Contraceptive pill could be sold over counter in first for UK


Public consultation led by the MHRA is looking for views on the potential reclassification of two pill types

The MHRA’s Dr Sarah Branch said: ‘We hope to hear from as many people and women’s groups as possible.’ Photograph: Getty Images/iStockphoto


Edna Mohamed and agency
Fri 12 Feb 2021 22.40 GMT

Two types of the contraceptive pill could be sold over the counter for the first time, the government has announced.

As part of a public consultation, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is looking for opinions on the reclassification of two progestogen-only pills.

If the medicines – Lovima 75 microgram film-coated tablets and Hana 75 microgram film-coated tablets – are reclassified, it will be the first time daily contraceptive pills will be available over the counter at a pharmacy.

At the moment, the contraceptive pill is only available on prescription following a medical consultation.

Dr Sarah Branch, director of vigilance and risk management of medicines at the MHRA, told PA Media: “Every response received will help us gain a better picture of whether people think the contraceptive pill with desogestrel [a synthetic form of progestogen] should be available over the counter. We hope to hear from as many people and women’s groups as possible.”

The proposals have been labelled a “positive step” by a consumer healthcare association.

Last year a report by a cross-party group of MPs found that many women in England were struggling to access contraceptive pills as a result of underfunding and cuts to services, which was only made worse by Covid-19.


Women in England struggling to access contraception as result of underfunding

Read more

The report warned that reduced access to contraception would affect marginalised groups the hardest, with young people possibly put off from going to see their GPs about contraceptives.
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Michelle Riddalls, chief executive of PAGB, the UK trade association that represents the manufacturers of branded over-the-counter medicines, said the body backed the the reclassification of the pills.

“The MHRA consultation represents a landmark opportunity in women’s health and one which we hope will be viewed positively,” she said.

“Both Maxwellia [a British drugmaker] and HRA Pharma [a French drugmaker] have asked the MHRA to permit the sale of their progestogen-only pill products under the supervision of a qualified pharmacist.

“As expert healthcare professionals, pharmacists are fully equipped to offer advice to anyone seeking information about over-the-counter medicines.”

She said the application to reclassify the medicines had “particular significance as they are the first to seek over-the-counter licences for any form of daily contraceptive pill, 60 years after the pill in its original form was made available via prescription on the NHS for married women only.

PA Media contributed to this report

UK

U-turn on public sector payment cap ‘will benefit millions’

Unions say ‘perverse’ government rules on maximum payouts would have hit low-paid workers hardest

Prospect members at the Science Museum in London striking for better pay in 2019. The rules would have affected government workers paid £23,500 who were made redundant. Photograph: Guy Smallman/Getty Images

PA Media
Sat 13 Feb 2021 

Millions of workers will benefit from a government decision to withdraw regulations aimed at preventing excessive payments in the public sector, according to unions.

A government U-turn means “perverse” regulations that would have hit low-paid workers the hardest will now be revoked, said unions. They said the rules, aimed at preventing excessive payments to the highest earners, would have affected long-serving local government workers who earned just £23,500 and were made redundant.

Unison’s general secretary, Christina McAnea, said: “It’s great the government has finally seen sense and stepped back from this damaging regulation that threatened to blight the retirement of millions of workers.

“Through no fault of their own, long-serving staff over the age of 55 and facing redundancy would have been hit by the regulation. Because they’re obliged to take their pensions if they lose their jobs, when combined with redundancy payments the final amount could have exceeded the £95,000 cap.

“All along the Treasury was told that the regulations were flawed, and they would hit ordinary workers. Unfortunately, ministers wouldn’t listen, so Unison had to take them to court.

“The government has wasted much time and money and should now abandon any plans to reintroduce the regulations.

“Instead, ministers should concentrate on supporting dedicated public service workers who are delivering for their communities in the most challenging of circumstances.”

Garry Graham, the deputy general secretary of Prospect, said: “Our robust legal challenge has been successful. Despite initially contesting our legal case to go to judicial review, the government has now thrown in its hand. They have also conceded anyone the cap has been applied to so far should be compensated.

“We said at the time we believed the government’s approach was both unlawful and chaotic and have been proven right.”

Rehana Azam, a GMB national officer, said it was a “victory for millions of public sector workers, but once again it proves that this government is not on the side of our invaluable public sector workers who have put themselves in harm’s way throughout the pandemic.

“At a time when we should be protecting our public sector workforce, the government has been hell-bent in attacking their hard-fought terms and conditions.

“GMB will be working hard to assist members who were affected by this unjust cap and will stand vigilant against any attempt to reintroduce these cruel and flawed plans.”

A Treasury statement said: “In line with the government’s long-term commitment to ensure that public sector exit payments are fair and proportionate to employers, employees and taxpayers, the Restriction of Public Sector Exit Payments Regulations 2020 came into force on 4 November 2020.

