Labour abandoned any claim to be a progressive party when they backed the Conservatives to criminalise squatting, legislation that saw a young man jailed last week for squatting in a housing association flat which had been empty for a year and which is now empty again.
Alex Haigh is the first victim of a policy based on a borderline-racist campaign by the Evening Standard who ran fact-free stories about organised gangs of immigrants squatting houses. This is a policy eagerly embraced by three parties who are politically and morally bankrupt and have no ideas at all for the economy beyond keeping an overinflated housing bubble inflated.
The Green Party conference recently agreed the following:
This Conference deeply regrets the recent action of the Coalition Government to criminalise squatting.
We note that it will evict up to 20,000 squatters, the majority of whom are decent, honest and self-reliant people.
We note that these people will either be thrown onto the streets, or into jail, or placed in local authority temporary accommodation, all of which carry a cost to society.
We note that in the vast majority of cases the accommodation they have been squatting will mainly revert to empty status.
We note that there are some 60,000 households classified as homeless in the UK, while some 720,000 houses are currently empty. This is an outrageous, irrational and unintelligent way to run a country.
We note that as well as being a waste of resources, empty houses adversely affect the neighbourhood directly (by causing dampness in adjoining terraced houses) and indirectly through the depressing appearance of boarded up houses.
Therefore we ask our elected representatives to do all in their power to implement our present policies of Empty Property Use Orders as an immediate tactical response to the Government’s criminalisation of squatting, and also to press for a Land Value Tax as a strategic response to the problem of empty housing.
The difference between Labour and the Conservatives on key policies is hard to see. Miliband backs the sales of council houses, the restriction of union powers and is leaving himself an opt-out by refusing to commit personally to reversing Lansley’s NHS reforms. Several of his colleagues are championing cuts. [Update: to his credit, Miliband finally promised "the next Labour government will... repeal the NHS Bill"].
Labour might limp into government with the help of what is left of the Liberal Democrats but only a fool would claim that a coalition next election might somehow soften Labour’s worst tendencies.
I am the first to admit that the Green Party has its flaws. The worst of these is a tolerance for scientifically illiterate positions on alternative medicine that undermines our overall credibility on the the serious scientific issue of climate change. However, this is nothing compared with the battle needed for Labour to regain its soul.
In 2000, 189 nations promised to free people from extreme poverty and multiple deprivations (pdf). This pledge turned into the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015.
However, disabled people were not involved in the process to create the goals and their needs are ignored in the goals themselves as well as the targets and measurements that go with them.
This has meant that disabled people haven’t been able to benefit as much as they could have done from the increased opportunities development has made possible in poor countries – and also that they haven’t been able to contribute their skills, knowledge, experience and energy to help their countries succeed. Given that one in five of the world’s poor people have a disability of some kind, this is a lot of people being excluded!
The MDGs expire in 2015 and the conversation has already begun to decide what will replace them.
The NGO Sightsavers are currently working to produce a “Voices of the Marginalised” report with five other organisations – ADD, Alzheimer’s Disease International, Basic Needs, HelpAge International and the Secretariat of the African Decade for People with Disabilities. The report examines how the current MDGs have affected disabled people, older people and people with mental health issues or dementia.
Sightsavers are determined that disabled people are not excluded next time and have produced a short film featuring Paralympic athletes who will be taking part in London 2012 as part of their campaign to make sure that voices of blind, disabled, and other marginalised people are listened to in discussions about poverty. It’s called Relay4Equality.
Please take a moment to watch then share the video using the hashtag #Relay4Equality then visit Sightsavers to learn more about the campaign.
The Atos Games
Elsewhere, many are concerned that a government hell bent on demonising sick and disabled people will cynically attempt to use the Paralympics to whitewash their heartless policies:
By all means, let us celebrate the Paralympics. But don’t let this Government capitalise on it. They are leaving sick and disabled people frightened, impoverished, stripped of dignity, independence and hope.
Protests are planned for over 20 towns and cities to draw attention to the grotesque hypocrisy in allowing Atos Origin to sponsor the Paralympic Games.
Yet we cannot allow Tory hypocrisy and the contempt for liberty shown by the British police and politicians to overshadow the good that can come out of the Games. As well as supporting these protests organised by DPAC and UKUncut, please take a look at separate initiatives like #Relay4Equality which are making the most of this opportunity to help include disabled people in discussions about poverty.
