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| Newsletter | March 2002 |
It is important not to be intimidated by hysterical ranting and lies and to keep closely as one can to the course of truth and honesty and concern for the human consequences of what one does, or fails to do. All truisms, but worth bearing in mind. -- Noam Chomsky
We cover local, national and international issues and events. The focus and the issues covered varies from one newsletter to the next, driven as much by events as targeting readers' specific needs and interests, which bearing in mind our wide and varied readership scattered across the globe means at least we satisfy some of you some of the time, if not all of you all of the time.
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We are all interconnected. What we do effects others around us and the effect ripples out to infinity. What others do ultimately effects those around us and ourselves. In other words don't be a selfish bastard as what goes around comes around. A bit like AIDS really.
Apology: The last newsletter was sent out end of January, but for reasons not known it was never received. It was then sent out again early February. Hence the unfortunate delay, and possible multiple copies.
No we ain't giving any away. We would though like to congratulate The Ecologist for two Alternative Press Awards and Common Dreams for Best Web Site Award.
Awards were presented by UTNE Reader (and no, we have no idea who they are either).
What is £20,000 compared to lives in Farnborough? If they had got it right first time it would not have cost them a penny. -- Keith Parkins
If they think my my judicial review was frivolous, that shows the contempt they have for the local community. -- Keith Parkins
From the crowing of local councillors one would think that some amazing victory had been won, that a landmark judgement had been handed down by Solomon. Had that been the case, why crow over a victory over the local community? The truth was somewhat different: the judge made no ruling as the case was not placed before him, the case was settled out of court, with a minor victory to the local community, and as for the £20,000 costs an entirely fictitious figure to make it look as though the councillors had achieved something.
August 2000. TAG were granted Outline Planning Consent. As part of that consent around two dozen planning conditions had to be met. Planning was then to be granted as various conditions were met. [BVEJ newsletter #0004 September 2000]
August 2001. TAG applied for consent to fix the runway lengths. This required discharge of conditions 16 & 17 regarding safety. Rushmoor commissioned two ex-CAA inspectors to look at safety. The consultants made the point that they were only looking at air safety, not ground safety, that they were not qualified to look at ground safety. They also stated that with various obstacles, and other problems, the proposed runway did not meet CAA safety requirement. Rushmoor nevertheless approved the planning application. [BVEJ newsletter #0016 September 2001]
October 2001. Application made to the High Court in London for leave to take a judicial review. Grounds: Rushmoor had recognised safety to be a material planning consideration, then failed to consider ground safety, Rushmoor had misdirected itself. [BVEJ newsletter #0018 November 2001]
Keith Parkins and his legal team submitted 185 pages of documentation to the court in support of their case. Rushmoor submitted one page as defence. TAG submitted an identical one page, the only difference, one headed Rushmoor, the other TAG.
The judge declined to take the case. The reasons are not known as the judge is not required to give any. He just declared himself satisfied with Rushmoor. An educated guess: In their defence Rushmoor stated they were yet to discharge conditions 16 & 17, ie both sides were now arguing the same point (more or less). Prior to this about-turn defence Rushmoor had declared all safety studies had been carried out (a statement that was blatantly false).
November 2001. Keith Parkins applied for leave to make an oral appeal to the court, which was accepted by the court.
January 2002. Keith Parkins opened negotiations with Rushmoor. If they were going to discharge conditions 16 and 17 let's establish some ground rules. Rushmoor were asked to commission an independent study of ground safety to include societal risk. At the last minute Rushmoor refused. Instead they offered to seek independent advice. Both parties then signed a Consent Order (ie agreed to withdraw from seeking a judicial review) with Rushmoor agreeing to seek independent advice before discharge of conditions 16 & 17. A victory for the local community on whose behalf Keith Parkins was fighting.
Contrast Rushmoor's refusal to agree to an independent safety study with the comments of Roland Dibbs (the Tory councillor whose ward is most at risk of a crash):
This should give all residents confidence in the council's planning procedures, particularly when we are dealing with measures affecting safety and quality of life.
Or that of planning official Daryl Phillips, after they had been caught pulling a fast one, that it had been their intention all along to seek independent advice (yeah pull the other one):
Basically we agreed to do what we were going to do. The assessment was part of the conditions set by the original planning consent in 2000.
[Last year at the planning meeting (Aug 2001) councillors were told several safety studies had already been carried out, there was no need for further advice. A position Patrick Kirby was later to slam, and then be rubbished by John Debenham.]
Councillors and officials bragged about a victory that never was and ended up with egg on their face. They showed the same lack of understanding of the court proceedings as they have of the airfield issue itself.
No ruling was made as to the merits of the case as it did not go before the judge for a judicial review. If Rushmoor were so convinced of the merits of their actions why were they so keen to prevent a judicial review? Could it be they feared a can of rotten worms opening up?
Council officials claimed they had been obliged to carry out a large amount of work. If production of one sheet of paper is a lot of work it gives an idea of their normal work load.
As for costs, entirely fictitious. No cost would have been incurred if Rushmoor had behaved properly in the first place. The figure of £20,000 was not going to be incurred if there was on the table an out-of-court settlement. In any case what is £20,000 compared with the loss of life of one member of the local community in the event of a crash?
In summary, a settlement was reached whereby all parties consented to withdraw from the judicial review. The basis of the settlement was that Rushmoor are to seek 'independent advice', ie Rushmoor cannot grant TAG planning consent for the runway configuration requested by TAG until such time as independent advice has been sought. Were Rushmoor not to seek independent advice, or not carry out what they specified in their defence to the court, ie to carry on regardless, there would be more than sufficient grounds to take Rushmoor back to court.
The situation is being closely monitored to ensure that Rushmoor comply with the Consent Order.
Rebecca Chard, Council saved from likely £20,000 bill, Farnborough News, 1 February 2002
Rebecca Chard, Airfield campaigner denies being forced into submission by council, Farnborough News, 8 February 2002
Mark Farnham, Time-waster 'costing more than vandals', Farnborough News, 15 February 2002
Keith Parkins, Farnborough Airfield judicial review, UK Indymedia, 4 February 2002
John Walton, Airfield challenge withdrawn, Surrey-Hants Star, 31 January 2002
Anyone walking through Farnborough town centre can see the appalling state of the town, a testament to the stewardship of Key Property Investments. The district valuer was not too impressed either. He dropped the rateable value by 50% for one year and 60% the following year. Not good news for the few remaining traders but at least they can get the unexpected windfall of a rate rebate, or so they thought. Rushmoor refused to grant any refund on the grounds that just because the rateable value goes down it does not mean the rates go down! Work that one out. Asked for an explanation Rushmoor refused on the grounds too complicated to explain and the retailers would not understand.
Those who are suffering the most are the small retailers. Both Rushmoor and KPI have indicated they wish to see them driven out of the town.
A retailer has now taken legal action against Rushmoor for rebate of rates and discrimination under the Human Rights Act. A summons has been served on Andrew Lloyd, Rushmoor Chief Executive. Requests for information from Rushmoor have been refused.
Lawyers based in the West Country acting for Rushmoor have tried dirty tricks and intimidation to get the case dropped.
First line of defence, dirty tricks - claim the summons had been incorrectly served. The summons was correctly served on Andrew Lloyd. Nothing personal, Andrew Lloyd is the chief executive of Rushmoor.
Next line of defence, intimidation - threaten huge legal costs if the case goes ahead. The case has been placed in the Small Claims Court, neither side can claim costs against the other.
The way the lawyers have handled their side of the case has left much to be desired. They failed to sign the covering documents for their defence. They asked for the case to be 'stirked-off'. We believe this may be legalese for telling the retailer to 'fuck-off'.
The West Country lawyers acted for Rushmoor against the retailer a couple of years ago. They tried it on then too. First they tried to claim their full fees whilst travelling to Aldershot from Devizes, second they refused to supply requested information. The judged warned them that as servants of the court he expected professional behaviour at all times and found them wanting, he severely reprimanded the lawyer present in court.
The behaviour of the lawyers has been referred to the Court and the Law Society.
Following the complaint to the Law Society the law firm responded to the retailer. The letter stated who was the solicitor handling the case, who was his supervising partner, who complaints should be referred to - who the letter was from is anyone's guess, as you've guessed, it was sent out unsigned with no name attached!!!
I am encouraging people to take more judicial reviews. If they think what they have had so far is bad they are in for a big shock. -- Keith Parkins
Dear, oh dear, oh dear, the cabinet is in a tizzy. Local residents have dared challenge the council.
Members of the cabinet have launched a vicious attack on anyone who dares to launch a judicial review against the council, and local resident Keith Parkins in particular who not only dared to take a judicial review against the council but forced the council into a humiliating out of court settlement.
The council members reach democratic decisions, they engage in endless consultations, and yes pigs fly too.
Where was the 'endless consultation' on Farnborough Airport, Cove Brook, Farnborough town centre, Firgrove Court etc? Where was the enforcement on the old Post Office site, ASDA, Farnborough Airport etc? Why are local residents to be seen and not heard, and in the case of the Farnborough Business and Community Panel, not seen at all? Once again we have to ask: Why is Rushmoor acting for big business, not the local community, the people who live here?
The local community were attacked for having nothing to do with their idle time other than to hold up the Council's pet projects with their judicial reviews and challenges, those taking them were doing so out of political reasons, on trivial matters, for 'whimsical' and 'frivolous' reasons. It only goes to show the contempt the Council has for the community. We thought these were the developers' projects? The safety of local residents a trivial matter? If the Council got it right in the first place, acted for the local community, there would be no cause to take judicial reviews. Thank God some people have the courage to stand up and be counted and bring the Council to account.
What has really got up their noses is that people are prepared to stand up and be counted - to fight the crass planning decisions that favour big business, the corruption, the lack of democracy and accountability.
Let's hope the May local elections bring forth some decent candidates so we can kick this lot out once and for all.
Mark Farnham, Time-waster 'costing more than vandals', Farnborough News, 15 February 2002
This paper is bad news, it is not just the big business stance we predicted long before it was published but there are many other points that remove democratic accountability.
Keith Holland <kholland@rushmoor.gov.uk>, Rushmoor Head of Planning, has written a useful briefing document (PLN0204) - attached to planning agenda 23 January 2002.
FoE and CPRE have published a report, Third Party Rights of Appeal in Planning, highlighting the ills of the present planning system and how it will get worse under the Neo-Labour pro-big business proposals.
