Category Archives: Human rights and development

Guest blog: Still collateral? Trafficking survivors lack basic human rights protections, by Klara Skrivankova

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Summary: In spite of the self congratulations by politicians regarding their stance on slavery, muddled government policies on trafficking, migration and labour rights render those vulnerable to slavery at continuing risk of abuse and exploitation.

October is usually a month filled with noise on “modern” slavery. It has been thus for over a decade now. Since 2007, 18th October has been designated the EU Anti-Trafficking Day and in 2010 the made it its UK Anti-Slavery Day. Organisations that work on the issue throughout the year tend to use the day to highlight campaigns, while politicians usually search for a photo op.  In 2020 photo ops are not really possible as events are largely held online.

Klara Skrivankova

As, in Europe at least, we are not busy flying from conference to a conference this October 2020 should be a reminder that the international community has been trying to deal with the issue for a long time. This year marks the 90th anniversary of the introduction of the ILO Forced Labour Convention; 20 years since the UN “Palermo Protocol”, 15 years since the Council of Europe Trafficking Convention, and six years since the ILO’s Forced Labour Protocol. Importantly, it has also been 70 years since the European Convention on Human Rights was first introduced, prohibiting forced labour and slavery.

When I first started working on trafficking 20 years ago, convincing governments that trafficking exists was a challenge. Later the task was to persuade them that trafficking for forced labour was an issue. Today, the level of awareness and the number of people that work on the issue are unprecedented, at least since the heights of the anti-slavery struggle in the 19th Century. Dedicated funds exist, as do masters courses. Trafficking and modern slavery are for all intents and purposes talked about as serious problems of our times. Some could see this as the ultimate success of campaigns and advocacy of 1990’s and 00’s.

Yet, we are far from being able to declare success.

Human trafficking and people smuggling are still confused and used as interchangeable terms by media and politicians, reflecting muddled and often contradictory policy on these matters. This is despite that the above mentioned two “Palermo Protocols” distinguishes between trafficking – the rendering someone into a situation of exploitation and a crime against a person, and smuggling – the facilitation of clandestine crossing of international borders and a crime against the state.

With the exception of a few specialist journalists, such as Kieran Guilbert and dedicated projects like the ones by the Guardian and Thompson Reuters Foundation, much of the reporting on human trafficking remains flat and simplistic.

For the most part, policies designed to deal with modern slavery fail to engage with the difficult questions about underlying causes that are deeply embedded in our political economies. Civil society is increasingly rendered into the role of a service provider, gagged through government contract and prevented from acting as critical friend holding government to account.  There is a dearth intersectional analysis examining how policies and actions by governments and sometimes also NGOs perpetuate the very circumstances that lead to exploitation.

Collateral Damage  was the title of a report published in 2007 by the Global Alliance against Traffic in Women. The publication reflected on the previous decade of anti-trafficking efforts and how these impacted on the rights of trafficked women. The title was chosen as it summed up well what we found – that peoples’ rights were often the casualty of anti-trafficking efforts.

Collateral damage is felt by trafficked people. For many, getting out of a situation of exploitation does not lead to “freedom”, but to a different kind of unfreedom. A trajectory from being enslaved to being processed by authorities, detained, disbelieved, deported, faced with destitution, debt and an uphill struggle to show that they are deserving victims.

Since 2007, laws have changed and arguably there have been some improvements in the way countries and civil society organisations respond. Trafficking for forced labour is now a strong focus and businesses are a key stakeholder in anti-slavery efforts. Yet I am struck that the overall argument of that report still stands and systemic failures described in it remain.

Let’s look at the UK for example. In 2007 I wrote in a chapter examining the UK’s response: “…. the authorities seemed to have failed to assess the implications that migration and labour market polices have for trafficking and on the vulnerability of certain groups to being trafficked.”

This statement rings true in 2020. In fact, I would argue that the implications of those policies are likely to be more significant today that they were in 2007.

