I feel very honoured to write a brief biography about Staff Cottman – ILP activist, Spanish Civil War veteran, socialist, internationalist, trade unionist, personal friend of George Orwell, Labour Party activist, and a genuine, nice guy.

I first met Staff in 1993 when I interviewed him about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War at his home in Bath. He was happy to answer any questions about his time in Spain. He was very open and not on the defensive which had been my experience when interviewing several ex-International Brigaders. He invited me and my wife to stay the night and when I told him we had booked into a bed and breakfast he insisted we stay for a vegetarian meal as I mentioned my wife did not eat meat.

After this meeting I had many years of correspondence with Staff and his wife Stella until his death in 1999. He held no grudges against former political opponents and, in particular, the Communists who had vociferously called him a traitor when he returned from Spain in 1937 having fought with the ILP and POUM forces.

I got him to sign a book, Volunteers for Liberty, written by Bill Alexander, a commander of the British Battalion of the International Brigade and a Communist Party Great Britain executive member. I already had several signatures of British International Brigaders with the dates of their time in Spain. Staff happily signed with a mischievous twinkle in his eye and under his signature wrote, ‘ILP/POUM 1937’.

We corresponded regularly over the following years particularly about Spain and current British politics. I do remember in 1998 getting an unusually stern letter from Staff after I had criticised the new Labour government. He agreed with my criticism but pointed out the need for realistic expectations and what the alternative would be like. He was a lovely, warm and generous man, and someone I wish I had known for more years.

Socialist Sunday school

Staff was born on 6 March 1918 in Southampton. His father, captain of the only Russian oil tanker in England, died in a car crash leaving Staff’s mother to raise him and his two brothers alone in an artistic household with socialist views. During Staff’s childhood the family moved to London and finally Bristol. Staff left school when he was 14.

An unusual aspect of Staff’s childhood was his attendance at the Socialist Sunday school in Barking, east London. Here they were taught socialism, internationalism and the horrors of the industrial revolution. Staff’s favourite saying of the school was:

“Observe and think in order to discover the truth. Do not think that he who loves his own country must hate or despise other nations, or wish for war, which is a remnant of barbarism.”

As a teenager Staff joined both the ILP Guild of Youth and the Young Communist League, attracted by the anti-fascism of the two organisations. He became aware of the atrocities of Nazi Germany having met German refugees in 1933 and clashed with British fascists in Bristol.

His anti-fascism eventually led to him volunteering to fight in the Spanish Civil War. “My political concerns were more instinctive than analytical,” he said. “I felt a personal disgust that Franco should get military aid from Hitler and Mussolini, whilst Britain and France agreed on a non-intervention policy, which starved the rightful government of Spain of arms and meant Spanish workers bled to death. Surely it must be wrong to do nothing. So I volunteered to fight for the Spanish people on the side of the elected government.”

Staff saw adverts for volunteers in both the New Leader and the the Daily Worker and applied to both to go to Spain. The ILP replied first, so Staff went to its head office where they were more interested in his socialist views than his lack of military experience.

Staff commented: “They asked whether I had military experience with their tongue in their cheek, because what sort of chap would they get with military experience, because there wasn’t much military experience to be had? The only experience of guns I’d ever had was at fairgrounds where you set them up and had a shot.”

Spain

Staff was accepted for the ILP contingent and travelled to Spain in January 1937. In Barcelona Staff found a city in the throes of revolution, with the colours of the revolutionary parties displayed everywhere.

Staff particularly remembered the noise of the city:

“All the various political groups in Catalonia had large brass bands and numerous banners, which were brought to demonstrations, two or three times a week. Everybody seemed to enjoy the noise, display and fun. The bands played ‘The Marseillaise’, ‘The Internationale’ and a rousing anarchist marching song, ‘Hijos del Pueblo’, or ‘Sons of the People’. Our contingent was met at the station and marched to the Hotel Falcon, the POUM headquarters in Barcelona, amid cheers and enthusiasm, and with banners and a brass band.”

In Barcelona Staff and the other ILP volunteers received two weeks’ rudimentary military training in the Lenin Barracks, and at the front were given weapons that were old and poorly maintained.

Staff served at the front from January to April 1937, when he was sent to the Maurin Sanatorium in Barcelona to help him recover from suspected TB.

Staff remembers sleeping in caves in the mountains of Alcubierre, which were remarkably comfortable, although he dreaded waking up one day facing an enemy bayonet. He also recalled a skirmish involving four Moroccans (elite mercenaries fighting for the fascists) caught in ‘no man’s land’ where they shot one Moroccan dead. The body remained lying on the ground for several days.

On the Aragon front, Staff saw a Spanish youngster being shot and falling forward over the sandbags. Staff dropped his rifle to go to the young man’s aid and then realised he too could be shot, so he remained in cover till the first aid group arrived to carry the young man away. Staff claimed that he fired few shots in Spain because the enemy were too far away and ammunition was in short supply.

The food at the front was poor, and Staff said he left Spain hating rice, sardines and olive oil, although the sweetened coffee and bread were much better. The volunteers regularly talked about capturing Huesca and drinking a coffee there.

“It became a joke that we looked forward to the day when we would capture the town and drink coffee at our leisure,” said Staff. “This was never to be the case and in fact it took me 46 years to have the pleasure of drinking coffee in Huesca in 1983. This was thanks to the BBC and I enjoyed a coffee with Nigel Williams, writer and director of the Arena programme and an Orwell enthusiast.”

While at the front Staff received a letter from the Barking Guild of Youth, asking him if he needed anything. He replied that chocolate was in short supply and later received several tea chests of chocolate. He ate a bar with John McNair, the ILP’s representative in Barcelona, and then sent the rest to the local hospitals.

May Day 37

In May 1937, while on leave in Barcelona, Staff became involved in the ‘May Day events’, when anarchist and POUM militants tried to prevent government forces overturning the revolution. He left the Maurin Sanatorium to help his comrades and was put on guard duty on the roof of the Hotel Falcon, which McNair claimed was healthier for him. He was given a couple of hand grenades due to lack of rifles:

“Now these grenades were the dangerous Spanish phosphorous type grenade, which you lit before throwing,” he rememebred. “They were always considered as much more of a hazard to the user than the recipient.”

Staff slept on the roof of the POUM headquarters for three nights until the fighting started to die down. After the May days Staff returned to the Maurin Sanatorium and was there when a the police raided looking for POUM sympathisers. Staff and another ILP volunteer fled to avoid capture.

As members of POUM were arrested, Staff and the others visited the British consulate for help. Staff was living in the same hotel as McNair, and when the police raided McNair’s room he asked Staff to warn other foreign socialists in Barcelona who supported POUM. One of these foreigners was Willy Brandt, the future German Chancellor. Staff helped George Orwell to destroy some possible incriminating documents, and tried unsuccessfully to get another arrested ILP volunteer released from jail.

He left Spain in June 1937, along with Orwell and his wife, and McNair. During the day Staff, McNair and Orwell pretended to be British businessmen, while at night they slept rough.

The British Consulate eventually got their passports in order but the slow process meant they missed the train to the frontier. Luckily, an anarchist owner of a restaurant close to the station allowed them to sleep in his house till morning. They caught the next train and decided that everyone should read a book on the train, and pretend to be wealthy businessmen or tourists. The group’s luck held once more when police checked their papers and passports and failed to recognise that the 29th Division mentioned in Orwell’s discharge papers actually meant he was with the POUM.

World War

On his return to England he became involved in the ‘Aid Spain’ movement, attending meetings, taking part in door-to-door collections, and visiting the Basque refugees in Street, Somerset.

