Report for the UK Constitution Society
Tufton Street’s new Cabinet?
(repost with extra links)
When Liz Truss was forced to abandon her mini-budget, Mark Littlewood, the Director General of the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), one of the secretively (oil, gas, tobacco) funded think-tanks at the centre of the Tufton Street network, and behind Truss’ economic policies, was reportedly “distraught”.
Even before Truss resigned, those in favour of a de-regulated/disaster capitalist/extremist agenda were lamenting, The opportunity, Nigel Farage told Politico, “now appears to be dead. And I would have thought dead for a very, very long time. The people in the Conservative Party that I talk to, who think on my wavelength … have pretty much given up.”
Fast forward to Sunak’s cabinet and making the headlines is the re-appointment of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary, whose dream of deporting refugees to Rwanda is backed by Tufton Street’s Migration Watch (and Nigel Farage).
Three other members of Sunak’s first cabinet are, according to the IEA, “alumni of IEA initiatives”. They are:
Dominic Raab – Deputy Prime Minister. Co-author, with Truss, Kwarteng et al, of ‘Britannia Unchained’
James Cleverly – Foreign Secretary
Alister Jack – Secretary of State for Scotland
Four other members of the cabinet are listed as parliamentary supporters of the Free Market Forum: a “project of the Institute for Economic Affairs”. The Free Market Forum’s head is senior policy advisor to Mark Littlewood. Matthew Elliott, founder of Tufton Street’s Taxpayers’ Alliance is on the Advisory Council.
The cabinet supporters named by the Free Market Forum are:
Kemi Badenoch – International Trade Secretary and Minister for Women and Equalities (Liz Truss’ former role)
Therese Coffey – Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Mark Harper – Transport Secretary
Gillian Keegan – Education Secretary
Chris Heaton-Harris, former head of the European Research Group, was a supporter of the Free Market Forum’s first incarnation, the Free Enterprise Group, co-founded by Liz Truss in 2011. He remains as Northern Ireland Secretary.
Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak’s trusted press secretary, Nerissa Chesterfield, is a former communications manager at the IEA.
So the vested interests behind the crashing of the UK economy, by their own account, remain invested in, and influential at the highest level on: UK trade, transport, agriculture, environment, foreign affairs, Northern Ireland and education policy, as well as in the office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the Prime Minister. They may have gone quiet. But they have not gone away.
Liz Truss: There’s More
Yes, her policies have just crashed the economy. No, we don’t yet know who’s made the money from the resulting public losses. Yes, her policies are constructed and controlled by a secretively funded international network of far-right million and billion-aires, whose basic belief can be summarised as ‘let the rich get richer, while the devil take the hindmost’. Rejecting rights for workers, or regulations of any kind, what they call ‘the free market’ is unfettered disaster capitalism, as seen in post-Yeltsin Russia. Truss’ effective replacement, Jeremy Hunt, is no stranger to Tufton Street; the current UK base for that network. And research, before current events, shows the details of how far that network is prepared to take us: from abortion rights to the environment, to bombs and animal welfare. Truss joined the network almost as soon as she entered Parliament, if not before. And here, on a Liz Truss timeline, is some of it.
In 2005, after standing several times for local councils, and in general elections, Truss is put on the A list of Conservative candidates by David Cameron. She is finally elected MP for the safe seat of South West Norfolk in 2010.
Truss endears herself to her constituents by campaigning to prevent the sell-off of Norfolk’s Thetford forest. At the same time she votes in favour of selling off England’s public forests in Parliament.
In 2012, Truss is promoted to Under Secretary of State at the Department for Education. In January 2013 she publishes proposals to ‘reform’ child care, including weakening child to teacher ratios, which she says are based on a report, commissioned by the government, from childcare expert Professor Cathy Nutbrown.
In March 2013 Professor Nutbrown “slams” the proposals, saying they will “shake the foundations of quality provision for young children”. It emerges that Truss has ignored public membership organisations, professionals and Professor Nutbrown, in favour of multiple meetings with US based corporate providers.
In 2014 Truss is made Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Her department comes under fire for publishing a report into the effects of fracking, including falls in house prices, which is so heavily censored, it is “almost comical”, say the Green Party. Truss blames her civil servants.
In response to the alarming decrease in bee populations, she launches a 10 year National Pollinator strategy. Six months later, in the face of expert opinion and a petition signed by over 400,000 people, she temporarily lifts a ban on two of the most damaging pesticides, assessed to pose an “unacceptable risk” to bees. Manufacturers such as Syngenta and Bayer had strongly opposed the ban.
March 2016: Truss puts the Tufton Street deregulation agenda in action by pushing for government statutory codes on farm animal welfare to be scrapped. After an outcry, led by the RSPCA, the idea is dropped.
In 2016 Truss campaigns for Remain, saying “I don’t want my daughters to grow up in a world where they need a visa or permit to work in Europe….Every parent wants their children to grow up in a healthy environment with clean water, fresh air and thriving natural wonders. Being part of the EU helps protect these precious resources and spaces”.
