The Tegucigalpa-San Jose agreement set out the priority of returning to constitutional order, and requires the need to “return the holder of executive power to its pre-June 28 state through to January 27, 2010, which marks the end of the term of the current government.” At the time of the agreement, Hillary Clinton said:

“I cannot think of another example of a country in Latin America that…overcame such a crisis through negotiation and dialogue.”

But the situation is so fast moving that within a very short space of time things had turned around again. The illegal government of Roberto Micheletti refused to implement the accord, excluding Zelaya from the interim government.

These events have brought international condemnation. Spain’s Secretary of State for Latin America, Juan Pablo de Laiglesia, said, for example:

“I believe that there is a flagrant breach of the agreement…It seems clear that the government of national unity and reconciliation…is a mere continuation of the situation following the coup. [It] “at first sight appears to be contrary to the spirit and even the letter of the agreement”.

Zelaya himself now says “The accord is dead.” An election in these conditions could not be democratic and would be a farce. It should not be given a veneer of respectability. The President of the country has been holed up in the Brazilian embassy, which has been surrounded and repeatedly harassed by the military. There has been ongoing repression and political violence. An agreement to restore normality and democracy has been ripped up. Zelaya’s supporters are calling upon the international community to refuse to legitimise the situation including by not recognising elections that look likely to take place in these impossible circumstances on 29 November.

If Hillary Clinton and President Obama wish to usher in a new phase in America’s relations with their southern neighbours then a clear and unambiguous refusal to go along with this charade is essential. The grave danger is that the opposite may happen.

The British government gained respect around the world for the strong line it took in the hours following the coup. We now need ministers to work with their counterparts in other countries to completely isolate Micheletti’s regime. If Micheletti’s de facto administration is able to ignore international condemnation it will send a powerful and dangerous signal to anti-democratic forces in Latin America that there is still space for military coups to subvert democracy in the region. That would be an enormous step backwards.

As ever, for the most regular updates on this matter, including practical support for Honduran democracy, visit the website of the Emergency Committee Against the Coup in Honduras.

* Originally published on Labourlist, 8 November 2009. For the original article click here.

Yet the government under Roberto Micheletti installed by the coup leaders remains in place, however unpopular it may be. Democratic forces ranged against the coup in Honduras deserve greater support if the political situation in central and Latin America is not to be thrown backwards to a period when coups and right wing military dictatorships were commonplace.
 
This Wednesday the chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party Tony Lloyd will be among those speaking at a public meeting*, organised by the emergency committee against the coup in Honduras, at the Unite trade union – discussing how to further extend international support for a return to democracy in Honduras. Labour members should take the issue up as a case of internationalism of the most important kind. In such situations interntional support can be decisive.
 
The situation in Honduras is extremely tense. Against the claims of the coup government Zelaya managed to return to his country where he is currently based in the Brazilian embassy, itself now the focus of state-sponsored attack. Zelaya’s return is intolerable to the coup leadership which has responded with repression and violence. Simultaneously they have spent thousands of dollars to mobilise right wing opinion in Washington.

President Zelaya was first kidnapped by the military, removed from his home by force, prevented from communicating with the outside world for several hours and then violently expelled from Honduras.
 
As Greg Grandin reports in The Nation Amnesty International has documented a “sharp rise in police beatings, mass arrests of demonstrators, and intimidation of human rights defenders” since Zelaya’s return to Tegucigalpa. Protests have been met with security forces rounding up demonstrators, holding some of the detained in football stadia; there are reports of people being tortured, burned with cigarettes and sodomized by batons; troops have harassed the Brazilian embassy with tear gas, other weapons and sonic devices. Over a dozen people – all opposed to the coup – have been murdered since Zelaya’s overthrow, according to numbers released by COFADEH (Comité de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras). “Honduras risks spiraling into a state of lawlessness, where police and military act with no regard for human rights or the rule of law,” said Susan Lee, Americas director at Amnesty International.
 
The coup is linked up to US political forces with a long track record of ruthlessly destabilising central and Latin America. The New York Times last week exposed the lobbying campaign working to support the illegal government. The coup, the New York Times reported, has “drawn support from several former high-ranking officials who were responsible for setting United States policy in Central America in the 1980s and ’90s, when the region was struggling to break with the military dictatorships and guerrilla insurgencies that defined the cold war.” They include figures such as Otto Reich, who was Bush’s ambassador to Venezuela at the time of the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez, which ended in failure, but which Reich backed; and Roger Noriega, co-author of the Helms-Burton Act, which brutally tightened the stranglehold of the illegal blockade against Cuba.
 