Staff was expelled from the YCL and his house was picketed by local Communists who accused him of being in the pay of Franco. They even questioned people who entered his house. In the 1980s his friend Don Bateman organised a meeting with Staff and some old YCL comrades who apologised for their earlier actions towards him.

At the outbreak of World War II Staff declared himself a conscientious objector because of his experiences in Spain and the appeasement policy of the British government. But the success of Hitler’s armies forced Staff to change his mind, so he joined the RAF and became a rear gunner. During his time with the RAF he met his future wife, Stella, who was also in the armed forces. He and Stella later had a daughter, Barbara.

After the war the Cottmans moved to Ruislip in Surrey where Staff worked in air traffic control at London airport. In Spain, Staff had become a friend of Orwell and remained his most loyal friend from the Spanish war, even trying to visit him days before Orwell’s death in January 1950. Staff and Stella later moved to Bath where Staff, now aged 70, almost won a safe Conservative council seat because of his local standing.

Throughout his life Staff remained a committed socialist and internationalist. In 1968 he and Stella were in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring when Czech leader Dubcek attempted to liberalise the Communist state before being overthrown by Soviet tanks.

Staff returned twice to Spain after the civil war, first for a holiday in 1960, then in 1983 as a guest of the BBC while they were making an Arena documentary on Orwell. In Staff’s last years he became friendly with the film director Ken Loach and helped him research his critically acclaimed film, Land and Freedom. Many believed the film’s main character was based on Staff. By the time the film was premiered in London, Staff was too ill and frail to attend, so Loach arranged a special screening in Bath with Staff as the guest of honour.

His wife, Stella, wrote: “He watched it in silence and then said, ‘George Orwell always said the truth about what happened to the republican cause in Spain will never be told. But now it has been.’”

Stafford Cottman died on 19 September 1999.

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In Spain with Orwell: George Orwell and the ILP Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, by Christopher Hall, 2012, is available from Tippermuir Books for £12.50. Email: tippermuirbooks@blueyonder.co.uk

Christopher Hall’s book ‘Not just Orwell’: The Independent Labour Party Volunteers and the Spanish Civil War was published by Warren and Pell, in May 2009.

Read other ILP profiles here.

See also: Two Hundred Brigadiers Pay Homage to Orwell; Not Just Orwell; and In Spain With Orwell.

I felt the letter was quite rightly saying that we should not call denouncement of the Israeli state’s actions against the Palestinians anti-Semitic. It is anti the actions of the Israeli state. All too often those speaking out against the harsh treatment of the Palestinians by Israel are accused of anti-Semitism.

Admittedly it was unfortunate that the cartoon was published on Holocaust Day, however its intention was to criticise the Israeli state and not the Jewish race.

While Israel continues to ignore UN agreements and build its walls and settlements, expanding its occupation and constraining the Palestinians, the chance of a two-state solution and peace in the Middle East becomes less and less likely, a situation that could be catastrophic for all of us.

J9

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To read the letter in full click here.

To see the Sunday Times apology for the Gerald Scarfe cartoon, click here.

To read Gerald Scarfe’s statement on the cartoon, click here.

Many people today could be excused for not knowing much about Namibia. Situated south of Angola and north of South Africa, this large land mass, with its relatively small population, is seldom in the news.

Yet, as Marion Wallace’s in-depth study, A History of Namibia, ably reveals, Namibia has a remarkable history. Its varied peoples have experienced not only their own internal dynamics but were subjected to two periods of colonialism: first by Germany in the late19th and early 20th centuries; then by South Africa from 1915 until liberation in 1990.

South West Africa, as it was known under German occupation, underwent similar developments to many African colonies. White farmers displaced African pastoralists taking the best land for themselves and using Africans as cheap labour. Missionaries arrived to save African souls. Merchant capitalists were eager to exploit African workers for mining and other industries. During this period, different African peoples sometimes collaborated but increasingly resisted. In turn this led to more fierce forms of German domination as the occupiers brutally consolidated their hold on the territory.

Of the 1904-08 war of resistance which threatened German rule, Wallace writes: “By the time of the last major military engagement in 1908 Germany had committed genocide against the peoples of south and central Namibia.” Huge numbers of men, women and children died in concentration camps, prefiguring by decades what was to happen in Europe.

The second period of occupation came about because South African forces defeated the German colonists during the First World War. Technically, South West Africa was meant to be governed by South Africa under a League of Nations – and later a United Nations – mandate. South African governments thought and behaved very differently.

I can attest to this personally. When arriving at Johannesburg airport in the late 1960s, I was asked by a passport officer for details of my visit. Innocently, I replied that I was staying for a month in South Africa then five weeks in South West Africa. He fixed his eye on me saying coldly and firmly: “They are the same country.” His compatriots nodded their assent.

As the Apartheid system became more formalised in South Africa, so it was increasingly, and illegally, introduced into South West Africa. This was discrimination on a mass scale.

A hard fight

Over time, the growing struggle for independence led primarily by the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) began to make inroads into the apartheid regime’s control. But it was a very hard fight. To an extent, the liberation struggle became engulfed in the Cold War conflicts over the future over the former Portuguese colony, Angola.

No less significantly, it broadened and deepened into a people’s struggle, involving women’s organisations and school students. Thousands of young people crossed the border into Angola to join SWAPO. Various churches also backed the independence movement.

What so impressed me when I was there was the warmth and energy of the African people I met, in spite of the history of white oppression. It was a humbling and enriching experience.

Today, in spite of its mineral wealth, Namibia remains a poor county. While formal colonialism has ended the struggle for social justice there continues.

A History of Namibia: From the beginning to 1990 by Marion Wallace is published by Hurst & Company, London (2012).

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This article was first published in the November/December 2012 issue of Chartist magazine: www.chartist.org.uk

Electoral advances for the left in Europe are long overdue coming after a succession of defeats and capitulations in recent years. But a review of the events of the past 18 months, and longer, show a world still in the midst of deep, intractable economic and political problems.

Indeed, it is a period that has left many people reeling on both left and right. No-one has come out of the crisis looking sure-footed, nor as if they can confidently ride out the storms around us. In every important area of politics the world has been either in flux or in crisis, either in revolution or locked in contradictions without easy solutions.

New ground is being broken in national political circumstances in almost every corner of the world, while fundamental and basic challenges have emerged to established approaches to economic policy, regulation and governance. It is also apparent that we are living through historic and potentially very perilous changes in the contours of international politics.

Each of these changes are the outcomes of longer-running processes, dominated by phases of political and economic liberalisation and integration, of resistance and reaction to those, and the consequent upheavals they have set in train.

So far, faced with these developments, the political right, at least in those areas where it has got its act together (and that is not everywhere by any means), has responded by renewing market fundamentalism. Though both transformative and extremely damaging, this looks unlikely on current forecasts to resolve problems of growth, to say nothing of some of the deep-seated social and environmental problems we face.

The left, so far, has not articulated a clear response to the crisis. Hollande’s victory in France is the first sign of an electorally-successful response. For the left across Europe, a great deal rides on how his presidency pans out. Until now, it has been the right and not the left that has taken to heart Rham Emanuel’s quip that we should ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’.

In this review article, I will briefly flesh out the three areas of political change mentioned above – national change; economic challenges; and international politics. I will then set these within something of a longer time-span and examine them as the outcomes of longer processes of change. Finally, I’ll touch on the Euro crisis, which is not only of critical importance in and of itself, but exemplifies some of the many of the difficulties faced by us all, including the left.

Crisis and change in national politics

In almost every corner of the world we have seen accepted and relatively stable political systems thrown into question, either as a direct result of the financial crisis and its aftermath or as a consequence of the complex interaction between this crisis, the period of liberalisation and growth that preceded it, and longer-running social and cultural changes within different countries.

