Agrochemical companies found guilty

The independent Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) that examines community complaints of human rights abuses has recently examined the operations of the six biggest Agrochemical companies in the world.

Syngenta, Bayer, Monsanto, Dow, DuPont and BASF have a combined 72% share of the global pesticide market worth $44 billion in 2009. In addition Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta control 53% of the global seed market worth $27.4 billion, enabling them to control the green economy.

With the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimating that 355,000 people (split roughly 2/3rds in developing countries and 1/3^rd in developed) die each year from poisoning from exposure to pesticides the PPT, which was established back in 1979, provided an opportunity for hundreds of peasant farmers, agricultural workers and activists to meet in Bangalore in early December for a conference organised by PAN. (Pesticides Action Network)

It was an appropriate time to meet, as it was the 37^th anniversary of the 1984 Bhopal tragedy in India, in which the release of 40,000 tonnes of lethal gas instantly killed 8,000 people and left many thousands to suffer – and die – in the future. The company responsible, Union Carbine Corporation, was taken over in 2000 by Dow Chemical, one of the main sponsors of the London Olympic Games. The $470 million in compensation agreed as a payout to victims and/or their families represents – at best – a few pounds for each and there’s no chance of any of the senior people responsible for this crime ever doing any time in prison. Mind you, just to make sure, that campaigning activists would find it doubly difficult to get justice it has, in February 2012, been revealed by Wikileaks that Dow employed US-based security think-tank Stratfor to spy on them.

Endosulfan doesn’t kill people quite so quickly, but the insecticidal organochlorine pesticide produced by Bayer and sprayed on crops such as cashews, tea, coffee and cottons has been shown to lead to severe suffering by many communities unfortunate enough to live near the plantations that provide work for them. In Kasargod, Kerala, India spraying between 1976 and 2002 officially killed 500 people, and unofficially eight times as many. Endosulfan is now banned in Kerala, but allowed in other districts of India. As is also the case in China, where the authorities have ignored that 80 countries have now banned the product. So Bayer, who must be aware that their product kills people, continue to supply it to countries where governments must know it will kill their citizens. Profits rule at the expense of ordinary people’s welfare.

Here in Britain, the dangers of organophosphate (OP) sheep dip has been well documented by campaigners such as Brenda Sutcliffe – see article on archive site – who was delighted that her well-researched paper: Cause and effect – was submitted to the Bangalore conference.

Sutcliffe, who suffered, along with members of her family, when forced by government officials to use OP sheep dip in 1992 has estimated that as many as 2,000 shepherds have died as a result of using it – or similar products – in the last two decades. The result though has been a wall of indifference at all levels, including research institutions, government bodies and political parties and MPs, for Brenda and her supporters, who have also demonstrated that OP’s are likely to have been responsible for the many thousands of soldiers made ill by the first Gulf War.

The PPT verdict was that the six companies were ‘responsible for gross, widespread and systematic violations of the right to life, economic, social and cultural rights, as well as of civil and political rights, and women and children rights.’

As all six are based the US, Switzerland and Germany the PPT denounced these three states for failing to regulate, monitor and discipline them and criticised ‘the double standard approach’ in which banned products at home are allowed to be produced for use overseas, especially in the developing world.

States allowing the use of products on their land were criticised for not doing sufficient to protect human rights and bodies such as WHO and the Independent Labour Organisation were blamed for not recognising the urgent need for regulation and redress.

The Tribunal also made a series of recommendations including the establishment of an appropriate mechanism to investigate human rights abuses by major companies, national governments and states not to grant immunity to agrichemical companies from criminal liability and to amend the Rome Statute to include crimes against the environment. Sadly - as we witness a worldwide capitalist drive to push down wages and welfare benefits – none of this seems likely in the near future. But fair play to everyone involved.

1912 – the miners’ strike and Barnsley football club

1912 – the miners’ strike and Barnsley football club

In 1912 Barnsley won the FA Cup for the only time in their history. En route they beat the holders Bradford City 3-2 after a third replay in the quarter-final. The game was held at Bramall Lane, Sheffield and took place smack bang in the middle of the Miners’ strike that year. The following account, of how strikers got to the match, is taken from the Barnsley Independent of March 21^st 1912. Hopefully one or two on this list might like it, which is taken from a book I co-authored with the club historian David Wood a few years ago about the 1910-12 team.  Lifting the Cup – the story of battling Barnsley 1910-12.

