21st Century Vision

Detaining children

Readers of this blog will be aware that we are sometimes critical of the working of our democracy and the parliamentary process. There is another side however, and today we give extracts from a speech by Diane Abbott, Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, made on 20th November but not reported as widely as it deserves.

Today is universal children’s day. It is also the anniversary of the 1959 declaration of the rights of the child and of the 1989 convention on the rights of the child. It therefore seems a suitable day to try to bring the attention of Ministers to bear on one of the most tragic and socially excluded groups of children in Britain in 2007—children in immigration detention. Such children are uniquely vulnerable, partly because of the media climate around immigration and asylum, so it is possible to treat them in a way in which the state would not treat other children in this country. Children in immigration detention are vulnerable because, as we all know, when party leaders consult the polls, they find over and over again that one of the issues that people are most concerned about is immigration, asylum and borders. The Government have chosen to meet that fear and the concern reflected in opinion polls with an increasingly draconian system of immigration control.

This group of children is also uniquely vulnerable because who speaks for them? I know, because I have spoken to Ministers about this, that Ministers get constant pressure from Labour MPs in marginal seats who are worried about public opinion on immigration, and MPs who are calling for ever stricter and more draconian regimes... That is why this group of children is uniquely exposed and uniquely vulnerable.

I remind colleagues that when the question of detaining children originally came up, in the 1998 White Paper entitled “Fairer, Faster and Firmer”, the Government were saying that families should not normally be detained for more than a few days and only if they were due for removal. The starting position was that the detention of children and their families would be the exception rather than the rule and would last a few days at most. That was the basis on which MPs put the legislation through the House. The position now is that children are being detained in detention centres for up to three months and beyond. I shall come to the facts of the situation later in my remarks, but if people think about it, it is extraordinary that one of the wealthiest liberal democracies in the world should find itself locking up children arbitrarily for indefinite periods. We came to that position as a result of media and political pressure ...

Let me begin to talk about the conditions in which the children are held. There are general issues that make those conditions deplorable. The first general issue that makes the detention of children for immigration purposes deplorable is the arbitrary nature of the detention process. I ask hon. Members to reflect on the fact that a child who has committed a criminal offence and is put in prison, who is serving a sentence at Her Majesty’s pleasure—that is how sentencing is termed for children under a certain age—has more rights than a child held in immigration detention and is dealt with in a more transparent way. Immigration detention is not ordered or sanctioned by a court; it is an administrative power. People are not being detained because they have committed a criminal offence. That means that there is a lack of transparency and accountability ...

I should like to allow colleagues to hear the voices of children in detention, because in the debate on this issue—which is driven by concerns about polling, pressures from MPs and the latest front page of the Daily Express, among other things—not enough attention is paid to the voices of children. The Children’s Commissioner for England visited Yarl’s Wood in 2005. His report said many things about what he saw, including one thing that I thought disturbing: “During our visit to Yarl’s Wood, we spoke to a number of children”... “Not one of these children had any clear idea or, in the case of some children, any idea at all, of why they were detained at Yarl’s Wood.” It is one thing to say that a robust immigration control system requires the detention of children, but what immigration control system requires the detention of young children who do not know why they are there or what will happen to them?

A Save the Children report quoted the mother of a detained child: “After the detention Michael was in a bad way. The bedwetting was a problem again and he had nightmares. He wouldn’t go upstairs without me. At 9 pm when I took him to bed, I had to go to bed as well because he wouldn’t let me leave...Michael was afraid of the police coming again. He was always afraid.”

To read Diane Abbot's speech in full, click here

The checks are in the post

Ministers love to pontificate on the deficiencies of governance in Third World countries, so it is only fair that the deficiencies of governance in this country should come under public scrutiny - and haven't they just, following the appalling loss of the personal data of 25 million people.

The question of course arises: whose fault is it? Who gets to carry the can? We can rule out the possibility of ministerial resignations (see the blog of October 25th) and the head of HMRC has already (most unusually for them!) done the honourable thing, so it's all his fault - right? Well maybe.

Hamish McRae in the Independent makes some telling points about the proliferation of tax regulations and the disastrous idea of trying to merge the Inland Revenue with H.M Customs and Excise - two huge institutions with very different cultures and ways of doing business. But even before that merger the Inland Revenue was out of control. Mention them (or, now, HMRC) to my accountant and you'll get a litany of complaints about their shortcomings that will go on for at least half an hour. He is, perhaps, more outspoken than most accountants, but I imagine he is not the only one with complaints.

