class war comes round to your house

In the last days of that runaway train of Tory evil before the 1997 general election the man seen as their next leader, Michael Portillo, was still in full twitchy right-armed Thatcherite flow.

He made a speech saying that poor people should not be allowed to live where they choose but instead should be made to live in 'housing befitting their station'.

His choice of phrasing was almost as telling as the idea itself. The vision of robust class boundaries, ensuring the lower orders were punished for their poverty, and his own sense of snobbish entitlement.

But more than a decade into Labour rule - Tory-imitating Labour rule that disavowed its belief in public ownership and hooked itself to the freemarket bandwagon, saddling us with the PFI public finance ticking timebomb - we forgot what real full-throttle Tories were like.

THE LATEST INSTALMENT OF CRUELTY

Despite being twice rejected by the House of Lords, the government got its way with the 'spare bedroom tax' in the Welfare Reform Act which got Royal Assent earlier this year.

The new rules for Housing Benefit will take money away from people whose homes are underoccupied. Anyone with a spare bedroom loses 14%, anyone with two spare bedrooms loses 25%.

The rules have been drawn up to make some horrifying exclusions. They are not merely harsh. They will knowingly cause real suffering and - here's the proof that it is ideologically punitive rather than drastically cash-strapped - much if not all of the savings made will be swallowed up by the costs of the knock-on effects.

STOP BEING DISABLED

The majority of those affected by the change - almost half a million people - are disabled.  Someone who has a disability that requires a carer to stay overnight retains their spare room as long as it's used every night. But someone whose medical condition fluctuates - as a great many do - cannot keep a room for a carer, even if it means they will be housebound alone for half their life. This will lead to medical conditions being exacerbated and more hospital treatment.

As Shelter noted, the National Housing Federation estimates that 100,000 tenants set to be affected live in homes specially adapted to their needs. Encouraging these tenants to move would not be cost-effective as new properties would need to be adapted while aids and adaptations would be stripped out of vacated homes.

STOP CARING FOR CHILDREN

Foster families cannot keep a room for the children they care for. Just as the Tories want to restrict marrying a foreigner to the rich, so poor people are effectively deemed unworthy to foster. This will lead to more children in care, and more people growing up without the self-esteem and social connections brought about by family life.

Children under 16 of the same gender must share a bedroom. Children under ten must share a bedroom regardless of gender. Children under three get no room at all and are expected to sleep in their parents' room. This means that a couple with three or four young children must live in a two bedroom household, with all the stress on family life and impediment to academic work it will bring.

A separated parent who does not have custody of their child cannot keep a bedroom for them. The government has already changed the rules so that someone under 35 cannot have a self-contained flat, only a room in a shared house. Clearly, a vast proportion of parents with children under 16 are below the age of 35.

So, a separated parent would have to have their child sleep in the parent's room, sharing a toilet, bathroom and kitchen with a house full of un-CRB checked strangers. Many courts will see this as a 'safeguarding' situation and prevent custody or even visits in order to protect the child. This will lead to loss of contact and reliance on sole parents. This, in turn, will lead to more single parents claiming benefits and a further increase in the number of children in care and those needing foster homes, even as the supply diminishes.

SAVINGS COST MORE

Those living in 'underoccupied' households will run up arrears and then be homeless and in debt. This will mean an explosion in the need for debt advice, more people homeless, more vulnerable people in short-stay bed and breakfast accommodation, more mental health treatment required, and more people saddled with long term debt repayments taken out of their benefits, pushing their heads further below the waterline.

The knock-on financial costs of these changes, especially to the penal, health and benefits systems, are obvious to anyone who thinks about them for more than four seconds. It proves that this, like so much of the cuts agenda, is not about reducing spending. It is straightforward cruelty and open class warfare.

the lorax: turkeys advertising christmas

As adults have to face the fact that the myriad potential of youth is largely unfulfilled, so they tend to idealise their formative years. Not just their personal youth, but everything about the times and society they grew up in. Thus people around 50 seem to think 1970s Britain - National Front marches tens of thousands strong, dogshit everywhere, queerbashing a normalised activity ignored (or participated in) by the police, and no decent curry to be found - as a glorious arcadia.

This determined nostalgia makes adults, now substantially richer than when they were 12, readily vulnerable to being fleeced by people who offer them any reminder of their youth. Thus we see 30-somethings spending 40 quid on fucking Take That tickets.

