‘Labour is getting Britain back on track’

Ben Lyons, Co-Chair of OU Labour Club

In the Glasgow North-East by-election, the Conservative Party won 1,075 votes. This is a few hundred less than the “New Loony Party” candidate, Honest Blair, achieved in Oxford East at the last general election and just a hundred more than the Independent Working Class Association. By contrast, Labour won an impressive victory, holding the seat with almost 60% of the vote, despite the accepted political truth that governments lose by-elections (the Tories lost 19 by-elections before winning the 1992 general election). David Cameron is wrong to argue that the Conservatives have become a One Nation Party, representing the whole of Britain, rather than its countryside and suburbs. His party’s ideas still ring hollow to great swathes of the population.

There are two reasons for this. Firstly, his rhetoric is meaningless and contradictory; soundbites rather than a serious programme for government. In a speech last week, Cameron explained that “we need new answers now, and they will only come from a bigger society, not bigger government”. Yet he explains that “big society is not just going to spring to life on its own: we need strong and concerted government action”. The speech’s argument was bizarre – using the government to fight a bloated state – but Cameron’s real vision is actually quite simple: unreconstructed Thatcherism. Beyond the pseudo-intellectualism of his speeches, how do Cameron’s policies work out for hard-working families and those concerned with fairness and a basic sense of social justice. His single tax pledge is a cut for the 3000 richest estates in England, paid for by cutting pay for junior nurses; his gut hatred of the EU has forced him into alliance with a Polish party which will only accept complicity of Poles in the Holocaust if “someone from the Jewish side” also apologises for how “the Jews” behaved and there has been no pledge on what the Conservative Party would do on global warming.

By contrast, the Labour Party is pushing on unglamorously. We haven’t got the money for the expensive ads and we haven’t got a leader who sets your hairs on end. But we are doing the things that are getting Britain back on track. Earlier this week, Labour announced plans to tear up the contracts for risky bankers, guarantee one-to-one tuition for students and legally enshrine the right to hospital treatment within 18 weeks. None of these policies are exciting and the speech to introduce them was blunt and dry. What they will do is make a huge difference for millions of people across the whole of Britain, rebuilding the economy, strengthening our education and saving lives. This is what government should be about: taking practical steps to make life better for people, not grand tautological speeches. This is why Labour won in Glasgow.

‘Glasgow North East is not representative’

Alexander Hall, History, Wadham

I sometimes wonder if A-level politics was the mother of my scepticism. Half a lesson was dedicated to ‘safe seats’, in which Liverpool Riverside was given as an example as the safest Labour seat in the land. Today, this example has become relevant once again, when BBC News informed me that in Glasgow North East: ‘More than 9,000 people – one sixth of potential workers – were claiming incapacity benefit or severe disablement allowance in February… the second highest rate in the UK after Liverpool Riverside.’

Glasgow North East is not representative of the challenge that faces Labour at the next general election. If Labour had lost Glasgow North East it would have been far more worrying for the party than even Crewe and Nantwich last year. Even the most optimistic of Tory candidates would not expect such safe seats to be prised from redder hands, and in this constituency the SNP presented a far likelier alternative than the Conservative Party. The by-election victory was a convincing one, but unfortunately Glasgow does not represent the Labour Party’s comeback, and I suspect this result will soon fade into the shadow of a subject more worthy of attention and sensation: a new bank loan or a fresh demand for new helicopters in Afghanistan, obviating any bounce Labour might have gained from the by-election.

