New York lawmakers want to write Palestinians out of history

Michael F. Brown Power Suits 14 February 2023


Congressman Ritchie Torres and nine Republican US representatives

from New York have blasted an exam that shows maps depicting the

loss of Palestinian land. Tom Williams CQ Roll Call

Congressman Ritchie Torres of New York, an anti-Palestinian stalwart, has taken a page from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his war against Black American history.

Torres is waging his own war on Palestinian history.

He is seeking to dictate to the New York Board of Regents wording around how Israel – and Palestine – is presented to students in the state of New York.

The goal is to diminish the historical reality of the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the Israeli seizure of Palestinian land. For Torres, unpleasant history related to Israel’s founding – which included massacres of Palestinians – can simply be rewritten.

The New York Democrat wrote on 1 February in a complaint to New York Board of Regents chancellor Lester W. Young Jr. after learning of exam questions he disliked. The next day, US Congressman Mike Lawler, who also harbors anti-Palestinian views, led eight other Republican representatives in writing to the governor of New York with their own concerns.

Dov Hikind, a former New York state assemblyman and ongoing supporter of genocidal anti-Palestinian Meir Kahane, thanked Lawler for writing to the governor. Lawler condemns as “anti-Semitic” members of the US Congress who support freedom and equal rights for Palestinians. In 2022, Lawler accepted a campaign donation from Carl Paladino, a serial bigot and frequently unsuccessful New York political candidate who has praised Adolf Hitler.

Torres, for his part, complained that the exam “features several maps of Israel’s changing borders without mentioning the critical context in which those changes arose: as a consequence of defensive, rather than aggressive, wars.”

The congressman omits that by mid-May 1948, when Israel declared its statehood and Arab states declared war, “half of the total number of Palestinian refugees had already been forcefully expelled from their country.”

That is not a defensive war. Nor was Israel’s 1967 attack on Egypt and Syria defensive when it seized the Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights and then the West Bank when Jordan subsequently engaged.

Torres added, “Beneath the map itself is a seemingly innocuous but insidious question portraying the state of Israel as a response to the Holocaust, essentially ignoring Zionism as a national movement that long predates the Holocaust. The implication that Jewish self-determination has no rationale apart from the Holocaust is as ahistorical as it is offensive; it belongs nowhere on a Regents exam.”

The exam did not say Zionism wasn’t a factor. It just indicated that of the four answers provided, the Holocaust was the most appropriate response.

The implication of the letter is, however, very serious as Torres appears to be seeking a broader examination of what is said about Zionism in New York schools. That raises the question of whether the relationship of Zionism to the dispossession of Palestinians will be sufficiently addressed or simply whitewashed when anti-Palestinian politicians get involved and pressure educators to alter what students are taught.

Torres concluded his letter by calling on the Board of Regents to “convene a meeting with institutional leaders in the Jewish community in order to confront its own role in miseducating students about the historical origins and development of Israel as a Jewish state.”

This simply writes Palestinians and the Palestinian American community out of the equation and comes dangerously close to implying that the Jewish community is monolithic on these matters with “institutional leaders in the Jewish community” who can readily handle the matter.

Are Palestinian Americans not worthy of inclusion in these discussions promoted by Torres? His words certainly indicate that Palestinians need not be included.

And will any negative attention go to Israel as a “Jewish state”? This is an exclusivist construct rightly no longer tolerated in the US following decades of Jim Crow segregation and allying with apartheid South Africa.

Torres did not respond to questions from The Electronic Intifada about his anti-Palestinian stance.

He did tell Jewish Insider that he regards the exam as “insidiously anti-Israel.”

Torres added, “I worry that these poorly contextualized maps, which give the impression of having been drawn by [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement] propagandists, play into the character assassination of Israel as an aggressor with ever-expanding borders, the settler-colonialist caricature.”
Republican take

The Republicans writing Governor Kathy Hochul expressed “grave concern with the abhorrent, anti-Semitic question included in this winter’s NYS Regents exam in global history and geography.” They said nothing about the exam not explicitly raising the dispossession of Palestinians displayed by the map.

That dispossession is not of interest to them. Nor did they note that none of the three maps notes that Israel occupied the Sinai, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967. The term occupied isn’t employed at all.

