They Can't Take That Away From Me

7 October, 1955.  Norman Granz’s all-star line-up, Jazz at the Philharmonic, plays Houston, Texas.  Amongst the performers on the bill are Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Buddy Rich and Illinois Jacquet.  The Houston Music Hall is packed out with an audience of all ages and ethnicities, all sitting in together, going wild for the jazz stars.

In Houston, in 1955, this was unprecedented.  Despite the historic Brown vs Board of Education ruling the previous year, which overturned the farcical ‘separate but equal’ Plessy vs Ferguson ruling of 1896, which the southern states of the US used as justification for segregating blacks and whites in all areas of public life, Houston was still a divided city.  The concert took place nine years before the Civil Rights Act was signed into law by President Johnson, effectively ending legal segregation, and fourteen years before the Texas State Legislature enacted its own desegregation laws, in 1969.

Mixed race audiences had been enjoying jazz concerts together for some time in a few cities in the North, where segregation, although not legally sanctioned was in de facto operation in most areas of society.  The 1955 JATP gig is widely recognised as the first desegregated concert in Houston.  Granz, who saw the potential of jazz to advance the cause of civil rights, had hired the venue and knew he had such an attractive line-up that he could dictate his terms.  He insisted that the “White” and “Negro” signs be removed from the toilets.  Tickets were sold on a first-come-first-served basis, regardless of colour, and there were no advance sales, preventing anyone from block-booking seats and allocating them to whites only.  Some white audience members objected to being seated next to blacks – Granz gave them their money back and asked them to leave.

L-R: Ella Fitzgerald, her assistant Georgiana Henry,
Illinois Jaquet and Dizzy Gillespie at Houston Police Station.

The concert was an undisputable success, but the spectre of Jim Crow was not completely absent from the auditorium that night.  Undercover Vice Squad members managed to get backstage and raided Ella Fitzgerald’s dressing room, arresting several of the stars for gambling as they were playing a private craps game.  Granz paid a $10 bond and they were released from prison in time for the second show, with audiences none the wiser.  There were a number of reporters at the police station that night, and although it was humiliating for the stars, the Houston Police Department didn’t come off too well in the press that followed.

The audiences that major black jazz musicians attracted, from across the social spectrum, helped break down barriers between communities in the USA, from the 1920s onwards.  Music has often been ahead of its time when it comes to social change.  With its roots in the music of slaves brought from Africa to North America, jazz music was intrinsically entwined with the struggle for equality, but its popularity amongst a wide range of people brought integration to its audiences before many other areas of society.

American folk music also played a key role in the civil rights movement, as well as in anti-Vietnam War protests in the US.  In Eastern Europe, in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania, traditional folk music was used as a form of defiance against the Soviet puppet governments.  It’s not always the obvious political songs and artists that spark the significant transformations.  Sometimes, the simple act of bringing a crowd together for a shared musical experience can be potent enough to push forward new social agendas.  Few jazz songs and pieces were explicitly about the civil rights movement.  It’s the grassroots music, the music in our souls, that moves us and lets us share a common bond with those around us, that is the most powerful.

So don’t despair about today’s pop musicians.  They may not appear to be singing protest songs, but their music is shaping the minds of a generation of young people.  With the advent of the internet and the availability of recording equipment, the music scene has changed radically in the last decade, but we should not doubt the power of music to unify, and to be ahead of its time.  The musicians who took to the stage in Houston, way back in 1955, came to play good music, not to change the world.  Yet good music is, whether it knows it or not, one of the first steps towards that goal.

Merry Christmas, folks!

Of Assassinations, Faith and Intrigue

“President Kennedy was shot by two CIA agents, one in the Texas School Book Depository and the other on the grassy knoll.  I believe that Jack Ruby was acting under the misinformation that the Mafia was behind the assassination and that he received help from Dallas police officers.  I believe that the CIA wanted Kennedy dead because they blamed him for not backing up the anti-Castro Cuban rebels.”

Thus concluded my ten page school project on the assassination of JFK.  For a while when I was fifteen I was more than a little obsessed with Kennedy’s death, reading and watching everything available and convincing myself that the whole thing was a massive conspiracy on the part of the US government.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s death, there has been a litany of articles, blogs and documentaries dissecting the unanswered questions about that fateful day in Dallas.  How many shots were fired?  Where were they fired from?  Who was the man on the grassy knoll?  Why was the open-topped presidential motorcade travelling below the prescribed speed?  Was Kennedy’s brain removed from his body before it was buried, and if so, where is it now?  Why were there frames removed from the Zapruder home movie?  What motivation would a nightclub owner with ties to the mob have to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald before he could stand trial?  Why did the 500-plus page Warren Commission report have no index?

As a historian, a lot of my research has, both willingly and grudgingly, involved debunking popular intrigue about historical events.  There is no evidence that Margaret Thatcher ordered the sinking of the retreating General Belgrano during the Falklands War.  The moon landing wasn’t faked.  And it would seem overwhelmingly likely that one troubled young man on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository was responsible for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The confluence of circumstances on 22 November 1963 make a compelling case for conspiracy – a young Democratic president, who had defused the Cuban Missile Crisis but had blundered in the Bay of Pigs, who was pushing forward Civil Rights legislation and cracking down on organised crime, who had a beautiful wife and a young family, had been gunned down in his prime.  Though he had his enemies, Kennedy was a popular President, at home and abroad, emblematic of a new era of hope in global politics, and to many it was impossible to believe that one man acting alone could end his life so suddenly.  How could one ordinary citizen with a mail-order rifle be responsible for killing the most powerful politician in the world?  Rather than accept this sobering fact, it has become easier, more comforting even, to imagine that it was all the work of a web of shadowy characters behind the scenes of power.  To accept this theory is to refute the unpredictable nature of the assassin’s bullet.

Human beings love conspiracies.  They fill the pages of airport thrillers, pack the television schedules and make fantastic films.  JFK’s assassination was itself given the Hollywood makeover by Oliver Stone in 1991, which only fanned the conspiracist flames.  We have a particular predilection to deny the existence of random acts of madness or, even more so, tragic accidents.  It’s the reason why so many people cling to the idea that Princess Diana’s death was orchestrated by the British Royal family.  When coupled with the legends that develop around them, bound up with the mysterious draw of ‘what might have been’, the deaths of popular figures come to be seen as momentous events which can only have happened for a reason.

