Syria and Its Refugees

In 2014 we have been commemorating the outbreak of the First World War, the most terrible conflict in modern history. Not only did millions of young people lose their lives, but large parts of continental Europe were left devastated and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children found themselves displaced by a conflict not of their making.

This year, in 2015 we have the chance of celebrating the centenary of one of the most incredible acts of humanity from the people of Malvern – when, in the midst of their own suffering during the Great War, they opened their doors to give a welcome and a place of refuge and safety to 500 Belgian refugees.

What better way could there be of marking this centenary than to reach out to those innocent victims of today’s terrible conflict in the Middle East and thereby continue this country’s proud tradition, which stretches back centuries, of receiving refugees. What better way of showing how much we cherish our freedoms than by extending those freedoms to those who are subject in their countries of birth to unjust imprisonment and torture.

And, amidst the hysteria in this country about immigration – stoked up by those who refuse to accept any responsibility for our economic calamity, but seek to point the finger of blame at so-called outsiders, a debate I don’t intend to get into tonight, it cannot be stressed enough that asylum seekers – and ultimately refugees – are not economic migrants. 

A migrant is a person who makes a conscious choice to leave their country to seek a better life elsewhere. Before they decide to leave their country, migrants can seek information about their new home, study the language and explore employment opportunities. They can plan their travel, take their belongings with them and say goodbye to the important people in their lives. They are free to return home at any time if things don’t work out as they had hoped, if they get homesick or if they wish to visit family members and friends left behind.

Refugees are forced to leave their country because they are at risk of, or have experienced persecution. The main concern of refugees is for their safety, not economic advantage. They leave behind their homes, most or all of their belongings, family members and friends. Some are forced to flee with no warning and many have experienced significant trauma or been tortured or otherwise ill-treated. The journey to safety is fraught with hazard and many refugees risk their lives in search of protection. They cannot return unless the situation that forced them to leave improves.

And we must remember too how this country has benefitted from accepting refugees. It is estimated, for example, that since 1972 30 thousand jobs have been created in Leicester alone by Ugandan Asian refugees. About 1200 medically qualified refugees are recorded on the British Medical Association’s database. It is estimated that it costs around £25,000 to support a refugee doctor to practise in the UK – training a new doctor is estimated to cost over a quarter of a million. And the Office for Standards in Education reports that children seeking asylum – who may ultimately become refugees – contribute very positively to schools across the country, which in turn enables more successful integration of families into local communities. Refugees want to work, they want to contribute, they want to be part of our communities.

Some will argue that we already have more than our fair share of refugees in the UK? The figures do not bear this out: the UK is home to just 1% of the world’s refugees – out of more than 15 million worldwide. Over 80% of refugees live in developing countries, in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, often in camps with the most basic facilities.

Syria's neighbours are struggling under the weight of this unprecedented crisis – more than three million people have fled the country – and it is time we stopped asking of them what we are not doing ourselves. Ours is a modest proposal, the resettlement of a small number of refugees. Our government has so far agreed to take just 500 Syrian refugees and to date only 100 have arrived in the country for resettlement. That’s 100 out of three million.

In 1915 the people of Malvern showed their humanity when they welcomed the displaced of the First World War and made them part of our community. It is now time that we showed the same generosity of spirit as our predecessors a century ago by offering a place of to those very much less fortunate than ourselves, allowing them the chance to rebuild their lives, free from persecution.

TTIP and the betrayal of UK consumers

It has been said that “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Into this category falls the Government’s lie that savage cuts to essential public services are an austerity-driven imperative to reduce national debt. It is nothing of the sort: the debt rises to record levels, while big business cherry picks services that have been built over many years with public money and expertise. While their shareholders, wherever they may be, will reap the short-term benefit, the euphemistically named ‘third sector’ – charities and voluntary groups – will be left to pick up the pieces. Government has no interest in public service.

Some lies, though, are so big that they can’t even be spoken aloud – except in terms of baffling acronyms designed to send us into stupor before we’ve understood their consequences. No doubt it is for this reason that the media (dominated by the multinationals who stand to benefit) have told us nothing about TTIP and why there is no public debate about ISDS – though it is no exaggeration to say that these represent the biggest challenges to democratic governance in a generation.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a trade treaty that has been negotiated between the EU and the US for some years – almost entirely behind closed doors and the details of which the EU and our government appear shy about disclosing. Its purpose, apparently, is to remove the barriers to trade between the continental blocs. Who could possibly argue with that?! Except the current trade barriers between the EU and US are already very low. In fact, the treaty’s purpose is to remove those pesky profit-blocking rules – the ones that stop consumers being poisoned or killed, or that prevent pollution. 

