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	At last, a law to stop almost anyone from doing almost anything by George Monbiot, Seumas Milne The Guardian / UK   Jan 2014   At last, a law to stop almost anyone from doing almost anything, by George Monbiot.   Until the late 19th century much of our city space was owned by private landlords. Squares were gated, streets were controlled by turnpikes. The great unwashed, many of whom had been expelled from the countryside by acts of enclosure, were also excluded from desirable parts of town.   Social reformers and democratic movements tore down the barriers, and public space became a right, not a privilege. But social exclusion follows inequality as night follows day, and now, with little public debate, our city centres are again being privatised or semi-privatised. They are being turned by the companies that run them into soulless, cheerless, pasteurised piazzas, in which plastic policemen harry anyone loitering without intent to shop.   Street life in these places is reduced to a trance-world of consumerism, of conformity and atomisation in which nothing unpredictable or disconcerting happens, a world made safe for selling mountains of pointless junk to tranquillised shoppers. Spontaneous gatherings of any other kind – unruly, exuberant, open-ended, oppositional – are banned. Young, homeless and eccentric people are, in the eyes of those upholding this dead-eyed, sanitised version of public order, guilty until proven innocent.   Now this dreary ethos is creeping into places that are not, ostensibly, owned or controlled by corporations. It is enforced less by gates and barriers (though plenty of these are reappearing) than by legal instruments, used to exclude or control the ever widening class of undesirables.   The existing rules are bad enough. Introduced by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, antisocial behaviour orders (asbos) have criminalised an apparently endless range of activities, subjecting thousands – mostly young and poor – to bespoke laws. They have been used to enforce a kind of caste prohibition: personalised rules which prevent the untouchables from intruding into the lives of others.   You get an asbo for behaving in a manner deemed by a magistrate as likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to other people. Under this injunction, the proscribed behaviour becomes a criminal offence. Asbos have been granted which forbid the carrying of condoms by a prostitute, homeless alcoholics from possessing alcohol in a public place, a soup kitchen from giving food to the poor, a young man from walking down any road other than his own, children from playing football in the street. They were used to ban peaceful protests against the Olympic clearances.   Inevitably, more than half the people subject to asbos break them. As Liberty says, these injunctions "set the young, vulnerable or mentally ill up to fail", and fast-track them into the criminal justice system. They allow the courts to imprison people for offences which are not otherwise imprisonable. One homeless young man was sentenced to five years in jail for begging: an offence for which no custodial sentence exists. Asbos permit the police and courts to create their own laws and their own penal codes.   All this is about to get much worse. On Wednesday the Antisocial Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill reaches its report stage (close to the end of the process) in the House of Lords. It is remarkable how little fuss has been made about it, and how little we know of what is about to hit us.   The bill would permit injunctions against anyone of 10 or older who "has engaged or threatens to engage in conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person". It would replace asbos with ipnas (injunctions to prevent nuisance and annoyance), which would not only forbid certain forms of behaviour, but also force the recipient to discharge positive obligations. In other words, they can impose a kind of community service order on people who have committed no crime, which could, the law proposes, remain in force for the rest of their lives.   The bill also introduces public space protection orders, which can prevent either everybody or particular kinds of people from doing certain things in certain places. It creates new dispersal powers, which can be used by the police to exclude people from an area (there is no size limit), whether or not they have done anything wrong.   While, as a result of a successful legal challenge, asbos can be granted only if a court is satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that antisocial behaviour took place, ipnas can be granted on the balance of probabilities. Breaching them will not be classed as a criminal offence, but can still carry a custodial sentence: without committing a crime, you can be imprisoned for up to two years. Children, who cannot currently be detained for contempt of court, will be subject to an inspiring new range of punishments for breaking an ipna, including three months in a young offenders centre.   Lord Macdonald, formerly the director of public prosecutions, points out that "it is difficult to imagine a broader concept than causing "nuisance" or "annoyance". The phrase is apt to catch a vast range of everyday behaviours to an extent that may have serious implications for the rule of law". Protesters, buskers, preachers: all, he argues, could end up with ipnas.   The Home Office minister, Norman Baker, once a defender of civil liberties, now the architect of the most oppressive bill pushed through any recent parliament, claims that the amendments he offered in December will "reassure people that basic liberties will not be affected". But Liberty describes them as "a little bit of window-dressing: nothing substantial has changed."   The new injunctions and the new dispersal orders create a system in which the authorities can prevent anyone from doing more or less anything. But they won"t be deployed against anyone. Advertisers, who cause plenty of nuisance and annoyance, have nothing to fear; nor do opera lovers hogging the pavements of Covent Garden. Annoyance and nuisance are what young people cause; they are inflicted by oddballs, the underclass, those who dispute the claims of power.   