A partial and incomplete tour might include the following, though you will have your own additions to make to this list.

Perhaps most dramatically, we’ve seen the demise of two long-standing authoritarian regimes in the Middle East under the impact of sustained popular protest; the removal by armed force (national and international) of the 40-year rule of Libya’s Colonal Gaddafi; and a sustained insurrection against Syria’s President Assad. Add to those the removal of Yemen’s President Saleh and protests in Bahrain, Jordan and Iran, and the picture is of seismic change in the region, even if some of the wilder hopes for democratic change made in 2011 now look badly overstated.

Although much under-reported in the west, as the ‘Arab Spring’ unfolded in 2011, there were also anti-regime protests in a dozen African countries south of the Sahara, challenging incumbent, ageing rulers.

In Europe, a succession of more peripheral countries – Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain – came under sustained economic pressure while Italy and, potentially, at least, France, were no great distance from economic crisis. Indeed, since the onset of the Euro crisis we’ve witnessed the removal of governments or heads of government in Portugal, Spain, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Slovakia, Slovenia and Finland.

The main country doing things differently is Belgium (who said it was boring?). Having had more than 18 months with no government, it finally resolved its long-standing political stalemate in December last year. The BBC news website noted dryly that ‘it is thought the crisis in the Eurozone prompted the politicians to act’!

As we know, mass protest has confronted governments in Greece and Spain, where youth unemployment is estimated at 50%, while in Ireland mass migration has resumed since its economic bubble burst, 1% of the population leaving in 2011 alone. Italy’s economic woes saw the end – for now – of the long-running Berlusconi governmental farce. In Germany, the Chancellorship has often seemed paralysed between the competing pressures of European stability and domestic politics, even while economic growth has been maintained. And in France we wait to see what the centre-left’s return to power presages: crisis and accommodation to the European orthodoxy; or the start of a wider rethink among Europe’s elite.

Even in the United States, where growth had returned thanks to Central Bank actions, currency devaluation and Federal stimulus, we find a country politically paralysed by deep divisions between conservatives and liberals. It is a country barely coming to terms with the meltdown of the neoliberal economic model championed over the previous three decades, where there have been persistent attempts by the Republicans, under the influence of an increasingly extreme right wing, to derail Obama’s already inadequate stimulus and reform package. What had been a deep cultural divide at the heart of American politics has hardened into an economic stand-off and, at its most extreme, division over the legitimacy of federal government itself.

In China, the world’s other leading economy, the Communist Party faces a growing political challenge as it approaches its 10-yearly change of leadership, as its sole remaining claim to popular legitimacy – that it will deliver growth and rising living standards – has come into question. The first signs of slow-down in growth, mounting inequality and deep problems of political corruption, plus growing political divisions, all suggest the regime has a lot to contend with.

And in the UK, we have an ideologically-driven attack on long-standing core institutions of collective social provision, from the NHS, to education, to welfare; an economy pitched into a renewed recession; and a revitalised nationalist challenge to the continuation of the UK as a unitary state.

To have political crises on this scale in one or two countries would be noteworthy; to have them across the leading economies of the world at the same time is remarkable.

Economic change and challenge

To the fore in most of these political crises – or at least in the more developed economies of the world – is a crisis of economic policy and economic management. In most developed western economies we saw a two-fold response to the financial meltdown.

First, an initial state-centred and quasi-Keynesian response bailed out banks deemed ‘too big to fail’ and stimulated the economy to stave off a full-blown depression. However, largely as a result of the government deficits thus created, in most economies (the USA was a partial exception) these measures were replaced by a commitment to austerity that has seen governments across Europe adopt severe public sector cuts and privatisation.

Under the tyranny of the financial markets, few sitting politicians dare to question the need to cut budget deficits. Yet, by acting in the same manner all at once, Europe and, increasingly we can fear, America, are fulfilling a classic fallacy of composition: for each individual country, deficit cuts seem rational, even unavoidable, yet for all countries to do this at once risks eliminating any prospect for growth, recovery, and ultimately any prospect of deficit reduction, ostensibly the purpose of the cuts in the first place.

The financial markets too, are increasingly schizophrenic – they demand belt-tightening from everyone, then, as output falls and debt remains high, panic because there is no prospect of economic growth.

Writing in New Left Review, the German academic Wolfgang Streeck argued that this policy cul-de-sac is the result of decades in which governments sought to buy off dissent by increasing debt.

For Streeck, there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of western countries between democracy and capitalism. On the one hand, we have democratic pressures from the population pushing in some vague, general way towards social justice – at least in the form of demanding jobs, growth, and rising living standards. On the other, there is the logic of capitalism which, though it delivers growth, faces periodic episodes of crisis and adjustment. The capitalist response to economic problems is to drive down living standards and state provision, bringing it into direct conflict with democratic pressures.

In the post-Second World War era, says Streeck, ‘no democratic government dared to impose on its society another economic crisis of the dimension of the Great Depression of the 1930s, as punishment for the excesses of a deregulated financial sector’.

For a time they didn’t have to and combinations of economic growth, inflation, government debt and private debt all played a role in massaging this underlying conflict in liberal democracies.

According to this analysis, the immediate responses of governments to the financial crisis resulted in a mushrooming of public debt, followed by an imposition of austerity measures across the developed world and a severe decline in living standards. The political sustainability of this strategy remains in question, however, and suggests, according to Streeck, that ‘the political manageability of democratic capitalism [as a whole] has sharply declined’. If true, the long-term consequences are of the utmost importance.

As a result, a whole series of renewed conflicts have emerged. These include conflicts between governments and financial markets, as the former try to assure the latter of their fiscal rectitude in order for the latter to keep lending to governments to pay for the debts incurred in saving the banks; and they include conflicts between populations and governments over the adoption and implementation of austerity packages, not least in Greece and Spain.

On a wider stage, political tensions between countries worsen as they each face domestic political upheaval and find themselves locked in a cul-de-sac of economic orthodoxy.

Systemic change in international politics

The Financial Times columnist, Gideon Rachman, has argued that contemporary economic turbulence and political upheaval mean that the world is moving from an era of liberal optimism to an era of anxiety. He says:

‘…the economic crisis that struck the world in 2008 has changed the logic of international relations. It is no longer obvious that globalisation benefits all the world’s major powers. It is no longer clear that the United States faces no serious international rivals. And it is increasingly apparent that the world is facing an array of truly global problems – such as climate change and nuclear proliferation – that are causing rivalry and division between nations. After a long period of cooperation, competition and rivalry are returning to the international system. A win-win world is giving way to a zero-sum world.’

In his book, Zero-Sum World, Rachman argues that we have lived through three phases of domestic and international politics since the 1970s.

The first he terms ‘an age of transformation’ which ran roughly from 1978 to 1991. That is from the onset of liberalisation, through Deng’s ‘four modernisations’ China in 1978, to the rise of the new right with Thatcher and Reagan in the west, through to the end of the Cold War and the proclamation of a new world order after the Gulf War in 1991.

Within this period we not only saw programmes of liberalisation in the developed world, not least in finance, but also an increasingly rapid opening up of the communist bloc, and the first major moves towards economic liberalisation in India. Alongside these oft-quoted changes, Rachman also notes the rapid political liberalisation of Latin America, with 16 countries moving towards some form of liberal democracy within a decade.

