EcoLogics

“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.” Charlton Ogburn Jr

What makes a university, a university? Or, to put it somewhat differently, when does a university stop being a university?

Since 2006, an experiment has been taking place in a university in Bristol, UK that may provide some answers to these questions, and which may have wide-ranging consequences for students and lecturers who value higher education as a place for independent teaching, learning, and research. The experiment involves the University of the West of England (UWE), one of the UK’s largest so-called ‘new’ universities. And the experiment is, at least in the first instance, the brainchild of Sir Howard and Sheila Newby. Howard Newby was the Vice-Chancellor (1) of UWE from 2006 to mid 2007, and his wife Sheila was made the Assistant Vice-Chancellor at more or less the same time. This article provides an introductory account of the Newbys’ experiment; EcoLogics will publish additional posts about this subject in the future. [Update: for all of the EcoLogics articles on this subject, see this blog's Higher Education category.]

* * *

We should perhaps begin with a brief history of what was arguably a failed recruitment process. In 2004/2005, UWE announced that it would be recruiting a new VC. After a first round of advertisements and interviews, staff at UWE were informed that the university had failed to find a suitable candidate. Several months later, the university announced with great fanfare that it had finally identified the new head, and that it would be Howard Newby. The first UWE press release described him as a progressive vice-chancellor: ‘Sir Howard has unparalleled experience of the University sector. Since October 2001, he has been the Chief Executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England and at the forefront of progress in the University sector(2)’. In the same press release, Newby himself was quoted as saying that he was ‘looking forward to taking up this exciting new challenge. Bristol UWE is well positioned to become a distinctive new kind of university for the twenty-first century, one which constantly strives for excellence in learning and teaching, knowledge transfer and the extension of educational opportunities to all who can benefit from it.’

It was thus surprising to hear that, less than 16 months after Newby took up his post, he would be leaving to become the VC at Liverpool University. Some staff at the university have speculated that this was always the Newbys’ plan. But many wondered if their sudden departure had something to do with the controversy that had begun to envelop Howard Newby. The GuardianEducation (3) reported that the Liverpool position was advertised in the first week of June 2007 with an application deadline two weeks later on June 15; apparently, UWE officially announced that Sir Howard would go to Liverpool less than a month later on July 6, the day after he informed the board of governors of his resignation. The same piece included sharply critical views by staff and former staff at UWE. A week or so before, the other major higher educational supplement in the UK, the THES, noted that the local branch of the University and Colleges Union (UCU) took the unprecedented step of issuing a damning statement: Newby’s tenure had been ‘disruptive for students and staff, disastrous for the morale of staff and damaging to the reputation of the university’(4). The shortest piece pointed to what was possibly the most embarrassing revelation: Private Eye, the magazine with the highest circulation in the UK, noted the potential conflict of interest raised by the fact that Newby had attempted to award a UWE contract to Carter & Carter, a provider of vocational training for which Newby is a non-executive director. It concluded by saying, with its characteristically acerbic humour, that ‘Life for Sir Howard at UWE just gets cosier and cosier. His Assistant Vice-Chancellor is none other than his wife, Sheila Newby’ (5).

EcoLogics will be publishing a separate piece about the Carter & Carter saga in due course. In this post it is more pertinent to analyse an aspect of the Newbys’ brief stay at UWE that seems to have eluded critical scrutiny in the media. The aspect involves the Newbys’ experiment with what they described as ‘knowledge exchange’ (KE). According to the UWE website, knowledge exchange is ‘the two-way flow of innovation or best practice, often involving an exchange of ideas and experience’. This glib definition is fleshed out a bit with references to ‘user-led’ research and consultancy, ‘effective and long-lasting relationships with businesses, public services and communities’, teaching and learning ‘for employability’, and ‘continuing professional development for lifelong learning’(6). These are arguably code words for a drastic vocationalization of teaching and learning at UWE—one that is to be implemented by way of the kind of management ethos normally found in large private corporations. In effect, Howard and Sheila were attempting to turn UWE into a kind of meta-business (a business about business)(7). One that would, in Howard Newby’s terms, be demand led by ‘UK Plc’.

The THES article reported that a UCU survey suggested the possibility of a UWE staff exodus, and there can be little doubt that KE was at least as important a factor for many staff as were concerns about the Newbys’ management style. This blogger resigned last spring after UWE attempted to muscle in on the copyright of research about science and environmental education. UWE’s corporate business department sent word that the principal investigator longer had control over the copyright of a database generated by way of ESRC-funded research on environmental education (significantly, the department in question was formerly called the Centre for Research, Innovation and Graduate Studies, and then Newby renamed it as RBI—Research, Business and Innovation). This writer was thereby bestowed the rather unfortunate honour of being one of the first people in the faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences to be on the receiving end of what was for all practical purposes a new private corporate IP policy at UWE. At the time, and in the context of the humanities and social sciences at UWE, losing the copyright over one’s research was almost unheard of, so many of us assumed that there was some mistake. Efforts to contact first the dean of the faculty and then the new head of RBI (a Newby appointee) over a period of five or six weeks proved unsuccessful. There was no substantive response until Newby himself was approached. His polite reply, many weeks later, upheld the RBI’s ‘ruling’, but promised a review of the policy.