Instead, the Republican lawmakers conflate Israel with all Jews when they write, “It is simply beyond comprehension that anyone at the New York State Education Department would approve a question on a statewide exam that blatantly promotes hateful anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rhetoric which only fan the flames of anti-Semitism in our schools.”

What the maps portray Israel as doing between 1947 and 2017 is the responsibility of Israel and not of all Jews. Saying otherwise, as the members of Congress appear to suggest, is, in fact, anti-Semitic.

The Republican writers then make a remarkable claim: “For centuries, the state of Israel, one of our nation’s greatest allies, and Jews have fought for their right to exist. This question attempts to cast doubt on that very notion and rewrite history by erasing the struggle for independence that the state of Israel faced.”

But the modern-day state of Israel and its support from the US has only been a reality for a little more than 70 years – not centuries. Furthermore, the Republicans have nothing to say about Palestinians’ struggle for independence or even for equal rights between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea.

These aren’t historians.

They’re ill-informed ideologues attempting to wrangle educators to do their political will and seeking the jobs of those responsible for the exam questions. As they say: “There must be a thorough examination into this abject failure and the individuals responsible must be held accountable.”

The nine Republicans and Torres have no more standing to write Palestinians out of the history books than Ron DeSantis does to write out Black Americans.

An asteroid will just miss us in 2029. Scientists are making the most of a rare opportunity


Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists Lance Benner, Paul Chodas and Mark Haynes are studying the 1,100-foot wide asteroid Apophis, which will come within viewing distance of Earth on April 13, 2029.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

BY CORINNE PURTILL

STAFF WRITER 

FEB. 14, 2023 

To be clear: The asteroid is not going to hit us.

There was a while there when it seemed like it could. Suffice to say those were heady days in the asteroid-tracking community. But as of March 2021, NASA has confirmed that there is absolutely zero chance the space rock known as 99942 Apophis will strike this planet for at least 100 years. So, phew. Cross that particular doomsday scenario off the list.

What remains true, however, is that on Friday, April 13, 2029, an asteroid wider than three football fields will pass closer to Earth than anything its size has come in recorded history.

An asteroid strike is a disaster; an asteroid flyby, an opportunity. And Apophis offers one of the best chances science has ever had to learn how the Earth came to be — and how we might one day prevent its destruction.

In the movies, incoming asteroids appear without warning from the depths of space and speed directly toward us until missiles or Bruce Willis heroically destroy them.

In real life, asteroids orbit the sun on elliptical paths. They are often spotted years, if not decades, before a potential collision — which is not great for dramatic tension but better for planetary survival.

Apophis was discovered in 2004. After calculating its potential orbits, astronomers were startled to realize it had a 3% chance of hitting Earth in 2029. In a nod to its horrifying potential, they named it Apophis, an Egyptian god of chaos.

“We were shocked,” said Paul Chodas, who manages NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada-Flintridge. “That is very serious and, actually, a very unexpected and rare event.”

Astronomers use a color-coded warning system called the Torino Scale to gauge the degree of danger an asteroid or comet presents to Earth in the next 100 years. Since the scale’s creation in 1995, none of the roughly 30,000 near-Earth objects known to exist in the solar system had ranked higher than 1 on the zero-to-10 scale.

Apophis was a 4.

The longer astronomers track an asteroid, the more clearly defined its orbit becomes. Within a few months, scientists were able to rule out the possibility of a 2029 strike. Within a few years, they were able to dismiss the even smaller chance of a hit in 2036.


Images of the asteroid Apophis, captured in 2012, allowed scientists to determine that it will not strike Earth during a close flyby in 2036.
(NASA / JPL-Caltech)

And in 2021, radar observations confirmed that Apophis will not strike when it passes us in 2068, leaving Earth in the clear for at least a century.

With humanity’s safety assured — from this threat, at least — the coast was clear to geek out on some asteroid science.

“We’ve never seen something that large get that close,” said Lance Benner, a principal scientist at JPL.




“Close,” in the space world, is a relative term. At its nearest, Apophis will pass roughly 19,000 miles (31,000 kilometers) above Earth’s surface. That’s about one-10th the distance to the moon.