The final demise of the Soviet Union left the world at the start of the 1990s in what has been termed its ‘unipolar moment’ with the USA as the leading economy enjoying unquestioned military dominance. This ushered in what Rachman calls an ‘age of optimism’ which ran from the early 1990s to the financial crisis of 2008. In this period there was more overt and widespread neoliberal dominance of policy, even if, under the third way of Clinton and Blair, this was tempered by greater attention to social problems than under Thatcher and Reagan.

The achievements were not negligible: growth in India and China meant some 200 million Chinese people were lifted out of poverty and the proportion of India’s population living in absolute poverty declined from 60% to 40%. Britain had its longest ever period of uninterrupted growth which allowed space for some important investment in public services. And yet, we also saw the corporate world increasing its reach deep into the heart of western states, while, as we know, the age of optimism in general was built on false foundations.

The origins of the financial crisis lay in changes that were put in place both by the centre-right in the age of transformation, and by the centre-left and right in the age of optimism.

Now, says Rachman, a new ‘age of anxiety’ is upon us as the economic crisis dovetails with a series of quite profound changes in the global balance of power. The rise of China and India are the most dramatic of these, but there are also a series of more regional, authoritarian challengers to western liberal dominance, from Russia and Iran to Venezuela. Even established democracies such as India, Brazil and South Africa are proving less reliable allies than they once were to western liberal states.

As a result, we have, according to Rachman, a coming together of regional and global problems at a time when the room for international cooperation has been squeezed. In the age of optimism, prolonged economic growth provided a permissive context for international cooperation. A plethora of new agreements of regional and international scope were formed as part of a burgeoning architecture for international economic governance, albeit of a distinctly neoliberal hue.

‘This was an era when there was plenty of everything to go around,’ Rachman claims, ‘plenty of economic growth, plenty of oil, plenty of scope to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.’

Now, much of that is in question. It is not hard to see why. With a growing economy, all countries can expect a larger slice of the cake and worry less about what others are getting. In a stagnant or very slow growing world economy, the size of the cake is fixed and the potential for conflict grows. Gains for one state often mean losses for another, the very definition of a zero-sum conflict.

The Eurozone

Although many areas of international politics are now perilously poised, some of the difficulties I have covered are exemplified by the Euro crisis. Indeed, perhaps, nowhere better reveals the depths of pre-crisis liberal hubris and post-crisis political sclerosis than the European Union.

Prior to the crisis, and in the wake of the launch of the Euro, some commentators claimed Europe represented an exemplar of modern international cooperation and liberalisation. As Rachman noted, Europe was transformed in the post-war years from a place that people fled from to a largely peaceful continent which a steady stream of new countries, and people, wanted to join. The EU as a whole became the largest economy in the world, the biggest market for Chinese exports and the biggest destination for US overseas investment. As with so many other areas, the crisis has cruelly exposed the weaknesses which lay behind these optimistic views.

Central to the Euro crisis is the struggle over what to do about government deficit and debt. In countries that have their own currency, these problems are resolved by spending less and earning more. The former occurs through government expenditure cuts, austerity, lower wages; the latter through improved competitiveness (which partly comes through wage cuts and efficiency gains), and through currency devaluation.

In the Eurozone, currency devaluation is not possible, and the alternative route – transfers of money from richer Eurozone countries to poorer ones – has been largely ruled out by Germany. This leaves Europe with a single policy response: austerity alone.

Indeed, as early as 2009, several countries – France, Spain, Greece, Ireland – were ordered by the EU to reduce their deficits by cutting public expenditure. All of these countries, partly for reasons to do with the crisis, and partly for longer-standing reasons, were breaking Eurozone rules on government deficit and debt levels.

EU scrutiny of government figures led to revelations about Greece’s national accounts which had hidden huge irregularities dating from Greece’s accession to the Euro. The first in a long-running succession of negotiations resulted in a bail-out package in 2010, funded by the EU and the International Monetary Fund, followed not long after by similar packages for Ireland and Portugal.

All of these attempts to shore up the Euro were based on austerity, meaning that dealing with debt problems was being laid at the door of the populations of these countries through reduced wages, lost jobs, less welfare and cut services.

By mid-2011 concern had spread to Spain and Italy where the European Central Bank intervened to help reduce the cost of government borrowing and later to supply cheap money to banks who were struggling to cover bad loans or raise finance on the money markets.

As noted, in Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Italy, dealing with the crisis, reassuring financial markets and pledging commitments to the IMF, EU and the ECB entailed the removal from office of elected leaders. Two of their replacements – Papademos in Greece and Mario Monti in Italy – joined Mario Dragi, head of the ECB as a triumvirate of former Goldman Sachs employees at the very top of European politics.

But the politics of the crisis has extended well beyond turmoil in the countries concerned. Although it has rightly been condemned as inept, the response of the EU to the growing crisis in Greece and other Eurozone economies has been hampered by genuinely difficult political problems.

The key problem for economies not in crisis – Germany in particular – is that they want to leave the responsibility for dealing with deficits to the countries concerned, and their populations, yet know that if those countries fail to act in the desired way, and default or exit from the Euro, it will have severe effects on their own economies causing falling exports and rising interest rates and unemployment.

Caught in this dilemma, the EU has lurched from crisis talks to crisis talks, with outsiders – the IMF’s Christine Lagard, the UK and even the US and Chinese governments – urging Europe to get its act together. At each stage EU leaders have pledged to be tough on recipients of bail-outs, at each turn knowing that commitments to austerity mean real sustained political conflict in the countries concerned, and at each stage knowing that default would have dramatic consequences on the whole world economy.

The consequences of all this affect the Eurozone as a whole: at its summit in December, 25 EU members agreed to a fiscal pact that, if implemented, will legally entrench austerity at the heart of the EU.

The on-going struggle over the deficits has seen repeated mass protests in Spain and Greece, in particular. In Greece’s case, European leaders eventually accepted that some of the debt reduction would have to come from the lenders – the banks – recognising the power of popular opposition to austerity. The BBC’s Paul Mason even claimed that ‘By hitting the streets, Greek people were able to force Europe to impose losses on the bankers’.

Nevertheless, the package of measures eventually agreed was draconian in its impact, ensuring that the population would bear the long-term brunt of changes. Advances by the left in the Greek election have put even this painfully-negotiated response in doubt. As one investment analyst put it in The Guardian on 8 May: ‘The irresistible force of German austerity has clashed with the immovable object of Greek popular resistance’.

Some sense of the visceral anger of the young unemployed in Spain is gained from this anecdote from the Open University academic, Georgina Blakeley. The Indignados movement has mobilised millions of Spaniards against austerity and in condemnation of a corrupt, unaccountable, remote political system. Showing typical arrogance and condescension, many in the political elite and media dismissed the protesters as having no relevance and no alternative proposals to put forward. Excluded from political influence and denied a voice up to that point, the retort from the protestors was telling: ‘Those who have never asked us anything, now ask us for proposals!’.

This is emblematic of a much wider sense of deep anger that exists in Europe and elsewhere. People who have had no role in creating the crisis are being asked to pay for the mistakes of others in lost livelihoods, jobs and welfare. Those excluded from circles of power are only allowed a voice if they can offer solutions to problems created by others. And entire populations – particularly in Greece – are condemned by outsiders in the most xenophobic terms for the faults of their corrupt leaders, a corruption in which those very outsiders, bankers, politicians and media, were themselves complicit.

Crisis and the left

The crisis in the Eurozone, and elsewhere, shows little sign of easy resolution. But elections in France, Greece and Italy on 7 May have moved the debate into a new phase. Up until this point, the political right had been entirely dominant, calling the shots and at each turn reverting to its default position of austerity, whipping up fear that anything else will spook the markets. So far this strategy has shown no clear way out of crisis as growth stalls and the markets remain jittery.

