Sarah Wollaston, Anna Soubry and Heidi Allen: driven out by dark money? Image: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire/PA Images. All rights reserved.

The three departing Conservatives MPs pulled no punches. In a joint resignation letter that rocked Westminster on Wednesday, the trio said that the Tories were “in the grip” of the pro-Brexit European Research Group who were “now recklessly marching the country to the cliff edge of no deal".

The ERG is a secretive organisation. No one knows for certain how many members it has. Many already call it a “party within a party”. But when it comes to ideas on Brexit, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s group of Tory MPs has often looked outside its own ranks. And to one place in particular – the Institute of Economic Affairs, a right-wing think tank that does not declare its funders, and the IEA’s trade advisor, Shanker Singham.

Last month, on the same morning that Theresa May’s aides were furiously trying to corral Conservative MPs to back her doomed withdrawal bill vote, active ERG supporter Dominic Raab was holding a press conference in a quiet corner of Westminster outlining an “alternative vision” for leaving the EU. Sitting alongside the former Brexit secretary at a short wooden table was Shanker Singham.

Singham, until Brexit an unheralded trade lawyer who had spent most of his career in the US, was on stage again this month at another Westminster press conference. This time another one-time Brexit secretary, David Davis, was telling journalists that Britain could do a minimal deal with the EU then cut all tariffs to zero on goods, agricultural and food products. The proposals were Singham’s.

Singham, his employers – the IEA – and their anonymous financial backers have gained remarkable influence at a crucial moment in modern British history. With Westminster in chaos and Whitehall paralysed, an unelected lobbyist working for a think tank funded by dark money has come to play a pivotal role in pushing ideas for a hard break with the EU into the heart of government. Many of those who say ‘no deal’ is ‘no problem’ cite Singham’s work.  

Now, documents obtained by openDemocracy show in new detail the depth of the personal and professional connections between the IEA and the ERG and senior government ministers. The IEA is a registered charity but despite censure from the charity regulator for its pro-Brexit work the think tank’s influence on the Conservative right, especially the ERG, is huge.

Emails we’ve uncovered also show that Singham personally arranged for interest groups to meet with then Brexit minister Steve Baker and senior IEA staff had easy access to cabinet ministers. Commenting on these findings, Labour’s shadow minister for the cabinet office Jon Trickett said that the “unfettered access to decision-makers” showed that “a complete overhaul of politics is needed”.     

‘The Brexit influencing game’

Just hours before the February press conference that argued for zero tariffs after Brexit, the Charity Commission had issued a formal warning to the IEA over Singham’s Brexit work. The former Washington lobbyist was invited onto Sky News afterwards all the same to explain his trade plans. That evening he appeared on Channel 4 News, where presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy described Singham’s proposals as “unicorns and nonsense”.

Image: Faisal Islam

Singham's calls for the UK to elimate all tariffs are backed by many in the ERG but most economists believe such a dramatic move would lead to widespread job losses, economic damage and a serious reduction in standards across. The Times this week described the idea as "voodoo economics". Even Patrick Minford, a pro-Brexit economist and IEA trustee, has admitted that removing tariffs would mean that British car manufacturing would have to be "run down".

Nevertheless, Singham has been a near-constant presence in British media in recent weeks, often dismissing concerns about a no-deal Brexit. And as well as a constant stream of broadcast media invites for a man who refuses to reveal his paymasters, Singham has enjoyed “extraordinary” access to government ministers including Michael Gove and Boris Johnson.

Earlier this month, Singham attended a meeting at the Cabinet Office between senior ERG figures, Brexit secretary Steve Barclay and officials “from all arms of government” to discuss “alternative arrangements” for the Irish backstop. Theresa May was said to be “clearly taking this exercise seriously”.

Between them, influential, dark-money-funded lobbyists like Singham and pro-Brexit MPs have sought to play down fears about Brexit, and particularly a no-deal departure from the EU. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of pounds of dark money has poured into social media ads warning MPs not to “steal Brexit” and promoting the UK leaving the EU on WTO rules.

Support for a no-deal Brexit appears to be strengthening. It’s not known who is paying for either the lobbyists or the adverts, nor whether the same people or businesses are behind both.

Singham’s Brexit work has not escaped the scrutiny of regulators. The Charity Commission’s formal warning in February stated that the IEA’s alternative to May’s white paper, ‘Plan A+: Creating a Prosperous Post-Brexit UK’ – which Singham co-wrote – breached charity law by calling for Brexit to be used to deregulate finance, weaken rules on hazardous chemicals and remove rules protecting agency workers. The regulator said that the IEA risked being seen as “politically biased” after Jacob Rees-Mogg, David Davis and other pro-Brexit Tories attended the report’s launch. The charities watchdog is still investigating the IEA.

This was not the first time that Singham has been rapped over the knuckles. Last May the Charity Commission found that a Brexit paper he wrote in his previous role as trade advisor at the think tank Legatum had ‘crossed the line’ and did not meet its charitable objectives. That summer Singham was also forced to quit international trade secretary Fox’s ‘committee of experts’ after openDemocracy revealed that he had taken a job with a lobbying firm.

But rules and regulations designed to ensure political transparency are easily circumvented.

The Charity Commission forced the IEA to take down ‘Plan A+’ from its website but it is still available on the website of a political consultancy owned by Singham. When openDemocracy alerted the Charity Commission to this the watchdog said it had “issued the charity with a serious warning and expect the trustees to be cautious of any links to this publication”.

Losing his place on Liam Fox’s committee doesn’t seem to have limited the unrivalled access that Singham – and others – have to the political process. Last summer, the IEA’s director Mark Littlewood was filmed apparently boasting to an undercover journalist from Greenpeace’s investigative unit Unearthed that he could avoid having to record Singham’s presence on official data by using his name instead of the trade advisor’s on government transparency registers.

Littlewood told Unearthed that his outfit was involved in the “Brexit-influencing game”. IEA staff regularly appear as independent ‘experts’ in the British media, and have decades-long relationships with senior figures in right-wing politics on both sides of the Atlantic.

The IEA, which does not disclose its funders, is rated “highly opaque” by the accountability group Transparify. The think tank has previously received money from gambling and tobacco companies, and for promoting privatisation of the NHS. Last year, the IEA was accused of pushing “paid-for propaganda” after openDemocracy found its free schools magazine had carried articles arguing against tobacco taxes and climate change science, and in favour of NHS privatisation.

‘A Better Deal’

The 15 January press conference where Singham sat alongside Raab and Davis was held to promote the release of ‘A Better Deal and a Better Future’, a Brexit policy document written by former minister Steve Baker with the help of, among others, Shanker Singham. Within weeks ‘A Better Deal’ had had a major impact on the Brexit debate within the Conservative party: it formed the basis for the ‘Malthouse compromise’, drafted by Baker in attempt to unite warring factions of the Tory party.

That Baker and Singham were working together on Brexit was not new. The pair had been friends since the EU referendum, often meeting to talk about trade and economics while the ardently Eurosceptic Baker chaired the ERG and Singham worked for the Legatum think tank.  

As Buzzfeed revealed last year, after Baker was appointed as a minister in the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) in June 2017 he frequently had meetings with Singham that were not disclosed in official government transparency records. Also present was Singham’s former Legatum colleague Crawford Falconer, who works for Liam Fox’s department of international trade.

Now documents released to openDemocracy show that Singham even arranged for lobby groups to meet Baker.

The Automated Customs and International Trade Association, a trade body primarily focused on the use of computerised customs systems, wanted to talk to government after the Brexit vote. A committee member suggested that Singham could help. “He knows a lot of people,” recalls ACITA director general Des Hiscock, speaking to openDemocracy.

In January 2018, Singham emailed Baker saying “ACITA, the association of Customs Professionals would like to meet with you… Could you let me know when you can meet?” In a follow-up correspondence, Singham told the then Brexit minister that “we are working with ACITA” and requesting that he also attended the meeting.

Less than three weeks later, Baker met the ACITA alongside officials from HMRC and the Treasury. Singham, who was also present, was not employed by the trade group but he said that he had access to other government ministers.

“Some promise was made that we would see David Davis. [Singham] was trying to see David Davis to push this idea of ours forward. There was some indication that Shanker had seen him and would be able to arrange a meeting for us. Then it was ‘you know Steve Baker could see us,’” recalls Hiscock.

In July 2018, Baker resigned from government in protest at May’s Chequers plan. For ACITA nothing concrete came out of the meeting with Baker. “A lot of promises were made but by the time that we were close to getting anything, Steve Baker wasn’t there,” says Hiscock.

“[Singham] put us in contact with strange people promising wonderful things that never come to any type of fruition,” he recalls.

The Epicenter mystery

Singham’s access to Tory ministers and other leading politicians is so great it’s easy to forget he’s not himself on the government or Conservative party payroll. In fact his home base is a secretive network of right-wing think tanks.

Singham joined the free-market Legatum Institute before the EU referendum, but on 9 March 2018, after months of negative headlines about the think tank, including a series of newspaper stories about its founder and main donor Christopher Chandler’s links to Russia, it was announced that Singham had been “poached” by the IEA, taking a team of three analysts to set up a new trade and competition unit.

Two days earlier, Brexit minister Steve Baker had had dinner with an Italian libertarian think tank called the Bruno Leoni Institute. Baker's meeting with the Leoni Institute was disclosed as part of the government transparency data, but when openDemocracy asked for further information about attendees, DExEU said the minister attended in his “personal capacity”.

Quite how a minister could have dinner with representatives of a right-wing think tank in a “personal capacity” is not clear. The Bruno Leoni Institute is part of Epicenter, a grouping of European right-wing think tanks that includes the IEA. The day after Baker had dinner with the Bruno Leoni Institute, the Italian think tank gave a talk at the IEA’s headquarters in London.

Epicenter has long been accused of being opaque about the origins of its funding. Following repeated complaints by European watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory, Epicenter declared in January 2018 that it was entirely funded by the IEA. Though, of course, we don’t know where the IEA gets the money it gives to them.

In May 2018, Baker also met with politicians from a libertarian think tank based in Oklahoma, the E Foundation, which promised to raise donations for the IEA, including from farming interests keen to ensure the UK drops EU-level regulations after Brexit. IEA director Mark Littlewood told an undercover reporter for Unearthed that Singham was “unbelievably well connected” to Brexiteer cabinet ministers including Brexit secretary Fox and environment minister Michael Gove.

Steve Baker, Turning Point and the ‘the Brexit prize’

Steve Baker has re-emerged as a powerful voice in the ERG – a group he never fully left when he became a minister– and has been among the most vocal supporters of ‘no deal’ in British politics. He has links to more radical, fringe groups, too.

In December 2016, Baker received £6,500 from the secretive Constitutional Research Council (CRC) to fund what appeared to be a Christmas party for ERG members and staff. As openDemocracy previously revealed, the CRC funnelled £435,000 to the DUP’s Brexit campaign, and its only known member, Richard Cook, was involved in illegally shipping waste internationally. Cook is also a member of the influential ERG WhatsApp group.

Baker recently described right-wing student group Turning Point UK as “the angels against the darkness of socialism” just days after one of its founders said Hitler would have been “fine” if he “just wanted to make Germany great”. (IEA digital manager Darren Grimes, who was found guilty of breaking electoral law during the Brexit referendum, is reportedly also involved in Turning Point, which is a branch of the eponymous dark money-funded US organisation.)

Baker and Singham were listed together at the Conservative party conference in September speaking on a panel about “how to create a prosperous and global Britain”, organised by the IEA and another think tank funded by anonymous sources, the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Baker also attended the launch of the IEA’s ‘Plan A+’ proposal to “deliver the Brexit prize” through radical free-trade deals and deep cuts to regulation with countries including the US.

British right-wing think tanks, including the IEA, have received millions from anonymous US donors. In October, Singham wrote to the international trade secretary saying that the UK “should take advantage of this moment” to secure a free-trade agreement with the US that would include access to “agricultural markets”. Farmers have warned that a trade deal with the US would reduce UK food standards.

David Davis and ‘errors’ in transparency records

Singham’s arguments for ‘no deal’ are gaining ground. Senior Tory Eurosceptics have said that there is ‘nothing to fear’ from leaving the EU without a deal. But none is more blithe at the prospect than former Brexit secretary David Davis. In November, Davis rejected warnings about the consequences of ‘no deal’ as “proven nonsense” and suggested that Britain could trade “more successfully” under World Trade Organization rules than as an EU member. This argument closely echoes the ‘Plan A+’ document that Singham co-authored for the IEA.

As Brexit minister, Davis was close to Singham too, often having unminuted meetings with the then Legatum trade advisor. Now new documents released to openDemocracy reveal that Davis personally invited Singham to a round table at DExEU in December 2017 – but the minister did not declare this meeting in official government transparency records.

A DExEU spokesperson confirmed that both Davis and Singham attended the event, adding: “David Davis’s name was not included in the transparency report due to an error. Since then, processes have been tightened to ensure that information is properly disclosed.”

Steve Goodrich of Transparency International said that the failure to record the meeting in Davis’s in official records “does nothing for confidence in their probity. Whether these omissions are the result of mishap or conspiracy, neither engender trust that government is truly operating out in the open.

“In the same month this engagement was not published, the prime minister had personally reminded departments of their obligations to disclose all meetings between ministers and lobbyists. Given the frequency with which this happens, one could be forgiven for thinking that they're more than just a mistake.”

Since Davis resigned as Brexit secretary over the prime minister’s Chequers proposals, Singham has remained close to him. The IEA trade advisor accompanied Davis on a six-day trip to Oklahoma to meet US agribusiness interests in November. Davis’s trip was part-funded by US agribusiness lobbyists, keen to water down the UK’s food and farming regulations after Brexit. It’s not known who paid Singham’s costs.

In the same month, Singham appeared alongside Davis and Owen Paterson, a former Tory environment secretary, at the right-wing Heritage Foundation in Washington DC to discuss ‘Brexit and the opportunities for the US-UK trade relationship’. Last month, Edwin Feulner, the founder and former president of the Heritage Foundation, argued on its website that the UK should “pursue a no deal Brexit” to “help facilitate a highly anticipated bilateral trade deal between the United States and Britain”.

Travels with the ERG

Singham has emerged as an eminence grise for Brexiters on this side of the Atlantic, too. When the ERG’s Iain Duncan Smith and Paterson, and former Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble, visited Brussels last October “to discuss the Northern Ireland border” with European Commission chief negotiator Michel Barnier, Singham was by their side.

Documents released to openDemocracy show that the Brexiters presented Barnier with a copy of the ERG’s paper on the Irish border, which included no text on the backstop. The Brussels negotiator told the ERG group that he could “only negotiate with the UK government”, according to contemporaneous notes.

After the meeting, Paterson wrote to EU deputy chief negotiator Sabine Weyand asking for a follow-up meeting. Paterson said he was “more convinced than ever” that he had a “long term practical solution” to the Irish border. Almost two weeks later, Weyand replied saying that the European Commission did not believe there was any alternative to the backstop. There is no record of any subsequent meeting between the ERG and Michel Barnier.

Separate communications released to openDemocracy suggest that Singham’s relationship with the influential ERG caucus is long-standing. In November 2017, Singham wrote to Steve Baker suggesting that the then Brexit minister could come to “a session of ERG and other parliamentarians” that the Legatum trade commission was holding the following months.

openDemocracy has also mapped ERG room bookings and noticed that a number overlapped with when Singham was in proximity of Parliament and meeting government ministers. We have asked Singham whether he was also attending ERG meetings but have yet to receive a response.

‘Best wishes, Esther’

The IEA’s access to the highest levels of the British government is not confined to Singham, or to Brexit ministers. Just days after Esther McVey was appointed as minister for work and pensions, in early January 2018, the former television presenter received a handwritten congratulatory letter from Mark Littlewood. “We’re very happy to be used to bounce ideas off, to be set a problem to solve or to advise on etc,” the IEA chief wrote.

McVey replied a few days later. The new minister’s typed response was typical departmental boilerplate about “transforming lives” and “wonderful achievements”. But the letter was signed off with a far more personal tone. In her own looping handwriting, McVey’s suggested she “catch up” with Littlewood to “discuss some of the ideas you might have”.

True to her word, on 19 April 2018, McVey met with the IEA to discuss “employment-related issues”. The think tank, whose ideas greatly influenced Thatcher’s governments, has often called for sweeping cuts to social welfare and been publicly supportive of the controversial Universal Credit scheme.

Esther McVey resigned from the cabinet in November in protest at Theresa May’s Brexit deal. Many economists warn that leaving without a deal would hit the poorest regions of the UK worst but McVey and other Conservative Brexiters, many with links to the IEA, have decried such warnings as “Project Fear”.

A few days after May’s withdrawal bill defeat, McVey announced that she was launching an online advertising campaign “to explain why no deal is nothing to fear”. Meanwhile Nigel Farage’s campaign group, Leave Means Leave, has spent thousands of pounds on adverts for talks featuring the former pensions minister. We do not know where this money comes from.

McVey said of her connections with the IEA: “Any suggestions of ‘cosy relationships’ would be untrue and an incorrect description by you and openDemocracy.”

Who profits from a no-deal Brexit?

The UK’s right-wing think tank world is relatively small. Most are based in and around Westminster and hold regular meetings to agree strategy. Few give any details of who pays for their work.

These secretive organisations have played a crucial role in making the case for a ‘no deal’ Brexit – in Westminster, in the media and, by extension, across the country. Many are staffed by people who have spent years pushing for deregulation, privatisation and for the UK to leave Europe and embrace the US.

Many of those lobbying for a no-deal Brexit appear set to profit from the UK leaving the EU without a deal. ERG chair Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Somerset Capital Management investment fund opened a Dublin office last year to take advantage of an EU base. Vote Leave donor Crispin Odey, who made a fortune shorting sterling on referendum night in 2016, is betting on the pound plunging ahead of 29 March.

Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski is being paid £6,000 a month by American billionaire Tom Kaplan’s Electrum Group to give advice on gold and other resources. The price of gold is expected to rise in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Last year it was revealed that Steve Baker had invested heavily in a firm advising clients to buy gold to avoid the impact of a no-deal Brexit. Singham’s own personal political consultancy offers advice on opportunities arising from Brexit.

The IEA was founded in 1955 to promote the free-market ideas of the economist Friedrich Hayek. At the time, one of its founders, Oliver Smedley, wrote to the other, Antony Fisher, saying it was “imperative that we should give no indication in our literature that we are working to educate the public along certain lines which might be interpreted as having a political bias”.

Over the decades, the IEA has often influenced Tory policy. Brexit, and particularly the prospect of no deal, offers the think tank and its anonymous backers the ultimate opportunity: to remake Britain in line with its ideological and corporate interests.

Tamasin Cave of transparency advocacy group Spinwatch said: “We know next to nothing about the corporate lobbying activity that's taking place around Brexit. When it comes to Shanker Singham, not only is there little public scrutiny of his contacts with ministers, we have no idea which corporate and financial interests he is working for. Who is funding his lobbying for the hardest of Brexits?”

Shanker Singham told openDemocracy: "I moved back to the UK in 2016 after spending more than 20 years in the US working on international trade policy. Given the size of the challenge before us as the UK leaves the EU, I am pleased to be able to offer my expertise in trade policy to the government and parliament."

IEA spokeswoman Nerissa Chesterfield said: “Our Director General and other IEA representatives will happily meet with any ministers, MPs, policymakers and stakeholders of all stripes and persuasions, who wish to hear our ideas.”

Chesterfield added that “because of the quality of our research we are regularly asked by policymakers of all kinds from all parties for our thoughts and advice on relevant subject areas… it would be extraordinary if we were to decline these requests. Whether the policymakers in question take up our ideas is down to them.”

Illustration by Hannah Kirmes-Daly.Radio Hakaya is a community radio project started by Brush&Bow in a refugee camp in North Lebanon. Radio Hakaya's podcasts feature individuals whose communities have been directly affected by the war in Syria and the displacement of Syrians to Lebanon. Each podcast presents a subjective opinion that, combined with the rest of the series, provides a mosaic of differing perspectives and experiences, exploring the reasons why people fled Syria, the living conditions in Lebanon and what the future might hold.

All recordings are taken, translated and edited with the help from members of the local community.

Interviews and Editing by Roshan De Stone & David L. Suber.

Editing and Translations by Fadi Haddad.

Illustrations by Hannah Kirmes-Daly.

This is the third podcast of an 8-part series. It is an interview with Tony Abood, the mayor of Minyara, a small predominantly Christian village in Akkar, the northern most province of Lebanon. Born in Minyara, Tony Abood has been the mayor of his town for more than 20 years.

His political career began when large parts of Lebanon were under Syrian occupation, an occupation that started during the Lebanese civil war, and lasted until the assassination of Lebanon's then prime minister Rafic Hariri in 2005.

