What is it with oranges?

Oranges may not be the only fruit, or orange the only colour but they are distinctly troublesome all the same. Much of my early life was spent picking over fruit, first in markets then in supermarkets, to avoid buying the products of apartheid South Africa or Francoist Spain. What is it about oranges that they would only grow in fascist soil? There was temporary relief when democratic oranges arrived from Florida; soon, however, Cesar Chavez and the United Fruit Workers revealed to us the appalling conditions under which Chicano farm workers toiled in California and there was little reason to believe Florida gang-masters were more humanitarian.

Following the death of Franco, Spanish oranges became edible and I could indulge myself on liberated fruit and later emancipated Outspans entered our home. But the need for careful inspection of labels did not stop, Jaffa oranges were still the problematic fruit of a discriminatory regime. For many years this was an individualised gesture of disdain for a state that granted me the right of return (how could I return somewhere I had never been - a right of return to Shepherds Bush at pre-BBC house prices, now that’s another matter ) but denied access to their homes to people expelled within my lifetime.

This is no longer an individual gesture. BIG -Boycott Israeli Goods – was organised to co-ordinate and promulgate the feelings of many others. Recently a group of us, of Jewish origin, formed J-BIG, Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods, to demonstrate that there are many who will not support Israel – an apartheid state or worse.

Jimmy Carter was roundly attacked for using the A word to describe Israel. But Apartheid means, in strict terms ‘separate development’ and has Israel not called the wall it has built, deep within the West Bank, the ‘separation fence’. So Apartheid Wall seems an appropriate term – it looks far more like a wall than a fence so, again, this terminology is accurate. But the separation in Israel is in many ways worse than South Africa’s was. South Africa depended upon its Black labour force to keep its mines and farms running which made the growth of trade union activity a possible and effective means of survival and opposition. Israel has adopted a policy of relying less and less upon its Arab population, denying them work, free movement and the possibility of work based organisation. They have, instead, encouraged immigration of people who would qualify as Jews under the Nazi’s Nuremberg classification but do not under rabbinic tradition.

South Africa had no settlement policy, occupying the most fertile land within the Bantustans (of course, at a national level, the whites had already grabbed all the best bits) and garnering to themselves all the water resources. Israel’s settlements, established in violation of international law, eat into the West Bank like termites, insisting on no-go zones for the Palestinian populations around each gated community, and appropriating farmland and demolishing inconvenient houses.

It is not just the fruit, of course, but the very colour orange has been adopted by separatists and as the marker of racial and religious discrimination. Orange Order and Orange Free State are names to trouble any believer in human rights. The word itself seems to be a disease vector; Orange, in Provence, was one of the first towns in France to be run by le Pen’s National Front.

But why Israel, why now? Advocates of consumer, professional and academics boycotts of Israel are asked ‘why pick on Israel?’ Israel is not uniquely awful, and neither was South Africa: countries from Burma to North Korea to Sudan and beyond also treat their people with contempt and brutality. Israel is our problem, as was South Africa, in ways these other countries are not. Israel was created in response to Europe’s inability to live at peace with its Jewish citizens; Israel claims, despite geography, to be part of Europe, a participant in the Eurovision song contest and the EUFA football competitions. Israel has privileged economic and academic arrangements with the EU; Israel is the recipient of United States military aid at level that would have made Latin American dictators of previous decades green (or orange) with envy; and Israel is deeply implicated in planning America’s disastrous strategy in the Middle East, a strategy that has sorely damaged Britain and the other European countries that have become ensnared in it.

Many of the most febrile advocates of Israel’s expansion have been American and European recent immigrants. It was striking, when listening to the accents of the diehard resisters of the evacuation of the Gaza settlements, how many of these people fighting the Israeli army and police were fleeing the pogroms of Brooklyn and Redbridge. It was also striking how small the risks of violent response such people ran from their aggression, compared with the quotidian experience of Palestinian children and teenagers.

That is why I cannot buy a Jaffa orange, a Carmel avocado or a Palwin bottle (although I must admit the last is no hardship). In the last century we knew there was blood on the coal, these are blood oranges.