The majority of humans love to embrace faith – “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” - whether it be in religion, conspiracy theories or in the unshakeable dependability of our heroes.  The alternative is to accept that there is no more to life than that which we see in front of us.  For me, it’s the existence of extra-terrestrial life.  I’m fairly convinced that aliens haven’t made contact with Earth (though open to persuasion!), but like Fox Mulder, I want to believe they exist out there somewhere, and that we aren’t alone in the universe.

We feed on stories like Snowden’s NSA leaks because we like to think that our governments are hiding things from us.  They must be, because there has to be a reason why our lives aren’t quite as good as we’d like them to be.  There has to be someone to blame; someone pulling the strings, keeping us in the dark.  Hey, if we’re living in the Matrix, that would explain why we don’t feel as fulfilled or happy or earn as much money as we’d like.  Unfortunately, this theory discounts another significant human trait – our inability to keep secrets.  As we have daily evidence, secrets leak.  To quote The West Wing’s CJ Cregg, “there is no group of people this large in the world that can keep a secret.  I find it comforting.  It's how I know for sure that the government isn't covering up aliens in New Mexico.”  Disappointingly, what may appear to be mysterious anomalies that could only be the result of a complex plot just waiting to be exposed by a plucky maverick can almost always be attributed to miscalculations, misinterpretation and, sometimes, simple, foolish mistakes.  Never underestimate the ability of your government to bungle.

Even when the archives are opened and we have definitive answers about the Kennedy assassination, there are people who won’t believe them.  It’s harder than you’d think to shake a person’s faith.  And what about me?  Have I outgrown my teenage notions of CIA cover-ups and double agents?  The rational part of my brain would like to think so, but there’s a bit of my fifteen-year-old self inside who still clings onto the hope that the conspiracy will one day be revealed.

Bridging the Divide

By early afternoon the hordes were already gathering on the bridge.  One diver strutted back and forth along the parapet, flexing and posing, while another worked the crowd, taking BAM, Euros and even Kuna from the tourists who had flocked to Mostar on day trips from the Dalmatian coast. They hadn’t timed it right this time.  They'd waited too long and the crowds had become bored, dispersing off into the old town to search for coffee pots and ice cream, post cards and paintings.  Or perhaps they’d timed it perfectly, returning to the club house on the turret of the bridge with a wodge of notes.

Two hours later we return to the bridge and the diver is back.  This time he jumps, arms outstretched before pulling himself pencil thin to plunge feet first into the fast-flowing bright green waters of the River Neretva below.  Young men have been diving off the Stari Most for centuries to impress the local girls and during the summer months the divers of the Mostar Diving Club earn a fair trade from tourists who pay to photograph them making the iconic 22-metre jump.

Twenty years ago today, on 9 November 1993, the 427-year-old Stari Most was destroyed by Bosnian Croat forces during the Bosnian war.  Its destruction served no strategic military purpose – there were other modern bridges across the river – but was instead an act of cultural vandalism.  The bridge was demolished for the Ottoman heritage it represented and the place it held in the hearts of the city’s inhabitants.

Footage of the bridge’s destruction was shown around the world and for some reason, as the shelling of Dubrovnik’s old town had done during the Croatian War in 1991, stirred feelings of outrage with westerners.  The war had been morally unambiguous when Bosnian Serbs, sponsored by Serbia, launched an offensive against the dream of an independent multi-ethnic Bosnia, but when fighting broke out between the Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks, it transformed the conflict into one far more complex, as western politicians never tired of telling reporters.  How could they possibly be expected to intervene in such a complicated civil war, where all sides were attacking one another?

Mostar served as the frontline between the Bosnian Croat forces (HVO) and the Bosnian government forces (ARBiH) during the early years of the war and was the scene of fierce fighting.  The fragile alliance between the HVO and ARBiH in the latter half of the war did nothing but paper thinly over the fissures in Mostar’s society.  

When the rebuilt bridge opened in July 2004 it was hoped that, in the ultimate act of symbolism, it would reunite a city that had been torn apart during the war.  Nine years on, the divisions are as evident as they ever were.  Mostar truly is a tale of two cities, divided by the Neretva, with the Bosniak population on the east bank and the Croats on the west.  The city duplicates all its municipal services – two central post offices, two water suppliers, even two fire services.  Infighting between Croat and Bosniak politicians brought the local government to a standstill earlier this year.  The western half of the city is noticeably more affluent, with Croatian flags flying and Croatian nationalist graffiti scrawled on the buildings.  Try finding a Sarajevska on this side of the river.

This uneasy coexistence is mirrored across Bosnia.  The recent debacle over ID numbers in the Parliament has only enflamed tensions between the Republika Srpska and the Bosnian Federation.  Bosnia-Herzegovina qualified for their first World Cup in October – it was celebrated in Sarajevo; less so in Banja Luka and Mostar.  What comes across strongest in eyewitness accounts of the war is a certainty that the majority of Bosnians were good, peace-loving people, that they all got along exceptionally well before the war, and that the fighting was perpetrated by outsiders.[1]  Yet a war was fought there and for many the memories are still raw.

Today the shell-marked bombed-out buildings interspersed amongst the renovated ones along the old frontline are a stark reminder of the fighting that devastated Mostar just twenty years ago.  The words “don’t forget” are painted on a stone in the old town so unobtrusively small that many miss it.  But it turns out that many of Mostar’s citizens have not forgotten.  And whilst the tourists queue up to take photos of the local divers, browse for trinkets in the cobbled streets of the old town and then get back on their coaches for a whistle stop tour of Medjugorje before heading back to Croatia, it is painfully obvious that it will take a lot more than rebuilding a bridge to bring many Bosnians back together.

---

[1] Svetlana Broz, Good People in an Evil Time: Portraits of Complicity and Resistance in the Bosnian War (New York: Other Press, 2004).

