Last week Australian National University announced that they will be making all of the staff in their music department reapply for their jobs resulting in cuts of over 10 academic staff (here’s the grim letter they sent to staff). This is on the basis that teaching music properly makes a loss, and is being done under the cover of reorganising the curriculum for the purposes of employability, replacing staff and one to one tuition with fancy eLearning facilities. You can see all of the most horrendous spin on this in a press conference they gave last week:
Marnie Hughes-Warrington, who is the foul managerialist on the right in that video apparently also oversaw 350 redundancies at Monash University too. Anyway, there’s been a brilliant massive backlash, and a few days ago the head of department who is behind these sackings, Adrian Walter, went on indefinite leave due to the pressure. Except it’s just been revealed today that he’s got a new job starting in September at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts – he’s clearly a massive wanker who’s essentially working as a management consultant to implement cuts which will devastate music teaching internationally. Anyway, if you want to support the students and staff fighting these sackings you can sign a petition here: http://www.communityrun.org/petitions/savetheanuschoolofmusic-1 and follow the campaign on facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/AnuSchoolOfMusicSaveYourDegree
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It has been quite a weekend for Europe. The bondholders’ settlement has been well and truly shaken. First Hollande deposed Sarkozy. He has entered office on a pledge to amend or reject Fiscal Union, a treaty that will force Eurozone governments to cut spending during any present or future recession. Yet the real tremor came on Sunday when the Greeks – who for 6 crucial months have been ruled by an unelected former banker – were finally given a say on how they ought to be governed.
And thus a long overdue bonfire of Greece’s mainstream parties took place. PASOK, Greece’s main social democratic party, spent its time in office imposing savage cuts in order that the country could continue to service its debts to French and German bondholders. On Sunday they were all but wiped out. Their share of the vote dropped from 42% to 14%, and they were beaten into 3rd place by the Coalition of the Radical Left. Like PASOK, Greece’s major Conservative party had pledged to stick to the terms of the European imposed austerity plan. And they too saw their share of the vote tumble from 33.5% to 19%.
The real winners were the three big parties of the radical left who been them took a third of the vote. Meanwhile, an absolute majority of seats has been won by groups who, in opposition to the mainstream parties, pledged to reject the bailout-austerity package – a system under which Greece continues to cut public spending to the bone, in order to keep the debt payments flowing to Europe’s banks, and in return is allowed to borrow just enough to keep on functioning.
Of course, neither Angela Merkel , nor her allies in the EU and the ECB, are troubled by such trifling matters as the results of elections. After all, it is German bankers who, first and foremost, stand to lose if the countries of Southern Europe begin to unilaterally repudiate their evidently unpayable debts. It took less than 24 hours for Europe’s new Holy Roman Empress to come out and tell Greece to bloody well carry on as before.
Needless to say, she has been quickly backed by Europe. Pia Ahrenkilde, spokeswoman for the unelected European Commission said that she “hopes and expects that the future government of Greece will respect the engagement that Greece has entered into” with regard to the bailout-austerity package.
Now of course, in the generality of human life, there is some virtue in people sticking to what they agree. But the pertinent question is “what was agreed and by whom?”. Because so far the people of Greece have not had the chance to agree to anything. When the former PASOK PM Papandreou proposed that Greeks be given the the opportunity to agree to the bailout-austerity system, by means of a referundum, Merkel and her Euro allies wasted no time in hounding him out of office and replacing him with Papademos – an former official of the European Central Bank, who had never stood for public office. And for the past 6 months it has it been he who, with no popular mandate, has negotiated Greece’s austerity plan vis-a-vis the EU and the IMF.
Just who on earth do these people think they are? How dare Pia Ahrenkilde – elected by nobody – tell Greece to ignore the fact that its voters chose to shatter the country’s political establishment, and that they did so precisely over the question of the EU/IMF bailout. It’s democracy versus the bondholders, and the EU establishment all know who’s side they are on.
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Wonderful to be greeted with a May Day rose from the Occupy people at Liverpool Street this morning. Caught them later on in Paternoster square waving banners and shouting down capitalism. It was a small and lively demonstration, but glad to see that after six months, they finally made it to the London Stock Exchange!
May Day greetings to Occupy and the workers of the world from The Third Estate.
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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m launching a new conference on tax justice in London this Wednesday through International Tax Review magazine, so here’s one final shameless plug and an invitation to come and debate an issue which, I think, is one of the most important facing the world today.
