In Britain, being thin is increasingly seen as a sign of wealth and status, yet more of us are overweight than ever. Are we in danger of becoming a society segregated according to size?
Dr Hamish Meldrum, head of the British Medical Association, is one of life's boffins. With his salt-and-pepper beard and his sensible shoes, he is known for his thoughtful and circumspect comments on all the matters that fall into his remit. But earlier this month, Dr Meldrum seemed to veer off course. He claimed in an interview that fat people are simply greedy and obesity is caused by over eating. "We are in danger of 'over-medicalising' the problem," he said.
Obesity experts were immediately outraged, and said that Dr Meldrum's remarks were unhelpful and anachronistic, as well as politically incorrect. The 88,000 people who were prescribed with anti-obesity prescriptions for drugs like Xenical and Reductil last year, and the one in four Brits who, according to the World Health Organisation, are obese, no doubt felt similarly affronted.
How, they probably wondered, could Dr Meldrum, a medical man, not understand that their problem is genetic, an illness, a cruel compulsion. How could he fail to understand that what fat people need is medical intervention and drugs, and that if this was a simple matter of eating less then they wouldn't be in this position in the first place? And many would also say, what is wrong with being fat anyway?
However, if you are not one of these people, then let me ask you this. How many of you have watched an obese person chowing down on a double hamburger with double fries and a triple cola and thought "Why don't you get it?" How many of you have stood in a newsagent watching an overweight person forcing their overweight hands into a family-sized bag of Doritos and thought "You shouldn't be eating that."
And how many of you listened to Dr Meldrum and thought "He's absolutely bloody spot on."
Right or wrong, the reason Dr Meldrum caused such controversy is because his words in fact marked the latest victory in a cold war that is taking place on every street corner and within every household in the country. Thanks to Dr Meldrum, the skinnies scored again.
While, publicly we all recognize that people can be divided over deep-seated issues such as religion, politics and money, we are now also separated by another issue: fat.
We barely noticed it as it crept its way into our mind, put its roots down in our brain and expanded its tendrils slowly into our consciousness. Slowly, it began to control our views and guide our judgement towards other people. Now, I'm not entirely sure a thin person can look at a fat person without passing a silent judgement, nor can a fat person look at a thin person without sentiment, be that envy or angry defiance. Each side is busy racking up points against the other and at the moment, the skinnies, lead by the likes of Victoria Beckham, Kate Moss and Nicole Ritchie, are winning.
They are the most beautiful, they are the most successful, they are the in-crowd. There was once a time when being large was a sign of prosperity but that pendulum has now swung in the opposite direction and now, according to the Office of National Statistics, obesity is more common amongst lower classes and those in "routine or semi-routine occupational groups than the managerial and professional groups". The fatties, despite well-respected and successful figureheads such as Beth Ditto and Kelly Osbourne, are fighting a losing battle to be seen, heard and respected.
Perhaps this is not surprising, given the strength of recent scientific research on the matter, which only seems to fuel the social divide. Take the report published earlier this year in the Journal of Evolution and Human Behaviour. It concluded that fat people actually have the ability to make thin people ill.
The researchers said that thin people instinctively dislike fat people because their immune system associates fat with infection and sends out a signal of disgust. It is, they say, no different than what happens to our bodies when nausea is triggered on encountering a bad smell.
The study points out that "antipathy towards obese people is a powerful and pervasive prejudice" but suggests that far from being irrational, this could be rooted in a clever Darwinian desire to protect against signs of disease.
Another recent study, carried out at the University of California, showed that obesity spreads within social networks and that people with fat friends are 50 per cent more likely to be overweight than those who hang out with skinny people.
These things considered, its difficult not to wonder if one day the fat and the thin will live as two separate tribes, or perhaps, eventually, species.
Peter Marsh, the co-director of the Oxford based Social Issues Research Centre has just completed a report on "Belonging" in 21st century Britain; he agrees that fat and thin is enough to drive the population into distinct groups.
"We consider ourselves individuals, but it is our membership of particular groups that is most important in constructing a sense of identity" he says. "Without doubt, there is escalating polarization between fat and thin and we suspect that will continue for some time. Couple that with a general sense in Britain that thin equals beautiful and healthy, and what you have is a growing sense that thin is 'in' and fat is very much 'out.'
"This means that members of the thin group grow in power, with better access to jobs and a voice that is more likely to be heard, while fat people feel like an unpopular minority and are without doubt stigmatized. They feel increasingly inadequate, insecure and neurotic, pinning all their hopes on fad diets. Which is a depressing thought given that in the long term, research has proven that those who spend their lives on diets actually end up larger than those who don't diet."
This segregation is, without doubt, growing more extreme, and in some cases more bizarre, by the day. In America, trendsetters such as the website Style.com and The New York Times have named "the bony parts", namely legs and ' the clavicle, as the "new erogenous zones". Really? Even skinnies should now be asking themselves whether it's really possible that the sight of a razor-edged collar bone can make men weak at the knees in the same way as an image of Scarlett Johanson's cleavage?
But no, their stampede continues regardless, and their propaganda grows stronger by the day. The book Skinny Bitch, of which Victoria Beckham is a fan, has become a bestseller and every serious-minded skinny has a copy. It promotes a vegan lifestyle of fruit, vegetables and whole grains and is billed as a "no-nonsense, tough-love guide for savvy girls who want to stop eating crap and start looking fabulous."
The quiet town of Buckingham has also morphed into a skinny mecca. Scientists there are busy working on a baby formula with the power to programme babies' metabolisms to prevent them from ever getting fat. No doubt, if successful, it will make them all billionaires. The drug will influence levels of the hormone leptin, which is thought to act on the hypothalamus which influences food intake and energy expenditure in the long term. If the hypothalamus can be programmed to guarantee your baby girl will still be able to slip into her 26-inch waist jeans even after having three children, thanks to a quick injection shortly after birth, then why not.
And the goalposts of what is thin have been firmly moved too. Once, a size 10 was good enough. Now, unless you've been hiding in a cave in the Outer Hebrides, you will be more than aware that a size zero is the new ideal. In LA, women are apparently achieving this by taking a veterinary medication called clenbuterol. Normally used to treat asthma in horses, it causes rapid weight loss in humans.
I was offered the job of reporter on a recent Channel 4 documentary which would have involved me effectively starving myself and over-exercising for 10 weeks to see if I could achieve a size zero. I was told I'd also need to eat cotton wool, make myself sick, purge on laxatives and live on a diet of only lemonade and cayenne pepper.
I turned the job down on the grounds of a desire to preserve my sanity, but I was left wondering if the programme's producer might be secretly longing to take on the role herself. She talked to me as if the entire female population of the world were worshipping at the altar of size-zero women.
Everyone, I thought, save for the mothers of two size-zero models, 21-year-old Brazilian Ana Carolina Reston and Uruguayan model Luisel Ramos, who recently died of the results of their starvation diets, and the parents of the legions of girls with eating disorders who refuse to eat in the hope of one day looking as thin as Paris Hilton.
Thin may be in, but it is impossible to avoid the fact eating disorders across all ages, from children to middle-aged women, are on the rise. Online, pro anorexic groups, where girls boast of choosing an anorexic lifestyle and post "thinspiration" pictures of skinny celebrities, are thriving.
One clinic in Scotland recently reported a four-fold increase in women in their 30s, 40s and 50s being admitted with anorexia and bulimia. Surely something has gone wrong when middle-aged women subject themselves to tortuous gym routines and starvation diets when a decade ago they would have been more concerned with getting the children to pony club on time. But then, 10 years ago, they didn't have to wake up to see the likes of Madonna, fast approaching 50, prancing around in a high-cut leotard and putting everyone else her age to shame.
Dr Helena Fox is an eating-disorder specialist and consultant psychiatrist at the Capio Nightingale psychiatric hospital in London, and runs a clinic that is permanently full. She believes that current super-thin standards will only lead more women to knock at her door.
"Although there are many factors that lead to eating disorders, the bottom line is that my patients simply believe that if they are going to be successful, considered attractive and be able to do things like get married and find a husband, they have to be skinny," says Dr Fox. "They say things like 'Yesterday was a good day.' When I ask them what this means, it turns out they mean they only ate three lettuce leaves. In today's world, that has become an achievement."
Thankfully, a backlash has begun against the skinny army, but what it will achieve is not yet known. In America, we are now seeing the rise of so-called "fat acceptance groups", such as NAAFA (the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance) which empower obese people to live more fulfilling lives. Groups meet to offer support and advice to each other just as Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous do.
The likes of Beth Ditto and Tyra Banks are attempting to do their bit too. Banks, after being pictured in a less than flattering swimsuit last December, told those that criticized her to "kiss my fat ass" and started a campaign called So What! which aimed at encouraging women to be positive about their bodies. Beth Ditto is rumoured to be bringing out her own plus-size clothes line.
Following in their wake is American comedian and actress Mo'nique, a size 18, who bills herself as a "fat woman talking about being a fat woman." Her book, Skinny Women Are Evil, is about raising the plus-size army to fight back against the skinnies, and quickly became a best seller.
"I wish I didn't have to write the book, but I did because big women are subjected to ridicule simply because we're blessed with a few extra pounds," she says. "I've enjoyed a life-long affair with every roll, every curve and every pound, and because I've always loved me, I've never felt the need to apologise.
"Skinny women are the most intolerant, competitive, judgemental, shallow, sharp-tongued creatures to walk the face of the earth, and just because we like to eat doesn't meant there shouldn't be room in the spotlight for us to shine too."
A backlash is evident on British shores as well, although without quite the same veracity. Nonetheless, issues like model health are being tackled. Although the Interim Report of the Model Health Inquiry, for instance, stopped short of enforcing rigorous measures to weigh models or test their BMI, it did recommend models aged under 16 be banned from runways and also suggested designers should be trained to help models with eating disorders, and that all models should receive education about healthy eating.
And a new Channel 4 series, despite being dubiously named Cook Yourself Thin, is about ditching diet books and learning to cook from scratch. It is fronted by a Claudia Schiffer's ex chef Sophie Michell, who despite cooking for a supermodel is herself a rounded size 12.
"We've lost all sense of middle ground when it comes to weight," says Sophie, who has been critised for being too plump to be qualified to talk about weight loss. "I did a demonstration with some girls recently and they literally backed away from the counter when I got out the olive oil. Why is it that it's no longer enough to be just healthy?"
But it is difficult to be entirely convinced of the rectitude of this backlash. Tyra Banks, for example, undid her good work when she lost two stone this summer, suggesting that despite her bravado, she had taken the criticism to heart.
And take the very public case of Anne Diamond, the British television presenter. She spent years being overweight and a role model for bigger women. Then she had a gastric band fitted. "Being overweight affected every day of my life," says Diamond. "It isn't easy starting the day with a smile when all you can do is pull on a pair of size 22 stretch black trousers and a T-shirt that could shelter a dozen earthquake victims. You feel wretched. It shouldn't, but fat demeans you, even in your own eyes."
Perhaps, no matter how proud they appear and what they say, the fat can't help but wish they were thin.
As with any war, the only real solution lies in coming together and developing a mutual respect for the other's position. This would seem especially poignant given the thoughts of Dr Adrienne Key, a specialist at the Priory Clinic.
She points out that both extremely fat and super thin are part of the same psychologically disrupted attitude to food that is endemic in Western consumer societies. Third World cultures, she says, do not suffer from a wish to be a size zero, nor do they experience obesity. Fat people and thin people, she says, are fighting the same battle.
This knowledge however, is unlikelyto spur either side to lay down arms, let alone call a truce. No, this is a battle that for the immediate future at least, is here to stay. *
Fiona Wright: So I'm skinny, get over it
I've been slim all my life. I've never dieted, I rarely go to the gym and I'm a size eight. Even having two children in quick succession has made no difference to my weight. In fact, I'm thinner now than I was before. Do you hate me? I spend my life being chastised by my friends. "You don't eat enough," they cry. "You're too thin, your legs will snap."
I've never really minded though, because I know the secret code. People who criticise me for being slim are jealous. "Skinny cow" translates roughly as "I want to be slim like you." Adults rarely mock fat people, because no one likes kicking someone when they're down.
Most people think I must have good genes or I'm just lucky. The bottom line is, I just don't eat that much. I don't consciously diet, but I eat healthy food in moderate portions. I don't obsess about it. To be honest, I don't really think about it. And there's the rub. Fat people do think about food – a great deal. They know that they can lose weight by eating less, but they choose not to. And let's be clear here, it is a choice. Over-eating is a vice. It makes people feel better, temporarily. If you're eating because you're unhappy or bored, unless that changes, you won't stop eating.
I'm not suggesting that I lead this flawless life, but I don't rely on food to bolster my feelings. Because whether we like it or not, looks count, and looking fit, slim and healthy is about taking responsibility for yourself. If you're very fat, whether it's true or not, people think you have no will-power and no self-respect. They think you're not good at your job, not good spouse material, not well-paid and not successful. I know I'm going to get hate mail for this, but after doing a quick poll in the office, no one disagreed with me. Apart from anything else, being fat is not good for your health. Lovely, clever Dawn French and Fern Britton can protest all they like about being happy with their size, but they are more likely to die earlier than thin people. And that really is the bottom line.
Ursula Hirschkorn: Fat and proud
Anyone would think that being able to squeeze your skinny haunches into a size zero was some sort of Nobel Prize-worthy achievement, the way we laud those few women who manage it.
Posh Spice, Nicole Richie – what's their talent apart from an ability to say no to food? Who cares when their bony behinds have dozens of picture spreads devoted to them?
But what good is a seriously skinny body, if no one gets to enjoy it, least of all yourself? I've been a size six (a US size 2), and I was miserable as sin, caught like a hamster in a constant cycle of fitness and fasting, just so I could keep track of every bone in my ribcage.
After years of starving myself to keep slim, I realised I was on the wrong side of the battle against fat, and that I should give in and let my inner big girl out to play.
I'd brainwashed myself that when it came to diet, dainty was best, picking salad over steak, espresso over ice cream, but who was I kidding? If cottage cheese really was tastier than a luxuriously creamy korma, we'd all be size zero and it'd be no big deal.
The new, super-sized me can enjoy a meal out with friends without salivating over their every mouthful as I toy with a salad leaf; I can sleep in, instead of setting the alarm for 6am for daily trips to the gym; and I can grow out of my clothes and into my curves.
Give me the choice between size zero, or 2-0, and I'll race you to the plus-size rail. It's not that I have anything against the skinnies (after all, it's nothing a few cream cakes can't cure), it's just being fat is so much more fun.
Skinny nation
The role models
1. Kate Moss: Veteran waif and supermodel.
2. Rachel Zoe: Anorexic-looking stylist to the stars "credited" with starting the size-zero movement.
3. Angelina Jolie: Skinnier with every new child.
4. Victoria Beckham: Number one "thinspiration" role model on pro-anorexia websites (which promote anorexia as a lifestyle choice).
5. Mischa Barton: Admits she'd be "frightened" of having the voluptuous figure of her former 'The OC' co-star Rachel Bilson.
6. Nicole Ritchie: Actress and singer said, pre-pregnancy, to weigh just six stone.
7. Kate Bosworth: Once a glowing surf chick, now one of the " lollipop head brigade".
The culture
Books: 'Skinny Bitch' by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin, 'How the Rich Get Thin' by Dr Jana Klauer, 'That Extra Half Inch' by Victoria Beckham.
Television: 'You are What You Eat' presented by ferociously sinewy Gillian McKeith
Holidays: The Mayr Clinic in Austria, for a fortnight of colonic irrigation, stale bread and starvation.
Food and drink: Luscious Organic, Kensington, one of Britain's only macrobiotic restaurants; Skinny Water – bottled water fortified with L-Carnitine and Chromium, said to aid weight loss.
The facts
Beat, the UK eating disorders charity, estimates there are 1.15 million people in Britain with eating disorders. According to the Department of Health, some 15 per cent of cases of anorexia result in death, caused mainly by suicide, and complications due to starvation. Being underweight raises risk of osteoporosis and brittle bones, heart attack, kidney failure and infertility.
'Size zero' is a equivalent to UK size 4 and a 22in waist.
Big Britain
The role models
1. Beth Ditto: Hefty rock singer and friend of Kate Moss who says she's never tried a Slim Fast in her life.
2. Lily Allen: Won legions of fans when she posted a video of herself crying on MySpace, saying she felt "a bit chubby".
3. Coleen McLoughlin: Wayne Rooney's fiancee proves an average girl with an average body can make millions.
4. Fern Britton: Self-confident size-16 TV presenter.
5. Kelly Osbourne: The singer and fashion designer who never outgrew her puppy fat.
6. Dawn French: Large-and -proud comedienne who is convinced she will shortly die (not,ironically, it seems from health-related problems)
7. Tyra Banks: once a supermodel, now proclaiming "Kiss my fat ass" on behalf of all plus-sized women.
The culture
Music: Mika's 'Big Girl (You are Beautiful)', Mutya Buena's 'Real Girl' and 'Ugly' by The Sugababes.
Books: 'Skinny Women are Evil', by Mo'Nique, 'Fat Chicks Rule!' by Lara Frater, 'Fat is a Feminist Issue' by Susie Orbach.
