Bolivia Gives Legal Rights To The Earth

Kirsten Cowart


Bolivia has become the first country in the world to actually give nature legal rights in a huge effort to put a halt to not only climate change but the exploitation of our world, and in turn improve the quality of life for the people of Bolivia.

Our Mother Earth looks to Bolivia as they spearhead new economic and social models based on the protection and preservation for nature.

This idea had been developed by grass root social groups that presented their ideas to politicians and were accepted as one. In doing so, the Law of Mother Earth in Bolivia recognizes the rights of all living beings, whether they be plant or animal. This law gives our world equal status to human beings.

When this law is fully approved, this legislation will then provide the Earth with the rights to life and regeneration; liberation from genetic modification and biodiversity; naturally balanced systems, pure water and clean air; complete restoration from the effects of its human activity; and freedom from the continual contamination on all fronts.



The prioritising of this legislation based on broader principles of looking towards living in harmony side by side with the Earth and moving towards the collective good of all. At the core of this legislation is a full understanding that the Earth is sacred, which comes from the indigenous people called Andean, viewing the world as ‘Pachamama’ which translates to Mother Earth a living being.

Back in December 2010 the initial act had already outlined the rights of the earth as a dynamic and “indivisible community of all living systems and living organisms, interrelated, interdependent and complementary, which share a common destiny.”

With the Law of Mother Earth Bolivia’s government would then be legally bound to ensure the prioritising of not only the natural world’s policies and making sure that they are promoting sustainability and controlling industry, but making sure they have the wellbeing of its citizens and the world are at their heart.

The economy of Bolivia will be looking to operate within the limits of nature as they push towards a renewable green food stability and energy efficient technologies. Helping to prevent the drastic climate changes already taking place, ensuring that the future generations have brighter lives and a more hopeful future.

The Bolivian government is also requesting a call to arms with other rich countries to work together in adopting the recognition of the effects of climate change due to their high carbon emissions. According to an Oxfam report in 2009, Bolivia is particularly susceptible to the impacts of climate change with increasing drought, flooding and melting glaciers.

On the stage international change, the Bolivian government will have a duty to help promote the upkeep of the rights of Earth, while becoming advocates of not only peace but the elimination of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

Following the change to the Bolivian constitution back in 2009, the law will play a large part of overhauling the legal system. It helps represent a strong shift away from the universally adopted western development model to a much greener holistic vision, based on the concept of Vivir Bien meaning ‘to live well’.

The proposal for the new law brightly states:


“Living Well means adopting forms of consumption, behaviour and conduct that are not degrading to nature. It requires an ethical and spiritual relationship with life. Living Well proposes the complete fulfilment of life and collective happiness.”

An umbrella group for five different Bolivian social movements called the Unity Pact helps prepare the draft of the new law. The represent and speak for over 3 million people of the countries 36 different indigenous groups, the majority of them are small scale farmers who still call their ancestral lands home. The bill helps to protect not only their livelihoods but the diverse cultures that feel the immense impacts of the large industries.

One of the leaders of the social movement Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia Undarico Pinto, states that “It will make the industry more transparent. It will allow people to regulate industry at national, regional and local levels,” helping to signify a large shift away from the exploitation of nature.

The draft laws that refers to the mineral resources of the world as “blessings” and goes further and states that Mother Earth, “is sacred, fertile and the source of life that feeds and cares for all living beings in her womb. She is in permanent balance, harmony and communication with the cosmos.”

Bolivia will also establish a Ministry of Earth to promote their new rights and make sure that they are all complied with. yet the economy of Bolivia is at this moment solely dependent of the exports of natural resources, earning almost a third of its foreign currency which averages around £300m a year from multiple mining companies. Bolivia is looking to create a new balance and obligations against the demands of that industry.

Bolivia Rain forest



Within the next few months, the full law is expected to pass and it is very unlikely to face opposition due to the ruling party, The Movement Towards Socialism, has been able to hold a considerable majority in their parliament. President Evo Morales, its leader, voiced a commitment to what they were creating at the World People’s Conference on Climate change that was held in Bolivia back in April 2010.



The Law of Mother Earth includes the following:

The right to maintain the integrity of life and natural processes.

The right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.

The right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration.

The right to pure water.

The right to clean air.

The right to balance, to be at equilibrium.

The right to be free of toxic and radioactive pollution.