The irony is that orange as a colour is very difficult to wear with a pale complexion and only looks good against a darker skin. It is my hope that soon I can buy my fruit for taste and quality not as a small but continuing gesture of solidarity with an oppressed people.

Who knows you are a dog?

The loss of 5 million tax records has highlighted the degree of state knowledge about each of us. The collection of tax data is largely uncontroversial, even though its handling and the tax decisions made are not; however other publicly collected data is, in itself, far more problematic.
In Britain we live in a surveillance society. There are over 4 million CCTV cameras here, over one in five of all the world’s cameras, and this only one visible form of surveillance. We may look askance at the degree of social conformity demanded by Singapore but spitting out chewing gum is far more likely to be aught on camera in London. Surveillance has broad public support because it is widely supposed to improve the personal security of the ‘law-abiding citizen’: seen only as a threat to the miscreant and the hoody.
Hoods, with all the threat that the bare faced may experience in their presence are a rational and effective response to surveillance: hoodies are a fashion statement induced by cameras. The hoovering up of our unhooded images may seem no more problematic that the gathering up of our national insurance numbers along with our bank details. That is until the CD goes missing and our faces become tradable on e-BadaBing and are uploaded on to a Russian server.
It is striking that among a landscape populated by public IT procurement fiascos there are two outstanding successes: London’s congestion charge and Oyster systems. This poses the question of what is common between these two schemes; it may be that Transport for London have discovered an elixir that has escaped the sight of al other local and national government agencies. It may not, however, be totally paranoid to note that both these schemes had the (un)intended side effect of delivering high quality surveillance data to the security services: is it more important to have MI5 in your client team than TfL?
Mike Power of LSE described in ‘The Audit Explosion’ how the response to audit failure was the, frequently successful, demand for more and more audit – it was the demand for further audit that was successful, not the further auditing. We are now told that the appropriate solution to technology failure is more, and more expensive, technology. CCTV is of debatable use in reducing crime and disorder. It is more clearly implicated in the paradox of falling crime rates being accompanied by increasing fear of crime. Every CCTV camera reminds us the possibility of attack, and while giving surface reassurance, more deeply reminds us of the possibility of attack. So CCTV always increase fear of crime, regardless of their effect on crime rates and every camera increases the felt need for more cameras.
The belief in the efficacy of CCTV and advanced technology for crime fighting is systematically reinforced by TV cop dramas. This come in a number of forms, from the technology drooling of the CSI franchise—Top Gear for geeks—to the slightly seedy but tech savvy Spooks to the poor beat PCs watching hours of CCTV on The Bill. The result is the same, the techie always gets his (sic) man. The discrepancy between this vision of perfection and the miscarriages of justice that surface in the Appeal Court as a result of the unreliability of this evidence is less often noted.
There was a famous 1990s’ cartoon showing a dog at a computer saying, “In cyberspace nobody knows you are a dog.” The caption of any current version should state, “In surveillance space, everyone who wants to know knows you are a dog.”
I took a break from writing this to watch Newsnight. On it I saw the Secretary of State for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, John Hutton, explaining to an even more sceptical than usual Jeremy Paxman that the loss of the HMRC data made the ID register, which will stand behind the ID cards, yet more pressing. Biometric data would be the padlock that secured our identities, not the unregulated overflow pipe spilling our personal identifiers willy-nilly.
Eisenhower warned of the Military-Industrial Complex. That hasn’t gone away but it now has a child, the Surveillance-IT Complex. This devils spawn provides security for the shareholders, career prospects for the police and increasing vulnerability for the rest of us.

Junk Royal Mail

I read a news item about Roger Annies apostman in south Wales who was suspended for telling households on his round how to stop the Post Office delivering unaddressed junk mail to them. I decided I too wanted to stop the post office delivering unaddressed junk to my house - I have enough waste paper to recycle to help my local authority meet their targets without this.

Easy I thought, just log on to the Royal Mail website and get straight forward instructions on how to do it. No such luck, a search for junk mail told me about the mailing preference service (useful but I already subscribe to that). A search for 'door to door' gave me lots of information for firms wishing to use the service, nothing for householders on how not to be used.