Hostile environment has been a flagship UK policy for almost a decade now. The policy was designed to make the UK unwelcoming to migrants who do not have regular status in the country. Consequently, anyone who cannot immediately show their right to be here should be viewed with suspicion. Anti-migrant rhetoric and government campaigns such as the infamous go-home vans and vilification of lawyers have led to irregular migrants being labelled as criminals.  At the same time, most victims of modern slavery in the UK are migrants. The Home Office is the department in charge of both policies – one that is designed to remove as many foreigners as swiftly as possible, and the modern slavery strategy that is meant to provide victims with a recovery and reflection period, including a temporary permission to stay in the UK. The conflict between these two policies is glaring. Nevertheless, one would search in vain to find a recognition by the government that this contradiction exists. A new report by ECPAT UK shows what this policy dissonance means – life of insecurity and possible removals experienced by thousands of child victims of trafficking.

Labour exploitation too is, to a large extent, enabled by government policy. Deregulation, promoting ultra-flexible labour market and cuts in budgets of inspection bodies have led to increasing precarity in the UK labour market. Vast swathes of workers on zero-hour contracts, subcontracted through chains of labour brokers face uncertainty, poverty wages, poor conditions and in some cases forced labour. Flexibility and complexity in the labour market, where the rights of workers are secondary to the constant growth agenda, bring about situations where forced labour is found in value chains of well know companies.

Then there is the intersection between the labour market policies and immigration policies such as the criminal offence of illegal working. The impact of the new post-Brexit UK immigration tier system, to be introduced in 2021, is yet to seen. COVID19 has not only shone the light on underlying issues of inequality, but is expected to lead to more insecurity and precarity.

Back in 2007 the Collateral Damage report caused a bit of a stir. Rereading it today, I think it is time for volume two as the rights of migrants and rights of workers are under renewed assault, to serve as a reminder what governments and broader international community ought to do to seriously take on the issue of “modern” slavery.

East West Street: on the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity, by Philippe Sands

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Summary: an lucid and important exploration of the personal consequences of atrocity, and the origins of international human rights law.

East West Street is something of a hybrid of a book. It is part family memoir: Sands’ maternal grandparents were survivors of the Holocaust, but never spoke about their experiences. And while loving people, they never smiled much, something that becomes more understandable as their biographies are painstakingly revealed.

In part the book is a history of the philosophy of international law. The book is also a joint biography of the originators of key concepts of human rights: Rafael Lemkin postulated the idea of “genocide” – the destruction of groups of people based on their identity; Hersch Lauterpacht formulated the idea of “crimes against humanity” – atrocities against individual civilians, often by their own governments.

What binds all this into a remarkable whole is the strange coincidence that, like Sands’ grandfather, Lemkin and Lauterpacht had deep ties with the city of Lviv, currently in Ukraine, previously known as Lemberg when it was in the Hapsburg empire. It was there that Lemkin and Lauterpacht originally studied law, and may well have come to know each other, though they do not seem ever to have become friends. Lemkin was a solitary and spiky soul. Lauterpacht had deep concerns that the concept of genocide would drive human beings deeper into their group identities and hence perpetuate the roots of genocide, if not its actual manifestation.

Nevertheless, both “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” are now important concepts in international human rights law. However, it was a struggle to get them accepted at Nuremberg. The US and the UK did not like the idea of genocide having been formidable practitioners of it themselves in the past. The Soviets, whose own campaign in the East had been marked with atrocity, including mass rape during the conquest of Berlin, did not like the concept of “crimes against humanity.” Nevertheless, Lemkin and Lauterpacht’s advocacy, and the interventions of Robert Jackson the chief US prosecutor, and Hartley Shawcross, the British Attorney General, eventually got them included.

The book builds considerable momentum towards its climax at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. Here the personal, political and legal strands of the book are drawn together into what must be the most important courtroom drama in history. Sands focusses particularly on the case of Hans Frank in this trial. Himself a lawyer, as Governor General of Nazi occupied territories in Poland, Frank was ultimately responsible for the murders of many of Lemkin’s and Lauterpacht’s families, as well as members of Sands’ own family. 

