You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2007.
All the white working class kids in my little corner of the world are onto this one and have been for the past year or so!
Soaring global demand for copper is a growing threat to the British railway network leading to a surge in trackside metal theft, police have warned. Copper theft caused more than 240,000 minutes of delays for train passengers last year after a near-fivefold rise in robberies at tracks and depots.
Rail customers are the victims of an economic crime that is being driven by the insatiable demand for industrial material in China and India, said Andy Trotter, deputy chief constable of the British Transport police. “It is a growing problem,” he said. “You have only got to look at the rising copper price on the metal market and the theft of copper matches that rise almost absolutely. Unfortunately, the impact on the infrastructure is beginning to bite.”
Copper theft is a major problem in north-east England, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the delays related to metal thieves in the UK and wreaking havoc with the Northern Trains franchise. Mr Trotter said the regional bias of the problem may reflect the north-east’s industrial heritage. “The north-east has a tradition of heavy industry and of people who know how to deal with copper and metals,” he said. “There are also lots of people who know how to trade in it.”
Police also blamed copper thieves for the demolition of a bungalow in Bradford yesterday. The unoccupied house exploded after copper gas pipes on the outer walls were fractured, apparently by someone trying to rip them out. Police are looking for two boys, aged 10 and 11, in relation to the explosion.
“The copper is going through larger scrapyards, then to smelters and then by ship to China, which has an incredible demand for copper, particularly with the Beijing Olympics coming and the demand for telecoms infrastructure,” Mr Trotter said.
The global price of copper has risen fivefold since 2001 and has risen above $8,000 (£4,000) a tonne this year, driven by demand for its use in car production, building and power grids. China accounts for about 20% of global copper consumption and the US for 13%. Such is the demand that 2p pieces are more valuable if they are melted down for their copper…
…The clampdown has also led to stakeouts at suspect scrapyards, which have emerged as key outposts in the cable crime food chain.
Copper theft is also spreading to other industries. Earlier this month, Northumbrian Water said it had stepped up security after a spate of thefts from some of its sewage works in the north-east which it said would cost the company £100,000.
What makes this theft criminal and why is theft of oil or minerals from the third world through force not? Rhetorical question… Looking from my own lofty height I see no violent crime. Yes, cables are stolen from the railway and sidlngs but these are young boys still in school and some barely out of it who have picked up the profrit motive in an adulterated fashion. He! The Guardian. Non Sexy. So PC.
That aside, I ask you to think of Zambia, a supplier of copper to the world market during the sixties and seventies, eighties, nineties but which always found that the market for copper was controlled abroad in trading markets and ensured that so many Africans in Zambia lived below the poverty line sans water and electricity and good schools on the dirt road that passed their home. A road which a public transport vehicle might pass two or three times a day, if you were lucky. People in Zambia, those who worked the mines that stripped the copper, never saw wealth from copper enriching their communities.
Now I have to feel sorry for a bunch of booted and suited wankers who miss their trains because some entrepreneurial ten year olds steal copper from their railway? Give me a break.
I am watching Filthy Rich and Homeless on the telly and so far I am struck by how free enterprise is not so free.
A bunch of filthy rich brats give up the comforts of their homes to live on the streets sans mobiles, money, contacts.
One of the more entrepreneurial of the group arrogantly imagines he can make £200 pounds a day and begins his new enterprise by blagging flowers on credit from a wholesaler. His attitude to the waifs and strays he has encountered on the streets so far, has been that they are lazy, good for nothings. Given the chance to make hard cash he is dismayed to suddenly discover he needs a license to sell those flowers to the general public. The license costs money. Money he, of course, does not have. The coppers soon get to recognise him and thwart his plan at every underground station he decides to pitch at.
He is cold, tired and hungry and now begins to see the purpose of the soup kitchen.
The Guardian. So PC.
The Daily Mail pulled the following article from their online Mail on Sunday edition following a D-notice being issued by the Attorney General or Herr Reid sending a couple of bruisers around to the rag following revelations of his drunken behaviour in Baku?
A cached version can be found here. If you click on the link for the original article you are informed that Article:454442 Not Found. This is London also ran and pulled the story. The article is explosive, if true.
It tells the seedy story of life inside BP and how BP worked with MI6 to topple the Azerbaijan government twice in order to install a more friendly regime under Hayder Aliyev, a former KGB general and First Deputy Prime Minister of the USSR. Months later in September 1994, BP signed the so-called Contract of the Century worth £5 billion and which put BP at the head of Azerbaijan International Operating Company (AIOC), an oil producing consortium. The majority of Azerbaijan’s population some 10 years later are still mired in poverty with no access to electricity or gas, while those living beside the pipeline still await compensation for environmental damage to their land and livelihoods. In the same period BP has recorded rocketing profits.
“BP supported both coups, both through discreet moves and open political support. Our progress on the oil contracts improved considerably after the coups.” Les Abrahams
Salient facts are left to the final paragraphs. The corruption runs deep. As the layers are peeled away from this story events that reveal the machinations of BP and Big Oil in the Caucasus – connections that go back beyond the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 come into sharp focus.
Hookers, spies, cases full of dollars…how BP spent £45m to win ‘Wild East’ oil rights
By GLEN OWEN
BP executives working for Lord Browne spent millions of pounds on champagne-fuelled sex parties to help secure lucrative international oil contracts.
The company also worked with MI6 to help bring about changes in foreign governments, according to an astonishing account of life inside the oil giant.
Les Abrahams, who led BP’s successful bid for a multi-million-pound deal with one of the former Soviet republics, today claims that Browne – who was forced to resign as chief executive last month after the collapse of legal proceedings against The Mail on Sunday – presided over an “anything goes” regime of sexual licence, spying and financial sweeteners.
Scroll down for more…
He also claims that Home Secretary John Reid was arrested at gunpoint on a BP-funded foreign trip for being out on the streets after a military curfew had been imposed.
Mr Abrahams tells how he spent £45 million in expenses over just four months of negotiations with Azerbaijan’s state oil company.
Armed with a no-limit company credit card, he ordered supplies of champagne and caviar to be flown on company jets into the boomtown capital, Baku, to be consumed at the “sex parties”.
The hospitality continued in London, where prostitutes were hired on the BP credit card to entertain visiting Azerbaijanis.