The right to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities

This law pushes the world “harmony and peace” with “the elimination of all nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.”

Unhappy? Welcome to Bhutan – the nation of 90% joy

The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan was the first to measure happiness as an alternative to GDP. No wonder they’re so pleased


Tim Dowling in The Guardian




News from the International Conference on Gross National Happiness, where Bhutan’s happiness index rose from 0.743 in 2010 to 0.756 in 2015. “Is this fast or slow?” asked Bhutan’s prime minister in his keynote speech. “We do not yet know. We are still learning what is a ‘good’ growth rate!” He sounds jolly.

The notion of GNH was first introduced by Bhutan’s fourth king in the 70s, when he announced that “gross national happiness is more important that gross national product”. The GNH index is a number crunched from happiness survey statistics across nine “domains”, of which only one is living standards. Others include health, education, psychological wellbeing, time use, community vitality and cultural diversity.
GNH is a blend of hard numbers, subjective perceptions and virtually unmeasurable concepts, but it works pretty well in Bhutan, provided you’re not among the 17% of the population – mostly Hindus of Nepalese origin – expelled from the country in the 90s. It’s one way to get your GNH index up – kick out that oppressed minority.

In the last decade the idea of GNH has gained international traction. In the US some states measure the genuine progress indicator, alongside gross state product. In 2012, the UN released a World Happiness report. And the UK’s Office For National Statistics recently started measuring national wellbeing.

There’s nothing wrong with measuring subjective happiness levels – it’s interesting precisely because they’re subjective. Recent GDP improvements brought no corresponding increase British wellbeing. In Bhutan, people’s perceptions of their own health worsened even as healthcare indices improved. Still, 91% of Bhutanese are classed as either narrowly, extensively or deeply happy. Joy-wise it’s roughly on a par with Denmark, even though Bhutan’s adult literacy rate is around 60% and its GDP per capita puts it well below mid-table in world rankings.

Happiness is relative, which means the statistics can be pressed into service by anybody wanting to prove anything, including those who would suggest that spending money to improve people’s lives isn’t worth the bother. I fear that’s where all this wellbeing measurement will lead us. But cheer up – it may never happen.

Don’t sneer at redbrick revolutionaries – some of our best leaders were terrible students

Owen Jones in The Guardian

It is the season for academic snobbery, apparently. Labour was once the “clever party”, bemoaned Harry Mount in the Spectator recently, but now it’s had a “brain transplant. It’s out with the Oxbridge and Harvard graduates with first class degrees; in with the redbrick university graduates”. The horror. Martin Amis concurs, slamming Jeremy Corbyn for being “undereducated”. And now Tristram Hunt is at it, referring to Cambridge University students lazily but revealingly as the “top 1%” who had a “responsibility to take leadership going forward”.

Labour risks turning into a sect, says Tristram Hunt



A disclaimer: I am, myself, an Oxbridge graduate, like so many who write on these pages. I’m not ashamed of making the jump from comprehensive schools to Oxford either (although I am no working class hero): if Oxbridge drew more students from non-selective comprehensives, the status quo would be less objectionable. But the comments betray a depressing lack of insight into supposed academic success and its relevance in the world of politics.

First off, Oxbridge does not mean the best. Knowing lots of things and being clever are not the same thing. Yes, Oxbridge is supposed to be about more than stuffing the heads of students full of knowledge – it’s about encouraging critical thinking and the like. But while I met some incredibly bright people at Oxford, I also met others who were certainly not clever at all; similarly, I’ve met people who never attended university who are supremely clever.

Unless you are a social Darwinian who believes the richest are the brightest, in no sense can Oxbridge be described as an academic elite. More than 43% of Oxford students went to a private school, as did 7% of the rest of the population; many of its state school students went to grammars, and a terrifyingly small 11% of Oxbridge students are working class by origin.

We all like to imagine our achievements are down to our own individual ability, and suggestions to the contrary normally provoke defensive and insecure reactions. But the backgrounds of Mount, Amis and Hunt go a long way to explain their successes. Westminster school-educated, ex-Bullingdon Club member Mount is the son of Sir Ferdinand Mount, Margaret Thatcher’s former head of policy. Amis (whose best friend, Christopher Hitchens, was awarded a third-class degree in PPE at Oxford) is the son of literary giant Sir Kingsley Amis, and Hunt is the University College School-educated son of Lord Hunt. Would they have racked up their achievements without their privileged background? It is possible. But very unlikely.