Policy gave way to partisan and class traditions in Glasgow, but this does not mean that the same will be the case more widely in the next general election. Policy will be scrutinised – this may seem a positive thing for Mr. Brown, who has not received due credit for his quick responses once downturn was underway, albeit that he was – at least – complicit in its origins. However, it may be that Cameron’s cost-cutting and emphasis on efficiency reflects the feeling of the public at large. Many seem to have forgotten that discontent in the winter of 1979 produced Mrs Thatcher’s cost-cutting; either that or they have been waiting for such an opportunity for its return. Discontent naturally hits the government hardest: economic crisis, MPs’ expenses and sensitivity to immigration will hit the government both where they are responsible and where they are not. Where traditional alignments such as those in Glasgow are not strong enough, or where Brown’s policies seem too little for the scale of the crisis, alternatives will succeed. Glasgow North East has not greatly bolstered Labour’s position, but focused the realities of elections for politicians.

Obama’s inauguration was supposed to mark a new era in American human rights policy. Guantanamo Bay – a continuing stain on their record – was to be shut down. Horrors such as water-boarding were to be ended. Gone would be the harrowing days of ‘torture flights’. But how much has been achieved? Are the promises being kept? I caught up with Sara MacNeice, Amnesty International UK’s Campaign Manager on Terrorism, Security and Human Rights to find out.

She explains that the swearing in of the new president gave Amnesty a real sense of optimism and hope that things would improve. ‘In January of last year, President Obama issued orders to close the base. He anticipated the closure within a year. Amnesty has been working for the closure of Guantanamo Bay basically since Guantanamo Bay existed, so this was a huge victory for us, in the sense that the president obviously had a firm desire to close the base. That was good news, along with that came other executive orders that looked to ending the practice of secret detention and closing down CIA run secret detention facilities and other measures that were very, very much pro human rights.’

I ask what we know about these facilities. Naively expecting such centres to be secluded within the vast American landscape, I am shocked to discover their global spread. ‘They’re in varying places, countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan. There have been rumoured – but it’s not absolutely confirmed – to be secret detention facilities in Poland, parts of eastern Europe, possibly, and also places like Diego Garcia which is under British control. But we don’t have a very clear picture of the secret detention network.

‘Alongside that went the practice of extraordinary rendition which allowed individuals to be transferred from one place to another without any judicial procedure where they would end up very often in these secret detention places.’

It is alarming that British territory could be used for such practices. Last year, David Miliband apologised, admitting that previous denials had been incorrect and that Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, had been used by the U.S. for refuelling extraordinary rendition flights. Yet he further affirmed U.S. assurances that no US detainees were ever held on the island. However, later on in the year, Time magazine claimed a ‘former senior American official’ had told them that the U.S., in 2002, had ‘imprisoned and interrogated one or more terrorism suspects on Diego Garcia’.

Whatever the past though, at the beginning of 2009, Amnesty could at least take solace that things were going to improve. But has it panned out this way? Not in Amnesty’s book.

‘Obama was putting forward what we termed as “mixed messages”‘

‘Whilst it all looked very, very positive in January, Amnesty then reviewed Obama’s progress over the first 100 days of his presidency and we came to the conclusion that he was putting forward what we termed as “mixed messages”.

‘A good example of that is, whilst he said we close the CIA run secret detention network, he did not say he would end the practice of extraordinary rendition which leaves open the possibility of individuals being transferred from places like Guantanamo to other prisons, which are just not prisons run by the U.S..’

As well as renditions continuing, Guantanamo’s closure is wracked with difficulty:
‘In terms of Guantanamo, it is likely we will be disappointed in the promise to have it closed by January. If not, and if Guantanamo is closed by then, what we need to see is it closed properly within clear human rights-based parameters. That means that the individuals who remain in the base (numbering 200-220) need to be charged or released. They need to be charged and tried in a proper federal legal system or they need to be released.’

It looks like 80 shall be transferred to countries where asylum has been found. Amnesty hopes that for those who have been detained for so long without trial, redress will be found and abuses investigated.

For the ones who are to be charged, as many as 60, Amnesty strongly opposes trial by ‘military commission’. They argue that these bodies are illegal and unjust, with defendants lacking good quality legal representation (they have usually been offered only military lawyers), translation facilities, and access to the evidence against them before the hearing. On top of their extended incarceration, this has meant that the detainees cannot mount a proper defence. Congress recently enacted measures to add safeguards to the commissions.

