Politics | the ZAHIR magazine

Jun

The State of Care – Sarah Dean

Sarah Dean considers our future care.

As a student old age seams a far and distant fate, detached in almost all ways from the lives we are currently living. However during my gap year I found myself working at a care home and giving home visits to elderly and disabled people in my area. This was a rather rude awakening to the future that lies before us all. It is understandably difficult to imagine yourself in a position where you need continuous care and attention from strangers. But for many elderly people, this is reality. The quality of the care we receive when we are older should be an issue we concern ourselves with now. So with the beginning of a new government, I want to find out what is in store for us when we are all old and grey.

My first concern with the care system came with the lack of training I was given as an 18 year old. I was let loose upon poor un-expecting elderly people after a mere two days training. I started by assisting another carer but by the next day I was on my own. I would be expected to wash, dress, feed, and give medication to people in their homes. As a teenager I quickly became overwhelmed by the responsibility and troubled by the misery of the women I was trying my hardest to care for. It was extraordinary how the other carers managed to so easily deal with the situation, but often I would be met by carers who would treat the clients like animals. The company was so disorganised and poorly run there were times I witnessed women left in bed without the ability to move for 17 hours at a time.

When I moved from house visits to a care home I assumed there would be positive changes. Surely a care home would give the residents companionship not achieved by the house visits. I also assumed the level of care would be higher as the nurses and carers would be on site all day. Needless to say my hopes were in vain. Residents were often ignored, I heard screaming from a room and alerted a nurse and the response was ‘oh she always does that’. So distress is acceptable if a resident is always distressed. The residents were often left in their rooms without any form of stimulation or entertainment, then wheeled out into living rooms when anyone of importance came to visit. It soon became clear to me that the home was understaffed and that the appearance of good quality care was more important than the actual quality of care.

So why is the government allowing such substandard care to be provided for the elderly? The obvious answer is that we don’t like to think about it. We ignore the impending death that lies in front of us, block out the inevitable reliance upon others that we will eventually experience. Is it this fear of our own mortality which leads us to neglect the important issues around care for elderly and disabled people? It seems distorted that even though the elderly vote in strong numbers, such an important issue is ignored.

The Conservatives have made promises to improve the quality of state pensions and to also put measures in place to reduce the number of elderly people forced to sell their homes in order to pay for their care. These are both positive steps but they fail to address the fundamental issues which deprive many elderly people the dignity they deserve. It will fail to ensure that quality skilled carers with experience are looking after the elderly. The neglect I witnessed in the year that I worked as a home visit carer and in a care home was appalling, yet nothing is being said or done about it.

When councils hand over the care of the elderly to companies instead of providing the service themselves they are turning the vulnerable elderly of our society into a commodity. I have far too often seen underpaid and under qualified women rush through house visits because they know the more people they see in a day the more money they will earn. I’m not suggesting all care homes are bad, as I am sure they aren’t, or that all carers are selfish and self-serving, as I know many of them do excellent work. But I do believe we need a new system to ensure we safegaurd the vulnerable people within society. It is important that we change the system now whilst we still have a voice.

Jun

Setting the poverty agender – Alexandra Khoo

Alexandra Khoo looks at the patriarchal bias in the fight against poverty.

The portrait of poverty is often given a female face, and it is a fact that women are over-represented in poverty. Yet, women’s agency is rarely given much thought in poverty-reduction projects. It is falsely assumed that they benefit equally in regaining control over their lives as do their male counterparts from the projects. Poverty is gendered in its experience and impact and any projects that fail to recognise this almost inevitably have a pro-male bias. Specifically targeting women in poverty-reduction efforts is a more moderate move than having an overt element of women empowerment, but it is an effective start to helping poor, disadvantaged women obtain control and attain a better future.

Impoverished women tend to be harder hit by poverty. Adopting a women-orientation in poverty-reduction projects would help level the playing field for women in providing them with a fairer chance of regaining control. Gender-based power relations translate into impoverished women generally experiencing poverty differently and more intensely than their male counterparts.

Within the household, the ‘anti-female bias’ results in a male preference when allocating food and healthcare. Inequitable distribution of household resources extends to poor men withdrawing portions of their income from domestic collective funds for personal consumption like alcohol. This may be around one-third in Honduras to a half in areas like Nicaragua and Mexico. Hence, women and girls in the family usually experience sharper poverty than husbands and sons.

In the sphere of public policy, poor women have difficulty accessing welfare benefits in their own rights and have to act through being dependants of male relatives. Poverty-reduction projects ought to rectify this flaw through targeting women in particular and enabling direct access to resources. Additionally, women may work long hours every day in the household, but this is often ignored when the government or household members account for the respective inputs of women and men in the family’s joint prosperity.

When scrutinising the labour market, poor women are shown to be economically active, and yet they form a majority of the world’s poor. This is because they are often limited to jobs with little or no income. Unless, poverty alleviation projects are women-centred, it is difficult to address women’s poverty issues on equal terms as that of men.

Having a female focus also better-place these projects to tackle the additional obstacles women have in comparison to men in overcoming poverty. It allows poverty alleviation results to be more gender-balanced, especially in helping beneficiaries obtain greater control over the circumstances they live in. In a context with a rigid and in-egalitarian socio-economic order, women are unable to utilise opportunities presented by development as effectively to improve their welfare.

The unjust order may manifest in legalised discrimination in property rights and income-earning rights. In many countries including Namibia and Swaziland, husbands are permanently the custodian of married women who have no right to manage property. Even where that is not the case, husbands can limit their wives’ outside employment. Less attention is also given to the intellectual and cognitive development of women. Poor women are thus comparatively less endowed with physical assets (e.g. land) and essential skills like literacy. A downward spiral persists as they are then often bypassed in typical poverty reduction strategies due to such approaches mostly attempting to build upon existing assets to produce results.