Snow, slush, together with rain many times repeated were not sufficient to dampen the enthusiasm of hundreds of football fans who tramped over from the Barnsley district for sheer necessity propelled the use of ‘Shank’s mare’ as owing to the coal war the train service is almost hopelessly disorganised and from the same cause the bulk of these enthusiasts had not money with which to pay for a train service.

Soon after nine o’clock little groups of independent representatives of little groups of men and youths were to be found at Wentworth station plodding citywards. They had suffered an hours snowstorm, which had closed the roads and countryside in white, and looked wretched but resolute.

Gradually the struggling procession increased, the enthusiasts coming along in ones, twos and threes and occasional in dozens. But they followed each other in quick procession, and after several hours added animation to the sloppy turnpike which otherwise would have been almost deserted. Many of the travellers, a number of the them ‘pitlads’ had neither overcoat or ‘mack’, they made no mystery of the fact they were already wet through and accordingly it was anything but a triumphal procession - but to turn back? They scorned the suggestion. When opportunity offered some of the more active spirits tried to rouse the spirits by singing for ‘good old Bairnsla!’ But for the most part they plodded and plodded with the skies seeming to frown all the while, mentally counting for the last milestone which would bring them into the great city. All their energy was concentrated on ‘getting there’ since a good proportion of them were making their first acquaintance with the road. One group lightened the monotony of the journey with a noisy clatter of rattles, whilst other men got inspiration from a melancholy corner and band bells.

Trampers from Bradford.

One party were fortunate in commandeering the goodwill of the drivers of a big brewery motor and perched on the top of numerous 36-gallon casks they made great sport of their foot sore comrades who tried to keep a brave heart in face of adversity. A number of the lucky passengers hailed from Bradford. As a matter of fact, many supporters from the woollen town tramped all the way, but half of the journey was done on the Wednesday. The Barnsley enthusiasts came from places as widely apart as Hemsworth, Ryhill, Staincross, Dodworth, Barnsley, Worsbro’, Hoyland and Wombwell.

Several hundred colliers in clogs must have passed me on the road during the four hours. Often they looked limp and stiff, and suggested a problem of ‘what about the return journey?’

There is not the least room for doubt that many of the enthusiasts had not more than the price of admission to the ground.

The Last Copper

This was strongly borne out by the fact that they were not able to avail themselves of the boon of a penny train ride when the outskirts of the city was reached. Many who had intended to make the trip abandoned it at the last minute owing to the weather.

A singular fact is that many of the trampers went by strange round about routes to get to the city. Some turned off at Harley and went via Rotherham; others for on to the Wortley road and travelled via Greneside and Wadsley Bridge, and more strange of all, at Ecclesfield not a few left the straight route to the city and went three miles out of their way through Southey and into the city via Owlerton.

A bloody good read THE BIG MEETING – A history of the Durham Miners’ Gala

A bloody good read

THE BIG MEETING – A history of the Durham Miners’ Gala

By Dave Temple

Former miner Dave Temple has done a fine job in bringing to life the spirit of the Durham Miners’ Gala, which was first organised in 1871.

Held on the second Saturday in July, last year’s (the 127^th) brought 130,000 people onto the cobbled streets of the historic City. Durham’s magnificent castle and cathedral always provides the perfect background for an impressive display of banners, that are accompanied by dozens of brass bands as marchers make their way to the Racecourse grounds next to River Wear to listen to speeches from distinguished trade union and labour movement figures.

Later, there’s a chance to relax, enjoy a few beers, have a chat with old friends and take a trip on the showground attractions. If you’ve never been before then you really have missed a treat.

Temple has tapped into the atmosphere and the sense of belonging felt by the many hundreds of thousands who have over the years taken part in the Gala. The first pioneers were after ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ and over the years the miners had to fight tooth and nail with their employers and government’s of all political persuasions to get it. Being collectively organised was the key, and the struggle to achieve this was mirrored by the Gala speakers of the day, many of whom Temple does brilliantly to bring alive.

Nationalisation, once seen as providing permanent employment and improved pay and working conditions, may have been welcomed in 1947 but few were happy that the hated coal owners got massive payouts - totalling £165 million with the royalty owners getting a further £78 million - for handing over mines that lacked up-to-date technology. The burden of debt thus inherited by the NCB would be a drain on its resources for generations. Temple is thus left to chart the pit closures of the post war years - which peaked under Labour in the 1960s - that impacted harshly on Gala attendances.