Mr Abrahams, an engineer by training, joined BP in 1991, just as the disintegration of the Soviet Union had triggered a “new gold rush” by oil multi-nationals seeking a share of the 200 billion barrels of oil reserves beneath the Caspian Sea.
While employed by BP, Mr Abrahams says he was persuaded to work for MI6 by John Scarlett, now head of the service but then its head of station in Moscow.
He says he was passing information to Scarlett in faxes and at one-to-one meetings in the Russian capital.
He also claims that BP was working closely with MI6 at the highest levels to help it to win business in the region and influence the political complexion of governments.
Mr Abrahams worked for BP’s XFI unit – Exploring Frontiers International – which specialises in opening new markets in often unstable parts of the world.
He said Lord Browne, then BP’s head of exploration, allocated a budget of £45 million to cover the first year’s costs of the Baku operation.
“The order came from Browne’s aides to ‘get them anything they want’.
“By ‘them’, they meant local officials in Azerbaijan,” Mr Abrahams said.
“There were 20 or 30 people working on it at BP head office, and we soon had a steady stream of executives coming over as negotiators. We got through the money in just four months – after which it was simply increased without question.”
He described a Wild West world in which oil executives with briefcases full of dollars rubbed shoulders with mafia members, prostitutes and fixers and cut their deals in smoke-filled back rooms.
“The BP officials would come out to Baku in groups of five or six, every week,” he said.
“Sometimes I would charter an entire Boeing 757 to carry as few as seven staff. Their main base was the hard currency bar of the old Intourist hotel – so named because it accepted only dollars and was only open to foreigners.
“It was full of prostitutes and many of us, including me, used them on a regular basis, although we quickly established they all worked for the KGB.
“If we went back to the rooms, not only were they bugged, but the girls would quiz us closely about what we were doing and where we were going, and reported straight back to their handlers.
“Everywhere was bugged, and all the phones were tapped. One of our executives was recorded saying unflattering things about the president, and his comments were played back to us in a meeting with local state oil company officials.
“We were then told clearly that he was no longer welcome in the country.”
Mr Abrahams helped to forge links with the local officials by throwing lavish parties. He said the Azerbaijani girls who worked in the BP office, which occupied a floor of the Sovietskaya hotel, would attend the parties and routinely provide “sexual favours”.
They were also presumed to work for the local intelligence services.
“There was one girl, called Natasha, assigned to teach us Russian, but it usually ended up as more that that. She would use the intimate opportunity to ask us questions about what we were up to.
“Caviar and champagne were consumed at the parties, which would start in the bars but inevitably end with the girls in the rooms.
“We had a company American Express card with no name on it which we could use to draw out $10,000 a time to pay for entertaining without ever having to account for it.
“Our local fixer was called ‘Zulfie’, who would help find girls, drink and occasionally hashish. We always suspected he worked for the KGB, because he was so well connected.
“A lot of the BP men’s marriages went wrong. Either they ended up with the local girls, or the wives would find out – often because the girls would ring their home numbers “by accident”.
“I don’t believe that Browne didn’t know everything that was going on. He came out to Baku on five or six occasions.”
Mr Abrahams, who left BP in 1994, said his first marriage buckled because of his work in Baku. He has since remarried and lives in West London with his new wife Lana and six-year-old daughter Anastasia. He now works as an adviser to the EU.
He said BP applied the same laissez-faire attitude to hospitality when Azerbaijani officials came to the UK during the negotiations.
“I was given a hotline number which connected to a desk in the Foreign Office. It meant visas could be granted instantly for the Azerbaijanis and collected on arrival at the airport, rather than taking the usual several weeks.
“We had bundles of cash to spend on them when they got here, and could again use the corporate card without restraint.
“We would typically have a dinner at which Lord Browne would be present, then he would go home and we would head off to somewhere like the Gaslight Club in Piccadilly – where girls would dance topless and you would get charged £250 for your drink.
“Our guests would usually want girls to go back with afterwards. Sometimes we could persuade the girls in the clubs, but more often we would just phone up an escort agency.
“We could charge them straight to the BP Amex card. But it sometimes became problematic. One group of Khazak Oil officials stripped their hotel rooms in Aberdeen bare, including the sheets and pillowcases, and they would usually clear out the minibars wherever they were staying.”
All the entertaining paid off in September 1992 when BP signed a £300 million deal to exploit the Shah Deniz oilfields.
Mr Abrahams says that a key factor in securing the deal was an £8 million payment BP made that year to SOCAR, the state-owned oil company in Azerbaijan, for the right to use a construction yard on the edge of the Caspian Sea.
“It was effectively a sweetener to help to secure the deal – and it worked,” he said.
Among the guests at a dinner and ceremony at Baku’s Gulistan Palace to celebrate the Shah Deniz deal were Lord Browne and Baroness Thatcher.
Mr Abrahams says he was told to ensure that everything ran smoothly for the event, including meeting Browne’s fastidious requirements.
“I had his favourite brand of water, Hildon, and his preferred foods flown out in advance, and I made sure money was paid for police escorts and to circumvent immigration procedures at the airport for Browne and his entourage.
“That evening, he personally handed me a briefcase containing a cheque for $30 million (£15million), to close the deal.
“He was so keen to wear a particular shirt, which he had left at the airport, that I persuaded the chief of police to close off the roads so his cavalcade could go via the airport to collect it.”
In 1993, Mr Abrahams played host to a group of MPs who visited Baku as guests of BP, including Harold Elletson – then a Tory MP but now an adviser to the Liberal Democrats – and Home Secretary John Reid, a Shadow Defence Minister at the time.
“John flew out in the BP Gulfstream jet,” he recalls.
“After dinner, we went drinking in the hard currency bar. He was drinking a lot – this was a year before he gave up for good – and I grew worried as it got closer to the time of the curfew imposed because of the tense political situation at the time.
“I said, ‘Come on John, we have to get back to the hotel.’ But as we left, he was swaying around and being very noisy.
“I urged him not to draw attention to us because we weren’t meant to be still on the streets. But then a van load of police armed with Kalashnikovs pulled up and asked us what we were doing.
“He said, ‘I am a British politician…’ I urged him to be quiet, but then he said to one of the policemen, ‘If you don’t take that f***ing Kalashnikov out of my face I’m going to stick it up your f***ing a***.’
“With that, we were arrested and shoved at gunpoint into the back of the van.