Deadline for comments on Neo-Labour proposals: 18 March 2002.
Streamlined planning process, including fast tracking.
More than 90% of planning decisions to be decided by officials. This is what happens in practice, but it removes even the veneer of democratic accountability and opens up the way for more abuse and corruption.
Business planning zones, where no planning consent is required.
Enhanced compulsory purchase powers.
Fast track appeals. Objectors are still to be denied the right of appeal (an abuse under the Humans Rights Act, and also contrary to the planning system in the rest of EU).
Major plans to be decided by Parliament - airports, major roads, nuclear power stations etc. The locals to be allowed to decide the paint scheme?
Public to be allowed to speak at planning meetings. Councils to be penalised if public not allowed to speak.
Developers to be encouraged to engage in public consultation before submitting plans. Cosmetics?
Better enforcement.
Crown immunity to be removed. Contrary to EU directives?
We all know the problem, those annoying banner adds and now even more annoying popup ads. Well now you can do something about it.
AdSubtract comes in three flavours, Standard Edition that comes free, Cookie Edition that clobbers cookies, and the Pro Edition that has all sorts of bells and whistles for fine tuning, but more important stops popups.
For techies: AdSubtract works by acting as a proxy server. All requests for web pages are passed to AdSubtract, it then requests the page from the net and passes it back to the browser but what it fails to do is to make further requests for those bloody annoying banner ads. Now apart from seeing lots of pleasant white space previously occupied by ads offering unwanted services and consumer junk, it also saves on download time as the graphic intense ads are never downloaded. In addition to saving you time it saves everyone time as it frees up capacity on the net.
AdSubtract offers more, yes there is more. It allows you to monitor and delete cookies. Cookies are nasty little things that allow web sites you visit to maintain profiles on you. To add insult to injury they store the cookies on your machine.
Banner ads: Standard format ads that are delivered to a web page by adservers.
Popup ads: Extra browser windows that pop up containing ads.
Web browser: The piece of software you use to browse the web and download web pages.
Now if only HotMail offered something similar to filter out all that unwanted junk mail.
AdSubtract are hoping to launch SpamSubtract to eliminate unwanted junk e-mail.
All canals have a complex system of locks and weirs, overspills and gates to regulate the level of water. The Basingstoke Canal is no exception.
An overspill allows water to flow into Gelvert Stream, another by the A325 allows water to overflow onto the airfield and on to Cove Brook. The overspill by the A325 is rather special. It also contains a gate. It is through this gate that the volume of water, and hence the depth, is maintained for the entire length of the canal from the Greywell Tunnel to Ash Lock.
TAG are trying to limit the amount of water being let out of the gate. Their demands should be strongly resisted as there is a historic right to release water at this point.
The Basingstoke Canal runs from the Greywell Tunnel to the Wey Navigation.
This other Eden, demi-paradise ... -- William Shakespeare
Everywhere on these Isles, rich and beautiful habitats have been ploughed, bulldozed and sprayed out of existence, not as a result of need but in response to farm subsidies. -- Graham Harvey, The Killing of the Countryside
The quest for even cheaper food is at the root of all these problems. It has encouraged farmers to cut corners, compromising food safety, animal welfare and damaging the environment. -- Prof Jules Pretty, University of Essex
Since December our prices have fallen by up to 10p per pound at a time when they should normally be going up. The industry could end up dumping thousands of tonnes of the best UK apple crop we have seen for many years. The main reason for this problem is a lack of shelf space allocated to us by our supermarkets. Cheap imports from overseas have not helped the situation. -- Martin Harrell, an apple grower from Gloucestershire
Having just restocked after foot and mouth, I find that liquid milk prices are falling and are now below my production costs. My buyers are being squeezed by the supermarkets which sell liquid milk at below acceptable levels to attract customers. I am being asked to run a business at a loss. I have done all I can to become efficient and meet high welfare and farming standards. But unless I get a fair deal from the supermarkets I will not be able to continue. The issue of fair trading must be urgently addressed. -- Gareth Watkins, a dairy farmer from Gloucestershire
Foot and Mouth, BSE, one crisis after another. The only light at the end of the tunnel was that it gave the opportunity for reform.
All subsidies to farmers apart from those for conservation, quality production, animal welfare should be phased out.
Farmers get a subsidy that works out on average at a little over £5,000 per farmer, but averages can be misleading, the bulk of the money goes to the big farmers.
Subsidies were introduced after the Second World War. The system was designed to boost farm production from a low base so that never again in times of war would Britain have to rely on food convoys. Subsidies have an unpleasant habit of sticking. A subsidy when production is low, has no place in over-production of unwanted products.
The production subsidy also disguises the fact that it simply substituted food imports with chemical imports. Britain became no more self-sufficient, but what it did in the meantime was destroy the countryside and pollute the land.
Farmers should be no different to any other producer. They should not be paid to produce. Farmers do though have a special place, they are the guardians of our countryside. If we want them to care for the countryside, to go organic, not rip out hedgerows, drain ponds, grub up woods there is no reason why we should not pay them as they are producing a wider benefit for the rest of society.
The taxpayer pays several times over - the cost of subsidies, the externalised environmental and health costs, the cost of storage, the cost of disposal, the cost of dumping, the Third World Farmer then pays the cost of unwanted food imports.
Shipping food around the world forces farm gate prices down, the only beneficiaries are the Cargills of the world and the big supermarkets, meanwhile the climate suffers.
We therefore welcome the report of the English Policy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food as a step in the right direction.
Production subsidies do not benefit farmers, apart from big farmers who are not really farmers at all. All subsidies do is enable farmers to produce food at extraordinary low price below production cost. The benefit does not go to consumers as lower prices (they are already paying for the subsidies) they go to underwrite supermarket profits.
The figures shown are cost of production versus farm gate price for March last year (source Small and Family Farm Alliance):
Milk 21p/l 17p/l Pork £1.08/kg £1.18/kg Beef £2.25/kg £2.13/kg Eggs 65p/dozen 77p/dozen large free range
These figures emphasise why you should be buying at farmers markets. Not only are you supporting farmers by putting your money where you want it to go and reducing shipping and packaging costs, by buying direct you know where the food comes from, you can question the farmer about his production methods, tell him to change, take your custom elsewhere.
The reforms will have to go far beyond this Sacred Isle, CAP has to be abolished, WTO dismantled. Localised production, supplying the local area, a concentration on small family or co-operative farms, will benefit small farmers across the world. Industrialised agriculture has had its day and the sooner the system of subsidies supporting it are abolished the better.
A real farmer takes a pride in the land, he cares for it to pass on to future generations. A real farmer does not ponce around in an air-conditioned tractor unit, laptop plugged into grain futures, mobile phone connected to accountant.
The report of the English Policy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food has not surprisingly been rejected by No Fucking Use, the organisation that represents big farmers and no one else. As Farmers for Action have said, 'It is fact that this organisation, the NFU, only fully supports the large 1,000 plus farmers they do not represent the average family farm who are the majority of the members.' Hearing Ben Gill (president NFU) pontificate to the media the impression is always given that NFU have the majority of farmers as members, a myth never questioned by the media. According to data released by Farmers for Action, NFU has only 38% of all farmers as members!
NFU represents only 38% of British farmers, add to this the fact that the NFU are large shareholders in Tesco, add to this the fact that the NFU do the government's bidding, and what do you come up with? No Fucking Use! So why do 38% of our farmers put up with it?
The report does nothing to challenge the power of supermarkets. Odd that, especially when you consider that Peter Davis, Sainsbury's group chief executive, was a member of the Commission.
The recent meeting between Farmers for Action and Tesco proved to be little more than a PR exercise. The farmers are to be offered a seat at the table. One result of the meeting is that Tesco are now paranoid at learning that FFA have broken their links with truckers and are now working with environmentalists, even worse with anti-globalisation campaigners. [BVEJ newsletter #0021 February 2002]
Wendell Berry, The idea of a local economy, The Ecologist, February 2002
Richard Body, Agriculture: The Triumph and the Shame, Maurice Temple Smith, 1982
Richard Body, Farming in the Clouds, Maurice Temple Smith, 1984
Jose Bove and Francois Dufour, The World is Not for Sale, Verso, 2001
Graham Harvey, The Killing of the Countryside
Andy Jones, Eating Oil: Food supply in a changing climate, Sustain and Elm Farm Research Centre, 10 December 2001
Caroline Lucas MEP, Stopping the great food swap, Green Party, March 2001
Richard Mabey, The Common Ground, Arrow Books, 1980
Helena Norberg-Hodge et al, Bringing the Food Economy Home: The social, ecological and economic befits of local food, ISEC, October 2000
Jonathon Porritt, Land of hope, Environment, Guardian Society, The Guardian, 6 February 2002
Charlie Pye-Smith & Chris Rise, Crisis and Conservation in the Countryside, Pelican, 1984
SchNEWS, Food Fight, SchNEWS issue 340, 1 February 2002
Marion Shoard, The Theft of the Countryside, Temple Smith, 1980
Marion Shoard, This Land is Our Land - The struggle for Britain's Country
[BVEJ newsletter #0015 August 2001]
[There] isn't much community inside a big supermarket. There, we shop as individuals, each in our own private world. Gone are our relationships with the soil, the growers, and for the most part, even the distributor. Do you know the name of the produce manager in your supermarket? Or anything about his or her family? -- Art Gish
All we are asking for is a minuscule increase in the prices paid to farmers, Tesco being the largest and most powerful of the UK supermarkets, basically control the prices paid by the likes of Safeway, Sainsbury, Asda, etc., to the primary producers. Once again, we quote 'primary' meaning 'of first importance'! By having such a monopoly, they have the fate not only of UK agriculture in their hands but also the future of our rural economy and way of life, which if destroyed can never be replaced. -- Farmers for Action
Depending upon who you listen to food is either too cheap (cheap food policy has destroyed the countryside and bankrupted farmers) or it is too dear (EU subsidies and import restrictions places a premium on our food). Where lies the truth?
The truth depends where you look at food. At the farm gate, prices are low and have been driven down by a 'cheap food' policy, no matter what the costs elsewhere in the environment, our health, and the social fabric of the countryside. In the supermarket food prices are high, driven up by processing, marketing, packaging and high supermarket mark-ups. It is the differential between low prices to farmers and high shelf markup that enabled Tesco to return a profit in excess of £1 billion last year.
