A Letter to Max

The problem is that the Fascists are relentless once they gain a foothold and they build on the developing euroscepticism which is running throughout established parties and in the UK has been running deep in the equivocal support the mainstream British parties have given to the European (Peace) project. One would have thought they would have learned their lesson by now. I can tell you that there is no appetite among the rising generation of NZers or Aussies to come come back to fight in Europe yet again if it all falls apart and that we, their parents and grandparents will not send them. NZers refused to send young men and women to Iraq to fight in that Imperialist war and will not do it again, lightly.

The political classes in Europe have made two critical errors - they have stopped explaining to the rising generations why they created the European Union (for peace in Europe) and have left the impression it was all just about free markets, which are now failing badly. Instead they created a complex system to keep the economic and social peace; so complex it is difficult to explain in translation from the official languages. Second, those national politicians, seeking to gain advantage over their national fellows, have attacked and denigrated European institutions as both too feeble and too powerful. When Europe has produced some stunning achievements they have often claimed credit for them, themselves. For example, Eurpean trade unions and employers organisations negotiated equal treatment in pay etc for both part-time workers and workers on fixed term contracts. these agreements have become the law of Europe and every member state, bringing equality and millions of euros in wage increases and benefits to millions of European citizens. Blair and Brown and many other national leaders claimed they had achieved this, when in the case of Blair and Brown, they did everything in their power to wreck our negotiations, as UK business did not want to pay equal wages.

So it does not surprise me that, with leaders who will not defend the peace treaties, that millions do not vote.

You should indeed Max, write a letter to the Independent and carry on doing all those things you have been doing before to campaign against this party, the BNP; for it is a party which supports what Hitler did in Germany and what the Japanese Imperial Army did in China and throughout Asia Pacific during the second world war. This is why it is so sad that it was able to secure two seats in the European Parliament created by a Peace Treaty after the end of that war in Europe, a treaty whose main purpose was to create an economic and social basis for a lasting peace in Europe.

As you know there are now quite a few parties like the BNP in other European countries and in the European Parliament, all seeking to pull the European Union apart and to establish militant, nationalist regimes in their own countries. If these, and other less militant parties with similar nationalist politics succeed in their efforts to wreck the European Treaties then we will not be just back to 1945 but probably to 1914 in Europe. The EU has many problems to solve, but not one of these parties has any intention of helping to do so.

My father 'did his duty' like millions of others (including many other colonials of German descent in Australian, Canadian and American armies), when he was asked to do it but he never once talked to us about this, so great was the effect of that episode of his life on him. But I thank God he did so, despite the tragedy that befell the German part of my family, some of whom went to their graves years before they should have done, during the wars of the 20th century. My father, an engineer on aship blown up off the D-Day beaches, grabbed the engine room clock as he finally left the bow section of the ship, which had remained afloat after being blown apart and he used to wind it up every week. It was a seven day clock and it ticked throughout our childhoods. We all knew that something terrible had happened, and this was the way he remembered his fallen comrades.

There are two films now showing in China about the 'rape of Nanjing'. One is the 'City of Life and Death' and it documents how the Japanese Army killed 300,000 citizens of the former Chinese capital city and raped thousands of women and girls in public and private. That Imperial Army, one million strong, went on to kill 4 million Chinese citizens citizens during the occupation of China, but was tied down by the Chinese people's resistance, instead of coming south to Australia and New Zealand, or east to the US, where they were trying to go. Japanese bombers and submarines did get as far as Sydney and Darwin in Australia in any event.

So, yes, Max, I do support everything you are doing to fight the ideas and influence of Mr Brons and his party. It is a very sad day for Britain indeed that you now have to do this.

in solidarity,

Dave

Where there's muck there's brass

This old Yorkshire adage should be followed by the New Zealand and other country dairy industries to save on costs, provide energy and clean up the environment. As the global recession bites, New Zealand and other country dairy farmers will come under tougher cost pressures from increased electricity charges and environmental compliance. One solution is to use dairy waste to raise heat and power. Instead of taking fright at New Zealand greenhouse gas (GHG) emission rules, farmers can turn the situation to their advantage. New Zealand has a particular problem with methane, as 49 % of its GHG comes from grazing animals – mostly from their gut and out of their mouths and a the rest from the back end.

The technology involved comes off the shelf. It is in widespread use in the United States, being taken up in Europe and is now taking off in Asia. Any company which ‘cracks’ the packaging of a flexible system for dairy farms, will make a good living. Whanganui, where I live, and situated between large dairy regions, Taranaki and Manawatu, and having dairy farms of its own, could become a regional centre.