Eventually a worried colleague circulated a draft of the review. The review extended the university’s claims over IP, and, crucially, proposed that, when undertaking work from which IP, IPR might emerge on any materials covered by the new policy, we would have to notify the university immediately and in writing to inform it ‘about any innovation, invention, IP, IPR, exploitable technology or material created’. To do so we should use a new UWE ‘Invention and Material Disclosure Form’.

The proposed policy may or may not have been implemented; those of us who could left before it could be put into action. This blogger’s resignation seemed particularly paradoxical insofar as many of colleagues assumed that my research more than fulfilled the apparent ideals of KE. In fact, there is good reason to believe that, insofar as the research remained critical and independent, it went very much against the grain of KE.

* * *

A brief account of the political background of KE may help to explain how and why this is the case. The July 20, 2007 THES also included an article (‘Embrace Leitch or lose out to FE, sector warned’) which begins to provide a sense of the ideas which informed the Newbys’ UWE experiment. The article reported on the government’s plans to impose a ‘cultural revolution in higher education’. In it John Denham, Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, said that he wanted a ‘skills revolution’ and that employers would be given the ‘purchasing power to shape what our country supplies by way of skills and qualifications’. Richard Brown, chief executive of the Council for Industry and Higher Education, was also quoted as saying that if universities didn’t embrace this ‘revolution’, ‘then the private sector will continue to take this market. Universities have to decide how much of a loss that would be’[8]. The Council of Industry and Higher Education is funded by what reads like a who’s-who of the UK’s largest private corporations—the list includes BAE Systems, Corus, Rio Tinto, the Bank of Scotland, Tesco and BUPA(9). Interestingly, one of its council members is Drummond Bone, the current VC of Liverpool University(10).

While the invocation of a ‘cultural revolution’ in higher education may sound Maoist (11), the revolution is to be rather more prosaic in its aims, even if its politics do seem rather totalitarian. The aims are spelled out in Sandy Leitch’s grandly titled Review of Skills: Prosperity for all in the global economy-world class skills(12). An interim version of the report was published in December 2005, and the final version was published in December 2006. Sandy (Lord) Leitch is a New Labour peer, and at the time of the review was chairman of BUPA as well as a non-executive director of Lloyds TSB, United Business Media and Paternoster. Before that he was Chairman and Chief Executive of Zurich Financial Services (UK, Ireland, Southern Africa and Asia Pacific) and Chairman of the Association of British Insurers (13). According to the Guardian (‘Brown’s £113,000 war chest for the leadership contest that never was’) he was a donor for Gordon Brown’s virtual leadership contest (14), and indeed it was Brown that commissioned him to produce what became known as the Leitch Review in 2004. [Update: Leitch went on to become one of the leading directors of the part-nationalised Lloyds Banking Group, which at the height of the banking crisis was allowed to takeover HBOS despite the manifest issues regarding competition law.]

Despite—or perhaps thanks to—its social engineerism, the Review’s main argument is cutting edge KE: there is a ‘direct correlation between skills, productivity, and employment’ and ‘[u]nless the UK can build on reforms to schools, colleges and universities and make its skills base one of its strengths, UK businesses will find it increasingly difficult to compete.’ ‘Skills’, the review suggests, ‘were once a key lever for prosperity and fairness.’ But they ‘are now increasingly the lever’ and so ‘A radical step-change is necessary’. The Review concludes that the ‘prize for the country’ of unlocking the country’s ‘skills potential’ will be ‘enormous’: ‘higher productivity, the creation of wealth and social justice’(15).

This article is not the place for a critique of poor common sense. The management of higher education would be easy—and terrifying—if New Labour grandees like Leitch could pull, metaphorically or otherwise, on a single ‘lever’ to achieve whatever they want to achieve. Things acquire such a reifying simplicity when people reduce vastly complex and difficult matters to one single thing. In the case of the Leitch review, there is, however, a very clear motivation for representing things in this manner, and indeed one quote in the Review goes a long way in revealing the Review’s underlying ideology. After explaining that the UK’s ‘skills base’ lags behind that of many ‘advanced countries’ (sic), the Leitch Review suggests that this is ‘the product of historic failures in the education and training system’. It notes that ‘[e]ven back in 1776, Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” suggested that “the greater part of what is taught in schools and universities… does not seem to be the proper preparation for that of business”’(16).

This is where the Newbys come into the picture. New Labour appointed Howard as head of HEFCE in 2001, and the UWE post that followed provided Sheila and him with a guinea pig on which to conduct a grand KE experiment—UWE has some 30,000 students and 3,000 staff members. Along with vocationalization, the Newbys began to impose a root-and-branch rationalization. In less than two years, they decided to reduce the number of UWE faculties from nine to five. The Faculty of Humanities, Languages, and Social Sciences—itself the result of a recent and grossly mismanaged amalgamation of the three named fields—was to be merged with Business, Law, and Education. Few if any were keen on this rest-of-the-world merger; but, significantly, in the early planning stages it was only Business that was allowed to opt out of it.

