandoned entirely” (see my blog for the full letter: https://bobmouncerblog.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/secretly-negotiating-to-steal-whats-ours/).
So far I have received nowt but a stony silence from my parliamentary representative. Meanwhile, due to campaigns against it, the negotiators’ secrecy has been undermined (which must make them really cross). One such campaign is being waged by The People’s NHS, and it’s not hard to see why: the group points out that Slovakia (which has a similar deal) was sued for trying to nationalise part of its healthcare service while Australia is being sued for trying to introduce plain cigarette packets. The People’s NHS points out:
“If companies wanted to sue our government, they can do so in a secret court. There will be no public outcry about what they’re trying to do because in most cases, we won’t know it has happened until it’s too late. This deal is so secretive, and the consequences so potentially far-reaching, that the Guardian labelled it ‘a gunpowder plot against democracy’. If we don’t get this deal debated in the open, we may never know the full scale of the havoc it could wreak.”
So I’ve written to Alan Johnson asking for a reply. Meanwhile, let’s all sign the petition: http://action.peoplesnhs.org/eu-ttip-debate
The best of all possible worlds?
This article by the US ambassador to the Court of St James is incredible. Literally. And I can’t work out for the life of me what it’s doing in The New Statesman.
It is, I think, intended as a drug, or as the diplomatic equivalent of “Calm down, dears”. It’s so at odds with the reality we know that I glanced at the calendar to check if it was, after all, April 1st. But no, it is November 2nd, just under two months afer the anniversary of the second political event in my lifetime when everybody can remember where they were when it happened (the first was JFK’s assassination). And one of the events in a long chain that tells us that we reap what we sow and that the last thing we should do is sit back and trust that, due to America under Obama being “more flexible, nimble and creative in response to global threats”, the US and the world is now “more peaceful, more prosperous and more just”.
That would be very foolish indeed, Your Excellency.
To drown or not to drown? – a “finely balanced decision”, says MEP
The scandal of the government’s new policy to let the Mediterranean boat people drown (see my earlier blog: http://wp.me/p2Ygy5-b4 ) continued last night on Channel 4 News. The previous policy of supporting rescue operations in the Mediterranean, the government has decided, had only encouraged people to board ramshackle boats to find safety in Europe when, if they knew there would be nobody to rescue them if they got into life-threatening difficulties, they would stay where they were. So rescue had to stop and the boat people had to learn the lesson.
Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan defended the new policy and looked only momentarily uncomfortable when Jon Snow remarked that letting people drown “seems to be an intolerable decision”.
“Well”, said Hannan, “it’s a finely balanced one.”
So it is, Daniel, so it is.
My friend Robert Marcus was shocked at the whole idea and compared it to “withdrawing support from the fire brigade as its continuing existence encourages people to be careless with matches.”
Exactly.
Not that the boat people themselves are being careless. The Refugee Council’s Maurice Wren said on the same programme:
“People will move, they will find a way to find safety or they will make every attempt to find safety. And the point we make is that when you’re standing on the quayside in Tripoli, about to board a rickety, overcrowded boat, that’s a rational decision for many people, because it’s their best chance of safety.”
On the “finely balanced decision”, Hannan also said that he couldn’t “imagine what it’s like to take that decision, and the burden of responsibility … I’m very glad I’m not the person having to do it.”
Really? Earlier, Snow had asked him whether, if the policy came up in the European Parliament, he would vote for it. Hannen avoided the question. But he clearly would vote for it. Which, in my book, would make him responsible. You can’t avoid it, Daniel, that old “burden of responsibility”.
The Lady’s not for rescue
People fleeing persecution who find themselves crossing the Mediterranean in crowded, unstable boats often don’t make it. They drown.
As a result of the Lampedusa tragedy in 2013, when 500 people died, the Italian authorities launched a search and rescue operation called Mare Nostrum, which scans the Mediterranean for boats in trouble and rescues as many people as it can. The scheme involves the participation of the Italian navy and, since Lampedusa, has managed to save at least 150,000 lives.
The operation is now being closed down. According to The Guardian:
“The Italian authorities have said their operation, which involves a significant part of the Italian navy, is unsustainable. Despite its best efforts, more than 2,500 people are known to have drowned or gone missing in the Mediterranean since the start of the year.”[1]
It will not be replaced by anything remotely like it being set up by the European Union or any member state – in effect there will just be a border-control operation.
