Pigs – in there

A shocking article today on the conditions in which pigs are reared in most of Western Europe, where most of our bacon comes from, reminded me of Robert Wyatt’s song Pigs – in there. (If you haven’t heard it there’s an MP3 at Leaky Sparrow’s blog, scroll down to the bottom of the post).

The article was by Jon Henley, who seems to have been transformed from jaunty/jokey Diarist into campaigning reporter. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but in summary, Britain has introduced decent welfare standards for pigs, which are more complied with than not, but most of Europe hasn’t, and we don’t ensure that people exporting pork to the UK comply with our standards. The result is every bit as bad as battery farming for hens, with pigs – who are clean, intelligent and playful animals – kept in the dark inside in conditions which reduce them to boredom and fighting with each other.

A Dutch pig farmer he interviews blames market conditions:

“We’re supplying what the market wants,” he insists. “And where are we, the farmers, in the chain? The retailers tell the slaughterhouses what they’ll pay, the slaughterhouses set their prices for us. Everyone takes their margin, and right at the bottom it’s the farmer. People, consumers, just aren’t being realistic; they want cheap meat, then they’re worried about welfare. Buy organic, then! Pay twice the price. But no one will do that.”

Another Dutch couple are more reflective – it will take laws and more effort in the food chain:

The Kerstens are a charming, and plainly thoughtful, couple in their 50s. … “It’s all a compromise,” says Lowie. “Everyone would like to see better conditions for pigs, but change demands time, good laws, an effort from everyone in the chain and responsibility, from the producer, the retailer, the consumer and the politician. The cold fact is that better welfare means more expensive meat. We’d love to produce it; are people ready to buy it?”

Meanwhile, a British farmer – who was losing £26 per animal when feed prices rocketed last summer, says the problem is the supermarkets’ assumptions about what consumers want:

“The retailers always say the customer likes the cheapest,” she says. “We say we think the customer would actually like the choice. But the bottom line is, if people don’t want to pay for higher welfare, farmers will stop doing it.”

I would like the choice, certainly. Henley also quotes Churchill’s memorable line about pigs:

“I like pigs. Dogs look up to you; cats look down on you; pigs treat you as equal.”

Update, 9th January: A letter from Professor JT Winkler of London Metropolitan University’s Nutrition Policy Unit points the fingers firmly at the supermarkets, and at the margins they gouge on organics and fairly traded food:

The real problem does not lie with the farmers. The devils in this saga are the supermarkets and national meat inspection services. The organic farm you studied produces its pigs at double the cost of conventional animals. But Sainsbury’s sells that farm’s bacon at six-and-half times the price of its basic range. This is an extreme example of the extra margin (the “health premium”) that retailers commonly load on to better products. If humanely produced pig meat costs more in the shops, most of the difference comes from supermarkets’ exploiting their customers’ principles.

The picture is of a Croatian pig farm, from Animal Friends Croatia.

Colonel Blimp and the ‘good German’

I watched again Powell and Pressburger’s classic wartime film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp a couple of weeks ago, and it sent me back to A F Kennedy’s BFI monograph about the film.Blimp was released in 1943, in the teeth of opposition from Churchill, who had not seen it but had had reports from his staff. Although Powell and Pressburger made a number of war films, I think of Blimp as part of a trilogy which connects 49th Parallel to A Matter of Life and Death. The question that links all three is a simple one: ‘why do we fight?’. In Blimp, the role of the German officer Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, played by Anton Walbrook, is to show British audiences the values that matter, that are worth fighting for.

Walbrook is a ‘good German’ – initially thrown unwittingly into the duel with Clive Candy as a young man, later an anti-Nazi whose children have joined the Party, who ends up in Britain as an ‘enemy alien’ just before the second world war. And without delving too deep into screenwriting theory, he is also the “centre of good”, a term developed by the screenwriter and teacher Robert McKee to describe the character (there’s almost always one) who carries the values of the film we are as audience invited to empathise with. One of the benefits of this is that he has all the best speeches. His hymn to England, in the Alien Registration Office, in which he evokes the country through the memory of his dead English wife, is currently on YouTube. (There’s also a screenplay online).

It’s impossible to watch the film without feeling the autobiographical resonances. Pressburger was a Hungarian Jew who had learned German long before he spoke English, had attended a German speaking university, and had worked for the Ufa studios in Berlin before fleeing the country in 1933, during the first great purge of Jews, after a tip-off from a Nazi colleague. Walbrook, born Adolf Wohlbrück, was a half-Jewish Austrian, and also gay, who had left Germany in 1936. Both were classified as “enemy aliens” when the film was made.

According to Kennedy’s essay, Walbrook was confronted by Churchill about Blimp during the interval of a play in the West End in which Walbrook was performing. Churchill wanted to know whether Walbrook thought the film good propaganda. Walbrook’s reply?

“No people in the world other than the English would have had the courage, in the midst of war, to tell the people such unvarnished truth”.

