Giving Len McCluskey the space to outline a stirring call to arms to a battered union movement seemed like a good, progressive move, but then everyone’s favourite liberal rag has steamed ahead with a staunch piece of anti-union propaganda.

I’m going to assume (along with others) that this is the work of Julian Glover, because there’s a smug, self-satisfied air of self-proclaimed leftiness, an assumption that ‘everyone knows’ that strike ballots are good, Blair was bad and the Coalition is the bad guy. (All very strange from a paper which supported Blair, then the Lib Dems). But I’d be willing to forgive and forget, if it weren’t for this vile diatribe:

“The labour movement will not be able to defend and renew what it cherishes if it follows Mr McCluskey up the blind alley of deficit denial, indiscriminate opposition to all cuts, and a programme of strikes which large parts of the country will see as an attack on rather than a defence of the public realm. The labour movement is now in a minority. A large majority of the public are not in unions and do not vote Labour.”

“There are millions in this majority who nevertheless feel threatened by cuts, who fear for the future of the economy and who think the government is too doctrinaire – but who do not approve of increasing deficits, who accept that sacrifices have to made (and shared fairly), who approve of the trade union laws of the 1980s (even if not of Mrs Thatcher), who think Labour can learn positive as well as negative lessons from Mr Blair, and who are not excited by battling the police or a new wave of strikes. Mr McCluskey’s priority ought to be to reach out to these people, showing he understands their lives and looking for innovative ways of addressing their anxieties. Instead, like a true Bourbon, he sadly sounds as if he stopped thinking in 1979. What a waste.”

Woah. Let’s start with the declining union membership.The reason that union membership is so low is not just because of anti-union laws or the decline of industry, but also because of a lack of militancy within the movement. By beating the drums, McCluskey is getting people to join. Union membership is on the rise.

As for the voting public, Richard Seymour has argued well that if we take into account the fact that the government had to be formed through coalition, alongside decreasing voter turn-out, then the Tory vote has actually never been lower than it is now. And arguabley those who don’t turn out to vote are, in general, alienated Labour voters. Again, a more militant party would increase the Labour vote.

There are two ways of reading the second paragraph. One is that McCluskey needs to find ways of talking to people who aren’t yet convinced of the left’s arguments against the Coalition government. But the other is as a call to ignore the left’s counter-arguments and, whatever happens, never, ever to take strike action.

Of course, Glover wants a nice reasonable end to all this nuisance. Not strike action, but rather something innovative. Like what Julian? Asking the boss nicely to not cut everyone’s wages? Letter writing to your local riot police? Perhaps all the Guardian interns could be subcontracted to Acas, as a gesture of solidarity between moderates.

The references to ‘deficit denial’ show that Glover is unwilling to read any of his own paper’s content on disaster capitalism, and the repeating of the Cameron-esque ‘sacrifices to be made’ is evidence that no one in the Guardian editorial office is paying attention to Brooker or Rowson’s satire. And the dig at being ‘excited’ by battling the police shows that they’re certainly not reading what Paul Lewis and Matthew Taylor have been reporting from the streets. Frankly, it’s quite repulsive to know that people are up for treating police violence against protesters so mockingly.

I just hope that some of the better Guardianistas read what their editors want the readership to believe, and how low their opinion of your reporting is. And when the chips fall, I hope you all go on strike, just the way they don’t want you to. It’s perhaps fitting that the editorial begins with the name of one of the most notorious traitors of the French revolution.

Today’s Guardian seemed very keen that we be morally outraged that wealthy tourists are visiting earthquake-stricken Haiti in cruise ships. The precise justification for this disgust, however, isn’t really very clear. I’m happy to concede that one thing highlighted in the story – the fact that the Labadee resort where the Independence of the Seas has moored is essentially a privatised stretch of the country’s coastline, from which ordinary Haitians are barred – is clearly quite worrying. And intuitively there’s clearly something we find pretty disquieting about rich white people sunning themselves in a tropical paradise while untold thousands of dead and injured are being rescued from earthquake rubble a few short miles away, but, well…why? Would it be less bad if the Independence of the Seas had instead stopped off a short distance down the coast in the Dominican Republic (the nation which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti)? Or should it have gone to a neighbouring island? How close is too close when you’re on holiday near the site of a natural disaster? And does it just apply to natural disasters? What about places where people live their entire lives on the brink of starvation, completely in the absence of earthquakes or other similar hazards? Is it OK to holiday anywhere near there?

Image: adactio/flickr

There’s undeniably something deeply wrong with a world where some endure terrible suffering and deprivation while others essentially live lives of luxury. I’d say agreement with that statement is a bare minimum requirement for anyone to be able to plausibly describe themselves as even vaguely of the left. But what the hell is the moral relevance of the geographical distribution of the rich and poor? I don’t see how rich people happening to temporarily be located closer to the extremely poor makes the global distribution of wealth any less acceptable, any more than moving said rich people further away again would magically make the world we live in more socially just.