Opening the school door and ending poverty

52% of the current cabinet were privately educated

Twice a week I run past the private school a few streets away from my house.  I peer through the fence in wide-eyed envy.  The autumn term has just begun and the summer’s immaculate cricket pitch and tennis courts have been replaced by pristine hockey and rugby pitches.  At a time when state schools are selling off their playing fields, is it any wonder that 37% of British medal-winners at the 2012 Olympics were privately educated?  Private schools educate just 7% of the British population but their former pupils make up 35% of MPs, 54% of leading journalists and 70% of judges.  96% of privately educated pupils go on to university, compared with 36% of those who attend state schools.  That percentage drops to 14% when it comes to children eligible for free school meals.

Is there anyone who truly believes this is because children whose parents cannot afford to send them to private school are inherently less intelligent?  The gulf between the academic achievements of children from disadvantaged backgrounds and those from wealthy families has not closed since the establishment of universal secondary education in 1944.  And this inequality extends beyond private schools.  The introduction of free schools and expansion of academies under the current government has generated yet another highly selective tier within British education.  A huge disparity in educational attainment exists between children whose parents live in affluent localities, who can afford to move between catchment areas to ensure their children attend the best state schools, and those for whom moving will never be a possibility.  Lack of social mobility for these families ensures that schools in the deprived areas of Britain are unable to lift themselves out of this perpetual cycle of poor performance.

Some very telling statistics:

• 11-year-old pupils eligible for free school meals are around twice as likely not to achieve basic standards in literacy and numeracy as other 11-year-old pupils.
• 1% (6,000) of pupils in England obtained no qualifications in 2009/10.
• 7% (47,000) of pupils in England obtained fewer than 5 GCSEs in 2009/10.
• 15% of boys and 10% of girls eligible for free school meals do not obtain 5 or more GCSEs.

(From http://www.poverty.org.uk/)

It is shocking that in a developed nation 16% of our adult population cannot read at the level expected of an 11-year-old.  A 2011 study revealed that 42% of the 566 employers interviewed were “not satisfied with the basic use of English by school and college leavers.”  The study also revealed that adults with poor literacy were least likely to be in full-time employment at the age of thirty and that “63% of men and 75% of women with very low literacy skills have never received a promotion.”

The Centre for Social Justice has warned of an ‘education underclass’ developing, reporting that some children from disadvantaged backgrounds start school at five “still in nappies, unable to speak or not even recognising their own name.”  The centre-right think-tank blames the parents for this, but it is depressingly likely that, failed by the education system, these children will leave school with poor - or no - qualifications, and go on to send their own children to school in a similar condition.  Taking a step back from the statistics, it doesn’t take a university-educated genius to recognise that equality of access to education is the key to breaking the poverty cycle.  Schools should be enormously expensive for the government and completely free for all children.  No one should be able to buy a better start in life.

Giving Britain’s children equal life chances is not simply a matter of providing every child with the same curriculum structure.  It is about making up the gap in more quantifiable resources.  The pupil premium, which was intended for this purpose, has had limited success.  Though I didn’t grow up in a particularly affluent household, my parents packed the house with books and placed a high value on learning.  Many children are not lucky enough have this kind of support at home.  With libraries closing down all over the country it is more important than ever that children are given access to books through school, above and beyond the textbooks essential for their lessons.  A recent study revealed that children who read for pleasure do better in other areas of education.  All children should be given the opportunity of free music lessons from an early age, which studies have proven have a positive effect on psychological development.  They should be given access to the arts, to the theatre and concerts, and to school trips abroad.  These may all sound like woolly liberal delusions, but that’s because the chances are that if you are reading this, you were given these opportunities as a child.

Britain’s schools have a crucial role to play in tackling the country’s obesity epidemic.  The introduction of free school meals across the board would remove the stigma associated with them and ensure that all children receive at least one healthy meal a day.  Free school meals for all pupils has been piloted in some of London’s poorest boroughs – and it seems to be working.  School cookery lessons should focus on how to cook healthy meals on a budget, children should be taught how to grow their own food and be given the opportunity to try many different sports, spending several hours on PE every week.

Even more important is the role which schools can play in helping children make the best decisions about their future.  Ofsted recently reported that “three quarters of schools visited by Ofsted were not delivering adequate careers advice.”  It is hard to imagine yourself doing something if it has never been presented to you as an option.  Even those state school students who get to university don’t do as well after graduating as their privately educated counterparts who are “far more able to draw upon family resources and had access to influential social networks to help get work experience or internships during their degree.”  Here there is a role for business and industry in education – in providing outreach to schools and work experience placements for students from all backgrounds.

In order to bring up standards in British education, it is time to start thinking about making drastic changes to the status quo.  Much has been made of the success of Finland’s education system, which ranked third in the world in the OECD’s 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and is “built upon values grounded in equity and equitable distribution of resources rather than on competition and choices.”[1]  Three of the most important features of the Finnish education system are a later school starting age, smaller class sizes, allowing education to be child-centred, and the freedom for teachers to try different styles of teaching within a standardised national framework.

Finnish children, like many others around the world, start school at the age of 7 and they do not take any formal national examinations until they reach secondary school.  Britain appears to be instigating the reverse, with formal education beginning whilst children are at nursery, the majority of children starting school at four and plans for the assessments of the three Rs that children currently take at 7 to be moved to the “early weeks of a child’s career at school”.  In a letter to the Daily Telegraph this week, a group of 127 academics, teachers, authors and charity leaders highlighted their concerns about the dominance of formal education during children’s formative years and emphasised the importance of “active, creative and outdoor play which is recognised by psychologists as vital for physical, social, emotional and cognitive development”.  Despite the success of this approach in many other countries, a spokesman for Michael Gove dismissed the concerns as “bogus pop psychology” belonging to a “powerful and badly misguided lobby who are responsible for the devaluation of exams and the culture of low expectations in state schools”.

Smaller class sizes are one of the chief benefits of a private education in this country.  Britain requires significant investment in teacher training to reduce class sizes so that education can be tailored to pupils’ individual needs.  Teachers should be given the freedom to explore new methods of teaching.  Yet Education Secretary Michael Gove remains rigidly opposed to creative approaches to teaching, favouring instead traditional methods of learning what he sees as core academic subjects.  He is woefully out of touch.  Technology has moved on and children need to be given the skills to use it to their advantage.  And you know what Michael?  Learning should be fun.  If it’s fun, the knowledge is more likely to be retained, and it is far more likely to pique a child’s further interest in a subject.