The value to farmers in the food we eat is pennies in a loaf of bread, 12p in a pint of milk, 20p a pound of mince. Add a bit of processing (adding value to the retailer) breakfast cereals and frozen pizzas around 2.5p of actual real food. A year's supply of home grown vegetables can be bought at the farm gate for around £17, the entire diet for around £200.
Only 8% of UK farmland is given over to crops that provide for people directly. The rest goes to feed livestock. We would need only a fifth of our current cultivated area to be self-sufficient in this country if we grew food for only human consumption.
A fifth of farms, mostly the wealthy ones in this country, receive 80% of the annual production subsides. This mis-distribution of subsidies can be compared to the government choosing to subside grocery shops, and giving all the money to Tesco and Sainsbury's. And farming just like the retail world has had it's casualties - small farms are closing all the time while the large monoculture farms (Tesco equivalent) keep growing. But even these big farms are being screwed by the supermarkets they serve. For example a litre of milk in March last year costs 22p to produce, farmers were being paid 17.6p for each litre, the supermarket was selling it for 35p, that's 17.4p profit for supermarkets and a bill of 4.4p to the tax payer for subsidies, which means that we are subsidising the supermarkets! Overall today in the UK only 9p of each pound you spend ends up in the farmer's pocket.
Our 'indigenous food' is bought off the farmers for around £12 billion, around £60 billion is spent on buying food, £30 billion on eating out. The less the actual nutritional content, the more sugary and greasy crap, the more we tend to spend and the less flows back to the farmer - a bag of crisps, a greasy Big Mac.
Consumers are spending a lower percentage of income (around 10%) on food, and of that an ever shrinking percentage leaks back to farmers. In 1970 the average household spent 25% of its income on food
The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) has recently launched the Race to the Top project which brings together both NGOs and Supermarkets to answer questions such as how are supermarkets performing in their promotion of a greener and fairer food system? Are they sourcing food at lowest cost with the lowest ethical, environmental, animal welfare and labour standards? And to what extent are they now competing on social, environmental and ethical performance?
The government has announced in excess of 40 more farm-scale trials of GM crops, the final phase of their evil plan of deliberate attempts at countryside contamination.
The minimum separation distance around the GM oilseed rape trials should be at least 5 km to safeguard neighbouring crops from GM contamination. The current separation distance between GM oilseed rape and conventional varieties is 50 metres. The trashed trials in Oxfordshire, one of the first oilseed rape trials in the country, is a classic example of poor separation and a poorly conducted trial. From the nearby hills the surrounding fields yellow with oilseed rape could be seen.
Tests by the FSA has shown 15% of baking products are contaminated with GM soya. Products with less than 1% GM contamination can be legally labelled GM free. In Denmark samples of organic feed found 20 out of 48 samples to have GM contamination.
EU has proposed 0.7% GM contamination of seeds which guarantees widespread contamination.
We are now half way through the Five Year Freeze campaign. As we indicated last month (BVEJ newsletter #0021 February 2002) the industry is already applying pressure to put GM back on the shelves. Alan Simpson (one of the few decent MPs left in the House) has tabled Early Day Motion 499 on behalf of the freeze. Has your MP signed EDM 499 yet?
The Five Year Freeze does not go nearly far enough. It was only introduced because the mainstream environmental groups were too timid to call for a total ban. Anything less than a complete GM ban is pissing in the wind.
Croatia needs help to stay GM free.
The Royal Society (to date a strongly pro-GM organisation) has issued a highly critical report on safety. The report highlights lack of nutrition, allergies, and toxins. The RS so-called scientists have finally caught up with what others have been saying for years. But they still maintain that GM is no different to conventional breeding.
English Nature has produced a report on gene transfer. They have belatedly discovered the problem of gene crossover to weeds in Canada, and are worried the same problem could arise in the UK. Maybe they should read BVEJ newsletters! In Canada there is now a serious problem of GM contamination, causing organic farmers to take class action (BVEJ newsletter #0021 February 2002) - non-GM crops are becoming contaminated, weeds are acquiring herbicide resistant genes. The weeds aren't just acquiring single genes, but multiple genes, giving them multiple resistance to more than one herbicide (gene stacking). Even before the problem became widespread in Canada it was all too obvious what would happen releasing rogue genetic material into the wild. [BVEJ newsletters passim]
Genetically modified cotton boll worms have been released in the US in the state of Arizona.
The US FDA has warned six natural food companies not to label their products GM free. The concern is not that the products may be GM contaminated, rather it alerts the public that GM is bad, which FDA has declared as safe.
Environmental benefits - Organic farming seeks to protect and enhance biodiversity and the countryside.
This little homily was found on the back of a label 'using a minimum of 50% recycled paper' for Sainsbury's Organic Closed Cup Mushrooms. The mushrooms were shrink wrapped in a plastic box!
As German multinational Bayer launched on the New York Stock Exchange, activists blockaded their UK Headquarters to highlight their recently acquired status of Europe's biggest GM research company.
At dawn a group of around sixty people arrived at the Bayer complex in Newbury, England. Using tripods and lock-on arm tubes they blocked car entrances to the HQ and later a number of the building's doorways. Workers were unable to enter the Bayer multistory car park and many were prevented from reaching their desks. After a blockade of the site lasting six hours, activists left peacefully, of their own accord, without arrest and having made their point.
Bayer are in the process of acquiring Aventis' GM research interests. This will make them the biggest GM company in Europe. The majority of crop trials in the UK this year will be run by them (around half of all crop trials in Europe).
Bayer need to float on the New York Stock Exchange to raise the money to finance the acquisition of Aventis CropScience. Bayer's share price has recently plummeted following the revelation that their anti-cholesterol drug Baycol has been linked to almost 100 deaths.
Bayer recently forced BayerWatch to relinquish their rights to the name.
Warning: BayerHazard!, Corporate Watch Newsletter #6 November-December 2001
Bayerhazard!, Earth First Action Update, February 2002
Sarah Irving, Bayer beware, Ethical Consumer, February/March 2002
[BVEJ newsletter #0019 December 2001]
Asbestos is a killer. It has been known to be a killer for over a century. The first death occurred in 1924. The number of deaths from asbestos have yet to peak. Death from asbestos is not pleasant.
Companies are delaying payment to victims. The longer the delay the fewer the victims to compensate. T&N, whose main business was asbestos, had no asbestos liability insurance cover.
The polluter shall pay. Not when the law is an ass. In the Fairchild case it has been ruled that if the asbestos contamination was caused by more than one company, none are liable.
Asbestos was present in the old Post Office in Farnborough town centre. Rushmoor planner Daryl Phillips knew of the presence of asbestos but took no steps to monitor its removal, even though the site was in the town centre and a large number of people were at risk.
EU has lowered the limits on fish quotas, but it is always too little too late. There is also the question of whether quotas work. If a fish is over quota it will either be landed illegally (as is common in Scotland) or tossed back into the sea. Far more effective would be a total ban in areas where the fish stocks are known to be at risk.
The waters off Newfoundland were the richest in the world, that is until the fish stocks collapsed at the end of the 1980s. In the early 1990s a complete ban on fishing was introduced, even though it put out of work tens of thousands of workers and turned towns dependent on fishing into ghost towns. Only now are the fish stocks starting to recover. A cod takes around ten years to reach maturity.
The EU quotas are somewhat hypocritical. EU imposes quotas in its own waters, at the same time as expanding fishing in other country's waters. Fishing off the coast of Africa is being much expanded. Traditional African fisherman can't compete with industrial fishing and are seeing their waters cleaned of all life.
The EU fishing policy is coming up for a ten year review. We have a chance of influencing that review.
Research presented to the annual meeting of the AAAS showed a dramatic collapse to be expected in the North Atlantic fish stocks over the next ten years.
NAFTA Parties should reopen and renegotiate the provisions of [NAFTA] Chapter 11 to ensure the ability of national and sub-national governments to protect their citizens and the environment from toxic substances. -- letter signed by two dozen environmental groups
NAFTA offers a microcosm of WTO/GATS in action. Borders between Canada, US and Mexico were opened to facilitate free trade, any impediment to free trade can lead to massive fines.
In July 1998, Canada withdrew its ban on the gasoline additive MMT and paid $13 million in damages to the US-based Ethyl Corporation, which had brought a NAFTA challenge against the prohibition.
Corporations in each of the three NAFTA countries - Canada, Mexico, and the United States - have filed at least seven other cases challenging domestic environmental and health policies. In 2000, a NAFTA tribunal ruled that Mexico violated the trade agreement and ordered the government to pay $16.7 million to the US-based Metalclad corporation. The company had wanted to open a hazardous waste treatment and disposal site in central Mexico but local government said the project violated environmental protection laws.
Another pending claim involves the Canadian-based company Methanex, which filed against the United States claiming that the state of California's decision to phase out the use of its gasoline additive, MTBE, cost the company $970 million. California's governor, Gray Davis, ordered the use of MTBE halted by the end of this year after studies revealed unusually high - and potentially harmful - levels of MTBE in California's drinking water.
Canfor Corp, a British Columbia timber company has filed a $250 million lawsuit against the US government under NAFTA Chapter 11.
Canfor Corp destroys ancient forests in BC. The practice is heavily subsidised. Using the subsidy as a valid reason, US has imposed import duties.
Canada must demonstrate that it will not let narrow corporate interests dictate the health of its citizens. -- Angela Rickman, Sierra Club Canada
Crompton Corporation has filed a $100 million dollar NAFTA Chapter 11 suit against Canada for de-registering lindane for use on Canadian canola crops. Crompton charges that by banning the pesticide and 'failing to live up to its undertaking to conduct a review of lindane, the government has taken measures tantamount to expropriation.'
Canada did not ban the use of lindane for canola directly because of health or environmental concerns. Rather, it de-registered the use of lindane for canola seed after it became a trade dispute with the United States, which forbids the use of the pesticide on canola. In 1998, Washington warned Ottawa it would block imports of crops treated with pesticides not allowed for use in the United States. US canola growers, prevented by US law from using the chemical to treat their seed, had complained that the higher cost of lindane substitutes gave Canadian growers an unfair competitive advantage. In response, Canadian authorities, canola growers, and manufacturers of lindane - including Crompton unit Uniroyal Chemical - had agreed to phase out lindane.
Lindane is one of the original 'dirty dozen' pesticides. Lindane is considered a persistent organic pollutant, or POP, because it travels long distances and breaks down extremely slowly. The documented health effects of lindane include dizziness, seizures, nervous system damage, immune system damage, and birth defects.