Until now the left has had few convincing arguments. Notwithstanding the indignation of Spanish protestors, critiques of austerity only really gain traction when alternatives become clearer – protests and saying ‘No’, however justified, are only the first step towards a more strategic view of political change.

Europe is pinned between the logics of financial crisis and democratic popular opposition to austerity. In such a political impasse, real, lasting social harm is being inflicted on living standards and life-chances of the young, and on public services and collective provision.

Without an alternative from the left, the danger from right wing extremism grows. The first round of the French elections was another reminder that bad economic conditions have rarely gifted the left an advantage in any straightforward way. Indeed, alongside gains for the left in France and Greece were gains for the right – a fifth of the electorate in France and Greece voted for extreme right wing parties.

Given the depths of the economic problems, and the intransigent position of Germany, the room for manoeuvre is extremely limited. The prospects for any emergent Greek government are most constrained. Unless the wider European consensus shifts, it is hard to see Greece remaining in the Euro.

For Hollande, a realistic assessment is that only modest change can be expected from ‘Monsieur Normal’ in the short term. Indeed, small successes may be the best hope, building a basis from which a more widespread shift in European policy can be argued for and, in the German elections of 2013, campaigned for.

By contrast, crisis and collapse in France, as happened under Mitterrand in 1983, will do huge damage to social democratic prospects elsewhere in Europe. The stakes are high indeed.

–

This is an edited version of a talk given at the ILP’s Weekend School, ‘Crisis, Markets and Protest’, in Scarborough on 5-6 May 2012.

Gideon Rachman’s Zero-Sum World is published by  Atlantic Books, priced £20.

Wolfgang Streeck’s article in New Left Review is available here.

There is an undoubted justice to the campaign to the extent that, as the LRA leader, Kony is responsible for crimes against humanity stretching back many years. He ought to face justice, whether in Uganda or in the International Criminal Court.

However, as seems to be the way with such ‘viral’ internet activism, the Kony campaign simplifies to the point of misrepresentation the complex political problems that underlie such conflicts. Presented as a crude ‘let’s get the bad guy’ issue, the video at the heart of the campaign pretends that such problems are simple enough to be understood by a child.

In a perceptive commentary on ‘the perils of conflict for a Facebook world’, Uganda expert Jonathan Fisher of the International Development Department of Birmingham University makes some telling points.

Fisher reminds us that it does no-one any good to ‘depict African violence as incomprehensible, illogical and ‘solvable’ by ‘taking out bad men’ like Kony’. ‘Crimes such as those committed in Kenya in 2007 or in Rwanda in 1994’, he goes on, ‘do not happen because of any cultural predisposition to random, unintelligible outbreaks of communal blood-letting.’ Rather, they are political conflicts with a logic of their own that needs to be grasped if lasting peace is to be achieved. The neglect – at best – of northern Uganda by the Museveni regime mean that anti-government sentiments will not disappear with the arrest of Kony, Fisher claims.

Secondly, Fisher points out (as others have done) that the Ugandan government is hardly an innocent by-stander in the conflict and is also guilty of human rights abuses as well as increasingly authoritarian tendencies and of reneging on peace agreements.

While casting doubt on the claimed inability of Uganda to deal with the LRA, Fisher argues that the Stop Kony campaign helps to bolster the Ugandan government’s presentation of itself to western backers as an ally against terrorism. This positioning has seen western governments supply military backing to Kampala for a number of years. Indeed, the tangible focus of the latest phase of the Stop Kony campaign is to ensure that US military aid to Uganda to track down Kony, in the shape of 100 special advisers, is continued.

As has been the case at many times in the past – the Live8 and Make Poverty History campaigns chief among them – Africa becomes what Graham Harrison called ‘a distant other’, deserving of often fleeting, emotional sympathy while political sense and analysis goes out of the window. However much we may support the call for Kony to face justice, Fisher’s comments remind us not to neglect the politics of this and other conflicts.

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Jonathan Fisher, ‘Stop Kony and the perils of conflict for a Facebook World’

Graham Harrison (2010) ‘The Africanization of Poverty’ African Affairs vol 109 no.436

Though his pronouncements insist that Turkey’s Kemalist secularism remains undiluted, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan can’t seem to shake off innuendos about his past and that of his party. He and the Justice and Development party (AK) he leads have Islamist roots, emerging as they did as a faction of the tellingly named Virtue Party. In the years since the AK party have employed the classic conservative manoeuvre of converging piety and nationalism.

There has been plenty of heartache in the western media at the proliferation of headscarves and the lifting of the ban on said item for members of the civil service. Far more significant, but with less ink spilt over it, has been the government’s approach to public art, one which displays all the prudishness and humourlessness one would expect from either an Islamist, a nationalist, or some toxic brew of the two.

The planned demolition of a monument near to Kars of two statues reaching out to embrace each other is a study in art criticism, AK-style. The monument is sited near to Turkey’s border with Armenia; hence the significance of the statues’ pose and also the solemn offence that Erdogan has taken on behalf of the Turkish people and the military. Though it is not officially conceded that this is the reason for getting rid of it, it can be inferred that the monument’s existence would contradict the government’s denial of the genocide of Armenians during the Great War.

The statue is apparently also guilty of blasphemy of a different sort as it is sited near to the tomb of the 10^th century (scholar) Hasan Harakani. Some Muslim scholars have declared this idolatrous. The AK Party can therefore satisfy religious sensibilities and offended national pride with one swing of a wrecking ball.

The demolition will be the symbolic consummation of Mr Erdogan’s rejection of the protocols agreed with Armenia in 2009 that sought to establish normal relations between the two countries. This is predictable; closely aligned with a preoccupation with deference to established religion in the puritan nationalist mindset is the tendency to quarrel over marginal lands; in this case the predominantly Armenian statelet of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Officially it has been conveniently argued that the Kars monument does not complement the distinctive Ottoman and Russian character of the city, the long Armenian heritage of Kars having mysteriously evaporated along with its inhabitants.

We can add priggishness to Mr Erdogan’s list of dismal cultural hang-ups. Nevzat Bozkuş, the mayor of Kars (in what must have been a dizzying rush of civic tidying ahead of a visit by the boss) removed bare-breasted nymphs from a public fountain on the grounds that they were an offence to public decency.

When faced with adversity we often find out who our real friends are. Despite being deserted by his own people, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak can for now put his trust in the police and the top-tier of the military. In the rest of the world he can count on his fellow autocrats from the alma mater of the Cold War and, until 31 January, could claim at least the nominal solidarity of the Socialist International, and therefore of our own Labour Party.

According to the Ethical Charter of the Socialist International, the member parties affirm their “total commitment to the values of equality, freedom, justice and solidarity which are the foundation of democratic socialism”. Fine words. Words that chime with the Labour Party’s contemporary clause 4 and to which the Party can proudly subscribe, but words not so fine as to be taken all that seriously by many of the parties signed up to it.

In the letter of expulsion addressed to the nameless ‘general secretary’ of Egypt’s National Democratic Party (NDP), the Socialist International cites concerns at “the lack of developments in relation to democracy”. Aside from the evasive and slightly euphemistic language that describes a lack of democracy as if it were a vitamin deficiency in an otherwise healthy body, this letter fails to address those areas where the NDP is also lacking.

From the start of Mubarak’s rule the NDP has stood for the democratic socialism of the truncheon and the private swimming pool. The gross disparities of wealth and the lack of opportunities in Egypt prove there has been a lack of development in relation to socialism. The cartelised state industries that have ensured the economic domination of the political elite for decades are the classic symptom of a hypocritical racket.