It’s free to attend if you’re an activist or with an NGO and you’ll hear from a whole host of great speakers including former Secretary of State for International Development, Clare Short, and anti-poverty activist Richard Murphy. I would urge you to come and make your voice heard. Tax transparency is one of the biggest issues facing the developing world right now, and indeed our own public services as UK Uncut activists seeking to ensure multinational corporations pay their fair share of tax have shown.
Development agencies such as Christian Aid and ActionAid, which have long argued that poor countries lose more through tax avoidance than they receive in aid, are pushing for country-by-country reporting, a standard which is soon to become a reality for companies in the extractive industries. The NGOs argue that tax is not simply a legal issue, it is a moral one, and it is not enough that taxpayers remain within the letter of the law, rather they must adhere to its spirit. Most multinationals remain sceptical about country-by-country reporting, but where it was once a niche issue demanded only by hardened activists calling in from the cold, now it is something companies cannot afford to ignore.
Unusa Karimu’s people, the Mbororo, are a marginalised semi-nomadic community of cattle herders in Cameroon. The daily persecution and exploitation they face at the hands of government and wealthy elites inspired Mr Karimu to become a lawyer so he could defend their human rights in court. Karimu talks to Salman Shaheen about his struggle against economic hardship to become the Mbororo’s first and only barrister and the far more difficult struggle to win equality for his people.
Cramped and overheated as it is, Karimu’s London hotel room is a world away from his sweltering, mosquito-infested little place in war-ravaged Sierra Leone where he studied to become a lawyer. He’s in the UK to hone his skills with Derbyshire-based charity Village Aid so he can return to Cameroon to bolster the Mbororo Social and Cultural Development Association (MBOSCUDA), an organisation chaired by him which is dedicated to defending the rights of his people.
When MBOSCUDA was first established, its members were threatened with death and falsely imprisoned, languishing in jails without any charges ever being brought against them in court. But, with Karimu as the Mbororo’s first lawyer, things are beginning to change.
Karimu was born in 1980 in the village of Mentang in the Boyo district of the North West region of Cameroon. His mother died when he was three years old and his absentee father squandered much of the family’s cattle wealth. He had just enough left to fund his way through school.
“I did quite well at school, I cannot remember failing any exams,” says Karimu, who used the last of the cattle to go to university, where he graduated in law.
Witnessing the “day to day abuses” of his people, intimidated by rich landowners and corrupt government officials making a fast buck confiscating Mbororo cattle and exhorting bribes, Karimu set out to become a lawyer to use the law of the land to protect them. Despite the rarity of his academic success among a people whose literacy rate remains as low as 5%, however, Karimu had no money to go to law school.
His career, and his ambition to use his legal expertise to empower the Mbororo, might have reached a dead end there had it not been for Village Aid, a small UK charity concerned by the silent suffering of his people, which entered into a partnership with MBOSCUDA and managed to secure funding from Comic Relief to train him to become a lawyer.
“I was trained as a paralegal, providing legal services based in the community,” says Karimu. “I could advise and say where there had been violations of human rights. But we could not intervene directly and had to take the cases to a barrister.”
Karimu quickly realised, however, that for the Mbororo people to truly realise their rights enshrined, but not actualised, in law, they had to have their own barristers capable of representing them in court.
“I could not address the day to day abuses of my people unless I became a practising lawyer,” says Karimu. “So I took up the task and I went to Freetown. If you see my room where I was living, you can’t believe it. I resigned from my job, I left my house and my family and I went down to Freetown, the capital of a country that had undergone 10 years civil war. But now I have qualified and am in Cameroon, I can talk like a barrister on their behalf.”
Representing the plight of his people before Cameroon’s courts, the greatest problem for Karimu and for the Mbororo people is the billionaire cattle rancher and business magnate, Baba Amadou Danpullo. Darling of the national press, bane of the Mbororo, Danpullo has used his position on the central committee of Cameroon’s ruling party and his ownership of the Danpullo Broadcasting System (DBS) television station to make life for Karimu’s people a living hell.
“He is the main perpetrator of abuses on the Mbororo people,” says Karimu. “Because he needs a lot of land for ranching and his tea plantations he has made many evictions without any due compensation. He has imprisoned a lot of my people. Recently he made a ban on the sale of horses, which are the livelihood of the Mbororo.”
Why is Danpullo on a seemingly personal campaign of hatred against the Mbororo? Perhaps it is nothing more complex than blind prejudice. Perhaps it is because he is a powerful man afraid of groups like MBOSCUDA organising against him. Certainly he has done his best to see their members thrown in jail, while using the courts to block cases against his interests.