“It was only after I persuaded the driver to go to the hotel to speak to the intelligence officer there that they released us. John had only about two hours’ sleep, then was up at 5.30am to fly to the nearby war zone of Nagorno Karabakh. He was completely hung over.”
Some of Mr Abrahams’ most intriguing claims surround the alleged co-operation between BP and the British intelligence services to secure a more pro-Western, pro-business regime in the country.
He says the operation, masterminded by Scarlett in Moscow, contributed to the coup in May 1992 which saw President Ayaz Mutalibov toppled by Abulfaz Elchibey, and then to a second change a year later which saw Haydar Aliyev take power.
Just months after Aliyev was installed, BP signed the so-called ‘contract of the century’, a £5 billion deal which placed BP at the head of an oil exporting consortium.
John Scarlett, says Mr Abrahams, “approached me very subtly and asked me to help to gather information for him.
“Because my daily route to the construction yard passed the supply routes for Nagorno Karabakh, he asked me to report on troop and weapons movements. And BP’s deputy representative in Russia seemed very close to the embassy, too.
“BP supported both coups, both through discreet moves and open political support. Our progress on the oil contracts improved considerably after the coups.”
Subsequently released Turkish secret service documents claimed BP had discussed an ‘arms for oil’ deal with the assistance of MI6, under which the company would use intermediaries to supply weapons to Aliyev’s supporters in return for the contract.
When the documents emerged in 2000, BP denied supplying arms – although sources admitted its representatives had “discussed the possibility”.
A BP spokesman said last night of Mr Abrahams’ claims: “There are some facts in his account that are accurate, but we don’t recognise most of it. We regard it as fantasy.”
A spokeswoman for John Reid said she had no comment and the Foreign Office said of Mr Abrahams’ claims: “We neither confirm nor deny anyone’s allegations in relation to intelligence matters.”
UPDATE: 20.05.07
Looks like the cached version has been pulled from Google too! Does it really matter? The facts are out there! Let us rise.
Warning! Not for the easily offended!
After a run in with Paris Hilton’s lawyers, Gallery of the Absurd removed a piece of artwork from it’s internet blog that showed Paris in an unflattering light. The offending image was this – a parody of Hilton and Ritchie go to camp – now sans fresh-water crabs the Gallery had drawn attached to the side of the boat, in reference to Paris’ alleged (wink) crotch infestation of crabs that many were talking about on the net and which Hilton’s lawyers were not very happy about. So the Gallery removed the offending crabs.
Hilton’s displayed crotch in a host of celebrity mags is more of an assault on womanhood, I think, than a couple of crabs painted on the side of the boat, but more on that later. The fact is, thanks to the papparazi that Paris courts so assiduously, most of us have seen Paris’ crotch, however her crabs have yet to be photographed.
The Gallery removed the crabs from the image but not before vowing to continue painting Paris. Upholding the Gallery’s promise, more images are now ready to be viewed here.
Also from the Gallery is this poignant image of Paris
According to the artist, the piece speaks “of the pinnacle of modern day mob mentality’s ability to build higher and higher pedestals for their celebrity objects to sit – for the pleasure of seeing them fall.”
I think someone ought to remind the artist Maynard that nobody democratically elected Hilton to be humanity’s “celebrity object.” The same people that hoisted her exposed crotch into the celebrity magazines are the same ones that are scrutinising every detail of her fall from grace, the fall which they themselves have engineered. It’s the media that photograph Paris’ crotch, publish it and put it in the magazines much to our disgust and/or fascination. Men might display their genitals to shock women in lonely public places but for women, there is no power in flashing only shame and scorn lie there. Hilton and co. do not gain any points from it. As we have seen. Or is there?
Call me a cynic but there’s been a flurry of coochie exposing by the rich and famous of late, Britney, Janice Dickenson etc. If a man flashes the response is “ewww, put it away you perv!” but when female celebs are doing it? Outrage. It is the ultimate publicity gimmick. One after another, celebs are leaving their knickers at home and flashing for the papparazzi. One thing that unites all these lunch-box images is that all of them display crotches that have been brazilian waxed, not a hair in sight, making them appear pre-pubescent. Also the labia you would expect to see on a mature woman are absent. Susie Bright writes about it here.
I am left with the grim thought that all these crotch shots are nothing more than an attempt to imprint on women the idealised labia that can only be surgically applied and by plastic surgeorns – it’s all the rage now in the USA.
Here we are trying to tell our teenage daughters that they are beautiful just as they are and the plastic surgeons are selling them silicon here and a nip tuck there. A few years down the line our girls will be demanding labia ops because theirs just doesn’t look right when compared to those pics of Paris and Janice and the girls in the Playboy magazine. And… here are all the politically correct screaming about how the uncivilized perform cliteroctemies!
I don’t blame the parents, the media, or the mob. No, I blame them and the surgeons!
From The Tribune
NICK “neotrot” Cohen, lately responsible for a lengthy published rant deriding the left for its opposition to the war in Iraq, has been given a dressing down by his mother for being politically incorrect. Well, it was more than that actually. She gave him a slapping.
Mum Maggie was seriously upset at being called a Stalinist in the opening pages of nasty Nick’s book. Not least because, when the Cohen family last gathered together to enjoy a jolly Christmas, cowardly Nick failed to mention the reference, or even the book.
Maggie, a lifelong leftie, could not contain her feelings when she next saw her son. Although diminuitive to Nick’s beanstalk proportions, she let him have one round the chops. “In all the years they were growing up I never hit the children,” Maggie recently told friends. “Now I have to go and do it when he is grown up.”
He deserved it Mrs Cohen because he’s a very naughty boy!
Blair finally announces the date of his departure. Er… which happened sometime yesterday in Sedgefield. The date of reckoning was only announced publicly the day before yesterday which didn’t really leave me or anyone else enough time to express our personal feelings about his departure, in fact we were given so little notice that Blair was able to fly to his constituency, Sedgefield in a private jet without meeting with the adoring public that the sycophants were assured must exist…
How different from the days when he took the British electorate by storm and won an overwhelming majority promising to make Britain a kinder place. Then later as a friend of Bush he took him to visit his home in Sedgefield and his local pub, no doubt, as proof of how he, Blair, was undervalued by the British electorate. Look, he must have told Bush, in all his years he had only managed to acquire a modest house in the environs of Sedgefield and only ever warm beer to drink in the local. The life of the British politician is gruelling*, very quaint, and a world away from the Bush photo-ops in the ranch where cronies (FEMA and Texas police Dept) spend most days clearing the ranch of shrub and the tents of embittered mothers (and their supporters) who have lost their sons in Bush’s war. Bush of course found this all so quaint and immediately awarded Blair with a shiny medal as compensation. Blair to date has not been able to collect the medal for fear of being tarred with the label of being Bush’s poodle! He should have not worried because that label was attached to him on Feb 17.03. The idea of a kinder Britain out the window. One in which representative democracy died and two jelly babies rule by consent.
