I went to launch this evening of Keith Ewing’s important new book Bonfire of the Liberties and the Institute of Employment Rights new booklet Ruined Lives on blacklisting in the UK construction industry, also written by Ewing. I was expecting the usual drinks party. But no, it was a serious meeting of trade unionists at the NUJ headquarters. We heard from Henry Porter, who I find it hard to disagree with. He talked about the expansion of what he called “State patrolled space” and how each one of us is being made to feel that both we and everyone else are persons who may “harbour bad intentions”. (Or, as John Berger <!–break–>wrote in Meanwhile, we find ourselves living as prisoners.)

Then the photo journalist Marc Vallée spoke about how he discovered the police were storing a private photo-database of everyone then can get pictures of at demostrations, while initimidating us from taking pictures in public.

Then Pennie Quinton spoke about how the police used section 44 of the anti-terrorism act to stop her photographing a demonstration outside a London arms fair, even though she was an accredited photographer, and how the House of Lords supported the police and how Liberty helped her and her colleague go to the European Court to get a ruling that the police action was illegal.

Then we heard from Dave Smith of the Blacklist Support Group about how he was blacklisted in the construction industry as a ‘troublemaker’. He waved his 30-plus page file. Afterwards he told me that the Home Office has helped to fund a National Dismissal Register which will become another database for employers. I couldn’t believe it. We know that the government’s aim is to gradually link up its databases, now our health and tax records will be mashed with an informal, private database that reports whether someone has been sacked (implictly because they are “trouble”) open to business. I looked it up on the web when I got back, here is part of a description of it from PersonnelToday:

It appears that an employee can be included on the register if they have caused loss to the relevant organisation or a third party, although it is not clear whether this act needs to be dishonest, or whether a mere mistake is enough.

Since individuals can be included on the register without any trial or criminal conviction, there is a risk that it could be abused by employers, and individuals could be ‘blacklisted’. Although an employee has the protection of unfair dismissal claims and could ask for their inclusion on the register to be changed or removed, this takes time, and the damage could already have been done.

This register has the potential to seriously damage an employee’s work opportunities

Then we heard from a gentleman who had been subjected to a Control Order and he described his semi-confinement for years without knowing the charges or reasons, until a judge dismissed the case.

What was powerful was hearing at first hand, the testimony and experience of regular people caught up in a machinery driven by our government. The fight for modern liberty is no ‘abstract’ cause.

Finally, the author himself spoke. There are ten reasons to be worried about what is happening, and they need to be taken together.

1. Increase in stop and search

2. Increease in the powers of search and arrest

3. Increase in surveillance and intrusion by officials

4. Increase in CCTV

5. Mssive increase in phone tapping

6. The retention of the illegal DNA databse

7. The push for ID cards

8. Militarisation of the police

9. Development of Control Orders

10.Complicity in torture

The articles in this series try to throw light on recent or current developments in international security. Just occasionally an element of personal experience creeps in. This is one of those.

The last weeks of 2009 were difficult for the public face of scientific research into global warming. The failure of the climate-change conference in Copenhagen, the identification of minor flaws in the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC’s) published documentation, and the exposure of email exchanges centred on the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at England’s University of East Anglia - all raised doubts about those charged with presenting scientific evidence about climate change and renewing efforts to address the phenomenon. In the case of the email affair - given an extra conspiratorial frisson by being called “climategate” - the careful selection of damaging details by an evidently well-resourced group made it possible to erect a narrative of deception that found an uncritical welcome among climate “sceptics” and “deniers”.

Soon after the furore, Associated Press tasked a team to examine 1,073 emails from the CRU material in order to provide an independent view of what had happened. The result showed no evidence that climate change was faked (see “’ClimateGate’ Doesn’t Show Global Warming Was Faked, AP Reports”, Huffington Post, 12 December 2009); but amid a deluge of negative comment this attracted little attention, and the impression persists that the whole case for human-induced climate change has been severely hit.

For many of the researchers involved, the period of late 2009-early 2010 has been traumatic; they may have had to contend with controversy over the years, but this is something outside their experience.

The intensity of the coverage, and the zealotry of many sceptics in pressing their case, stem in part from changing global circumstances. There has long been deep opposition to any international move towards a low-carbon economy, from reasons both ideological (free-market true-believers) and commercial (the more retrograde transnational corporations, especially fossil-fuel companies). There was no great risk of such a move as long as George W Bush was in the White House; but the election of Barack Obama and the prospect of Copenhagen agreeing a successor to the Kyoto protocol made 2009 potentially a dangerous year. In this context, “climategate” has been a gift.

