Reclaiming our food system

Editorial from my first issue of Red Pepper as the main editor

It is surely one of the most damning indictments of global capitalism that one sixth of the world’s population is chronically malnourished. Yet merely to use this statistic as propaganda against the current system is not only to ignore a pressing problem but to do a disservice to the myriad struggles over our food system taking place around the world.

The globalisation of agriculture over the past 30 years has placed ever more of our food system into the hands of multinational corporations. But it has also called into being an increasingly co-ordinated movement of small producers trying to reclaim democratic control of that system.

Most obviously organised through La Via Campesina (‘the peasant way’), this millions-strong movement has managed not only to campaign at the international level against the likes of the World Trade Organisation’s Agreement on Agriculture, but to formulate a radical alternative in the form of ‘food sovereignty’.

Defined as the ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems’, food sovereignty is a political demand for land reform, the rolling back of corporate control and the protection of natural resources. It is also a vision of ‘agroecological’ production, using modern sustainable techniques to work with nature, and of prioritising local markets over exports.

The 20th-century left tended to see the solutions to feeding the world as large scale and equated democratic control with the state. The realities of the 21st century demand a different approach, albeit one that doesn’t rule out state intervention. In Venezuela, the Chavéz government has embraced food sovereignty and mobilised its resources towards empowering small producers. By extending low-interest credit and buying produce for distribution through its network of subsidised supermarkets, while encouraging co-operatively run farms and food-processing factories, it has sought to secure the livelihoods of producers and affordable access to food for consumers at the same time.

Climate change demands that we localise our food systems in the global North too, but progressives can tie themselves up in knots when trying to marry this with the South’s current dependence on food exports. Food sovereignty could go some way towards squaring this circle, bolstering local and regional trade and ending the South’s subordinate role in the global food economy.

Yet reclaiming the food system is not just an imperative for the global South. Supermarket dominance continues to squash local communities, and the price squeeze they impose on producers makes sustainable farming unviable. Queen’s Market in east London is recognised as a multicultural community hub. It has fought off an Asda but is still under threat from property developers. Defending existing local alternatives such as this is among our first tasks.

Building new sustainable and ethical alternatives is also vital. Initiatives such as Growing Communities (page 13 in our October/November issue) are trying to make organic, locally sourced food an everyday reality in one of London’s poorest boroughs. The model of consumer co-operatives that has taken off in some US cities could start to provide a means by which ethical sourcing and affordability can co-exist. And the popularity of allotments, once a staple of working class life, is a sign that people are starting to reconnect with what they eat in a more meaningful way.

These initiatives and others can start to return a level of autonomy and democracy to our food system, but we should be careful not just to content ourselves with an ethical subculture serving only the concerned citizen with money and time. As Kath Dalmeny argues (page 10 in our October/November issue), we can and should demand government support for these initiatives to make them mainstream.

However, another of the themes of this issue of Red Pepper points the way to an interesting and complementary possibility: worker involvement in a green transition. It is more than 30 years since the workers at Lucas Aerospace presented their alternative plan for the company, but as Hilary Wainwright points out (page 24 in our October/November), while some of the political conditions are now very different, the example of Lucas can perhaps inspire some creative red-green thinking today.

Whether it is in the global food system via food sovereignty, or in industrial production, by insisting on putting the people involved at the centre of the solutions, we can ensure that producers’ creativity and intelligence are used to build a sustainable world. Effectively this means building forms of economic democracy.

By building into the Green New Deal, with its reliance on traditional forms of state intervention, new demands for economic democracy, we can provide a real challenge to the hold of corporate power and chart a path beyond, towards a post-capitalist future.

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Booktopia

So the normal idea with Red Pepper's Booktopia feature is to get someone at least a bit famous and at least a bit left wing to choose eight of their favourite books. I only fulfill one of those conditions, but got to do it anyway as someone else fell through at the last minute. I guess there was some rationale since its a sort of introduction to me as I take on being one of the editors. Anyway, various people have said they enjoyed reading it, so I thought I'd post it here too.

