No Room To Breathe

I've lived outside the UK for three out of the last five years and every time I return I notice the change.

Everything is monitored. Everyone is checked. Everything and everyone is part of a growing system of government control which has moved beyond traditional parameters of law, order, and welfare provision into the private sphere where it hopes to create and enforce the concept of the 'model citizen'.

Increasingly, there is no more room to breathe in British society. No room to live according to different norms, to espouse different beliefs, or simply exist outside the ever-extending scrutiny of the state.

We live in a country where the fingerprints of thousands of innocent schoolchildren are kept on file by the police, where an electronic snapshot of our lives can be obtained by everyone from the local authority to the Egg Marketing Board - without our permission ever being asked.

A country where the phonecalls of MPs are tapped, where people can be fired from their jobs (or never employed) for 'misconduct' in their private life, ranging from drunken pranks with their pals to an unfortunate facebook photo.

Where ID cards containing all our personal information will so be required to access any public service, at any time. Where nothing we say do or think can be kept private.

It's just a step away from the situation depicted in 'The Lives of Others', which was so well received at last night's BAFTAs. The director claims enough time has passed to critically depict East-Germany's past under the Stasi.

Yet the surveillance state is not in the past. It is alive and well in modern Britain and the film contains a warning of what could lie ahead if Britain doesn't wake up to what liberties we allow our government to take away in the name of the 'common good'. For while the current political climate may still be reasonably open there may come a time when that is no longer the case - and it will be too late to change anything.

Successive Home Secretaries have accused critics of state surveillance for being paranoid, stating that if citizens have nothing to hide they have nothing to fear.

Yet as Dan Kieran points out in his book 'I Fought the Law', even respectable middle class citizens canfind themselves blacklisted, or even arrested, for engaging in the right to protest, whether over the war in Iraq or building a ring road in an environmentally sensitive area.

Isaiah Berlin famously defined liberty as 'an answer to the question: 'What is the area within which the subject — a person or group of persons — is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons'.

Totalitarian regimes corrode the space of negative liberties (where our freedom of action is uninterupted as long as it does not interfere with the freedoms of others) to the extent that all actions (no matter how private) become politicised and fall under the jurisdiction of the state.

That is what seems to be happening in the UK, with the active collusion of many unwitting and 'upright' British citizens. And before you accuse me of being paranoid, let me refer you the following article by Simon Carr in the Independent.

As he says: 'What we have emerging in Britain is a general cultural movement in favour of surveillance. There is a growing sense that society generally and the state in particular should take an active interest in all individual activity. And that this is right, proper and inevitable.

...We're witnessing something like Rousseau's "general will" in a preliminary stage of development. Polls, politics, television, public opinion, the insurance industry, the state sector, they are all combining to exert public "general will" rights over the private sphere.

Laying down an approved way of doing things is one expression of this. "Best practice" it is sometime called. Or "directives" or "targets" or "operational guidance".

The State has a powerful incentive and logic driving it: it is spending so much of our money to help us that it has the right to demand appropriate behaviour in return."

Efficient public spending requires model citizens. So be prepared to conform - or be convicted.

Questionable Facts

At last!! Proof that a taste for expensive restaurants, drinks receptions, and sedentary office life does not lie at the heart of my weight control issues. It's not my lifestyle that's to blame for being a few pounds overweight - it's my genes. Thanks Mum. That should keep her quiet the next time she gets on at me for not being a size 10...

Except that it doesn't add up. After all, almost noone was obese fifty years ago - and the gene pool hasn't changed much in that time. Even if some people find it harder to control weight than others genes can hardly explain the obesity epidemic that's hit the country.

Facts are facts. Sixty percent of British people will be obese by the year 2010 because modern life is bad for our health. The majority of people exist off diets permeated by rich, fatty, nutrition-free convenience food - because they are too busy to sit down and cook. We live lives of sloth, trapped in offices like those mice scientists use for experiments, and then express surprise at the expanse of flab around our middles.