Specifically, the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) as prescribed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS) by organisations such as the United Nations Development Programme focus on income, salaries, commodities transactions. There is a significant lack of women involvement in those areas, often leading to women being omitted as aid recipients. Informal sector work, especially that of unpaid, domestic work, in which women are the primary labourers, is rarely considered in poverty discourse, despite the long hours required and its contribution to formal income-generation.

A gendered approach is more critical in targeting a group identified as the majority of the world’s poor, women. According to DFID, they make up about 70% of the world’s 1.3 billion people in. Gender must be taken into account in efforts to reduce women poverty and poverty as a whole. This means recognising that poor women have differentiated needs from poor men. For instance, women’s high concentration in the unstable, low-wage informal sector when compounded by gender discrimination indicates that they have more pronounced problems of inadequate social security and limited access to credit.

Helping poor women regain control requires a prior understanding that they are also ‘time-poor.’ This arises from their dual roles in ‘reproductive economy’ as primary family caretakers and in outside labour markets. For example, according to the World Bank, water collection already takes up to 40% of a woman’s day in some rural areas of Kenya, not withstanding her other duties. It is clear that poor women are in acute need of labour- and energy-saving technologies and strategies catered to their context. This, women-centred poverty reduction projects are better-positioned to introduce to grant them greater autonomy in how they spend their time.

Also, it must be realised that women are not a homogeneous bloc. The question of ‘which women’ must be asked; in that poverty-reduction efforts must be differentiated to target different groups of women who require help in different ways. There exists a ‘geography of poverty’, in which the extent and kind of help women required depends on how the patriarchal structure in a community disadvantages them through defining gender-specific roles and powers.

Finally, programmes must also consider individual economic positions: For instance, women who are poorest of the poor are often still excluded from microcredit scheme targeting women. Culprits are problems like the vicious cycle of having no initial entrepreneurial projects required to access loans that are needed to start such projects.

Human dignity demands that people have sufficient control over their lives to create meaningful livelihoods. Poor women, a marginalised group within a marginalised group, face much deprivation in this aspect. Poverty is harsher for them, they have weaker social mobility to overcome poverty and they have largely unmet female-specific needs as the majority of the world’s poor. In order that they are given the redress due them, more needs to be done in poverty-reduction efforts. Not all contexts are suitable for having an explicit element of women empowerment in aid programmes, but having more programmes specifically target women is a good step forward. It will be helpful that governments facilitate NGOs co-ordinating such programmes by working to: improve women’s education, launch public campaigns to counter gender discrimination, and adopt gender-balanced policies in the public sector. Globally, concerned citizens could petition these governments or their partners in aid development such as international aid organisations and donor governments to address the issue. Making the invisible women visible, paints a brighter future for them.

Jun

Forward the Libservatives – Greg Freeman

The Guardian’s Greg Freeman looks at an unusual election.

Libservative … Cleggeron … Con-Dem-nation? Whatever term you come up with to describe the new coalition government – and there have been quite a few others – there is a sense that no one knows quite where we are heading for yet.

Just as we didn’t as I went home at 5am on the morning after the election. As a backroom journalist at the Guardian – a news sub-editor who has worked on every general election at the paper since 1983 – I can’t remember a night quite like it.

On normal election nights, you always knew the result by the time you set off home at the end of the shift. In the 1980s I would drive through the streets of south London and out into Surrey, another blue dawn breaking, another Conservative landslide to contemplate. In 1992, as soon as Basildon stayed Tory, we knew that the exit poll prediction of a hung parliament was wrong and, whether thanks to the Sun or not, Neil Kinnock had missed out: the air of trounced expectations in the Guardian office the next day was palpable.

New Labour’s triumph in 1997 included the Portillo moment, when the astonishment of Stephen Twigg in ousting the-then Conservative glamour boy summed up a remarkable night. In a rather tedious election in 2001, when only a few seats changed hands, the one highlight was Peter Mandelson’s “I’m a fighter, not a quitter” speech at the count at Hartlepool: the entire newsroom woke up and went: “Whoooo!”

In 2005, in the aftermath of the Iraq war, the Tories and the Lib Dems significantly reduced Labour’s majority but Tony Blair remained in No 10, albeit a diminished figure, a tarnished brand. Two years later Gordon Brown replaced him as prime minister. After a brief honeymoon period with the electorate, he became deeply unpopular.

Somehow this 2010 election campaign felt different. After the bad odour of MPs’ expenses, it drew attention to the perceived unfairness of the first-past-the post voting system and raised hopes that something might change. During the three leaders’ X-Factor style debates, which rejigged the opinion poll fortunes of the parties during the campaign, Nick Clegg’s appeal seemed obvious: he was the prettiest. As young as David Cameron, but more appealing. In such a beauty contest, with any mention of spending cuts airbrushed out of the picture, Brown didn’t stand a chance. Tabloid newspapers grew ever more desperate as they appeared unable to swing public opinion decisively. There was the Mail’s “Nazi Clegg” splash, and the Sun’s woeful “Scrambled Clegg and Toast” headline after one of the TV debates. (They had taken to depicting Gordon Brown as a slice of brown toast, for some reason. It was good to see the Sun so comprehensively losing its touch, after its dominance of the political agenda in the 1980s and 90s). Reflecting the apparent public mood, the Guardian dismayed some of its readers and journalists in switching its allegiance from Labour, advising in a long, well-argued leader that voting Lib Dem was the best hope of keeping the Conservatives out, and implementing many of the paper’s values.

On May 6, as we arrived at our desks in readiness for a long election night, the arrival of the exit poll with its prediction of a drop in Lib Dem seats was scarcely believable, given the Cleggmania of the preceding weeks. Had the BBC got it spectacularly wrong again? In that immediate surprise its far more important forecast was momentarily overlooked: no overall majority for the Conservatives. Hung parliament.

