The Nimrod XV230 disaster is a metaphor of New Labour’s Britain

Yesterday Charles Haddon-Cave QC published a damning report about the causes of the Nimrod XV230 disaster. The report is as critical of the New Labour government as it is of the Ministry of Defense and of New Labour ‘partners’ such as BAE. For once, we find a review that has the guts to tell it like it is: what killed the RAF airmen is a combination of managerialism, the outsourcing and privatisation that come with corporate welfarism, and of course, political expediency. This is, arguably, also what is undermining the broader culture in a variety of social spheres–a case in point, New Labour’s assault on higher education.

The following are two excerpts that give a taste of the review:

“1. The MOD suffered a sustained period of deep organisational trauma between 1998 and 2006 due to the imposition of unending cuts and change, which led to a dilution of its safety and airworthiness regime and culture and distraction from airworthiness as the top priority.

1998 Strategic Defence Review
2. This organisational trauma stemmed from the 1998 Strategic Defence Review which unleashed a veritable ‘tsunami’ of cuts and change within the MOD which was to last for years.

3. Financial pressures (in the shape of ‘cuts’, ‘savings’, ‘efficiencies’, ‘strategic targets’, ‘reduction in output costs’, ‘leaning’, etc.) drove a cascade of multifarious organisational changes (called variously ‘change’, ‘initiatives’, ‘change initiatives’, ‘transformation’, ‘re-energising’, etc.) which led to a dilution of the airworthiness regime and culture within the MOD and distraction from safety and airworthiness issues. There was a shift in culture and priorities in the MOD towards ‘business’ and financial targets, at the expense of functional values such as safety and airworthiness. The Defence Logistics Organisation, in particular, came under huge pressure. Its primary focus became delivering ‘change’ and the ‘change programme’ and achieving the ‘Strategic Goal’ of a 20% reduction in output costs in five years and other financial savings.”

[...]

“7. The Strategic Defence Review intensified three organisational themes during the period 2000-2006:
7.1 First, a shift from organisation along purely ‘functional’ to project-oriented lines.
7.2 Second, the ‘rolling up’ of organisations to create larger and larger structures as a result of
(a) the drive to create more tri-service ‘purple’ organisations, and (b) a move to ‘whole-life’
management of equipment.
7.3 Third, the ‘outsourcing’ to industry of increasingly more of the functions traditionally carried.”(1)

An epigraph to Chapter 13, the one that details the ‘organisational causes’ of the accident, is worth quoting, as it reveals in a few short sentences what managerialism is all about:

“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.”

The item is attributed to one ‘Gaius Petronius Arbiter, 210 BC’, but as noted by Haddon-Cave, it is also attributed to Charlton Ogburn Jr. (1911-1998), an American author and free-lance writer who was formerly an officer in U.S. military intelligence. EcoLogics suspects that the latter is the more accurate attribution.

Two questions before ending this post:

1) Is this the kind of inquest that Jack Straw wants to make secret?

2) Will any New Labour politicians—or corporate executives, from BAE or any other company—be taken to court on corporate manslaughter charges?

References

1. http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/hc0809/hc10/1025/1025.asp

Griffin, the BBC, and Britain’s Political Culture

Updated 23 October 2009 (scroll down to see update)

A brief post about the BBC Radio 4’s ‘News at One’ programme, heard yesterday, 20 October 2009. The programme focused on the news that a group of retired British generals have had a go at the BNP (without actually naming it) for ‘seeking to hijack the symbols of the armed forces and their history’. Martha Kearney, the BBC anchor,  interviewed Simon Weston, the renowned Falkland War veteran, who joined the generals in condemning the BNP; and then she interviewed Nick Griffin himself.

Two thoughts: first, it was apparent that the news piece was designed to support the armed forces’ position, and to undermine the BNP’s. This blogger has seldom witnessed such a manifest effort on the part of the BBC to coach one side, and to attack the other. While the BNP is a neo-fascist organisation and deserves to be condemned, the interview threw up into the starkest relief the manner in which the BBC’s alleged codes of impartiality are there to be used and abused. How to reconcile the mentioned codes (see EcoLogics’ earlier analysis of these codes in The BBC, New Labour & the BNP) with the extraordinarily one-sided interviewing technique?

The point is not to defend the BNP, but to suggest that this has long been a style of interview employed by the BBC against anyone whom its journalists or editors regarded as being an ‘enemy of the state’. The interview showed just how manipulative the claims to impartiality can be, and how easy it is to abuse them.