“The legislation set a £95,000 cap on exit payments for public sector authorities and offices listed in the schedule.

“After extensive review of the application of the cap, the government has concluded that the cap may have had unintended consequences and the regulations should be revoked.

“HMT [Treasury] directions have been published that disapply the cap until the regulations have been revoked.”

The Unite assistant general secretary Howard Beckett said: “We warmly welcome this decision by the government to jettison the £95,000 cap that would have adversely affected dedicated long-serving public servants earning relatively low salaries of £25,000 a year.

“A potential injustice that would have dramatically lowered morale in the workforce has been averted and Unite is pleased to have played its part in achieving this victory.”

US government appeals against ruling to block extradition of Julian Assange

The Biden administration says it is ‘continuing to pursue extradition’ against the WikiLeaks founder

By Charlie Duffield
February 13, 2021 1:30 pm

The US government has appealed a UK judge’s decision against the extradition of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, a justice department official said.

The appeal confirms that Joe Biden intends to have Mr Assange stand trial on espionage and hacking-related charges, due to WikiLeaks’ publication of hundreds of thousands of US military and diplomatic documents.

The Biden administration is challenging the ruling delivered on 4 January, which found that Mr Assange would pose a suicide risk if he were extradited to the US for trial due to his mental health.

A justice department spokesperson, Marc Raimondi, confirmed to AFP: “We filed an appeal and we are continuing to pursue extradition.”

Mr Assange remains under detention by UK authorities pending the appeal, and could face a prison sentence of up to 175 years in the US if convicted there.
Transparency and media freedom issues

Protesters hold a sign to support WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in front of the EU British Embassy in Brussels (Photo: John Thys/AFP)

Supporters of Mr Assange and some human rights campaigners have called on Mr Biden to drop the case against the Australian national, which they assert raises sensitive transparency and media freedom issues.

Earlier this month, Mr Assange’s partner Stella Moris said: “I urge the (US) Department of Justice to drop the charges and the President of the United States to pardon Julian.”

After WikiLeaks began publishing US secrets in 2009, the Obama administration – in which Mr Biden was vice-president – initially declined to pursue the case.

Mr Assange claims WikiLeaks is no different than media outlets constitutionally protected to publish leaked materials. However, the organisation has faced questions over its decisions to publish files obtained via theft and hacking, and whether it can be legitimately considered journalism.

Donald Trump‘s 2016 election campaign was buoyed by WikiLeaks publishing Russian-stolen materials, which were detrimental to his opponent Hillary Clinton, and the justice department compiled a national security case against Mr Assange.

Espionage charges

In 2019, Mr Assange was charged under the US Espionage Act, and computer crimes laws, on several counts of conspiring with and directing others – from 2009 to 2019 – to illegally obtain and release US secrets.

According to the charges, he assisted hacking, illegally exposed confidential US sources to danger, and used the information to damage the US.

At the time, assistant attorney general John Demers said: “Julian Assange is no journalist.”

This week 24 organisations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA and Reporters Without Borders, urged Mr Biden to drop the case.


In an open letter they said: “Journalists at major news publications regularly speak with sources, ask for clarification or more documentation, and receive and publish documents the government considers secret.

“In our view, such a precedent in this case could effectively criminalise these common journalistic practices.”

 

Yukon's Gurdeep Pandher on why he's breaking his silence on the farmers' protest

In an exclusive interview with Global News, Yukon Bhangra instructor Gurdeep Pandher explains why the farmers' protest in India isn't really about politics, or agriculture laws, it's about a culture under threat, and how his passion for spreading positivity through Bhrangra, is rooted in the movement. Neetu Garcha reports

'Hopefully it makes history': Fight for $15 closes in on mighty win for US workers

Fear was the overwhelming emotion Alvin Major felt when, on a chilly November morning in 2012, he went on strike at the Brooklyn KFC where he worked.

“Everybody was scared,” said Major. He may have been fearful, but what Major didn’t know was that he was about to make American history – an early leader in a labor movement that some historians now see as the most successful in the US in 50 years.

Major was paid just $7.25 an hour as a cook at KFC, but the consequences of losing his job were dire, as his family was already struggling to make the next month’s rent. “Everybody was scared about going back to work,” he said. “Nobody visualized what this movement would come to.”

The New York strike by hundreds of majority Black and brown New York fast-food workers was, at the time, the largest in US history – but it would be dwarfed by what was to come. Two years later, strikes had spread across America, and fast-food workers in 33 countries across six continents had joined a growing global movement for better pay and stronger rights on the job.