Remembering when half his village fled to Syria during the Lebanese Civil War, Abood reflects on the big-brother relationship Syria has with Lebanon and the paradox that, after having hosted Lebanese refugees, so many Syrians have now come to Lebanon to seek refuge from war in their country.

Abood is known for his harsh policies toward Syrian refugees: enforcing a 6 pmcurfew,evicting families and being a public supporter of the return of refugees to Syria – despite Syria not yet beingsafe for refugees to return.

Abood points to how Lebanon is not equipped with sustaining Syrian refugees any further, and that between thecorruption and mismanagement of aid money by public office and agencies, a lot of international support has gone to waste. However, he is prone to overestimate numbers and statistics, doubling both the population of Syria and the number of Syrians in Lebanon.

Despite the crudeness of his opinions, it is important to hear what he says as it reflects agrowing trend amongst politicians and public officials in Lebanon, who believe - despite recurringreports of arbitrary arrests, torture, disappearances and forced conscription - that Syria is safe for Syrians to return to, and that Lebanon has done enough for Syrian refugees.

Just as important to listen to what Abood has to say, it is crucial to note what he omits. He fails to consider that 'Lebanese hospitality' is also based on widespread and systematic exploitation of Syrians, and that where competition is getting harder for Lebanese workers, the reason predominantly lies with business owners in Lebanon who are profiting from the crisis, setting lower wages and often preferring to hire irregular Syrian workers for little to nothing than Lebanese regular workers.

His experience represents only a fragment of the very complex puzzle of memories and positions Lebanese society holds on the hardships of hosting such a high number of refugees in such a small country. As such, it should be heard in relation to the contents expressed in the previous and forthcoming podcasts.

Listen to the podcast in English or in Arabic below

Read the transcript:

Podcast #3: Abood: Mayor of Minyara

Introduction

Welcome to Radio HAKAYA – حكايا the official podcast series of Brush and Bow. These podcasts report on stories and challenges of the Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian communities in Lebanon. By focusing on individual stories, we hope to convey the complex realities of life here in Lebanon: people’s memories, present experiences and hopes for the

future. We would like to remind you that the views published on these podcasts are the participants alone and do not reflect the opinions of Brush and Bow.

Today’s podcast is an interview with Tony Abbod, the Mayor of Minyara. Minyara is a Christian village in Akkar, the northern most province of Lebanon and one of the poorest regions of the country. It is here, along with the Beqaa valley, that the majority of Syrians in Lebanon have found refuge, fleeing the 7-year civil war across the border. In this interview, Abbod tells us about his memories of the Lebanese civil war, and about the complex history that has turned Syrians from occupiers to refugees in Lebanon.

Interview:

I have been the leader of the Shefet union of 12 municipalities for 9 years. And I have also been the mayor of Minyara since 1998.

The Lebanese war of 1975 wasn’t a war between Muslims and Christians, but rather one between the Palestinian and the Lebanese.

When the Syrian military arrived, they established offices and checkpoints everywhere. Soon they controlled the whole of Lebanon! Beirut, Zagharta, the south, the Bekka valley, everywhere.

I’ll tell you something: our villages here in Akkar were not hugely affected by the civil war. Only a little. And that is because there was social harmony between Muslims and Christians in Akkar. But when orders were given to groups of thugs from outside to attack some villages, they would come to steal and kill.

For example, these groups of thugs would come to Akkar with orders to attack this or that village, according to their sectarian population, and this was in order to make pressure or regulate contentions in another places. This kind of thing continued to happen until Hariri died and the Syrian military withdrew.

And the result of this today is that all the different sects of Lebanese society cannot find any agreement. Not even between different Christian groups, or amongst the Druze, or amongst the Sunnis. The only exception are the Shia, as their parties of Hizbullah and the Amal movement have an agreement with each other. This is the state of the country today.

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During the civil war some Lebanese from Akkar fled to Syria, whilst others remained here. It was mostly the Christians who left to Syria of course. But once the war was over they returned back to their homes in Lebanon.

Syria is a country of 30 - 40 million people whereas Lebanon is a country of only 3 million. When we went to Syria, our numbers were insignificant. 4000, 5000, maybe even if 20,000 Lebanese went to Syria, that was nothing overall. But when 2 million Syrians come to live with 3 million Lebanese, that is nearly as much as our own population!

---

When the Syrians refugees came here everybody welcomed them at first. But soon the number of Syrians became too huge. Associations started to come and offer help to the Syrians but, trust me, three quarters of these associations are thieves. They keep 90% for themselves and only give 10% to the Syrians.

The situation in Syria now is acceptable for return. There are some villages and areas where there is no fighting anymore. There are safe areas, but the Syrians are still here. We can’t ask all the Syrians to go back to Syria. If all the Syrians left, then we wouldn’t have anyone to work on land, or in the industrial labour markets. Do you understand my point?

But the great numbers should go back to their country, to their villages. They are making political settlements for Syria to resolve the conflict. Those Syrians who are wanted by the regime, they should stay here, but those who don’t run any risks should go back to Syria!

---

Recently, a Syrian called me saying that there are about 3,500 people from Quaysir in Syria who want to go back to their home town. So I called an officer in the Lebanese General Security where an officer told me to wait half an hour. This officer called someone in Beirut and half an hour later I received a call from the department in Beirut confirming the political will to facilitate the process of return for these Syrians and provide whatever help they might need. The next day, we held a meeting here with the Syrians in presence of the General Security officers, but the Syrians were advised not to go back. Why? I don’t know.

Fear of being imprisoned by the regime!? No, it’s not about prison. There is an agreement between the Lebanese General Security and the Syrian government. Whoever wants to go back Syria will have their name sent to the Syrian government to check if they are wanted or not. Those who are wanted will be informed and will have to fix their situation with the regime before going back. And if they are not wanted, then the Syrians will be free to return to Syria. For example, if someone is wanted for compulsory military service, they will inform them and give them 6 months’ grace to get their affairs in order. Only then will they be forced to join the military – as the military service in Syria is compulsory. You must serve or pay a lot of money not to serve.

No one will be forced to return. Nobody! If they are fearful of return, they can stay in Lebanon, and no one would force them to go back. Only if they say, “I want to return,” then the Lebanese authorities would facilitate their return. But no one would force them. Ever.

--- 

Most of the Syrian refugees who came at the beginning were self-employed. Syrians took many jobs from the Lebanese, working in gold shops, in sweet shops, they are driving the buses, the trucks….

The Lebanese work in restaurants and services, and only a few of them in agriculture. But when the Syrians came here they took not only jobs in agriculture but in almost everything. Today, almost all restaurants workers are Syrians. Some Syrians even hired shops and opened their own restaurants! And they can buy stocks from Syria at cheaper prices than we can find here in Lebanon.

---

Lebanon! Ah Lebanon… when the Sykes-Picot agreement was signed, Lebanon was divided into several sects. This was what caused the sickness of this country. It means that today, if you want to grant citizenship to a Muslim, the Christians would refuse and vice versa. Do you understand? So giving citizenship in our country is a very difficult issue. Today, if someone travels to Australia, Brazil, Canada, they might get citizenship. But in this country, even in you have a Lebanese mother, you won’t get Lebanese citizenship. 

Lebanon is not like in all the other countries. This is a country where every decision is made outside, by others. Nothing its decided by its people. Never. Everything is linked to larger powers outside the country. For example, Saad Al Hariri is linked to Saudi Arabia, Hizbullah to Iran. Do you get me?

We have every political group linked to a different country. The decisions are taken by those countries, and here we can’t decide nothing for ourselves. Never. Here, the people don’t decide anything. The people, in Lebanon, don’t decide anything.

16 May 2018: railway workers on strike at ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih. Source: 1st City Channel, Kryvyi Rih.In early summer 2018, Ukraine’s railway workers held a mass work-to-rule action – strictly observing official quotas and safety instructions.

Across the country, drivers refused to complete routes on the grounds that their engines were not fit for operation. Employees at Ukrainian Railways, Ukraine’s state-owned railway company, demanded a wage rise, a return of pension benefits and guarantee of safe working conditions.

Six months after the action started, I visited some of the railway depots that drove this protest to find out what’s changed.

Technical faults

The engine pulls out smoothly, dragging freight wagons filled with cement. Through the dirt-smeared front windshield, Kyiv’s already depressing industrial landscape looks even bleaker. The driver’s assistant tries to turn on the windshield wipers, but they barely move.

“Just imagine if we had snow, the whole windshield would be covered and you’d have to drive blind,” the driver’s assistant tells me over the roar of the engine. “This is a real risk to safety on the line.”

View from the driver's cab. Photo courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.According to the assistant, the roar isn’t normal, either. The external door doesn’t close properly, and therefore the sound can’t be reduced. Sometimes, driver teams don’t hear orders via the radio, which also appears to hardly work.

Driver Serhiy and his assistant Oleksandr work out of the Darnytsya depot on Kyiv’s left bank. On 13 May 2018, this depot started a work-to-rule action, whereby employees come to work, but strictly observe instructions that are usually ignored. Given that work in risky environments can be governed by a number of rules, observing them can slow down or completely halt work. This is what happened at Darnytsya, where driver teams refused to take trains out on the line due to their mechanical state.

The next day, railway depots at Kremenchuk, Kryvyi Rih, Zaporizhzhya and Poltava joined them in a wave of protest.

State within a state

Despite this neglect, Ukrainian Railways (Ukrzaliznytsia) remains the largest company in Ukraine. Older members of the the largest company in eastern Europe call it a “state within a state”, with extensive infrastructure held over from the Soviet period. This isn’t just stations, depot and trains, but its own system of factories, healthcare facilities and even a militarised security detail.

Today, there are 19,800 kilometres of railway track in Ukraine, making it the twelfth largest network in the world. But every year the railways’ infrastructure is worn out a little more, and the length of track is constantly reduced.

With the start of the war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, the company has found itself in a deep crisis. From a profitable company, Ukrainian Railways turned, at the drop of a hat, into a loss-making enterprise. In 2014, the company’s losses were more than 15 billion hryvnya, in 2015 – almost 17 billion. For the most Ukrainians, the railway is associated with passenger travel. But financially, it’s freight travel that brings in the most money – 80% of all income, while passenger travel only makes up 10%. For the first four years of the war, freight shipments have dropped by a quarter and continue to decrease.

The lack of engines and freight wagons is a particular issue. And the rolling stock that the company has needs either to be written off or repaired.

A locomotive lacking front wheels, at Kremenchuk railway depo. In a recent report, the Ukrainian Institute of the Future think tank argued that the crisis at Ukrainian Railways doesn’t only stem from the war, but poor management and wide-ranging corruption. And the company’s problems have consequences for the country’s economy as a whole, which relies on metal exports and agricultural products – the majority of internal freight is transported by Ukrainian Railways.

But this crisis is hitting the company’s employees hardest, all 263,000 of them.

Worked to the bone

The engine passes the Darnytsya industrial zone in Kyiv and pushes through the fog into a barren winter forest. Oleksandr Skiba, the driver’s assistant, is watching the track. Camouflage jacket, strong build, close-shaven hair – Skiba is head of the Darnytsya depot’s Free Trade Union of Railway Workers. To the right of him sits Serhiy, the driver. Both of them are sitting on scratched, broken seats, the cushions ripped out.

“We brought an extra seat. Twelve hours on this is torture,” Oleksandr sighs. “But this isn’t the worst of it. Sometimes the back of the seat gets up to 90 degrees, there’s nothing to rest on.”

This engine was issued in 1975, and judging on looks, it seems as if nothing has been changed since then. Broken seats, broken windscreen wipers and a crackly radio are the tip of the iceberg. Instruments in the driver’s cabin leak oil, which is a fire risk.

Oleksandr Skiba, a head of the Darnytsya depot’s Free Trade Union of Railway Workers. Photo courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.For work in these conditions, Oleksandr received 13,000 hryvnya (£372) last month. He also worked 30 hours overtime, for which he received overtime pay. If he hadn’t over-fulfilled his quota, he would have earned a few thousand less. Serhiy, the driver, says he usually works above the norm and receives around 12,000 (£343). According to him, most of the drivers at the depot receive these wages. To earn more, you have to work a lot more overtime, and that can have predictable costs.

“A driver I know from Zhmerynka worked 300 hours in one month and received 27,000 (£772). He spent the whole of next month in hospital, after throwing out his back. What did he spend the money on in the end?” says Oleksandr, turning his gaze to Serhiy, a mocking flicker of a smile on his face.

“On medicine,” the driver replies.

The overtime that drivers are compelled to take in order to receive higher wages is fraught with circumstances – and not only for drivers. According to Oleksandr, a tired driver team can make mistakes which can lead to serious accidents. Trains regularly carry tonnes of flammable freight or chemicals – nuclear fuel, petrol, gas, ammonia or chloride. An accident with this kind of freight can lead to serious environmental and human consequences.

“The stress, a changing shift-pattern, constant vibrations – it’s clear that this has a far from positive effect on our health. For drivers, early deaths and cancer are usual fates”

“If you keep breaking the rules, sooner or later there’s going to be an accident,” Oleksandr says angrily. “All these rules are written in blood. The limits on work schedules are there for a reason, and some colleagues just ignore them.”

The average wage before tax at Ukrainian Railways in December 2018 were 10,989 hryvnya (£314). But there is a significant gap between wages of ordinary workers and management: the majority of employees are on minimum wage, 3,723 hryvnya (£106) per month. People employed in repair shops can make slightly more, between 5,000-7,000. Meanwhile, members of the advisory board make up to 252,000 hryvnya (£7,200) per month, and CEO Yevgen Kravtsov’s average monthly wage was 920,000 hryvnya (£26,335).

This wage gap makes drivers, who sacrifice their health on the rail, angry. According to the drivers I spoke to, the wages that they earn are too little given the difficult working conditions.

The driver's seat. Photo courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.“We sit on a huge traction motor, and we’re constantly exposed to the electromagnetic field it generates,” Skiba complains. “The stress, a changing shift-pattern, constant vibrations – it’s clear that this has a far from positive effect on our health. For drivers, early deaths and cancer are usual fates.”

Until recently, railway workers employed in hazardous working conditions could choose to retire early: men at 50, women at 55. But in 2017, the Ukrainian parliament amended the pension legislation and removed these provisions – another factor that pushed the drivers’ patience over the edge.

From below

The initiative for a mass work-to-rule action came from drivers in Kremenchuk, an industrial city on Ukraine’s Dnipro river. A few kilometres downriver lies one of the largest iron ore mining and enrichment plants in Ukraine, Poltava GOK, which belongs to oligarch Kostyantyn Zhevago. And it’s the railway depot of Kremenchuk that transports products of this plant and others out of the region.

“Our action was planned for two weeks before,” Moskalets, the energetic head of the local union branch since 1992, recalls in his sing-song mix of Russian and Ukrainian. “But the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] put pressure on me. They said: look, there’s pro-Russian forces here, you’ve come to an agreement with them, they paid you money. If you start this action, they said, that’s it, we’ll strap you up on a treason charge. And I told them: no worries, we’ll postpone our holiday.”

Serhiy Moskalets, a head of the Kremenchuk depot’s Free Trade Union of Railway Workers. Photo courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.The walls in the Moskalets’ office are covered in union posters, jokes and memes printed off the internet and classic quotes (“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”). Everyone is here: drivers, assistants, metalworkers, station officers, train personnel. When I ask them to talk about the strike, they respond with a request of their own: “don’t call May 2018 a strike.” According to Ukrainian legislation, railway workers are not allowed to strike. Instead, they call their action a “work-to-rule” or “safety week”. Indeed, formally, there was no strike on the railway: drivers came to work, but they refused to take the engines out because they didn’t conform to safety regulations.

In striking depots, management tried to convince and pressure drivers into returning to work from the very beginning

“How did it all begin? We came to work on Monday at five in the morning, and took a look at the first engine we found,” Maksym, a young driver, tells me. “And we told the driver that we’re a safety commission, and we’re going to take a description of the engine. The lads on our teams are fighters, they got involved and helped us.”

In two days, the union commission had drawn up reports on all the engines in the depot. Each engine displayed between 50 and 80 violations, which are supposed to prevent a driver from taking the engine out. Work at the depot stopped.

Similar actions were held at depots in Kryvyi Rih, Poltava, Zaporizhzhya, Korosten, Lviv, Ternopil, Sinelnikove and other centres.

The Railway Workers Union advanced a series of demands to the authorities and Ukrainian Railways’ management: raise the wages of all employees to European standards, return the right to an early retirement, permit trade unions to participate in elections to management positions and create safe working conditions.

Two days later, the railway depot at ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih, a flagship foreign-owned metallurgical plant in southeastern Ukraine, joined the action. Local drivers and train personnel began strictly observing safety rules and, as a result, only 14 of 92 diesel locomotives went into operation.

In the repair shop depot Kryvyi Rih. Photo courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.According to the head of Ukrmetallurgprom, over four days of the May 2018 action, roughly 126,000 tonnes of iron ore remained unloaded. The company suffered losses and began to sound the alarm. On 16 May, a third of a day’s production was not transported, at a loss of $2.5 million. Due to lack of raw materials, the risk of a stoppage began to loom over several metallurgical plants. Industrial managers and politicians demanded action from Ukrainian Railways. They didn’t have to wait long.

Demands

Ukrainian Railways’ press office stated that the company was working as normal, and that the refusals to work were minimal. The Union of Railway and Transport Construction Workers (PZhTSU), the successor to the Soviet railway union (and where the majority of railway employees are member), issued its own statement. Activists from the Free Trade Union, which organised the protests, call their competitors a “pocket” or “banana” union. Indeed, PZhTSU came out against the work-to-rule action, calling the protestors’ actions “destructive ways of blocking freight transport”. Andriy Ryazantsev, director of finance at Ukrainian Railways, called the action “a crime against the entire state, as it leads to losses not only for Ukrainian Railways, but the economy of Ukraine.”

Indeed, in striking depots, management tried to convince and pressure drivers into returning to work from the very beginning.

In the Free Trade Union of Railway Workers office, Kremenchuk. “What did our management do first?” Oleksandr, a driver, starts, with malice in his voice. “Instead of coming out to speak to people, hear their demands, wishes, complaints, they brought people into their office one by one. They know whose nerves are weaker, they can pressure those people! They started trying to frighten us, deceive us in all sorts of ways. They offered one person a promotion to instructor, another – the senior job on the diesel engine, a third was offered a bonus, and fourth – a new job. Places where people are less organised are more vulnerable, and management managed to get people back on the track. At the more combative depots, Kremenchuk, Kryvyi Rih, Darnytsya, they got the trains back on the track with help from drivers from other towns.”

“Our employers got clever,” remembers driver Maksym, “and drew up a backdated report that said all the engines were fine for work and are being sent to other depots, for ‘repairs’. That is, we were told that the engines were in the shop to be repaired, and in reality they were being used at other depots, only…”

“By loyal teams,” another driver finishes Maksym’s sentence.

“I wouldn’t call them loyal,” Maksym responds. “At the beginning, we didn’t let the engines out of the depot, we put stop signals on. We explained this to all our comrades, that they were violating the rules. In response, a bunch of police and military security turned up at the depot. They put the squeeze on us. And when they invited us to negotiate, they got all the engines out of the depot, and hid them from us.”

This situation lasted for two weeks. Several depots gave in and went back to work during that time, and some joined the action. Railway managers tried to convince activists with the Free Trade Union to stop protesting, as did other businessmen and representatives of law enforcement. In Dnipro and Kremenchuk, some activists were sent summons for the army conscription office. But the protests didn’t die down. Eventually Serhiy Moskalets received a phone call inviting him to travel to Kyiv for negotiations.

“How can we stop working to instructions? This is our air!”

Trade union representatives and management met in Kyiv on 29 May. The meeting was moderated by the Minister of Infrastructure, Volodymyr Omelyan. The negotiations last for six hours until late at night, but the sides could not reach a compromise. Protest leaders insisted on a substantive increase in wages for all employees, but management refused.

As a result, an agreement with decisions was drawn up, but the minister was the only one who signed it – the unions and management refused. The agreement’s first paragraph read: “It is recommended that representatives of the Free Trade Union of Railway Workers of Union stop their ‘work to rule’ action in order to stabilise work in the railway sector.” This phrase still has the Kremenchuk drivers in shock.

“They want us to stop working according to instructions, that is, you can do whatever you want?” one union member bursts out.

“Whatever you want, apart from working according to instructions!”

“And Omelyan signed this, our minister!”

“How can we stop working to instructions? This is our air!”

In the same agreement, Ukrainian Railways is due to create a commission to inspect the condition of engines, return early pension benefits and pay strike participants in accordance with legislation.

Although the Free Trade Union wasn’t satisfied with the results of the negotiations, with time, the protests gradually fizzled out. Some got tired of fighting and the stress. Others went back to work, afraid of not having enough to feed their family. Elsewhere, drivers no longer saw the point, given their engines were already being driven by “strikebreakers”. By mid-June, Kremenchuk was the only depot still striking.

