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CND IN THE NEWS
CND in the News: 10-16 July 2003
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1 Girl, 11, searched by police at protest against war in Iraq
Daily Telegraph, 16 July 2003
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2003%2F07%2F16%2Fnterr16.xml
An 11-year-old girl was among hundreds of people stopped and searched
by police using anti-terrorism powers during protests against the war
in Iraq, an investigation has found.
Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft was issued with a notice under Section 44 of
the Terrorism Act 2000 when she accompanied her father on a visit to the
"peace camp" at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire. The Cotswold
base was used by American air force B52s on their way to bombing raids
over Baghdad.
Research by Liberty, the civil liberties organisation, uncovered widespread
use of anti-terrorist legislation against peaceful protesters, despite
ministerial promises in Parliament that it would not be used to stop legitimate
demonstrations.
When the Terrorism Act was going through the Commons in December 1999,
Jack Straw, then Home Secretary, said: "The Bill does not focus on
demonstrations, which are a normal activity in a democracy. I wholly defend
people's right to go in for peaceful protest."
During the war in Iraq, David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, denied that
the Act was being used against demonstrators. "Powers under this
legislation are applied solely for the prevention and investigation of
acts of terrorism," he said in a parliamentary written answer.
But, according to Liberty's report, Casualty of War: "One of the
most disturbing aspects of the policing . . . has been the widespread
use of counter-terrorist powers as opposed to conventional public order
powers. The treatment of protesters at RAF Fairford as potential or suspected
terrorists raises serious concerns."
Dave Cockcroft, 42, Isabelle's father, said she often accompanied him
on visits to the peace camp at the airbase and on a number of occasions
they were stopped by Gloucestershire police.
"I argued against them searching her and told them it was patently
absurd," said Mr Cockcroft, a computing consultant from Stroud. "Normally,
they would let her go after writing down her description. Then on one
occasion, the police insisted they had to search Isabelle.
"Because they had no women officers there they did not touch her
but made her empty her pockets, which contained virtually nothing, and
then filled in a notification slip under the Terrorism Act."
Mr Cockcroft, a former town councillor who has worked closely with the
police on the local liaison board, was himself stopped and searched at
least 20 times. He believes the "incessant searches" dissuaded
many protesters from going to Fairford and belied the Government's promise
not to use the legislation to stifle legitimate dissent.
"The first time I felt really indignant. What right did they have
to do this?" said Mr Cockcroft. "After a while it became so
repetitive that you got used to it."
A spokesman for Gloucestershire police said they had been given powers
to stop and search "persons and vehicles for the prevention of terrorism".
She could not comment on the decision to stop and search Isabelle.
In total, more than 1,000 stop and search notices were issued. The police
also used public order powers to stop three coaches bound for Fairford
with CND members, Quakers and a samba band taking part
in a "Flowers for Fairford" demonstration. The buses were escorted
back to London by a police convoy without the passengers being allowed
to disembark.
Liberty called on the Commons home affairs select committee to investigate
the use of anti-terrorist powers at Fairford and to question ministerial
denials that this was happening.
Simon Hughes, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: "In
any society there must be a balance between liberty and security, and
it is always difficult to strike a fair balance faced with the threat
of terrorist acts. However, on the basis of the evidence presented here,
I believe that the policing of the demonstrations at RAF Fairford got
the balance wrong."
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2 Upward and onward
The Scotsman
http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=767522003
This year we have been celebrating the hundredth anniversaries of the
births of George Orwell (who died in 1950) and Cyril Connolly (who died
in 1974). But there is another novelist of the same vintage who is still
very much alive and writing as well as he ever did in his 100th year.
Edward Upward, who was born on 9 September 1903, has just published a
new collection of short stories, A Renegade in Springtime, and there is
every sign that fresh pages will be emerging from his word-processor for
a few years to come.
Upward originally found fame as one of the so-called "Auden Generation"
of the 1930s, when he was part of the loose group of Leftist poets and
novelists which included WH Auden, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Cecil
Day-Lewis and Christopher Isherwood. He appears, thinly disguised, in
Isherwood’s novel Lions and Shadows as the character "Chalmers",
who "knew all about opium, absinthe, Lesbos and the metamorphoses
of the vampire". As well as being the last survivor from this generation
of writers, Upward was the only one among them who retained his Communist
convictions after 1945 - I suspect the reason why some critics have been
hostile towards his work. Yet he has also had sympathetic followers, such
as Anthony Burgess, who wrote that Upward was "part of that big revolutionary
optimism of the Thirties, a fable, a myth". Rod Mengham of Jesus
College, Cambridge, the author of a new book about Upward, says: "His
work has never ceased to be prescient and revisionary in ways that are
startlingly fresh".