In Europe, all agricultural uses of lindane have been banned. The US Environmental Protection Agency has called the pesticide a possible human carcinogen and is currently completing a scientific review of the chemical. The Stockholm Convention on POPs, adopted and signed by 90 countries in May, does not yet cover lindane but discussions are under way to ban the pesticide.
Should a Forum that is dominated by corporate interests be encouraged to take on the role of mapping out future frameworks for global governance? -- Peter Goodman
We've not done our fair share to take on some of the global challenges like poverty, disease and women's rights. We need to convince the US public that this is a role that we have to play. -- Hilary Clinton
They came in solidarity with this terror-wounded city. But since they arrived, speaker after speaker at the World Economic Forum has lambasted America as a smug superpower, too beholden to Israel at the expense of the Muslim world, and inattentive to the needs of poor countries or the advice of allies. -- Jim Krane, AP
Thanks for the show of solidarity, please next year go back to Switzerland. -- New York cop
This was perhaps the first action that was entirely put together by the 'bad' protesters. By standing up and taking action anyway, despite all the police and military force and manipulation of the press and public opinion we know are being marshalled against us, we are sending a message to the world that it is not necessary to be ruled by fear: we refuse to bow down to terror, just as we refuse to terrorise anyone else. -- David Graber, New York Anti-Capitalist Convergence
Normally held in Davos, the WEF switched to New York in an act of solidarity. With friends like this who needs enemies. World Economic Fortress would have been a better name as delegates hid behind barricades to plot the running of the world.
Out on the streets several thousnd prosters held peaceful protests. Despite the fact that protest was peaceful, police still found need to go in hard with hundreds of protesters arrested. Eye-witnesses said the police appeared to be targeting people dressed in black. Just prior to the start of the AWIP march, police stormed a crowd of peaceful protesters. Among groups represented on the streets were Another World Is Possible (AWIP), Reclaim the Streets (RTS), the Anti-Capitalist Convergence (ACC), and International ANSWER. All sought to highlight the devestating effects of unbridled capitalism and to display theatrical belief in grassroots democracy.
NYCLU criticized the police for its confrontational tone in preparing for the protests and urged the department to respect the First Amendment rights of demonstrators. Upon the urging of the NYCLU, the city's Civilian Complaint Review Board remained open on Saturday to handle police misconduct complaints.
The national Students for Global Justice conference attracted over one thousand attendees since it began Thursday. Many more activists gathered at the Public Eye on Davos summit near the United Nations. While these countersummits have been largely ignored by the mainstream media, they, like the World Social Forum in Brazil, offer activists opportunities to chart alternatives to the current economic system embodied by organizations such as the World Economic Forum.
Activists rallied for fair wages at the GAP and heard labor leader Joe Sweeney, among others, address a Working Families Economic Forum. Scores of police lined the perimeter of the Gap's flagship store in midtown to keep away the peaceful protesters. Hundreds of police were also stationed at Starbucks, McDonalds and other corporate chains throughout the city.
WEF protests began with Netstrike crashing the Forum website on the opening day.
Within the Waldorf-Astoria, WEF was a gloomy affair, delegates recognised that anti-globalisation campaigners held the moral high ground.
The media who had hyped up the street violence, when it failed to happen, failed to report the street protests, even less the alternative conferences, least still the message from the streets.
Formed in 1971, the Davos-based WEF is viewed by critics as the architect of corporate globalization and the catalyst for the formation of the World Trade Organization. Although the Forum is a private affair, the meeting's clout has begun to rival, if not exceed, that of the United Nations as the world's leading global body.
SchNEWS, Big Apple Pied, SchNEWS issue 341, 8 February 2002
The real conference was the alternative conference taking place in Porto Alegre in Brazil. Here radicals were trying to sketch out a new world order. In New York we had has-beens trying to cling to their vestiges of power.
The keynote speech at the opening session was by Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky called the WSF (which emerged last year as the counterpoint to the World Economic Forum, the annual gathering of the global corporate elites traditionally held in Davos, Switzerland) 'the most exciting development in recent times,' a continuation of the struggle for an integrated world of human beings that has been a part of people's and workers' movements for more than a century.
Speaking on the main theme of his talk A World Without Wars, Chomsky said that the weapons of mass destruction in human possession could currently wipe out the world completely.
'Either we have a world without war or we have no world', he warned, pointing out that despite this dire threat there are developed countries, like the United States, that are pursuing research on even more deadly ways of destroying the world.
Chomsky was scathing on TWAT, the current campaign against terrorism. He questioned the US government's moral right to undertake such a war when Washington itself was guilty of promoting and implementing terrorism internationally on many occasions in the past. TWAT was, he pointed out, being run by US officials who in the mid-1980s were themselves responsible for running an international campaign of terrorism against leftist-run countries in Latin America and the Middle East.
'If one looked at the official definition of terrorism, it would be identical to the official definition of US foreign policy', Chomsky said to wild cheers from the audience.
Speakers on the Saturday condemned the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, with one comparing the practice to apartheid-era South Africa's creation of `Bantustans', which were economically poor areas designated as homelands for blacks. Meanwhile back at the WEF in New York, delegates heard a similar message the following day.
Porto Alegre, a city of 1.5 million, has been governed by the Brazil Workers Party since the 1980s. Citizens participate directly in the governance of the city.
The Air Power 2002 conference at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London was targeted. In Germany the Annual Munich Security conference was targeted.
After World War II, integration of the international economy ('globalization') has been increasing. By late 20th century, it had reversed the decline of the interwar period, reaching the level prior to World War I by gross measures - for example, volume of trade relative to the size of the global economy. But the picture is considerably more complex.
Postwar integration passed through two phases: (1) the Bretton Woods period until the early 1970s; (2) the period since, after the dismantling of the Bretton Woods system of regulated exchange rates and controls on movement of capital. It is phase (2) that is usually called 'globalization'. Phase (2) is associated with so-called 'neoliberal policies': structural adjustment and 'reform' along the lines of the 'Washington consensus' for much of the Third World, and since 1990, others, such as India and the 'transition economies' of Eastern Europe; and a version of the same policies in the more advanced industrial societies themselves, most notably the US and UK. The two phases have been strikingly different. For good reasons, many economists refer to phase (1) as the 'golden age' of industrial state capitalism, and phase (2) -- the 'globalization period' -- as the 'leaden age', with significant deterioriation of standard macroeconomic measures worldwide (rate of growth, productivity, capital investment, etc.), and increasing inequality. In the world's richest country, for most of the workforce wages have stagnated or declined, working hours have dramatically increased, and benefits and support systems have been reduced. Through the 'golden age', social indicators closely tracked GDP; since the mid-1970s, they have steadily declined, to the level of 40 years ago according to the most recent detailed academic study.
Contemporary globalization is described as expansion of 'free trade', but that is misleading. A large part of 'trade' is in fact centrally-managed, through intrafirm transfers, outsourcing, and other means. Furthermore, there is a strong tendency towards oligopoly and strategic alliances among firms throughout the economy, along with extensive reliance on the state sector to socialize risk and cost, a key feature of the US economy throughout this period.
The international 'free trade' agreements involve an intricate combination of liberalization and protectionism, in many crucial cases (particularly pharmaceuticals) allowing megacorporations to gain huge profits by monopolistic pricing of drugs that were developed with substantial contribution of the public sector. The enormous explosion of short-term speculative capital transfers in phase (2) sharply restricts planning options for governments, hence restricts popular sovereignty insofar as the political system is democratic.
The constitution of 'trade' is far different from the pre-World War I period. A large part now consists of manufacturing flows to the rich countries, much of it intrafirm. These options, along with the mere threat to transfer production, are another powerful weapon against working people and functioning democracy. The emerging system is one of 'corporate mercantilism', with decisions over social, economic, and political life increasingly in the hands of unaccountable private concentrations of power, which are 'the tools and tyrants of government', in James Madison's memorable phrase, warning of the threats to democracy he perceived two centuries ago.
Not surprisingly, the phase (2) effects have led to substantial protest and public opposition, which has taken many forms throughout the world. The World Social Forum offers opportunities of unparalleled importance to bring together popular forces from many and varied constituencies from the richer and poor countries alike, to develop constructive alternatives that will defend the overwhelming majority of the world's population from the attack on fundamental human rights, and to move on to break down illegitimate power concentrations and extend the domains of justice and freedom.
[taken from MSTBrazil]
Here in Bolivia $25 million is the annual cost to hire 3000 rural doctors, 12,000 public school teachers or hooking up 125,000 families who don't have access to the public water system. Which of these are you suggesting Bolivia should do without in order to pay you? -- Jim Schultz, director of the Democracy Center in an open letter to Riley Bechtel, Chief Executive of Bechtel Enterprises
Privatisation of water in Bolivia shows what we can expect under GATS. The water was privatised and massive price hikes followed. Mass protest forced the government to back down and the water was re-nationalised. Under GATS, once sold off, the water could not be taken back into state hands, the private service sector could sue for lost profits if it was barred from purchasing the water supply.
In February 2000, just months after it took over the water system of Bolivia's third largest city, Cochabamba, an American corporation Bechtel hit water users with enormous price increases. They forced some of the poorest families in South America to literally choose between food or water. A popular uprising against the company, repressed violently by government troops, left one 17-year old boy Victor Hugo Daza dead and more than a hundred people wounded. Due to the protests Bechtel was forced to leave and the water supply handed back to public ownership (see SchNEWS 286). Then in November last year Bechtel decided to add to the suffering it had already caused by demanding compensation of $25 million against the Bolivian people – compensation for its lost opportunity to make future profits.
The employees of the consortium didn't leave empty handed. They took the hard drives from the computers, the cash left in the company's accounts, and sensitive personnel files. They also left behind an unpaid electric bill for $90,000. Now its saying it wants more.
In his letter to the company Jim Schultz continued 'Your losses, however you may calculate them, are numbers on a ledger. Mrs. Daza's loss is buried in a cemetery. No one will be representing her in your arbitration. For Bechtel, with revenues of more than $14 billion annually, $25 million is what you take in before lunch on any given workday.'
Tell Riley Bechtel - the 51st richest person in America - why does he need to take any more money from the one of the poorest countries in South America.
