Could the Israeli government be buying favors from British members of parliament (MPs)?
I spent some time today wading through the register of financial interests for MPs from the Conservatives, the party of prime minister David Cameron. These showed that a number of them took part in a trip to the Middle East in early summer that was funded by Israel’s foreign ministry.
Declarations made by Chloe Smith, Aidan Burley, James Morris and Neil Parish cite estimates that the cost of their visit from 29 May to 3 June amounted to £1,548 ($2,429) each. They report that £574 of that sum came from the Israeli foreign ministry and the remaining £974 from an internal party group called Conservative Friends of Israel.
It is striking that the trip occurred at a time when Britain was in the process of changing its law on universal jurisdiction (the principle that a country may prosecute grave human rights abuses irrespective of where they occur) at the behest of Israel. In 2009, Tzipi Livni, Israel’s ex-foreign minister, chickened out of a trip to London because some political activists had sought a warrant for her arrest over Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza. Under a revised law that entered into force last week, new bureaucratic obstacles have been placed in the way of apprehending war criminals on British soil.
Watering down war crimes law
The Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), which organized the MPs’ trip, has been working diligently to have the universal jurisdiction law watered down to the liking of Israel’s politicians. And it is hard to believe that the fate of the new bill wasn’t discussed during the visit.
While the CFI likes to gloat of how it can attract 150 parliamentarians, 500 businesspeople and Cameron himself to its annual lunch, it is less transparent about the sources of its money.
According to the CFI’s website, both the summer trip and a previous one that it organized for MPs in February featured tours of production facilities run by the arms company Elbit. So I called the CFI to ask if Elbit is one of the group’s donors. “I don’t have to give you those details,” a spokeswoman told me.
I pressed a bit further and enquired why her group does not publish accounts. “According to the law, we don’t have to do that,” the spokeswoman replied, before calling a halt to our conversation.
I have also contacted Elbit, requesting if it provides support to CFI. I am still awaiting the firm’s response.
Elbit, let us never forget, is the maker of the Hermes drones that were used to attack civilians during Operation Cast Lead. The tacit support for that attack from both of Britain’s largest parties, Labor and the Conservatives, can partly be explained by how a consortium involving Elbit has provided the British army with a Hermes 450 drone for use in Afghanistan. Amnesty International has reported that engines used in Elbit’s drones have been fitted by a plant belonging to the company near England’s second largest city, Birmingham.
With economic and neo-imperial interests at stake, it is little wonder that the well-heeled Conservatives are not bothered by the plight of Gaza’s “little people”.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada, 20 September 2011.
Showing posts with label David Cameron. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Cameron. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
EU turns blind eye to Palestinian citizens in Israel
Answering questions from YouTube viewers over the past few weeks, Binyamin Netanyahu depicted Israel as an oasis of interracial harmony in a region of strife. "There's only one country in the heart of the Middle East that has no tremors, no protests,” the Israeli prime minister said. “That's Israel. Because we're the only one where we respect human rights. The only one that respects the rights of Arab citizens. Twenty percent of our population are Arabs. And they enjoy full civil rights in Israel. It's the only place in this entire vast expanse where Arabs and Muslims enjoy complete freedom and complete equality before the law."
It was a statement of characteristic chutzpah. Despite his claim that Israel “respects the rights of Arab citizens”, its national parliament – the Knesset – had just approved two pieces of legislation that discriminated against the 1.4 million Palestinians living within Israel’s internationally accepted borders.
First, on 22 March, a bill was passed to withdraw state funding from any institution that commemorates the Nakbah, the massacres and forced displacement of Palestinians that led to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Then, six days later, the Knesset approved a new law, which allows for Israeli citizenship to be removed when someone is convicted of terrorism or treason. Opponents of the law noted that it was directed at Palestinians and that it was virtually unthinkable that Jewish Israelis would have their citizenship revoked as a result.
Netanyahu’s comments were made ahead of a short European tour, confined to Germany and the Czech Republic. Predictably, they did not elicit any protest from the political leaders he met in Berlin and Prague. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, went out of her way to exude warmth towards her guest. Insisting she is “never irritated” by Netanyahu (notwithstanding reports they had exchanged cross words in February over the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories), Merkel described her contacts with him as “fun”.
Merkel’s silence over the treatment of the Palestinian minority in Israel is mirrored by the stance of the entire 27-country European Union.