Engines with dozens of violations are still going out on the track every day, degrading further, with risks for life and health of their drivers

On 1 September, all the engines returned to Kremenchuk and began working as normal. Three weeks later, a tragedy occurred at a nearby depot: a fire broke out in the driver’s cabin while an engine was on the track. The driver inside, Yury Kachan, died a week later from his injuries. The engine should not have been out on the track.

“The engine was fully loaded with metal and posed a risk to the environment and people,” says Alexander Petrov, one of the Kremenchuk union leaders, in a YouTube broadcast. “He didn’t die, he didn’t perish, he was killed! They killed him with their lack of responsibility, their lack of organisation. We had already told them: guys, look at what we have to work on! This case should make them us say: “Stop! What are we doing? Where are we going?!’”

"They killed Yury Kachan!": Alexander Petrov's video message, October 2018. Source: NabatTV.

This tragic death is yet to have any consequences. Engines with dozens of violations are still going out on the track every day, degrading further, with risks for life and health of their drivers. Many repair shops are in a state: there’s nothing to repair engines with; metalworkers, even on a 4,000-8,000 hryvnya monthly wage, often have to buy parts and tools with their own money.

The strike continues

Seven months on, the work-to-rule action may have ended, but Vyacheslav Fedorenko, a young driver who heads up the Free Trade Union of Railway Workers in Kryvyi Rih, is still going. Every day, Fedorenko goes to work, draws up an engine report and then gets on with other tasks. He refuses to handle engines that have safety violations.

For Fedorenko, what’s important is the example he’s setting to other drivers. But his conviction is costing him: he receives no additional payments, and takes home 6,000 hryvnya a month. But Fedorenko is yet to lose his job, as he’s breaking no rules.

“Before the action, many complained that we don’t have a collective here”

The decoration and furniture in his large office is minimal: a worn desk, two rows of stools. Fedorenko and his fellow members are yet to make this space their own. They created their union only a year ago, and only recently received their legally-mandated office. Before the May 2018 action, Fedorenko’s union had only 19 members out of 1,300 possible workers, but that didn’t stop them from paralysing the depot’s work.

Vyacheslav Fedorenko, a head of the Free Trade Union of Railway Workers in Kryvyi Rih. Photo courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.“Before the action, many complained that we don’t have a collective here,” Fedorenko remembers. “We tried to figure out whether all this was worth starting or not. I had to work with people very closely, print out instructions, hand them out to people, tell people what to do, show them things, give phone numbers out. I told them: if you have questions, get in touch! There’s nothing to lose, guys, you’re driving the same trains your parents and grandparents were, and they retired at 55. And they’ve taken that right from you!”

In the end, not a single demand put forward by the Free Trade Union was fulfilled. But neither Fedorenko, nor other union members regret their protest. For Vyacheslav, there’s been a practical purpose: after the strike, many depots underwent a workplace inspection. In Kryvyi Rih, this inspection concluded that drivers work in hazardous conditions and that pension benefits need to be restored. The Free Trade Union’s authority has risen thanks to the protests, and its membership has increased, too. But the main result of May 2018, for Fedorenko and his comrades, is the experience, which has hardened them for future battles.

“You have to understand, before 14 May [2018] no one raised their heads,” Fedorenko tells me. “People were treated like cattle, and they silently agreed to it. And then suddenly we remembered: we’re citizens! I believe that civil society was born in our depot on this day.”

President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko and Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew. Photo Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International / The President of Ukraine. Some rights reserved.Who now remembers the “clash of civilizations”, Samuel Huntington’s hypothesis that religious identities would prove a primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world?

Events in Ukraine over the course of the last few months are indicative of wider reconfigurations shaking the Orthodox world. The Russian Orthodox Church (Patriarchate of Moscow) has broken off communion with Ecumenical Patriarchate (Constantinople), based in Istanbul, traditionally “first among equals” in the Church order. The Russian Church has even opened parishes in territories under the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s jurisdiction, including in Istanbul.

While Ukraine is faced with ongoing division, Russia is confronted by increased difficulties in the use of religion to project power into neighbouring countries. The rest of the Orthodox world is called on to take sides. In short, it is the clash within the religious group rather than between civilizations that has come to the fore. But arguably, it is the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople which is confronted with the greatest challenge.

Symbolic capital

Competing interpretations of the events of 2014 remain central to any understanding of the Ukrainian Church crisis of 2018 and 2019. The doubting of separate Ukrainian nationhood implied by the ideology of a “Russian world”, an argument made explicit by Patriarch Kirill during his negotiations with Patriarch Bartholomew in 2018, frames the question of why the Russian Church had not proceeded to grant autocephaly (self-rule) to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) itself.

If this had happened, the newly autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church would then have been constituted around the old Episcopate, allowing Moscow to continue exerting influence through both formal channels and informal. This would have allowed for reunification of the different Ukrainian Orthodox churches only on terms set by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate). Granting autocephaly was discussed in Russia, with such figures as the blogger and deacon Andrey Kurayev arguing in favour. But the granting of autocephaly by the Russian Church would have clashed with the belief that the “Russian world” really should be unified politically, and not just culturally.

The validity of a “Russian world” including Belarus, Ukraine and the Russian Federation, is by no means the only contested discourse that has played out during the Ukrainian Church crisis. Central have been the nature of Church-state relations. So too the status of the Church in Ukraine up until 1686, and the documents of purported transfer of Ukraine from Constantinople to Moscow dated to 1686 itself. A further set of contested discourses relate to the status of the Ecumenical Patriarchate as “first among equals” in Orthodoxy. Tangentially related to these has been the question of whether Orthodoxy should be opposed to the West, or find itself in creative dialogue with ideas emanating from further West.

But above all it is the omnipresence of the past in arguments over the Ukrainian Church crisis that has been evident. This is in contrast with Soviet ideology which looked to the future, and also in contrast with Orthodox thinkers whose works have a more eschatological bent. The prominence of the past in determining current practice limits potential creativity for resolving disputes.

In the post-Soviet context, the connections between religious institutions and state administration are being reconfigured. The result is that religious expression is pushed from privatized spheres into forms of public performance. Both Vladimir Putin’s and Petr Poroshenko’s criticism and use of Ukrainian autocephaly adhere to this pattern.

Finally, it is worth noting that the Russian Church did not anticipate that the Ecumenical Patriarchate would intervene in Ukraine so decisively. The Russian Church could easily have attended the Pan-Orthodox Council on Crete in 2016, a decision that would have placed obstacles to the granting of Ukrainian autocephaly. Nonetheless, the outcome of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s intervention is not yet clear: what will it mean for Ukraine and the Orthodox world as a whole?

Trading places

One of the consequences of the decisions of the Ecumenical Patriarchate on autocephaly is that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is starting to acquire the trappings of a state Church. This has not occurred through changes in the Ukrainian constitution, but rather, given the role of President and Parliament in requesting autocephaly, through association with state authorities and media projection.

This all fits with 19th and 20th century examples of the growth of national consciousness, in the Balkans and elsewhere. When the nation is presented as “a sacred communion of the people”, a separate Church is required to underline the nation’s longevity, and unite its members into a single community. The nation borrows its narratives of salvation from religion.

To be fair, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine starts with advantages. Its statute is more democratic than the equivalent of the Russian Church. In the results of the secret voting by Bishops, clergy and lay persons to elect the new Metropolitan of Kiev, no single group appeared to dominate. Thus, there is a chance that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church might function in a more conciliar way than others. Finally, in Ukraine, the laity matters. Their movements will end up deciding which Orthodox Churches have more members, and, in the context of new legislation, where the majority of parishes will settle. But if the equation of Church with state has been central to the story of Russian Orthodoxy, it is the equation of Church with nation rather than state that has been the predominant narrative in the Balkans. How this difference will play out in Ukraine remains to be seen.

Constantinople at the cross-roads

But what of the challenges faced by the Ecumenical Patriarchate? First, some thoughts about its structure. The absence of significant laity in Istanbul, and the dispersion of the Patriarchate’s flock between parts of Greece and diaspora and convert communities in the West complicates analysis. One solution is to focus on the Patriarchate’s inner circle of Hierarchs.

As the decision-makers at the core of the Patriarchate are few, the role of religious intellectuals in interpreting and projecting the world-view of the Patriarchate has proved important. In the Ukrainian Church crisis, the work of theologian Konstantin Vetoshnikov has been significant. A closer examination of the arguments for the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s intervention point to strengths and weaknesses in its position.

Discussion of historical precedent includes the role of Constantinople from the Christianizing of Kievan Rus onwards. Excluded are the responses of parts of the Russian Church in order to progress beyond the suffocatingly close relations of Church and state that characterised periods of Tsarist and Soviet history. The most important of these has been the All-Russian Church Council of 1917-1918 which accorded lay members and priests an important role in Church governance, and which has served as an alternative vision to state-Orthodoxies.

Further to this, it remains unclear to what degree the historian Dmitri Obolensky’s “Byzantine Commonwealth” and its extension to an “Orthodox Commonwealth” can be employed for Russia. The different influences at work in the construction of the Russian state suggest limits for such terms. Any understanding of them leads to a consideration of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s declared role from the Patriarch Athenagoras on (Patriarch 1948-1972) as proponent of an ecumenical Church with a super-national mission. It is this vision of the Patriarchate’s role that Paschalis Kitromilides develops in his new book. A component part of this role is Kitromilides’ revision of the understanding of the relation of religion and Enlightenment.

Kitromilides argues that Orthodoxy in the 18th and 19th century Balkans, with the Ecumenical Patriarchate at its head, showed willingness to take initiatives that were “concordant with the age of reason”. This interpretation of the interplay between Orthodoxy and Enlightenment has proved popular because it challenges the vision of Orthodoxy as the kern of a separate civilization, reducing the distance between Orthodox countries and contemporary Europe. It also provides room for the Church today to engage with a range of ideas about the rights of human beings and democratic government. Patriarch Bartholomew’s engagement with the ecological crisis from the outset of his Patriarchate in 1991 conforms to this pattern. One of his successes has been to persuade the other Orthodox Churches to incorporate an ecological worldview within their pastoral mission.

Patriarch Bartholomew has repeatedly condemned exclusivist nationalism during the course of the Ukrainian Church crisis. Such statements seem to be out of sync with events taking place in Ukraine, which might explain their repetition. But there are also contradictions between the nationalism which parts of the Hierarchy of the Ecumenical Patriarchate has espoused and these ecumenical teachings.

Equally importantly, in the case of the Ecumenical Patriarchate memory as knowledge has often crowded out living memories. The number of texts interpreting Church law hosted on Orthodox websites has been growing exponentially. But the way in which canon law has been applied seems to strengthen the group of Hierarchs that rotate in and out of the Holy Synod. These canons were written for a world very different from our own. Thus, the legitimacy of the Patriarchate’s claims to be the “canonical consciousness of the Church” depends upon the perception that the Patriarchate is not abusing them. The Ecumenical Patriarchate has thus to engage with other traditions of Orthodoxy in order to maintain its claims to primacy.

And it is in this regard that the Ecumenical Patriarchate is open to criticism. Inevitably arguments about the need for conformity with Church law will prove less powerful now that the Patriarchate has been central to the redrawing of religious boundaries in Ukraine, however justified.

Further, alongside intervention in Ukraine, the Ecumenical Patriarchate has been criticised for its attempts to ensure that diaspora communities, including Ukrainian, remain under its direct jurisdiction. This is based on the principle that there should be only one Bishop in each city. But the Ecumenical Patriarchate has made no moves to create structures of governance that might encourage non-Greeks to feel that they have a role in the governance of the diaspora/Western Church.

People first

One of the few exceptions to this is the Exarchate of Parishes of Russian Tradition in Western Europe, known colloquially as Rue Daru, in Paris. This is under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, but it draws its traditions from the Russian Church Council of 1917-18. Nurtured by exiles who had fled the Russian Revolution, the laity here plays a central role in Church governance, including the election of Bishops.

At the same time as its intervention in Ukraine, it is this Exarchate which the Ecumenical Patriarchate decided through a Synodal decision of 28 November 2018 to terminate. The “symbolic capital” of the Exarchate is far greater than its one-hundred and twenty Western European parishes, and it now constitutes a new front in the confrontation between Moscow and Constantinople.

The decision to dissolve the Exarchate has left the Ecumenical Patriarchate open to criticism that it is characterised by a power vertical. The change in sections of the Russian language blogosphere before and after the decision underlines this point. Whereas before much criticism had been directed against the lack of efforts by the Moscow Patriarchate to surmount divisions in Ukraine, after the decision to dissolve the Exarchate the words of the religious writer Sergei Chapnin may be considered indicative: “this is a war for power in its purest form”.

Whereas the Russian Church has a state to support it, the Ecumenical Patriarchate does not. At a time when the Russian Church is disputing the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s Orthodoxy, the role of those who are willing to project the Patriarchate’s authority and reaffirm its “symbolic capital” is particularly important. Its role as interpreter of Church canons will become untenable unless it places the pastoral concerns of its flock at the fore. And that means dealing with the issue of its own Church governance. A small first step in this direction would be to signal a reversal of the decision of the Holy Synod on the dissolution of Rue Daru, before the Exarchate itself takes a decision whether to join Moscow, something that could happen as early as 23 February. The Ecumenical Patriarchate is at the cross-roads, torn between its closed system of control, and its purported openness to dialogue and “supranationalism”.

Imperial ecumenism?

The “clash of civilisations” is at its core an imperial discourse concealed as a universalist one, and that explains the popularity of civilizational theories in Russia today. Perhaps the greatest difference between theories of a “Russian world” and a “Byzantine” or “Orthodox Commonwealth”, however, remains the absence since 1453 of a revisionist state in the formerly Byzantine world. Religious ecumenism of this imperial variety posits a civilizational paradigm with the ability to transcend the sub-division of the imperial space into nations. But it conflates faith and ethnicity, while also, in the case of the “Russian world”, justifying the re-imposition of forms of imperial control.

Religious ecumenism in its contemporary sense is removed from this vision, seeking to transcend national boundaries, without constricting its scope to civilisational spheres. It draws on universal values of equality, freedom and human dignity. In Constantinople and throughout the Orthodox world, the particularism inherent to the Church’s imperial and ethnic past is clashing with the universalizing nature of the Christian faith.

Design for the new Tashkent City project from above. Source: Tashkent City.Corso Solutions LP appears to be an unusual property developer. The Edinburgh-registered company has no website, no contact details and no obvious business activity. And yet it was named last autumn as a foreign investor on the Tashkent City project, a giant property redevelopment in the centre of Uzbekistan’s capital. openDemocracy has found that Corso Solutions has connections to an opaque international network that provides company formation services, including to apparent money laundering vehicles.

Tashkent City, a $1.3bn project to construct a series of shopping malls, parks, luxury apartments and business centres in the capital, is part of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s plan to rebrand Uzbekistan as investor-friendly, modern and open for western capital. Under the former president, Islam Karimov, who ruled the country until his death in summer 2016, the country was plagued by high-level corruption and offshore schemes, and foreign investors were found to have entered into shady deals.

Last December, an openDemocracy investigation revealed that one of the three foreign investors in Tashkent City, German company Hyper Partners GmbH, appears to be hiding its real beneficial owners behind several layers of corporate ownership. On the basis of Hyper Partners’ corporate linkages and shareholder information, we suggested that several of the company’s owners could be a group of Uighur businessmen from Kazakhstan and Xinjiang, China – and that the sources of Hyper Partners’ and related companies funds should be audited.  

Tashkent City Press Conference, 31 January. Source: BBC Uzbek / YouTube.

Responding last month to our reporting on Hyper Partners, the mayor of Tashkent said at a press conference:

“It’s not within our competencies to ask who is investing, where their money is from, how funds have travelled through the banking system. The most important thing is that the project is being implemented, the most important thing is that a foreign company is investing in our market.”

According to Tashkent City Project Administration, all decisions on investors are taken by an administrative board, which comprises the prime minister of Uzbekistan, the mayor of Tashkent and other ministerial representatives. 

Now we have found that the directors of Corso Solutions appear to be employed by an international company formation business which has connections to businesses linked to money-laundering activities. These activities raise further questions about the nature of foreign investment in Tashkent City – and which investors the Uzbek government is choosing to work with.

Edinburgh backstreet

Corso Solutions LP was registered as a Scottish Limited Partnership in Edinburgh in May 2017, with its legal address at 101 Rose Street South Lane — and £99 in initial capital. 

Located in a tiny backstreet in Scotland’s capital, 101 Rose Street South Lane is legally home to 1,653 companies according to the OpenCorporates database. “This address in Edinburgh is is used as a proxy address,” says financial crime consultant Graham Barrow.

According to the UK companies registry, Corso Solutions has not logged any activity or accounts since its formation. As reported by Scottish newspaper The Herald, the company should have disclosed its beneficial owner (“Person of Significant Control”) after new UK legislation on Scottish Limited Partnerships came into force in 2017. Concerns about this situation were raised in September last year. 

In their 2017 report “Offshore in the UK”, anti-corruption campaigners Transparency International and Bellingcat, a team of investigative journalists, stated that the “minimal filing requirements” and “perceived respectability” associated with Scottish Limited Partnerships are “increasingly being abused by money launderers”. In October 2018, The Herald reported on the use of SLPs as investment vehicles in multi-million-dollar industrial and cotton projects in Uzbekistan.

Excerpt from a September 2018 report by Podrobno.uz, which names Corso Solutions LP as a foreign investor alongside Hyper Partners GmbH. Corso Solutions was first mentioned in a September 2018 report by Uzbek media on investors in Tashkent City. Since then, we have been unable to find any information on the exact nature of Corso Solutions’ investment, and it is not mentioned on Tashkent City’s official website. When Radio Ozodlik contacted Tashkent City in October 2018 regarding Corso Solutions, an official responsible for foreign investment stated that information on approved foreign investors, including Corso Solutions, was a “commercial secret”. When we contacted Tashkent City project administration to confirm Corso Solutions’ role in the project in January and February 2019, we received no response.

According to Graham Barrow, the lack of transparency over Corso Solutions’ beneficial owner in the filings immediately raises red flags.

“Corso Solutions LP are in breach of several UK requirements and subject to a penalty of up to two years in prison, a fine or both. But who would they arrest or fine? The company has failed to comply with the requirement to list people with significant control.”

Meet Mr Charyev

Corso Solutions LP has two registered partners: Indian citizens Deepak Devidas Shetty, a general partner, and Arasakumar Jayaraman, a limited partner. Searching the UK companies database, Jayaraman and Shetty appear as directors of numerous limited companies, which appear to form a constellation of “mailbox” companies together with Corso Solutions.

Both men appear listed as directors for companies that either have connections to or were set up by a Russian citizen, Viacheslav Charyev, who is director of an international company formation network.  

Project design for Tashkent City's Lot 3, a shopping centre with two 30-storey buildings. Source: Tashkent City.For example, Shetty replaced Charyev as director of Winlinebet Ltd last June. In November, Shetty signed off on 2017-2018 accounts for DDD Media LLP (registered at the same address as Winelinebet) on behalf of Sterling Legal Payment Services, one of two UK businesses run by Charyev. In a similar vein, Jayaraman is listed as a director for a UK limited company, Aveia Ltd, where he replaced Charyev as director in May 2017.

Two London addresses, 91 Battersea Park Road and 507 Green Lanes, are the hubs where most of the companies linked to Charyev, Jayaraman and Shetty are registered. Both addresses have hosted Charyev’s company Sterling Legal Payment Services.

As we show below, Viacheslav Charyev runs a network of on- and offshore companies, hidden behind opaque networks, and which are registered in locations from the Seychelles to Belize, Hong Kong to New Zealand.

The question is: whoever Corso Solutions’ real owner is, why does the investor require this kind of opacity? What are the connections that Charyev has established across the globe?

The Sterling network

Viacheslav Charyev has many associates who assist him in company formation in different locations. In 2016, he sought to hire an Indian national to serve as a “nominal director” of numerous companies registered in Russia, for a fee of $50 per company.

Screen shot from advert on GoAdIndia.com, posted in 2016.Ads like the one shown above were posted on various online job forums. Coincidentally, the dates of posting match the beginning of the cooperation between Charyev-linked businesses and Deepak Shetty and Arasakumar Jayaraman, who went on to act as partners for Corso Solutions.

“It’s a reasonable inference that Deepak Shetty and Arasakumar Jayaraman are among the India-based nominee directors Charyev was advertising for in 2016,” said Richard Smith, who researches companies involved in money-laundering schemes. “In the following years, both Shetty and Jayaraman took up many more director appointments at companies at the 507 Green Lanes address, which is exactly what you’d expect nominee directors to do.”