Zelaya’s crime in the eyes of the Republican right is no doubt his programme of intervention into the economy to improve the conditions of the majority, as his daughter documented in the New Statesman last month. 
 
The problem remains that while the US has joined international condemnation it has not taken decisive measures to turn that rhetoric into reality – unlike many governments in the region.
Forces in central and Latin America that favour right wing military coups to block the will of the people look primarily to the USA: they know they could not survive without significant support and political sponsorship from powerful forces to their north.
 
The Obama Presidency can and should decisively break with the past by facing down domestic right wing pressure and taking firm action to delegitimise and further isolate a coup it itself says is illegal.
 
* Restore democracy in Honduras – No more dictators in Latin America; End all US financial support to the coup. Speakers include Ken Livingstone, Tony Lloyd MP (Chair, Parliamentary Labour Party), Sally Hunt (TUC General Council International Spokesperson), Colin Burgon MP.

* This article first appeared on Labourlist, 12 October 2009. The original can be found here.

Just imagine the fury-filled pages that would have dominated London’s Evening Standard under the editorship of Veronica Wadley if the mayor in question was Ken Livingstone, and consider how much of the rest of the media would have swung in behind to pursue these stories under those circumstances.

Yet the mayor in question is not Livingstone, during whose time as mayor no such serious events occurred, but Boris Johnson. And, in a glorious irony, one of the people involved in the latest of these cases is Wadley herself whom Boris Johnson is attempting to place at the head of the Arts Council for London.

It comes in the same week that Johnson’s former Deputy Mayor Ian Clement pleaded guilty to fraud, for which he has received a suspended prison sentence.

It is an indication of how the media cards are currently stacked in favour of the Tories that Johnson does not receive a rougher ride.

The Times reported this morning:

“Johnson has been accused of breaching rules on public appointments after trying to appoint a key ally to a top London arts job…

“The appointment was resisted by Liz Forgan, chairwoman of the Arts Council in England, who took part in the shortlisting process and has suggested the appointment was effectively cronyism. The ‘appointment is based on reasons other than selection of the best candidate for the post,’ she wrote in a letter to Mick Elliott, culture director at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It has been blocked by the Government on the grounds that the process breached the Nolan rules, which prevent political interference in the public appointments process.”

From the end of 2007 through the whole of the first half of last year Wadley’s Standard waged a campaign to denigrate and smear Ken Livingstone’s administration in the minds of Londoners. It relentlessly operated on the principle that if it threw enough dirt, no matter how baseless, some of it would stick at least in the weeks until the election. It could not last much longer as it could not stand up to serious scrutiny. It was a huge abuse of media power.

Day after day for months the Standard devoted pages of copy and thousands of billboards to its onslaught. The Tory Assembly member Richard Barnes claimed there was a tide of corruption.

But Livingstone’s period in office in fact contrasts sharply with the actual, conceded, fraud of one of Boris Johnson’s senior Conservative appointments, the naked cronyism of his actions over Wadley, and his other disastrous errors of judgement in his senior appointments.

Despite the Standard’s activities, in Labour’s worst night in decades Ken Livingstone performed better in London than Labour nationally. Yet whilst the Standard’s campaign did not win it for Boris Johnson, that cannot justify its low tactics.

So counter-productive was the impact of Wadley’s leadership on the Standard that her replacement as editor launched an advertising campaign to say sorry on behalf of the paper for being negative and out of touch.

Now a balance sheet based on reality, rather than fiction and smears, can be drawn up.

There is the real and admitted fraud in the case of Ian Clement. Boris Johnson himself signed off Clement’s expense claims.

Then there is the resignation of Boris Johnson’s deputy Ray Lewis, caught lying to the media that he was a magistrate, and after allegations about his time as a clergyman.

Johnson’s appointee for the Olympic Games, Carphone Warehouse co-founder David Ross, was forced to resign from his responsibilities after admitting he had not informed National Express board members that he’d used his shares in the business as security for a multi-million pound loan.

Johnson became mired in a controversy over the way he tried to appoint his then planning adviser – now his de facto chief of staff – Simon Milton, and had to go back to square one.

Finally there is the series of other resignations of the mayor’s most senior appointees.