That it should take all this and a popular revolt to get a corrupt party ostracised, and that the fine words of a country’s official left should ever be taken on face value, is unsettling. But worse still, it helps justify old slanders against the left that accuse it of being complicit with tyranny and fundamentally undemocratic.

When the Conservative Party threw its lot in with the European Conservatives and Reformists group in the European Parliament it was rightly criticised for so easily breaking bread with the unreformed right in eastern Europe, but we should take care that the obvious double standard does not go unnoticed.

Do these affiliations mean anything, or are they merely the comforting vestiges of more optimistic days? More importantly, who in Egypt can claim the mantle of the democratic left and make something of that Ethical Charter?

This week’s major intervention in the election campaign has surely been the call by the Institute for Fiscal Studies for the major parties to ‘come clean’ about their strategies for reducing the public sector debt, if elected. The IFS report has chimed strongly with the overall public attitude in this campaign, which is that politicians are all devious and untrustworthy. The media response to the report has therefore been to pander to this attitude by unthinkingly echoing the IFS position. The Guardian asserts that the IFS is “the leading economics think-tank” in the country, clearly implying that its views must be accepted without question.

But why should the IFS be beyond criticism? Is cutting the public debt really an objective economic necessity, or is it actually a deeply political stance, reflecting the interests of the business and financial élites?

To answer this question, we have to look closely at the history of debates about the public finances over the last forty years. During that time, the theory and practice of economic policy has shifted markedly from mainstream Keynesianism of the early 1970s, to the unchallenged hegemony of free-market neoliberalism since the early 1990s. Although there have been many elements in this overall shift – notably privatisation of state enterprises, deregulation of financial markets and attacks on trade union rights – the public finances have consistently played a critical role.

There were two key campaigns in particular that have affected the UK: the first during the ‘stagflation’ crisis of the mid-1970s, and the second during the sharp recession of the early 1990s. Both were paralleled by related shifts in policy prescriptions all across the world economy.

In the mid-1970s, Britain suffered especially sharply from an unprecedented combination of high inflation and the return of mass unemployment. Attempts by successive governments to address these problems started under the 1964-70 Wilson administrations, and continued through the Heath years to the return of Labour in 1974. In the decade from 1964, restricting public spending might be necessitated when sterling was under pressure, but was not seen as the key to macroeconomic stability. Instead, the predominantly Keynesian policy mainstream favoured state initiatives in the form of incomes policies and indicative planning, aiming to reconcile the conflicting interests of employers and unions through the good offices of the state.

But by 1976 these efforts had ended apparently in abject failure, although Keynesians could argue that inflation was significantly the result of factors outside British government control – notably the breakdown of the dollar-gold link in 1971 and the oil shock of 1973. The result was the emergence of two policy platforms standing to left and right of the mainstream. On the left, Labour and the unions flirted with an Alternative Economic Strategy which centred on a radical extension of state intervention in the modernisation of British industry. On the right, the monetarists led by Milton Friedman offered an equally radical alternative diagnosis of stagflation, blaming it on the fiscal and monetary indiscipline of the government.

Following a sudden dip in Britain’s trade balance in 1976, a run on the pound forced Chancellor Healey to turn to the IMF for help. The public spending cuts that followed signalled an early victory for the monetarist right, and the end of the road for both mainstream Keynesianism and the leftist Alternative Economic Strategy.

Mrs Thatcher’s election success in 1979, followed by Reagan’s in the USA, heralded the return of pre-Keynesian economic and social conservatism.  In Britain, the fierce monetary and fiscal squeeze that ensued put manufacturing to the sword, while the abolition of exchange controls allowed the burgeoning wealth from North Sea oil to be invested largely abroad. Subsequently, while the Third World was devastated by the debt crisis of the 1980s, the UK and US financial sectors pressed forward with deregulation at home and expansion abroad, laying the basis for their joint dominance of global financial markets.

Breakneck expansion eventually led, as it always does, to unsustainable credit growth, overheated markets and a new round of inflation. When the bust came in 1990-91, coinciding with the fall of communist regimes across the Soviet bloc, the free-market right once again blamed excessive public spending. The result within the European Union was the strictures of the Maastricht Treaty, first negotiated in 1991 and finally enacted, after some resistance, in 1993. In relation to public finance, from now on all EU member states were enjoined to limit their fiscal deficits to 3% of GDP, and their aggregate public debts to 60% of GDP. Limits along similar lines had, by then, become a central feature of Third World aid packages from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; they were also imposed upon the post-communist ‘transition’ countries. The hegemony of neoliberalism was now complete.

What is most striking, and highly relevant to the assessment of this week’s IFS intervention, is that at no point did the monetarist economists – or their neoliberal successors – explain why any particular limit to public deficits and debt was economically necessary. Instead we are offered, then as now, an entirely circular argument. We are told that deficit cuts are necessary because international bond markets require them. So why do international bond markets require them? Because they think that cuts are necessary. And why is that? Because the economic experts say so!

Now it is certainly the case that any individual government which accumulates debts that are very high compared to those of other governments will find itself subject to special scrutiny by the bond markets, as the Greeks now know only too well, and as many Third World governments found out already back in the 1980s. We should of course make allowance for the pernicious effects of speculators, for instance the role of George Soros in our own 1992 crisis that forced us out of the EU’s Exchange Rate Mechanism, or the flight of hot money from East Asia in 1997. But a reasonable case can still be made that governments should, in normal times, avoid excessive reliance on borrowing, especially to fund current expenditure as opposed to capital investments.

However, from the standpoint of macroeconomic stability, and especially that of maintaining full or near-full employment, our overriding concern today should remain that of Keynes: the need for governments to sustain economic activity at a time when savings in the private sector greatly exceed investments. This need is met by absorbing excess savings through the sale of government securities, the proceeds of which are then spent.

And because we now live in an integrated global economy, this Keynesian precept should be applied at the global level, not at the level of an individual country. Thus, the continued growth and prosperity of countries with chronic trade surpluses, like Germany and China, depends in conditions of global recession on the willingness of other countries like the USA and Britain to continue to run trade deficits. As a corollary – and this is really an economic fact – there will be matching outflows of capital from the former countries, and inflows into the latter. Given the current reluctance of businesses and households in the trade-deficit countries to borrow and spend, it is their government borrowing that keeps the world economy going.

We can see, therefore, that the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of England, and Chancellor Darling and Shadow Chancellor Cable, are right to urge that government deficits should not be cut prematurely, because that would risk a ‘double-dip’ recession. As long as global savings continue to exceed global private sector investments, governments must continue to absorb that excess.

But still, why this obsession with restoring the deficit and debt ratios to ‘normal’ levels, once the global recovery has reached the point where private sector investment has recovered fully and cyclical unemployment has disappeared? There is, after all, no economic ‘law’ that dictates the 3% and 60% levels, or any other numerical values. The level of aggregate economic activity is entirely unaffected by the proportion of demand that flows through the public rather than the private sector.

The answer to this question, now as in the 1970s, lies not in economics, but in politics, or more specifically, in class warfare. It concerns the privileged position of private wealth within our restricted form of democracy. After 1945 the propertyless in most parts of the world, West, East and South, made remarkable gains in their well-being and in the strength of their political voice. By the mid-1970s, the propertied classes, whether capitalists, usurers, merchants or landlords, or indeed the Soviet-bloc bureaucratic élite, found themselves on the defensive on many fronts.

Many radical nationalist governments in the Third World continued to press for reforms in the governance of the world economy, challenging the new forms of economic colonialism that followed independence. In the Soviet bloc, the Prague Spring and the first stirrings of the Polish workers’ movement threatened the bureaucrats’ highly centralised power. And in the West, not only had new social movements challenged the elites on issues of gender, race and the environment, but workers were also advancing new claims to workplace democracy and economic security that seriously threatened the power of big business and high finance.