Two years ago massive protests halted the planned privatisation of the water system, now the battle is over Coca. For several months, the government has totally militarised the region in order to stop the traditional cultivation of the Coca plant, they have started a 'war on drugs' - but the real objective of evicting peasants and indigenous people is that the land can then be sold to multinational companies. Over the last few weeks, dozens of demonstrators have been killed by the Army. Four soldiers were also shot during clashes which is a bit suspect considering the peasants don't carry guns on demos. Using this as a pretext the government had 60 community and union leaders arrested. The Bolivian human rights organisations have already denounced the abuse that they have suffered, such as beatings and wounds, electric shocks on the teeth, etc.
Parliament also voted the repeal of the parliamentary immunity of Evo Morales, one of the most popular deputies and foremost union leaders of the country. He now stands accused of being the 'intellectual author' of the soldiers' deaths.
Radio +, which belongs to the peasant confederation has been heavily damaged and closed down by the police, while organisations of other social sectors in solidarity with the peasants have also been brutally attacked.
Coca is traditionally brewed as a 'tea', hot water poured over the green leaves. It is a very pleasant and relaxing drink.
[SchNEWS 339 & SchNEWS 341]
Would you get McDonald's to advise you about healthy eating? Or BP to sing the praises of free electricity from the sun? Well, Neo-Labour thought it would be a good idea to ask accountancy firm Andersen to write a report on the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) - the scheme where the nation's public services are flogged off to the private sector, who then lease them back to the taxpayer! Andersen said PFI was a great idea and would save money - but forgot to mention that it would also make them lots - they've already made millions thanks to 37 PFI schemes they've already got their sticky little accountants' fingers in.
This company is so dodgy that even the Tories took them to court and banned them from any government contracts for 12 years. This didn't put off Neo-Labour though. Before Blair's government came to power, they were advised by Andersen about the windfall tax, capital gains tax and advanced corporation tax and in the summer of 1996 more than 90 Labour MPs attended an Andersen seminar on 'how to be a minister'. Patricia Hewitt, now Trade and Industry secretary, used to be head of research at Andersen Consulting.
Since coming to power, Neo-Labour continued to follow Andersen advice on how to flog off our remaining national assets like Air Traffic Control, the London Underground, defence research labs, schools and hospitals. Andersen has also given expert advice on Railtrack, the Jubilee Line Extension, British Nuclear Fuels, education action zones, the management of local education authorities as well as doing the accounts for the Millennium Dome.
Andersen are making the news at the moment for helping to cover up the collapse of energy giant Enron - which last year entered the record books by becoming the biggest company to go bankrupt in US corporate history. Not only did Andersen receive $25 million for its Enron audit work, where you would have expected to see that Enron's accounting was bullshit, but also $27 million for its Enron consultancy work, which probably explains why they turned a blind eye and also why one US Senator commented 'If Enron robbed the bank, Arthur Andersen drove the getaway car.'
Lately Andersen have been busy shredding as many Enron documents as possible - all in the interests of recycling and making more bedding for hamsters of course.
[purloined from SchNEWS issue 340 1 February 2002]
This should serve as a warning to other companies operating in Burma - get out now or you could be next. -- Burma Campaign UK
People power has triumphed again!
Lingerie giant Triumph International has been forced to close down its Burma-based manufacturing site. The company was targeted for its part in supporting the military regime. It was charged by the UN's International Labour Organisation with a 'crime against humanity' for the oppression and exploitation of Burma's people. [BVEJ newsletter #0020 January 2002]
Reebok, that well known champion of human right's has attempted to award Dita Sari, an Indonesian labour activist with a Reebok Human Rights Award. The multinational reckons it honours, 'champions and torchbearers in the fight for a better world' with its annual £35,400 Award. Shameless Jill Tucker, from Reeboks Hong Kong office said, 'We feel like we are fighting for the same thing' and somehow managing to keep a straight face. Reebok are but one of many shoe and clothing companies to have their 'sports goods' manufactured on the cheap in Indonesia by sub-contractor companies. In their plants, the workers are lucky to get paid $1.50 a day. 'They then have to live in a slum area, surrounded by poor and unhealthy conditions, especially for their children', said Dita Sari. 'At the same time, Reebok collects millions of dollars of profit every year, directly contributed by these workers. The low pay and exploitation of the workers of Indonesia, Mexico and Vietnam are the main reasons why we will not accept this award.'
Many of the issues raised in connection with the Ilisu dam may also arise over the Yusufeli dam. ECGD and Ministers must not only be even-handed as between the two projects, but be seen to be even-handed, in view of the strong feeling we have heard expressed in Turkey that Ilisu is a political football. -- House of Commons Select Committee on Trade and Industry
Liz Airey sits on the board of Amec as a non-executive director. Liz Airey has recently been appointed as head of ECGD. ECGD have been asked by Amec to underwrite to the tune of £68 million their participation in the Yusufeli Dam in northern Turkey.
The Yusufeli Dam straddles the Coruh river in northern Turkey, its construction will displace around 30,000 people mainly Georgians, four towns will be destroyed, 14 partially destroyed, and a further 42 towns and villages will flooded or indirectly affected.
ECGD has a draft Environmental Impact Assessment carried out on behalf of the Turkish government and Amec, but refuses to place in the public domain. A resettlement plan has yet to be received.
So even-handed will Ministers and ECGD be on the decision of this project that Patricia Hewitt will be advised by a non-executive director of Amec. The Amec AGM (expected early May 2002) is to be targeted.
If you have not already done so please lodge an objection with Patricia Hewitt (DTI) to this dam project. Also lobby your MP.
Blair is now focusing on Africa. What he means by that is opening up the continent for his big business paymasters and cronies.
Neo-Labour are planning to sell of an agency that was set up to specifically help Africa.
The Control of Exports Bill is currently passing through Parliament. It is vital that it contains a clause on 'sustainable development' to stop bad projects, eg the supply of a £28 million military air traffic control system by BAE Systems to Tanzania, a project that is ill-suited to the needs of the country and which the country can ill-afford. Please lobby your MP.
Zambia is now going organic in a big way. Back to the roots. The aim is not development, self-sufficiency, but entry into western markets where there is an unsatisfied demand for organic foods.
In the first few years yields drop, then spring back to equal if not exceed pre-organic chemical farming methods.
The farms are huge, acres of organic mono-cultures destined for export, compost production on an industrial scale. The cost in the west of going organic is the high cost of labour. Not in Zambia where the cost of labour is less then a dollar a day.
Some of the farms are small but they supply local markets. The future is seen as out-sourcing, where the small farms become the serf producers for large multinationals supplying the western demand for organics, the farming equivalent of sweatshop out-sourcing.
Barclays Bank are erecting a gleaming new multi-story office block in Tanzania. This in a country where few people have spare cash let alone a bank account. But let's get real, Barclays are not there to service the needs of poor Tanzanians, they are there to service those asset stripping the country. To provide the finance for the state sell off: utilities, coffee farms, to finance unwanted white elephant projects like a military air traffic control system. BAE Systems are supplying a military air traffic control system, the £28 million price is being loaned by Barclays at commercial interest rates. The tab is being picked up by the ordinary people, the price a poor health service and other basic services including primary education and rural development. If Tanzania is unable to keep up the payments the bill will paid paid for by the UK taxpayer via export credit loan guarantees.
Tanzania is the first country to be guaranteed debt relief. One of the myriad of conditions attached to debt relief is neo-liberalisation of the country.
Under Nelson Mandela the ANC was led by a decent bloke (a rare accolade indeed for a Black African leader). Under Thabo Mbeki we have reverted to the normal African model, a stooge enforcing repression at the bidding of neo-colonial masters.
Thabo Mbeki is forcing through a neo-liberal agenda, state assets are being sold off to western interests. Prior to sell-off they are being put in shape. Eskom, the state electricity company, is hiking prices and cutting off non-profitable customers.
At the WTO conference in Doha, the ANC representative was the only African delegate pushing for a new trade round.
Tafelsig Water War: A movement was built to fight evictions in the Western Cape. The self-organisation of the Tafelsig community, facing the effects of a national neo-liberal assault, allowed them to resist the new enemy - water cutoffs. As the western province governance structures, indistinguishable from faces of power in other provinces, deploy the state's agents against the people of Tafelsig, the community stands firm in a forced water war. Against police harassment, live ammunition, and a complete cut-off of water to the community; the people of Tafelsig remain militant in their demand for basic services.
In Soweto the people are now worse off than they were under apartheid. The people there no strangers to suffering, they also know how to fight back. SECC, Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, is reconnecting disconnected customers. Tens of thousands of people across South Africa are taking to the streets in anti-WTO protests.
As under apartheid, dissent is not tolerated. Trevor Ngwane, a former ANC Soweto councillor, was kicked out of the ANC for criticising its privatisation policy.
If one looked at the official definition of terrorism, it would be identical to the official definition of US foreign policy. -- Noam Chomsky
The number of innocent civilians killed in Afghanistan exceeds the number of innocent civilians in New York, but still the bombing continues, the American lust for revenge still not slaked.
The Taliban were an evil bunch of bastards, the only thing that could be said in their favour was that they stabilised an unstable country. Now as it descends into chaos no one is safe. Before, women could not show themselves, now they dare not show themselves for fear of rape.
The US has shown that brute force is used to resolve a problem. A lesson that has not gone unlearnt in Israel, or even in Turkey, where a brutal crackdown is taking place, all of course in the name of TWAT.
Hamid Karzai, the temporary Afghan leader (?), and Zalmay Khalilzad, US special envoy, were both special advisers to Unocal, who attempted to construct a pipeline through Afghanistan in the mid-1990s.
A massive outflowing of gold and dollars has flowed out of Afghanistan to the Middle East through the Taliban and Al Qaeda network.
Neighbouring countries are carrying out their centuries old traditions of meddling in Afghanistan.
In January US Special Forces acting on faulty CIA intelligence data burst into a school and slaughtered innocent civilians whilst they were sleeping in their beds. Those captured were beaten and kicked. This is not the only CIA cockup where innocent civilians have been killed. Last month the CIA fired two missiles from a remote-controlled Predator spy plane near Zawar Kili in southeastern Afghanistan at what were believed to be Al Qaeda leaders, but local residents say three peasants who were collecting scrap metal were killed instead.