In the course of writing this lucid and important book Sands became friends with Frank’s son, Niklas. Together in the courtroom where his father was sentenced to death, Niklas described it as a “happy place.” Later Niklas explained further that he was against the death penalty, but not for his own father. 

East West Street is a mighty book.

The Outlaw Ocean, by Ian Urbina

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Summary: an impressive work of investigative journalism detailing the vast scale of human rights abuses and environmental damage in the world’s oceans.

The Outlaw Ocean is based on a celebrated series of articles that Ian Urbina wrote for the New York Times on the struggles for human rights and environmental standards in the vast lawless expanses of the world’s seas.

It is an impressive achievement, but also a deeply depressing one. As well as the continuing butchery of the planet’s whales, Urbina catalogues the environmental devastation of bottom trawling, the damage caused by the oil and gas industries, the risks arising from the destruction, “bleaching”, of the world’s corals, and the routine and brutal enslavement of seafarers, particularly fishermen, on the world’s ships and boats.

There are some heartening descriptions of the work of activists, such as those of Stella Maris or Sea Shepherd, who strive to bring some measure of humanity to this brutal realm, and there are exciting descriptions of some of their operations. But, appositely enough, all these seem like drops in the ocean such is the scale of the both environmental and human rights challenges.

Urbina shows how the abuses at sea are perhaps the most extreme example in history of the “tragedy of the commons” – the idea that when, in effect, everyone is responsible for something then no one actually takes responsibility. International maritime law, such as it exists, empowers states with its enforcement. This means that on the high seas – beyond territorial waters – a vessel flagged to a particular country can only be boarded by a war ship of that country. So the vast majority of the ships are simply never inspected at all. A land locked country like Mongolia, to which many ships are registered under flags of convenience, does not even have a navy.

Much maritime law, such as the 2006 international convention, does not apply to fishing vessels anyway which can do so much environmental damage through overfishing and other devastating fishing practices. Consequently slavery is also endemic on these vessels, most notoriously on the high seas of South East Asia. But I have also encountered it in the territorial waters of Myanmar and Ireland due to poor regulation and inadequate inspection.

Those who are enslaved are generally migrants, so desperately poor that they are driven to seek work from unscrupulous labour brokers. Urbina describes how sharp practices amongst labour brokers lead to seafarers becoming debt bonded, a form of slavery recognised in international law. Once this has happened the boat captains who receive them as crew routinely use physical violence, including murder, to keep discipline.

Urbina’s impressive work shows how the roots of enslavement on the sea lie on land in the indebtedness of the families and communities from which seafarers originate. This is something I also found in 2019 when researching the enslavement of raft fishermen in Myanmar’s Gulf of Motama. Hence it is a logical extension of Urbina’s research that prevention of slavery requires focussed attention on eliminating the debt that is the key mechanism for so much contemporary slavery.

Such is the scale of “modern” slavery, currently estimated as affecting over 40 million people globally, that meaningful action to reduce these numbers would require a response of comparable imaginative and actual scale to the Marshall Plan. Such a plan should focus on creation in slavery vulnerable communities of decent work, and direct cash transfers to secure early child development and school attendance. A crackdown on usurious money lenders and unscrupulous labour brokers would also be a welcome thing.

Until that happens Urbina’s work will stand as an appalling indictment of the human rights and environmental carnage at sea that the world is collectively turning a blind eye to.

Responding to child labour in Nespresso’s supply chain

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Originally published by Thomson Reuters Foundation News

No one who has ever dealt with the challenges of agricultural livelihoods in the global South should ever be surprised that child labour remains an issue. However a report that Channel 4’s Despatches programme has filmed children picking coffee beans and hauling sacks on six Guatemalan farms believed to supply Nespressogives a shocking glimpse of the cynicism with which some businesses seem to treat this issue.

In responding to the reports Guillaume Le Cunff, Nespresso’s CEO, stated that “Nespresso
has a zero tolerance of child labour”, and the company noted over the past four years only 15 child labour cases had been identified by third-party auditors in Nespresso’s supply chains. All had been “effectively resolved” according to the business.