OK, I'm good at this, I'll send them an e-mail asking for the information. Eventually I found a form but the only vaguely relevent category was complaint - well I surely had one of those. However this was all geared to undelivered mail - the opposite of my problem but I completed it anyway.

I quickly got an automated response asking me for more details of my missing mail. I composed a suitable reply and today got the information I needed. After reading much irrelevent and unasked for information about the mailing preference service, I found I had to send a request to

Door to Door Opt Outs
Royal Mail
Kingsmead House
Oxpens Road
OXFORD
OX1 1RX

They did not reply to the second half of my query, "why I cannot find this information on your web site?"

However the good news is that from today the Royal Mail website has a new link on its front page telling you how to opt out. Even better, unlike the email I received this page tells you how to do it ny e-mail optout@royalmail.com (saving the price of a stamp and envelope).

Roger Annies is still at risk of his of losing his job but he has forced the Post office into action to limit the damage it is doing to the environment and to the tempers of their 'customers'. Well done Roger, I hope the Post Office management will be too ashamed to take any action and will, instead, give him a bonus for improving their customer service and that DEFRA will send him a properly addressed and bio-degradeable award for services to the environment.

More reflections on Salem

The discussion on sex-offenders in school has made me reflect upon my school experiences some considerable number of years ago in my secondary school - a highly selective boys direct-grant school, a now defunct category balancing between grammar and public schools.

I remember well one schoolmaster (that's what they were, not teachers), a science master who was also, if I remember right, responsible for, what we would now call, pastoral care of the boys in the first two years. This master had an unhealthy interest in the genitalia of the boys in his charge and would often invite boys back to his house, which was next to the school, for tea. He was a gifted and enthusiastic teacher, who gave many of his pupils a deep, and I suspect, lifelong interest in science. He even managed to give my brother, who was adrift outside the arts and humanities, a passing interest which was a far more difficult accomplishment. I do not remember myself - and I was in his charge for a three week school trip round Europe - nor any other boy coming to harm from him. I think it likely that if he were around now he would not have resisted downloading child pornography from the internet. I do not think that would have made him a worse teacher or a greater danger to children - he would, however, have been caught in the net of Operation Orr and under Kelly's law and the Daily Mail's urging, have been automatically and, without further thought, been barred forever from teaching.

This is perhaps unfair to the Daily Mail as almost the entire press has been baying for the blood of these paedophiles and even the Guardian has welcomed automatic exclusion. Also Operation Orr is important in trying to slow the demand for child pornography and thus, hopefully, it's supply and the exploitation of children required to produce it. But, unless exclusion from teaching is seen as part of a deterrent strategy and some way is found of justifying this continuing punishment, conviction should not lead to automatic exclusion. It should however be an urgent prompt to seek out evidence of more threatening and dangerous behaviour, while keeping open the possibility there may be none. However the easy access to child pornography that the internet provides has created many more offenders without demonstrably increasing the risks to children in our schools and youth centres. The joint occurrence of the words sex, children and internet produces a stream of saliva that Pavlov could only have dreamed of. Replay this over-excitement from press to parliament to television and back to the press and we have a feed-back loop spiralling out of control, proscribing any rational action.

Going back to my school, although I'd rather not, I came to far more harm from uncaring, spiteful and sarcastic teachers than I did from this science teacher. These were the people who made some, but far from all, of my school days unhappy. Child sexual abuse must be a horrifying thing to experience, but it is only one, if one of the most extreme, way that a child can be made unhappy in school. The over-concentration on sex is prurient, moralistic and self-serving - it is easily identified as something most of us do not do. It is safer to engage with than behaviours like sarcasm and verbal aggression that most of us must admit we do perpetrate to some extent. These are dangerous not just to our children, but to our sense of self as a good person as we cannot so easily define an us and a them.

Salem part 2

So now we know how Kelly will handle the difficult decisions about who will teach in our schools - she will abdicate all decision making and discretion. Any transgression, no matter how minor, no matter how long ago will mean a lifetime ban. Of course many, even most, people on the sex offenders register are not suitable to work with children (or vulnerable adults). But this decision is one rooted not in the desire to protect children, but in moral cowardice.