Charyev’s worldwide network is easily recognisable: his companies have similar names, usually involving the word “Sterling”, and Charyev’s own directorship and ownership. For example, we found that a Czech company, Sterling Legal Services s.r.o.registered in 2017 with CZK 10,000 (€384) capital, was one of the most active among Charyev’s businesses. There is also a Hong Kong-registered Sterling Legal Payment Services, and a now deregistered Australian company of the same name.

In Russia, Charyev is the registered director of three businesses, which include two active companies registered with the same name (OOO Sterling – registered in 2011 and 2014 respectively) but at different Moscow addresses.

On his Russian website, Charyev offers company and bank account formation across several dozen countries, including jurisdictions such as Belize, the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus and Seychelles.

Clearing an apartment block to make way for Tashkent City. Source: Atkhan Akhmedov. According to this website, registering a Scottish LP costs $3,100. With this service, Charyev offers Sterling’s services, which entail “tax-saving and full legal compliance at the same time”, and with a core value of “compliance”.

According to the Russian companies registry, one of the two Sterling branches has been subject to seven tax enforcement proceedings. These proceedings could not be settled because the Russian authorities were unable to locate the owner. As noted in the Russian company registry, Sterling’s registered Russian address (Luchnikov Lane 7/4, Moscow) is a known hub for Russian mailbox companies. The second Russian Sterling company was also involved in a similar proceeding.

What sort of company uses the services of Sterling Legal Services?

Proximity to money laundering

In Latvian bank accounts for Sterling Legal Services seen by openDemocracy, we found dozens of payments for company formation and legal services performed by Charyev’s company between 2013 and 2015.

The transactions show that this is only one of several accounts linked to Charyev and the Sterling network of companies. One of these accounts shows a turnover of $270,000 over two years.

We asked UK financial crime consultant Graham Barrow to examine the accounts, and the UK limited liability partnerships (LLPs) that are recorded as paying Sterling Legal Services for company formation and legal services.  

“LLPs have been central to all the major previous laundromats (Russian, Azerbaijani, Moldovan, Danske Bank), so when I see a lot of them connected to a single company, I want to take a closer look.”

Danske Bank is currently under investigation over 200 billion euros in payments from Russia and post-Soviet states that were found to have flowed through its Estonian branch. (c) Christian Charisius/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.Barrow points out that two of the UK limited partnerships which paid Sterling Legal for services, Grandburg Ventures LLP and Townstreet Complex LLP, are registered to the same UK address: 175 Darkes Lane, Potters Bar, Hertfordshire. “This address has been one of the most prolific providers of LLPs to laundromats and other money-laundering schemes,” said Barrow. According to Transparency International, this address hosted a company used in the $2.9 billion Azerbaijani laundromat. In 2018, the BBC “calculated that $1.7bn has been laundered through companies registered at [this] single address”.

The 2014-2015 accounts for Grandburg Ventures LLP (now dissolved) were signed off by Ali Moulaye, a Brussels-based dentist. Buzzfeed reported last August that Moulaye had supplied the paperwork for a network of 127 British shell companies, “around a third of [which] face allegations – some in criminal courts – of large-scale tax evasion, fraud, or corruption”.

From London to New Zealand

A second group of three UK limited partnerships (Alpha-M LLP, Alsical CIS LLP and Isomag UK LLP) identified as making payments for legal services in Sterling’s accounts is or has been registered at 91 Battersea Park Road and 507 Green Lanes – the same London addresses as a number of companies which list (or have listed) Viacheslav Charyev, Deepak Shetty and Arasakumar Jayaraman as directors. Alpha-M LLP lists a Seychelles-registered Sterling Legal Services as a corporate member.

The other two UK limited partnerships (Alsical CIS LLP and Isomag UK LLP) previously included a New Zealand limited liability company, Steel Refractory Limited, as a corporate member. At the incorporation stage for both partnerships in 2011, Steel Refractory Limited was represented by a director, Angelique Elizabeth Lilley.

Previously, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project found that Angelique Elizabeth Lilley has acted as a nominee director at a holding company for Moldovan television channel Publika TV, and a director at a company involved in the 2013 ownership battle over Ukrainian television channel TVi.

According to research by Naked Capitalism, a blog run by Richard Smith, Lilley has worked for Ian Taylor, who ran a New Zealand-based company formation business, the GT Group.

OCCRP and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists report that the GT Group has set up offshore corporate networks used by Russian organised crime, Hezbollah and the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel to launder funds and hide ownership. Companies House records that Ian Taylor has been disqualified as acting as a company director until 2021 under section 6 of the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986 (Duty of court to disqualify unfit directors of insolvent companies).

According to the financial information website interest.co.nz, by last December New Zealand police had received more than 350 criminal investigation inquiries from abroad about companies created by Taylor.

In this regard, suspicion arises when we examine the 14 companies that Arasakumar Jayaraman, limited partner for Corso Solutions, was previously or is currently listed as director of.

For example, Jayaraman was succeeded in five companies (Ultrapaymax Ltd, Globalwinmax Ltd, Siampay Ltd, Choice Trade (International) Ltd, Victory Lotter Ltd) by Vanuatu citizen Leah Toureleo. At two of the companies, Jayaraman was replaced by Toureleo on the same day, 29 November 2017.

In 2014-2015, Leah Toureleo’s name emerged in the context of the OCCRP investigation into the “Russian laundromat”, which laundered billions of dollars in Russian money stolen from the government or earned via organised crime activity. Naked Capitalism found that Toureleo was registered as a director of New Zealand company Chester NZ Limited, which received billions of roubles in illegal payments from Moldova’s Molincondbank. According to Naked Capitalism, Toureleo acts as a proxy director for the GT Group.

The Latvian bank accounts also show that Hong Kong-based company Nordfield Export Limited paid Sterling $6,600 for legal services in February 2015. In January 2018, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) identified a company with the same name as one of several that transferred $674,000 out of a corrupt tender scheme at the country’s Berdyansk and Mariupol ports in 2015. A search on OpenCorporates’ database of companies reports only one registered under the name “Nordfield Export Limited”. According to Ukrainian court documents, the NABU investigation found that this scheme, which centred around the management of the Ukrainian Sea Ports Authority state company, was launched in January to February 2015.

“Having reviewed these bank statements,” Graham Barrow told us, “they clearly exhibit connections to other significant laundromats.”

This background to Corso Solutions, one of the much-trumpeted foreign investors in Tashkent City, raises questions about the funds and expertise being deployed in this mammoth urban development, the reality of Uzbekistan’s new “open” and transparent economy, and the continuing lack of enforcement of new UK legislation designed to identify “persons of significant control” at Scottish LPs.

We contacted Tashkent City Project Administration, Corso Solutions LP and OOO Sterling for comment, but did not receive a response. You can contact us at media@opendemocracy.net.

Screenshot. Fearless Cities session hosted in Barcelona, 2017. You Tube.

In June 2017,Barcelona en Comú hosted the first international Fearless Cities summit. Bringing together more than 700 officially registered participants from 6 continents, Fearless Cities was the first time many of these initiatives had been brought into conversation with one another.

With a series of regional Fearless Cities gatherings having occurred throughout 2018 and early 2019 (in Warsaw, New York, Brussels, Valparaiso and Naples), a second North America gathering reputedly in planning, and a second global gathering scheduled for the Autumn of 2019, the four hot days spent gathered in the classrooms, gardens and grand halls of the Universitat de Barcelona may come to be known as the ‘coming out party’ of the global new municipalist movement.

Screeenshot.YouTube.Fair use.Each of these initiatives emerged independently of one another, responding to the specificities of their own context; they’ve not followed a pre-authored revolutionary blueprint, nor do they tend to define themselves neatly as liberals, socialists, Marxists, or anarchists. They are municipalists, and the ongoing discussions between many of them – not least through the Fearless Cities summits – is leading to a process of collaborative theory building. From Barcelona en Comu’s commitment to carrying out a ‘democratic revolution’[i] through to Cooperation Jackson’s strategy of building ‘black self-determination and economic democracy’[ii], the municipalist project is unquestionably a democratic one. Yet when we talk of the struggle of (and for) democracy, we are not talking of political parties and mayors – even when they are a feature of the movements. So what exactly is this ‘democracy’ we are struggling for?

What democracy?

From the election of the neo-fascist Bolsonaro to the farce of right-wing Brexit and the racist schemes of Salvini in Italy or Orbán in Hungary, it appears that it is precisely the failings of democracy that have both fuelled and created the space for reactionary, far-right and populist forces. When these same forces are driven by a demand to “take back control”, or make promises to “give voice to those populations that are cut down by those who only ever cared about financial outcomes and the multinationals”[iii]– neither of which would have sounded out of place in the occupied squares of Syntagma or Plaza del Sol – does it still make sense for progressive movements to talk of democracy? Can we distinguish a democracy of the right from a democracy of the left – and do these terms still make sense when building radically progressive social movements?

It may seem anathema to suggest that building walls[iv], closing university departments[v], and letting hundreds of bodies wash up on the beaches of Europe can be equated with ‘democracy’. Indeed, it’s not uncommon to hear people characterise the current western interregnum as a collapse or absence of democracy, or to suggest that the rise of populism poses a challenge to democracy itself[vi]. Yet in each case these are democratically elected national governments which, irrespective of the barbarity of their actions or inability to address structural crises, nonetheless have legitimacy through the representative democratic process. With the (democratically elected) extreme-centre of neoliberalism having entered a terminal tail-spin, various flavours of the (democratically elected) extreme-right are vying to fill the void.

What all these cases share is an interpretation of democracy which is fundamentally wedded to the state. We conventionally think of the state as if it were some form of machine – an ever-modifying series of mechanisms, and the associated buildings, weaponry and technical infrastructure to support it – which is passed from one group to another. Under state-democracy (sometimes called liberal or bourgeois democracy, but these terms don’t quite fit here), elections are used to determine which small group of people should be controlling this machine. They are seen as the least-worst way of ascertaining a mythical “general will”[vii] of the people which is then entrusted to those controlling the machine, but also as a safety-valve to guard against its excessive misuse. This understanding of state-democracy is by no means the preserve of the ‘right’. From social-democracy through many interpretations of socialism, the democratic question remains who controls the machine, how the population choose them, and what they do with it. Whilst the electoral process itself may be tweaked (for example, a move to proportional representation) or interstitial ‘participatory’ processes introduced (such as referenda), the concept of the machine itself – as a necessary infrastructure which sits on top and does-to society – is left unquestioned.

Screenshot: Fearless Cities, YouTube. Fair use.Traditional Marxist approaches to state-democracy understand the state as an instrument of domination that must ultimately be dissolved, and that its “withering away” is an essential pre-requisite to the establishment of a society of freely associating individuals. Whilst there are different interpretations of how this might happen[viii], they largely share the perception of the state as an indispensable tool which must be seized (through election, violent revolution, or otherwise) as the method of transition to a world without the state. Indeed, Lenin goes as far as making the state and democracy fundamentally intertwined concepts, such that ‘the state in general, i.e., the most complete democracy, can only “wither away"[ix]’. In practice, these traditional methodologies remain dominated by the problem of ‘who’ controls the state-machine; if only the bourgeois can be toppled, and the proper revolutionary interests of the working class (the ‘will’ of the people that has obtained class consciousness) can be represented through a dictatorship of the proletariat, then the withering of the state on behalf of the ‘whole people’ can begin.

Yet there is another reading of democracy that recognises that “the state, then, is not just an institution. It is a form of social relations, a class practice. More precisely, it is a process which projects certain forms of organisation upon our everyday activity”[x]. So what of a democracy that looks for different ‘forms of organisation’ of our everyday activity? When hundreds of thousands of people took the Spanish squares behind the banner ¡Democracia Real YA! (Real Democracy Now!), or occupied the financial heart of Wall Street chanting “this is what democracy looks like”, we know that (for many) this was not simply a demand for a ‘better’ government to be in charge of an unmodified state-machine. It was a challenge to the idea of state-democracy itself – a rejection of the form of social relations that we’ve nick-named ‘the state’ – and an affirmation that we can develop very different ways of organising our own everyday activity. It was a restatement of the democratic principle that the demos can organise itself, a refusal to wait for the state to deliver its own antithesis, and a belief in the possibility of us beginning to ‘freely associate’ together now.

Experiments in autogestion

There are thus two almost diametrically opposed understandings of ‘democracy’; either a commitment to the idea that we can develop a plurality of approaches to organising our own everyday activity, or a commitment to being alienated from governing our own affairs through the form of social relationships we call ‘the state’. Writing in 1966, the heterodox theorist Henri Lefebvre referred to the former as autogestion, noting that ‘the state in essence opposes a centralizing principle to the decentralizing principle of autogestion[xi]’. As Mark Purcell summarised, the struggle of/for autogestion:

‘is a struggle from below by people who have decided to take on the responsibility of governing themselves, who gain confidence through their successes, and who are able to demonstrate, bit by bit, that the state is no longer necessary… In autogestion, we do not smash the state and then begin managing our own affairs. Rather we manage our own affairs, we work hard at it, and we get to the point where it is evident that we can truly govern ourselves. Only then does the withering of the state truly kick in. Autogestion thus offers the possibility of a withering from below. It is a clear alternative to a failed model of a vanguard party seizing the state in order to impose conditions that will cause the state to wither away’[xii].

Without this interpretation of democracy as autogestion, it’s difficult to register the potency of Debbie Bookchin’s assertion, made during the final plenary of the 2017 Fearless Cities summit in Barcelona, that “municipalism is not about implementing progressive policies, but about returning power to ordinary people”[xiii]. This is perhaps a necessary overstatement; progressive policies are, of course, something that the new municipalist movements are looking to achieve, but it is not what fundamentally characterises them. The remunicipalisation and cooperatisation of essential services (from energy, to water, dentistry, funeral services, and transport-systems) so as to reduce costs and carbon-emissions whilst increasing service access and quality is a testament towhat can be achieved at the municipal level[xiv]. Yet these should be seen as positive symptoms of a political project that is notfundamentally about the policies themselves (which could hypothetically be implemented by a traditional social-democratic party), but about the construction of new ‘forms of organisation’ of our everyday activity.

Screenshot: Fearless Cities, Barcelona, June,2017. YouTube.As Ana Mendez, an activist in Madrid 129, former cultural-policy advisor, and co-organiser of the Fearless Cities summit puts it, municipalism is “not a way to implement the state conception of the world in a smaller scale. It’s a way to actually modify this level of the local government into something that is different, that actually operates at a different scale”. In other words, many municipalist activists are guided by this principle of autogestion – that we should be able to take on the responsibility of governing ourselves – and that this means trying to fundamentally reshape the bundle of social relationships that constitute the alienating state-machine in favour of new forms of collective social organisation. As Ana puts it, “we were sent out like scouts, we were sent like a kind of force into this enemy territory in order to fight, in order to try to change a super complicated machine”.

Caren Tepp, a councillor elected as part of Ciudad Futura in the city of Rosario, Argentina, phrases this as a commitment to:

“constructing a different kind of power. Not this power over someone, of oppression, but rather a power of equality, of getting things done, of cooperation, not of competition… [but] a new kind of power in society which is precisely in the hands of ordinary people, but organised ordinary people. Ordinary people that have started down the path of prefiguration. [The aim] is not to take power but to build a new kind of power, from the bottom up, a power to do with others, a power as a creative power and collective capacity to change things”

Whether it’s called autogestion, self-determination, or autonomy, it’s clear that the radical democratic impulse is to build a new collective social order from within the shell of the old. Yet this commitment to developing the self-organizing capacity of society does not mean forsaking working within existing state processes (something more akin to ‘traditional’ anarchist approaches to autonomy). Rather, we can see these movements as functioning transversally, developing strategies for organising in, against and beyond the state, where the radical democratic impulse – perhaps paradoxically – is to try and turn these institutions against themselves through ‘transforming the institution itself and its mechanisms in order to distribute power’. As opposed to a narrow understanding of simply getting elected and passing progressive policies, ‘this second kind of municipalism entails… giving autonomy to the social movements and opening the institution in order to let them act as a counterbalance. Once you have distributed power you lose the monopoly of the strategy and the agenda, so this second type of municipalism entails losing part of the control of the political process, but enhancing the changing process’[xv].

To be sure, people have committed to these municipalist movements for different reasons, and the (sometimes productive, but potentially insurmountable) tension between these two opposed understandings of democracy continue to play out within the movements themselves. Yet for Giuseppe Micciarelli, a legal scholar and activist with Massa Critica in Naples, the stakes are clear: “We have to imagine how to change institutions, because if we think that we win and we change the world, or our country, or our city, only [by] going to manage it – we fail…. You try to change the system, or the system will destroy you”. In these terms, it is the permanent commitment to transforming institutions and distributing power outwards, and the constant movement towards ‘a withering from below’, that defines the municipalist project. These new municipalist movements are, in Hardt & Negri’s terms, looking to form ‘a constitutive process that on the basis of our social wealth creates lasting institutions and organizes new social relations, accompanied by the force necessary to maintain them’[xvi].

Municipalism beyond the municipality

If a shared commitment of these initiatives is to project different forms of organisation onto our everyday activity, then why not organise at a ‘higher’ political scale, one that controls more resources and has greater capacity to produce policy? If these movements are demonstrating a willingness to operate in, against and beyond the state, why focus on the ‘periphery’ rather than on the ‘core’ of the nation-state? If these movements can be successful at the municipal level, why not ‘scale up’ and contest power at the national level?

The recent emergence of a municipalist electoral list for the European Parliament – which promises to pursue a ‘municipalist agenda for a Fearless Europe’[xvii]– suggests that many municipalists are acting strategically and fluidly across established political scales. Rather than being caught in a ‘local trap’[xviii] that erroneously positions towns and cities as inherently more democratic or progressive than other political scales, municipalism is understood as ‘a means by which to achieve [our] vital goals’[xix] that may well find strategic opportunities in the most distinctly ‘non-city’ like of places. To this extent, this municipalist tendency can be seen as embodying ‘an argument against localism but for… a politics of place beyond place’[xx].

Nonetheless, arguments to ‘scale up’ this municipalist turn are in danger of betraying one of its most central characteristics. Municipalism is an anti-state and radical-democratic project that rejects the myth of the state as a machine that can be conquered, and instead sees it as a tightly-knitted knot of social relations to be unpicked, distributed and rewoven. Municipalism did not begin in our towns, villages, and cities because of an erroneous belief that existing political structures are at their ‘strongest’ there, or simply because movements were too weak to claim the control centre of the state-machine. Rather, municipalism began where people are in their greatest proximity to one another, and thus where there is the greatest opportunity to undertake this reweaving, building new institutional forms – a “new kind of power in society which is precisely in the hands of ordinary people” – that are grounded in the day-to-day relationships of our immediately social and lived experiences.

The goal is thus not to repeat the tightly-knitted knot and inherited linear understanding of power, but to weave a new political geography, a new terrain of distributed power. No longer is this a challenge of an expansive fiefdom to be owned and controlled, but a series of humans whose relationships need to be collectively organized.

[i] Barcelona en Comú (2015) Governing by Obeying: Code of political ethics.

[ii] Akuno, K. (2011) The Jackson–Kush Plan: The Struggle for Black Self-Determination and Economic Democracy.

[iii] Salvini in Polleschi, I. (2019) ‘Italy’s new political order – a green beard and mozzarella’ Reuters. July 3rd 2018.

[iv] Travis, A. & Stewart, H. (2018) ‘UK to pay extra £44.5m for Calais securyt I Anglo-French deal’  The Guardian. 18th Jan 2018.

[v] Day, M. (2018) ‘Viktor Orban moves to ban gender studies courses at university in ‘dangerous precedent for Hungary’ The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/13/viktor-orban-moves-ban-gender-studies-courses-university-dangerous/

[vi] Mounk, Y. (2018) ‘How populist uprisings could bring down liberal democracy’. The Guardian. 4th March 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/04/shock-system-liberal-democracy-populism

[vii] Conceptualized by the French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the ‘general will’ is considered as one of the foundation stones of western democratic systems, and was enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen during the French Revolution.

[viii] Most famously, https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/lenin/state-and-revolution.pdf

[ix] The author acknowledges that there are many different interpretations of Lenin, and this isn’t intended to offer a definitive position on Lenin’s own work.

[x] London-Edinburgh Weekend Return group (1979) In and Against the State.

[xi] Lefebvre, H. (1966) Theoretical Problems of Autogestion in N. Brenner & S. Elden (eds.) (2009) State, Space, World: Selected Essays of Henri Lefebvre.

[xii] Purcell, M. (2013) The Down-Deep Delight of Democracy London: Wiley-Blackwell. Pp.40-41

[xiii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zohw_IUJUiw

[xiv] Transnational Institute (2017) Reclaiming Public Services: How cities are citizens are turning back privatization.

[xv] de Alòs-Moner, A. (2017) Seizing Power Within Global Neoliberalism: Lessons from the Municipal Movement. Alternative Information & Development Centre.

