Transparency in law enforcement

Hereford Times October 15 comment ‘Enforcement should be transparent’ informs us of police procedure and guidelines while a take-away outlet subjected to Covid-19 rules infringement fine of £1000 remains anonymous. Comment concludes, “Such secrecy risks undermining faith in a system that effectively imposes punishments without the public oversight that is part of the justice system.”

Hereford takeaway breaks 10pm hospitality curfew

There are potential dangers in ‘naming and shaming’, but identifying targeted ‘culprits’ can help highlight prejudices on the part of those doing the targeting.

At start of secondary schooling in Birmingham in 1965 I was subjected to 'shaming' by some peers after Year 1 class teacher informed those new little fish in a big pool who had shifted from being big fish in smaller ponds, that I had a disability. “Spas,” "The Handicap" and “Mongol Spastic” I was subsequently called in the parlance of the time. The 'shaming' in a predominantly White school took a new twist when I mentioned that I had been born in West Africa: I was then called ‘The White Wog’ and told that my father was “still swinging through the trees in Africa.” (My White UK national parents had just separated and I was an outsider or ‘immigrant’ upon moving from primary schooling in Staffordshire.)

We live in more enlightened times, both in terms of racial equality and the understandings brought about by the Social Model of Disability, which states that disability arises from social structures and prejudices rather than from culpable failings on the part of the person with an impairment.

But how enlightened are our police? In August, Liberty — formerly the National Council for Civil Liberties — revealed with the aid of Crime Prosecution Service data — that no police detentions of potentially infectious people under the Coronavirus Act were correct, while police were up to seven times more likely to fine people of colour than white people.(1)

Alan Wheatley

Edward Said was no 'tree-hugger' but opposed the roots of global warming

17 people on a boat off the Dover coast — BBC photo

"Bombs, drones and boats follow the [fossil fuel 'rich']
'Aridity Line'" — Naomi Klein

UK news broadcasts are currently dominated by reports of 'illegal migrants' attempting to enter the UK illegally, and earlier this year I witnessed intense floods in Herefordshire where I now live. Against that backdrop, a London friend currently helping his mum in Kent, sent me this from London Review of Books website, in which author Naomi Klein speaks about the 'othering' — i.e., treatment of 'illegal migrants' etc. as effectively subhuman — that legitimises treating people as such.

Klein also mentions the UK Government avoidance of addressing the real issues behind the flooding as key for a right wing media industry to use the 'othering' as a diversion against thinking of the consequences of global warming as a global issue, the roots of which are in what is falsely declared as "human nature."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n11/naomi-klein/let-them-drown

A real "wow!" of an essay, tying together media myths, greenwashes and political acuity in an educational and informative way. It's long, but you can listen to it instead if preferred.

I'll never look at carbon capture of conservation zones again without considering them as "the face of the new enclosure acts"...my oversimplification of her statements. You'll probably be stunned by the JNF section too, but I know you're better informed than me on such matters.

 The talk he was referring to by Naomi Klein was actually given in June 2016, but the recency of the recurrence of such matters helps enormously in explaining why I overlooked the headline in following Naomi Klein's text down the page as I listened at

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n11/naomi-klein/let-them-drown

and thought she was talking of the early 2020 floods in England and the current drive to get the Royal Navy to stop the boat people from landing on our shores.

I sat riveted talking to Naomi Klein's citing of why the work of Edward Said is invaluable in tackling the roots of global warming, that take up about 47 minutes of the online recording, and took a break from the full 1:27:42 worth to blog this up now.

There is, of course, so much to quote from and I'm due for a late lunch, but shall conclude direct reference to her talk with this extract:

Fossil fuels, unlike renewable forms of energy such as wind and solar, are not widely distributed but highly concentrated in very specific locations, and those locations have a bad habit of being in other people’s countries. Particularly that most potent and precious of fossil fuels: oil. This is why the project of Orientalism, of othering Arab and Muslim people, has been the silent partner of our oil dependence from the start – and inextricable, therefore, from the blowback that is climate change. If nations and peoples are regarded as other – exotic, primitive, bloodthirsty, as Said documented in the 1970s – it is far easier to wage wars and stage coups when they get the crazy idea that they should control their own oil in their own interests. In 1953 it was the British-US collaboration to overthrow the democratically elected government of Muhammad Mossadegh after he nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP). In 2003, exactly fifty years later, it was another UK-US co-production – the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. The reverberations from each intervention continue to jolt our world, as do the reverberations from the successful burning of all that oil. The Middle East is now squeezed in the pincer of violence caused by fossil fuels, on the one hand, and the impact of burning those fossil fuels on the other.

 In conclusion, I draw attention to these articles at New Internationalist magazine about attacks by Erdogan's Turkey with Trump's complicity on Kurds in North-Eastern Afghanistan and Brazilian President Bolsonaro's attempts to assimilate the indigenous people of the Amazon as fellow travellers on the road to climate catastrophe.

Betrayed again

Water as a weapon of war