Films: 'Hairspray' (2007), in which "pleasantly plump" Tracy Turnblad proves weight is no obstacle to fame.
Art: Jenny Saville's oil paintings of curvaceous nudes.
The facts
A BMI (body mass index) of over 30 is referred to as obese, over 35 is known as morbid obesity, and over 40 indicates extreme obesity. Obesity is responsible for more than 9,000 premature deaths per year in England and increases risk of chronic diseases such as heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and some cancers. A report by the World HealthOrganisation also suggests that health is compromised when waist measurement exceeds 94cm (37in) for men or 80cm (32in) for women. .
Tuesday 21 October 2008
Children at breaking point: Knives, guns, bullies...a shocking look at growing up in today's UK
As a survey of 1,700 young people paints a damning picture of the way we treat the young, we ask our own panel - just how do they cope?
The rights of a generation of children in Britain are being eroded by poverty, unhappiness and fear of crime, the largest report on the state of childhood in six years reveals.
The report, seen exclusively by The Independent on Sunday, says that young people in the UK are further away than ever from living in a society in which they are valued, respected and enjoyed. The damning report to the United Nations paints a bleak picture of growing up today in a country where children have limited access to sport and play areas and are put under pressure from too many exams.
The basics of a happy childhood – playing safely outside and enjoying learning at school – are now precious commodities, the report says. In their place are a routine lack of respect from adults and a culture of crime. With knife crime claiming the lives of 31 young people so far this year, the report reveals that one in eight children has carried a knife or a gun in the past 12 months.
The verdict, by a cross-section of 1,700 children aged nine to 17 and the Children's Rights Alliance for England (Crae), representing more than 100 charities, will be presented to ministers tomorrow and to the UN in Geneva on Wednesday. It casts a shadow over the promise made in the Government's Children's Plan to "make this country the best place in the world for children and young people to grow up".
Today the IoS gives a panel of children aged 11 to 13, above, the opportunity to have their say about being a child in Britain.
The report warns that the UK falls "well short" of meeting minimum standards set out in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), agreed in 1989 by every country in the world except the US and Somalia.
Reports by the UK's Children's Commissioners will also be handed over to the UN. The world body will use the documents as evidence for its own report on Britain in October.
At the end of this month, Unicef will publish a league table for wellbeing among children up to five in rich countries; Britain is expected to perform poorly. The UK came bottom out of 21 wealthy nations in 2007 for happiness, relationships and health and safety for older children.
In 2002, the UN criticised Britain's failure to put the best interests of children at the heart of legislation. Yet Crae's report says nearly 30 laws that in part breach the rights of children have been passed since 2002. The organisation lists 100 urgent actions that need to be taken if the Government is to fulfil all its obligations under the convention.
The children's half of the report makes 14 recommendations to the UN, echoing those submitted by children in Wales and Scotland at the end of last year.
Government figures to be published tomorrow will show it is likely to miss its target of halving child poverty by 2010 – the number of children living in poverty is rising. The Secretary of State for Children, Ed Balls, writing in the IoS today, admits "a 'good childhood' is not a reality for every child" but pledges to do all he can to make this a "golden age for our children". He says child poverty is a "scar on our national conscience". More than three million people live below the poverty line. The Government has pledged an extra £1bn to fight this.
The report comes against a backdrop of headlines of teenagers caught up in violent crime, curbs on young binge drinkers and pupils branded "unteachable". "Children's rights are a matter of life and death," it says. "Since the last examination in 2002, we believe our country has moved much further away from ... a culture that enjoys, respects and values children.
"While ministers, the Prime Minister included, appear comfortable using the language of rights and social justice when talking about children abroad, there is a reluctance to acknowledge that children in England have rights ... and that children's rights abuses are happening in our own institutions and communities."
Education
More than 78 per cent of children surveyed said they get stressed, mainly because of school tests and exams. One in 10 children never enjoys school.
By the age of 16, children will have sat at least 70 tests. Some 13 per cent say bullying is an issue, and 4.2 per cent say the problem is so great that they have never felt safe in school. Gay, Traveller and ethnic-minority children most often report being bullied.
Nearly 75 per cent said their school only listened to their opinions sometimes, while 5.5 per cent said they were never listened to. One in 10 children thought their teachers did not respect them, while the same proportion felt other children did not respect them. The reports call for student councils in every school.
Law and order
A shocking 12 per cent of children said they had carried a knife or gun in the past 12 months. A third of those did so to protect themselves, but 22.6 per cent did so to threaten or hurt someone.
Half of children believed children in their area committed crimes because they were bored.
The UNCRC requires that children be imprisoned as a "very last resort". Yet the charities state that nearly 25,000 children in England and Wales were given custodial sentences between 2003 and 2006. "The law has been changed to introduce punishment as an explicit purpose of sentencing for children," the report says. It condemns the "deeply punitive and abusive" treatment of children and calls for a full public inquiry into the deaths in custody of 30 children since 1990.
It condemns the use of terms such as "yobs" and "thugs" to describe children, in newspapers but also Government press releases and ministerial speeches.
Health and wellbeing
One in 10 children have a clinically recognisable mental health disorder.
A third of children say there are not enough local play areas. Some 82 per cent found broken glass, 50 per cent found condoms and 25 per cent hypodermic needles in parks and playgrounds. Four out of 10 say their local play facilities had closed down, while half were stopped from playing outside by their parents.
Refugee children say they are often unable to find translators or advocates to help them in doctors' surgeries. And the lack of enough safe, well-staffed shelters and hostels meant that depressed and self-harming children often had nowhere to turn for help.
Families and care
Both the charities and children call for an outright ban on smacking. Some 14.6 per cent were hit at home, while one in 20 children fear being hurt by people at home.
The charities' report warns of a 14-year difference in the life expectancy between children born into the richest and poorest households. In London alone, 41 babies would be saved each year were it not for poverty and inequality. Social mobility in the UK is "no better now than it was in the 1970s". The UNCRC requires governments to give positive support to parents, yet they are being penalised "more than ever" for their children's behaviour.
It warns of "massive erosion" in the privacy rights of children since 2002. The police hold DNA samples of up to 360,000 children, 82,000 of whom are innocent. Many nurseries and schools use electronic equipment to monitor children's behaviour.
Discrimination and choices
More than nine out of 10 children think they are judged on what they wear, while some 78.2 per cent believe the media paints an unfair picture of young people.
The report warns that asylum-seeking and refugee children do not get the same levels of child protection as other vulnerable children. While there is a battle to detain terror suspects for 42 days without charge, asylum- seeking families are detained for weeks and months without any judicial scrutiny.
Carolyne Willow, Crae's national co-ordinator, said: "We, and the Government, have to face the fact that human rights abuses don't just happen to adults, they happen to children – and they are happening in our country."
Bob Reitemeier, chief executive of the Children's Society, said: "Both the young people's report and the report from the coalition of children's charities highlight many breaches of children's rights that require urgent action."
Additional reporting by Ian Griggs, Jonathan Owen and Mark Jewsbury
Fenner Clark
Age 12, from Worcester Park, London. He is a keen cyclist and judo enthusiast
On respect from adults
Some adults judge you on what clothes you wear and just lump everyone together depending on that alone. The media does the same thing. It puts everyone in the same group and generalises. I think that is very unfair. You see big groups hanging around, but they don't always mean trouble.
Laura Gearey
Age 13, from Blackfen, Kent, is a member of St John Ambulance Cadets
On being listened to in school
Teachers listen quite well, but sometimes you get the impression they can't be bothered to talk to you. We had a school council at primary school which worked well – we asked for bike sheds and got them. We have a council at secondary, but I haven't seen any changes come from it.
Sofia Yasin
Age 12, lives in Luton. She is a participant in Youth Parliament
On exams and counsellors
Exams should be spread out over the year. I have four or five next week and we all get stressed, especially about the SATs. As for counselling, there are mentors we can go to, but their reactions are pretty slow. I had a friendwho used to cut herself, but the mentor did not talk to her for at least a month.
Joshua Newstead
Age 12, from Bromley in Kent. He is interested in environmental issues
On divorce and religion
Personally, I have no experience of parents splitting up, but I think that children should be able to choose which parent they want to stay with. I also think that children should also be able to choose which religion they want to follow.
Eithne Loughran
Age 12, from Hackney, London. She is from an Irish background
On sport and smacking
I think the cost for children who want to do sport is too much. All the swimming pools near where I live cost up to £2 for a child to get in. I think that is quite expensive. I also think that smacking should be banned. I don't think it's nice, hitting children.
Yll Buzoku
Age 12, from Woolwich, south-east London. He was born in Kosovo
On discrimination
My parents came here while travelling the world but got stuck here during the war. I have not been a victim of discrimination, but there are a few Chinese people at my school who some people are extremely rude to. It's not fair at all. Sometimes if I speak Kosovan to my friend we get bullied.
Morgan Daniels
Age 12, from Bushey, Hertfordshire. A participant in Youth Parliament
On privacy and ID cards
I don't have a problem with ID cards. It could even be a good idea, but I don't like the idea of teenagers on a database. It is not a good thought. People should not be put under surveillance. The only exception is if a child has done something wrong and there is the possibility of them doing it again.
Adeeb Abdul Razak
Age 12, from Dagenham, Essex. He is from an Indian background
On the right to vote
Children should have a say about who they want to see as the next Prime Minister or the next Mayor of London. They should have a say because only older people have the choice at the moment and children don't have it. We want to express our views, too.
Sally Milner
Age 13, from Kingston, Surrey. She has been a scout since the age of six
On knife crime
There is no need for children to carry knives. One day recently, the police did a security check at school. We didn't like it. The police kept asking the black children if they were carrying weapons, but they weren't as pushy with the white children. Some of the black kids got a bit feisty about that.
Laura Bizzey
Age 12, from Hollesley, East Sussex. She has a muscle-wasting condition
On play facilities
We do have play parks near where I live, but I don't go to them because of my disability. I would like it if the play parks had better access for people like me, but they are all aimed at people who want to fling themselves across the monkey bars and lots of climbing things. But they're no good for people like me without muscles.
Cut and pasted from The Independent. By Jane Merrick and Alison Shepherd
Sunday, 8 June 2008
The rights of a generation of children in Britain are being eroded by poverty, unhappiness and fear of crime, the largest report on the state of childhood in six years reveals.
The report, seen exclusively by The Independent on Sunday, says that young people in the UK are further away than ever from living in a society in which they are valued, respected and enjoyed. The damning report to the United Nations paints a bleak picture of growing up today in a country where children have limited access to sport and play areas and are put under pressure from too many exams.
The basics of a happy childhood – playing safely outside and enjoying learning at school – are now precious commodities, the report says. In their place are a routine lack of respect from adults and a culture of crime. With knife crime claiming the lives of 31 young people so far this year, the report reveals that one in eight children has carried a knife or a gun in the past 12 months.
The verdict, by a cross-section of 1,700 children aged nine to 17 and the Children's Rights Alliance for England (Crae), representing more than 100 charities, will be presented to ministers tomorrow and to the UN in Geneva on Wednesday. It casts a shadow over the promise made in the Government's Children's Plan to "make this country the best place in the world for children and young people to grow up".
Today the IoS gives a panel of children aged 11 to 13, above, the opportunity to have their say about being a child in Britain.
The report warns that the UK falls "well short" of meeting minimum standards set out in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), agreed in 1989 by every country in the world except the US and Somalia.
Reports by the UK's Children's Commissioners will also be handed over to the UN. The world body will use the documents as evidence for its own report on Britain in October.
At the end of this month, Unicef will publish a league table for wellbeing among children up to five in rich countries; Britain is expected to perform poorly. The UK came bottom out of 21 wealthy nations in 2007 for happiness, relationships and health and safety for older children.
In 2002, the UN criticised Britain's failure to put the best interests of children at the heart of legislation. Yet Crae's report says nearly 30 laws that in part breach the rights of children have been passed since 2002. The organisation lists 100 urgent actions that need to be taken if the Government is to fulfil all its obligations under the convention.
The children's half of the report makes 14 recommendations to the UN, echoing those submitted by children in Wales and Scotland at the end of last year.
Government figures to be published tomorrow will show it is likely to miss its target of halving child poverty by 2010 – the number of children living in poverty is rising. The Secretary of State for Children, Ed Balls, writing in the IoS today, admits "a 'good childhood' is not a reality for every child" but pledges to do all he can to make this a "golden age for our children". He says child poverty is a "scar on our national conscience". More than three million people live below the poverty line. The Government has pledged an extra £1bn to fight this.
The report comes against a backdrop of headlines of teenagers caught up in violent crime, curbs on young binge drinkers and pupils branded "unteachable". "Children's rights are a matter of life and death," it says. "Since the last examination in 2002, we believe our country has moved much further away from ... a culture that enjoys, respects and values children.
"While ministers, the Prime Minister included, appear comfortable using the language of rights and social justice when talking about children abroad, there is a reluctance to acknowledge that children in England have rights ... and that children's rights abuses are happening in our own institutions and communities."
Education
More than 78 per cent of children surveyed said they get stressed, mainly because of school tests and exams. One in 10 children never enjoys school.
By the age of 16, children will have sat at least 70 tests. Some 13 per cent say bullying is an issue, and 4.2 per cent say the problem is so great that they have never felt safe in school. Gay, Traveller and ethnic-minority children most often report being bullied.
Nearly 75 per cent said their school only listened to their opinions sometimes, while 5.5 per cent said they were never listened to. One in 10 children thought their teachers did not respect them, while the same proportion felt other children did not respect them. The reports call for student councils in every school.
Law and order
A shocking 12 per cent of children said they had carried a knife or gun in the past 12 months. A third of those did so to protect themselves, but 22.6 per cent did so to threaten or hurt someone.
Half of children believed children in their area committed crimes because they were bored.
The UNCRC requires that children be imprisoned as a "very last resort". Yet the charities state that nearly 25,000 children in England and Wales were given custodial sentences between 2003 and 2006. "The law has been changed to introduce punishment as an explicit purpose of sentencing for children," the report says. It condemns the "deeply punitive and abusive" treatment of children and calls for a full public inquiry into the deaths in custody of 30 children since 1990.
It condemns the use of terms such as "yobs" and "thugs" to describe children, in newspapers but also Government press releases and ministerial speeches.
Health and wellbeing
One in 10 children have a clinically recognisable mental health disorder.
A third of children say there are not enough local play areas. Some 82 per cent found broken glass, 50 per cent found condoms and 25 per cent hypodermic needles in parks and playgrounds. Four out of 10 say their local play facilities had closed down, while half were stopped from playing outside by their parents.
Refugee children say they are often unable to find translators or advocates to help them in doctors' surgeries. And the lack of enough safe, well-staffed shelters and hostels meant that depressed and self-harming children often had nowhere to turn for help.
Families and care
Both the charities and children call for an outright ban on smacking. Some 14.6 per cent were hit at home, while one in 20 children fear being hurt by people at home.
The charities' report warns of a 14-year difference in the life expectancy between children born into the richest and poorest households. In London alone, 41 babies would be saved each year were it not for poverty and inequality. Social mobility in the UK is "no better now than it was in the 1970s". The UNCRC requires governments to give positive support to parents, yet they are being penalised "more than ever" for their children's behaviour.
It warns of "massive erosion" in the privacy rights of children since 2002. The police hold DNA samples of up to 360,000 children, 82,000 of whom are innocent. Many nurseries and schools use electronic equipment to monitor children's behaviour.
Discrimination and choices
More than nine out of 10 children think they are judged on what they wear, while some 78.2 per cent believe the media paints an unfair picture of young people.
The report warns that asylum-seeking and refugee children do not get the same levels of child protection as other vulnerable children. While there is a battle to detain terror suspects for 42 days without charge, asylum- seeking families are detained for weeks and months without any judicial scrutiny.
Carolyne Willow, Crae's national co-ordinator, said: "We, and the Government, have to face the fact that human rights abuses don't just happen to adults, they happen to children – and they are happening in our country."
Bob Reitemeier, chief executive of the Children's Society, said: "Both the young people's report and the report from the coalition of children's charities highlight many breaches of children's rights that require urgent action."
Additional reporting by Ian Griggs, Jonathan Owen and Mark Jewsbury
Fenner Clark
Age 12, from Worcester Park, London. He is a keen cyclist and judo enthusiast
On respect from adults
Some adults judge you on what clothes you wear and just lump everyone together depending on that alone. The media does the same thing. It puts everyone in the same group and generalises. I think that is very unfair. You see big groups hanging around, but they don't always mean trouble.
Laura Gearey
Age 13, from Blackfen, Kent, is a member of St John Ambulance Cadets
On being listened to in school
Teachers listen quite well, but sometimes you get the impression they can't be bothered to talk to you. We had a school council at primary school which worked well – we asked for bike sheds and got them. We have a council at secondary, but I haven't seen any changes come from it.
Sofia Yasin
Age 12, lives in Luton. She is a participant in Youth Parliament
On exams and counsellors
Exams should be spread out over the year. I have four or five next week and we all get stressed, especially about the SATs. As for counselling, there are mentors we can go to, but their reactions are pretty slow. I had a friendwho used to cut herself, but the mentor did not talk to her for at least a month.
