People's power in Tunisia

Great news from Tunisia! Popular protest has forced the corrupt President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali to flee the country. Good riddance!

The uprising of the Tunisian people was sparked by increases in the costs of cooking oil and sugar but underneath it is a desire for economic justice, civil liberties and democracy.

The intifada in Tunisia will be scaring the living daylights out of corrupt rulers across the Arab world. They are right to be afraid. For far too long the Arab peoples have had to endure the humiliation of being ruled by corrupt, dictatorial, Western-backed stooges. My hope is that the Tunisian intifada will be the spark for a broader revolt that will give to the Arab peoples the justice for which they so desperately yearn.

Egypt's Muslims and Christians unite

Reports of the recent suicide attack on Egyptian Christians attending a church service in Alexandria made for depressing reading. There are fears that the attack signals a growth in religious sectarianism.

I was really heartened therefore to read about the inspiring acts of solidarity Egyptian Muslims have shown towards their Christian brothers and sisters in the aftermath of the New Year's Day bombing.

Juan Cole reports that:

"Thousands of Muslims honored a promise made by their leaders and showed up at Christmas Mass or at candlelight vigils outside Egyptian churches offering their bodies as human shields against any acts of terrorists…

Father Marqus, the Bishop of Alexandria, said that in his entire life he had never seen the degree of solidarity of Muslims with Coptic Christians that he has witnessed in recent days. He said that Muslims attending the funeral of the Christian victims of the New Year’s Day bombing had treated them like Muslim martyrs, pronouncing ‘God is Great!’ in mourning, and had erupted in applause at the condemnation of the terrorists."

A new wave of student protests in 2011

It is great to see that students are getting ready for a new wave of protest in 2011. The Tories and Lib Dems rushed through a vote in parliament on tuition fees in the hope that everyone would just meekly accept the damage they have done. Instead they have inspired a movement that is determined to fight for education.

A major national demonstration has now been called for 29 January, with the support of several trades unions and a range of student campaigns.I was shocked to read that the National Union of Students have voted against supporting this demonstration. Surely the role of NUS is to throw everything it can into reversing this disastrous attack on education? If not, what is the point of a student’s union?

Mary Roberston, who was part of the occupation at the School of Oriental and African Studies, explains why a campaign is underway to get rid of the NUS President, Aaron Porter. You can read her piece on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site.

Students debate fees fight

The fight against education cuts is opening up heated debate inside the National Union of Students.

Student activists from the Free Education Campaign are deeply critical of the role being played by NUS National President, Aaron Porter.

You can read their case here.

Photo: Fiona Edwards, from the Free Education Campaign.

There is an alternative to the VAT rise

VAT hammers the poor hardest, because they spend almost all their meagre incomes, whereas the rich save a big chunk of theirs…Instead of raising VAT and national insurance this year, the government could introduce taxes on carbon and financial transactions next year. And it should levy a tax on land values. Since all the land in Britain is worth some £5 trillion, an annual levy of 1% could raise £50bn a year – without depressing economic activity, because land is in fixed supply: central London can't be spirited away to a tax haven. As well as preventing property bubbles (and busts), a land tax would be fair. A mere 160,000 people (mostly hereditary landowners) own more than two-thirds of Britain – and the value of that land increases not through their own striving, but through that of others. Surely it would be better to tax this windfall gain than the hard work and enterprise of those who generate it?


Excellent article from Phillippe Legrain in Guardian. You can read it in full here.

Police have to win trust for new powers

According to reports in the Guardian, the police are asking for new powers to stop and search people without the need to suspect them of any involvement in crime. We are entitled to ask whether the police can be trusted with such exceptional powers.

There is no doubt that the police have a difficult job to do. Faced with a possibly devastating terrorist attack in a crowded location, it might be necessary for all of us to accept that they need the ability to stop and search anyone they choose, for any reason. In those situations we would have to trust the police to act only when truly necessary, and to do so effectively and fairly.

Unfortunately, recent experience suggests we should be careful before giving the police too many powers. After all they are asking for new powers because the previous legislation – Section 44 of the Terrorism Act – was so grossly misused that European judges ruled it unlawful.