The Newbys and their associates would have liked staff to believe that such changes constituted a ‘do or die’ ‘third way’. They would also have had staff believe that, despite the reductive nature of their aims, the new UWE would preserve an element of catholicity. It may well be that the sheer size of the organisation, and the impossibility of changing it overnight will preserve that ‘element’, if only for the time being. However, during a meeting this blogger had with John Rushforth, a Newby appointee entrusted with setting up what many staff mistakenly assumed would be new ‘research institutes’, it was made abundantly clear that Newby’s UWE was prepared to be inclusive so long as its staff were willing to be knowledge exchanged. Rushforth himself honestly admitted he had no experience of academic research.

* * *

The Newby (or post-Newby) management may well claim that it does value methodological pluralism. But its spin doctors will not be able to conceal a number of contradictions and risks that are inherent to KE.

First, and as Newby ruefully admitted in one of the talks he gave at my former faculty, UK corporate bosses do not seem to know what they actually need in the way of skills or ‘human resources’ –so much for being ‘demand led’ by ‘UK Plc’. This is actually unsurprising because as Leitch himself explains in his review, ‘No one can accurately predict future demand for particular skill types’(17) .

Second, one has to ask why the vocationalization of universities like UWE is necessary if a) there is already a very substantial further education (FE) sector in the UK; and b) if universities have in any case always included at least some professional disciplines such as law, engineering, and medicine. Will UWE really be charging higher education fees for an FE-like education? Or is there a plan to get the government off the expensive hook of fulfilling its pledges on the radical expansion of higher education by engaging in a de facto privatization of this emerging sector (further education as higher education, or vice-versa)?

But the most fundamental problem involves the independence of teaching, learning and research at UWE. The consequences of the KE experiment for this aspect of higher education are quite clear: the Newbys’ KE eliminates the crucially important boundary that has long provided some insulation for teaching, learning and research in universities. In principle if not always in practice, this boundary is what has allowed academics to engage in ‘blue skies’ thinking, and to invent things that initially may not have seemed to have any practical application. It is also what has long provided lecturers and researchers with some protection from the possibility of grossly distorting interventions by the Church, Government, and now, ‘UK Plc’.

Anyone doubting the wisdom of this approach may wish to consider what has happened to science, and science education in the United States over the past years [18]. While we have to hope that KE is not the thin end of a wedge of a similarly neoconservative politics, this is one possible outcome of the changes. Such a politics could not come at a worse time for the UK, and for Europe: we face the prospect of an environmental cataclysm that is arguably a consequence of economic fundamentalism, and in this context it must be an own-goal of epic proportions to downgrade or even suppress what Adam Smith might today welcome as ‘a preparation for that of the limits of big business’.

Newby and his associates would doubtless insist that KE is actually the solution to environmental problems, and might well wheel out a few choice examples of KE do-goodism. But that is a bit like saying that supporting Macdonald’s Hamburger University is the best way to help society to develop a new approach to obesity. Institutions like the Hamburger University or the Disney Institute are, no doubt, very useful to their corporate sponsors. They may well help their graduates to acquire ‘economically valuable skills’, and in so doing, to get jobs at least in their own industry. That is no mean feat, and certainly not one that should be taken for granted by any educator on any level. The problem is that they also render utterly disposable the ideal of university as a space for independent and critical thinking, a place for learning to question, as opposed to learning to obey.

But obedience is arguably what the changes are really about: for many years now, higher education has been one of the few mainstream spaces that has not been entirely determined by the political economy that both drives, and is sponsored by gigantic corporations such as the ones that fund the Council for Industry and Higher Education. The Newbys’ experiment at UWE marks a UK milestone insofar as it constitutes the first time that a major university, still organised as a public, and charitable entity, begins to be transformed into a private or quasi-private corporation devoted to providing services mainly for big business. That is why EcoLogics is including this and other posts on the vocationalisation, or ’skillification’ of higher education under the category of ‘weapons of mass silencing’.

A piece in the THES on 24 August 2007 noted that post-92 universities in the UK were investigating the possibility of giving up their charitable status in order ‘to give themselves more freedom to hire and fire staff and to expand their commercial activities’(19). The article quoted a lawyer specializing in providing advice on such changes as suggesting that ‘”The private sector has a much more flexible workforce.”’ If the Newbys and the rest of the private corporate proxies in the UK’s higher education have their way, perhaps that flexibility will extend to teaching, learning and research.

Note: after reading this post, readers may wish to see this follow-up post (the first of three) Lord Leitch’s Levers.

Additional information about the Newbys’ effort to develop a partnership with Carter and Carter can be found at ‘Carter & Carter goes into administration‘.

Soon after Newby arrived at his new post at Liverpool University, he tried to close down the departments in the subjects that most strongly opposed him at UWE: amongst them, politics and communication studies. Newby tried to justify the cuts by alleging that the departments were not performing well enough in research terms. Less noticed in the scandal that followed was Newby’s intention to divide his staff into those allowed to conduct research, and those forced to engage in knowledge exchange.

For a recent critique of the way in which the UK’s funding councils have started to be controlled by the corporate sector, see George Monbiot’s ‘Captive Knowledge’ at http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/05/12/captive-knowledge/

This blog’s Higher Education Archive allows you to access a number of updates since this blog was posted in the summer of 2007.