Joshua Newstead
Age 12, from Bromley in Kent. He is interested in environmental issues
On divorce and religion
Personally, I have no experience of parents splitting up, but I think that children should be able to choose which parent they want to stay with. I also think that children should also be able to choose which religion they want to follow.
Eithne Loughran
Age 12, from Hackney, London. She is from an Irish background
On sport and smacking
I think the cost for children who want to do sport is too much. All the swimming pools near where I live cost up to £2 for a child to get in. I think that is quite expensive. I also think that smacking should be banned. I don't think it's nice, hitting children.
Yll Buzoku
Age 12, from Woolwich, south-east London. He was born in Kosovo
On discrimination
My parents came here while travelling the world but got stuck here during the war. I have not been a victim of discrimination, but there are a few Chinese people at my school who some people are extremely rude to. It's not fair at all. Sometimes if I speak Kosovan to my friend we get bullied.
Morgan Daniels
Age 12, from Bushey, Hertfordshire. A participant in Youth Parliament
On privacy and ID cards
I don't have a problem with ID cards. It could even be a good idea, but I don't like the idea of teenagers on a database. It is not a good thought. People should not be put under surveillance. The only exception is if a child has done something wrong and there is the possibility of them doing it again.
Adeeb Abdul Razak
Age 12, from Dagenham, Essex. He is from an Indian background
On the right to vote
Children should have a say about who they want to see as the next Prime Minister or the next Mayor of London. They should have a say because only older people have the choice at the moment and children don't have it. We want to express our views, too.
Sally Milner
Age 13, from Kingston, Surrey. She has been a scout since the age of six
On knife crime
There is no need for children to carry knives. One day recently, the police did a security check at school. We didn't like it. The police kept asking the black children if they were carrying weapons, but they weren't as pushy with the white children. Some of the black kids got a bit feisty about that.
Laura Bizzey
Age 12, from Hollesley, East Sussex. She has a muscle-wasting condition
On play facilities
We do have play parks near where I live, but I don't go to them because of my disability. I would like it if the play parks had better access for people like me, but they are all aimed at people who want to fling themselves across the monkey bars and lots of climbing things. But they're no good for people like me without muscles.
Cut and pasted from The Independent. By Jane Merrick and Alison Shepherd
Sunday, 8 June 2008
Resistance struggles
Jun 26th 2008From The Economist
Wage-earners may not prove as meek as the government wants them to be
AS INFLATION makes an unwelcome return, just how workers respond to it has become overwhelmingly important. Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the exchequer, exhorts wage restraint, and with reason. The last thing he wants—or Britain needs—is a pay-price spiral that would turn a temporary surge in inflation, driven by higher global food and energy costs, into a more persistent and general national affliction. Yet the soaring bill for essentials is bound to make Britons worse off, and workers are not slow to spot it.
Until recently, fear of an inflationary wage-price spiral seemed misplaced. Inflation, measured by the retail-prices index, moved up sharply in the second half of 2006 and has generally remained above 4.0% since then (see chart). Despite this, average-earnings growth has stayed remarkably docile, thanks partly to a flexible labour market and partly to confidence that any upsurge in inflation would peter out.
Until recently, fear of an inflationary wage-price spiral seemed misplaced. Inflation, measured by the retail-prices index, moved up sharply in the second half of 2006 and has generally remained above 4.0% since then (see chart). Despite this, average-earnings growth has stayed remarkably docile, thanks partly to a flexible labour market and partly to confidence that any upsurge in inflation would peter out.
That now looks set to change. A recent strike by tanker-drivers resulted in a bumper two-year 14% pay rise. This has encouraged militant talk from public-sector unions, who feel aggrieved that the government has insisted on very low pay deals (around 2%) this year and threaten to strike. Some point to big bonuses and pay rises for even conspicuously unsuccessful company bosses as one reason why they should refuse stingy deals themselves.
Wage awards have already begun to move up, according to Incomes Data Services (IDS), which monitors them. For most of the past year or so, the median pay settlement was typically 3.5%, but in the three months to April it rose to 3.8%. And total earnings, which include bonuses and overtime, tend to increase faster than basic pay. Ken Mulkearn of IDS says that many firms which had secured lower increases in 2007 in the expectation that inflation would fall have had to agree to higher rises this year to restore purchasing power.
Whether workers succeed in resisting a fall in their living standards will depend mainly on the balance of power in the labour market. This seems to be tilting towards employers, as unemployment starts to rise. But the big influx of workers from eastern Europe since 2004, which helped to keep a handle on pay pressures, is slowing as new arrivals dwindle and some longer-established workers return home.
Political will also has a role to play. Unions are strongest in the public sector, and garbage left to rot in the summer sun is already promised. Mr Darling may find that too much for even his sangfroid.
Wage awards have already begun to move up, according to Incomes Data Services (IDS), which monitors them. For most of the past year or so, the median pay settlement was typically 3.5%, but in the three months to April it rose to 3.8%. And total earnings, which include bonuses and overtime, tend to increase faster than basic pay. Ken Mulkearn of IDS says that many firms which had secured lower increases in 2007 in the expectation that inflation would fall have had to agree to higher rises this year to restore purchasing power.
Whether workers succeed in resisting a fall in their living standards will depend mainly on the balance of power in the labour market. This seems to be tilting towards employers, as unemployment starts to rise. But the big influx of workers from eastern Europe since 2004, which helped to keep a handle on pay pressures, is slowing as new arrivals dwindle and some longer-established workers return home.
Political will also has a role to play. Unions are strongest in the public sector, and garbage left to rot in the summer sun is already promised. Mr Darling may find that too much for even his sangfroid.
Mary Poppins and Magna Carta
Civil liberties
Jun 19th 2008From The Economist
British liberties have been eroded under Labour. Few seem to mind much. LIBERALS have long lamented that, despite much stirring rhetoric about the mother of parliaments and Magna Carta, modern Britons have little real interest in their hard-won liberties. On June 17th, as Gordon Brown gave a speech on the subject, that pessimism seemed confirmed when one rapt listener fell asleep in the middle of the prime minister's oration.
Yet civil liberties are much in the news these days. Mr Brown's speech came in the wake of the surprise resignation on June 12th of David Davis, the Conservative shadow home secretary. Mr Davis quit the House of Commons after it voted to allow terrorist suspects to be detained without charge for up to 42 days (the bill now looks set for a rocky ride in the House of Lords). From the steps of the Palace of Westminster, Mr Davis accused the government of presiding over the “slow strangulation” of freedoms and the “ceaseless encroachment of the state” into daily life. He hopes to use the resulting by-election in his Yorkshire constituency as a referendum on Labour's liberal credentials, and on the growth of the nanny state in general.
The charge sheet against the government is long and damning. Besides its 42-day detention proposals (and earlier, failed plans to imprison suspects for 90 days), it is accused of colluding with America to transport terrorist suspects to secret prisons abroad. It has created new crimes, such as glorifying terrorism or inciting religious hatred, that, say critics, dampen freedom of speech. Those who breach one of its Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, introduced in 1998, can be jailed for things that are not illegal in themselves (such as visiting a forbidden part of town or talking to certain people). In 2005 the prohibition on double jeopardy—trying a person twice for the same offence—was removed for serious offences. The government has tried to cut back the scope of trial by jury.
Along with the new crimes have come new ways of detecting them. Millions of publicly and privately owned closed-circuit television cameras (no one is sure precisely how many) monitor town centres. The latest innovation is unmanned, miniature aircraft (adapted from army models) that can loiter over trouble spots, feeding images to police on the ground.
Vast computerised collections of information have become popular too. Britain possesses one of the largest police DNA databases in the world, containing the records of over 4m of 60m citizens (including a third of the black men in the country). Records are kept for everyone who is arrested, meaning that many on the system have never actually been charged with any crime. The government's identity-card scheme, the first phase of which is due to start later this year, aims to record the fingerprints and biographical details of everyone in the land.
Other big databases are justified on grounds of administrative convenience rather than crime-fighting and security. One such is a plan to centralise the records of all patients of the National Health Service. Another would allow social services to monitor every child in the country, including how parents spend their money and how many portions of fruit and vegetables they feed their offspring each day.
Mr Brown argues that frightening new threats—terrorism, drug trafficking and (rather incongruously) benefit fraud—require new powers. In his speech he turned criticisms about authoritarianism on their head, saying that new state powers were guarantors of liberty, not threats to it. He expanded on the risks—the 2,000 terrorist suspects whom the security services are apparently tracking—and the benefits—the 8,000 suspects who have been matched with crime scenes since 2001 thanks to DNA evidence retained when they were released, uncharged, after a previous arrest. He repeated his promise that Parliament would prevent abuse of the 42-day detention law. Labour has passed a raft of other measures too: the Human Rights Act in 1998, freedom of information legislation in 2000 and changes to ensure the rights of gays and other groups. An unhappy few
Government reassurances do not impress civil libertarians, who argue that, once restrictive new laws are in place, uses for them tend to multiply. In March it emerged that local councils had been using surveillance powers intended for deployment against serious criminals to check up on footling infringements: people who flouted smoking bans, for instance, or tried to game the school-admissions system.
And promises that sensitive personal data will be carefully stewarded look rather limp next to an official proclivity for leaving confidential material in public places. Mr Brown was badly embarrassed in November, when CDs containing 25m child-benefit records were reported lost by the Inland Revenue. More recently, on June 12th a civil servant was suspended after top-secret papers about terrorism were found on a train; on the same day another set of documents—this time on financial fraud—turned up on a different train. Five days later it emerged that a laptop stolen from the office of a cabinet minister may have contained confidential documents, violating data-protection rules. But Britain's small band of civil libertarians has bigger problems than a recalcitrant prime minister and careless civil servants. Despite Benjamin Franklin's famous advice, the public seems happy to trade a little liberty for a little security. Surveys before the 42-days vote consistently showed public opinion in favour. More recent polling for The Economist shows broad public support for many liberal bugbears (see chart). Women tend to be more authoritarian than men, Labour supporters more relaxed about infringing civil liberties than Tories and Liberal Democrats, and richer folk more worried than the poor (full details can be found here). Half of the respondents were consistent in their answers to most questions; this, says YouGov's boss, Peter Kellner, is rather high.
The poll suggests that people are vehement in defence of civil liberty and privacy when considered in the abstract. Confronted with specific situations, their resolve wilts, especially when specific security gains are promised (although administrative benefits can overcome libertarian instincts too). Trust in private firms is much less than in the government—odd, since more than half of all consumers are voluntarily enrolled in data-tracking supermarket loyalty schemes.
Mr Davis's supporters point to a poll in the Daily Mail in which 57% of respondents said they supported his crusade. That is hard to reconcile with the findings of our survey. The alternative explanation—that any politician seen to thumb his nose at the establishment delights disenchanted voters—seems rather plausible.
Jun 19th 2008From The Economist
British liberties have been eroded under Labour. Few seem to mind much. LIBERALS have long lamented that, despite much stirring rhetoric about the mother of parliaments and Magna Carta, modern Britons have little real interest in their hard-won liberties. On June 17th, as Gordon Brown gave a speech on the subject, that pessimism seemed confirmed when one rapt listener fell asleep in the middle of the prime minister's oration.
Yet civil liberties are much in the news these days. Mr Brown's speech came in the wake of the surprise resignation on June 12th of David Davis, the Conservative shadow home secretary. Mr Davis quit the House of Commons after it voted to allow terrorist suspects to be detained without charge for up to 42 days (the bill now looks set for a rocky ride in the House of Lords). From the steps of the Palace of Westminster, Mr Davis accused the government of presiding over the “slow strangulation” of freedoms and the “ceaseless encroachment of the state” into daily life. He hopes to use the resulting by-election in his Yorkshire constituency as a referendum on Labour's liberal credentials, and on the growth of the nanny state in general.
The charge sheet against the government is long and damning. Besides its 42-day detention proposals (and earlier, failed plans to imprison suspects for 90 days), it is accused of colluding with America to transport terrorist suspects to secret prisons abroad. It has created new crimes, such as glorifying terrorism or inciting religious hatred, that, say critics, dampen freedom of speech. Those who breach one of its Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, introduced in 1998, can be jailed for things that are not illegal in themselves (such as visiting a forbidden part of town or talking to certain people). In 2005 the prohibition on double jeopardy—trying a person twice for the same offence—was removed for serious offences. The government has tried to cut back the scope of trial by jury.
Along with the new crimes have come new ways of detecting them. Millions of publicly and privately owned closed-circuit television cameras (no one is sure precisely how many) monitor town centres. The latest innovation is unmanned, miniature aircraft (adapted from army models) that can loiter over trouble spots, feeding images to police on the ground.
Vast computerised collections of information have become popular too. Britain possesses one of the largest police DNA databases in the world, containing the records of over 4m of 60m citizens (including a third of the black men in the country). Records are kept for everyone who is arrested, meaning that many on the system have never actually been charged with any crime. The government's identity-card scheme, the first phase of which is due to start later this year, aims to record the fingerprints and biographical details of everyone in the land.
Other big databases are justified on grounds of administrative convenience rather than crime-fighting and security. One such is a plan to centralise the records of all patients of the National Health Service. Another would allow social services to monitor every child in the country, including how parents spend their money and how many portions of fruit and vegetables they feed their offspring each day.
Mr Brown argues that frightening new threats—terrorism, drug trafficking and (rather incongruously) benefit fraud—require new powers. In his speech he turned criticisms about authoritarianism on their head, saying that new state powers were guarantors of liberty, not threats to it. He expanded on the risks—the 2,000 terrorist suspects whom the security services are apparently tracking—and the benefits—the 8,000 suspects who have been matched with crime scenes since 2001 thanks to DNA evidence retained when they were released, uncharged, after a previous arrest. He repeated his promise that Parliament would prevent abuse of the 42-day detention law. Labour has passed a raft of other measures too: the Human Rights Act in 1998, freedom of information legislation in 2000 and changes to ensure the rights of gays and other groups. An unhappy few
Government reassurances do not impress civil libertarians, who argue that, once restrictive new laws are in place, uses for them tend to multiply. In March it emerged that local councils had been using surveillance powers intended for deployment against serious criminals to check up on footling infringements: people who flouted smoking bans, for instance, or tried to game the school-admissions system.
And promises that sensitive personal data will be carefully stewarded look rather limp next to an official proclivity for leaving confidential material in public places. Mr Brown was badly embarrassed in November, when CDs containing 25m child-benefit records were reported lost by the Inland Revenue. More recently, on June 12th a civil servant was suspended after top-secret papers about terrorism were found on a train; on the same day another set of documents—this time on financial fraud—turned up on a different train. Five days later it emerged that a laptop stolen from the office of a cabinet minister may have contained confidential documents, violating data-protection rules. But Britain's small band of civil libertarians has bigger problems than a recalcitrant prime minister and careless civil servants. Despite Benjamin Franklin's famous advice, the public seems happy to trade a little liberty for a little security. Surveys before the 42-days vote consistently showed public opinion in favour. More recent polling for The Economist shows broad public support for many liberal bugbears (see chart). Women tend to be more authoritarian than men, Labour supporters more relaxed about infringing civil liberties than Tories and Liberal Democrats, and richer folk more worried than the poor (full details can be found here). Half of the respondents were consistent in their answers to most questions; this, says YouGov's boss, Peter Kellner, is rather high.
The poll suggests that people are vehement in defence of civil liberty and privacy when considered in the abstract. Confronted with specific situations, their resolve wilts, especially when specific security gains are promised (although administrative benefits can overcome libertarian instincts too). Trust in private firms is much less than in the government—odd, since more than half of all consumers are voluntarily enrolled in data-tracking supermarket loyalty schemes.
Mr Davis's supporters point to a poll in the Daily Mail in which 57% of respondents said they supported his crusade. That is hard to reconcile with the findings of our survey. The alternative explanation—that any politician seen to thumb his nose at the establishment delights disenchanted voters—seems rather plausible.
A matter of justice
From The Economist
A controversial ruling on anonymous witnesses prompts calls for a new law
ONCE again, the government has been thrown into a tizzy. Dozens of criminal prosecutions, many involving suspected terrorists, could be in jeopardy as a result of a ruling by the House of Lords, Britain’s highest court of appeal, deeming it unlawful for prosecutors to rely on anonymous witnesses to secure convictions. On June 26th the government announced emergency legislation in an attempt to rescue trials and block appeals in scores of cases where defendants have already been convicted. It hopes to rush through a bill before Parliament rises on July 22nd.
The law lords’ ruling, on June 18th, has already claimed its first casualty. On June 24th a murder trial at London’s Central Criminal Court, which had cost £6m, was halted after the judge told the jury it had heard evidence from “a number of witnesses that you should not have heard”. Four witnesses, using false names, had given evidence over two months from behind screens in the trial of two men accused of killing another man in East London in 2004.
Contrary to some reports, the law lords did not rule that anonymous witnesses may never be used. In an appeal brought by Iain Davis, jailed four years ago for murdering two men after a New Year’s Eve party, they said the defendant had been denied a fair trial because the identity of three key witnesses, without whose evidence Davis would not have been convicted, remained hidden from the defence. They recommended that the conviction be quashed and a new trial held.