No one on the ground will be tempted to duck, and it will not appear as a fireball swooshing across the heavens.


On the big night, Apophis will be visible with the naked eye from parts of Europe and Africa. (In Los Angeles, experienced stargazers might be able to spot it with binoculars around 3:30 a.m. on April 13.)

The asteroid close encounter presents “an unprecedented opportunity to study its physical properties and to help us learn things that we’ve never been able to learn before,” Benner said.



An approach this close from an asteroid this big occurs at most every few thousand years, said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at JPL.

“It’s something that almost never happens, and yet we get to witness it in our lifetime,” Farnocchia said. “We usually send spacecraft out there to visit asteroids and find out about them. In this case, it’s nature doing the flyby for us.”

From the ground, Apophis will resemble a star traversing the night sky, as bright as the constellation Cassiopeia and slower than a satellite. Though it may appear far away for those of us down here, it will in fact be near enough for NASA to reach out and touch it.

OSIRIS-REx, a spacecraft currently ferrying home samples from the surface of an asteroid called Bennu, will rendezvous with Apophis in 2029. Shortly after April 13, the craft — by then renamed OSIRIS-APophis EXplorer, or OSIRIS-APEX — will steer toward the asteroid until it is drawn into its orbit, eventually getting close enough to collect a sample from its surface.

Apophis is shaped like a peanut shell, a form astronomers call a “contact binary.” The hunk of nickel, iron and silicate is a relic from the earliest days of the solar system, a byproduct of the massive cloud of gas and dust that formed 4.6 billion years ago and eventually led to us.

“These asteroids are primordial samples,” Chodas said. “Learning about the composition will help us understand the history of the solar system and where these things came from.”

The European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory spotted Apophis during the approach to Earth on Jan. 5 and 6, 2013. The image shows the asteroid in three wavelengths.
(European Space Agency )

Given the proximity, researchers will also be able to study Apophis with ground-based tools that have never been deployed for an object this size.

On Dec. 27, researchers at the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Gakona, Alaska, sent a low-frequency radio signal to an asteroid called 2010 XC15. It was part of a test to see if radio waves could penetrate an asteroid and send back data on its interior structure, said Mark Haynes, the JPL radar systems engineer who led the project.

Knowing an asteroid’s internal mass distribution would be extremely helpful if we needed to knock it out of our way.

Hundreds of space rocks hit Earth every year, and most are harmless. A big one, though, can wreak havoc far beyond its initial impact site.

The massive Chicxulub asteroid that 66 million years ago slammed into what is now the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico released an estimated 420 zettajoules of energy. (For context, the world’s collective electricity output in 2021 was about 0.5 zettajoules.)

The resulting heat pulse vaporized rock and sparked wildfires across much of the planet, followed by a years-long impact winter as a choking cloud of particulate matter blocked out the sun. By the time it was over, 75% of species were gone for good, including all non-avian dinosaurs.

The Chicxulub asteroid measured 7 miles across, the same as the city of Paris. Apophis is as long as the Eiffel Tower. A collision with an object that size would be less catastrophic but could still cause serious damage.


OPINION
Op-Ed: Good news for a change — NASA proves there’s a defense against killer asteroids

NASA is working on a plan to deal with that. Last year, its Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, spacecraft deliberately crashed into a rock 7 million miles away to see whether humans could change the trajectory of a celestial object. (Good news: We can.)

If we ever did have to deflect an incoming asteroid, that’s how we’d do it: not with a grand, Death Star-style explosion but with a speedy projectile strong enough to knock it ever-so-slightly off course.

“That mission was spectacularly successful and showed that that technique works,” Benner said. “Don’t send Bruce Willis and a bunch of oil drillers up there to blast it to smithereens.”

Qatar donates World Cup mobile homes to Turkey earthquake survivors


One of a batch of mobile home cabins that Qatar has allocated to be transferred to Turkey as part of relief efforts in the aftermath of a deadly earthquake is transported in Hamad Port, Qatar, February 12, 2023.

The Associated Press
Published: 14 February ,2023

Qatar plans to send 10,000 cabins and caravans from last year’s World Cup to provide shelter for survivors of the Turkish earthquakes, officials said.