During World War II, with all the talk of universal education, private schools thought their death knell was sounding, but when the 1944 Education Act was passed it left them intact.  Education Minister George Tomlinson, explaining the decision not to abolish private schools, declared in 1947 that the Labour Party had “issued a statement of policy in which it looks forward to the day when the schools in the state system will be so good that nobody will want their children to go to a private school.”[2]  Nearly 70 years on we are nowhere near this goal.

Yes, these changes will be expensive and no, there will not be any immediate benefit to the taxpayers who will fund them.  There is, though, an economic argument here.  The state cannot afford to continue funding welfare for the number of British families living in poverty, and has a vested interest in improving their prospects so they can contribute to the state system through tax.  But more importantly, there is a fundamental moral imperative to ensure that all children have the same chances in life, regardless of their background.  In the sixth richest nation on Earth there are 3.5 million children living in poverty who are far less likely to do well at school than their more privileged peers.  Britain is at risk of becoming irrevocably divided along economic lines.  The only way to reverse this trend is through universal access to exceptional education.

---

[1] Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish Lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland?, (New York: Teachers College Press, 2010), p.127.

[2] Ken Jones, Education in Britain: 1945 to the Present, (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), p.17. 

The Cold War is Dead - Long Live the Cold War!

Not once has Britain been directly threatened by a hostile nuclear power.  Earlier this year, when North Korea readied its warheads for launch, the targets were South Korea, Japan and, of course, the USA.  The Cuban Missile Crisis, widely acknowledged to be the moment the world came closest to nuclear destruction, was a confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States.

From the end of World War II onwards, Britain’s global influence has steadily declined. The war left us with a severely damaged economy to rebuild, and the inclusion of Britain in the Yalta and Potsdam conferences was a tokenistic gesture in recognition of Britain’s wartime contribution.  But Churchill, and then Attlee, represented a nation with its glory days fading fast.  As the Empire slowly disintegrated over the next quarter century and the US and Soviet Union grew more powerful than Britain had ever been, even at the height of its influence, the UK was shunted into the wings of the global stage.

Far from being something to lament, as many nostalgic for an era when Britannia ruled the waves believe, it is something to be grateful for.  The number one nemesis of today's rogue nuclear states is the USA.  These states, either known to possess or suspected of possessing nuclear weaponry – Russia, China, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel and Iran – have little to no interest in Britain as a strategic target.  Though our politicians would have us believe otherwise, Britain is globally insignificant.  We are one of a number of European nations, a little fish in a big pond, and our ‘special’ relationship with the USA is best described as one of those somewhat awkward love affairs, where it is painfully obvious to observers that one party is just a little bit more into the whole thing than the other.  Whether we like it or not, this is how the rest of the world views us.  So maybe it is time embrace this realisation.

That Britain is a declining world power is just one of a long list of reasons why it makes sense, economically, politically and morally, to eliminate the UK’s nuclear capability.  Top of that list is indisputably that nuclear weapons are an ineffective and inappropriate response to the threats we face in a post-Cold War world.

Britain tested its first nuclear weapons in 1952

The Cold War officially ended with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, but it had been drawing to a close throughout the 1980s.  President Ronald Reagan announced in his inaugural address in 1985 that his administration sought “the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth,” marking a definitive departure from the pro-nuclear policies that had prevailed in previous decades.  Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s twin policies of ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’ (economic restructuring and openness) signalled a shift in the Russian position, as well as conceding the crippling effect that the nuclear arms race had had on the Soviet economy.  The thawing of the Cold War was confirmed by the INF Treaty, signed in 1987, and cemented by START I, signed 22 years ago this week by Gorbachev and President George Bush Snr.

When the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, it was predicted that any future war would result in nuclear holocaust.  This turned out to be erroneous.  The 20th century did not see a reduction in the number of wars being fought with conventional weaponry.  Indicators suggest the 21st century won’t either.  And alongside the conflicts erupting across the globe, in which many more combatants and civilians have been killed than lost their lives during both World Wars, we are facing new enemies against which nuclear weapons will be next to useless.  Terrorists who are prepared to martyr themselves for their cause will not be deterred by the threat of annihilation.  The possession of nuclear weapons by the major powers has not brought peace, nor has it made the world a safer place.

Yet their proliferation increases the risk that nuclear weapons will be used by accident.  There were many near misses during the Cold War.  During the Cuban Missile crisis, having lost communication with Moscow, the commander of a Soviet submarine, not knowing whether or not war had broken out, put it to a vote amongst his senior officers as to whether or not to launch his nuclear torpedo at a US ship blockading Cuban waters: the vote was 2:1 against firing.  There were numerous other incidents of confusion, misidentified flying objects and technical hitches which could have led to World War III.  It is perhaps only luck that prevented this.

Thousands in the UK marched in 1958 against nuclear weapons,
and the protests continued throughout the 1960s.

According to Gareth Evans, Co-Chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND), there are “at least 22,000 nuclear warheads still in existence, with a combined destructive capability of around 150,000 Hiroshima or Nagasaki sized bombs.” Why – morally and rationally – do we need this capability on the planet?  Experts believe that even a limited nuclear conflict – say, between India and Pakistan – would result in a nuclear winter, produced by ash from urban firestorms blocking out the sun and “causing devastating changes in weather patterns and rainfall.”

As for the role of Trident as a deterrent, the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction (commonly known as MAD) no longer stands up to scrutiny.  In 1967, US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, recognising that there could be no such thing as a winnable nuclear war, famously gave a speech in which he advocated the policy of acquiring so many nuclear weapons that it would, quite literally, be madness to start a nuclear war.  However, it is now recognised that MAD is no longer a viable in an unstable world with increasing numbers of nuclear adversaries.  In an article in the Wall Street Journal in 2007, three former US Secretaries of State, including Henry Kissinger, and a former chairman of the US Senate Armed Services Committee argued that "it is far from certain that we can successfully replicate the old Soviet-American ‘mutually assured destruction’ with an increasing number of potential nuclear enemies world-wide without dramatically increasing the risk that nuclear weapons will be used.”