The peace benefit

The lesson of my own experience in the 1980s suggests that the longer-term impact might be rather different from what the architects of this affair intend. I got into working in the field of international security from teaching environmental science and resource-conflict at Huddersfield Polytechnic, west Yorkshire, in the early 1970s (and recently came across some of my thirty-five-year-old lecture notes dealing with rising atmospheric CO² levels!). I moved to Bradford’s department of peace studies at the end of the decade, just as the cold war was entering a particularly tense period; from around 1980 onwards, several of us there saw the need for independent research and writing on nuclear issues.

An early outcome (with co-authors Malcolm Dando and Peter van den Dungen) was a book about the risks and consequences of nuclear war: As Lambs to the Slaughter: The Facts About Nuclear War (1981). It struck a chord; 25,000 copies were sold in a few weeks, and that year around 500,000 people purchased an accompanying leaflet published by the environment group Ecoropa.

As Lambs... was part of a wider body of writings, much of it for an academic rather a general readership. This was the case with A Guide to Nuclear Weapons (1981) which ran to several editions and led eventually to a reference work: The Directory of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms and Disarmament 1990. The core purpose of this writing was to be as accurate as possible; this meant (for example) always analysing Soviet as well as western systems and postures, and having a particular focus on the actual consequences of a nuclear war.

What strikes me in retrospect - and when thinking about the problems that climate scientists now face - is how widely varied were the reactions to our work. Military officers, for example, were actually very interested in it and very ready to engage in intensive debates. I was first invited to lecture at the Royal Air Force staff college in 1982 and have continued frequently to lecture at defence colleges to the present day. Senior civil servants in Britain’s ministry of defence were also willing to discuss our work.

The reaction on the political right - then very much in the ascendancy during Margaret Thatcher’s long premiership (1979-1990) - was very different; it was bitter and sustained opposition to what we were doing. In the Thatcherite view of the world, peace studies was “appeasement studies”, indulgent to official enemies and undermining of the nation’s moral fibre. Many articles and pamphlets were written about the Bradford department’s dangerous and subversive nature; one noble member of the House of Lords (the upper chamber of Britain’s parliament) even described us as a “rest home for urban guerrillas”. Some critics preferred a more personal touch: I was called “Dr Death”, and we regularly got abusive mail (which, on one or two occasions, went as far as death-threats).

It was known that Margaret Thatcher wished “something to be done” about peace studies; but this was politically difficult, since universities still retaine considerable independence (a situation that subsequent governments have done much to redress). than now. But the University Grants Committee (UGC) came under pressure to investigate us and to its credit agreed to do so only if Bradford’s vice-chancellor allowed it; he too was prepared to say yes, but - also to his credit - only if the peace-studies staff gave their consent. We certainly would! What followed was the equivalent of today’s “subject review”. It was thorough and exacting, and the UGC made public its verdict - that the department was maintaining high standards.

That outcome lifted the pressure off peace studies for the rest of the 1980s. With the end of the cold war by the end of the decade, much of the other work our staff and research students already did - on peacekeeping, environmental conflict, and mediation, among other issues - came to the fore; this created the foundation for an expansion of our work in the 1990s.

The landscape after battle

How does this relate to “climategate”? A key factor is that we were exposed to intensive criticism and persistent scrutiny of our work virtually from day one, and this in direct consequence made us hugely aware of the need for very high levels of accuracy and impeccable referencing of sources. Access to a wide range of military and defence journals, and a huge amount of information in the public domain, meant that this was actually not so difficult; but under so much external pressure we learned to be very cautious in our analysis at a time when exaggeration on the issues we addressed was common enough.

Many of us now think that the experience made us better academics. If almost everything you write is going to be exposed to detailed examination by relentless and often politically-motivated critics, then you have to set unusually exacting standards for your work. The likely - and beneficial - implication is that climate researchers who have gone through their own test-by-fire will in future take even greater care over published assessments and analyses.

In many ways we were luckier than today’s climate researchers: for there was an intense focus on our peace-studies work from the very beginning - whereas critics of climate science are able to retrieve work published a decade and more ago, when the issue was far less controversial, in order to pinpoint a minor laxity and use it to great effect to damn the whole enterprise.

The overall effect of the setbacks to climate-science’s public face may amount to the loss of a year in the transition to a low-carbon future, but the good work being done in this area offers many grounds for optimism. The New Economic Foundation’s The Great Transition project, and Tim Jackson’s book Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (Earthscan 2009) are but two examples. Alongside the evidence that continues to emerge about the accelerating impact of climate change, the flow of impressive research and compelling argument based on even more rigorous standards will ensure that the refusenik stance will in future become harder to make.