In 2017 she switches to supporting Brexit. Tufton Street is the centre for Vote Leave, and other Brexit-supporting groups. In a Damascene conversion she now says: “I believed there would be massive economic problems but those haven’t come to pass”. By 2018 she has fully signed up to “no deal is better than a bad deal”. When asked by the BBC’s Emma Barnett how the UK will legally achieve a No Deal Brexit, she replies: “I don’t know the precise details of exactly what we will do, and even if I did I wouldn’t tell you”.
2017: After 11 months as Secretary of State, and criticism from former ministers, the judiciary, barristers, and insurers, Truss is moved to Chief Secretary of the Treasury.
2018: On a taxpayer funded visit to the US, Truss holds secretive meetings with right wing think tanks, allied to Tufton Street, pushing for the UK to adopt a hardline free market agenda.
One is the Heritage Foundation, which shaped Donald Trump’s policies to scrap environmental regulations and withdraw from the landmark Paris climate agreement.
At another, the Cato Institute, Truss says that “a thicket of regulation and control” is holding back business and calls for a new “Anglo-American dream”.
Back in the UK, the Cato Institute is publishing its ‘ideal’ US UK trade agreement, alongside the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute – both of Tufton Street. The proposed deal would threaten environmental regulations, and “open all government procurement markets to goods and services providers from the other party” ie open up the NHS to competition from the American healthcare industry.
November 2019: The Guardian reports on the Atlas Network: a global coalition of more than 450 right wing thinktanks and campaign groups which operate independently, but also co-operate closely in fighting for their shared vision of ultra free markets and limited government. They call themselves the “worldwide freedom movement”. Collectively they have multimillion-dollar budgets, and many of their donors, board members, trustees and researchers overlap. The network was established by the founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs. Other members, say Sourcewatch, include the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Its UK affiliates backed Brexit. The chief executive, reports the Guardian, said his organisation takes inspiration from Milton Friedman’s insight that “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change”. In other words: disaster capitalism.
In 2019, Truss considers standing for leader of the Conservative party. Instead, she supports Johnson. He makes her International Trade Secretary and, when Amber Rudd resigns, Minister for Women and Equalities.
August 2019: Truss gives an address to the US Heritage Foundation, in her role as trade secretary, urging the benefits of a US UK trade deal. She refers to the “huge amount of investment” the UK has attracted which has led to “untold prosperity” for both nations.
August 2019: Truss appoints advisors to recommend locations for new, post-Brexit ‘freeports’ – the deregulated zones pioneered by the Adam Smith Institute. One is Tom Clougherty – head of tax at the Centre for Policy Studies and previously executive director of the Adam Smith Institute. Clougherty was also a senior editor at the Cato Institute.
Co-founded and part-funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, the Cato Institute has also been funded by ExxonMobil and Philip Morris. In 2014 Rolling Stone reported that only three companies ranked among the top 30 polluters of America’s air, water and climate: ExxonMobil, American Electric Power and Koch Industries.
September 2019: Truss has to apologise to a court for two breaches of a pledge not to licence exports to Saudi Arabia that could be used in the Yemen conflict.
July 2020: Truss lifts the UK ban on arms sales to Saudi Arabia. She says that despite “isolated incidents, which have been factored into the analysis as historic violations of international humanitarian law, Saudi Arabia has a genuine intent and the capacity to comply with international humanitarian law”. Saudi armed forces are using UK built and licenced arms in Yemen, including Typhoon aircraft, missiles and bombs.
Throughout 2020, Truss tweets extensively about animal welfare. “We will not be undercutting our high animal welfare standards”, “We will never sign a trade deal that leaves our farming industry with its high animal welfare standards worse off”, “We won’t compromise on our high animal welfare and food safety standards”, she promises.
In October 2020, she votes “not to require agricultural and food imports to meet or exceed relevant domestic standards applying (to) matters including food safety, the environment and animal health”.
Politico will later report that Truss rejected a proposal to fast-track import bans on products made to low animal welfare standards, arguing it would reduce British leverage as it negotiates trade deals.
2021: Sky News obtains a leaked government email showing that Truss, and her fellow minister and Britannia Unchained author Kwasi Kwarteng, agreed to drop binding commitments to the Paris climate change agreement from the UK-Australian trade deal.
March 2021: Eight new freeports (low tax, de-regulated zones outside of public control) in each of the English regions, including Thames Freeport and Solent Freeport, are awarded to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) based corporation DP World. Eammon Butler, director at the Adam Smith Institute, discloses in the Telegraph that the idea of reviving freeports has come from Liz Truss. DP World will later make headlines when P&O Ferries, which it owns, sacks its British work force to replace them by cheaper staff contracted to a third-party supplier.
May 2021: Truss touts the Gulf states as crucial to UK attempts to forge new agreements in the wake of Brexit. Officials are working on an approach to the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), including the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, she tells the Telegraph.
September 2021: Truss is made Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs. In December, after the resignation of David Frost, she becomes the government’s chief negotiator with the EU.
