You don’t need a justification for clemency

At 8.35am GMT, former gang leader Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams was executed by lethal injection at San Quentin prison in Northern California, having been convicted 24 years ago of four murders. The Militant Pine Marten will not argue whether or not he was guilty, since it lacks any real knowledge of the evidence presented or the circumstances, but that isn’t strictly relevant here. Suffice to say that Williams always denied his guilt.

Williams’ last chance for a stay of execution was an appeal for clemency to the Arnold Schwarzenegger, Republican Governor of California by the Grace of Loki the Trickster God presumably. It’s quite often suggested in the media that although Schwarzenegger is part of the Republican top brass, he’s actually a closet liberal. Certainly socially, he’s perceived to be rather more liberal than George Bush, but then that’s not terribly difficult. The problem is that I haven’t seen any evidence of his alleged liberal leanings. Stepping in to stop gay weddings in Sacramento doesn’t strike me as very socially liberal, and approving the state-sponsored killing of a man who may have been a murderer, and may or may not have been repentant isn’t very liberal either.

I’m not idly questioning the jury in this case’s integrity or judgement, I’m basing what I say on Schwarzenegger’s own words. Last week, the governor said that he was "agonizing" over the case. Well you don’t agonize over things that you’re certain of, and even within a legal system that allows the State to take away its’ citizens’ lives, surely being unsure of their guilt is reason enough to show clemency? However it does not appear that Schwarzenegger thinks like that, stating, "I could find no justification for granting clemency".

This is an abhorrent statement. You don’t need to justify clemency. But you do need to explain why you let someone die, and you’d better be damned sure that he’s guilty. Something which Schwarzenegger was not. So why did he sanction Williams’ death? The obvious explanation is that he did it to align himself with influential figures and sections of the Republican Party grassroots, which is understandable in the context of political skulduggery. Only political machinations in a democracy don’t usually involve anyone’s death, especially not in a country that is the self-appointed global guardian of freedom, democracy and the legacy of the Enlightenment. For a group of proselytising Christians, Bush and his friends seem to have surprisingly little grasp of the concept of forgiveness. This continuing appetite for judicial revenge all seems a bit ‘Old Testament’.

In two years’ time, Bush will leave the White House, and his gang of neocon zealots with him. They haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory. At which point there’s a good chance that Schwarzenegger will be secure among the Republican nomenklatura whether he demonstrates a little effortless magnanimity or not. He can afford to make a point, to affirm what he stands for, if he really is a liberal Trojan donkey in the midst of the Republicans. But maybe he’s just a Macchiavellian greasy pole climber. Either way, I doubt that it will have been worth going to bed every night knowing he wasn’t quite sure if that man should have died or not.

"Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad." - Conan The Barbarian, 1982

"Yes we bloody well will." – The Militant Pine Marten, 2005

Watch the Right, watch the Left and watch your back*

Could someone please explain to me what exactly it is that El Caudillo Blair is currently trying to achieve in Europe? If you cast your minds back to June 2005, you may remember Tony Blair’s barnstorming performance at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. It was all talk of breaking the deadlock, giving the EU a new sense of direction and impetus, moving forwards with our new partners from the East, making Europe modern, forward looking, and if you think that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s classic Vintage Tony circa 1997 and you’ve heard it all before. Most of the MEPs hadn’t been as overexposed as the UK electorate to old-style Tony magic, and once again it worked. Tony must have been delighted.

In much of Europe, Tony Blair enjoys something of a reputation as a miracle worker. He seems to be able to do nothing wrong. He even managed to avoid serious electoral retribution over the Iraq debacle for goodness sake! He’s also seen by many as Socialism’s new hope. A Jedi of the Left who will restore balance to progressive politics. And much of the UK electorate believed that once too. So it’s understandable that when six months later, the achievements of the UK’s stint at the presidency of the EU are precisely nothing at all, many of our European partners feel rather aggrieved. In fact Le Monde, which has been having a misguided love-in with Blair for a few years now, has stopped only slightly short of calling him a coward and a traitor:

“Despite his critics, Tony Blair may yet achieve his goal. Lacking the courage to define his European policy and explain it to his electorate, the ardent European enlargement enthusiast that he was risks promoting Euroscepticism in the East, just 19 months after they joined the Union”.

However making a mess of EU policy after building up expectations is one thing. But Blair’s current budget looks like a deliberate attempt to alienate everyone. The EU budget is in its current fix because the two biggest bullies in the playground are having a fight and won’t let anyone else have any fun until it’s over. The Franco-German camp won’t budge on the CAP reforms voted in 2002, that are currently in progress, and the UK won’t budge on its rebate obtained by Margaret Thatcher in 1984, when the UK was a much lesser economic force. But Blair’s proposed budget involves “refunding” some of the rebate to the richest countries in the EU and cutting the amount of money going to the poorer new members. This is a simplification obviously, but it looks a lot like a snub to countries that Blair had been happy to consider the UK’s natural allies in “New Europe”.

But while Blair has been busy winding up all of Europe, trouble has been stirring at home, in the form of David Cameron, the new leader of the Conservative Party, who have been a joke party for the best part of a decade. Thanks to an uncharacteristic moment of collective lucidity, the Tory members didn’t elect the worst candidate for once. David Cameron is all smiles, affability and witty comments and in that way reminiscent of a chubbier version of Tony Blair a few years ago. In terms of giving the Tories a chance of actually winning an election, he’s a very good choice. The question though is that of what he stands for. Having given up on working out what Tony Blair is all about, I’d like to know what his new sparring partner is for?