In the end, peace studies was made stronger by those who sought to expose it. In a similar way, the travails of climate researchers may well end up reinforcing the integrity of the science and the necessity of the low-carbon transition.

One of the really insistent questions raised throughout the Convention of Modern Liberty one year ago was the one Anthony Barnett signalled in his opening invitation to participate: ” What is the problem to which the database state and the surveillance society is… the solution?”

I made this the first real article in the CML book because it struck me that the rest of the book (and the event itself) is really a set of different attempts at an answer, coupled with some early exploration of what to do about it. Anthony kicks off with a list of potential candidates. Helena Kennedy puts it differently - “What do they put in the water in the Home Office? “. Simon Jenkins asks what happens to perfectly reasonable liberal types when they get into high office… etc. etc.

Maybe Simon Jenkins gets close to the truth with the shocking passing reference to the fact that, ‘We now apparently spend more money on surveillance equipment of all sorts than on arms.” If you have quarter of an hour this week, I recommend that you listen to this aptly named, undersung BBC 4 radio programme called Thinking Allowed on the theme of “military futurology” while it’s accessible.  

The conversation involves Matt Carr who recently wrote an article for Race and Class entitled,’Slouching towards dystopia: the new militarism’, and Stephen Graham, whose book, Cities Under Siege: the new military urbanism  is shortly to be published by Verso. The speakers agree that an amazing degree of ‘pessimism’ seems now to characterise the work of military futurologists in the various university departments which, following the pioneer faculty in Houston, have become dedicated to an endeavour which they also agree is highly influenced by science fiction writers, particularly, a sub-genre they refer to as cyberpunk science fiction.

Analysing the threats of the future has moved on considerably since the days in which DARPA counted nuclear warheads, thought the unthinkable, and assessed the survivability of the USA if the Cold War turned hot. Now they are much more concerned about ‘urbanism, demographics and cultural and social trends’. So now the same technofiliac obsession with something that will maintain US and western hegemony in the world is turned towards a much more elusive enemy.

Who can that be? Well, this is where the conversation takes a turn that makes ‘pessimism’ sound distinctly euphemistic.  It circles round and round a similar question to Anthony’s - why are cities regarded as so threatening - one’ s own cities that is, not foreign cities? It appears that the new danger comes from urban insurrection, not confined to the far-off ‘feral cities’ associated in this discourse with the southern hemisphere, but much closer to home. In the global economic downturn, it is pointed out, ‘homeland security’ has become one of the few huge new growth areas for US, British and Israeli companies, thanks to the cosy relationship between companies selling simulations, think tanks and the military.

This merging of military and policing scenarios, it seems, has long since left the pages of fiction. The Liverpool police, we are told, will be among the first to adopt their own surveillance drones as modelled in Afghanistan and piloted there from the outskirts of Las Vegas. Kent police are also the proud new owners of similar drones deployed this time to survey the English channel. And apparently the London Olympics will be a ‘massive test ground’ for a whole slew of the security technologies which have emerged from military futurology ‘thinking’. No wonder they seem so excited by these Olympics…

We begin to see, I think, a very clear and chilling picture of what is happening to UK democracy as a direct result of its disastrous military alliances… Next week, as it happens, there is the launch of a rather different project which also deploys ‘futures thinking‘. For this group of thinkers, it is also obvious that a radical claiming back of people power is on the cards.  More of this project here on openDemocracy shortly. But in what Stephen Graham calls, ‘ the transformation of Western militaries into high-tech urban counter-insurgency forces’, my point is that these campaigners for a better democracy just happen to be on the other side. Is this scary undeclared war already changing the way we live now?

“Equality between men and women is a matter of human rights and a condition for social justice and is also a necessary and fundamental prerequisite for equality, development and peace.” – Beijing Platform for Action.

We said this in 1995, when we penned one of the most holistic and far-reaching international accords ever authored to affirm the unique experience and rights of women: the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

Five years later, we had another global declaration: the Millennium Declaration, wherein we committed ourselves to a time-bound plan of action to eradicate poverty and achieve equality through the internationally-agreed Millennium Development Goals. Two of them were specific to women.

At the same time, we were beginning to see more and more research coming out of places like the World Bank and the Economist—well respected sources of economic research and analysis—showing that investing in women is the best way to achieve broader development goals and stimulate economic growth. One such statistic is that women invest up to 90% of their income in the family, as compared to 30-40% by men (World Bank).