Tom Paine on freedom

I found this quote from Tom Paine while visiting the Taking Liberties exhibition in London last weekend, from the days when people understood that freedom needed to be fought for:

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must … undergo the fatigue of supporting it.

The curators had edited out the phrase ‘like men’ which was in the middle where the ellipses are, perhaps because it was easier than having a discussion about gender and historical language.

The original is from a series of articles written by Paine, a prolific pamphleteer, in the months and years following the American declaration of independence, and are an interesting reminder of how fragile the fledgling American state was. This one is from September 1777.

The exhibition, which is free, runs until 1st March next year. It’s especially good on the ferment of the English Revolution in the mid-17th century, which led to the execution of Charles I and the creation of the Commonwealth. The Leveller movement produced The Agreement of the People and the Putney Debates,  radical beacons which were far ahead of their time, and are still astonishing to read now.

There’s also an interactive application, for those who’re unable to get there in person.  It’s worth visiting – as is the curator’s blog.

[Update 24.01.09: A good post at Our Kingdom on Obama's use of Paine's writing in his speeches - including the inauguration speech.]

The picture at the top of the post is from Peter Golden’s “Random Jottings” site, interesting thoughts on (mostly American) politics. “Three weeks ago, at our meeting, a board member asked: “What does leafleting have to do with democracy?”What indeed?

If I had a hammer

I was listening to the Weavers’ original (1949) version of ‘If I had a hammer‘, written by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, who were both members of the Weavers. The chorus runs: “I’d hammer out love between all of my brothers, all over this land.”.

The version of the song that we know these days is by Peter, Paul and Mary, who had a top ten hit with it in  1962: “love between, my brothers and my sisters, all over this land.”. (In the clip above Seeger graciously attributes their success with the song to having rewritten the tune for the better).

Notes at Henry’s Songbook credit the change in the lyric to a radical singer in 1952:

It was a young radical activist, Libby Frank, in 1952 who insisted on singing “my brothers and my sisters” instead of “all of my brothers”. Lee resisted the change at first. “It doesn’t ripple off the tongue as well. How about ‘all of my siblings’?”

As protest songs go, it seems mild enough now, popularised during the protests of the 1960s, and not just in the United States. But when it was written, at the height of McCarthyism and the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, it was incendiary:

‘Counterattack‘ and the FBI succeeded in blacklisting the Weavers [between 1952 and 1955], but If I Had A Hammer was unconquerable. The song had a specific radical message in 1952; when Seeger suggested the Weavers perform it on bookings, one of them answered, “Oh no. We can’t get away with anything like that.”

“Why was it controversial?” Pete reflected. “In 1949 only ‘Commies’ used words like ‘peace’ and ‘freedom’. … The message was that we have got tools and that we are going to succeed. This is what a lot of spirituals say. We will overcome. I have a hammer. [...] No one could take these away.”

The story comes from David Dunaway’s biography of Seeger. There’s a good article from the New York Times on Seeger and The Weavers.

Obama and the Liberation Music Orchestra

One of the best US election night stories I’ve read is about Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, in Salon. The writer is the music journalist Larry Blumenfeld. The Liberation Music Orchestra was founded by Haden as a protest in the depths of the Vietnam War, and recorded their fourth record, Not In Our Name, in 2004 after the invasion of Iraq. (And it’s good for once not to be writing about a musician because they’ve died…). Anyway, here’s the story:

On Tuesday night, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra — the band that bassist Haden first assembled in 1968 and has reconvened during each Republican administration — had just ended Carla Bley’s “Blue Anthem” during a late set at Manhattan’s Blue Note when Allen Broadbent (subbing for Bley) jumped up from the piano bench.

“Obama has won!”

Someone had whispered the news in Broadbent’s ear, along with the Democratic electoral-vote total at 11:20 p.m. (It was 297 and counting.)

“Are you sure?” Haden asked, clutching his bass.

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Broadbent nodded.

“Man!” Haden sighed with force. He stood silent a few moments. “I guess it’s time to play ‘Amazing Grace.’”

And they did.

(You can hear music from their 1969 LP online here. Parts of tracks from Not In Our Name, including Amazing Grace, can be heard here).

Quoting Mark Twain

Harry Truman used to have a sign on his desk, which I’ve liked since I first heard of it, quoting Mark Twain:

“Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”

A while ago (might it have been used by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth?) I came across another Mark Twain quote (or more exactly, a quote attributed to Mark Twain) which I have been using from time to time in workshops to remind people of the dangers of certainty:

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Once an activist…

There’s a heartening story about the veteran American singer and radical, Pete Seeger, who’s now 89, in an article by David Rothenburg in the current issue of the ecological magazine Resurgence. It turns out that six years ago, at the age of 83, he instigated an annual river race – ‘the great Newburgh to Beacon Hudson River Swim’ in his home town of Beacon to celebrate the fact that the river was now clean enough to swim in – while also trying to raise money for a lined swimming pool in the river so it was safe for everyone to swim in. Words like redoubtable and irrepressible come to mind.