If the moral and strategic arguments against replacing Trident aren’t convincing, then the economic ones surely must be.  £3 billion has already been spent on exploring new designs for the submarines.  It is estimated that the final cost could be up to £34 billion.  Maintenance of the fleet will cost around £100 billion over the next 30 years.  For that money, we could build the 100 best schools in the world.  Or, as John Prescott argued yesterday, plug the predicted £25 billion black hole in NHS funding by 2020.  In a time of austerity, we can ill afford to maintain a weapons system which exists only to act as a status symbol of a former glory.

Almost from the moment nuclear weapons were first tested politicians of all guises have committed themselves to disarmament, and yet we remain a nuclear world.  And, like children in the playground, if some countries have them, others will want them too.  Britain could set an example in becoming the first nation to fully disarm.  Unilateral disarmament could be the opportunity pro-nuclear fantasists dream of for the UK to become a world-leader again.

Dear Sarajevo, I’ll never forget the first time we met…

The first time I saw Sarajevo was from the window of a train, having spent a sweat-soaked three days travelling across Europe in the late-June heat.  Our compartment was air-conditioned by way of a spare bootlace tying the window open.  We had left Zagreb at 9 that morning and it was now approaching 6pm as the hills fell away to reveal the outskirts of the city.  We disembarked the packed train and the crowds dissipated into the city, leaving us standing bewildered in virtually disserted plaza outside the station.

I was finally there, in the city I had spent four years studying and many more obsessing over.

It was all a little surreal.  Here were the landmarks I’d seen on archive TV news footage burning and shattering into dust, whilst shells and sniper fire echoed around.  In the peaceful evening sunshine, it was hard conflate the two images.  The tram we took to our hostel passed under the Holiday Inn, still towering in garish ochre over the expanse of Sniper Alley.  That day, cars, trams and pedestrians made their way untroubled along the wide road out to Ilidža.  I looked up at the surrounding hills, clambering down into the town at this point, orientating myself in this strange new reality.

My friends and I stayed six days before heading south to Mostar. I could have stayed for six weeks.  You can devour everything there is to read about somewhere, but until you visit, you cannot appreciate the taste, the touch and the sound of a place.  The random juxtaposition of Euro-pop and the call to prayer; the bitterness of your first Bosnian coffee, drunk in a tiny front room up a spiral staircase; walking barefoot home from a mountain-top restaurant in a summer storm.

I was just eight years old when the war ended in 1995, so my vague memories are limited to the coverage on Newsround.  My curiosity about Bosnia was piqued at a much later age and my visit served only to cement the country's place in my heart.  I am not arrogant enough to presume that because I have visited Sarajevo I can even begin to imagine how they suffered during the siege.  I do not pretend to know the city like a local.  Far from it.  There is so much more to learn, to experience and discover in this fascinating European capital.  I highly recommend a visit.

Sadly, all too often, Sarajevo is associated with war.  The Latin Bridge spanning the River Miljacka, on which Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, is a stark reminder that this is the city in which the war to end all wars began.  And if they are unaware of that connection, many people automatically connect Sarajevo with the horrific images of the 1990s.

But despite spending three-and-a-half years under almost constant fire from encircling forces in the mountains around the city, Sarajevo survived.  In the summer months, the BSA turned off the water; in the winter, they cut off fuel supplies.  They arbitrarily sniped at pedestrians as they sprinted across road junctions and landed shells at random.  Against this backdrop, Sarajevans held a film festival and classical music concerts.  They dug a tunnel under the airport to bring supplies in from beyond the frontline.  And when the war was over, they quietly picked up the pieces of their lives and rebuilt their multicultural city, where East meets West.

Being the only student of the war in the group, I didn’t inflict too much history on my fellow travellers.  We visited what remains of the airport tunnel and the siege exhibition in the historical museum.  But, to the informed eye, the signs of the conflict which was raging just twenty years ago are everywhere.  Pavements and buildings are pock-marked with bullet holes and shell craters.  I watched in a dumbstruck trance as my friends shopped in the Markale marketplace.  The only sign of the shell that fell there in February 1994 is a memorial along the back wall bearing the names of the 68 who died there; you’d miss it if you weren’t looking for it.  A market trader accidentally knocked his sack trolley into it the glass casing around the shell crater.  And there were the railings over which I had seen the image of a mutilated body slumped.

Yet it felt necessary not to be seen noticing these things.  Whether it was due to my own awkwardness, being intimately acquainted with the pusillanimous efforts of the British government to end the war, or a sense of intrusion, it seemed somehow inappropriate, or at the very least impolite, to mention the war.

Aside from one moment of tension on arrival, when, confused and tired from travelling across seven countries and dealing with four different currencies in one weekend, we attempted to pay for our room with Croatian Kuna and were curtly informed that Bosnia was a different country, it was not apparent from the Bosnians we spoke to that a war had taken place.  We were accepted on face value as tourists and the people we met were eager to show us the delights of their beautiful country.

There was a sense almost as if the people were holding their breath.  The government buildings were set apart from the rest of the vibrant city, shrouded in a fearsome quiet.  Sarajevans were reclaiming their lives through hospitality, culture and congeniality, not through politics, which, since Dayton, have become toxic in the capital which suffered so much during the siege.  Declarations of political intent could tear apart a city which has restored itself to peace so successfully.

Over the last month, however, Sarajevo has awoken.  Sparked by the political stalemate over legislation governing the allocation of ID numbers, which has left babies born since February without numbers and therefore without access to insurance and passports, protesters have come out in force onto the streets of Sarajevo. The demonstrations have been further fuelled by the story of baby Berina, whose life-saving medical treatment in Serbia was delayed because she could not be issued a passport.  An emergency 180 day law was passed on 5 June allowing ID numbers to be allotted, but it was too late for Berina, who passed away on 13 June.

The sticking point is that politicians from the Republika Srpksa, the Bosnian Serb entity within Bosnia-Herzegovina, want the ID numbers to contain a signifier identifying the bearer’s region.  Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Muslim politicians want the numbers to be allocated randomly.  As a result, Parliament is at an impasse.  The protesters set a deadline of 30 June for the government to break the deadlock, but that date has passed and the vote on the new draft law has been postponed until next week.