In the next few hours, Guardian staff brought round portions of risotto and shepherds pie, fuel for its hard-pressed hacks – a welcome innovation for our first election in our new, gleaming offices at King’s Cross, beside the Regent’s canal – amid TV scenes of chaos at some urban polling stations as late arrivals missed out on their right to vote. Thanks to the higher turnout, the results were taking longer to come in than usual. Even Jeremy Paxman seemed, for once, out of his depth, haranguing politicians of various hues with questions based on information that was quickly out of date. Editions came and went, intros were altered, headlines were tweaked, the air crash of Ukip’s Nigel Farage moved further down the story, but nothing was conceded: nothing was certain. In his constituency speech in Witney David Cameron said Labour had lost the mandate to govern, but he felt unable to claim victory for the Conservatives. Despite the Lib Dems’ apparent surge in popularity during the campaign, on the night they had lost seats; yet because the Tories still had no overall majority, Nick Clegg was emerging as the kingmaker.

On the Friday after the election there were subsidiary stories to focus on momentarily: the satisfyingly comprehensive trashing of the BNP, the election of Britain’s first Green MP in Brighton. But the breaking news at around 5pm or 6pm is usually the composition of the victorious party’s new cabinet. Not this time. Instead, it was replaced by a fascinating if bewildering swirl of speculation, reported minute by minute on website blogs and written up by dog-tired political reporters, as coalition negotiations began in earnest.

Over the next few days, as hopes of a “rainbow coalition” dipped, principally because the numbers did not add up, drooping spirits were momentarily lifted by the sight of Sky’s Adam Boulton los ing it big-time in a spat with Alastair Campbell endlessly replayed on YouTube. The Guardian’s photographer Martin Argles revealed in a series of pictures the poignancy of Gordon Brown’s final moments in Downing Street, surrounded by Campbell, Mandelson, and Ed Balls, but more importantly, Sarah and the boys. And Brown was really smiling at last, rather than displaying that rictus grin that you saw during the TV debates and outside Gillian Duffy’s Rochdale home. Then came that Cleggeron moment in the No 10 garden, two former public schoolboys at ease with each other, the body language, and you sensed that, all through the negotiations involving Labour as well, it had really been the only game in town.

During the 2010 election campaign you often heard this despairing cry from a member of a public: “Why can’t they all just forget their differences, and work together?” As someone who regarded himself as an old hand, who had seen it all over many years – the disappointment, the elation, and the disillusion – I would usually think to himself: “Your poor, deluded fool. That’s not how politics works.”

But it’s much more difficult to read the runes now. Is everything changing in this new era of pick ‘n’ mix policies? What wrongfoots many gnarled old politicos is the air of idealism abroad. Talk of “a new politics”, “historic, seismic” shifts, “the national interest”, “reasonable, civilised, grown-up behaviour”, “the bigger picture” … It’s not what we’re used to. But when the country is facing its most stringent, long-term economies since the second world war, maybe the political landscape has to be transformed. We live in interesting times.

Mar

Up in Arms – Freddy Vanson

As arms manufacturer BAE systems faces a record fine relating to the allegedly corrupt Al-Yamamah arms deal, Freddy Vanson makes a passionate critique of the arms industry.

The arms industry is one of the biggest global industries; the world spends some $1,000 billion annually on the military and military expenditure out strips nearly every other sector of business, more than anything we spend on public services and welfare institutions. In more recent years, annual sales of arms have risen to around $50-60 billion. Big business treats war, and the deaths of millions, as another ‘market’ to be exploited for profit.

The military industrial complex is just another arena of business, an opportunity for corporate oligarchies to increase financial revenue. Often, the only thing that matters in the trade deals brokered between arms companies and any militia is that they have the money to pay for the expensive weapons. The cost to life, the many murdered with these arms, is rarely factored in the cost of production.

You’ll find the people (normally white, middle-aged, corporate men) claiming that we need to spend millions of pounds on weapons, for ‘national security’ reasons, are often the same people paid off and propped up by business and military elites.

It’s these same sorts of people, earning a living from the arms trade, who claim that the world would be a safer place if everyone had a firearm; that peace and equality can only come from building more tanks, bombs and nuclear weapons. And yet it’s funny how you’ll rarely see the people making most of the blood money fighting on the front line.

But away from the sanitised commercial media outlets, and with little investigation, you will find that when businessmen say ‘defence’ industry they really mean attack industry. It’s also intriguing how little we hear or read about acts of ‘state terrorism’, the wars waged for commercial ventures. Not surprisingly it’s mostly well paid government lobbyists and military analysts from arms companies behind the commercial propaganda machine powering a global industry of war.

The invasion of Iraq and the occupation of Palestine have earned large companies like BAE Systems huge sums of money from arms sales to American, British and Israeli forces. Not to mention the sales to all the various armed services of other corrupt governments. The U.K is the 4th largest arms supplier in the world with sales in arms close to $27 billion (2008), a large proportion going to developing nations. Some people make billions of pounds from arms sales, whilst the vast majority of people are left for dead, or live in abject poverty, surrounded by a world of war and violence.

The arms trade perpetuates cycles of war to make ever greater profits; this is the ugly truth we choose to ignore. The term ‘defence industry’ is a complete hoax, a scam to have us believe we need weapons of mass destruction for our own security, a trick to con us into believing it’s in our interests to waste vast amounts of public money on stock piles of nuclear weaponry.

It is common knowledge that large corporations don’t particularly care who they sell to, they are indiscriminate arms dealers selling to whoever bids the highest price. Arms companies take stock of local antagonisms and global rivalries between differing factions and sell to both sides of the map to maximise profit. Not to mention all the corruption that goes with it, illegal arms deals, bribery and government payoffs.

Without the many millions of arms around the globe, disproportionately sold to the side with more wealth and power, mass genocide could not happen on the scale it has done. The massacre of many thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese women and children in Beirut between 1982-87 is just one such case. We are still witnessing a mass-genocide taking place in Gaza today because of a well-equipped Israeli military, supported by British and U.S governments.

