Taxpayers will have to pay more than £3m in unpaid wages to former employees of York-based Jarvis Rail after the firm collapsed last year.
Trade unions for the 1,200 workers argued at an industrial tribunal that the company should have given 90 days’ notice of compulsory redundancy.
The claim is eight weeks at the maximum £380 per week under employment law.
The workers were made redundant when talks between Network Rail and the administrators finished in April 2010.
More than 350 jobs were lost in York, 300 in Doncaster and 80 in Leeds.
As Jarvis Rail no longer exists, the government has to meet the bill.
Imagine that! Three million pounds is almost half a banker’s bonus, which “the taxpayer” is also “footing the bill for” in the case of all the nationalised and subsidised banks… And it’s almost 3/1000th of the cost of those 14 new Chinook helicopters the Ministry of Defence has today announced it’s going to buy. But even though this too is “a bill footed by the taxpayer”, the BBC does manage to report that piece of news much more matter of factly, without cheap populist language. Apparantly wasting a billion pounds on war equipment is okay with the BBC, but helping some 700 or so families whose wage earners got sacked through no fault of their own is beyond the pale.
As I see it, the skills of an historian, when confronted by a complex phenomenon like this, ought (and this is neither original nor controversial) to include at least the following:
The evasion of a simple catch-all explanation, of whichever ‘political’ narrative, particularly a doctrinaire explanation
The avoidance of reliance on untestable notions like ‘innate human nature’
The avoidance of sweeping generalisation
The ability to disentangle different elements within the phenomenon; to tease out geographical and other variables
An aversion to reducing a complex phenomenon to simple cause and effect
If only the various talking heads on the BBC radio and television pontificating on the riots this past week had been using those rules. For example, the fools who I heard on Broadcasting House yesterday morning, who dismissed the idea that the riots could’ve been political in nature because some of the rioters didn’t even know which party was in government — as if politics end outside of the Westminster bubble. There seems to be a deliberate refusal to engage the questions of how and why the riots started, why they persisted so long and why they spread on a more than superficial level, at least in the mainstream media and especially at the BBC. If reporting is the first draft of history, this particular one will be unreadable.
Good news for everybody who was hoping for a nice, easy, racist explenation for the riots in Britain, “historian” David Starkey has come to your aid. Yes, the rioters were multiracial, Black, white and Muslim, while the victims and defenders of various communities in turn were also multiracial, Black, white, Sikh, Turkish and so on and it seemed that all the simplistic ideas about how those minorities just cannot help their criminal natures were clearly wrong, but Starkey knew the truth. It was the white man that had gone Black, had abandoned its superior nature, that it had been infected by the “gangster culture”, probably through that newfangled hippity-hop music. This is not racist of course, it’s just common sense. And hence Starkey is listened to politely, not interrupted and taken seriously as a commentator even if the other guests disagree with him.
Compare and contrast the treatment of Darcus Howe, who is clearly a dangerous loony who has to be chided and can’t be trusted to be sensible. Howe needs to be handled aggressively, he’s almost a rioter himself and his waffle about root causes to explain the riots need to be attacked immediately as excuse mongering.
As with every unexpected, natural crisis when the news media are caught unawares, the raw edges of approved reality become a bit more visible. On the one hand, the manipulation of news and acceptable opinion becomes more blatant — one very obvious example being the whitewashing of the spontaneous cleanup operations in the days after the first riots, as noted and ripped apart by W. Kasper. On the other hand, even more blatant is how unacceptable opinions like Howe’s are handled, attacked, shouted down. This by and large is not a conscious process, but something journalists and the news media pick up by osmosis. It’s no surprise that it’s the BBC, supposedly independent but in practise always hypersensitive to how the political winds are blowing, that is the most hardline in this. We saw the same thing with the War on Iraq, where it was the commercial news channels that were more skeptical than the BBC, other than you’d expect at first.
Starkey might just well be trying to move the acceptable discourse to the right, to make his racist ideas respectable as Lenny argues, but the BBC is more culpable by giving him a platform and treating him with respect, making his ideas more respectable by that. Howe’s views on the other hand, the idea that some of the responsibility for the riots may just have to lie with the police for their treatment of (young) Black people in general and the murder of Mark Duggan in particular, are still beyond the pale, as shown by how he is treated. In short, the BBC is actively shifting the borders of acceptable, mainstream opinion rightwards.
The Deep State is an idea that originated in Turkish leftwing circles, as leftwing activists in the seventies and eighties started to notice the links between the army, police, judiciary, certain political parties, organised crime and the intelligence services and how these various interests groups worked together to block unwanted democratic developments like the election of leftist parties and politician or later, the rise of political Islamistic parties. The Deep State has supposedly apolitical organs of the state working together with extra-governmental and even criminal or fascists groups to pursue their own political agenda, while keeping up the appearance of a democracy, through a largely informal network of likeminded people in positions of power both within the state as outside of it, sometimes even working against the interests of their own government.