Academic success is disproportionately the preserve of those from privileged backgrounds for many reasons: among them, being exposed to broader vocabularies from an earlier age; the quality of housing; diet; the potential stresses of poverty, and so on. And to rebut the inevitable calls for the reintroduction of secondary moderns, the evidence shows worse outcomes for poorer children in areas that still select by supposed ability. Oxford and Cambridge go to great lengths to improve their access, but the truth is many bright working class students don’t apply because they feel the institutions are culturally alien. The Oxbridge colleges should surely enrol the brightest working class and state school students without interview if they aspire to a full representation of the brightest. Privileged people, who disproportionately attend Oxbridge, go on to dominate the professions for other reasons, such as unpaid internships being a gateway to, say, media, politics and law; or postgraduate qualifications that are affordable if you have parents with deep pockets.

In any case, succeeding at a university is no automatic guarantee of being an effective politician. What we need are politicians with an understanding of the problems confronted by millions of people, and a creative imagination that allows them to conjure up appropriate solutions. Winston Churchill was notoriously poor at school, though it seems his political career turned out OK in the end.

The postwar Labour government may have been led by the public school educated Clement Attlee, but look at his ministers. Nye Bevan was the son of a miner; after languishing near the bottom of the class, he began working down the pit almost as soon as he became a teenager. But the conditions he grew up in informed his politics, and he went on to found one of our greatest institutions, the National Health Service. Herbert Morrison was a linchpin of the government, born to a police constable at a time when they were paid derisory wages. Ernest Bevin was born to an impoverished family in Somerset, and went on to become foreign secretary.

I am no fan of John Major, but it is worth noting that under this non-graduate, the Tories chalked up 41.9% of the vote in 1992, trouncing the 36.9% won under the stewardship of Old Etonian David Cameron in May.

If academic success were a guide to political achievement then President George W Bush’s administration would have been a triumph. It was, after all, stuffed full of alumni of Princeton University, Yale University, Harvard Business School (like Bush himself), Harvard University and Notre Dame. Alas, his turned into the most disastrous presidency since the second world war, bequeathing us the calamity of the Iraq war and financial meltdown.

What we need is not politicians who flourish at university coursework and exams, but those who have powers of empathy and imagination. Hailing from a privileged background does not mean you are unable to understand the lives of those less advantaged than you. But when parliament is so white, so male, and where around two-thirds of MPs are from middle class professional backgrounds, inevitable questions have to be raised about our “representative” democracy. Having more female MPs means the issues affecting women are more likely to be addressed, and the same goes for, say, those trapped on social housing waiting lists, lacking secure work, or indeed those who are having their tax credits cut.

Education is so much more than what is learned in lecture rooms and libraries. Political disillusionment and cynicism are complex beasts and they have been stirred for many reasons, but one factor is surely that parliament does not much look like the country it exists to serve. “Oxbridgeocracy”, and those who agitate for it, are sources of sustenance for Ukip and other rightwing populist forces. Sure, there is a place for Oxbridge alumni, but we need far more balance – including from the redbrick universities that so scandalise Mount, and those who haven’t been to university in the first place. Oxbridge isn’t everything. Trust me – I know.

Another recession is coming - the only question is how bad

Jeremy Warner in The Telegraph


According to the late, and great, American economist Rudi Dornbusch “none of the US expansions of the past 40 years died in bed of old age; every one was murdered by the Federal Reserve”. What he meant by this was that all US business cycles are brought to an end not by natural causes but by the actions of the Fed in raising interest rates. The art of the central banker is to take away the punch bowl before the party gets going, but few succeed; invariably they leave it too late, so that when they do apply the brakes, the economy crashes.


A powerful US senator is proposing the Federal Reserve, pictured, is stripped of the majority of its regulatory powers


With the Fed’s Open Market Committee again hinting at a rate rise by the end of the year, are not policymakers in danger of repeating the same mistake? I believe they are – that recession risk in the US and in Britain is substantially underestimated both by policymakers and the markets. Consider the facts. The current expansion may not feel like a boom, and in many respects it isn’t. In the UK, working age disposable income has still to recover to pre-crisis levels.

