Letters
The Faction that Fools the World
Mike Small, Variant issue 24
Dear Editors,
For years I subscribed to Living Marxism, until it ceased publishing. I noticed the magazine’s libertarian turn and it published a number of letters I wrote, criticising articles which were becoming increasingly bizarre, at any rate in an ostensibly left-wing publication.
Mike Small is correct to say that the LM group are right-wing, but his suggestion that a clique is conspiring to enter the media is not correct. LM may or may not have an agenda, whatever that means, but there it is no secret that rightwingers and establishment supporters are welcomed by a media only too willing to offer them space. Ever since Thatcher the political scene have moved steadily right. Frank Furedi and Claire Fox enthuse about this. LM are not going to subvert anything and conspiracy is unnecessary: they are part of a ruling establishment.
When Mike Small says that the Moral Maze is the apogee of British broadcasting intellectualism, I hope he is being ironic. The Moral Maze, Any Questions, Thought for the Day (are no thoughts expressed outside this 4-minute sermon on the Today programme?), all are products of a narrow, philistine, querulous middle-class for whom preserving the status quo is a paramount aim. Besides, since when has Radio 4 usurped Radio 3 to become the intellectual station?
Mike Small complains that it is disingenuous of LM to present themselves as beyond left and right. No, it is not disingenuous: it’s the age-old, transparent argument of the right. Perhaps too, it was not naive of the book festival organisers to invite LM to its platform. It might have been exactly what they wanted and now they too, can bask in the reflected glory of the right.
Yours,
René Gimpel

Mike Small replies:
After writing the piece I have heard many more examples of LM members co-hosting radio programmes with fellow members of LM front-groups. René Gimpel writes: “Mike Small is correct to say that the LM group are right-wing, but his suggestion that a clique is conspiring to enter the media is not correct.”
It is quite correct. I was not advocating conspiracy but describing a clear and evident process, being tracked and researched by Spinwatch amongst others.
Most disturbing perhaps is their infiltration of key posts in areas of ethical debate and policy. For example Juliet Tizzard is not the only Furediite embedded in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the government body which, amongst other things, licenses and monitors all human embryo research conducted in the UK.
Ann Furedi, wife of Revolutionary Communist Party founder Frank Furedi, used to work at HFEA (before she went back to direct the abortion lobby group BPAS), and Ann’s good friend Vishnee Sauntoo moves between HFEA and BPAS. Ann Furedi (also known as Ann Bradley and Ann Burton) is director of communications at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service.
Then there’s Emily Jackson who is a member of the HFEA committee itself. She co-authors with Dr Ellie Lee on abortion rights and is part of the ProChoice Forum network. Both Lee and the ProChoice Forum are closely associated with Furedi, Tizzard, et al. As I described, at a conference at Kent University Jackson publicly endorsed human reproductive cloning.
As well as contributing articles to LM, Tizzard has also contributed to the LM network’s later fronts: Spiked, and the Institute of Ideas (I of I). She also wrote a chapter for the I of I publication, ‘Designer Babies: Where Should We Draw The Line?’ (Hodder and Stoughton, 2002).
Then there’s Dr Ellie Lee the co-ordinator of the ProChoice Forum and lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Kent, cosily enough where Ann’s husband Frank Furedi works. Lee was on the Moral Maze last year (funny that eh?) where she stated her mantra that “abortion should be available as early as possible and as late as necessary”. She was asked: suppose a mother gave birth to a baby at full term, and then just as the umbilical cord had been cut, found that the infant repelled her. Should she be allowed to have the baby killed? “I think so, yes,” replied Dr Lee.
These people aren’t trivial. We have a pro-cloning lobbyist in charge of regulating cloning.
I have no problem with Gimpel’s argument that: “LM are not going to subvert anything and conspiracy is unnecessary: they are part of a ruling establishment.” Accept that they are presented as being iconoclasts, critical theorists, the cutting edge of post-left thinking.
I would suggest that they be opposed when given platforms and the organisers or broadcasters should be forced into acknowledging these connections. I have no fear of their tired and repetitive ideas—and so do not advocate censorship—but we should demand transparency and integrity from those who host these people.
Gimpel is weakest when writing: “LM may or may not have an agenda”. This is a highly charged, well resourced professional network actively pursuing a radical right-wing agenda through the media and political organisations who repeatedly use front-groups and false identities in promoting their ideology.

Notes on Watching Human Rights Watch
Macdonald Stainsby, Variant issue 21

Open Letter to Kenneth Roth, Executive Director Human Rights Watch
from Gabriele Zamparini
Dear Mr. Kenneth Roth, Executive Director Human Rights Watch,
On December 2, 2005 the New York Times published an article with the title ‘Rights Group Lists 26 It Says U.S. Is Holding in Secret Abroad’. The article quotes Marc Garlasco, Senior Military Analyst at Human Rights Watch (HRW):
“One thing I want to make clear is we are talking about some really bad guys,” Mr. Garlasco said. “These are criminals who need to be brought to justice. One of our main problems with the U.S. is that justice is not being served by having these people held incognito.”
Mr. Garlasco said, “Our concern is that if illegal methods such as torture are being used against them,” trials may “either be impossible or questionable under international standards of jurisprudence.”¹
On December 4, 2005 I wrote to Mr. Garlasco, asking:
1. Did the New York Times quote you correctly?
². If not, will you ask for a formal correction to the NYT?
3. If yes, don’t you think your words are quite bizarre for a HRW’s representative? Did we get to the point that even HRW doesn’t care for the presumption of innocence? Is that really HRW’s concern about torture?
In my e-mail I also wrote:
I had the opportunity to interview HRW’s Reed Brody and Hanny Megally just a few years ago. Also because of those interviews I have great esteem and respect for the work of your organization. I fear that your words – as reported by the New York Times’ article – will damage HRW’s image and the trust many people have for its work. 2
Since I haven’t received any answer, I have now decided to write you an open letter to reiterate my questions and also to ask you if someone who “recommended thousands of aimpoints on hundreds of targets during operations in Iraq and Serbia [and who] also participated in over 50 interrogations as a subject matter expert” fits a senior position at Human Rights Watch.
Mr. Garlasco’s biography reads:
“Before coming to HRW, Marc spent seven years in the Pentagon as a senior intelligence analyst covering Iraq. His last position there was chief of high-value targeting during the Iraq War in 2003. Marc was on the Operation Desert Fox (Iraq) Battle Damage Assessment team in 1998, led a Pentagon Battle Damage Assessment team to Kosovo in 1999, and recommended thousands of aimpoints on hundreds of targets during operations in Iraq and Serbia. He also participated in over 50 interrogations as a subject matter expert. “³
According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mr. Garlasco also had an interesting role in damaging a study “published in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, concluding that about 100,000 civilians had been killed in Iraq since it was invaded by a United States-led coalition in March 2003.”⁴ The Chronicle of Higher Education writes:
The Washington Post, perhaps most damagingly to the study’s reputation, quoted Marc E. Garlasco, a senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch, as saying, “These numbers seem to be inflated.” Mr. Garlasco says now that he hadn’t read the paper at the time and calls his quote in the Post “really unfortunate.” He says he told the reporter, “I haven’t read it. I haven’t seen it. I don’t know anything about it, so I shouldn’t comment on it.” But, Mr. Garlasco continues, “Like any good journalist, he got me to.”
Mr. Garlasco says he misunderstood the reporter’s description of the paper’s results.⁵
Marc Garlasco, Senior Military Analyst at HRW also had an interesting role in a BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit’s investigation following a series of Media Lens’ Alerts on the BBC’s reporting on Fallujah.⁶ The BBC reports:
In its verdict that the NewsWat ch report was not misleading, the Editorial Complaints Unit — which investigates complaints independently of journalists — cited the evidence given to it by the HRW spokesman: “I find nothing inaccurate in what Paul stated. I think the issue is with the choice of the word ‘investigation’. As Paul noted, we did not have a full-fledged investigation with testimony from eye-witnesses, etc.
“What we did have, and I communicated to him [BBC’s defence correspondent Paul Wood, who was embedded with the US marines in Falluja at the time] was an investigation more on the lines of what I would term an inquiry. We had folks try to get into Falluja but were unable, and we had folks talk to people in Baghdad who had left Falluja.
“But the information was not of the quality for us to do any reporting. Beyond that, we made inquiries to the US Government, and other press. To the best of our knowledge no banned weapons were used during either battle of Falluja.” ⁷
Dear Mr. Roth, I would kindly ask you to re-read that last paragraph. Why didn’t the best of Human Rights Watch’s knowledge include:
1. “Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water. Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin.”
‘U.S. Forces Battle Into Heart of Fallujah’, by Jackie Spinner, Karl Vick and Omar Fekeiki, Washington Post, November 10, 2004
2. “‘The US occupation troops are gassing resistance fighters and confronting them with internationally-banned chemical weapons,’ resistance sources told Al-Quds Press Wednesday, November 10.”
‘US Troops Reportedly Gassing Fallujah’, Islam OnLine, November 10, 2004
3. “The U.S. military has used poison gas and other non-conventional weapons against civilians in Fallujah, eyewitnesses report.”
‘Unusual Weapons Used in Fallujah’, by Dahr Jamail, November 26, 2004
4. “I saw cluster bombs everywhere, and so many bodies that were burned, dead with no bullets in them. So they definitely used fire weapons, especially in Julan district.”
‘An Eyewitness Account of Fallujah’, by Dahr Jamail, December 16, 2004
5. “White Phosphorous. WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE. We fired “shake and bake” missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out. [...] We used improved WP for screening missions when HC smoke would have been more effective and saved our WP for lethal missions.”
“The Fight for Fallujah,” a “memorandum for record” by Captain James T. Cobb, First Lieutenant Christopher A. LaCour, and Sergeant First Class William H. Hight, published in the March-April 2005 issue of the US Army’s Field Artillery magazine
6. “Bogert is a mortar team leader who directed his men to fire round after round of high explosives and white phosphorus charges into the city Friday and Saturday, never knowing what the targets were or what damage the resulting explosions caused. [...] ”Gun up!” Millikin yelled when they finished a few seconds later, grabbing a white phosphorus round from a nearby ammo can and holding it over the tube. “Fire!” Bogert yelled, as Millikin dropped it. The boom kicked dust around the pit as they ran through the drill again and again, sending a mixture of burning white phosphorus and high explosives they call “shake ‘n’ bake” into a cluster of buildings where insurgents have been spotted all week.”
‘Violence Subsides for Marines in Fallujah’, by Darrin Mortenson, North County Times, Saturday, April 10, 2004
I am not making any charge. I am just asking questions. Is it still possible to ask questions in these dark times of pre-emptive wars? After embedded journalists, shall we have embedded human rights organizations? Shouldn’t Caesar’s wife be above suspicion?
Kind regards,
Gabriele Zamparini
info@thecatsdream.com

