Month: July 2019

Scenario planning plays an important role in modern politics. Political contestation is the art of out-manoeuvring opponents. By attempting to anticipate the moves they will make in response to events and problems, party leaderships or factions plan for possible eventualities. They seek to defeat the other side by outwitting them strategically. Simulation games are aimed at helping these efforts by building up a picture of how their opponents behave.

Interpretive hypotheses

Such games can hone strategic thinking, but they are, of course, necessarily imperfect, ‘probabilistic’ exercises. However well scenarios are prepared for there will always be too many variables for us to ‘know’ the future. There are simply too many possible events and factors that might occur, and interact in unique, complex and contingent ways, for us to be entirely sure what the actual course of history will be. E.H. Carr made this point in his famous text, What is History? Carr argued that, by the middle of the twentieth century, historians had abandoned determinism and were now more modest in their goals. ‘Content to inquire how things work’, as he put it.[i]

Rather than believing the goal of an enquiry into the past was to achieve certainty about the course of events in the future, Carr instead proposed a method based on hypothesis and interpretation. For Carr a good hypothesis constituted a ‘tool of thought, valid in so far as it is illuminating, and dependent for its validity on interpretation’.[ii] The logic of this principle was simple. History does not follow a strict determinism. But neither is anything possible. Drawing on Carr we might say that any study of a political process requires interpreting the mix of interests and circumstances in order to illuminate how exactly it evolves over time. Carr serves as a useful frame for a simulation game exercise.

The Brexit simulation

A group of us recently participated in a simulation game to model the future of the Brexit process. By assuming different roles amongst the forces in conflict over the future of the United Kingdom, we hoped to gain a greater understanding of the process and what might come next. We solicited the help of Richard Barbrook, an academic at Westminster University, and director of Digital Liberties, a UK-based cooperative that has pioneered the use of participatory simulations to anticipate political scenarios. His book, Class Wargames, applies the ideas of the French situationist, Guy Debord, who advocated the use of strategy games as performative, even theatrical, exercises to understand one’s political opponents and their strategic thinking. Barbrook designed the game, which he called, Meaningful Votes: The Brexit Simulation.

Collaborating on this initiative with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) and the ERSTE Foundation in Vienna we assembled a group of participants in Vienna comprised of civil society, journalists, academics and intellectuals.They were a mixture of nationalities, from Austria, the Balkans, the United States and Britain, and held a plurality of political views from left to right. For mainland European participants the game provided an opportunity to empirically rationalise a crisis that many had found inexplicable; for example, the refusal hitherto of the British parties to find a compromise on Brexit in Parliament is highly alien to those used to the political systems with a culture of building consensus (often with proportional representation), that exist in Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. Each participant took on the role of a faction within Parliament with the game beginning after the defeat of the heavy defeat of the First Meaningful Vote on 15 January 2019.

Simulating the factions

As Brexit has radically disrupted the existing British party system, the factional roles assumed by players did not tend to align with a particular party leadership. Instead different Tory and Labour factions were represented within the game. Each player had a series of votes allocated in the British Parliament. Larger factions had two different vote allocations: ‘waverers’ and diehards. They could potentially cast these votes in different directions. Another element of the game design lay in a consciously British-centric approach. An assumption underpinning the game was that the EU side would act as, in gaming-terms, a ‘dummy-player’. This refers to when an actor is present within a scenario, who does not face choices that affect the overall arc of the decision pathway. With modifications to the Withdrawal Agreement persistently ruled out by the EU, had players assumed this vantage point they would not have faced any choices. As a dummy-player, the umpire thus articulated the position of the EU-27 states at key decision-making points across the game.

Following the playful spirit of Debord’s legacy, this really was a game. Players accumulated points in relation to different votes passing and goals being reached. Some had hidden objectives that were revealed at the end of the game, identifying a potential conflict between the public statements of factions and their underlying motivations. The ‘winner’ had the most points at the end of the game.

Towards ‘no Brexit’

So what happened? And what did we learn from this exercise?

The outcome of the game eventually resolved itself in a new referendum. By this stage the game had moved into the near future of early autumn 2019. The cross-party negotiations had failed to reach a breakthrough acceptable to both leaderships. Softer members of the Tory Brexit Delivery Group then split away from the party leadership, crossing the floor to support a new referendum. Interestingly, this came as a surprise to the game designer, Barbrook, who had anticipated a stalemate and a further extension of Article 50 at the end of October 2019.

If this suggests the game had a Remain bias, other moments in the scenario serve to refute this. At an earlier moment in the game a majority emerged in Parliament in spite of opposition from Labour and the Remain parties, for the kind of technological solution to the Irish border question favoured by the ERG as an alternative to the troubled ‘Irish backstop’. Assuming the dummy-player function, the EU then intervened via the umpire into the Parliamentary scenario to rule out an agreement without the backstop. With Parliament then voting against leaving without a deal, the political factions were confronted with the same problem they have at the current time.

The crux of this decision is ultimately a narrow one: few options are still available to parties, making the outcome relatively straightforward to model. Leave on the deal May has negotiated with the EU, which is unpopular with Brexit voters and with Labour Remain voters who would like a second referendum. Or negotiate changes to the UK-future relationship document (the Withdrawal Agreement will not be reopened by the EU) to make the Brexit deal softer, making it more palatable for the Labour Party but even less acceptable to Brexit voters and Brexiters in the Tory party. As the changes are not legally binding on a future Tory prime minister even a Labour Party leadership wishing to ‘deliver Brexit’ has little incentive to support such a deal. This leaves only two further choices. Hold new elections in the hope they might produce a balance in the Parliament more conducive to striking a deal. Or, move towards a new referendum, which includes the opportunity to remain in the EU.

Globalisation, Brexit and strategic choices

The outcome of the game is not an exact prediction of events in the near future. One player’s calculation that at a certain stage the mainstream of the Tory party will have to try and ‘move on’ from Brexit by peeling off towards a referendum is what Carr called an interpretive hypothesis. It will be tested in the months ahead.

Rather the game offers an insight into the interests that will shape this and the core contradiction underpinning the process: that there is not a tangible, pragmatic form of Brexit acceptable to the people that want Brexit. The vote in the game for ‘technological solutions to the Irish border’ was analogous with, though not identical to, Parliament’s vote on the 30 January 2019 for the ‘Brady amendment’, which mandated the government to seek changes to the Irish backstop as a condition for passing the Withdrawal Agreement. Having passed by 317 votes to 301, Theresa May hailed it as demonstrating a ‘substantial and sustainable majority’ for leaving the EU. When the EU insisted on the Irish backstop, the refusal of the hard Brexiters and the DUP to compromise forced a logic of events that points increasingly to ‘no Brexit’.

Underpinning this is a mistaken conception of how sovereignty operates in the twenty-first century. No state, however powerful, enjoys absolute sovereignty. All states are constrained by economic and political forces beyond their border. Larger states or geopolitical blocs, such as the European Union, China, or the United States, have significantly more power to ‘shape’ the way globalisation works and operates. Britain would have to make steep concessions to these larger blocs to get a trade deal. The game successfully modelled this geopolitical logic by demonstrating – through the existence of the EU as a ‘dummy player’ – the limitations placed on UK Parliamentary sovereignty by the fact of its international relations with the wider world.

Leave campaign rhetoric about taking back control comes into contradiction with this material reality. In all Brexit scenarios, exiting the EU entails a loss of substantive sovereignty for Britain. Even the ‘no deal’ Brexit preferred by hardline Leavers would lead to Britain signing a deal on less advantageous terms shortly after the exit – perhaps in as little as ten days depending on the scale of the economic dislocation. Once the legal uncertainty and accompanying economic turmoil is experienced any government would be under huge pressure to end the chaos by striking an agreement with the EU. On the other hand, the Brexit process has also demonstrated the maximising-effect of EU membership for sovereign states: Ireland has been in a far stronger position to protect the open border with the North and the Good Friday Agreement because of the clear support of 26 other EU member-states.

Constrained political choices

Many people are rightly concerned about a Boris Johnson premiership. He has an appalling record of racist statements and seems motivated by little else than narcissism and personal ambition. Nonetheless, it is debatable whether there would, in the end, be a practical difference between the Brexit he pursues compared to that of his rival, Jeremy Hunt. Ultimately they inherit constrained political choices.

If a no deal, which would be an electoral disaster for any PM and would not even result in the kind of total break with the EU for which it is designed, is taken off the table, there are few remaining options. Johnson could negotiate cosmetic adjustments to the Withdrawal Agreement (akin to the ‘reassurances’ on the backstop May received prior to Meaningful Vote #3) and present these as ‘new’ changes. He could then attempt to get these through Parliament. He would need enough support from rebels on the Labour side to cancel out the Tory and DUP dissenters. This is his clearest route to ‘delivering Brexit’ by October 31.

If this fails he can then fight either an election or a referendum to ‘deliver the deal’. The choice between the two will surely be determined by the state of opinion polling at the time, with the striking rise of the Brexit Party making any voluntary move to an election by the Tories unlikely. As for a referendum, what the game did not tell us, of course, is its likely outcome. Remain will start as favourites, given the long-term shift in the polling away from Leave, but the margins are tight and contingent events can intervene. Victory is far from assured.

In search of reason

It can often feel that the Brexit process has unleashed euphoric, unreal, deeply performative, and rhetorical politics. A politics that is incapable of being rationalised in terms of interests and goals. But the game assisted us in comprehending the micro-nationalities operating within the logics of this evolving situation. ‘[W]e achieve understanding by reenacting its history in miniature’, as Debord argued.[i] Out-gaming the other side requires tactical insight into the assumptions underpinning their behaviour. While this could lead to the game becoming an end in itself, this political conflict still has to resolve itself on a normative set of assumptions: deciding on the best outcome desired for the country is the only basis from which rational compromises can be worked through in order to achieve the best possible scenario. The refusal of Brexiters to compromise, and their use of rhetorical devices to harden opposition to May’s deal amongst Leave voters, reduces the scope for a compromise. It risks triggering a decision tree that leads squarely to a ‘no Brexit’ situation.