It is argued that this consumer-protecting legislation (derided by government as “bureaucratic red tape”) needs to be “harmonised”. Again, difficult to argue with that (though US regulation is far less stringent – eg 70% of US processed food contains genetically modified ingredients). But that is where the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) – a part of the TTIP – comes into play. ISDS will allow big multinationals, using their armies of corporate lawyers, to sue national governments in offshore “arbitration tribunals” – beyond the UK courts – for doing anything that harms their profits. Fanciful? Not at all. Philip Morris, the US tobacco conglomerate, has already used similar trade treaties to sue the Uruguayan and Australian governments for trying to implement greater control on cigarette advertising. And a Swedish energy company has sued Germany for phasing out nuclear power. So should a future UK government try to enact a law that, for example, restricted the ability of a private-sector US medical services giant poaching great swathes of the NHS, it would find itself being sued for billions. 

By means of TTIP – supported by the three main parties and UKIP – our government is stripping UK citizens of the last vestiges of protection from rapacious big business. Speak out before it’s too late.

A Brand New Politics

Russell Brand does have a point. Though at times he seems to confuse a thesaurus with political eloquence (‘autodidact’ looms large in every Brand sermon), he has nevertheless highlighted the real disconnect between most ordinary people and our politicians. With a couple of notable exceptions, political party membership is lower than it has been for a century. And when people do get the opportunity to have their say – casting their vote at an election – increasingly they show their disengagement by abstaining. Our forefathers fought and died for the right to vote that today is so readily surrendered. But it is the politicians who are to blame.

There are many causes of this malaise. Our first-past-the-post system means most elections are decided in a handful of seats by a few voters; those of us unlucky enough to live elsewhere have the distinct impression we don’t matter and that the politicians have stopped listening. The main parties are all trying to occupy the same ‘middle ground’, to such an extent they have become entirely indistinct from one another. There’s actually a broad spectrum of opinion in this country – but when I hear the leaders of the main parties speak I am reminded of Marx (Groucho that is) who said ‘These are my principles. And if you don’t like them I have others.’ Additionally we must look for causes in the types of people we elect to Parliament. Just a generation ago, the Commons was filled with teachers, miners, dockers, health professionals – those who had in fact done a ‘proper’ job – not career politicians with little experience of real life beyond an apprenticeship in media or on a City trading floor so alien to most of us.

While Brand has highlighted the problem, he is somewhat hazier on the solutions. One positive to take from people’s disengagement from formal political dialogue is that they have found other ways of ‘making a difference’ in their communities – by working directly or indirectly with local groups on issues that affect their daily lives. Some of these will be overtly political – campaigning on specific issues. Many however will not be – but still they make a difference. Politicians need to start listening, and social media should increasingly play its part. People are beginning to rely on social media for their news and everyday discourse; and they rightly expect to be engaged by politicians via this medium. More importantly, though, social media is an open parliament, where its users, not politicians, set the agenda.

And politicians, media-trained to reveal nothing of their personalities or beliefs, need to start having a dialogue directly with the people they serve. For this reason I fully applaud the efforts of the Lansdowne Church, supported by the town council and others, to launch a series of debates on topical issues. Last Saturday it was food banks, a debate that was lively, informative and revealing of the grotesque inequalities of 21st century Britain, with local people showing they were better informed than our representatives in Westminster.

Putting communities before developers

As MHDC prepares to vote on whether to add still more homes to the already bloated South Worcestershire Development Plan, its Tory leadership predictably wrings its hands. But let’s not forget how readily they’ve accepted central government’s bidding to build our way out of recession, regardless of the environmental and economic cost. To its pleas there is no choice – there is always a choice.

The SWDP needs to have people and communities at its heart and should be embracing their contributions and participation throughout the plan-making process and over the full life of the plan period that follows. Instead, the process appears to have generated more upset and disquiet than enthusiasm among communities in South Worcs, and while we appreciate that the proposed plan has been produced in line with the formal consultative requirements of a plan-making process, the outcome has clearly failed to attract the groundswell of active public support/ownership that would surely be the hallmark of a successful outcome. This is a highly unsatisfactory basis for committing to a long-term development plan and reflects an insufficiently ‘bottom-up’ plan-making process, with inadequate provision for active engagement and dialogue with communities.