The Gulf nation says it had always planned to donate the mobile homes. They were needed to help house some of the 1.4 million fans who descended on the small country during soccer’s biggest tournament.

For the latest headlines, follow our Google News channel online or via the app.


An initial batch of 350 structures was shipped out on Sunday, the Qatar Fund for Development said.

The magnitude 7.8 and 7.5 quakes that struck nine hours apart on February 6 killed more than 35,000 people in southeastern Turkey and war-torn northern Syria. The toll is expected to climb even further as search and rescue teams find more bodies.

Tens of thousands of buildings were destroyed or severely damaged, leaving millions homeless. As shelters filled up in the days after the quake many were forced to sleep outside in wet, wintry weather.

Qatar and other wealthy Gulf countries have joined the global effort to send rescuers and aid to the stricken region. The United Arab Emirates has pledged $100 million for relief efforts. Saudi Arabia has dispatched eight planes loaded with supplies to Turkey and Syria.

Russia says over 300 troops sent to Syria to help with earthquake relief


Russian military personnel involved in a search and rescue operation after a devastating earthquake in the region of Latakia, Syria, in this image taken from handout footage released February 7, 2023. (Reuters)

Reuters
Published: 14 February ,2023

More than 300 Russian servicemen and 60 units of special military equipment are helping Syria in its response to a devastating earthquake that struck more than a week ago, Russia’s defense ministry said on Tuesday.

The 7.8 magnitude Feb. 6 quake and aftershocks killed more than 37,000 in Turkey and Syria and the death toll looked set to keep rising with almost no chances of rescuers finding any more survivors in the rubble.

“Servicemen of the Russian group of forces continue to carry out activities to clear rubble and eliminate the consequences of earthquakes,” the defense ministry said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app, referring to Russian forces stationed in Syria.

“More than 300 servicemen and 60 units of military and special equipment have been involved in the work.”

Food packages and disinfectants as well as other essentials had also been delivered to humanitarian aid points in the northwestern city of Aleppo, the ministry added.

The Kremlin said on Monday that it was in contact with Syrian authorities over providing relief to areas affected.

Russia, which backs Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, has been a dominant military force in Syria since launching air strikes and ground operations there in 2015. It further asserted its presence after the United States pulled out its forces in 2019.

 

Improving working conditions in Japan’s agriculture sector

14 February 2023

Author: Yusaku Yoshikawa, JIN Corporation

In 2019, the Japanese government introduced the Work Style Reform Law which sought to increase diversity in the workplace and improve working conditions. But reform has not been sufficiently discussed in one of the industries that needs it the most — agriculture.

The agriculture industry in Japan has suffered a dramatic decrease in labour, with the number of farmers decreasing by 50,000 per year. The majority of them are small-scale farmers with side jobs, who are also ageing at an advanced stage.

It has been a challenge for the sector to attract young farmers. In 2021, 52,300 farmers joined but nearly two-thirds of them were over 50 years old. The turnover rate of agricultural workers is also higher than in other sectors. The most common reasons for changing jobs are discontentment with working conditions, long labour hours and low incomes.

Despite some efforts being made to improve the working conditions of agricultural workers, such as discussions by the Exploratory Committee on Work Style Reform in Agriculture organised by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), there is still a long way to go in extending the reforms.

Agriculture in Japan has long been considered a ‘family business’, with a blurred boundary between work and life. The 2020 Census of Agriculture and Forestry compiled by MAFF reported that 96 per cent of agricultural management bodies in Japan were still family-owned. On the contrary, employed workers have conventionally not been very common. Because farming activities are mostly seasonal, workers are usually employed only during the busy harvest season. Yet, Japan’s Labour Standards Act only applies to employed workers and excludes family workers engaged in agriculture.

Government statistics and laws related to employed workers in the agricultural sector are often different from those in other sectors. For example, the MAFF Census classification of employed agricultural workers — as employees that work more than seven months per year — does not match the commonly used distinction of regular and non-regular employment.

The Labour Standards Act stipulates that extra wages for overtime and holiday work do not apply to agriculture. The law also excludes the industry from regulations concerning the minimum requirement for break time and holidays for farmers, based on the understanding that agricultural work is subject to seasonal and climate conditions.