References

(1) In the UK, this is the name given to a university’s president or CEO (the Chancellor is a ceremonial role awarded to a prestigious figure).
(2) UWE press release, ‘Sir Howard Newby to head the West’s Largest University’, 8 September 2005. http://info.uwe.ac.uk/news/UWENews/article.asp?item=689&year=2005, accessed 13 August 2007.
(3) Anthea Lipsett, ‘Will the Newby Broom Sweep Clean?’, in http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/careers/story/0,,2132912,00.html?87%3A+Education+news, accessed July 24, 2007.
(4) Melanie Newman, ‘Mixed View’s on Howard’s End’, July 20, 2007. http://www.thes.co.uk/search/story.aspx?story_id=2037551
(5) Private Eye 1185, 25 May 7 June 2007.
(6) see UWE’s page on ‘knowledge exchange’ at http://www.uwe.ac.uk/aboutUWE/knowledgeTransfer.shtml, accessed August 24, 2007.
(7) The interim post-Newby UWE senior management, which will be led by Ray Burton, the chairman of UWE’s Board of Governors, have vowed to build on the Newbys’ legacy.
[8] All quotes taken from Tony Tysome, ‘Embrace Leitch or lose out to FE, sector warned’, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=209662&sectioncode=26, accessed May 14, 2009.
(9) see http://www.cihe-uk.com/fundingorganisations.php, accessed August 24, 2007.
(10) see http://www.cihe-uk.com/members.php, accessed August 24, 2007.
(11) see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution, accessed August 24, 2007.
(12) The UK’s Treasury website has put this document on-line. See http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/leitch_review/review_leitch_index.cfm, accessed August 24, 2007.
(13) This information provided by the Treasury’s press notice on the day that the Leitch Review was published. See http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/newsroom_and_speeches/press/2006/press_leitch.cfm, accessed August 24, 2007.
(14) David Hencke, ‘Brown’s £113,000 war chest for the leadership contest that never was’, May 31, 2007, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labourleadership/story/0,,2091743,00.html, accessed August 24, 2007.
(15) Leitch Review, p. 3.
(16) Leitch Review, p. 10-11.
(17) Leitch Review, p. 17
[18] See for example Donald Kennedy, ‘An epidemic of politics’, in Science, 31 January 2003, Vol. 299, No. 5607, p. 625. Article available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/299/5607/625, accessed August 24, 2007.
(19) M. Newman, ‘Charity status may be traded for legal gains’ in THES, http://www.thes.co.uk/current_edition/story.aspx?story_id=2037987, accessed August 25, 2007.

If Tony McNulty’s plans come to fruition, English and Welsh police will soon be armed with wooden cotton buds wrapped in paper.

Don’t be deceived by this apparently low-tech approach. Plastic tubular sticks and wrapping can’t be autoclaved. If and when you’re caught speeding, or if perhaps you fail to collect your dog’s faeces in the park, the officer who stops you and rubs the inside of your mouth to and fro will need to do so with a sterile bud.

Before doing so, s/he will probably read you a new version of the UK’s nearly defunct equivalent of the Miranda rights. In addition to the Tories’ Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994) text, ‘You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence’, the new version may well say something like ‘Whether you choose to say something or not, you will have to open your mouth when ordered to do so by the law enforcement officer, such that s/he might obtain your DNA sample’.

* * *

Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca was released in 1997, and is set in what the film describes as the ‘not-too-distant future’. Vincent Freeman, played by Ethan Hawke, wants to become an astronaut. But his parents have made the mistake of failing to consult a geneticist before Vincent is conceived. Within seconds of his birth, Vincent’s parents are read a list of his likely illnesses, and indeed the possible causes of his premature death are ‘neurological condition 60% probability; manic depression, 42% probability; attention deficit disorder 89% probability; heart disorder [the camera shows the nurse looking over at Vincent’s mother, who’s cuddling the new-born baby] 99% probability…life expectancy, 30.2 years’.

This effectively bars Vincent from becoming anything but a cleaner. As Vincent’s voiceover narration explains, ‘of course, it’s illegal to discriminate… genoism, it’s called, but no one takes the law seriously. If you refuse to disclose, they can always take a sample from a door handle, or a hand shake, even the saliva on your application form…’

Defying the logic of that not-too-distant future, Vincent goes on to become a super man. He beats his younger brother—the genetically ‘superior’ Anton—when they play chicken by swimming far out to sea. And from an early age, Vincent prepares to become an astronaut by poring over books about outer space. He is, however, barred from fulfilling that dream by his low ‘genetic quotient’.

A vicarious substitution—getting a job as a cleaner in the hyper-modernist offices of Gattaca, a corporation devoted to space exploration—only whets Vincent’s appetite for outer space. So he decides to go underground and buys the DNA identity of Jerome Morrow, a man with a ‘genetic quotient second to none’. Morrow, who is played by Jude Law, grew depressed and tried to commit suicide, but ended up instead on a wheelchair. He now needs the money that Vincent can earn by way of a job in Gattaca, and so is ready to sell his genetic identity to Vincent in order to sustain the luxurious lifestyle that his genetic ‘superiority’ earned until his attempted suicide.