Click Here: Sports Water Bottles

Time plays an important role in this process. Barbrook had envisaged that the game would end with a stalemate in October 2019 as Britain asked the EU for a further extension. But the different outcome players arrived at illustrated how the micro-rationalities animating their decisions eventually had to break. Although it may seem like the Brexit impasse will last for time immemorial, eventually the passing of time requires one of the competing factions to splinter away from their preferred outcome. There does seem to be a prima facie case for assuming this will eventually be mainstream Conservative politicians. As the governing party, they feel the stresses of state-management and power politics in a way that the opposition simply do not.

Is Britain on a path to no Brexit? We will soon find out if this interpretive hypothesis has captured the logic of the country’s vexed attempt to leave the EU.

[i] E.H. Carr, 2018. What is History? Penguin Modern Classics (epub version): New York, p. 223.

[ii] Ibid, p. 224.

[iii] Guy Debord, The Game of War, Unpopular Books: Poplar, p. 61.

Disinformation and deflection

Ever since the start of the direct military intervention of the US in the Syrian war in September 2014 (and indeed before), Syrians have long protested that beyond its mandatory declarations of support for the ‘Syrian Spring’, the US has been actively supporting the Assad regime and preventing its “collapse”. Syrians argued that the US stood opposed to the victory of the armed revolution, preferring the Assad regime’s survival – whether with or without Assad personally at its head – than the prospect of Assad leaving power by force.

On the other hand, many self-denominated “anti-imperialist” westerners repeating the propaganda of Assad, Mubarak and Saleh – all western collaborators who put on the robe of “anti-imperialism” when their populations turned against them – argued that it was in fact the revolutionaries of the ‘Arab Spring’ who were the western-orchestrated “conspiracy”. The irony that the regime itself would welcome US airstrikes in 2014 and celebrate it across its national media, whilst Assad personally would boast that western governments criticised him in public but provided his regime with intelligence in private, earned a new title for this category of western propagandists: more pro-Assad than Assad himself.

2014 headline of pro-regime newspaper: “Washington and its allies in one ditch with the Syrian Army against terrorism”

…“Syrian warplanes used to shell us two or three times a week but now they target us every day thanks to the coalition forces,” Faris Samir, from Harm in the northern Idlib region, complained on Thursday. “We are losing martyrs and many get injured but no one pays any attention. Now the Syrian [regime] army is taking areas bombed by the coalition forces after the Islamic factions withdraw. I have to say that the coalition military campaign is in the interest of the Syrian regime and against the Syrian people.”' – Coalition air strikes against Isis aid Bashar al-Assad, Syrian rebels claim – The Guardian, Oct 9, 2014.

“The politics don’t matter to the people here, all we see is one type of death – it comes from the sky, whether the Americans are dropping the bombs or Assad, it makes no difference. They are both murdering us. What do you expect any sane person to think here? One day American airplanes and the next Bashar’s, how do they not crash or shoot each other? It is simple, they call each other and say today is my turn to kill the people of Raqqa, please don’t bother me, it will be yours tomorrow." – Sharing the skies with Assad: America’s predicament in Syria – Middle East Eye, November 28, 2014.

"We are seeing coalition warplanes hit targets during the day in Raqqa province and then Syrian warplanes follow-up with more indiscriminate strikes at night,” a commander with the Free Syrian Army told The Daily Beast. “This is not a coincidence—to argue that it is stretches credulity”" – Here’s How Obama and Assad Team Up Against ISIS – The Daily Beast, October 2, 2015.

As a result of a fixation on a never-arriving ‘regime-change’ operation, such events as airstrikes against mainstream rebel factions by the US during the war repeatedly passed under the radar – as has the intervention of US allies like the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Units (PMUs), officially part of the Iraqi military, the Egyptian al-Sisi regime and even the Lebanese government on the side of the Assad regime. Indeed, besides the indirect support that the US has provided Assad via his pro-Iran Iraqi sectarian militias, the US has even actively supported pro-Iran foreign militias on Syrian territory.

Between the ‘War on Terror’ and regime change

One of the reasons for this confusion lies in the fundamental contradiction within the Neoconservative ’War on Terror’ matrix established under the Bush administration. The ‘War on Terror’ is often associated with the neoconservative Bush regime. Neoconservatives of course believed that it was the US’ moral duty to spread both its influence and democracy to authoritarian regions, if necessary by force. Yet neoconservative thought, whilst influential, could not be said to have unilaterally or even predominantly informed US foreign policy-making under Bush, and indeed the hallmarks of the ‘War on Terror’ continued to be a traditional and ‘realist’ collaboration with authoritarian regional regimes (including that of Assad).

The ‘War on Terror’ under the Bush administration often relied on consolidating the rule of autocratic regimes in the region despite Iraq being justified in the opposite neoconservative goals. There was thus always an internal contradiction between the ‘neoconservative’ and ‘anti-terror’ dimensions of US foreign policy, the latter relying on supporting the regimes that the former in its pure sense wanted replaced (thus some neoconservatives advocated that even allied regimes like Mubarak and Saleh’s should be removed from power).

The Obama administration moved away from the partial commitment (however misguided) to interventionist ‘democracy promotion’ established under Bush (which even US allies had been limitedly subject to, as when Egypt’s Mubarak was forced in 2005 to hold multi-candidate presidential elections for the first time), whilst continuing the ‘War on Terror’. This did not mark a long-term commitment to reducing US ‘intervention’ in the region, but simply a return to a purer and more traditional form of US foreign policy in the region. The Bush administration’s support of NGOs and civil society groups in allied authoritarian countries was unwelcome by many of these regimes, who nonetheless largely toed the line in their (lack of) public criticisms for fear of being ‘next in line’. When the Arab Spring uprisings overthrew them however (with popular anger at the subjugation of national sovereignty to US diktat playing no small part), the likes of Mubarak and Saleh would, like Assad, blame their overthrow on a ‘US conspiracy’.

Historical context: the myth of US Syrian enmity

By 2011 and the outbreak of the Arab Spring, US relations with Syria had in fact been the best they had been in decades, with Syria reportedly on the verge of being ‘fully’ normalised into the western sphere as part of a peace settlement being pursued (and according to US Secretary of State John Kerry, on the verge of being completed) with Israel – the same transformation undertaken by Sadat’s Egypt in the 1970s. Though Syria under the Assads had never been a western ‘enemy’ – with the US and the Assads consistently collaborating on key regional issues (as during the Lebanese Civil War, when Assad’s Syria intervened in 1976 against the Palestine Liberation Organisation at the notorious urging of Henry Kissinger, the First Gulf War and the War on Terror) – it instead occupied a floating position between the western and Russian spheres of influence, lying firmly in neither (indeed, Vladimir Putin would declare that Russian relations with Syria were not warm at the outbreak of the Arab Spring). So long as Israel continued to occupy Syrian territory, Syrian relations with the US were not fully normalised (though European countries enjoyed warmer relations), whilst not falling into the ‘rejectionist’ camp or being categorised a ‘pariah’ state (a la Gadaffi’s Libya for instance) either.

This normalisation process was combined with major security and intelligence coordination with the US, including against insurgent groups in Lebanon and Iraq (in the latter case these were ironically the same groups that the Syrian Ba’athist regime had once facilitated after Bush’s invasion of neighbouring Ba’athist Iraq, a time when the regime feared that it was next in line amid a sharpening of rhetoric by hawkish neoconservative elements in the administration; many of the same anti-US insurgents would later find themselves returning to Syrian prisons after relations with the US improved). Thus, Syrian protesters in 2011 would in fact declare Assad’s security chief and brother, Maher, the “agent of the Americans”.

Similarly, contrary to the regime’s revisionist propaganda after the revolution’s outbreak, the regime had not only kept Israel’s northern border its quietest frontier since a 1974 Separation of Forces agreement, but had for more than a decade all but publicly recognised Israel. The Syrian regime’s flag publicly flew alongside that of Israel during direct talks in the 1990s (broken down by Israeli, rather than Syrian, intransigence); Syrian regime officials appeared on Israeli TV; the Syrian Grand Mufti recognised Israel as ‘part of the Holy Land’ in a speech at the UN; whilst Bashar al-Assad himself would publicly declare Syria’s willingness to exchange embassies if Israel returned the Golan Heights (whilst privately agreeing to restrict the capabilities of both Hamas and Hezbollah, according to Wikileaks cables).

Thus like Egypt before it, Syria had long abandoned any notion of a ‘comprehensive’ peace agreement inseparably tied to a resolution for the Palestinians, and was for all intents and purposes happy to publicly recognise Israel’s existence if it thought this may help return the occupied Golan Heights (and indeed, effectively even before then). Indeed, it is ironically the case that it was the outbreak of the Arab Spring which broke off Syrian regime negotiations with Israel, with Israeli officials who had been under heavy pressure from the Obama Administration to make concessions on the Golan breathing a sigh of relief at the outbreak of the turmoil and the political impracticality of a settlement (the Obama Administration had hoped its foreign policy legacy to be that of a Syrian Israeli peace treaty, continuing the tradition of Arab Israeli normalisation set by Democrat predecessors: the Egyptian Israeli peace treaty under Jimmy Carter, and the Oslo and Wadi Araba Accords with the PLO and Jordan under Bill Clinton).

Two symbolic flashpoints of the Obama Administration’s endgame: Daraya and Aleppo

Contrary to myth, the US role in the Syrian conflict independently of Russia’s intervention has long consisted of regime preservation. In August 2016, the revolutionary, democratically-organised town of Daraya – a town symbolising the values of the revolution, governed by an elected local Council whose authority local rebel battalions were subject to – fell to Assad loyalist forces led by Iraqi paramilitary groups backed by the United States in Iraq. To add to the role of these militias, the US and Jordan had been blockading for a year the entry of ammunition and weaponry to the Southern Front FSA rebels, including those in Daraya.