And remember, please subscribe to Red Pepper. Its a great magazine, but walks a fraying tightrope above the pit of financial collapse... or something.

A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

New Directions 1958

Ferlinghetti’s San Francisco bookshop, City Lights, is my favourite bookshop in the world. Ferlinghetti was one of the major figures of beat culture and later associated with left libertarian politics and opposition to the gentrification of San Francisco. Some of his poems in A Coney Island of the Mind also have a political edge, though this is no didactic tract. Rather it gathers together fragments of America's post-war reality and presents them in critical juxtaposition. Some pieces are written to accompany jazz and in rhythm seem to anticipate Gil-Scott Heron’s later proto hip-hop.

Live Working, Die Fighting by Paul Mason

Vintage 2008

Paul Mason really brings to life the history of workers' struggle as he examines different episodes of it, from the 1871 Paris Commune to the experience of the Jewish workers' Bund organisation in Poland. Alongside this, Mason draws parallels with 21st century struggles in the global south, allowing him not only to present a fascinating historical narrative, but to draw out of it key dilemmas which have informed the alternative strategies pursued by different parts of the international workers movement over time.

The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord

Zone Books edition 1995

Many theoretical tracts lose relevance as history overtakes their insights, but in many ways this one seems more relevant today than when it was written in the 60s. Less self-indulgent than other situationist writing, its not an easy read, but some of its insights into mass consumer society are crucial.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Virago 2001

I’ve yet to come across anyone who’s read this book and didn’t like it. Definitely Atwood’s best novel, it utilises both a common theme of hers, that of people trapped by their circumstances, and her talent for verisimilitude. The result is a book that does what truly great novels can – engross you so thoroughly that you use every spare moment to carry on reading.

The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes

Thames and Hudson second edition 1991

This is the classic account of modernism in visual art in the 20th Century and should be read in conjunction with regular trips to the Tate Modern. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually managed to get through all of the copious text, interesting though it is, but the book is worth owning just for the colour prints. From impressionism to expressionism, dada to pop art, the historical context of artistic movements shines through, helping not just to explain art through history, but history through art too.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge

New York Review of Books new edition 2004

Though Serge was essentially an anarchist, when he arrived in Russia in 1919 he joined the Bolshevik party to support the revolution. His ended up exiled to Siberia for his opposition to Stalinism, eventually escaping the country but to great personal cost. This novel, set in 1930s Europe stands out as an illumination the Soviet dictatorship and its foreign policy as great as Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.

Detroit, I Do Mind Dying by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin

St Martin’s Press 1975

US history is full of exciting revolutionary moments you never hear about, and 1968-72 in Detroit was one of them. This is the definitive account of revolutionary unionism amongst the mainly black workforce in Detroit’s massive car industry. Far more than the ‘counterculture’ which was at least partly absorbed into neoliberal consumer culture, this was a movement which really scared the US establishment and which, along with the rest of the radical black liberation movement had to be definitively defeated.

Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood

University of Minnesota Press edition 2001

Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin is well known, not least because it eventually became the basis for the film Cabaret. Yet the ‘Christopher’ character is that novel is only loosely based on Isherwood. By 1976 the gay liberation movement had happened and Isherwood felt able to write this properly autobiographical account of his life between 1929 and 1939, covering not just his time in Berlin but his subsequent journey around pre-war Europe and attempts to rescue his German lover Heinz from the Nazis. It’s a fascinating and intimate account.

Back to the future

I went to see the Tate Modern's futurism exhibition at the weekend. Despite taking quite an interest in modern art, I was actually fairly ignorant about futurism, and what I thought I knew turned out to not be quite right.

Futurism was related to, and had some similar concerns as cubism. How to depict the age of light, speed and machines? An Italian invention, futurism rejected the veneration of the old, the fusty museums that covered Italy, and sentimentalism. Instead they gloried in the speeding train, the electric street lamp, but also nationalism and war. Marinetti, who wrote the futurist manifesto (and what is an art movement without a manifesto?) was also a thoroughly nasty misogynist.