June 2022: The government has quietly dropped “human rights” and “rule of law” from its goals in the Gulf states trade deal, the Independent reports. Questioned by MP Chris Bryant, Truss says she “raises human rights issues with Gulf leaders all the time”. Her spokesman says she has not. Asked by Bryant to name a single occasion, she cannot.
July 2022: Seventy percent of Britons believe that parliament should be allowed to vote on whether a trade deal goes ahead. But, in a move which sets an ominous precedent, ministers are poised to break a promise to give MPs a final say before approving the controversial post-Brexit trade deal with Australia, the Independent reports. The agreement – which, on the government’s own figures, will punish the farming and food sectors – will clear parliament under an obscure behind closed doors process. A Freedom Of Information request revealed that Liz Truss received detailed warnings about the harsh impact on the UK’s farming and food sectors. But the details of forecasts of UK losses – from both the Australia and New Zealand agreements – were kept secret when talks were launched in 2020.
Simultaneously, environmental campaigners launch a last ditch legal bid to prevent or delay the deal, reports the Guardian. Lady Rosie Boycott, the cross-bench peer who served as “food tsar” for London under Boris Johnson when he was mayor, said: “Australia has an abysmal record on deforestation, animal welfare and climate. The government’s own advisers conceded that overuse of pesticides in Australia would give their farmers a competitive advantage over the UK’s. Australia uses many more highly hazardous pesticides than the UK, many of which are banned here on health and environmental grounds. How will UK consumers be protected?”
14 July 2022: Truss launches her bid for the leadership of the Conservative party, and Prime Minister. Listing her achievements, she claims, without evidence, that “in government I have consistently delivered and taken tough decisions”. She says “As trade secretary I struck dozens of trade deals with major partners such as Australia and Japan”. She says: “I am prepared to do whatever it takes to get the job done”. And she insists: “I don’t give in to vested interests”.
27 July 2022: After the overturning of Roe v Wade, a senior Conservative MP asks Truss, who is still Women and Equalities minister, to explain why the UK government appeared to perform a “sudden backtracking on women’s rights” after commitments to abortion and sexual health rights were removed from an official statement on gender equality. The Heritage Foundation, with whom Truss and other Tufton street alumni are closely linked, described the removal of abortion rights as a “victory”.
August 2022: “It is truly damning that, in a week when the climate emergency has never felt closer to home, its discussion in the Tory leadership race has been conspicuous by its absence” says Green MP Caroline Lucas. Truss did confirm she will maintain the UK’s 2050 net zero target but also says she wants to rethink some net zero policies. Instead of a windfall tax on the billions being made by fossil fuel companies, she intends to scrap the “green levies” which make up around 8 percent of energy bills, and which cover renewable sources, insulation and the warm home discount, which helps low-income households with heating bills.
“Andy Mayer from the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) says the levies for renewable energy pay back less than claimed, and questioned the need for subsidies at all. The free market think tank has received funding from fossil fuel companies” Sky News reports.The latest polling by Ipsos shows that 84 percent of the British public are greatly concerned about climate change, with more than half “very concerned”.
August 2022: Truss’ economic plans – cut taxes (which will benefit the wealthy); scrap the national insurance rise (which was intended to fund health and social care), cut regulations (removing environmental standards, animal welfare standards and more protections from workers in the least regulated labour market in the OECD) have come under fire from left, right and centre. They would also fuel inflation and prompt quicker interest rate increases from the Bank of England, potentially taking them to a 40 year high, a Bloomberg poll of UK economists found.
When asked to name one economist who agreed with her tax plans, Truss names Patrick Minford. Minford was head of Vote Leave’s ‘Economists for Brexit’, now known as ‘Economists for Free Trade’. He sits on the advisory team of the TaxPayers’ Alliance and is a Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs. He predicted that Brexit would mean that “the cost of living would drop 8 percent, that’s £40 per household adult” and that leaving the EU without a trade deal would have boosted the UK’s GDP by 4%.
August 2022: In other home policies, Truss vows to ‘clamp down’ on ‘unfair’ protests, after being interrupted by a small group of climate activists. She promises to take action on ‘militant’ trade unions and change the rules over balloting, prompting calls for a general strike if this happens. She pledges to make more Rwanda-style deportation deals – a policy supported by Tufton Street’s Migration Watch.
On foreign policy, Truss descibed herself as ‘leading the free world’ in the fight against Putin. Her suggestion that China might use the Russian invasion of Ukraine as an opportunity to launch aggression of its own in the Indo-Pacific prompted former Australian PM, Paul Keating, to call her remarks “nothing short of demented”. She has promised to increase defence spending and raised the possibility of the UK arming Taiwan, although she avoided further questions, as Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Tom Tugendhat pointed out that this is not currently government policy. She is accused of ‘hyping up’ the threat from China; like her “war on woke”.