To acquire Jerome’s identity, Vincent must go through what reality shows would describe as an extreme makeover. Jerome is a lot taller than Vincent, so Vincent must have his leg bones sawed and extended to attain Jerome’s height. Once he gets a job as an astronaut in Gattaca—which of course he does—its DNA surveillance technologies force him to take extreme precautions on a daily basis. Each morning, he must slick down his hair and shave his entire body to slough off any unwanted skin cells that might be detected at the workplace. Jerome must do the same, but for the opposite reason: he must produce the skin cells and hairs that Vincent will carefully sprinkle on his keyboard, in his desk drawer and indeed on the comb that he leaves behind at work. All of the Gattaca staff are also screened when they enter the workplace by way of a scanner that draws blood from the index finger, and on occasion urine samples are required. So Vincent and Jerome develop a daily routine for the production of the various samples in Jerome’s home laboratory.

At first, everything goes well, and indeed Vincent, known at Gattaca as Jerome Morrow, is chosen to go on a mission to Titan. But then someone murders the managing director in the Gattaca offices. The police investigating the crime scene find one of Vincent’s (real) eyelashes. The eyelash yields the ‘In-Valid’ DNA identity of Vincent. Although the police don’t know until the end of the film that the Gattaca ‘Jerome’ is really Vincent, they assume that the ‘In-Valid’ must be the murderer. As one of the detectives puts it, ‘We’ve found our man. It’s the only specimen in the entire place that can’t be accounted for.’

In fact, Vincent hasn’t killed the director, but the dogs of genoism and scientism have been let loose. The police start to close in on Vincent, armed with the apparently unassailable truth of a ‘proven’ DNA identification. The problem is no longer to question whether Vincent’s DNA has anything to do with the crime, but simply to find Vincent. The search itself is aided by the same technology: in one scene, the police swoop in on a bar where Vincent, aka Jerome, is having a drink with Irene (played by Uma Thurman), a Gattaca co-worker who suspects that ‘Jerome’ is an ‘In-Valid’. When the police come into the bar, they order everyone to stay inside, but the patrons run out in a panic. Doing so is futile because every person’s DNA ‘evidence’ is left behind. As the detective tells his staff, ‘check the handles. Check lenses… I want napkins, I want cigarette buts, I want the saliva off teacups…’

* * *

Gattaca’s future, imagined in our own past, is arguably New Labour’s present. In March, its Home Office produced a document with a magnificently unthreatening title (‘Modernising Police Powers: Review of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) 1984’). The document nonetheless paves the way for what might well be described as the Gattacaization of the UK. The document has been put on the internet by statewatch.org(1), and arguably provides a good example of New Labour’s political stealth technologies, a modus operandi that this blog describes in some detail in The New Labour Modus Operandi. One of the ‘suggested areas for consideration’ in Chapter 3 concerns ‘Biometric information and identification procedures’. This section raises the prospect of universal DNA ‘sampling’, to be applied even for what it describes as ‘so-called minor offences’. However, it does so rather elliptically:

‘3.33 The absence of the ability to take fingerprints etc in relation to all offences may be considered to undermine the value and purpose of having the ability to confirm or disprove identification and, importantly, to make checks on a searchable database aimed at detecting existing and future offending and protecting the public. There have been notable successes particularly through the use of the DNA database in bringing offenders to justice.

3.34 Is there scope to populate identification databases and remove unnecessary operational constraints on the extent to which police are able to use fingerprints etc. to prevent, detect and investigate crime?’(2)

That little ‘etc.’ may well be the most loaded etc. in the history of UK policing legislation. A number of commentators have noted how the proposed policy erodes civil liberties to the point that it may well complete the UK’s transformation into what the London Editor of Vanity Fair has reluctantly described as a ‘Police State’. As Henry Porter puts it in the Observer, ‘…before we all shut up shop for the holidays, it is worth underlining one sentence that needs to be written in neon across every town centre: Britain is on the way to becoming a police state. […] Writing about the crisis of liberty in Britain, I have been careful not to use these words, but today I see no other conclusion to draw. Taken in the context of the ID card database, the national surveillance of vehicles and retention of information about every individual motorway journey, the huge number of new criminal offences, the half million intercepts of private communications every year, the proposed measures to take 53 pieces of information from everyone wishing to go abroad, which will include powers to prevent travel, this widening of the DNA database for minor misdemeanours confirms the pattern of attack on us all. It is time to pay attention to what the government under Labour has done to British society and what may be awaiting us just a short distance down the road.’(3)

Who is behind this proposal? It is, undoubtedly, a part of the New Labour lurch to the right that began as soon as Tony Blair took office, but which looks set to continue under Gordon Brown. I am nonetheless interested to note that there is one person who has presented, signed, and fronted photographically the document, but who has so far avoided the media spotlight (4). That person is Tony McNulty, the UK’s Minister of State for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing, and whose pictures on the Policing document and in the official government website (5) make him look eerily like a character in Gattaca.