Bryan Bender and Marcella Bombardieri, CIA's Afghan Role Questioned in Raid That Killed Allies, Boston Globe, 15 February 2002
George Monbiot, America's Imperial War, The Guardian, 12 February 2002
Zubeida Malik, Better the Devil You Know?, The Ecologist, February 2002
[BVEJ newsletters passim]
The Terrorism Act (2000) and the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001) have turned the UK into a police state. The more Draconian measures are never intended to be used, or so we are told, merely to intimidate and deter political dissent, but if that be the case, why are they there?
To discuss these issues, a meeting was hosted by Jeremy Corbyn MP in the Grand Committee Room in the House of Commons on Tuesday 12 February 2002.
Democracy is not a static process, it is a dynamic process. The plebs, usually through force, acquire rights, universal franchise, equal rights for women, human rights, universal education, the state claws them back.
Events are used by the state to claw back its powers, increasingly the state and big business are indistinguishable, simply replacing the landowners and capitalists of old. 11 September 2001, was no exception, a tragedy for New York, but a Godsend for the state. It has been used as an excuse to carry out a massive clamp-down on human rights and political dissent.
In the UK, Ireland has usually been the proving ground for anti-civil liberties measures. Try them out in Northern Ireland then extend to the rest of the UK. As the boundaries between the state and big business blur then attacks on big business are used as part of the crackdown. Recently the clash has been with protesters and big business, rather than the traditional enemy, the state. The Terrorism Act 2000 widened the definition of a terrorist to encompass the protesters. 11 September 2001 was used to usher in still further anti-terrorism legislation, even though the previous Act was largely untried and untested.
Increasingly it is not acts that define terrorism and catch the 'guilty' but vague notions - association, conspiracy, membership. Join the wrong group, support the wrong people, be in the wrong place, think the wrong thoughts and you too can be a terrorist.
Not many people may realise it but we are in a State of Emergency, called by David Blunkett (Home Secretary) after 11 September 2001. We were not attacked, nor were we under the threat of attack. A State of Emergency is usually called under a natural catastrophe, declaration of War. The State of Emergency has been used an an excuse to remove protection under the Human Rights Act to detention without trial.
Afghanistan was bombed, is still being bombed, to impose democracy on the Afghan people, to save them from their own evil ways. Protection of the Human Rights Act, restrictions on civil liberties, are being removed or introduced in the UK to safeguard democracy. The media, not us of course, remains silent.
A brilliant introduction by an Irish professor, a leading world authority on human rights, the rest not up to much. Too many speakers of dubious quality with little to say. It would have been far better to have had fewer quality speakers. George Monbiot was unable to take up his invitation which was a pity.
There was also too much concentration on real terrorists, or groups with terrorist links (with no attempt to define terrorism or to recognise armed struggle), rather than a concentration on the real issue which is the criminalisation of dissent. To argue, as one speaker tried, that there is no international terrorism, is to devalue the arguments and discredit the whole cause. The fight is against terrorism, not against genuine political dissent. There should have been environmentalists, anti-globalisation campaigners. But, when Kurds say they can no longer act on human rights abuses in Turkey for fear of intimidation in the UK we all get the message.
The appeal to trade unions was rather twee. Unions are greed-driven, the alto-egos of big business. Hard line lefties wish to replace the totalitarianism of global corporations with the totalitarianism of the state.
The Acts become self-justifying in their own right. Police are under instruction from above to increase the number of stops and searches under the Acts. There may be no grounds, but a useful trawl can be carried out, but more important when the Acts are due for renewal the numbers of stops and searches can be used as grounds for the need for the Acts.
Europe. EU is building a database of 'troublemakers' and 'activists'. A Europe wide arrest warrant means you can be hauled before the court in any EU country without extradition. Europol are immune from prosecution.
What does it all mean in practice? This was illustrated by two examples from the floor.
A guy, a white guy not Turkish, regularly goes to Turkey to pick up a Turkish magazine. A far left magazine, but surprisingly legal in Turkey therefore fairly innocuous else the magazine would have been closed long ago, its premises and printing equipment destroyed and the journalists killed. He regularly gets stopped coming into the country and his magazines confiscated. The magazines are in Turkish so the demand in the UK must be very limited. He was warned things would get tough when the Terrorism legislation came into force. On his last trip he was held in custody at Dover for two days, previously he had been held for a few hours.
A couple of girls, invited to the meeting, were searched on their way in, had their bags searched, and all their leaflets confiscated. The leaflets were confiscated by the Police on the grounds that they were 'political'!
What can you do?
Spread the word, that dissent is being criminalised. Oppose any renewal or extension of the Terrorism Acts. Inform CACC of any attempt to intimidate or of harassment under the Acts. Refuse Police requests for information on political dissent. Maintain professional ethics and confidentiality of information on political dissent.
CACC circulated a statement for everyone to sign. Copies can be obtained direct from CACC. 020 7586 5892 / 020 7353 1633 / knklondon@gn.apc.org
Political dissent is not a crime.
[BVEJ newsletters passim]
Turks climbed onto and occupied the giant bicycle wheel in London. They caused no damage and although charged with various criminal offences eventually got off scot free. Their actions were to highlight the ill-treatment of political prisoners in Turkey which until then apart from by ourselves had got little media coverage. The ill-treatment eased off, but now that TWAT is in full force the ill-treatment has racked up.
A big campaign is currently taking place in Turkish occupied Kurdistan for Kurds to be taught in their own language. The response of the Turks is the usual response, violent repression.
The Turkish authorities have a history of 'information management' that extends beyond labelling free thinking publishers as terrorists. Little over a year ago the Turkish Government threatened 'action' against Microsoft for content relating to the Armenian genocide included within Encarta on-line encyclopaedia.
Quite how the Turkish authorities expected Encarta to 'gloss over' the genocide of approximately 1,500,000 Armenians between 1892 and 1921 is another matter.
Fatih Tas was acquitted last month in Istanbul of charges of producing propaganda against the unity of the Turkish state. Fatih might well have spent over a year rotting in a Turkish jail, however, if it were not for the intervention of star witness Professor Noam Chomsky.
A relieved Mr Tas stated after the acquittal that 'If Chomsky hadn't been here we wouldn't have expected such a verdict'. Tas faced imprisonment under anti-terrorism laws simply for translating and publishing Chomsky's work, which was highly critical of the US for supplying the Turkish Government with weapons that would ultimately be used for 'intensive ethnic cleansing' against the Kurds. Chomsky supporters said he would petition the court to add his name to the charge sheet. He will say 'I am here, I wrote this book and if there is a crime I should be tried too.'
[BVEJ newsletters passim]
A recent Antarctic study showed glacial 'ice streams' that feed the Ross Ice Shelf in West Antarctica appear to be growing, not shrinking. To the scientists involved, the studies suggest that the effects of global warming on Antarctica may prove harder to forecast than anticipated. But to their dismay, the mainstream media interpreted the reports as evidence that the global warming theory itself was in trouble, even though that was the furthest thing from the scientists' minds.
The screwup offers a case study in 'the difficulties associated with communicating information about climate change to the public,' said Benjamin Preston, an environmental biologist with the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Arlington, Virginia, who wasn't involved with the studies.
One of the scientists involved in the two studies, Slawek Tulaczyk of the University of California at Santa Cruz, said the latest press misinterpretations leave him 'increasingly frustrated' by sometimes-careless media coverage of the global warming issue.
Tulaczyk and Ian Joughin of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena reported in Science (18 January 2002) that the movement of the glacial Ross ice streams appears to be slowing, allowing the ice to thicken.
A headline over an editorial in the San Diego Union-Tribune minced no words about it: Scientific findings run counter to theory of global warming. The editorial sarcastically asked: 'Oh dear. What will the doomsayers say now? How will they explain away yet two more scientific studies that clearly contradict the global warming orthodoxy?'
The media mistakenly equated the phenomenon studied by Joughin and Tulaczyk - a change in ice flow rates - with ice melting rates. The mistake contributed to the erroneous belief that the studies constituted, as it were, scientific 'tests' of the global warming theory.
For example, a headline in the National Post, a Canadian newspaper, declared: Antarctic ice sheet has stopped melting, study finds.
The thickening of Antarctic ice in certain regions - especially Ice Stream C of the Whillans Ice Stream, adjacent to the Ross Ice Shelf - results from unexpectedly complex internal dynamics of the ice itself.
That the ice-flow changes are unrelated to global warming is illustrated by a simple fact: Such changes were occurring long before the Industrial Revolution boosted atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases. The area with the greatest ice thickening is on an ice stream that stopped flowing about 150 years ago.
Eco-changes in Australia have left no doubt as to which way the temperature is moving. Habitats at danger include coral reefs (bleaching from rising sea temperatures), northern wetlands (salt water contamination from rising sea levels), bush destruction (forest fires), eucalyptus groves (temperature and rainfall beyond their survival limits). At least 90 species are at risk.
UK companies are linked to some of the world's worst cases of forest destruction. These companies are profiting from environmental devastation. The Government must step in and bring them to account. -- Ed Matthew, FoE Corporates Campaigner
UK paper merchants are buying paper sourced from the world's most bio-diverse lowland rainforest. The Tesso Nilo rainforest in Indonesia is home to a number of endangered species, including tigers, elephants, gibbons and tapirs.
At least nine paper merchants in the UK are buying PaperOne products made by APRIL, one of the world's most destructive paper companies and owner of the world's largest pulp mill. APRIL has already cleared at least 220,000 hectares off Indonesian rainforest, an area almost twice the size of Greater London. It is now logging Tesso Nilo, recently discovered by scientists to be the most bio-diverse lowland rainforest on earth.
APRIL's operations have been supported by a number of other British companies. AMEC, one of the UK's largest construction groups, helped build APRIL's pulp mill in Indonesia and a British bank has been involved in financing APRIL's development. Baring Brothers (now ING Barings) arranged a £130 million loan for the construction of APRIL's pulp mill. Barclays also attempted to arrange loans of £140 million to APRIL subsidiaries but the deal collapsed following the Asian economic crisis.
Since starting operations in 1995, the vast majority of the timber sent to its pulp mill has been sourced by clear-cutting Indonesian rainforest. APRIL has admitted that it will be destroying at least another 140,000 hectares of rainforest during the next six years. APRIL has also been involved in a number of high profile land disputes with indigenous peoples.
FoE have published a report, APRIL Fools, though why not wait until All Fools Day to get maximum publicity is beyond us!
UK paper merchants buying PaperOne paper include: David John Papers, Davies Harvey Murrel, GF Smith, SV Sier, Ovenden Papers, Rosefox, The South Wales Paper Company, Fulton Paper, Frederick Johnson.