These laws will be used to stamp out plurality and difference, to douse the exuberance of youth, to pursue children for the crime of being young and together in a public place, to help turn this nation into a money-making monoculture, controlled, homogenised, lifeless, strifeless and bland. For a government which represents the old and the rich, that must sound like paradise.   http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/06/law-to-stop-eveyone-everything http://www.monbiot.com/   First world war: an imperial bloodbath that"s a warning, not a noble cause, by Seumas Milne.   For all the promises of a dignified commemoration, the Conservative Party"s right wing standard bearers held back for less than 48 hours into the new year before launching a full-throated defence of the "war to end all wars". The killing fields of Gallipoli and the Somme had been drenched in blood for a "noble cause", declared Michael Gove. The slaughter unleashed in 1914 had been a "just war" for freedom.   Hostility to the war, the education secretary complained, had been fostered by leftwingers and comedians who denigrated patriotism and painted the conflict as a "misbegotten shambles". Gove was backed by the prime minister, as talk of international reconciliation was left to junior ministerial ranks.   Boris Johnson went further. The war was the fault of German expansionism and aggression, London"s mayor pronounced, and called for Labour"s shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt to be sacked forthwith if he doubted it. The Conservative grandees were backed up by a retinue of more-or-less loyal historians. Max Hastings reckoned it had been fought in defence of "international law" and small nations, while Antony Beevor took aim at "anti-militarists".   This is all preposterous nonsense. Unlike the second world war, the bloodbath of 1914-18 was not a just war. It was a savage industrial slaughter perpetrated by a gang of predatory imperial powers, locked in a deadly struggle to capture and carve up territories, markets and resources.   Germany was the rising industrial power and colonial Johnny-come-lately of the time, seeking its place in the sun from the British and French empires. The war erupted directly from the fight for imperial dominance in the Balkans, as Austria-Hungary and Russia scrapped for the pickings from the crumbling Ottoman empire. All the ruling elites of Europe, tied together in a deathly quadrille of unstable alliances, shared the blame for the murderous barbarism they oversaw. The idea that Britain and its allies were defending liberal democracy, let alone international law or the rights of small nations, is simply absurd.   It"s not just that most men and all women in Britain were still denied the vote in 1914 – unlike Germany, which already had full male suffrage – or that the British empire was allied with the brutal autocracy of tsarist Russia.   Every single one of the main warring states was involved in the violent suppression of the rights of nations throughout the racist tyrannies that were their colonial empires. In the decades before 1914, about 30 million people died from famine as colonial officials enforced the export of food in British-ruled India, slaughtered resisters in their tens of thousands and set up concentration camps in South Africa.   Britain was supposed to have gone to war to defend the neutrality of "plucky little Belgium" – which had itself presided over the death of 10 million Congolese from forced labour and mass murder in the previous couple of decades. German colonialists had carried out systematic genocide in what is now Namibia in the same period.   As to international law, Britain"s disdain for it was demonstrated when Germany had asked by what right it claimed territory in Africa a few years before. London refused to reply. The answer was obvious: brute force. This was the "liberal" global order for which, in the words of the war poet Wilfred Owen, the ruling classes "slew half the seed of Europe, one by one".   In reality, it wasn"t just the seed of Europe they sacrificed, but hundreds of thousands of troops from their colonies as well. And in case there were any doubt that all the main combatants were in the land-grabbing expansion game, Britain and France then divvied up the defeated German and Ottoman empires between them, from Palestine to Cameroon, without a thought for small nations rights, laying the ground for future disasters in the process.   Gove and his fellow war apologists worry that satirical shows such as Blackadder have sapped patriotism by portraying the war as "a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite". The incompetence and cynicism of generals and politicians certainly had horrific results. But it was the nature of the war itself that was most depraved.   Fortunately, the revisionists lost the argument among the public long ago – just as Gove has largely lost his battle to impose a tub-thumping imperial agenda on the school history curriculum. They will keep trying though, because history wars are about the future as much as the past – and so long as imperial conflict is discredited, future foreign military interventions and occupations will be difficult to sell.   For the rest of us, this year"s anniversary should be a reminder that empire in all its forms, militarism and national chauvinism lead to bloodshed and disaster.   http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/08/first-world-war-imperial-bloodbath-warning-noble-cause http://www.theguardian.com/profile/seumasmilne   * Australia"s forgotten war.   There is far too little, if any, commemoration of Australia’s war between the settlers and the original inhabitants, historian Henry Reynolds argues. He says that until those conflicts are fully acknowledged, in the same way that our overseas battles have been, reconciliation will never be complete.   The 19th century explorer Edward Eyre wrote of Indigenous courage: "...I have seen many instances of an open manly intrepidity of manner and bearing, and a proud unquailing glance of eye, which instinctively stamped upon my mind the conviction that the individuals before me were very brave men".   http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/australia27s-forgotten-war/4835842 Visit the related web page
