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George Monbiot is never one to mince words, and todays column in the Guardian is a classic example. The uncompromising headline above, Flying Kills, is prelude to an uncompromising look at the massive impact that air travel has on the planet. It looks unflinchingly (well, maybe a little flinchingly, in fact) at the disparity in income levels between those who use the air the most, those who can barely ever afford to, and those who suffer most from the consequences and the article is especially unsparing of those who know perfectly well how harmful it is but have no intention at all of changing their own behaviour. Then of course, from the personal to the political, there is the institutionalised support for the continued growth (a new Heathrow every five years) and the almost total lack of viable alternatives, whether in modes of travel or fuel for aircraft.
George Monbiot, in Protest as Harassment raises an important but overlooked (in the media) issue about the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill. While attention has focused almost exclusively on the admittedly problematic religious incitement provisions, most people have not noticed that, by clever redefinitions of offences, the Bill pretty much outlaws all forms of peaceful protest and makes free speech a crime. The most basic activities of peaceful protest are now defined as criminal harrassment; it is only necessary, for example, to hand a handbill making a valid point to two people to be guilty of "harrassing" the public 'in order “to persuade any person … not to do something that he is entitled or required to do, or to do something that he is not under any obligation to do.” ' And the public itself does not have to complain of being harrassed; under this law, the McDonald's libel action against Dave Morris and Helen Steel that was recently overturned on human rights grounds would not even have been needed. McDonald's could have just had the two activists locked up for criminal activity.
George Monbiot's blog has an excellent article titled "Punitive - and it works" which attacks the received wisdom that neo-liberal economic policies work better than those old outmoded social democratic ideas with their "punitive taxes" and "grandiose projects of public spending". He does this in the simple, straightforward way of comparing various economic and social welfare indices for two fully developed "post-industrial" countries, one of which (the UK) follows neo-liberalism in an exemplary fashion and one of which (Sweden) is "one of the last outposts of distributionism". The results are telling: GDP is slightly higher in Sweden, and has been for all but seven of the years between 1960 and 2000. Sweden's national balance sheet shows a $10bn surplus, while the UK's shows a $26bn deficit.
Even by the neoliberals’ favourite measures, Sweden wins: it has a lower inflation rate than ours, higher “global competitiveness” and a higher ranking for “business creativity and research”.
In terms of human welfare, there is no competition. According to the quality of life measure published by the Economist (the “human development index”) Sweden ranks third in the world, the UK 11th. Sweden has the world’s third highest life expectancy, the UK the 29th. In Sweden, there are 74 telephone lines and 62 computers per hundred people; in the UK just 59 and 41.
The contrast between the averaged figures is stark enough, but it’s far greater for the people at the bottom of the social heap. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Economist does not publish this data, but the United Nations does. Its Human Development Report for 2004 shows that in Sweden 6.3% of the population lives below the absolute poverty line for developed nations ($11 a day). In the United Kingdom the figure is 15.7%. Seven and a half per cent of Swedish adults are functionally illiterate – just over one third of the UK’s figure of 21.8%. In the United Kingdom, according to a separate study, you are over three times as likely to stay in the economic class into which you were born than you are in Sweden. So much for the deregulated market creating opportunity. It's interesting that I read this today; this morning, on the radio, I heard a story about Sure Start, the eminently neo-liberal programme for lifting families and children out of poverty. A think tank had evaluated the results and found them almost too small to measure and had predicted that far better results could be attained by simply giving the parents the money. Sort of a no-brainer when you hear that the programme, with all its overheads and bureaucracy, costs £100K per year per child.
George Monbiot says: just because you can make a moral argument for a war does not mean that you have a moral reason for the war. In fact, he argues, superpowers do not go to war for moral reasons, but for strategic ones, even if they do append a moral justification on to what they need to do.
"It (the US) armed and funded Saddam when it needed to; it knocked him down when it needed to. In neither case did it act because it cared about the people of his country. It acted because it cared about its own interests."
George Monbiot's opinion piece in the Guardian is about a shocking racist incident that occurred just last week in rural England, and is apparently not even considered a crime or racist by most. In fact, the MP for the area where it occurred blamed the whole thing on the victims. What group is it that can be insulted and assaulted with impunity in modern Europe? (Indeed, this group suffers less in the UK than in many other countries.) They are the gypsies, or "travellers" as they are called here, or Roma, as is their offcial designation. Monbiot then turns to the question of why the racism against the Roma is so acceptable, and I have to say his thesis is a bit of a stretch. I think he got it the first time - they are stateless, therefore without rights, and with fearful barriers to organising to better their lives.
You must read this article, Poisoned Chalice, by George Monbiot. It is an excellent explanation of what the IMF does, why it does it, and what happens to poor and emerging economies, depending on whether or not they accept the bad medicine spooned out by the IMF.
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