In 2003 there was a Cat In The Hat movie. It wasn't actually a movie, it was an unmitigated pile of shite. The Boston Globe said

At one point in "The Cat in the Hat," the Cat, played by Mike Myers, is mistaken for a pinata by a group of children at a birthday party. One by one, they line up to smack him, and the scene culminates with a husky lad swinging a baseball bat directly into the unfortunate feline's cojones.

That's a remarkably precise metaphor for what this movie does to the memory of Dr. Seuss. If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel's body and hung it from a tree, they couldn't have desecrated the man more.

Nonetheless $134,000,000 was handed over by people who went to see it. Even this was seen as a flop, and surely more money could be made from the Dr Seuss franchise. The lesson was learned and they decided not to make any more live action movies. Bring on the animation.and its marketing opportunities.

The thing with Dr Seuss is that it's not just whimsical tales with daft made up language and ear-stretching rhymes. The books have a clear agenda of encouraging children to explore themselves and the world, to be open minded, to not go for the greedy, destructive, mean and narrow - to reject all that marketing and advertising stands for.

The Lorax is perhaps the clearest of these. The Once-ler cuts down trees to make thneeds, a piece of junk that will make their seller rich. The Lorax come to speak for the trees, warning that if the Once-ler goes ahead then all the tress will be cut down and the forests will not regenerate.

Behold, the Lorax selling thneeds.



We're told the cars are Truffula Tree Friendly. The Mazda CX-5 has carbon emissions of 119g/km-144g/km, some 20%-50% higher than other cars presently available. And those lower emission cars are still an unsustainable environmental nightmare.

The solution is surely electric cars, a whole planet's worth of which, thanks to this ad, could be powered by a generator rigged up to the fast-spinning corpse of Theodore Geisel.

and the lord smote the wicked with unseasonal rain

After the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, some American christians said the satellite picture had looked like a massive foetus and the near-obliteration of New Orleans was God punishing Florida. It's a barking idea made even wackier by the fact that New Orleans is in Louisiana.

The Good Lord continues to move in weatherly ways. This summer's flooding in parts of the UK are also the judgment of God, according to senior Church of England bishops.

It's a novel set of skills that have you able to control the weather yet unable use a pen. I have to say, excessive rainfall is a bit ambiguous. Folk might respond better to your holy instructions if you dropped them a text instead.

All this is well and good, the easy pickings of using the gun handed to you by an outsize fish as it climbs into a barrel. But the really choice bit of this stuff, and one that does deserve our conscious attention, is the unironic arrogance of it all.

Firstly the Rt Rev Graham Dow, Bishop of Carlisle, is certain that he knows exactly what evil we're being punished for. Environmental degradation and gay rights apparently. Gay sex is, after all, unambiguously prohibited in Leviticus 18:22. Yet just three lines earlier the book of Leviticus also prohibits wearing clothes made of two types of fibre. Given the prevalence of poly-cotton shirts in modern society, I reckon the Lord's having a go at us for that. Or maybe it's for eating prawns.

And wouldn't a god of justice, infinite love and mercy act well within the norms of the Geneva Convention? You'd have thought they might want to target just the sinners as opposed to meting out collective punishment. Apparently not, sayeth the bishop.

The principle of God's judgment on nations that have exploited other nations is all there in the Bible

When did environmentally assaulted countries like Ethiopia and Bangladesh do their exploiting of other nations? Did I miss some stuff?

But there's a higher level of unintentional irony beyond the bishop's bilingual fluency in English and meteorology.

In the Bible, institutional power is referred to as 'the beast', which sets itself up to control people and their morals.

Human institutions aren't allowed to make moral rulings. That job is reserved for, er, the church.

boris the bigot strikes again

Boris Johnson shambles along with his ill-chosen words and messy hair, and we see him as a bumbler who can't really do much harm. Ronald Reagan had a similar schtick when he went into politics, even though he was an accomplished union buster before he quit Hollywood.

Those who had personal experience of Johnson's tenure as editor of The Spectator testify to his sharp intellect, swift and complex grasp of issues, and persuasive methods to ensure he got exactly the articles he wanted out of his staff.