The second thought concerns Nick Griffin’s performance. On one level, it certainly seemed to live up to the claim that Griffin/BNP have acquired a certain moderation when it comes to expressing racist views. Martha Kearney repeatedly tried to get Griffin to voice the racism for which the BNP is infamous, but more often than not, Griffin managed to side-step the inquisitorial blows. For example, when pressed on the matter of deporting ‘foreign’ members of the armed forces who committed crimes, Griffin appeared to soften the BNP’s stance, suggesting that if criminal behaviour occurred as a result of a lack of support for war veterans, this would have to be ‘taken into account’. Such deft discursive manoeuvres were cleverly interspersed with populist stances, such as the suggestion that Britain should immediately exit the war in Afghanistan, a war that had ‘nothing to do with us’, and involved sending poorly equipped men into battle.

However, when you contrast Griffin’s public stance with the information that has leaked out about the BNP’s views in the privacy of their own meetings (or indeed on the BBC’s own earlier interview on Radio 1), it becomes apparent that, more than having moderated his views,  Griffin has learned to hide the views, and to do so by appealing to a mixture of a perceived common sense, and a ‘centre ground’.

This being true, we can say that Griffin has learned to do what many Tory and New Labour politicians have been doing for decades. No wonder both parties are worried; the fascists are learning, and so becoming a part of, the UK’s political culture.

Update 23 October 2009: after the infamous BBC Question Time

BBC’s handling of the Question Time episode in which Griffin appeared more than confirmed the above analysis. What a travesty of alleged impartiality: one moment the BBC was saying it had to include Griffin in the programme thanks to impartiality rules, and the next it was organising a veritable kangaroo court against Griffin. And today the establishment is congratulating itself….

Monbiot on Justice David Eady and Libel Law in the UK

The following is an excerpt of a post published by George Monbiot about Sir David Eady, a judge of the Queen’s Bench Division, whom Monbiot describes as Britain’s legal censor. EcoLogics publishes it in solidarity with Monbiot and all those who are unfairly finding themselves on the receiving end of Britain’s extraordinarily repressive libel laws. To read the full blog, go to monbiot.com to ‘The Hanging Judge‘.

“During the libel case brought by Richard Desmond, pornographer and proprietor of Express newspapers, against the investigative author Tom Bower, who had claimed that Desmond acted on grudges, Eady refused to allow the court to hear evidence that he had done just this in another instance. In July, the appeal court found that Eady’s decision was “plainly wrong” and risked “a miscarriage of justice”(5). In 2004, during a case brought by a Saudi businessman, Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, against the Wall Street Journal, Eady decided that the newspaper’s story that the Saudi central bank was monitoring the accounts of certain businesses in case they were being used (unwittingly or otherwise) to channel funds to terrorists was not responsible journalism(6). Among his justifications was the fact that the US government hadn’t published this information: Eady appeared to see the interests of the state and the interest of the public as the same thing(7).

The law lords decided that Eady was “hostile to the spirit” of the public interest defence and that he had “rigidly applied the old law” in a way that was “quite unrealistic … unnecessary and positively misleading”. In one amazing passage, Lord Hoffmann compared Eady’s approach to that of the Communist Party censors in the Soviet Union(8).

But perhaps the gravest judgements against the Honourable Mr Justice Eady are those made by legislators in the United States. Such is the reach and severity of his illiberal rulings that four states have so far passed what are, in effect, Eady laws(9), and Congress is currently considering a federal bill whose purpose is to defend US citizens from his judgements, and the English law he interprets. The Eady laws arise from his encouragement of libel tourism: allowing cases with only the most tenuous connection with this country to be heard in London, and using them to stamp on free speech all over the world.”

The funny thing about Eady is that, if anyone takes the time, as EcoLogics did, to research his past, a rather interesting contradiction becomes evident: according to the Daily Telegraph,

Surprising as it may now seem, Mr Justice Eady was once a leading courtroom defender of red-top journalism, much in demand as a barrister who could be relied on to uphold the freedom of the tabloids to expose the private lives of public figures. It was to David Eady that the Sun newspaper turned when the Coronation Street actor Bill Roache sued over taunts that he was “boring”.

How extraordinary that, in a country that is almost second to none when it comes to Rottweiler journalism, with press barons such as Rupert Murdoch routinely employing their newspapers to attack politicians not to their liking, we have the most draconian press law in the so-called ‘free’ world.

It might be argued that this is precisely the reason why we have these laws. In fact, given the nature of British political culture, it is usually only the rich, and apparently especially the rich on the political right that can use the law to silence newspapers, and defend their interests. This means that, far from being in the public interest, the law as it stands serves to undermine democracy. According to Monbiot, a key defender of the status quo has been Jack Straw, who as Justice Minister has blocked attempts to reform the libel laws.