Notes
1. ‘Rights Group Lists 26 It Says U.S. Is Holding in Secret Abroad’, by Ian Fisher, The New York Times, December 2, 2005
2. ‘Questions for Human Rights Watch’, Gabriele Zamparini’s e-mail to Marc Garlasco, Senior Military Analyst HRW and Kenneth Roth, Executive Director HRW
http://www.thecatsdream.com/blog/2005/12/questions-for-human-rights-watch.htm
3. Bio of Human Rights Watch’s Mark Garlasco, Mother Jones, October 2, 2005
http://www.motherjones.com/radio/2005/10/garlasco_bio.html
4. Lost Count. Researchers rushed a rigorous study of Iraqi civilian casualties into print. Is that why it was dismissed as pure politics? by Lila Guterman, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 4, 2005
http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i22/22a01001.htm
5. Ibidem
6. Rapid Response Media Alert: Doubt Cast On BBC Claims Regarding Fallujah, Media Lens, April 18, 2005
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/050418_doubt_cast_on_bbc.php
7. NewsWatch complaint not upheld, NewsWatch, BBC News, 3 August 2005
http://news.bbc.co.uk/newswatch/ukfs/hi/newsid_4740000/newsid_4741400/4741431.stm

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Mr Hebbly (Not a Golfer)
Metaphrog

Poetry was his interest (a sort of secret hobby). Highlighting a sensitivity that his outward appearance belied. He had been an electrician, was an electrician; but work was hard to come by and now he was sleeping later.
He’d even written a poem for the bin men after they had woken him several weeks in succession:

The urge to sing is great we know
The tenements close the walls echo
But spare a thought for those who keep
Some different hours and need their sleep
Neatly typed on Peter’s word processor he had affixed the poem in purple ink to the inside back door of the close. That Thursday morning would henceforth in his mind be thought of as the laughter morning: the guffaws and groans of hysteria resonating well into the weekend.
He hadn’t shown his work since but was proud of some fragments he had guarded in a small black spiral bound notebook that still smelled faintly of malodorous damp storage.
And another little piece of paranoid poetry (as he referred to it privately thus, with gentle irony, and no small amount of thinly veiled angst): (Didn’t know how long he had been observed.
Followed. Hadn’t seen them at the garden fence.
Under surveillance; electrically dense.
Interestingly, he couldn’t explain just how, precisely, he had written this. It seemed to ooze forth from the ozone one Saturday morning as he sat ruminating breakfast.
The fridge had felt nice and cold to his head at first that morning. He’d almost wanted to hold a bottle against his scapula and then drink coolly, but on trying this the temperature had gradually increased and then the slow water trickled smelly towards the floor.
Of course, he did not attribute his verse solely to himself but rather ascribed to the somewhat cosmic view that inspiration was, relatively speaking and without religious overtones, divine. His muse had been the clothes pole standing slightly obliquely in the back garden closest to his window. Proud holder of knotted blue twine and rotting remains of Indian weave peg bag. It was while gazing upon this pole that he had seen the bush twitching. True bird watchers, twitchers, in the vernacular, would mutter and mumble to themselves or, more accurately, to microphone and cassette devices discretely secreted about their persons or hidden in their hats. These men were, it appeared, actually watching him (with binoculars). At least two of them were; one was reading a copy of Understanding Alchemy and occasionally giggling to himself attempting to muffle his mirth with the back of a rather large and hairy hand.
A sign snapped neon in his mind: Mr Hebbly (Not a Golfer).
Insipid figures drifted along the pavement, limp clothing over bent frames, horizontal rain washing everything grey.
Somewhere a dog barked, distant metallic sounds coming from over the trees across the park. He’d wanted to walk there, get some green air and escape the incessant traffic noise, but now he wasn’t so sure. Maybe better to take the bus, with its don’t-lick-me sticky poles. Interesting to observe people sometimes, not eavesdropping but listening to the musicality of their language; the pathos of the situations they found themselves in. His own situation was pathetic he realised, the world simply mirroring what he was. He was late and he actually didn’t care. The precise nature of the trouble he would find himself in if he missed the appointment, or made a poor impression by tardiness, sweatiness or general untidiness, was still a mystery. A place of unpleasant ideas he preferred not to visit, but which he knew would involve further penury.
Grinning, bounding figures danced past the window, then began banging and kicking, throwing stones; stopping the bus in its tracks. So much for speeding things along nicely. I’m so sorry I’m late we were attacked and then almost swallowed by zombies. They were drooling. Oh man it was crazy. You should have seen them. A chipped cup, emblazoned with the tired slogan: you have to be crazy... welcome to the world of grey cubicles and desk tidy tedium. He didn’t want a job but was not sure how long he could continue without electricity or gas. Cold beans.
Slowly the bus restarted and crossed the little painted circle that designated a roundabout. “Circle the wagons”, the driver had said. Hannah hadn’t found it funny picking glass out of her head; for weeks tiny particles migrate outwards to the skin surface. Bus then tube, a real commuter today and a suit to boot. Cute.
He suddenly remembered BANG for no BANG apparent reason his last formal interview. Where BANG.
His late arrival had been celebrated with a photograph. Not a modern digital job but strangely film, left to develop as he awaited their bidding in a small overly hot antechamber.
Do you have any faults? Sunshine somehow seemed to stultify and strangle the air in the office. His mouth biscuit-dry and gummed shut. Faults?! He was a veritable tapestry of faults: it was what held him together. He tried humour. “I get stress incontinence.” BANG BANG
Three dull grey faces clouded over in lack of amusement BANG you bastards. “I’m not usually late,” he essayed. Too late. BANG.

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They all belong to Glasgow
From a conversation in early January with Ahmed Khan, who has been peacefully protesting the dawn raids and forced removals of asylum claimants in Glasgow.

Ahmed Khan: I’m a consultant psychiatrist. I’ve been doing the solitary protest at Glasgow’s Brand Street immigration removal centre since June 2005, when I was the only one there. There are now groups protesting, especially on a Saturday, although I’m not a member or affiliate of anything.
The Home Office building at Festival Court on Brand Street, Ibrox is where asylum seekers are forced to sign on every week with their family, and whenever else they’re called. They only get 70% of the minimum social security. It’s where the immigration snatch squad is based that conducts dawn raids on asylum families, forcibly removing them from their homes. When the families walk in to Brand Street to report they are very, very scared as they don’t know if they’re coming out again. People go in to sign on and some leave handcuffed in a van, taken to one of the immigrant prisons like Dungavel or Yarls Wood, before being deported. It’s very unpredictable but the families have been saying that if they know there are people outside supporting them it makes them feel better. When you go to Brand Street, especially on a Saturday, you see families with children, toddlers, babies forced to queue up from early in the morning to report. If the general public were made to stand outside and see this they wouldn’t tolerate it. They wouldn’t be able to live with it.
I’m not there as a political agitator, I’m there from a humanist point of view. The first time I protested I had a placard I found in the street that said, “No To Detention”, and the police tried to arrest me—they regularly harassed and intimidated me. The authorities are so upset about the weekly Saturday protests that they’re telling families not to come to report on that day any more. The trade union for immigration staff in Brand Street (Public and Commercial Services Union) are panicking, apparently Glasgow has become the most difficult city in the UK for the immigration department to work in. “Group 4 Securicor Justice Services were awarded a five year contract, which began in April of 2005, by the Home Office to provide escort and removal services for the Immigration & Nationality Directorate.” A couple of months ago in front of witnesses, Securicor threatened to kill me and have been charged with threatening behaviour—obviously they still stand and growl at me. I put up with abuse every single week, but like I said one person can make a difference. Now there’s lots of us and we’re causing them to run scared.
We blockade the dawn raid vans at 4am every morning. Since we’ve been there they haven’t been able to carry out a single dawn raid. The dawn raids are carried out by immigration—about fifteen of them turn up, wearing balaclavas, black helmets and full body armour, and they kick your door down at 4 or 5am and storm in. There are also police attached to Brand Street to arrest anyone who physically tries to stop a deportation. Instead, when they suddenly open the gates at Brand Street and a raids van drives out at maximum speed we jump out in front of it, and if you’ve got your back turned to them hopefully they’ll think twice before running you down.
In contrast, the local Helen Street police have actually been very sympathetic—they’re the ones that form the big lines of police when we attempt to stop the raids vans leaving. I’ve seen the police in action many times, and this is the most sympathetic I’ve seen them. Initially they would actively voice their sympathy but about a month ago they stopped, but their faces are still saying this is disgusting, we don’t want to be here.
You could say in general we live this stupid ignorant life, coming to coffee shops, doing what we’re told. But when you go to Brand Street you see control at its most raw and physical, then you can see it in terms of the propaganda war being carried out by the government against essentially the weakest, most vulnerable people in this society, because they have no rights. All we’re doing, one way or another, is fighting to give them basic human rights.
When the changes to asylum legislation came into force in 2004, it seemed they were detaining everyone at random. And because many didn’t have access to legal representation it was difficult to know how many. It’s still unclear how anyone is selected—people have been detained before their cases have even been processed! Immigration go out early morning, they grab people and take them. The government uses the phrase “administrative removal” for deportations. According to the UN: “the methods employed to effect removals should be consistent with human rights requirements and failed asylum seekers should be dealt with humanely” and that “specially designed return programmes for children should be established which incorporate the necessary safeguards”.¹ So, someone bursting into your house at 4am in the morning, dragging you out in your night-clothes, handcuffed, leaving the door wide open with all your possessions inside, dragging away your children, putting you into vans, driving you four to five hundred miles to Yarls Wood on the outskirts of Bedford (because we made such a fuss about Dungavel)... essentially it’s terror tactics.