A mock awards ceremony at the Olympic Clock in Trafalgar Square descended into farce today after police arrested six people taking part. Three people pretending to be corporate representatives from BP, Dow and Rio Tinto were awarded gold medals for being the worst corporate sponsors of the Olympics, before having small quantities of green custard poured over their heads. The good-natured performance took about 15 minutes and was clearly amusing a number of passers by.
After the ceremony was over and the performers were packing up, about 25 police officers arrived and arrested six people, including the three corporate representatives and people who were mopping up the small amounts of custard on the ground with paper towels.
When confronted, the police officers alleged that ‘criminal damage’ had been done by custard falling on to the stone surface of Trafalgar Square. Before the arrested were even driven away, the controversial custard had been completely cleaned up leaving no trace whatsoever.
One of the arrests was Laurie Flynn, the Chair of Trustees of the Bhopal Medical Appeal who was only observing the event and happened to have picked up the fake medals as part of the tidy-up.
The arrests took place despite the fact that Lord Coe himself has stated: “[the United Kingdom] is a democratic nation, we have a tradition of peaceful demonstrations as long as it doesn’t become a public order issue, we take it as that”.
The Greenwash Gold Ceremony was the culmination of a three month campaign in which members of the public were invited to vote online for they thought was the worst corporate sponsor. The awards were compered by Meredith Alexander, the ex ‘Olympics ethics csar’ who resigned over controversies surrounding Olympic sponsors.
Kevin Smith of London Mining Network said:
“Arresting people over small quantities of spilt custard is incredibly heavy handed policing. Peoples’ freedom of expression is being sacrificed at the Olympics in favour of the protection of the brands of controversial sponsors like BP, Dow and Rio Tinto.”
Meredith Alexander who witnessed the arrests said:
“It’s an Olympic sized overreaction to arrest people just for telling the truth about the Sponsors. Dow Chemical, BP, and Rio Tinto have bought themselves a global opportunity to present a friendly face. Greenwash Gold was set up to tell the other side of the story- the toxic legacy that each of these companies have left behind. It’s outrageous to think that a 15 minute street performance and some green custard required the attention of around 25 police officers. If the companies can’t stand a bit of critical attention, they shouldn’t have sponsored London 2012, which is meant to be the greenest games ever.”
Colin Toogood of the Bhopal Medical Appeal said:
“After Lord Coe’s own statement claiming he supported peaceful protests, these arrests look like giving LOCOG yet another PR headache. This was a peaceful and legitimate protest, against terrible corporate sponsors, and protesters seem to have been arrested for spilling a small amount of custard!”
A proposal was once made in the senate to distinguish slaves from free men by their dress; it then became apparent how great would be the impending danger if our slaves should begin to count our number.
This passing aside in a discussion on mercy by Seneca reveals an important truth. All it takes to make the rule of a cruel elite untenable is for the downtrodden to realise that their oppressors are a small minority. We suffer in solitude. Together we are strong.
I don’t wish to reinforce the common accusation that workfare is slavery. Injustice incites strong emotions and strong words but the comparison is wrong:
Workfare is not slavery but wage labour on the terms common in most of the world: work or starve. £64/week is a wage – a poverty one.
Workfare only appears as slavery in relation to the welfare ‘safety net’ which many of us have grown up with.
The governments’ objectives are clearly not the creation of jobs. Workfare is part of a strategy to feed tabloid prejudices against “scroungers” designed to turn the lowly paid against the unpaid so neither recognises the real source of their misery.
On workfare, Labour are as bad as the Conservatives. Opposition has been coming not from the political establishment but from the streets, leading to a first victory:
Escalating protests against workfare over the last few months have led to news of a first major victory today.
Campaigners are claiming a major scalp in the fight against workfare after retailer Holland & Barrett announced they were pulling out of the scheme. On hearing the news, Brighton Solidarity Federation tweeted “we’ve won an important battle against workfare, but the war is far from over.” The announcement came just 24 hours before a planned national week of action against workfare organised by the Boycott Workfare Network. Holland & Barrett had strongly backed workfare, announcing that they were committed to taking 1,000 people on unpaid work schemes this year alone (out of a workforce of just 3,500).