The neoliberal counter-revolution was the concerted response. For more than thirty years, the ideologists of neoliberalism, with economists to the fore, worked assiduously to construct a new common-sense about the economy based on the old liberal mantra: property rights, individualism and the residual state. By the time the sequence of localised crises that began in Britain on Black Wednesday in 1992 culminated in the global credit crunch of 2007, that work of construction was very largely complete.

Faced in September 2008 by an imminent total meltdown of global finance, the business and financial élites had no choice but to sanction a massive and collective rescue programme by the governments of the leading economies. There followed a period  during which neoliberalism appeared to be in disarray, and in both academia and the media, alternative voices could once again be heard.

But within about six months, the neoliberals had regrouped. In Britain, as the debate over Darling’s 2009 Budget already showed, their ownership of the economic common sense allowed them to steadily shift the focus of debate from exacting retribution and repayment from the banks, to blaming governments for assuming the vast fiscal deficits that have kept capitalism afloat. Meanwhile. those who spoke up for real alternatives – for Green New Deals, for radical reform of the banks, for a new international financial architecture – have been pushed back to the margins of public attention. All that matters now, apparently, is to make sure that the state is cut back.

And to make absolutely sure that this happens, the IFS message comes with a chorus of attacks on the competence, work effort and dignity of public sector employees. The accompanying relentless demands for ‘efficiency gains’ have a double purpose. On the one hand, they are a euphemism for cuts in public sector jobs and pay, heralding an assault on the last redoubts of organised labour while undermining continued citizen support for nurses, teachers and soldiers alike. On the other hand, they undermine our confidence in the provision of public goods, encouraging a resumption of the shift to private sector providers initiated under Mrs Thatcher.

Given these attacks on working people and their communities, it is surely time to summon up our collective courage and reject the lies and misrepresentations that are being foisted upon us in this phoniest of all elections. For at present, it really doesn’t matter what combination of Libs, Labs and Cons cobble together a majority at Westminster. The Institute for Fiscal Studies are sadly right about one thing:  the government that emerges will impose massive cuts in public spending. But they are not, repeat not, economically necessary.

Hugo Radice is a Life Fellow of the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds. His recent columns on the crisis in the Yorkshire Post are available via his webpage: http://www.polis.leeds.ac.uk/about/staff/radice

Contact the author: h.k.radice@leeds.ac.uk

The Kurdistan region of Iraq enjoyed a head start over the rest of the country. Its 1991 uprising ousted Saddam’s genocidal forces which had murdered nearly 200,000 Kurds at Halabja and elsewhere. Its leaders started to build universities and lay down democratic foundations but it also endured a bloody civil war whose divisions are now healing.

Security is tight although there have ‘only’ been about 120 terrorist killings since 2003, 100 of these in early 2004, and overseas business people and diplomats rarely take special measures. Crime is very low.

There’s also been a development boom with homes and big infrastructure projects built in recent years. Workers don’t pay tax and work six hours a day. Unions are social partners and back the call for full union rights in the rest of Iraq, where they are restricted.

Iraq has the world’s third largest oil reserves but is only the 11th biggest producer. Kurdistan has plentiful supplies. Oil and gas provide virtually all Iraq’s revenues and diversification is vital. Agriculture was born in Kurdistan but liquidated by Saddam who razed thousands of villages and herded people into cities. Kurds have lost farming skills and its young people are not accustomed to rural life. Most food is imported although Kurdistan could become self-sufficient by modernising its methods through foreign investment. Tourism is another growth area.

Kurdish leaders seek UK investment and trade and are mystified that there has been no official ministerial trade mission while other European countries are making a beeline to the region. Britain is losing business opportunities. Direct flights to the UK and a wider visa scheme would boost commerce.

Kurdistan is wrongly overlooked in case UK engagement upsets Arab Iraq. This is not, however, a zero sum game. Kurdistan is open to business which is currently less feasible elsewhere. Kurdistan could become the gateway to the whole country and companies could expand as security permits.

Kurdistan’s leaders are open to international best practice. They don’t want to reinvent every wheel and have contracted British institutions to help them tackle corruption and administrative inexperience.

Secular opposition

Their Speaker asked us to outline the British political system and more than half their 111 MPs enthusiastically participated in two lively sessions. They were keen to understand our Official Opposition system. They now have one – Gorran (the Change). This breakaway from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) took 25% of the seats in last year’s elections. The split is very bitter and Gorran has yet to find its feet. The emergence of a secular opposition is an important example for the Middle East.

Iraq has become a cold house for Christians but many have fled to Kurdistan and senior Christian leaders praised the government for building churches and protecting Christian villages.

Discussion in landlocked Kurdistan always turns to the neighbours. The good news is that frosty relations with Turkey have thawed massively in the last year, partly driven by extensive trading. However, Turkey and Iran are manipulating water supplies and one leading politician told us directly that Iran is not a neighbour but controls Shia Iraq.

The bad news is that relations between Iraqi Kurds and some Arabs have worsened considerably. This dangerous gap involves cultural and ethnic differences, resentment and fear and has come close to a shooting war. The Kurds suffered genocide directed from Baghdad but now embrace a federal and democratic Iraq. An independent Kurdistan including parts of Turkey, Iran and Syria is a popular dream but would almost certainly cause conflagration and is not on the agenda.

Kurds fear that Baghdad is building a centralised rather than federal state and it constantly delays implementing agreed constitutional provisions to solve problems. These include making Kirkuk and other disputed territories part of the Region, and establishing a reliable regime for oil production and sharing revenues.

Neutral statistics should underpin political representation and planning but they are not available in Kurdistan because the last census was in 1957. The Prime Minister, a Labour supporter-in-exile, Cardiff Barham Salih, told us they need UK technical assistance.

Improving Kurdish-Arab relations depends on the Iraqi parliamentary elections in March which could bring a new Iraqi PM with Kurdish support and reshaped cross-community alliances.

Iraqi Kurdistan has come a long way quickly but governance and human rights need improving. Its leaders and people most clearly desire deeper and wider political and commercial engagement by the UK, and others. It is in everyone’s interests that Kurdistan achieves its full potential within and for Iraq. The whole country would then stand a much better chance of working for its long-suffering people.

–

Gary Kent’s sixth fact-finding visit to Iraq, his fourth to Kurdistan since 2006, was with Meg Munn MP for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Kurdistan. They were guests of the Kurdistan parliament. In five days they met the President, Speaker, Prime Minister, Interior Minister, other ministers, unions, women activists, Gorran, Christian leaders, plus British and Kurdish business leaders.

Labour Friends of Iraq

The USA can’t commit to meaningful cuts in carbon emissions; China and other developing countries refuse to budge before industrialised countries have addressed their historic legacy of pollution; the small island, least developed and African nations insist on the need to do something to avert threats to their existence; and the Europeans make positive but ineffectual noises from the sidelines. Wonderful Copenhagen in 2009? Yes, but you could almost be talking about any climate negotiation from the past twenty years – Marrakech, The Hague, Bali, Kyoto or Rio.

The depressing fact is that ever since the first climate change agreement – the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – back in Rio in 1992, the main contours of international climate politics have remained stubbornly in place. Back then, US President George Bush Senior established the family tradition by declaring that the USA would not commit to cuts in CO₂ emissions and that America’s way of life was not up for negotiation. Back then, China, Brazil and other leading developing countries argued that principles of justice meant that industrialised countries had to cut their emissions before anything was asked of developing nations.