Now if that all sounds a bit fascist, you might be surprised to learn that the early futurists were more interested in the anarchist riot than the fascist state, although in a thoroughly macho way of course. But beyond the political posturing, both what the futurists depicted and how they depicted it were revolutionary at the time and are still compelling today.

Futurism proper only lasted about 5 years, ending with the onset of the First World War. The Italian futurists agitated for Italy to end its neutrality and enter the war, yet those futurists who actually encountered the war for real quickly reassessed their views. CRW Nevinson, the only English futurist drove an ambulance during the war and soon rejected his pro-war positions. Perhaps fittingly, it's his picture of an exploding shell which ends this exhibition.

The exhibition doesn't deal with fascism at all, which took up the futurist aesthetic which suited it very well. But since that was the only bit I already knew, it was good to find it wasn't nearly the whole story. I'll finish with an extract from a futurist statement called Vital English Art, published by Marinetti and Nevinson. In the section titled 'Against' they write:

2. The pessimistic, sceptical and narrow views of the English public, who stupidly adore the pretty-pretty, the commonplace, the soft, the sweet, and mediocre, the sickly revivals of medievalism, the Garden Cities with their curfews and artificial battlements, the may-pole Morris dances, Æstheticism, Oscar Wilde, the Pre-Raphaelites, Neo-primitives and Paris.

If they'd been writing a century later, they may well have added ITV costume dramas to the list...

Save the Children turns Tory

Yesterday the Tories released their green paper on international development. It was pretty horrendous - a mix of ideological free market nonsense and silly gimmicks. The gimmicks included the suggestion that the public might vote for their favourite international development projects and only these would get money. Luckily this sounds like one of those stupid suggestions that we won't hear about again.

The support for trade liberalisation and privatisation is corporate welfare dressed up as development policy, but no more than you would expect from the Tories. More of a departure, and arguably therefore more worrying is the idea of 'aid vouchers' and assisted places at private schools - in other words, shifting aid money directly to private businesses.

The cherry on the top of the cake, by the way, was the Tory assertion that capitalism is Britain's gift to the world. As Nick Dearden of the Jubilee Debt Campaign commented "Given the problems which the unregulated global economy has recently subjected the world to, many countries might prefer to be removed from the Christmas list."

Most self-respecting development charities condemned the aid vouchers as a very bad idea, and many also rejected the other free market nonsense. Not so Save the Children, who hosted the launch of the Green Paper at their offices, and whose chief executive wrote a friendly comment piece in the Times yesterday in support of David Cameron's ring-fencing aid spending. The aim was clearly to position Save the Children as the Tories' international development charity, just as Oxfam was Labour's.

Not surprising, perhaps, given how much of Save the Children's budget comes from government, and will therefore be dependent on Tory favour if (when?) they win the next election. But problematic nonetheless, not least because its a pattern replicated across the NGO sector, albeit less obviously and less successfully. Despite being generally progressive in some way, the talk in charity-world has been for a good while that the 'smart money' is on 'engaging' with the Tories now.

Yet despite the fact that this has been going on, the Tories still come out with awful right-wing guff like this Green Paper. And they'll do it in government too. We need to be building a movement against them, not a dialogue with them - that way we might be able to replicate what's happened in France, where some of the most agregious of Sarkosy's policies have been headed off my social mobilisation. But there's no chance of that happening if NGOs avoid public criticism of the Tories, let alone giving 'development cover' to their anti-development policies as Save the Children are.

Are BNP voters racist? And other important questions

So in the end, the BNP got not just one but two seats in the European parliament. They are, of course, Nazi scum, and their election is a big problem. The resources and acceptability (respectability is not really the right word) this will give them risks establishing them on the political scene in the kind of long-term way that the Front National is in France (thankfully the FN dropped half their seats, down to three, but that's still three seats in a bad year for them). What's more, their victory will surely give confident to party members, and in the areas where they are strong, lead to an increase in what's politely called 'community tension', but which is more acurately known as racism.