The bottom line is that the Inland Revenue had lost sight of the fact that it is a public service, and HMRC continues in the same vein. Typical was an incident 3 or 4 years ago when - despite having sent my return in at least twice - I was doorstepped by an IR official demanding to know why they hadn't recived one. In due course I went in person to the local tax office to deliver a third copy; at the desk I asked for a receipt, only to be told, in belligerent tones, that they no longer issued receipts. Instead I was handed (from a high pile) a letter explaining why not - which boiled down to "people who get receipts can cause trouble, so we aren't going to give them any". The man at the desk - clearly picked for his physical presence - was aggressive and arrogant. His attitude said clearly that any taxpayer was, by definition, a fraudster who wasn't going to put one over on him. This is the public face the IR wished to display, and I have no reason to suppose that HMRC is any different. It is an attitude that permeates all their relations with the public.

It used not to be like that. The Inland Revenue has never, of course, been loved, but there used to be an acceptance of the idea of innocent until proven guilty. The change is one that has permeated down from government, from ministers who increasingly see the public not as their democratic masters but as awkward customers to be kept firmly in their place. Hence the erosion of civil liberties, the growth of the nanny state and the eagerness for ever more comprehensive databases and for ID cards. The present fiasco has at least put a dent in the plans for those unwanted, expensive items.

Will it also make HMRC wake up to its true place in society? I'm not holding my breath.

Moving on in Iraq?

Is the worst over in Iraq? Has the surge worked, and are we stumbling towards the emergence of a post-Saddam settlement that achieves the main goals of the coalition? Has democracy finally asserted itself, put Al Qaeda to flight and seen the point of making common cause with the US and Britain?

By some indicators you might think so. Coalition casualties are down sharply, in the British case dramatically. But then the British have effectively withdrawn, albeit to bases still within Iraq. As regards civilian casualties, the best estimates now suggest there have been over a million deaths as a result of the invasion, while Iraq Body Count has this to say about recent trends -

"It is important to place the events of 2007 in context. Levels of violence reached an all-time high in the last six months of 2006. Only in comparison to that could the first half of 2007 be regarded as an improvement. Despite any efforts put into the surge, the first six months of 2007 was still the most deadly first six months for civilians of any year since the invasion."

If there has been a significant reduction in civilian deaths since then it will be some time before research confirms it, and mortality aside, Iraq remains a deeply damaged society at every level, political, economic and psychological, with childhood trauma likely to reverberate for decades into the future.

One reason for the changing level and pattern of violence is undoubtedly that many Iraqis are taking stock of this catastrophe and looking to a post-invasion world. The surge will soon be over and Bush will soon have gone, so why fight now?

But behind all this is the social disaster, with perhaps two million Iraqis having fled the country and a similar number of internal refugees. Ethnic cleansing, encouraged by the divisive policies of the coalition, has done its work, and left the future government of Iraq a task of the most extreme difficulty. And as regards our part in this, the Refugee Council remarks that -

“We are witnessing a massive humanitarian crisis in Iraq, with a movement of refugees bigger than any in the last fifty years. The UK, as a leading country in the international community, is failing to live up to its responsibility. Instead, it continues to focus on removing relatively small numbers of refused Iraqi asylum seekers, at great cost, so as to meet Home Office targets. Quite apart from being very dangerous, this is a total misallocation of resources. Ministers need to get their priorities in order.”

Bags I save the environment!

Things are beginning to move in the right direction in at least one small way. The movement to ban the free giveaway plastic bags so beloved of supermarkets is gathering pace. A couple of villages have already gone plastic-free, and on Tuesday the massed ranks of the London Boroughs voted unanimously to join them. It will take an act of Parliament to implement, but a private bill will shortly be put forward by Westminster Council.

The supermarkets won't go down without a fight, of course - bags provide almost free advertising - but they do have a problem in that they are trying to colour themselves green in the public's perception. Defending the plastic bag while appearing not to do so will require some fancy footwork, but I have every confidence they can manage it.

The public ought to have a similar problem, of course, as a substantial proportion of us describe ourselves as green/environmentally aware/active recyclers/you name it in opinion polls while actual statistics of green activity tell a very different story. But few of us are under individual scrutiny in the same way as Tesco or Sainsbury.

Being environmentally aware myself (well that's my story, and I'm sticking to it!) I scan the shopping trolleys of my fellow shoppers, and their actions at the checkout. I don't see many bringing their own bags - though at least I am no longer the only one - and all too often I see someone exiting with a trolley piled with 7 or 8 bags, each with only a few items in. I don't really understand that, environmental considerations apart: surely, when the time comes to transfer the booty from car boot to kitchen it's easier to carry 2 or 3 bags than to try to disentangle the handles of 7 or 8? Even with only two I often find I've picked up one bag by only one side.

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, though - between us we get through a staggering 13 billion bags a year. That's over 200 for every man, woman and child on these islands. The consequences for landfill and for wildlife (who are sometimes unwise enough to try to eat them) are devastating.