Similarly Aleppo’s fall was not only the work of Russia but an independent outcome of US and Turkish policy. For months before the fall of Aleppo discussions within pro-revolution circles speculated that there was a clear US direction towards allowing Aleppo to fall – the final piece of the long-term, time-biding “no alternative to Assad” which has been the end-game of US policy. US statements in recent months served as an indicator to this “end point” trajectory at which US policy was finally arriving; such statements included predicting that the rebels would be “decimated” a year before the fall of Aleppo, proclaiming that Russian-blitzkrieged Aleppo was “primarily Nusra held” (when Nusra possessed an estimated 150 out of 7000 rebel soldiers in the city), announcing that Assad could be authorised to bombard “designated terrorists” alongside the US and Russia, arguing that rebels should stop fighting the Syrian Army and instead unite with it against ISIS (even with Assad still in power), and finally to stating that the opposition should accept Assad running for elections in 2017.

Such statements were significantly backed up by policy on the ground: the US had already “frozen” the fight against Assad in Syria’s South since 2015 (leading eventually to the fall of Daraya) and in July and August of 2015 the US also bombarded some of the strongest rebel battalions in Syria’s north – which had at the time seized the entirety of the province of Idlib and threatened to advance onto the regime heartland of Latakia, refusing to comply with US-mandated operational “red-lines” against further advances – with the US “warning strikes” coming a month before Russia’s intervention. By this point Assad had been sufficiently rehabilitated and along with Turkey’s own final selling out of the rebels in exchange for an anti-YPG accommodation with Russia (and perhaps also the US, likely involving the retention of the regime in exchange for preventing the connection of the YPG-held cantons) to add to rebel disunity, Aleppo’s fate had been sealed.

What has also been very poorly reported in western media outlets has been US military actions during the fall of Aleppo: during the regime siege leading up to its fall, the US repeatedly bombed rebel positions in Aleppo, including civilian infrastructure, as well as assassinating anti-Assad rebel commanders – events which led to anti-US protests taking place in rebel-held areas of Aleppo during the regime siege. One of the protest sites, the FSA-held village of al-Jinah, would be the same site of a US bombing of a mosque in 2017 which killed 50 worshippers.

Concurrently at the time of the Aleppo siege, US special forces were even kicked out of the town of Al-Rai by an FSA battalion, protesting their complicity with the Assad regime (rebels in the same area were “mistakenly” bombed by the US a day later). Meanwhile Iraqi forces backed by western governments against the insurgency in Iraq (and officially part of Iraqi state forces) formed the biggest single component of pro-Assad forces, forming up to half of all pro-Assad forces, whilst the US-backed Kurdish YPG also played a role alongside pro-Assad militias during the siege of Aleppo. The western-backed Al-Sisi regime in Egypt further supported the regime offensive, having been providing arms and ammunition to the Assad regime for years.

Indeed, whilst Aleppo was being subjected to Assad and Russia’s blitzkriegs ISIS forces retook Palmyra. The US government – criticising Russian “inefficiency” – bombarded ISIS forces around Palmyra and helped pro-Assad forces recapture territory. In other words, Assad was able to rely on Russian aerial support in Aleppo and US aerial support in Palmyra.

With the theatre of conflict rhetoric today between the US and Iran breaking out again following years of hibernation, it is easy to forget that during the Obama Administration, Iran conducted a regional, anti-Arab Spring counter-revolution that was being explicitly supported in places like Iraq and Syria. Simply speaking, the US allowed an Iranian winter to come in and achieve an unprecedented regional expansion – constantly boasted about by Iranian officials – to counterbalance against the Arab Spring; an expansion unprecedented in Middle East history (previous undertakers of such expansionisms included Saddam Hussein, who was struck down after his annexation of Kuwait, Nasser-led Arab nationalism and the 19th century "moderniser" Mohammed Ali Pasha – all such expansionist projects were struck down by western governments), with Iran supporting governments subject to the Arab Spring protests not only in Syria, but in Iraq with (the western puppet) Maliki, in Egypt, recognising the coup of the (western-backed and Israeli-favourite) al-Sisi regime, and finally Yemen with the (former western puppet) Saleh. The disparity between the reporting of Arab media and alternative outlets and that of their western counterparts of this reality could not have been more pronounced.

US policy in Syria: dissociation and collaboration with a discredited regime

For those who have closely followed the daily realities and details of the Syrian conflict, it is clear that contrary to popular myth, the US never supported a military victory of the armed revolutionary forces. Nor has this been a secret: US officials have for years outwardly revealed the extremely underreported ‘small print’ of US policy, to those who were willing to pay attention: Assad should step down, but not at the expense of the rebels dismantling the entire regime. Such statements however went largely under the radar because of bombastic declarations of a non-existent “Iraq-style regime change” about to take place in Syria.

Indeed, the Assad regime in fact repeatedly welcomed the US military intervention in 2014 – which by contrast was condemned by the vast majority of rebel groups and opposition civil society. Ultimately, such widespread claims in these circles that the US intervention ostensibly against ISIS was really a ‘backdoor’ attempt at regime change were therefore, effectively, more defensive of the regime than the regime itself. As Assad himself once stated, accurately summarising his understanding of western policy towards Syria far better than many of his defenders: “They attack us politically and then they send officials to deal with us under the table, especially the security”.

The reality of US policy on the conflict, thus, was more nuanced, yet ultimately simple: the US supported what could effectively be described as an intra-regime coup (whereby power structures within the regime and military sacrificed the ‘head of the snake’ to save the body), as effectively took place in Egypt when the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces nudged Mubarak to leave power. Such an approach would pacify the popular revolutionary fervour and insulate Syrian state institutions from the threat of ‘collapse’; thus the preservation of Syrian security and intelligence apparatuses (the most authoritarian in the region) in any ‘political solution’ was declared early on as a key US policy goal, despite this demand contradicting one of the earliest outlined demands of the Syrian protesters even before a call for the resignation of Bashar al-Assad had been made.

The US thus encouraged the inner circles of the regime and Syrian Army to sacrifice its figurehead throughout 2011, and though this clearly transpired to be an unforthcoming scenario by 2012/13 – with the regime’s innermost power circles staying loyal to the figurehead (this was in no small part due to sectarian dynamics not present in such places as Egypt and Tunisia and weaker in Yemen, whereby the person of Assad effectively represented a sect’s predominance in various state institutions) – the US nonetheless never shifted from this position of a ‘regime minus Assad’ political solution to adopting a policy of facilitating (or allowing) a rebel military victory which threatened to dismantle the entirety of the government in Damascus (a dismantlement of regime institutions which had already taken place in vast areas of Syria). As US Secretary of State John Kerry plainly declared, “If you don’t want the government to crash, you can’t have Assad go boom”.

The first US policy preference was thus a ‘regime preservation’ without Assad at the helm; in lieu of this option being available however, it was the second US preference which was the ultimately decisive question. Would the US prioritise regime preservation even if it meant Assad remaining at the helm as the consolidator of the regime, or would it accept a rebel military solution which overthrew Assad as well as potentially dismantling the entire regime?

It was clear that even before the rise of ISIS it was the former option that constituted US policy, with US officials publicly declaring that a rebel military solution was not on the table from the earliest days of the armed rebellion, whilst practical US policy quietly undermined any rebel military solution through major restrictions imposed on third party providers of rebel arms (as well as tying the ‘vetting’ of third party arms transfers to conditions imposed on the permitted scope of rebel military campaigns) and blockades on the provision of ‘game changing weaponry’.

This included diplomatic pressure on Qatar and Saudi Arabia to preclude the provision of qualitative weaponry (including in particular a complete ban on anti-aircraft missiles, which were blocked according to private statements by US officials relayed by Syrian opposition figures because they would ‘bring about the collapse of the regime within fifteen days’), the major influence the US exerted within the Military Operations Centre (MOC) in Jordan and its Turkish equivalent (MOM) – through which arms transfers into Syria were coordinated – and ultimately through the seizing of arms shipments by the CIA along the Jordanian and Turkish borders, both from private donors and even allied states.

It was the role of the MOC and MOM in particular which determined major battle dynamics on the ground; thus in coordination with Jordan in particular (and during the early stage of the conflict, Turkey) the US would effectively cut third-party ammunition supplies to rebel forces if they launched ‘unauthorised’ offensives which threatened to destabilise the equilibrium status quo; this occurred when countryside FSA forces surprisingly entered the city of Aleppo in 2012 to capture the eastern half (with ammunition supplies from Turkey being cut during the offensive, preventing the entirety of the city being captured), when FSA forces captured the suburbs of Damascus and entered the city (with ammunition supplies again being cut from Jordan during the offensive), when rebels attempted to take the entirety of the southern city of Dara’a, and when a rebel coalition known as Jaish al-Fatah overran the province of Idlib and advanced onto the sensitive regime heartland of Latakia, prompting a then-widespread panic of regime collapse (the US would repeatedly bomb mainstream rebel brigades during the offensive, including an FSA arms factory, and Russia would intervene a month later).

Indeed, US sensitivities to ‘regime collapse’ were to such an extent that the effective US policy was largely to ‘allow’ the survival of rebel forces in the countrysides, largely opposing their entry into major urban centres. This policy caused a major tension with US allies such as Saudi Arabia, a country which incidentally also favoured a political accommodation with the regime (as took place in Yemen with Saudi’s support for the post Saleh retention of his loyalist General People’s Congress). Indeed, Saudi Arabia was not keen on a rebel military solution (unlike Qatar) but wanted a much more serious commitment to the stated US aim of bringing about a political solution through imposing a sufficient degree of rebel military pressure. Power holders within the regime, the Saudis believed, would never be scared enough to sacrifice Assad if the rebels were only to occupy provincial countrysides, effectively the US policy.