According to the ‘TheyWorkForYou.com’ website, McNulty has voted ‘very strongly against a transparent parliament’,‘very strongly for introducing ID cards’, ‘very strongly for introducing Foundation [quasi-privatized] hospitals’, ‘very strongly for introducing student top-up fees’[arguably the beginning of the privatization of higher education in the UK], ‘very strongly for Labour’s anti-terrorism laws’, ‘very strongly for the Iraq war’ and ‘very strongly for replacing Trident’[and so for a £20 billion nuclear sub replacement]. If TheyWorkForYou.com is to be believed, McNulty is, from the New Labour point of view, a very safe pair of hands (6).

Returning to Porter’s suggestion that there should be a warning in neon across every town centre, perhaps that warning should come with a name, and should also be placed above the STHF’s (‘short term holding facilities’) that McNulty wants to put into shopping malls, and which will be one of the sites where our DNA samples are to be taken. That name could be ‘the Gattaca Law’, or perhaps, the ‘McNulty Act’.

Postscript: Given the seriousness of this matter, we should perhaps end this article with a little light relief: imagine a future in which a police officer orders you to stop, calmly pulls out a little paper envelope, carefully removes a cotton bud from it, and then suddenly points the bud at you and barks, ‘DROP THAT JAW!’

But anyone resisting that order may face a rather more conventional, if equally high-tech form of policing: apparently plans are afoot to arm officers with a new kind of Taser that shoots ‘wireless’ electric bullets by way of a shotgun. (Was this the kind of weapon that McNulty had in mind when he spoke of arming more officers with Tasers?).

If you’re wondering how this shotgun works, have a look at the Taser company’s own ‘XREP Teaser’ promotional video, in which a US military-style soldier—white of course—shoots first a ‘Black’ and then an ‘Asian’ man at http://www.taser.com/pages/VideoDetails.aspx?videoid=56. The tacit racism of this video, if not that future officer’s order, may make your jaw drop.

[Update on 29 October 2009: the offending video has long since vanished from the Taser website. See, however, the article titled Weapons of Mass Silencing.]

 

References

1) http://www.statewatch.org/news/2007/mar/uk-sweeping-new-police-powers.pdf, accessed 20 August 2007.
2) Modernising Police Powers: Review of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) 1984, p. 11.
3) Henry Porter, ‘Each DNA Swab Brings Us Closer to a Police State’ in Guardian Unlimited, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2141998,00.html, August 5 2007.
4) A Google search of the news on the morning of August 20, 2007 suggests little more than a few oldish entries, e.g. McNulty’s determination to arm more police officers with Tasers, and his defence of the massive policing bill for Gordon Brown’s coronation in Manchester. For the former news item, see Jane’s ‘Frontline Officer Squads to Trial Tasers’ at http://www.janes.com/news/lawenforcement/pr/pr070724_1_n.shtml, 24 July 2007; for the latter, see ‘MP demands enquiry into cost of Brown leadership conference’ in Guardian Unlimited, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labourleadership/story/0,,2140965,00.html, 3 August 2007.
5) http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/about-us/organisation/ministers/tony-mcnulty/, accessed 20 August, 2007.
6) http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/tony_mcnulty/harrow_east, accessed 20 August 2007. In fairness to McNulty, this website also suggests that he has a moderately liberal record when it comes to banning smoking and fox hunting, and a very liberal record when it comes to protecting gay rights.

What is the difference between a ‘Terrorism Power’ and the Power of Terrorism?

Martin Niemöller became a famous U-boat commander in WWI. After the war, he joined the Friekorps, a group of far right-wing paramilitaries who wished to revoke the Treaty of Versailles and to stop the rise of socialism in Germany. Amongst many other actions, in 1919 members of the Friekorps engaged in the summary execution of two leading members of the left, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

In 1920, Niemöller followed his father’s footsteps and took up the study of theology. He eventually became a Lutheran pastor and a fervent Nazi sympathizer. By the early 1930s he had acquired a reputation for being one of the foremost pro-Nazi Christians in Germany. National Socialism, Niemöller felt, was fundamentally a Christian movement, and Germany needed a Christian führer.

Similar stories might be told of many religious Nazi sympathizers both within and beyond Germany. However, in the mid-1930s it became clear to Niemöller that the Nazis were willing to imprison anyone who spoke out against their policies. In Niemöller’s view, this was wrong if it meant that the Gestapo could enter a church and detain some of its members. Niemöller dared to suggest that it was even wrong to imprison Jews if they had already converted to Christianity.

Despite this anti-Semitic stance, Hitler had Niemöller arrested in 1937. He was sent for ‘re-education’ first to Sachenhausen and then to the Dachau concentration camp, where he remained until the end of the war. Apparently Goebbels was determined to execute him, but Niemöller acquired the status of an international cause cèlébre when the Bishop of Chichester took an interest in his case. The threat of adverse publicity may well have saved Niemöller’s life.