Since Catherine Ashton was appointed the EU’s foreign policy chief in 2009, she has not issued even one statement focusing exclusively on the plight of Palestinians within Israel. Her reticence stands in marked contrast to her hasty reaction to incidents that affect Israeli Jews. For example, she swiftly condemned the rockets fired by Hamas from Gaza into southern Israel on 7 April.
Ashton frequently meets Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, whose party Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Our Home) has been part of the country’s ruling coalition for the past two years. During that time, Lieberman and his colleagues have been the main sponsors of about 20 laws and bills designed to worsen the discrimination faced by Israel’s Palestinian minority.
In 1973, the United Nations recognised that the crime of apartheid did not only apply to South Africa but also to other situations where one racial group dominated over another. Israel has long enshrined its racism against Palestinians in quasi-constitutional legislation. The 1950 Law of Return enables Jews throughout the world to move to Israel and gain citizenship. Yet Palestinians forced to leave their homes during the Nakbah are denied that right.
When I asked Ashton’s spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic why EU representatives never utter the words “Israel” and “apartheid” in the same sentence, she replied: “Israel is a democratic country and a partner of the European Union. Human right issues and possible shortcomings in this respect are discussed in the regular dialogue we have with the Israeli authorities.”
Kocijancic would be well-advised to read an interview with the Israeli historian and political dissident Ilan Pappé published earlier this month by New Internationalist magazine. “Israel is what we in political science call a herrenvolk democracy, democracy only for the masters,” Pappé said. “The fact that you allow people to participate in the formal side of democracy, namely to vote or to be elected, is meaningless if you don’t give them any share in the common good or in the common resources of the state, or if you discriminate against them despite the fact that you allow them to participate in the elections. On almost every level – from official legislation through governmental practices to social and cultural attitudes – Israel is only a democracy for one ethnic group.”
The EU’s unwillingness to address the treatment of Palestinians within Israel was exposed in a report published in February by Adalah, a minority rights organisation based in Haifa, and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network. It noted that the rights of the Palestinian minority in Israel are not even mentioned in the “association agreement” between the EU and Israel that came into effect in 2000 and sets out the main contractual basis of relations between the two sides.
That omission was partly compensated for by an “action plan” on Israel approved by top-level EU representatives in 2005. The plan listed minority rights as one of the topics which the European Commission (the EU’s executive) and Israel were prepared to hold discussions. While Brussels officials appear to be monitoring the situation facing the Palestinian minority in Israel, “the Commission’s language has neither consistently hardened nor softened over the years,” the February report says.
“The EU is not willing to compromise its relationship with Israel,” Nathalie Tocci, the report’s author, told me. “This means it's unwilling to recognize Israel as not being a democracy. It is ready to criticise Israel's democratic deficiencies - regarding human and minority rights - but would view these problems as analogous to those within some European countries too.”
The socio-economic conditions in which Palestinians inside Israel live also put them at a disadvantage. Throughout Israel, more than 20% of households live below the poverty line. But the proportion rises to 50% for the Palestinian minority in general and to 80% for Bedouins.
When Lieberman visited Brussels in February, the EU issued a 45-paragraph statement on its relations with Israel. It called on the Israeli government to implement the recommendations of a panel chaired by Eliezer Goldberg, a retired Israeli judge, on Bedouin communities in the Negev. Issued in 2008, the Goldberg Commission report found that 62,000 Bedouins in 46 villages unrecognised by Israel were living in an “unbearable state”. It urged Israel to confer a legal status on those villages.
Lending its support to a commission mainly dominated by Israeli establishment figures was an easy step for the EU to take. Unsurprisingly, it did not go further by denouncing the role of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in destroying Bedouin villages such as Al Araqib, which has suffered more than 20 demolitions since July last year.
Even though the JNF’s bulldozers have been used in those demolitions and other acts of dispossession against Bedouins, the fund is regarded as a charity by some 50 countries worldwide. The JNF held a central position in the Zionist movement well before the state of Israel was established and used that position to advocate vigorously in favour of ethnic cleansing. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, one of its leading figures Yosef Weitz argued repeatedly that Palestinians should be forced out of Palestine.
The JNF has been given direct ownership of 13% of the land of Israel and a role in managing most of the remainder. It is particularly influential in Britain, where David Cameron, the prime minister, is one of its patrons. On its website, the JNF presents itself as a humanitarian and environmental organisation dedicated to planting trees in Israel.