To all this we can now add the attempt to impose his friend and political backer Veronica Wadley on the Arts Council apparently against the Nolan rules for appointments in public life and despite her having, in the words of the chair of the panel making the appointment, “almost no arts credibility.”

It is striking that the editor of the newspaper that orchestrated a months-long campaign based on trumped-up charges of cronyism to smear the Labour mayor should now be exposed as an apparently willing beneficiary of something that looks very much like cronyism from her own candidate Boris Johnson.

The Evening Standard’s smear campaign against Ken Livingstone, under the editorship of Veronica Wadley, is destined to provide a text-book case of scurrilous gutter journalism. The case of Boris Johnson’s efforts to appoint her to a post for which the most eminent members of the appointment considered her unqualified just shows how a certain class consider they are above the rules that govern mere mortals.

There is one footnote to this week’s events. Boris Johnson is reported as digging in over Wadley’s appointment, saying that he may be prepared to sit it out until another – presumably more pliable – Secretary of State can drive the appointment through after the general election, assuming the Tories win. It is an interesting sign of how Johnson believes a Tory government would operate.

* This article first appeared on Labourlist, 8/10/09. For the original click here.

“Gordon Brown’s fightback falls flat in Brent as Labour councillor defects to the Conservatives.”

Eric Pickles cannot contain himself:

“It seems like Gordon’s great fightback has already crumbled at its first hurdle. People are deserting Labour in droves as they realise the only real way of achieving positive change for the country is through a Conservative government. The Prime Minister should do everyone a favour and spare us  another eight months of  labour infighting and plotting  and call an election.”

I am sorry but the fortunes of the Prime Minister are not even vaguely tied to the activities of Cllr Francis Eniola or the antics of a defecting Labour councillor in Brent.

The Tories are forgetting their history. Labour defections to the Conservative party in Brent are nothing new, and have often proved more in the interests of the Labour party than the Tories.

Who can forget the weird and wonderful case of Poline Nyaga and Nkechi Amalu-Johnson, who defected to the brutally right wing Brent Tory group in 1991, under its leader Bob Blackman, thus handing control to them – and who then proceeded to cause mayhem in the media and in the ruling Conservative group, perhaps the most innocuous example of which was their demand that Harlesden should be renamed ‘Harlesden-upon-Paradise (Nirvana)’ ward.

Then there was the defection of Cllr Bertha Joseph in 2007, much-trumpeted by the Conservative Party at the time, but a great relief all round to many in the local Labour party.

I have followed Brent politics on and off for many years. When I started working for Ken Livingstone he was the MP for Brent East, so it is twelve or thirteen years since I had a direct interest in following the twists and turns of local politics in the borough – through Labour’s re-taking of the council under Paul Daisley, Paul’s replacement of Ken as the Brent East MP, the miserable Brent East by-election, Dawn Butler’s election as only the second ever black woman MP after Paul Boateng’s departure, Toby Harris’s time as the local Assembly member and his sad defeat in the Assemby election in 2004, the grim night when Labour lost control of Brent council (only to see the LibDems put the Tories back in power), the great votes for Ken and Navin Shah in the London elections in the area last year…but I am afraid Cllr Francis Eniola has barely even crossed my consciousness. I had to look him up to see if I could recognise him. He is no great prize for Pickles, not even locally.

Cllr Eniola declares today:

“I am genuinely convinced that I will be much better able to serve my constituents in Welsh Harp  by joining the Conservatives, under the forward thinking of David Cameron and the strong local leadership of Cllr Bob Blackman and I am very much looking forward to working with them”.

What a laugh. Blackman was one of the most ineffective Conservative members of the London Assembly until he lost his seat to Labour’s Navin Shah last year. His period as leader of Brent council in the bad old mad old days of Brent politics was a benchmark for extreme and chaotic Tory policies. Internal divisions and rows continue to be a defining characteristic of the Brent Tories.

If Eniola is even vaguely attracted to the weird and wacky world of Brent Tory politics then he is absolutely no loss to the local Labour party at all.

So don’t try to kid us that it makes even a scintilla of difference to “Gordon Brown’s fightback”.

This first appeared on Labourlist on 28th September 2009. Click here to read the original.

One minute it’s off, then it’s on, then … well, what exactly? Boris Johnson’s administration was rocked by the Evening Standard’s report – based on comments from the mayor’s own transport adviser – that Johnson may abandon his plan to axe the western extension of the congestion charge zone.