Nothing more to say really as the sycophants dutifully pay him homage. One such toady from Ghana praised his humanitarianism and told us how wonderful he had been for Africa. Rwanda. Sierre Leone. Somalia. Democratic Republic of Congo. Zimbabwe. Darfur. Note how Darfur’s now the Word, not Sudan! Darfur … Whoop de doo.
*arduous: characterized by toilsome effort to the point of exhaustion; especially physical effort; “worked their arduous way up the mining valley”; “a grueling campaign”; “hard labor”; “heavy work”; “heavy going”; “spent many laborious hours on the project”; “set a punishing pace”
Is it possible to even begin to imagine the horror…
‘this space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. […] The question is how do you interpret the alley? […] We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps. […] I want to surprise him! This is the essence of war. I need to win […] This is why that we opted for the methodology of moving through walls. . . . Like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. […] I said to my troops, “Friends! […] If until now you were used to move along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!” Frieze
A shocking article follows on how the distinction between the interior (domestic) landscape and public urban spaces is continuously being blurred. Homes now become thoroughfares and conduits for the IDF in Israel’s so-called “occupied territories”, as the setting for wars stops being something that happens “out there”. Private homes and living rooms become the setting for conducting warfare. Into these private spaces the paraphernalia of war is becoming as acceptable as the family photo on the mantle-piece. The destructive force of electric drills and stun grenades are used to puncture the peace and serenity of the family home. Holes are drilled through walls to create safe spaces for soldiers to move through as they give up the “dangerous and deadly alley-ways”. What shocks me here is that this form of blurring the distinction between the public and the private, the inside and the outside, this “infestation” of our private spaces destroys any lasting idea that the “war” will be carried out in zones which are recognised as battlefields but increasingly in our homes and as that happens the geographic boundaries of war is spread so that those inside are no different from those outsiders that invade their homes with drills and stun grenades. The private unarmed citizen becomes a combatant too whose private space is one that can be invaded in order to search and destroy those who resist such debasement. Surely that is all of us? The distinction between the combatant and the civilian is lost within this. Inside the home lurks an enemy seeking to use the sanctity of this space to inflict harm on the shock troops. So the argument goes. Read on…
The Art of War
The Israeli Defence Forces have been heavily influenced by contemporary philosophy, highlighting the fact that there is considerable overlap among theoretical texts deemed essential by military academies and architectural schools by Eyal Weizman
The attack conducted by units of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, as ‘inverse geometry’, which he explained as ‘the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions’.1 During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of ‘overground tunnels’ carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manoeuvring simultaneously in the city, they were so ‘saturated’ into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city’s streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as ‘infestation’, seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF’s strategy of ‘walking through walls’ involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.
Contemporary military theorists are now busy re-conceptualizing the urban domain. At stake are the underlying concepts, assumptions and principles that determine military strategies and tactics. The vast intellectual field that geographer Stephen Graham has called an international ‘shadow world’ of military urban research institutes and training centres that have been established to rethink military operations in cities could be understood as somewhat similar to the international matrix of élite architectural academies. However, according to urban theorist Simon Marvin, the military-architectural ‘shadow world’ is currently generating more intense and well-funded urban research programmes than all these university programmes put together, and is certainly aware of the avant-garde urban research conducted in architectural institutions, especially as regards Third World and African cities. There is a considerable overlap among the theoretical texts considered essential by military academies and architectural schools. Indeed, the reading lists of contemporary military institutions include works from around 1968 (with a special emphasis on the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Guy Debord), as well as more contemporary writings on urbanism, psychology, cybernetics, post-colonial and post-Structuralist theory. If, as some writers claim, the space for criticality has withered away in late 20th-century capitalist culture, it seems now to have found a place to flourish in the military.
I conducted an interview with Kokhavi, commander of the Paratrooper Brigade, who at 42 is considered one of the most promising young officers of the IDF (and was the commander of the operation for the evacuation of settlements in the Gaza Strip).2 Like many career officers, he had taken time out from the military to earn a university degree; although he originally intended to study architecture, he ended up with a degree in philosophy from the Hebrew University. When he explained to me the principle that guided the battle in Nablus, what was interesting for me was not so much the description of the action itself as the way he conceived its articulation. He said: ‘this space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. […] The question is how do you interpret the alley? […] We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps. […] I want to surprise him! This is the essence of war. I need to win […] This is why that we opted for the methodology of moving through walls. . . . Like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. […] I said to my troops, “Friends! […] If until now you were used to move along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!”’2 Kokhavi’s intention in the battle was to enter the city in order to kill members of the Palestinian resistance and then get out. The horrific frankness of these objectives, as recounted to me by Shimon Naveh, Kokhavi’s instructor, is part of a general Israeli policy that seeks to disrupt Palestinian resistance on political as well as military levels through targeted assassinations from both air and ground.