Delivering the ruling, Lord Bingham said that the right of an accused to confront his accusers so as to be able to challenge their evidence was a long-established principle of English common law. America had adopted it as a constitutional right, and other common-law countries too considered it important. The principle was also enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights; under case law of the European court, no conviction should be based solely, or to a decisive extent, on the testimony of anonymous witnesses.
The law lords accepted that the problem of witness intimidation was real. Witnesses often would not give evidence unless their identity was withheld from the defence, and dangerous criminals might then walk free. This, Lord Bingham conceded, was a serious problem that “might well” call for urgentattention by Parliament. But the paramount object must always be to do justice. In Iain Davis’s case, the anonymity granted to witnesses hampered the conduct of the defence “in a manner and to an extent” that was unlawful and rendered the trial unfair, he said.
Police and prosecutors have increasingly resorted to promises of anonymity in order to persuade frightened witnesses to testify in cases of gangland violence and gun crime. Many fear the ruling could have a catastrophic effect on current and future prosecutions. But the government seems convinced that it can fix the problem and the Conservatives have intimated their willingness to co-operate. It may prove harder to square the new law with the human-rights legislation.
A controversial ruling on anonymous witnesses prompts calls for a new law
ONCE again, the government has been thrown into a tizzy. Dozens of criminal prosecutions, many involving suspected terrorists, could be in jeopardy as a result of a ruling by the House of Lords, Britain’s highest court of appeal, deeming it unlawful for prosecutors to rely on anonymous witnesses to secure convictions. On June 26th the government announced emergency legislation in an attempt to rescue trials and block appeals in scores of cases where defendants have already been convicted. It hopes to rush through a bill before Parliament rises on July 22nd.
The law lords’ ruling, on June 18th, has already claimed its first casualty. On June 24th a murder trial at London’s Central Criminal Court, which had cost £6m, was halted after the judge told the jury it had heard evidence from “a number of witnesses that you should not have heard”. Four witnesses, using false names, had given evidence over two months from behind screens in the trial of two men accused of killing another man in East London in 2004.
Contrary to some reports, the law lords did not rule that anonymous witnesses may never be used. In an appeal brought by Iain Davis, jailed four years ago for murdering two men after a New Year’s Eve party, they said the defendant had been denied a fair trial because the identity of three key witnesses, without whose evidence Davis would not have been convicted, remained hidden from the defence. They recommended that the conviction be quashed and a new trial held.
Delivering the ruling, Lord Bingham said that the right of an accused to confront his accusers so as to be able to challenge their evidence was a long-established principle of English common law. America had adopted it as a constitutional right, and other common-law countries too considered it important. The principle was also enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights; under case law of the European court, no conviction should be based solely, or to a decisive extent, on the testimony of anonymous witnesses.
The law lords accepted that the problem of witness intimidation was real. Witnesses often would not give evidence unless their identity was withheld from the defence, and dangerous criminals might then walk free. This, Lord Bingham conceded, was a serious problem that “might well” call for urgentattention by Parliament. But the paramount object must always be to do justice. In Iain Davis’s case, the anonymity granted to witnesses hampered the conduct of the defence “in a manner and to an extent” that was unlawful and rendered the trial unfair, he said.
Police and prosecutors have increasingly resorted to promises of anonymity in order to persuade frightened witnesses to testify in cases of gangland violence and gun crime. Many fear the ruling could have a catastrophic effect on current and future prosecutions. But the government seems convinced that it can fix the problem and the Conservatives have intimated their willingness to co-operate. It may prove harder to square the new law with the human-rights legislation.
What is happening with our kids?
Classrooms have become war zones, battered and threatened teachers say
Violence in the classroom is on the increase, but it is not only the pupils who are the victims, according to a survey that has found that nearly a third of teachers have been punched, kicked, bitten or pinched by children or attacked with weapons or missiles.
More than half of teachers say that their school’s policy on pupils’ poor behaviour is not tough enough and two thirds have considered leaving the profession because of physical aggression, verbal abuse and threats.
The survey, published today by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, suggests that excluding the most violent youngsters does not help because they will repeat the pattern of violence at neighbouring schools.
Mary Bousted, the union’s general secretary, said that no teacher should have to put up with the behaviour seen in schools today.
“Not only is poor behaviour driving teaching staff away at an alarming rate, it is also damaging the chances of other pupils during lessons by causing major disruptions,” she said.
Speaking ahead of the union’s annual conference in Torquay today, Ms Bousted said that one in ten teachers had received physical injuries in the classroom.
Twelve per cent said that they had needed to visit a doctor and eight per cent had taken leave from teaching as a result of pupils’ aggression.
Three per cent of teachers said that they had been involved in incidents involving knives, two thirds had been punched, nearly a half kicked and a third had been threatened.
The survey follows news last month that airport-style metal detectors are to be installed at hundreds of school gates.
Official figures also suggest that schools are finding it increasingly difficult to exclude violent pupils because of the growing tendency by governors and appeal panels to overturn the head’s decision. Between 1997 and 2007 permanent exclusions fell by 25 per cent to 9,170 cases nationwide. But over the same period the proportion of expulsions overruled by panels rose from 20 to 24 per cent.
Jean Roberts took early retirement from her post as a deputy head of a primary school in West London because she could no longer stand having to restrain children physically.
“Over the years, we are increasingly seeing children who are disturbed, with very little ability to communicate other than through biting or pulling hair. Some are barely socialised when they arrive,” she said. “They kick or they throw things when they are in an extreme state of anger.”
Most teachers said that pupil behaviour had worsened in the last two years and many said that low-level disruption – such as pupils talking, not paying attention and refusing requests to turn off mobile phones – was now the norm in classrooms.
The findings coincide with comments from Jim Rose, the Government’s adviser on the primary curriculum, who said that part of the role of primary schools was to socialise children and teach them how to behave.
“Where else would they get it if they don’t get it at home?” he said.
School of hard knocks
— Teachers suffered 221 injuries from attacks in 2005-06, up 21 per cent on the previous year
— 1,128 teachers were assaulted between 2000 and 2006
— A survey found that most attacks were on nursery nurses, special school teachers and learning assistants
— Another survey suggests that British schoolgirls are among the most violent in the world, with 29 per cent of English and Scottish girls aged 11 to 15 having been in at least one fight in the past year
Source: Times database
Related Links
Child jail plagued by assaults ‘should close’
With today's news that teachers are going to empowered to search kids for weapons, drugs and alcohol, what else can be done? Should teachers be doing this? What role do the parents play. Would be interested in your comments. Polly
Violence in the classroom is on the increase, but it is not only the pupils who are the victims, according to a survey that has found that nearly a third of teachers have been punched, kicked, bitten or pinched by children or attacked with weapons or missiles.
More than half of teachers say that their school’s policy on pupils’ poor behaviour is not tough enough and two thirds have considered leaving the profession because of physical aggression, verbal abuse and threats.
The survey, published today by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, suggests that excluding the most violent youngsters does not help because they will repeat the pattern of violence at neighbouring schools.
Mary Bousted, the union’s general secretary, said that no teacher should have to put up with the behaviour seen in schools today.
“Not only is poor behaviour driving teaching staff away at an alarming rate, it is also damaging the chances of other pupils during lessons by causing major disruptions,” she said.
Speaking ahead of the union’s annual conference in Torquay today, Ms Bousted said that one in ten teachers had received physical injuries in the classroom.
Twelve per cent said that they had needed to visit a doctor and eight per cent had taken leave from teaching as a result of pupils’ aggression.
Three per cent of teachers said that they had been involved in incidents involving knives, two thirds had been punched, nearly a half kicked and a third had been threatened.
The survey follows news last month that airport-style metal detectors are to be installed at hundreds of school gates.
Official figures also suggest that schools are finding it increasingly difficult to exclude violent pupils because of the growing tendency by governors and appeal panels to overturn the head’s decision. Between 1997 and 2007 permanent exclusions fell by 25 per cent to 9,170 cases nationwide. But over the same period the proportion of expulsions overruled by panels rose from 20 to 24 per cent.
Jean Roberts took early retirement from her post as a deputy head of a primary school in West London because she could no longer stand having to restrain children physically.
“Over the years, we are increasingly seeing children who are disturbed, with very little ability to communicate other than through biting or pulling hair. Some are barely socialised when they arrive,” she said. “They kick or they throw things when they are in an extreme state of anger.”
Most teachers said that pupil behaviour had worsened in the last two years and many said that low-level disruption – such as pupils talking, not paying attention and refusing requests to turn off mobile phones – was now the norm in classrooms.
The findings coincide with comments from Jim Rose, the Government’s adviser on the primary curriculum, who said that part of the role of primary schools was to socialise children and teach them how to behave.
“Where else would they get it if they don’t get it at home?” he said.
School of hard knocks
— Teachers suffered 221 injuries from attacks in 2005-06, up 21 per cent on the previous year
— 1,128 teachers were assaulted between 2000 and 2006
— A survey found that most attacks were on nursery nurses, special school teachers and learning assistants
— Another survey suggests that British schoolgirls are among the most violent in the world, with 29 per cent of English and Scottish girls aged 11 to 15 having been in at least one fight in the past year
Source: Times database
Related Links
Child jail plagued by assaults ‘should close’
With today's news that teachers are going to empowered to search kids for weapons, drugs and alcohol, what else can be done? Should teachers be doing this? What role do the parents play. Would be interested in your comments. Polly
Abortion Vote
What a sad day for the unborn. Whilst not wishing to take away the choice for a woman to have an abortion, I do believe that 24 weeks is very late for it to happen. Our parliament has voted not to lower the age limit for abortion, and keep it as it has been since 1967 at 24 weeks.
18 years ago my sister in law gave birth to her twin girls, at 22 weeks, although they only weighed in at 1lb and 15 and a half ounces respectively, they survived. Undoubtedly they had a few problems with breathing etc., For two months one, then the other twin would be poorly.
With the advances in paediatric technology, life for premature babies is better now than it was even 40 years ago. My brother was born a month premature in 1964, and they told my mum he might not survive. He is a granddad himself now, and always has been tough as old boots.
It's not an easy decision for any woman to make, but I believe in her right to make that decision if that is her choice, and for her to be supported if she does. I would have preferred it if they had lowered the limit to 18 weeks. From experience with the twins, I have seen that babies are fully formed human beings at 22 weeks - that then is murder of a human being.
I believe, that very, very few abortions are done at 24 weeks, most are done in the very early stages.
I still feel that it is a sad day for the innocent victim here, the unborn child.
18 years ago my sister in law gave birth to her twin girls, at 22 weeks, although they only weighed in at 1lb and 15 and a half ounces respectively, they survived. Undoubtedly they had a few problems with breathing etc., For two months one, then the other twin would be poorly.
With the advances in paediatric technology, life for premature babies is better now than it was even 40 years ago. My brother was born a month premature in 1964, and they told my mum he might not survive. He is a granddad himself now, and always has been tough as old boots.
It's not an easy decision for any woman to make, but I believe in her right to make that decision if that is her choice, and for her to be supported if she does. I would have preferred it if they had lowered the limit to 18 weeks. From experience with the twins, I have seen that babies are fully formed human beings at 22 weeks - that then is murder of a human being.
I believe, that very, very few abortions are done at 24 weeks, most are done in the very early stages.
I still feel that it is a sad day for the innocent victim here, the unborn child.
Thursday 16 October 2008
Was Jesus Christ a revolutionary?
Terry Eagleton sifts through the texts of the Gospels and comes up with some ambiguous answers
Jesus certainly kept some shady political company. One of his inner circle was known as Simon the Zealot, the Zealots being an underground anti-imperialist movement dedicated to driving the Romans out of Palestine. The Roman presence in the province was not in fact particularly oppressive. No Roman institutions, legal, educational or religious, were imposed on the people. In Jesus’s own home territory of Galilee there was no official Roman presence at all, so it is unlikely that he would have grown up at the knee of smoulderingly anti-imperialist parents. Any Roman soldiers he saw as a child would have been on holiday.
Even so, there were religious reasons why even hands-off rule by a pagan state was objectionable to God’s chosen people. The Zealots wanted a purified, traditionalist, theocratic Jewish state, and promoted a theology not unlike that of al-Qaeda today. In addition to the militant Simon, two other of Jesus’s disciples, James and John, are given a nickname (Sons of Thunder) which some New Testament scholars suspect may link them, too, to the insurrectionists. Perhaps Judas sold Jesus because he had expected him to be Lenin, and became bitterly disenchanted when he realized that he was not going to lead the people against the colonial power.
Daggers drawn
It is, however, unlikely that Jesus was part of the anti-imperial resistance. For one thing, he seems to have believed in paying taxes (‘Render unto Caesar...’), while the Zealots did not. For another thing, he was at daggers drawn with the Pharisees, who were in some ways the theological wing of the Zealots. In fact, they are the only sect whom he curses to hell.
Another reason why Jesus is unlikely to have been a Zealot is that his disciples were not arrested after his execution. Had they been known insurrectionists, the occupying Roman forces would almost certainly have moved in to mop them up. There may have been a sprinkling of anti-imperialist militants among the disciples, but the Roman authorities seem to have been clear that the Jesus movement was not out to overthrow the state. This is not why he was crucified.
Indeed, why he was crucified is something of a mystery. It was certainly not because he claimed to be the Son of God. Jesus makes no such claim in the Gospels, except once, implausibly, in the Markian trial scene; and Mark had his own axe to grind. Taken in a literal sense, the title ‘Son of God’ would almost certainly have resulted in Jesus’s being stoned to death on the spot for blasphemy, which was presumably one excellent reason why he did not make claim to it. In any case, Jesus cannot have believed that he was literally the Son of God. Yahweh does not have testicles.
Only the Romans had power of execution, and they took no interest in the theological squabblings of their colonial subjects. Or rather, they took an interest only if they threatened to breed political consequences. They would certainly have been put on the alert if Jesus had claimed to be the Messiah, since the Messiah was seen for the most part as a militant political leader who would put Israel on its feet again. But Jesus does not claim to be the Messiah either, except on two occasions, both of which are historically dubious.
It is likely that Jesus ended massive as the evangelists make out. Even so, there was a general expectation that God was about to do something dramatic. For Christian theology, he did – but it turned out to be a resurrection, not a revolution.
It may be that Jesus’s violent act of trying to clear the temple of moneychangers, which sailed preciously close to blasphemy, was enough for his antagonists to nail him. A reverence for the temple was an essential feature of Judaism, and a strike against it was a strike against Israel itself. The temple rulers controlled Israel’s currency and economy, so that the place was among other things perceived as a bastion of the ruling class.up on Calvary because of his enormous popularity with some of the poor, who had swarmed into Jerusalem for the feast of Passover, and who no doubt looked to him for some vague sort of salvation from the Roman occupation. His popular support was probably by no means as
Not ‘anti-capitalist’
Running out the moneychangers was not, however, intended as an ‘anti-capitalist’ gesture. Jesus would have understood well enough that pilgrims would not have brought their sacrificial animals with them from home, for fear that they might be found blemished by the priests who inspected them on arrival. They would consequently buy a dove or pigeon in the temple itself, and would need to change currencies to do so. Jesus was probably signifying the destruction of the temple in a symbolic way, rather than expressing his distaste for its commercial sleaze. The paraphernalia of organized religion was to be replaced by an alternative temple, namely his own murdered and transfigured body.
Quite what the charges against Jesus were is not entirely clear. The accounts of the Gospels on this score are mutually inconsistent. The general impression is that the whole of the Jewish governing caste were against Jesus, but that they could not find common ground among themselves on why they were. He was certainly accused of blasphemy. But the Romans would not have cared about that, and in any case executing someone as a pseudo-teacher or pseudo-prophet was remarkably rare in Jesus’s day.
The High Priest, Caiaphas, had therefore to concoct some charge which legitimated Jesus’s execution in the eyes of the Jews while sounding sufficiently alarming to the Romans to spur them to dispose of him. Protesting that he claimed to be king of the Jews, even though we have no evidence that he did, would fill the bill nicely. Suitably spun, it might sound like blasphemy to the Jews and sedition to the Romans. But it might also have been enough to get Jesus crucified to advise the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, that this unruly vagabond represented a threat to law and order in such politically volatile conditions.
Brutal Pilate
Pilate seems to have had a particular penchant for stringing people up. He is presented in the Gospels as a vacillating liberal of a metaphysical turn of mind, but we know enough about his historical record to be sure that he was nothing of the sort. He was, in fact, a notoriously brutal viceroy, an official who was accused of bribery, cruelty and executions without trial and who was eventually dishonourably dismissed from office. Had Jesus come up against a more liberal regime, he might well have got off.
Was Jesus, then, a ‘spiritual’ rather than a political leader? This, to be sure, is the customary reading of his exhortation to render unto Caesar what was owed to him, while at the same time granting God his due. But it is unlikely that this is how his words would have been understood in first-century Palestine. It projects back upon them a modern distinction between religion and politics which is decidedly non-scriptural. Those who heard Jesus’s words would have understood that ‘the things that are God’s’ included mercy, justice, feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrant, sheltering the destitute and protecting the poor from the oppression of the powerful. There is little opiate delusion in Jesus’s grim warning to his comrades that if they were true to his Gospel of love and justice, they would meet the same sticky end as him.