More than 100,000 people were stopped under Section 44 in 2009. Not a single one of these stops led to an arrest for terrorism. Those being stopped were disproportionately from black and minority ethnic communities. On top of that, Section 44 was used against photographers and peaceful protestors. This type of discriminatory and disproportionate policing does not make us safer, but simply generates anger and distrust among law-abiding members of the community.

If the police are going to make the case for additional powers, they need to show that they have learned the lessons from these failures. They have some way to go.

The Queen's question

After listening to an lecture on the financial crisis at the prestigious London School of Economics in November 2008, the Queen somewhat impertinently asked, 'how come nobody could foresee it?'

How come indeed. In his new book, '23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism' Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang provides some answers.

Chief among them is that for the last 30 years we have been blinded by endless propaganda from economist and politician alike about how free market capitalism is the best way to organise society.

Like a religious mantra it has been drummed into our heads that, if subject to only the lightest regulation, markets are inherently self correcting and guaranteed to ensure the most optimum and efficient allocation of resources.

Chang demonstrates this is nonsense. He dismantles myth after myth about how capitalism actually works as opposed to how we are led to believe it works. Again and again he illustrates a conviction, learned the hard way by our ancestors during the 1930's, that it was in the public interest that market capitalism be regulated.

While the economists of today became hypnotised by the apparent infallibility of the finance sector, their predecessors half a century ago would not gave been.

They had lived through the Great Depression. They had seen how economies driven to meet the short term needs of shareholders did long term damage to the underlying economy. They had experienced how the interests of the private financial sector was opposed to interests of society as a whole, and therefore had to be tightly regulated.

That's why the Roosevelt administration introduced strict regulations, including the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, putting a wall between investment and commercial banking (torn down by the Clinton Administration in 1999). And it is why Labour's 1944 manifesto carried the pledge to return finance 'to it's role as the servant, and the intelligent servant, of the community and productive industry; not their stupid master'.

Chang agrees that the market 'is an exceptionally effective mechanism for coordinating complex economic activities across numerous economic agents'. He argues that while the Soviet command economies could be remarkably successful when confronted with tasks which were relatively simple and clear during it's early industrialisation phase, once the economy developed and became more complex, decision making became more complicated and the central planning mechanisms in place were simply not up to the task.

However, he disagrees in investing markets with some divine power.

The market is nothing more than a mechanism-a machine that like a powerful car needs careful steering and good breaks. He highlights over and over how the state not only regulated the market, but subverts it by intervening and allocating resources in the public interest.

Chang also points out that you did not have to be alive during the Great Depression of the 1930's to learn the lesson that capitalism has inherent destructive tendencies.

Since the 1980's there have been dozens of smaller financial crisis: the 1982 Third World debt crisis, the 1995 Mexico peso crisis, the 1997 Asian crisis and the 1998 Russian crisis. For those not blinkered to see it, the writing was on the wall.

We have been failed by a right wing economic model and those politicians, on both right and left, who became enthralled to it. Today millions of people around the world pay the price for that failure in unemployment, cuts to wages and welfare provision. If we are to see any silver lining in the dark clouds above, one must be an opportunity for public re-education about the need to subvert markets to people, not the other way around.

To that end, Chang's book should be required reading.

Christians in Iraq

Wednesday's Channel Four News report on the plight of Iraq's Christians made for sad viewing. This is a community that has existed in the region for 2,000 years. Some of them still speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Yet their very future is under threat.

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq the size of its Christian community has literally halved. While unfavorable demographics and immigration are contributing factors, thousands more have been forced to seek refuge abroad as sectarian religious hatred has made their lives unbearable.

The primary responsibility for this exodus lies with Al Qaeda and their ilk. It is they who are planting the bombs in Churches; it is they who are murdering priests and worshippers; and it is they who seek to sow the seeds of religious hatred. Their intention is clear. They intend to attack Christians 'wherever they can be reached' and fully intend to 'open upon them the doors of destruction and rivers of blood."

It is too simplistic to describe what is taking place as a Muslim-Christian conflict or a 'clash of civilizations'. The vast majority of those fleeing Iraq seek refuge in Muslim majority countries elsewhere in the Middle East. And there is a long history of religious coexistence and tolerance in the region.