If you still believe, as the IDF would like you to, that moving through walls is a relatively gentle form of warfare, the following description of the sequence of events might change your mind. To begin with, soldiers assemble behind the wall and then, using explosives, drills or hammers, they break a hole large enough to pass through. Stun grenades are then sometimes thrown, or a few random shots fired into what is usually a private living-room occupied by unsuspecting civilians. When the soldiers have passed through the wall, the occupants are locked inside one of the rooms, where they are made to remain – sometimes for several days – until the operation is concluded, often without water, toilet, food or medicine. Civilians in Palestine, as in Iraq, have experienced the unexpected penetration of war into the private domain of the home as the most profound form of trauma and humiliation. A Palestinian woman identified only as Aisha, interviewed by a journalist for the Palestine Monitor, described the experience: ‘Imagine it – you’re sitting in your living-room, which you know so well; this is the room where the family watches television together after the evening meal, and suddenly that wall disappears with a deafening roar, the room fills with dust and debris, and through the wall pours one soldier after the other, screaming orders. You have no idea if they’re after you, if they’ve come to take over your home, or if your house just lies on their route to somewhere else. The children are screaming, panicking. Is it possible to even begin to imagine the horror experienced by a five-year-old child as four, six, eight, 12 soldiers, their faces painted black, sub-machine-guns pointed everywhere, antennas protruding from their backpacks, making them look like giant alien bugs, blast their way through that wall?’3
Naveh, a retired Brigadier-General, directs the Operational Theory Research Institute, which trains staff officers from the IDF and other militaries in ‘operational theory’ – defined in military jargon as somewhere between strategy and tactics. He summed up the mission of his institute, which was founded in 1996: ‘We are like the Jesuit Order. We attempt to teach and train soldiers to think. […] We read Christopher Alexander, can you imagine?; we read John Forester, and other architects. We are reading Gregory Bateson; we are reading Clifford Geertz. Not myself, but our soldiers, our generals are reflecting on these kinds of materials. We have established a school and developed a curriculum that trains “operational architects”.’4 In a lecture Naveh showed a diagram resembling a ‘square of opposition’ that plots a set of logical relationships between certain propositions referring to military and guerrilla operations. Labelled with phrases such as ‘Difference and Repetition – The Dialectics of Structuring and Structure’, ‘Formless Rival Entities’, ‘Fractal Manoeuvre’, ‘Velocity vs. Rhythms’, ‘The Wahabi War Machine’, ‘Postmodern Anarchists’ and ‘Nomadic Terrorists’, they often reference the work of Deleuze and Guattari. War machines, according to the philosophers, are polymorphous; diffuse organizations characterized by their capacity for metamorphosis, made up of small groups that split up or merge with one another, depending on contingency and circumstances. (Deleuze and Guattari were aware that the state can willingly transform itself into a war machine. Similarly, in their discussion of ‘smooth space’ it is implied that this conception may lead to domination.)
I asked Naveh why Deleuze and Guattari were so popular with the Israeli military. He replied that ‘several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaux became instrumental for us […] allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise. It problematized our own paradigms. Most important was the distinction they have pointed out between the concepts of “smooth” and “striated” space [which accordingly reflect] the organizational concepts of the “war machine” and the “state apparatus”. In the IDF we now often use the term “to smooth out space” when we want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. […] Palestinian areas could indeed be thought of as “striated” in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, roads blocks and so on.’5 When I asked him if moving through walls was part of it, he explained that, ‘In Nablus the IDF understood urban fighting as a spatial problem. [...] Travelling through walls is a simple mechanical solution that connects theory and practice.’6
To understand the IDF’s tactics for moving through Palestinian urban spaces, it is necessary to understand how they interpret the by now familiar principle of ‘swarming’ – a term that has been a buzzword in military theory since the start of the US post cold War doctrine known as the Revolution in Military Affairs. The swarm manoeuvre was in fact adapted, from the Artificial Intelligence principle of swarm intelligence, which assumes that problem-solving capacities are found in the interaction and communication of relatively unsophisticated agents (ants, birds, bees, soldiers) with little or no centralized control. The swarm exemplifies the principle of non-linearity apparent in spatial, organizational and temporal terms. The traditional manoeuvre paradigm, characterized by the simplified geometry of Euclidean order, is transformed, according to the military, into a complex fractal-like geometry. The narrative of the battle plan is replaced by what the military, using a Foucaultian term, calls the ‘toolbox approach’, according to which units receive the tools they need to deal with several given situations and scenarios but cannot predict the order in which these events would actually occur.7 Naveh: ‘Operative and tactical commanders depend on one another and learn the problems through constructing the battle narrative; […] action becomes knowledge, and knowledge becomes action. […] Without a decisive result possible, the main benefit of operation is the very improvement of the system as a system.’8
This may explain the fascination of the military with the spatial and organizational models and modes of operation advanced by theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari. Indeed, as far as the military is concerned, urban warfare is the ultimate Postmodern form of conflict. Belief in a logically structured and single-track battle-plan is lost in the face of the complexity and ambiguity of the urban reality. Civilians become combatants, and combatants become civilians. Identity can be changed as quickly as gender can be feigned: the transformation of women into fighting men can occur at the speed that it takes an undercover ‘Arabized’ Israeli soldier or a camouflaged Palestinian fighter to pull a machine-gun out from under a dress. For a Palestinian fighter caught up in this battle, Israelis seem ‘to be everywhere: behind, on the sides, on the right and on the left. How can you fight that way?’9
Critical theory has become crucial for Nave’s teaching and training. He explained: ‘we employ critical theory primarily in order to critique the military institution itself – its fixed and heavy conceptual foundations. Theory is important for us in order to articulate the gap between the existing paradigm and where we want to go. Without theory we could not make sense of the different events that happen around us and that would otherwise seem disconnected. […] At present the Institute has a tremendous impact on the military; [it has] become a subversive node within it. By training several high-ranking officers we filled the system [IDF] with subversive agents […] who ask questions; […] some of the top brass are not embarrassed to talk about Deleuze or [Bernard] Tschumi.’10 I asked him, ‘Why Tschumi?’ He replied: ‘The idea of disjunction embodied in Tschumi’s book Architecture and Disjunction (1994) became relevant for us […] Tschumi had another approach to epistemology; he wanted to break with single-perspective knowledge and centralized thinking. He saw the world through a variety of different social practices, from a constantly shifting point of view. [Tschumi] created a new grammar; he formed the ideas that compose our thinking.11 I then asked him, why not Derrida and Deconstruction? He answered, ‘Derrida may be a little too opaque for our crowd. We share more with architects; we combine theory and practice. We can read, but we know as well how to build and destroy, and sometimes kill.’12
In addition to these theoretical positions, Naveh references such canonical elements of urban theory as the Situationist practices of dérive (a method of drifting through a city based on what the Situationists referred to as ‘psycho-geography’) and détournement (the adaptation of abandoned buildings for purposes other than those they were designed to perform). These ideas were, of course, conceived by Guy Debord and other members of the Situationist International to challenge the built hierarchy of the capitalist city and break down distinctions between private and public, inside and outside, use and function, replacing private space with a ‘borderless’ public surface. References to the work of Georges Bataille, either directly or as cited in the writings of Tschumi, also speak of a desire to attack architecture and to dismantle the rigid rationalism of a postwar order, to escape ‘the architectural strait-jacket’ and to liberate repressed human desires.