The most pressing question, though, is what should the left do? Mainstream politicians of all stripes were keen to stress as the results came in last night that they didn't think BNP voters were racist, just that they were expressing a protest vote. I can see why you might want to avoid labelling nearly 1 million people as racists, but I think that without confronting this head on, we risk burying our heads in the sand. BNP voters are at least somewhat racist.

I should clarify that. I'm not saying that they are irreconcilably racist (although some of them will be). I'm not saying that their racism is very well thought out (although for some of them it will be). But quite frankly, given the choice of hard right 'protest vote' parties (UKIP, English Democrats), its clear that the BNP have built a base on the basis of racism. For instance, in the Yorkshire and Humber region, where the BNP won their first seat, their vote was actually slightly down on 2004 (from 126,538 to 120,139) - it was only the collapse of the Labour vote which gave them a seat.

Of course in one sense, the vote is a protest against the mainstream, but one which is sustained rather than one-off. In the absence of any kind of left alternative, its hardly a surprise either. With communities torn asunder by 30 years of neoliberalism, and a tabloid press obsessed with immigration, the conclusions people are likely to draw once the BNP move in are depressingly obvious.

The main left responses to the threat of the BNP are both beginning to show their shortcomings. Unite Against Fascism was formed a few years ago by bringing together the Anti-Nazi League and the National Assembly Against Racism with trade union backing. The result somwhow ended up being less than the sum of its parts. Although Love Music, Hate Racism has had some success in energising youth anti-fascism, with no Nazi marches to confront on the streets there is no clear direction for those who are mobilised.

Searchlight meanwhile, with its Hope not Hate formula, has been succesful in some places and not in others. It recognised, correctly I think, that shouting 'Nazi' doesn't necessarily work. The problem is that the 'hope' part of its formula is largely illusory.

In both approaches, that weakness of any organised political left that can pose an alternative to the politics of hate is a key stumbling block. While the Labour party is in no small part to blame for this, it is not the only one. This is not to say that there has to be one left organisation that can fulfill this role, but there has to be something in every area, and ideally there would be collaboration.

Which brings me to the Green party campaign in the North West. I heard several condemnations of the 'vote Green to stop the BNP' message that the Greens were putting out, though it must be said that all were from partisans of other parties. But with only 5,000 more votes, the Greens would have denied Nick Griffin a seat. Their strategy was a correct one, and built as it was on trying to form a left, anti-racist alliance across the region, it suggests a small degree of hope for the future.

Respect took a constructive approach, backing the Green campaign, and I hope the Greens will reciprocate in the future - it would be extraordinary now if they stood against Salma Yaqoob in Birmingham Sparkbrook. Hopefully bridges can also be built with the Socialist Party and indeed any bit of the active Labour left that still exists.

When it comes to electoral politics, pragmatism and a sense of reality are even more important than normal. We need an electoral left, even if it isn't the be-all and end-all, so we better get our act together.

The perils of cycling

And which driver is not tempted, merely by the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children and cyclists?
- Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

I recently became a cyclist, in the sense that I bought a bike and now ride it to work. Work is six miles from home, so in the last week I've cycled at least 60 miles, which I reckon is pretty good going, and certainly makes me feel healthier. Truth be told though, while I don't miss the stale warm air of the tube, or the crush when trying to get on the southbound Northern line at Kings Cross, or closed stations necessitating annoying detours, I've actually swapped one set of frustrations for another.

Even though there are some great, quiet routes through some bits of London, and even bits of genuine cycle path (ie those not just hastily painted on the side of the road that finish in less-than-useful places) to help you avoid death traps like the Elephant and Castle roundabout, you can't avoid busy roads sometimes. And here one encounters the intimidating rumble of heavy goods vehicles. Buses aren't great either, but to be fair, most bus drivers are very considerate to cyclists, even if their fumes and and sheer size are not what you want to encounter on your journey to work.