Today he gave us a very small glimpse of that. In a demonstration of uncharacteristically slick political operating for the Tories, the day after his election, the new leader made his first policy statement, and of all things it was about social justice. Social Justice! Oh! David! Bold move there, straight for the Labour jugular! The Tories can’t do social justice, that’s a Lefty area, surely? The Militant Pine Marten was intrigued and impressed. And then it came. David Cameron is “deeply committed to social action for social justice”. And there we have it: David Cameron has been watching Blair’s technique, and he’s going to do the same. He’s going to use rhetoric that suggests that there is a great hopeful generous plan, an optimistic progressive ideology. And actually, there will be surveys, focus groups, Parliamentary Working Groups, consultations and mainly a load of marketing drivel and management consultancy jargon with some branding. Full marks to David Cameron. If I may, I’d like to suggest that Sir Digby Jones should be invited to join the “Social Justice Group”.

The political landscape in the UK may be shifting, but not necessarily in a very encouraging way. Tony should watch the Right. David should watch the Left. And we should all watch our backs.

*I admit to adapting this from an Anti-Flag lyric, but in exchange I’ll plug the album. It's only fair.

In which the CAP does good things for good people, and for partridges too

I think it’s probably not too controversial to say that the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy doesn’t have a good reputation, especially in the UK. The average UK voter doesn’t really know all that much about what the EU actually does and doesn’t really want to either. Instead, a lot of facile clichés and myths are served up as facts and are peddled by lazy journalists and editors. Amongst these are the famous stories about how the EU specifies the acceptable curvature of bananas and wants to ban the Traditional British Banger. But one of the more legitimate concerns of voters throughout Europe is amount of money that the EU spends on agriculture through the CAP. By the end of 2005, the EU will have spent 46% of its budget, €49 billion, mainly on guaranteeing minimum prices and export subsidies. Indeed, until 1992, that is all that the CAP’s budget paid for, meaning that all subsidies were directly linked to production. Within Europe, this system meant that overproduction was endemic, as was the environmental damage linked to intensive agricultural production. Although there have been reforms to decouple production from subsidies, by and large the same problems still persist. Approximately 80% of the CAP’s budget goes to only 20% of EU farmers, while 40% of small farmers receive only 8% of the available subsidies.

To summarise, the productivist model of the CAP work like this. The more a farm produces, the more it receives in subsidies. The more farmers produce, the less agricultural commodities are worth. The less they’re worth, the more the EU has to compensate the farmers. As too much has been produced for the EU’s needs, it has to be exported. As it’s too expensive due to guaranteed prices, the EU has to subsidise exports so that European producers can undercut others. As a result, Third World producers especially can’t compete and go bankrupt. But it’s not only sugar cane growers in Jamaica who suffer. If you run a large farming concern in the EU, it’s all gravy. You can benefit from economies of scale to produce as much as possible, and you’re rewarded for it. This encourages you to use pesticides and artificial fertilisers liberally. There’s no incentive at all to stop hammering your environment and producing commodities that are of no use to anyone. But if you’re a small family farm, you can’t produce enough volume to make it worth your while, you can’t increase your yields because agricultural chemicals and especially machinery is unaffordable and won’t pay for itself on your small acreage. So you build up hopeless amounts of debt to stay in the game and end up selling up to the local barley baron to compensate for having a worthless pension. You can’t easily convert to another crop or diversify because you’re working to pay off your debts and can’t afford the initial investment or the risk. In fact, small farmers caught in the CAP productivist system are in a situation that is familiar to their aforementioned Jamaican counterparts.

So you’ll be glad to read that the Militant Pine Marten brings you agricultural tidings of great joy, having just witnessed the beneficial effects of the CAP reforms that were made in 2003. Briefly, in 2003 the EU decided to decouple subsidies from production gradually and instead to link direct single payments to environmental practices, animal welfare and food safety. In the UK, this mostly comes in the form of Defra’s various Stewardship schemes. The Militant Pine Marten was visiting a small family farm of the sort that was at the receiving end of the previous productivist model. This farm hadn’t really made any money for a decade or so. Suddenly, the kitchen has been redecorated, the tractors are looking in far better repair. Oh, you may not care very much, but you’ll probably be more impressed by the environmental benefits: people like that generally. The environmental benefits come in the form of an explosion on the local population of grey partridges (English partridges if you’re English, Hungarian ones if you’re from North America). Populations of grey partridges throughout the EU collapsed as intensive farming practices were introduced in the 1950s and 1960s especially. The thing is that young partridges live on insects in grass and fields. However the use of vast amounts of pesticides, the destruction of grass banks and hedgerows to rationalise fields weren’t conducive to vast insect populations. The grey partridge is as good an indicator of environmentally friendly agricultural practices as you could want. I am glad to report that the partridges are back, in high densities, to the extent that three of them will grace my table later this week.

The CAP has been a bad thing. It’s still far from ideal. It needs to stop doing things like making Tate & Lyle the single largest recipient of subsidies in the UK (to the tune of £127 million last year, for Christ’s sake). The shameful export subsidies need to be scrapped, although Peter Mandelson doesn’t seem to be doing too well on that front. But other stated aims of the CAP such as “to ensure fair living standards for the agricultural community” and now to improve and protect the environment, landscape, wildlife are being met, and as more reforms in this vein are introduced, the situation will improve. So you see, it’s not all lazy French farmers stealing money from hardworking British management consultants! Give the EU a chance. It stumbles around like a drunk a fair amount, but it will find the way home eventually.

UPDATE: Today the EU announced that in accordance with a WTO ruling, it was abandoning the insane sugar subsidies. This was by a long way the worst example of ill-considered agricultural policy. Well done the Council of Ministers! You see? I told you they were sorting themselves out.