In no uncertain terms, education in the humanities – often believed to be the most powerful weapon against imperialism – is being appropriated as a powerful vehicle for imperialism. The military’s use of theory is, of course, nothing new – a long line extends all the way from Marcus Aurelius to General Patton.
Future military attacks on urban terrain will increasingly be dedicated to the use of technologies developed for the purpose of ‘un-walling the wall’, to borrow a term from Gordon Matta-Clark. This is the new soldier/architect’s response to the logic of ‘smart bombs’. The latter have paradoxically resulted in higher numbers of civilian casualties simply because the illusion of precision gives the military-political complex the necessary justification to use explosives in civilian environments.
Here another use of theory as the ultimate ‘smart weapon’ becomes apparent. The military’s seductive use of theoretical and technological discourse seeks to portray war as remote, quick and intellectual, exciting – and even economically viable. Violence can thus be projected as tolerable and the public encouraged to support it. As such, the development and dissemination of new military technologies promote the fiction being projected into the public domain that a military solution is possible – in situations where it is at best very doubtful.
Although you do not need Deleuze to attack Nablus, theory helped the military reorganize by providing a new language in which to speak to itself and others. A ‘smart weapon’ theory has both a practical and a discursive function in redefining urban warfare. The practical or tactical function, the extent to which Deleuzian theory influences military tactics and manoeuvres, raises questions about the relation between theory and practice. Theory obviously has the power to stimulate new sensibilities, but it may also help to explain, develop or even justify ideas that emerged independently within disparate fields of knowledge and with quite different ethical bases. In discursive terms, war – if it is not a total war of annihilation – constitutes a form of discourse between enemies. Every military action is meant to communicate something to the enemy. Talk of ‘swarming’, ‘targeted killings’ and ‘smart destruction’ help the military communicate to its enemies that it has the capacity to effect far greater destruction. Raids can thus be projected as the more moderate alternative to the devastating capacity that the military actually possesses and will unleash if the enemy exceeds the ‘acceptable’ level of violence or breaches some unspoken agreement. In terms of military operational theory it is essential never to use one’s full destructive capacity but rather to maintain the potential to escalate the level of atrocity. Otherwise threats become meaningless.
When the military talks theory to itself, it seems to be about changing its organizational structure and hierarchies. When it invokes theory in communications with the public – in lectures, broadcasts and publications – it seems to be about projecting an image of a civilized and sophisticated military. And when the military ‘talks’ (as every military does) to the enemy, theory could be understood as a particularly intimidating weapon of ‘shock and awe’, the message being: ‘You will never even understand that which kills you.’
Eyal Weizman is an architect, writer and Director of Goldsmith’s College Centre for Research Architecture. His work deals with issues of conflict territories and human rights.
A full version of this article was recently delivered at the conference ‘Beyond Bio-politics’ at City University, New York, and in the architecture program of the Sao Paulo Biennial. A transcript can be read in the March/April, 2006 issue of Radical Philosophy.
1 Quoted in Hannan Greenberg, ‘The Limited Conflict: This Is How You Trick Terrorists’, in Yediot Aharonot; www.ynet.co.il (23 March 2004)
2 Eyal Weizman interviewed Aviv Kokhavi on 24 September at an Israeli military base near Tel Aviv. Translation from Hebrew by the author; video documentation by Nadav Harel and Zohar Kaniel
3 Sune Segal, ‘What Lies Beneath: Excerpts from an Invasion’, Palestine Monitor, November, 2002;
www.palestinemonitor.org/eyewitness/Westbank/what_lies_beneath_by_sune_segal.html 9 June, 2005
4 Shimon Naveh, discussion following the talk ‘Dicta Clausewitz: Fractal Manoeuvre: A Brief History of Future Warfare in Urban Environments’, delivered in conjunction with ‘States of Emergency: The Geography of Human Rights’, a debate organized by Eyal Weizman and Anselm Franke as part of ‘Territories Live’, B’tzalel Gallery, Tel Aviv,
5 November 2004
5 Eyal Weizman, telephone interview with Shimon Naveh, 14 October 2005
6 Ibid.
7 Michel Foucault’s description of theory as a ‘toolbox’ was originally developed in conjunction with Deleuze in a 1972 discussion; see Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. and intro. Donald F. Bouchard, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1980, p. 206
8 Weizman, interview with Naveh
9 Quoted in Yagil Henkin, ‘The Best Way into Baghdad’, The New York Times, 3 April 2003
10 Weizman, interview with Naveh
11 Naveh is currently working on a Hebrew translation of Bernard Tschumi’s Architecture and Disjunction, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1997.
12 Weizman, interview with Naveh
The preferences and the prejudices of the swing voter in the marginal constituency retain a disproportionate influence within our political system. As such, the modern politician seeks to neutralise – or triangulate around – difficult political terrain. There is no better example of this terrain than the current debates around race and demographic change.
Labour Party Deputy leader contestant Jon Cruddas tackles immigration and the far right in this essay…
Race, Class and Migration: Tackling the Far Right
18 April 2007
Article by Jon Cruddas in the Policy Network book “Rethinking Immigration and Integration: a New Centre-Left Agenda”
Over the last few years, many of our communities have experienced extraordinary rates of change – primarily driven by mass migration, changing patterns in the demand for labour and the dynamics of the housing market. The policy issues thrown up by these forces have been diffi cult for the state to comprehend; not least because many of the people affected by the changes do not show up in the census and therefore do not exist for the purposes of public policy making.
Moreover, the communities undergoing these rapid demographic changes are often the most poorly equipped to do so, and maintain high levels of poverty, social immobility and poor public services. Poorer, low-cost housing areas, primarily in urban settings, are taking the strain in managing migration fl ows. The impact of migration on the labour and housing markets has triggered tensions and threatened community cohesion. In particular communities, the local population grows at a faster rate than the state’s refinancing of public services, as decisions on funding are based on an out-of date formula for resource allocation.
These issues demand an adequate response from the state that must be based on the empirical realities of modern Britain. It means a return to issues of class, race, poverty and migration. It means that we have to construct a real-time demographic picture upon which to build such an adequate response. It is through such a response that we can construct a framework for addressing the material conditions which aid the far-right in exploiting these issues.