Through it was first articulated this way by Turkish leftists, the idea of such a “deep state” is not unique to that country of course. As made clear by Watergate, the Lockheed Affair or the Gladio Network and other such scandals, deep state structures can be found in any western democracy, especially in its intelligence services. It’s inevitable. Those who join institutions like the army, police or secret services are more likely than not to have rightwing sympathies and especially in the higher echelons of such a service, contempt for “fickle politicians” is almost bred into them, as any Tom Clancy novel shows. Combine that with an outlook that’s designed to see reds under every bed and is professionally pessimistic when estimating threats and the temptation to do something about these threats must be high. All this doesn’t really need men in suits around a big table in some smoky backroom, though I’m sure some such scenes will have happened, just people of similar backgrounds and political opinion informally helping each other against a common enemy. The people at the top don’t really need to do anything, just turn a blind eye to what their subordinates are doing.
A perfect example of such a Deep State conspiracy is the current News of the World phone hacking scandal. You have journalists hacking the phones of mainly leftwing politicians, as well as the usual celebrity suspects in the service of finding sleaze to splash on the frontpages of rightwing newspapers and in Scotland Yard, a police service that is a) highly politicised already and b) is strangely reluctant to investigate these crimes or even inform victims that their phones had been hacked, to the point that even Gordon Brown had to ask if he had been a victim. Meanwhile Andy Coulson, the ex-editor of the News of the World, who had to resign back in 2007 when one of his journalists had been convicted of phone hacking, was deemed respectable enough to become and remain David Cameron’s spin doctor until he was scapegoated this weekend.
The mainstream spin on this is that this is all an awful example of Rubert Murdoch’s grip on the UK’s political classes but that since all newspapers are complicit, do not expect much to change. And sure, perhaps ninety percent of such hacking is just done for crass commercial interests: getting the scoop on the next Royal scandal, digging up dirt on the newest X-Factor celebrity, “getting” yet another MP playing hanky panky with somebody else’s husband, a rubber suit and a large orange and so on. This is bad enough, but it is also the perfect instrument for the intelligence services to keep a tap on “enemy” politicians. No need to set up your own, risky surveillance programme if you can get friendly journalists to do it for you. These services have long had ties with the more respectable British newspapers (see e.g. Spycatcher) anyway and the illegality of such phone taps, as well as the expertise needed to get that bit of hacking done (not always very great, admittedly) means that the papers won’t look too closely at who’s helping them get their material and sharing it either — one hand washes the other.
It’s not surprising then that Scotland Yard has been reluctant to look too closely into the phone hacking allegations, other than when they’re forced to through the courts. They have every reason not to.
If the US government can pressure companies all over the world to cut off access to Wikileaks, the internet’s most chaotic, trollish forces can target these same companies too:
The forces of Anonymous have taken aim at several companies who are refusing to do business with WikiLeaks. 4chan’s hordes have launched distributed denial-of-service attacks against PayPal, Swiss bank PostFinance, and other sites that have hindered the whistleblowing site’s operations.
A self-styled spokesman for the group calling himself “Coldblood” has said that any website that’s “bowing down to government pressure” is a target. PayPal ceased processing donations to the site, and PostFinance froze WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s account. The attacks are being performed under the Operation: Payback banner; Operation: Payback is the name the group is using in its long-running attacks on the RIAA, MPAA, and other organizations involved with anti-piracy lawsuits.
The battle over Wikileaks might just be the most important event of this year, as it morphs into a battle for control of the internet. Wikileaks is the product of the internet’s idealist, libertarian (in the good sense of the word) origins, owning no allegiance to any meatspace government and acting according to internet, not offline morality. 4chan and its various shadowy subgroups and self appointed vigilantes are another product of this morality: far from perfect, often misguided and sometimes as eager to punish disrespect as much as real transgressions, but still a vital part of the internet’s immune system. Thanks to them the companies who were eager to curry favour with the US government have found out these actions have consequences.
Wikileaks meanwhile is defending itself against being taken offline and does so rather well:
Taking away WikiLeaks’ hosting, their DNS service, even their primary domain name, has had the net effect of increasing WikiLeaks’ effective use of Internet diversity to stay connected. And it just keeps going. As long as you can still reach any one copy of WikiLeaks, you can read their mirror page, which lists over 1,000 additional volunteer sites (including several dozen on the alternative IPv6 Internet). None of those is going to be as hardened as wikileaks.ch against DNS takedown or local court order — but they don’t need to be.
Within a couple days’ time, the WikiLeaks web content has been spread across enough independent parts of the Internet’s DNS and routing space that they are, for all intents and purposes, now immune to takedown by any single legal authority. If pressure were applied, one imagines that the geographic diversity would simply double, and double again.
Almost a textbook example of the old adage that the internet percieves censorship as damage and routes around it. For the moment there’s a stalemate in the Wikileaks cyberwar, a stalemate in Wikileaks’ favour.