Over the weekend, US Attorney General Eric Holder announced five detainees are to be tried by these modified military commissions and five more – including alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – in a civilian court in New York. Whilst this falls in line with Amnesty’s demands insofar as this is within normal legal parameters, I have suspicions that – just blocks away from Ground Zero – the intense desire not to let the real perpetrators escape justice means that anyone facing trial on terrorist charges faces a foregone conclusion.

So what role can students play in fighting against injustices in the war on terror? MacNeice sets out Amnesty’s appreciation of student activism: ‘The student body is one of our most powerful activist bases…We’ve had positive experiences with student activists who are ready and able to mobilize within hours.

‘Our job as an organization is to get the facts out there and make people aware how severe the violations of human rights are but also to look at the end game: to get the message out there that it will achieve very, very little to approach the issue of counter-terrorism in the way that many governments are persisting to approach it. Security and human rights are not two distinct issues, but they go hand in hand.’

In the war on terror, previous progress in human rights has been rolled back as is evident by such techniques such as water boarding which for many are tantamount to torture. Amnesty wants to arm the student body with arguments they need to counteract this regression, bringing about changes in popular opinion and government policy. Neglecting human rights only contributes to the problem of terrorism; only if we respect them again can we find a solution.

Students are invited to attend an event on human rights and the war on terror on November 26th, in London. See amnesty.org.uk for details.

Not all students want to change the world. When I was a student, I barely even changed my jeans. Still, plenty do, and because of this the words “student” and “activist” sit next to each other pretty chummily. So you’d sort of imagine they might be good at it. But they aren’t. They’re rubbish.

This is a surprise. It’s sort of like realising that pensioners are rubbish at buying grey clothes, or that the bears actually have an Armitage Shanks showroom tucked away somewhere. And yet, it is true. Society’s most prominent activists are, when it comes to activism, actually pretty hopeless. They may have a lot of fun, but they get nothing done. They get nothing done.

You want to know who is good at activism? Parents. You don’t want to come down on the wrong side of them. Parents kick activist ass. Last week, for example, Gordon Brown indicated that he was ready, probably, to back down over his plans to scrap childcare vouchers. He announced them at the Labour Party Conference in September and those parent activists, they went into overdrive. Within weeks, more than 80,000 people had signed a petition asking him not to. Two months later, Gordon’s U-turn.

And not a keffiyeh in sight. Nobody organised a sound system. I suppose quite a few people probably did have sex with each other as a result of this protest, but they were probably going to anyway, and hardly any of them will have done it in tents. From a student activist point of view, as protest, this was unrecognisable. And that’s why it worked.

So what’s the problem with students? Well, I’d say various things.

Personally, I only marched once as a student. (I changed my jeans a few time more, I promise.) That was over the Government’s proposals to introduce tuition fees. 1998, or thereabouts. University was free at the time, and the thought it might one day not be seemed outrageous. So we marched through the town, we waved banners and blew whistles, and then we all met up in a City centre park for an impromptu “awareness-raising” boozy rave type thing. It seemed a good idea at the time, but in retrospect, I can’t think of anything that could have been more incredibly counterproductive. A bunch of frivolous middle-class idiots, whose lives were subsidised by the working taxpayer, flaunting this by spending a day holding up traffic and disturbing office workers, before heading off to get pissed in a field. It’s not exactly great PR, is it?

The world looks different when you get older. I know that probably looks like a terribly patronising thing to say, but it’s true. If your views don’t change, they should. It’s very easy to be anti-capitalism when you’ve never had a salary or a mortgage. It’s every easy to be green when you don’t have kids to take to school. By the same token, activism at a student level often looks suspiciously like too much fun.