But with the advantage of being able to cycle in bus lanes you can often seem reasonably safe, even on a busy road. Unless its full of potholes that is. Some roads in London have terrible surfaces, a combination of regularly being dug up and multiple manhole covers. The latter can be particularly frustrating when they litter those painted-on cycle lanes - with heavy traffic to your right, its difficult to cycle round them, and the worst threaten to knock you off course and into an accident. Farringdon Road is a particular danger for this, as its often necessary to keep up a reasonable speed to avoid getting in the way of other vehicles.

The Green Party, wherever it gets a local council seat, is keen on pushing 20mph speed limits. This would definitely make for safer roads, though on the road I live on, getting people to stick to 30mph would be a start. Slower cars will encourage cycling and make London safer for cyclists. But what we also need are decent road surfaces, so cyclists can travel on equal terms with drivers.

Long live the Freedom and Solidarity Party!

Perhaps its because of frustration at there not being a political party in the UK that accords well enough with my views, but I've always had a certain fascination with the details of political landscapes in other countries. Its great news that the Left-Green Movement in Iceland has just won 21% in the general election there, giving it a major role in a coalition government with the Social Democrats. But one country isn't nearly so much fun as the whole of Europe, with its myriad of different parties.

Enter the EU Profiler (thanks Jim!), an online tool to help you decide who to vote for in the European elections. No great surprise or interest that it tells me I should vote Green on June 4. But if I switch from 'national parties' to 'parties in Europe', I discover that my closest matched party is the Freedom and Solidarity Party (ÖDP) in Turkey. The ÖDP is a libertarian socialist party with 1 MP and no prospect of getting any MEPs, because of course, Turkey is not a member of the EU. So while its strange that EU Profiler decided to include it, I'm glad it did - I've found a political home and will send fraternal greetings immediately!

My other very close matches include the Communist Refoundation (Italy), Left Alliance (Finland), the Left Bloc (Portugal) and the Swiss Greens. Also within the rather arbitrary circle around my position can be found Holland's Party for the Animals (no animal welfare questions were included incidentally) and the Galician Nationalist Bloc (from the Spanish state, in case you were wondering where Galicia was). Just outside my circle sits France's newly-formed New Anti-Capitalist Party, an organisation I would have thought I had plenty in common with, but apparently EU Profiler knows better...

But no matter. I have my political home. I shall be setting up the North London branch of the Freedom and Solidarity Party shortly.

Brown New Deal

It's rare, these days, for a bank to be condemning the government rather than the other way around, but that's what a new report by HSBC does. It reveals that despite promises to "lead the world in building the low carbon society with a low carbon economy", Gordon Brown's actual investment in anything resembling a 'Green New Deal' is tiny compared to other rich countries. China, whose emissions are regularly referred to as an excuse for not tackling our own, is devoting 110 times as much money to environmental investment. Brown loves to jump on any bandwagon that rolls by, but just like with Make Poverty History, it seems he's not actually serious about the Green New Deal.

The HSBC report points out that by investing in green energy, the government could create more jobs than with conventional financial stimuli, as well as cutting emissions and solving energy supply issues. All well and good. But when the principles of the Green New Deal were originally brought together last year, they included proposals such as a windfall tax on energy super-profits. Although campaigning was done around this issue, it doesn't seem to have made its way so strongly into mix when the Green New Deal is talked about in the mainstream. There is a danger that HSBC, Brown or anyone could cherry-pick the corporate-friendly policies, calling what they've done a Green New Deal, but losing the vital essence of the proposal; to fundamentally challenge the neoliberal model that got us in the mess in the first place.