But employed workers in agriculture have become more common, especially for newcomers. 22.1 per cent of new farmers in 2021 were employed workers. For new farmers below 49 years old, 8,540 were employed workers, outnumbering the 7,190 self-employed farmers. Still, there is a lot of room to improve farmers’ working conditions further. In 2021, MAFF’s Policy Research Institute reported that 27 per cent of men and 17 per cent of women regularly employed in the agricultural sector worked over 300 days a year.

According to the report, the annual income of regularly employed workers in the sector is low compared to other industries. The average annual income for men working in the agricultural sector was 3.1 million yen (US$22,100) in 2017, compared to 5.2 million yen (US$37,200) for other industries. Women agricultural workers earned only 1.9 million yen (US$14,000) compared to an average annual income of 3.3 million yen (US$23,700). This income gap only widens as the workers’ age increases.

The working conditions for non-regular employees including part-time workers are even more challenging. In the agricultural sector, 46.8 per cent of male workers and 77.8 per cent of female workers were not regularly employed in 2017. Since they were hired for short-term contracts, their annual income was only 2 million yen (US$28,000) for men and 800,000 yen (US$6,000) for women.

Part of the reason for this low income is that agricultural management entities are having trouble securing profit out of the business which has suffered from low market prices of products and an increase in agricultural input costs such as fertiliser.

Foreign workers, such as the Technical Intern Training Program trainees, are also in vulnerable positions. The Program originally aimed to develop the capacity of trainees from countries like Vietnam and the Philippines but many criticise that it has become a means to secure cheap labour in the agriculture industry. The trainees cannot change their workplaces and often suffer from mistreatment, such as violations of security standards. Still, some good practices are balancing pleasant working environments with productivity. In these practices, comfortable working conditions have successfully attracted workers.

As the proportion of employed workers increases, agriculture is becoming less of a ‘family business’ in Japan and transforming into a more ordinary industry in terms of its working style. If this situation continues, improved working conditions for agricultural workers will eventually sustain the industry by contributing to solving challenges such as labour shortages.

Yusaku Yoshikawa is an aid consultant at JIN Corporation.

French jobless figures dip to lowest level in 15 years

Issued on: 14/02/2023 -

RFI/AFP 

Text by: Michael Fitzpatrick

The last three months of 2022 saw the number of French people out of work stabilise at 7.2 percent of the active population, the lowest jobless rate recorded since 2008.
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Figures released on Tuesday by the French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies,(Insee) show that there were 2.2 million unemployed at the end of last year, a reduction of 45,000 compared to the previous three months.

The unemployment rate has thus declined to a level last attained in the first quarter of 2008.

The national statistics agency has been careful to exclude the period of the Covid epidemic from its calculations and comparisons, since many job seekers gave up the hunt for work during the periods of confinement.

Several members of the ruling party have hailed the figures;

Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne welcomed the news, reaffirming the government's determination to get the jobless rate below 5 percent of the active population by 2027.

Labour Minister Olivier Dussopt said the statistics were good news, especially since the figures to which the present situation is being compared, in the early months of 2008, was itself unprecedented in the previous 40 years.

 
Good news, not great news

Not everyone has been equally enthusiastic.

Mathieu Plane, an economist at the French Observatory of Economic Indicators (OFCE), says the figures are certainly positive.

"It's better than the expected stagnation," he says, "but the margin of change is very slight."

The employment statistics are coherent when compared to last week's figures showing that the level of job creation had remained stable over the closing three months of 2022, after nearly two years of uninterrupted growth.

The Insee's employment analyst, Yves Jauneau, points to the important details concealed by the overall figures.

In particular, the employment rate in the 15-64 age bracket is 68.3 percent, the highest level since 1975.

By age group, those between 15 and 24 have seen their unemployment rate decline by one point to 17 percent; 6.5 percent of those in the 25-49 bracket are out of work, showing long-term stability; and the rate of joblessness among those over 50 is also steady, at 5 percent.

BULLDOZERS OF ISLAMOPHOBIA

Soaring demolitions of Palestinian homes must stop: UN experts

“Israel’s tactics of forcibly displacing and evicting the Palestinian population appear to have no limits,” they said.