It doesn't have to be that way, though, and maybe soon it won't. Free plastic bags at the checkout are a rarity on the continent. Ireland put a tax on them and saw usage drop 90% virtually overnight. The switch to bringing your own is easy enough; you can already acquire long-life bags at most if not all the supermarkets, then all you have to do is remember to take them with you. It's an easily acquired habit, to go with remembering to take your wallet; nobody seems to find that too difficult.

Proliferation? No problem, we'll just grab them

For nearly forty years our government and those of the other nuclear powers have flouted their obligations under the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), which commits them to "negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament". As we have pointed out here (26th February), the renewal of the British Trident submarine-based missile system further undermined the process envisaged in the treaty. Our parliament calmly took a decision which endangered us all and paid no regard to whether our children would inherit a safer world.

In their arcane game-theory calculations, nuclear strategists analyse rational responses to threats and opportunities. Should we launch our long-range missiles "on warning"? Can we lower the threshold so that - to use a phrase beloved of ministers whose connection with the actual battlefield is limited to seeing it in the cinema - we can deploy short-range weapons "in theatre"? Would a "counter-force" strike (i.e, one against military targets) mean a "counter-value" response (i.e, against cities) using missiles surviving the first strike?

What seems to escape the attention of these planners of death on a scale that must be the envy of Lucifer is that calculations based on the thinking of rational actors assume that government is stable and rational actors in control. Of course it has dawned on them that a criminal or terrorist organization might try to produce a dirty bomb (one using conventional explosives to disperse radioactive material). For the rest the nuclear powers can only make strenuous efforts to deny nuclear capacity to state actors presumed to be non-rational, which in practice means that they are hostile to us (Libya, Iran) or to our allies (North Korea).

And yet if we look at the history of the nuclear states themselves, stability is not exactly their leading characteristic, with several having undergone major political - even revolutionary - upheavals. The Soviet Union collapsed and for a period experienced near anarchy; in South Africa the nuclear-armed Apartheid regime fell to pieces; North Korea is on the verge of widespread famine, if not worse; and Israel fights endless wars to survive as a racially based state.

Largely because they wanted to point them at each other and not at us, India and Pakistan were allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, and the dominant powers comforted themselves with the same facile assumption that rational actors would always be in control. Now that turmoil in Pakistan has once again exposed the illusions of the nuclear elite, what do they propose to do? Well according to the Washington Post (11th November), they are considering moving in to take control of the country's nuclear arsenal. "Former officials" concede however that any attempt by the US to seize the weapons could be "very messy".

So there you have it, the modern approach to non-proliferation. First behave as if non-proliferation doesn't apply to you, while allowing your friends to acquire nuclear weapons. Then, when things go wrong, move in to confiscate them, even if it might turn "messy".

Just one question: wouldn't it have been better to implement the NPT in the first place?

Click here for the Washington Post article in full

You can't eat money

Last week we related the government's slightly-less-than-adequate response to the challenge of climate change. To be fair to them they are doing better than most other governments - which tells you a whole lot about the general standard of governance in the world, or maybe about the inadequacies of democracy.

Governments, of course, are not the only ones facing up (or not) to the challenge of climate change. Big business is right there too. And if I likened the response of the UK government to countermanding the "Hard a-port!" order on the Titanic, then some companies seem to be actively seeking out icebergs to aim their ships at.

Take palm oil, for instance. All the supermarkets are queuing up to get more of the stuff, as well as food giants like Unilever, Procer & Gamble and Nestlé, and now it is being hyped as a bio-fuel to replace petrol as the oil runs out. Isn't that good, you may ask - surely replacing petrol with renewable palm oil is a blow struck against climate change? Actually no. It's a weighty blow struck in favour of climate change.

Palm trees need space to grow, and there isn't much space left on the planet, at least not space where the ground is fertile enough to grow anything, so something else has to be cleared out of the way. What can we do without? How about those useless virgin forests? Or swampy peatland? No use to anyone! They'll do!

So in Indonesia, where most of the new supplies of palm oil come from, forests are being cut down like there's no tomorrow (rather appropriately, as there probably won't be). 1.4 million hectares so far in Riau province alone, with another 3 million already scheduled to be turned into cooking oil. Indonesia is also home to 22 million hectares of peatland, much of it also in Riau - or it was: half of it is gone already, cleared and drained. Riau's peatlands are eight metres deep in places, and contain the highest concentration of carbon stored per acre of anywhere in the world - where they still exist. The destruction of them already accounts for nearly 4% of all global greenhouse gas emissions.

The passengers need ice for their drinks. Helmsman! Aim for that big white thing over there and see if you can slice off a few cubes.