However, Mr Le Cunff also mentioned that coffee suppliers are given “a day or two days”
advanced notice before spot checks take place. With practices like that, one can only
imagine  Mr Le Cunff’s shock – SHOCK! – to discover there is child labour in his supply chain.

To be fair, audits are used by many big companies to give a façade of transparency rather than actually putting in the hard work that is necessary to more effectively tackle the issue. However, even with the best will in the world, audits are a poor instrument for resolution of child labour.

Unlike child slavery, which is the trafficking of children to a third party for the purposes of exploitation, child labour tends to occur within the family context. In other words, those who practice child labour are often the child’s own parents who are often trying to do their best for their kids in horrendously difficult circumstances.

That their best intentions for their child result in child labour is a consequence of poverty. It is a consequence of the poverty of families who put their children into the fields because they may not have enough money to eat let alone send their kids to school. It is a consequence of the poverty of communities which may not even have schools or, where there are buildings, may not have qualified teachers to staff them.

Audits by their very nature do not address these underlying causes of child labour. As
Nespresso appears to practice them they just make sure that labouring children are not
there to be seen when the inspectors show up with their note pads for fear it puts
consumers off their coffee.

Even where businesses pay premiums to suppliers for the commodities that they purchase, as Nespresso appears to do, this is often insufficient to end child labour in communities: landless labourers will never benefit from premiums; and families with only small parcels of land still may not earn enough from such payments to obtain a living income.

Hence, it would, paradoxically, be a pity if these reports of Nespresso’s failings put people
off buying their coffee. If businesses stop trading with poor communities they will be
impoverished further. Instead of boycotting Nespresso consumers should demand better of it and, as George Clooney, Nespresso’s public face for many years, said “hold everyone’s promise to account.”

So what does “doing better” look like? First it requires that businesses recognise that, like
any human rights or poverty challenge, child labour is a political issue. That is, it relates to the allocations of power and resources within communities and within wider societies. So if businesses want to address child labour in a meaningful way then they must engage with those issues.

Specifically, they need to act to advance gender equity, economic diversification, and child rights within the communities from which they source ensuring that the distinctive
challenges of the landless and, in particular, girls are directly addressed. Current models of trade and audits simply do not tackle these aspects of poverty. Instead there must be
specific focus on women’s political and economic empowerment in communities, establishing effective cultures of child protection, and ensuring that the landless have a
proper stake in the local economy.

Businesses must also work to ensure good governance, both nationally and locally in the
countries with which they do business. For example, businesses pay significant amounts in tax to the countries from which they source their commodities. It is reasonable for them to ask if national governments are using that revenue to effectively reduce poverty in the communities from which they source: Are they providing student grants for needy children? Or do all the schools have enough books and desks?

In spite of the complexities progress is being made. The number of children in child labour fell by 16 million from 168 million to 152 million between 2012 and 2016. Further progress depends on businesses like Nespresso properly engaging with the issue and its underlying causes.

As such Dispatches provides a moment of truth for the business. We all await to see if they rise to the challenge or merely tinker with their public relations.

We shall always overcome: speech to Rally For Our Rights, London, 12 Oct 2019

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A couple of weeks ago I was back in Ireland visiting my family in the very place that Boris Johnson wants to reimpose a hard border.

It was a time for remembering and we remembered the dead: the dozens of people, British and Irish, who had died violently mere hundreds of metres from where we met.

There is peace now. It’s a peace that was forged by peaceful protest, by force of argument, by the spilling of sweat not blood. It’s a peace that has European foundations. Britain and Ireland’s common EU membership allowed different identities to be accommodated and old quarrels to be recast. From that new alliances and friendships have formed: before the 2016 referendum Ireland and Britain were the closest allies in the EU.

How things have changed. Now the uppity Irish are the bogey men and women of Brexit, disgracing ourselves in Brexiter eyes by our insistence that our peace is more important than their fantasies of reclaimed imperial glory.