Rumours have been circulating for days that the mayor’s team was being forced to think the unthinkable: to abandon its policy of getting rid of the western extension.

Then the Standard’s Katharine Barney broke cover, having spoken to the mayor’s transport adviser. “We always wanted to remove it at the earliest possible opportunity but it was aspirational and these are difficult times,” Kulveer Ranger told the Standard. Of course, this is nonsense – it was not aspirational, it was a commitment. Johnson renewed that commitment as recently as November last year. “I want to remove this tax by 2010 and hopefully before [my emphasis]. It will be great for this part of [west] London, which is already struggling and it is absolutely the right thing to do, especially from an economical point of view.”

As the day has progressed, City Hall has backpedalled over Ranger’s comments. It is engaged in a face-saving exercise, albeit one in which it is unable to say exactly when it plans to carry out the commitment to abolish the western extension. The sense of incompetence surrounding the mayor’s office has only been reinforced by this episode.

As a result of these skirmishes, the question of the western extension and Johnson’s overall transport priorities is now rightly part of the discussion about transport finances in London. It shows that fare increases or cuts are not the only game in town. This is no bad thing when the mayor is clearly contemplating a big fare increase for this January. If London’s transport finances are under the pressure of a recession-driven dip in Tube ridership, then it cannot make sense to halve the size of the congestion zone and turn off millions of pounds in revenue.

Those who want to protect the fare-payer and continue to promote public transport should take the opportunity of this debacle to argue for a better set of priorities for transport in London. An ideological frenzy has driven Johnson’s attempts to reorganise transport policy: public transport users are hit with big fare increases while drivers, especially the most polluting drivers, are given a licence to carry on as before. This could and should be changed.

On the mayor’s own figures, the abolition of the western extension could mean about 30,000 extra vehicles in that part of London. The £25 CO₂ charge on gas-guzzlers has been cancelled. The next phase of the low emission zone, which would have seen fines on smaller lorries and some vans that did not meet higher pollution standards, has been kaiboshed. The effect of all this is that a revenue stream of about £50m to £70m would be lost from London’s transport finances as a result of the axing of the western extension. The CO₂ charge revenue was projected at £50m. That’s £100m a year in TfL’s projections wiped out.

Londoners would also pay in other ways – worse air quality, more traffic, worse conditions for cyclists and buses. Then there is the exercise of paying more to provide worse services that cause greater congestion, such as removing bendy buses from London’s bus routes and replacing them with smaller, single-decker buses.

Yet, as this report shows, the mayor does not have only two options in working out the transport budget – fare increases or cuts to investment and services. Polluters could pay more. The CO₂ charge should urgently be brought back to life. The apparent flirtation with keeping the western extension should become a full-on romance. The daft and expensive removal of the bendy bus should be dumped.

These policies would save or generate millions that would otherwise be extracted from bus, tube, DLR, overground rail and tram passengers through a smash-and-grab raid on the fare-payer. The chaos in City Hall has at least shown there are alternative routes for the mayor to take, if he wanted to.

* From Guardian Comment is Free, first published 24 September 2009. Read the original here. ]]> http://www.simonfletcher.info/boriss-transport-policy-breaks-down/feed/ 0 http://www.simonfletcher.info/fares-too-low-to-be-reasonable-says-mayor-boris/ http://www.simonfletcher.info/fares-too-low-to-be-reasonable-says-mayor-boris/#comments Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:55:48 +0000 simon http://www.simonfletcher.info/?p=810 London transport fares are not “reasonable” says Boris Johnson – but before anyone leaps to agree, he means they are not high enough. “There are real pressures on our finances,” thelondonpaper reported him as saying at yesterday’s Mayors Question Time. “These are largely chronic and historic, built up by repeated failures to deal with the necessity to charge a reasonable price for services.” [My emphasis].

So Boris Johnson’s view is that London’s transport budget is underfunded because fares don’t represent a reasonable price for the service delivered. Or, to summarise, the Tory view is that Ken Livingstone kept the fares too low.

Londoners are likely to disagree that they are not paying enough. They may well feel that the fare increase imposed last year was already bad enough. Johnson raised fares by 6% overall – and in the case of a single bus journey using the Oyster card a full 11% up – but simultaneously slashed the Transport for London investment programme. Johnson’s “bonfire of the transport projects” saw important new links for outer-London axed, such as the extension to the Croydon Tramlink. Higher fares but lower investment is a poor deal for the capital.