But, like Reagan before him, he knows the un-PC errant uncle routine is a great way to make even your opponents reluctant to call you out on your extreme right wing ideology. A laboriously constructed image of not being in thrall to spin is the way he spins himself.

Let's be clear about him. He's a vicious bigot who attacks the marginalised and favours the rich. Being in charge of a city utterly reliant on public services and containing the poorest boroughs in the country, he has special opportunity for damage and as such voting for him is far worse than voting for some quiet backbench rural Tory in Dorset.

The London Mayor's office and associated Tory establishment have sabotaged this year's Pride march. Now I know modern Pride is a far cry from the courageous political rallies of 40 years ago when it was a few hundred people being jeered by their police escort, and these days it's a pink-pound corporate jamboree. But really, I don't think that's why the Mayor has undermined it, do you? For the real reason, let's remind ourselves that Johnson likened gay marriage to bestiality.

Peter Tatchell lists many of the ways the event has been stymied, including:

- The Mayor insisted the start time be brought forward by two hours, citing 'safety issues' and 'problems' but refused to say what they actually were. This means people who already booked travel tickets wouldn't be able to join in.

- Greater London Authority insisted on Pride paying all money up front, even though guaranteed sponsorship money wouldn't come in till after, and even though the GLA didn't cough up its promised funding in time. 

 - They banned not just floats but all vehicles from the parade, effectively barring people who need vehicles for mobility.

- Westminster council sent a threatening letter to gay venues warning them that their licences could be revoked if they play music that is "audible outside of your premises", saying that Pride day must be treated like "any normal day".

It's all been done to run it down and discourage people from attending, seemingly solely because the Tories are an evil gang of bigoted scumfucks. We haven't heard much about that though, as the Mayor insisted Pride run all press releases past them first, and made changes in order to spin the Mayor's position.

And meanwhile, the much larger 'safety issues' around for the Olympics can be readily dealt with or ignored, anything needed for that is just fiiiiiiine.

Fuck Johnson, fuck the Tories, fuck everyone who voted for them.

the dpp protecting miscarriages of justice

The Mark Kennedy affair became big news when, in January last year, a trial collapsed. Out of 114 climate activists arrested at a planning meeting to shut down Ratcliffe coal-fired power station, 26 had been charged.

The thing is, it was 113 activists and the undercover police officer Mark Kennedy. Twenty of the activists, who admitted planning the action but said it was justified, had already been convicted.

Another six activists had not decided to participate at the time of arrest and so were having a separate trial. In light of the information that one of their number had been a police officer who must have submitted a report that may well exonerate them, they asked to see what Kennedy had said. The prosecution have a legal duty to reveal any evidence that might help the defence.

Rather than disclose it, the prosecution dropped the case that millions of pounds had been spent on. (Remember that next time you hear any bullshit about it collapsing because Kennedy was going to testify for the defence. Kennedy never helped the activists, it was in fact his solid police work that caused the trial to collapse).

Faced with this scandal, a whitewash self-investigation report was commissioned from Sir Christopher Rose, a Surveillance Commissioner who had ultimate oversight over the deployment of Kennedy and other undercover officers. He said the prosecutors had seen Kennedy's fat file on the case but hadn't realised it was significant in any way, that it didn't occur to them that a transcipt of what went on in the meeting might be handy, honest guv, it was incompetance rather than a cover up.

Then in April last year the Director of Public Prosecutions, Kier Starmer, took the highly unusual step of recommending that the 20 already convicted appeal against their convictions, which were duly quashed. Starmer tried to make out that Ratcliffe was a one-off and there is no systemic problem, but if any activists thought they had convictions from other cases that may have had undercover evidence witheld, they should get in touch.

The gall of the man is hugely impressive. How are activists meant to know if undercover officers reported on them?

We can start with actions that had convictions where known undercovers were definitely present. The salient example is the Drax 29 - a train carrying coal to Drax power station was stopped and its cargo shovelled on to the tracks. Mark Kennedy was one of the drivers that dropped them off, and 29 people were convicted. Yet the DPP didn't look into that as an unsafe conviction.

But as the undercover scandal refuses to go away and more details come out, the 'one rogue case' stance has crumbled underneath them. It's taken them over a year but today they finally invited the Drax 29 to appeal, meaning it is a formality that their convictions will also be overturned. This makes a total of 49 convictions quashed (plus 6 that were reprieved at the last minute), giving Kennedy & co the high score for largest miscarriage of justice in recent legal history.