“On 22 September, the First Minister spoke out on dawn raids on Scottish asylum families like the Vucaj family. On 13 September, this family was subjected to a terrifying dawn raid by a sixteen strong immigration snatch squad. Mr Vucaj and 17 year old Elvis were handcuffed and Saida, 13 years old, thought she was still dreaming.
“Despite condemnation from every section of Scottish society, the immigration raids have not stopped.
“On 14 October 2005, the Kupeli children, Suna (9) and Yagmar (6), pupils at Blackfriars Primary School, Gorbals, were dragged from their beds at dawn by a twelve strong immigration snatch squad. Their mother and father were both handcuffed and the family was taken separately in caged vans to Brand Street Immigration Office and then to Yarls Wood Removal Centre, Bedfordshire. (The family were bailed on the 9th November, making it very questionable as to why they were detained in the first place.)
“Two days after this shameful behaviour, Tony McNulty, Immigration Minister went onto BBC Newsnight (16 October) and defended the tactics of dawn raids, despite widespread condemnation—including protests by executive ministers and the Children’s Commissioner, Kathleen Marshall. Mr McNulty went onto say that “We are not knocking down doors at four in the morning”. He claimed that most of the removals took place between 0530 and 0700 am, as if this made any difference to the terror felt by families too scared to sleep in this city.”
Robina Qureshi, Director, Positive Action In Housing (PAIH)

In the Red Road flats in the north of the city to which a number of families have been “dispersed”, the women wake up at four every morning and put their coats on (so at least they’ll have a coat). Everything’s packed, everything’s by the door ready to go. And that’s why we’re setting up unions to mount early morning watches—at least people will know what’s happening to each other. Things will get more organised with the passage of time, but an issue is that it’s actually against the law for asylum seekers to resist and oppose what’s happening to them. If they get politically involved they could be deported just like that.
Tom Harris, the Glasgow South MP, has taken it upon himself to mount a campaign of persecution of asylum seekers, seeking to cut off money from charities working with them, such as PAIH, by saying they are carrying out a political act in helping them. This would be against the rules governing their charitable status. Meanwhile the Charity Commission has actually placed greater positive emphasis on the campaigning activities that charities can undertake.² The problem is they deliberately keep the law vague, and if ever it’s tested they change it very quickly. They have this point about how you’ve got to declare you’re an asylum seeker when it is “practicable”, which is there as a tool to discriminate.

“Say the Vucaj family they deported, maybe things might have changed a wee bit now. But when these people left that country seven or eight year ago, that was the position they left the country in. They fled for their lives and their children’s. If you look at the Vucaj family, particularly the younger ones, half of them can’t speak the language of the country they’re being deported to. Especially the young lassie, the only schooling she’s been through is here in Drumchapel. And with her school mates she was integrated into Scottish society, culture; her music, her dress, this is what she knew. I think it’s very, very unfair, and inhumane... Here’s another sad aspect: in respect to the armed forces the recruiting level has dropped drastically in the last few years, yet the young fella there was going into the army next year. He was already signed up for it, that was his ambition, to become a soldier in a Scottish regiment... We’re crying out for qualified people at all levels and yet we’re throwing these people out. It defies common sense and logic. Bureaucracy gone mad.”
Paddy Hill, Miscarriages of Justice Organisation (MOJO)

The whole refugee issue is surrounded by ignorance. Essentially what the government has been doing the last couple of years is making you scared of things you shouldn’t be scared of, and not telling you about things you should be scared of. The general public are ignorant of what’s going on and even the existence of Brand Street. Secondly, it’s ignorance of racism—what motivates the system here is out-and-out racism. I don’t see any white faces going in to report at Brand Street. You don’t meet any Australians or New Zealanders. Scotland’s First Minister Jack McConnell has recently gone to the US and Canada on this ‘Fresh Talent’ tour to try to increase the number of people coming to live and work in Scotland, while they’re detaining and deporting the people who want to be here!
Variant: In January the NHS Employers’ organisation voiced concern at confirmed poaching of staff from other countries for the health service.³
AK: The so-called brain drain. For example, with my job they actively go out to countries and offer them jobs here, security, money... Sub-Saharan Africa has one psychiatrist per million people. Nigeria has two psychiatrists, when there’s something like 2,000 Nigerian psychiatrists working in the UK. They’re trying to take away talented people who can help those countries, bring them here, put them into dead end jobs; they’re doing the donkey work here. New Labour claim they’ve issued more work permits than ever before.⁴ On the other hand they don’t want refugees from underdeveloped countries, even though many are university educated.
Another recent problem is the removal of the right to work; forcing people into destitution and making them homeless. This is just a way of demoralising and destroying people. I met a man a week ago who’s been living in Glasgow for seventeen years. Suddenly twelve months ago they told him they were deporting him, and they made him homeless and jobless. Now he is absolutely destitute. But because he’s lived here so long he has social contacts and support, unlike most refugees. An effect of this policy that really saddens me is that in the early morning in a couple of a south side streets there are illegal labour markets.
In 2000 the government claimed that the cost of supporting asylum seekers, including legal aid, welfare benefits, housing, health and education was £597 million, or 0.17% of total Government spending (Hansard, 12 April 2000, 227W)—while in 2002 immigrants contributed £2.5 billion more to the state than they receive in benefits and state services (Gott & Johnson 2002).
The most recent problem is, for a six month period, offering people who claimed asylum before the end of December up to £2,000 to withdraw their claims or appeals and to leave. This “cash” would somehow be paid in instalments over twelve months. The picture of a further £1000, possibly funnelled to NGOs, for “education, job training or setting up a business”, gives a false impression of an overall situation that holds no danger for anyone. “Incentivising” people, as they call it, does not make them safe, and the term “voluntary” becomes meaningless if they are returning to danger. We’ve been trying to tell people don’t think of this-—our concern is the moment you give them your details it will be treated as acquiescence.
Just now we’re organising the Red Road flats into unions and attempting to organise Pollokshaws. They are already organised in Knightswood, where there’s the Glasgow Girls, who won the Scottish Campaign of the Year Award at the Scottish politician of the year ceremony. They’re a group of young women aged about 14 to 15 from Drumchapel High School who came together to campaign against the deportations of their friends and neighbours. They organised Knightswood into a refugee union, formed a database of everyone there, and the kids in school formed support groups so when the Vucaj family were detained they responded immediately.

“Mr McConnell wanted to have a private meeting with us. So we started talking to him and expressed the issues. I looked in his eyes and I begged him, ‘Please help us.’ He said he would see what he could do. He looked like he understood. He gave us so much hope and we had so much faith in him. But after that we went to the parliament again because the Vucaj family were taken away. That time Mr McConnell did not meet us. Saida Vucaj wanted to talk to him. I was upset. She is just a 13-year-old girl and she was saying please help us. It was a horrible feeling. We’ve pictures of us crying from then.
“I really thought he would help us. But obviously there’s no help from him. He didn’t just let me down, he let me and all the other asylum seekers down.”
Sunday Herald, Dec 11 2005, Amal Azzudin, aged 15, Glasgow Girls

The Girls went to a meeting at the Scottish Parliament with Jack McConnell and said to him you lot are all talk, what are you actually going to do for the right of all young people to stay in Scotland, and against deportations? Since they were a group of youngsters who basically put McConnell on the spot they got a lot of publicity. McConnell publicly agreed with them that the dawn raids were outrageous... blahdeblah... what everyone wanted to hear. And when it looked like the Scottish Parliament might act the Immigration Minister Tony McNulty was dispatched from Westminster and McConnell stopped talking like that. The parliament’s political impetus to deal with this situation stopped, but more and more people are organising.

