ID

A report released today by the London School of Economics on the government's plans to introduce biometric identity cards concludes that "The risk of failure in the current proposals is...[at] the point where the scheme should be regarded as a potential danger to the public interest and to the legal rights of individuals." (Executive Summary (PDF), p. 5) The government's proposals are "too complex, technically unsafe, overly prescriptive and lack a foundation of public trust and confidence." (p. 9)
The Bill gets its second reading in the House of Commons tomorrow.
Amidst claims and counter-claims about whether the government might be preparing to sell information from the central database to private companies to offset the costs of the scheme, Labour are facing the prospect of strong trade-union and back-bench opposition. The next few days could be interesting...

Brazil to break the rules

The story below is from Saturday's FT. I hope it marks the beginning of a movement by governments in poor countries to refuse to play by the rules dictated by the richest nations' richest corporations. I fear it might signal the start of a struggle that could bring catastrophic results for AIDS sufferers, and the thousand of others who die from preventible diseases every day. This - not debt relief - lies at the core of effectively "making povery history".

"Brazil to break patent on Abbott Aids drug unless price is reduced by 40%"
By CHRISTOPHER BOWE and RAYMOND COLITT

Brazil yesterday triggered a confrontation with western pharmaceutical companies when it threatened to break for the first time the patent on an Aids drugs.

The government told Abbott Laboratories of the US that it had 10 days to agree to a 42 per cent price cut for Kaletra, an anti-retroviral, or it would allow local producers to start manufacturing.

Abbott sells the drug at Dollars 1.17 a pill, the health ministry said. Farmanguinhos, a state-owned laboratory, could sell a generic copy for 68 cents.

Humberto Costa, health minister, said: "This is the first time that the government of Brazil has broken a patent on a drug. The patent of the Kaletra medicine is of public interest."

Aids medicines from other drugmakers could also be threatened. Mr Costa said negotiations were continuing with Merck and Gilead Sciences, both US drugmakers, over a voluntary licence for Aids drugs, Mr Costa said.

Global sales of Kaletra, developed as an Aids treatment that could fight resistant strains of the virus, were Dollars 896m last year. Brazil's government gives the drug therapy free to an estimated 170,000 Aids patients. Brazil's threat highlighted the continued pressure on pharmaceutical companies' patents in the developing world, even as some countries, including India, move to comply with World Trade Organisation agreements.

The move was condemned as "troubling" by Ken Johnson, of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry lobby. Although WTO rules allow countries to break patents in certain circumstances involving national emergencies, he said Brazil was spending less money today on Aids drugs than it was five years ago.

Abbott Laboratories also criticised the announcement but said it hoped to work out something that would be better for Brazilian patients.

"We cannot overstate the potential negative impact granting compulsory licences could have on the global discovery and development of future treatments for all disease areas, not just HIV/Aids," it said.

"The discovery and development of innovative new treatments depends on the reasonable return on investment for existing treatments. Without innovation and new therapies, in the end it is patients who will lose."

India, where the drug industry blossomed by copying blockbuster drugs, adopted more stringent patent protections on pharmaceuticals this year to come more in line with WTO rules. The change alarmed health and poverty activists, who argued that it could close the supply of life-saving drugs to poor countries.

Although the Brazilian government has repeatedly threatened to break patents as part of its annual price negotiations, yesterday's statement was seen as the most serious yet. "We don't expect a last-minute deal," a health ministry official said. "Brazil is preparing to produce the anti-viral drug."