“DBS was saying very nasty things about the Mbororo and MBOSCUDA,” says Karimu. “We instigated a defamation action against DBS. We reported it to the state prosecutor and a summons was issued for accused persons to give their statements. As I’m speaking to you, I’ve got information from Cameroon that suggests the case will not go anywhere.”
Where Danpullo has used his considerable government influence to block cases, Karimu has used international partners and social networks to raise awareness about the issues. It’s an uphill struggle for the hitherto voiceless Mbororo, but Karimu’s work has begun to make a difference.
“The work I’m doing has made things better,” says Karimu. “I can write to the state authorities and explain things to them. They can arrest all of the Mbororo people, but they cannot stop me. So at least there is someone out there who can do something.”
One success story Karimu is particularly proud of is his intervention in a case of cattle theft falsely brought against two Mbororo men by a powerful woman.
“I represented them in court and they were acquitted based on the evidence,” says Karimu.
He believes that it was entirely a case of prejudice and if he had not been there to argue the facts, the accused would have gone to prison for at least three years each.
“Sometimes the judges are not bad, but if you are not well represented, other lawyers will make the opposition case look genuine,” Karimu explains. “We need lawyers who know the facts about their case. I was against the most senior barrister in the jurisdiction. A lawyer is always as good as his case.”
Karimu has close to 60 cases on his hands at the moment. With so many daily injustices perpetrated against his people, generating new cases all the time, it’s a big challenge being the only Mbororo lawyer. North West Cameroon has seven districts with high courts. When two of these districts have a case on the same day, even a man as passionate and dedicated as Karimu cannot be in two places at once.
“I can’t deal with all these cases alone,” he says. “We need more Mbororo lawyers. It’s not like we don’t have other law graduates who can do it. The programme is so expensive, they can’t afford to go to the law school.”
Karimu hopes his example will inspire others and attract funding for Village Aid and MBOSCUDA to send more of his people to law school.
Many challenges lie ahead. Human rights defenders in the Mbororo community continue to receive death threats, while a lot of the cases Karimu would like to take up go unreported because the abuses happen in remote areas. The problem is not Cameroon’s laws. On paper, the country’s legal framework guarantees the rights of all its citizens, including its Mbororo minority. However, as is so often the case, theory falls flat in the face of corrupt practice, poor implementation and a lack of legal understanding among the victimised. With Karimu leading the fight in the courtrooms and in the communities, there is hope for the Mbororo. If that hope is to be realised, Cameroon needs more people like him.
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It emerged today that Greece will hold snap elections less than 4 weeks from now. An official announcement will be made tomorrow. Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal have confirmation from an unnamed government official that the poll will take place on May the 6th.
The radical left, meanwhile, have surged forward in the polls. According to recent opinion polls, three parties to the left of PASOK (the main social democratic party) will get 30-40% of the vote between them. The Coalition of The Radical left – a kind of Greek version of the Socialist Alliance – are on 10-12%, while the newly formed Democratic Left have been gaining up to 16% of the prospective vote. Meanwhile the Communist Party having been polling significantly above the 7.5% they gained in the last election.
In many ways this is no great surprise. PASOK united with the Conservatives to back the bailiff regime of Papademos – an EU imposed technocrat whose only real objective has been to force through austerity at any cost. Last week a pensioner sent shockwaves through Greece when he shot himself outside the parliament. His suicide note called on Greece’s youinger generation to rise up and hang the treacherous political class “as the Italians hanged Mussolini.”
With Greece electing its deputies through a PR system, the next parliament could well be exciting and indeed very radical. And we may see a head on clash between Greece’s political institutions and the EU, hich so far has proved determined – above all else – to make sure that Greek interest payments keep flowing into the coffers of French and German banks.
And without a doubt, this is part of a general European phenomenon. Jean Luc Melenchon is taking the political establishment by surprise in France. In Ireland Sinn Fein nearly trebbled their representation, while the Socialist Party gained their first seats. With living standards being squeezed across the continent for the beneift of bondholders, and after decade in which mainstream Social Democratic parties have very much embraced Neo-Liberal economics, people are finally, and understandably looking elsewhere.
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Things can quickly get out of hand. It started with questions being asked about how much tax Mr Livingstone actually paid. Boris’ tax arrangements were inevitably brought into the argument. And then came Mr Osborne, who has indicated that the shadow cabinet will happily release all of their tax returns – a move that would, by necessity, be reciprocated by the Labour front bench.
And thus we have the next great upsurge of triviality on our hands. Precious column inches will be devoted to who earned what, and how much tax they paid on what income. We might even hear that some of them are “out of touch” – a cliche that has been worn to within a cubic milimetre of nothingness.
