Silence on arms is a ticking bomb

This week UN negotiators are meeting in New York to discuss a global arms trade treaty, ahead of final negotiations this summer.

Believe it or not there are currently no laws in place to control the sale of arms around the world – from bullets and cluster bombs to tear gas – although the trade in consumer products like coffee and bananas are heavily regulated.

With Amnesty International estimating that around 1,500 people are killed in armed conflict every day, this is a huge opportunity for the UK government to save millions of lives.

Yet it’s already showing signs of backing down, with foreign minister Alistair Burt saying in this week’s Independent on Sunday, "there would have to be compromises".

The West has been shaken by the violent crackdown that’s happening in Syria at the moment.

And with countries like Russia thought to be still selling the very weapons being used against civilians, something needs to be done to control this trade.

The idea that Governments around the world are profiting from slaughter is abhorrent but it’s been going on for decades.

According to The Guardian’s research, in the year ending in September 2010, £215million worth of UK export licences for ‘controlled’ products were granted to companies selling to Libya.

‘Controlled’ goods can include everything from radioactive material to guns and tear gas.

So it’s likely crowd control equipment sold to Libya by the UK was used against protesters during last year’s uprising.

Labour leader Ed Miliband has shown his support for the treaty, saying: “A key element in helping prevent conflicts, and making them less deadly when they occur, is better controls on arms supplies.”

But double act Cameron and Clegg have been pretty quiet on the subject.

Government ministers are speaking of compromises but how can you compromise on human life?

It’s high time the UK stood up for the individual instead of big business. I don’t remember Cameron’s Big Society mentioning anything about destroying societies overseas.

This week will help decide the content of the treaty – what will be controlled – as well as how it will be enforced and who is allowed to take part in the talks this July.

Now more than ever is a crucial time for the potentially game-changing treaty.  So here’s hoping the UK stands it ground and does its bit to make the world a safer place.

Raise your hand

If you asked a group of people to raise their hand if they had their dream job, I’m guessing less than half would do it.

Let’s be clear here. I don’t mean these people aren’t happy doing what they do or they don’t enjoy their day jobs. Maybe it’s the best job they’ve ever had.

No, I’m talking about whether they have their ultimate, one-in-a-million, wake up every day and pinch yourself kind of jobs.

Okay so this isn’t based on any kind of scientific research, call it anecdotal observation.

And this is so much more the case for creative people.

How many poets do you know who only write verses to pay the bills? What percentage of artists can afford to live off their canvas?

I don’t think it’s a high number. Otherwise where did the term ‘struggling artist’ come from?

This is where PoV magazine steps in. It’s a place where creatives everywhere – be they journalists, photographers or sketch artists – can get their stuff published without their bosses sticking their noses in.

It’s a quarterly free online magazine based on a different theme each time and the first issue is out now.

Take a look below, enjoy and if you’re a creative person with something you want the world to see, why not get involved?

Open publication - Free publishing - More art

Some justice at last

This week brought justice at last when Gary Dobson and David Norris were finally convicted 18 years after killing teenager Stephen Lawrence.

A catalogue of failures in the original investigation made this a landmark case, exposing institutional racism within the Metropolitan police.

For me it was interesting that this case came to a head as I was reading ‘In the Place of Justice’ by Wilbert Rideau.

The book is a memoir of Rideau’s 44-year stint in one of America’s most violent prisons, Angola.

He ended up there after he killed a cashier during a botched bank robbery.

As a 19-year-old black man in 1960’s Louisiana – at a time of racial segregation, the Klu Klux Klan and mob rule – killing a white woman made him public enemy number one.

During his three trials Rideau was never allowed to give a defence against his crime, which was grossly embellished by the prosecution.

For example, they claimed he decapitated the bank cashier. This was not true.

What he did was terrible – after all he did take someone’s life. But while he always admitted his crime, his enemies continually made out he was a dangerous man who had set out to kill that day.

In reality he was a frightened teenager who did the unthinkable in a moment of panic.

The prosecution’s claim was later disproven but these stories – a result of anger and bigotry by the overwhelmingly white population meant Rideau served double the time for what he did.

After escaping the electric chair when the state introduced a moratorium on executions Rideau made it his life’s mission to try to put right his wrongs while inside.

He became the prison’s first black editor of its all-white newspaper The Angolite, winning a plethora of journalism awards for writing exposés on life behind bars.

But as those guilty of similar crimes were released he continued to lose countless appeals for clemency, despite having the support of corrections officials.