It now seems likely that Johnson will proceed with his plan for further above-inflation fare increases. It remains to be seen exactly how much higher they will go. With inflation so low any fares hike that goes significantly above the rate of inflation will cause many Londoners to feel aggrieved. A large fare increase is the last thing Londoners need when so many of them face hard times and economic uncertainty. Johnson faces pressure from Assembly members for a fares freeze at the very least. A spokeswoman for passengers’ watchdog London Travelwatch said yesterday: “We would be very disappointed if the fares are very far above inflation.”

Far from Johnson’s claim of imprudence, Ken Livingstone left his successor with strong balances in the transport budget. It is Boris Johnson’s own actions as mayor that are making London’s transport finances worse: planning to lose around £50-70 million in revenue by halving the size of the congestion charge zone, cancelling the higher £25 charge on gas guzzlers which has erased another £50 million from TfL’s projections, wasting money on the extra cost of scrapping bendy buses to deliver a worse service.
That’s before the high cost of the “new Routemaster” vanity project is rolled out. The consequence of these policies is to place greater pressure on fares.

Under Ken Livingstone, the aim of keeping fares as low as practically possible was combined with a significant expansion of the bus service, major investment on new transport projects such as the East London Line Extension, and congestion charging to bring car use into the framework of overall transport policy. The effect was that London became the only major city in the world to see a ‘modal shift’ from car use to public transport.

During the election Johnson dodged claims that his policies would lead to higher fares. It is ironic that Tory politicians long campaigned to say fares under Ken Livingstone were too high but now their own mayoral administration says otherwise – and plans to hit the public with another above-inflation increase.

First published on Labourlist, 10 September 2009. Click here for the original.

“Barnet wants householders to pay extra to jump the queue for planning consents, in the way budget airlines charge extra for priority boarding,” reports the Guardian.  “And as budget airline passengers choose to spend their budget on either flying at peaktime or having an in-flight meal, recipients of adult social care in Barnet will choose to spend a limited budget on whether to have a cleaner or a respite carer or even a holiday to Eastbourne.”

The Guardian leader fears where all this may lead:

“As in the 1980s, there will be new “local discretion” in interpreting social obligations. As in the 1980s, there will also be much talk of choice and of charity. And as in the 1980s, it will soon ring hollow if the upshot is that there is no one around to help an old lady in need.”

The truth is that Barnet is aiming for a radical programme of cuts and privatisation, no different – despite the new ways of explaining it – to the policies that were pursued to such a damaging effect on public services and investment in the 1980s and 1990s.

As the Labour group leader in Barnet, Alison Moore, said today:

“It’s fine to offer ‘no-frills’ airline services in a market where there is lots of choice available for those who can pay extra for a better service, as airlines are not delivering critical frontline services.  What we face is residents having to pay extra for everything that is beyond an absolute basic service where only those who can afford it get the quality service.”

Barnet has been pushing its Future Shape plans for some time. Exposed to scrutiny locally by Labour and in the London media it tried to deny that it was pursuing a programme of wholesale privatisation. It has been forced on the defensive over its plans to cut provision for resident wardens in sheltered housing. Last December’s budget proposed saving £950,000 by cutting the warden service, reduced down to £400,000 to retain a small amount of wardens after an effective local campaign.

However, Barnet clearly has no intention of retreating. Barnet recently changed its borough vision to drop “supporting the vulnerable” from the Corporate Plan and replace it with “promoting independence.” Surely it is possible to do both.  The council is proposing to axe the borough’s Welfare Rights Unit, which represents the most vulnerable in the community at benefit tribunals – such as the terminally ill, the severely disabled and those with learning difficulties.

Barnet has about 15,000 families on the housing waiting list – one of the largest waiting lists in London and some of the largest regeneration projects in the country outside the Olympic boroughs but the amount of affordable housing agreed on its regeneration sites so far amounts to a net loss of affordable housing.

And as Robert Booth of the Guardian reports:

“The council plans to make savings of up to £15m a year by outsourcing services and reducing the size of its 3,500-strong directly employed workforce. Private sector organisations and charities could take on contracts for services looking after streets and parking, planning and the environment, residential care, housing, refuse and recycling.”