“Today the immigration officers came in my house at 6am. First they knocked on the door, then someone said ‘open the door now, I am from the Immigration Service’.
“I am not that sure how many of them there were at my front door but it looked like 15 to 17 of them. When my dad opened the door all of them split up. About four women came into my room, some went in with my dad, some with my brothers.
“They handcuffed my dad and my big brother. They never let me and my mum see my brother and dad. The immigration officer told us to pack. I saw my mum crying. At the same time I was crying too. I was shaking. I was tired. I was scared when I saw them because they were telling us to get up and one of them told me to tell my mum that we had to leave the UK that Friday.
“When they came [referring to dawn raid] I just jumped up, thinking what are these four people doing in my room? I was dead scared, you know, I was not thinking, all my good clothes are in my house, I forgot, I left my new clothes and took my old ones, just tired, never expected it, they just said get up. I was shaking, I was tired, I wanted my mum. But my mum was crying in the other room. Here, my mum says I get scared in the middle of the night, I wake and scream some nights ... As soon as I wake up I can’t remember why I’m scared, but I feel scared.
“Life in Yarls Wood every single day is becoming more boring. It is. I’m here three weeks and it’s like brain damage, because you’re trapped inside.
“It feels like I’ve done something wrong to be in a prison. I can’t hardly eat, only once a day, because, honest, I’m very, very depressed.
“My mum’s depressed, crying in bed all day, but she’s hanging there. I’m not joking, I’m scared if my mum get’s sick, she was already sick with worrying about our case in Glasgow for five years. My dad, he is the same as my mum, very depressed. His eyes are red, his head is pure thumping. But we just have to hang on there, keep strong.
“I heard about my girls meeting the First Minister. Is he helping? I haven’t been to the Scottish Parliament, but I could go one day. Have you been there?
“If I saw the First minister, I would just say: ‘Hi, how you doing? I hope you and your family is very well. And if you help me and my family, I would thank you so much.’
“How could I forget life in Glasgow? I love my Glasgow, I remember going shopping with my friends, having fun, listening to music in my own room, not worrying, having my own space.
“If we come back to Glasgow, I want to finish the book, ‘The Ragged Boy’, with our teacher Mr Turnball. Anyway, I’m writing my own book now in here—I don’t know how my book finishes, but I’ll see tomorrow what’s gonna happen.
“The government might say that Kosovo is safe, but if only they lived there for just two days they would change their minds. Two days there feels like five years. The British government just don’t understand. That’s why I am angry. But what can I do? I am just a child.”
Saida Vucaj, aged 13

Saturday morning vigils at the Brand Street Immigration Centre: Immigration and Nationality Directorate office, Festival Court, 200 Brand Street, Glasgow G51 1DH. Nearest Underground, Cessnock.

Notes
1. UNHCR: ‘UK White Paper on Asylum and Immigration: “Secure Borders, Safe Haven”’
UNHCR London 18 March 2002, www.unhcr.org.uk/legal/positions/UNHCR%20Comments/comments_WP2002.htm
2. www.charity-commission.gov.uk/publications/cc9.asp
3. www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1677505,00.html
4. www.scottishlabour.org.uk/freshtalentspeech/

Accompanying photographs by Gareth Harper www.photoecosse.net

No Border Network Glasgow
www.openborders.org.uk
Positive Action in Housing
www.paih.org
National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns
www.ncadc.org.uk
Stop deporting children
www.standup4children.org
Scotland Against Criminalising Communities
www.sacc.org.uk

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From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks
Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter

In Florian Schneider’s documentary Organizing the Unorganizables (2002), Raj Jayadev of the DE-BUG worker’s collective in Silicon Valley identifies the central problem of temporary labour as one of time. Jayadev recounts the story of ‘Edward’, a staff-writer for the Debug magazine: “My Mondays roll into my Tuesdays, and my Tuesdays roll into my Wednesdays without me knowing it. And I lose track of time and I lose hope with what tomorrow’s going to be”. Jayadev continues: “What concerns temp workers the most is not so much a $2 an hour pay raise or safer working conditions. Rather, they want the ability to create, to look forward to something new, and to reclaim the time of life”. How does this desire to create, all too easily associated with artistic production, intersect with the experiences of other workers who engage in precarious forms of labour?
With the transformation of labour practices in advanced capitalist systems under the impact of globalisation and information technologies, there has arisen a proliferation of terms to describe the commonly experienced yet largely undocumented transformations within working life. Creative labour, network labour, cognitive labour, service labour, affective labour, linguistic labour, immaterial labour; these categories often substitute for each other, but in their very multiplication they point to diverse qualities of experience that are not simply reducible to each other. On the one hand these labour practices are the oppressive face of post-Fordist capitalism, yet they also contain potentialities that spring from workers’ own refusal of labour and subjective demands for flexibility – demands that in many ways precipitate capital’s own accession to interminable restructuring and rescaling, and in so doing condition capital’s own techniques and regimes of control.
The complexity of these relationships has amounted to a crisis within modes of organisation based around the paranoid triad: union, state, firm. Time and again, across the past fifteen years, we heard proclamations of the end of the nation-state, its loss of control or subordination to new and more globally extensive forms of sovereignty. Equally, we are now over familiar with claims for the decline of trade unions: their weakening before transnational flows of capital, the erosion of salaried labour, or the carefully honed attacks of neoliberal politicians. More recently, the firm itself is not looking so good, riddled with internal instability and corruption for which the names Enron, Worldcom, and Parmalat provide only the barest index. Clearly, the ‘networked organisation’ is not the institutional form best suited to the management of labour and life within information economies and networked socialities. But it is not these tendencies themselves as much as their mutual implications that have led to the radical recasting of labour organisation and its concomitant processes of bargaining and arbitration.
Within the ambit of social movements and autonomous political groups, these new forms of labour organisation have been given the name precarity, an inelegant neologism coined by English speakers to translate the French precarité. Although the term has been in circulation since the early 1980s, it is really only over the past two or three years that it has acquired prominence in social movement struggles. Particularly in the Western European nations, the notion of precarity has been at the centre of a long season of protests, actions, and discussions, including events such as EuroMayDay 2004 (Milan and Barcelona) and 2005 (in seventeen European cities), Precarity Ping Pong (London, October 2004), the International Meeting of the Precariat (Berlin, January 2005), and Precair Forum (Amsterdam, February 2005).¹ According to Milanese activist Alex Foti (2004), precarity is “being unable to plan one’s time, being a worker on call where your life and time is determined by external forces”. The term refers to all possible shapes of unsure, not guaranteed, flexible exploitation: from illegalised, seasonal and temporary employment to homework, flex- and temp-work to subcontractors, freelancers or so-called self-employed persons. But its reference also extends beyond the world of work to encompass other aspects of intersubjective life, including housing, debt, and the ability to build affective social relations.
Classically, the story told about precarity is that it was capital’s response to the rejection of ‘jobs for life’ and demands for free time and flexibility by workers in the 1970s. Thus the opposite of precarity is not regular work, stable housing, and so on. Rather, such material security is another version of precarity, consuming time, energy, and affective relations as well as producing the anxiety that results from the “financialisation of daily life” – to steal a felicitous phrase from Randy Martin (2002). Among other things, the notion of precarity has provided a rallying call and connecting device for struggles surrounding citizenship, labour rights, the social wage, and migration. And importantly, these struggles are imagined to require new methods of creative-social organisation that do not make recourse to social state models, trade union solidarities, or Fordist economic structures.
The political challenge is to determine whether the uncertain, unpredictable condition of precarity can operate as an empirical object of thought and practice. Precarity would seem to cancel out the possibility of such an undertaking, since the empirical object is presupposed as stable and contained, whereas, the boundaries between labour, action, and intellect appear increasingly indistinct within a post-Fordist mode of production. Can common resources (political organisation) be found within individual and collective experiences of permanent insecurity? Furthermore, is there a relationship between the potential for political organisation and the technics of communication facilitated by digital technologies? In sum, what promise does precarity offer as a strategy and why has it emerged at this precise historical moment as a key concept for political thought and struggle?
In order to address these questions, we first outline the distinction between ‘precarity’ and ‘precariousness’. In surveying the various ways in which these terms have circulated, we wish to establish a framework within which questions of labour, life and social-political organisation can be understood. The various uncertainties defining contemporary life are carried over – and, we argue, internal to – the logic of informatisation. Our aim, however, is not to collapse respective differences into a totalising logic that provides a definitive assessment or system of analysis; rather, we seek to identify some of the forces, rhythms, discourses and actions that render notions such as creativity, innovation, and organisation, along with the operation of capital, with a complexity whose material effects are locally situated within transversal networks. Where there are instances of inter-connection between, say, the work of migrants packaging computer parts or cleaning offices and that of media labour in a call centre, software development firm or digital post-production for a film studio, we see a common expressive capacity predicated on the dual conditions of exploitation and uncertainty.
Yet to cast the experience of informational labour as exclusively oppressive is to overlook the myriad ways in which new socialities emerge with the potential to create political relations that force an adjustment in the practices of capital. Such collectivities are radically different from earlier forms of political organisation, most notably those of the union and political party. Instead, we find the logic of the network unleashed, manifesting as situated interventions whose effects traverse a combination of spatial scales. The passage from precarity to precariousness foregrounds the importance of relations. It makes sense, then, to also consider the operation of networks, which above all else are socio-technical systems made possible by the contingency of relations.

Uncertainty, Flexibility, Transformation
To begin to grapple with the sort of questions sketched above it is necessary to acknowledge that the concept of precarity is constitutively doubled-edged. On the one hand, it describes an increasing change of previously guaranteed permanent employment conditions into mainly worse paid, uncertain jobs. In this sense, precarity leads to an interminable lack of certainty, the condition of being unable to predict one’s fate or having some degree of stability on which to construct a life. On the other hand, precarity supplies the precondition for new forms of creative organisation that seek to accept and exploit the flexibility inherent in networked modes of sociality and production. That the figure of the creative, cognitive, or new media worker has emerged as the figure of the precarious worker par excellence is symptomatic of this ambivalent political positioning. Some commentators have gone as far as to suggest that the collaborative processes and affective relations that characterise artistic work reveal the inner dynamics of the post-Fordist economy. By questioning the boundaries between social labour and creative practice, for instance, Brian Holmes (2004) follows one of the central themes of Italian post-operaista thought, arguing that creative linguistic relation (the very stuff of human intersubjectivity) has become central to contemporary labour regimes.
No doubt there is some truth to the claim that the dynamic relationship between material production and social reproduction converges, under contemporary capitalism, on the horizon of language and communication. This argument, as developed in the work of thinkers like Christian Marazzi (1999) and Paolo Virno (2004a, 2004b), has been redeployed in any number of contexts to question the boundaries between creative action and social labour. It would be foolish to underestimate the utility of these interventions. But implicit in this tendency to collapse otherwise disparate forms of labour into the containing category of creativity is an eclipse of those forms of bodily, coerced, and unpaid work primarily associated with migrants and women (and not with artists, computer workers, or new media labourers).
In this sense, it is probably not a good thing that precarity has become the meme of the moment. Proclamations of the epoch-breaking character of contemporary labour market transformations, while doubtless augmenting the rhetorical force of the struggles surrounding precarity, inevitably occlude two important facts. First, the current increase of precarious work in the wealthy countries is only a small slice of capitalist history. If the perspective is widened, both geographically and historically, precarity becomes the norm (and not some exception posed against a Keynesian or Fordist ideal of capitalist stability). With this shift in perspective the focus also moves to other forms of work, still contained within the logic of industrial or agricultural production, that do not necessarily abide the no-material-product logic of so-called cognitive, immaterial, or creative labour. Without denying that neoliberal globalisation and the boom-bust dot.com cycle of information technology have placed new pressures on labour markets in the wealthy countries, it is also important to approach this wider global perspective in light of a second fact: that capital too is precarious, given to crises, risk, and uncertainty.