But this, too, is a fob-off. Despite the already massive total of wrongful convictions, it has the distinct appearance of an iceberg tip. In many cases, officers won't have gone on actions yet will still have reported on things they overheard or that their comrades told them about. In many cases, officers went on actions, reported and left the movement without being uncovered. How are those activists wrongly convicted to know that evidence was witheld?

Starmer knows this, so his reluctance can only be a cover-up for the police. We know he knows, because he has seen it with his own eyes. As a young defence lawyer he handled a case of hunt saboteurs where one of them, Jim Sutton, went through the case under his false name and identity. He was in fact police officer Jim Boyling. There is also serious suggestion that Bob Lambert was prosecuted under his activist alias for the deadly crime of leafletting.

If I get burgled, find a finger print and take it to the police, they're unlikely to tell me to find a name to match it before they investigate. It's they who have the fingerprint files with matching names. They are the only ones who can put that together.

By the same token, they - and only they - know exactly who all the undercover officers are, what they reported, and which cases led to conviction. The responsibility is with them to go through those files and contact those wrongly convicted. Anything else is a conspiracy to let miscarriages of justice stand.

the sinking of the arandora star

Two years ago the freshly elected David Cameron spoke of how Britain owes so much to the USA for its military support during the Battle of Britain.

the fact is that we are a very effective partner of the US, but we are the junior partner. We were the junior partner in 1940 when we were fighting the Nazis.

Robert Fisk writes of how, as the Iraq War began in 2003,

both Bush and Blair reminded journalists that the US had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Britain in her hour of need in 1940.

In fact the Americans only joined the war in December 1941. In 1940, Britain stood alone against the Nazis. Facing vastly superior weaponry the Americans expected that, like much of Europe, we would readily fall to Nazi occupation.

Knowing that the immediate future would be one of either occupation or the protracted privation of war, the British swiftly interned all German and Italian men, even those who were here as refugees from fascism, then set about deporting them.

And so it was that around 1,400 of them were crammed into a ship called the Arandora Star. On 1st July 1940 she sailed out of Liverpool and, in the early morning light 72 years ago today, appeared to the commander of a German submarine like a slow moving prize of a troop ship. After the torpedo hit there was barely half an hour before she sank, taking around 800 men to their deaths.

Towards the end of July, as bodies washed up along the Scottish and Irish coasts, only the few whose personal papers had survived weeks in the sea could be identified. Many were buried in services paid for by the communities who found them.

If you want to know more, I wrote a piece about it for the radical history calendar site On This Deity. There's also a really well-written home made documentary on Youtube in four parts starting here.

Last month I visited Islay, one of the westernmost isles off the coast of Scotland, facing out into the Atlantic.

On Islay, as all across Britain, cemeteries usually have a few military graves tended by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I was surprised and moved to find that Arandora Star passengers - civilian non-combatants and enemy nationals - are also buried in these areas. As such, their graves and headstones are tended in perpetuity out of public funds.

Both of Islay's Arandora Star passengers are Italian. The Italians had been on the lowest decks, under the most barbed wire, and a disproportionate number of them died.

Here is the grave of Andrea Gazzi, a 41 year old from Bardi in northern Italy, buried in Bowmore churchyard. He was found after more than two months in the sea on 6 September 1940. Some 48 men from his small village died on the Arandora Star, and there is now a commemorative chapel in Bardi's cemetery.

Down at Port Ellen cemetery there is an unknown Italian civilian. The inscription says 'Deceduto il 19 Agosto 1940' - died 19 August 1940, which is erroneous. They will have died on the 2nd July when the ship sank and, like Andrea Gazzi, the inscription should say 'rinvenuto', 'found'.

They are both buried with the phrase 'morto per la patria' - 'died for their country'. This appears to be a standard motto on all Italian graves in the care of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

In the case of prisoners of war it is perhaps accurate, but here it has a sharp, almost cynical sting. They did not die fighting for anything. The Arandora Star internees - many of the Italians resident in Britain for 30 or 40 years - died for their nationality, rather than their country.

bob lambert: once a bomber, still a spy?

Mark Kennedy may be the only household name in the undercover police spy scandal but as more information emerges it seems that Bob Lambert was the most malevolent of them.