It is a remarkably similar approach to that of the Heritage Foundation, and of Steve Bannon, the US’ far right, Vote Leave Farage-Johnson backer, who himself has ties to Tufton Street and the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Meanwhile, Iain Duncan Smith, who previously sat on the board of the Brexit backing Tufton Street thinktank, the European Foundation, alongside Matthew Elliott of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, writes approvingly in the Telegraph that Truss “will make it crystal clear that we stand for human rights, decency and, critically in this moment, for Taiwan.”. According to Truss herself: “freedom is a price worth paying”.
“Almost Never Discussed”: Inside the UK Whipping System
Piece for The Constitution Society, detailing current research:
Fowl
Years of funny, perky, sweary, affectionate, feisty or simply sweet rescue hens have not prepared me for the extraordinary, dignified, stately, brave creatures that are turkeys.
HMA vs Craig John Murray in the Court of Appeals, 27 January
NB No recording of proceedings was allowed. Journalists had to get clearance before watching the hearing via Zoom. James Dolman reports other salient facts here: https://twitter.com/jamesdoleman/status/1354381549316272138
Predicted final costs of over £160,000; threats of two years in prison and an ‘unlimited fine’; months of concern, and in the end, an hour and half (and 29 pages of contemporaneous notes) later, the virtually-held court case against the UK’s former ambassador, Craig Murray, for contempt of court, seemed largely to rest on a concept of his character.
Speaking for the Crown, the Advocate Depute twice referred to Murray’s “attitude” to the reporting of the case, and once to his “conduct”; both were significant, apparently, when reaching a judgement as to whether Murray’s blog posts had either a) posed a substantial risk of seriously prejudicing the recent court case against Scotland’s former First Minister, Alex Salmond b) breached an order by referring to the departure of participants c) contributed information likely to lead to the “jigsaw identification” of complainants in the case.
Referring to the issue of prejudice, the Advocate Depute, for the Crown, agreed from the beginning that Salmond’s trial had proceeded as planned, and that “no-one complained the trial was unfair”. Despite the fact that the articles the Crown referred to had been published by Murray in August 2019 and January 2020, respectively, while the trial itself was held in March, he agreed the Crown had decided not to bring forward proceedings against Murray. Murray had instead, he confided, “been put on notice”.
The judge, Lady Dorrian. commented that if these articles had created a substantial risk to the proceedings, it seemed strange that the Crown did not take any action at the time. The Advocate Depute accepted that this was “factually correct”.
Apparently referring to the issue of “jigsaw identification”, Lady Dorrian then moved on to the fact that in certain passages submissions to the court relied on information “which is asserted can be found on the internet or twitter”. How she asked, could a court determine the issue, or address this point, if today a different result would arise? Once again the Advocate Depute “completely accepted” that “all the court can proceed on is facts”. Which essentially meant, suggested Lady Dorrian, that “we have to leave it aside”. To which, once again, Advocate Depute agreed that “the court must proceed on facts”.
An issue, raised by Lady Dorrian, as to whether Murray was responsible for moderating the comments on his blog, concluded with Dorrian suggesting that, apart from the consideration of the respondent’s awareness and responsibility if the comments breached the “objective test” it would not be relevant to whether the articles themselves constituted contempt, or breached the “objective test” for it. The Advocate Depute agreed.
Continuing with the issue of “jigsaw identification”, the Advocate Depute then appeared to argue, that although the order was a “broad, wide-sweeping order” he was in fact interpreting it narrowly viz: “It is not my submission that the crown must demonstrate that a member of the Borough of London must be able to identify (the complainants from Murray’s writing)” as opposed to “someone from the workplace”. It would, he said “be much more distressing in a work environment”.
The Advocate Depute then continued to underline how widely publicised the case was, how much information there was in the public domain, and how the respondent was “clearly aware and recognised this”. “Taking account” of the whole broad relevant information “and the respondent’s conduct” he said that there appeared “to be a desire..” as to “the identity of the complainers”. Earlier he had referred to a “collusion of information”; although when asked by Lady Dorrian to repeat this, he did not.
“Am I to understand” asked Lady Dorrian “that the argument is that these articles breached the order only in conjunction with other material?” – not that somehow themselves they breached the circumstances of the order?
These were, the Advocate Depute agreed “difficult points” which “must be looked at not in isolation but in conjunction with other material”. “By the same publisher” Lady Dorrian added.
But it was, emphasised the Advocate Depute, “the overall conduct” of the respondent.
Lady Dorrian then again emphasised that the issue of whether any of the material led to the identification of the complainants had to be judged “objectively”.
For the defence, John Scott then reiterated the point made by Lady Dorrian about reliance on internet searches; adding that results were dependent on algorithms, which themselves could be affected by searches made by the Crown, thereby distorting results, or by the defence. Referring to other points about about jigsaw identification: the defendant was aware of the names of the complainants when there was no court order but it was not “responsible journalism” to have named them. Scott referred to material evidencing the care the defendant took to avoid jigsaw identification. “If he had wanted to do what the Crown say he has done he could have done so”.
There were references to Murray seeing “a bigger picture” – in this case, media bias and political affairs in Scotland, and on not being “fixated” on identifying witnesses. There was a discussion about Murray being excluded from the Salmond trial, and how his subsequent reporting could then be tested for accuracy.