Labour, Communication, Movement
Importantly, capital has always tried to shore up its own precariousness through the control of labour and, in particular, the mobility of labour. It is the insight of Moulier-Boutang’s De l’esclavage au salariat (1998) to identify the subjective practice of labour mobility as the connecting thread in the history of capitalism. Far from being archaisms or transitory adjustments destined to be wiped out by modernisation, Moulier-Boutang contends that labour regimes such as slavery and indenture are constituent of capitalist development and arise precisely from the attempt to control or limit the worker’s flight. In this perspective, the figure of the undocumented migrant becomes the exemplary precarious worker since, in the current global formation, the entire system of border control and detention technology provides the principal means by which capital controls the mobility of labour. Because the depreciation and precarisation of migrant labour threatens to engulf the workforce as a whole (and because the subjective mobility and resistance of migrants tests the limits of capitalist control), their position becomes the social anticipation of a political option to struggle against the general development of labour and life in the contemporary world (Mezzadra, 2001; Mezzadra, 2004).
A similar argument can be made regarding the un- or under-paid labour of women, both as regards the status of the patriarchal family as the locus of the reproduction of labour power in capitalist societies and preponderance of women in precarious sectors such as care-work, house-work, or call centres (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 292-293, 2004: 110-111; Huws, 2003). Indeed, the Madrid-based group Precarias alla Deriva, which has always resisted the temptation to use the term precarity as a common name for diverse and singular labour situations, has devoted much of its research to the feminisation of precarious work. And the sheer proliferation of women in contemporary labour migration flows means that there is a great deal of convergence between approaches that emphasise the role of border technologies in capital’s attempts to minimise its precariousness and those that focus on the ongoing marginalisation and undervaluation of women’s work (Anderson, 2000; Gill, 2002; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Parrenãs, 2001; Huws, 2003).
The point is not to replace the figure of the creative worker with that of the migrant or female care-worker in the discussions and actions surrounding precarity. Nor is it to collapse these various types of labour practice into a composite category, such as the much circulated term precariat (which combines the words precario and proletariat in a single class category). Equally, it is insufficient to subordinate these very different labour practices to a single logic of production (which is the tactic followed by Hardt and Negri when they argue that all forms of labour in the contemporary world, while maintaining their specificity, are transformed and mastered by processes of informatisation). In terms of political practice and strategy, we believe there is something to be gained by holding these labour practices in some degree of conceptual and material separation but articulating them in struggle.
For instance, the fight for open architectures of electronic communication pursued by many creative workers cannot be equated with the subjective practices of mobility pursued by undocumented labour migrants. While these actions might be conjoined on some conceptual horizon (through notions such as exodus or flow), they have distinct (and always highly contextual) manifestations on the ground. There are clearly important differences between copyright regimes and border control technologies, even if both are ultimately held down by the assertion of sovereign power, whether at the national or transnational level. Recognising this, however, does not mean that the struggles surrounding free software and the ‘no-border’ struggles surrounding undocumented migration cannot work in tandem or draw on each other tactically. As the editorial team of Makeworld Paper#3 writes: “the demand to combine the freedom of movement with the freedom of communication is social dynamite” (Bove et al., 2003).
Precarity, then, does not have its model worker. Neither artist nor migrant, nor hacker nor housewife, there is no precarious Stakhanov. Rather, precarity strays across any number of labour practices, rendering their relations precisely precarious – which, is to say, given to no essential connection but perpetually open to temporary and contingent relations. In this sense, precarity is something more than a position in the labour market, since it traverses a spectrum of labour markets and positions within them. Moreover, the at best fleeting connections, alliances and affiliations between otherwise distinct social groupings brings into question much of the current debate around the ‘multitudes’ as somehow constituting a movement of movements. Such a proposition implies a degree of co-ordination and organisation that rarely coalesces at an empirical level beyond the time of the event.
There is little chance, then, that a coherent political opposition will emerge from the organised activities of civil society. Rather, what we see here is a further consolidation of capital. More disconcerting is the likelihood of civil society organisations becoming increasingly decoupled from their material constitution – that is, the continual formation and reformation of social forces from which they were born. This is a predicament faced by activist movements undergoing a scalar transformation. The system of modern sovereignty, which functioned around the dual axiom of representation and rights, cannot encompass these new modes of organisation. Nor can the postliberal model of governance, which rearranges vertical relations into a horizontal order of differentiated subjectivities. Nonetheless, the problem of scale remains. In the case of social movements that begin to engage with what passes for global civil society, this can entail an abstraction of material constitution that is often difficult to separate from the histories and practices of abstract sociality vis-à-vis capitalism. Such a condition begins to explain why there is a tendency to collapse the vastly different situations of workers into the catch-all categories of the multitudes and precarity. This, if you will, is the logic of the empty signifier. And here lies the challenge, and difficulty, of articulating new forms of social-political organisation in ways that remain receptive to local circumstances that are bound to the international division of labour.
We suggest the emergence of precarity as a central political motif of the global movement relates not only to labour market conditions but also to the prevalent moods and conditions within advanced capitalist societies at a time of seemingly interminable global conflict. Once again this brings the doubled-edged nature of precarity to the fore. For while precarity provides a platform for struggle against the degradation of labour conditions and a means of imagining more flexible circumstances of work and life, it also risks dovetailing with the dominant rhetoric of security that emanates from the established political classes of the wealthy world. This is particularly the case for those versions of precarity politics that place their faith in state intervention as a means of improving or attenuating the worsening conditions of labour.

Ontological Insecurity in the USA
Undoubtedly, current perceptions of insecurity are complex and cannot be traced to a single source such as global terrorism, precarity at work, environmental risk, or exposure to the volatility of financial markets (say through pension investments and/or interest rates). At the existential level, these experiences mix or work in concert to create a general feeling of unease. And the conviction that the state (whether conceived on the national scale or in terms of some more extensive sovereign entity like the E.U.) can provide stability in any one of these spheres is not necessarily separable from the notion that it can eliminate risk and contingency in another. Not only does this imply that the struggle against precarity, if not carefully conceived, may bolster and/or feed off state-fueled security politics, but also it suggests that there is something deeper about precarity than its articulation to labour alone would suggest – some more fundamental, but never foundational, human vulnerability, that neither the act nor potential of labour can exhaust.
This is certainly the sense in which Judith Butler, in Precarious Life (2004), confronts what she calls precariousness (which should be distinguished from precarity intended in the labour market sense). For Butler, precariousness is an ontological and existential category that describes the common, but unevenly distributed, fragility of human corporeal existence. A condition made manifest in the U.S. by the events of 911, this fundamental and pre-individual vulnerability is subject to radical denial in the discourses and practices of global security. For instance, Butler understands President George W. Bush’s 921 declaration that “our grief has turned to anger and our anger to resolution” to constitute a repudiation of precariousness and mourning in the name of an action that purports to restore order and to promote the fantasy that the world formerly was orderly. And she seeks in the recognition of this precariousness an ethical encounter that is essential to the constitution of vulnerability and interdependence as preconditions for the ‘human’.
Key to Butler’s argument is the proposition that recognition of precariousness entails not simply an extrapolation from an understanding of one’s own precariousness to an understanding of another’s precarious life but an understanding of “the precariousness of the Other”. Her emphasis is on the relationality of human lives and she sees this not only as a question of political community but also as the basis for theorising dependency and ethical responsibility. Rather than seeking to describe the features of a universal human condition (something that she claims does not exist or yet exist), she asks who counts as human. And with this reference to humans not regarded as humans, she seeks not a simple entry of the “excluded into an established ontology, but an insurrection at the level of ontology, a critical opening up of the questions, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade?” (2004: 33). At this level, the theorisation of precariousness impinges on fundamental ontological questions and, to this extent, it suggests a means of joining some of the actions and arguments surrounding precarity to a more philosophically engaged encounter with notions such as creativity, contingency, and relation.
As noted above, Butler’s argument, while claiming to affect an ontological insurrection, takes shape above all in the post-911 United States. A passionate appeal for the necessity of critique under circumstances where popular energies have rallied around the executive branch of government, Precarious Life understandably focuses on the progress of global war and the transformations of life within the U.S. polity. But it also presents precariousness as a general principle of the human (and who counts as such). And while it emphasises the uneven distribution of this basic human fragility, it does not analyse the workings of this unevenness in detail (as if they were merely given, coincidental and outside the realm of fundamental ontology). In other words, Butler does not explore the whole problematic of global capitalism and its relations to the current conflict.² Certainly these relations are of a complex order and cannot be reduced to the simple formula (‘no blood for oil’) that would have war working always in the service of capital and vice versa.
In a world where the operations of the global market (by which any object, regardless of location, can be valued and ordered) do not necessarily accord with the logic of strategy (by which spatially fixed resources, subject to calculation and command in the aggregate, are brought under control by state actors), there are likely discrepancies to exploit between the workings of capital and the enterprise of security (Neilson, forthcoming). For instance, the effort to block the flow of laundered money that funds terror networks requires a tightening of regulation on that very institution that lies at the heart of global neoliberal enterprise, the deregulated financial market (Napoleoni, 2003). Indeed, it may be in these gaps, where security and capital come into conflict, that the motif of precarious life receives its most radical articulation, where precariousness meets precarity, and the struggle against neoliberal capitalism that dominated the global movement from Seattle might finally work in tandem with the struggle against war. Such a realisation must be central to any politics that seeks to reach beyond the limits of precarity as a strategy of organisation.