“The JNF is involved in the illegal expropriation of Palestinian land and the concealing of Palestinian villages beneath parks and forests,” said Michael Kalmanovitz from the Stop the JNF Campaign in Britain. “The fact that David Cameron is one of its patrons is a disgrace.”
Hassan Jabareen, director of Adalah, said that both the EU and the US have tended to concentrate only on Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza and not on the Palestinian minority within Israel. By turning a blind eye to the Palestinian minority in Israel, the EU has failed to learn important lessons from the experience of its own member states. “You couldn’t have got peace between the UK and the Republic of Ireland without addressing the situation in Northern Ireland,” Jabareen said. “Europe should understand that.”
In his new book Boycott Divestment Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, Omar Barghouti argues that Westerners promoting conflict resolution in the Middle East have not grappled with the underlying injustices. “The main culprit is the insistence of Israel and successive US governments on exploiting the current massive power imbalance to impose a peace devoid of justice and human rights on the Palestinians, an unjust ‘solution’ that fails to address our basic rights under international law and undermines our inalienable right to self-determination,” he writes.
Barghouti is correct to pin much of the blame on Washington. Yet Europe’s contribution to this dismal state of affairs should not be overlooked, either. As the biggest destination for Israeli exports, the EU could have made the strengthening of its political and economic links with Israel conditional on improving the situation of all three groups that comprise the Palestinian people. These are the Palestinians in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza; those within Israel’s internationally accepted borders; and refugees in the diaspora. The EU’s refusal to attach such conditions exposes its never-ending declarations of support for human rights as hollow.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 12 April 2011
It was a statement of characteristic chutzpah. Despite his claim that Israel “respects the rights of Arab citizens”, its national parliament – the Knesset – had just approved two pieces of legislation that discriminated against the 1.4 million Palestinians living within Israel’s internationally accepted borders.
First, on 22 March, a bill was passed to withdraw state funding from any institution that commemorates the Nakbah, the massacres and forced displacement of Palestinians that led to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Then, six days later, the Knesset approved a new law, which allows for Israeli citizenship to be removed when someone is convicted of terrorism or treason. Opponents of the law noted that it was directed at Palestinians and that it was virtually unthinkable that Jewish Israelis would have their citizenship revoked as a result.
Netanyahu’s comments were made ahead of a short European tour, confined to Germany and the Czech Republic. Predictably, they did not elicit any protest from the political leaders he met in Berlin and Prague. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, went out of her way to exude warmth towards her guest. Insisting she is “never irritated” by Netanyahu (notwithstanding reports they had exchanged cross words in February over the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories), Merkel described her contacts with him as “fun”.
Merkel’s silence over the treatment of the Palestinian minority in Israel is mirrored by the stance of the entire 27-country European Union.
Since Catherine Ashton was appointed the EU’s foreign policy chief in 2009, she has not issued even one statement focusing exclusively on the plight of Palestinians within Israel. Her reticence stands in marked contrast to her hasty reaction to incidents that affect Israeli Jews. For example, she swiftly condemned the rockets fired by Hamas from Gaza into southern Israel on 7 April.
Ashton frequently meets Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, whose party Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Our Home) has been part of the country’s ruling coalition for the past two years. During that time, Lieberman and his colleagues have been the main sponsors of about 20 laws and bills designed to worsen the discrimination faced by Israel’s Palestinian minority.
In 1973, the United Nations recognised that the crime of apartheid did not only apply to South Africa but also to other situations where one racial group dominated over another. Israel has long enshrined its racism against Palestinians in quasi-constitutional legislation. The 1950 Law of Return enables Jews throughout the world to move to Israel and gain citizenship. Yet Palestinians forced to leave their homes during the Nakbah are denied that right.
When I asked Ashton’s spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic why EU representatives never utter the words “Israel” and “apartheid” in the same sentence, she replied: “Israel is a democratic country and a partner of the European Union. Human right issues and possible shortcomings in this respect are discussed in the regular dialogue we have with the Israeli authorities.”