The Tories’ policy item for the 8 September Barnet council meeting takes its cuts agenda even further forward. It proposes to “commission in-depth reviews into high expenditure areas” and begin a “review of revenue streams.” This walks and talks like a plan for more cuts and higher charges.

We know where this agenda of privatisation and slashing spending got us under Thatcher and Major – crumbling schools, a decaying health service, poor and unreliable public transport, inadequate levels of support for policing, a degenerating public realm, unaccountable private sector monopolies squeezing profits out of public services at the expense of the public. It led to social conflict and exclusion, lower wages and far-too low levels of investment. It would do so again.

The Conservatives have tried to bat away the controversy over Daniel Hannan’s attacks on the NHS as a ‘mistake’ and ‘Marxist’ by claiming that he is expressing his own view and not that of his leader. But there is no way to spin out of what a Conservative administration really does. How Conservative councils act, and how their council members vote, gives us a clear insight into what the Conservative party is already really like in power.

Conservative Hammersmith and Fulham Council for example is rapidly acquiring a reputation for a hard-line right wing agenda on housing and public services. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act revealed how the borough’s leader and officials have worked on a radical policy to turn council housing into a safety net for just the old and disabled. One paper released under FOI also called for rents to be increased to full market levels. Hammersmith and Fulham has consistently tried to evade responsibility to provide new social rented accommodation.

Councils such as these are not rogue boroughs. Barnet is led by one of David Cameron’s parliamentary hopefuls, Mike Freer. By this time next year he aims to be on the government benches in the House of Commons. The mayor of the borough and a leading member of the Barnet Council Tory group, Brian Coleman, is the former Conservative chair of the London Assembly and is now Boris Johnson’s appointee to run London’s fire and emergency services.

It is bound to be tempting for observers to characterise each right wing step of each Conservative administration as at odds with the cuddlier approach of the Conservative party leadership. Nothing could be further from the truth. Such policies fit neatly with the radical plans for public spending cuts that the Conservatives plan for the country as a whole. David Cameron says he would have spent £5 billion less than Labour for this year alone. Nationally the Tories are committed to an inheritance tax cut worth £200,000 for just 3,000 millionaires and say that the new top rate of tax is “in the queue of taxes we want to get rid of” – though they are rather less clear about what is in the queue for cuts to public spending.

The Tory programme of public sector cuts would have the effect of also slowing economic growth by cutting demand and would open a serious attack on many peoples’ quality of life. Barnet’s approach is not new or an aberration, but completely consistent with the principles and past practice of Conservative government.

* This article first appeared on Labourlist Friday 28 August. Click here to read the original.

So the London Paper is to close, ending Rupert Murdoch’s intervention in the London evening newspaper market, which, until the paper’s first edition hit the streets, was completely dominated by the Daily Mail group.

Broadsheet readers and news junkies will not mourn the passing of the one-edition-a-day London freesheet distributed at tube stations and on the streets. Its mix of news and lighter material always leaned towards the latter. But it was only able to launch in the first place because its rival, the Evening Standard, had left a gap in the market – in seeking to break that monopoly, it was a positive development, and its creation has changed newspaper coverage in the capital.

The London Paper’s debut was the first serious attempt to break the Evening Standard’s monopoly in decades. Associated Newspapers had enjoyed unassailed control of the London-wide daily print market, frequently enabling it to drive the news agenda. More than this was its commercial power. Because it had no competition, it had unparalleled leverage over cover price and advertising rates. If you wanted London-wide print advertising as part of your media campaign, you had nowhere else to go. The advertising market dominance was solidified with the Standard’s sister paper, Metro, which enjoys a lengthy distribution contract.

Murdoch’s London Paper sought to break this stranglehold. For no other reason than that a private monopoly is nearly always bad for the customer – in this case, readers and advertisers alike – the attempt to break Associated’s control was a good thing for London.

A market opening for the London Paper was created by the Standard’s abuse of its monopoly position to push a relentlessly negative, insular, sub-Daily Mail view of London and Londoners. It drove a partisan political agenda, out of step with those many Londoners who do not buy into a strident rightwing view of the world. London as it really was – including its great achievements and attractions – became barely recognisable under the editorship of Veronica Wadley. Murdoch’s News International saw a gap in the market that was less at odds with the experience of many of London readers.

The London Paper tapped into the large numbers of potential readers who – though not rich – nonetheless had a disposable income to spend and enjoyed London’s opportunities for doing so. All of this was a massive jolt to the grim prevailing orthodoxy of the Daily Mail group.