Innovative Capacities and Common Resources
Key to understanding the human capacity for innovation is the recognition that such change is not the norm but the exception, something that occurs rarely and unexpectedly. Virno (2004b) pursues a reading of paragraph 206 Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, concerning the impossibility of applying rules, in an attempt to understand the conditions of such an exception and their radical difference from organisational models that aim to extract an economic value from creative practices. Crucial for Virno in Wittgenstein’s understanding of normative or rule-governed behaviour is that the rule can never specify the conditions of its application – e.g., there is no rule that specifies how high the tennis ball can be thrown during service. For such a specification to be made, another rule about the application of rules would have to be instituted, and so on to an infinite regress, just as in the normative legal system of judicial precedent. Creative innovation, however, requires a mode of action that escapes this formal space of regulation.
Whatever the current possibilities for desertion or exodus, it is hard to escape the observation that the corporate-state nexus increasingly asserts a sovereign command over the very matter of our bodies. With the informatisation of social and economic relations, intellectual property is the regime of scarcity through which control is exerted over the substance of life. Think of the rush to patent recombinant DNA sequences or the pressure placed upon agricultural industries and government representatives to adopt genetically modified organisms. Despite the dot.com crash of 2000, stocks in biotech industries are again yielding substantial profits – a phenomenon fuelled in part by aging populations anxious to invest in narratives of security and technologies of arrested decay. This revival of biotech stocks can also be seen as a response to the affective economy associated with the shift of venture capital into the business of bio-terrorism and a move from what Melinda Cooper (2004) calls the irrational exuberance of nineties speculative capital into an era of indefinite insecurity and permanent catastrophe within a post-911 environment.
Yet where resides the space of commons exterior to both the state and the interests of the market? Indeed, is it even possible to invoke this sense of exteriority within an ontological and social-technical field of immanence and political economy in which capital interpenetrates the matter of life? It is no longer feasible to draw a homology between the commons and the notion of the public – a social body too easily assumed as co-extensive with the citizen-subject. Both the citizen-subject and the public are categories that refer particularly to European and North American political legacies that have long since declined as constituent powers of democratic polities (see Montag, 2000 and Nowotny, 2005).
If ‘the public’ has become a non sequitur vis-à-vis the informational state, there is nonetheless a persistence of social desires to create “modulations of feeling” whose logic of expression is antithetical to the strictures of control set forth by the informational state. The widespread practice of file-sharing within peer-to-peer networks is routinely cited by many as an exemplary instance of resistance to the closure of the commons by IPRs. The increasing adoption of open source software and Creative Commons by governments and businesses across the economic spectrum is another example of a kind of reverse engineering of the super-structure by the educative capacity of civil society and informational social movements. Certainly, we would not want to underestimate the positive potential of such transformations and redefinitions of information societies. Yet just as it is clear that such activities endow networks with an organisational force, so too is it uncertain whether substantive change will eventuate in the material situation of precarious labour and life.

Communicative Networks and Creative Expression
It is one thing to think innovation as a common resource outside the phantasm of total market control; it is another to consider the operation of such a resource. Here we find it necessary to engage the materialities of communication in order to illuminate further the exceptional quality of innovation. In so doing we introduce the political concept of the ‘constitutive outside’ and proceed to an analysis of the creative industries. Our interest is to discern the ways in which the ontology of precariousness is immanent to networked systems of communication. How, we wonder, do the internal dynamics of social-technical communication constitute an ontology that oscillates between uncertainty, fluctuation, and fleeting association on the one hand, and moments of intensity, hope, and exhilaration on the other? In what ways are global information systems embedded in singular patterns of life? Is it possible for the pre-individual, linguistic-cognitive common – or general intellect – to operate as a transcendent biopolitical force by which living labour asserts a horizon of pure virtuality (unforeseen capacity to create and invent)? How might an ontology of networks be formulated, and does creative potential subsist in networks of social-technical relations?
Much creative industries discourse in recent years places an emphasis on the potential for creative clusters, hubs and precincts as the social-urban arrangement or model that is supposedly the conduit best suited to the establishment of cultural economies. Along with ‘mapping documents’ that set out to demonstrate ‘value-chains’ of innovation based on the concentration of a range of cultural activities and stakeholders, this focus points to the inherent fragility of cultural economies.³
In short, there is little empirical correspondence between the topography of ‘mapping documents’ and ‘value-chains’ and the actual social networks and cultural flows that comprise the business activities and movement of finance capital, information and labour-power within creative economies. Such attempts to register the mutual production of economic and creative value are inherently reductive systems. Capital always exceeds regimes of control, inevitably destabilising the delicate balance between determinacy and indeterminacy, regulation and inherent precariousness. And for this reason we maintain that capital is a force whose dynamic is shaped considerably by cultural and social inputs whose register, while largely undetected, comprises a common from which new social forces and modes of creative organisation may proliferate.
The implication for creative expression as it manifests in the variegated patterns of labour within informational economies can be summarised as follows: the regulation of labour-power is conditioned by the dual regime of scarcity and border control. Scarcity consists of that which is perceived and constructed as finite and inscribed with economic value (e.g., the logic of IPRs). Boundaries confer the expressive form of creative labour and its concomitant networks with either discursive legitimacy and economic value or disavowal and the suspension of movement. The governance of networks, however, is not so straightforward or easily defined. If the ontic of networks is underscored by interpenetration and disequilibrium – as evidenced, for example, in the fragile life of mailing lists, prone as they are to rapid destruction, irrelevance and closure if actors such as ‘trolls’ are unchecked (Lovink, 2003) – then it becomes much harder to generalise about the expressive capacity of social-technical life as it subsists in a state of permanent construction.
For all the talk in creative industries policy and analysis of unleashing the creative potential of cultural workers, what comes to pass is the reproduction of the same. Such an economy is, after all, exercised through the model of clusters. Who ever said Feudalism was eclipsed by the modern state system? Despite the pervasiveness of creative and cultural networks within government policies and academic literature, one is hard pressed to find evidence of networks in any operative sense. Projects that assemble a range of actors or stakeholders within a cultural precinct or business park are simply not the same as networks. For our purposes, networks consist of social-technical relations that are immanent to the media of communication. The collaborations that ensue within communicative networks are frequently promiscuous, unlike the ‘old boys’ style of partnerships developed in what is much better defined as the cluster model of the creative industries.

Freedom without Security
It is worth recalling that the precondition of surplus-value is cooperation. In this sense, the potential for alternative modalities of organising creative labour is inseparable from the uncertain rhythms, fluctuations and manifestations of global capital. Indeed, it is precisely this relation between labour-power and capital that defines the immanence of socio-technical networks. Given these mutual dependencies, it is not beyond reason to imagine that variations of living labour might, as Jayadev noted at the start of this essay, “reclaim the time of life”. Such interventions are not as radical as they might sound. But they nonetheless involve transforming precarity as a normative condition precipitated by the demands of capital.
In the case of creative labour, a reclaiming of the time of life entails a shifting of values and rhetoric away from an emphasis on the exploitation of intellectual property (and thus labour-power) and reinstating or inventing technics of value that address the uncertainties of economic and ontological life. Engaging rather than sublimating the antagonisms inherent to such experiences is, in part, a matter of rethinking networked modes of relation. The many accounts, events and analyses on precarity documented earlier in this essay begin to tell the story of social-political networks seeking to institute creative projects responsive to situations of living labour. The communication of such efforts begins to comprise a history of networks as they subsist within an informational present. Moreover, we find here a common resource from which lessons, models, and ideas may be exchanged and repurposed as transformative techniques.
Such processes, however, are by no means straightforward. By posing the question of the unstable ontology of networks alongside that of migration and border control, we are forced to think together the precarity that invests the labour relation and the regime of border reinforcement, which is one of the primary registers of the current ubiquity of war. Earlier we cited the creators of a free newspaper and collaborative filtering project who described as “social dynamite” the attempt to combine freedom of communication with freedom of movement. But the effects of this social dynamite are disparate and, in their very multiplicity, inflate the tendency to treat these phenomena as separate moments. Such a disconnection again poses the question of commonality and the resources it might supply for the imagination of alternative forms of life.
The ongoing tussle between those who cast the creative worker as the precarious labourer par excellence and those who assign this role to the undocumented migrant is one symptom of this divide. Such a debate is certainly worth having, but it also misses the point: that being, to alter the circumstances in which capital meets life. All too often the precarity struggle revolves about the proposition life is work. But the challenge is not to reaffirm the productivism implicit in this realisation but rather to take it as the basis for another life – a life in which contingency and instability are no longer experienced as threats. A life in which, as Goethe wrote in Faust II, many millions can “dwell without security but active and free”.