Frankly, I couldn’t care less. Even the current crop of multi-millionaire front bench Tories are not so wealthy that their tax arrangements materially affect the nation’s finances. If it turned out that Francis Maude arranged with the HMRC to pay his tax bill in monopoly money, the whole exercise would still be of questionable political importance.
If this was a one-off distraction then it wouldn’t matter. But these fundamentally pointless character tests are quickly becoming the very stuff of politics. Historians will look back upon our generation and note that just when our economy was coming apart at the seems, and millions were being thrown on the scrapheap, the media was obsessing over who built a moat at public expense, and whether or not a few hundred grand ended up in the wrong pockets.
Before expenses, it was cash for peerages – as though any of the life peers, paying or non-paying, actually deserve to be voting on our laws. In the future, I imagine, politicians will begin publishing their school reports, so as to demonstrate that they never stuck chewing gum to the bottom of their desks during their adolescence. And somewhere in between the very many discussions about whether individual members of the political class are good or naughty, we might, very occasionally get the opportunity to ask what on earth politicians intend to do about the fact that 3 million of our citizens are without work.
The rise and rise of scandal mongering can only be explained in part by the greater intensity of media scrutiny. A far more important factor is the general depolitisation of politics. These days, her majesty’s official opposition only ever seems to want to talk about the “competence” of the governing parties. This was evident in Labour’s pathetic response to the government’s deeply unpopular attempts to radically expand the govenrment’s power to snoop. Yvette Cooper meandered on about the government’s “incompetence”, and its need to “get a grip”, while leaving us none the wiser with regard to what Labour actually believed the policy on internet-snooping ought to be. Likewise, when David Cameron temporarily scuppered the Fiscal Union treaty, Ed Miliband offered us no clue as to what he thought about the great issues at stake – namely fiscal union and financial regulation – but did, of course, manage to tell us that David had handled the diplomacy very badly.
The focus on such matters as politicians’ tax returns both reflects and sustain the current vacuous, non-political parliamentary culture. These upsurges of interest in the personal conduct of ministers and MPs draw attention away from the real issues for which political leaders ought to be accountable. And they enable the various front benches to do battle with one another without having to go to the trouble of establishing real and important areas of disagreement.
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Imagine having emphysema. For those who don’t know what that entails, emphysema is when the lining of your lungs is destroyed, meaning that it gradually becomes harder and harder to take in the oxygen your body needs. To start with, you notice that you get out of breath just a bit faster than you used to. Then, over time, it gets worse. And worse. After a while you find yourself fighting for breath even while sitting still. And then, after a few years – for most of which you’ll be constantly hooked up to oxygen tanks, barely able to speak, move or even feed yourself – you’ll most likely die, either from a simple lack of air or from heart failure as the low oxygen levels in your blood cause your veins and arteries to constrict and your blood pressure to skyrocket. There is no cure. Oh, and if you smoke regularly for many years, the odds of this happening to you get a lot shorter (12 to 13 times shorter, in fact – although technically that’s for COPD rather than just emphysema).
None of this is really news – most people who smoke are aware that their habit is likely to have some nasty health consequences as they get older – and plenty of them would probably argue that the reason they smoke is that the pleasure they get from doing so outweighs the negative health effects. But this ignores the rather glaring issue that tobacco is an addictive substance, so the enjoyment of smoking for most people lies in large part in the relief from your addictive craving (though I’m not denying that smoking is enjoyable in itself as well). And it’s for that very simple reason that I support the announcement today that displaying tobacco in shops is to be banned.
The libertarian argument often used in cases like this – that people should be free to do things which put their own health at risk if they want to – is a compelling one, especially if those activities bring in more to the Treasury than is spent by the government tackling any associated health issues, as is commonly claimed to be the case with smoking. But autonomy shouldn’t be the only consideration when you’re thinking about addictive behaviour, for the fairly obvious reason that people who are acting under the influence of an addiction aren’t acting completely autonomously, which probably goes a long way in explaining why people still smoke despite the fairly high likelihood of severe health problems in the future. If you’re addicted to tobacco and want to quit (as the government claims one in three smokers are) then not seeing cigarettes displayed every time you go to the shop could well make it that bit easier. It’s easy to mock the idea that displays in shops affect your retail habits, but you know what? The reason that shops put up displays – and have been doing so for decades, if not centuries – is because they make you more likely to buy things. Of course they’re not the only thing determining what you buy (and the government’s claim that they’re the main reason teenagers start smoking does admittedly seem pretty implausible) but it’s ridiculous to claim they have no effect at all. And when those things are products you’re addicted to, that’s doubly true.