Thus even within the confines of a ‘regime preserving’ political solution (let alone ‘regime change’), the US was seen as uncommitted to the policy it publicly espoused. This perhaps was unsurprising, since US policy makers were likely fully aware of the fundamental (and nonsensical) contradiction within its own policy; for how could power holders within the regime be scared enough to sacrifice Assad, when the US also publicly declared that ‘regime collapse’ or a rebel military victory was not an option on the table? Simply speaking, power holders within the regime knew that the US ‘demands’ for Assad to step down amounted to little more than compulsory bluff, made mainly for cosmetic purposes. This did not mean that the US did not want Assad to step down, but it does mean that it preferred him remaining than a rebel military victory.

In other words, the US wanted to pressure Assad to go but not force him to do so, and its main intervention in the conflict has overwhelmingly been to use its influence from within the ‘pro-rebel’ camp to prevent a rebel military solution. This has taken the combined form of arms restrictions, supporting ‘alternative’ forces that were ostensibly distinct from the regime but were officially indifferent to, and practically collaborationist with, it (such as the SDF, which would serve as a US -attempted replacement for the FSA), and eventually intelligence coordination (including even joint operational sorties between the US and Syrian airforces) and military intervention (which both indirectly helped the regime, being aimed practically exclusively at Assad’s enemies, and on occasion directly doing so, as in Palmyra and Deir al-Zor). The major irony is that the vast majority of anti-imperialist and anti-war movements have misunderstood this US policy of ‘Distancing to Protect’ (or Dissociate to Protect – D2P for short) – the general US Arab Spring policy of creating political distance from discredited leaderships whilst privately encouraging the consolidation of the ‘deep states’ constituting it – as an obsession with ‘regime change’ justified in the name of ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P).

Indeed, the realities of the conflict are that the US has mainly limited its direct arming of groups and support by air-cover to those that either collaborate with the Assad regime or agreed to suspend their fight against it. These most prominently include the SDF (which includes within its ranks a pro-Assad faction, the Jaish al-Sanadeed, as well as the regime-collaborating YPG) and the former New Syrian Army stationed at the al-Tanf garrison (often again misleadingly portrayed as ‘FSA rebels’ in media coverage, despite being excommunicated from its larger FSA sub-coalition for agreeing only to fight ISIS). Meanwhile, US bombs have almost exclusively fallen (at a proportion of more than 99%) in anti-Assad heartlands which were bastions of the Arab Spring protests in 2011 (areas such as Raqqa and Deir al-Zor were liberated by the opposition in 2012/13 before a heavily armed ISIS outgunned local rebel brigades, including with tonnes of US military equipment seized from the Iraqi government at Mosul in 2014 – with calls for help by anti-ISIS rebels ignored). Amongst the thousands of Syrian civilians killed by the Coalition in these areas are people who came out onto the streets in 2011.

Click Here: Sports Water Bottles

Failure to understand the nuance of the policy was in no small part because of its inconvenience. Simply speaking, it was much more straight forward to proclaim and propagate the notion: “The US wants to repeat regime change in Syria like it did in Iraq” than “The US wants Assad to step down but not for the entire regime to be overthrown, and has thus effectively supported the retention of the regime whilst dissociating itself from its representative figurehead, Assad”.

Indeed, it is the opinion of this writer that it has been US intervention which has been more effective than that of Russia in keeping the regime in place. Simply speaking, Russia did not have the capacity to determine the military capabilities of the opposition; it could only support the regime. It is the US, which by playing the role of a Trojan Horse within the opposition’s arms pipeline has ensured that the rebels were starved of the resources they needed to topple the regime from third parties, regardless of its Russian support. If Russia set the house on fire, it was the US that hit the fire-extinguisher from its inhabitants (and as areas such as Raqqa and Mosul would attest, added a fair bit to the fire as well) That this complicity in the largest crime so far of the 21st century by the prime so-called proponents of ‘democracy’ is so unknown, is a tragedy.

Democratic legitimacy is a precious political treasure and Europe is trying quite desperately to obtain it. Yet the selection process for the new head of the European Commission will leave many citizens bewildered. Gone is the only minor democratic reform of the recent years, which envisaged the spitzenkandidat of the largest European party being selected as the Commission President. Back is the power of member-states to appoint their own candidate in back-door horse-trading. The European Parliament can show its disgruntlement, but in the end, it has no viable alternative but to fall into the line as it did yesterday, however narrowly.

The power of the Council used to be justified in democratic terms, because its members represent vibrant democracies. However, this proposition becomes shaky if we look at some states in Central and Eastern Europe. Even leaders of western states such as Italy, Great Britain or France are now confronted with a serious legitimacy crisis.

The system of parliamentary representation in Europe was always opaque because there is no such thing that we could call a European demos; instead we have a loose collection of numerous national demoimanifesting little coherence and solidarity. Besides, the European Parliament was never allowed to control the European government. Paradoxically, this might be a blessing for an integrated Europe. The EP hosts ever more politicians determined to bring power back from Brussels to their own national capitols. They may have failed to take over the EP during the May elections, but they are now able to block important decisions within the Parliament and the Council, as Frans Timmermans has learned lately.

Europe’s experiments with direct democracy have proved even more imperfect. Most of the European referenda resembled a festival of populism with ample space for demagoguery and little for deliberation. Other forms of direct participation, such as online surveys and petitions, civic dialogues or peer-to-peer networks can work well in local or municipal communities, but are less suited for a vast European space with different languages and preoccupations.

Ursula von der Leyen is obviously not responsible for these democratic deficiencies of the EU, but she is well advised to put democracy at the top of her agenda. Von der Leyen prevailed over Frans Timmermans thanks to support received from sovereigntist (populist) politicians. They hope that Von der Leyen will be as friendly with them as her party colleague, Manfred Weber, the failed spitzenkandidat. Von der Leyen’s position on the violation of the rule of law in member-states would therefore be the first test of her Presidency. Yet it is hard for the EU to give lessons in democracy to its member states if the EU itself is not seen as very democratic. What can she do given the above-mentioned complications?

She should start with the issue of transparency, an issue without which people can hardly control any government. The EU has cosier relations with lobbyists than with citizens, it shows more determination in curbing “excessive” social spending than tax dodging, and its communication strategy is highly selective. We recently learned that the EP snubbed a proposal to make contacts with lobbyists more transparent while the Commission for months refused to disclose the results of emissions tests it did on diesel vehicles produced by Porsche. Details of tax havens used by Europe’s firms were revealed by WikiLeaks and not by Mr Juncker or Tajani. These are probably only the symbolic tips of the icebergs, and Von der Leyen should start cleaning up this mess quickly, reassuring Europe’s public about its unbiased and transparent conduct.

She should also identify practical ways of involving citizens in the process of decision-making. This does not mean more referenda, but a sound institutional system of consulting Europe’s demoi on the most important matters tackled by the EU. These consultations must be genuine and they should not be held in Brussels, but across the entire continent.

Creating a second chamber of the European Parliament featuring representatives of cities, regions, NGOs and business associations could also bring citizens closer to the EU. This chamber would chiefly feature local activists and sectoral representatives who are closer to ordinary citizens than professional politicians currently sitting in the EP. Of course, Von der Leyen is not in a position to create a second chamber, but she can wholeheartedly embrace the idea. She can also propose to give Europe’s citizens meaningful ways for contesting decisions directly affecting them. The prerogatives and the budget of Europe’s Ombudsman could increase and the scope of private litigation in the European Court of Justice could be broadened.

The trickiest issue concerns the powers of the European Commission as such, which many critics consider too vast and insufficiently accountable. Parliamentary oversight of the Commission is important, but probably inadequate given the scale of the enterprise. It is therefore important to think about another standard democratic devise, which amounts to curbing and dispersing the centralized power. Decentralization brings power closer to citizens and it facilitates accountability. The EU has more than forty regulatory agencies located in different countries and dealing with such diverse issues as human rights, maritime traffic or food safety. They could be given more power and resources at the expense of the European Commission. Such a step will not necessarily weaken the Commission, but it will release it from some current burdens and beef up its legitimacy.

With the EU being granted ever more powers there is pressure to legitimize its decisions. In the past, the European project chiefly relied on output legitimacy; the key objective was to make Europe more efficient and prosperous. However, disappointing economic growth from the 1970s onwards and then a series of economic and migratory crises made it pertinent for the EU to increase reliance on the input legitimacy based on democracy of some sort.

Moreover, successive waves of EU enlargement have made it increasingly difficult to reach decisions by consensus, and so majoritarian decisions within the European Council have been progressively introduced. As member states are no longer able to veto certain EU decisions there is the need to legitimize majoritarian decisions in a Pan-European framework.

Democracy is about participation, contestation, accountability and representation. Elections and parliaments are only a few among the numerous institutional devices possible to secure democracy. The EU is not a state, so we need to be innovative and forge some experiments.

The President of the European Commission cannot single-handedly alter the existing treaties, but she can forcefully speak about democracy and propose ways for strengthening it. Von der Leyen’s predecessors have not done this forcefully enough: hence the current crisis of the entire European project. Let’s hope that the first female head of the Commission will go down in history not merely as a skilful bureaucrat, but also as a bard or advocate of Europe’s people. Or is it too naïve to hope for such a thing?

This article was originally published in German in Die Zeit on July 17, 2019.

Tomorrow, two months after Theresa May announced her resignation, we will find out who will be our next Prime Minister. In a leadership contest dominated by Brexit, the voices and concerns of children didn’t play much of a part. Whether it’s Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt who ends up in the top job, it doesn’t seem they have much of a plan for how to protect and promote children’s rights. To help out the new PM, we’ve put together this short to-do list with a few suggestions for how to set this right and ensure a brighter future for children and young people.