[xvi] Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2017) Assembly Oxford: Oxford University Press

[xvii] Shea Baird, K. (2018) A municipalist agenda for a Fearless Europe. 2nd November 2018.

[xviii] Purcell, M. (2006) Urban Democracy and the Local Trap. Urban Studies 43(11): 1921-1941

[xix] Roth, L. & Baird, K. (2017) Municipalism and the Feminization of Politics. Roar Magazine. Available online:< https://roarmag.org/magazine/municipalism-feminization-urban-politics>

[xx] Massey, D. (2007) World City Cambridge: Polity Press

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey announce Green New Deal legislation in Washington on February 7, 2019. Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images via YES! Magazine.

Myron Ebell of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, the man who led the drive to pull America out of the Paris climate accords, said the other day that the Green New Deal was a “back-to-the-dark-ages manifesto.” That’s language worth thinking about, coming from perhaps the Right’s most influential spokesman on climate change.

Ebell’s complaint (and that of the rest of the Right) is that the set of proposals to address climate change and economic inequality put forth last week by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey would do too much, and cost too much. Indeed, he describes the Green New Deal this way:

“It calls for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in 10 years, ‘upgrading all existing buildings’, and replacing our vehicle fleet with electric cars and more mass transit. And turning our energy economy upside down must be accomplished while ending historic income inequities and oppression of disadvantaged groups.”

All of which sounds good not just to me, but to most people: Polling for the Green New Deal is through the roof, especially among young people so ably organized by the Sunrise Movement.

But even if ending historic oppression doesn’t catch your fancy, it’s not a return to the Dark Ages.

A return to the Dark Ages is what happened in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit: Survivors dying in the convention center of a modern American city, locals organizing a makeshift “navy” to try to pluck people from rooftops after levees collapsed.

A return to the Dark Ages is what happened in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, when most of the island was literally dark for months as workers struggled to rebuild power lines.

A return to the Dark Ages is what happened in California last fall, when old people burned to death in their cars while stuck in traffic jams trying to flee deadly wildfires.

And that’s just the United States. Around the world now we’re seeing climate change help ignite diabolical civil war in places like Syria, where the fiercest drought in the history of what we used to call the Fertile Crescent has driven millions of farmers off their land. We’re watching the rapid spread of diseases such as zika via the wings of insects whose range expands as climate warms. Studies have demonstrated that, after years of decline, starvation and child labor are now on the rise as the result of climate stress.

That’s what a modern Dark Ages looks like.

What the future looks like is electric cars, to use one of Ebell’s examples. They outperform internal combustion vehicles by every metric: They move more nimbly, they cost less to own and operate, they break down less often because there are fewer moving parts.

What the future looks like is mass transit. Visit Europe and ride on the trains for a few days and then explain how much more modern it is to sit in traffic jams in American exurbia.

What the future looks like is “upgrading all existing buildings,” because it’s now easy to do. Example after example shows that technology like, say, air-source heat pumps don’t just cut carbon, they cut heating bills, making them affordable from day one.

We’re against these things because—why again?

That better future doesn’t come for free—but it costs pennies on the dollar compared to the future Ebell and his Beltway ilk apparently accept, the one where you have to start moving all the residents of Miami, the one where fire season never stops, the one where growing wheat becomes a chancy proposition. And if you think these political conservatives prefer a less costly plan, think again: When Barack Obama proposed the mighty-modest Clean Power Plan to reduce the use of coal-fired power plants, Ebell called it “illegal.”

What Ebell and his colleagues prefer is—nothing. It’s sticking with coal and gas and oil while the global temperature rises another degree and another and another. Forget the Dark Ages merely 1,500 years ago—Ebell would set Earth back to the interglacial Eemian era, 130,000 years ago. Or maybe the Eocene-Paleocene Thermal Maximum, 55 million years ago.

It’s very clear that conservatives have one plan for dealing with the popularity of the Green New Deal: scaring the hell out of people. And it’s very clear that they have one big problem: The hell they’re building through inaction is a lot scarier than “upgrading all existing buildings.”

This article was first published in YES! Magazine.

Israeli soldiers arriving to Palestinian family house in Hebron. Picture courtesy of author. It’s a little before 8pm when the text message arrives from Emad Abu Shamsiya – a well-known local activist here in Hebron. It’s worrying news – a group of settlers have been seen gathering by the old bus station (now converted into an Israeli army base). There is going to be another demonstration. Less than an hour later, it’s happening. Settlers have taken to the long thoroughfare – Shuhada Street, that dominates the historic centre of the city. They yell anti-Arab chants calling for Palestinians to leave, throwing stones at the houses of those who remain in the area. Some settlers carry guns, which seems superfluous since they are accompanied by their own armed guard of soldiers.

Activists from local monitoring groups rush to the scene to record the violence and try to protect families and it’s reported that one even receives a solidarity phone call from Abu Mazen – Mahmoud Abbas - , the Palestinian president who is presently on an official visit to Saudi Arabia. As I record these words, there have been further warnings that the settlers may even proceed to my neighbourhood – Jabal al-Rahma – some way away from the usual epicentre of strife. My neighbours are quietly taking the precaution of moving their cars out of sight of the main road.

The last time things kicked off like this was just two days ago when settlers began a march in the small hours of Sunday morning, accompanied by the usual hateful chanting and stone throwing aimed especially at families in the central neighbourhood of Tel Rumeida and at Palestinian families living close to the Kiryat Arba settlement. Later on that same day, settlers came to the small tourist shop run by my good friend Abed al-Muhtaseb, just next to the Ibrahimi Mosque. They brought with them iron bars – of the exact kind normally used here by the Israeli police – and proceeded to forcibly install these, shutting him out of the business which is his sole source of income.

Hebron is already notorious as a crucible of the occupation of Palestine, a dramatic microcosm of the entire struggle in which a small but fanatical group of hard line religious-nationalist settlers wages a constant war to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian inhabitants from the most populous city in the West Bank. Recently, though, things have taken a dramatic turn for the worse.

On the 28th January, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the shocking announcement that he would be expelling the Temporary International Presence in Hebron – an international observer team comprised of representatives from Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and Denmark (the latter temporarily unrepresented at the time of the announcement). TIPH was established after the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre in 1994, in which the settler and IDF reservist Baruch Goldstein gunned down twenty five Palestinian worshippers. TIPH was, itself, a typically weak compromise. At the time, Palestinian negotiators, fresh from signing the first Oslo accord, hoped for a United Nations backed peacekeeping mission – a nonstarter, needless to say, due to the prospect of an American veto in the Security Council.

Even as an observer mission, TIPH was strictly limited, forbidden from using film or photography to document its findings, or to publicise its observations beyond the reports it sent back to contributing countries, as well as Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Nevertheless, its presence did help Palestinians to feel, if not totally safe, at least significantly safer in the knowledge that as long as representatives of these influential countries were watching, Israel and the settlers would feel at least somewhat restrained.

Moreover, TIPH was more than just an observer mission. Less publicised, but also important, was its behind the scenes role in supporting important civil society initiatives in the city. One such is the Ibrahimi Society – a community organisation which, among other things, runs a kindergarten, organises trips for children, and puts on training sessions for local women on the psychology of child trauma. All of these make an important difference to making life here more bearable. TIPH helped with funding and by providing computer equipment. “We’re going to miss this support”, a representative from the Society told me, laconically.

Equally ominous is the fact that TIPH isn’t the only observer mission lost to Hebron. The news of TIPH’s expulsion almost immediately prompted an announcement by the World Council of Churches that its own observer mission, the EAPPI (Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel) would also be withdrawing because of security concerns. Christian Peacemaker Teams, which also sends observers to Hebron, is down to two people, due to the Israeli authorities blocking numerous volunteers from entering. Observers from the International Solidarity Movement face an equally uphill struggle; it is commonplace for activists to be arrested and detained by Israeli authorities for many hours on unsubstantiated charges before being forced to sign injunctions banning them from central Hebron. This happened most recently just a few days ago after a notoriously strident settler called the police after an altercation with some ISM volunteers.

The settlers in Hebron are now emboldened to the point that to us they feel like a second occupying army, with the only difference between them and the troops being that one lot wears uniforms and the other doesn’t. But as much as they may fantasise about expelling us from our city with the same ease they have dispensed with international observer teams, this is our home and we are as determined as ever to organise to defend our communities.

Palestinians in Hebron now have long experience of being their own international observers, and we are intensifying this activity. We have created local committees in each neighbourhood responsible for observing the settlers’ movements and providing early warning of violence – just as Emad did for us this evening. My organisation, Human Rights Defenders has long been running a camera project, distributing video cameras and providing training to families in the most vulnerable area – the thin line from Tel Rumeida down Shuhada Street to Kiryat Arba. Meanwhile “Dismantle the Ghetto” our campaign against no-go area for Palestinians in Hebron which has brought together a coalition of numerous local civil society groups continues to run. On 25th February we will be holding a torchlight procession to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre. Now as then, we won’t back down in the face of violence.

August 2018: Adoptă un Vot and OccupyGuguță action in Chișinău, with the "classic" symbol of life abroad. Source: OccupyGuguță.On 24 February, Moldovans are due to vote in parliamentary elections. Except the current government – which the World Bank has recently described as “captured by oligarchic interests”– is trying to prevent some of its electorate from voting. Indeed, there are reports of people who work state institutions being threatened that if they don’t give their votes to the ruling Democratic Party, they will lose their jobs. As the Democrats have never managed to get more than 20% of the vote, they instead rule by “converting” parliamentarians of other parties.

The biggest group that the government is concerned about, and trying to limit, is Moldova’s diaspora.

They have their reasons. According to some estimates, there are one million Moldovans living abroad – compared to the three million that still populate Europe’s poorest country.

In 2016, the Moldovan diaspora mobilised politically for the first time. Some 138,000 citizens outside Moldova went to polling stations to choose between Igor Dodon, leader of the pro-Kremlin Party of Socialists, and Maia Sandu, one of the two leaders of pro-EU accession opposition bloc ACUM.

Postal votes are not permitted in Moldova. So a few weeks before elections, a Facebook group called Adoptă Un Vot (“Adopt a Vote”) helped the diaspora organise. People offered free seats in their cars to others living in areas without polling stations; many living in big cities hosted those living further away. It was a moving moment for Moldovans abroad and at home. Some Moldovans travelled thousands of kilometers across the Americas, Central Asia and the Middle East to vote. For the first time in many years, there was hope for change.

Yet despite queueing for hours, thousands of Moldovans abroad (myself included) were unable to vote. Polling stations in Bucharest, Verona, Parma, Padua, Frankfurt, London, Dublin, Montreal and other cities ran out of ballot papers. Igor Dodon won the vote by a small margin, with 52% in the second round, and despite breaches of the electoral law cited by the opposition and civil society. But Moldovans in Europe and America voted in droves for Maia Sandu.

Queues outside a London polling station, November 2016. Source: UniMedia / Moldova.org. Perhaps the diaspora’s support for Sandu and her political bloc ACUM is unsurprising: what the two share is a genuine anti-corruption sentiment and a vision for Moldova as a liberal prosperous state with a rule of law. And the diaspora’s broadly anti-oligarchic position is precisely why the current government has tried to limit their vote. How have they done that?

Firstly, following the 2016 election, the ruling Democratic Party, together with Dodon’s Party of Socialists, voted to change the electoral system from a proportional vote to a mixed one, whereby half of the 101 seats in Moldova’s Parliament are elected proportionally, and half – based on circumscription lists (local MPs). This change was introduced in disregard to specific recommendations by the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission.

The government has forbidden people from using out-of-date passports as voter identification. Yet most Moldovans in Europe, Canada and the US use Romanian passports or permanent residence papers to travel and work

Under this new arrangement, the diaspora only gets to decide three seats in Parliament – there is one MP for Europe, one MP for Russia and the East, and one MP for North America. This means that, if in the past the diaspora was able to influence the seats of 101 MPs, now they can only influence 53 seats. Moreover, the way the polling stations have been set in the US and Canada does not reflect the number of Moldovans living in specific cities. For instance, in Montreal, where in 2016 the ballot papers finished before all citizens queueing could vote, no poll station was opened.  

Secondly, the government has forbidden people from using out-of-date passports as voter identification. Most Moldovans in Europe, Canada and the US use Romanian passports or permanent residence papers to travel and work. And many Moldovans voted with out-of-date passports in the 2010, 2014 and 2016 elections. In 2014, Moldova’s Supreme Court of Justice irrevocably and definitively decided that voting with an expired passport is legal. But a recently appointed Constitutional Court declared in mid-January that voting with expired passports in the diaspora is illegal. The reasons they invoked include preventing fraud and double voting. Yet the personal numeric code in a passport is unique, which means that the same person cannot vote twice. Likewise, observers in previous elections have not reported significant fraud at polling stations outside Moldova. Legal experts’ opinions vary on whether the Constitutional Court’s decision is binding for Moldova’s Central Electoral Committee.

While the Central Electoral Committee says that only 175 Moldovans voted with out-of-date passports abroad in 2016, the opposition bloc ACUM estimates there are currently 500,000 Moldovans living abroad with out-of-date papers. The truth is probably somewhere in between, and somewhere where it really matters. On the Adoptă Un Vot group, a Facebook poll said 263 people had valid passports and 132 had invalid passports. Similarly, diaspora Facebook group FreeMoldova states they have received over two hundred comments and questions about voting with out-of-date passports. If citizens living in Moldova with out-of-date or no ID can still get a temporary ID to vote, then in the diaspora this is impossible.

Despite these limitations, Moldovans abroad are still organising themselves online — Adoptă un Vot has now reached over 80,000 members. But in addition to this, a new diaspora movement has formed, FreeMoldova. This group started in June 2018, when the Moldova Supreme Court declared local election results in the capital Chișinău null, ruling that the winning candidate – Andrei Năstase, a leader of opposition bloc ACUM – breached the electoral code by encouraging people to vote in a Facebook Live video the day before elections. In the same period, young people in Chisinau organised the OccupyGuguță initiative, initially posed against the property development of an iconic city cafe. They have since made themselves known by distributing their own newspaper across the country and playing drums at protests, thus animating the more traditional top-down protest style in Moldova. Both groups are crowdfunded – a first for Moldova.

Giving out newspapers. Source: FreeMoldova. This month, members of FreeMoldova flew back to Moldova and, together with OccupyGuguță, are trying to inform people across the country of the changes in the electoral system, encouraging them to vote on 24 February without fear of intimidation. Mostly, they get very positive reactions. Along with the thanks and cheers for being active citizens, many Moldovans tell the youths about their own relatives abroad. Only a few reproached FreeMoldova members that they shouldn’t have left in the first place.

The Moldovan diaspora has drastically expanded following the 1998 economic crisis. Initially, people left illegally, with false papers, passing borders under trucks or in refrigerators, risking their lives. But in the past 20 years, people have managed to receive the right to stay in countries where they found work. Romania’s 2010 simplification of the citizenship process, and Moldova’s 2014 EU visa liberalisation regime has helped Moldovans migrate legally.

Throughout the years, the diaspora’s remittances sent back home have constituted an astonishing 20% of the former Soviet republic’s GDP. What are they looking for? A better standard of life, and a society in which one’s political allegiance or success in business isn’t threatened by the rule of a mafia-style government.

Image: Joe Corré and anti-fracking protestors, October 2018. Credit: David Mirzoeff/PA Images, all rights reserved.

“We’re in this kind of war against an industry that knows it's on its way out, but is clinging on as long as it can,” says Joe Corré of anti-fracking group, Talk Fracking.

In the next few weeks, Corré will find out whether his efforts to challenge a wide-ranging injunction brought by petrochemical giant, Ineos, against protestors have been successful. Ineos is one of the main companies pushing to frack in the UK.

“If we win, it will be another major blow to the fracking industry,” says Corré. “If we don’t, then it's going to be a really big thing for protest.”

What is at stake, and the reason why Corré decided to take the case to the Court of Appeal, is the nature of the injunction granted to Ineos, which has been described as “draconian” and “anti-democratic”.

Granted by a private court in 2017, it tells campaigners they will be in contempt of court if they cause any obstruction to the firm’s fracking operations and may be put in prison, fined or have their assets seized. It adds severe penalties to existing laws, such as trespass, and covers tactics such as “slow walking” in front of vehicles. What is unusual about this particular injunction, though, is that it is addressed to “persons unknown”, meaning that it covers anyone who engages in the injunction's “prohibited conduct”, whether they are aware of the injunction, or not.

“What it has done is put the frighteners on people,” says Corré of the injunction, which has now been in place for 18 months. “It has curbed their right to peacefully protest.” This is the basis of Corré’s appeal: that, by applying the injunction to everyone, it is incompatible with people's legal right to protest. Ineos disagreesand states that the injunction “does not prevent anyone effectively exercising their rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of expression”.  

What is clear is that the case represents an escalation on Ineos’s part to tackle what it describes as “mounting opposition, threats and unlawful conduct faced by shale gas operators.” It is right on at least one point: fracking is increasingly opposed by the public, despite the vast amounts the industry has spent on public relations to win over opinion.

Ineos’s wide-ranging injunction has also, inevitably been adopted by other fracking companies to shut down protest. “They’ve all copied the “persons unknown” thing,” says Corré, although he says that if campaigners win the appeal, they will be able to “take big chunks off” these other injunctions.

“I’m quite used to going to court these days,” he says, and is both proud to be challenging the injunction and ashamed that it takes someone with his personal wealth to do it. Corré is the founder of Agent Provocateur and son of Vivienne Westwood. In this context, though, he is David to Ineos’s Goliath. Its founder and chair, Jim Ratcliffe, is a billionaire and Britain’s richest man.

People who are now out protesting against the climate crisis should be clear, however, where the power lies in this battle. “These local communities affected by fracking,” says Corré, “have spent god knows how many weeks, months, years writing letters to their MPs, finding out information, talking to each other, fighting off all attempts by the fracking companies, at every opportunity.”
For years they have successfully held back fracking operations in this country and kept the gas in the ground. Corré’s case is trying to make sure that they – and all “persons unknown” protesting against fossil fuel companies – can continue doing it.

Image: Donald Trump visiting Theresa May in 2018. Whose agenda will dominate post-Brexit trade deal talks? Credit: Stefan Rousseau/PA Images, all rights reserved.

Remember all that talk about parliamentary sovereignty a couple of years ago? Remember being told that a key reason for Brexit was having control of our own trade policy? And that Brexit would mean we wouldn’t have to sign up to any undemocratic trade deals like TTIP?

Well it turns out it that those arguments were about as much hogwash as the £350 million extra a week which Boris Johnson desperately wanted to spend on the NHS. We saw that yesterday, when MPs debated Britain’s post-Brexit trade deals with countries including the United States, Australia and New Zealand, as well as signing, however geographically improbably, the Transpacific Partnership.

Or at least, some MPs debated those deals. The government benches contained no more than five MPs. Which is extraordinary given that this is possibly the only guaranteed debate MPs will get before a standard-slashing “America first” trade deal is brought back for them to approve. And approve such a deal they will have to do, because yesterday government ministers confirmed that in Brexit Britain the mother of parliaments will be effectively unable to stop any trade deal, however much they dislike it.

In a democratic country, Thursday’s debate would have been the point at which parliament saw Liam Fox’s negotiating objectives for the trade deals under discussion. They would have been able to question his red lines (assuming he has any), and to apply some sort of framework which lays out the type of trade deal Britain wants. They would have seen scoping documents and impact assessments, laying out what such deals would mean for different parts of the country, for different industries, and for our ability to protect public services, our environment and our welfare. They would have been promised access to all the negotiating documents so they could keep the Secretary of State on the straight and narrow. Scrutiny committees would have been established. Consultations with the public would have been launched. Devolved nations would have been given a specific say on what they wanted and didn’t want from a trade deal.

But, as Barry Gardiner, Labour’s trade spokesperson commented: “Today’s debate certainly cannot be considered to constitute that important discussion. It is a general debate on a Thursday, in a week that was intended to be recess, talking about potential agreements before Parliament has even debated the whole process of consultation, impact assessment, negotiating mandate, parliamentary debate, transparency of negotiation, ratification and subsequent review and periodic appraisal that should constitute a framework within which the Government intend to bring such agreements into being.”

As the SNPs trade spokesperson Stewart Hosie summed up: “Current procedures are such that this could be the only opportunity MPs have to debate four major trade deals. That would be woefully inadequate.”

Yesterday’s debate was a sham, which exposes the democratic black hole at the heart of Brexit. A hole which the government plans to fill with numerous trade deals which will affect everyone in the country, but which we are allowed no voice on. To be clear, MPs were told yesterday that there was no guarantee of another debate, of a written mandate to guide trade deals, of them being allowed to access any papers, of a proper scrutiny process or of a final meaningful vote.