The saving of 150,000 lives must be considered a worthwhile achievement by any normal standards – but not according to Lady Anelay, minister of state at the Foreign Office. The UK, she announced (“quietly”, according to The Guardian) would not support any future search and rescue operations. Her Ladyship believes that any such operation in these waters represents an “unintended ‘pull factor’” on people which encourages them to board ramshackle boats to Europe’s shores when they otherwise wouldn’t do so.
They don’t need rescue, according to Lady Anelay. They need discipline and punishment. Apparently, drowning them will teach them a lesson and discourage others. What she said was this: if the UK were to fund a new search and rescue operation it would encourage “more migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing”. This would lead “to more tragic and unnecessary deaths”. Presumably the deaths that will be caused by the government’s no-rescue policy will be untragic and necessary to good order. Discipline and punish. If you drown in your attempt to flee persecution in your own country don’t go whining to her Ladyship. She’s warned you what to expect.
And the government wants new immigrants and citizens to adopt “British values”? Well, if Lady Anelay’s announcement is an expression of those values, it has to be said that all the Mediterranean boat people and all the new immigrants and new citizens in the UK are better than that.
Read The Guardian’s dossier on the Mediterranean migrants: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/20/-sp-migrants-tales-asylum-sea-mediterranean
[1] The Guardian, Monday 27 October 2014.
There is no such thing as an ‘England-only’ issue..
Much talk continues in the media of the ‘inevitability’ and supposed fairness of ‘English devolution’ – which is nothing more than a cynical Tory attempt to neutralise the 58 out of 59 Scottish MPs who are not Tories, preventing them from hindering the Right’s plans to further strip away vital supports from vulnerable and ordinary people and making it far harder for a Labour government to achieve good in government or resist Tory predations in opposition.
The purported logic behind this effective coup is that, if the people of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have the right to decide issues such as health and education spending and (in the case of Scotland) to raise revenues, ‘then it’s only right’ that English people have the ‘freedom’ to decide on so-called ‘England only’ matters.
But this is a complete red herring, because there is no such thing as an ‘England only’ issue.
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Secretly negotiating to steal what’s ours
Heard about TTIP? No? Nor have most people. That’s because it’s a secret. Its full title is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. I only heard about it recently, and I was worried enough to rouse myself to write to my MP about it. Here’s the letter, and when you’ve read it you might want to write to your MP too:
“Dear Alan Johnson, I am writing to ask you about Labour Party policy on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), currently being negotiated in secret between the EU and the US. I am concerned that TTIP, posing as a traditional trade agreement, has as its goal the removal of regulatory barriers which, even now, serve to protect us in a number of ways, e.g. with regard to workers’ rights, food safety rules, toxic chemical use, digital privacy laws and the banking safeguards introduced after 2008. I am particularly concerned, however, about TTIP’s potential effect on public services. TTIP apparently wants to open up public services and government procurement contracts to competition from multinational companies. This threatens even more privatisation in areas such as health and education. This is particularly worrying in the case of the NHS since TTIP wants foreign investors to have the right to sue sovereign governments before ad hoc tribunals for loss of profits resulting from public policy decisions. So it looks as if, for example, Virgin could sue the Department of Health in certain circumstances if, say, it didn’t get the contract for STD services in a particular area. In truth, nobody knows how this “investor-state dispute settlement” mechanism would work. But however it might work it seems set to throw any democratic control out of the window. I also understand that, while the European Commission claimed that public services would be excluded from any TTIP agreement because they are “supplied in the exercise of government authority”, it has also recently said that it wants to see public services included in EU trade agreements. This contradictory stance can give no comfort to those of us who fear that our public services are soon to be entirely private – taken out of our hands. What is your view on these matters? And what is your view, and indeed the Labour Party’s view, on multinational companies’ rights to sue governments for loss of profits? And what would Labour Party policy be on TTIP if it won the 2015 election? From what I’ve read, I think that TTIP, and the secret negotiations to get it, should be abandoned entirely. Yours sincerely, … …”
See what I mean? Also look at this link: http://www.waronwant.org/campaigns/trade-justice/more/inform/18078-what-is-ttip
Bob Mouncer's blog 