1. Reform the law on school exclusions

Every child has a right to an education which allows them to pursue their dreams and fulfill their potential. In recent years, though, there has been a rise in the number of children being permanently excluded from school. These children often end up struggling to access the education they need to progress in their lives, and many end up stuck in Pupil Referral Units. These lack the educational standards of mainstream schools, and children there often fall prey to criminal exploitation and get funnelled into a life of crime.

What is even more shocking about this situation is that it often proves impossible to overturn unfair exclusions. The independent panels where parents can go to contest exclusions currently don’t have the power to reinstate a child in education – even if they find an exclusion to be unlawful! This is particularly concerning when we consider, as was reported in the recent school exclusions review by Edward Timpson, that exclusions disproportionately affect children from Black and Minority Ethnic backgrounds, and those with special educational needs and disabilities.

There’s lots that needs to be done to improve our education system and ensure children get the best possible start in life. A simple place the next Prime Minister could start would be to introduce effective oversight mechanisms for school exclusions to ensure schools are held to account and all children are given a fair chance with an education that empowers them to contribute to society.

2. Ensure appropriate housing for all children

All children deserve a home where they feel safe and secure. But despite legal obligations for local councils to provide suitable homes for children, unacceptable numbers of children continue to be housed in inappropriate accommodation for long periods of time.

Department for Education figures show that last year over 3000 children under care of local authorities in England were housed in independent accommodation, which often lacks live-in staff support and includes unsupervised B&Bs. Meanwhile, homeless families with children continue to be housed in inappropriate B&B-style accommodation, many of them for longer than they should be by law. At the end of March 2018 2,230 families with children, including those headed by a child, were housed in B&Bs. Nearly 40% of them were there for longer than six weeks – which is the legal limit for housing children in this kind of accommodation.

If our new Prime Minister needs to know more about why action on this issue is so important, all he needs to do is listen to children themselves. Over the last couple of years we have been working with a group of children with experience of homelessness to empower them to talk about their experiences and campaign for change. Last year they wrote a report about what it’s like to live in B&B-style accommodation, and met with the Housing Minister to discuss possible solutions. We’re sure they would be interested in meeting with the new Prime Minister to share their ideas on how he can ensure that every child has a safe and stable place to call home.

3. Put the brakes on “Knife Crime Prevention Orders”

Reducing violent crime will rightly be a priority for the new Prime Minister. Despite this being an issue people of all ages and from all regions, inner city children and young people are disproportionately painted as perpetrators in media coverage. This leads to kneejerk reactions from politicians which often end up doing more harm than good.

When it comes to steering children away from violence, there are solutions out there, such youth support outreach programmes, which get to grips with the issue by tackling the root causes of why children get involved in this kind of behaviour in the first place. There is also progress to be made in ensuring that we respond to children in trouble with the law in a way that helps them to escape the strong current of crime. One way to help achieve this is by ensuring they have advice and representation from specialist youth justice lawyers.

These policies stand in stark contrast to the government’s plans for new “Knife Crime Prevention Orders”, which were rushed through parliament earlier this year. Based on the disastrous Anti-social Behaviour Orders (“ASBOs”), police will be able to use these new powers to put restrictions on children as young as 12 – including those who have never carried a knife or been involved in violent crime – with severe criminal penalties for minor infringements of the orders. We already know that children from Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds are more likely to end up in the criminal justice system and more likely to end up in custody following sentencing. Shockingly the latest official data shows there are more children in prisons for young people from BAME backgrounds than from white backgrounds. Arming police with yet more discretionary powers will only lead to further disproportionality.

Rather than reducing violent crime in our communities, these new police powers will push more children into the criminal justice system, trapping them in a life of crime and preventing them from reaching their potential. Rather than regressive measures that will only exacerbate these problems, our new Prime Minister should focus on coming up with solutions that get to the fundamental causes of violent crime in our communities.

4. Correct our unjust criminal records system

In January, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark judgment on our criminal records system. The judges decided that the current system for disclosing youth reprimands and cautions was unlawful and ordered the government to change the system – but new legislation has yet to be brought forward.

Youth reprimands and cautions are supposed to divert children who have committed minor crimes from the criminal justice system, but under the current regime some reprimands and cautions can appear on police checks for decades after they were issued. The Supreme Court rightly decided that this system is disproportionate and damaging to the future rehabilitation of children, preventing them from moving on from their past.

MPs agree with this assessment. A 2017 inquiry by the House of Commons Justice Select Committee found that this undermines the ability of the youth justice system to steer children away from crime. Instead, children find themselves trapped by their past. The next Prime Minister should work with his parliamentary colleagues to ensure that this is corrected, as well as asking the Law Commission to conduct a root and branch review of the criminal records systems for children and young people to ensure criminal records do not blight their lives indefinitely.

5. Protect legal rights after Brexit…

Brexit will undoubtedly be the prime concern of the next Prime Minister, but in all the debates over trade deals and customs unions, it’s vital that children are not forgotten. An urgent issue will be the status of children of EU citizens. There are more than half a million children of EU nationals living in the UK, many of whom were born here. There is still a lack of clarity over whether the Brexit arrangements will safeguard the rights of these children, and many could face unforeseen barriers to applying for UK settled status. The new Prime Minister must guarantee the rights of these children to a secure and stable future in the UK.

Another concern for children’s rights post-Brexit is the loss of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which the government excluded from being transposed into UK law in the EU Withdrawal Act. Article 24 of the Charter gives rights specifically to children, including the rights to protection and care, and to have their views taken into consideration. These rights aren’t enshrined in current domestic legislation, and there is a serious risk they will be lost after Brexit if action is not taken.

Our country is clearly divided as to whether Brexit will have a positive or negative effect, but surely we can all agree that children should not be left to suffer as a result of EU withdrawal. Our new Prime Minister should act urgently to ensure that they aren’t.

6. …and extend them further

It’s vital that we protect the rights and entitlements that we already have, including those in the Human Rights Act, but a real legacy for the next Prime Minister would be one which saw rights extended further. In November we will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This landmark agreement, ratified by 140 countries, sets out the minimum expectations for how governments the world over should treat children. It guarantees them all the things that every person needs to live a happy and healthy childhood, from education, play and family life to freedom from exploitation and fair treatment in the justice system.

Click Here: online rugby store malaysia

The UK ratified the Convention in 1991, but it has still not been incorporated in domestic law. What better way for the next Prime Minister to mark this anniversary year, and show his commitment to the wellbeing of children, than to finally bring about this legislation? Doing so would send a clear signal that this is a country where we want every child to have the opportunity to reach their potential and have their rights respected and promoted. At the very least, he should enact a statutory child rights duty on all government ministers to ensure that they take into account the rights of children when making a policy or budgetary decision.

But there’s lots, lots more to do

This list is far from exhaustive – there is a lot more that the next Prime Minister needs to do to ensure that every child can reach their potential, growing up respected, promoted and safe. From ending child imprisonment to introducing simpler pathway to citizenship and better mental health support for children, this goal is not only possible but also crucial.

Luckily a more comprehensive list is available. The State of Children’s Rights report , produced by the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, part of my organisation Just for Kids Law, includes eight thematic briefings outlining the government’s record on protecting children’s rights, and presents a set of clear recommendations for government policy to transform and improve young lives.

We’re happy to send the new Prime Minister a copy. We know his address.

“He’s morally unfit to be President.” “The environment is a moral issue.” “We should consume only those commodities produced by the highest moral standards.” We hear this kind of moralizing all the time, but these are not political positions, let alone critical ones, and to pretend that they are only makes us dumb to today’s actually-existing conditions.

Pretty much everything that goes under the name of politics today is not political at all, if by politics we mean, not the cartoon version we witness daily in the media but real contestation over the economic, cultural, psychological and spiritual institutions that shape what is possible and for whom – and that shape the very way by which we dream what might be possible in the future.

Anyone can argue against a system when it’s gone wrong, when a cop’s chokehold asphyxiates an innocent man or when we catch a politician with his pants down. The real test of critical thinking is to resist this temptation to knock on the open door and moralize against the liars and the cheats and the crooks (however much they deserve it), and instead attune ourselves to how, even if the system seems to be functioning crisis-free, it is still producing inequality and injustice.

Even if the factory is clean and safe, for example, the workers are still being exploited. Even if I am kind and caring, I can still be part of the race problem. And even if the system is producing injustice it is still functioning according to plan. This is not some contrarian and easy cynicism; this attunement requires a rigorous and non-moralizing critique of capitalist logic and an unapologetic speculation about what can come after it.

What would be the principles of such a critique? First, it is not personally motivated. Of course, every action is personally motivated insofar that it comes from an individual person and is necessarily fashioned by conscious and unconscious desires. But a non-personal critique of capitalism recognizes that we are necessarily part of this system and wrapped up in its ideologies, and that we share this necessity with others, both friends and enemies.

There is no escaping capitalism since capitalism is not only the production and consumption of commodities, but a system with special forms of exchange, meaning-making, social relations, desire, communication and thought that imbue themselves into our very beings, so much so that attempting to avoid them is like trying to avoid our deepest habits.

Second, this non-moralizing critique is not personally directed. Instead it is directed toward the structure, system and logic of capitalism, which requires less scathing and shaming rhetoric against individuals and more analytic understanding of how the system actually works. Yes, capitalism produces greedy and corrupt capitalists, but to begin with a criticism of them is counterproductive, not only because the dominant system of media representation is based on a sophisticated defense of these individuals and their practices, but also because to go after successful capitalists undermines the analytical skills required to understand the larger system.

To direct a critique at the system and not at the individuals who manage and defend it is to reaffirm a belief in the system itself – in systems as such. To argue that crises occur in capitalism not because capitalism has gone wrong but because it has gone right is to argue that there is a cause-and-effect logic that can explain events like war, poverty and illness.