Huge public concern

To be fair, there has actually been a public consultation. It was even accessible online. And a massive 600,000 people and organisations took part. That’s a record for such a consultation, and shows very clearly how interested and concerned the public are by trade policy. The majority of respondents are believed to have raised concerns that these trade deals could change the sort of food of we eat for the worse, could threaten the livelihoods of farmers, could undermine the NHS, and could introduce a “corporate court” system which would open our government up to being sued – in secret – for introducing perfectly reasonable environmental protection, public health standards and improving workers rights.

Yesterday, Liam Fox simply dismissed most of these concerns. But in any case, the consultation wasn’t in any way ‘meaningful’: it didn’t set out the type of deal the government wanted to do with these countries, or make any assessments of the changes the deals might bring about. It did little more than ask the anodyne question: Is trade with these countries a good thing?

But too bad. That was your chance. There won’t be another one.

Why does all this matter so much? Well in just over five weeks time, Fox can head to Washington to face the most experienced negotiating team in the world, determined to force Britain to accept chlorine-washed chickens and allow big business to get its hands on the NHS. This is not scare-mongering. We know precisely what US multinationals want because they told us last month: standard-slashing policies that includes allowing meat filled with antibiotics and steroids onto our shelves, as well as vegetables covered in chemical residues and milk with more pus in it. And less labelling on that food. It includes more expensive medicines, costing the NHS billions of pounds, and new data rules allowing Big Tech to use and abuse your data at will. It includes more GMOs, and worse chemical standards, and a corporate court which can be used by US multinational to challenge government decisions. By and large, the US administration agrees with this wish list.

The threat to the NHS is mostly that posed by the corporate court system. And it is not made up. Stewart Hosie pointed out how it might affect government decisions yesterday in parliament:

“In Scotland, when cleaning was contracted to the private sector, hospital-acquired infection rates went up. We then took a decision to bring back NHS cleaners, and hospital-acquired infection rates came down. Had that contract been won under the terms of one of these agreements, we could have been sued and challenged.”

He’s quite right, which is why many campaign groups launched a campaign against these awful courts, known as ISDS, this week. Such a system is already part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Fox wants the UK to sign after Brexit. The deal has been widely criticised by trade unions and campaign groups across the world for entrenching deregulation and liberalisation. Signing this deal would also move us away from the EU “precautionary” system of trying to prevent harmful products coming onto to the market, to one which says, “let’s not worry until something really bad happens”.

Most of this won’t concern Fox, who seems to know “the price of everything and the value of nothing”. His belief is that the free market will work its magic to provide us with cheaper goods, and that will be beneficial for consumers. No matter that consumers are largely also producers – and that some cheap clothes made in appalling conditions doesn’t make up for losing your job. Fox is full throated in his support of ISDS, and yesterday said that the EU-Canada deal CETA was a great basis for future UK deals. CETA also includes ISDS.

So things are now serious. In fact it’s always been the case that many hard Brexiteers see trade deals as a way of entrenching deregulation and privatisation in the British economy. Fox told business leaders a couple of weeks ago, that in the event of a no-deal Brexit he was favourable to applying zero tariffs to all goods coming into the country. It’s astonishing this didn’t generate more headlines given that it would decimate British farming and lay waste to large parts of industry. But then again, that’s not a problem to those who see Brexit as a means of completing the Thatcher project.

Do we really want to give this man royal powers to negotiate our future relationship with the world? It’s actually turned out to be the House of Lords who have most firmly stood up to Fox. Peers have put Fox’s Trade Bill on hold until he outlines his proposals to give parliament a proper role in overseeing trade policy. They will certainly be disappointed with his response, and it’s to be hoped that at that point, expected to be reached in the next two weeks, they use their powers to radically amend the Bill and force the government to implement a democratic system for holding the secretary of state to account for his trade policy.

If we fail in this task, then we need to prepare for a long campaign ahead. It’s been more than two years since we beat the dreadful EU-US trade deal known as TTIP. What we’re looking at now is TTIP on steroids. We must defeat this threat.

The government’s strategy, away from the scrutiny of parliament, is to give in to the US on agriculture, in return for the US letting the City of London run amok in the American economy. Finance and services are the bit of the British economy Fox seems to really care about, in his desire to create a low-tax, low-regulation Singapore-on-Thames. This would be bad for British workers, bad for creating a more equal country, and bad for the rest of the world which needs to deal with the damage of our financial giants. We need to stop it.

Join the campaign against corporate courts: https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/join-fight-against-corporate-courts

Pedro Sánchez at the PSOE party conference in 2017. Wikimedia Commons. All Rights Reserved.

The political landscape in Spain is that of instability, alongside rising radical nationalisms that make it almost impossible to reach an agreement.

The socialist government of Pedro Sánchez has lasted eight months. It’s the shortest government the country has seen since the re-establishment of democracy in 1978 after 40 years of dictatorship under general Franco.

The rising independence movement in Catalunya that provoked a constitutional crisis led to the the creation of this government, that took over from Mariano Rajoy, leader of the Popular Party (PP). 

The minority government of Rajoy that possessed 134 seats and sustained the support of the Citizen’s Party unexpectedly fell after a vote of no confidence promoted by Sánchez, the leader of a weak opposition that had only 84 seats in a parliament of 350.

In May 2018, the PP, persecuted by a long list of scandals and illegal finance cases, were sentenced by the Judiciary placing the party at the epicentre of an extensive corruption plot.

The corruption sentence assured that the government could no longer continue, and that a vote of no confidence was inevitable. 

The corruption sentence assured that the government could no longer continue, and that a vote of no confidence was inevitable. However, it was Sánchez who promoted the idea that Rajoy must stand down and name a new leader of the PP to the government.

An unexpected government

The negative approval ratings of Rajoy ensured the entire opposition would unite in pursuit of removing him from government.

A majority organised themselves, including the new left Podemos (with 67 representatives), and a group of minority representatives from Basque and Catalan nationalist parties.

Named as president by surprise, Pedro Sánchez, conscious of his weakness, began ruling with a minority government.

He attempted to revert some of the most antisocial measures of the previous conservative governments and opened dialogue with the pro-independence parties of Catalunya, who continue to control the Catalan parliament and the autonomous community.

However the Catalan issue remains plagued with negative emotions. The negotiations for governance, above all, to pass the annual budget through parliament, have left their mark on Sánchez’s short but sweet stay at the Palacio de la Moncloa, ensuring its lack of viability towards the end.

The eventual alliance between archenemies, the Catalan nationalists with the PP and the Citizen’s party, to take the government down is a prime demonstration of this.

The demands of the Catalan government for the recognition to the right to autodetermination and for international mediation was too much for the socialist government to take.

The demands of the Catalan government for the recognition to the right to autodetermination and for international mediation at the negotiation table was too much for the socialist government to take.

Thus, the government of Sánchez was obligated to call new elections, this time for the 28th April, one month short of the municipal, European parliament and autonomous community elections, set for the 26th of May.

Crisis, fragmentation, and instability

The coming elections on the 28th of April will be the third general elections in Spain in the last four years, bringing to light the instability that has defined the political system.

Spain has gone from a bipartisan system in the past few years to a highly fragmented scenario which is far less stable.

Traditionally, governments have governed with either an absolute majority or with minority governments that gained the support of the Basque and Catalan nationalists, that were pragmatic in character. The nationalists often acted as bargaining chips in favour for benefits for their territories.

This hegemony of the two large parties began to break down with the emergence of two new parties, Podemos on the left and the Citizen’s Party on the right, that erupted in the 2015 elections with 42 and 40 seats in parliament.

They emerged mostly as a response to the poor management of policies relating to the great recession of 2008 and the following social crisis that rocked the parties of the establishment.

Alongside the emergence of these two new political forces, in Catalunya, nationalists on the right of the political spectrum radicalised due to the same social tensions produced by the financial crisis, and the threat of losing its hegemony to its republican pro-independence competitors.

Disaster in Catalunya

This radical shift in Catalan nationalism, with clear populist traits, demanded a referendum to gain territorial independence, something which is not permitted by the Spanish constitution however is widely supported by the Catalan people.

Despite the fact that no constitution of any State allows for the secession of one of its territories, the Catalans played along knowing that the Spanish state wouldn’t accept their demands under any circumstances.

Regardless of its populist radicalisation, massive demonstrations in the streets led by the Catalan government, and with civil society on their side, nationalist parties decided to unilaterally push the issue of a referendum beyond the point of no return.

The government of Rajoy, caught up in recovering from the economic crisis and focused on a purely judicial approach, was unable to contain the independence movement, and the Catalan nationalists convoked a referendum without the support of the central government on the 1st October 2017.

The consequences of this territorial conflict that has been so badly managed have been disastrous: Catalan society has been divided and Spanish society has been radicalised.

Although it was an illegal referendum that could not provide democratic guarantees, and in spite of the warnings from the government and restrictions put in place by the Supreme Tribunal, the result caused the subsequent declaration of independence (even if it never became fully effective), and the central government intervened, applying enforced rule over the region.

The consequences of this territorial conflict that has been so badly managed have been disastrous: Catalan society has been divided and Spanish society has been radicalised.

Police repression of peaceful voters at polling stations was a grave error, and fell right into the trap that the nationalists had planted.

The photo of an old lady defending the polling station whilst being beaten by police was powerful publicity for the independence cause and tragic for Spanish democracy.

The posterior denouncement and incarceration of nationalist leaders (bar a few who fled the country) has led us to the situation that we are currently in.

We witnessed the tragic spectacle of a trial under charges of rebellion that, although evidently violating the law, didn’t appear to exist.

Despite other violations such as disobedience and embezzlement having clearly taken place, the charge of rebellion and the high penalty that such a charge receives has been perceived as a revenge plot by the Spanish state.

This only throws petrol over an already raging fire, feeding into victimisation and aggravating nationalist sentiments in Catalunya.

Destabilization

As a reaction to an increasingly nationalist Catalunya, the PP is also suffering a process of populist radicalisation.

This has caused the party to fragment, with some sectors leering towards the far right, causing the ultra right party VOX to emerge with force in 2018.

Whoever comes out on top at the next elections, will have to face up to growing tensions over the possibility of ‘Catexit’, and the potential reaction of the extreme right.

The recent regional elections in Andalucia have created a right-wing alternative coalition, made up of the Popular Party, Citizen’s Party, and with the support of VOX and the 400,000 votes they received. What could occur in Spain from the 28th April onwards is that the country emerges governed by ‘the three rights’.

In few years, Spain will have gone from an imperfect bipartisan system supported by conservative yet moderate nationalists, to a five party system, with one leering to the extreme right and other populist nationalisms on the periphery.

The political landscape in Spain is that of much instability, in which it has become impossible to reach an agreement with radicalised nationalists who wish to promote their own agenda.

Whoever comes out on top at the next elections, will have to face up to growing tensions over the possibility of ‘Catexit’, and the potential reaction of the extreme right.

An ultra-right reaction to the threat of the breakdown of the Spanish state could take advantage of the current state of affairs to create a dangerous scenario for Spain, and as a consequence the whole EU.

Internal destabilisation will only provoke delirium for the likes of Steve Bannon, rejoicing for the White House, and satisfaction within the Kremlin.

Image: Pixabay

The BBC has been holding a consultation about how – or whether – it should maintain the current provision of free TV licences for the over-75s. It offers a number of different options, with different costings, and Enders Analysis has kindly agreed to allow openDemocracy to publish its submission to the BBC: in effect, an impassioned plea for the government to “do the right thing”, and take back responsibility for an important piece of social provision, rather than undermine the BBC’s public service offerings.

This bomb started ticking four years ago when the BBC and the newly-elected Tory government came face to face over the broadcaster’s future funding. George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was determined to deliver what he had failed to achieve five years earlier, when the BBC board and management refused – to the point of threatening resignation – to take on the cost of providing free TV licences for any household containing someone over the age of 75.

That giveaway had been one of Gordon Brown’s wheezes when he had been Chancellor, in 2001, and was becoming increasingly expensive as the number of people living to 75 increased, and as their survival beyond that age also extended. In 2010, the BBC – which had unwisely boasted of how it had delivered savings of £600 million a year from internal efficiencies – accepted a settlement that effectively swallowed those savings, leaving the licence fee frozen, but absorbing within it the cost of the World Service (saving the Foreign Office over £250 million a year), the Monitoring Service at Caversham and the Welsh language channel S4C, along with a subsidy to local TV and a contribution to the cost of rolling out rural broadband.

How legitimate these expenditures were as a charge to the licence fee was questionable: but the principle that the licence fee should only be used to fund BBC broadcast services had been breached years earlier, when the BBC agreed to allow hundreds of millions of pounds a year to be allocated to helping vulnerable households manage the switch from analogue TV to digital TV. The BBC’s calculation was that the increase in the licence fee that was authorised in order to cover this expense would accrue to the BBC once digital switchover was complete: but dangerous precedents had been set. Governments could express their preferences as to how the licence fee should be spent, and social projects could qualify as suitable for licence fee funding.

In 2015, with the surprise election of a majority Conservative government, Osborne and his colleague, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, John Whittingdale, reversed the 2010 strategy. Instead of freezing the licence fee, they would agree that it could be restored to an index-linked basis, which was something the BBC had long desired: but only on condition that the cost of funding the over-75s concession was shared during the period of the licence fee settlement, on a progressive basis. This had the merit of fulfilling the Conservative election manifesto promise of maintaining the concession until at least 2020 (renewed, as the Enders paper correctly notes, in the 2017 manifesto), but providing a route whereby its cost to the Treasury had a finite end date.

It is important to make two points about this deal. The first is that the BBC itself accepted that it was balanced, in that it had been granted concessions that matched in value the cost within the licence fee settlement period of the BBC’s requirements to contribute to the cost of the over-75s obligation.

In addition to annual rises in the licence fee, there would be reduced obligations to fund S4C and broadband rollout, and a long-sought change in the rules whereby the licence fee could be “modernised” – in other words, that it could become compulsory for users of the iPlayer, thus closing a loophole that was starting to drain away licence fee income, in the case of households that simply watched TV on playback rather than live.

Not for the first time, this was a “front-loaded” settlement, with the BBC’s upside in the early years only being overtaken by the downside in the last 18 months. Put another way, even in 2021/22, the annualized benefits for the BBC from the concessions granted will be only £50 million less than the full cost of the over-75s concession (expected to have reached some £750 million a year by then): or 1.25% of the value of the licence fee.

So it is hard to have much sympathy for the BBC as it decides what to do next. The analysis by a think tank, the public consultation, the setting out of different options and the ritual hand-wringing cannot obscure two key facts: that the BBC entered into this agreement voluntarily and that Osborne and Whittingdale made explicit that the BBC would be entitled, in 2022, to eliminate the over-75s concession entirely.

The Enders Analysis response to the public consultation is passionate, not least in its excoriation of the Conservatives. It is certainly hypocritical in the extreme for the Tories to have washed their hands of the licence fee concession, and then to urge the BBC to maintain the concession. Technically, I suspect that (contrary to the Enders document) the Tories have not actually breached their manifesto commitments to the over-75s, in that their free licences will last almost to the scheduled date of the next election (and certainly well past 2020, which was the extent of the 2015 commitment). Indeed, the 2017 manifesto argues for the Winter Fuel allowance (which is worth more than a free TV licence) to be better targeted, rather than handed out to millions of people who do not need it.

As for the hardship argument, it is hard to see why impoverished single mothers should so regularly be pursued for non-payment of the licence fee (tens of thousands every year), when wealthy pensioners are exempt (it is estimated that 20% of pensioners are millionaires). Nor can there be a serious argument that the elderly face being cut off from information and public debate: radio – which continues to be provided free – is a far more prolific medium than television in providing news, current affairs and discussion.

All the options canvassed by the BBC as an alternative to cancellation or full maintenance of the concession are unattractive, for similar reasons: the BBC should neither be deciding which group of people, if any, should be exempt from paying the licence fee, nor involved in implementing any system created to enforce such discrimination. Any modifications to the household obligation – such as lower payments for black and white TVs or for people who are registered as blind, or special arrangements for hotels or care homes – should be the responsibility of governments, not the BBC.

If there needs to be a means test to ensure that really poor over-75s who want to watch television but might struggle to find the required £3 a week to do so legally can so do, then the Department for Work and Pensions, not the BBC, should set the test and implement it: and, of course, fund the cost. The BBC needs to bite the bullet, and announce that it would be wholly unfair to the 20 million households where no-one is over the age of 75 to have 20% of all BBC investment in content sacrificed in order to maintain the over-75s concession. A poorer service for everyone is the wrong answer to this conundrum.

There would still be an element of discretion for the BBC if it decided to abolish the concession. Enforcement of the licence fee remains in the BBC’s hands (even if outsourced to Capita). The odium of dragging thousands of over-75s through the courts for non-payment is something the BBC could well do without, so it might covertly introduce a process of failing to prosecute where it was deemed prudent to avoid negative PR. Of course, word could get around such that many over-75s decided to call the BBC’s bluff when the letters stamped “TV licence dodger” started landing on doormats. In effect, for the over-75s, payment of the TV licence might become largely voluntary, which would be a very British compromise. Who knows, maybe the idea might extend to the rest of us in due course.

Image: Elliott Brown/Flickr, CC 2.0

The BBC’s consultation on rescinding free TV licences for all those aged 75 and over, in whole or in part, has sparked a heartfelt petition from key stakeholder Age UK to restore Government funding for the elderly, which we support.

The Government has put the BBC in the intolerable position of choosing between funding the remit, whose delivery is regulated by Ofcom, and free TV licences for the over-75s, a lose-lose for the BBC, its viewers and listeners. In our submission to the BBC we highlight the human impact of reduced services and/or higher monthly expenses on the 2 million single-income households, 75% headed by women, for whom the BBC is a lifeline.

The BBC Board is being required to decide how to address the £745 million loss of Government funding for free over-75s TV licences from June 2020, which is 18% of the £4.1 billion the BBC currently spends on its services. Our submission to the BBC’s consultation on what concession should be in place for older people from June 2020 is contained below. Its purpose is to support the petition of Age UK: Together, we must demand the Government takes back responsibility for funding free TV licences for everyone over 75.

The end of Government funding for free TV licences for the over-75s was abruptly decided by Chancellor Osborne in 2015, separately from the remit contained in the Charter for 2016-25 overseen by Secretary of State (SoS) John Whittingdale of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The package of funding and remit for the BBC was not subject to an evidence-based and consultatory policy-making process engaging viewers and listeners, which were thus ignored. The Act of Parliament making the BBC responsible for the exemption to the licence fee tax that funds it and free-to-air TV looks to be an illegitimate exercise of power.

The BBC Board has ruled out keeping the current regime, consulting on three options, e.g. Option 1 is to give over-75s a 50% discount, each of which would make some or all of the existing beneficiaries worse off. We have not opined on these options in order to bring to the fore our profound opposition to a policy that prima facie reduces funding for services and contributes to pensioner poverty, and notably that of elderly widows living alone and surviving on the state pension.

The BBC might expect a licence fee hike in 2021/22. We worry it will increase the affordability challenge for pensioners under each of the BBC’s three options, as well as encouraging even more licence fee payers to cancel their TV licences.

Key thoughts

1. Parliament has illegitimately conferred on the BBC responsibility for deciding the exemption to a tax. The transfer to the BBC of the funding of free TV licences for over-75s coincides with the halt of the funding for the exemption provided by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). The underlying Act of Parliament is illegitimate in conferring the power of taxation on the BBC via its responsibility for the exemption for all those 65 and over. The licence fee is a tax borne by households meeting the conditions of payment, and it is properly the role of the Government or legislator to decide any departures from its payment. The TV Licensing Authority confirms the statutory position of the BBC: “The TV Licence fee – including concessions and payment amounts – is prescribed by Parliament under the Communications (Television Licensing) Regulations 2004 (as amended). The BBC is not responsible for these matters. [bold italics added] You may wish to contact the government agency responsible for broadcasting in the UK – the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) – to raise any issues you may have about the legal framework for the licence fee. The Department’s address is 100 Parliament Street, London SW1A 2BQ.”(1)

2. Parliament’s decision broke the promises to pensioners made by the Conservative Party in the manifestos for the 2010, 2015 and 2017 General Elections:

1)     In the 2010 manifesto it is stated: “That is why we have made a pledge to pensioners to re-link the basic state pension to earnings, and protect: the winter fuel payment; free bus passes; free TV licences; disability living allowance and attendance allowance; and, the pension credit.”

2)     In the 2015 manifesto it is stated: “If you have worked hard during your life, saved, paid your taxes and done the right thing, you deserve dignity and security when you retire. We want Britain to be the best country in which to grow old. We will: take the family home out of Inheritance Tax for all but the richest by raising the effective threshold for married couples and civil partners to £1 million; continue to increase the State Pension through our triple lock, so it rises by at least 2.5 per cent, inflation or earnings, whichever is highest; reward saving by introducing a new single-tier pension; give you the freedom to invest and spend your pension however you like – and let you pass it on to your loved ones tax-free; protect pensioner benefits including the free bus pass, TV licences and Winter Fuel Payment; ensure Britain has a strong economy, so we can continue to protect the NHS and make sure no-one is forced to sell their home to pay for care.”