Lambert went undercover in the early 1980s, meaning it is likely he was trained and overseen by the people who founded the Special Demonstration Squad in 1968. From this, we can presume that he acted in accordance with their desired methods and purpose. He fathered a child with one of his targets yet was not withdrawn from operations, indicating that they had no problem with that.

He then had a second serious intimate relationship with someone who wasn't even an activist, just to make him appear a well rounded character. He had her house raided by his Special Branch colleagues to beef up his image and give him the excuse to disappear without raising suspicion about his real role.

Anyone who has been burgled knows of the trauma, the sense of violation that it brings. A police raid is far beyond that. Like burglars they are after some of your possessions, but they are also after you personally, your thoughts, beliefs, ideas, family and friendships. It is a massive piece of 'collateral intrusion' to visit upon anyone, let alone a non-activist.

By 1987 Lambert had infiltrated a cell of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) who were on a campaign of firebombing shops that sold fur. Their plan was to attack three branches of Debenham's in Luton, Romford and Harrow simultaneously. Last week Caroline Lucas MP told a debate in Parliament that Lambert planted the Harrow firebomb which detonated causing £340,000 of damage. 

The interesting thing is Lambert is having none of it and flatly says

I did not commit serious crime such as 'planting an incendiary device at the [Debenhams] Harrow store'

Really Bob?

The plan was hatched by a small secretive cell of which Lambert was one. He ensured two of the bombers were caught and must know who the third was. Either he planted that third bomb, or he knows who did but chose to let them go. Which do you think is more likely?

One of the others has spoken out and is in no doubt, saying that Lambert was the only other person who knew of the plan and that, perhaps in an attempt to reduce his damage, he had failed to place his second device.

Lambert's outright denial is just the latest in a string of implausible arse-covering he's issued since being unmasked. His credibility can be judged from his earlier claim that

the vast majority of Met special branch undercover officers never made the mistakes I made

Of the exposed officers, we know most did exactly what he did. Most of them acted as agents provocateurs, most had long term intimate relationships with targets - a quarter of them fathering children - most targeted campaigns that posed no risk to public safety, and at least two of them did so under the orders of Lambert himself after he became the superior officer running undercover operations.

One of them was Peter Black who says that, far from being aberrant (and yet somehow allowed to continue for years), Lambert's methods were hugely admired

He did what is hands down regarded as the best tour of duty ever

So why the denials? Unlike the other outed undercover officers, Lambert still has a respected career to protect. After more than 20 years involved in infiltration he suddenly set up the police's Muslim Contact Unit along with another ex-undercover, Jim Boyling. Why would the police's friendly bridge-building exercise need to be designed and run by two of the most experienced infiltrators, unless it too is a cover for spying and running a network of informants?

Several years later, Lambert left the police - collecting an MBE for his services - and forged a career as an academic along the same lines as his work with the Muslim Contact Unit. And 'forged' is the right word if it's cover for spy work.

Because Mark Kennedy was the first undercover cop outed and was then tacky enough to hire Max Clifford to pimp him to the media, he is the most prominent of them. Yet there is nothing we know that Kennedy did that wasn't also done by other officers, with the exception of his returning to his targets as a private spy after he left the police.

Bob Lambert, on the other hand, committed every outrage undercover police are known to have perpetrated and one or two, such as getting a non-activist's house raided, that were just for him. If, as appears plausible, his current academic career is a continuation of spying begun in the Muslim Contact Unit then he too has continued his infiltration after leaving the police, making him the worst of the worst. No wonder he wants to pretend none of it is true.

the puppet apologist for abusers

Let's just remind ourselves of the official position of the police regarding undercover officers having sexual relationships with the people they are spying on.

Jon Murphy of the Association of Chief Police Officers - the body in charge of the deployment of Mark Kennedy and others who infiltrated the environmental and anti-capitalist movements - is clear and unequivocal.

It is absolutely not authorised. It is never acceptable for an undercover officer to behave in that way...

It is grossly unprofessional. It is a diversion from what they are there to do. It is morally wrong because people have been put there to do a particular task and people have got trust in them. It is never acceptable under any circumstances... for them to engage in sex with any subject they come into contact with.