To solve the problem of ‘terrorism’ we need to plough money, time and dedication into public services and community development projects, not just nationally but globally. Surely things such as free education for all children, better health services and greater employment opportunities, good working conditions and fair pay, a more equal distribution of wealth are the real answer.

Ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and upholding civil liberties and human rights through democratic judicial structures seem more reasonable suggestions to make when attempting to tackle inequality and injustice. This could be set into motion as social policy, instead of in an arms industry and a foreign policy of war.

Most ordinary people seek freedom from military oppression and tyrannical leaders. Much of the world’s poor have struggled for generations to be free from the chains of violence, exploitation, discrimination, prejudice and a lack of opportunities. They have been oppressed at every turn by the military invasions of imperialist empires seeking to gain the riches of the land. Arms companies have capitalised on this, selling cheap weapons to desperately poor communities having to arm themselves against imperial invaders.

Many rightly argue that the growth of the arms industry can only result in larger numbers of mass-murder victims and many more bloody wars over territory and resources; hence disarmament is the only way forward. A symbolic act that would say to the world we don’t want to invest in an immoral industry of armed warfare.

It is our right to live free from tyranny and exploitation, it is wrong and undemocratic for small elite groups to use brutal ‘force’ to wield political and economic power over a working class – in other words to use violent military attacks to suppress democratization and a voice for those deprived of basic human rights to a decent quality of life.

Yet the arms industry only serves to exasperate political rivalry and social antagonisms. Stirring up tensions and creating a market for intolerance, where education might heal the mental scars of oppression and inclusion might mend the rifts between members of society.

Every day we take for granted the civil liberties we are afforded by years of dedicated campaigning and protesting. To achieve the basic rights to a fair trial before the law and the minimum wage, welfare services and benefit schemes, a national health service and the vote many lost their lives. But when weapons are used to quell an opposition campaigning for social justice and the right to live free from domination, arms companies are only too happy to supply arms to any political authority keeping them in business.

When it’s from our bank accounts that money is ending up in the pockets of large arms companies, and us who profit from war, we must act. When our governments and business institutions decide to spend billions of tax payers’ money on military weapons, like Apache helicopters worth at least £49,000,000 (which produce a great many casualties and fatalities) we must stop this corruption and profligacy. And when the British government sells arms to corrupt military regimes, like Hawk Jets to the Suharto regime of Indonesia used to kill thousands in East Timor, I think it is our moral duty to speak out.

An arms industry that produces and distributes greater numbers of technologically advanced weaponry is not going to stop people fighting, but investing in education, jobs and a more equal distribution of wealth and power might. The increased manufacture and distribution of weapons in the name of profit is a disgrace to humanity and is jeopardising the possibility of a world without unnecessary violence.

Mar

How many unelected Lords can you fit in a Cabinet? – Dominic Mantle

Dominic Mantle asks what the effect of having too Mandy lords can be on democracy.

Today one of the most influential politicians in the country, Peter Mandelson is treated as a near cult figure by the media. He initially contributed to the landslide electoral victory of New Labour in 1997, and he has now twice come back from the political dead. Fair enough, you might say, everybody deserves a third chance. The problem is that Gordon Brown, in his eagerness to attract a kiss of life for his ailing premiership, with his October 2008 reshuffle in which Mandelson rose yet again, decided that the fact his former enemy was no longer an MP need not be an obstacle. He was instead handed an emergency life peerage, a huge and still growing amount of power and several long-winded titles. However, First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, etc, etc Mandelson is not the only Cabinet member who sits in the Lords rather than the Commons. As of another desperate reshuffle in June 2009, four others, Lords Adonis and Drayson and Baronesses Scotland and Royall, now also variously attend cabinet meetings. Since that time, a very important question has been hanging in the air, and few have raised their hands to ask it. Is the practice of including Lords in the Government, and especially the Cabinet, compatible with the concept of democracy?

It is certainly surprising that there has not been more of a debate about the ramifications for claims of Britain being a democratic polity whilst Brown is using Lords in his Cabinet. This would seem to be down to some notion that the House of Lords is just as good as the Commons but with the furniture moved around a bit and generally older, occasionally moribund people sitting on it. In fact there is another obvious but vital difference; Lords are unelected. They exist as an anachronism, in some cases also a bastion of privilege, and do so at the behest of politicians rather than the people. While over the centuries the Commons has come to assume the most powerful role in Parliament in place of the Monarchy, rightfully reflecting their respective mandates to legislate, the Lords has retained a great deal of power, illustrated perfectly by the present-day role or indeed roles of Mandelson. It has also come to serve as a means for a Prime Minister to legitimise their promotion of unelected individuals to power, through the creation of peerages.

It was reported that Gordon Brown would not have been able to complete the aforementioned Cabinet reshuffles without resorting to offering jobs to Lords, but it is arguable he should not have been able to do so. Many former ministers sitting in the Commons including Hazel Blears, James Purnell and Caroline Flint had resigned in protest at Brown’s leadership style and over fears that, under it, Labour is heading for electoral oblivion, leaving him with few credible alternatives. But what are crucial are the comparative amounts of power that Cabinet members and MPs hold. In exchange for his loyalty, Blairite credentials and political nous, Mandelson was awarded a place at the very top of government. He is a member of 35 of the 43 Cabinet committees and sub-committees, more even than the Prime Minister. Though he has been an MP before and more recently an EU commissioner, he is unelected in his most recent incarnation. The average MP, on the other hand, though necessarily elected, wields a fraction of his decision making power.

It is curious then that, while the media, speaking on behalf of the people, of course, are so determined that our democratic values be upheld in other areas of life such as television phone-in competitions, little mention has been made of our predicament. In his final address last year to a Labour Party conference before the 2010 general election, the Prime Minister did very briefly suggest, probably for the ensuing applause, that he intended to create a democratic and accountable second parliamentary chamber, which would offer a belated resolution to the problem. However, neither Labour or the Tories are likely to do so following the election, and any manifesto claims to the contrary must unfortunately be treated with cynicism.