Amec is seeking ECGD backing to build the Yusefeli dam in Turkey.
We reported last month on Sainsbury's plans to build a supermarket on a derelict site next to Brighton Station. In 1997 the original proposal was strongly opposed by local residents, and was refused planning permission by the Council, a decision upheld by a Public Inquiry. Since the start public consultations have been organised by BUDD, in the absence of a democratic council. These consultations have shown that when residents have their say, they are well capable of sussing out that more developments will only benefit the fat cats.
Undeterred, Sainsbury's are back again, clutching a new (nastier) development application. This 'exemplar of 21st century urban development' includes (unsurprisingly) a huge supermarket, two luxury hotels, a car park that will obliterate the Sunday market, and 'housing for key workers' (read yuppie flats, but looks good on paper). Never mind sustainability or open spaces - bring on the pollution say Brighton Council (sounds a bit like Rushmoor). The Council rejected the last application, but are set to accept the current proposal because they have a development quota they have to maintain, passed down from Westminster.
The decision was due to be made at the end of last month (February 2002).
The Manchester Free Trade Hall was built on the site of the Peterloo massacre where militia attacked a mass meeting being held in protest of the Corn Laws and as part of the campaign for universal suffrage. The Free Trade Hall is a key monument of the struggle for democracy. It was built in 1840 to house the great Corn Law debates and to provide space for Manchester people to hold political, religious and cultural public meetings. The Manchester Corporation bought the Free Trade Hall in May 1921, 'so that the Hall should not be lost to citizens.' But now Manchester Council is all modern and new and have sold it as part of the council's asset-stripping programme to fund the unwanted Commonwealth games being held there this July. It has been sold to a private developer for £4 million, and is currently scheduled for 95% demolition to make way for a £45 million luxury hotel.
We, together with the good northern folk of Manchester, are demanding that the building be returned for use by the general public.
Demolition was due to begin on 11 February 2002.
RMT are still showing themselves to be a bunch of prats in their dealing with SWT. Have they never heard of 'smart strikes'?
SRA has given SWT special dispensation, they will not get penalised for non-running trains during strike days. This reduces the pressure on SWT to reach a settlement. SWT may even benefit, it may be cheaper not to run the trains, especially if it does not trigger any penalties with SRA.
Cost Plus was widely discredited and no longer used in placing defence contracts. It is an open incentive to inflate costs as not only do you get your costs but profits on top directly geared to the costs. Arriva Trains have the same arrangement with SRA. Offer the drivers a big pay award, then claw back not only the costs, but profit on top, then sit back and watch the entire rail network unravel as leap-frog pay awards are gone on strike for.
Stephen Byers has given the go-ahead for part-privatisation of London Underground. This only days after a Commons Select Committee said it would be a disaster. Please write to Byers expressing your strong objection and lobby MPs.
Nats is seeking a 5% hike in its charges to cover mounting losses. Nats is expected to lose £230 million over the next three years. Nats is rapidly heading towards bankruptcy as the banks that funded the part privatisation are threatening to withdraw their support. As we predicted, Nats is turning into the Railtrack of the skies.
Ryanair has seen its last quarter profits rise by 35%. BAA has seen a slow recovery since 11 September 2001. BA lurches from one crisis to another. Final quarter losses were £160 million. GO was launched as a spoiling operation against easyJet, BA then sold GO. BA is now rumoured to be going back into the low cost market. 7,000 jobs were lost at BA last year, 16,000 more are expected to be lost this year. Heathrow Terminal Five was to be built for the exclusive use of BA.
Airport security at Manchester has been shown to be non-existent. Huge job losses and lack of training have made it all too easy to smuggle weapons and explosives onto aircraft. Thieves were able to mount an audacious robbery in the most secure area of Heathrow. Security, what security?
When will someone, anyone, pick up on the fact that at Farnborough there is no security.
The airline industry has said there was little mileage in an air pollution study that suggested replacing long range flights with a series of shorter connecting flights could make substantial savings in fuel.
Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport will install monitoring devices - microphones pointed at the sky and hooked into a computer system - at 10 places in neighborhoods around the airport this summer to track noise.
They'll track the flight paths, altitude and speed of specific aircraft in airspace over Anchorage and match them to sound levels. Then, if someone calls to complain about aircraft noise at a particular time of day, the airport should be able to pinpoint which aircraft is bothering them.
Detailed information make it possible to track the patterns, then the airport, the FAA and the airlines could choose to limit air traffic to a more defined path out of Anchorage to direct the noise away from people's homes.
The monitors will be in place for many years to record changes over time. The system will cost about $1.2 million to get going. The Federal Aviation Administration is paying for it.
The Section 106 Agreement between TAG and Rushmoor should be used to force a similar system for Farnborough Airport.
The European Parliament Environment Committee's rapporteur on airport noise has called for European Union legislative proposals on limiting noise nuisance around airports to be tightened. In a recent report, Dutch Calvinist Hans Blokland calls for more airports to be covered by the law and for the noisiest aircraft to be phased out more quickly.
People living near the Stockholm airport were more likely to have high blood pressure than people who lived outside the zone of greatest noise, a new study in Sweden has found. The study, published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, reported that 20% of those who had lived near the airport for at least a year were found to have hypertension, compared with 14% of those farther away.
When specifics like age - the airports neighbors tended to be younger - were factored in, the researchers calculated that the highest level of airport noise almost doubled the risk of high blood pressure. People with hearing loss were less affected.
The study's lead researcher, Mats Rosenlund, a researcher at the Stockholm County Department of Environmental Health, said in an interview that the increased risk was far less than that caused by smoking:
However, because many people live close to airports and air traffic is increasing in many countries, even potentially small increased risks may be important in a public health point of view.
The Stockholm study adds weight to previous studies that show that aircraft noise, apart from being a bloody nuisance, has long term measurable physiological effects.
FAST was originally established with a worthy aim - to preserve some of the wealth of aviation history in Farnborough. They then got side tracked, becoming little more than a front organisation for TAG, promoting their airfield plans whenever they could. Obviously they were hoping for some reward at the end of the day. Well now they have got their just reward though it probably wasn't quite what they were expecting. Rushmoor have barred them from holding public exhibitions of their artefacts because they lie within the proposed public safety zone and it would not be safe. Poetic justice indeed!
Ironically the strongest objection to FAST occupying a building within the PSZ came from SBAC. They were of the view that it was not safe during Airshows. What of the rest of us?
FAST were granted use of the building, previously unoccupied, for their own use as an office. A clear breach of PSZ which is intended to stop people residing or congregating within the PSZ. PSZ policy is quite specific, it excludes offices. Other planning applications for development within the PSZ have been rejected, with the exception of an old peoples home (a mere coincidence the involvement of the chairman of the planning committee). One rule for friends of TAG, another rule for everyone else.
If TAG house such a valuable historic heritage, should it be housed in area where there is a high risk of a crash and all the artefacts are likely to be destroyed? Somewhat negligent on their behalf to say the least. If nothing else FAST have shown themselves to be unworthy custodians of Farnborough's important aviation heritage.
PSZ: Public Safety Zone. PSZ policy is draft only, no PSZ exist for Farnborough Airport.
TAG flag waving councillors were celebrating their amazing victory over local resident Keith Parkins for having the audacity to take them to court over their handling of the Airfield (BVEJ newsletter #0018 November 2001). Amazing victory indeed, as no such victory took place. The judicial review was withdrawn with Rushmoor agreeing to seek independent advice before planning consent can be granted for the runway configuration TAG desire. The action now switches to the political domain: Why did Rushmoor refuse to agree to an independent safety study to include societal risk? And contrary to the view of planning official Daryl Phillips, it was not the case that Rushmoor had all along intended to seek independent advice, they had been forced into it by the action of a local resident.
We have been in many meetings chasing this [town centre development] and like so many local residents were sceptical as to whether anything would ever happen. We were, therefore, delighted to see work start on the old Post Office site. -- Rosemary Possee, Pat Devereux & John Wall, Rushmoor Tory councillors
If Farnborough were a derelict inner city wasteland begging for development we could understand what is going in but it is not, or was not until KPI destroyed it. We had a viable town centre. What were the idlers doing to protect our town? And by idlers we mean the councillors with big gobs who contribute nothing to society other than a lot of noise and hot air, but happily receive their handouts in the way of allowances, expenses and free lunches for doing nothing for the community.
We said that the demolition of the old Post Office was simply to fool gullible councillors into believing the town centre development was about to start, and have now been proved right.
Last year the local Tories put out a leaflet that apart from upsetting everyone with the claim that the town centre development was wanted, it claimed the work was about to commence. Well time has progressed and nothing has happened. Never deterred by something as trivial as the wishes and feelings of the local community the local Tories have put out another leaflet welcoming the destruction of the town and that all the small retailers are being driven out. Farnborough Gate is listed as a success! Success for who? The only success was in dealing a death blow to Farnborough town centre by pulling out many of the core retailers, with KPI dealing the final death blow. It is claimed that modern retailing requires larger units. In which case why are KPI wishing to build four small retail units on the old Post Office site and why did the Tories approve it?
The Tories note that the area to be developed is 'technically highway'. Maybe if they were to visit the town they would note it is in actual reality highway, highway that is well used.
The development on The Mead will drastically reduce the highway, access to the service road at the back will be restricted to a very narrow gap. The building planned for the Book Boyz corner will extend backwards into the service road at the back, blocking off an unofficial cycle route through the town. Parking for cycles is behind the back, hidden behind a wall. Ideal for vandalism and theft. The Asda manager was miffed to learn that his turning lorries will be obstructed. The 'widespread consultation' did not extend to Asda, a price Rushmoor will dearly pay.
The old Post Office site will narrow the gap between the old Post site and the Pizza Hut to a ten foot alley. Marrow Brook is to be relocated within the narrow alley. The possibility of opening up the brook and making it a feature of the town will be lost forever.
GOSE has so far refused to grant a stopping up order for the highway either at The Mead or the old Post Office site.
As discussed last issue (BVEJ newsletter #0021 February 2002), government planning guidelines wish to see mixed use development with a diversity of retail units, to include housing, ie what the town centre already has, or did have, and the developers, with the unqualified support and enthusiasm of local councillors, are trying to destroy.