Unless we recognize that each system has a special logic, politics will be relegated to the dull paternalism of dinner-table debate measured only by what counts and makes sense within the dominant ideology. Resisting moralizing critiques and the smug cynicism of dystopian narratives that find any reference to “the system” to be a straight line to the gulag enables us to be more conscious of the fact that capitalism is a system that came into being at one moment in history and will go out of being at another.

Moreover, the capitalist system today, dominated by finance capital and neoliberal strategies of dispossession, is constituted by dominant ideologies that are no longer underwritten by the cold-war political justifications of freedom and democracy. The demand that one must starve or work one’s fingers to the bone to ensure liberty against foreign enemies falls on deaf ears. Today’s post post-cold war ideologies of sacrifice openly justify the economic logic of sustainability and growth.

People die, for example, because the logic of capitalist profit and expansion requires a withholding of their life-saving medications. The most vulnerable, in other words, are told the truth: that the global capitalist system cannot afford to save their lives, at least if it wants to manage its own contradictions. The most vulnerable are also the least susceptible to those who argue that capitalism can be fixed, or at least that capitalism can be managed so as to make it more progressive or compassionate or moral. It can’t be fixed because it’s not broken – it’s operating precisely as it’s designed to operate.

This simple fact sustains a non-moralizing critique because it denaturalizes capitalism, opening up a comparative analysis with other social formations, especially those that don’t yet exist, and based on what each system delivers in areas like health care, a healthy natural environment, opportunities to experience diverse pleasures, social equality, individual justice, nourishing food and secure shelter.

Third, instead of anthropomorphizing capitalism with histrionic claims of how it is evil or righteous, a non-moralizing critique sees it for what it is – a human-built machine that performs certain functions based on fundamental principles that cannot be suspended – such as the necessary expansion of commodity production and the accumulation of perversely excessive profits that can only be hoarded by a privileged few.

Such a critique generates a certain degree of respect for capitalism based on how capable it is at performing such tasks. Instead of incredulity and counter-productive anger, a non-moralizing critique generates a clear voice and a measured response that doesn’t retreat from the most painful and beautiful aspects of everyday capitalist life.

But this non-moralizing critique is not enough. No matter how much we recognize that it is tactically counterproductive to moralize against bad actors or chance events and blame them for disrupting our otherwise smooth sailing into a peaceful and prosperous future, we are still no closer to changing the system itself.

To resign ourselves to this paradox is not the answer either – not only because such a clever settling functions to strengthen the system and dull our critical edges, but also because the pleasure gained by a spirited and non-moralizing critique of capitalism is enlivening, and radical politics will always require a reclaiming of personal pleasure from the state, and a redirection of erotics away from the dominant order.

Something similar can be said about critique on the personal level. Even if we know why we behave the way we do and what activates these symptoms, this knowledge doesn’t keep us from repeating the same patterns of behaviour. In fact, often times it is precisely the accurate knowledge of the truth about ourselves that keeps us locked into our harmful ways.

In this sense, it is precisely the truth of our self-analysis, and the gratification we take in the force of the narrative itself, that is likely to prevent us from radically transforming it. This is not to argue against all projects of self-inquiry, but to recognize that something truly creative and nourishing requires a confrontation that exceeds this form of knowing, and that confronts head-on the making of a self that exceeds what we want or can imagine.

I’m not sure which project is more difficult: to make a self beyond ourselves or to make a world beyond itself. Regardless, it is in the face of this transformative desire that the personal and the political meet most profoundly.

Click Here: bape jacket cheap

For those trying to live a sustainable lifestyle, swimsuit shopping might feel stressful for one more reason this year. In addition to feeling good about how the suit fits your body, you might be concerned with the materials and manufacturing that went into the garment.

Luckily, there are plenty of sustainable swimsuit brands on the market. To help get you ready for summer, Green Matters has rounded up a list of eight companies that make eco-conscious swimsuits — for people of all genders, shapes, and sizes.

If you clicked on this article, you’re probably already familiar with the basics when it comes to shopping for sustainable clothing. One of the most important things eco-minded people look out for when shopping, whether it’s new or secondhand, is that the clothing be made from natural materials.

That way, it won’t release microfibers when you put it in the washing machine, and it might even be compostable at its end of life. However, that rule doesn’t quite apply in the swimwear sector. 

As Eco Cult blogger Alden Wicker wrote, it’s pretty much impossible to get a practical bathing suit made from all-natural materials. Wicker even once tried to skirt around this rule with a crocheted cotton bathing suit, and when she told the company that it stretched out upon hitting the water, the company told her it was not meant to get wet. So… yeah.

So since bathing suits made from synthetic materials are the only functional options in 2019, there are a few other things you can look out for to keep your swimwear eco-friendly. For one thing, some companies make swimsuits out of recycled plastic — many from recycled ocean plastic — which definitely reduces the garment’s environmental impact. You might also look into the factories a company uses, to see if its manufacturing processes align with your ethics. 

And to further reduce the impact of a swimsuit (or any other synthetic garment), consider machine washing it with a Cora Ball or Guppyfriend, which will trap microfibers and prevent them from entering waterways. Additionally, air-drying a bathing suit instead of putting it in the dryer will prolong its life, meaning you can still wear it next summer (as long as it’s still in style, of course).

Read on for eight sustainable bathing suit companies.

1. Fair Harbor

Fair Harbor makes women’s bikinis and one pieces out of about 82 percent plastic water bottles and 18 percent spandex. The small company also makes men’s swim trunks out of the same two materials mixed with organic cotton. Fair Harbor recently partnered with Harry Potter actress Bonnie Wright on a collection of two new swimsuits, and 15 percent of their sales will be donated to environmental nonprofit Heal the Bay.

Additionally, Fair Harbor partnered with 2ReWear on a bathing suit recycling program called the Round Trip Initiative. You can download a free prepaid shipping label on Fair Harbor’s website, and mail in old swimsuits in exchange for a 10 percent off coupon for each one you send in, up to 30 percent off.

2. Athleta 

Athleta makes its AquaRib (a ribbed bathing suit fabric) out of Econyl fabric, which is nylon made from discarded fishing nets. The company also uses H2Eco Swim Fabric, which is made from recycled nylon. Athleta is a certified B Corp, meaning it has met the non-profit B Lab’s standards of “social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose.”

Plus, Athleta is a great option if you prefer to shop for your bathing suits in-person rather than online, since the store is in malls and shopping centers all across the country. 

3. Otherwild

Otherwild is a queer-owned business that is centered on ethical practices, fair wages, and promoting low-waste. The company makes a bathing suit called Hirsuit, which is an “androgynous swimsuit designed for a wide variety of bodies and gender expressions.” The swimsuit is made of 82 percent recycled polyester and 18 percent spandex, it comes in sizes XXS through XXL, it’s reversible, and — bonus — it has pockets.

4. Taje Swimwear

Taje Swimwear makes bathing suits out of recycled Lycra, made from 100 percent fishing nets collected from the ocean. Taje’s mission is to make their brand “fully sustainable,” which extends not only to the swimsuits, but also to the packaging. The company’s shipping boxes, stickers, hang tags, and strings are all plastic-free, and made from biodegradable or recyclable materials. Taje also works to create as little fabric waste as possible.  

5. Alyned Together

Click Here: Cheap kid backpacks

Alyned Together is a women-owned company that makes swimsuits for men and women in all-inclusive styles and sizing, with women’s pieces ranging from XS to 3X in size. The bathing suits are all made from around 82 percent recycled polyester (from plastic bottles) and elastane. 

Alyned Together was only founded in 2018, but the company is already giving back. 1 percent of Alyned Together’s annual sales are donated to support environmental nonprofits, through the 1% for the Planet movement. 

6. Summersalt

Summersalt makes bathing suits for women of all shapes and sizes (from 2 to 22). The company’s swimwear is made from 78 percent recycled polyamide, derived from recycled plastics, post-consumer materials, and recovered fishing nets.

The brand’s Mamas and Minis collection has a confetti swimsuit for women along with a matching confetti swimsuit for girls, and a complimentary striped swimsuit for boys. Plus, Summersalt also offers an At-Home-Try-On Discovery Pack, which will send you a selection of suits to try on. Mail back the ones that you don’t like, and only pay for whichever ones you keep.

7. Patagonia

Patagonia makes women’s, men’s, and children’s bathing suits and wetsuits. Most of the company’s swim items are all made from recycled polyester or nylon, some of which also feature spandex, natural rubber, and a few virgin synthetic materials.

Patagonia is Fair Trade Certified, and you can read all about the company’s Corporate Responsibility, including its factories, on its website. The website also has a program called Worn Wear, where customers can send in Patagonia clothes they don’t want anymore and shop for secondhand Patagonia gear. Plus, Patagonia stores are accessible in a lot of malls and shopping centers.

8. Shop the Thrift Stores

I know, I know, you probably don’t want a secondhand bathing suit. For obvious reasons. But I’m here to tell you a thrifty secret: charity shops are often loaded with brand spanking new bathing suits. I’m talking swimsuits that still have the original tags and the crotch sticker, people.

Last summer, I was browsing Goodwill when a rack of neon-colored bathing suits caught my eye. I noticed that there were multiples of the same styles, and that most of the suits still had their original tags sticking out. An employee told me that that particular Goodwill location only accepted bathing suit donations if they were clearly unworn, and that the donations often come directly from stores or brands with a surplus. You better believe I walked out of there with a fabulous, sustainable, and brand new one piece that still had the original tags and sticker — for just $8.

Basically, if you don’t mind buying a bathing suit secondhand, the thrift store (as well as apps like Poshmark and Depop) not only helps save something from the waste stream, but will also save you money. But if you’d rather not take the risk, all of the brands above have great options worth investing in.