The technology works like this: dairy shed waste is flushed into a set of sumps; the grit is left to settle and then the waste is pumped into a digester. This produces methane gas from the waste, which is then burned to raise heat. It can also be burned in a small methane engine to generate electricity. Remote farms, using expensive diesel generators, can replace them. If a feed pad system is used, then more waste is collected while the cows are eating.

Here are the three wins:
• First, it allows farmers to manage their effluent better, including nitrous oxides. The process does not eliminate nitrogen, but manages it better.
• Second - it converts methane –20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide – into useful energy.
• Third, in future, farmers will earn carbon credits for doing this. All political parties should be thinking about how to bring farmers into such a system early, to encourage the take up of biogas generation, now.

The Christchurch, NZ company, BioGenCool and Landcorp have a working prototype. Other trials have been conducted on middle sized dairy farms and several New Zealand companies are in talks with farmers to set up projects. Warwick Cutfield, technical director of Maunsell Engineering laid out the issues in a presentation to our Whanganui River Institute annual seminar back in February. Environutra, a start-up company is in discussions with dairy farmers in the region. The brass is in sight.

May 1st reminds us - working hours are too long

May 1st is a Workers’ Holiday in many countries. It began as a harvest holiday. It became formal after tough strikes in 1886 in Chicago, for the 8 hour day. May Day should give us pause for thought about how long our working hours are. Between them, Kiwi men and women spend an average 62 hours a week at work. There is no legal limit on weekly working hours in New Zealand. Only four other developed countries have no limits.
The deep recession should also give us pause. There is much less work around. To preserve existing jobs, the National Government has extended the nine day fortnight scheme to firms with 50 or more employees, taking it down from the 100 minimum before. Well done. Shorter working hours would also share work around.
Long hours have a huge impact on family life, separating men, especially, from their children. Kiwi men work the second longest average weekly hours in the developed world, after the UK. Many women are working to boost family income because they have no choice, when their kids are young. These days we have many kids who are often ‘home alone’. Throw temporary, agency and migrant work into the mix and we can see social problems being created daily. Families are under pressure and the loss of income in the recession hits hard as well. Decent pay is essential, too.
Long working hours are damaging to health as well as to family life. May 1st makes us reflect and so, too, does our own Labour Day. It also commemorates the struggle for an eight-hour working day. New Zealand workers were among the first in the world to claim this right when, in 1840, the carpenter Samuel Parnell led the fight for the eight-hour day in Wellington. Labour Day was first celebrated in New Zealand on 28 October 1890.
Another milestone in the fight for shorter hours came with the Blackball miners’ strike in 1908. Blackball was the birthplace of the New Zealand Labour Party. Its foundation followed the 1908 miners’ strike to reduce hours of work. If we are to have a healthy society and families which spend time together, then working hours must be reduced. There needs to be much better social support provided for working families with young children. Otherwise we will reap an even worse whirlwind of social problems.

Dateline: Beijing

Last week I promised to look at equality in China.

First, there is the stunning fact that over 200 million people have been lifted out of absolute poverty in recent decades. China is now the world’s third largest economy, yet its citizens have a per capita income of US$3,100. This is one tenth of ours - US$31,000. They are 104 in the league table; we are 28. But the Chinese have been getting wealthier year on year, as their economic growth rate has been stratospheric.

This year China is aiming for a ‘recessionary’ growth rate of 8%! In the months since the global recession hit, 20 million jobs of rural migrant workers have gone in the export factories as orders to the US, European and other shops and factories have dived. But China has not been as hard hit as Japan or the other Asian ‘tiger’ economies.

As recently as 1990, three quarters of the Chinese population lived in the countryside. Now it is down to around half. In the US the rural population is only 7%. The government is pursuing a broad strategy of moving people to urban areas as a means of increasing incomes. However, special measures have now to be put in place to help migrant workers returning to their villages to set up small businesses.

The National People’s Congress, which meets annually in March has just ratified the government’s proposal to spend 4 trillion RMB or US$ 586 billion on the economic stimulus package. More money is available if need be, says Premier Wen Jiabao. Expenditures are already flowing through via construction and infrastructure projects into the industrial economy. Some imports from Western countries are on the rise again, which is important for New Zealand, as exports to China are now substantial.