But Boris Johnson and the imbecilic charlatans that form his government have forgotten something. They have forgotten that Britain is not just a land of Empire nostalgists and currency speculators. Like every country it may have a few racists and Blackshirts.

But Britain is also the land of the anti-slavery movement and the first trades unions. It is the land of the suffragettes and campaigns to make poverty history. In other words, this is a country filled with uppity citizens, people who believe in justice and fair play no matter what they are told by those who seek to profit from lies.

Following the corrupted referendum of 2016 the political leaderships of this country, Left and Right, wanted us to go quietly into the darkness. They wanted us to surrender to a far-Right clique the progress that had been made in peace, democracy, human rights, and environmental protections as a result of the UK’s membership of the EU. And they gave us comforting myths to help us on our way: garbage about a “jobs first” Brexit from the Left; nonsense about the Dunkirk spirit from the Right.

But we have not gone quietly. Instead a movement was born of ordinary people showing what Bobby Kennedy called numberless diverse acts of courage and belief and so reshaping the history of these times.

This movement is an expression of that collective sense of outrage that drove the anti-slavery movement and the suffragettes, and that drives still the demands for justice for Grenfell, the Windrush generation and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. It is the same sense of outrage that drives every struggle for social justice and human rights across the world.

Each of us here today is saying with our presence that we are not prepared to silently accept the stripping away of the rights of young people to live and study and work and love across Europe.

Each of us is saying with our presence that we are not prepared to silently allow the denial of the rights of our friends and neighbours to contribute to the flourishing of this society simply because they come from a different part of Europe.

Each of us is saying with our presence that we are not prepared to allow the peace forged at great effort in Ireland to be jeopardised through the racist blundering of the buffoons who currently occupy Downing Street: people who for all their crass talk of world wars have never seen the effect of a bullet or a bomb on a human body, or the devastation that a battle can inflict upon a community or a war upon a society.

The spirit of British decency is alive on these streets today. It has forced the political leadership of this country to accept that Brexit is not a done deal. We have shown them all, from Boris Johnson to Jeremy Corbyn, something they should never have forgotten. That when citizens are outraged, united by our common humanity and repudiating the hatred and racism of the bigots around us, then no matter what injustice we may be confronted with, we will always overcome.

The Problem of Jefferson: political inaction and the continuation of slavery in the world

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My remarks to the Slavery Panel during the Women’s Forum in the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting

It’s highly appropriate that slavery is on the agenda of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting this week. Because while London is sometimes thought of as the cradle of the anti-slavery movement, the anti-slavery movement truly started years before the meeting in 1787 that set up the Committee to Abolish the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. It started the first time west African men and women rose up to fight with their bare hands for their freedom from the slave ships, and whose actions disrupted the slave trade to such an extent as to save hundreds of thousands of others from such trafficking.

That is a tradition that has continued across the centuries and across what is now the Commonwealth. From Caribbean leaders such as Mary Prince, to African leaders like Equiano and Cugano, to Asian leaders such as Dr Ambedkar, to contemporary organisations like Piler in Pakistan, OKUP in Bangladesh, Centre for Education and Communication in India, and the Global Alliance against Trafficking in Women. All these have asserted and continue to assert the principles of human rights in opposition to the way the world dehumanises and enslaves others.

So after these centuries of struggle why are we still discussing how to end slavery. Well it is because we, as a human society, still permit slavery to exist.

While I have rarely met anyone who is in favour of slavery in principle, I have met many people who are in favour of slavery in practice. Slavery provides benefits to the powerful, in terms of cheap commodities, cheap construction workers, vulnerable domestic workers, advantages in terms of trade, opportunities to sexually abuse women and children, or simply to indulge prejudice.

So while we all bear a moral responsibility for this continued existence of slavery, the greatest responsibilities must be borne by those with the greatest power to end the power.

A recurrent problem through history is what I have come to think of as the problem of Jefferson. Jefferson was possibly the most brilliant man to hold the US presidency and a vocal opponent of slavery. But all he used that brilliance for was developing excuses why he couldn’t do anything about slavery.