	What is Social and Solidarity Economy and Why Does It Matter? by UN Research Institute for Social Development   The Potential and Limits of Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE).   This series of articles by scholars and practitioners working on a broad range of issues within the field of SSE is one of several activities in the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) inquiry on “Potential and Limits of Social and Solidarity Economy”.   These contributions present in a succinct manner a variety of perspectives, including: the nature and impacts of different organizational forms, for example, cooperatives, women’s self-help groups, fair trade networks, informal workers, social entrepreneurship and social enterprise; the prospects for realizing the potential of SSE in different institutional and political contexts.   The articles are published as part of the UNRISD conference “Potential and Limits of Social and Solidarity Economy”, in collaboration with the International Labour Organization and the UN Non-Governmental Liaison Service.   What is Social and Solidarity Economy and Why does it Matter? UNRISD Deputy Director Peter Utting introduces the theme.   I’ve long been interested in the potential and limits of collective action—of people organizing and mobilizing through associations, unions, cooperatives, community organizations, fairtrade networks and so on. The Sandinista “revolution” soon gave way to the “neoliberal” 1990s. As in much of the world, collective action went on the backburner or assumed new forms via NGO networks and identity politics.   Fast forward two decades and we are witnessing a significant rebound in collective action associated with workers, producers and consumers. Whether in response to global crises (finance and food), the structural conditions of precarious employment or new opportunities for cultural expression and social interaction afforded by the internet age, old and new forms are on the rise.   The term social and solidarity economy (SSE) is increasingly being used to refer to a broad range of organizations that are distinguished from conventional for-profit enterprise, entrepreneurship and informal economy by two core features.   First, they have explicit economic and social (and often environmental) objectives. Second, they involve varying forms of co-operative, associative and solidarity relations. They include, for example, cooperatives, mutual associations, NGOs engaged in income generating activities, women’s self-help groups, community forestry and other organizations, associations of informal sector workers, social enterprise and fair trade organizations and networks.   In addition to diversification, we see signs of upscaling. SSE appears to be moving beyond its niche, peripheral, project or community-level status, and becoming more significant in terms of macro-economic, commercial and social-economic indicators, as charted in a 2011 ILO report:   In the UK some 62,000 social enterprises contribute £24 billion ($37.1billion) to the economy and employ 800,000 people.   In Europe; 2 million SSE organizations represent about 10% of all companies.   In India, over 30 million people (mainly women) are organized in over 2.2 million self-help groups; and the country’s largest food marketing corporation, the cooperative organization Amul, has 3.1 million producer members and an annual revenue of $2.5 billion.   In Nepal, 5 million forest users are organized in the country’s largest civil society organization.   The global fairtrade market has grown to $6.4 billion) and involves some 1.2 million workers and farmers producing certified products.   Mutual benefit societies provide health and social protection services to 170 million people worldwide.   Beyond the statistics, why the growing interest in SSE? Theory and anecdotal evidence tell us that such an approach can be a key mechanism through which poor or disempowered people in society gain greater control over resources and decision-making processes that affect their lives.   Economists and political scientists have long espoused the benefits that can derive from co-operation or group behaviour in terms of addressing market failures and making demands on more powerful entities. Sociologists have emphasized other virtues related to social cohesion, identity and job satisfaction.   But the contemporary interest in SSE also relates to the fact that we are living in an era that seems to be crying out for new models of development. Not only have we to deal with multiple and recurring crises (finance, food and energy), but there is growing recognition that today’s agenda has to be much more encompassing.   Some may hark back to the days of post WWII “embedded liberalism”, of welfare states protecting citizens and corporations upholding some principles and practices of “decent work”. But for all its benefits and ongoing pertinence, this model ignored some key issues related to gender equality and environmental pollution, and is struggling to reproduce itself in contexts of economic liberalization and informalization of labour markets.   The discussions and debates taking place in the build-up to 2015—the date that has been set for a new or revised set of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—signal that the old development formula of economic growth plus social protection is no longer sufficient.   Other aspects, associated with the realization of rights, empowerment, equality, women’s care burden, and transformations in production and consumption patterns, need to be factored in.   The theoretical attraction of social and solidarity economy lies precisely in the ways it lends itself to addressing these multiple dimensions of development. It simultaneously fosters economic dynamism, social and environmental protection and socio-political empowerment.   But achieving in practice what is promised on paper is another ballgame. SSE’s recent revival has been, organic, a largely grassroots phenomenon. And therein lies the rub—in two respects. First, collective action needs to connect at multiple scales via networks, movements and alliances.   