The motif of a close link between the deepest suffering and the highest exaltation is a traditional one in Judaism, as it is in the Western lineage of tragedy. True power flows from powerlessness, a doctrine which Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection is meant to exemplify.
In the so-called Beatitudes, the poor, hungry and sorrowful are declared blessed, but not the virtuous. Unlike the virtuous, they are signs of the coming kingdom because they exemplify the emptiness and deprivation which the New Jerusalem is destined to repair. The point of prophecy is not to foresee the future, but to warn those in the present that unless they change their ways, the future is likely to be extremely unpleasant.
Bathos
The kingdom did not, of course, arrive shortly after Jesus’s death, as the first Christians (and certainly St Paul) seem to have believed it would. The Christian movement begins in bathos. Its origins lie in a hideously embarrassing anti-climax, one which follows hard on the heels of the shameful scandal that the Son of God has actually been butchered.
One reason why Jesus and his followers expected the kingdom to arrive very soon is that they had no notion that human activity might have any role in helping to establish it. For the early Christians, the kingdom was a gift of God, not the work of history. History was now effectively at an end. There was no point in seeking to overthrow the Romans when God was about to transform the whole world. Jesus’s disciples could no more bring about the kingdom of God by their own efforts than socialism for deterministic Marxists can be achieved by intensified agitation.
Some aspects of the way Jesus is portrayed in these texts have an obvious radical resonance. He is presented as homeless, propertyless, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinfolk, without a trade or occupation, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, a thorn in the side of the Establishment and a scourge of the rich and powerful. The problem of much modern Christianity has been how to practise this lifestyle with two children, a car and a mortgage.
Jesus has most of the characteristic features of the revolutionary activist, including celibacy. Marriage belongs to a regime which is already passing away, and there will be no marrying in New Jerusalem. This is not an anti-sexual motif. Celibacy is seen by Christianity as a sacrifice, and sacrifice means giving up what is regarded as precious. St Paul, an enemy of the flesh in popular mythology, regards the sexual union of two bodies, not celibacy, as a sign of the coming kingdom. Actually working for the kingdom, however, involves surrendering or suspending some of the goods which will characterize it. The same is true of working for socialism.
‘He expected it to be soon swept away by a form of existence more perfected in its justice, peace, comradeship and exuberance of spirit than even Lenin and Trotsky could have imagined’
Even so, Jesus is not presented as an ascetic, in the manner of the ferociously anti-social John the Baptist. He and his comrades enjoy food, drink and general festivity, and he enjoins men and women to unburden themselves of anxiety and live in the present. What one might call Jesus’s ethical extravagance – giving over and above the measure, turning the other cheek, rejoicing in being persecuted, loving one’s enemies, refusing to judge, non-resistance to evil, laying oneself open to the violence of others – is similarly motivated by a sense that history is now at an end.
In his crucifixion and descent into hell, Jesus in St Paul’s view is ‘made sin’, identifying with the scum and refuse of the earth, enduring a solidarity with suffering, evil and despair in order to transfigure it through his resurrection. Like the classical tragic protagonist, he succeeds only through failure. If he lay down confidently expecting to spring up again, he would not have been raised from the dead.
Effervescent hopes
This, then, is what all the effervescent hopes of Jesus and his entourage have come to. The crucifixion proclaims that the truth of human history is a tortured political criminal. It is a message profoundly unacceptable to those sunk in a dewy-eyed delusion (idealists, progressivists, liberals, reformers, Yea-sayers, modernizers, socialist humanists and the like), though one which was perfectly understood by a Jew like Walter Benjamin. Only if you can gaze on this frightful image without being turned to stone, accepting it as absolutely the last word, is there a slim chance that it might not be.
Christianity is thus considerably more pessimistic than secular humanism, as well as immeasurably more optimistic. On the one hand, it is grimly realistic about the recalcitrance of the human condition. On the other hand, it holds out not only that the redemption of this dire condition is possible, but that, astonishingly, it has in some sense already happened. Not even the most mechanistic of Marxists would claim these days that socialism is inevitable, let alone that it has already come about without our noticing. For Christian faith, however, the advent of the kingdom is assured, since Jesus’s rising from the dead has already founded it.
Was Jesus, then, a revolutionary? Not in any sense that Lenin or Trotsky would have recognized. But is this because he was less of a revolutionary than they were, or more so? Less, certainly, in that he did not advocate the overthrow of the power-structure that he confronted. But this was, among other things, because he expected it to be soon swept away by a form of existence more perfected in its justice, peace, comradeship and exuberance of spirit than even Lenin and Trotsky could have imagined. Perhaps the answer, then, is not that Jesus was more or less a revolutionary, but that he was both more and less.
Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester. This is an edited extract of his introduction to The Gospels, published as part of its ‘Revolutions’ series by Verso, London and New York, 2007, www.versobooks.com
Jesus certainly kept some shady political company. One of his inner circle was known as Simon the Zealot, the Zealots being an underground anti-imperialist movement dedicated to driving the Romans out of Palestine. The Roman presence in the province was not in fact particularly oppressive. No Roman institutions, legal, educational or religious, were imposed on the people. In Jesus’s own home territory of Galilee there was no official Roman presence at all, so it is unlikely that he would have grown up at the knee of smoulderingly anti-imperialist parents. Any Roman soldiers he saw as a child would have been on holiday.
Even so, there were religious reasons why even hands-off rule by a pagan state was objectionable to God’s chosen people. The Zealots wanted a purified, traditionalist, theocratic Jewish state, and promoted a theology not unlike that of al-Qaeda today. In addition to the militant Simon, two other of Jesus’s disciples, James and John, are given a nickname (Sons of Thunder) which some New Testament scholars suspect may link them, too, to the insurrectionists. Perhaps Judas sold Jesus because he had expected him to be Lenin, and became bitterly disenchanted when he realized that he was not going to lead the people against the colonial power.
Daggers drawn
It is, however, unlikely that Jesus was part of the anti-imperial resistance. For one thing, he seems to have believed in paying taxes (‘Render unto Caesar...’), while the Zealots did not. For another thing, he was at daggers drawn with the Pharisees, who were in some ways the theological wing of the Zealots. In fact, they are the only sect whom he curses to hell.
Another reason why Jesus is unlikely to have been a Zealot is that his disciples were not arrested after his execution. Had they been known insurrectionists, the occupying Roman forces would almost certainly have moved in to mop them up. There may have been a sprinkling of anti-imperialist militants among the disciples, but the Roman authorities seem to have been clear that the Jesus movement was not out to overthrow the state. This is not why he was crucified.
Indeed, why he was crucified is something of a mystery. It was certainly not because he claimed to be the Son of God. Jesus makes no such claim in the Gospels, except once, implausibly, in the Markian trial scene; and Mark had his own axe to grind. Taken in a literal sense, the title ‘Son of God’ would almost certainly have resulted in Jesus’s being stoned to death on the spot for blasphemy, which was presumably one excellent reason why he did not make claim to it. In any case, Jesus cannot have believed that he was literally the Son of God. Yahweh does not have testicles.
Only the Romans had power of execution, and they took no interest in the theological squabblings of their colonial subjects. Or rather, they took an interest only if they threatened to breed political consequences. They would certainly have been put on the alert if Jesus had claimed to be the Messiah, since the Messiah was seen for the most part as a militant political leader who would put Israel on its feet again. But Jesus does not claim to be the Messiah either, except on two occasions, both of which are historically dubious.
It is likely that Jesus ended massive as the evangelists make out. Even so, there was a general expectation that God was about to do something dramatic. For Christian theology, he did – but it turned out to be a resurrection, not a revolution.
It may be that Jesus’s violent act of trying to clear the temple of moneychangers, which sailed preciously close to blasphemy, was enough for his antagonists to nail him. A reverence for the temple was an essential feature of Judaism, and a strike against it was a strike against Israel itself. The temple rulers controlled Israel’s currency and economy, so that the place was among other things perceived as a bastion of the ruling class.up on Calvary because of his enormous popularity with some of the poor, who had swarmed into Jerusalem for the feast of Passover, and who no doubt looked to him for some vague sort of salvation from the Roman occupation. His popular support was probably by no means as
Not ‘anti-capitalist’
Running out the moneychangers was not, however, intended as an ‘anti-capitalist’ gesture. Jesus would have understood well enough that pilgrims would not have brought their sacrificial animals with them from home, for fear that they might be found blemished by the priests who inspected them on arrival. They would consequently buy a dove or pigeon in the temple itself, and would need to change currencies to do so. Jesus was probably signifying the destruction of the temple in a symbolic way, rather than expressing his distaste for its commercial sleaze. The paraphernalia of organized religion was to be replaced by an alternative temple, namely his own murdered and transfigured body.
Quite what the charges against Jesus were is not entirely clear. The accounts of the Gospels on this score are mutually inconsistent. The general impression is that the whole of the Jewish governing caste were against Jesus, but that they could not find common ground among themselves on why they were. He was certainly accused of blasphemy. But the Romans would not have cared about that, and in any case executing someone as a pseudo-teacher or pseudo-prophet was remarkably rare in Jesus’s day.
The High Priest, Caiaphas, had therefore to concoct some charge which legitimated Jesus’s execution in the eyes of the Jews while sounding sufficiently alarming to the Romans to spur them to dispose of him. Protesting that he claimed to be king of the Jews, even though we have no evidence that he did, would fill the bill nicely. Suitably spun, it might sound like blasphemy to the Jews and sedition to the Romans. But it might also have been enough to get Jesus crucified to advise the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, that this unruly vagabond represented a threat to law and order in such politically volatile conditions.
Brutal Pilate
Pilate seems to have had a particular penchant for stringing people up. He is presented in the Gospels as a vacillating liberal of a metaphysical turn of mind, but we know enough about his historical record to be sure that he was nothing of the sort. He was, in fact, a notoriously brutal viceroy, an official who was accused of bribery, cruelty and executions without trial and who was eventually dishonourably dismissed from office. Had Jesus come up against a more liberal regime, he might well have got off.
Was Jesus, then, a ‘spiritual’ rather than a political leader? This, to be sure, is the customary reading of his exhortation to render unto Caesar what was owed to him, while at the same time granting God his due. But it is unlikely that this is how his words would have been understood in first-century Palestine. It projects back upon them a modern distinction between religion and politics which is decidedly non-scriptural. Those who heard Jesus’s words would have understood that ‘the things that are God’s’ included mercy, justice, feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrant, sheltering the destitute and protecting the poor from the oppression of the powerful. There is little opiate delusion in Jesus’s grim warning to his comrades that if they were true to his Gospel of love and justice, they would meet the same sticky end as him.
The motif of a close link between the deepest suffering and the highest exaltation is a traditional one in Judaism, as it is in the Western lineage of tragedy. True power flows from powerlessness, a doctrine which Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection is meant to exemplify.
In the so-called Beatitudes, the poor, hungry and sorrowful are declared blessed, but not the virtuous. Unlike the virtuous, they are signs of the coming kingdom because they exemplify the emptiness and deprivation which the New Jerusalem is destined to repair. The point of prophecy is not to foresee the future, but to warn those in the present that unless they change their ways, the future is likely to be extremely unpleasant.
Bathos
The kingdom did not, of course, arrive shortly after Jesus’s death, as the first Christians (and certainly St Paul) seem to have believed it would. The Christian movement begins in bathos. Its origins lie in a hideously embarrassing anti-climax, one which follows hard on the heels of the shameful scandal that the Son of God has actually been butchered.
One reason why Jesus and his followers expected the kingdom to arrive very soon is that they had no notion that human activity might have any role in helping to establish it. For the early Christians, the kingdom was a gift of God, not the work of history. History was now effectively at an end. There was no point in seeking to overthrow the Romans when God was about to transform the whole world. Jesus’s disciples could no more bring about the kingdom of God by their own efforts than socialism for deterministic Marxists can be achieved by intensified agitation.
Some aspects of the way Jesus is portrayed in these texts have an obvious radical resonance. He is presented as homeless, propertyless, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinfolk, without a trade or occupation, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, a thorn in the side of the Establishment and a scourge of the rich and powerful. The problem of much modern Christianity has been how to practise this lifestyle with two children, a car and a mortgage.
Jesus has most of the characteristic features of the revolutionary activist, including celibacy. Marriage belongs to a regime which is already passing away, and there will be no marrying in New Jerusalem. This is not an anti-sexual motif. Celibacy is seen by Christianity as a sacrifice, and sacrifice means giving up what is regarded as precious. St Paul, an enemy of the flesh in popular mythology, regards the sexual union of two bodies, not celibacy, as a sign of the coming kingdom. Actually working for the kingdom, however, involves surrendering or suspending some of the goods which will characterize it. The same is true of working for socialism.
‘He expected it to be soon swept away by a form of existence more perfected in its justice, peace, comradeship and exuberance of spirit than even Lenin and Trotsky could have imagined’
Even so, Jesus is not presented as an ascetic, in the manner of the ferociously anti-social John the Baptist. He and his comrades enjoy food, drink and general festivity, and he enjoins men and women to unburden themselves of anxiety and live in the present. What one might call Jesus’s ethical extravagance – giving over and above the measure, turning the other cheek, rejoicing in being persecuted, loving one’s enemies, refusing to judge, non-resistance to evil, laying oneself open to the violence of others – is similarly motivated by a sense that history is now at an end.
In his crucifixion and descent into hell, Jesus in St Paul’s view is ‘made sin’, identifying with the scum and refuse of the earth, enduring a solidarity with suffering, evil and despair in order to transfigure it through his resurrection. Like the classical tragic protagonist, he succeeds only through failure. If he lay down confidently expecting to spring up again, he would not have been raised from the dead.
Effervescent hopes
This, then, is what all the effervescent hopes of Jesus and his entourage have come to. The crucifixion proclaims that the truth of human history is a tortured political criminal. It is a message profoundly unacceptable to those sunk in a dewy-eyed delusion (idealists, progressivists, liberals, reformers, Yea-sayers, modernizers, socialist humanists and the like), though one which was perfectly understood by a Jew like Walter Benjamin. Only if you can gaze on this frightful image without being turned to stone, accepting it as absolutely the last word, is there a slim chance that it might not be.
Christianity is thus considerably more pessimistic than secular humanism, as well as immeasurably more optimistic. On the one hand, it is grimly realistic about the recalcitrance of the human condition. On the other hand, it holds out not only that the redemption of this dire condition is possible, but that, astonishingly, it has in some sense already happened. Not even the most mechanistic of Marxists would claim these days that socialism is inevitable, let alone that it has already come about without our noticing. For Christian faith, however, the advent of the kingdom is assured, since Jesus’s rising from the dead has already founded it.
Was Jesus, then, a revolutionary? Not in any sense that Lenin or Trotsky would have recognized. But is this because he was less of a revolutionary than they were, or more so? Less, certainly, in that he did not advocate the overthrow of the power-structure that he confronted. But this was, among other things, because he expected it to be soon swept away by a form of existence more perfected in its justice, peace, comradeship and exuberance of spirit than even Lenin and Trotsky could have imagined. Perhaps the answer, then, is not that Jesus was more or less a revolutionary, but that he was both more and less.
Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester. This is an edited extract of his introduction to The Gospels, published as part of its ‘Revolutions’ series by Verso, London and New York, 2007, www.versobooks.com
Tourism is booming worldwide – but not everyone is happy about it
Chris Brazier reports.
I stood aghast: was this really the same place? The time I spent in Ubud in 1981 is one of my most cherished travel memories. This village in central Bali had a steady trickle of Western visitors even then, attracted by its reputation as a haven for artists. But it was still a village and my partner and I were the only people staying at a modest guesthouse that we reached down a mud track leading to the luminous beauty of the paddy fields.
I struggled to fit modern reality with memory when I returned in 2006. Where once ducks had marched in line through the rain towards the rice fields, now cars jammed streets lined with hotels, restaurants and shops, all of them aimed at tourists.
This is a story that you could replicate in every corner of the world – the Spanish mega-resorts of Benidorm and Magaluf were once sleepy fishing villages, after all. And the forerunners of mass tourism are always the more intrepid, backpacking travellers who discover the place in its ‘authentic’, ‘unspoiled’ state. Cafés and guesthouses aimed at them spring up, word spreads, and with every passing year the services improve and the visitors become more mainstream. The place eventually becomes a tourist haunt pure and simple, the province of people who will travel only on organized or packaged tours, and (in many cases) ultimately falls into decline. Meanwhile, the intrepid traveller has moved on, Planet Guide in hand, in search of the next ‘undiscovered’ location (Laos, anyone?). Tricia Barnett says she often wonders if she works for the campaigning organization Tourism Concern to absolve her own guilt. Thirty years ago a Thai friend took her to his village in northeast Thailand. She was the first white woman to visit; now half a million tourists a year go trekking in those hills.
The number of people travelling abroad on holiday continues to soar with every passing year.