Today politicians and business leaders across the world, including within the Commonwealth, find, in the name of convenience and prejudice, all sorts of reasons not to stand up for the children of their nations and citizens everywhere to end slavery and its causes. Migrants are vilified and exploited in the countries where they live and work and are too often ignored by the governments of the countries from which they originate. Governments make inadequate provision for education, particularly of girls, and both women and girls are denied their most basic rights. Civil society activists and trade unionists who lead the struggle against slavery and for decent work are isolated and persecuted. Police corruption is tolerated. Rule of law is undermined.

The struggle to end slavery is a political one. And yet it is not a coherent political priority for any of the governments of the Commonwealth, even those most voluble in their antipathy towards slavery. So long as this remains the case, it is ordinary Commonwealth citizens who will pay the price with their lives and liberty.

Chimes at Midnight: Brexit and the demise of rule of law in the UK

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Summary: the increased threat of terror brought by the UK’s decision to withdraw from European security cooperation mechanisms actually plays into the central purpose of the Brexit project: erosion of rule of law

The idea of rule of law is not a new one. It is frequently dated as far back as Aristotle, who said “It is better for the law to rule than one of the citizens.”  But the idea is at least a hundred years older. Sophocles dramatized it in his play, Oedipus the King, in which, as a result of his own investigation, the King finds himself responsible for the plague on Thebes and realises that he must be held accountable, just as anyone else would be, to his prior judgement.

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The Daily Mail reminds readers of its long-standing association with fascism

Rule of law then is the idea that it is the law, independently administered, that governs a people not the whims of any monarch or minister or mob, and that no one is above the law. So, when the mob gathers with flaming torches and pitchforks outside the “witch’s” hovel, or the minister wants rid of his mistress’ husband, the law should protect the basic human rights of the wise-woman and the cuckold, and restrain human excesses, or punish them when they transgress the law.

It is this concept, one that in British law can be traced back as far as Magna Carta, that is most fundamentally under attack with Brexit. It began with press and political denunciations of the independence of the judiciary. It has continued with British government proposals to use the excuse of Brexit and the “will of the people” to grant sweeping Henry VIII powers to ministers. If these powers are granted they will permit ministers to make law without reference to parliament.

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Tom Bingham, Baron Bingham of Cornhill, who served as Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice, and Senior Law Lord

In his magisterial book on the subject, Tom Bingham sets out the fundamental principles of rule of law, noting that these include a requirement for compliance of the state with its obligations in international as well as national law. Bingham quotes Professor William Bishop as describing the international rule of law as including, “the realization that law can and should be used as an instrumentality for the cooperative international furtherance of social aims in such a fashion as to preserve and promote the values of freedom and dignity for individuals.”

But this ideal has long been anathema to powerful sections of the Conservative party. In 2015 David Cameron removed from the ministerial code the requirement for ministers to adhere to international law. Theresa May has never been shy about her wish to remove the UK from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, an entity separate to the EU.

Brexit furthers this ambition to remove the constraints of international law from the UK government. As part of the Brexit process, the Government intends to remove the UK from the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the European Union. This, if it happens, will further remove constraints on ministerial power. A side effect of this will be to put in jeopardy the UK’s continued law enforcement and intelligence cooperation in Europe. But while this would undoubtedly increase the risks of terrorism for ordinary UK citizens, there is little that the pathetic foot soldiers of Islamic State can do that will pose an existential threat to the nation. However, the cynical might comment that, as in the past, an upsurge of terrorist attacks on the civilian population would provide a convenient excuse for a further concentration of power in the hands of ministers and further erosion of the civil rights of the British people.

Since the Brexit vote in 2016, the British Government have sought to find common ground with some of the most unsavoury governments and anti-democratic leaders on the planet. As well as Theresa May’s supplication to Donald Trump and the leaders of the bloodthirsty Saudi Arabian government, she has also proven herself a ready apologist for the governments of Poland and Hungary as they also strike at the foundations of human rights and rule of law in their own countries. Disgraced former Defence Secretary Liam Fox, gave more away than he intended with his declaration of “shared values” with Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines leader whose repudiation of rule of law is so absolute that he promotes indiscriminate murder as a central tenet of his so-called “war on drugs”.