Kocijancic would be well-advised to read an interview with the Israeli historian and political dissident Ilan Pappé published earlier this month by New Internationalist magazine. “Israel is what we in political science call a herrenvolk democracy, democracy only for the masters,” Pappé said. “The fact that you allow people to participate in the formal side of democracy, namely to vote or to be elected, is meaningless if you don’t give them any share in the common good or in the common resources of the state, or if you discriminate against them despite the fact that you allow them to participate in the elections. On almost every level – from official legislation through governmental practices to social and cultural attitudes – Israel is only a democracy for one ethnic group.”
The EU’s unwillingness to address the treatment of Palestinians within Israel was exposed in a report published in February by Adalah, a minority rights organisation based in Haifa, and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network. It noted that the rights of the Palestinian minority in Israel are not even mentioned in the “association agreement” between the EU and Israel that came into effect in 2000 and sets out the main contractual basis of relations between the two sides.
That omission was partly compensated for by an “action plan” on Israel approved by top-level EU representatives in 2005. The plan listed minority rights as one of the topics which the European Commission (the EU’s executive) and Israel were prepared to hold discussions. While Brussels officials appear to be monitoring the situation facing the Palestinian minority in Israel, “the Commission’s language has neither consistently hardened nor softened over the years,” the February report says.
“The EU is not willing to compromise its relationship with Israel,” Nathalie Tocci, the report’s author, told me. “This means it's unwilling to recognize Israel as not being a democracy. It is ready to criticise Israel's democratic deficiencies - regarding human and minority rights - but would view these problems as analogous to those within some European countries too.”
The socio-economic conditions in which Palestinians inside Israel live also put them at a disadvantage. Throughout Israel, more than 20% of households live below the poverty line. But the proportion rises to 50% for the Palestinian minority in general and to 80% for Bedouins.
When Lieberman visited Brussels in February, the EU issued a 45-paragraph statement on its relations with Israel. It called on the Israeli government to implement the recommendations of a panel chaired by Eliezer Goldberg, a retired Israeli judge, on Bedouin communities in the Negev. Issued in 2008, the Goldberg Commission report found that 62,000 Bedouins in 46 villages unrecognised by Israel were living in an “unbearable state”. It urged Israel to confer a legal status on those villages.
Lending its support to a commission mainly dominated by Israeli establishment figures was an easy step for the EU to take. Unsurprisingly, it did not go further by denouncing the role of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in destroying Bedouin villages such as Al Araqib, which has suffered more than 20 demolitions since July last year.
Even though the JNF’s bulldozers have been used in those demolitions and other acts of dispossession against Bedouins, the fund is regarded as a charity by some 50 countries worldwide. The JNF held a central position in the Zionist movement well before the state of Israel was established and used that position to advocate vigorously in favour of ethnic cleansing. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, one of its leading figures Yosef Weitz argued repeatedly that Palestinians should be forced out of Palestine.
The JNF has been given direct ownership of 13% of the land of Israel and a role in managing most of the remainder. It is particularly influential in Britain, where David Cameron, the prime minister, is one of its patrons. On its website, the JNF presents itself as a humanitarian and environmental organisation dedicated to planting trees in Israel.
“The JNF is involved in the illegal expropriation of Palestinian land and the concealing of Palestinian villages beneath parks and forests,” said Michael Kalmanovitz from the Stop the JNF Campaign in Britain. “The fact that David Cameron is one of its patrons is a disgrace.”
Hassan Jabareen, director of Adalah, said that both the EU and the US have tended to concentrate only on Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza and not on the Palestinian minority within Israel. By turning a blind eye to the Palestinian minority in Israel, the EU has failed to learn important lessons from the experience of its own member states. “You couldn’t have got peace between the UK and the Republic of Ireland without addressing the situation in Northern Ireland,” Jabareen said. “Europe should understand that.”
In his new book Boycott Divestment Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, Omar Barghouti argues that Westerners promoting conflict resolution in the Middle East have not grappled with the underlying injustices. “The main culprit is the insistence of Israel and successive US governments on exploiting the current massive power imbalance to impose a peace devoid of justice and human rights on the Palestinians, an unjust ‘solution’ that fails to address our basic rights under international law and undermines our inalienable right to self-determination,” he writes.