3)     In the 2017 manifesto it is stated: “We will maintain all other pensioner benefits, including free bus passes, eye tests, prescriptions and TV licences, for the duration of this parliament.”

3. A deeply flawed policy-making process by DCMS led to the illegitimate Act of Parliament to transfer the authority to the BBC to decide on the concession to over-75s TV licences. The end of funding for the free TV licences for over-75s was abruptly imposed by Chancellor Osborne, while DCMS Secretary of State (SoS) John Whittingdale proceeded with the Charter’s renewal for 2016-25 laying out the remit. The reduced funding of the remit of the BBC was not subject to the usual process of consulting stakeholders, namely BBC viewers and listeners. They required evidence on the decided policy and the trade-off that would be implied in terms of the level and quality of service enjoyed by BBC viewers and listeners in performance of the remit contained in the Charter for 2016-25. Many viewers and listeners would equate an implacable reduction in services to the detriment of the remit under the scenario where the BBC is forced to “fund” the exemption from TV licence revenues, in whole or in part, and would have expressed firm opposition. Had DCMS consulted on the policy, the cost to BBC services from amputating DWP funding would have become clear, and DCMS would have been called out for damaging irrevocably the BBC’s mission as a universally accessible public information and entertainment service.

4. Protecting the concession for the elderly is essential. The households directly affected by the over-75s TV licences constitute 18% of the TV licence universe. Who are these 4.5 million households? (2) About 2.5 million are people of 75 and over living with other people. The particularly vulnerable households include women living alone, those with sight loss, in poverty, and suffering from other medical conditions. According to Age UK:

4.1. “2 million people over 75 live alone; 1.5 million of these are women.” (3)

4.2. Sight loss: “35% for those aged 75+”, which makes them heavily dependent on radio services

4.3. “In the last reported year (2015/16), the average (median) net income for single pensioners in the UK was £250 a week before housing costs and £205 after housing costs. Averages don’t tell the whole story. For example, the poorest fifth of single pensioners had median net incomes of £106 a week after meeting housing costs (2015/16 prices), while the richest fifth had £408.”

4.4. “The average weekly expenditure for one-person households mainly dependent on state pensions is £168”

It is absurd that the BBC is being forced to consider imposing these households by the removal in whole or in part of the free TV licence fee. It is absurd that the TV Licensing Authority will be forced to pursue non-payers of the TV licence should the concession lapse in whole or in part, subjecting the elderly, the poor and women living alone to enforcement by the TV Licensing Authority. This can include paying a £1,000 fine, and those refusing to do so, including if they lack the means, may endure a prison term. We support the petition of Age UK calling for the Government to restore DWP funding for the policy, at least until 2022 in our view. (4)

5. Protecting performance of the remit is essential. The Government has not explained how the BBC can deliver the remit despite the elimination of DWP funding for the free TV licences; the best-case for the BBC under its own proposals is to lose ‘only’ 28% of its funding (Figure 1). When DWP ends the funding, it will cap a decade of Government efforts to axe BBC funding, already costing roughly 20% in real terms: the licence fee was frozen between 2010 and the start of the new Charter in January 2017 (and will increase in line with inflation until 2021/22); and the BBC’s budget was ‘top-sliced’ through the funding of various services/projects (S4C, BBC World Service, BBC Monitoring, rural broadband roll-out, and local TV). True, the BBC may seek a higher level of the licence fee as of 2022, but that will simply increase the affordability challenge for pensioners under each of the options for reform.

6. The BBC will be blamed for falling short on the remit. The BBC’s performance is vetted by Ofcom, based on surveys of viewers and listeners. Inevitably, as the BBC is forced to reduce its panoply of services and/or programming expenditure to accommodate the funding gap, surveys are likely to report a lower level of satisfaction with the BBC, which will lead Ofcom to castigate the BBC. Keeping the funding of the BBC intact is essential to preserve audience satisfaction and performance of the remit. Ofcom stated in its 2018 review of the BBC: “The BBC is generally delivering on its remit for audiences through the breadth and quality of its output. It provides a significant volume of news and current affairs, a wide range of learning and educational content, as well as high-quality distinctive and creative content for all audiences across its mainstream and specialist services. Audience satisfaction continues to be relatively high: three-quarters of people say they are satisfied with BBC radio and with BBC online, and two-thirds with BBC TV.” (5)  It is implausible to expect the BBC to continue to deliver its public purposes well at the same time as Parliament has determined it is to be responsible for funding free TV licences.

7. Parliament has condemned the BBC to a morally ambivalent position. It has to choose between funding the remit and funding the over-75s TV licence regime, in whole or in part, a situation that can only be to its detriment. The BBC is also required for the first time to pick the “winners” and “losers” of the regime change, a situation at odds with its unique position as the publicly owned provider of information and entertainment services above the political fray.

Notes

(1) TV Licensing, Licences facts and figures

(2) House of Commons Library, TV licence fee statistics, briefing paper number CBP-8101, published 10 January 2019.

(3) Age UK, Later Life in the United Kingdom, April 2018.

(4) Age UK, Switched Off: Save Free TV for Older People.

(5) Ofcom’s annual report on the BBC, p4. Published 25 October 2018.

Riga International Airport, 2016 – "safety valve"? Wikicommons/ Avio2016. Some rights reserved.

Throughout the last decade, Europe has been marred by both economic and ‘migration’ crises. This has triggered the emergence of various Eurosceptic trends across the Continent. In Central and Eastern Europe, Euroscepticism has been mostly propagated by the right. Regardless of whether these are parties of the populist and radical right (Hungary’s Jobbik, Latvia’s National Alliance and Slovakia’s ‘Our Slovakia’) or ‘radicalized’ parties of the centre-right (Hungary’s FIDESZ and Poland’s PiS), these actors have primarily embedded their Euroscepticism into identity-politics: gender-related themes (opposition to LGBT rights); the migration crisis (rejection of EU quotas for refugees); and, at an earlier stage, domestic minority issues (e.g. ‘Gypsy criminality’ in Hungary and/or Slovakia).

Nevertheless, recent years have also witnessed the dynamic emergence of new political actors with a paramount stress on economic Euroscepticism across the region. What has encouraged these parties’ steady growth of popularity? What are their prospects? 

Amidst crises 

The outbreak of the economic and the ‘migration’ crises decisively reshaped domestic as well as European politics. The former triggered public discontent with austerity measures, encouraged the dynamic emergence of leftist parties in the countries mostly affected (SYRIZA in Greece, Podemos in Spain) and engendered ‘centre versus periphery’ ramifications (narratives of ‘Germany versus the EU-south’). The latter was met by a wave of Islamophobia, as well as the orchestrated endeavor by the populist and radical right to capitalize on identity-politics. This engendered one more ‘centre versus periphery’ cleavage (the dispute between the European Commission and the Visegrad Four, later Italy, over the refugee quotas arrangement).

SYRIZA and Podemos had beenrepeatedlyaccusing Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schäuble of promoting a brand of neoliberal capitalism which is disastrous not only for the EU-south but for the entire EU, including Germany(2010-2015). As an alternative, these two parties and other anti-austerity initiatives throughout southern Europe called for a ‘Europe of the Peoples’, where the main emphasis is on social equality and not on the voracious appetites of bankers and transnational capital.

In Central and Eastern Europe, Hungary was the country most badly hit by recession (2008). In response to these critical circumstances, Jobbikembedded the concept of so-called ‘Eco-social National Economics’ into its political programme (2010). In this platform, Jobbik called for the renegotiation of Hungary’s foreign debt, the establishment of a banking system free from the interference of multinational corporations, the state-ownership of sectors such as health and education and the long-term renationalization of various others. This campaign of pseudo anti-capitalism enhanced Jobbik’s appeal in those segments of society feeling most imperilled by Hungary’s economic stagnation. Random and less articulate ‘quasi-leftist’ standpoints on the economy also featured in the party-programmes of Ataka (Bulgaria), the League of Polish Families/LPR (Poland) and the Slovak National Party/SNS (Slovakia). 

At the other end of the political spectrum, the Slovenian United Left(nowadays ‘The Left’/Levica) evolved out of anti-corruption protests in 2014. The party opposes neoliberalism, endorses an anti-corruption/anti-austerity platform, has adopted a ‘horizontal’ intra-party structure and calls for a bottom-up, democratic socialism. Levica delivered a satisfactory performance in the latest parliamentary elections (2018) and won 9 seats (9.29%). 

Further to the northeast, in Poland, Razem/’Together’ espouses an equally anti-austerity agenda, opposes the promotion of national conservatism in Polish politics and maintains close contact including shared electoral ambitions with Yanis Varoufakis’ DiEM25 pan-European Movement. Nevertheless, ‘Razem’ has not yet managed to pass the 5% threshold and enter parliament. Overall, it might not be a sweeping generalization to contend that left-wing (soft or hard) Euroscepticism remains rather weak in Central and Eastern Europe. This, in turn, has provided an opportunity structure for parties with a non-ideological profile and agendas of economic Euroscepticism in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe that were most negatively affected by recession. 

(Non-ideological) anti-establishment mavericks

Croatia’s entry into the EU brought some economic advantages for the country. Nevertheless, this is only one side of the coin. Despite its steady recovery, Croatia’s economy had been burdened by a six-year recession (2009-2015) and the purchasing power of Croatian citizens within the EU remains relatively weak. The collateral damage of free mobility within the EU space often corresponds to the emigration of highly-qualified personnel out of Croatia and an ensuing brain-drain. Moreover, more peripheral and less developedparts of the country do not seem to have taken adequate advantage of the EU Cohesion and Structural Funds: their technical infrastructure remains outdated, and employment opportunities remain scarce.

The entirety of Croatia’s largest parties converge around the conviction that EU financial aid remains of vital significance for development and tend to understate the aforementioned side-effects. This has emboldened smaller actors to aim at filling this particular vacuum in the country’s political map, capitalizing on economic grievances among the electorate.

Under the leadership of, political activist, Ivan Vilibor Sinčić and initially set up as Savez za Promene/Alliance for Changes (2011), the party of Živi Zid/Live Wall is currently represented by 4 deputies at the Sabor (parliament). Fashioning themselves as an ‘activist-political organization that consists of humanitarian and non-corrupt individuals who fight for social and economic justice’, the party promotes an agenda of economic Euroscepticism. Živi Zid holds that ‘the EU is not run by the elected representatives of the people but by an impersonal bureaucracy and corporations’. The party-manifestofurther contends that the EU is structured according to a ‘neo-feudal and neocolonial principle’, rejects austerity measures and emphasizes that while ‘we do not desire Croatia’s isolation, however we would not desire our country to become a colony of foreign interests, to the detriment of its citizens’.

These programmatic principles, in combination with Živi Zid’s espousal of ’global neutrality’ and endorsement of parties such as Podemos, brings the party’s agenda rather close to the orbit of left-wing Euroscepticism. Nevertheless, a closer look reveals that Živi Zid also: (a) objects to its classification along the right-centre-left axis and, instead, is self-designated as a (non-ideological) ‘humanitarian party’; (b) stands for the reduction of certain taxes and the abolition of others in order to encourage domestic entrepreneurship; (c) pledges to safeguard ‘national values’ and proposes the formation of a ‘third’ Croat entity in Bosnia. It is this syncretic scope that aims at accommodating heterogeneous demands within society which largely accounts for Živi Zid’s rapidand steadyrise in public appeal throughout 2017 and 2018.

Along comparable lines to Croatia, Latvia’s economy has not fully recovered from the recession of 2009-2011. At first, emigration to the west (usually Scandinavia, the UK and Ireland) was deemed a way out from financial turmoil. Nevertheless, remittances from abroad have not sufficed to reverse the aftermath of the crisis. To this one should add the persistent impact of depopulation and poverty (especially in the southeast region of Latgale) which cuts across the Latvian/ethnic Russian divide. One of the latest Eurobarometersurveys (no. 89, Spring 2018) found out that a large percentage of the Latvian public remain highly vexed about social security, unemployment and the cost of living inside Latvia. Therefore, it appears that Riga’s airport as a ‘valve’ for releasing social pressure cannot be looked to for an indefinite period of time. 

Under the leadership of, former actor, Artuss Kaimiņš, KPV was officially launched on May 6, 2016. Fashioning themselves as a ‘non-ideological and anti-establishment organization of political activists’, along the lines of Italy’s Five Star Movement, the party platform lays  considerable weight on the economy, including a touch of economic Euroscepticism. Conforming to predominantly pro-EU inclinations across the party-spectrum, KPV does not promote a platform of hard Euroscepticism, yet contends that EU budgetary policies cannot guarantee Latvia’s full recovery from recession; and that Latvia did not benefit from the introduction of the Euro because the cost of living has dramatically increased.

Economic grievances and anxietiesabound in Latvian society and KPV has succeeded in filling in this particular vacuum in the country’s political map. KPV’s high appeal among Latvian, mostly blue-collar, immigrants in western Europe, throughout the span of its existence as a party, is indicative of the financial insecurities within society as well as the toll of the recession as a whole. Consequently, KPV duly jumped to a percentage of 14.25% in the last parliamentary elections (2018) making it Latvia’s second largest party in its own right. 

The increasing public appeal of parties such as Živi Zid and KPV  hints at the growing relevance of economic Euroscepticism not solely for anti-austerity initiatives in southern Europe but also for a new generation of ambitious, anti-establishment, parties in the crisis-ridden parts of Central and Eastern Europe. The platforms of the two parties over the management of the economy do not necessarily converge in that Živi Zid, generally, displays a more pro-welfare disposition in comparison to KPV. 

Nevertheless the operation of both parties as ‘all-inclusive’, non-ideological, umbrella-movements benefits both Živi Zid as well as KPV, since they can extract votes from target-groups who: (a) have been affected by economic malfunction but, as a result of the two countries’ political pasts, do not trust left-wing initiatives; (b) cannot or do not want to cast their economic grievances under the auspices of the populist and radical right (e.g. a certain fraction among Latvia’s Russophone community). 

The forthcoming elections for the European parliament (May 2019) may turn out to be a crucial testing ground for the consolidation of these two parties’ popularity, as well as their future prospects to inspire likeminded initiatives elsewhere in the region.      

No attribution needed. نهاية العام 2008 صفّق جمهور المسرح في دمشق طويلاً لعرض "صوتان" من إخراج الهولندي يوهان سيمونز. عرض المونودراما المسرحي قد قدّم ليومين على خشبة المسرح الدائري في المعهد العالي للفنون المسرحية، والّتي ضاقت بجمهورها، فافترشوا الأرض ملامسين فضاء أداء الممثل جيرون فيلمز، الذي أضحكهم وأمتعهم فصفقوا له طويلاً بعد نهاية العرض.

نهاية الـ 2008 كان الضحك أكثر سهولة من السنوات السورية التي ستليها. حينها كانت دمشق عاصمة للثقافة العربية، والكثير من المال كان قد استثمر لإغناء المشهد الثقافي في المدينة على مدى عام كامل. وبالفعل، كانت العاصمة السورية قد شهدت حضوراً كبيراً لمسرحيين وموسيقيين وفنانين عالميين لم تشهده في تاريخها الحديث ولا في أية مدينة سورية أخرى. يومها كان عرض المخرج الهولندي سفيراً فنياً "عالمياً" في سوريا التي ستصبح هي نفسها قضية عالمية في السنوات القليلة التالية.

أما في عامنا الحالي، وبعد قرابة العشر سنوات على تقديم عمله في دمشق، يقيم المخرج الهولندي كمبرمج للفعاليات المسرحيّة في "بيت التمثيل" أو   Schauspielhaus في مدينة بوخوم الألمانية، والتي تضم كما المدن الأخرى المجاورة لها، عدداً كبيراً من اللاجئين، وبخاصة السوريين منهم.

كجزء من إقامته في المسرح، أنجز المخرج الهولندي مؤخراً عرض "يهود طليلة" Die Juden von Tolidoالمقتبس عن روايةالكاتب الألماني ليون فويشتفغنر والتي تعود إلى إسبانيا في العصور الوسطى، وتحديداً إلى مدينة Tolido أو طليطلة بالتسمية العربية، لتتابع قصة الشخصية المثيرة للجدل يهوذا إبن إسرا، والذي كان قد غير دينه من اليهودية إلى الإسلام عند عمله عند أحد الملوك العرب في الأندلس، ثم عاد إلى اليهوديّة بعد أن غادر ليعمل كمستشار عند الملك القشتالي ألفونسو الثامن.

خلال إقامته عند الملك ألفونسو تنشأ علاقة غرامية بين هذا الأخير، وابنة المستشار اليهودي، علاقة لا تسرّ حاشية الملك الكاثوليكية المتعصبة، ولا عموم السكان الحانقين على الملك المتفرغ لعلاقته "الآثمة" بينما جنود المملكة، والممالك الأوروبية الأخرى، يزحفون في مهمة مقدسة نحو "القدس" ضمن إطار الحروب الصليبية.

ضمن هذا الوضع المضطرب، تنشأ مساومات كثيرة بين الملك ومستشاره اليهودي، وفي أحدها يطلب ابن إسرا من الملك إيواء ستة آلاف يهودي لاجئ من فرنسا بسبب اضطهاد الملك الفرنسي لهم، وطردهم بشكل تدريجي من المدن الفرنسية واحدة تلو الأخرى، الإقتراح الذي يفتح أبواب جهنم على الملك القشتالي الواقع بين فكّي إغواء عشيقته اليهوديّة من جهة، وحنكة والدها ودهائه من جهة ثانية.

حين تسمع حاشية الملك المتعصبة بقراره استقبال اللاجئين اليهود في طليطلة، تردّد شخصيات الممثلين في العرض خطاباً تسهل فوراً مطابقته مع الخطابات اليمينية المعادية للاجئين في أوروبا، أو حتّى في الولايات المتحدة "إنهم ليسوا مثلنا، لا يتكلمون لغتنا، ويدينون بغير ديننا، سيملؤون شوارعنا بهيئاتهم المتسخة والغريبة"، في حين يناقش مناصرو وجودهم بأنهم سيجلبون معهم خبراتهم العلمية والمهنية المختلفة، وأنهم سيعيدون الحياة إلى اقتصاد المملكة المتعّثر، في مماهاة مثيرة للاهتمام من صنّاع العمل بين اللاجئين اليهود في إسبانيا العصور الوسطى، ولاجئي ألمانيا بغالبيتهم المسلمة في أعوامنا الحالية.

نجد استخدامات متواترة للأندلس كمساحة للإسقاطات السياسية

الفردوس المفقود، أرض الإسقاطات

بالعودة إلى السياق الثقافي العربي، نجد استخدامات متواترة للأندلس كمساحة للإسقاطات السياسية، أي عبر تمرير رسائل سياسية واجتماعية عمّا قد يتعذر قوله بشكل مباشر لأسباب رقابية، أو ربما لأسباب جمالية ترى في الاستعارة التاريخية أداة جمالية أرقى من التعبير السياسي المباشر.

في الحالة الأولى، وهي الغالبة، أي الالتفاف السياسي عبر استخدام الأندلس، تشكل "ثلاثية الأندلس"التلفزيوينّة، من تأليف الكاتب الفلسطيني يوسف سيف وإخراج السوري حاتم علي أبرز الأمثلة الفنية العربية المعاصرة، وربما أوسعها انتشاراً وتأثيراً، على الاستخدام السياسي للأندلس.

في المسلسلات الثلاثة الممتدة على تسعين ساعة تلفزيونية، يسهل الربط مباشرة بين الواقع المأساوي الذي وصلته الدول العربية المختلفة في الأندلس عقب مئات السنوات من الازدهار من جهة، وبين الواقع المتردي للدول العربية في العقد الأول من سنين الألفية. "إن الطغاة كانوا دائماً سبب الغزاة"، كانت الجملة الوحيدة التي تتردد في شارةمسلسل "ملوك الطوائف" الجزء الأخير المنجز من الثلاثية، والذي أنجز في العام 2005، أي بعد عامين فقط من غزو العراق، في إشارة واضحة إلى الديكتاتوريات العربية، وعلى وجه الخصوص صدّام حسين في حينها.

على الضفة المقابلة، عرضت قناة الجزيرة الوثائقية مؤخراً سلسلة من ثلاث أفلام وثائقيّة إسبانيّة، أيضاً بعنوان "ثلاثيّة الأندلس-حكاية الشاطئين" تعرض مجموعة من اللقاءات مع أكاديميّين وأدباء إسبان مهتميّن بمراجعة التاريخ الإسباني على قاعدة إعادة الاعتبار للمكوّن العربي المسلم واليهودي فيه، والذي جرى نسفه (بحسب الفيلم) أثناء كتابة الرواية الإسبانية الرسمية للتاريخ الإسباني الحديث.