I once heard a vociferous denunciation of the State of Israel from a guy freshly back from a gap year in the West Bank. He almost had me convinced, right up until the point at which he told me that the best thing about the West Bank was the way you could take acid and have sex on the beach at weekends. How can you have hobbies like that, and still be a fan of Hamas? I think the same, every time, about Climate Camp. If you really want to save the environment, then maybe some kind of Climate Video Conference might be a better idea.

The main way that student activists go wrong, though, is not by being students but by being activists. Successful activists aren’t really activists. They’re just people, who have a beef and get active. Nobody should be an activist first.
When I meet a passionate environmentalist who is also anti-capitalist, anti-vivesectionist, anti-fox-hunting, and pro-Marxist, while simultaneously being terribly worried about police brutality and Israel’s actions in Gaza, my first thought is that they have too much time on their hands. My second is that they might as well just go the whole hog, and get a religion. And my third, often, is that they ought to change their jeans.

Why did NASA crash a craft into the moon?

The crash was carefully targeted to one of the regions on the Moon where scientists believe there may be large deposits of water, in the form of ice, just below the surface. These special regions are all in craters at high latitudes, near the poles, where they are permanently shaded from the Sun by the crater walls.
The Moon has virtually no atmosphere, so permanently shaded regions are exposed to cold space and have very low temperatures, less than minus 200 degrees Centigrade. At such low temperatures, any traces of water vapour exhaling from the interior of the Moon, or falling onto it as meteors or small comets, can remain trapped for billions of years.
We know that the Moon used to be volcanically active, and that icy grains do fall onto its surface (and onto all of the planets, including Earth) from space, so this is a plausible scenario. The experiment was designed to find out if it is actually what happened.

How can this prove whether there is water on the moon?

The impact generates heat that vaporises any water that is present and throws it up in a plume that can be observed with instruments on spacecraft orbiting the Moon, including spectrometers that can distinguish water from other materials. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was placed in a low, polar orbit around the Moon by NASA a few months ago specifically for this purpose.(Incidentally, one of the instruments carried on the Reconnaissance Orbiter was designed and built partly at Oxford. Our device, Lunar Diviner, uses infrared radiometry to map the temperature of the Moon’s surface, including the permanently shaded craters and the crash site.) The plume was big enough to be observable through telescopes from the Earth as well, although obviously that is more difficult and did not deliver such good results.

Why do we want to know whether there is water up there?

Water is a very important molecule (as everyone on Earth knows from our own experience) and we want to know how much of it there is in the Solar System and where it is. For something that is so common on Earth, water seems to be in remarkably short supply on Venus, Mars and the Moon. We now believe that they all had lots of water initially, but either lost it to space (like Venus) or buried it below the surface, as on the Moon and Mars. Whether this is true, what happened to the water and what processes changed the climate on all of these Earthlike bodies is a topic of great scientific interest at the moment.
Another important reason for finding water is that it is an important resource – future astronauts will not be able to survive on the Moon for long without a water supply. Water is heavy and it would be expensive to bring the amount needed for a future manned Lunar base all the way from the Earth.

How does this fit into NASA’s broader programme of lunar exploration?

NASA plans to have a permanent presence on the Moon by 2020 or soon afterwards, and to go on from there to land a crew on Mars. There have been discussions to the effect that the European Space Agency, to which Britain belongs, may join in with the US programme of exploration, and the Chinese and Indian agencies have indicated that they each have plans for their own expeditions to the Moon.

Why is it important to explore space and its contents?

Three reasons:

1.To understand the origin and evolution of the Solar System and the planet upon which we live. What is the history of the Earth, and of the development of life? What parallels to this exist on other worlds?

2. To gain knowledge about how planets work so we can better understand and control our destiny on Earth. For instance, we now know that Venus has a hot climate for the basically same scientific reasons that the Earth is getting hotter. We need to understand the common Physics of the processes involved if we are to survive in the longer term.

3. Because it’s there! Humans love to explore, and most of us would like to know, for example, whether there is life on Mars.

Professor FW Taylor is the Halley Professor of Physics at Oxford University