PM TO OUTLAW CRIME
On Thursday Tony Blair announced a plan to force DNA tests on to everyone arrested in Britain for any offence, no matter how trivial. The police already hold samples of DNA from almost a million people. That's a million people whose right not to incriminate themselves has been causally removed. Now the government intends to increase this to four million people. According to the PM this would mean that any one from 'virtually the entire criminally active population' could be traced should they leave any DNA at the scene. Opposition to this Orwellian surveillance operation based on the quaint notion of civil liberties was swept aside by Blair as 'misplaced'.
But what has really been misplaced is any sense of responsibility on the part of government. Instead New Labour's cowardly politics of fear indulges the fantasy that criminal behaviour can be controlled and prevented by new administrative techniques. The Prime Minister's apparent belief that he can see into the future and predict criminal behaviour before it happens will blow up in his face. Blair wants to be seen to give the public what they want, and hold back the 'tide of crime'. Crime, as he will learn, is always present in a free society, and the fear of crime does not decrease, but increases in proportion to law-and-order measures.
ETHICAL CLEANSING TRIGGERS NEW PLAGUE
A new plague could follow the decision of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in June to outlaw a common pesticide on ethical rather than scientific grounds, writes Bill Durodié.
Chlorpyrifos, sold under the trade names Dursban and Lorsban, has been in widespread use for over 30 years with no evidence of harm to humans. It is used to exterminate billions of cockroaches, ants, spiders, fleas, flies, termites, and other insects each year - pests that pose a threat to food crops and human health.
Under the 1996 Food Quality Protection Act, the EPA was required to conduct a systematic review of pesticide safety. However in 1998 the EPA stopped using human data pending an as-yet unfinished review of the ethics of testing on people. This was despite the fact that, as in clinical trials for potential new pharmaceuticals, experiments using paid human volunteers given non-toxic doses followed substantial evidence previously obtained from animal assays. Remarkably the restriction was applied not just to new testing but to human data obtained from earlier tests as well.
Without human data the EPA would now have to determine permissible exposure levels on the basis of animal testing. But such tests necessitate the inclusion of a substantial margin of safety to account for uncertainties in extrapolating between species. In some instances adverse effects noticed in animals have no applicability to humans due to differences in biology. Nevertheless it has been just such data that was subsequently used to justify the EPA position.
Dow AgroSciences, the leading manufacturer of the pesticide, said it remained convinced the chemical was safe when used properly, but that 'it no longer made business sense in the current regulatory environment' to continue making it. Steven Cohen, Professor of Toxicology at the University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy, pointed out that 'reverting to animal-based endpoints for chlorpyrifos risk assessment is clearly a step backwards'.
Ironically the EPA concluded that the compound poses no immediate threat to public health and thus will not order a recall of products containing it. Retail sales will be allowed until December 2001 due to the ban taking the form of a voluntary agreement to halt production by manufacturers. An EPA official was forced to admit that this was 'the fastest possible action that we could have taken', as any other approach would have resulted in years of litigation, and the possibility no-doubt that sound science rather than ethics would win out.
Last year the agency banned the use of the pesticide methyl parathion on fruits and many vegetables, as well as restricting the use of azinphos- methyl. A draft study of another organophosphate insecticide, diazinon, is expected to lead to yet another ban before the end of the year. Coming together with the more recent European Union ban of the last organochlorine pesticide, Lindane, in July, farmers are increasingly being deprived of the means to protect the crops that feed us and millions of others around the world.
School curricula now routinely teach children that pesticides are a threat. It would be better to teach them how refrigeration, municipal garbage and sewage services, washing machines, disinfectants and pesticides, among other technologies, have transformed their lives from those of the children of only a few generations ago, who lived in filth and squalor, plagued by insect and rodent pests that served as vectors of disease.
LOYALISTS: SURPLUS TO REQUIREMENTS
Last week British troops were deployed in Northern Ireland in the first substantial reversal of the demilitarisation of the province - only this time they were patrolling the supposedly 'loyal' Protestant districts of Belfast to prevent in-fighting between paramilitaries. Since then two men have been shot dead, 'Ulster Freedom Fighter' Johnny Adair has been sent back to prison after being released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, scores of Protestants have been forced from their homes and four men have been charged with the attempted murder of a 12-year old girl shot in the back. The rising tension is described in London as rivalry between criminal gangs. In truth the degeneration of the loyalists into faction-fighting is a consequence of the British state's betrayal of its Protestant militias.
British patronage of the Protestants has been a way of life in Northern Ireland for a long time. Nineteenth-century landlords favoured Protestant tenants under the 'Ulster Custom', which was the model for sectarian employment practices in Belfast's linen mills and shipyards. Shipyard boss Edward Harland supported the exclusion of Catholics from the yard in 1886. 'Employ good Protestant lads and lassies', Sir Basil Brooke MP told the Fermanagh Times (13 July 1933). 'All I boast', said Ulster Prime Minister Lord Craigavon, 'is that we have a Protestant parliament for a Protestant state' (Parliament of Northern Ireland, Hansard, Vol. 16, col. 1095, April 1934). Bound to the interests of their rulers, loyalist workers were the backbone of the Orange State by the 1970s, when they brought down the power-sharing executive instituted by Westminster.
The paramilitaries came into their own in the late seventies, when the British policies of 'Ulsterisation' and 'Normalisation' handed the job of holding down the nationalist population - undertaken by British troops after 1969 - back to the loyalists. Loyalist death squads were run and armed by British intelligence. They assassinated prominent nationalists like lawyers Patrick Finucane and Rosemary Nelson, as well as indiscriminately attacking nationalist communities. The British played a treacherous game, publicly denouncing the extremes of loyalist terror, pretending to stand above the fray, and identifying nationalist resistance to British rule as just another wing of the faction fighting. The myth that the loyalist tail was wagging the British dog became entrenched in the minds of moderate nationalists, who demanded that Britain restrain them.
With the recent rapprochement between the British government and republicans - now re-cast as community activists and education ministers - the loyalist militias were surplus to requirements. Attempts to re- model paramilitaries as political parties, the Progressive Unionist Party and the Ulster Democratic Party were stillborn. Older leaders Billy Hutchinson and David Ervine of the PUP and John White of the DUP embraced the peace process, but the paramilitary soldiers were released into nowhere. The bastions of loyal employment like the security services are winding down. Even Harland & Wolff's Norwegian owners Fred Olsen Energy are discussing closure this week, with the Ministry of Defence declining to step in with new orders. Without a nationalist challenge, the British have no need for their loyal supporters.
With prescient cynicism the Ulster poet Tom Paulin once said of the peace process: 'Isn't the game plan obvious? The IRA move back and the loyalists go on the rampage. Then the British government move against the loyalists. This will be the final confrontation. The loyalists don't know where they are going and they won't till the British government finally and publicly betrays them.' (Observer, 4 September 1994)
Reading: Michael Farrell, The Orange State, Pluto Press, 1976; Andrew Clarkson and Phil Murphy, 'The Loyalist Working Class', Revolutionary Communist Papers, No 7, July 1981, Tim Pat Coogan, The Troubles, Hutchinson, 1995
-- James Heartfield
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