Peculiar, then, that last week Home Office policing minister Nick Herbert contradicted this, saying that it can be authorised under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

It's notable that Herbert, unlike Murphy, extensively hedged his position saying that it was only the case

in very limited circumstances... and consideration should always be given to seeking legal advice.

He then supplemented his speech with an odd notion.

Of course, there is another point that banning such actions would provide the group targeted the opportunity to find out whether there was an undercover officer specifically within their group.

The assumptions here are baffling. Do they imagine that all activists, no matter what their personal feelings, would allow themselves to be forced into sexual activity with people just to prove that they are not police?

The fact is that more than one of the undercover officers lived and worked among activists without having any sexual relationships, and without being suspected. At at least two of them would refer to a partner who lived far away and actually brought their supposed partner to meet the activists.

This successful tactic of supplying pretend partners means that not only did officers not need to enter into the relationships with activists, it points to something more. It strongly implies that superior officers chose on some occasions not to give pretend partners, that the officers who had relationships were, in effect, sanctioned and even encouraged from on high.

This would certainly tally with the testimony of another undercover officer, Liam Thomas, who says

The official Met line was 'don't do it', but unofficially it was condoned.

The real outrage of the undercover operations is not the sexual activity, it is the prolonged intimacy, profound emotional bonds and personal trust they fraudulently cultivated. One of the women currently suing the police had a nine year relationship, another lasted for six years. More than one had children with their police partners, men sent into their lives to ruin the womens' most important moral values, who became as close as anyone could get and then, with little or no warning and on someone else's orders, upped and left.

Whatever Nick Herbert and his novel interpretations of UK law say, that's a clear breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees that no-one shall be subject to inhumane and degrading treatment and that we all have the right to private and family life, including the right to form relationships without unjustified interference by the state.

It sounds like hyperbole to call what was done to these women the most complete invasion of someone's life that is possible but really, I defy anyone to say how it could have been more so.

Given that such relationships are known to have occurred since at least the early 1980s, and involving officers like Bob Lambert who had two significant intimate relationships and fathered a child with activists and then went on to run operations, it is ludicrous to suggest that senior officers were unaware of the possibility, and that the daily-contact cover officers were blind to how their charges lived.

As the womens' lawsuit progresses, the police must be terrified of the facts of this most invasive and indefensible of strategies coming out. They must be desperate to try to fob them off or invent a trapdoor to jump through and escape. And indeed, it's not just Nick Herbert who's been suddenly saying that sexual relations are, after all, professional and acceptable.

the Met had told the women's lawyers that "forming of personal and other relationships" is permitted under Ripa, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.

Britain's only Green MP, Caroline Lucas, highlighted the contradiction and points out that whatever the truth there are officers guilty of very serious acts.

either rogue undercover officers have been breaking the rules set by senior officers, or senior officers have misled the public by saying that such relationships are forbidden.

Perhaps it's not so simple as that. Perhaps it was, indeed, officially forbidden clearly last year (and therefore at the time that all those officers were deployed), yet was still used by this unsupervised runaway train spy department as a deliberate tactic.

Under the new threat of accountability the police will have been furiously thumbing their rulebooks and legislation to make something, anything, slant enough to sound like it might make their actions somehow permissable. To back up their case, the words would need to come not just from them but the more objective and authoritative mouth of, say, a sock-puppetted government minister.

Step forward, Nick Herbert, apologist for the sustained psychological, physical and sexual abuse of the citizens he represents.

if i were the gm crop industry

Around fifteen years ago several large multinationals tried to introduce genetically modified crops to Europe. They were met with suspicion, and they responded - notably with Monsanto's 'Food Health Hope' advertising campaign that included URLs for anti-GM groups - with a concerted effort to allay fears.

They lost. They said that what they were doing was no different to the selective breeding that humans have been doing for centuries. But thus far nobody has been able to make a scorpion mate with a tomato; the results of such a novel genetic mix are far more unpredictable than crossing two tomatoes. They claimed their new crops would need less argichemicals, but part of the point of things like Monsanto's Roundup-Ready crops was to allow farmers to drench fields in the chemicals without killing the crops.

This leads us on to the really sinister part. GM was planned as a device to get farmers to use patented crops which tied you in to using their chemicals. You know the way Canon, Epson and co sell you an amazing scanner-printer for £40 then charge you £30 a time to get toner cartridges, leaving you skinter than planned or else with a printer that's perpetually out of use? Like that, but with the global food supply.