The worst offender when it comes to rottweiler journalism is Italy—or rather, Berlusconi’s press. Have a look at this press item, published by Reuters, which reveals that Berlusconi is having one of his TV channels shadow and secretly film a judge who has ruled against the prime Minister in a bribery case. ‘Days after Judge Raimondo Mesiano ordered Berlusconi’s holding company to pay 750 million euros in damages to a rival, the media mogul’s Canale 5 channel aired a video of the judge taking a walk, smoking and getting a shave at the barber. Dubbing the judge’s behaviour “eccentric”, a narrator points to him smoking the “umpteenth” cigarette, calls his turquoise socks “strange” and says: “He’s impatient … he can only relax at the barber’s”.

The BBC, New Labour, and the BNP

Amid the growing controversy surrounding the possible, indeed likely appearance of the neo-fascist BNP on the BBC’s Question Time this Thursday, two different, but inter-related issues have scarcely been raised by the Westminster commentariat.

The first is New Labour’s role in aiding and abetting the rise in the popularity of the BNP. New Labour, along with media press barons such as the Murdochs and the Rothmeres, are arguably much to blame for this phenomenon. First, New Labour has arguably so deceived its former political base—British working men and women—that it may well have generated a disillusion and frustration with mainstream politics that is finding an outlet in the hateful BNP. The ‘intense relaxation’ of figures such as Peter Mandelson about the ‘filthy rich’ appears to be in direct proportion to the anger that is being expressed by former Labour voters. Some have responded by going to the BNP; next spring many of the rest may vote for David Cameron’s PPP, this blogger’s sardonic reference to the new Tory ‘People’s Progressive Party’.

While this aspect is key, it is not enough, in of itself; the second factor has been the xenophobia which New Labour politicians like Hazel Blears, David Blunkett, Jack Straw and other figures on New Labour’s further–and–further–to–the–right leadership may have promoted. This by talking up the ‘Islamist threat’ and by promoting anti-immigrant legislation. New Labour appears, in this sense, to have joined the ranks of tabloid papers such as The Sun and the Daily Mail in scapegoating foreigners for Britain’s own social malaise. Even Gordon Brown has dipped his political spoon into this poisonous broth, claiming as he did in 2007 that ‘British jobs are for British workers’.

In this context, for New Labour to be suggesting that the BNP should be excluded from national television is extraordinary. The calls dissimulate the party’s own stance on immigration, and make a mockery of its allegedly progressive social credentials.

The BBC is playing no less problematic a role in the entire process. Let’s be very clear: the corporation has never been unbiased. Talk of impartiality is no more—and no less—than a convenient fiction which has served to maintain a degree aperture in the corporation’s coverage of a variety of events—a whisker of pluralism that, as this blogger has suggested before, is certainly better than the kind of Fox News Society achieved in the United States by the Murdoch family and their associates. But let us not believe for a moment that this is tantamount to the impartiality that the BBC claims to adhere to. Anyone who thinks otherwise might want to investigate the role of Mark Thompson, the BBC’s Director General, vis-a-vis the corporation’s coverage of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In this case we find a useful example of the limits of the liberal model of journalism. (For a more detailed critique, EcoLogics includes below an excerpt of an analysis published in 2007, in the post on the British judge, Stephen Sedley, who tried to support the New Labour government’s plans to introduce a universal DNA database.)

No, what we have to fear is not so much the appearance of the BNP on television, as the fact that it will do so in a broadcasting system which has already shown a predisposition to tolerate both manifest and subtle forms of racism. If you missed the controversy surrounding an earlier appearance of the BNP on Radio 1, then read up on it to find out what is likely to happen, if not now, then in the medium term in a broadcasting system that has become subservient to the forces of neoliberalism—the same ones that may have contributed, and are arguably quite possibly still contributing to the renewal of fascism in the UK, and beyond.

Here is, from an earlier post, a critique of the BBC’s claims of impartiality:

‘The BBC’s editorial guidelines suggest that the BBC is committed to impartiality. According to the BBC, this means that, amongst other things, the corporation seeks to provide ‘a properly balanced service consisting of a wide range of subject matter and views broadcast over an appropriate time scale across all our output’; to ‘reflect a wide range of opinion and explore a range and conflict of views so that no significant strand of thought is knowingly unreflected or under represented’; to ‘produce content about any subject, at any point on the spectrum of debate as long as there are good editorial reasons for doing so’; to ‘explore or report on a specific aspect of an issue or provide an opportunity for a single view to be expressed, but in doing so we do not misrepresent opposing views. They may also require a right of reply’. The Corporation aims to ‘ensure [that] we avoid bias or an imbalance of views on controversial subjects’. Indeed, the BBC goes so far as to say that its ‘journalists and presenters, including those in news and current affairs, may provide professional judgments but may not express personal opinions on matters of public policy or political or industrial controversy’ and ‘[o]ur audiences should not be able to tell from BBC programmes or other BBC output the personal views of our journalists and presenters on such matters’(8).