Notes
* This is a shorter version of an essay that was first published in Fibreculture Journal 5 (2005), http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/neilson_rossiter.html.
1. Over the past year there has been a proliferation of magazines, journals and mailing lists exploring the theme of precarity and the associated problematic of labour organisation. These include Greenpepper, Mute, Multitudes, republicart, ephemera, European Journal of Higher Arts Education, Derive Approdi, and aut-op-sy.
2. While more expansive on the global dimensions of this problematic, David Harvey (2003) also remains primarily within a U.S. political imaginary. See also Arrighi (2005a, 2005b).
3. While a recent UNCTAD (2004: 3) policy report notes that ‘too often [creative industries are] associated with a precarious form of job security’, such observations remain the exception within much policy-making and academic research on the creative industries. A recent issue of The International Journal of Cultural Policy, edited by David Hesmondhalgh and Andy C. Pratt (2005), tables some of the most sophisticated research on cultural and creative industries to date. See also O’Regan, Gibson and Jeffcutt (2004), Gill (2002), and Ross (2003).
Sites
aut-op-sy mailing list (https://lists.resist.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aut-op-sy/
Chainworkers, (http://www.chainworkers.org/dev
Derive Approdi, http://www.deriveapprodi.org/
DE-BUG: The Online Magazine of the South Bay, (http://www.siliconvalleydebug.org/
Dutch labour market reforms, (http://www.eiro.eurofound.eu.int/1999/01/feature/nl9901117f.html
ephemera: theory & politics in organization, (http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/4-3/4-3index.htm
EuroMayDay 2004 (Milan and Barcelona), (http://www.euromayday.org/
EuroMayDay2005 (in seventeen European cities), (http://www.euromayday.org/index.php
European Journal of Higher Arts Education, (http://www.ejhae.elia-artschools.org/Issue2/en.htm
Flexicurity, (http://www.chainworkers.org/dev/node/view/102
Greenpepper Magazine, (http://www.greenpeppermagazine.org/process/tiki-index.php?page=Precarity+%3A+Contents+Page
Incommunicado, http://incommunicado.info/
Intermittents du Spectacle, (http://www.intermittents-danger.fr.fm/
International Meeting of the Precariat (Berlin, January 2005), (http://www.globalproject.info/art-3264.html
Molleindustria, http://www.molleindustria.it/
multitudes, (http://multitudes.samizdat.net/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=458
Mute Magazine, (http://www.metamute.com/look/issue.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=1&NrIssue=29
Organizing the Unorganizables, (dir. Florian Schneider, 2004), (http://kein.tv/
Precarias alla Deriva, (http://www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias.htm
republicart, (http://www.republicart.net/disc/precariat/index.htm
Precair Forum (Amsterdam, February 2005), (http://precairforum.nl/ENG/index.html
Precarity Ping Pong (London, October 2004), (http://greenpeppermagazine.org/pingPong.html
San Precario, http://www.sanprecario.info/

References
Anderson, Bridget. Doing the Dirty Work: The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (London: Zed Books, 2000).
Arrighi, Giovanni. ‘Hegemony Unravelling, Part 1’, New Left Review 32 (2005a): 23-80.
______. ‘Hegemony Unravelling, Part 2’, New Left Review 33 (2005b): 81-116.
Bove, Arianna; Empson, Erik; Lovink, Geert; Schneider, Florian; Zehle, Soenke. (eds) Makeworlds Paper 3, 11 September (2003), http://www.makeworlds.org/node/2.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004).
Cooper, Melinda. ‘On the Brink: From Mutual Deterrence to Uncontrollable War’, Contretemps 4 (September, 2004): 2-18.
Foti, Alex. ‘Precarity and N/european Identity. Interview with Merjin Oudenampsen and Gavin Sullivan’, Greenpepper (2004), http://www.black-international-cinema.com/BIC05/XX.BIC2005/HTML/articles/article_08.htm.
Gill, Rosalind. ‘Cool, Creative and Egalitarian? Exploring Gender in Project-based New Media Work’, Information, Communication & Society 5.1 (2002): 70-89.
Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
______. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
Harvey, David. The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Hesmondhalgh, David and Pratt, Andy C. (eds) ‘Special issue: The Cultural Industries and Cultural Policy’, The International Journal of Cultural Policy 11.1 (2005).
Holmes, Brian. ‘The Spaces of a Cultural Question. An Email Interview with Brian Holmes by Marion von Osten’, republicart (April, 2004), http://www.republicart.net/disc/precariat/holmes-osten01_en.htm.
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
Lovink, Geert. My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition (Rotterdam: V2_/NAi Publishers, 2003).
Marazzi, Christian. Il posto dei calzini. La svolta lingusitica dell’ economia e i suoi effetti sulla politica (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999).
Martin, Randy. The Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).
Mezzadra, Sandro. Diritto di fuga: Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione (Verona: ombre corte, 2001).
______. ‘Capitalismo, migrazioni e lotte sociali. Appunti per una teoria dell’ autonomia delle migrazioni’, in Sandro Mezzadra (ed.) I confini della liberta: Per un’ analisi politica delle migrazioni contemporanee (Roma: DeriveApprodi, 2004).
Montag, Warren. ‘The Pressure of the Street: Habermas’s Fear of the Masses’, in Mike Hill and Warren Montag (eds) Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere (New York: Verso, 2000), 132-145.
Moulier-Boutang, Yann. De l’esclavage au salariat. É conomie historique du salariat bridé (Paris: PUF, 1998).
Napoleoni, Loretta. Modern Jihad: Tracing the Dollars behind the Terror Networks (London: Pluto, 2003).
Neilson, Brett. ‘The Market and the Police: Finance Capital in Permanent Global War’, in Jon Solomon and Naoki Sakai (eds) Traces 4, Special issue on ‘Addressing the Multitude of Foreigners’ (forthcoming).
Nowotny, Stefan. ‘Clandestine Publics’, republicart (March, 2005), http://www.republicart.net/disc/publicum/nowotny05_en.htm.
O’Regan, Tom; Gibson, Lisanne and Jeffcut, Paul. (eds) Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 112 (2004).
Parrenãs, Rachel Salazar. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
Ross, Andrew. No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson (New York: Semiotext[e], 2004a).
______. ‘Motto di spirito e azione innovativa’, Forme di Vita 2 & 3 (2004b): 11-36.
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Creative Industries and Development, Eleventh Session, São Paulo, 13-18 June (2004), http://www.unctad.org/en/docs/tdxibpd13_en.pdf.

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Guardians of Power
Gabriele Zamparini interviews Media Lens’ editors

‘Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media’¹ is a new book by David Edwards and David Cromwell, the two editors of Media Lens, an internet-based watchdog “correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media”.
According to Noam Chomsky,
“Regular critical analysis of the media, filling crucial gaps and correcting the distortions of ideological prisms, has never been more important. Media Lens has performed a major public service by carrying out this task with energy, insight, and care.”
Edward Herman wrote,
“Media Lens is doing an outstanding job of pressing the mainstream media to at least follow their own stated principles and meet their public service obligations. It is fun as well as enlightening to watch their representatives, while sometimes giving straightforward answers to queries, often getting flustered, angry, evasive, and sometimes mis-stating the facts.”
John Pilger thinks that,
“The creators and editors of Media Lens, David Edwards and David Cromwell, have had such influence in a short time that, by holding to account those who, it is said, write history’s draft, they may well have changed the course of modern historiography [...] Not since Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s ‘Manufacturing Consent’ have we had such an incisive and erudite guide through the media’s thicket of agendas and vested interests. Indeed, they have done the job of true journalists: they have set the record straight. For this reason, ‘Guardians of Power’ ought to be required reading in every media college. It is the most important book about journalism I can remember.”
But not everybody agrees. After he was recently contacted following Media Lens coverage of the Guardian, its Readers’ Editor Ian Mayes described them as “an electronic lobby group”. Expressing his views about the Guardian’s readers, his job and the very idea of democracy, he also said:
“I did not engage with or respond to this lobby, whose members poured several hundred emails into the Guardian. I did not read more than a tiny sample of the emails directed at me. I consider organised lobbies in general to be in effect—whatever the rights or wrongs of their position—oppressive to put it mildly.”²
Mayes also happens to be the President of the Organization of News Ombudsmen.
I asked David Edwards and David Cromwell to tell me more about their book and their work at Media Lens.

QUESTION: Why the title (and the subtitle) ‘Guardians of Power: The myth of the liberal media’?

ANSWER: The title is obviously a not very subtle reference to the Guardian, but it also refers to the media in general. The sub-title is intended to indicate that the liberal media—the best media, like the Guardian, the Independent, the Observer (as it used to be) and the BBC—play a really crucial role in protecting power. In a totalitarian system it doesn’t matter what people think—if they get out of line, you can hit them on the head, drag them away in the middle of the night. Thanks to centuries of popular struggle, violence of that kind is no longer an option for Western elites. Instead, in our society, control is primarily maintained by controlling what people think.
It’s ironic that we tend to associate this kind of thought control with Soviet-style systems, but in fact it’s far more important in an ostensibly democratic society like ours. If you are to convince people in our society that they are free, you can’t just censor everything as they did in the Soviet Union, because then everyone knows they’re living in a kind of prison. In our society people are bombarded with business and political propaganda that shapes their assumptions about the world. But they also have access to some honest ideas in comparatively small circulation newspapers like the Guardian and the Independent, and primarily through one or two honest writers like John Pilger and Robert Fisk. This acts as a kind of vaccine—tiny doses of dissent that inoculate people against the idea that they are subject to thought control. But the reality is that this dissent is flooded and overwhelmed by propaganda that keeps us thinking the right way, keeps us passive and in line. By the way, we don’t intend to suggest that this is the result of any kind of conspiracy. It happens as a kind of side-effect of the media’s pursuit of maximised profits in a state-capitalist society.