There is a paradox however, only future offenders are subject to an automatic lifetime ban, people who have offended up to now will still need to judged, weighed and unless the current febrile climate abates, condemned without exception.

Orwell's Big Brother may have been transmogrified into TV humiliation (the rats in room 101 seem benign in comparison) but Kafka's Castle has been relocated to Sanctuary Buildings. Now that's an ironic address if ever there was one.

Salem comes to Westminster

There is more than a whiff of sulphur in the air. It is not the tell tale smell of witches; it is the sulphurous outpourings of the press about the paedophiles who hide round every street corner and school desk and the politicians who protect them.

There has been a deliberate, damaging and de-humanising elision of a name on the sex offenders register and a clear and present threat to every child that person comes in contact with. Not all people on the sex offenders register are a threat to children; not all the people on the register are guilty of anything substantial or at all. A justice system exists to deal out punishment to those who deserve it, prison, fine, community service or whatever. The sex offenders register exists, not as part of a punishment system, but in an effort to minimise future risk to potential victims – children and others. If membership of the register is by itself to prevent people from working in many careers it is then not part of a risk and harm reduction systems, but a lifelong punishment regardless of the gravity of the original offence. The register is a call for a risk assessment not a predictor of the outcome of that assessment. There is also pressure on the police and courts to make the register more and more inclusive so they can avoid future blame if a person who was not put on the register commits a future offence. A particular cause for concern is the route from a caution to the register. People often accept cautions when they are doubtful of their ability to establish their innocence, the police like this as it avoids the time and cost to them of court appearance, for what are often marginal cases. But if the route is caution – register – lifelong punishment, without any judicial or quasi-judicial review we have gone several dozen steps too far.

Without a detailed knowledge of the circumstances I cannot say whether I would have reached the same conclusions as Kim Howells and Ruth Kelly in the cases they reviewed. However, the evidence is that the procedure they followed was careful and detailed and based on a study of expert reports. I similarly cannot know whether what other present and former ministers decided was wise. We need a careful audit of the process by which a decision is made whether a person is granted future employment or is moved from the status of being on the register, being a cause for concern, to being on list 99, considered to pose an immediate and continuing risk to children.

Kelly was right (I don’t often say that) not to reveal Kim Howell’s name, placing the focus on someone who has made a difficult and unpopular decision and making them subject to media and public scorn makes the position of future decision makers more difficult. The personal risk of making a permissive decision becomes close to unbearable and decision maker becomes a conduit for mob vengeance and is forced to become the hand that lights the bonfire – whether we have found a witch or not.

Kelly was wrong to agree to pass the decision making to experts. This suggests that there are clearly defined ‘right’ decisions that ’experts’ will always reach. Expert opinion is crucial in this process, but the decision is one of public policy and judgement, which is what we elect politicians to exercise on our behalf. Further, there is no certainty (or even liklihood) that experts will agree, who then adjudicates between the experts, a better expert or a judge or an elected representative? The political decision becomes pushed back to, even concealed behind, a highly contestable choice of which experts to appoint. The decisions will be framed, even made, through this appointment. In Britain such decisions are made in secret, unlike in the United States where there are made publicly as the senate arguments over the Supreme Court membership demonstrate. Registers, lists and databases are not solutions to our problems; they are ways of ordering data to assist our judgement forming and decision making.

Kelly should not be sacked for this farrago. She should keep her job so she can be hounded out of office for the war she is waging, on Blair’s behalf, on the comprehensive education system; and for the disastrous error of judgment she made over rejecting Tomlinson’s re-ordering of 14-19 education and condemning further generations of school children to inadequate examination systems. Now, that’s what I call child abuse.

It seems Blair appointed her in preference to the more qualified David Miliband because she would do his bidding on Tomlinson and Miliband wouldn’t. So war on our children, can be added to his other wars and his tenure in his post shortened too.