The public’s prior reluctance to protest is perhaps understandable.  The last mass protest in Sarajevo was a peace rally in April 1992.  Snipers shot into the crowd and killed two civilians.  Three-and-a-half years of war followed.  The Dayton Accords, signed in November 1995, left Bosnia-Herzegovina in a state of limbo, governed in an uneasy peace by the Federal government in Sarajevo and the Republika Srpska, with its de facto capital in Banja Luka.  The Bosnian Serbs want independence, whilst the Federal government wants unification and so the political system remains balanced on a knife edge.

Bosnians are now beginning to come out of political hibernation and exercise their democratic rights.  There has been plenty to inflame tensions in the last few weeks – the returning of 405 recently-identified bodies to Srebrenica on the 18th anniversary of the massacre, the reversal of Radovan Karadžic’s acquittal on charges of genocide in The Hague and the posturing of Bosnian Serb politicians boycotting Parliament and claiming that Sarajevo is not a safe place for Serbs.  But in Sarajevo the people have not reacted with violence but with a resounding demonstration that they will not allow the political elite to drag them back into conflict with one another.  Ethnicity has not played a part in the protesters’ message.

The recent of accession of Croatia to the EU has further highlighted the petty infighting amongst Bosnia’s politicians.  They had five years to prepare for it, but the Bosnian government still managed to miss the 1 July deadline for reforming legislation in order to allow its farmers to continue exporting food to neighbouring Croatia once it joined the EU.  Bosnia has now lost its largest export market worth 22 million euros annually.  Even if the legislation can be passed, it will take EU inspectors up to six months to give the exports the seal of approval, whilst Bosnian farmers search desperately for markets elsewhere.  Dissatisfaction with bickering politicians who appear more concerned with furthering their own personal interests than those of the Bosnian people is mounting.

It is true that the root of Bosnia’s current problems lie in the poor construction of the Dayton Accords, which left the country over-reliant on the international community and nationalist political parties.  But part of the blame lies with the people who have buried their heads in the sand and elected these politicians back into power time and time again.  With Croatia joining the European Union, perhaps the Bosnians now have a realistic goal to strive towards.  Croatia was also devastated by war twenty years ago, though admittedly not to the same extent as Bosnia, and has now recovered to a point where it can be accepted into political union with the rest of Europe.  Bosnia has a long way to go – it is predicted that they won’t be joining the EU until 2015 at the very earliest – and a lot of changes to make, but a resurgent political consciousness amongst Sarajevans may just be a start.

“Little did I dream you could be so reckless and cruel”: Surveillance and the Abuse of Power

McCarthy and assistant Roy Cohn during the hearings

On 9 June 1954, in a packed Senate Caucus Room in Washington, D.C., televised live to 80 million Americans, a historic subcommittee hearing was reaching its climax.  Senator Joseph McCarthy was taking his anti-communist crusade to the United States Army.  Beginning on 17 April, the hearings had been broadcast in their entirety, and, 30 days in, a now famous exchange took place between McCarthy and Army special counsel Joseph Welch.  McCarthy, who had been revealed as a crude bully, repeatedly shouting “point of order” to cut off people when he didn’t like what they had to say, irrelevantly revealed that a member Welch’s staff had been a member of the National Lawyers’ Guild, the only lawyers willing to defend those accused of being communists during the period.  Welch responded by calling McCarthy “reckless and cruel”, asking “have you no sense of decency, sir?” Welch’s response was met with cheers from the gallery.

Though they concluded no wrongdoing on his part, the Army-McCarthy hearings are widely perceived to mark the beginning of Joe McCarthy’s downfall.  The junior Senator from Wisconsin had first come to prominence in February 1950, when he made a speech in which he claimed to have the names of numerous individuals in the State Department “who would appear to be either card carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party.”[1]  McCarthy’s claim made headlines, and despite a Senate Committee concluding that none of the names on McCarthy’s list had links with the communist party, he became a household name in America.  Having assumed the chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953, McCarthy was able to widen the target of his attacks, holding 169 hearings throughout 1953 and 1954.  Taking on the US Army proved to be a step too far, however.  Following the Army hearings, McCarthy was censured by the Senate in December 1954 and in January 1955 lost his position as the Subcommittee chair.  His influence declined from this point onwards until his death in 1957.

Surveillance by official bodies is by no means a 21^st century phenomenon.  Whilst McCarthy leant his name to the age of McCarthyism, his activities constituted only a fraction of the anti-communist movement in the US, which had begun in the 1940s.  As World War II ended and the Cold War began, the communist threat posed by the Soviet Union, and subsequently China, to the American way of life became a major concern for the US government.  The prominent convictions of Alger Hiss, Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs on espionage charges served only to fuel the American people’s paranoia.  In the name of protecting the US from this threat, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the FBI, under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover, conducted widespread surveillance of US citizens and thousands were added to blacklists which ended their careers.

There are no longer reds under the beds.  Nowadays the bogeyman is not the communist but the terrorist.  Contrary to the popular view of McCarthyism, many of those accused were, or had been, members of the Communist Party.  Many had links to the Soviet Union.  Whether or not they can be deemed to be ‘innocent’ victims depends on your view of communism.  In advocating the overthrow of the government, communists would doubtless argue that their actions are intended for the betterment of mankind.  Doubtless fundamentalist terrorists would argue this too.  The crucial difference for the average citizen is that terrorism directly threatens their lives and communism does not.  There are a large number of people in the UK who probably feel that not voting for the Tories was their contribution to the betterment of mankind.  Does that give the government the right to label them a subversive threat and monitor their communications?

The leaks about the NSA PRISM programme released over the last month have stirred up arguments about the right to privacy and the nature of surveillance carried out by the government.  On the surface it would seem reasonable to argue that openness can only be good for a society, if it prevents more expenses scandals, regulatory body cover-ups and police smear campaigns.  Openness is the key to combatting corruption.  As McCarthyism teaches us, we enter dubious moral territory when those in power are left to their own devices to decide who constitutes a threat to the government.