The defence then reiterated points already mostly made about the Crown case – the fact that the case had not been prejudiced by Murray’s previous articles and the trial had been completed; that the Crown had not drawn them to the attention of the court; that the Crown could not “subsequently complain that there was substantial prejudice”. As the Advocate Depute had said “there was no complaint by anyone of the fairness of proceedings”.
The defence flatly denied, in the case of the specific order of the 2nd March (referring to the withdrawal of a participant) that the order was breached.
As to the “third and clearly main limb” of the Crown case: the jigsaw identification; Scott took issue with the idea that anyone, not just the wider public, should be prevented from seeing details which would mean anyone with particular knowledge of a situation could identify a complainant, since in that case, that would surely mean that nothing could be published.
Lady Dorrian, envisaging a situation where there would be a case when one clear piece of information would be enough to provide identification: for example, “an assault on a member of staff in a branch of a building society in Totnes and there is only one member of staff”, appeared to see this point. There were no questions from the bench.
Lady Dorrian then concluded the session: the court would take time and issue its decision in writing.
Afghanistan – our forgotten war
In February last year, a peace deal between the US and Afghanistan was framed as a breakthrough: a solution, finally, to the daily death toll of the US’s longest war to date. Then, as coronavirus took over, the deal was quietly forgotten; replaced by headlines about the country’s suffering in the face of the pandemic, in pieces which occasionally highlighted the UN’s warning that the “lack of adequate medical facilities and resources…threaten to aggravate the health crisis”, but which rarely went further.
Few analyses incorporated the US and allies’ responsibility for the poverty, malnutrition, poor sanitation, lack of health care access and environmental degradation, all of which the war has exacerbated. Few pointed out that, even in the absence of fighting, unexploded ordnance and cluster bombs keep killing and maiming, or that civilian deaths and casualties rose again after the deal, or that US air strikes continued after the deal and still continue. Few have detailed the parlous position of Afghan women today, after an invasion which was promoted time and again as “a fight for the rights and dignity of women”.
Today, the headlines are once again focussing on the peace deal. “A future without the United States as an occupying force becomes possible for the first time in almost two decades” reports Foreign Policy. Of course, it was possible before 2001, when the US-led invasion – apparent aims: remove the Taliban, expel Al Qaeda – began. It’s easy to forget that the invasion came with a slew of positivity: it was progressive, secular, humanitarian, ‘democratic’, and at the forefront were women’s rights. Leaders, from the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to US Secretary of State Colin Powell, insisted the war would restore them. Laura Bush described it as “a fight for the rights and dignity of women”. To oppose the war was to condone female suffering: after years of the Taliban’s medieval barbarity, ran the narrative, Afghan women would be free again.
Two years ago, a Gallup survey showed that Afghan women felt less free than the women of any other country in the world. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) report that seventy to eighty percent of women still face forced marriage, many before the age of 16. Around two-thirds of Afghan girls do not attend school. The United Nations Population Fund estimated in 2018 that nearly 90 percent of Afghan women have been subjected to physical, psychological or sexual violence, and over 60 percent have been subjected to multiple forms of abuse. Worldwide, there are more male suicides than female, but in Afghanistan, 80 percent of suicides are estimated to be women. Nearly half of all Afghan women want to leave the country. “Years of war and insecurity have spread the culture of violence” concluded the OECD’s Gender Index in 2019.
But Afghanistan has not merely suffered “years of war and insecurity”, or, as the Guardian put it, forty years of “civil war – in various iterations”. The British East India company first invaded in 1839; numerous wars followed. An outbreak of peace in the 20th century, under Afghanistan’s last king, Zahir Shah, merely paved the way, after he was forced to abdicate, for a Soviet supported coup in 1978. During the civil war which preceded and followed the regime’s collapse, the Soviet Union first contributed aid and arms, and then troops, while the US channelled increasing millions of dollars and increasingly lethal weaponry to the counter-Soviet mujahideen; particularly to the fundamentalist Hezb-i-Islami party, and their anti-Western leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar, an ally of Bin Laden, was also supported and funded by US allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan – specifically, in the latter case, by the notorious Pakistani secret service ISI.
And yet when the Taliban finally took over in 1996, and at the height of their regime, they were considered by the US government and US business interests to be potential partners. US oil and gas corporation Unocal had, among others, long been in talks with the Taliban to construct two oil and gas pipelines travelling through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Unocal officially withdrew from negotiations in 1998, after the Clinton administration’s bombing of al-Qaeda Afghan bases, and any suggestions that the subsequent US invasion was promoted by oil and gas interests were widely dismissed as conspiracy theories. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan fiercely condemned the invasion as an act of “vast aggression”, and equally condemned the US’s previous support for “jihadis”, but no-one was listening.