In eight years, what became the Fight for $15 movement has grown into an international organization that has successfully fought for a rise in minimum wage in states across the US, redefined the political agenda in the US, and acted as a springboard for other movements, including Black Lives Matter. It now stands perilously close to winning one of the biggest worker-led rights victories in decades.

This Tuesday, fast-food workers will walk out again, hoping to push through a change that will affect tens of millions of American workers.

For Major, now 55, it all began in a hall in Brooklyn, where union and community activists had convened a meeting of fast-food workers to see what pressure they could bring on an industry notorious for its low wages and poor conditions, and a state that had shown those workers little interest.

With a platform to speak, the workers talked about “how you had to be on food stamps, get rent assistance, all these kinds of things, and we’re working for these companies that are making billions”, said Major.

At one point, a worker showed the burns on his arm he had suffered at work. In a show of solidarity, workers across the room others rolled up their sleeves to show their scars too. Even when injured on the job, workers said, they were too scared to take time off.

This was not how Major imagined America to be when he moved to the US from Guyana in 2000. “In our family, with 14 kids, my dad’s wife never worked a day. My dad used to work, he took care of us, we had a roof over our head, we went to school, we had meals every day, he had his own transportation.”

In America, “the greatest, most powerful and richest country in the history of the world”, he found “[that] you have to work, your wife has to work, when your kids reach an age they have to work – and still you could barely make it”.

Industry lobbying allied to Republican and – until relatively recently – Democratic opposition has locked the US’s minimum wage at $7.25 since the last raise in 2009. Now a raise to $15 looks set to be included in Joe Biden’s $1.9tn Covid relief package – although it will still face fierce opposition.

Even Biden, who campaigned on the raise, has expressed doubt about whether it can pass. But more progressive Democrats including longtime champion Senator Bernie Sanders are determined to push it through, and it remains in the House Covid relief bill.

The stakes are huge. The Congressional Budget Office said this week that 27 million Americans would be affected by the increase, and that 900,000 would be lifted out of poverty at a time when low-wage workers – and especially people of color – have suffered most during the pandemic. The CBO also said the increase would lead to 1.4m job losses and increase the federal budget deficit by $54bn over the next 10 years.

Other economists have disputed the CBO’s job-loss predictions – the Economic Policy Institute called them “wrong, and inappropriately inflated”. The long-running debate about the real cost of raising the minimum age will no doubt continue. What is certain is that Biden will face enormous political blowback if his campaign promise to raise the minimum wage falls so early in his presidency – a promise that during his campaign he argued was central to his plans to address racial inequality.

That backlash will also cross party lines – at least outside Washington. The US may be as politically divided as it has been since the civil war, but polling shows the majority of Americans support increasing the minimum wage no matter their chosen party. In November 60% of voters approved a ballot initiative to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2026 even as they voted to re-elect Donald Trump.

Related: Fight for $15 minimum wage boosted in Florida but Biden faces tough task

More people voted for that ballot initiative than voted for either presidential candidate in the state. With Florida, seven states plus the District of Columbia have now pledged to increase their minimum wage to $15 or higher, according to the National Employment Law Project (Nelp) and a record 74, cities, counties and states will raise their minimum wages in 2021.

The movement, and this widespread support, has changed the political landscape, pushing Democratic politicians, including Biden, Hillary Clinton and the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, to back a $15 minimum wage, against their earlier qualms.

Cuomo called a $13 minimum wage a “non-starter” in February 2015. By July, he was racing California to get it into law.

In the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, Clinton went from supporting a raise to $12 an hour to $15 as Sanders made ground on the issue. Even Saturday Night Live parodied the pair arguing about who was most for a $15 higher wage.

Big companies including Amazon, Target and Disney have all moved to $15, or pledged to do so. One of Biden’s first executive orders called for federal contractors to pay employees a $15 minimum wage. The federal holdout would be the movement’s biggest win to date, but there is little arguing that they have made significant progress without it – not least for Alvin Major, who now has a union job earning over $17 an hour working at JFK airport and who says he is no longer worried about his bills.

For Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), this is “the David and Goliath story of our time”. She puts the public support down to the “pervasiveness of underpaid, low-wage work”.

“Every family in America knows somebody that’s trying to make ends meet through a minimum-wage job. And the pandemic has revealed that essential work in a way that many people hadn’t noticed before, and they now understand how grocery store clerks, nursing home workers, janitors, airport workers, security officers, delivery drivers [and] fast-food workers are all people trying to do the very best job they can, and provide for their families.”

The SEIU has been a longtime funder and supporter of Fight For $15 and for Henry, the first woman to lead the SEIU, the fight for a higher minimum wage is just the beginning of a greater push for workers’ rights – not least the right to join unions, in a service sector where women and people of color make up a disproportionate number of workers.