Europe is still the top destination, chosen by 54 per cent, but the Majority World now receives more than a third of all tourists, compared with a quarter in 1990 and a sixth in 1982. According to the travel and tourism establishment, this spells nothing but good for poor countries who would otherwise find it difficult to earn foreign exchange. The total earned from tourism in 2006 was a whopping $733 billion and 75 countries earned more than a billion dollars during the year. And the flow of tourists is not justone way – South Koreans entered the world’s top 10 in terms of spending on tourism in 2006, while Brazilians spent 33 per cent and Argentineans 24 per cent more on tourism in 2006 than in 2005.1
‘Tourism is a major factor in the war on poverty,’ says Francesco Frangialli, Secretary-General of the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). ‘For most developing countries... it is their largest single export and major driver of jobs, investment and economic transformation.’2
These facts are undeniable and yet they provide a distorted picture. For a start, most of the income from tourism does not remain in the host country but leaks back to the rich world. This can be because a Western-based transnational company owns the hotel, or because food, drink or other supplies demanded by tourists have to be imported from overseas. The World Bank estimates that 55 per cent of international tourism income in the South leaves the region via foreign-owned airlines, hotels and tour operators, or payments for imported food, drink and supplies.3 In some countries, notably in the Caribbean, the figure for ‘leakage’ can be as high as 75 per cent. Nor is this restricted to the Majority World: one survey showed two-thirds of the income from tourism in the Mediterranean was pocketed by fewer than 10 tour operators from northern Europe.4
Leakage is by no means the only problem. Local communities are also forced off their land by tourist developments. Tricia Barnett recalls a recent visit to a luxury hotel in Oman. ‘You go through the desert and over the mountains and down to this classical bay. At one end there’s the resort – a beautiful Bedouin-style development – and at the other a fishing village that used to stretch over the whole bay; they were asked to move and got paid peanuts. At the top of the road they now want to put a barrier and a guard so that the guests with their passes will be safe. The villagers will also get passes but only for themselves, which effectively cuts them off from their friends, relations and anyone else they want to meet.’
Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, thousands made homeless by the 2004 tsunami have still not returned to their former villages and livelihoods – partly because of tourist development. In 2005, an official of the Sri Lanka Tourist Board was quoted as saying: ‘In a cruel twist of fate, nature has presented Sri Lanka with a unique opportunity, and out of this great tragedy will come a world-class tourism destination.’5 In practice wholesale development has not yet taken place – and solid community opposition seems to have beaten off a plan for luxury hotels at the surfing beach of Arugam Bay. But camps in the capital, Colombo, are still full of tsunami refugees and ‘exclusion zones’ near the coast remain, stopping villagers from rebuilding their homes. Locals, including fisherfolk, have been priced out of land by investors buying holiday homes.
The environmental impact of tourism can also stretch far beyond the climate-changing emissions of jet aircraft. At one extreme is the development of Dubai as a luxury destination. This desert sheikhdom is literally constructing a new world – a kind of playpen for the world’s most affluent citizens built from oil money. Already famous for the distinctive shape of its 321-metre-high Burj Al Arab Hotel (where suites can cost up to $28,000 a night), Dubai has been dumping millions of cubic metres of rock and sand into the sea to create entirely new archipelagos. The sheikhdom’s natural coastline of just 70 kilometres will more than double when the project is finished, each extension of new land filled with luxurious villas and resorts for the rich. The Palm Jebel Ali archipelago will spell out in the sea a poem in Arabic by Dubai’s ruler. Another development, ‘The World’, will feature 300 artificial islands laid out as a map of the world when seen from the sky. Dubai also boasts the largest shopping mall outside the US, a 25-storey ski slope made with artificial snow, and is building the world’s largest theme park (it will be twice the size of Florida’s Disney World). To call developments like these ‘unsustainable’ is almost to make a mockery of the word.
But even standard tourism developments rarely take account of their ecological impact. Take Cancún on the Yucatan peninsula, a region the Mexican Government now calls the Mayan Riviera. The money to pay for this massive resort complex was borrowed from the Inter-American Development Bank by Mexico in 1971, the first such loan to fund tourism development.
‘Land was incredibly cheap and it had all the right conditions to lure tourists – beautiful beaches, blue seas, Mayan ruins,’ Araceli Dominguez, the owner of a small, eco-friendly hotel and a high-profile campaigner, told writer Leo Hickman. ‘The plan was to build 30,000 rooms in 30 years on the island of Cancún. But then they started to dredge the lagoons and destroy the vegetation… They are now trying to build hotels in protected areas as there isn’t enough prime land left any more… The politicians just don’t see that ecotourism could bring in more money in the long run than the chain hotels.’
Tourism loans from international financial institutions like the World Bank are supposed to meet environmental as well as economic and social criteria. But in practice this doesn’t mean much. And the results, given a World Bank portfolio of tourism-related lending of $3 billion across 114 projects worldwide,6 can be disastrous. A report in Jamaica’s Gleaner newspaper in 2006 laid into the country’s tourism expansion programme: ‘The Government must have known there would be implications for such fast-paced development. And the sores have already begun to fester. Current Cancún-style hotel developments on pristine protected land and over-development of our resort towns are putting endemic wildlife and flora at risk and putting pressure on community infrastructure… Too often, foreign investors have breached environmental guidelines without consequence.’
Tourism offers employment – but often of a particularly exploitative and low-paid kind. Again, Cancún provides a far from atypical example. ‘Some 90 per cent of hotel workers there get only the minimum wage. Average salaries are rarely above $4 a day, while an apartment can cost $150 a month. Hotels often hire staff for 28 days then let the contract expire and recruit the worker again. Staff frequently work 12-14 hour days and commute for an hour to their lodgings.’7 The ultimate irony is that these workers who make tourism possible themselves have only six days’ holiday a year and no access to the spectacular beaches.
The long list of problems associated with tourism could consume pages more – and we have not even touched on the sad saga of sex tourism. It would be easy to conclude from this that tourism is a disaster area, that developing countries should not touch it with a bargepole. And yet countries the world over keep clamouring for more. Sometimes it’s local élites chasing the tourist dollar because they know they will find a way of benefiting, even if the poor do not. In other cases it may simply be desperation – the genuine lack of any alternative.
The beast just keeps on growing and there is barely a government that is not laying down a welcome mat
When I interviewed Peter M Burns, author of An Introduction to Tourism & Anthropology, he recalled working on a tourism development plan in Eritrea, just after the end of its 30-year war. ‘We were in the Minister of Tourism’s office and we were telling her all the usual things that tourist consultants do, giving her the party line about the need for slow and careful development – all of the things that you and I would instantly agree about. There was a pregnant pause and she said: “Well, that’s just fine but my people have been at war for 30 years: they need work right now, not 10 years down the line. Now, how are you going to help me to give them that?” And we were flummoxed. Because she’d demolished us in one sentence.’
And why is mass tourism the main compromise Cuba has chosen to make with the capitalist world during its decades of principled isolation? Implacably hostile to conventional Western models of almost anything, the Castro Government has promoted tourism in a major way – and not without problems. There is now a virtual two-tier system in Cuban society (those who have access to tourist dollars and those who don’t). Is tourism just the least damaging devil available?
The consistent demand for tourism from countries of every political hue is something that even those most suspicious of tourism need to take into account. Bali, where we started this brief tour, is worth considering in this respect. When I visited in 2006, most of the restaurants and hotels were empty. The bomb blasts in Kuta in 2002 and 2005 had drastically reduced tourist numbers, with many Western governments warning their nationals against travelling to Indonesia. Australians in particular switched to Fiji as their ‘island paradise’ of choice. The result was taxi drivers and street sellers desperately competing for custom. It seemed a classic case of tourist-led development turning sour.
Yet everyone I talked to wanted the tourists to return. For most people, work in the tourist industry sits alongside traditional activities such as subsistence farming. Their home is still the village and growing foodthe centre of family life. But the extra income from the tourism provides for the luxuries that subsistence farming rarely allows. The same might be said of the island as a whole. Tourist dollars certainly leak away via grotesque global intrusions like Hard Rock Café and McDonald’s, but foreign cash has also contributed to widespread electrification and free schooling that have vastly improved the quality of life over the past 25 years. According to Tourism Concern, employment conditions in Bali’s big hotels are the best they have found anywhere in the world.
The Balinese soul, moreover, still seems amazingly resilient in the face of global monoculture – rooted in the peculiar mélange of animism and Hinduism that has sustained the island’s people for centuries. The Balinese seem to have a knack for taking what they want from tourism while continuing on their own sweet way. It is a knack that all too few other cultures threatened by mass tourism seem to possess.
So what do we conclude from all this? Anybody can make a pretty strong prima facie case against mass tourism: finding horror stories and exploitation is easy enough. But the beast just keeps on growing and there is barely a government on the planet that is not laying down a welcome mat. It is clear that these governments need to think more carefully about the kinds of tourist developments they approve – there is not much sense in trusting to the environmental and ethical good sense of the travel and tourism industry.
But is there also something that can be done from the demand side? Are there more positive forms of tourism that would both benefit local communities and allow us to holiday with a clearer conscience? The next article tries to answer these questions.
All figures from the UNWTO.
Speech to the Climate Meeting in Bali in November 2007.
http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afrec/subjindx/131envir.htm
Worldwide Fund for Nature, cited in People and Planet, http://www.peopleandplanet.net/doc.php?id=1113
Tourism Concern, Post-tsunami reconstruction and tourism: another disaster?, October 2005.
As of 1986. Cited in Leo Hickman, The Final Call, Eden Project Books 2007.
Tourism Concern, Sun, Sea, Sand and Sweatshops, 2005.
Tourism Concern/Leeds DEC, cited in Pamela Novicka, No-Nonsense Guide to Tourism, NI 2007.
I stood aghast: was this really the same place? The time I spent in Ubud in 1981 is one of my most cherished travel memories. This village in central Bali had a steady trickle of Western visitors even then, attracted by its reputation as a haven for artists. But it was still a village and my partner and I were the only people staying at a modest guesthouse that we reached down a mud track leading to the luminous beauty of the paddy fields.
I struggled to fit modern reality with memory when I returned in 2006. Where once ducks had marched in line through the rain towards the rice fields, now cars jammed streets lined with hotels, restaurants and shops, all of them aimed at tourists.
This is a story that you could replicate in every corner of the world – the Spanish mega-resorts of Benidorm and Magaluf were once sleepy fishing villages, after all. And the forerunners of mass tourism are always the more intrepid, backpacking travellers who discover the place in its ‘authentic’, ‘unspoiled’ state. Cafés and guesthouses aimed at them spring up, word spreads, and with every passing year the services improve and the visitors become more mainstream. The place eventually becomes a tourist haunt pure and simple, the province of people who will travel only on organized or packaged tours, and (in many cases) ultimately falls into decline. Meanwhile, the intrepid traveller has moved on, Planet Guide in hand, in search of the next ‘undiscovered’ location (Laos, anyone?). Tricia Barnett says she often wonders if she works for the campaigning organization Tourism Concern to absolve her own guilt. Thirty years ago a Thai friend took her to his village in northeast Thailand. She was the first white woman to visit; now half a million tourists a year go trekking in those hills.
The number of people travelling abroad on holiday continues to soar with every passing year.
Europe is still the top destination, chosen by 54 per cent, but the Majority World now receives more than a third of all tourists, compared with a quarter in 1990 and a sixth in 1982. According to the travel and tourism establishment, this spells nothing but good for poor countries who would otherwise find it difficult to earn foreign exchange. The total earned from tourism in 2006 was a whopping $733 billion and 75 countries earned more than a billion dollars during the year. And the flow of tourists is not justone way – South Koreans entered the world’s top 10 in terms of spending on tourism in 2006, while Brazilians spent 33 per cent and Argentineans 24 per cent more on tourism in 2006 than in 2005.1
‘Tourism is a major factor in the war on poverty,’ says Francesco Frangialli, Secretary-General of the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). ‘For most developing countries... it is their largest single export and major driver of jobs, investment and economic transformation.’2
These facts are undeniable and yet they provide a distorted picture. For a start, most of the income from tourism does not remain in the host country but leaks back to the rich world. This can be because a Western-based transnational company owns the hotel, or because food, drink or other supplies demanded by tourists have to be imported from overseas. The World Bank estimates that 55 per cent of international tourism income in the South leaves the region via foreign-owned airlines, hotels and tour operators, or payments for imported food, drink and supplies.3 In some countries, notably in the Caribbean, the figure for ‘leakage’ can be as high as 75 per cent. Nor is this restricted to the Majority World: one survey showed two-thirds of the income from tourism in the Mediterranean was pocketed by fewer than 10 tour operators from northern Europe.4
Leakage is by no means the only problem. Local communities are also forced off their land by tourist developments. Tricia Barnett recalls a recent visit to a luxury hotel in Oman. ‘You go through the desert and over the mountains and down to this classical bay. At one end there’s the resort – a beautiful Bedouin-style development – and at the other a fishing village that used to stretch over the whole bay; they were asked to move and got paid peanuts. At the top of the road they now want to put a barrier and a guard so that the guests with their passes will be safe. The villagers will also get passes but only for themselves, which effectively cuts them off from their friends, relations and anyone else they want to meet.’
Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, thousands made homeless by the 2004 tsunami have still not returned to their former villages and livelihoods – partly because of tourist development. In 2005, an official of the Sri Lanka Tourist Board was quoted as saying: ‘In a cruel twist of fate, nature has presented Sri Lanka with a unique opportunity, and out of this great tragedy will come a world-class tourism destination.’5 In practice wholesale development has not yet taken place – and solid community opposition seems to have beaten off a plan for luxury hotels at the surfing beach of Arugam Bay. But camps in the capital, Colombo, are still full of tsunami refugees and ‘exclusion zones’ near the coast remain, stopping villagers from rebuilding their homes. Locals, including fisherfolk, have been priced out of land by investors buying holiday homes.
The environmental impact of tourism can also stretch far beyond the climate-changing emissions of jet aircraft. At one extreme is the development of Dubai as a luxury destination. This desert sheikhdom is literally constructing a new world – a kind of playpen for the world’s most affluent citizens built from oil money. Already famous for the distinctive shape of its 321-metre-high Burj Al Arab Hotel (where suites can cost up to $28,000 a night), Dubai has been dumping millions of cubic metres of rock and sand into the sea to create entirely new archipelagos. The sheikhdom’s natural coastline of just 70 kilometres will more than double when the project is finished, each extension of new land filled with luxurious villas and resorts for the rich. The Palm Jebel Ali archipelago will spell out in the sea a poem in Arabic by Dubai’s ruler. Another development, ‘The World’, will feature 300 artificial islands laid out as a map of the world when seen from the sky. Dubai also boasts the largest shopping mall outside the US, a 25-storey ski slope made with artificial snow, and is building the world’s largest theme park (it will be twice the size of Florida’s Disney World). To call developments like these ‘unsustainable’ is almost to make a mockery of the word.
But even standard tourism developments rarely take account of their ecological impact. Take Cancún on the Yucatan peninsula, a region the Mexican Government now calls the Mayan Riviera. The money to pay for this massive resort complex was borrowed from the Inter-American Development Bank by Mexico in 1971, the first such loan to fund tourism development.
‘Land was incredibly cheap and it had all the right conditions to lure tourists – beautiful beaches, blue seas, Mayan ruins,’ Araceli Dominguez, the owner of a small, eco-friendly hotel and a high-profile campaigner, told writer Leo Hickman. ‘The plan was to build 30,000 rooms in 30 years on the island of Cancún. But then they started to dredge the lagoons and destroy the vegetation… They are now trying to build hotels in protected areas as there isn’t enough prime land left any more… The politicians just don’t see that ecotourism could bring in more money in the long run than the chain hotels.’
Tourism loans from international financial institutions like the World Bank are supposed to meet environmental as well as economic and social criteria. But in practice this doesn’t mean much. And the results, given a World Bank portfolio of tourism-related lending of $3 billion across 114 projects worldwide,6 can be disastrous. A report in Jamaica’s Gleaner newspaper in 2006 laid into the country’s tourism expansion programme: ‘The Government must have known there would be implications for such fast-paced development. And the sores have already begun to fester. Current Cancún-style hotel developments on pristine protected land and over-development of our resort towns are putting endemic wildlife and flora at risk and putting pressure on community infrastructure… Too often, foreign investors have breached environmental guidelines without consequence.’
Tourism offers employment – but often of a particularly exploitative and low-paid kind. Again, Cancún provides a far from atypical example. ‘Some 90 per cent of hotel workers there get only the minimum wage. Average salaries are rarely above $4 a day, while an apartment can cost $150 a month. Hotels often hire staff for 28 days then let the contract expire and recruit the worker again. Staff frequently work 12-14 hour days and commute for an hour to their lodgings.’7 The ultimate irony is that these workers who make tourism possible themselves have only six days’ holiday a year and no access to the spectacular beaches.
The long list of problems associated with tourism could consume pages more – and we have not even touched on the sad saga of sex tourism. It would be easy to conclude from this that tourism is a disaster area, that developing countries should not touch it with a bargepole. And yet countries the world over keep clamouring for more. Sometimes it’s local élites chasing the tourist dollar because they know they will find a way of benefiting, even if the poor do not. In other cases it may simply be desperation – the genuine lack of any alternative.