Today, the same standoff between principles of justice, the realities of self-interest and the ticking clock of environmental damage, remains. Now, as in 1992, the result was an agreement with no legally enforceable limits on emissions, roundly condemned by all and sundry.

True, the UNFCCC eventually give birth to its deformed, half-dead offspring, the Kyoto Protocol which did contain binding commitments from some countries. As is well known, the USA signed but never ratified that treaty and the large developing countries signed only because they had to make no cuts at all. It thus left the two largest global polluters (the USA and China) outside its remit. Even its most ardent supporters, the northern European states, have shown an inability to reach even their modest targets and the Kyoto treaty contains no effective mechanism with which to punish those who fail their obligations.

So what of the fiasco that was Copenhagen? In recent years, important shifts have occurred in climate politics, which raised hopes that Copenhagen might have delivered some kind of step forward. The science around climate change is much more well established, despite the spoiling noises of the oil industry and their media mouthpieces like Fox News and the dreadful dailies, Telegraph and Mail. And there is more widespread political agreement that something should be done.

However, despite these shifts, the pace of political change, particularly in China and the USA, is slow, leaving the two unmoving objects of climate politics – US Congressional opposition and China’s veto power – in place. Without significant change here, progress at the international level will be very difficult.

The USA

It is true that climate politics in the US have changed a great deal since Bush Junior’s much-criticised exit from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. The USA finally has a president who takes the issue seriously and has brought the country actively back to the centre of international negotiations.

Nevertheless, within the US political system, the President’s freedom to act on the international stage is highly constrained by the need for Congressional approval, something environmental critics and other countries seemingly fail to register. George Monbiot even managed to note the critical importance of the US Senate then simply wished it away, singling out President Obama as the person to blame for the failure in Copenhagen. Such critics speak as if the President could freely choose to sign up to whatever he wanted. He cannot. More accurately, whatever the US President agrees to has to be ratified by Congress, something that has not escaped past US Presidents, from Wilson to Clinton.

While the politics within Congress, including the Senate, have changed, and there are now serious discussions around a US climate change bill, there is still considerable opposition. Perhaps more crucially, even those in Congress who favour binding emission reductions baulk at the prospect of the US agreeing to them without China and other large developing countries committing to some action as well. This was the crux of the Copenhagen impasse.

China

Like the USA, China has belatedly begun to recognise that it has some interest in having cuts to carbon emissions, partly for reasons of energy security, partly because of the likely effect of climate change on its agricultural sector and coastal cities. However, this is tempered by the view that action against climate change, in the medium term, should be the sole responsibility of industrialised countries. There is some justice to this argument: climate change has largely been created by rich countries and in terms of per capita emissions they still dwarf China’s.

But there is also a heavy dose of self-interest in China’s objections. If oil is part of the architecture of the US economy, for China it is coal. No less than the US, China’s current stance is formed with its eyes on economic growth and nurturing its global power. There are many countries that pollute much less, and will suffer much more, than China, and are ill-served by its obstructionism.

On top of this, China’s opposition to any meaningful verification measures, without which no international treaty has ever been successful, served both to meet its aim of avoiding any verifiable binding commitments at all and to protect the regime against the ‘intrusion’ of independent scrutiny of its internal affairs, something the Communist Party has never accepted.

Together, these concerns put China in the extraordinary position, in the final hours of Copenhagen, of insisting that any significant targets on limiting temperature increases or emissions be removed from the final declaration. As reported by Mark Lynas not only did China not want to sign up to commitments for itself, it didn’t want other countries to make any commitments either, for fear it would lead to increased pressure down the line on China to adopt binding targets. If this remains part of China’s strategy, it is difficult to see any possibility of progress beyond a series of broad, voluntary, individual and unverifiable promises.

While criticism of the politics around climate change in the US is entirely apt, China’s stance is extremely risky. As well as using up scarce borrowed time, environmentally speaking, it may also squander an opportunity to make limited but real progress. In a dangerous game of chicken, China seems to calculate that if it continues to play hardball, the US will eventually give in.

But current political circumstances in the USA might be as good as they will get for some time: there is a President in favour of an international agreement on climate change and the Democrats control both houses of Congress. This will not last. In all likelihood the Democrat grip will be severely weakened by the Congressional mid-term elections later this year and a second Obama term is far from certain. Whatever the issues of justice, the developing countries may have missed an opportunity to strike a limited, pragmatic deal with the US in Copenhagen.

Lessons

For their part, the Labour government strove to make Copenhagen a success, and Ed Miliband is credited (though some wouldn’t use that word) with ensuring the final declaration was in fact agreed. Gordon Brown, too, has been forceful in arguing for large financial transfers to the less developed countries, though as ever, some argue more could and should be done. The weakness of the government’s position, and that of the EU more generally, is that their domestic performance on cutting emissions is so poor, particularly when placed against some of the grander statements that both the UK government and the EU have made. It will take more than gimmicky boiler scrappage schemes to convince other nations that the UK is serious about achieving the huge cuts in emissions that it says it wants to see.

Another lesson to take from Copenhagen is that it is high time for western NGOs and other commentators to recognise that their traditional understanding of international politics (in short and with little simplification, ‘industrialised and western = venal and bad; developing and rural = noble and good’) will no longer wash, if ever it did. The very grouping together of developing countries – in this of all issues – looks increasingly anachronistic, though it serves political purposes for various governments (allying with China provides leverage for the weakest states, siding with the least developed provides ideological and moral cover for China’s intransigence). Whether this alliance will prove tenable in the long term, remains to be seen. It is hard to see how China’s refusal to cut emissions can really benefit those who will be hit first and hardest by climate change.

But perhaps the key lesson, and what is weakest in the NGO-environmentalist criticism, is any attempt to reconcile the gulf between arguments of justice and the realities of international politics. It is no good acting as if the latter simply did not exist. Certainly, it is important that arguments about justice – whether couched in terms of historical responsibilities, or in terms of per capita CO₂ emissions – are made and reiterated. But an international emissions regime in which there is an even distribution of CO₂ emissions per head is simply not attainable in the near future. It is politically, not to mention physically, unachievable in the short term and possibly never this side of a technological revolution. Moreover, because of their volume, climate change cannot be curtailed without cuts in China’s rate of emissions, regardless of issues of justice. Nor is the international political landscape – multiple states acting in their own self-interest – likely to alter anytime soon.

As ever with progressive politics, what is needed, and what is most difficult to achieve, are steps that deliver tangible progress but which also begin an inevitably slow process of bridging the gulf between present day realities and environmentally effective and socially just outcomes. Some elements of this are beginning to feature in the negotiations – large transfers of financial resources to assist the poorest countries adapt to climate change are an essential first step, regardless of any other actions. An agreed goal for mitigating climate change – whether 2^oC or 1.5^oC – signifies some progress from 20 years ago, when a vague goal of avoiding ‘dangerous’ climate change is all countries would commit to.

Beyond this, further progress will probably require a division within the developing country block, and the larger, heavily polluting countries will have to give some ground while protecting the interests of the least developed and most vulnerable. In this context, developing countries’ insistence at Copenhagen on keeping the Kyoto deal in play, looks like a major mistake.

But the really serious work will involve looking for some limited common ground between China and the US. While something may be achievable through better handling of international negotiations than was displayed in Copenhagen, the real battles will be fought in the internal political environments of these two powers, as well as others. When states’ national interests are as deadlocked as they currently seem to be – when there is only limited agreement about ends, never mind means – then international cooperation will be similarly limited. It may take much more sustained campaigning on climate change, as well as wider economic and technological change, to change governments’ views of what is in their national interest.