Speaking at the 1980 Gala, Arthur Scargill warned that closure numbers were going to get even worse, but not even he realised by how much! For having successfully stood up to former Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath’s wage restraint policies, Margaret Thatcher’s Government was determined to destroy the National Union of Mineworkers and stockpiled coal and created a national police force before Ian McGregor, head of the National Coal Board, announced the decimation of mining communities across Britain.

All of which meant that the holding of the 1984 Gala was in the middle of a year long strike and for the first time it drew on the support of the wider trade union movement, who again marched in large numbers in 1992 when the Tories, under Michael Heseltine’s closure programme, provided the final nail in the coffin for an energy source that could still – with the development of clean coal technology – provide much of Britain’s energy needs. As such Durham no longer has any mines, but it still has a fighting trade union spirit and joining former miners at last year’s Gala were plenty of trade union members from different parts of the country.

Because as Unite general secretary Len McCluskie said from the speakers platform: ‘The Durham Miners’ Gala is the most important event in the whole of the labour movement and I salute the Durham Miners and their communities for continuing to give all of us so much inspiration.”

The Big Meeting is 244 pages long and is packed with photographs and illustrations.

It can be obtained through the Durham Miners’ Association at £17.50 soft back or £23.50 hard back. dmpress@aol.com

By Mark Metcalf. 

Football madness - four games in a day!

Friday April 6th and it's Groundhoppers day.

10.45am 

Eccleshill United 2 Dinnington 3 

 Eccleshill make it 1-1 from the penalty spot

GAME 2 at 13.45pm

Thackley 1 Long Eaton 1 

GAME THREE

At 16.45pm

Liversedge 0 Arnold Town 1

GAME FOUR

19.45pm

Brighouse Town 5 Barton Town Old Boys 1

ACCIDENTAL CRUSADER - TOM WATSON MP

ACCIDENTAL CRUSADER

Taken from this week's Big Issue in the North magazine 

Tom Watson has done more than any other parliamentarian to bring the extent of phone hacking to light. But as Mark Metcalf finds, his campaign nearly didn’t happen.

If it hadn’t been for a love of football and film then Tom Watson’s crusade against the Murdoch media empire that has corrupted much of Britain’s political and civil life would never have got started.

Now, with each day of the Leveson Inquiry into media practices revealing some major sensation then not even the combative deputy chairman of the Labour Party can predict what it might recommend or when it will end. Before then, Watson is though willing to wager that some media moguls and police officers will be off to jail and the Prime Minister will apologise about hiring Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor.

Under Gordon Brown’s leadership Watson was a Cabinet Office minister but resigned in June 2009 when it was revealed that Gordon Brown’s close advisor Damian McBride intended using a blog to post scurrilous rumours about the sexual and personal details of senior Conservative politicians. Although there was no indication that Watson played any part in the affair, he subsequently appeared eight days in a row in the Sun newspaper.

The West Bromwich East MP alleges he found himself “under siege, with parked cars outside my home, people following me, my bins being rummaged through and long range photo-lens peering into my affairs. It came to a head when there was a knock at the door and my son, then aged 3, said: ‘There’s another nasty man at the door’ and so I decided to resign my post and to consider quitting as an MP.”

Watson is a big football fan; with non-League Kidderminster Harriers his first team with West Bromwich Albion a close second. He also loves film – his favourite being the comedy The Big Lebowski in which Jeff Bridges stars – and so “casting around for something to do I thought I’d try and get on the Culture, Media and Sport select committee.”

Successfully elected in July 2009, he joined the committee only two days after Guardian journalist Nick Davies revealed that, for Professional Footballers Association chief executive Gordon Taylor had accepted a £700,000 out-of-court settlement from Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers for having his phones hacked by the News of the World.

The former footballer’s case was at the heart of a network of illegal acts at Britain’s most popular Sunday paper, where David Cameron’s then director of communications Andy Coulson had been deputy and editor up until January 2007 when he resigned. Going to prison that year was another former employee, Glen Mulcaire, who admitted hacking into the phones of Taylor and five other targets, including celebrity PR Max Clifford.

“I’d only been on the committee a week when appearing before us was News of the World editor  director Colin Myler. I had no idea about how deep phone hacking had gone but as a big fan of the American TV series The Wire I thought what would Lester Freamon, played by Clarke Peters, do? He would follow the money and ask who authorised the payment.

Finally we know that James Murdoch authorised it. It was paid to a victim of a crime to keep quiet. We found that the newspaper group appeared to have collective amnesia and yet when we issued a damning report in February 2010 the media – wrongly – reported we had cleared Coulson of any wrong-doing.”