Fad diets won't change that. Only a lifestyle revolution can. And that has got to start with challenging the efficiency epidemic that encourages these characteristics in the first place

Why Do We Bother?

I just don't understand it. While we expend vast amounts of energy frustrating Turkish attempts to join the European Union - despite Erdogan's best efforts to reform it in line with our rigorous standards - we approach Serbia, that hotbed of xenophobic nationalism and protector of war criminals, with open arms.

Indeed, if all goes 'well' the Slovenian Presidency will sign a Stablisation and Association Agreement with the Serbs this Thursday, offering them closer trade relations and relaxed visa requirements.

My question is, in exchange for what? Why exactly are we handing all of this to Serbia on a platter when there is precisely 'no evidence', according to Serge Brammaerts, the new Chief Prosecutor for the International Tribunal tasked with bringing war criminals to justice, that Serbia is cooperating in the search for Mladic?

This is the first and only main requirement the EU imposed on Belgrade for the SAA to be signed - and now we are all but ignoring it. So much for the EU commitment to upholding Human Rights.

The Presidency defends its decision on the basis that pro-Western President Boris Tadic has just been re-elected, as opposed to the pro-Moscow nationalist Tomislav Nikolic. But I'm afraid that doesn't really cut the mustard.

Firstly, the contest was exceptionally close, with almost half the population voting for closer ties with the Ruskies and in favour of ultra-nationalist sentiments. That's hardly evidence of a revolutionary change in mindset.

Secondly, both candidates came out against independence for Kosovo - one of the EU's main objectives.

And thirdly, ties with Russia have been effectively institutionalised after the same said Tadic allowed Gazprom and others to buy up almost all of Serbia's industry and major enterprises.

What we are looking at is a new Russian Satellite whose infrastructure, economy, and legal institutions are in need of nothing less than a major shakeup. Of what possible advantage could a country like this be to the EU?

However, thanks to Kostunica, we may not have to worry about that, at least for a while. He has come out against the planned agreement, accusing the EU of "directly undermining the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Serbia and its constitutional order" through a planned peace mission to Kosovo.

As the government coalition relies heavily on support from his faction, his move could topple the government by the end of the week. And that would mean forming a new coalition with none other than uber nationalist Tomislav Nikolic. Good to see that times have changed so definitively.
Instead of pretending that Serbia is yet in a fit state to join the Union we should focus on countries that can offer us something in return.

Turkey, with its access to and influence over Central Asia and its gas reserves, its highly educated labour force, growing economy, and potential for overcoming regional security issues, is far and away a better prospect than countries like Serbia who would simply take and not give.

Choosing the Right Way Forward

One of the main purposes of my work is convincing people that democracy and human rights are universally applicable, anywhere in the world. What I write is very black and white - because that is what my job demands. Propaganda isn't propaganda otherwise. However in private I have always -been slightly suspicious of the 'democratisation agenda': partly because it has been hijacked by American neo-cons in their quest for world dominance and partly because of an instinctive dislike of 'universalisms' which I have come to associate with thinly veiled cultural imperialism.

I don't think that makes me a cultural relativist on the other hand. I do not, for example, believe that all cultural practices are equally good. I do believe that better and worse decisions can be made and that in order to know which is which we have to make comparisons.

Yet I am also quite convinced that all cultural practices have a certain validity (that is they 'make sense') within the internal logic that governs every civilisation. Whether we are aware of it or not most of us operate on auto-pilot within our own societies, either conforming to or reacting against the unwritten rules which govern our understanding of right and wrong action.

Living within the parameters of these rules provides us with our sense of normality. We do not question why we behave a certain way, most of the time, nor do we try to justify it in our own terms. And if we are dissatisfied with the rules of the game, we react against them instead of putting in place alternative systems to govern our lives.

A good example would bethe sexual revolution which swept the West in the sixties and seventies where people swept away the suffocating social norms that governed relationships only to replace them with their diametric opposite - with little or no attempt to make sense of this seismic shift from one extreme to the other.