Dec

Origin of Theses – Sam Cooke

Sam Cooke tackles the tensions of the academic world.

This spring, my university proposed the closure of my department. It’s a recession, I am prepared to accept that some departments may be financial dead weights and should be cast off. That, however, was not the issue the University took with my department, but instead was one which is systemic to the academic institution in Russell Group universities – of which York is not one, but I can’t imagine the counterpart 1994 Group stands in any better stead. The problem is a stifling demand for research from the administration, and demand for research for the sake of research. However, this is not to be a polemic against the institution, but a detail of my personal experiences.

I am an undergraduate in Philosophy at Liverpool University, and I am also president of the Philosophical Society for students. This sounds more prestigious than it is: the position is nothing more than a liaison between student body and department, and the title is ‘something for the CV’ as one of the part-time lecturers put it. It does mean that you spend a lot of time with your Doctors and Professors, however, and a lot of time listening to them complain about the situation they’re in. One tweed-clad Buddha scholar, a lovely (if inhumanly pedantic) man who eventually fled to the Orkney islands, told me of his gripes throughout my first year; he wanted to write books, but this would take longer than the University was willing to fund him for, as they required a steady stream of papers to be published from all staff.

I remember a meeting in an office in which every table and desk was packed with paperwork from administration, as being a member of the full-time staff obligates you in a tripartite workload of admin, teaching and research. I’ve never met someone who’s achieved a PhD in Philosophy without having at least one obvious oddity, and there appears to be no upper limit to the level of insanity achieved by the faculty while remaining un-sectioned. These are people who have run over their own briefcases, who spend their evenings building ramps for their elderly cats, and who only speak in languages that are either dead or formal1. These people are not suited to administration.

However, I digress. In the spring of this year, the minutes for an upcoming university senate were released to selected members of the campus-wide faculty: this selection was of heads of department and professors. Within these minutes was a “proposal for a consultation” of closure of the Philosophy and Politics Departments, the reason given being that the university needed to “continue investing in excellence”. Hiding behind the words, closure was proposed because both Philosophy and Politics failed to meet the expectations the university had put forward for the 2008 RAE, or ‘Research Assessment Exercise’, a now defunct government assessment of the quality of research.

The news broke (though it shouldn’t have; the minutes for the senate are confidential) when a professor from the History Department made a gesture of sympathy to one of the Politics staff, the Friday before the Wednesday senate meeting. The lecturer was unsurprisingly shocked, and swiftly informed the students he taught, who swiftly formed a group of opposition, led by the Philosophical Society and its Politics counterpart. By the Wednesday, there were hundreds of students and staff outside the senate building protesting the closures, and media coverage had gone national the day before. The Vice Chancellor Howard Newby, who issued the closures, referred to us as “the noise outside”.

Maybe a word is required on Sir Howard, a man who is preceded by a reputation acquired at the University of the West of England, at a job he left after sixteen months. He proposed a restructure of UWE in ignorance of the previous one four years before, and it was at UWE was where his buzzword rhetoric really started to show: transforming higher-education facilities into “centres of knowledge exchange” with “blue sky thinking exercises”. His “realignment” of UWE made use of a company named ‘Spirit of Creation’ set up by Shelia Watt (the maiden name of Shelia Newby), who was also appointed to Assistant Vice Chancellor of UWE. Controversies ensued, and were met by a further string of seemingly senseless buzzwords from Sir Howard when asked about Shelia’s duties: she was working on a project involving “employer engagement”.

So, at his next (and current job) at Liverpool University, he was met with suspicion by staff, and rightly so. The attempt to close the Philosophy and Politics departments was eventually brought to a halt by widespread opposition throughout nearly every department in the University. An official statement criticising Newby’s decision to shut a philosophy department was released, with the signatures of the heads of every philosophy department in the Russell group, and the pressure from the UCU (the University and Colleges Union) provided enough external opposition for the closures to be thrown out. This is not to say that damage had not been done – a number of premature retirements (or voluntary redundancies) and changes of leadership within Liverpool’s Philosophy Department have followed since the official closures were rejected in summer.

I’ve been trying to think about what the moral of this story is, but I don’t think there is one to find. Newby isn’t the antagonist because he runs universities like businesses, nor because he tried to close my department – in the long run he’s doing what he thinks will provide the best future for the university, and maybe he’s mistaken in his method. What I gained from this whole unsavoury affair, apart from a distaste for academia and the ‘something for the CV’ mentality, is a notion that as students, we are at the bottom of the pyramid in a university: we’re both the foundation and the furthest from the top. We have no power within the system because we bring nothing to the table apart from our tuition fees, something which I suspect makes the upper echelons consider us like raw materials or cattle, something to be brought in and shunted through. Because of this, it is difficult to use the system to our advantage. Even now, the relationship between the Philosophical Society and the Department has reverted back to the way it was – they do not answer to us within the system, so unless we can offer some motivating force, they’re our opposition. The only reason that we had any success in our endeavours with the closures is because we went outside the system – the media attention, the petitions to people with power, and the physical presence with demonstrations. There is no moral, but there is a reassuring example that the system that constrains us can be circumvented.

1 – all true stories.

Dec

The dead body politics – Huw Halstead

Huw Halstead casts his eye over European corruption scandals.

Imagine. The Church of England, using its overbearing influence on the political system, has scandalously swapped vast tracts of worthless land it owns in the Yorkshire moors for prime real estate in the heart of London, in a deal with the government that will lose the taxpayer over eighty million pounds. The Church, having immediately sold some of this land on to developers at a huge profit, is also refusing to back down on its tax-exempt status, and says it will not pay if proposed government reforms revoking this status are put through. Meanwhile, a series of vicious forest fires have swept across North West England, killing more than sixty people and making thousands homeless. The government has been accused of corruption and incompetence for replacing the forestry fire service’s senior officers, who had been sent abroad for specialist training, with political appointees lacking any relevant experience. The electorate has no grounds for complaint, however, because the governing party announced before the election that it would look after “its true-blue boys”.