However, since their April announcement at a workfare conference organised by Department for Work and Pensions Minister Chris Grayling, escalating protests have singled-out the firm with regular pickets across the UK turning away shoppers shocked at the firm’s involvement in the scheme. Outraged customers have also been bombarding H&B’s Twitter and Facebook accounts with complaints. The sustained pressure has forced a u-turn, with Holland & Barrett’s official facebook page announcing late last night that: “the 60 people currently undertaking the work experience scheme will be the last to complete the eight week placement. After this time Holland & Barrett will not participate further in that scheme.”
Holland & Barrett intend to replace unpaid work placements from the Job Center with a salaried apprentice scheme. The Solidarity Federation will keep a close eye on Holland & Barrett and meet any backsliding with renewed direct action, but for now we are celebrating a victory against unpaid work. As a revolutionary union initiative made up of workers and claimants, the Solidarity Federation sees workfare as an attack on all workers by undermining pay and conditions. For example, staff at Holland & Barrett told us that overtime was no longer available in some stores as it was being done by unpaid workfare labour instead.
We will now support the national week of action called by the Boycott Workfare Network against remaining workfare firms before meeting to discuss the next steps.
We are not slaves but what Seneca wrote about slaves is just as true of lowly-paid and precarious workers and the unwaged. We are the majority. We need to learn to see beyond the tactics of Labour and Tories who while pretending “we are all middle class” urge us to blame immigrants and the feckless for the structural inequality in our society.
Today’s news is a sign of what happens when people ignore this propaganda and come together to stand in solidarity against exploitation.
At the height of the Libor fixing scandal, the Conservatives were demanding more deregulation for their paymasters
[Labour] claims that this regulation is all necessary. They seem to believe that without it banks could steal our money… This shows ignorance of how a competitive market works. Our aim is to liberate the economy from the burden of unnecessary regulations.
You have to ask yourself what criminality the Tories are hoping to enable now with their persistent calls to remove “the burden of unnecessary regulations” along with inconvenient “red tape” like human rights.
The financial system has already failed at huge economic and social cost. It has been shown to be corrupt, incompetent, rapacious and economically destructive. The City’s claims to be an indispensable jobs and tax engine for the British economy are nonsense: the bailout costs of 2008-9 dwarfed the financial tax revenues of the boom years, which were below those of manufacturing even at their peak.
In fact, the banks are pumped up with state subsidies and liquidity that they are still failing to pass on in productive lending five years into the crisis. A crucial part of the explanation is the unmuzzled political and economic power of the City: its colonisation of Whitehall and public life, effective grip on its own regulation, revolving-door pull on politicians and civil servants, and purchase of political parties. Finance has usurped democracy.
The Conservatives are doing all they can to block an independent judicial inquiry into criminal behaviour at Barclays bank even in the light of increasing evidence that this systemic fraud was being carried out by other banks too, perhaps even with the collusion of the Bank of England and the Treasury.
As the government continues to resist calls for a proper enquiry into the criminal behaviour in Britain’s banks, it’s time to end the links between ministers and the industry they do not dare to regulate.
51% of Conservative Party funding comes from the financial industry. (via TBIJ.)
The Home Office has held meetings with the UK’s largest ISPs and mobile network operators, and has given them information about the hardware which companies will have to use to monitor traffic flowing through their systems.
When an individual uses a webmail service such as Gmail, for example, the entire webpage is encrypted before it is sent. This makes it impossible for ISPs to distinguish the content of the message. Under the Home Office proposals, once the Gmail is sent, the ISPs would have to route the data via a government-approved “black box” which will decrypt the message, separate the content from the “header data”, and pass the latter back to the ISP for storage.
The report contains no information about how this “black box” works so the following is an assumption.
This is quite technical but it’s important to understand so I’ll try to keep it as simple as possible.
Here is what gets sent across the internet when I type “I have an embarrassing medical condition” into google.
If I was doing this at work or in a web cafe, anyone with the right skills could read what I’d typed.
Most modern web browsers change the colour of part of the title bar to green to let you know when you’re visiting a secure site. I’m writing this post using a “https:” connection which you can see at the start of the address bar.
Notice the colour. Notice too the padlock icon.