Open that door!

It has always been an assumption of what might be called the Western political consensus that democracies will be on "our" side; and also that history itself tends towards universal democracy through a virtuous circle whereby free trade generates not only commerce in goods and services but also the emergence of middle classes with middle-class aspirations just like ours. These bourgeois groups will have every reason to support a menu of human rights, political freedoms and laissez-faire economics, so giving another turn to the ascending helix. It is the Whig interpretation of history - the idea of a steady accumulation of rights and freedoms as the leitmotif of our British island story - projected onto a global level.

Of course the time it takes for the benefits of this process to make themselves apparent to others has sometimes seemed too long. As the future US president Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1907, "the doors of the nation which are closed [to trade] must be battered down", an approach well illustrated by US proconsul Paul Bremer's remark in Baghdad in May 2003 that "Iraq is open for business". Western idealism, as neoconservatism has realised, is impatient to bring liberty to others who will then thank us for it - and also become more like us.

Almost by definition, anyone who resists or criticises the open door is a friend to tyranny. Anyone who points out for example that exposing weaker economies to competition from the immense accumulation of capital and technological expertise of the West is a formula for domination must somehow be opposed to liberty. To suggest further that the very purpose of opening doors in this way is to facilitate corporate penetration into every corner of every activity on the planet is to make oneself an enemy of Western values.

Strange, then, to find who are the real allies of dictatorship. Last week it was the king of Saudi Arabia and his entourage parading down the Mall and dining with the queen. These standard bearers of democratic values in the Middle East - who also happen to be such excellent customers for our military hardware, even if it takes a little bribery to oil the wheels - are our stalwart partners. This week Western support for General Musharraf in Pakistan turned from farce to tragedy and back with bewildering speed. It doesn't matter that his military dictatorship is now eight years old, that he has repressed the opposition and arrested the supreme court judges: all will be OK if he just "takes off his uniform" and holds "elections" in January.

And why do "we" support them, just as we condone the Israeli oppression in Palestine? Why do we not excoriate them all, as we are pleased to do with Robert Mugabe?

Can it be that like the blood-soaked horrors of Vietnam and Iraq, or like the savage repression in Indonesia in the 60s or Latin America in the 70s and 80s, they are all part of the process of holding open the door, and that what matters is the opportunity for business, not the democracy which is supposed to be its consequence?

This year, next year, sometime, never

The last couple of weeks have brought a series of doom-laden stories indicating that global warming is happening faster and/or with greater inevitability than we had thought, and another series of government responses to it.

It started the week before last with a report which should have made banner headlines across all the front pages, but was actually tucked away in small paragraphs on inside pages: that scientists had found that over a ten-year period the amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in the waters of the north Atlantic has halved. That means that the oceans - or at least that bit of them - are no longer soaking up some of the excess CO2 we keep pumping into the atmosphere, but actually releasing some more. We're relying heavily on oceanic uptake, so this is seriously bad news.

The other carbon sink we rely on is the world's forest, but there was a report just today that the northern forests aren't doing their assigned job either. Forest fires are destroying forests and releasing CO2 almost as fast as new growth soaks it up.

A couple of days after the north Atlantic story we had the British Antarctic Survey reporting that the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere was 35% higher than we thought it was. That makes the IPCC's forecast of temperature rises this century of up to 6.4 degrees "seem unduly optimistic".  Given that 6.4 degrees would be a death sentence for the human race (see the blog of April 19th, "No hiding place") that is very scary.

A week ago the United Nations Environment Programme reported that the failure of governments to prioritise responses to climate change was "putting humanity at risk", then a couple of days later respected environmentalist James Lovelock declared that it was already too late to tackle climate change.

So what is the government doing about it? Re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. They started by admitting that they were actually retreating from the target they set for themselves - an extremely modest one, given the seriousness of the threat - to increase the proportion of energy generated from renewables to 20% by 2020. Then we had a report that food miles by air have increased by 31% in the last year - not actually by government fiat, but for lack of any restraint.

We did get a "strengthening" of the Climate Change Bill, but it will still include targets only every five years, and no legal responsibility on ministers to achieve them. Given the government's track record of setting itself modest targets then abolishing them as soon as they begin to look difficult to meet, this does not inspire confidence.

Then just a couple of days ago we had Ruth Kelly announcing a transport plan that's all about maximising economic competitiveness, and includes road building and further expansion of aviation. It beggars belief.

My metaphor was wrong. This is not re-arranging the deckchairs as the Titanic heads for the iceberg - it is countermanding the order of "Hard a-port!" to "Steady as she goes". The Titanic didn't have enough lifeboats. Spaceship Earth doesn't have any.