On the other hand, we understandably rely on our governments to keep us safe.  In his defence of PRISM, Obama argued that we “can’t have a hundred per cent security and also then have a hundred per cent privacy and zero inconvenience”, and maybe he’s right.  I want to be safe.  And I know that terrorists of all guises couldn't care less about me as an individual, and my views on privacy, when they take a bomb onto the London Underground or fly a plane into a skyscraper.  It would be fantastic if there was no requirement for security services, but the fact remains that there are people out there who want to kill, indiscriminately, as many others as possible.  Some level of surveillance is necessary and the intelligence services cannot protect us if our enemies know exactly how they are doing it.

I am undecided as to whether Edward Snowden is a champion of civil liberties or simply a nobody seeking notoriety.  Everybody likes a guy who knows a secret and despite our apparent outrage we have an insatiable appetite for government conspiracy theories.  But, traitor or not, Snowden’s actions have certainly highlighted the need for serious debate on this topic.

If there is a lesson to be taken away from all this it is that our privacy laws are outdated and desperately need reviewing in order to catch up with developments in electronic communication.  To say that we should not expect anything on the internet to be private ignores the fact that huge portions of our lives are lived online nowadays, from banking, to shopping, to passport applications.  We would not expect our post to be intercepted and read and our electronic communications should be treated with the same respect.  There is a difference between that which we choose to make public, our Twitter posts for example, and those communications (emails, text messages) which are intended for specific recipients.  The law has not caught up with technology and it badly needs to.  Unfettered, warrantless access to our emails, internet browsing history and mobile phone records is completely disproportionate.  Under existing legislation in the UK the police can demand communications data for terror and serious crime suspects, and these powers have been widely used already.  Judicial oversight can be given to accessing electronic communications without compromising our security, in the same way a search warrant can be obtained to enter a suspect’s house.

I am more than happy for my government to develop the tools to keep me safe from terrorists in the cyber age, but as the excesses of McCarthyism demonstrate, the abuse of power is not purely the purview of totalitarian states.  This is a universal truth that can be transposed from phone tapping in the 1950s to email hacking in the 2010s.  The solution is an urgent review of legislation accompanied by robust regulation; terrorists will not be defeated by the creation of a police state.  Sending back the McCarran Security Act in 1950 (a veto which would be overridden by Congress), President Truman wrote that “we will destroy all that we seek to preserve, if we sacrifice the liberties of our citizens in a misguided attempt to achieve national security.”[2]  The leaders of the ‘free world’ should take note.

---

[1] Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents, (Bedford, 2002), p.240.

[2] Ibid., p.220.

World Elder Abuse Awareness Day (15 June 2013)

Growing old is an inescapable fact of life.  Old age awaits us all, and when it arrives, surely we would expect to be treated with the same dignity and respect that we have experienced throughout the rest of our lives.  And yet, disgracefully, for many older people, this is not the case.

In a departure from my usual genre, I want to take this opportunity to draw some attention to a topic which will come to be important to us all.

Today is World Elder Abuse Awareness Day.  It was launched on 15 June 2006 by the International Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse (INPEA) and the UN’s World Health Organization.  On 9 March 2012, UN General Assembly Resolution 66/127 established 15 June as a UN International Day.

Much work has been done to raise the protection of vulnerable older people up the political agenda, but there is still more to do.  No one questions the need to keep our children safe, but when it comes to adults, the issue becomes more complex.  It is assumed, for many, that because we have knowledge of our rights and are able to speak for ourselves, we do not require assistance in securing these rights.  However, as we grow older, we may find ourselves physically unable to do the things we once did for ourselves.  We may find that we deteriorate mentally, leaving us unable to advocate for ourselves and totally reliant on others.

Many elderly people are extremely vulnerable.  They may not have relatives; they may live alone and be unable to leave the house unaided.  They may feel ashamed to report abuse, fearing it will be an admission that they are vulnerable and are no longer as capable as they once were.  For many elderly people, this results in them being taken advantage of, neglected, treated with disrespect and indifference and left in conditions that would cause outrage were it to happen to a child.  We know this is happening and yet society turns the other way - our growing elderly population is an inconvenience to us.

Sixty percent of all adult safeguarding alerts raised in 2011-12 involved people over 65.  The majority of this abuse takes place in people’s own homes.  According to the charity Action on Elder Abuse:

-      8.6% of older people living in our communities are subject to elder abuse (in excess of 500,000 people)

-      60% of victims are over 80 years of age and more than 15% are over 90 years old.

-      Nearly a quarter (23%) live with their abusers (66% of abusers are relatives) and 19% of victims have dementia.

The truth is that the vast majority of abuse arises out of ignorance – an inability on the part of perpetrators to see that their actions are abusive.  Financial abuse of older people is commonplace, with relatives helping themselves their “inheritance” early or selling off belongings without permission.  Many elderly people who are reliant on others to provide their care are simply neglected, either wilfully or due to time pressures.  They are left in the same position for hours, sometimes in soiled continence pads, put to bed in the afternoon or left without access to food and drink, as evidenced by a Care Quality Commission (CQC) review of dignity and respect in care homes and an Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report, published in 2012.

Many older people, especially those with dementia, are not included in decisions about their own care.  Many, particularly those who cannot independently mobilise, are not provided with social stimulation.  No effort is made to support older people to take part in the activities they enjoyed when they were independent.  Often they spend the majority of their days sitting in lounges or in bed, not even offered the opportunity to access homes’ gardens.  It is a moral imperative that everyone should be able to enjoy the best quality of life possible until the end.  Too often providing anything beyond basic care is seen as simply not worth the effort.

Care provided by domiciliary care agencies in the home is frequently rushed, and is accordingly of poor quality, sometimes even unsafe.  In order to fit into schedules, customers are put to bed in the afternoon and are expected to stay there until the next morning.  Carers do not stay to ensure the clients are eating or drinking properly.  A CQC report into home care published in February 2013 found that the people they spoke to “felt that they lacked choice with regard to the number of new or unfamiliar care workers who arrived at their home.”  Imagine how you would feel your personal care was delivered by a succession of strangers?  This is the reality for many older people across the UK.