Yet in both Britain and the US, the economic expansion is already a long one by historic standards. Indeed, in the US it is one of the longest ever, as defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research, proud keeper of the record on American business cycles – a full 76 months, against the 58.4 month average for the 11 post war cycles identified. Only three of these cycles have been longer.

No recession is ever predicted by official forecasting; it would be an admission of failure if it was, for the whole purpose of economic policy making is to keep things just right – not too hot and not too cold. Ultimately, the policymakers always fail. Gordon Brown, the last UK prime minister, preposterously boasted that he had abolished boom and bust. Alan Greenspan, former Fed chairman, likewise believed he could defy the gods. Both were in for a rude awakening, having failed to notice the mega-boom their policies helped create in financial services.

With this searing experience to learn from, the present generation of economic decision makers tends to be less hubristic in aim, yet even George Osborne, the Chancellor, is relying on extended growth way beyond the normal parameters of a typical business cycle to meet his target of a budget surplus by 2019/20.

As it is, there is little chance of this target being met. It will be broken on the anvil of events. Already there are worrying signs of a slowdown in the UK, with both construction and manufacturing contracting in the last quarter. Lead indicators published by the OECD, a relatively accurate predictor of past recessions, point unambiguously to a pronounced UK slowdown and to a loss of growth momentum in the US.

In Europe, things are still so bad that the European Central Bank is considering even more monetary accommodation on top of the quantitative easing and negative interest rates already applied. Likewise China, where far from raising rates, they are cutting them in an attempt to head off a hard landing which in all probability is already happening. The China Iron & Steel Association has warned of an “unprecedented” slump in steel demand and prices as China attempts to transition from investment to consumption led growth.

Central banks normally act in raising rates when the economy is booming. The curiosity of this particular expansion is that for advanced economies at least, it seems barely to have begun. If there has been a boom, you’ll be forgiven for not having been aware of it. So why is the Fed thinking of acting?

There are two reasons. First, the Fed worries that once the effect of the sharp drop in oil prices falls out of the equation, inflation will come surging back, and it wants to dampen things before this happens. The other is that it simply yearns, like the rest of us, for a degree of normality in interest rates. If it can’t do it now, with the economy growing, when will it ever?

Regrettably, it may already be too late. After seven years of “unconventional monetary policy”, the world economy is once more drowning in easy credit, with few of the underlying causes of the global financial crisis even remotely addressed.
Excessive leverage and investment risk taking is again the order of the day, not so much in Britain, but certainly in the US and previously booming emerging market economies. One small interest rate rise may be all it takes to plunge the world back into some kind of mild recession. Yet to double up, as the Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, recently suggested as a possible answer to renewed weakness in the global economy, and pile yet further “unconventional” policy on top, risks an even bigger bust further down the line. The choice, I’m afraid, is between the economy catching a cold now, or full-blown pneumonia later.

Paralysed by political cowardice, advanced economy governments have become far too reliant on monetary voodoo to support demand, leaving central banks with an almost impossible task. Supply-side measures to turbo-charge investment, including if necessary additional public infrastructure spending, must be brought forward as a matter of urgency.

Why cricket is the greatest of all games

Ian McDonald in Cricinfo 

No other sport compares in terms of the number of skills displayed, and the blend of subtlety, entertainment, sudden thrill and sustained intellectual interest on offer


Twenty-two yard theatre: a good Test match is the equal of a five-act masterpiece of the stage © Getty Images

I have been looking at a great deal of cricket lately from across the world: Test cricket - the Ashes, India versus Sri Lanka - and ODIs and T20 cricket from all over. I am more than ever convinced that cricket is the greatest game that exists for the delight and fascination of mankind. I am also confirmed in my settled view that of all forms of this great game, Test cricket is by far the most interesting, satisfying and lastingly memorable.

When I was young I played a little cricket. Indeed, one of my most precious memories, a memory now nearly 70 years old, is of playing for my school 3rd XI on a rough pitch up near Mount St Benedict in Trinidad and taking five wickets in one eight-ball over with some slow, cunning legbreaks that did not turn - they were an early incarnation of the doosra. However, much to my regret, I never became a serious cricketer. I played tennis hard and grew to love the game. And tennis was certainly good to me, filling my life with much pleasure, excitement, challenge and reasonable achievement. It was a game that introduced me to many lifelong friends and taught me, I think, a few of life's important lessons.