But all this should not be surprising. Because, for the empire-dreaming elite whose money and lies obtained the soiled “mandate” for Brexit, the diminution of rule of law is their central purpose. It will facilitate an environment in which ecological and safety standards, workers’ and consumers’ rights are negated. Capital will once more be given pre-eminence over labour, as newly empowered ministers ensure that the wealthiest are permanently put above the law, at least as far as their tax affairs are concerned. No matter what fantasies are spun by the leadership of the British Labour party about the possibilities of a “People’s Brexit”, they will not alter, one iota, the vital essence of this project, irrespective of who is in government.

So, the prospects of Brexit for the UK are not simply of economic decline, international isolation and irrelevance. British democratic standards and human rights, a tradition that can be traced back to Runnymede, are themselves under threat as the UK continues to seek its future alliances with new dictatorships and old autocracies.

As Shakespeare’s Falstaff reflects while Prince Hal prepares to repudiate their friendship and put him back into his lowly place, these are the “chimes at midnight”. They ring again today for any British subject not wealthy enough to indulge in tax avoidance. The lower orders have had their day. Now they must know their place.

Another fine mess: politics since the Brexit vote

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Also published in Left Foot Forward 

When I worked in Angola in the late 1990s, towards the end of the Civil War, I discovered an important truth: just when you think things can’t get any worse, they can. So has it proven with British politics since the 23 June 2016 when the UK narrowly voted to leave the European Union.

Before the 2017 UK General Election I had thought that a hung parliament was probably the best possible outcome, to force some sanity and compromise into the UK’s intent to exit the European Union. Instead, Theresa May has sought a de-facto coalition with the Irish Democratic Unionist Party, a group so extreme that for them the witch burning scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail is not so much comedy, but a utopian ideal.

For many observers the UK’s attitude to the EU in general and to its putative departure from the Union seems profoundly irrational. The government’s stated intention to leave both the Single Market and the Customs Union, ignores the vast economic cost of such moves. Instead Brexiteers fall back on the slogan “take back control”, dreams of a British Empire 2.0, and cooked-up alternative numbers that have little basis in reality. This is a position that has gone broadly unchallenged by the opposition Labour Party who promise the fairytale of a “People’s Brexit” if the electorate were only to entrust them with the levers of government.

To “take back control” of what the government has never really been clear. Certainly immigration, in spite of the UK’s need for immigrants, in order to satisfy the xenophobic amongst the government and its voters.

The government is also intent to “take back control” from the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the European Union, in spite of the threat that this poses to security and justice cooperation in Europe at a time of rising tensions and increasing violence across the continent. This perhaps gets to the nub of the matter. Because it suggests that rather than the government’s approach to Brexit being only economically incompetent and politically delusional it rather suggests that the government’s intent is profoundly ideological.

Taken alongside the antipathy of Theresa May to the European Court of Human Rights, and the former Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision to remove from the Ministerial Code an obligation for ministers to comply with international law, the UK’s intent to quit the European Union indicates an enduring colonialist instinct in the government that still bristles at the idea of international rule of law. They seem to regard it as an affront to the primacy of the UK parliament, which some seem to believe still should rule the waves.

But, of course, the supremacy of the UK parliament has already taken a kicking in the Brexit process as dozens of MPs, contrary to their judgment as to what is best for their country, voted to uphold the notional “will of the people” as expressed through a blood-stained and, it now increasingly appears, a corrupted referendum.

But this is as nothing to the intent of the Great Repeal Bill, to invest ministers with Henry VIII powers that will enable them to make vast swathes of law for years to come without reference to parliament. In other words the intent of the Great Repeal Bill appear less to do with withdrawal from the EU and more to do with a significant repeal of democracy itself.