The leaflet is badly photocopies and virtually unreadable. Can't the local Tories afford decent printing any more? Pat Devereux had the gall to deliver the leaflets to Firgrove Court. When residents tried to discuss their eviction with her (to make way for a car park) she beat a hasty retreat. The view of Pat Devereux is they go find somewhere else to live. A measure of how much Farnborough Tories care for the local community?
A sign of things to come in Farnborough (if KPI are allowed to turn the highway between the old Post Office site and the Pizza Hut into a narrow alleyway), a woman in Camberley was dragged down into an alleyway and robbed.
End of January the unsafe barricade around the old Post Office site almost took off in the gales and a local resident had to get out of bed in the early hours of the morning to tighten up the clamps (BVEJ newsletter #0021 February 2002). The first day of February and the winds returned with a vengeance. The barricade blew down three times and at one point was lifted several feet into the air. Luckily no-one was killed. But who cares? Obviously KPI don't care, but neither it seem do Rushmoor. Rushmoor were warned before Christmas last year that the site was not secure, they had repeated warnings this year. Their response was to do nothing. When Rushmoor was warned again, their response was it was a Friday evening, time to go home.
Building sites are the most dangerous sites in the country. Last year over a hundred people were killed. This year 6 were killed before the month of January was out. Last year deaths in the workplace rose by 32%. When HSE were warned that flying was taking place whilst building work was taking place at the end of the runway, their response was to do nothing. When HSE were warned that the barricade around the old Post Office site was not safe, their response was to say it was close to 5 o'clock on a Friday evening, time to go home. The most they were able to offer was to ring KPI and suggest they secure the site.
The response of KPI to the danger they were subjecting the town was that it was windy! Presumably that is why the roofs of many of their buildings in town leaks, it rains.
KPI workers were out trying to unscrew the clamps with an adjustable wrench. The KPI budget does not stretch to a socket set. This is the company that Rushmoor are trusting to develop the town.
Over two weeks after the winds took the barricade down parts of the site were still secured with ribbon and a few cones. At least it would have been if the cones had not been knocked over and the tape ripped and on the ground. No sign of KPI keeping an eye on the site, no sign of enforcement by Rushmoor.
The cinema/bar complex which has been about to start in the next few months for the last year, has still not started. KPI need to buy the car park on which it is to built from Rushmoor. They have yet to enter into negotiation to buy it. KPI have never been able to name the cinema group. Forced by Rushmoor to come up with a name, when checked out it was the first the cinema chain knew about it.
Rushmoor councillors and officials are falling over backwards to tell anyone who will listen that KPI have cocked up big time, that they are not up to the job and haven't got the money. Why has it taken them four years to reach the same conclusion that everyone else sussed in two minutes?
Rushmoor councillors and officials are dropping strong hints to anyone who will listen that the northern end of Queensmead won't get planning consent. It's not that it breaches more government planning guidelines than you can shake a stick at, or that the local community don't want it. Rushmoor recognise that if they do give planning consent they are going to hit the same problems as they have with The Mead and the old Post Office site, only more so. But don't leave it to chance. Put in a planning objection.
Even if KPI were kicked out tomorrow, it will take ten years for the town to recover from the damage inflicted by KPI.
Councillors have suddenly discovered the town centre, they are rushing around like blue arse flies, delivering leaflets, talking to people, offering to arrange meetings, slagging off KPI. The same councillors who have stood idly by for the last four years and watched KPI destroy the town, the same councillors who have approved without reservation KPI's planning applications, the same councillors who have put out leaflets welcoming the town centre redevelopment, the same councillors who have ignored widespread public objection and legitimate concerns. A mere coincidence that all councillors are up for re-election in the May Local Elections.
Meetings are taking place on 4 March 2002 to discuss the town centre, one a public meeting starting at 7pm, the other a showdown between Rushmoor and KPI over the state of the town. Contact Andrew Colver at Rushmoor for details.
Firgrove Court is a group of 28 maisonettes at the back of Farnborough town centre. It is a community in every sense of the word - young women with babes in arms to people in their seventies, everyone knows everyone else, everyone looks out for each other. A rarity indeed in this greed driven age.
KPI, through Pavilion Housing Association, and with the help of Rushmoor, wish to destroy this community. They wish to demolish the housing and replace with a car park. Sustainability, what sustainability.
The residents are willing to fight. It will be very difficult to get them out. Many have well-protected tenancies, several of the houses are now privately owned.
Pavilion, having been promised £3 million, are doing KPI's dirty work for them. They have tried to 'persuade' people into signing agreements agreeing to move. Residents have quite wisely refused to sign. The few who were duped into signing have since ensured their agreements were ripped up.
One old lady found the stress too much. She ended up in hospital, came back home for a few days, rapidly deteriorated and finally ended up in a home. One less for Pavilion to evict.
Pavilion have valued the houses at £27,000 each! As an incentive to move Pavilion have offered a measly £2,500, a princely sum which has since been halved. Pavilion are rumoured to be under investigation for cooking the books.
The properties are in a poor state of repair. Windows for example are badly rotted, wiring is scheduled for rewiring. A standard technique of Rachman landlords is to drive tenants out through disrepair.
Harassing people out their homes is not only a breach of Rent and Tenancy Acts, it is also a breach of the Human Rights Act.
As with the rest of the town centre development by KPI, completely at odds with government planning guidelines (PPG3 housing, PPG6 town centres and retail development, PPG13 transport).
The northern end of Queensmead, which would include destruction of Firgrove Court for a car park, has yet to be placed before the Planning Committee, it keeps getting deferred. It has to be strongly opposed, as does the stopping up of the highway (the northern end of Queensmead will disappear).
Not a single councillor, not a single official has called round Firgrove Court to discuss the issue. This is what Rushmoor calls 'widespread consultation'. Pat Devereux went round delivering Tory leaflets. When residents caught up with her and said they wished to discuss the demolition of their homes she refused to talk and beat a hasty retreat. Challenged later on her visit she said she could not see a problem as the residents could find somewhere else to live. This is what Rushmoor calls 'democracy', the new Tory caring image.
On the other hand Keith Holland (Rushmoor Head of Planning) called in a Firgrove Court residents and asked that he did not push things as he did not want the embarrassment of a Public Inquiry.
The Secretary of State should be invited to call-in the entire town centre redevelopment, including B&Q (off Victoria Road) and Farnborough Station, and a Public Inquiry held.
Plans have been submitted to extend a derelict building and turn into office space. The plans have been approved over the objections of local residents and their ward councillors. Residents said the development would cause them nuisance but the planners know best.
The developers have been set a planing condition that the extension has to be in keeping with the rest of the building. Contrast with the carbuncles approved for Farnborough town centre that stick out like sore thumbs.
A further condition is that the developers have to draw up a transport plan to minimise car usage. Ha, ha, ha. Who is going to monitor it? We can guarantee Rushmoor won't, and when locals complain, they will be ignored.
Farnborough Business and Community Panel is the interface between Rushmoor and local business and the community. This is where matters affecting the town centre are aired, so-called 'consultation'. The panel supposedly represents the interests of local people, it is loaded with councillors, council officials, big business and developers, local people, small traders are noticeable by their absence. Few people are even aware of the existence of this panel let alone its deliberations.
At the last meeting of the panel, four members of the local community walked in on the dot of 7 o'clock on Wednesday 6 February 2002 just as the meeting was due to start. They were met by Rushmoor chief executive no less and asked to leave. The doors were locked and security guards posted. This is what masquerades as democracy in the Rotten Borough of Rushmoor, not only are the local community to be seen and not heard (they are not allowed to speak at council meetings), they are not to be seen either.
In the Rotten Borough of Rushmoor, the one thing that is not allowed is public participation. Councillor David Clifford, who to our observations has contributed nothing to the local community, recently shot his mouth off launching a vicious attack on members of the local community who dare to challenge council decisions, reached according to Clifford under the 'democratic direction of the council', and, according to Councillor Peter Moyle, who also jumped on the bandwagon of kick the local community, through a process of 'endless consultation'.
As Keith Parkins (one of those attacked) was to comment, 'consultation is a sick joke.'
The next meetings of the Farnborough Business and Community Panel (all are at the Council offices and start at 7pm):
24 April 2002 24 July 2002 6 November 2002
We have been justifiably critical of the Farnborough News in the past but it does at last appear to be moving in the right direction. The jury is still out but we have seen some better quality reporting critical of Rushmoor and big business.
Why can the news articles not be found on the web site?
There can be no local democracy without local participation. Nor can there be a vibrant local democracy without a critical and informative press.
Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel & the Palestinians, Pluto Press, 1999
We see Palestinian suicide bombers, Islamists killing innocent civilians in a bid for martyrdom. But do we ask why? We tend to support Israel against the deranged filthy Arab. But would we feel the same way if Israel as a modern western democracy was closer to Nazi Germany? Can we understand the Arabs better, when we learn that Israelis regularly round up villagers and beat them, young and old are not exempt - the old because they fathered terrorists, the young because they are destined to become terrorists.
Before even the founding of Israel the goal was a Greater Israel. A goal that was to be achieved by negotiation with Arab neighbours, but if that failed, force would be used.
Israel plays on its David and Goliath image, but as Chomsky notes, it is the fourth military power in the world, and that was before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
At times the book has to be put down as the pages and pages of documented atrocities become too much to bear.
The atrocities of Ariel Sharon are well documented and his career started well before the massacres in Lebanese refugee camps, actually suburbs of West Beirut, in 1982.
The Palestinians have no rights. They are to be driven out of Israel, it is for other Arab nations to look after them. Chomsky often reverses the position, would we tolerate the same treatment of Jews as the Jews mete out to Palestinians.
A constant theme throughout the book is the distortion of the western media, especially that of the US and its client state UK. The Israel Hebrew press is praised for its courageous reporting.
Originally written in 1983, following the invasion of Lebanon, Chomsky ends on a very pessimistic note. Israel as a client state, available to do the bidding of the US. The US holds it in a state of dependency. What if the US were to withdraw its support. As Chomsky shows this is nigh impossible for fear that Israel will fall back on the Sampson Syndrome and trigger a super power conflict.
Since then we have had the Oslo Accords under Clinton. The PLO has become a corrupt, available to do the bidding of the US and Israel. The standard model for a neo-colonial client state. The autonomy they have been granted is less than the South African homelands of apartheid South Africa.
How we see a situation is determined by the filter through which we view it. This definitive study allows us to see the Middle East in a new light. As Chomsky in his introduction says, he is often asked to agree to a talk years in advance, the title The Middle East Crisis never fails.