Barghouti is correct to pin much of the blame on Washington. Yet Europe’s contribution to this dismal state of affairs should not be overlooked, either. As the biggest destination for Israeli exports, the EU could have made the strengthening of its political and economic links with Israel conditional on improving the situation of all three groups that comprise the Palestinian people. These are the Palestinians in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza; those within Israel’s internationally accepted borders; and refugees in the diaspora. The EU’s refusal to attach such conditions exposes its never-ending declarations of support for human rights as hollow.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 12 April 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
Put merchants of death out of business
Over the past few years I have developed an unhealthy obsession with the arms industry. Just as I tend to become transfixed in art galleries, the images of precision-guided missiles in “defence” magazines can leave me with a pleasantly blank sensation. That’s when I have to shake myself and recall that these photogenic instruments were designed for the sole purpose of ending human life.
The promotional copy pumped out by weapons manufacturers renders satire redundant. In February, Belgium’s FN Herstal displayed some of its shiny new assault pistols and submachine guns at the IDEX arms fair in Abu Dhabi. An explanatory note told us that the Liège-based firm “contributes to maintain and restore international peace and security”.
One day after the exhibition opened, a video appeared on YouTube. It showed a Libyan civilian clasping one of the “special” weapons held by forces under Muammar Gaddafi’s control. Branded an FN-303, the weapon was made by the aforementioned Herstal, as part of its contribution to international peace and security. About 2,000 such weapons were authorised for export to Libya by the Walloon regional government in June 2009. This is by no means the first time that Herstal has profited from grubby deals. Automatic rifles made by the company were found in eastern Congo in 2005, indicating they were used in a war that left nearly 400,000 people dead over the previous two years.
In a prescient report published in November last, the Dutch Campaign Against the Arms Trade cited Libya as one of the clearest cases where EU governments attach greater importance to “export promotion” than to ethical considerations when licensing the arms trade. When Gaddafi was the West’s favourite bogeyman in the mid-1980s, the European Community imposed an arms embargo on Libya. But as soon as it was lifted in 2004, arms exporters scrambled to do business with their new buddies. The British trade association Defence Manufacturers Association rhapsodised in 2005 about how Libya was a “relatively sophisticated customer with a political will to procure equipment”. The “relatively sophisticated” Gaddafi could be persuaded to be anything: one British deal to supply an elite brigade in Libya’s army was worth €100 million.
Since 1998, the EU’s governments have been committed to observing a “code of conduct” on arms exports. Made legally binding a decade later, it requires that weapons are not sold to countries where they are likely to be used for internal repression or to exacerbate regional tensions. Like more than a few policy documents, it looks great on paper and is routinely violated in practice.
It is not difficult to see why. Data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that the arms trade has been largely cushioned from the global recession. In 2009, the volume of sales for the world’s top 100 arms companies amounted to $401 billion, a rise of almost $15 billion over the preceding year. One-third of these companies have their headquarters in Western Europe; they include BAE, EADS, Finmeccanica and Thales.
With their deep pockets, the representatives of these companies have no problem twisting arms in the Brussels bureaucracy and in national capitals of EU countries. Due to their diligent schmoozing, support for the arms industry is being treated as an enterprise promotion dossier in the nominally civilian European Commission. The EU’s multi-annual “framework programme” for scientific research has also been partly hijacked by the arms industry. A little-noticed study completed at the European Parliament’s request in 2010 decried a clash of interests: the same arms companies that persuaded the EU authorities to allocate science grants for “security research” after the 11 September 2001 attacks have been the biggest recipients of those same grants. Out of a sample of 91 projects with a total value of €443 million analysed for that study, the French firm Thales bagged well over half (€254 million) of the cash on offer.
Top-level politicians often double up as salespeople for the arms industry. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, is pushing for the arms embargo slapped on China after the Tiananmen Square massacre to be scrapped on the grounds that relations with Beijing need to be nurtured for strategic reasons. Proving that she suffers from the same lack of scruples as other top players in New Labour, she is more concerned with drumming up business for the arms industry than in China’s oppression of Uighurs in Xinjiang or Buddhists in Tibet. Proving, too, that mollycoddling the arms industry transcends party lines in British politics, David Cameron toured the Persian Gulf last month with a few of his country’s leading arms traders. Critics of the trade are “completely at odds with reality”, the prime minister thundered.
It is right that a fresh ban on weapons sales to Libya has now been introduced. But we know that such bans can be lifted on the flimsiest of pretexts. The EU officially stopped selling weapons to Uzbekistan after its troops mowed down peaceful protesters at Andizhan in 2005. Four years later, the embargo was removed because the Uzbek authorities were deemed useful allies for NATO’s imperial war in Afghanistan.