But it undeniably the case that the invasion of Iraq has stoked the flames of religious hatred and provided a fertile breeding ground for those hate filled agendas. As William Dalrymple notes, it is ironic that a war championed by self avowed Christians in Bush and Blair, and described as a 'crusade' by one of them, has 'created the environment that led to the destruction of Christianity in one of its ancient heartlands – something Arab, Mongol and Ottoman conquests all failed to pull off'.

What is our government doing about abuses in Bangladesh and Kashmir?

Wikileaks is providing a huge public service in highlighting the complicity of governments in human rights abuses, as the latest reports about Bangladesh and Kashmir illustrate.

According to today's Guardian the British government are involved in training what human rights organisations describe as 'Latin American style death squads' in Bangladesh. The Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) has a notorious reputation. It kills and tortures with impunity and, allegedly, is responsible for 1,000 murders in the last 6 years. The Guardian says 'the cables make clear that British training for RAB officers began three years ago under the last Labour government' and that British officials had provided training as recently as October.

Wikileaks also revealed more evidence of 'abductions, enforced disappearances, custodial killings, rape, torture and detention' in Kashmir. Indian journalist Dilnaz Boga rightly asks what it would take for western governments to exert pressure on India over its blatant abuse of human rights.

Outside interference from Pakistan has often been used as a cover to justify human rights abuses in Kashmir but as Dilnaz comments, 'the summer of 2010 brought on a significant change in the Kashmiri struggle for independence from India. From being a pan-Islamic militant movement sponsored by Pakistan in 1989, it has now transformed into a non-violent indigenous people's movement. But the response of the state has not altered since the 1990s'.

For historic reasons Britain has a distinct influence in the region. It is time that influence was used to end human rights abuses rather than begin them.

Len McCluskey is right

Yesterday, Len McCluskey called on his trade union colleagues to discuss coordinated strike action to stop the government's 'austerity frenzy'. He also called for a coalition of resistance to unite trade unionists, students and service users. It makes sense to me. How else can an ideologically inspired attempt to destroy the welfare state be stopped without resistance on the broadest possible scale?

But some of the reaction to his interview has been very revealing.

Government officials weighed in with new threats to tighten anti-union legislation. They suggested that a legal strike should only be possible if a majority of union members vote for it, regardless of whether they chose to take part in the ballot or not. The double standards are breathtaking. This is a government that nobody voted for, in an election in which 35% of the electorate did not feel inspired enough to vote at all. Yet this is apparently a mandate to destroy the welfare state, and millions of jobs along with it.

The Guardian’s editorial wasn’t as threatening. It was just pathetically abusive, portraying McCluskey as a trade union dinosaur, misty-eyed with nostalgia for the 1970's. This is the same Guardian that advised its readers to vote for the Lib Dems, without which this Tory government would not exist. Perhaps they have resorted to Daily Mail-style clichés out of embarrassment. In any case, they offer no way of reversing this Tory agenda. In typical Guardian style they regret its excesses, appeal for a middle ground, and then conclude that resistance is futile.

Len McCluskey was certainly right to praise the way the student movement has shaken up this government. The heat has been turned up, and I suspect Vince Cable’s statement about walking out of government if 'pushed too far' over the cuts is directly related to it.

But students alone won't be able to reverse the government’s agenda. For that, we need a movement of similar militancy throughout the rest of society. We are not there yet. Many people still think the cuts are ‘necessary’.

Len McCluskey is right again that the unions, much weaker than they once were, are still uniquely placed to unite workers with users of public services, and the rest of the community, into a formidable alliance.

With unemployment predicted to hit 3 million in the coming year, a 20% increase in VAT on the way, and the public still to become fully aware of the assault upon the NHS, a fall in support for the Con-Dems is predictable. But without pressure being applied, on as many fronts as possible, the government could still emerge unscathed.

Len McCluskey is stating no more than the obvious truth when he says, “It is our responsibility not just to our members but to the wider society that we defend our welfare state and our industrial future against this unprecedented assault.”