When I was researching my medical condition above, I visited http://www.google.co.uk. If I had visited https://www.google.co.uk instead, no one would have been able to snoop on my web traffic. The text “I have an embarrassing medical condition” would have been turned into a garbled string of characters, a code that would take them hundreds of years to break. The “s” after “http” stands for secure (it actually stands for “over Secure Socket Layer” but the important word here is “secure”).
Turning my search string into a coded message that cannot be read by eavesdroppers involves some clever mathematics using prime numbers explained in the brief video below.
Anyone can generate a public keys that can be used to encrypt traffic. But how do you know that the person or organisation is who they claim to be when you visit their site?
Let’s have a look at an example. When you try and browse Indymedia using https you receive a warning:
If you accept the warning and select “Proceed anyway” the browser warns that the https connection is not trusted by using the colour red, a bar through the word and a cross through the padlock.
No one has validated this certificate. You are making an explicit choice to trust them.
If I click on the green beyondclicktivism.com padlock in my browser, however, I can see that the identity of the website has been verified by a Certification Authority. This is why I don’t get the warning I get with Indymedia. The information explains who issued the certificate and who it belongs to (there’s also some extra information about the security of the connection.)
Certification authorities belong to a web of trust, a group of bodies who validate each other. They issue public key certificates like the one from Go Daddy Secure Certification Authority above. These are electronic files that bind a public key with the name of a person or an organization and can be used to verify that a public key belongs to that individual.
Principle of a public key infrastructure. Rough outline: A user applies for a certificate with his public key at a registration authority (RA). The latter confirms the user’s identity to the certification authority (CA) which in turn issues the certificate. The user can then digitally sign a contract using his new certificate. His identity is then checked by the contracting party with a validation authority (VA) which again receives information about issued certificates by the certification authority.
If you haven’t followed all the details above, it doesn’t matter. All you need to understand for now is that there are certificates issued by authorities that identify gmail, for example, as belonging to google so when you go to a website that claims to be gmail you can be sure that it is what it says it is.
Certificate Authority Trustwave has revoked a digital certificate that allowed one of its clients to issue valid certificates for any server, thereby allowing one of its customers to intercept their employees’ private email communication.
The skeleton-key CA certificate was supplied in a tamper-proof hardware security module (HSM) designed to be used within a data loss prevention (DLP) system. DLP systems are designed to block the accidental or deliberate leaking of company secrets or confidential information.
Using the system, a user’s browser or email client would be fooled into thinking it was talking over a secure encrypted link to Gmail, Skype or Hotmail. In reality it was talking to a server on the firm’s premises that tapped into communications before relaying them to the genuine server. The DLP system needed to be able to issue different digital certificates from different services on the fly to pull off this approach, which amounts to a man-in-the-middle attack.
The same principle approach might be used in government monitoring activities, such as spying on its own citizens using web services such as Gmail and Skype. Evidence suggests that digital certificates issued by Netherlands-based firm DigiNotar last year were used in this way to eavesdrop on the webmail communications of Iran users last year, although no firm state-sponsored connection has been established.
The only way that these black boxes could work would be if the UK government were creating fake certificates like this with the collusion of a Certification Authority. This wouldn’t be a company spying on its staff, it would be a government spying on every email, every post, every tweet, every message, every query, every electricity bill paid or balance transfer arranged by its citizens. And the padlock in your browser would stay green.
If the government are planning on forging certificates then using tor or a VPN is not going to protect either you so those who’ve read a little bit about this and think they’ll be safe – think again. When I wrote Online Idiocy Kills warning of potential dangers when using tor, I assumed https was secure. News of the Home Office black boxes show that this is no longer the case.
Before the election, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats both agreed they wanted to roll back Labour’s authoritarian state. They lied. This surveillance system has no place in a democratic society. This legislation must be thrown out along with the totalitarian minded ministers who are trying to push it through. This is one step too far towards a police state that we must urgently reject.
In the days since I wrote my first blog post on the Rothamsted GM wheat controversy I’ve spent more time reading up on GM than in the past nine years. It’s been a tortuous few days for me. As a big fan of the Bad Science movement who was loosely involved with improving the Green Party’s science policy; as the author of the 2012 London manifesto on which Jenny Jones and others stood, and somebody who has put a lot of my life in the last four years into helping her achieve great things on the London Assembly and Southwark Council; and as somebody who slightly sits on the fence on the GM debate; I’ve found myself agreeing with all quarters.