To ensure that farmers didn't wriggle out of it there were patents filed for 'terminator genes'; plants whose seeds would be infertile, meaning farmers couldn't save some of their seed to plant next year but instead would have to buy new seed every year from Monsanto.

Even as they conspired to take control of food away from those who can't pay, they claimed that anti-GM sentiment was ill informed fear of technology, a luxury only available to well fed rich people. This convenently ignored the fact that governments across Africa banded together to shun GM, and Indian farmers burned crops and protested in their hundreds of thousands, a scale far greater than in the rich nations. 

The UK press, used to food scares like botulism, salmonella, BSE, E coli and all the rest, largely portayed it as a public health risk, which ignored the much more definite threat of corporate control of global food production and impacts on wildlife.


The release of genetically modified organisms isn't like an oil spill or chemical leak. This stuff replicates and multiplies. It cross-pollinates with non-GM crops, leading to new mutations. The UK government allowed field trials, all but one of which showed detrimental effects on local biodiversity.

A 2005 study by the GM companies and DEFRA found that even fifteen years after GM oilseed rape was planted there will still be a GM plant in every square metre of the field.

The field trials were hampered by protesters going into the fields and ripping up the crops before they'd had chance to pollinate. With overwhelming public support, these few hundred underfunded people stopped a multibillion dollar industry dead in its tracks.

A few years later, BASF resurrected the idea. Once again they trotted out the unsubstantiated overblown claims of their new crops being essential to provide food for the starving. The anti-GM campaigners pointed out that BASF's potato grown for industrial starch isn't really a belly filler. That, coupled with outcry from local beekeepers whose premium borage honey production would have been affected, forced another complete climbdown.

So, what to do? GM is already planted across swathes of the Americas. There's an industry that's been geared up for Europe and is jealously coveting this untapped market. If I were them, on the back of two serious defeats, I'd realise this can't be done in one jump. Stepping stones are needed.

For example, the government know they can't simply privatise healthcare in one go, so they transfer fund-holding to GPs (who, though public in service, are essentially private in structure). When, in five or ten years, the GPs find they haven't the time or knowledge to run their own funding, the large corporations will step in and clean up. We'll then get crap doctoring for free and a range of top-up plans for anything that provides real health care.

By the same token, the UK is not going to take corporate-controlled chemically intensive GM crops. So ask, what do the protesters complain about, then tackle that stuff head on. Persons here assembled, I give you the Rothamstead GM wheat trial (and its opponents Take The Flour Back).  

What if we make a GM crop that really is a food crop, really does use less chemicals, and has no patents? The protesters will have to agree or look insane; all of a sudden the geneticists will appear like the reasonable ones. Then, that problem finally dealt with, we will have the way clear to bring in the GM crops that make money.

I'm not saying that's necessarily what's happening with the new GM crop of wheat being tested in the UK. Who knows, maybe the biotech industry has suddenly become altrusitic and has no interest in developing products in order to make profit.

going for the nuclear option

Really, I'd forgotten what it was like living under Tories. Once or twice a week they roll out something utterly outrageous, so obviously cruel, duplicitous and/or corrupt that it stuns you with its gall and makes you feel powerless to stop it even though it's a once-in-a-generation horror. Then a few days later it's superceded by the next one.

Earlier this month I flagged up their new law to monitor every phone call, text and email. Imagine if Royal Mail were obliged to open all letters and keep photocopies for police and security services to look through. This goes beyond that. Through long term logging of your texts, emails and websearching I could get a more complete and accurate picture of you than you could ever describe to anyone.

And this is from the government whose foundational policy document said

We will implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties and roll back state intrusion.

So, another day, another bit of jaw-danglingly bold hypocrisy from the government. That same Programme for Government promised us:

Liberal Democrats have long opposed any new nuclear construction. Conservatives, by contrast, are committed to allowing the replacement of existing nuclear power stations provided that they are subject to the normal planning process for major projects (under a new National Planning Statement), and also provided that they receive no public subsidy.

The government are to bump up electricity bills to subsidise new building of energy sources it deems to be low carbon. This isn't just developing new technologies that need investment to get up to scale. The phrasing - we can only assume deliberately - makes no mention of the word 'renewable'. It includes nuclear power.