Image: United Nations Development Program/flickr

As with so many other news stories, this one, while it purports to be about the tragedy in Haiti, is All About Us. I suspect that most of us, regardless of political allegiance, feel deep down that there’s something deeply unjust about the level of global poverty and deprivation when we in the rich world have so much (and, more pertinently, could potentially do so much to help – through campaigning and donating to charity). But, most of the time, we shut it out. Haiti, as I mentioned in a previous post, was in a pretty horrendous state well before the earthquake, and that fact didn’t do much to stir our consciences. But when that poverty is made immeasurably worse by a natural catastrophe, and when we see pictures of rich white People Like Us holidaying just next door to the disaster area, then the injustice becomes a little harder to ignore. So we avoid facing up to it by working up a nice bit of moral outrage to direct at the cruise passengers, when their only crime is being as privileged as us in a part of the world that’s closer to the devastation than we are.

(Once again, if you want to donate money to help victims of the earthquake in Haiti, you can do so at the Disasters Emergency Committee website)

Victory! The injunction’s been lifted, and the Guardian is allowed to report the Parliamentary question for itself. Good work everyone.

Earlier this evening The Guardian was served with a gagging order forbidding it from reporting parliamentary business. To quote the article in the paper itself:

Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

The right to report on what’s said and done in Parliament is traditionally seen as pretty important in a democracy, so in an attempt to aid transparency, the Third Estate can exclusively report that the question is (probably) this one:

61 N: Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

Trafigura, of course, is the company that was recently revealed to be not only dumping toxic waste into the sea near Ivory Coast, but also trying very hard to make sure no one found out. Why they and Carter Ruck would be so keen for this question not to be revealed I’m not sure, (especially as it’s clearly publicly available), but they have a history of this kind of behaviour.

All the questions due to be asked in Parliament from tomorrow (Tuesday) onwards can be found here, so feel free to have a browse through the rest of them – it’s possible I guessed wrong, though I think it’s unlikely. And please, please re-post this – the more places publish it, the harder it is to justify a gagging order and the worse Carter Ruck and Trafigura will look.

Edit: This guy found it too (and a bit sooner than me I think).

Edit edit: You can download a copy of the Minton Report, which Trafigura is so keen you don’t read, from Wikileaks here. (H/t Chicken Yoghurt)

You know that you’re a bit behind the times when you’re blogging about an article that was published almost a month ago, but I’ve been busy recently, and was so incensed by this nasty little article I feel I should write something. On July 11 the Guardian Graduate section put out a piece about networking and finding graduate jobs. We are told by the Guardian that in times like these, when there just aren’t that many jobs around, and there are tonnes of new graduates, the best approach is to network, to get in with people you know, rather than sending off tonnes of applications. Well yes, I mean I’m not going to pretend that the world of work is not horribly nepotistic, but maybe we should be thinking about the wider social consequences messages like this have.

Of course social mobility should not be necessary, but in a highly stratified society such as our own, it is something we can fight for. It is something that may at least start to bring about some equality even if that equality is not systemic. But the problem with networking is that it does the opposite. If you happen to be the child of some posh liberal guardian readers, and spend your time hobnobbing with media types over quiche and claret, the networking agenda means that you are more likely to find your feet somewhere warm and comfortable than if you spend your evenings having a few mates round with a few cans of stella and a take-away pizza. There is nothing clean or reasonable about networking, when the reality is that it simply means opening opportunities for those with one background over another.

And isn’t this what was fought against 30 years ago? Just because your old boys network now has women, just because they didn’t go to public school, just because they have some stories about 1968, it does not mean that in networking you aren’t excluding others from jobs. We have fought the case for fair access to universities, and yet people who proclaim themselves to be liberals cut off all of the benefits that may be gained as soon as the degrees are handed out. So maybe, if you think you’re a little bit left wing, and you’re considering exploiting your contacts, or even worse if you’re setting up contacts for your kids, you should have a long hard think about those, who work bloody hard, who you’re screwing over in the process.

But the consequences of a networking society run deeper. The political abhorrence has a nasty personal obverse. Now, maybe I’m old fashioned, but I’m quite interested in people because they’re people. I quite like talking to people because they might have something interesting to say. But all of this is now undercut by the notion that people only enter into social interactions for purely self-interested reasons. Yes, I’d like to get to know you, and no, I don’t want you to try to get me a job. Is that all you consider yourself to mean? Is that all you consider my approach to you to be about? All relationships become a practical matter of self-interest, none are permitted to remain outside of the sphere of pervasive networking.

And so I appeal to you to throw out this idea of the network, to take a bottle of tippex to your address books, taking out all those repugnant souls whose numbers you wrote down because “they might be useful” leaving only those people who wouldn’t mind sitting down for a pint with. I appeal to all those who engage in networking to remember that the system you are buying into is essentially a constriction on the life possibilities of the poor, and of people who have been born into poor families. Just because everyone might be doing it, or because the Guardian tells you that it’s ok, it doesn’t mean you are innocent.