The government is making efforts, too, to persuade the Chinese, who are great savers, to spend more of their cash. A large chunk of the $586 bn is going into the health and social security systems, which are underfunded. Perhaps the most worrying aspect for China is their huge holding of US government debt. If the US struggles economically, China cannot escape. So while China is in a better position than most large economies, there remains a vast gulf between rural and urban living standards.

I am proud of my Chinese colleagues

I am very proud of my Chinese colleagues and the other foreign advisers working to reduce coal mine accidents among China’s five million miners. The number of fatal accidents in coal mines has fallen from a peak of 6,995 in 2002 to a provisional figure for 2008 of around 3,200. This means that thousands more families have their men folk alive, earning a wage which often supports all three generations of a family.
China’s coal output has increased hugely - from 998 million tonnes in 2000 to 2,720 million tonnes in 2008; so, expressed as a rate per million tonnes of coal produced, fatal accidents have fallen much more than 50%, from 5.8 fatalities per million tonnes in 2000 to 1.18 per million tonnes in 2008. But this figure remains very much higher than the rates for developed countries, especially when compared with Australia and New Zealand, whose large mines are the safest in the world.
But the story does not end here, of course. China is producing over 40% of the world’s coal. It is the fossil fuel with the highest carbon content. Oil has 80% of the carbon of coal on a energy equivalent basis and natural gas has 60% that of coal. Consequently, China’s carbon footprint is rising fast. In total, it has just overtaken the United States, which emits just over 6,000 million tonnes per year. China’s energy demand is rising in line with its 8% annual economic growth rate. Other countries are asking China to maintain this so that they can sell China their goods. China’s CO2 emissions are likely to double to 12,000 million tonnes by 2030.
The earth quite simply cannot sustain this. Consequently, the other part of our work in China is to help China to move towards a lower carbon economy – to first stabilize, then to reduce its emissions. This is no easy task. President Obama is one person who wants to help. He knows very well the US itself has a very great problem in meeting its Kyoto CO2 reduction targets. During the G20 summit in the UK early in April, the US and China discussed these issues. New Zealand and others must help them succeed. Otherwise, the frequency of extreme climate events, like one in one hundred year floods in the Whanganui region, will increase. We have a direct stake in the outcome.

Arthur's instinct was right

The 25th anniversary of the miner’s strike has been greeted with much head-shaking about its wrong-headed leadership and failure to compromise. This view needs to be challenged for never has any community of working people contributed so much to their country and yet been so badly treated. Never has there been such a willful destruction of so many individual communities, of such a vast amount of productive public capital, or of a nation's strategic energy resource.

Perhaps the real measure of the miners' sacrifice is this: since records were first kept in 1850, more than 100,000 of them have been killed at work. Countless others were injured or struck down by disease, with the present generation only now being compensated for some of those diseases - bronchitis and emphysema. Imagine what it must have been like to have had one of those men as a son, husband or father. Now, at the point when technology can prevent such destruction, that selfsame technology is being removed from the few remaining pits.

On the 25th anniversary of the miners' strike three key points need to be understood. First, on energy policy: instead of being the only European Union country that is self-sufficient in energy and a net oil exporter, we have now joined the others in their energy dependency. This time the UK will be at the end of the gas and oil pipelines from Russia, central Asia, Algeria and the Gulf. Wind-farms, however welcome, will not save us.

Labour’s own energy white paper acknowledged this: "By 2020 we are likely to be importing around three-quarters of our energy needs. And by that time half the world's gas and oil will be coming from countries that are currently perceived as relatively unstable, either in political or economic terms." There are no major plans to build clean coal stations, but that is what Spencer Abraham, the US energy secretary, advised George Bush and Tony Blair in July 2003.

Second, the economic and social costs of destroying the British coal industry have been huge - at least £28bn. This is nearly half of the North Sea tax revenues of £60bn collected since 1985. Unless further support is forthcoming, the horrendous damage to mining communities will take at least two generations to heal, notwithstanding the work of the Coalfields Regeneration Trust and the Coalfield Communities Campaign.

Third, the miners' strike could not have taken shape in the way it did in any other EU country. It would have been negotiated to a settlement firmly within the restructuring aid framework of the European Coal and Steel Community treaty, the founding treaty of the European economic and social model. Instead, in Britain we had the application of 19th-century industrial relations to an industry that was at a technological watershed.