The beast just keeps on growing and there is barely a government that is not laying down a welcome mat
When I interviewed Peter M Burns, author of An Introduction to Tourism & Anthropology, he recalled working on a tourism development plan in Eritrea, just after the end of its 30-year war. ‘We were in the Minister of Tourism’s office and we were telling her all the usual things that tourist consultants do, giving her the party line about the need for slow and careful development – all of the things that you and I would instantly agree about. There was a pregnant pause and she said: “Well, that’s just fine but my people have been at war for 30 years: they need work right now, not 10 years down the line. Now, how are you going to help me to give them that?” And we were flummoxed. Because she’d demolished us in one sentence.’
And why is mass tourism the main compromise Cuba has chosen to make with the capitalist world during its decades of principled isolation? Implacably hostile to conventional Western models of almost anything, the Castro Government has promoted tourism in a major way – and not without problems. There is now a virtual two-tier system in Cuban society (those who have access to tourist dollars and those who don’t). Is tourism just the least damaging devil available?
The consistent demand for tourism from countries of every political hue is something that even those most suspicious of tourism need to take into account. Bali, where we started this brief tour, is worth considering in this respect. When I visited in 2006, most of the restaurants and hotels were empty. The bomb blasts in Kuta in 2002 and 2005 had drastically reduced tourist numbers, with many Western governments warning their nationals against travelling to Indonesia. Australians in particular switched to Fiji as their ‘island paradise’ of choice. The result was taxi drivers and street sellers desperately competing for custom. It seemed a classic case of tourist-led development turning sour.
Yet everyone I talked to wanted the tourists to return. For most people, work in the tourist industry sits alongside traditional activities such as subsistence farming. Their home is still the village and growing foodthe centre of family life. But the extra income from the tourism provides for the luxuries that subsistence farming rarely allows. The same might be said of the island as a whole. Tourist dollars certainly leak away via grotesque global intrusions like Hard Rock Café and McDonald’s, but foreign cash has also contributed to widespread electrification and free schooling that have vastly improved the quality of life over the past 25 years. According to Tourism Concern, employment conditions in Bali’s big hotels are the best they have found anywhere in the world.
The Balinese soul, moreover, still seems amazingly resilient in the face of global monoculture – rooted in the peculiar mélange of animism and Hinduism that has sustained the island’s people for centuries. The Balinese seem to have a knack for taking what they want from tourism while continuing on their own sweet way. It is a knack that all too few other cultures threatened by mass tourism seem to possess.
So what do we conclude from all this? Anybody can make a pretty strong prima facie case against mass tourism: finding horror stories and exploitation is easy enough. But the beast just keeps on growing and there is barely a government on the planet that is not laying down a welcome mat. It is clear that these governments need to think more carefully about the kinds of tourist developments they approve – there is not much sense in trusting to the environmental and ethical good sense of the travel and tourism industry.
But is there also something that can be done from the demand side? Are there more positive forms of tourism that would both benefit local communities and allow us to holiday with a clearer conscience? The next article tries to answer these questions.
All figures from the UNWTO.
Speech to the Climate Meeting in Bali in November 2007.
http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afrec/subjindx/131envir.htm
Worldwide Fund for Nature, cited in People and Planet, http://www.peopleandplanet.net/doc.php?id=1113
Tourism Concern, Post-tsunami reconstruction and tourism: another disaster?, October 2005.
As of 1986. Cited in Leo Hickman, The Final Call, Eden Project Books 2007.
Tourism Concern, Sun, Sea, Sand and Sweatshops, 2005.
Tourism Concern/Leeds DEC, cited in Pamela Novicka, No-Nonsense Guide to Tourism, NI 2007.
'Death would be better'
Hopes raised that domestic violence bill will curb abuse
A bill that would make domestic violence a criminal offence in Tajikistan will go before Parliament later this year. Women’s groups, including the Association for Gender Development and Preventing Violence Towards Women, drafted the law in November 2006 in an effort to protect thousands of victims.
Panorama, a local NGO, says that 70 per cent of married women in Tajikistan are tormented by their mother-in-law or husband. The police insist that they will not interfere in ‘family matters’ but, if adopted, this law will set out a clear prosecution procedure whilst freeing up state funds for victim support centres.
The legal age for marriage was set at 17 at the end of Tajikistan’s 1992-97 civil war, but girls unlucky enough to be married before then were packed off to their in-laws as young as 13. Most women are completely reliant on their husband and his family for financial support and those who don’t have close friends or relatives willing to help are often driven to suicide.
‘Death is better than this daily humiliation,’ says Saima, a 31-year-old mother of four from Rudaki whose husband and in-laws beat her so severely that she set fire to herself in the bathroom last September, burning half of her body. Her husband has a seasonal job on a farm, and there is not enough money to go around outside the harvest period. In frustration, he beats Saima for not providing the children with sufficient food and clothing. Since the beginning of her 14-year marriage, Saima has drunk a pail of vinegar, cut herself with broken bottles and tried to drown in the river. Family members have always found her in time, then beaten her harder.
Saima’s bedroom reeks of acrid bandages and burned skin. Her husband calls her a ‘disfigured bitch’, refusing to let anyone but the doctor in to see her. He will not pay for her medical bills and repeatedly threatens her with divorce and destitution if she presses charges. There is no escape. ‘My parents told me to put up with it and that God will decide my fate. It would have been better if I had died,’ she says.
Ninety per cent of the population is Muslim and suicide is strictly forbidden. Nearly all deaths are registered as accidental and anyone who fails in their attempt risks being shunned by society.
Around 36 women took their own lives in the first half of 2006 as a direct result of systematic abuse. Self-immolation is becoming increasingly common because most homes have ready supplies of kerosene for lamp fuel and it is considered a less sinful form of death.
Even if domestic violence does become a criminal offence, it will take a radical change in society’s attitude before the cycle of abuse is broken. Mothers who were beaten in their youth often terrorize their son’s wife in the belief that a hardy Tajik is a good Tajik.
Darigha, a 26-year-old mother of three, whose mother-in-law will not allow her to speak in the house, smiles when she says: ‘I take comfort in knowing that I have a son and one day I can make life hell for his wife.’
Sorrel NeussAdditional reporting by IWPR (Institute of War and Peace Reporting) staff in Tajikistan
The names in this article have been changed
A bill that would make domestic violence a criminal offence in Tajikistan will go before Parliament later this year. Women’s groups, including the Association for Gender Development and Preventing Violence Towards Women, drafted the law in November 2006 in an effort to protect thousands of victims.
Panorama, a local NGO, says that 70 per cent of married women in Tajikistan are tormented by their mother-in-law or husband. The police insist that they will not interfere in ‘family matters’ but, if adopted, this law will set out a clear prosecution procedure whilst freeing up state funds for victim support centres.
The legal age for marriage was set at 17 at the end of Tajikistan’s 1992-97 civil war, but girls unlucky enough to be married before then were packed off to their in-laws as young as 13. Most women are completely reliant on their husband and his family for financial support and those who don’t have close friends or relatives willing to help are often driven to suicide.
‘Death is better than this daily humiliation,’ says Saima, a 31-year-old mother of four from Rudaki whose husband and in-laws beat her so severely that she set fire to herself in the bathroom last September, burning half of her body. Her husband has a seasonal job on a farm, and there is not enough money to go around outside the harvest period. In frustration, he beats Saima for not providing the children with sufficient food and clothing. Since the beginning of her 14-year marriage, Saima has drunk a pail of vinegar, cut herself with broken bottles and tried to drown in the river. Family members have always found her in time, then beaten her harder.
Saima’s bedroom reeks of acrid bandages and burned skin. Her husband calls her a ‘disfigured bitch’, refusing to let anyone but the doctor in to see her. He will not pay for her medical bills and repeatedly threatens her with divorce and destitution if she presses charges. There is no escape. ‘My parents told me to put up with it and that God will decide my fate. It would have been better if I had died,’ she says.
Ninety per cent of the population is Muslim and suicide is strictly forbidden. Nearly all deaths are registered as accidental and anyone who fails in their attempt risks being shunned by society.
Around 36 women took their own lives in the first half of 2006 as a direct result of systematic abuse. Self-immolation is becoming increasingly common because most homes have ready supplies of kerosene for lamp fuel and it is considered a less sinful form of death.
Even if domestic violence does become a criminal offence, it will take a radical change in society’s attitude before the cycle of abuse is broken. Mothers who were beaten in their youth often terrorize their son’s wife in the belief that a hardy Tajik is a good Tajik.
Darigha, a 26-year-old mother of three, whose mother-in-law will not allow her to speak in the house, smiles when she says: ‘I take comfort in knowing that I have a son and one day I can make life hell for his wife.’
Sorrel NeussAdditional reporting by IWPR (Institute of War and Peace Reporting) staff in Tajikistan
The names in this article have been changed
Floods, earthquakes and disasters
You can't help but compare the responses to Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar (Burma) and to the earthquake in China, can you?
While Governments internationally are engaged in condemning the Burmese authorities for refusing aid and not managing to distribute what aid there was to their communities BBC NEWS Politics Burma 'guilty of inhuman action', in China the situation appears to be quite different, with aid and workers flooding in from a variety of countries.BBC NEWS World Asia-Pacific Quake effort resumes after panic
While I obviously deplore the failure of the military rulers of Burma to deal with this crisis adequately, apparently because of a conflict of ideology, could there possibly be a sense of 'the West' being a little too keen to contrast China's more positive approach in the run up to the Olympics? Call me cynical (most do!) but after the debacle of the Olympic flame's journey and the continuing situation in Nepal, it's rather convenient that the news headlines are now concentrating on China's capabilities rather than its less than impeccable record on human rights. I hope the positive and necessary response to the plight of millions of Chinese citizens does not obscure the continued human rights issues which need to be addressed.
Yes I am being deliberately controversial butthat's what debate is all about so what are your views?
Newscow x
While Governments internationally are engaged in condemning the Burmese authorities for refusing aid and not managing to distribute what aid there was to their communities BBC NEWS Politics Burma 'guilty of inhuman action', in China the situation appears to be quite different, with aid and workers flooding in from a variety of countries.BBC NEWS World Asia-Pacific Quake effort resumes after panic
While I obviously deplore the failure of the military rulers of Burma to deal with this crisis adequately, apparently because of a conflict of ideology, could there possibly be a sense of 'the West' being a little too keen to contrast China's more positive approach in the run up to the Olympics? Call me cynical (most do!) but after the debacle of the Olympic flame's journey and the continuing situation in Nepal, it's rather convenient that the news headlines are now concentrating on China's capabilities rather than its less than impeccable record on human rights. I hope the positive and necessary response to the plight of millions of Chinese citizens does not obscure the continued human rights issues which need to be addressed.
Yes I am being deliberately controversial butthat's what debate is all about so what are your views?
Newscow x
For those who want to abolish Human Rights, please read
Human rights - the facts
Civil and political rights
At the last count, in 2006: 1Torture and terror
There were cases of torture and ill-treatment by security forces, police and other state authorities in 102 countries
400 detainees from more than 30 nationalities were held at Guantánamo Bay; 200 had staged hunger strikes since the camp opened; 40 had attempted suicide; 3 died in June 2006 after apparent suicides
An unknown number of detainees were being held in secret detention centres or ‘black sites’ around the world The death penalty
20,000 people were on death row worldwide
3,861 people were sentenced to death in 55 countries; 1,591 prisoners were executed in 25 countries – down from 2,184 in 2005 (figures include only judicial executions)
91% of all known executions took place in 6 countries: China, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Pakistan and the US
69 countries still use the death penalty Violence against women
At least 1 in 3 of the world’s women had been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused
70% of the casualties in conflicts were non-combatants, most of them women and children Firearms
85% of killings worldwide involved the use of small arms and light weapons
60% of the world’s firearms were in the hands of private individuals
Economic and social rights 2
In 2000 the member states of the UN committed themselves to the Millennium Development Goals. These set out what are, in effect, the most basic economic and social rights. 1990 was taken as the starting point; minimum ‘targets’ were to be achieved by 2015. Just 7 years now remain to achieve them.
At present rates of progress, it will be 30 years before South Asia gets there – at least 100 years before sub-Saharan Africa does so. Apart from Europe and North America, no region will reach the base level before 2020. Extreme poverty
Target: halve the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day.
Comment: the target may almost be hit by ‘developing regions’ as a whole – but it will be missed spectacularly by sub-Saharan Africa.
Child mortality
Target: Reduce the rate by two thirds.
Comment: Painfully slow progress. To meet the target the rate should fall by roughly 50 points in the 10 years between 2005 and 2015. It fell by just 23 points in the 15 years between 1990 and 2005.
Hunger
Target: halve the number of people who suffer from hunger.
Comment: progress is far too slow. Every 5 seconds a child still dies from hunger-related causes. In Bangladesh, India and Nepal nearly half of all children under 5 suffer from malnutrition.AIDS
Target: Halt or reverse spread.
By the end of 2006 the number of people living with HIV was up to 39.5 million from 31.9 million in 2001. The rate of increase is slowing, but in 2006 just 28% of people in need of treatment were receiving it in developing regions. Water
Target: Halve the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water.
Comment: The target will be missed by 600 million people. An estimated 1.6 billion people will need access to ‘improved sanitation’ – not the same as safe drinking water - by 2015. Access to safe drinking water is likely to be even more restricted.
Maternal Mortality
Target: Reduce by three quarters. There are no reliable figures. An estimated 500,000 women die each year from treatable or preventable complications of pregnancy or childbirth. In sub-Saharan Africa a woman’s risk of dying from such complications over the course of her lifetime is 1 in 16, compared with 1 in 3,800 in the rich world. Education
Target: Ensure that by 2015 children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary education.
Comment: In sub-Saharan Africa 30% of primary school age children are still out of school. Worldwide, 77 million children do not go to school; 781 million adults cannot read or write, of whom two-thirds are women.
Environment
Goal: Reverse loss of environmental resources.
Comment: Forests are still being lost rather than renewed.
Comment: Emissions continue a relentless rise. Counter measures have been ineffective. Projections suggest that unless the rise is not just halted but reversed by 2015, then changes to the climate will be both uncontrollable and catastrophic.
Amnesty International Annual Report 2007.
The statistical tables are taken from the UN Millennium Development Goals Report 2007, available online at http://mdgs.un.org Other data and comment are taken from Social Watch Report, also available online at www.socialwatch.org
Civil and political rights
At the last count, in 2006: 1Torture and terror
There were cases of torture and ill-treatment by security forces, police and other state authorities in 102 countries
400 detainees from more than 30 nationalities were held at Guantánamo Bay; 200 had staged hunger strikes since the camp opened; 40 had attempted suicide; 3 died in June 2006 after apparent suicides
An unknown number of detainees were being held in secret detention centres or ‘black sites’ around the world The death penalty
20,000 people were on death row worldwide
3,861 people were sentenced to death in 55 countries; 1,591 prisoners were executed in 25 countries – down from 2,184 in 2005 (figures include only judicial executions)
91% of all known executions took place in 6 countries: China, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Pakistan and the US
69 countries still use the death penalty Violence against women
At least 1 in 3 of the world’s women had been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused
70% of the casualties in conflicts were non-combatants, most of them women and children Firearms
85% of killings worldwide involved the use of small arms and light weapons
60% of the world’s firearms were in the hands of private individuals
Economic and social rights 2
In 2000 the member states of the UN committed themselves to the Millennium Development Goals. These set out what are, in effect, the most basic economic and social rights. 1990 was taken as the starting point; minimum ‘targets’ were to be achieved by 2015. Just 7 years now remain to achieve them.
At present rates of progress, it will be 30 years before South Asia gets there – at least 100 years before sub-Saharan Africa does so. Apart from Europe and North America, no region will reach the base level before 2020. Extreme poverty
Target: halve the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day.
Comment: the target may almost be hit by ‘developing regions’ as a whole – but it will be missed spectacularly by sub-Saharan Africa.
Child mortality
Target: Reduce the rate by two thirds.
Comment: Painfully slow progress. To meet the target the rate should fall by roughly 50 points in the 10 years between 2005 and 2015. It fell by just 23 points in the 15 years between 1990 and 2005.
Hunger
Target: halve the number of people who suffer from hunger.
Comment: progress is far too slow. Every 5 seconds a child still dies from hunger-related causes. In Bangladesh, India and Nepal nearly half of all children under 5 suffer from malnutrition.AIDS
Target: Halt or reverse spread.
By the end of 2006 the number of people living with HIV was up to 39.5 million from 31.9 million in 2001. The rate of increase is slowing, but in 2006 just 28% of people in need of treatment were receiving it in developing regions. Water
Target: Halve the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water.
Comment: The target will be missed by 600 million people. An estimated 1.6 billion people will need access to ‘improved sanitation’ – not the same as safe drinking water - by 2015. Access to safe drinking water is likely to be even more restricted.
Maternal Mortality
Target: Reduce by three quarters. There are no reliable figures. An estimated 500,000 women die each year from treatable or preventable complications of pregnancy or childbirth. In sub-Saharan Africa a woman’s risk of dying from such complications over the course of her lifetime is 1 in 16, compared with 1 in 3,800 in the rich world. Education
Target: Ensure that by 2015 children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary education.
Comment: In sub-Saharan Africa 30% of primary school age children are still out of school. Worldwide, 77 million children do not go to school; 781 million adults cannot read or write, of whom two-thirds are women.