Today, Afghanistan’s strategic importance, and its natural resources, are firmly back on the international agenda. After the invasion, and the fall of the Taliban, Afghans generally expected that their state would once again lead the country’s economy. The 1976 Afghan constitution, as well as confirming equal rights for women, had stipulated that all main enterprises should be state-owned, and encouraged small businesses. Instead, the World Bank and the US began the privatisation of Afghanistan. War on Want reported that USID privatised 25 state owned agricultural enterprises, transferred millions of dollars in assets to the private sector, and labelled over a thousand state-owned areas for privatisation. The International Finance Corporation, an arm of the World Bank, invested millions of dollars in private companies.
By 2005 the World Bank was luring investors with the promise that those entering Afghanistan would benefit from being “first movers” in a virgin market which was “highly pro-business”. It was also helping privatise Afghanistan’s mines and mineral sector. On paper, “economic growth” has occurred. On the ground less than a third of people in Afghanistan have access to clean water, while over a third live in chronic poverty, and that figure is rising. “Poverty rates (less than $1 a day income) are rapidly increasing, from about 39% in 2012 to about 55% now, while the number of jobs available to Afghans is declining” said the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s summary, earlier this year. According to a 2017 report for the US Department of State, child labour and/or slavery is wide-spread, with children used as drug-traffickers, sex slaves and in mines. Benefits from the imposed market system have been delivered to the top percent – including power brokers, war-lords and mafia-style groups. Transparency International place Afghanistan as the eighth most corrupt country in the world – just below Iraq.
In February 2018, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, the Turkmen President, the Pakistani Prime Minister, and the Indian Minister of State for External Affairs gathered in Herat to mark the start of Afghan construction on the TAPI gas pipeline, which, should it be completed, will run from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistan and India. General John Nicholson – commander of US Forces Afghanistan and NATO’s Resolute Support Mission – was beside them. The addition of the TAPI pipeline to the region’s energy markets would threaten a number of existing suppliers, not least Russia, and would need stability to complete. In the event of US troop withdrawal, US experts have suggested a deployment of national security personnel, together with military personnel from international or local private security firms as protection.
Thanks to the explosion of private security companies, Afghanistan is already one of the most militarised countries in the world. In 2016, US military contractors outnumbered US troops in Afghanistan by a factor of 3 to 1; currently, there are 12,000 US troops and 26,000 contractors, who are involved in air strikes and intelligence, as well as military operations and support on the ground. Trump ally Erik Prince, the founder of the US private military/mercenary company Blackwater (now Academi) proposed a “private military solution” to Afghanistan two years ago, drawing on the British East India Company as inspiration.
Prince’s new company, Frontier Services Group, was reported to be working closely with Afghan warlords and with the last US administration to exploit Afghanistan’s previously untapped mineral resources – including what could be the world’s largest source of lithium, a mineral toxic and water-intensive to mine, but one increasingly of major interest to world powers, thanks to its use in most electronic products, from military weaponry to renewable batteries in electric cars. From this January, according to Afghanistan’s original WTO commitments (it became a member in 2016) Afghanistan will eliminate the requirement that mining and hydrocarbon operators give priority to domestic suppliers. Afghanistan is classified as a “least developed country”: a UN report points out that “multinational corporations in pursuit of minimized cost choose developing and least developed countries for the purpose of production and resource extraction”, and warns of “potential environmental destruction”.
Meanwhile, none of the state players, including the US, while talking peace, show many signs of leaving Afghanistan to it. Russia started involving itself again in Afghan affairs several years ago, and appears to have recently offered to send troops there to “fight terrorism”. China also has an eye to what it sees as an Islamic challenge, and, increasingly, in becoming a major economic stake-holder in the country, and using it to “advance westward“. While maintaining links with the Taliban, it has also offered military support to the Afghan government. Iran, which the US has ignored in recent negotiations, has a major stake in Afghan affairs, as does the Taliban-supporting Pakistan. After a year in which the US dropped the most bombs in Afghanistan yet, the agreement between the Trump administration and the Taliban immediately resulted in more US air-strikes against Taliban fighters. The US deal may simply leave a power vacuum; meanwhile over 8000 US troops will initially remain on the ground, the deal can easily be reversed, and, significantly, there is no mention of US private military contractors leaving. Women’s rights, incidentally, were not included in the deal.
The importance of pink-footed geese
Past revisited:
Direct action against the Karahnjukar hydro-electric dam project in Iceland has started in earnest. The dam will devastate Western Europe’s last pristine wilderness, solely to power an Alcoa aluminium smelter (see Corporate Watch number 23, April May 2005, page 9)
(Background from campaign group Saving Iceland)
ANARCHY IN ICELAND
T. Troughton September 2005
Iceland was under attack. Violent international protestors were arriving on its shores, fresh from the G8 and bent on further destruction. The Icelandic police were calling for the urgent tightening of border controls. Laws had just been passed allowing foreigners to have their phones tapped, their houses searched, and their possessions confiscated, all without warrants. News presenters were emitting warning gouts of Icelandic, spattered with the word ‘Anarkisti!’, alongside blown-up images of figures in IRA balaclavas. There was muttered talk, on all sides, of terrorism.