 

Last month, Jared Kushner led a delegation of US envoys to Bahrain for an “economic workshop,” where he outlined his vision for a lasting settlement between Israel and Palestine. Titled “Peace to Prosperity”, the $50 billion plan was effectively a bribe, a one-time payment intended to persuade Palestinians to abandon their core national ambitions. Roundly scorned, Kushner’s deal was rejected before it even emerged.

The central innovation of “Peace to Prosperity” is its attempt to resolve what is essentially a political problem through economic means. “Land for Peace”, the organising framework of the past three decades, has been traded for “Money for Peace”, a Trumpian formula designed to work in lockstep with the increasing neoliberalism of the Palestinian Authority (PA) economic policy. The language of the plan is appropriately corporate: it speaks vaguely of ‘empowerment’ and ‘opportunity’, and leans heavily on the influence of the private sector.

‘Modern’ is a key buzzword: everything stands to be modernised, from the dilapidated transportation network in Gaza, to the old-school inspection techniques that clog up West Bank checkpoints. Palestinians are envisioned as customers in a vast transnational business deal, rather than political subjects making a moral and historical claim to their land. There is no mention of an occupation, or of a Palestinian state. The plan’s appeal, such as it is, is directed squarely at Palestinian desperation, designed to exploit their powerlessness in a region increasingly dominated by Israel.

Kushner’s deal is not distinguished by its newness – the PA has been trading resistance for economic incentives since at least the Oslo accords – but by its ineptitude. Its specifications are either suspiciously vague, or haphazard and incoherent. Take the $910 million intended to revitalise Palestinian agriculture. Where would this money actually go? To the West Bank, where the verdant Jordan Valley has been almost entirely seized by the occupation, leaving Palestinians to tend the dry Wadis and desiccated olive groves of Areas A and B. Or to Gaza, where 35 per cent of the fertile land lies within the Israeli-enforced buffer zone, meaning that any Gazan foolhardy enough to actually take advantage of Kushner’s provisions risks being shot.

Palestine doesn’t control its agriculture, or its infrastructure, where the bulk of the cash would have flowed. The occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza have ensured that. When the plan begins to address education, the irony becomes even richer, the punch line even sicker. Palestine’s beleaguered schools are promised close to $2 billion in funding, an amount that might initially appear generous, until you consider that their economic woes stem in good part from Trump’s decision to cut all funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA), which operates schools in the West Bank. Agriculture, infrastructure, education: Kushner’s plan presupposes statehood while carefully excising any mention of a Palestinian state.

With the economic portion of the deal having been rejected, attention will soon turn to the next chapter of this long, doomed process: the release of Trump’s political plan, the centrepiece of the much-hyped ‘deal of the century’.

Initially, the plan had been forecast for release after April’s election, which the U.S. had anticipated would result in a Likud-led coalition. But with internecine right wing squabbling thwarting Netanyahu’s attempts to cobble together a government, the unveiling has been delayed again, and no one has any serious idea of when it will now emerge. Jason Greenblatt, a Middle East envoy and one of four people privy to the plan’s contents, has speculated that it might be unveiled before Israel’s next election on September 7th. But with Kushner’s plan having been so thoroughly rejected, some on the Palestinian side think it may never emerge at all.

Click Here: bape jacket cheap

With such a lengthy gestation period, it’s no surprise that there have been a plethora of leaks supposedly revealing the plan’s contents. As the process has dragged on, these leaks have increasingly dominated media coverage, and their sheer volume has ensured a deeply diminished standard of reportage. Leaks have emerged in Israeli, Jordanian and Egyptian papers; they have come from “senior US diplomats” and “knowledgeable Arab diplomatic sources”; they have disclosed everything from Israeli annexation to a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. In the process they have provided every partisan hack with irrefutable evidence of the truth of their particular narrative. One especially egregious example of this appeared on the website of American uber-Zionist Daniel Pipes, who attempted to cast a since discredited report in the Arab paper Asharq al-Awsat as proof that Trump was planning to sign East Jerusalem over to Palestine.

So I propose that we ignore leaks, or at least learn to read them far more sceptically. We should instead approach the plan like good materialists, interpreting the actions of Israeli and American authorities, and examining what kind of deal is permitted by conditions in the occupied territories.

If we follow this strategy, there emerges at least one thing that we can confidently say about Trump’s plan – chiefly, that it will issue some kind of U.S. recognition of Israel’s claim to the West Bank. This is overwhelmingly likely for a host of reasons, from Trump’s recognition of Israel’s claim to the Golan Heights – captured in the same way and in the same war as the occupied territories – to Netanyahu’s announcement that he intends to annex parts of the West Bank. There are also the close links the plan’s authors have to the settler movement. This includes Greenblatt, who in the mid-1980s lived in a settlement east of Jerusalem, which he patrolled with an M-16; it also includes ambassador David Friedman, who once headed a pro-settler organisation, and has called Jews opposed to the occupation “Kapos”.

U.S. recognition would create a somewhat paradoxical situation in the occupied territories. On the one hand, a plan that formalized the occupation in the eyes of the U.S., the longstanding mediator between Palestine and Israel, would represent a monumental, epochal shift. It would mean that the U.S. had abandoned the two-state framework, obliterating a decades-old diplomatic precedent in the process. Perhaps more significantly, it would likely prohibit any future President from ever again taking up the two-state baton, effectively salting the earth from which a prospective solution might grow.

At the same time, for residents of the West Bank – Palestinians and settlers alike – life would remain the same. Alongside two decades of steady settlement growth, a slew of changes to Israeli law have essentially collapsed the legal distinction between the settlements and the state, ensuring that everything from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea is governed by the same regime.

Often slow to catch on, western discourse around Israel finally seems to be coming to terms with this reality. It’s now commonplace to come across articles proclaiming the death of the two-state solution, and not just in the left wing press. Over the past couple of years, the New York Times has run at least five such pieces; Foreign Policy at least three. Similar reports have been commissioned by prestigious think tanks, like Chatham House and the Brookings Institute (a good indicator that the media is taking something seriously). And if the two-state solution has run out of road, Trump recognizing the West Bank as legitimately Israeli would merely bring White House policy into alignment with reality.

Reckoning with the reality of the Israeli present, however, seems to be entrenching a warped media perception of its past. In configuring Trump as a radical break from Presidential precedent, journalists and analysts obscure the fact that it was the failure of this precedent that produced the current situation. In fact, there’s little that’s meaningfully new about Trump’s position on Israel, save the honesty of its biases.

In order to demonstrate this, let us imagine how Trump’s plan might present itself to Palestinians. To accomplish this, I’m going to shamelessly break my own rule, and rely on unauthenticated leaks from the Israeli press – specifically, a document that was printed in Israel Hayom. This document alleged that Trump would seek to establish ‘New Palestine’, a semi-autonomous state-minus comprised of Areas A and B, with a capital in Abu Dis, a town on the eastern border of Jerusalem. New Palestine would not have control of its borders, which would be administered by Israel, or be allowed weapons to defend itself.

While there may be divergences here and there, there are good reasons to think that the parameters of New Palestine will be close to the final deal. For starters, it would be an act of colossal self-sabotage for the plan to not offer Palestinians anything at all. And while Kushner’s deal intentionally omitted mention of a Palestinian state, New Palestine would not infringe upon any impending annexation; in fact, it would not require Israel to give up an inch of settled land. Moreover, the authors of that deal will have known that talk of statehood would only inflame the Israeli far-right, allowing them to attack Trump as an appeaser, and Netanyahu as a spineless squish.

Now, here’s the key point: should New Palestine be offered to the PA, Trump’s plan would represent anything but a break from precedent. Abu Dis has been mooted as a potential capital since the Oslo accords, and divvying up the West Bank in a way that avoids expelling settlers in Area C has been a bipartisan position in Israel since the late 1990s. As for demilitarisation, the PA accepted that back in 1995, after a secret meeting in Stockholm that never translated into a concrete plan. On that occasion, when the deal had been agreed, PA President Mahmoud Abbas met Israeli negotiator Yossi Beilin in an embrace, his eyes moist with tears. He thought he had his state.

Two decades on, all that has changed is the portion of the West Bank over which the PA rules. Abbas, now 83, has not yet abandoned his quest for statehood, and New Palestine might find a measure of support amongst the PA elite. But Abu Dis isn’t Jerusalem, and a borderless mass of Bantustans isn’t a state, no matter which way you cut it.

Under Abbas, and former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, the PA leadership has become sclerotic and increasingly corrupt, forced into a fundamentally defensive posture by over reliance on Israeli industry. It launders its supplication through symbolic ‘resistance’, and through an illusory prosperity that has prettified the capital Ramallah but not done anything to remedy widespread poverty. Since the 2000s, their strategy has been to accept the dictates of Israel and the World Bank, to deregulate their economy and entice private investment, in the hope that they’d eventually be rewarded with a state. They cling to it still: no sooner had Kushner’s deal been rejected than Abbas was beseeching the White House to return to the status quo. “Recognize the vision of two states and [acknowledge that] East Jerusalem is occupied land,” he implored Trump. “If you say these words to me… you will find me at the White House the following day.”

But while the PA remains officially wedded to two-statism, elsewhere there are signs of an incipient paradigm shift. Polls suggest that the confidence of the Palestinian public in such a solution has utterly collapsed. And after Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Saeb Erakat, a principal architect of the Oslo accords, declared that Palestinians would be forced to begin striving for equal rights in a single state – “historic Palestine, from the river to the sea”.

In the current moment, talk of a one-state solution feels quixotic. There is no popular energy behind it, no serious work being done on its implementation. The obstacles to it are numerous and vast – even ignoring the obvious Israeli opposition to the prospect, there is currently no mechanism for coordinating Palestinians spread across the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel. But in the absence of a US framework for a two-state solution, the PA will be driven to a one-state position eventually. They will realise, in time, that all their other options have been exhausted, and that there is no other approach that might keep them on their land.

If you’ve been bummed out by recent reports of animals becoming endangered and plants going extinct, a few sea turtles are about to give you some hope. 