I think its important to remember, though, that its possible to both critique and push further any Green New Deal -style proposals. We should use the momentum created by the fact that mainstream alternatives to free market dogma are starting to be implemented to demand proposals which contain more social justice and a more sustainable basis on which to run our economy. That means more co-operatives and credit unions, more local food production and sustainable transport systems, not just investment in hi-tech green energy projects which are most suitable for multinational corporations, thereby confirming their place in our future.

A space to build a movement?

Yesterday was a long day. I've been on the organising team for 6 Billion Ways and yesterday it happened - all 14 hours of it. But it was also a real success. We don't have a final figure for the number of people who came, but it was getting close to 2,000 over the course of the day. They came to hear a mix of international and UK speakers talk about everything from whether getting climate justice necessitates getting rid of capitalism, to whether overseas aid is a good thing or a bad thing.

One of the original inspirations for the event was 'McPlanet', which various campaigning NGOs hold in Germany every two years, but the feel was very much like that of a mini social forum. That was deliberate on the part of the organisers. While there is nothing new in campaigning NGOs working together on events, what set 6 Billion Ways apart was that it had at the centre of it an idea of building a movement. This was just one event, of course, but it aimed to contribute to something wider, instead of simply seeking to build either the brand of even the particular campaigns of the organisations that put it on.

It was also clear, from both the numbers that turned up and the things they were saying, that the event struck a chord with lots of people who are becoming deeply disillusioned with the global order. I'm sure very few would have failed to be inspired by the day which was very buzzy and featured a photo exhibition, radical bookstore area, campaign stalls, skills workshops, films and a party at the end.

The inclusion of speakers like Tariq Ramadan, and the involvement of City Circle (an organisation of progressive Muslim professionals) as one of the organisers, also meant the event drew a diverse crowd. At the final plenary, speaking last after Susan George, Tariq Ramadan, Bianca Jagger, Trevor Ngwane and Meena Raman, Mark Thomas quipped that he was glad to have been included on the panel as the token white male. He then went on to be as angry and impassioned as I've seen him and gave us a very fitting end to the day.

After worrying about whether people will turn up and all the logistical and programmatical headaches that come with a big event for the last few months, we're now left with a question. Surely we have a responsibility to do something with the enthusiasm we've created for the 6 Billion Ways idea - and if so, what?

Derek Simpson is a disgrace

The picture says it all. A trade union leader grown flabby on a union expense account with his arms around two 'glamour' models from the right-wing (not to say anti-union) Daily Star to promote the most xenophobic take on the wildcat strikes over oil refinery jobs.

Simpson is the joint general secretary of Unite, the union formed from the recent merger of Amicus and the Transport and General Workers Union. He's also a key union ally of Gordon Brown, which perhaps makes his support for “British jobs for British workers” unsurprising, since Brown was the originator of the phrase in recent political discourse.

The wildcat strikers who have taken up the slogan have provoked much debate in the lefty blogosphere, including over the actual level of racism among strikers, but when Brown makes a promise like that and it rings so hollow, its not surprising that some of them seek to throw it back at the Prime Minister. Its certainly no more reactionary in their mouths than it is in his.

Nevertheless, there are people involved in the strikes that have tried to steer them away from nationalism and towards a demand for transborder workers' rights and decent terms and conditions for all. Not so Derek Simpson it seems. But the problems with Simpson don't end with his embrace of reactionary nationalism and sexism.

Simpson's leadership of Unite (Amicus section) has seen the union supporting a new third runway at Heathrow despite the implications for climate change and an expansion of nuclear power. Union leaders have to defend their members, but responsible progressive ones should be arguing for expansion in green industries, not dirty and dangerous ones. The union also strongly supported Tony Blair when he forced the Serious Fraud Office to drop its investigation into arms exporter BAE Systems amid pressure from Saudi Arabia to do so.