Yet the configuration of the electoral system pushes politicians into dangerous territory when addressing race and migration. The preferences and the prejudices of the swing voter in the marginal constituency retain a disproportionate influence within our political system. As such, the modern politician seeks to neutralise – or triangulate around – difficult political terrain. There is no better example of this terrain than the current debates around race and demographic change.
Those negatively affected by migration perceive government efforts to tackle immigration as being woefully inadequate, as the issues which concern them are not sufficiently reported in the media and therefore are not commonly understood. This underreporting, combined with the strain placed on existing services by the recent expansion in migration, has led to disillusionment and caused voters to seek populist answers.
The economic losers from immigration are becoming increasingly alienated from their traditional Labour representation. This essay explores this fundamental economic and political rupture. On the one hand, the current situation has created a contest of tough policies on migrants. Due to the lack of a visible and coherent Labour policy, right-wing political parties (both mainstream and more extremist) have garnered support from traditional Labour voters. Immigration is a contentious issue which will increasingly determine electoral outcomes.
On the other hand, migrant labour has contributed to the economic prosperity enjoyed by Britain. Migrants bring an enormous range of benefits to the British economy, and many low-skilled workers are filling gaps in the UK labour market.
The combination of migration and economics can also result, in the worst cases, in racism and extremism. With reference to my own constituency in East London, I offer an insight into the way these forces combine and the consequences of the rise of extremist political forces. This article argues that what is required is a response grounded in the material conditions of disadvantaged communities, in order to remove the forces that are feeding extremist political movements.
Public perceptions must be tackled in order for the government to receive credit for its policies, but simultaneously, these policies need to be more responsive to the actual situation on the ground.
Changing labour markets and the demand for labour
Globalisation and the information and communication technologies have been widely cited as the key contemporary levers of change that are reshaping the labour markets of the future. Yet, the fundamental problem with this conception of the ‘new knowledge economy’ is one of evidence. On the basis of both the empirical changes over the last ten years and the best projections for the future, it is clear that we are witnessing an ever more pronounced polarisation within the labour market – and wider society – often described as the ‘hour glass’ economy.
On the one hand, there exists a primary labour market – the knowledge economy. On the other, there is an expanding secondary labour market where the largest growth is occurring – in service-related elementary occupations, administrative and clerical occupations, sales occupations, caring, personal service jobs and the like. In terms of absolute employment growth since the early 1990s, the fastest growing occupations have been in four long-established services (sales assistants, data input clerks, storekeepers and receptionists); in state dominated education and health services; and the caring occupations (care assistants, welfare and community workers, and nursery nurses).
In short, employment growth has been concentrated in occupations that could scarcely be judged new, still less the fulcrum of a ‘new economy’. New Labour’s political strategy has been driven by the dynamics at work at the top end of this hour glass – the political inference being that those who occupy the bottom half will always stick with Labour as they have no other viable alternative. For purposes of political positioning, the worldview has developed which renders the working class invisible and downgrades the needs of working class communities. Yet paradoxically, New Labour has overseen an economic strategy characterised by the expansion in the demand for relatively low waged work. In short, empirically it has brought about the development of a thriving bottom of the hour glass. This mix has tended to create a brittle tension between the narrative of New Labour and the empirical realities of the modern world. New Labour presents a picture of immigration in England for both the purposes of policy and public relations which is necessarily wrong because of the evidence on which it is based. This clashes with the experience of British people, whose experience of immigration is concerned with how daily life is affected by migration, and who see only the gap between Labour policy and migration issues.
This gap needs to be bridged in order to confront the problems caused by migration and show the public that these problems are being addressed in a serious way. Furthermore, the benefits of immigration must be emphasised. This tension also characterises the politics and the economics of migration. On the one hand we triangulate around migration and race given the prejudices of the swing voter in the swing seat.
Thus the importance of the swing voter lies behind the portrait painted by Labour: tight control over immigration and a protection against the negative aspects of these population flows. The presentation of Labour policy thus becomes of the greatest importance.
On the other hand, migrant labour – regulated and unregulated – has in reality been the cornerstone of government economic strategy, fuelled by the demand for relatively low-waged labour. The best illustration of this collision between rhetoric and reality is the data regarding the minimal prosecutions for those employing un-regularised migrant labour. Given the rate of inward migration alongside the lack of market regulation, it is impossible to conclude anything other than that migrant labour is seen as a key driver in tacitly de-regulating the labour market in order to reproduce this flexible low waged economy.
Migration: the numbers game
Rapid change is occurring in the British economy and wider society. According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS), the population is growing at its fastest pace since the early 1960s despite record emigration. The ONS estimates the population of Britain to be some 60.2 million in June 2005 – a year-on-year rise of around 0.6 per cent or 375,000. According to research 235,000 of the 375,000 rise was due to net migration, with the remainder made up by the growing gap between births and deaths. In the same year net outward migration rose to 114,000 – the highest figure since records began in 1991.
The ONS has announced a programme to improve on these estimates given an acknowledgment that increasing numbers of people are on the move at any one time. This review is a tacit acceptance that these figures understate the real demographic changes at work within the UK – despite the record numbers contained in the estimates. The data assumes only a net migration of 74,300 from the new accession states.
The government has recently announced that some 427,095 people from the new EU countries had registered to work here over the two years from May 2004. However, the self-employed, students and dependents and legal ‘non-working’ residents do not register. It is a common estimate that at least 600,000 new EU nationals have now migrated to the UK over the last two years. The initial government estimate of the inflows was between 5,000 and 13,000. When we begin to scrutinise the details of this migration interesting information emerge. Most of them have come from Poland – 264,000. 82 per cent are young, aged between 18 and 34 and have no dependents. Most jobs performed are relatively low waged and low skilled jobs. In short there appears to have been a massive demographic movement into the UK driven by demand for certain forms of labour. Yet many of these families do not appear on the radar of public policy-makers, who remain attached to an out of date census that cannot encompass the sheer demographic dynamic that has developed over the last few years.
Demography, race and class: a case study of New Labour and the BNP
The Local Election results in May 2006 saw the British National Party (BNP) make significant electoral gains in specific parts of the country. Overall, the BNP gained 33 new councillors bringing their total to 48. BNP candidates were elected or polled over 25 per cent of the vote in over 100 council wards across the country. These gains built upon earlier electoral gains. The BNP polled 808,000 votes in the European elections and would have secured several MEPs and London Assembly members were it not for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). At the last General Election the BNP saved its deposit in 34 constituencies and made inroads within some of Labour’s traditional working class communities.