Social exclusion - it's the poor what gets the blame

On Tuesday 29 November I listened to Phil Woolas, standing in for a sick David
Milliband speak at LSE about the government's progress in reducing social
exclusion. We discovered that the progress can be exactly quantified because
the Government is defining social exclusion as suffering from 5 or more of
10 indicators. The indicators themselves are not irrelevant, they include
low qualifications, joblessness and living alone; but they have gutted the
idea of social exclusion of any experiential/existential dimension, reducing
this rich and perplexing concept to a set of tick boxes.

He drew attention to the persistent nature of social exclusion, but did not
reflect on how this may defeat the attempt to address social exclusion through
ameliorative measures (not to deny the importance of ameliorative measures
in improving many individuals' conditions of life). In systems terms we have
homeostasis or stability, where the system reconfigures itself to reduce
or obliterate the effect of change in any one component through negative
feedback: like a thermostat keeping a room at a steady temperature.

The address overwhelmingly saw the issue of social exclusion in individual terms,
rather than a group/collective/community experience, the only excursion beyond
the individual was to the geographic neighbourhood. Enabling individuals
to move from exclusion to inclusion is desirable for the individual but 'solving'
the problem for a few does not change the texture of experience for the community.
The individuation of the problem and the remedies puts the onus on the excluded
individual not the excluding society - the question of what it is in majority
society that excludes the non-conforming was never approached, let alone
addressed - we were left with a patchwork of deficit models where the individual
has to change (albeit with the assistance of interventionist agencies) not
the society.

It also remorselessly concentrated on assisting the 'deprived'. Unsurprisingly
he made no reference to growing inequality at the top of the income and resources
scale. He lambasted, correctly, the Tory governments for refusing to talk
about poverty and hiding behind social exclusion. However he identified the
root of Labour's interest in John Smith's Commission on Social Justice, but
failed to note that the transition from social justice to social exclusion
as the defining concept left important elements lying dead on the ground
behind them.

As usual for a New Labour minister, he praised the efforts of the third sector
in allowing people engagement - but of course could not reflect that the
most powerful voluntary organizations that had given the powerless a collective
voice, the trade unions, had been denuded of influence by this government
(and the previous one) and that the traditional vehicle for expressing the
aspirations of the powerless, the Labour Party, was now an empty and irrelevant
shell in self-organizational and policy terms.

This is not to ignore the real progress that has been made on child poverty and
other fronts; it is to say that if you wish to fly under a social exclusion
banner you have to be open to transformational changes that New Labour proscribes
both because they do not enhance 'choice' and also because they would have
to address the increasingly disproportionate rewards given to those in the
most favoured situations. The government affects that extravagant payments
to financial traders and footballers do not affect the life chances of the
majority and the poor. This is true to the extent that most of us are not
in competition with them for supplies of Porsches, Rolexes and caviar. However
their ability to bid up the price of a limited resource like land drives
up housing costs for the rest and partly accounts for the inability of many
London workers to live anywhere near their place of work. Further the damage
done by the ability of the wealthy to command and sequester the services
of scarce doctors and teachers through private purchase of services far exceeds
the public benefit of their payment for public services they do not consume.

Social withdrawal by the rich is as much a threat to social order and cohesion as
social exclusion of the poor; the issues are the two sides of the same coin.
Political exclusion of aspirations of equality means that social exclusion
will continue to haunt us.

It's the same the whole world over
It's the poor what gets the blame
It's the rich what gets the gravy
Ain't it all a bleeding shame.

I leave it to you to ponder who ate all the pies - with or without the gravy.

Critical Mass under attack

Sometimes on my way home on the last Friday of the month I cross the route of Critical Mass and ride along for a bit. This has been an enjoyable way to chat to other cyclists as we meander around London. In the past the police have been friendly, with cyling cops riding along and preventing car traffic attacking the ride.

Now CM is under threat under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005). The police have distributed leaflets threatening participants with arrest

“Organisers of public processions are required by law to notify police at least 6 days before the event occurs of the date, time, proposed route and the name and address of an organiser. Failure to do so makes the event unlawful

Demonstrations within a designated area around Parliament must also be notified, and anyone taking part in an unauthorised demonstration commits an offence.”

Critical Mass has no organizers and is not a demonstration (except that it demonstrates that there are lots of people who like cycling in London).