Upward began his literary career in 1924 when he was a history student
at Cambridge, where he collaborated with Isherwood on a surreal and comic
fantasy narrative called Mortmere. Between them, the two writers invented
a grotesque, nightmarish vision of an English village where the rector
was a closet Satanist, human blood fell from the skies, monsters lurked
in haunted towers and there were sudden outbreaks of coprophagia. The
Mortmere stories, which circulated for many years in manuscript form -
since they were considered unpublishable - drew the attention of the poet
Auden, who dedicated a long poem to Upward in 1930. Virginia Woolf later
became his editor at the Hogarth Press, and she published his first novel,
Journey to the Border, in 1938.
As I take the train to Sandown on the Isle of Wight to meet Upward, I
am nervously aware that he has a particular interest in railway disasters,
which he has written about in stories such as The Railway Accident (1928)
and The Coming Day (2000). There is a reason for this apparently morbid
preoccupation with train crashes, and it is related to his Marxist political
views: the speeding train coming off the rails is a metaphor in his fiction
for the destruction of capitalist society.
When I arrive at Upward’s large Victorian house, I am surprised
when the front door is opened by a man who appears to be not much older
than 60. He has a good head of hair, perfect hearing and no need of a
walking stick. He is short, neatly dressed, bespectacled, alert and gently
amused by the prospect of being interviewed. "On my last birthday
they published my photograph in the Times," he says. "The Times!
I can’t imagine why." After years of being ignored by the literary
establishment, he is secretly enjoying the attention that age has finally
brought him.
We sit down in his large study, which is dominated by floor-to-ceiling
bookshelves. He is happy to reminisce about his famous literary friends,
especially Auden and Isherwood. "Auden talked with scorn of people
who were afraid to sit down on lavatory seats for fear of getting gonorrhoea,"
he reveals, rather unexpectedly, "and I wondered whether Isherwood
had told him that I didn’t sit on them. I’ve always crouched."
He speaks with great enthusiasm about the indecent Mortmere stories that
he wrote back in the 1920s: "I’m afraid I destroyed most of
those. I remember one in which some green stuff blocking the urinals suddenly
enlarges itself and becomes a Leviathan. Then the hero discovers he’s
got some awful disease." He is beaming as he says this, and it is
easy to imagine him as the young author of 80 years ago. But he is keen
to tell me about his current projects, too: "What I’m writing
now is the diary of a nonagenarian, and my problem here is how true it
is to be, or not. I don’t want to upset people unduly."
He has never found writing easy, and he endured a 20-year-long creative
block which he finally cured in 1962 with the help of a Jungian psychoanalyst.
There has been deep sadness in Upward’s long life, particularly
with the recent deaths of his wife, Hilda, and his brother, who lived
in the house next door. Yet the stories he has written in his nineties
point to a rediscovery of sexual love after bereavement.
Although he no longer calls himself a Communist, Upward remains a supporter
of CND. He is angry about social injustice, political
sleaze, the Blairite betrayal of the old left and "the world with
its multiplying wars and racist exterminations and its poisoning of the
air and seas". As for writing, he insists that his best work is the
autobiographical trilogy The Spiral Ascent, published between 1962 and
1977, in which he documented his involvement with revolutionary politics
and the creative arts. "I’m hoping that one day someone will
decide to republish it. I’ve said that I’d like the title
changed. I think it’s too much like a pun on my name. I’m
going to call it No Home But the Struggle."
The symmetry of Upward’s writing career only becomes apparent if
we compare the stories of the 1920s with the work he has published in
his eighties and nineties. As he approaches the end of life, he has returned
to the phantasmagoric political fables with which he began, but the recent
fiction is more deeply charged with the pain of loss and long experience.
When I ask him if he follows the work of younger writers, he speaks of
his admiration for JM Coetzee ("rather decent"), Bernice Rubens,
Jonathan Coe (“a brilliant writer") and Martin Amis ("reasonably
good"). Of his own 1930s generation he says, regretfully, that "those
who have been neglected are largely the women, the women poets anyway".
Does Upward ever feel gloomy that he is the last of his contemporaries
who is still with us? "I remember saying before they’d all
gone, ‘I have an awful feeling that I might outlive you all’.
I don’t know why I felt that. By rights I shouldn’t be here.
But I still am."
• Edward Upward’s A Renegade in Springtime is published by
Enitharmon, £15.
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3 Big shot
The Times, July 16, 2003
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-5-746720,00.html
NEIL DAVIDSON, chief executive of Express Dairies, once compared the
milk processing industry to street-fighting. The 52-year-old executive,
who has worked in the industry for 26 years, even spending three weeks
trying his hand as a milkman at the start of his career, will need to
display the tenacity and spirit of a street-fighter as he awaits the Competition
Commission’s decision on the group’s proposed merger with
Denmark’s Arla.