g8

I've been wanting to write something about the G8 for a couple of weeks now, but not quite been able to formulate anything coherent enough, or really worthwhile. Finally having to concede that this is no kind of barrier to posting drivel on this particular blog, I can only share with you my basic thoughts on these matters.
1) Bob Geldof poses are more significant threat to the ability of the trade justice movement to express their demands clearly in public than the politicians or the media. This might sound rather unremarkable to those of you less cynical than I about politics and the media, but the contrast with Seattle, Genoa and Cancun in terms of coverage is really striking. It makes sense I suppose. Far easier simply to say "Bob Geldof is an idiot" (journalist seem to have no qualms about taking home a hefty pay packet for stating the complete obvious) than to suggest that the middle-aged protestors drinking tea from flasks are actually "anarchists" who want to start riots with police for a laugh.
2) Too much of the discourse on this matter is focussed on debt relief. The debt relief being proposed is like offering someone an elastoplast having chopped their limbs off. Trade justice means an end to protectionism, and needs to mean an end to the commitments of the rich countries to privatize public services on a global scale (the only successes here have been resistance on the part of those in poor countries - Bolivia the most recent example).
3) Because the whole discussion is focussed on debt relief, there is a danger of G8 governments (Blair in particular) hijacking this movement and "spinning" his meagre concessions on debt to look like he really was the voice in the wilderness determined to save Africa, and achieved it. This is what happened with the Jubilee 2000 campaign, ultimately killing it with triumphalism although almost none of its original demands had been met. Whatever action is taken is likely to be presented as pro-active vision, not simple reaction (just like elections in Iraq - actually forced on the occupying authorities, who tried to avoid them, as occasionally, quietly, conceded).

If the protestors in Edinburgh are to achieve anything of substance, they really need to make their demands clear and their voices heard. This is a particular problem for the Trade Justice movement, because the way the global economy actually works is so widely misunderstood, so making clear demands about reforms is difficult, beyond slogans. The shady world of IMF structural adjustment programmes and WTO agreements (shrouded by legal language, hard to penetrate for the uninitiated) is hard to talk about in soundbites, making Trade Justice a not-very-media-friendly issue. I have a feeling the support of pop stars will not make it any easier to articulate the core demands.

Saying "Oui" to democracy

Most of the media coverage of the EU constitution referenda in France and the Netherlands in the last week has been rubbish.
I just found this piece by Boris Kagarlitsky from the Moscow Times (May 31st 2005). It's a monument to elegant concision and informed analysis.


The European Union Constitution, which was supported overwhelmingly by the political and business elite, by the leading media outlets and of course by the EU bureaucracy and major transnational corporations, failed when more than 55 percent of French voters voted against it. After the French results, the vote in the Netherlands is unlikely to bring any surprises. It is merely a question of how closely the Dutch result will mirror the French one.

The commentators who declared that Germany and France were on different sides of the fence were completely off the mark. The Germans were simply not given a chance to vote. The issue was decided behind the closed doors of the parliament. If the Germans had been given the chance to express their opinion, the referendum would have likely gone the way of the French referendum.

The question of whether Turkey and Ukraine should become EU members can now be postponed indefinitely, to the great benefit of both countries, which now have a chance to rid themselves of the irrational belief that their problems will disappear like magic when Brussels waves its bureaucratic wand.

Hard-nosed French voters were not drawn in by discussions of the pressing need to "support Europe." They saw that the integration process in practice was not promoting European values, but destroying them. The Europe cooked up in the Brussels bureaucracy's lab under the watchful eyes of transnational corporations and international banks is a faceless continent, where culture, communities and local traditions are sacrificed to the holy and omnipresent laws of the free market, which are worshiped with totalitarian solemnity.

The EU Constitution is very strange. It focuses less on how the political institutions of a united Europe would function and more on giving the multitude of neoliberal reforms of recent years the force of law. The Europeans were supposed to reject everything that sets them apart from everyone else on the planet: strong labor unions, protective labor laws, a better social safety net, universal access to health care and education, and the diversity of age-old national customs and institutions.

The Europeans were supposed to forget the ideals of the French Revolution, to erase from history the ideals of the anti-fascist resistance and to make peace with a political situation in which the only difference between the right and the left is the color of their party flags. In other words, Europeans were supposed to turn their backs not only on the social state but also on real and substantial democracy.

The media attempted to pound into people's heads that anyone who was against the EU Constitution was in favor of nationalists, clerics and xenophobes.

But the propaganda misfired. Leftists conducted their campaign against the constitution separately from the nationalists, and for precisely this reason they were able to win mass support for their cause -- which would be a helpful lesson for Russia. The socialist leaders who snuggled up to the official right -wing camp discredited themselves more with every passing day in the eyes of their own supporters. As the referendum proceeded, the government and the opposition appeared as a united front. And they lost together. The results of the referendum were in effect a vote of no confidence in the political elite on the part of the public.