If the SSE is to be sustained, enabled and scaled-up on terms compatible with its values and objectives, action cannot remain local; it must cohere at other levels (municipal, provincial, national, regional and global) where governance, advocacy and politics play out.   Second, in order to expand and really move beyond the fringe, the SSE must interact far more with states, for-profit enterprise and global value chains. Such interactions inevitably generate tensions and dilemmas given differences in development priorities and approaches, as well as differentials in bargaining power.   For a graphic illustration of these tensions, look no further than fair-trade. In 2011 there was a major split in the international fair trade movement as the US labeling organization (then known as Transfair USA) left the international federation, FLO (since renamed Fairtrade International).   Closer integration with powerful market actors underpinned the split. Fair-trade had expanded significantly over the years but quite different approaches were being promoted. The US organization leaned towards engagement with corporations like Starbucks and was keen to source from large commercial tea and other plantations, something not possible under FLO rules.   Such relationships with big business had implications for the price that buyers were prepared to pay to small farmers and the quality of sustainability standards.   Meanwhile, various labeling organizations and producer groups that were key stakeholders in FLO wanted to stick to the original principles and practices of fair trade, based on smallholder empowerment and agro-ecology.   What immediate policy implications stem from this reflection? Governments and international organizations clearly need to be paying far more attention to the SSE, and question how its developmental and emancipatory potential can be realized. And they should also be asking themselves whether current priorities or biases in policy approach in the field of development are not missing, or indeed undermining, what could be a major new game in town.   These include the tendency to focus on i) individuals or entrepreneurship, rather than groups; ii) economic, rather than political, empowerment; iii) idealize the integration of small producers and communities in global value chains; and iv) social and environmental protection, rather than equality and emancipation. http://www.unrisd.org/unrisd/website/projects.nsf/%28httpAuxPages%29/93128CF1C037CFB9C1257B1D0054960F?OpenDocument&category=Think+Pieces   Combating Poverty and Inequality (Beyond 2015 Brief No. 1)   A set of social development goals agreed by world leaders at the Millennium Summit placed poverty reduction at the heart of the international development agenda. Ongoing crises, and the social unrest they generate, have now forced inequality into the centre of attention of national and global leaders.   The level and pattern of inequality within and between countries is now widely recognized as the critical problem—hindering inclusive growth, undermining social cohesion and acting as a barrier to poverty reduction and thus the achievement of the MDGs.   UNRISD research findings, based on an extensive inquiry that examined poverty and inequality from a developmental and social policy perspective, provide key lessons that need to be underpin a transformative development agenda beyond 2015.   UNRISD’s “Beyond 2015” Briefs contribute research-based insight and analysis to the dialogue around the post–MDG development agenda. They highlight key information in a concise format, with references to further in-depth reading, useful to policy makers, activists and academics alike. http://www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/(httpPublications)/C7515ADB78142BADC1257B08004CA838?OpenDocument   Inequalities and the Post-2015 Development Agenda (Beyond 2015 Brief No. 2)   Income inequalities between and within countries have worsened in recent decades. Gender inequalities are narrowing at a snail’s pace. Citizenship and location continue to determine life chances, despite the increasing integration of economies. Policy instruments to promote equality of outcome have largely been neglected in the name of approaches that claim to create “equality of opportunity”.   This has failed to stem the tide of inequality. Current social discontent and distrust of government highlight the urgency of addressing inequality head-on: it should be high on the post-2015 development agenda, both as a goal in itself and reflected in targets for other goals.   This text was originally published as UNRISD Research and Policy Brief 15 (October 2012). It is being reissued because of its continued relevance to current discussions shaping the post-2015 development agenda. http://www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/(httpPublications)/ACFC5542FBD29F44C1257B08005902E4?OpenDocument   Combating Poverty and Inequality. (Project from: 2006 to 2010)   Combating Poverty and Inequality, was a major research initiative which aimed to contribute to debates on policy approaches to poverty reduction within the context of a post-MDG framework. The preparation of the report drew heavily on the project on Poverty Reduction and Policy Regimes, as well as previous UNRISD work on Social Policy in a Development Context.   Many contemporary approaches treat poverty and inequality as residual outcomes of wider growth processes that can be addressed through discrete and targeted policy interventions. They often fail to consider key institutional, policy and political dimensions that may be both causes of poverty and inequality, and obstacles to their reduction.   Such approaches run counter to the evidence from countries that have successfully reduced poverty over relatively short time periods. The research showed instead that progress occurred principally through state-directed strategies which combined economic development objectives with active social policies in ways that were complementary and synergistic. It also showed how poverty outcomes are shaped by complex interconnections of ideas, institutions, policies and practices in the social, economic and political spheres. http://www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BB128/(httpProjects)/791B1580A0FFF8E5C12574670042C091?OpenDocument Visit the related web page
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