Environment
Goal: Reverse loss of environmental resources.
Comment: Forests are still being lost rather than renewed.
Comment: Emissions continue a relentless rise. Counter measures have been ineffective. Projections suggest that unless the rise is not just halted but reversed by 2015, then changes to the climate will be both uncontrollable and catastrophic.
Amnesty International Annual Report 2007.
The statistical tables are taken from the UN Millennium Development Goals Report 2007, available online at http://mdgs.un.org Other data and comment are taken from Social Watch Report, also available online at www.socialwatch.org
US loves democracy
As the US presidential election motor shifts into gear, Jeremy Seabrook, reflects on the United States' professed love of democracy.
Everyone knows of the love the United States bears for democracy. This passionate attachment is, however, something less than a concern that all the peoples of the world should enjoy the privileges America claims for itself. If the US is so keen on democracy, this is because it has candidates for high office in most countries of the world. This gives it a proprietary interest in the fate of its chosen, wherever elections take place; and it visits its wrath upon those dark places where its preferences are blocked.
If President Bush rushed to congratulate Mwai Kibaki on his 'victory' in Kenya, this was because he had been expected to fulfill the responsibilities which go with pre-selection by Washington. When Kibaki visited the US three years ago, he was hailed by George Bush as 'building a modern, prosperous and peaceful future', and congratulated for his 'economic reforms' and 'rooting out corruption.' The dispatch of Benazir Bhutto to her homeland as the bearer of democratic values was crafted in secret conclaves over many months between Washington, Dubai and Islamabad. Her function – an affirmation of secular democratic values – to embellish the threadbare dictatorship of Musharraf, was brutally abridged. A martyr to democracy, perhaps, but whose democracy?
In Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai wears his Western urbanity with the same assurance he wears his authentic regalia of cloak and karakul hat, made from the skin of aborted lamb-foetuses. In November, the largest US-based investment business conference focussed on Afghanistan reviewed opportunities in construction and materials, mining, energy and infrastructure, agribusiness and food processing, IT and telecommunications. The US Geological Survey mineral resources assessment of Afghanistan is expected imminently. In Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki manages the exhausted post-surge calm. In November he signed a deal for a 'long-term US presence' in Iraq, while the US re-affirmed its support for 'a democratic regime in Iraq against domestic and external dangers.'
Yulia Timoshenko, the 'fiery heroine' of the Orange revolution in Ukraine, returned by the narrowest of margins as Prime Minister in December 2007. Described as a 'Prime Minister we can dealwith' by the officials of the Bush administration, she wants Ukraine to join NATO and the European Union. In an article in Foreign Affairs, she urged the West to oppose Moscow's efforts to restore its grip on its 'lost empire.' President Mikhail Saakashvili, victor of the rose revolution in Georgia was re-elected in January 2008. His 'pro-Western' government also had on the ballot-paper a referendum on joining NATO. Georgia also has 2,000 soldiers in Iraq – the third largest contingent after the US and Britain. A graduate of Columbia University, Saakashvili worked in a New York law firm before becoming candidate to the presidency.
In Bangladesh, the chief of the Caretaker government, Fakhruddin Ahmed, is a former World Bank official. India is led by economist Manmohan Singh, whose liberalizing credentials were won during his apprenticeship in globalization in the USA. In Algeria, the army which has created a precarious stability by crushing Islamists who were on the verge of winning a democratic election in 1991, is reported to be 'stepping up' its relations with the USA, and is 'on board' with Washington's aspirations. Gloria Arroyo, economist president of the Philippines was, in the 1960s, a classmate of Bill Clinton, who has been quick to praise her handling of the economy.
America's love affair with universal democracy is not quite as it seems; it is, rather a narcissistic infatuation with its own destiny and its desire to project this onto the rest of the world.
Of course the 'spread' of such democracy appeals to the US. Its benevolent oversight of winning candidates ensures that US interests are going to be properly safeguarded, and will take priority over the fate of the people who have voted, sometimes unwittingly, for this noble ideal.
This is a continuation of the Reagan doctrine, for which the National Endowment for Democracy was set up in 1983. This was itself a reaction against the savage dictatorships which had sustained US priorities in the 1960s and 70s with such repression and violence.
There remain, of course, places the US cannot reach, undemocratic governments, 'fragile' or 'failing' states. Putin's Russia has shown signs of reverting from the tutelage of Western democracy to an older authoritarianism. China remains, despite its economic power, unfree, since it does not have the institutions that ornamentdemocracy. (There is a contradiction here. The US routinely advocates democracy as the surest way to economic success: China is the most glaring disconfirmation of this doctrine). Iran's Ahmedinajad, although voted for, was not 'properly' elected.
According to the US narrative, Hugo Chávez maintains his power over the poor of Venezuela by bribery and by intimidating powerless media moguls and innocent oil interests. Of course democracy can also produce the wrong result – Hamas in the Palestinian territories for example. Such entities have to be disqualified in other ways, in this case by virtue of its being a 'terrorist organization'. Clearly the will of the people is less sacrosanct than is sometimes claimed; it needs nurture and guidance, so that it does not appoint those which the US and its allies feel constrained subsequently to disappoint.
'A candidate in every country' is the ambition of the USA, so that it can count on the loyalty of its elect; preferably, the Opposition should be on-side also, so that no awkward flaws appear in the seamless garment of political freedom and economic necessity. Of course, in civilized – that is, rich – countries, there is no longer any need for the supervision of democracy, since all electable politicians have learned that it is their highest duty not to disturb the natural processes of global accumulation. In any case, the people can be trusted not to vote away their enjoyment of the modest privilege that have attained. It was not always so – after the Second World War, the USA used economic aid, support to non-Communist parties and covert actions to prevent Communist parties from coming to power in France and Italy. But those days are long gone.
With the experience of democracy in Kenya, Pakistan and Iraq in recent months, there has been a modification of the democratic rhetoric. The shallow electoralism preached by Bush for the past eight years as the sure sign of the 'democratic process' is no longer good enough. Clearly, all countries need 'democratic institutions', modelled on those of the USA or Europe. In other words, a more far-reaching transformation must take place than anything hitherto advocated. Every country must be re-shaped to this end; their customs, society and structures must all be moulded to create an easy transition between administrations, and the economy may run smoothly, unhindered by political interference, which, as everyone knows, is inimical to the wellbeing and prosperity of humanity.
If only it were so simple. There is another, serious obstacle to the realization of the US dream of universal democracy. Democracy in the West was established as a ritual to determine who gets what – that is to say, it was about the interaction between social forces and their relationship to the economy. In other words, it was based on class interests. The friction between social classes has been largely resolved in the West, and this is a further reason why distinctions between potential governing parties are marginal, and people see little difference between them.
When this model of democratic give-and-take is transferred to other parts of the world, particularly since the extinction of Socialism, it is no longer a question of temperate arguments between different strata in a clearly defined nation-state. Older, existential identities fill the vacuum left by the lapse of any other overriding ideological project – the establishment of socialism, for instance, or liberation from colonial rule. The main determinant becomes ethnic, tribal or religious affiliation. The struggle for justice between rich and poor mutates into more bitter rivalries for dominance, and takes on more ominous contours. These no longer set haves against have-nots within a national entity, but open up faults and fissures that are not defined by the boundaries of countries, but by ancient enmities. The elevation of sectarian or ethnic majorities into oppressors is sanctified by the mathematics of democracy; and majorities rarely exercise the theoretical forbearance towards their opponents which the theory of democracy advocates, since there is little danger that their captive minorities will ever outvote them.
The preachings of 'democrats' in Washington become empty slogans as they travel between the orderly arrangement of affairs in Washington or London and the shaky nation-states drawn by colonial pencils on trackless maps, or carved out of ancient crumbling empires, which have assigned this or that group to one country and their close kin to another, along with all their ancient jealousies, no longer submerged in wider social and economic visions.
America's love affair with universal democracy is not quite as it seems; it is, rather a narcissistic infatuation with its own destiny and its desire to project this onto the rest of the world. lpoliticalanimal at 09:55:00 o'clock BST
This entry has 1 comments:
Comment from dannyjmu 16/05/08 14:04
Isnt it hilarious that a country which is such a supposed bastion of democracy does itself not even have true democracy. As proven by the 2000 election, the popular vote counts for nothing when electing the President. Al Gore received half a million more votes than his rival and still got beat into office. What a shining example of how democracy can be circumvented.I also look at how democratically elected governments in the 1970's and 80's were brought down by armed right-wing movements backed by the US governments. I look at the Contras in Central America and Salvador Allende in Chile as prime examples. Just because the people of these countries sought fit to democratically elect left-wing governments, the US decided in its infinite wisdom that these people obviously didnt understand democracy and decided to support their friends who did. What love for democracy.Dont get me wrong, I'm not anti-American. I love alot of things about America, but sadly foreign policy and hypocrisy arent on that list. Hopefully things will change and the American Administrations and governments can once again foster respect and admiration from others, but I think that will take alot of time and alot of effort.
Everyone knows of the love the United States bears for democracy. This passionate attachment is, however, something less than a concern that all the peoples of the world should enjoy the privileges America claims for itself. If the US is so keen on democracy, this is because it has candidates for high office in most countries of the world. This gives it a proprietary interest in the fate of its chosen, wherever elections take place; and it visits its wrath upon those dark places where its preferences are blocked.
If President Bush rushed to congratulate Mwai Kibaki on his 'victory' in Kenya, this was because he had been expected to fulfill the responsibilities which go with pre-selection by Washington. When Kibaki visited the US three years ago, he was hailed by George Bush as 'building a modern, prosperous and peaceful future', and congratulated for his 'economic reforms' and 'rooting out corruption.' The dispatch of Benazir Bhutto to her homeland as the bearer of democratic values was crafted in secret conclaves over many months between Washington, Dubai and Islamabad. Her function – an affirmation of secular democratic values – to embellish the threadbare dictatorship of Musharraf, was brutally abridged. A martyr to democracy, perhaps, but whose democracy?
In Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai wears his Western urbanity with the same assurance he wears his authentic regalia of cloak and karakul hat, made from the skin of aborted lamb-foetuses. In November, the largest US-based investment business conference focussed on Afghanistan reviewed opportunities in construction and materials, mining, energy and infrastructure, agribusiness and food processing, IT and telecommunications. The US Geological Survey mineral resources assessment of Afghanistan is expected imminently. In Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki manages the exhausted post-surge calm. In November he signed a deal for a 'long-term US presence' in Iraq, while the US re-affirmed its support for 'a democratic regime in Iraq against domestic and external dangers.'
Yulia Timoshenko, the 'fiery heroine' of the Orange revolution in Ukraine, returned by the narrowest of margins as Prime Minister in December 2007. Described as a 'Prime Minister we can dealwith' by the officials of the Bush administration, she wants Ukraine to join NATO and the European Union. In an article in Foreign Affairs, she urged the West to oppose Moscow's efforts to restore its grip on its 'lost empire.' President Mikhail Saakashvili, victor of the rose revolution in Georgia was re-elected in January 2008. His 'pro-Western' government also had on the ballot-paper a referendum on joining NATO. Georgia also has 2,000 soldiers in Iraq – the third largest contingent after the US and Britain. A graduate of Columbia University, Saakashvili worked in a New York law firm before becoming candidate to the presidency.
In Bangladesh, the chief of the Caretaker government, Fakhruddin Ahmed, is a former World Bank official. India is led by economist Manmohan Singh, whose liberalizing credentials were won during his apprenticeship in globalization in the USA. In Algeria, the army which has created a precarious stability by crushing Islamists who were on the verge of winning a democratic election in 1991, is reported to be 'stepping up' its relations with the USA, and is 'on board' with Washington's aspirations. Gloria Arroyo, economist president of the Philippines was, in the 1960s, a classmate of Bill Clinton, who has been quick to praise her handling of the economy.
America's love affair with universal democracy is not quite as it seems; it is, rather a narcissistic infatuation with its own destiny and its desire to project this onto the rest of the world.
Of course the 'spread' of such democracy appeals to the US. Its benevolent oversight of winning candidates ensures that US interests are going to be properly safeguarded, and will take priority over the fate of the people who have voted, sometimes unwittingly, for this noble ideal.
This is a continuation of the Reagan doctrine, for which the National Endowment for Democracy was set up in 1983. This was itself a reaction against the savage dictatorships which had sustained US priorities in the 1960s and 70s with such repression and violence.
There remain, of course, places the US cannot reach, undemocratic governments, 'fragile' or 'failing' states. Putin's Russia has shown signs of reverting from the tutelage of Western democracy to an older authoritarianism. China remains, despite its economic power, unfree, since it does not have the institutions that ornamentdemocracy. (There is a contradiction here. The US routinely advocates democracy as the surest way to economic success: China is the most glaring disconfirmation of this doctrine). Iran's Ahmedinajad, although voted for, was not 'properly' elected.
According to the US narrative, Hugo Chávez maintains his power over the poor of Venezuela by bribery and by intimidating powerless media moguls and innocent oil interests. Of course democracy can also produce the wrong result – Hamas in the Palestinian territories for example. Such entities have to be disqualified in other ways, in this case by virtue of its being a 'terrorist organization'. Clearly the will of the people is less sacrosanct than is sometimes claimed; it needs nurture and guidance, so that it does not appoint those which the US and its allies feel constrained subsequently to disappoint.
'A candidate in every country' is the ambition of the USA, so that it can count on the loyalty of its elect; preferably, the Opposition should be on-side also, so that no awkward flaws appear in the seamless garment of political freedom and economic necessity. Of course, in civilized – that is, rich – countries, there is no longer any need for the supervision of democracy, since all electable politicians have learned that it is their highest duty not to disturb the natural processes of global accumulation. In any case, the people can be trusted not to vote away their enjoyment of the modest privilege that have attained. It was not always so – after the Second World War, the USA used economic aid, support to non-Communist parties and covert actions to prevent Communist parties from coming to power in France and Italy. But those days are long gone.
With the experience of democracy in Kenya, Pakistan and Iraq in recent months, there has been a modification of the democratic rhetoric. The shallow electoralism preached by Bush for the past eight years as the sure sign of the 'democratic process' is no longer good enough. Clearly, all countries need 'democratic institutions', modelled on those of the USA or Europe. In other words, a more far-reaching transformation must take place than anything hitherto advocated. Every country must be re-shaped to this end; their customs, society and structures must all be moulded to create an easy transition between administrations, and the economy may run smoothly, unhindered by political interference, which, as everyone knows, is inimical to the wellbeing and prosperity of humanity.
If only it were so simple. There is another, serious obstacle to the realization of the US dream of universal democracy. Democracy in the West was established as a ritual to determine who gets what – that is to say, it was about the interaction between social forces and their relationship to the economy. In other words, it was based on class interests. The friction between social classes has been largely resolved in the West, and this is a further reason why distinctions between potential governing parties are marginal, and people see little difference between them.
When this model of democratic give-and-take is transferred to other parts of the world, particularly since the extinction of Socialism, it is no longer a question of temperate arguments between different strata in a clearly defined nation-state. Older, existential identities fill the vacuum left by the lapse of any other overriding ideological project – the establishment of socialism, for instance, or liberation from colonial rule. The main determinant becomes ethnic, tribal or religious affiliation. The struggle for justice between rich and poor mutates into more bitter rivalries for dominance, and takes on more ominous contours. These no longer set haves against have-nots within a national entity, but open up faults and fissures that are not defined by the boundaries of countries, but by ancient enmities. The elevation of sectarian or ethnic majorities into oppressors is sanctified by the mathematics of democracy; and majorities rarely exercise the theoretical forbearance towards their opponents which the theory of democracy advocates, since there is little danger that their captive minorities will ever outvote them.
The preachings of 'democrats' in Washington become empty slogans as they travel between the orderly arrangement of affairs in Washington or London and the shaky nation-states drawn by colonial pencils on trackless maps, or carved out of ancient crumbling empires, which have assigned this or that group to one country and their close kin to another, along with all their ancient jealousies, no longer submerged in wider social and economic visions.
America's love affair with universal democracy is not quite as it seems; it is, rather a narcissistic infatuation with its own destiny and its desire to project this onto the rest of the world. lpoliticalanimal at 09:55:00 o'clock BST
This entry has 1 comments:
Comment from dannyjmu 16/05/08 14:04
Isnt it hilarious that a country which is such a supposed bastion of democracy does itself not even have true democracy. As proven by the 2000 election, the popular vote counts for nothing when electing the President. Al Gore received half a million more votes than his rival and still got beat into office. What a shining example of how democracy can be circumvented.I also look at how democratically elected governments in the 1970's and 80's were brought down by armed right-wing movements backed by the US governments. I look at the Contras in Central America and Salvador Allende in Chile as prime examples. Just because the people of these countries sought fit to democratically elect left-wing governments, the US decided in its infinite wisdom that these people obviously didnt understand democracy and decided to support their friends who did. What love for democracy.Dont get me wrong, I'm not anti-American. I love alot of things about America, but sadly foreign policy and hypocrisy arent on that list. Hopefully things will change and the American Administrations and governments can once again foster respect and admiration from others, but I think that will take alot of time and alot of effort.
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