The preamble to the Act states:

“An Act to provide for the establishment and functions of the Serious Organised Crime Agency; to make provision about investigations, prosecutions, offenders and witnesses in criminal proceedings and the protection of persons involved in investigations or proceedings; to provide for the implementation of certain international obligations relating to criminal matters; to amend the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002; to make further provision for combatting crime and disorder, including new provision about powers of arrest and search warrants and about parental compensation orders; to make further provision about the police and policing and persons supporting the police; to make provision for protecting certain organisations from interference with their activities; to make provision about criminal records; to provide for the Private Security Industry Act 2001 to extend to Scotland; and for connected purposes.”

This preamble already goes far beyond what any lay person would understand as ‘Serious Organised Crime’ – the link between Reggie Kray or Tony Soprano and ‘parental compensation orders’ certainly escapes me. The extension to Critical Mass goes even further. This is a part of mission creep that all police and anti-terrorism powers are highly prone to. One major purpose of the Act was to remove Brian Haw’s protest from Parliament Square (a Serious Organised Crime if ever there was one), but the courts ruled that lax drafting had meant the Home Office had missed its target.

It seems the cyclists are next. Future issues of this blog may be renamed News from Belmarsh- but I hope not. Join me at the next Critical Mass ride; assemble around 6.30 p.m. on 28 October outside the National Film Theatre on the South Bank. It’s the annual Halloween ride so many riders will be in fancy dress (but not me I’m afraid).

Thoughts from a boiled frog

I arrived at work today as a boiled frog. When I left home this morning on my bike it was barely drizzling, so it wasn’t worth putting on my waterproofs. As I cycled the intensity of the rain gradually increased, until I was soaked. If it had been raining like this when I set off, I would, of course have covered up: I’m not (that) stupid. I had become a victim of the boiled frog syndrome (which I was reminded of recently by Christopher Brookmyre in his dark, but hilarious thriller, Boiling a Frog.)

How do you boil a frog? If you put a frog in boiling water, it has the sense to jump straight out. If you put it in lukewarm water and gradually increase the temperature the situation never gets quite threatening enough to provoke alarm and action and the frog relaxes in the increasingly warm, and apparently comfortable, environment - until it is boiled. (Note to readers: no frogs were hurt in the writing of this blog; I have relied on secondary sources for descriptions of this behaviour.)

Is this syndrome only of concern to frogs, cyclists and thriller writers? No. Imagine you wanted to introduce a police state in to Britain, with few restrictions on the arbitrary actions of police. Would you legislate for unlimited powers of detention immediately? Not if you were wise, subtle and determined. You would play a long game, increasing the historic 24 hours limit to detention without charge and court appearance to 48 hours then to 7 days then to 14 then, say to 90, then to … It is of course possible that moving from 14 days to 90 days in one leap, would be to clumsy a hand on the regulator and it would wake up the frog. Never mind, you are playing the long game, turn the dial back to 28 and the frog will go back to sleep, warm and cosy, there is always next year for 90 and beyond.

There are of course other frogs, in other pans. One marked CCTV surveillance; another marked identity databases; another is the frequency of gun use by police. The great thing is that the frogs are warm relaxed and somnolent and never talk to each other, never make the connections which enable them to see they are all being boiled alive (sorry make that dead).

The government and the police have learned an important lesson in life. You don’t take the money and run: you take the money and walk slowly away without drawing attention to yourself.

Creating the Party

While sorting the newspapers for recycling last night, a job advert caught my eye: one for General Secretary for the Labour Party. Nothing surprising about that, they turn over fast, so they always seem to be looking for a new one.

What made me look was the section it was listed in. It was in the Media Guardian's Creative, Media and Sales section. It would seem that media management is even more the central concern of the party than we feared - 'we are moving beyond spin' was, well, spin. The role of the General Secretary used to membership and policy development and ensuring that the views of the members were taken note of by the leadership, oh happy days. Now it would appear to be branding and selling and that which is to be sold must first be created, not any longer through the labourious and labarynthine processes of inner party democracy. No, by a group of creatives in a London office snorting their way through ideas for ad campaigns and slogans. If not, why trawl there for candidates.