At the United Nations, a July 2012 deadline has been set for a global treaty to regulate the arms trade. As weapons-sellers are so powerful, there is only one way to combat them: by massive public pressure. Everything must be done to put merchants of death out of business.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 6-12 March 2011.
The promotional copy pumped out by weapons manufacturers renders satire redundant. In February, Belgium’s FN Herstal displayed some of its shiny new assault pistols and submachine guns at the IDEX arms fair in Abu Dhabi. An explanatory note told us that the Liège-based firm “contributes to maintain and restore international peace and security”.
One day after the exhibition opened, a video appeared on YouTube. It showed a Libyan civilian clasping one of the “special” weapons held by forces under Muammar Gaddafi’s control. Branded an FN-303, the weapon was made by the aforementioned Herstal, as part of its contribution to international peace and security. About 2,000 such weapons were authorised for export to Libya by the Walloon regional government in June 2009. This is by no means the first time that Herstal has profited from grubby deals. Automatic rifles made by the company were found in eastern Congo in 2005, indicating they were used in a war that left nearly 400,000 people dead over the previous two years.
In a prescient report published in November last, the Dutch Campaign Against the Arms Trade cited Libya as one of the clearest cases where EU governments attach greater importance to “export promotion” than to ethical considerations when licensing the arms trade. When Gaddafi was the West’s favourite bogeyman in the mid-1980s, the European Community imposed an arms embargo on Libya. But as soon as it was lifted in 2004, arms exporters scrambled to do business with their new buddies. The British trade association Defence Manufacturers Association rhapsodised in 2005 about how Libya was a “relatively sophisticated customer with a political will to procure equipment”. The “relatively sophisticated” Gaddafi could be persuaded to be anything: one British deal to supply an elite brigade in Libya’s army was worth €100 million.
Since 1998, the EU’s governments have been committed to observing a “code of conduct” on arms exports. Made legally binding a decade later, it requires that weapons are not sold to countries where they are likely to be used for internal repression or to exacerbate regional tensions. Like more than a few policy documents, it looks great on paper and is routinely violated in practice.
It is not difficult to see why. Data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that the arms trade has been largely cushioned from the global recession. In 2009, the volume of sales for the world’s top 100 arms companies amounted to $401 billion, a rise of almost $15 billion over the preceding year. One-third of these companies have their headquarters in Western Europe; they include BAE, EADS, Finmeccanica and Thales.
With their deep pockets, the representatives of these companies have no problem twisting arms in the Brussels bureaucracy and in national capitals of EU countries. Due to their diligent schmoozing, support for the arms industry is being treated as an enterprise promotion dossier in the nominally civilian European Commission. The EU’s multi-annual “framework programme” for scientific research has also been partly hijacked by the arms industry. A little-noticed study completed at the European Parliament’s request in 2010 decried a clash of interests: the same arms companies that persuaded the EU authorities to allocate science grants for “security research” after the 11 September 2001 attacks have been the biggest recipients of those same grants. Out of a sample of 91 projects with a total value of €443 million analysed for that study, the French firm Thales bagged well over half (€254 million) of the cash on offer.
Top-level politicians often double up as salespeople for the arms industry. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, is pushing for the arms embargo slapped on China after the Tiananmen Square massacre to be scrapped on the grounds that relations with Beijing need to be nurtured for strategic reasons. Proving that she suffers from the same lack of scruples as other top players in New Labour, she is more concerned with drumming up business for the arms industry than in China’s oppression of Uighurs in Xinjiang or Buddhists in Tibet. Proving, too, that mollycoddling the arms industry transcends party lines in British politics, David Cameron toured the Persian Gulf last month with a few of his country’s leading arms traders. Critics of the trade are “completely at odds with reality”, the prime minister thundered.
It is right that a fresh ban on weapons sales to Libya has now been introduced. But we know that such bans can be lifted on the flimsiest of pretexts. The EU officially stopped selling weapons to Uzbekistan after its troops mowed down peaceful protesters at Andizhan in 2005. Four years later, the embargo was removed because the Uzbek authorities were deemed useful allies for NATO’s imperial war in Afghanistan.