When the SWDP was published in 2012, the Greens were the only local party to offer a formal response – a serious, radical alternative to the concentration of development in large urban extensions. We proposed a distributed form of additional development across the area (all existing settlements growing pro rata to their current size) as a more appropriate option for accommodating the extra housing and employment growth. Such distributed development:

• better supports regeneration of rural and other local communities and makes them more self-sustainable as places to work as well as live
• does not require such large-scale additional infrastructure (particularly roads) or risk further congestion of the existing travel network
• provides a more manageable response to what is a fairly uncertain level of need for extra housing and employment provision, especially as distributed development (on smaller sites) can more easily be managed incrementally
• represents a more logical response to 21st century trends and lifestyles when so much more business and communication will be electronic, rather than face-to-face and the costs of transport (at least with fossil fuels) are likely to have escalated much further, particularly in response to ‘peak oil’
• enables the villages to become economically prosperous once again, able to sustain a wide range of local services and amenities, which in turn helps nurture and support local entrepreneurialism to further underpin their success as local economies
• enables the character of Malvern, the views from the hills, and the town’s tourist potential, to be protected from further sub-urban sprawl and more town centre traffic congestion
• is more likely to support sympathetic and high quality architecture and respect local vernacular design
• saves large tracts of high quality land for agricultural/food production purposes (recognising the importance of South Worcestershire’s farm economy both for local and national food supply) 
• minimises the pressure that large-scale concentrated development has on existing and new essential services (e.g. doctors’ surgeries, fire stations, water/sewerage mains and power supplies)
• is more likely to promote and support strong community identity and sense of place than do the soulless commuter-oriented, upwardly-mobile and transient estates that large-scale housing extensions invariably become
• avoids the risks of ghettoisation of less advantaged people and families that again so often goes hand in hand with large tracts of residential development, particularly where there is likely to be a significant proportion of social housing (e.g. the SWDP is looking for 50% affordable housing on larger sites).

In addition, particularly in response to the relatively high population/household growth envisaged for the sub-region, we proposed provision for one (possibly two) significant new green towns in the South Worcs area – zero/low carbon sustainable, self-sufficient communities, with a strong emphasis on advanced technology in terms of employment and economic base – of between 2,000–3,000 houses plus associated employment and amenity space and sufficient sites for a full range of service provision.

Certainly there is a need for more house-building – though there has been insufficient emphasis on bringing empty homes back into use and renovating our existing housing stock. But as important as the numbers are the variety of types, sizes and costs (affordability) of additional housing to meet a range of household circumstances. We want to see a much greater emphasis on achieving a better balance in the housing stock – with much more (affordable) provision for first-time buyers, more social housing (rented and shared equity), and many more smaller houses/bungalows to suit an aging population. The Plan should not just leave it to developers to build what they wish – since this only results in mass provision of (more profitable) executive homes that are unaffordable/unsuitable for many local needs and instead simply attract outsiders into the area, many of whom will commute long distances to work.

The SWDP, and the additional development it permits, also represents an important opportunity to upgrade significantly the standards of thermal efficiency in our housing stock to respond to the problems of climate change and escalating fuel costs. Exacting standards for new development with regard to energy efficiency and carbon emissions should be set. In this way the Plan can be the instrument by which we dramatically improve design standards in relation to a range of considerations, such as access to services and provision of community focal points, sound insulation and privacy etc.

The Plan is pessimistic about the prospects of being able to achieve the significant additional transport infrastructure (road schemes in particular), although having said that, the Plan also seems predicated on such additional infrastructure being provided. But cheap and easy car travel has been a major contributor to the loss of local facilities from smaller communities through diminished custom and viability. Moreover, experience tells us that road improvement/congestion alleviation schemes mostly only provide short-term relief and simply encourage more vehicles on to the highways so that soon the congestion and pollution problems re-emerge. This is a hopeless circular process out of which we must escape – and for which this SWDP again provided a golden opportunity that has been squandered. 

Our preferred option of a more distributed pattern of additional development seeks specifically to do this – by both reversing the trend to dormitory settlements for our villages and re-establishing them as sustainable and vibrant communities with local employment and services so that people need to travel far less. This is surely a more logical way to solve traffic congestion problems than continuing to throw public money at short-term alleviation schemes.

Such a vision requires imagination and the courage to stand up to central government and large developers. This administration has neither the imagination nor the courage, resorting to its party whip to ensure MHDC rejected our vision and forcing this unloved beast of a plan upon us.