The government has attempted to deflect criticism by accusing a rather unusual alliance of unscrupulous land developers and left-wing terrorists of committing arson in order to free up land for building. After initially threatening prosecution, the government gave the go-ahead for large-scale construction of hotels and luxury villas in the fire ravaged and environmentally important Lake District area.

Two London-based directors of German company Siemens have been arrested in connection with an alleged bribery scandal. The two men, who were arrested in Germany after going on the run, stand accused of using over 67 million pounds of Siemens’ money to bribe British MPs, to assure that Siemens won lucrative contracts for the country’s upcoming Olympic games. The government has responded by blocking an official enquiry, and locking up the wife and daughter of Siemens’ Financial Director on the grounds that they share a bank account with the under-suspicion director. Another suspect has suffered a stroke whilst giving evidence to the Director of Public Prosecutions, who himself is apparently involved in trying to secure impunity for the recently apprehended Siemens’ director. This has been followed by allegations that MPs have also been taking kickbacks from a government fund to subsidise ferry services to the Orkneys and Outer Hebrides.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister has been dogged by repeated accusations that he has connections to organised crime, has been criticised for his extensive control of the media, and has recently been through a divorce following allegations from his wife that he had been ‘fraternising’ with under-age young women.

In central London, the unelected Culture Secretary has exited his fourth floor flat through the window in an apparent suicide attempt, allegedly to avoid blackmail by his mistress, who apparently possessed a video of over one hundred hours of the couple’s adulterous sex. The mistress was immediately arrested and imprisoned without charge or access to lawyers and, since her release, seems to have lost the ability to speak. In the Westminster village, however, the blackmail story has been greeted with incredulity. “They have been openly flaunting their relationship for years”, said one source who preferred not to be named, “so the video would have been news to no one”. So, rumours abound as to why the Culture Secretary jumped (or was he pushed?). Some whisper that he had an affair with the Prime Minister’s wife, others that he received a large and very secret payment for forcing through the deal, allowing a well known fast food chain to open an outlet in Stonehenge.

Of course, this is not Britain. Far from it. Rather, it is a pastiche of political scandals and corruption over recent months in Greece and her Mediterranean neighbour Italy. The reality of British political scandal is – as far as we know – very different. Take the MPs expenses scandal for instance. Examples of the very worst of the accusations were Derek Conway paying his full-time student son £13,000 for research, Douglas Hogg allegedly claiming for a moat to be cleaned, and various MPs claiming for mortgages on expensive properties. At the other end of the scale, some of the alleged indiscretions produced huge overreactions. Take, for instance, the outcry at Jacqui Smith’s husband watching a couple of porn videos at the taxpayer’s expense. Embarrassing, yes. Scandalous, hell no. These are all examples of, at best, incompetence and negligence and, at worst, greed, not devious corruption or terrible theft; exploiting the system to one’s personal advantage, not entirely going outside of the system and undermining the political process. Indeed, many of the illegitimate expense claims seem to have been the result of poor paperwork, which should reassure the public that MPs are spending their time on more important issues, and even those which may have been deliberately pale in comparison to foreign examples. Yet, in instances such as this, we behave hysterically, as though we are reading accounts of corruption like the Mediterranean examples recounted above.

This contrast between British scandal, on the one hand, and Greek and Italian scandal, on the other, is more than just amusing: it also has serious implications for British politics. Firstly, by creating a culture of scandal in politics, the media runs the risk of convincing the public that the political system is irrevocably corrupt, and that there is therefore no point being involved in the political process. In Greece, this has already begun to happen. An elderly lady in a Greek village saw no point in going to vote, because all of her sons had good jobs and were doing well. The only reason she would have gone to vote would have been if she felt her sons needed a favour from the candidate. Secondly, creating a culture where the slightest mistake is leapt upon and dissected by the media, and in which perceived personality flaws are as serious a reason for resignation as political failings, will ensure that anyone even remotely human will avoid a political career. This is not to suggest that incidents such as the expenses scandal should be ignored, but simply that we require a more measured and appropriate response to these incidents. This point is best supported by a final reference to Greek politics: George Papandreou, whose PASOK party recently came to power, has embarked upon a campaign to stamp out political corruption in Greece. However, he is struggling with popularity, especially among the young, because he lacks the public charisma of some of his more colourful but rather frightening opponents. The scary possibility here is that even if a politician is intelligent, honest, principled, and courageous, voters may no longer think that is relevant.

Dec

something is rotten in the states of Europe – Lizzie Beardsley

Lizzie Beardsley sniffs out scandal in the European Union.

‘A unique economic and political partnership between 27 democratic European countries’. Unique is one way to describe it. Perhaps the uniqueness of how easy it is for MEPs to exploit money from the system. Or most importantly unique because it has been able to hide its scandal from most people in the UK, through the lack of political interest that a decade of Euroscepticism has fostered.

Brian Wheeler, a journalist for the BBC, in January this year visited the European Union for a week and unearthed some worryingly and deeply disturbing issues around the EU. These issues included an exorbitant maintenance allowance of almost 300 Euros per day for the 3 days that MEPs are in Strasbourg. Which evidently explains why, on the week Brian Wheeler visited the EU, MEPs were travelling in the luxury and comfort of a first class train to Strasbourg. The ironic thing about this maintenance allowance for MEPs, is that many of them see Strasbourg as unnecessary, believing that the real work is done in Brussels. So if the MEPS view Strasbourg as unnecessary why are we funding this?