At the United Nations, a July 2012 deadline has been set for a global treaty to regulate the arms trade. As weapons-sellers are so powerful, there is only one way to combat them: by massive public pressure. Everything must be done to put merchants of death out of business.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 6-12 March 2011.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Time to talk straight about corporate power
Straight-talking is such a hallmark of the North-East of England that it is listed as a tourist attraction by local authorities. Voters in the region might be interested, then, in reading the latest “declaration of interests” for their man in Brussels, Martin Callanan. It shows that the Conservative MEP undertook a “biofuels study visit to Malaysia” in May 2010. To his constituents, a “study visit” translates as a “junket” or a “jolly”.
Callanan’s expenses-paid trip was organised by the Malaysian embassy to the EU, which diligently promotes palm oil as essential for Europe’s transport needs. This week Callanan will return a favour to his hosts when he presents a paper he authored on “light commercial vehicles” (or, as his constituents call them, “vans”) during a session of the European Parliament. His paper advocates that there should be a special pollution target applying to those vans which can run on a blend of conventional petrol and biofuels.
Callanan’s paper is the Parliament’s official response to proposals on regulating emissions from vans published by the European Commission in 2009. Callanan purports to be a public representative, rather than a stooge for the private sector. How can it be right that he first behaves as a biofuels freeloader, then puts forward recommendations tailored to serve that industry?
A few months before he became Britain’s prime minister last year, David Cameron raged against the “far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money”. Cameron’s comments primarily related to domestic politics but they are equally valid when applied to his party’s MEPs, including Callanan.
A few years before he became prime minister, David Cameron tried to rebrand the Conservatives as an ecologically sound outfit. The behaviour of Callanan and other Tories underscores how cynical and hollow an exercise that was.
Along with his fellow Tory Malcolm Harbour, Callanan has been one of the most active participants in the Forum for Automobile and Society since its inception in 1999. The forum brings car-obsessed MEPs together with the manufacturers of their dream climate-changing machines. Both Harbour and Callanan have done nicely out of this far-too-cosy relationship (to use their leader’s words).
Harbour’s latest declaration of interests indicates that he no longer takes free gifts from his corporate chums. Nonetheless, he has spent much of his 12 years as an MEP doubling up as an adviser to the car industry and as a legislator on dossiers affecting that sector. He has attended Grand Prix racing as a guest of Jaguar and Toyota and been loaned a variety of models from different companies. Callanan, meanwhile, has admitted that he was given a discount by Ford when he bought a new car in 2006. No company gives a politician a perk without expecting something in return.
Whereas the Commission had proposed that an average new van should release no more than 135 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre by 2020, Callanan is pressing for a far less stringent target of 140g per km. His stance mirrors that of ACEA, the main umbrella group for car and van makers in Europe, which claims that it is being required to bring down emission levels too quickly.
ACEA deserves no sympathy. Although most sectors of the EU’s economy reduced their emissions of greenhouse gases between 1990 and 2007, there was a net increase of 185 million tonnes in the amount of carbon dioxide released by road transport over that period, according to the European Environment Agency. The urgent task of making cars and vans cleaner and more fuel efficient must not be stymied by a few Tories with a surfeit of testosterone.
In Bursting the Brussels Bubble, a book published last year by an alliance of transparency activists, this city was labelled a paradise for corporate lobbyists. On most weekdays, it is virtually impossible to walk through the European Parliament’s corridors without bumping into hordes of gung-ho gun-for-hires. Corporate interests massively outnumber champions of nature and the poor. An authoritative source told me recently that 700 access badges to the Parliament have been issued to the pharmaceutical industry. Public health advocates, in contrast, have less than 10.
The Parliament’s internal rules require that its members declare gifts they receive from governments or companies. Yet there are no comparable regulations obliging MEPs to divulge who writes the amendments that they seek to planned new legislation.
One of the most important dossiers considered by the Parliament’s economic and monetary affairs committee in 2010 related to the management of hedge funds. When this dossier faced a key vote in May last year, the committee had to grapple with 1,600 suggested amendments. Parliamentary insiders estimated that half of these were drafted by lobbyists representing the financial sector.
It is a measure of how far the Parliament can be removed from the real world that this appalling state of affairs was presented as a good thing. A clip on EuroparlTV, the assembly’s in-house channel, focused on the hedge fund dossier to explain what was called “the art of the amendment”.