وبغض النظر عن صوابيّة وجهة النظر التي تتخّذ من الأندلس مطيّة للمقولات السياسية المختلفة، سواءً في المنطقة العربيّة، أو حتّى الأوروبيّة، فإنّ هذا الاهتمام بحدّ ذاته، يطرح سؤالاً حول الأسباب المحرّضة لهذا الطرح. أي استلهام فترة تواجد العرب في شبه الجزيرة الإيبيريّة، كسياق زماني ومكاني، دوناً عن غيرها من الفترات التاريخّة المختلفة.

من الضفة العربيّة، أي من ضفّة المهزومين في معركة السيطرة على شبه الجزيرة الإيبيريّة، يبدو الجواب على سؤال تكرار استخدام الأندلس كمساحة للإسقاط الفني أكثر سهولة، فليس بجديد القول إنّ الحنين إلى "الأندلس" يعتبر جزءاً من الحنين العربي للماضي الإمبراطوري للدولة العربية الممتدّة من شرق آسيا إلى غرب أفريقيا، وهو نوع من الحنين لم تنج منه كثير من الأعمال الأدبيّةالعربيّة.

أمّا من الضفة الأوروبيّة، وهي في حالتنا عرض "يهود طليطلة" فيبدو "الاستخدام الأندلسي" فيها مرتبطاً بالاتّكاء على اللحظة الأندلسيّة بما ضمّته من قوميّات وديانات مختلفة في مساحة جغرافيّة واحدة -وإنه في جو مستقطب ومحتقن جدّاً- لتمرير رسائل سياسيّة مرتبطة بالحاضر، الحاضر الذي يبدو اليوم مشابهاً لمشهد الأندلس القديمة، من جهة تماثل حالة اللاجئين اليهود الهاربين من مملكة مسيحيّة إلى أخرى في ذلك الوقت، واللاجئين من دول الجنوب بإثنياتهم المختلفة، نحو دول الشمال التي ليس كل أهلها متفقين على استقبالهم.

لكن، وعلى اختلاف دوافع "الاستخدام الأندلسي" يبدو أنّه نوع من الضرورة عند الحديث عن التنوّع في لحظتنا المعاصرة، أي لحظة الدول القوميّة الحديثة، والّتي تبدو أكثر "انسجاماً" وأقلّ تنوّعاً من الإمبراطوريات القديمة مترامية الأطراف، ولكن في الوقت ذاته، لا تبدو هذه الدول بريئة تماماً من الطابع العنفي للإمبراطوريات القديمة، وفي حالة  اللاجئين السوريين الذين باتوا موضوعاً مسرحيّاً في عرض "يهود طليطلة" مثال كاشف على الطابع العنفي للدولة الحديثة، على الأقل في نسختها السوريّة المتوحّشة.

Pete Seeger at age 88 at the Clearwater Festival, June 16 2007. Credit: Wikimedia/Anthony Pepitone. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Pete Seeger, the banjo-playing folk singer, was in the forefront of every major reform movement in twentieth-century America. Born into a family with radical roots, he found his own way into the labor struggle, the civil rights crusade, the anti-Vietnam War effort, and finally the environmental movement. Hailed as the father of the folk music revival in the 1950s and 1960s, he used music to plead for reform, both in the United States and around the world.

Pete’s background shaped his early life.  His father Charles was a musicologist and composer who started the music department at the University of California, Berkeley. For a time a member of the Communist Party, he lost his job during World War I as a result of his pacifism. His mother Constance was a concert violinist and encouraged Pete’s interest in music. While a student at Harvard, Pete was a member of the Young Communist League, railing against the fascist forces crushing freedom in Europe and Asia without really knowing what he wanted to do.

Only after leaving Harvard toward the end of his second year did Pete find his own way, both politically and musically.  While a student at Avon Old Farms, an exclusive private school, he had begun to play the four-string banjo, and later moved on to the more versatile five-string version.  Working for musicologist Alan Lomax at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., he learned a good deal about the music he was transcribing. 

Lomax gave him a chance to perform publicly for the first time in 1940 at a benefit concert for migrant farm workers at the Forrest Theater near Broadway in New York City. There he met guitar player Woody Guthrie, older and better known, and the friendship that developed lasted for many years.  Guthrie took Seeger out West, riding freight trains and learning how to support himself playing in bars, and in the process changed his life.

After that trip, Pete gravitated to New York, where he met Lee Hays, a burly singer who shared his political views.  Together they assembled a group called the Almanac Singers, which supported working men and women and sang for labor gatherings as the union movement of the 1930s moved ahead.  One of Pete’s first songs, written together with Hays, was “If I Had a Hammer,” which called out for a more peaceful and harmonious world.

Drafted into the Army during World War II, Pete spent several years in Saipan, and then returned to the United States to join his wife Toshi and to resume his political and musical activities.  With friends, he founded an organization called People’s Songs to encourage the writing and singing of new songs to make the world a better place. 

As People’s Songs, which operated on a shoestring, fell apart, Pete began to sing with a new group called the Weavers. Its smooth and melodious sound caught the attention of the country and the group became enormously popular, with its Lead Belly song “Good Night Irene” reaching the very top of the national charts. 

Then Pete’s leftwing past came back to haunt him. Though he had only been a member of the Young Communist League for a short while, he and others found themselves under attack in the Red Scare of the 1950s. The Weavers began to lose bookings and eventually disbanded, and Pete and others found themselves called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities to testify about their radical history.

Unwilling to rely on the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution which protected people from self-incrimination, he invoked instead the First Amendment, which guaranteed the right to free speech. Charged with contempt for failing to cooperate with Congress, he was indicted and convicted in federal court, though on appeal the conviction was overturned on a technicality.

Without a job, Pete began to move out on his own. He visited schools, colleges, summer camps, and other gatherings, and in the process sang about the causes that were consuming the United States. In the process, he developed a constituency of young people who embraced the folk music movement as it began to catch on.

Meanwhile and with a growing sense of commitment (particularly after the attacks he had to weather for his political beliefs), he gravitated toward the fledgling civil rights movement.  In 1955, a year after the Supreme Court had declared school segregation unconstitutional in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Pete read about Rosa Parks’ arrest for refusing to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in violation of the city’s Jim Crow laws mandating the separation of races. Sympathetic, Seeger offered support and eventually went south to sing at rallies for the cause.

He also had a hand in crafting what became the marching song of the movement. Visiting the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in 1947, which trained activists to fight injustice on all fronts, he learned a song called “I Will Overcome” from music director Zilphia Horton. It derived from an older black spiritual called “I’ll Overcome Someday,” which was then sung by striking textile workers whom Horton had heard.  Pete sang the song more quickly with a banjo rhythm, and also changed “I Will Overcome” to “We Shall Overcome.” Eventually it reached Guy Carawan, a guitar-playing graduate student who later succeeded Horton as music director at Highlander after her death. 

In 1960, he organized a weekend gathering at Highlander for young civil rights activists, and invited Seeger to help him with the music. Carawan taught the song, played more slowly, to the volunteers, and it became the high point of the weekend. Several weeks later, at another conference in Raleigh, North Carolina that led to the formation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the volunteers called out for “We Shall Overcome,” and began to sing it with crossed arms, holding on to people on either side as a sign of solidarity.

As Black Power came to the fore toward the end of the 1960s, Seeger began to question his own role in the movement. Still convinced of the need for social and racial justice, he nonetheless found himself gravitating toward another cause – the ill-fated struggle in Vietnam.  Like many Americans, he believed that the war was a terrible mistake. He began to write and sing songs that highlighted both the absurdity and the destructiveness of the conflict that tore the United States apart.  “Bring ‘Em Home” was a plea to end the war, but his favorite song was “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” which told the story of the foolish stubbornness of an Army captain leading troops across the Mississippi River in 1942.  Despite warnings that the river was too deep and dangerous to cross, the captain persisted until his own inevitable demise, in a savage metaphor for the war in Vietnam.

As American involvement in Vietnam began to wind down, Pete became interested in another cause. The cabin he had built with his own hands in Beacon, New York looked out on the Hudson River, now miserably polluted. Long sympathetic to environmental activism, he became even more interested after reading Rachel Carson’s path-breaking book Silent Spring, about pesticide poisoning and environmental pollution. 

As he began to sail in a small boat on the Hudson, the pollution revolted him. Pete began to dream about building a sloop, like the large boats of the past, and sailing it up and down the river to highlight environmental awareness. He was instrumental in raising money to build the sloop, christened the Clearwater in 1969. Volunteers worked on the boat, which still travels the Hudson River today.

Seeger’s activism left a rich legacy by the time he died in 2014 at the age of 94.  His songs, including “If I Had a Hammer,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” and “Turn, Turn, Turn,” called out for a more peaceful world. “We Shall Overcome” remains the marching song in the continuing quest for civil rights, both in the United States and around the globe. Pete, who had come to his activism from a sense of the need to address injustice in the world, was fond of telling a story that was a kind of personal parable. 

There was, he said, a small peace demonstration in Times Square in New York City in the 1950s.  An observer scoffed at a Quaker carrying a sign, and said, “Do you think you’re going to change the world by standing here at midnight with that sign?” The Quaker responded, “I suppose not, but I’m going to make sure the world doesn’t change me.” Pete remained, like that Quaker, committed to a better world, and his example resonates with us all.

Debate between Asma Barlas and Tariq Ramadan organised by the Avicenna Society of Rotterdam. Courtesy of the author. Several years ago, Muslim students of the Avicenna Society of Rotterdam organized a debate between Tariq Ramadan and myself about the status of Muslims in the West. In speaking about the discrimination and violence Muslim women have suffered in the name of Islam, I pointed out that the Qur’an actually affirms their equality with men. It does so by teaching that God created both from the same self (nafs), made them viceregents (khalifa) on earth and appointed them one another’s guides and guardians (awliya) with the mutual obligation to enjoin the right and forbid the wrong. Yet, there is no trace of these verses in dominant interpretations of the Qur’an or in Muslim law. Instead, both law and exegesis foreground a handful of verses/lines (less than six out of more than 6,000 verses) that they take as advocating male supremacy over women.’

My larger point was to question why Muslims invest only men with the authority to interpret the Qur’an and why they are averse to interpreting it differently than they do. I have read it as an egalitarian and anti-patriarchal text in Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an. At the end of the debate, several women in the audience asked Ramadan what he thought about women’s readings of the Qur’an. Women, he eventually said, had to achieve a certain mastery in order to be able to comment on it knowledgeably. All these years later, I can still recall the incensed face of a young woman in hijab who was repeatedly pushing him to clarify just how many more centuries he felt women had to wait before men would regard them as being knowledgeable. He didn’t say.

The truth is that the Qur’an doesn’t authorize only men or a scholarly community to interpret it and nor is there an ordained clergy or church in Islam. Nor does the Qur’an say it came only for the literate. To the contrary it says it is meant also for the “unlettered” Bedouins in the deserts of Arabia. In a remarkably post-Reformation vein, it insists that believers should have a direct relationship with God and should rely on our own reason and intelligence to decipher its verses (ayat, or “signs” of God).

Yet, in the millennium and a half since Islam’s advent, only men, and only Arab, or Arabic-speaking men, have interpreted its religious texts, at least publicly. Even among liberal and progressive Muslims today, men remain the locus of authority as Ramadan’s comment made very clear. Arguably, on this score, Muslims may be no different from Jews and Christians and adherents of other faiths whose religious texts were also revealed or authored in patriarchies. Patriarchy, a form of institutionalized male supremacy, is older than Islam and its history is rather sordid when it comes to women’s welfare. It is this overlapping trajectory of religion and patriarchy that has prompted some feminists to dub Islam a religious patriarchy and to declare that patriarchy has “God on its side” (Kate Millett, Sexual Politics; 1970)

I don’t doubt that when religious traditions represent and misrepresent God as male, they empower men. But, what if a Scripture refutes the idea that God is a male or, indeed, comparable to any created being? What if—as the Qur’an asserts—God is beyond the “highest evolved thought” of human beings, utterly unique, utterly unlike anything that exists? Would such an unsexed/ ungendered God have an investment in propping up the authority of human males? Why on earth?

Given such descriptions of God in the Qur’an, I can’t understand why Muslims treat God as a male. True, the Qur’an calls God “He” but we can see this as a function of Arabic, the language in which it was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in seventh century Arabia. The Qur’an itself states that it is in Arabic because God wished to address the Arabs in their own language. And, while most Muslims have come to view Arabic itself as a sacred language, the Qur’an doesn’t intimate that it is.

The reason such seemingly esoteric issues are important to a discussion of women’s rights is because, if God is not a male, there is no reason for men to claim a special affinity with God as a way to then exercise totalizing authority over women. In fact, positing such an affinity and claiming this kind of authority borders on shirk, a derogation of divine sovereignty. The argument is simple enough: in Islam, we have an absolute God whose oneness and sovereignty are indivisible, meaning no one can participate in or partake of God’s encompassing dominion over everyone and everything. Yet, in many Muslim societies men posture as “earthly gods” over women, all in the name of following Islam.

To be clear, I’m not opposed to men interpreting the Qur’an. Far from it. My own understanding of it has been shaped solely by men’s interpretations and translations. The most compelling to me is by Muhammad Asad, who was born a Jew in Austria-Hungary at the turn of the twentieth century and converted to Islam when he was twenty-six. Another favoured translation is by the noted Shi’a scholar, Abdullah Yusuf Ali. I also don’t think, like many feminists do, that we need communities of women readers to generate liberatory interpretations of texts. Hundreds of years of women’s following in men’s footsteps, voluntarily or not, should dispel this illusion.

Having said this, though, I believe that the questions women and men bring into our reading of sacred texts are likely to differ. Women, who have a stake in challenging the deification of men, could very well ask whether the Qur’an endorses patriarchy, which is what I do at the start of my own reading. And, I define patriarchy as both rule by the father/husband and as a politics of sexual differentiation that privileges men because they are male. To my surprise—and relief—I find that the Qur’an doesn’t endorse either mode of patriarchy and, to the contrary, criticizes the mindless rush to follow the “ways of the fathers” who were (are) devoid of knowledge.

In the years since the debate with Ramadan, I’ve shared my reading with many young Muslims who are looking to encounter the divine. To them, what matters isn’t whether someone has the authority to interpret the Qur’an or not but what they have to say about it. At such times I’m reminded that, when we treat the Qur’an as simply a manifesto for claiming rights or for meting out punishments, we forget that, before anything else, it is a way for us to know the Creator we are called on to worship.

Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an by Asma Barlas is published by Saqi Books, February 2019

Alexander GAULAND, AfD party chairman at the AfD Federal Party Congress 2018, Augsburg, Germany. Oryk Haist/Sven Simon/Press Association. All rights reserved.

Among political analysts, it has for a long time been commonsense to highlight the importance of individual leaders’ public appeal. In an extreme form, the likes of Jörg Haider or Jean-Marie Le Pen were even portrayed as the main causes of their party’s success. Importantly, social scientists are pointing to the limits of such perspectives: on average, radical right leaders do not matter more for voting choice than the front runners of other parties. 

This is particularly obvious in the case of Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany; AfD), lacking a ‘charismatic’ – for example as conceptualized by Roger Eatwell– leader on top. Instead, the party’s key figure, 78-year old Alexander Gauland, is probably the opposite of what most would commonly associate with charisma. Gauland rather makes the peculiar impression of an elderly grump, avoiding eye contact in personal encounters, fascinated with Great Britain as reflected in his fashion and speeches, and always decked out with his famous Hundekrawatte.

Still, Gauland, co-leader of both the national party organization and the Bundestag group, is a highly efficient politician. The excellent recent book Gauland. Die Rache des alten Mannes [Gauland. The Revenge of the Old Man] by German journalist Olaf Sundermeyer helps to understand this politician’s rise. The short but informative biography, based on many conservations with him and other relevant personalities, provides an empirically-grounded perspective. In contrast to some other new non-scientific German books on the country’s far right, Sundermeyer’s critical stance towards Gauland does not overshadow, but adds to his analytical sense. 

Disappointed insider

Gauland tells the story of a disappointed CDU insider. At the beginning of the 1990s, when Gauland had reached his 50s, he left the party’s second row and became evermore critical of its politics. Already in 1994, Gauland wrote a provocative book on CDU chancellor Kohl – which points to the long-term dissatisfaction of some right-wing CDU members, even before Merkel’s chancellorship. Several of them, including Gauland, were involved in the foundation of the AfD. While some of them left the party over the course of its later radicalization, Gauland did not. Even though Sundermeyer refrains from portraying Gauland as ‘right-wing extremist,’ he is described as a person who does not hesitate to embrace and therefore to legitimize some of the AfD’s most radical members. When reading the book, I was reminded of the relevance of dimensions beyond ‘charisma’ to understand Gauland’s role as party leader.

First, Gauland’s socialization in both Germany’s east and west makes him particularly suitable as an AfD leader. Born in the Saxon city of Chemnitz in East Germany, he left the GDR before the wall was built. In Hesse, he made a career working for CDU politician Walter Wallmann, who was first mayor of Frankfurt, then, for a short time, Germany’s first environmental minister, and ultimately Hesse’s regional governor. In the 1990s, Gauland returned to the east, settling in Potsdam to work as a newspaper editor. Amongst others, this familiarity with the east made Gauland realize how important the Ukraine crisis was to many eastern Germans – a fact that, according to the author, is neglected by analysts of AfD. Despite lacking any fascination with Russia, Gauland took up the issue, criticizing the Ukraine politics of the US and the EU. Literature in social movement studies has highlighted the often neglected importance of individual biography in the choices of political players. 

Sheer experience and a talent for opportunism

Second, Gauland has the talent of pragmatism, or if you will, opportunism – specifically when it comes to having a nose for moods and trends. Acknowledging the liberal Zeitgeist in Frankfurt of the 1980s, Gauland even pushed his boss, the city’s mayor Wallmann, to award a prize to none other than Jürgen Habermas, back then still a no-go scholar for many conservatives. Wallmann’s honorific speech, praising Habermas, was written by Gauland.

For many contemporaries, such as the Green’s Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Gauland seemed like a rather liberal representative of his party. Three decades later, things look rather different: Gauland’s pragmatism and opportunism have led him to become a key AfD figure since 2013, both when the party was dominated by Euro-critical neoliberals and later when immigration-skeptical radical rightists took over. For some observers, Gauland seemed like a politician who did not want a clear radical right turn of the party, while for others, he has clearly been a driver of this process. Obviously not the staunchest ‘policy-proponent,’ it does not seem that Gauland’s eventual end as party leader will be caused by ideological conflicts. 

Third, Gauland is highly experienced, having always worked closely with leading political figures as well as journalists – before working for the CDU, he worked for the Press and Information office of the German government in Bonn and as press officer in the German consulate in Edinburgh. David Art points to the importance of skilled politicians for the electoral success of the radical right– the AfD certainly has not suffered from this problem, even after the ‘neoliberal professors’ left the party in 2015.

Gauland also learned from his opponents, in particular from the early Greens, whose stronghold in the 1980s was Hesse. There, the then new challenger party also mobilized on the streets. The AfD now follows a similar strategy, for example cooperating with PEGIDA’s Siegfried Däbritz, who organizes AfD’s anti-immigrant street mobilization. Unsurprisingly, Gauland was also among the first key AfD politicians to attend a PEGIDA demonstration in Dresden.

Politicking and charisma

What remains neglected in Sundermeyer’s very interesting book and what not only scholars of the radical right, but scholars of party politics in general have a problem studying is, in the words of William Riker, ‘the art of political manipulation’, i.e. the strategies and tactics used to construct majorities within organizations and institutions. In particular, a stronger focus on the key episodes of AfD leadership change would have been illuminating. In 2015, Bernd Lucke and his neoliberal supporters lost out at a party conference in Essen. What was Gauland’s role, then AfD deputy leader, in this? And how did Gauland and his supporters later sideline Lucke’s successor, Frauke Petry? Despite the empirical relevance of such micro-level developments, this perspective is neglected in the book – as in the specialized political science literature.

Some of the most interesting works on the radical right are provided by critical journalists, writing in their native tongues. Social scientists should not miss out on these publications, despite our focus on English-language scientific publications. Ultimately, reading Sundermeyer’s book from the perspective of the radical right leadership raises one more important counterfactual question: Would the AfD be even stronger if it had a leader who shared some of Gauland’s traits and was ‘charismatic’?

Marcia Chatelain is an associate professor of history at Georgetown University. Image: Georgetown UniversityMarcia Chatelain studies the relationship between fast food and race in America. In the latest episode of Changed My Mind, we dive deep into how that study has led this award-winning scholar and author to change her mind about the capitalist American dream she grew up with. 

We also delve into the times Marcia's students – she is an associate professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC – have made her sit back and think. Of course we also couldn't resist the temptation to ask a fast food scholar to tell us who makes the best French fries... 

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