An industrial psychologist by training, Mr Davidson graduated from Nottingham
University and worked with a small firm of consultants in London before
deciding that his future lay in milk.
He joined Northern Foods in 1977 and was a member of its board from 1994
to 1998 until Express’s spin-off from Northern in 1998, when he
took the top job.
In 1990 he did an MSc in organisational psychology without telling his
employers, saying: “It was this Quaker, CND company
and they would have thought ‘we’re welly-booted milkmen, we
don’t go in for that sort of thing’.”
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4 Look Poms, new Labour was all my idea
The Times, July 13, 2003
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-525-743317,00.html
Interview: Jasper Gerard meets Bob Hawke
Bob Hawke reaches the parts other leaders cannot reach. The notoriously
thirsty former prime minister of Australia holds the world record for
downing a yard of ale (12 seconds); but on the sunny afternoon we meet
he is sipping tea in the garden of an Oxford college, trying to beat another
of his records (nine minutes to complete the Times crossword).
“GEG, two words, any idea?” Gulp. “Scrambled egg. It’s
obvious.” He was one of the most successful premiers in Australia’s
history, new Labour when Tony Blair was still marching for CND.
But he was considered a blubbing bruiser who wouldn’t give a XXXX
for diplomatic niceties. Indeed, despite being the godfather of the “third
way”, he is eschewing Blair’s talkfest this weekend for a
jolly in New York. As prime minister he never used a bodyguard —
but would you dare throw an egg at Hawke? The stereotype of the fair dinkum
blue is not pure fiction. He remarks that Hillary Clinton — whom
he has just met in Oxford during the Rhodes scholarship centenary celebrations
— has a generously padded behind. When I chastise him for his Aussie
chauvinism, his laughter fills the quad. And he says the electoral value
of having studied at Oxford was not the Rhodes scholarship, but getting
into the Guinness Book of Records for boozing.
Still, that he makes the calculation suggests Hawke is shrewder than our
tabloids acknowledge (recognised by Oxford, which has just awarded him
an honorary doctorate). Having been ousted by his chancellor, Paul Keating,
in December 1991 after winning a record four terms, he warns Blair about
Gordon Brown: “Encourage but beware ambitious treasurers.”
He dissects Blair’s arguments on Iraq with donnish precision. Indeed,
his former pupil is a disappointment to Hawke, sharing “this messianic
religious conviction of George Bush and the Christian right”. Improbably,
he discloses that one of his best friends is John Major.
We start with Oxford. In 1953 it “seemed primitive, particularly
the plumbing. Even then showers were pretty intrinsic to Australian life.”
But it proved “a marvellous experience” and he claims he was
“well received” without prejudice, though he was called Digger.
“I had Digger’s Corner in Rhodes House library. During summer
I played cricket every day so I squeezed three terms’ work into
two.” He studied arbitration — lessons he later applied to
end big disputes back home — and found himself refreshingly free
from the McCarthyism pervading Australia.
So did he, unlike Bill Clinton, another University College Rhodes scholar,
inhale? “I drank a lot of alcohol, but I’ve never taken drugs.”
Snifter-wise, he was already a scholar before Oxford, despite his mother’s
tours with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. “I remember
these bottles of shrivelled-up specimens of livers she took round to warn
about the effects of alcohol.”
But it didn’t put him off? “No, it probably had a perverse
effect.” Yet he was not prepared for the college’s arcane
traditions. One evening he arrived late for dinner in the Great Hall minus
gown — “pinched by some rotten bastard” — so faced
the Sconce, a challenge to down a giant tankard in 25 seconds. He did
it in less than half that. “I thought ‘bugger this’,
but I had been blessed with a reasonably open gullet. And 2Å pints
of English bitter wasn’t that potent.” Still, it was sufficiently
enticing to make him a regular at pubs such as the King’s Arms and
the Trout.
Not all his Oxford drinking was triumphant, however. Before going in to
bat for his college against Millfield, the public school, the headmaster
sat next to Hawke, the star batsman, and plied Digger with beer. He then
invited Hawke to his study. While taking a sherry, he offered Digger a
gigantic white concoction, Kummel. “As soon as I drank it, I knew
I was gone. It’s the most powerful bloody stuff I’ve ever
had. Never again. I staggered back to the pavilion, hoping our night watchman
would be endowed with qualities he had never previously exhibited. But
he wasn’t. I attempt to block a very mediocre ball, but miss and
over goes middle stump.
“As I trudge off, a scorer shouts, ‘Bowler’s name?’