In 125 London the BNP polled 4.9 per cent in the Assembly elections. They had averaged some 35 per cent in five council by-elections over the last two years in Barking and Dagenham. Here, in September 2004, they won their first council seat in London for 11 years. This performance is significant not least because over the last few years there has been a sustained campaign against the BNP on the ground. At local level a new ‘Popular Front’ politics has been forged through anti-fascist groups and churches together with local union branches and voluntary and political groups coming together to defeat the far right.
How then are we to understand the BNP vote? This is partly accounted for by the ability of the BNP to become the depository of anti-Labour feeling in a number of wards given the limited alternatives available to vote for any other mainstream Party. Across the borough Labour stood 51 candidates, the Tories 23, UKIP 17, the BNP 13 and the Liberals 4.
This psephological analysis does not account for the material forces that underpin the BNP presence in the borough. The key forces at work relate to extraordinary demographic shifts that occur against a legacy of poverty and sustained underinvestment in public services and infrastructure. The key driver of the demographic transformation is the relatively low cost private housing market. Yet this consequence of ‘the right to buy’ has also heightened demand for social housing given sustained house price inflation over the last five years.
The major demographic changes are off the radar of public policy-makers who remain attached to census data that offers diminishing returns in terms of understanding the day to day realities of life in the borough. Major population changes have occurred since the census data. Yet public policy making assumes a stable – indeed slightly declining – population of 164,000 for issues of resource allocation with a static ethnic make up for every year since 2001. As such, formal state decision making assumes a stable demography. Yet the borough retains the lowest housing costs across the whole of London and as such it has developed a magnetic pull for all those in search of such housing.
The only data set that begins to uncover the demographic shifts that every resident is aware of is year-on-year data regarding school rolls. This shows up both a rapidly growing head count but also dramatic shifts within that total. For example, between 2003 and 2005 the percentage of white children on the school roll fell by some 9.1 per cent – three quarters of this change was accounted for by black African children – as the influx of migrants radically changed the demographics of certain areas. Immigration is occurring in ever greater numbers. One of the key factors behind the emergence of the extreme right is this breach between the formal state perception of the borough and the day to day dynamics at work within the locality. The incremental investment in public services by the state on the basis of out of date population statistics cannot begin to deal with concerns that demographic change is occurring whilst resources are becoming scarcer.
Therefore, this has helped to form the perception that these changes are actually reducing the social wage. This perception could be expressed in terms of growing health inequalities, or reduced access to social housing or even declining hourly wage rates as the dynamic of migration triggers a race to the bottom of working conditions. As such, issues of resource allocation are seen by many as issues of race – which becomes the prism through which, for example, health, housing and wage inequalities are viewed. The most acute politicisation of resources concerns housing. Yet it is considered to be driven by race rather than systematic failure to provide low rent social housing units. 127 It is here that the issue of working class disenfranchisement comes into play. New Labour has quite consciously removed class as an economic or political category.
It has specifically calibrated a science of political organisation – and indeed an ideology – to camp out in middle England with unarguable electoral successes. Yet the question remains as to whether the policy mix developed to dominate a specifi c part of the British electoral map actually compounds problems in other communities with different histories and contemporary economic and social profiles. It is not just about social housing, although this is the most concrete manifestation of the core problem. It is about the ability of the state to anticipate and invest in the poor urban communities that take the strain of rapid demographic change. These communities are themselves the least able to navigate through such change as they retain the legacies of previous periods of political and economic failure. It is across this seam of class, race, poverty, public service inequalities and the demography of urban Britain that the question of Labour renewal might be considered when cast alongside the rise of the BNP.
The policy remedies are actually easy to identify – housing strategy, labour market reform, sustained education investment, the removal of health inequalities, use of brownfield land, a creative approach to demographic change in real time – including a regularisation of illegal migrants so as to properly quantify population growth. In many respects, although unfashionable, the remedies are often self-evident. In reality, it is an exercise in political will. Such remedies would, in turn, allow us to return to the class disenfranchisement issues contained in current present strategy and the associated triangulations of New Labour, especially regarding race.
Conclusion
The way we have sought to neutralise negative political issues regarding race, immigration and asylum has been particularly damaging. The government has never attempted to systematically annunciate a clear set of principles that embrace the notion of immigration and its associated economic and social benefits. Yet at the same time it has tacitly used immigration to help the preferred flexible North American labour market. Especially in London, legal and illegal immigration has been central in replenishing the stock of cheap labour across the public and private services, construction, and civil engineering.
Politically, the government is then left in a terrible position. We triangulate around immigration and collude in the demonisation of the migrant whilst relying on the same people to rebuild our public and private services and make our labour markets more fl exible. Immigrant labour is the axis for the domestic agenda of the government yet we fail to defend the principle of immigration and by doing so we reinforce the isolation and vulnerability of immigrants. We aid the process of stigmatising the most vulnerable as the whole political centre of gravity moves to the right on matters of race. The wages of many of my constituents are in decline.
House prices appear to rise inexorably upwards, whilst thousands seek nonexistent new social housing. Public service improvements fail to match localised population expansion let alone the long term legacy of underinvestment. At work their terms and conditions are under threat as they compete for jobs with cheap immigrant labour. In terms of access to housing and public services and their position in the workplace, many see immigration as a central determinant in their own relative impoverishment. This remains unchallenged whilst the media and political classes help demonise the immigrant.
Those communities that must accommodate the new immigrant communities are the ones least equipped to do so. They themselves have the most limited opportunities for economic and social mobility. Yet they remain disenfranchised due to the political imperatives of middle England whilst political elites ramp up tensions in these very communities due to the way they triangulate around race.
It is this mixture of class poverty and race, together with policy issues around housing, public services and the labour market which has created such a rich seam for the BNP in many parts of the UK, especially when we see a national debate around race and immigration that heightens tensions in our community. To date, the debate around migration has been fundamentally dishonest in that it has tended to discuss the issues through a focus on the relative strength of the government’s immigration policy, rather than the actual material conditions experienced by both the migrant and the community within which he or she comes to reside.
A renewed focus on the material conditions within these communities would hopefully provide a more robust policy platform from which to manage population flows.