Now Simpson has been forced into a leadership contest he was trying to avoid. The strange terms of the merger between the T&G and Amicus led to a situation where Simpson was able to try and stay in power for eight years without being re-elected – until someone brought a legal challenge that is. Now that person, Jerry Hicks, is a candidate against Simpson, on a platform of democratic grassroots organising, environmental responsibility and internationalism. Simpson meanwhile has been accused of using official union publications to argue the case for a vote for himself. Being a member of the T&G section of Unite I won't be able to vote, but for the sake of the union's future I really hope that Jerry Hicks wins.

Review: The trouble with aid

Below is my brief review of Jonathan Glennie's 'The Trouble with Aid' for the February issue of Peace News. I hadn't seen Peace News for a while when I was asked to write this review. The last time I saw it, in 2006, I was less than impressed. A feature article about Venezuela, for instance, spent much time regretting Chavez's military background and virtually failed to mention the social advances that had taken place under his Presidency.

Looking at the December/January issue online, Peace News now seems more relevant and useful, even if its constituency must remain small. Clearly Milan Rai's editorship of the paper has improved it, and I'm happy to make a small contribution in the form of this review.

The Trouble with Aid: Why Less Could Mean More for Africa Jonathan Glennie, Zed, 2008.

This isn't a book about humanitarian relief, or really about the aid delivered by aid agencies at all. Instead its about the much bigger sums which rich country governments contribute to African infrastructure, governance and welfare systems on a regular basis. Most African countries receive more than 10 per cent of their GDP in aid, and a few, like Sierra Leone and Burundi, receive more than 30 per cent.

Aid received on this scale has an enormous impact, but not necessarily a good one Glennie argues. For a start, governments who are dependent on aid like this end up being more accountable to donors than to the people they are supposed to represent. And when those donors insist on economic policies like privatisation or the lowering of import taxes, aid dependence undermines not just democracy, but development too.

Glennie isn't opposed to aid, but calls himself an aid 'realist'. He makes a convincing case that there's lots rich countries could do to help reduce global poverty that would be far more effective than aid is even in the best scenarios. Like closing down tax havens that deny poor countries tax revenue for instance. Instead they promise aid increases because its easy, its buys influence among recipient countries and it presents no challenge at all to Northern corporations.

This is an accessible and tightly argued book which makes a refreshing change to both the uncritical calls for 'more aid' from some development charities, and from the neoconservative assumptions of last year's best-selling development book 'The Bottom Billion' by former World Bank economist Paul Collier. What Glennie is arguing for is a global justice agenda, and in that he's bang on target.

Our friends in the South

The latest issue of Red Pepper is just out and carries my article about social movements in the global South ('Our friends in the South', Red Pepper Feb/Mar 09). It was written partly to accompany an event which is happening in London on 28 February, 6 Billion Ways. The event is a kind of Social Forum lite, with speakers including Social Forum stalwarts like Trevor Ngwane (from South Africa's Anti-privatisation Forum) and Susan George. There's a huge range of discussions and workshops for a single day event, especially one which is free. Its organised by some of the more radical and social movement-orientated UK NGOs, and you can register for it here.

The article meanwhile surveys just a few of the coalitions of social movements in non-rich world in order to make a tentative argument that social movements have a better critique of the global system than many of the charities that are our primary connections to the 'developing world'. They also have better solutions too, like food sovereignty. In dealing with the fallout from the financial crisis as activists, we need better connections with such social movements.

The article is not available online yet, and its a bit long to post here. Besides, I should probably encourage people to buy Red Pepper, which also has some other interesting stuff, including analysis of the youth revolt in Greece and some very quickly turned around coverage of Palestine issues after the assault on Gaza. There's also an excellent piece by Sue Branford about the Landless Workers' Movement in Brazil as an accompanying article to mine.

If anyone gets round to reading it, I'd welcome comments on it here.

UPDATE: My article has now been put up online: Our friends in the South

Good news from Iceland

The recently resigned Prime Minister of Iceland, conservative Geir Haarde, is being widely described as the first government victim of the financial crisis. Since the economy collapsed last year, weekly riots have rocked the government until it was no longer viable. Early elections have been called for May, and the interim Prime Minister is to be Johanna Sigurdardottir of the Social Democratic Alliance.