And bloody Jack (the headmaster) yells (mocking toff accent), ‘Kummel’.”
Well, I say, at least Oxford taught him how to survive the rough and tumble
of politics. “No,” he laughs, “it just taught me how
low-down dirty you Poms could be.” He chuckles, tears of laughter
in his eyes.
Hawke toured with the university cricket side under Colin Cowdrey, later
England captain, and was 12th man against McC at Lord’s. “Colin
said, ‘We are not better than them at batting or bowling, myself
excluded, but at least we should excel them in the field’.
“So in very disloyal fashion I hoped one of our blokes might get
a bit crooked so I could get on. And my evil prayers were answered. Then
Raman Subba Row whacked this one and it went straight through my hands
for four. Some schoolboys shouted, ‘Get a bag, Digger’. I
felt about that big.”
His fiancée Hazel — later promoted up the order to first
wife — joined him shortly after he arrived at Oxford. “So
basically I was a good boy.” He says this with a twinkle that seems
to light other memories, but after the very public collapse of the marriage
he does not want to open old wounds. Now he is married again, to an exotic
blonde, Blanche d’Alpuget, with freaky green eyebrows and improbably
few wrinkles for one well past her half century.
At nearly 74, Hawke is still handsome, with a full head of white hair.
He has renounced booze and birds, but still keeps up his other passions:
discreetly circulating papers to world leaders with a plan for the economic
regeneration of Palestinian territory, travelling to China to promote
trade, and practising his golf. He was bitter about his demise but now,
suntanned, lugubrious and entertaining, he feels at peace with the world.
Except the world is not at peace.
Having led Australia into the first Gulf war, did this latest conflict,
also involving Australia, make him itch for power? “A good question.
I don’t normally feel that, but yes it did. I thought it was such
a mistake. I respect Tony Blair but on this his judgment is wrong. Osama
Bin Laden would have been praying to Allah that we invade Iraq, and it’s
never wise to do what your enemy wants.”
What particularly offended him was the failure of America and Britain
to acknowledge Saddam was a monster of their own making: “The first
Ba’athist minister of the interior said, ‘We have come to
power on a CIA train’. Then Britain’s Matrix Churchill helped
them with components for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The
hypocrisy of the past is matched by the cant of the present.”
Nor does he offer much comfort to Blair on those damned elusive weapons.
“Some might be found but not of the dimension claimed. And the link
with Al-Qaeda was never established.” He also thinks you can be
a friend of America without being its slave. “Reagan and his generals
spent hours trying to sign me up to star wars, and I said, ‘No,
I’m not, it’s crazy’.”
So who did he consider the nightmares among world leaders? “Well,
let’s start with Margaret (Thatcher. We had some incredible ding-dongs
over apartheid. At a Commonwealth meeting I had to tell her to get back
to the point. I was perhaps a bit direct at times.” (I can’t
bring myself to say: “Surely not.”) It was another Tory, Major,
who became his real cobber. “I have great respect for John. I keep
saying to people, ‘There are two John Majors’. Privately he
is vivacious, direct and thinks outside the circle, very attractive. It
just doesn’t translate to TV.”
Meanwhile, successive Labour leaders sat at his feet in the hope of learning
“Houdini” Hawke’s secret (he was PM for eight years).
“Tony and George Brown (bad luck, Gordon) came over to ask how to
do it. I always have a bit of a laugh when I hear Britain is new Labour.
We told them what it was all about.”
As he did Neil Kinnock, advising him bluntly that he stood no chance of
beating Thatcher. “I told him, ‘I think it’s a waste
of time’. Neil looked shocked. I said, ‘I am happy to give
you lots of advice, but if you go into this election supporting unilateral
disarmament, you can’t win’.” Denis Healey beamed: “His
eyebrows kept going up and down, because he agreed with me.”
As Labour considers lurching back to the left, what would Hawke advise?
“I was only ever a socialist briefly. I soon realised it didn’t
work, and really consider myself a social democrat.” I am also interested
in whether he thinks the blood bond between Britain and Australia will
survive. “The monarchy will be gone within 10 years.” Does
that make him sad? “Not at all, I’m a republican. Very significantly,
the Queen thinks we were mad to vote the way we did (against a republic).
She came over and said, ‘Whatever decision you make, the ties between
our two countries will remain’, which sounded to me as if she was
giving the green light.”
But ultimately he fears for that Aussie/Brit bond. “It’s inevitable
it will die to some extent,” he says, puffing on another cigar.
“At the start of the second world war, 60% of Australian exports
came to the UK. Now it’s 3%. Having said that, we are disappointed
England cricketers have gone off because we always think of the great
sporting contest as England v Australia. It’s no fun if you Poms
aren’t any good.”
We’ll all drink to that.
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