By this stage Watson, had decided to re-stand as an MP at a fast-approaching general election. He had fully backed Brown in his attempts to keep the economy afloat by pumping money into it following the worldwide financial crisis but he never though thought Labour could win the election, mainly because of the party’s disunity, with supporters of Blair and Brown apparently willing to use the press to spill the beans on each other.

Watson himself had fought in the trenches of the Blair-Brown wars and he was accused by Blair of being “disloyal, discourteous and wrong” when he resigned from a previous ministerial position in 2006 and added his name to a letter calling on the then prime minister to step down. But he wonder’s whether the stories from either side “were in fact gathered from journalists listening into people’s private phone conversations.” He points out that the 44 MPs listed in Mulcaire’s files were almost all Labour.

These files stretched to 11,000 pages and yet when Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner John Yates was asked in mid-2009 to conduct a review of the 2006 Police inquiry into phone hacking he did so within eight hours and recommended no further action be taken. It later emerged that Yates “spent more time than that having dinner with News International executives” says Watson.  Last July Yates quit his post and now works for the Bahrain police force, which has brutally suppressed democracy protests.

If Watson is less than impressed by Yates, that’s not the case with the enquiry teams headed by Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers. Started last year, there are three: one into phone hacking, another into alleged computer hacking – which Watson expects to dwarf phone hacking and possibly be Britain’s equivalent of the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of American President Richard Nixon in 1974  -  and then an investigation into alleged inappropriate payments to police and public officials.

“The current investigation teams are inscrutable, determined and doing a great job. Akers has said recently that they are not too far away from mapping out which police and public officials had been bribed. So some people should be very worried,” says Watson. (see below on my mistake)

Coulson, who has claimed in court to know nothing about payments to police officers or hacking, resigned as Cameron’s head of communications in January 2011 after just eight months in the Downing Street post.

Prime Minister David Cameron had given him a “second chance” and promised the Commons he would off a “profound apology if it turns out I’ve been lied to” over Coulson’s claims that he had no knowledge of illegality during his time at the News of the World. Now, Watson believes that Cameron is “very close to offering that apology.”

Six months after Coulson resigned, the Prime Minister set up the Leveson Inquiry, that alongside examining the specific claims about phone hacking, alleged illegal payments to public officials and the ethics of the press. Only days earlier Mark Lewis, lawyer for the family of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, had shocked the nation by claiming that the News of the World had in 2002 hacked into her mobile phone after she disappeared.

The messages were subsequently deleted, and a once full voicemail facility then accepted new messages, leading Dowler’s desperate family to believe she had been listening to them and was therefore alive.

“When I heard Sally Dowler tell the inquiry say she had said to her husband ‘she’s picked up her voicemails, she’s alive’ then I was determined to see this through to the bitter end” says Watson.

Considering that some of the private investigators employed by the News of the World are known to have links to the criminal underworld then this could be considered a very brave course of action. Watson though is boosted by the ‘huge number of people who have stopped me to wish me well in my endeavours.”

As to when ‘the bitter end’ might exactly be, he’s not sure. He doesn’t believe it will be soon, estimating that the halfway point has yet to be reached on “a story that is not about the practices – terrible as they are – but a political failure with the Metropolitan Police, Criminal Justice system, Parliament and the Prime Minister’s Office all frightened of the power of the Murdoch Empire.”

That power that was set to increase last year when culture secretary Jeremy Hunt gave News Corp the green light to takeover BSkyB, only for the bid to fall by the wayside when the Dowler details became public.

Now Watson wants to see Rupert Murdoch barred from owning newspapers and media outlets here -  “he is not a ‘fit and proper person’ and says Ofcom should try to withdraw his licence.

Instead of the discredited Press Complaints Commission scrapped he would like to see a new arms-length regulatory body, along the lines of the Advertising Standards Agency, on which consumers and the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) would sit alongside owners and editors. Watson, a former trade union official, is convinced that Murdoch’s breaking of the print unions at Wapping in the 1980s, and the subsequent de-recognition of the NUJ, made it almost impossible for young reporters on his papers to resist instructions to act unethically.

Impressed by Leveson’s questioning of witnesses, he says “Its revelations and the police’s work will mean some media moguls will be going to prison, and it’s likely that some police officers will face the same fate.”

He wouldn’t like to predict what recommendations Leveson will make but Watson has little doubt that “there will be a moment in Parliament when all three major party leaders – Nick Clegg, David Cameron and Ed Miliband – will have to do the right thing. They are going to come under unbearable pressure from powerful interests to water down whatever Leveson recommends. There is going to be a defining moment.”