(The picture is of Seeger, aged 79, singing at a concert to honour Woody Guthrie. It is from Woody Guthrie Links, a treasure trove of Guthrie-related material.)

Harold Wilson vs Tony Blair

Francis Beckett contrasts Harold Wilson with Tony Blair in a review in The Guardian: not to Blair’s advantage:

The children of the 60s and those of the 70s thought New Jerusalem was around the corner, its arrival hindered only by the conservatism of Harold Wilson’s Labour governments. They did not realise that they were living in New Jerusalem and that their generation, which benefited from this dazzling array of freedoms, would, within 20 years, destroy them. Nor did they realise – for they had never heard of Tony Blair – how lucky they were to have Wilson to hate. Wilson courageously kept Britain out of Vietnam, founded the Open University and made such cautious moves towards greater social equality as were allowed by the difficult economic circumstances.

Proud of having conquered their inherited inhibitions, the 60s and 70s generations thought, in their innocence and foolishness, that there was little else to conquer. Their parents had battled for healthcare, for education, for full employment and economic security. These battles having apparently been won, the young fought for, and won, the right to wear their hair long and to enjoy sex. These were the battles that the young Blair fought and won at a stifling old-fashioned public school, Fettes, at the end of the 60s. He rejected the statism of the Attlee settlement. It is precisely because Blair is an authentic child of the 60s and 70s that he threw away. Labour’s chance to change the Thatcher settlement of Britain’s affairs. He had no quarrel with it. The children of that time saw themselves as pioneers of a new world – freer, fairer and infinitely more fun. They were wrong.

The review is also good on the unions and the 70s:

[Alwyn] Turner shows how all the signs of their demise were evident in the 70s. Doom-laden books of the period included Anthony Burgess’s novella 1985, published in 1978, which predicted a dictatorship by the unions. Turner’s account of the Grunwick strike portrays the sad reality: that both the unions and their enemies thought the unions had power, but when unions had to protect workers against really bad employers who fired them for joining a union, they failed.

Identity, guilt, and Guantanamo

An article worth noting by the routinely excellent Gary Younge on the US and Guantanamo pulls together some intriguing historical threads.

First, from a American arrested for spying in Hungary in the Stalin era, Robert Vogeler, who was held in a cell in which he slept on boards suspended inches above water, with the light always on, and banging on the walls to prvent him from sleeping. Just a matter of time before you confess, he said, afterwards, but the confession was not about a conventional matter of guilt:

“To judge from the way our scripts were written,” wrote Vogeler shortly after his forced confession, “it was more important to establish our allegorical identities than to establish our ‘guilt’. Each of us in his testimony was obliged to ‘unmask’ himself for the benefit of the [Soviet-led] press and radio.”

The second site on a ‘grand tour’ is Algeria, where, as Simone de Beauvoir observed, discussion of ‘abuse’ at he time of the French atrocities, was futile:

“To protest in the name of morality against ‘excesses’ or ‘abuses’ is an error that hints at active complicity. There are no ‘abuses’ or ‘excesses’ here, simply an all-pervasive system.”

And finally, to a cnversation about Nuremberg – help between two present day US military lawyers:

Colonel Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo’s military commissions, recalled a meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes, who oversees Guantánamo’s tribunal process, about the forthcoming trials of the detainees. “[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” said Davis. Davis then pointed out that the handful of acquittals at Nuremberg had given the proceedings a sense of legitimacy and credibility that across-the-board convictions never would have.

‘I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis told the Nation. “At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals. We’ve got to have convictions.’”

Read the whole article, if you’re interested in Guantanamo, or even if you’re not. Younge lets Vogeler have the last word: “Every individual American should realise that what happened to me could happen to anybody.”

How civil rights are eroded…

Ronan Bennett reviews Patrick Maguire’s book My Father’s Watch in the Guardian. Maguire was 13 when he was arrested (in 1974) for his ‘part’ in the mythical bomb-making factory that police alleged – completely erroneously, and largely without evidence – had been run from his house. Much later the convictions of all involved were found to be unsafe. So why did it happen? Bennett’s argument resonates down the years:

It happened because of prejudice – against the Irish community specifically, against working-class Irish in particular; brutality – Irish prisoners had been threatened with guns and physical violence; they had been kicked, slapped, punched and verbally abused; stupidity – on the part of the police, the judiciary and the legal profession; compliant media – or worse: some papers actively fomented hatred of the accused; panic – there were bombings so politicians had to do something, now; science – which was said at trial to prove conclusively that the accused had handled explosives and which subsequently was rubbished as the work of incompetents and buffoons; and finally because of insufficient safeguards on the treatment of suspects, who were denied contact with lawyers and interrogated for extended periods. Is this ringing any bells, Mr Brown? Ms Smith?