Loggerhead sea turtles are the most common sea turtles along U.S. coasts, yet they have been listed as endangered and threatened under the Endangered Species Act for more than 40 years. But in a twist of fate, loggerhead sea turtles are currently experiencing a booming, potentially record-breaking nesting season along the coast of Georgia.

As the New York Times reported, in 1978, the U.S. government declared the loggerhead sea turtle threatened due to a declining population. Since then, there have been conservation efforts on coasts all along the country, and this year marks a milestone for loggerhead sea turtles off of Georgia’s coastline.

According to the New York Times, researchers have counted 1,779 turtle nests along the coast so far this season, as of Wednesday, June 12. As Conserve Turtles noted, each nest contains about 100 eggs, though not every egg will hatch.

It’s still early in the season (which ranges from May to September), meaning that number should continue to grow — and if the pace continues, experts think the turtles will set a record this season, according to the AP. Mark Dodd, a wildlife biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, told the AP that, by the end of the season, he foresees a total of about 4,500 nests.

“So far it’s pretty comparable to 2016, which was our biggest year on record,” Doug Hoffman, a wildlife biologist from the National Park Service, told the New York Times, noting that in 2016, the turtles laid 3,300 nests along Georgia’s coast. “I suspect that at the pace we’re going right now, we will probably meet that and possibly break it.”

According to the Sea Turtle Conservancy, there are a slew of factors that caused the loggerhead population to decline in the first place. The number one threat is loss of nesting habitat, which happens as a result of human activity like developing buildings along the coast.

Other factors include commercial fishing (which often results in accidentally capturing turtles and other sea animals as “bycatch”), ocean pollution, and bright lights near the coasts, the Sea Turtle Conservancy added.

So with housing development, commercial fishing, and pollution all still rampant in the U.S., how on Earth did the loggerhead sea turtle manage to go from threatened to thriving over the past 40 years?

Since being named endangered in 1978, the loggerhead has received federal protection under the Endangered Species Act. According to the National Wildlife Federation, that protection has helped fund: consistent monitoring of the loggerhead population; technology to reduce bycatch of loggerheads during fishing; modified fishing practices; beach closures during nesting and hatching seasons; and new regulations regarding lights along nesting beaches. 

Now that the loggerhead population is rehabilitating, it’s more important than ever to continue protecting sea turtles.

If you want to help, you can donate to organizations working to conserve sea turtles, eat fewer sea animals, and in case you ever see sea turtles during nesting or hatching seasons, check out guidelines from Conserve Turtles and See Turtles on how to be respectful.

Share image by Chris McGrath / Getty Images

Click Here: watford fc shirt

Living a simple and happy life, Chow Yun-fat plans to give $726 million fortune to charity, Hong Kong movie site Jayne Stars reported. 

Chow Yun Fat was born in Lamma Island, Hong Kong, to a mother who was a cleaning lady and vegetable farmer, and a father who worked on a Shell Oil Company tanker. Chow grew up in a farming community, in a house with no electricity.

He would wake at dawn each morning to help his mother sell herbal jelly and Hakka tea-pudding on the streets; in the afternoons, he went to work in the fields.

His family moved to Kowloon when he was ten, and at 17, he left school to help support the family by doing odd jobs, including bellboy, postman, camera salesman, and taxi driver. 

His life started to change after college when he responded to a newspaper advertisement, and his actor-trainee application was accepted by a local television station. He signed a three-year contract with the studio and made his acting debut. 

Chow became a heartthrob and familiar face in soap operas that were exported internationally.

The 63-year-old Chinese actor said in an interview this year that he plans on donating his entire fortune to charity, China Daily reports. 

Active in in the movie industry for over four decades — Chow is best known in Asia for his collaborations with filmmaker John Woo in the heroic bloodshed-genre films “A Better Tomorrow,” “The Killer and Hard Boiled”; and in the West for his roles as Li Mu-bai in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and Sao Feng in “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.”

One could be forgiven for thinking that with this vast wealth, Chow Yun Fat lives a luxurious lifestyle, that consists of expensive cars and sumptuous mansions.

Instead, Chow is shown to be fairly frugal – often opting to take public transit and doing charity work rather than spending money on himself.

Despite his massive wealth, Chow Yun Fat leads a very simple lifestyle, reportedly spending just $800 HKD a month on himself. That’s a little over $100 USD.

He used his first-generation Nokia phone for over 17 years before making a switch two years ago to a smartphone – only because his Nokia stopped working. 

Never ostentatious, Chow can often be seen shopping at discount shops. He expressed, “I don’t wear clothes for other people. As long as I think it’s comfortable, then it’s good enough for me.”

Chow spends his free time on healthy pursuits such as hiking and jogging, and often when he is recognized will happily stop and pose for the cameras.

Click Here: highlanders rugby gear world

Chow’s wife, Jasmine Tan, previously disclosed his net worth and his plan to donate it to various charities. Establishing their own charity several years ago, Tan supports Chow’s decision in giving his money to different causes. 

On his reason for giving away his fortune, Chow smiled, “The money’s not mine. I’m only keeping it safe for the time being.”

Expressing that money is not the source of happiness, he added, “My dream is to be a happy and normal person. The hardest thing in life is not about how much money you earn, but how to keep a peaceful mindset and live the rest of your life in a simple and carefree manner.”

The UK recently passed historic legislation setting a net-zero target for emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050. Setting a target though, is one thing, delivering it is another. Achieving net-zero and responding to the climate emergency is not politics-as-usual.

In recognition of this, six Select Committees in Parliament have come together to run a citizen’s assembly on climate change this autumn. This step could be the first towards a wholesale rethink of the policy response needed. The process, however, needs to last. It needs to engage the broader public and connect it to the various local deliberative exercises taking place throughout the UK. Only then might it deliver on its promise of creating a clear picture of the public support and political mandate for action.

“Government ignored participants because by participating they ceased to be ‘ordinary voters’”

Much of the excitement around Citizen Assemblies stems from the Irish Citizen Assembly, which generated a public mandate for new policies on tricky and polarising topics like abortion, aging and fixed term parliaments. But there is a longer history of deliberation. Back in 2007, the UK government commissioned a Citizen Summit on Climate Change.

Then, just as now, was a time of high hopes that deliberative democracy could fix politics. At the time Rich Wilson (co-author of this article) was the director of the participation charity Involve which played a role in promoting, running, evaluating and commissioning citizen summits. These were usually big, well-resourced deliberative events, involving hundreds, sometimes thousands of people. When run well they had a powerful sense of occasion; leaving the participants with a real belief that they were affecting politics. Trouble was, they weren’t.

Research commissioned by the Sustainable Development Commission found that government decision-makers were ignoring these deliberative events because they felt that participants in these events ceased being ‘ordinary voters’ by the very experience of going through a deliberative process. So the opinions of the participants, even if demographically representative of the UK, didn’t give decision-makers the mandate they needed to make brave choices.

Citizen Spring

Since the school strikes and Extinction Rebellion protests, many local areas have declared a ‘climate emergency’. The establishment of a Citizens’ Assembly or Citizens’ Jury is becoming a popular follow-up, as a way of developing a climate strategy with public support.

Citizens Assemblies are different to summits in that they can stand for weeks, even years, but the reason for their success or failure is the same. This success comes down to whether they can help people, especially politicians, take new bold decisions they otherwise didn’t feel they had the mandate for.

Today levels of concern about climate change are at their highest ever level in the UK. The mandate for action is big and growing, and the government seems to be responsive, even if it is just signalling for now. The real challenge will be holding this mandate together when it turns from ambitions to specifics. Just look at the Gilets Jaunes opposition to fuel taxation in France for an example of how dissent can stop a pro-climate policy. It’s easy to imagine a low carbon policy framework triggering the same passions and divisions surfaced by Brexit.

No one wants that.

So how can a Citizens Assembly deliver a mandate that helps Government take the actions necessary to fulfil its policy commitments, while avoiding disenchantment and disorder? To do this we think there are three things a Citizens Assembly needs to do:

1: Generate a public debate

The key to the success of the Irish Citizens Assemblies was the broad media engagement which meant that the conversation was simultaneously taking places in pubs, homes, tv shows, papers and social media.

To help create a national conversation we need mainstream and social media engagement during and after the debate so the public can contribute to the discussion. There has never been a better time to do this, indeed given the current interest in climate change, it may be unavoidable. But for it to unite rather than divide, we need to design the conversation space in from the start.

2: Connect the local assemblies and conversations

The national conversation does not just take place in Westminster. If people are to feel agency and connection, the deliberative processes taking part on their patch need to be acknowledged and fed in.

As local councils and cities start to run their own citizen assemblies and juries, this will create a rich network of discussion and ideas from across the country. Connecting up these conversations into this national conversation should create a mandate for all levels of government from parish to national. We should even seek to encourage community organisations like schools to have their own Citizen Summit. All of which needs to add to the national conversation in a meaningful way. Stimulating, supporting and capturing these different levels of conversations by all walks of life will be important.

3: Last for at least 5 years

There is no quick fix for climate change. This is not a process that can reach a conclusion in two events. We are now at the start of what needs to be a transformation of our society, from transport to homes to manufacturing over the coming decades. The social contract for the far-reaching policies required will need to be built and sustained over this time. An assembly which stands for at least five years, the people’s house, would acknowledge the ongoing and evolving nature of meeting the challenge of climate change.

Click Here: bape jacket cheap

More time will also allow for people to be involved at different life stages. This is an opportunity to embed longer-term thinking, which in itself would be helpful.

With time we hope the assembly process could become an integral element of the policy development and refinement process. It’s not as if there is a policy mix we know will work. It will be a learning journey, that we need as many of us as possible to be on.

Because, yes first and foremost we do need government to lead the charge to address the climate emergency, but it can only do this with the consent and cooperation of us, the people.