And yet always, in my heart of hearts, I have thought that cricket is the greatest, the most splendid, game of all. If I had been given the choice by some benevolent God between winning Wimbledon and hitting a match-winning century at Lord's for West Indies I always knew which I would have chosen.

I have no doubt that cricket is in fact the greatest game yet invented. No other sport compares with it in the number of skills displayed: batting skill; bowling skill; throwing skill; catching skill; running skill. It requires fitness, strength, delicacy of touch, superb reflexes, footwork like a cat, the eye of a hawk, the precision and accuracy of a master jeweller. It involves individual skill and nerve and also unselfish team play. It calls for short-term tactics and long-term strategy. In the course of a good cricket match there is a mixture of courage, daring, patience, aggression, flair, imagination, expertise and dour defiance that is certainly unequalled in all other, more superficial, games. It is not at all surprising that cricket has inspired by far the best and most varied literature of any sport.

If I had been given the choice by some benevolent God between winning Wimbledon and hitting a match-winning century at Lord's for West Indies, I always knew which I would have chosen

There are games that take more strength, more speed, ones that require a higher level of fitness, and ones that require deeper resources of endurance. But no game equals cricket in its all-round development of all the aptitudes. There are games that contain a greater concentration of excitement per playing hour. But no game approaches cricket in its blend of subtlety, entertainment, sudden thrill and sustained intellectual interest. Cricket, like no other game, takes the whole of a man - his body, soul, heart, will and wits.

Cricket - real cricket; that is, Test cricket - has been stigmatised as being too slow, too leisurely, lacking in colour and excitement. I believe this is simply one more aspect of the malignant modern appetite for instant stimulation and quick-fire titillation. The slash-bang games may satisfy the craving for a quick thrill, but they bear about the same relationship to a good game of cricket as instant food does to a superbly cooked gourmet dinner.

It is like the difference between lust and love. There is, it is true, the temporary excitement of a passionate one-night stand. But who can doubt that the more mature, the more beguiling, the longer-lasting love affair provides the more challenging and the deeper experience?

So it is with Test cricket. Like any lasting love affair a good Test match has its moments when the play is ordinary, slow-moving, and even boring. But the complex interplay of emotion, psychology, collective bonding and individual character, allied with the sudden bursts of excitement and the unexpected twists of fortune, add up to an experience that far outweighs the temporary and quick-fading lust for instant gratification that so many other sports supply.

One of the glories of cricket is the way the drama of a match develops, how the pace varies from the leisurely to the suddenly lethal, how the plot thickens, and the subplots are interlinked as the play goes on, how the heroes and the villains take the stage with time enough to act out their roles. A good Test match is the equal of a five-act masterpiece of the stage. Even the best of the other games can really only compare with one-act spectacles that attract those whose attention span is brief and whose imaginations are lacking. It may be that the latest pop star with his highly charged and hectic act can attract much larger crowds than Shakespeare's King Lear or Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, but we all know that the one will fade into oblivion long, long before the others' glory ends. For me, T20 cricket is a very popular, quickly-fading-in-the-memory game whose main purpose is to generate the money that will keep Test cricket active.

T20 money may keep Test cricket alive in other countries, but in the West Indies the dissolution of its Test team is a threat to be feared © Caribbean Premier League


Sadly, it will not keep Test activity alive and well in the West Indies. It is becoming clear the we will never again compete at the highest level of Test cricket. Increasingly our players are opting out of Test cricket for the sake of T20 gold. More and more our administrators will concentrate on the shorter, easy-to-make-money game. And more and more of our fans will only be interested in T20. And as these tendencies grow, the forces leading to a break-up of the West Indies team into its constituent parts will gain strength and eventually the countries will find their way in the shorter cricket world as Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, Barbados etc. It is sad but there seems no stopping this. The current sorry lot in charge of West Indies cricket are presiding over the death not only of West Indies Test cricket but also over the dissolution of the West Indies cricket team.

I think there is a large measure of truth in what the old men say - that in cricket today there is too much playing for self, playing for averages, playing for money, and that therefore a lot of the variety, spice, spontaneity and sportsmanship has gone out of the game. Lord Harris, a former England captain, wrote some famous words about cricket:

"You do well to love this cricket, for it is more free from anything sordid, anything dishonourable, anything savouring of servitude, than any game in the world. To play it keenly, honourably, generously, self-sacrificingly is a moral lesson in itself, and the classroom is God's air and sunshine. Foster it, my brothers, so that it may attract all who can find the time to play it, protect it from anything that would sully it, so that it may grow in favour with all men."