Communities doing it for themselves

If you’ve travelled past the Cube this week you may have been intrigued by the frenetic activity on the roof. What you might not have realised, as work on installing a solar array was completed, is that this is a really good news story for community working – locals coming together to make their community better, a unique community renewable energy scheme to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions in Malvern.

One of the most expensive fixed costs of the Cube are its utilities and in order to meet the Cube’s mission, these costs need to be minimised. One means of achieving this is to obtain electricity at well below market price. Malvern Community Energy Co-operative, of which I am a director and which has installed the array, will sell electricity at a discounted rate to MYCT, who run the Cube. Any excess will be sold to the grid at a higher rate.

The Co-op electricity will also not be subject to the uncertainties associated with fossil fuel price increases (over twice inflation for the last 10 years), instead linking increases in price to RPI. The difference between the Co-op electricity prices and the market prices equates to the social benefit this scheme is delivering and is a part of creating a viable youth and community centre for the community run by the community. It is worth remembering that the Cube and all its services and facilities only exist today because a group of community-minded volunteers campaigned to be allowed to run it rather than the County Council following their plan to demolish the building.

Co-operative ownership of renewable energy is familiar to many in continental Europe and has been growing rapidly in the UK in recent years. There are now renewable energy co-operatives across the UK and across a range of technologies. These projects are not only helping to improve the local environment, but by bringing people together they are making renewable energy more accessible and affordable. Co-operatives of this kind are truly democratic structures: anyone can apply to join and with a ‘one member one vote’ system and a board elected from the membership, they offer a fair and transparent way to operate a community-owned renewable energy business. They also have the power to prioritise membership from the local area, ensuring that financial benefits from renewable energy flow to people in the locality.

The fossil fuel multinationals and their friends in government are hostile towards renewables. Unlike their diminishing supplies of oil and gas, renewables are inexhaustible and available to every community – not dependent on unstable sometimes undesirable overseas governments. And as renewables belong to nobody (even if the Nestlé chairman is reported as having said that water is not a right, but should be given a 'market value' and privatised) each and every one of us can benefit.

The sole planned activity of Malvern Community Energy Co-op is the ownership and management of one or more solar arrays in the Malvern Hills area. The establishment of the solar array at the Cube is the first stage in this process. With this demonstration model and the knowledge and lessons learnt from the set-up process the intention is to develop other projects. The Co-op is already pursuing other possibilities with organisations who own large roofs that face south and have a high electrical power demand. Watch this space!

A world where everyone feels valued, equal and safe - free of domestic violence

Our country is justly proud of its record of supporting the rights of women around the world – whether it’s their fight for rights we take for granted or eradicating abusive practices – slavery, forced marriages, FGM.

So consider for a moment these statistics: 1 in 4 women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime; every 6 seconds a woman is assaulted in her own home; every minute an incident of domestic violence is reported to the police – though a victim is likely to have been assaulted 35 times before she seeks help for the first time. Two women a week are killed by a current or former partner.

So from which illiberal backward, authoritarian part of the globe do these shameful statistics come? In fact, they come from Great Britain. Look again at those statistics – can you believe they come from Britain in the 21st century?

Make no mistake, domestic violence knows no social, economic or class boundaries – it is seen in every walk of life. Wherever it occurs, the victims are many: the women –sometimes the men – who suffer not only visible physical scars, but invisible mental scars that may take far longer to heal – loss of confidence, sense of worth, of being valued; children who are forced to witness the hurt of those they love, who may themselves become conditioned to accept abuse as the norm; parents and friends of victims, who feel helpless and guilty, seeing their loved ones so diminished and cowed.

The authorities – police, social services, judicial system – have become far better at tackling the issues of domestic abuse. They more often see the signs, are less likely to believe what happens between partners – a ‘mere domestic’ – is something to steer clear of. If what happens behind closed doors remains there it will not only be allowed to continue, but will become commonplace and the norm within families and communities. But even now, especially now, the will may be there, but the resources are lacking.

While the authorities have become better at tackling instances of abuse, and while the networks to support the victims are slowly being put in place – allowing victims to become survivors, and once more to take control of their lives – there is still a long way to go. And we shall never eradicate this malaise at the heart of our society until we have tackled the root causes – our attitudes as a society to the role of women within it. Changing attitudes takes time and it takes resources.