A member of the Israeli border police stands guard at the site of a demolished house in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem January 19, 2022. (Reuters)

AFP
Published: 13 February ,2023

United Nations rights experts called Monday on the world community to act to stop a dramatic surge in Israel’s “systematic and deliberate” demolition of Palestinian housing.

In the month of January alone, Israeli authorities reportedly demolished 132 Palestinian structures across 38 communities in the occupied West Bank, including 34 residential structures, the three independent experts said in a statement.

The Special Rapporteurs for rights in the Palestinian Territory, the right to adequate housing and the rights of internally displaced people, said the demolitions marked a 135-percent increase compared to January 2022.

The figures are based on those of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

“The systematic demolition of Palestinian homes, erection of illegal Israeli settlements and systematic denial of building permits for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank amounts to ‘domicide’,” they said.

In late 2022, the Special Rapporteur on the right to housing, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, called for “domicide” -- defined as the massive, arbitrary destruction of civilian housing in violent conflict -- to be recognized as a crime under international law.

“Direct attacks on the Palestinian people’s homes, schools, livelihoods and water sources are nothing but Israel’s attempts to curtail the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and to threaten their very existence,” the experts said in Monday’s statement.

The experts, who are appointed by the UN Human Rights Council but who do not speak on behalf of the United Nations, reiterated their concern over the situation in the occupied West Bank’s Masafer Yatta villages.

They warned that more than 1,100 Palestinian residents there remained at “imminent risk of forced eviction, arbitrary displacement and demolitions of their homes, livelihood, water and sanitation structures.”

“Israel’s tactics of forcibly displacing and evicting the Palestinian population appear to have no limits,” they said.

“In occupied East Jerusalem, tens of Palestinian families also face imminent risks of forced evictions and displacement, due to discriminatory zoning and planning regimes that favor Israeli settlement expansion - the act that is illegal under international law and amounts to a war crime.”

The experts’ statement came a day after Israel’s security cabinet announced it would legalize nine settlements in the occupied West Bank following a series of attacks in east Jerusalem.

More than 475,000 Israelis reside in settlements in the West Bank, where 2.8 million Palestinians live.

Read more: Arab leaders warn Israeli actions in Jerusalem, West Bank threaten regional turmoil

ZIONIST ETHNIC CLEANSING

Israel troops kill Palestinian teen during arrest raid

Mourners carry the body of Palestinian Ameer Bustami, who was killed in a predawn Israeli army raid, during his funeral in Nablus in the occupied West Bank on February 13, 2023. 

AFP
Published: 14 February ,2023

Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian teenager in the occupied West Bank early Tuesday, Palestinian officials said, with the army saying troops opened fire after the suspect approached them with explosives.

The Palestinian health ministry said Mahmud Majid Mohammed al-Aidi, 17, died from “critical wounds he sustained by live occupation (Israeli) bullets to the head” at Al-Fara refugee camp north of Nablus.

The army said Israeli troops carried out “counterterrorism operations” in several West Bank towns and cities early on Tuesday.

“During activity in the Al-Fara camp, a Palestinian suspect approached the soldiers with an explosive device. The soldiers responded with live fire. A hit was identified,” the army said, without commenting specifically on Aidi’s reported death.

Camp official Assem Mansour told AFP: “The Israeli army entered the camp from various directions after midnight, and surrounded the house of a wanted person.”

The ministry separately announced the death of Haroun Rasmi Yussuf Abu Aram, 25, from injuries sustained “two years ago from live bullets of the occupation in Masafer Yatta,” an area of the West Bank where many Palestinians have been evicted from their homes by the army, who have declared it a military zone.

On Monday, Asil Sawaed, a 22-year-old Israeli policeman from a Bedouin town in northern Israel, was killed after being stabbed by an assailant and inadvertently shot by an armed guard who intended to hit the attacker but missed.

Since the start of this year, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has claimed the lives of 48 Palestinian adults and children, including militants and civilians.

Nine Israeli civilians, including three children, one Ukrainian civilian and a police officer have been killed over the same period, according to an AFP tally based on official sources from both sides.

 

London has ‘hidden army’ of involuntarily economically inactive people, Centre for Cities data show

7th February 2023

The think tank says the problem is more acute in the north of the country, but the numbers in the capital affected are very large

CHARLES WRIGHT

Official unemployment figures for the capital could be failing to count large numbers of working-age people who are “involuntarily economically inactive”, according to the latest Cities Outlook research from the Centre for Cities think tank.