Like the UK, the European Union has faced its own set of expenses issues, both fraudulent ones and controversial ‘legal’ ones. Firstly to the so called legal side of the expenses. In the EU, expenses rules are a lot less stringent than in the UK. This means that MEPs can exploit EU laws, for instance MEPs can give £180,000 in staff cost allowance’s, which up until recently could include family members. However move over to the darker side of the illegal expenses and a worse situation prevails. In Britain, in the MPs expenses scandal we saw examples including the cleaning of a moat and the financing of a duck house, but compared to the value of the European claims, the UK examples are minute. A clear cut example is the expenses claims of Den Dover (Ed: unfortunately no relation to Ben Dover) a conservative MEP who recently was removed by David Cameron for funding a number of businesses including donating 785,000 Euros to a company owned by his wife and daughter. However the investigation only resulted in 500,000 Euros being returned.

MEPs, who are supposedly maintaining our economic and political relations, appear very hostile to the idea of any change in the expenses scheme, unlike UK MPs who to varying degrees agree that change was inevitable and necessary. In June this year MEPs had to start producing receipts. However, as the MEP Jim Nicholson describes, many MEPs protested about this reform. One labour MEP for instance, believed it was unnecessary to bring about ‘greater accountability’. So what does this hostility mean? Well overall it means that any expenses changes brought about in the European Union are likely to be very gradual, meaning for the time being we have to continue funding MEP’S extravagant lifestyles.

So the question arises as to why MEP’S are able to exploit the European Union to greater levels than the UK parliament. Is it the fact there is a lack of organised oversight of MEPs? Or to the more socialist minded, is it the fact that the EU has its origins in a trade agreement, naturally leading to zealous capitalist politicians favouring a lack of regulation. My honest opinion is that there has been no public pressure due to the overall Euroscepticism that exists in this country. If we took more interest in the European Union, we would realise the immense issues regarding MEPs expenses that exist.

The larger and more influential European union that is emerging must deal with this issue, and our MEPs must bring about change to create a Union that has MEPs who are passionate about being politicians, rather than individuals exploiting a system for their own means.

Dec

the production of memory – Asa Roast

Asa Roast peers into our obsession with self-image.

Everyone is aware of the Western stereotype of the Japanese tourist. Not entirely unfairly, Japanese tourists in the West are generally stereotyped as obsessive photographers, viewing their holidays through a lens which they use to capture and preserve their experiences. This is probably the most visible manifestation of the phenomenon that I’m calling ‘East Asian photography culture’ for the purposes of this article.

In my opinion, this phenomenon is a Western construct, but one which is nonetheless based on certain truths as well as stereotypes, and is useful in examining broader questions about the function of photography. It’s very difficult to describe these vague ‘foreign’ cultural trends like East Asian photography culture without sounding incredibly Western-centric and patronising, especially when most of my examples are anecdotal, so I’ll apologise in advance. Hopefully if you keep reading until the end you’ll see what I’m getting at.

This is a phenomenon that most clearly presents itself in the young middle classes of East Asia, who’ve grown up with access to cheap and plentiful digital cameras and embedded their use into East Asian youth culture. Compared to Western photography culture, it seems to ‘fetishise’ the idea of the photo, granting it an importance and status that is far less common in the West. At its simplest it could appear to be narcissism – at its most extreme an obsession – but the logic and cultural dynamics that underpin it are revelatory.

If this vague stream of conceptual terms hasn’t served to explain what I’m actually talking about, perhaps it’s best illustrated by my own experiences with this culture in China. Urban malls were commonly full of cheap photography booths where young shoppers could commemorate their outing with a set of posed photographs. Next door, professional photographers had stalls where high school and university students queued to make appointments. Almost every young couple had several sets of posed photographs of them together, often made into little ornaments which they could dangle off their phones. It was surprisingly common for young women to have a full portfolio of professional and amateur photographs taken of themselves, and everyone who’d spent any time in China told stories of spending long evenings being shown through their hosts’ photography albums – which generally consisted of page after page of identically posed photos of the subject against an interchangeable series of backgrounds.

This phenomenon has become part of the general western stereotype of East Asia – the pouting East Asian youth giving a peace-sign. But the fact that this trend has become a stereotype makes it no less real. The Chinese version of Facebook (renren.com) seems to be almost entirely populated by cutesy, myspace-style, heavily airbrushed photos of Chinese youths. I once witnessed a Chinese teenager at a tourist location spend a good quarter of an hour taking pictures of herself pouting, camera held at arm’s length, with the tourist site itself in the background. After each attempt she checked the result, decided it was unsatisfactory, and repeated the process.

One of the most important distinguishing elements of East Asian photography culture is that the apparent objectivity of the photo is devalued, and the subjectivity of the medium embraced instead. The value of photography in such a culture is not its ability to recreate reality, but to create its own reality. This is done through a variety of techniques of ‘counterfeiting’ reality through the medium. I’ve chosen to divide these techniques of altering photographic reality into two categories, and I’m calling them: physical counterfeiting and emotional counterfeiting.

Physical counterfeiting consists of using simple digital photography tricks to alter the reality presented in the photo. This could be the common use of airbrushing on East Asian portraits, or just the use of false backgrounds. On one occasion in Shanghai I witnessed hundreds of families queue up to have their pictures taken in front of full-scale screens depicting famous international tourist sights, ignoring the real physical presence of the tourist sights in their midst.

The most important thing to note here in relation to East Asian photography culture, is that there is no element of deception or subterfuge in this physical counterfeiting – amateur photographers will openly admit to airbrushing their personal portraits or using false backgrounds, but would not expect for this to detract from the pleasure of viewing the photograph.

Emotional counterfeiting is much harder to pin down – but appears to be a practice that is embraced just as openly within East Asian photography culture. The image that prompted me to write this article was a friend describing a group of East Asian students walking glumly around a Northern English urban park, but still pausing to throw themselves down in every flower-bed they passed to take a picture of the group posed in a wildly ecstatic and happy manner.