QUESTION: What is Media Lens? When did it start? How does it work?

ANSWER: Media Lens is an attempt to subject the mainstream corporate media to analysis uncompromised by personal hopes of employment, payment or status within the media system. We do this by comparing the media’s versions of events with what we believe are honest versions based on rational arguments, verifiable facts and multiple, credible sources. We provide references and links for all of these, so that readers can evaluate for themselves whether we are distorting the facts in some way. We then invite readers to judge for themselves which is more reasonable and accurate, and to send their opinions to both journalists and ourselves. It is vital for us to provide an accurate account of the media version because we are not ‘selling a line’—we are encouraging readers to make a rational judgement on the basis of the facts. This is why we think it is wrong to describe us as a “lobby”, as often happens. The tobacco lobby, for example, is not motivated to provide the public with the facts it needs to make an informed judgement. The goal of the tobacco lobby is to subordinate truth to maximised profits. Their goal is to manipulate the public, to persuade them of their version of the truth. Our goal is to empower the public to establish their own version of the truth based on their own evaluation of the arguments. The world needs self-confident, critical thinking, empowered human beings, not Media Lens drones.
Our readers can check the media version of events for themselves, so we have every reason to be accurate and honest in describing these. Our readers can also easily check out the credibility and accuracy of the facts and sources we give because, as discussed, we provide references for all of them. As Noam Chomsky has noted many times, dissidents challenging the corporate status quo are automatically subjected to intense and relentless attack regardless of the honesty and accuracy of their views—our arguments have to be extremely accurate and reasonable if they are to stand a chance of being taken seriously.
Also, unlike, say, corporate lobbies, we are not motivated by profit, nor status or power. Our goal is to provide the facts so that people can draw their own conclusions.

QUESTION: Please, give us a couple of concrete examples of your work?

ANSWER:

Example One - Climate Change and Advertising
An editorial in the Independent on December 3, 2005 entitled ‘Global warming and the need for all of us to act now to avoid catastrophe’, declared:
“Governments must demand greater energy conservation from industry. And action must be taken to curtail emissions from transport. That means extensive investment in the development of alternative fuels and the taxation of air flights.”
The editors concluded:
“But it is not just governments that have a responsibility. Individuals must act too. By opting to cycle or walk, instead of driving everywhere, we can all do something to reduce emissions. If more of us turned off electrical devices when not in use and recycled our waste properly, our societies would be hugely less energy inefficient... A failure to act now will not be forgiven by future generations.”
As though these words had not appeared, the rest of the paper returned to adverts, consumer advice and financial news (“bet on easyJet to fly higher”). The Independent’s holiday supplement, The Traveller, urged readers to climb on fossil fuel burning planes and visit Paris, Brussels, Syria, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Aspen, Chamonix, Mallorca, Australia, Dubai, New Zealand, Lapland, Spain, North America, Austria, Germany, the Maldives, and on and on.
Advertising industry sources told us that between January 1st and October 7th, 2005, Independent News and Media PLC—owners of the Independent newspapers—received the following revenues from advertisers:
BP Plc: £11,769
(this figure has risen substantially since October 7 as a result of the ‘Beyond Petroleum’ campaign)
Citroen UK Ltd: £418,779
Ford Motor Company Ltd: £247,506
Peugeot Motor Co Plc: £260,920
Renault UK Ltd: £427,097
Toyota (GB) Ltd: £715,050
Vauxhall Motors Ltd: £662,359
Volkswagen UK Ltd: £555,518
BMI British Midland: £60,847
Bmibaby Ltd: £12,810
British Airways Plc: £248,165
Easyjet Airline Co Ltd: £59,905
Monarch Airlines: £15,713
Ryanair Ltd: £28,543
(Email to Media Lens, December 12, 2005)
It is enlightening to compare these figures with the Independent editors’ suggestion:
“Individuals must act too. By opting to cycle or walk, instead of driving everywhere, we can all do something to reduce emissions.”
At the same time, the Independent is hosting adverts specifically designed to disarm dissent and pacify the public.
The point is that the media are structurally obliged to remain on square one. What has a corporate business like the Independent to say about the impact of its own corporate advertising on environmental collapse? What has it to say about the remorseless activities of its business allies working to bend the public mind to their will over decades? What has it to say about their determination to destroy all attempts to subordinate short-term profits to action on climate change? What has it to say about the historical potency of people power in challenging systems of entrenched and irresponsible power of this kind, of which it is itself a part?

Example Two: An Exchange With Newsnight Editor, George Entwistle
In researching a New Statesman article, Media Lens co-editor David Edwards interviewed George Entwistle (March 31, 2003), then editor of the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme, Newsnight. Part of the interview involved asking Entwistle if Scott Ritter had appeared on Newsnight in recent months. Ritter, a UN weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991-98, described how Iraq had been ‘fundamentally disarmed’ by 1998 without the threat of war, and how any retained weapons of mass destruction would likely have long since become harmless ‘sludge’. He was almost completely ignored by the mainstream press ahead of the war. In 2003, the Guardian and Observer mentioned Iraq in a total of 12,356 articles. In these articles, Ritter was mentioned a total of 17 times.
David Edwards: ‘Have you pitted Ritter against government spokespeople like Mike O’Brien and John Reid?’
George Entwistle: ‘I can’t recall when we last had Ritter on.’
DE: ‘Have you had him on this year?’
GE: ‘Not this year, not in 2003, no.’
DE: ‘Why would that be?’
GE: ‘I don’t particularly have an answer for that; we just haven’t.’
DE: ‘Isn’t he an incredibly important, authoritative witness on this?’
GE: ‘I think he’s an interesting witness. I mean we’ve had...’
DE: ‘Well, he was chief UNSCOM arms inspector.’
GE: ‘Absolutely, yeah. We’ve had Ekeus on, and lots of people like that.’
DE: ‘But why not Ritter?’
GE: ‘I don’t have a particular answer to that... I mean, sometimes we phone people and they’re not available; sometimes they are.’
DE: ‘Well I know he’s very keen, he’s forever speaking all over the place. He’s travelled to Iraq and so on...’
GE: ‘There’s no particular... there’s no sort of injunction against him; we just haven’t had him on as far as I’m aware.’
DE: ‘The other claim is...’
GE: ‘David, can I ask a question of you at this stage?’
DE: ‘Yes.’
GE: ‘What’s the thesis?’
DE: ‘What, sorry, on why you haven’t...?’
GE: ‘No, I mean all these questions tend in a particular direction. Do you think that Newsnight is acting as a pro-government organisation?’
DE: ‘My feeling is that you tend to steer away from embarrassing the government [Entwistle laughs] in your selection of interviewees and so on, they tend to be establishment interviewees. I don’t see people like Chomsky, Edward Herman, Howard Zinn, Michael Albert, you know—there’s an enormous amount of dissidents...’
GE: ‘Well we’ve being trying to get Chomsky on lately, and he’s not wanted to come on for reasons I can’t explain. What’s the guy who was the UN aid programme guy...?’
DE: ‘Denis Halliday?’
GE: ‘Yeah, we’ve had him on. I think our Blair special on BBC2 confronted him [Blair] with all sorts of uncomfortable propositions.’
DE: ‘The other thing is that UNSCOM inspectors, CIA reports and so on have said that any retained Iraqi WMD is likely to be “sludge”—that’s the word they use—because, for example, liquid bulk anthrax lasts maybe three years under ideal storage conditions. Again, I haven’t seen that put to people like John Reid and Mike O’Brien.’
GE: ‘Um, I can’t recall whether we have or not. Have you watched every... episode, since when?
DE: ‘Pretty much. This year, for example. Have you covered that?’
GE: ‘Um, I’ll have to check. I mean, we’ve done endless pieces about the state of the WMD, about the dossier and all that stuff.’
DE: ‘Oh sure, about that, but about the fact that any retained WMD is likely to be non-lethal by now, I mean...’
GE: ‘I’ll, I can... I’ll have to have a look.’
DE: ‘You haven’t covered it have you?’
GE: ‘I honestly, I don’t know; I’d have to check. I genuinely can’t remember everything we’ve covered.’
DE: ‘Sure, but I mean it’s a pretty major point isn’t it?’
GE: ‘It’s an interesting point, but it’s the kind of point that we have been engaging with.’
DE: ‘Well, I’ve never seen it.’
GE: ‘Well, I mean, I’ll endeavour to get back to you and see if I can help.’
Following this conversation, Entwistle wrote to Edwards by email. He provided what he considered powerful evidence that Newsnight had in fact challenged the government case for war on Iraq. He cited this exchange between Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman and Tony Blair (Blair On Iraq – A Newsnight Special, BBC2, February 6, 2003):
TONY BLAIR: Well I can assure you I’ve said every time I’m asked about this, they have contained him [Saddam Hussein] up to a point and the fact is the sanctions regime was beginning to crumble, it’s why it’s subsequent in fact to that quote we had a whole series of negotiations about tightening the sanctions regime but the truth is the inspectors were put out of Iraq so -
JEREMY PAXMAN: They were not put out of Iraq, Prime Minister, that is just not true. The weapons inspectors left Iraq after being told by the American government that bombs would be dropped on the country.
(The rest of the transcript followed, March 31, 2003)
We responded to Entwistle:
‘You mention Paxman raising the myth of inspectors being thrown out. You’re right, Paxman did pick him [Blair] up on the idea that inspectors were “put out” of Iraq, but then the exchange on the topic ended like this:
TONY BLAIR: They were withdrawn because they couldn’t do their job. I mean let’s not be ridiculous about this, there’s no point in the inspectors being in there unless they can do the job they’re put in there to do. And the fact is we know that Iraq throughout that time was concealing its weapons.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Right.