These words summon up a view of cricket that, sadly, seems now much too idealistic and almost completely outdated.

And yet, and yet, I wonder. Cricket is a game great enough to rise above the limitations of this overly commercial age. In cricket we will always have dramas and performances to match any in the past. You can be sure there will be games of cricket that generations to come will wish they had seen.

Cricket contains the pure stuff of human nature. As Neville Cardus and CLR James advised long ago, you must go to this best of all games with your imagination's eye, as well as your physical eye, open. To the dull of spirit who merely looks at the scoreboard when, say, a Sobers is batting:

"A Sobers at the crease's rim
A simple Sobers is to him
And he is nothing more."

But to the cricket lover of sensibility this Sobers, and his fellows, are artists all and the game they play is the wonderful game of life itself.

Why don’t we save our steelworkers, when we’ve spent billions on bankers?

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian


 

‘Britain is entering the early stages of yet another industrial catastrophe.’ Illustration by Andrzej Krauze



Every so often a society decides which of its citizens really matter. Which ones get the star treatment and the big cash handouts – and which get shoved to the bottom of the pile and penalised. These are the big, rough choices post-crash Britain is making right now.

A new hierarchy is being set in place by David Cameron in budget after austerity budget. Wealthy pensioners: winners. Young would-be homeowners: losers. Millionaires see their taxes cut to 45%, while the working poor pay a marginal tax rate of 80%. Big business gets to write its own tax code; benefit claimants face harsh sanctions.

When the contours of this new social order are easy to spot, they can cause public uproar – as with the cuts to tax credits. Elsewhere, they’re harder to pick out, though still central. It is into this category that the crisis in the British steel industry falls.

Tata Steel confirms 1,200 job losses as industry crisis deepens



It would be easy to tune out the past few weeks’ headlines about plant closures and job losses as just another story of business disaster. But what’s happening to our steelworkers, and what we do to protect them, goes to the heart of the debate about which people – and which places – count in Britain’s political economy.

If Westminster lets the UK’s steel industry die, it’s in effect declaring that certain regions and the people who live and work in them are surplus to requirements. That it really doesn’t matter if Britain makes things. That the phrase “skilled working-class jobs” is now little more than an oxymoron. That’s the criteria against which to judge MPs, as they continue to take evidence today on the crisis and then debate options.

What does this crisis look like? Imagine coming to work on a September morning – only to find that you and one in six other employees in your entire industry face redundancy before Christmas. That’s the prospect facing British steelworkers. Motherwell, Middlesbrough, Scunthorpe: some of the most kicked-about places in de-industrialised Britain now face more punishment.

Mothball the SSI plant in Redcar and it’s not just 2,200 workers that you send to the dole office and whose families you shove on the breadline. An entire local economy goes on life support: the suppliers of parts, the outside engineers who used to do the servicing, the port workers and hauliers, the cafes and shops. Within days of SSI’s closure, one of Teesside’s biggest employment agencies went into liquidation.

‘If Westminster lets the UK’s steel industry die, it’s effectively declaring that certain regions and the people who live and work in them are surplus to requirements.’ Photograph: Nigel Roddis/Reuters

Steel is a fundamental part of manufacturing, so that the closure of a handful of steelworks in Scotland and the north endangers businesses in Derby and Walsall. At the West Midlands Economic Forum, the chief economist Paul Forrest calculates that about 260,000 jobs in the Midlands rely on steel for everything from basic metals to car assembly and aerospace engineering. He believes that the closures at Tata, SSI and Caparo leave 52,000 local manufacturing workers at direct risk of losing their jobs within the next five years. That’s just after the past few weeks – the UK Steel director Gareth Stace thinks that more plants face closure “within months”.

Join up these predictions, and Britain is entering the early stages of yet another industrial catastrophe. It could finally sink a sector, steel, that actually helps reduce the country’s gaping trade deficit. With that will go another pocket of well-paid blue-collar jobs. Chuck in employer contributions to pensions and national insurance, and the total remuneration per SSI staffer is £40,000 a year. Just try getting such pay in a call centre or distribution warehouse, even as a manager.