The centre’s annual snapshot of the economic performance of the UK’s 63 largest cities and towns highlights the growing numbers of working-age people neither in work nor looking for a job due to circumstances beyond their control, such as ill-health or lack of suitable opportunities – a “hidden army” some three million strong.

This concealed unemployment rate generally affects northern towns and cities more acutely, but other areas including London are not immune.

“The rate of forced inactivity is lower in the greater south east, but the numbers are still very large, which is sometimes missed,” said Centre for Cities research director Paul Swinney. “One point one million are in forced inactivity across the region, the majority in the capital.”

The centre’s data show that while there is a shortage of jobs in many areas, in others, including London, a more buoyant jobs market should have more capacity to accommodate those currently inactive.

“The jobs are there, but how do we connect people to those jobs?” said Swinney. “The problem is smaller but there is definitely a problem to think about.”

The capital has consistently had higher unemployment rates than elsewhere and at 4.3 per cent its official rate is the second highest of any UK region. It remains an economic powerhouse, however, according to the centre – consistently at or near the top of the league on productivity, business start-ups and jobs growth and on its number of “new economy” companies, skills and education levels and salaries.

But behind the headlines lie significant inequalities and, according to Swinney, as well as tackling the poor health and low skills keeping a sizeable number of working-age Londoners out of the jobs market, the city needs to deal with what he called the “costs of growth” such as the increasing unaffordability of housing, as well as the perhaps surprising fact  that London has more days of poor air quality than anywhere else in the UK – 36 of them in 2021/22.

The average house price in the capital last year was £694,700, the highest in the country, and 14.2 times the average wage, the centre finds, while the of new homes being built continues to fall short of the demand for them.

The homelessness charity Shelter last month reported that nearly 150,000 people in London are living in temporary accommodation, accounting for more than half the England total, and Sadiq Khan used a committee appearance in Parliament to call on government to “wake up” to a growing housing crisis.

The Mayor argued that with private rents in the capital up 16 per cent over the past 12 months, reaching an average of £2,343 a month, City Hall should be granted the power to freeze them for two years, “stabilising” the market and saving renters some £3,000.

Separately, a new survey of global cities by the London Property Alliance has highlighted “warning signs” about the capital’s economic growth, including faltering new homes delivery.

Slides illustrating the cities outlook 2023 findings are here.

Brexit deals UK economy ‘productivity penalty’ of £29 billion – or £1k per household

An external member of the Bank's monetary policy committee said a wave of investment "stopped in its tracks" in 2016 following the vote.

 by Jack Peat
2023-02-14 


Brexit has dealt the UK economy a “productivity penalty” of £29 billion, a Bank of England policymaker has said, which works out at the equivalent of £1,000 per household.

Jonathan Haskel, an external member of the Bank’s monetary policy committee, said a wave of investment “stopped in its tracks” in 2016 following the vote.

He said the UK had “suffered much more” of a productivity slowdown than other large economies because of Brexit.

Speaking to The Overshoot, Haskel was asked why he thought the UK was an “extreme outlier” when it came to facing a slowdown in productivity.

He said: “Yes, we suffered much more. A bit of that is that we have this larger financial sector. But I think it really goes back to Brexit.

“If you look in the period up to 2016, it’s true that we had a bigger slowdown in productivity up to 2016, but we had a lot of investment. We had a big boom between 2012-ish to 2016.

“But then investment just plateaued from 2016, and we dropped to the bottom of G7 countries.”

Haskel said that the Brexit referendum had an impact on economic growth as a result of the reduction in trade, with the UK opting to leave the EU and its single market and secure trade deals elsewhere.

He referred to a calculation to show what the UK economy could have looked like if investment had carried on growing at the rate it had been before the referendum, compared to what it is currently growing at.

Haskel described the hit to the economy as the “productivity penalty”, which amounted to about 1.3 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). GDP is an important tool for looking at how well, or badly, an economy is doing.

“That 1.3 per cent of GDP is about £29 billion, or roughly £1,000 per household,” he added.

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