The Standard’s owners fought the London Paper’s threat to its monopoly with the publication of a free rival, the Lite, days before the Murdoch paper appeared. The fact that it was prepared to defend its own paper by unleashing a free spoiler shows how much its market control was worth to Associated.

The outcome of the Standard’s old editorial approach was brutally clear: with its monopoly challenged by News International, it was sold to a new proprietor, Alexander Lebedev, for just £1. Lebedev’s new editor, Geordie Greig, launched the paper’s new look by apologising for its old ways.

If the new-look Standard is able to harness the positive elements the London Paper brought – clearly indicated in the new editor’s mission statement – and it combines these with the retention of strong news coverage over its several daily editions, then it may survive and thrive as a quality paid-for paper. Newspaper people and journalists, in particular, will no doubt feel that relying on advertising revenue does not work if you want high-cost reporting rather than “churnalism”.

Even among the freesheet’s critics, there has to be recognition that competition from the Murdoch paper has forced the market to pay more attention to the demands and views of readers and their experience of London. Let’s hope that the eventual outcome of the current period of change in the London newspaper market is not a return to the bad old days of monopoly.

This article first appeared on Comment is Free, 21 August 2009. Click here to read the original. ]]> http://www.simonfletcher.info/the-legacy-of-the-londonpaper/feed/ 0 http://www.simonfletcher.info/hannans-rhetoric-feeds-a-dangerous-us-right-wing-beast/ http://www.simonfletcher.info/hannans-rhetoric-feeds-a-dangerous-us-right-wing-beast/#comments Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:59:23 +0000 simon http://www.simonfletcher.info/?p=570 By Simon Fletcher

One of the most objectionable features of Daniel Hannan’s intervention in the US healthcare debate – aside from his actual attacks on the NHS itself – is how his comments feed the rhetoric and prejudices of very right wing strands of US opinion.

Hannan’s rhetoric that the NHS is “Marxist” and his claims that America risks becoming less American play straight into the notion of Obama importing what are seen as un-American ideas. The US right’s assertion of Obama as alien or other is one of the most virulent lines of attack available. Hannan aids this.

As the Washington Times reported:

“Ponder our example, and tremble,” Hannan warned. “You see a grizzly picture of your own country’s possible future…Do not make the same mistakes we have.” He continued: “I see this massive encroachment of the state… this huge power grab by the state machine… squeezing the private sector, to engorge the state.” In Great Britain, he explained, “It is not uncommon to wait six, 10, even 12 months for a knee operation.” He said, “It is exactly a Marxist system. You are treated as a supplicant and expected to be grateful for what you get.”

It’s hair-raising stuff for the average American to hear. All the more so because Hannan, as an outsider himself, appears to give the veneer of credibility to a whole continuum of right wing opinion that poses Obama as trying to impose something dangerous, extreme and foreign. Again, from the Washington Times, Hannan is reported to have warned about growing government, especially in healthcare:

“all of these things serve to make America less American…and less free,” Hannan said. “Indeed, this wouldn’t be America anymore.” [Emphasis added]

He must know, but surely does not care, that this is very right-wing and dangerous beast he is gleefully feeding.

For some of the most aggressive parts of the right wing in the States it is not sufficient to oppose the elected President’s policies – they question his very right to govern and portray him in the most extreme and outlandish terms, designed to present his as “other”. So he is said to be not really American, but in fact Kenyan (the so-called “birther” conspiracy claims). He is portrayed as a Nazi, including in posters showing Obama sporting a Hitler moustache. The US right relentlessly caricatures the “socialism” of Obama’s pragmatic healthcare plans. Former senator Rick Santorum has said that Obama is “determined to remake America as a socialist utopia.” His healthcare plan is claimed by no less a figure than the former Republican Vice Presidential candidate to involve “death panels” for older people.

This is a highly dangerous situation for the US. It is not difficult to see that a Democratic President governing at the time of the worst economic situation in most peoples’ memories, and a large right-wing base willing to resort to wild rhetoric – against a black leader of the country – can lead to some very extreme and unpleasant political forces being unleashed.