The results of the referendum came as quite a blow not only to the government in Paris, but also to the European Commission officials in Brussels. There is more at stake here than just the failure of the proposed document. After all, the text of the constitution was in fact little more than a compendium of numerous agreements and documents that had already been approved by the EU over the last 15 years.

But this is the heart of the matter: An overwhelming number of Europeans are profoundly unhappy with the status quo. By voting against the constitution, they took advantage of the opportunity to say what they really thought about the rules they are forced to live under and the politicians and institutions that govern them.

Neoliberal economic policy has never been too popular. The political triumph of the European and American elite came when they managed to convince the average Joe that there was no other way to do things. Thus, the democratic process has been deprived of its main point -- talking about alternatives.

The French referendum is sending us back to square one, and the discussion of constitutional propositions for Europe will start anew. In other words, they have put the substance back in the democratic process.

Boris Kagarlitsky is director of the Institute for Globalization Studies.

Sin City

Apologies for a lengthy absence - it's quite a busy time. Some stuff about the G8 coming up in the next few days, hopefully.
On less serious matters, I saw Sin City on Thursday, and it's fantastic. In lieu of a review, below is an email I sent to the BBC about the review of the film Jason Solomons (standing in for the usually fantastic Mark Kermode) did of the film on Radio 5 Live on Friday...


Dear Sir,

I am writing to plead with you not to let the idiotic Jason Solomons on your show ever again. His review of Sin City was nothing short of an atrocity. First, he judges movies by their titles, complaining he disliked the title of 'Monster in Law,' and again "if you call your film 'Sin City,' I think you should have something to say about sin." This is idiotic - as your programme discussed a few weeks ago, you can't judge a film by its title - look at 'The Shawshank Redemption'!
"The film is very confusing," he moaned. Quite simply, it is not; all four strands are connected in very obvious ways. Even though they are not told in chronological order, anyone old enough to see the film (ie over 18) should find no difficulty in following it; in this respect, the film is less taxing than 'Pulp Fiction,' not least because everything that happens in the film is described by narration - one could sit through the film with ones' eyes closed and still follow every twist and turn. In this context, the admission of confusion is damning.
"If you're gonna put so much violence up on screen I think you should have at least a comment on it." Solomons has clearly missed the entire point of the film, which is that a) it is meant to be comic-book pulp - an exciting tale of good characters and bad - not a flimsy morality-tale and b) the film is sufficiently grown-up not to shove a moral "message" down its viewers throats. That Rodriguez is "not one to probe the human heart" is arguably true, but any reviewer who considers this a valid criticism should seek another line of work. "I didn't really understand why these men were walking around," he finally admitted, suggesting that "the style is everything, the substance is nothing," and complaining that the film wasn't funny. Solomons tried to take the film far too seriously, forgetting that it is closely based on comics (or "graphic novels.") Because he so totally missed the point, his criticisms could not transcend extreme superficiality. Perhaps his announcement of 'Annie Hall' as his favourite film of all time should have been an early warning of this.
The poverty of his review is summed up in his complaint that "The broads...are not very empowering...they don't exist, they're kind of large-breasted bustiers...they just don't exist, these people." This is nothing short of stupidity. The "broads" are a group of prostitutes who take care of each other, protecting themselves from exploitation by pimps and drug dealers, using violent means to do so. This might not be very attractive, but it is undeniably empowered. That the women don't look like "real" women is also an odd complaint. This could be said of at least 90% of Hollywood productions; in this case, there is actually a valid excuse - it's based on comic books! Complaining that these womens' appearance is unrealistic seems akin to criticising the Superman, Spiderman or Batman films because their characters' powers don't occur in the real world. Solomons should reserve his outrage for ludicrous exercises like Disney's digital reduction of Lindsey Lohan's breasts, carried out "to avoid offending audiences," The Sunday Times reports. (John Harlow, "Prim Hollywood's 'digital boob jobs,'" Sunday Times, 29 May 2005, p. 23.) Such exercises in puritanism are a far greater risk to womens rights and liberties, as their bodies are made "offensive," and so must be concealed, or altered. James King was a little disappointing, but a far better stand in for Kermode.
This is not a simple matter of disagreeing with Solomons about Sin City - I often disagree with Kermode - the point is that Kermode is at least coherent, even when he is wrong, while Solomons is simply vacuous. Please do not subject us to more of him.