David Earnshaw from the public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller featured on that piece arguing that the “tabling of amendments to some extent demonstrates the democratic process.” What nonsense. Allowing a corporate clique dictate how their industries should be regulated amounts to a subversion of the democratic process. If this carry-on is so prevalent in the EU’s only directly-elected institution, why should anyone trust the wider system?
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 13-19 February 2011
Callanan’s expenses-paid trip was organised by the Malaysian embassy to the EU, which diligently promotes palm oil as essential for Europe’s transport needs. This week Callanan will return a favour to his hosts when he presents a paper he authored on “light commercial vehicles” (or, as his constituents call them, “vans”) during a session of the European Parliament. His paper advocates that there should be a special pollution target applying to those vans which can run on a blend of conventional petrol and biofuels.
Callanan’s paper is the Parliament’s official response to proposals on regulating emissions from vans published by the European Commission in 2009. Callanan purports to be a public representative, rather than a stooge for the private sector. How can it be right that he first behaves as a biofuels freeloader, then puts forward recommendations tailored to serve that industry?
A few months before he became Britain’s prime minister last year, David Cameron raged against the “far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money”. Cameron’s comments primarily related to domestic politics but they are equally valid when applied to his party’s MEPs, including Callanan.
A few years before he became prime minister, David Cameron tried to rebrand the Conservatives as an ecologically sound outfit. The behaviour of Callanan and other Tories underscores how cynical and hollow an exercise that was.
Along with his fellow Tory Malcolm Harbour, Callanan has been one of the most active participants in the Forum for Automobile and Society since its inception in 1999. The forum brings car-obsessed MEPs together with the manufacturers of their dream climate-changing machines. Both Harbour and Callanan have done nicely out of this far-too-cosy relationship (to use their leader’s words).
Harbour’s latest declaration of interests indicates that he no longer takes free gifts from his corporate chums. Nonetheless, he has spent much of his 12 years as an MEP doubling up as an adviser to the car industry and as a legislator on dossiers affecting that sector. He has attended Grand Prix racing as a guest of Jaguar and Toyota and been loaned a variety of models from different companies. Callanan, meanwhile, has admitted that he was given a discount by Ford when he bought a new car in 2006. No company gives a politician a perk without expecting something in return.
Whereas the Commission had proposed that an average new van should release no more than 135 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre by 2020, Callanan is pressing for a far less stringent target of 140g per km. His stance mirrors that of ACEA, the main umbrella group for car and van makers in Europe, which claims that it is being required to bring down emission levels too quickly.
ACEA deserves no sympathy. Although most sectors of the EU’s economy reduced their emissions of greenhouse gases between 1990 and 2007, there was a net increase of 185 million tonnes in the amount of carbon dioxide released by road transport over that period, according to the European Environment Agency. The urgent task of making cars and vans cleaner and more fuel efficient must not be stymied by a few Tories with a surfeit of testosterone.
In Bursting the Brussels Bubble, a book published last year by an alliance of transparency activists, this city was labelled a paradise for corporate lobbyists. On most weekdays, it is virtually impossible to walk through the European Parliament’s corridors without bumping into hordes of gung-ho gun-for-hires. Corporate interests massively outnumber champions of nature and the poor. An authoritative source told me recently that 700 access badges to the Parliament have been issued to the pharmaceutical industry. Public health advocates, in contrast, have less than 10.
The Parliament’s internal rules require that its members declare gifts they receive from governments or companies. Yet there are no comparable regulations obliging MEPs to divulge who writes the amendments that they seek to planned new legislation.
One of the most important dossiers considered by the Parliament’s economic and monetary affairs committee in 2010 related to the management of hedge funds. When this dossier faced a key vote in May last year, the committee had to grapple with 1,600 suggested amendments. Parliamentary insiders estimated that half of these were drafted by lobbyists representing the financial sector.
It is a measure of how far the Parliament can be removed from the real world that this appalling state of affairs was presented as a good thing. A clip on EuroparlTV, the assembly’s in-house channel, focused on the hedge fund dossier to explain what was called “the art of the amendment”.
David Earnshaw from the public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller featured on that piece arguing that the “tabling of amendments to some extent demonstrates the democratic process.” What nonsense. Allowing a corporate clique dictate how their industries should be regulated amounts to a subversion of the democratic process. If this carry-on is so prevalent in the EU’s only directly-elected institution, why should anyone trust the wider system?
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 13-19 February 2011
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