When WWII broke out in 1939, Niemöller nonetheless offered to rejoin the German army and to fight for Hitler. And indeed, after the end of the war many of Niemöller’s erstwhile defenders realized that he was hardly the anti-Nazi hero that they had assumed him to be. But Niemöller took a number of steps to atone for his Nazi complicity, which he articulated in terms of a Lutheran discourse on guilt. He became a signatory with fellow pastors of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt (‘By us infinite wrong was brought over many peoples and countries…’), and later he also recognised that he came from what he described as an anti-Semitic ‘past’. He eventually became a leading German pacifist and anti-nuclear activist, and he even accused President Harry S. Truman of being the second worst mass-murder in the world (after Hitler himself) for having dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the course of this mea culpa, Niemöller repeatedly noted how, during the rise of Nazism, he and many others had found it convenient to look the other way. He turned this self-criticism into a short poem that went on to become something like an anthem amongst human rights activists in the U.S. and elsewhere. According to Harold Marcuse, a professor in the University of California who has researched the poem, and whose work has allowed me to write on this subject, one of the earliest versions of the poem is found in Milton Mayer’s book, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45. Marcuse quotes Mayer as saying that

‘“Pastor Niemöller spoke for thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothin[sic]; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late.”’

There is still some debate as to what social groups Niemöller included in the poem. Marcuse believes that Niemöller produced different versions, some of which referred to Jews, Jehova’s Witnesses, and some also argue, Catholics. Be that as it may, Niemöller himself suggested a ‘definitive’ version in 1976:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out (1).

* * *

On Sunday, August 12, 2007, a group of environmental protestors began to set up a ‘Camp for Climate Action’ in a field outside Heathrow Airport. The camp was set up in protest over the relentless growth of air travel across the world. Heathrow is already the world’s busiest international airport, and plans are afoot to build a third runway. This would allow the airport to boost its flights from the current limit of 480,000 per year to almost 800,000 (2). According to the protestors’ website, Heathrow ‘is already a bigger source of CO2 emissions than most countries’. Even if this is a misleading statistic, it’s difficult to disagree with the activists’ suggestion that the proposed airport expansion is ‘sheer lunacy in this time of ecological crisis’(3).

That perspective is not contradicted by the British Airport Authority’s (BAA) own website. BAA is the privatised corporation that runs the airport. It was recently bought by Ferrovial and de-listed from the London Stock Exchange. Ferrovial is a Spanish construction giant that was founded in 1952 by Rafael del Pino. Del Pino made his fortune by doing maintenance for the Spanish state railway system (RENFE) at the time of the Generalísimo Franco (4). Today Ferrovial is led by Rafael del Pino Jr., and its ownership of BAA gives it a virtual monopoly over airports in the London area. Whoever wrote the entry on Rafael Sr. in Wikipedia describes him (‘and family’) as one of the richest men in the world (5).

A cynic might expect the owners of BAA to deny climate change. But after accepting the reality of climate change, the Ferrovial/BAA website’s Heathrow link notes that ‘The worst effects of climate change could be catastrophic for our planet and might include heat waves, floods and droughts, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, more frequent and severe storms and hurricanes, and damage to ecosystems and agriculture.’ Like the environmental activists themselves, Ferrovial/BAA also believes that climate change is not inevitable, and indeed quotes the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change as saying that ‘“There is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we take strong action now.”’ Ferrovial/BAA further says that ‘The risks to our planet demand an international response, based on the best available scientific evidence. We believe there is an important debate to be had regarding climate change and our starting point is simple: aviation’s contribution is growing and we must take action now to curb emissions from flights’(6).

Those who surf the Ferrovial/BAA website might thus be forgiven for being a little confused to learn that a couple of weeks ago, the corporate giant tried unsuccessfully to get the high court to issue what might well have become the most sweeping injunction ever imposed on an environmental protest. In theory, the proposed injunction would have given police the right to arrest anyone who failed to give 24 hours’ notice of their intention to join the protest, and who used any of the following: sections of the huge M4 and M25 motorways; platforms six and seven at Paddington Station (which serve the Heathrow Express rail service); or the London Underground’s Picadilly Line. Just who this ‘anyone’ included was unclear even to the judge, who asked the infamous anti-protest lawyer, Timothy Lawson-Cruttenden, to clarify who was the target of the injunction (7). At the time of the hearings, the Mayor of London said that he regarded the proposed injunction ‘unreasonable, and unnecessary. It is a serious infringement of civil liberties and an attack on the right to peaceful protest.’ In the same press release, the Greater London Authority noted that

‘This extraordinarily wide-ranging injunction, over which Transport for London was not consulted by BAA, could have a significant impact upon London Underground operations. It seeks to hold the individuals named in the injunction as representative of not only the action groups that they are said to represent, but also anyone who happens to support the groups, whether they are a member or not. […] This means that some five million people, the vast majority of whom have never taken part in any disturbance and are entirely lawful supporters of groups including the RSPB and the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, the Woodland Trust, and the national trust, could be restricted by the injunction.’[8]

There is, however, something else that makes this protest, or rather the attempts to suppress it, truly extraordinary. As reported by The Guardian, the government has encouraged the police to ‘“deal robustly”’ with activists—no surprise there, ‘robust’ is of course a corporate euphemism for the ruthless imposition of a managerial course of action. What is extraordinary is that the Guardian has got access to a government document which it quotes as saying that police should make use of the ‘“terrorism powers”’, ‘“especially the use of stop and search powers under s44 Terrorism Act 2000”’(9).