Arthur Scargill, the miners' leader, was right about two things in particular: the huge scale of the redundancy and closure programme, and the inability of the consultation procedures within the industry to handle the issue. Restructuring had to be collectively bargained as well, but neither the National Coal Board (NCB) nor the government wanted to negotiate the substantive issues.
Scargill was right by instinct, but also because a group of us from Bradford University had done the research. In 1982 we showed the National Union of Mineworkers executive that automated, heavy-duty technology would produce a productivity explosion. If the market for coal remained the same, this would lead in the worst case to the loss of more than 165,000 jobs, or 74% of the 1981 pit workforce of 225,000. The first to go would be the coalfields of Scotland, the north-east, Kent and south Wales, which had received little investment. As Nelson Mandela observed with his customary frankness at an international mineworkers' conference in Johannesburg in 1992: "Scargill and the NUM have been vilified for trying to defend their members."

At the famous meeting of March 6 1984, James Cowan, NCB deputy chairman, admitted only reluctantly that around 20 pits and 21,000 jobs would be hit. Scargill's initial figure of 70,000 job losses was attacked as scaremongering. Only in her 1993 memoirs could Mrs Thatcher admit the truth. Ian MacGregor, NCB chairman, had told her in September 1983 that he wanted to cut 64,000 jobs in three years and extend the redundancy scheme to include miners under 50.

There are now fewer than 5,000 miners working in Britain's pits. While the second phase of pit closures arose in the 1990s from market displacement - mainly by the new, privatised gas power stations - the majority of job losses had earlier flowed from the productivity revolution. To illustrate this point: just one hi-tech coalface, at Kellingley colliery in Yorkshire, was producing 42,000 tonnes a week by 2003, almost as much as the 46,000 tonnes a week the whole pit was producing in 1983 from six faces, with six times as many men.

Many have argued that the miners' strike could have been settled well before that terrible year had run its course. This was made immensely difficult because the NCB would not negotiate. True, the NUM was forced into tactical options that made matters worse. And a civil war fought against the mining communities generated such pressure that an internal civil war broke out inside the union, at a time when members in the Midlands did not understand that their jobs were at risk.

There was always another way. The union had tabled a draft technology agreement in 1983. The NCB rejected it as "inappropriate". When NUM negotiators raised this in 1984 they were accused of moving the goalposts. A new technology agreement would have cut working hours and allowed older men to leave, to be replaced by their unemployed sons. Anywhere else in Europe it would have been seized upon as a basis for settlement. The October 1984 agreement with the pit deputies' union, Nacods, added an independent review body to the colliery review procedure. But it dealt with consequences, not causes, and was not binding.

Britain suffered a needless civil war and the mining communities were destroyed. Many thousands of managers and breakaway UDM members lost their jobs. And now the country is about finally to lose one of its founding industries.

Equinox in Beijing

Spring in Beijing is a fascinating season. Winters are very cold and summers are very hot, but spring and autumn can be gentle seasons, with autumn winning. Spring, of course, is the time of the equinoxal winds. The spring Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere will be on March 20 and the winds are already blowing. Fine red sand is whipped up from the Gobi desert and blown through any crack in the windows, covering every surface. Biking on Beijing’s streets, in a sandstorm is no fun at all. The Equinox happens twice a year, in March and September. Night and day are of equal length, when the sun sits vertically above the earth’s equator. For me, wherever I happen to be, it also evokes a questioning of human progress towards equality. A socialist colleague once went so far as to argue that ‘The Equinox is inherently socialist!’

If physics cannot really be claimed for one politics or another, China certainly can. But which one? The last two centuries have been tumultuous in China. Movements pressing the case for equality have been in powerful evidence since the Christian working men’s movement, the Taipings, started their rebellion against the Emperor in 1850 until they were crushed in 1864. One of my boyhood heroes, the Christian General Charles Gordon was dispatched by the British Crown to lead the Emperor’s armies in putting down the Taipings. Around 20 million people died. Gordon later died at Khartoum, also a martyr. To locate this in time and place for the peoples of the Whanganui Region, my current home in New Zealand, in 1864 another British officer, General Cameron landed at the river mouth and disembarked 3,700 redcoats, having just helped to secure again the jewel in the Crown, India.

Former Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai was born in the days before the Spring Equinox, 1898. He is often attributed as saying, in answer to a question about the impact of the French Revolution of 1789, “It is too early to say.” Premier Zhou’s studies in France no doubt included Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. What he is remembered for, however, is his diplomatic finesse. He was responsible for inviting President Richard Nixon, the first major Western leader since the end of the Second World War to visit China, in 1972. The economic reforms began in 1978 and China is well on its way to becoming the world’s largest economy, which it was up until two hundred years ago. How equal it will be, is for next week’s column.