It was this climate which has just seen Icelandic police deliberately endanger the lives of peaceful protestors, as well as sexually assaulting a young woman, according to the most recent report from Iceland. People had started arriving in the country at the end of June, after pleas from beleaguered Icelandic environmentalists, who had called for an international protest camp after all attempts to stop a series of dam building projects in Iceland had failed. The international camp had been supported in the UK parliament by an Early Day Motion sponsored by Liberal Democrat Sue Doughty, and signed by 29 British MP’s. By the middle of July around forty people, from countries as diverse as Spain, Canada, Germany, Poland and the UK, had arrived in Iceland in response.
For some time, the Icelandic people had been aware of a government plan to dam all of Iceland’s glacial rivers, and sell the resulting energy to new aluminium smelters, owned by multinational corporations like Alcoa and Alcan. Based on past experience, rather than promises, this meant that, in a matter of years, not only would much of the previously protected highlands would be under water; the glacial rivers would be silted and barren, and Iceland, ‘pure, natural, unspoilt Iceland’, as it says in the tourist advertisements, would be pullulating with toxic heavy industry.
A peaceful, nature-loving people, the Icelanders had apparently done their best to rewrite this dystopian script. Demonstrations were held. A Gallup poll showed the majority were against more heavy industry. Nationally respected artists mounted campaigns against the plan. Bjork’s mother went on hunger strike. Icelandic scientists spoke out about its devastating environmental and social impact, “but they changed my report, sacked me, and after that, I couldn’t get another job” said a scientist with three masters’ degrees, two of them from Yale. The Icelandic Environmental Agency refused to condone it. The government’s sale of the National Bank to finance the project was revealed to be highly questionable. In an unguarded moment, the Icelandic minister for Industry and Commerce referred to Iceland as ‘heavy industry’s best kept secret’. The government refused to disclose how much they were charging the aluminium corporations for the energy, Meanwhile, workers were reporting that ten men were employed just to replant the trees around an existing aluminium smelter, because they died in the space of two weeks.
But still the plan went ahead. And the massive bones of the Karahnjukar dam, the one which will flood most of Iceland’s Grand Canyon, began to blown out of the mountains of the Eastern Highlands.
“And that’s where they’re building the dam” the Norfolk students had said, unnecessarily, after the jeep had puttered out of Egillstadir, the dam’s nearest town, over the huge glacial river, past the slopes of Snaefell, Iceland’s most mythical mountain, and across the moors. Bulldozers moved busily around the huge pit, dynamite exploded, stone gouted smoke, and rock-faces fell, at the hands of workers imported from China, Pakistan, Chile, Poland and Portugal, on six month contracts, working day and night in shifts, with no social life, no alchohol, no trips home and no remission. Icelandic people had overwhelmingly refused to accept work in the dam, despite it being touted as a solution to local unemployment. It was being built on a geothermal fault, and the main contractor was under investigation for fraud and corruption, but nothing was going to stop construction. “It is hell” one Portuguese man had confided.
Dwarfed by the project, the protest camp sat in a small hollow, across from the site’s main road. Around it was a wild, vast, bilberried swathe of landscape, populated by eagles, reindeer, waterfalls, geothermal springs and the faintly ridiculous sounding pink-footed goose. The camp itself was small, and jaunty, with flowery tents, a central marquee, and ecological toilets, which had been built by a sympathetic local farmer. And it contained a range of nationalities which almost matched the dam’s Italian contractor, Impregilo, for variety of choice.
Whether they came from Spain, Poland, Canada, the States, Austria, Wales, or Brighton, they were mainly young, and so nice that you suspected this must be part of the job description. “Wanted! Extremely decent young people! Must be tolerant, communicative, open, helpful, honest, and able to cook up vegan pizza from stale bread and other random stuff removed from a supermarket skip”, perhaps. You could have added ‘non-violent’, but it was obviously unnecessary; none of these people had it in them to hurt a rabbit.
The camp’s resident artist was a shy German sculptress, who, every morning, would don goggles and lug enormous quantities of material around; after which she would descend to the banks of the wide grey glacial river, where she would do something she described as ‘fixing the landscape’. You could see the river bank from the open-fronted ecological toilets, and, watching her earnest endeavours from your throne, as a waterfall rushed beautifully down the mountain behind her, it was hard not to be grateful to her for fixing the landscape. Somebody, you felt, had to.
“What are you doing here? Don’t you know it’s pointless? It’s too late! The dam’s going ahead, and that’s all there is to it!”
The Icelandic visitor looked cross, and cold. She was standing in front of the camp, arms akimbo; a faded black flag, with A! I! E! sprayed in wobbly white paint on the front, floating beside her. It belonged to a young man from New York who had not, he explained with some dignity, just run out of vowels. A stood for anarchy. I stood for in. E stood for Europe, or perhaps ecology. He was a nice, helpful young man, and an extremely good cook, “but I am a little worried about his flag” the German sculptress had confided earlier. “I think the flag might put people off”. In modern times, it is true, the mere mention of the word ‘anarchy’ can cause chaos, but the visitor did not even seem to notice.
“And you’ve come from all over the world?” she said.