The fact that she will be the first openly gay Prime Minister in the world is one in the eye for global homophobes. But although she's considered slightly to the left of her party, the Social Democrats have been in coalition with with Haarde's Independence Party since 2007, and therefore bear some responsibility for the neoliberal financial-deregulation-and-privatisation which turned out to be a house built on sand.

The Social Democrats' new coalition partner is the Left-Green Movement, which has 9 of the Icelandic Parliament's 63 seats. Although solidly green, they're not aligned with other global Green Parties, but rather with the Nordic Green Left, the alliance of left-wing parties across Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. Polls now put them on 28%, which would make them the biggest party if nothing changes before the election.

The Financial Times explains their appeal: "The Left-Greens – an anti-big business, pro-environment party – have benefited from a dramatic rise in anti-capitalist sentiment in Iceland following the crisis as people expressed disgust at prominent and flashy young businessmen known as the ‘Viking raiders’."

Of course, a Left-Green led government would not be a panacea. It is calling for the renegotiation of Iceland's recent bailout deal with the IMF, but even if it manages to do this, the better terms it negotiates are unlikely to include ensuring that ordinary people don't pay for the financial crisis through job losses and reposessions. If people resist this, which they may well do given the evidence of the protests so far, the Left-Green Movement could end up enforcing the interests of capital rather than fighting them.

But perhaps I'm judging them by the standards of your average Social Democrat. If the Left-Greens maintain a close connection to the social movements which emerge in response to the crisis, and those movements maintain their self activity rather than leaving it all to the Left-Greens, something rather exciting could emerge in Iceland. And in the meantime, we can be heartened by the fact that Iceland seems to be lurching left rather than right in response to their economic crisis.

For further reading (all in English) see the Left-Green Movement's website, Aftaka (an anarchist site) and the Guardian's Iceland section.

'My name is Harvey Milk, and I'm here to recruit you'

Last week I went to see 'Milk' and I can heartily recommend it. Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the US when he became a Supervisor of San Francisco in 1977. Although this was no mean feat, given that his constituency covered the city's gay district (the Castro) it was perhaps another campaign that was more astonishing. Milk was at the centre of the defeat of Proposition 6 which would have made the dismissal of gay teachers mandatory across California. Rather than hide behind mealy-mouthed assertions about human rights as some of the moderates in the campaign would have prefered, Milk took the bigots head on in public debates, and urged gay Californians to come out to friends and family.

The defeat of Proposition 6 was a turning point in the battle for gay rights in the US. Up to that point a wave of homophobia was sweeping the country, not least due to the efforts of evangelical Christian singer Anita Bryant. Milk's achievement was not so much to get elected, although that helped, but to build a movement. Thus it was that when both he and the Mayor of San Francisco were shot dead by a fellow Supervisor in 1978, 30,000 people turned out on the streets to mourn.

On Newsnight Review the day the film came out, Tony Parsons complained that the film was sanitised for a straight audience. This was San Francisco in the 70s, he said, where were the bath houses, the depravity? He even went so far to compare it to Philadelphia, the supposedly groundbreaking 1993 film with Tom Hanks as a gay man with AIDS who never so much as kisses his boyfriend on screen. In fact, I think Tony entirely missed the point. This was not a film primarily about gay life in 70s Frisco, but about political activism. The kissing, and indeed sex, was there in appropriate amounts to tell the story.

The generally excellent director Gus Van Sant made the right call here, and does a great job of invoking the excitement of the movement at the time (at one point an angry crowd of protesters chant "civil rights or civil war, gay rights now!"). Sean Penn's performance is also great, as a number of reviewers have commented. But perhaps the best recommendation is that despite the fact that though Harvey dies at the end of the film, you're still left with a sense of hope and optimism.

Being both gay and an activist, this was perhaps an obvious film for me to go see, but I'm pretty sure that anyone who isn't a thorough reactionary will enjoy it!