My mistake - in the piece (compiled by attending a function at which he spoke and then I did an interview during the interval and at the end) I misattributed the following words to Tom: "So James Murdoch should be very worried, as he authorised the payments." Watson did not in fact say these words and the error was not picked up in the editing process. Apologies for any confusion caused.

Luddite anniversary approaches

Luddite anniversary approaches

Walks, exhibitions and plays are planned to mark this year’s bicentennial anniversary

of the Luddite uprising in Huddersfield and nearby Spen Valley. The Local History Society is also publishing a revised version of a book written by two local historians nearly twenty years ago.

The Luddites were early 19^th century English textile artisans opposed to changes produced by the Industrial Revolution. In Huddersfield, Luddites, taking their name from a mythical leader, General Ludd, sought to prevent the introduction of cropping machines, which were throwing the elite of cloth finishers out of work in large numbers.

Secret meetings

Centuries-old law that since Tudor times had made it illegal to use a machine to replace people had been repealed in 1806. A new breed of capitalist entrepreneurs seized their chance to break the stranglehold of the skilled craftsman over the pace, control and location of production. Workers, industrial and agricultural, were to be forced to work in factories or, in the absence of a social security system, starve.

Petitions to Parliament to prevent the cropping machines’ introduction were ignored. With it being illegal to be a member of a trade union, secret meetings of angry people were organised where under oath it was agreed that if the manufacturers could not be persuaded to voluntarily abandon their plans then the new machines had to be smashed.

Retribution

This made it inevitable that the self-proclaimed ‘army of redressers’ came into conflict with employers, police and the military. On the night of 11 April 1812 an attack on Cartwright’s mill at Rawfolds, Liversedge - just outside Huddersfield - left two of the attackers dead and many injured and wounded.

On 12 April this year a 5-mile walk will visit the locations involved in the planning and execution of the attack, as well as the subsequent retributions taken against many of those involved. Following a series of trials in York, seventeen were hanged in January 1813 and a further seven transported to Australia - despite the Luddites having killed just one employer – William Horsfall of Ottiwells Mile at Crosland Moor – during their uprising in the area. .

Such ruthless acts had the effect of suppressing the Luddites and following which for many years’ historians portrayed the Luddites as poor folk, acting irrationally against the “forces of progress.”

Sell-out book

As such it wasn’t until 1963, and the release of Halifax lecturer E P Thompson’s book The Making of the English Working Class, that a thorough re-assessment of the Luddites

in the context of there times was undertaken. Liberty or Death – Radicals, Republicans and Luddites, a sell-out book written by Lesley Kipling and Alan Brooke in 1993 added to E.P. Thompson’s work.

“We are delighted to be reprinting the book as the Luddites were an important part of the struggle for economic and political participation by the working class,” says John Rawlinson, chair of Huddersfield Local History Society.

Brooke believes the historical events covered in the book, which is set firmly in the tradition of British social and political radicalism of the early 19^th century, “has parallels today, with an economic slump throwing thousands out of work and creating resistance in the form of demonstrations and riots.”

For more information see :-

www.ludditelink.org.uk

The book costs £9.95 including postage

Orders can be sent by post to HLHS, 24 Sunnybank Rd, Huddersfield HD3 3DE, with a cheque or via the Society’s website, www.huddersfieldhistory.org.uk

Elsewhere – Westhoughton

Westhoughton (located half way between Wigan and Bolton) Local History Group has also published a book on the historic events that took place in this small town in 1812. The Burning of Westhoughton Mill 1812 costs £3 – see www.theluddites.org.uk

For more details on this and the events that are to be organised over the weekend of April 21/22^nd, including the unveiling of a bi-centenary plaque and a symbolic ‘torching’ of a replica mill. Four men – Abraham Charlson, Job Fletcher, Thomas Kerfoot and James Smith were executed for their parts in destroying the weaving-mill, warehouse and loom-shop at the Mill, with a further seven transported for seven years.

Organophosphate victim Harold Sutcliffe remembered

A tree was planted on Sunday to commemorate the life of Littleborough farmer Harold Sutcliffe, who suffered badly after being poisoned when forced by Government decree to use organophosphate (OP) sheep dip.

His wife Brenda and son Andrew were joined by fellow victim George Westcott, and around a dozen other supporters including Councillor Peter Evans and Lancashire NFU chairman Tom Rigby, for the ceremony which took place on land owned by Tom. If the tree grows to be half as good a man as Harold, then it will be a bloody big un.

Advice on sheep dip at 

http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/as29.pdf