The reality, in my opinion, is that these practices of counterfeiting the physical and emotional contexts of photos extend well beyond the sphere of East Asian photography culture. The only real distinguishing trait of East Asian photography culture is the attitude towards such practices of counterfeiting. Whereas in the West, most people would place value in the objectivity of photographs as a way of representing reality, and look down upon any photoshopping or emotional ‘falseness’ of photos as diminishing the medium, East Asian photography culture embraces these acts of counterfeiting, and the ability of the medium to create a subjective reality of it’s own.

The practices of emotional counterfeiting are just as common in amateur photography in the West, and not just on the sub-conscious level of smiling when someone takes a picture of you. Every ‘hilariously’ posed photo of a student night out, cringe-inducing photo of a couple kissing, and self-consciously cool photo of a guy in a plaid shirt holding a guitar that’s uploaded onto Facebook is an act of emotional counterfeiting – it’s a destruction of the objectivity of photography and a use of it’s subjectivity to project a desired image.

This raises the question of the purpose of amateur photography. In an age when the internet allows us to access thousands of professional photos of every tourist site or band we could ever see, we still take crappy, fuzzy, shakey photos of these things and upload them to share with the world. These photographs don’t serve any purpose as reportage. They are about creating a physical, visible product out of a temporary, fleeting experience – the production of memory.

Memory, like photography, is not a objective representation of reality. So we are able to use the medium of photography to produce our own memories, and the practice of emotional counterfeiting is central to this. We want to produce happy memories, based on a happy reality, so we use these techniques to produce happy photographs which create their own happy reality.

The overwhelming sense I get whenever I see a group of students (East Asian or not) posing for a drunken photograph of themselves is that this is not an act of leisure that they are engaged in – they are at work, producing their own subjective memories based on the subjective reality they are capturing through a lens.

Jun

Anti-Semantism

J.M. argues that, unlike the proverbial omelette, combating the BNP should not involve breaking any eggs

This month, the British National Party beat their own electoral record by winning seats in two European parliamentary constituencies. So, naturally, everyone’s making a big fuss. It goes without saying that holocaust denial is unpalatable, that repatriation of third-generation British Asians is unthinkable and that Nick Griffin is a porky, beetle-eyed racist. All the same, the BNP are a legitimate political party. They have won two seats in a free election (no less free because 66% of those eligible did not bother to cast a vote), on top of several council positions they already hold. With almost a million votes at the most recent ballot, it is futile to pretend that their success does not reflect the political tendencies of a significant proportion of the British electorate.

Under the present system, there is little chance of the BNP winning a seat in the House of Commons at the next election. But in the meantime, there probably ought to be an enlightened debate about why the party has any support at all. Such a debate would, for example, examine whether or not there is any truth in the suggestion that most BNP voters are more interested in mass immigration, social housing and an increasingly straitened job market than wearing jackboots and attending Nazi rallies. Does the BNP owe its success to the pro-white working class stance they have adopted on these issues – issues which have been pullulating in the supermarkets of Britain for the last twenty-five years?

Every pathologist knows that disease is an opportunity to understand the body. In this case, it is the body-politic that needs to be examined. But this debate is not taking place. Why? Because the agenda has been set by Unite Against Fascism, a lunatic band of unreconstructed, knee-jerk Marxists whose campaign to exclude the BNP from politics is considerably more fascist than anything in the BNP manifesto. Now pay close attention, British liberals, progressive or classical, because these people are your advocates in the court of public opinion.

The explicit aim of UAF is to deny the BNP the basic platforms afforded to all the other elected parties in the UK. According to UAF, a party’s right to compete in the political arena is subject to its policies being acceptable to…UAF. Of course! What starry-eyed romantics we were to think that democracy is total and unconditional. Recently, a delegation of yobs from UAF pelted Griffin with eggs at a BNP press conference in Westminster. UAF were also responsible for the riots outside the Oxford Union in 2007. The protestors disrupted a forum at which Nick Griffin and David Irving, the controversial historian, had been invited to speak, even after the students had voted in favour of the event. The subject of the forum was free speech.

UAF are a public relations catastrophe, a raggedy assortment of hippies, druids, trainspotters, rent-a-gobs, po-faced trade unionists and common or garden violent thugs. So it has been no surprise to learn that UAF’s chairman is ex-Mayor Ken Livingstone, the man who upset a Jewish journalist by comparing him to a concentration camp guard shortly before telling two Iraqi-Jewish-Indian businessmen to ‘go back to Iran and try their luck with the Ayatollahs’. Yes, I concede, the journalist was, most likely, a weedy, snivelling nipple of a man, and the two businessmen should probably have been a bit more thick-skinned as well. But the fact remains: Red Ken is too clumsy an opponent for Cambridge-educated master-orator Griffin and his silky, well-spoken sidekick, Andrew Brons MEP.

Which leads on to another problem: language. Semantics are serious, vocabulary vital. As early as 1946, George Orwell observed that ‘The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.’ So is Unite Against Fascism really an appropriate slogan? Fascism seeks to curtail democracy and expand national borders, and generally aligns itself with some or other theory of racial superiority. By contrast, the BNP’s methods are eminently democratic and their defence policy is expressly one of ‘armed neutrality’. Moreover, though the BNP gives shelter to a concentrated supply of retired anti-Semites and parochial racists, their manifesto is more concerned with the perceived practical benefits of racial segregation than the philosophy of white supremacy. Why not Unite Against Racism, which would be more accurate and no less forceful?

But apart from the fact that they are chaired by a discredited political cadaver, that their proposals are undemocratic and that the title of their affiliate is practically meaningless, what’s not to like about UAF? I’ve no doubt they mean well, but if their strategy continues to be as violent, stupid and crude as it has hitherto been, we should give them no quarter. Nick Griffin is an inveterate distorter of facts, and is rarely right about anything. Yet he is certainly right to advise David Cameron and the other political leaders who have expressed support for UAF to withdraw it immediately. This organisation truly is a menace to democracy – and I don’t mean the BNP.

J.M

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