So we all operate within closed cultural systems mitigated only if and when we are exposed to alternative ways of living. In the past this happened rarely - through trade, or cultural exchange amongst the educated elite - but today alternatives to our own cultural norms are increasingly evident and accessible.

Migration, instant communication, the internet, even the availability of cheap foreign travel have all enlarged our horizons. Very few people alive today can claim to live culturally hermetic, homogenous lives. However it is equally true that our understanding of other ways of life remains superficial, even disneyfied.

Eating Chinese food, watching a foreign film, speaking another language, even hanging out with foreign friends, is rarely sufficient to give us more than a window onto another world. It's a bit like showing a photo of a tropical island to someone who has never been there.

They can exclaim at the beauty of the scene, perhaps remark on what people are wearing, eating, or doing, but they will not understand why those things are taking place - why they 'make sense' within the logic of that society . In fact, even if we went to that tropical island, most of us wouldn't understand a lot more about the scene in question - we would see, but we would not see clearly.

For most of us, 'our way' of doing things remains the best way. We view those who dissent from our norms - especially in our own society - on a spectrum ranging from the bizarre, to the suspect, or at worst, downright frightening.

This reaction differs from the reaction conventional people (and I speak as a British person here) have when confronted with an alternative cultural practice which is indigenous in origin, such aspeople acting like Punks, Goths, or whatever.

We are aware of where these practices come from and what they represent. And even if we dont like them we do understand them. What makes unknown cultural norms so frightening is that they don't make the remotest bit of sense to us.

So if a woman is veiled, if a Hindu refuses to eat meat, if an East Asian refuses to loosen up in our company, we don't understand why. We don't understand why these things are normal for the person in question and why any attempt to do otherwise would constitute a painful act of rebellion against their inner instincts.

It's a bit like telling your average British person to stop drinking alcohol, stop watching the football, or start going to church again, when they're an avowed atheist. These are simply things the average person does in today's Britain. They are normal. They are everyday. But are they right?

If we want to understand how best to live our lives we must put our own assumptions in question. While it may be normal for British people to drink to get drunk it certainly isn't in France. So who is right? Surely, when we make the comparison, we have to conclude that the French way of moderate drinking is preferable.

Yet other countries do not have a drinking culture. So which is better - the French way or their way? When we truly compare the effects of living with alcohol to the effects of living without we might well conclude that not drinking at all is essentially better for us even if it is, to our way of thinking, alot less fun.

So when deciding if you want to drink or not you can make a choice. You can say 'do I want to have fun and relax - and take the consequences if I cannot be moderate' or you can say 'to prevent overindulgence and its unpleasant effects on myself and others, I would do best to avoid alcohol'.

One argument derives from personal preference 'I want to have fun', the other from a qualitative, objective fact, which is personal health. As such, the best choice is probably not to drink - even though that goes against what most of us are culturally tuned to believe.

It's hard to make the 'right' choice from within British culture where not drinking is mocked as the preserve of the uptight and self-righteous. But it's much easier to make when looked at from the perspectives and norms of other cultures where the idea that you cannot 'have fun' without alcohol is an alien concept.

So we can see that enhanced cultural awareness can help us make choices and decisions about our own lives - by deconstructing our own norms and exposing much of our behaviour as the result of cultural conditioning instead of personal decision making or logic.

Once we realise this we can start to look for better ways forward. And it is here that I would like to return to democracy and human rights. Many people say that they're Western imports, a form of cultural hegemony that doesn't work for certain civilisations. That we should, de facto, respect every and all decisions made within the logic of other societies.

But that is not the case. As Amartya Sen has pointed out in 'La Democratie des autres' the idea of public debate and decision making is by no means confined to the West. Indeed, even that tradition which derived from the Athenian demos was more thoroughly reflected on in Asia Minor, the Middle East, and India many centuries ago, than it ever was in Western Europe until the current age.