Imagine what would happen if manufacturing were centred around the capital, and its executives had Downing Street on speed dial. Actually, you needn’t imagine – merely remember the meltdown of 2008. Then Gordon Brown was so desperate to save the City that the IMF estimates he propped it up with £1.2 trillion of public money. That’s the equivalent of nearly £20,000 from every man, woman and child in the country doled out to bankers in direct cash, loans and taxpayer guarantees.

That’s what the state can do when it decides a sector matters. In 2011 David Cameron stormed out of a Brussels summit rather than agree to more regulation on the City. When it comes to steel, his ministers shrug at the difficulties posed by the EU’s state-aid rules. Michael Heseltine even declares this a “good time” for Teesside’s workers to lose their jobs in Britain’s “exciting” labour market. Let them eat benefits!

True, the problems in the steel industry aren’t confined to these shores. They’re driven by a world economy coming off the boil and China dumping its excess steel output on the global market. Yet other European governments are being far more aggressive in confronting them. Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, bailed out a huge steelworks last December. Germany’s Angela Merkel ensures that steel producers are cushioned from higher energy prices.

Just how lame, by comparison, is Cameron? Here’s an example: the European commission runs a publicly funded globalisation adjustment fund that can grant over £100m a year for precisely the sort of situation British steelworkers now face. The Germans, the French, the Dutch: they’ve all drawn down many millions apiece. The British? European commission officials told me this week that they had never so much as seen an application from the UK. Here’s a giant pot of money – into which Whitehall can’t even be bothered to dip its fingers.

Once our steel capacity is gone, it’s gone – and with it goes a big chunk of what’s left of our manufacturing base. Whole swaths of the country that have only just got off their backs after Thatcher’s de-industrial revolution will be knocked to the floor all over again.

The choice is stark. Westminster can sit on its hands, pretend it can’t do anything about the supposedly free market in steel (in which the single biggest player is the Chinese Communist party), and let tens of thousands of families go to the wall. Or our political class acts as if its job is actually to protect people from market fluctuations – and keep the steel industry afloat by extended bridging loans and capital investment in return for public stakes.

A return to British Leyland? No: a far cheaper and smaller rescue than RBS and HBOS. Free-market fundamentalists will decry this as a wage subsidy to steelworkers. But the alternative is to wind up paying far more in benefits to thousands of unemployed workers and their families. Besides, the state already shells out billions in hidden wage subsidies, through the tax credits and housing benefit that taxpayers give to employees of poverty-pay firms such as Sports Direct and Amazon.

What’s being proposed here is open, transparent support to employees in normally high-paying and high-skilled jobs. To keep a vital industry from disappearing for good. And to show that it’s not just the City that matters.

Why are drugs illegal?

‘To enable Harry Anslinger to keep his army of drug enforcers [the Untouchables], he created a new drug threat, cannabis, which he called marijuana to make it sound more Mexican.’ Photograph: Tomas Rodriguez/Corbis

 David Nutt in The Guardian


This is, of course, a flawed question but one that illustrates a major paradox in the UK and international laws on drugs. Some drugs – such as alcohol, caffeine and nicotine – are legal, whereas others – such as cannabis, cocaine and opium – are not. This has not always been the case.

In the 19th century extracts of these three now-illegal drugs were legal in the UK, and were sold in pharmacies and even corner shops. Queen Victoria’s physician was a great proponent of the value of tincture of cannabis and the monarch is reputed to have used it to counteract the pain of menstrual periods and childbirth. Now it is denied to people with severe enduring spasticity and pain from neurological disorders and cancer. Why?

Activists to get high together in protest against psychoactive substances ban



The truth is unpalatable and goes back to the period of alcohol prohibition in the US in the 1920s. This was introduced as a harm-reduction measure because alcohol was seen (correctly) as a drug that seriously damaged families and children. But public demand for alcohol in the US did not abate and this fuelled a massive rise in bootleg alcohol and underground bars (known as speakeasys) that encouraged the rise of the mafia and other crime syndicates.

To combat this, the US government set up a special army of enforcers, under the command of Harry Anslinger, which became known as “the untouchables”. This army of enforcers was widely celebrated by the newspapers and the acclaim propelled Anslinger to national prominence. However, when public disquiet at the crime and social damage caused by alcohol prohibition led to its repeal, Anslinger saw his position as being in danger.