Even in the ‘90s Rideau came up against prejudice as politicians used his case to win votes from the white population.

Rideau was eventually freed in 2005 after a retrial found him guilty of manslaughter not murder.

Now I don’t think for one minute his case can be directly compared to that of Stephen Lawrence, who was killed in an unprovoked attack. He was the victim while Rideau’s actions put him where he was.

But I was struck by the power of racism to interfere with justice - keeping the guilty free and the reformed locked up.

As Doreen Lawrence said, this week’s verdict is not a cause for celebration.

This is a step in the right direction for the fight against racism in this country, but both here and in the US we still have a long way to go before we can stand up and say we are free from prejudice.

Two wrongs make a riot

In August thousands of people in cities across England took to the streets in the country’s biggest riots for decades.

Apocalyptic images of burning homes and businesses, track-suited looters raiding JJB Sports and lines of armoured police, beamed into living rooms everywhere.

Even those living in the leafiest of London suburbs flinched at the sound of a siren, as they anxiously checked Twitter for news.

Nearly 4,000 people were arrested for their involvement in the unrest.

Among them was teenager Danielle Corns, who was sentenced to 10 months in prison for stealing two left-footed trainers from a shop in Wolverhampton.

Pointless? Yes. Wrong? Of course. But worthy of nearly a year in a young offenders institute? I don’t think so.

A string of harsh penalties have been handed out to those involved in the summer riots.

While I believe those who caused criminal damage and spread fear up and down the country should be punished, the punishment should fit the crime.

It’s easy to say the book should be thrown at them, but in reality what will sending someone with no previous convictions to prison achieve?

Sure it’ll make them think twice about doing it again, but for most of the people punished, a court appearance would have been enough to put a stop to their faltering criminal career.

In the months since the violence some have put what happened down to the desire for a free TV. But I’m not so sure.

So why did rioters firebomb a family carpet shop in Croydon? What made them trash 89-year-old Aaron Biber’s Tottenham barber shop?

In the heat of the moment we could accuse them of being a “feral underclass” -  a la David Cameron – but we can’t  ignore the rising discontent bubbling beneath the surface that sparked the violence in the first place.

A joint study by the LSE and The Guardian released last week found for most rioters it was a sense of social injustice that fuelled their anger.

The research, which interviewed 270 people involved in the four-day riots, said they were reacting to a lack of opportunity and jobs.

However, it also found those that looted acted on impulse and opportunism.

So those girls who were recorded saying they loved rioting because of the free alcohol were clearly not political activists.

But there’s no denying that for many there was nothing to lose.

While this may not be true of Danielle, who had just finished her A Levels, I’m not sure that just because someone has something to lose we should take advantage of that.

Instead of handing out disproportionate sentences, which only serve to perpetuate the injustice people felt in the first place, we should be addressing the causes of inequality in our society.

·         A Reading the Riots report will be published in full on Wednesday

·         For more on riots and protest in 2011 look out for the first issue of POV, a new magazine full of creative content, out in January. 

Why our culture is priceless

Last week I got talking to a friend about a popular Twitter feed I’ve starting following.

MetPoliceCO11 isn’t a real life crime fighting message board. Instead the spoof account tweets about amusing and often implausible incidents.

After guffawing at the genius of a tweet about catching a drunk Brian Blessed with a large net, my friend replied, ‘But what’s the point of it?’.

At first I wasn’t sure how to respond.

Because it’s funny, I thought.  It lights up my otherwise dull day.

Then I got thinking. You could ask that question about almost anything.

What’s the point of music, of poetry, or fine dining? Why go to the cinema, play sport or watch the X Factor?

Whatever your views on reality TV these things exist because in one way or another they give us pleasure.

From watching a play that moves you to tears, to listening to an Adam and Joe podcast, none of these things are strictly ‘necessary’ but they’re what make life interesting.

While a joke twitter feed or a televised karaoke contest aren’t exactly Orwell, most people get that art has a vital role to play in our society.

The UK Government however doesn’t seem to share this opinion.

Its cuts to arts council funding and humanities education feel like an attack on the desire to create something beautiful or imaginative. (OK I know this is a bit of a jump but bear with me.)

According to most politicians it seems the only thing that matters is business and making money. Who cares if university courses in the likes of philosophy, English literature or history have to close or ramp up their fees to survive?

The Government seems to have forgotten that for every £1 invested in arts and culture £3.50 is put back into the UK economy.