On the eve of the protest I thought I’d put down a few more thoughts following the debate.
There is a lot of nonsense from all quarters (but it’s not the end of the world)
The Sense About Science petition really took off because Take The Flour Back appeared to carry a number of misleading or false scientific statements on their web site. For example, wheat isn’t wind pollinated, as they claim. It looked like an open and shut case of Bad Science, one that many anti-GM campaigners remain unwilling to accept or engage with.
Robert Wilson sent me a particularly egregious case of mendacious attacks on GM. This report, signed by major environmental organisations and hosted by Friends of the Earth, makes repeated mention of the tragic suicide rate amongst Indian farmers and the adoption, post 2001, of GM crops. Yet when the report was published in October 2011 there appears to be plenty of research showing that hypothesis has been debunked. It’s slapdash at best, irresponsible and appallingly disrespectful at worst, to repeat this theory if it is false, and is typical of the approach that too many anti-GM campaigners seem to take.
But then the Rothamsted researchers, ably assisted by a remarkable online campaign from Sense About Science, went too far in debunking that claim. One of their researchers (I think it was Prof. John Pickett) went onto BBC news to say there was “zero” risk of contamination. This contradicts his statement to the Telegraph that it is possible but unlikely. Their claim that wheat is only “1% self-pollinating” also looks suspect when you consider that this EU-funded public information web site states the risk is up to 9.7% depending on climate and the type of what. The researchers have certainly put in place safeguards. But perhaps any risk is too great?
Too often campaigners on any issue can be their own worst enemy.
The “pro science” tweeters have also been willfully naive and amazingly one-sided on a number of issues…
The silver bullet
There is a tendency among some people who care about science to believe technology is a silver bullet. Any cursory study of the history of technology will quickly unearth a more complicated picture. Just as anti-GM campaigners can overstep evidence when they suggest there is absolutely no need for GM anywhere, so it is daft to think GM is a silver bullet and essential to our future food security.
GreenFacts have an official summary of a major 2008 World Bank study, in which over 400 experts looked at options to secure our future food supplies. The full study was called the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development. It’s a very good place to start if you want to understand the place of GM.
They concluded should be part of the solution. But they also think that dealing with problems with patents, land ownership and many other issues need to be part of the picture.
Anti-science?
One of the most depressing charges made against the Green Party is as follows: Jenny Jones, a prominent Green politician, is going to a demonstration that will attempt to damage a scientific research project. Therefore the Green Party is anti-science.
This is just simplistic nonsense. If you are really against all forms of non-violent direction action that involve damage to property; if you really think allegedly dangerous or unethical scientific research should be able to proceed without any interference from politicians or the public; then you may think Jenny are “anti-science” in a limited sense.
But Jenny hasn’t gone around destroying the many other GM research projects in the UK. The Green Party is fine with research, but in the case of this particular open air trial Jenny – and many others – think they have reasonable evidence that it is unsafe and so think it better to stop it going ahead than to sit back and wait to see if the disaster of contamination takes place.
Another possible charge is that in reprinting scientifically inaccurate statements, the party is anti-science. But that’s equally daft. It just shows the party hasn’t got sufficient processes to weed out these statements, and perhaps subscribes to some ideas that it needs to drop. Being wrong about the science doesn’t equate to being anti-science.
The Green Party, like any loose association of likeminded people, is bound to accommodate a wide variety of views. When journalists dug up scientifically inaccurate material in our policy documents a few years ago, we took steps to address that. No doubt this recent debate will reverberate through conferences and policy discussions for the next year or two. Like all political parties with strong principles and beliefs that overlap with areas of scientific controversy, we have a complicated relationship with scientific evidence. That isn’t going to change, not for us or any other political party.
This is an extract from a longer post by Tom Chance licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
On the 22nd of May #OccupyOil will be holding a funeral procession for Dutch Shell Oil. In a turnaround we are calling for the end of Shell’s destructive behavior throughout the world, from the west coast of Ireland to the Niger Delta.
Many people have lost their lives resisting the behavior of this unethical company.
It time we said “Rest in Peace Shell”.
Shell makes nearly £1.6m profits every hour. Help us say farewell to this 1% company.
When and where
St Paul’s Cathedral
Arrival 815am
The Shell Corpse will leave at 845am.