In any case, getting rid of shop window displays doesn’t do anything to restrict the sale of tobacco, just the advertisement of it. This ban does next to nothing to limit the freedom of smokers to buy and consume what they want, and there’s a good chance it will help the large numbers of people struggling to overcome their addictions. I really don’t see a problem with it.
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The government’s decision to extend VAT to hot pasties has enabled chain store Greggs to represent itself as champion of the working poor.
‘At a time when ordinary, hard-working people are under enormous pressure, they need help in making their money go as far as possible”, the company’s compassionate chief executive Keith McMeikan remarked.
Unfortunately, there is a lot more to poverty than the price of pasties. Indeed, a rather important factor is the tendency of very profitable companies to force “ordinary, hardworking people” to make do with wages which they cannot live on. Despite recording record profits in recent years, Greggs pays its shop assistants just £6.70 per hour – significantly below the living wage.
What’s more, young workers are super-exploited. Under 18s start on just £5.52 per hour, rising to £5.75 after training. And this is in return for what the company acknowledges are “long and physically demanding” shifts, many of which start at 7:00 am. Presumably, compassion chief exec McMeikan does not believe that these particular “ordinary, hardworking people” deserve any better.
Not long ago Ed Miliband and Ed Balls demonstrated their support for the pasty cause by taking lunch at Greggs. Did these high representatives of Britain’s labour movement bother to ask the person making them lunch how much they were paid for their efforts? I would guess that the answer is probably negative.
By all means, let’s oppose the pasty tax – undoubtedly a regressive tax move. But while we are at it, let’s demand that Greggs pays its ordinary, hardworking employees a living wage.
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To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net
Posted Under: Poverty
This post was written by Reuben on April 5, 2012 Comments (3)
There was shock today as the government announced plans to remove Britain’s pavements as part of its latest round of reforms.
Speaking at his weekly press conference, David Cameron told journalists “I appreciate the sentimental attachment which many people have to pavements, but we have to face up to the facts.
“The world has changed, and at a time when we’re more dependent on our cars than ever, Britain can no longer afford to restrict access to large sections of our public highways as we have in the past. Over the next few weeks contractors for the Highways Agency will begin digging up pavements in towns and cities across the country, replacing them with tarmac which will finally allow cars access to the full width of the road.”
The Commuter’s Alliance expressed strong support for the move. “Frankly, a reform like this is long overdue” said a spokesman for the grassroots [Really? Aren’t we meant to fact-check stuff like this? –Ed.] organisation. “For too long our transport infrastructure has been held back by the dead hand of the pedestrian lobby. It’s high time we had a roads system fit for the 21st century. I mean, who walks anywhere in this day and age? Apart from a few poor people, obviously.”
Many groups expressed anger at what they saw as the betrayal of a promise made by David Cameron before the 2010 general election that “Britain’s pavements are safe in my hands.” Many have claimed that his proposals will only benefit the motoring lobby and construction firms, many of whom have strong financial links to the Tory party. Representatives of several such firms were recently reported to have been wined and dined at Chequers, but senior Conservatives have strongly denied any link between this and the government’s plans.
Labour leader Ed Miliband said he believed the proposals to be “ill-thought-out and reckless.”
“This government is getting rid of too many pavements, too fast,” he told assembled reporters on a pavement near his home. “We in the Labour Party have always made it very clear what we’d do about this issue if we were in power.
“We haven’t, you say? Oh.”
Miliband was in turn attacked by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, however, who claimed the Leader of the Opposition was “in the pocket of organised pedestrianism”.
“Just as the Conservatives have their rich motorist backers, Labour is totally under the thumb of the pedestrian movement. The Liberal Democrats on the other hand have no need of roads, as our support evaporated years ago. We are the only true one-nation party in Britain.”
Opponents of the plan have expressed concern that pedestrians’ lives could be endangered if it goes ahead. One road safety charity described the proposals as “utter madness”, and argued that they were likely to cause road deaths to rise, a claim dismissed by the Department for Transport.
“I can assure you that we’ve carried out a thorough assessment of the risks involved in implementing this reform, and we’re confident that this move will safeguard the future of Britain’s roads for generations to come,” said a DfT press officer, speaking exclusively to The Third Estate.
“There’s simply no reason to think that allowing two-tonne lumps of metal to drive at 30 miles an hour with no barrier between them and squishy fragile pedestrians could possibly be dangerous. Claiming otherwise is absurd scaremongering.
“What’s that? Will we be releasing our risk assessment to the public? Well that depen – ooh look, a squirrel!”
The presence or absence of the squirrel could not be verified at time of going to press.
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