As the Guardian notes, this act gives police the power to stop and search people and vehicles for anything that could be used in connection with terrorism; to search people even if they do not have evidence to suspect them; to search homes and remove protesters’ outer clothes, such as hats, shoes and coats; and to hold people for up to a month without charge.

The document’s justification for this draconian step is a verbal monument to New Labour’s blurring of what counts as a ‘Terrorism Power’, and what counts as the Power of Terrorism: the document is quoted as saying that police should use the Terrorism Powers ‘“because the presence of large numbers of protesters at or near the airport will reduce our ability to proactively counter the terrorist act [threat]”’(10).

* * *

It would of course be absurd to suggest that New Labour’s UK has become a contemporary version of the Nazi’s Germany. Even if today a parallel can be drawn between the persecution of Muslims and Jews, and even if it is true that Gordon Brown has now proposed that the period of detention without charge (the code-name for a police-state-like power of arrest without due process) should be extended from 28 to 56 days, it would be foolish indeed to draw a simple analogy between the two contexts. The UK in 2007 is not Germany in 1937.

And yet, Niemöller’s poem, like his life, offers not one, but three inter-related cautionary tales for those of us who do no more than read about New Labour’s efforts to undermine civil liberties.

The first one may be derived, paradoxically, from the uncertainty as to whom Niemöller included in the poem. While it is extraordinary that he left Jews out of the ‘definitive’ version, that should not obscure an equally important point: even if some people are far more likely to be persecuted by authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, it is always easy enough to include someone else—some ‘other’ group—in the list of ‘usual suspects’ if it suits the regime’s ends. In this sense the changing list of groups included in the poem is, inadvertently, very accurate.

The second point is that the poem reminds us of the temporal dimension of authoritarianism, and of course, of totalitarianism. In modern cultures, these political processes seldom if ever happen all at once, and indeed especially in the early days, each is likely to offer a seductive or indispensable ‘way forward’, especially when it seems that only other people’s civil liberties are being curtailed. Even if one is outraged by each new infringement, it is likely to be easier to remain in a state of passive outrage than to actually speak up, and speak out, against abuse.

The third cautionary tale, which is found in Niemöller’s own life, is perhaps at once the most obvious, and the most disturbing: authoritarianism or totalitarianism are not that—authoritarianism or totalitarianism—to their advocates. On the contrary, it is quite possible to vehemently oppose one or more aspects of such regimes and still remain fundamentally complicit with them.

There seems to be a lot of support in the media for the Heathrow protest. Will the protest trigger a minor revolt against the Terrorism Powers but leave intact New Labour’s power to terrorise the population by invoking an imminent (and immanent) threat of terrorism? Or on the contrary, will this year’s revelation of the ‘alternate’ uses of the Terrorism Powers be the proverbial silver lining in the enormous storm cloud that is climate change?

References

(1) This is a translation from the German. Readers interested in finding out about Niemöller may wish to consult the following websites: Professor Marcuse’s page at http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/niem.htm; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Niemöller; or http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERniemoller.htm, all accessed 29 October 2009.
(2) John Vidal and Helen Pidd, ‘Police to use terror laws on Heathrow climate protestors’, in Guardian Unlimited, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/aug/11/ukcrime.greenpolitics, 12 August 2007, accessed 29 October 2009.
(3) Both quotes taken from the ‘Camp for Climate Change’ website, http://www.climatecamp.org.uk, accessed August 13, 2007.
(4) See http://www.baa.com/portal/page/Corporate%5EAbout+BAA%5EWho+we+are%5EWho+owns+us%3F/3907dc4bf8721110VgnVCM10000036821c0a____/448c6a4c7f1b0010VgnVCM200000357e120a____/, and also http://www.ferrovial.com/en/index.asp?MP=14&MS=250&MN=3, both accessed August 13, 2007.
(5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_del_Pino_%28Spaniard%29, accessed August 13, 2007.
(6) All quotes taken from BAA’s link for the Heathrow airport: http://www.baa.com/portal/page/LHR%5EAbout+BAA+Heathrow%5EClimate+change/3130875427b54110VgnVCM20000039821c0a____/448c6a4c7f1b0010VgnVCM200000357e120a____/, accessed on August 13, 2007.
(7) For an account of what one newspaper described as scenes of ‘high farce’ at the high court, see the Independent’s http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/high-court-confusion-over-exactly-who-baa-wants-to-ban-from-protesting-at-heathrow-459928.html, 2 August 2007, accessed 29 October 2009.
[8] Greater London Authority Press Release, ‘Mayor demands that BAA rethink its “draconian” injunction’, July 31, 2007, http://www.london.gov.uk/view_press_release.jsp?releaseid=13112. Accessed 29 October 2009.
(9) John Vidal and Helen Pidd, ‘Police to use terror laws on Heathrow climate protestors’, in Guardian Unlimited, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/aug/11/ukcrime.greenpolitics, August 12, 2007, accessed 29 October 2009.
(10) John Vidal and Helen Pidd, ‘Police to use terror laws on Heathrow climate protestors’, in Guardian Unlimited, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/aug/11/ukcrime.greenpolitics, August 12, 2007, accessed 29 October 2009.