Yesterday’s Observer coverage of right wing opinion in the USA reported a recent poll in Virginia that showed only 53 per cent of voters believed Barack Obama was born in the States. If such mainstream opinion is a cause for concern, it should be seen alongside the rise of radical right wing activism and aggressive media campaigning against the President. The Southern Poverty Law Centre has found that the number of hate groups in the USA has grown from 602 nine years ago to 926 now. Fox News presenter Glenn Beck is quoted as saying that President Obama dislikes white people: “This guy is, I believe, a racist.”

Hannan has consciously waded into this toxic situation, revelling in the chance but to crank things up a few notches, rather than give a balanced view from Britain. His contribution adds to the presentation of the President’s policies as a threat to the American way of life.

Hannan’s role is deeply reactionary in US terms, and playing with fire.

* This first appeared on Labourlist on 17 August 2009. For the original article click here.

The London-to-Edinburgh route will be taken into public ownership at the end of this year. But the contract will be put back up for auction to private companies. As the Guardian’s Dan Milmo reports, it is the second time in three years that the owner of the east coast contract has walked away: GNER gave up the franchise in 2006 after admitting that its promise to pay the Department for Transport (DfT) £1.3bn over 10 years was too much.

Once more the public sector is left to step in where a private operator has failed, bearing the cost until the route can be contracted to another private operator. Reports also suggest that the next bidder will pay much less than the National Express contract, leaving an unexpected shortfall in the rail budget.

“It is simply unacceptable to reap the benefits of contracts when times are good, only to walk away from them when times become more challenging,” says Lord Adonis. Quite right. But then what is the government going to do to prevent it? What we are seeing at present is a pattern where the public sector is stepping in to bail out failed private sector institutions at a cost to the taxpayer, only to plan to return the profits to the private sector as fast as possible. This pattern, the least efficient policy for the public finances, is one of the issues that will be addressed at the Progressive London conference* on the global economic crisis later this month.

Over the last few months tens of billions of pounds has been poured into bailing out Britain’s bankers and shareholders – when they were in effect bankrupt – instead of nationalising them at their real price (which in effect was close to zero) and putting them to use to really assist the economy. As a result public debt has ballooned, the shareholders are happy, the executives at the top are largely unaffected, but lending to potential borrowers is still in the doldrums. The loss to taxpayers of the bank bailout still has to be counted.

It is a measure of how bad things are in the economy that this state of affairs is still actually better than the Tories’ approach, which would have slashed investment this year, in the midst of a recession, and would have let things spiral out of control; but this is no reason itself to persist with policies that basically let the private sector rip off the public – with the inevitable public backlash against a Labour government.

Only today it is being reported that Northern Rock is pressing for up to £3 billion more from the taxpayer once it is divided into one bank that can be sold off – perhaps to Tesco – and another that would probably be kept in public hands. In other words the potentially profitable section would be passed to the private sector whilst the public sector would keep the unprofitable half.

Public losses, private gains appears to be the National Express mantra.Thus it rejects government arguments that it might have to return its London-to-Essex service and National Express East Anglia franchise under default rules flowing from its east coast mainline fiasco. “National Express has taken and received clear and detailed advice from leading legal counsel upon its, and its subsidiaries’, positions under the east coast and other franchise agreements and is confident that the implication of any NXEC default should be confined to the NXEC franchise,” it says. “The group would oppose any attempt by the DfT to cross default, in order to protect shareholder value.” So it wants to keep making profits on the rest of the rail network while being bailed out by the public sector on the one it’s dumped.

It is reported that the government is preparing for a battle over the attitude of National Express towards the ‘cross-defaulting’ issue. It should take the same approach to the public sector generally. It may well be concerned that dirty words like nationalisation will make it appear too left wing. But bringing the banks into public ownership at their real cost would have been better value for the public sector and would have cut out massive costs to the taxpayer that will have be repaid in either cuts or tax increases or both.

In the case of the east coast mainline it would be better to return it to the public sector for good, bring in world class management, and run a decent rail service in the public interest rather than in the now twice-failed private sector.

* The Progressive London conference: The Global Economic Crisis – why it’s not over…and debating the alternatives will be held on July 11 2009 at Hamilton House, Mabledon Place, London, WC1. Speakers include Ken Livingstone, Vince Cable MP, Geofrrey Robinson MP, Diane Abbott MP, Steve Hart (Unite), Sam Tarry (Chair, Young Labour), Graham Turner (author, “The Credit Crunch”), Prof Danny Quah (LSE), Prof Doreen Massey, Jenny Jones AM.

This article first appeared on Labourlist 1.7.09. Read the original article here.