Despite this more than 200 organisations up and down the country are losing Arts Council Funding.

At the same time universities only offering courses in arts and humanities will have their funding cut to zero.

I’m not saying cutting cultural funding will somehow stop people from creating funny and whimsical twitter feeds.

But it’s this attack on the idea of creating something just for the sake of creating it that I find depressing.

The impression that if something doesn’t have a strict purpose and isn’t there purely to make money, it’s somehow redundant or unnecessary.

This view is short-sighted and simply untrue. We should be embracing our diverse and colourful culture, not stifling it.

So next time you find yourself wondering why on earth someone has bothered to build a life-size bear out of Lego, or painstakingly hand-make millions of ceramic sunflower seeds, give yourself a mental kick and embrace it.

Go on, open your mind.

11.11.11

This week thousands of people across Britain paid tribute to those who have died in conflicts all over the world since WWI.

Either through attending a remembrance service, watching TV coverage or by simply wearing a poppy, nearly everyone in the UK marks the anniversary in their own way.

And this year was the first time services were held since the world’s last known WWI combat veteran Claude Choules died in May.

That makes my generation the last to have any real living connection with the two wars.

Many people my age will remember sitting down with their grandparents to hear tales from the front line.

A couple of years ago, working as a freelance journalist for a local paper in North London I interviewed Donald Wilson, an 89-year-old WWII veteran.

He was there during the D-Day landings and the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

I remember the interview well; he spoke proudly of his fellow troops, describing them as “good blokes” who faced head-on the fearsome tasks at hand.

Describing the scene as he arrived at the notorious death camp, he said: “We fed the prisoners because they’d been living on potato soup and they were starving.

“We had 2,000 under our control and we managed to evacuate 400 of them to Switzerland but the rest died.  It was very hard.”

The Second World War left such a gaping hole in Donald’s generation, they became defined by it.

They had experienced an unprecedented moment in history and the overwhelming need to make sure it was never repeated left its mark.

Today in 2011 war has mutated for us here in the UK. The country isn’t caught in the grip of air raids, rationing and black-outs.

The so-called war on terror is really only felt by the families of the servicemen or women fighting in Afghanistan.

It’s only Remembrance Sunday that reminds us of the loss inflicted by war.

We are detached from war – a distant reality only experienced through our TV screens.

Remembrance Day is a way for us to feel connected to today’s conflicts, and more so the events of the 20^th century.

And even when the last veterans from WWII have left us, marking the 11^th hour of the 11th day of the 11^th month will always bring home the sacrifice made by the generations before us.

Feeding the world

The world’s population hit seven billion this week, pushing our planet’s resources to the limit.

As the West’s obesity epidemic grows, around one billion people are starving, with the famine in Somalia expected to kill up to one million.

Something somewhere has gone horribly wrong.

The balance has been badly tipped in favour of rich Western nations scoffing their faces with what is often factory-farmed, low quality meat.

Meanwhile those in Africa and the developing world are struggling to feed their families at all.

The New Internationalist magazine pointed to food market speculators in its feature The Food Rush as those gambling with hunger.

In the piece by Hazel Healy it explains how the rise of commodity trading is seeing banks and hedge funds bet on the price of crops like wheat and corn – the staples of the world’s poorest.

This is pushing food prices up to the point where one in seven people can’t afford to eat.

She writes: “There is something particularly sick about wealthy and unaccountable elites increasing their fortunes in a way that stunts – and starves – children. This is raw-edged capitalism at its worst.”

And as land to grow food for multiplying mouths shrinks, feeding the world gets even more complicated.

Sadly intensive farming – where animals rarely see the light of day and are bred to the point where they can no longer stand, let alone reproduce – is playing its part.

Precious space that could be used to grow crops for the starving is instead being used to produce enough animal feed to fuel the West’s obsession with cheap meat.

According to Compassion in Word Farming chief exec Philip Lymbery’s blog, it takes six tonnes of plant protein to produce just one tonne of animal protein.

If that space was used to grow plant crops there would be more to go around.

And while big farms would argue there’s a demand for this meat, the fact is, we don’t need it.

If everyone cut out meat from just one meal a week it would make a huge difference to the world’s health, as well as the environment.

In the end this global problem is being caused by greed.

From the banks gambling on hunger, to farmers sacrificing welfare for profit, the West’s greed only serves to exacerbate the plight of the poor.

And with the population set to rise by a further two billion by 2050, unless something changes, this will only get worse.