Every society has had its open and closed periods, every society has times of freedom and times of dictatorship. Every society has its successes and failures. The Arab world today is a good sight less developed - both materially and culturally - than it was five hundred years ago when it was by far the most developed, open, and tolerant civilisation in the world. That is why it flourished. And why it has now ceased to flourish.

Realising this, we must be aware that certain practices are - when considered relatively - qualitatively better than others. And of all the worst qualities a society can exhibit, closedmindedness and intolerance must be amongst the worst.

That is why not only concerned foreigners but all Muslims and Afghans should be so affronted by what is happening to Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the student of journalism who has been sentenced to death for blasphemy for downloading material on women's rights and distributing it for the purpose of stimulating debate on the Qu'ran's meaning and interpretation.

This is not only wrong because Afghanistan is now a democracy, and democracies allow pluralism, but because - from the perspective of openness and critical debate which allows all societies to move forward - it is illogical to execute someone for questioning norms: even if these are religious norms, and the society in question is a religious society.

For if we question something its truth, or logic, will either be revealed or denied. Truth (maybe not absolute truth, but internal consistency, lets say) can only be established through debate and discussion. And inconsistency - or falsehood - can only be exposed that way. So please, everyone, sign the petition to free this poor man - not because you believe a bunch of secular Westerners are right but because it is the right, and the only, thing to do.

Stop The Traffik

Trafficking in Human Beings is a very clinical term for what is essentially modern slavery: the buying and selling of human beings for profit.

Every year up to 120 000 women and children are brought into the European Union by people traffickers. Most are tricked into leaving their homes with promises of a better life. Some are simply abducted. All are destined for exploitation.

Once here, they are forced into prostitution or used as a source of cheap labour by unscrupulous employers, in sectors ranging from domestic work to farming, manufacturing and construction.

Many of these vulnerable people never see a cent for their labours. Too often, their passports are confiscated and they are deprived of their basic rights, held against their will in poor conditions, beaten, sexually abused, or subjected to other degrading treatment.

Worldwide, the figure is even higher. Although it is difficult to gather accurate statistics, because the victims cannot, or do not want, to reveal themselves to the authorities it is believed that millions of people are trafficked every single year, making human trafficking the fastest growing form of international organised crime.

Yet despite the terrible human cost to its victims, trafficked people are frequently treated as criminals or unlawful aliens when they come to the attention of the authorities.

Too often their ordeal is confused with ‘people smuggling’, where migrants pay middlemen to bypass border controls and enter the European Union illegally.

As such, non-nationals without rights to residence in the country in which they are found are given little or no access the justice system and are simply deported back to their home countries with little or no assessment of the risks they may face.

Where assistance is given, it is often made conditional on victims cooperating with the police to locate their traffickers, which can put both them and their families in grave danger.

For all our talk of fundamental rights, it is rare that victims of trafficking are given access to the support they need to overcome their ordeal.

As a result of these short-sighed strategies, the psychological, medical and social consequences of trafficking, not to mention the underlying root causes, are never addressed.

And for every trafficker put behind bars, there are many more willing to take the risk. Indeed, reports suggest that some criminal gangs are making the switch from drugs to human beings, in search of higher profits at lower risk.

This makes it more important than ever to tackle this problem in a holistic and humane manner taking into account the needs of the victims and the factors which encourage trafficking in the first place - a major departure from current practice.

The entry into force of the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings on 1 February 2008 will mark a major step forwards by committing participating states to criminalise trafficking, not the victims of trafficking.

However to date only fourteen Council of Europe Member States are party to this Convention, of which six - Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Georgia, Moldova and Norway - are non EU members, while thirty three are yet to ratify.

If the European Union is serious about its desire to promote and protect fundamental rights throughout the world it is imperative that all countries ratify and implement this convention without delay.

You can pressure our leaders to do so. Sign the petition to stop the traffik - with any luck millions of signatures will be presented to the UN in less than two weeks time - and raise awareness of this terrible crime against humanity.