To enable him to keep his army of drug enforcers, he created a new drug threat: cannabis, which he called marijuana to make it sound more Mexican. Working with a newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst, he created hysteria around the impact of cannabis on American youth and proclaimed an invasion of marijuana-smoking Mexican men assaulting white women. The ensuing public anxiety led to the drug being banned. The US then imposed its anti-cannabis stance on other western countries and this was finally imposed on the rest of the world through the first UN convention on narcotic drugs in 1961.

 

Mexican soldiers burning marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. Photograph: AFP/Getty

This process of vilifying drugs by engendering a fear of the “other people” who use them became a recurring theme in drug policy. Black Americans were stigmatised on account of heroin use in the 1950s. In the 1960s hippies and psychedelics were targeted because they opposed the Vietnam war. In the 1970s it was again inner-city black Americans who used crack cocaine who received the brunt of opprobrium, so much so that the penalties for crack possession were 100 times higher than those for powder cocaine, despite almost equivalent pharmacology. Then came “crystal” (methamphetamine) and the targeting of “poor whites”.

The UK has followed US trends over cannabis, heroin and psychedelics, and led the world in the vilification of MDMA (ecstasy). In the UK a hate campaign against young people behaving differently was instigated by the rightwing press. As with past campaigns, they hid their prejudice under the smokescreen of false health concerns. It was very effective and resulted in both MDMA and raves being banned. This occurred despite the police being largely comfortable with MDMA users since they were friendly – a stark contrast to those at alcohol-fuelled events.


Since the demise of ecstasy we have seen the rise and fall of several alternative legal highs, most notably mephedrone. This was banned following a relentless media campaign, despite no evidence of deaths and with little attempt to properly estimate its harm. Subsequently we have discovered that it saved more lives than it took because so many people switched from cocaine and amphetamine to mephedrone that deaths from these more toxic stimulants decreased by up to 40%. Since mephedrone was banned in 2010, cocaine deaths have risen again and are now above their pre-mephedrone levels.

As young people seek to find legal ways to enjoy altered consciousness without exposing themselves to the addictiveness and toxicity of alcohol or the danger of getting a criminal record, so the newspapers seek to get these ways banned too. Politicians collude as they are subservient to those newspapers that hate youth and they know that the drug-using population is much less likely to vote than the drug-fearing elderly. We have moved to a surreal new world in which the government, through the new psychoactive substances bill, has decided to put an end to the sale of any drug with psychoactive properties, known or yet to be discovered.

This ban is predicated on more media hysteria about legal highs such as nitrous oxide and the “head shops” that sell them. Lies about the number of legal high deaths abound, with Mike Penning, minister for policing and justice, quoting 129 last year in the bill’s second reading. The true figure is about five, as the “head shops” generally now sell safe mild stimulants because they don’t want their regular customers to die.

‘Queen Victoria’s physician was a great proponent of the value of tincture of cannabis, and she is reputed to have used it to counteract the pain of menstrual periods and childbirth.’ Photograph: Alamy

The attack on nitrous oxide is even more peculiar as this gas has been used for pain control for women in childbirth and surgical pain treatments for more than 100 years with minimal evidence of harm. But when a couple of premiership footballers are filmed inhaling a nitrous oxide balloon, then it becomes a public health hazard. In typical fashion the press renamed it “hippy crack” to scare people – what could me more frightening to elderly readers than an invasion of hippies on crack? In truth, the effect of nitrous oxide is nothing like crack and no self-respecting hippy would ever use it. Still, it seems likely it will be banned along with every other mind-altering substance that is not exempted.

The psychoactive substances bill is the most oppressive law in terms of controlling moral behaviour since the Act of Supremacy in 1558 that banned the practice of the Catholic faith. Both are based on a moral superiority that specifies the state will decide on acceptable actions and beliefs even if they don’t affect other people. Worse, it won’t work – evidence from other countries such as Poland and Ireland that have tried such blanket bans shows an increase in deaths as people go back to older illegal drugs such as cocaine and heroin.

Moreover, it may seriously impede research in brain disorders, one of the few scientific areas in which the UK is still world-leading. But hey, who cares about the consequences of laws, so long as the police and the press are appeased?

So the short answer to the question “why are (some) drugs illegal?” is simple. It’s because the editors of powerful newspapers want it that way. They see getting drugs banned as a tangible measure of success, a badge of honour. And behind them the alcohol industry continues secretly to express its opposition to anything that might challenge its monopoly of recreational drug sales. But that’s another story.