And it’s not just the ending poverty target that can be achieved by investing in women. Increasingly, we’re realizing that investing in women to achieve MDG3 - gender equality - can truly be the key to achieving all 8 Millennium Development Goals. Consider the following:

According to the World Bank, “Greater economic and educational opportunities for women mean her daughters are more likely to go to school, her babies are more likely to survive infancy and her family is more likely to eat nutritious meals.” That’s progress on MDGs 2, 4 and 1, respectively, all through investment in the mother.

Also according to the World Bank, the children of educated mothers are 40% more likely to live beyond the age of 5 and 50% more likely to be immunized. That’s MDG 4.

We also know that women are the stewards of and the closest to the environment (MDG 7), and they are the fastest-growing population infected with HIV/AIDS (MDG 6). And we know that the MDG that has made the least progress-nay, that has not moved-is MDG 5, on maternal health.

Or consider the words of Theres M’Canunani, a Congolese woman who had this to say after participating in a year-long training in rights and economic empowerment at Women for Women International: “I did not know that a woman has the right of defending herself anywhere, the right of inheritance, the right of giving childbirth, the right of standing in good health.” That one statement touches on MDGs 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

This is all evidence of how critically increased investment in women is needed. So one might imagine that fifteen years after Beijing and ten years into the Millennium Development Goals—a mere 5 years remaining on that charter—we would be making some real strides in doing just that.

One would be wrong. As of 2009, it was estimated that the U.S. was spending less than 4% of its foreign assistance funds on women and girls. 15 years after Beijing and 10 years after the penning of the MDGs, women still do 66% of the world’s work, produce 50% of the world’s food (up to 90% of the world’s staple food crops such as maize and wheat), yet earn 10% of the world’s income and own less than 2% of its land (UN). Clearly, our investments have failed to keep pace with our rhetoric.

And that’s just the problem the Secretary General of the United Nations points to in a recently-released report on member-state progress on the Beijing Platform and the MDGs. Looking at global trends, lack of resources was identified as the major hindrance to implementation in almost all areas. A quick examination of efforts on poverty, education, health and environment (the areas where BPfA and MDGs explicitly intersect) shows this.

On poverty, for instance, member states had made much progress in drafting national-level policies and action plans to address poverty for women and girls, but insufficient resources were allocated to implement them. Unequal access to employment and markets for women were also identified as major obstacles, as was women’s illiteracy and the lack of development cooperation across sectors—which is to say, member-states were good at investing in anti-poverty measures for women and girls in areas like health and education, but slow to recognize that equal investment had to be prioritized in areas such as agriculture, infrastructure and finance.

On education, 2/3 of member-states had achieved gender parity in primary school enrollment rates, but most saw uneven implementation across regions or even within states. Again illiteracy was marked as a major challenge, with women still accounting for 2/3 of illiterate adults worldwide.

On health, again national-level policy and action plans to implement were largely promising, but insufficiently resourced. Much progress had been made on expanding health infrastructure—the availability of clinics and hospitals and the capacity of health professionals to deliver quality health services to women and girls—but reproductive health issues such as pregnancy complications still are the leading source of women’s ill health and death worldwide. Widespread violence against women and malnutrition aggravated by the financial and food crises were also supreme challenges.

Finally, on environment, not only were resources insufficiently allocated to gender programs, but policy recognizing women’s unique experience in environmental degradation, agriculture, energy and climate change was largely nonexistent, owing to a severe lack of awareness on the topic. Gender is not only absent from environmental policy, but women are also largely excluded from relevant discussions.

Between the Secretary General’s report and the stories the statistics continue to tell us about women’s perennial obstacles to empowerment and equality, the outlook seems quite bleak for achieving our commitments to gender equality and development on schedule. It is estimated that one billion people will still live in poverty by 2015, our target gate for achieving the MDGs. While we didn’t set a date to realize the Beijing Platform, we can still see how far we have to go. As we close the 54th UN Commission on the Status of Women, there’s no mystery as to what it takes to close this tremendous gap between policy and practice: money. Best-laid plans are moot if not resourced. So, on the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, we at Women for Women International are coordinating a pledge encouraging member-states to invest in women to achieve the MDGs. We will deliver these signatures to the UN General Assembly this September, and make plain our concern that our promises are critically off-track. Join us today at www.womenforwomen.org/bridge and sign the pledge. As the UN motto reminds us, It’s our world.

The Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association says its biennial contest to name the world’s best cheese has attracted a record number of entrants.

Japan has vowed to oppose a proposed global trade ban on Atlantic bluefin tuna, a senior government official has said, as tuna brokers in Tokyo stage protests against the move.

Food prices fell 1.3% in February following a 2.1% rise in January, Statistics New Zealand says.

The Massachusetts Senate is weighing a bill that would ban the sale of salty and sugary snacks as well as high-calorie sodas in public schools.