It was not, someone explained, just this dam. If they made a stand here, they could stop all the other dams, which were scheduled to destroy even more of Iceland’s protected, vital wildernesses. Did she know, for example, how much wildlife and how many natural resources were going to be destroyed by this one alone?
“Wildlife looks after itself” the visitor replied. “It will make a nice lake for the boating” she added, rather uncertainly.
A flood of statistics greeted this assertion. What about the reindeer, who were going to lose their wintering grounds? The nesting eagles? The endangered pink-footed geese? The visitor smirked, which was one of the dangers of citing the pink-footed geese. What about the pollution? This dam was only being built to service an aluminium factory, as all the others would be.
The visitor was in the process of further dismissing the pink-footed geese with a mean little shrug. She was a large, comfortable woman: it did not look like one of her natural gestures. At any rate, with the mention of pollution, she stopped.
“I do not know about that” she said.
But you must, someone persisted, gently. You must know the track record of Alcoa, for example?
“No” the visitor said. No, she did not think about that.
And that is the problem in Iceland, in a nutshell. People are not thinking. Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of these black balaclava’d militants or, if you prefer, intelligent young people, was that their actions were forcing people to think. They had squirted some corporate aluminium executives with green yoghurt. They had cut up some dam publicity leaflets, after asking if they could have the leaflets first. They had achieved Iceland’s first ever lock-on, forcing the police to invent a new word for the process, and bringing the dam works cheerfully to a halt for almost three hours. They were ‘very nice’ said police, at the time. Some protestors were held for a few hours, after which they were all released, without charges.
But with, their second lock-on, someone had obviously decided that they were being too successful in provoking closer examination of the projects. As they sat chained, beneath the bulldozers, the police arrived and instructed the workers to start their vehicles, with people still attached. A protestor had to jump onto a bulldozer and pull out the fuel line, otherwise people could have been killed, or severely injured. The protestors were then manhandled, and assaulted. Three of them are now in prison, on fabricated assault charges.
“We have gathered to protest the continuing devastation of global ecology in the interest of corporate profits” said a recent statement from the camp. “We have come here to tip the balance of a struggle portrayed to be national, while actually being much larger. From the Narmada Dams in India, to the proposed Ilisu Dam in Turkey, the story is one of big business and oppressive government. The struggle to save our planet, like the struggle against inhumanity, is global, so we have to be too. We’re here to prevent the Kárahnjúkar Dam project from destroying Western Europe’s last great wilderness”.
The camp continues.
After the Badgers
This wood is alive. You can smell it. Rich, heady aromas of soil and leaves; the fresh astringent scent of trodden grass and ivy. When you look down, you can see why. There are small, oval scrapings everywhere; on one slope they seem to have been made in neatly ordered rows. Badgers.
They’ve turned the earth around the wood, aerated it, shredded and tossed the leaves, rotating the layers, as any good gardener would, for maximum fertility. The leaves are breaking down; the soil clear for growth. There are bustling trails through the grass and round the trees, fragmenting the twigs and fallen branches. Round-bottomed slides make easy paths down to the river. Around the setts, old hay has been neatly raked out and left to dry; impressive excavations, the height of a human, have left cascades of fresh, damp soil waiting for worms, and birds. Deep, mysterious tunnels penetrate and tame the hedgerows. Away from the main trails, latrines have been carefully excavated; the results are full of shoots and seeds, spread and ready to grow again.
This wood, by contrast, is dead. The leaves are lying flat, dry, unmoved. The trails are unused. The soil is left undisturbed, cracked and hard. The wood smells of nothing. And you can hear the absence of life as clearly as you can hear the silence after a car alarm stops.
An illegal trap is positioned carefully, to snap legs, in a hole by the fence. A pointless gesture: the badgers in the sett behind it have been culled already. A remarkable edifice, a feat of engineering, the sett must have been used for decades, possibly a century. Now, desiccated leaves are filling up the holes. Further down, in another empty sett, a cobweb has been spun across an entrance.
Animals can sense, and avoid, carnage. Try riding a horse past an abattoir. It’s possible that this wood will come alive again, with something. But the badgers have gone. No-one officially knows what the results will be of removing one of our oldest species from the eco-system, yet. An increase in foxes, they guess: a drop in hares. But in the meantime, nature’s gardeners have gone. And this wood is dead.
About
Former freelance investigative/features journalist for the Sunday Times, Guardian, Independent, Spectator, Observer, Morning Star, The Times, Counterpunch, Daily Telegraph etc. The ‘token Marxist’ on the Spectator’s editorial committee and News/Features editor for Corporate Watch. Reported on, inter alia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Abkhazia, Russia and Iceland. First novel ‘Animals’ published by Simon & Schuster; first screenplay, ‘Chicken’, commissioned by The Film Council. Associate Producer on Trashed, with Jeremy Irons – multi award-winning international film documentary on global waste. Has just co-produced and co-written six part series for television, again with Jeremy Irons, expanding on the documentary.
NB To make sense of the eclectic mix of blog posts on the home page below, they’re now organised into categories on the menu above.
tabitha troughton 