It cannot be denied that much of this has its roots in the current economic climate.  Staffing levels in many care homes and nursing homes are low, putting staff under pressure and leaving residents with their basic needs unmet.  Domiciliary care staff are paid minimum wage (sometimes less, as they are not paid for travel between calls) and are expected to deliver care in sometimes as a little as 15 minutes.  A United Kingdom Home Care Association (UKHCA) report, published in July 2012, found that “73% of homecare visits in England appear to be 30 minutes or shorter and a staggering 87% in Northern Ireland (42% in Wales and Scotland).

There is evidence of the use of visits which are 15 minutes or fewer in all administrations, and as high as 28% in Northern Ireland.” 

Providers report frustrations at how little local authorities are prepared to pay them to provide care, whilst the local authorities, in turn, protest that they are facing budget cuts and cannot afford to pay more.  This week the Care Minister Norman Lamb called home care providers to a summit, as he fears (quite rightly, as it turns out, given the revelations about the poor care delivered to an 83-year-old woman exposed by the BBC on Thursday) that the crisis in home care funding is “a scandal waiting to happen”.

The Care Bill

The Care Bill currently making its way through the House of Lords does much to ensure that current adult protection measures are made statutory, but it also has a number of shortfalls.  Of main concern is the fact that the Bill does not allocate adequate funding to cover the costs of the new statutory safeguarding work, nor does it touch upon provision of funding to prevent local authorities resorting to low cost care options.  The Bill also does not comprehensively protect vulnerable adults from abuse by people in positions of trust.  There need to be greater safeguards around social care staff accessing vulnerable people when the abuser is controlling access, with appropriate legal constraints to stop local authorities abusing this power.  The Bill does not provide guidance on exactly how Safeguarding Adults Boards should be funded once they are statutory, which could leave them underfunded and ineffective.

Action on Elder abuse would like to see a criminal charge of elder/adult abuse included in the Bill, which would “cover circumstances where an adult uses their relationship or position to cause or allow an older person or dependent adult to suffer unnecessary physical pain or mental suffering, or injures their health, or steals, defrauds or embezzles their money or property.”  MP Nick Smith is calling for an amendment to the Bill which will make corporate neglect an offence, in order that care home companies take responsibility for the poor standards in their homes.

The Care Bill will be going through the House of Commons later this year, so you can help by writing to your MP and highlighting some of the Bill’s weaknesses.  Please feel free to contact me for more information.  Action on Elder Abuse are also lobbying for many of these changes – visit their webpage for further details.

Raising Awareness

It is vital that a spotlight is shone on the widespread abuse of vulnerable elderly people in our society.  There are thousands of carers and relatives out there who provide excellent care, but there are too many who do not.  It is unacceptable.  Adult Safeguarding should be far higher on the government’s agenda.  It will be costly, but it should be, because this is an investment for all our futures.  We as individuals also have a responsibility for instigating a change in attitudes.  One of the first steps towards this is to spread awareness of what constitutes abuse, to make abusers to stop and think about the impact of their behaviour and to ensure that victims recognise it as abuse, and not just something to be suffered in silence.

What constitutes abuse?

Financial abuse: taking money or welfare benefits without your permission; belongings or property being withheld or stolen by another person.

Physical abuse: as well as intentional physical harm, this can include assisting you to move in a rough manner, forcible restraint, and even locking you in a room.

Emotional abuse: shouting, swearing, bullying, teasing or humiliating you or making threats.

Neglect: ignoring medical or physical care needs, whether maliciously or not.

Sexual: being made to do things of a sexual nature against your will.

Discrimination: comments or jokes about a person’s disability, age, race or sexual orientation.

Where to go for help or advice?

There are a number of places to go to get help and advice around adult safeguarding:

-      If someone has been seriously injured or is in immediate danger, you should call 999.  If you suspect a crime has been committed, it should be reported to the police.

-      Contact Adult Services, a department of your local council.  You can find out who your local authority is on the DirectGov website. Contact numbers can be found in the phone book.  Tell them you want to report an Adult Safeguarding issue.  They will be able to advise and support you.  Most councils will also have further information on adult safeguarding on their websites.

-      If the concerns are about a care home or domiciliary care service, you can contact the regulatory body to report any concerns:

o   If you live in England, this is the Care Quality Commission - 03000 616161

o   If you live in Scotland, this is the Scottish Care Commission - 0845 603 0890

o   If you live in Wales, this is the Care and Social Services Inspectorate for Wales - 01443 848450

o   If you live in Northern Ireland, this is the Northern Ireland Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety - Social Services Inspectorate  - 0289 052 0500

-      These bodies also offer a service for raising about concerns about a care that you work for, which can be raised anonymously if you wish.  The CQC advise that before contacting them with a whistleblowing allegation, you consider:

- speaking to your line manager or a senior member of staff about your concerns.

- reading your employer's whistlebleblowing policy which will give you information on       what to do next.

-      Mencap also run a free confidential whistleblowing helpline for all care staff working in the UK – the number is: 08000 724725

-      From October 2010 the Local Government Ombudsman has been able to consider complaints from people who fund their own care through Direct Payments. It is a free service, but in most cases they will only consider a complaint once the care provider has been given a reasonable opportunity to deal with the situation. You can contact their advice team on 0300 061 0614

-      You can speak in confidence to your GP, practice nurse or dentist if you are being harmed.

-      The Citizens Advice Bureau is a good source of advice around financial matters, if you have any concerns in this area.  They can be contacted on 08444 111 444

-      Domestic abuse can occur at any age and is never acceptable.  If you are scared of someone you live with, you can call the National Domestic Abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247

-      Action on Elder Abuse has a free confidential helpline which provides information, advice and support to victims and others who are concerned about or have witnessed abuse. This helpline is available Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm on: 080 8808 8141

-      Age UK also has an advice number you can call: 0800 169 6565

-      You can also call the Samaritans if you have any concerns you want to discuss on 08457 90 90 90

The conditions under which we allow our some of our elderly people to live are appalling.  We would not tolerate it for ourselves, so how can it be acceptable for those who have lost the ability to provide and speak for themselves?  Please take the time to share some of this information with the people you know.  If you have elderly friends, relatives or neighbours, you may want to consider printing out the numbers and details above to give to them.  We must do more to raise awareness of these issues, to keep them on the government’s agenda and end the abuse of our older generation to whom we owe so much.