These guidelines reflect the BBC’s commitment to what might be described as a traditional discourse on the nature of journalism. A good journalist, or rather the news that s/he produces, is accurate, balanced, includes where appropriate a diversity of views, and does so in a manner that is not prejudiced by any bias, or by the personal views of the journalist.

While this discourse has been comprehensively critiqued by a number of scholars (see for example, Stuart Allan’s News Culture), there is still much to be said for it; we have only to consider the alternative posed by Fox News (9) to realise how vitally important it is to try to produce impartial, or something like impartial accounts, in news reporting.

The problem is that editorial guidelines such as the BBC’s are of course no guarantee of impartiality—for the BBC, or for any other news organisation. On the one hand, and staying within the logic of the guidelines, journalism is always susceptible to external manipulation, to mistakes or bias incurred thanks to the pressures of time or the limitations of space, and indeed to ‘internal’ manipulation by ‘biased’ journalists. From a more critical perspective, the guidelines are based on relatively naïve understandings of the nature of the production, dissemination, and social reception of knowledge by way of the media of mass communication. Modern societies and the issues that emerge in them tend to be so complex that there may well be far more perspectives than a journalist can ever know, understand, or report in any given case or subject. To be sure, the finite nature of a journalist’s, or indeed of a team of journalists’ knowledge means that s/he/they will necessarily bring to bear a certain perspective to whatever aspects they do manage to cover. Practical constraints to do with generic formulae, the amount of space or time available to produce a piece, the political and economic interests of the news organisations and their bureaucracies are not a matter of exception. On the contrary, they are the structural conditions under which, and with which journalists must work to produce news.

This post is not the place to engage in a detailed critique of journalistic conventions. It must suffice to suggest that, in practice, the aforementioned constraints force journalists to be selective, and thereby reductive with respect to the range and number of points of view that they represent. Those that they do choose will reflect, however indirectly, the ‘biases’ of their own knowledge and/or experience. Put differently, journalists’ representations will always exclude or misrepresent at least some views or perspectives.”

Manchester Airport: Take off your clothes so we don’t have to touch you

Originally posted 15 October 2009; updated 2, 4 January, and 17 February 2010 (scroll down for update)

See also the more recent Confirmed: Full Body Scanner Recipe for Abuse

A remarkable experiment in public nudity—and the invasion of one’s most private space—is happening at Manchester Airport, in northern England. The experiment is being carried out by Manchester City Airports Group Plc (‘MAG’), a holding company owned by the ten metropolitan borough councils of Greater Manchester.

The experiment involves inviting you to go through an x-ray machine—called a ‘full body scanner’—that will, in effect, take your clothes off, ostensibly to spare you the embarrassment of being ‘patted down’ when you go through airport security. An officer that you can’t see, sitting in an office at one remove from the booth where you will be stripped, will then be able to see all of you.

The mainstream media are being very careful not to show the detail in which your breasts, penis or vulva will be visible, but have no doubt: you will effectively be stripped naked by the full body scanner, and you are being asked to believe that the images will be anonymous, and not subject to any kind of manipulation, publication, or exploitation (as if we hadn’t heard that before; have a look at what Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office had to say about the illegal sale of private data–including CCTV camera images–in the 2006 report What Price Privacy? The Unlawful Trade in Personal Information)

The quid pro quo—the ‘exchange’—is based on the following formula: you willingly take your clothes off—or rather, the machine takes them off for you—and we (the airport security guards, but more generally, the Manchester City Airports Group Plc) won’t touch you.

Sound perverse? It is, and EcoLogics will have a lot more to say about it, soon. In the meantime, vote with your feet, or rather, your itinerary: avoid Manchester Airport.

Update 2 January 2010

Following the near-miss with the Delta flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, it is clear that both politicians, and many members of the travelling public will quite literally be queuing up to demand the new full body scanners. It may well be that the machines are the only allegedly non-intrusive way to detect would-be bombers. The question is increasingly why anyone would want to subject themselves to ritual humiliation, and potentially, all kinds of behind-the-scenes abuse.

Update 4 January 2010

It looks like Heathrow is also introducing the full body scanners, and that the UK government is going to make their installation mandatory in all airports. This blogger wonders: what would happen if passengers insisted on stripping themselves in public, instead of having their nudity recorded and potentially sold or otherwise abused by unscrupulous officials? What would happen if there were huge queues of naked people in airports? Would the authorities be happy with that? The entire logic of the system really depends on people acquiescing to the lies behind the technology (that’s it’s completely ‘private’ etc. etc.). If enough people refused to travel, the airline industry would refuse to allow further intrusions in our privacy.