For this reason I was delighted to be invited to attend the launch of a new charity, the SupportWorks Foundation. The Foundation does invaluable work supporting survivors of abuse through its various educational recovery programmes – free of charge and designed to empower them and help rebuild their lives. The highest quality training is also being delivered to professionals who themselves deal with victims of domestic abuse.

But to eradicate this malaise once and for all we must start by educating our young. The Foundation delivers courses designed to prevent teenage relationship abuse, sexual assault and bullying and activate student leadership in promoting healthy and respectful relationships. These courses allow those in schools and other establishments to deliver the Coaching Healthy and Respectful Masculinity (CHARM) programme to boys and young men and the We Are Valued, Equal and Safe (WAVES) programme for girls and young women. To find out more, to offer your support, email info@supportworksfoundation.org.uk.

Living off the land - why a land value tax may help solve our housing crisis

Everyone recognises the need for more affordable accommodation, but what seems to be missing in the recent debates is any focus on the number of empty properties currently existing in our area. Recent statistics on empty homes suggest there are 6,406 in Worcestershire, including 923 in Malvern Hills of which 387 are ‘long-term empty’. In Britain there are at least 600,000 empty homes, many in the North and Midlands (the result of failed and non-existent regional development policies, and one more reason we shouldn't build HS2!). At the same time, developers sit on vast land banks, create an artificial housing shortage, and blame the planning system for resulting problems. The tax system encourages land hoarding. Keeping a property empty and unused makes excellent sense to speculators as minimal tax is payable on an empty plot.

One way to tackle this would be a locally determined Land Value Taxation (LVT), based on the annual rental value of the land, exempting all buildings on it, to replace the Council Tax and Non-Domestic Business Rates. As there would be no reduction of or exemption for buildings left vacant or that have been allowed to fall into a state of disrepair, this would encourage full use of existing properties and discourage the practice of people speculating on the price of sites whilst keeping the properties empty or derelict. It would become unprofitable to sit on unused land and would incentivise productive use of land.

Over time, this would help to stabilise the property market and tackle the boom-and-bust factor that contributed towards the 2008 financial crisis – discouraging disproportionate amounts of capital from being tied up in property and excessive accumulation of debt.

Moreover, the tax system should, whenever possible, target windfalls, not effort. The value of any plot is not the result of effort on the part of the landowner but the value added by the community; any increase is a windfall. As Winston Churchill recognised in a speech in 1909: "Roads are made, streets are made, railway services are improved, electric light turns night into day, electric trams glide swiftly to and fro, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains – and all the while the landlord sits still… To not one of these improvements does the land monopolist as a land monopolist contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is sensibly enhanced." The total value of the housing stock in the UK now stands at over £4trn, an increase above inflation since 1990 of £2trn. This £2trn increase has come through a rise in the value of land itself - not through new buildings (comparatively few houses have been built in the last two decades) but from improvements paid for by the community. Landowners have gained a windfall of £100bn yearly on average from a rise in land values to which they have not contributed. A tax levied on the value of the plot of land, without taking into account any building on it (value added by the landowner), targets this £100bn annual unearned windfall that at present is hardly taxed at all. Most goes to powerful and privileged freeloading landowners who fight to keep every penny, and in doing so harm the economy as well as damaging the environment.

The Green Party have developed a coherent LVT strategy:

LD400 The Green Party proposes introducing LVT (previously known as Community Ground Rent) as a tax payable on the annual value of land. The valuation would be of the land alone, exempting all buildings on it, recent and future improvements to it, or minerals extracted from it. LVT would therefore not be a tax on the rent of buildings, the value of crops, manufactured products or the product of other forms of work. (Minerals extracted from the land would be taxed separately - see NR423 & EC710s)

LD401 The proposed LVT would be levied by the local community at rates to be agreed amongst Districts and Regions. Any necessary redistribution between Districts and Regions would be undertaken by agreement between local governments in accordance with the principles agreed in EC551.

LD402 The level at which the tax would be levied would be based on the full value of the current permitted use of the land. Permitted use would mean, for example, that the taxable value of land which is deemed by the community to have special amenity or habitat value, thus inhibiting use for possible greater financial return , would be reduced. When it is considered desirable to change the use through the land-use planning framework, this new permitted use would then form the basis of the assessment.

LD403 Assessments would be reviewed automatically on change of use and every few years, or more frequently, on request. An arbitration process would be made available to provide compensation for those adversely affected by permitted use, and provision made for appeal against assessment.