The UK may appear to be blundering towards the exit of the EU like a drunk staggering towards the door of a bar. But all citizens must beware that the pantomime shenanigans of Davis, Johnson and Fox, the three Brexit Stooges, mask a much more sinister domestic agenda. And Labour needs to stop being the government’s poodle on Brexit.

 

 

A Selfish Plan to Change the World: Finding Big Purpose in Big Problems, by Justin Dillon

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img_1203Summary: a self-help book like no other I have read, concerned with identification of personal purpose, and giving some important insight into contemporary slavery

I must begin with a declaration of interest: Justin Dillon is a pal, someone I got to know and like over beers and years in the margins of conferences and meetings in different parts of the world.

Justin’s warmth, enthusiasms and likeablity come through strongly in this book, which is part memoir, part reportage, part philosophical treatise.

The book begins, rather disconcertingly, with an account of a performance by the Clash in Dublin. This inspired U2 to become who they are, who in turn inspired Justin, an accomplished musician, to change direction to become the filmmaker and anti-slavery activist that he is today. I think Joe Strummer would be pleased by that.

It is an important book in a number of respects. First of all at a time when much of the global discourse on slavery focuses simplistically on the minority of cases that relate to organised crime, Justin shows with illustrative cases from Haiti to Ghana to India that slavery is a complex issue of power, poverty, human rights and international development, not simply one of law enforcement.

Given this, a further theme of the book is even more apposite. This is the importance of purpose. Even before I got to the section in which Justin discusses Victor Frankl I was reflecting that the book could be considered as an application in the field of activism of Frankl’s remarkable work on humans’ search for meaning. Justin discusses how the lack of resources and power that impoverish so many across the world, their “poverty of means”, is echoed in the “poverty of meaning” in the lives of so many who in other respects seem wealthy. His “selfish plan to change the world” then relates to addressing this poverty of meaning by engaging those who lack purpose with the challenge of empowering those who lack means. In honour of Joe Strummer he exhorts his readers to find their “riot,” the struggle for justice that they they wish to be part of.

Justin describes the book as a “self-help manual”, but I doubt there are many other self help manuals like this, because it is one with a profoundly social purpose. Justin recognises that in order to change the world we may first have to change ourselves, and he shows the desperate needs that still exist across the world that demand we all look beyond ourselves.

Reflections on St Patrick

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For many, if they think of him as anything other than an excuse for a party, St Patrick, a Fifth Century priest, may seem a remote figure. But his life still has some powerful contemporary resonances.

Patrick was not born Irish. He was a Briton. Different parts of Britain claim him, but he came from a Romanised family somewhere on the west coast. As a young man he was kidnapped by an Irish raiding party and trafficked across the Irish Sea into slavery. After six years he escaped and returned to his family, and his studies, in Britain. Eventually, after study in other parts of Europe, he became a priest.  His story would probably not be one that is remembered by history but for the fact that after this, in a remarkable display of personal magnanimity, he decided to return to Ireland, the land that had enslaved him, as a missionary.

Are you all right in the back there lads?

There are many fanciful legends associated with Patrick, including how he rid the country of snakes. But he left two written documents: his Confessions, a spiritual auto-biography from which many of the details of his life are known; and his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, a furious protest against the murder and enslavement of members of Patrick’s congregation by a raiding party of pirates, probably composed of Patrick’s fellow Britons. The anger of this protest was doubtless further sharpened by Patrick’s own bitter memory of the violence of slavery.

There are many powerful echoes from Patrick’s life with the contemporary world: For example, in a world where poisonous xenophobia seems to have taken hold in so many places the story of Patrick’s transformation from immigrant to an emblem of the country he adopted as his own stands in counterpoint. And in his protest against the war crimes of Coroticus and his men Patrick, the former slave, gave nascent voice to the ideals of human rights and anti-slavery in Western Europe.

Across the world today other immigrants work to make their adopted countries better places, other slaves and former slaves resist the systems of slavery that still persist. St Patrick’s Day is a good time to remember them, and remember that after the day’s parties a long struggle lies ahead of us to fulfil some of the ideals that they, and Patrick, represent.