“Eighty per cent of our economy is driven by consumer spending. Service and care jobs are the dominant sectors in the US economy, and we have to create the ability of those workers to join together in unions in this century, just like auto, rubber and steel were the foundation in the last century,” she said.

“If the US Congress can’t see what the American people are demanding, in terms of ‘Respect us, protect us, pay us’, then they’re going to have a political price to pay in 2022,” she added. “Our nation’s leaders need to get this done. Congress has used its rules to pass trillions of dollars in tax cuts for billionaires and massive corporations, so now it’s time for our nation’s leaders to give tens of millions of essential workers a raise.”

Backing Henry will be a younger generation of activists who cut their teeth in the Fight for $15 movement and have used it as a springboard into a political debate that is now centered around racial and economic justice. One of those leaders is Rasheen Aldridge, one of the first to take action when the Fight for $15 spread to St Louis, who was elected to Missouri state assembly last November.

Aldridge was working at a Jimmy John’s restaurant in 2013 when he was approached by a community organizer asking him about his pay and conditions. Aldridge had recently been humiliated by a manager who took pictures of him and a co-worker holding signs they were forced to make, saying they had made sandwiches incorrectly and had been 15 seconds late with a drive-through order. “It was so dehumanizing and just a complete embarrassment,” said Aldridge.

The organizer talked about the strikes in New York, Chicago and elsewhere, and suggested the same could happen in conservative Missouri.

“I thought he was crazy,” said Aldridge. But he also thought: “I have to do something. The worst thing that can happen is what? I get fired. And, it’s unfortunate, but I can find another job, another low-wage job, because there’s just so many of them unfortunately that exist in our country and our city.”

By 2014, Aldridge was a leader in the local minimum wage movement and building a network of contacts. Some of them were working in a nearby McDonald’s in Ferguson that was next to the Ferguson Market and Liquor store where Michael Brown, an 18-year-old who had graduated from high school eight days earlier, was shot dead by the police after leaving the store with an allegedly un-bought package of cigarillos.

Aldridge heard the police cars rushing to the scene. The shooting led to months of unrest and, coming after the high-profile killing of other Black people, was a turning point for the Black Lives Matter movement. “I remember I was in high school and I was wearing a hoodie and said, ‘I’m Trayvon,’” said Aldridge, referencing the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old shot dead by a neighborhood watch guard in Sanford, Florida.

“I think after Ferguson, it really took off in a different way. I think the way we resisted in Ferguson was like no other,” said Aldridge. Aldridge became an early BLM organizer in Ferguson. “If it wasn’t for the Fight for $15, though, I’m not sure if I would have went out to Ferguson as quick as I did and would have been out there as long as I did.”

For the freshman representative, Fight for $15 and BLM are the same fight.

“You can’t really talk racial injustice without talking economic injustice,” he said. “You can’t forget that those same black workers still live in the same community that is oppressed, that is over-policed. Those workers were the same workers that also went to the streets of Ferguson, have protested, because they feel like Mike Brown could have been them, regardless if they was working at McDonald’s or if they was working at a healthcare facility,” said Aldridge. “It’s all connected.”

“Hopefully President Biden really follows through and does it, and makes it possible for everyone all across the state, all across this country, to make a livable wage. To not have so much burden on their back, especially in the midst of a pandemic.”

For labor historian Erik Loomis, a history professor at the University of Rhode Island and author of A History of America in Ten Strikes, the Fight for $15 is one of the most significant victories for workers in 50 years. Although he has caveats.

“It has been a huge success in conjunction with other issues in reshaping narratives around economic equality in America,” he said. From Occupy Wall Street to the Fight for $15 to the #MeToo movement to BLM, Loomis sees a building movement for greater equality. “For the first time in a half-century we are beginning to move in the right direction on this, in a way that, forget about Republicans, did not exist not only under Obama but under Clinton or Carter,” said Loomis. “This is the farthest left economic platform than anything you have seen since the 60s.”

But, as he points out, the $15-an-hour wage Major and others were fighting for in 2012 is worth less than it was back then due to inflation, and will be worth even less in 2025, when a lot of states aim to hit that level. Nor has the campaign managed to establish unions in many fast-food outlets – at least not yet. “The answer is you just keep pressuring,” said Loomis. “In other words, don’t be satisfied with $15. It is time for 20.”

Many workers caught up in the movement are exhausted. While their hard-fought successes have made a big difference, many have been hit hard by the pandemic. Now they are worried that some have made gains, others will be left behind.


Management just has a way of knocking you down, making you feel useless, you are not worth $15Adriana Alvarez

Back in 2010, Adriana Alvarez was earning $8.50 an hour at McDonald’s in Chicago. The city voted to increase its minimum wage to $15 an hour by July this year and Alvarez is now on $15.15.

Like many restaurant workers, she has seen her hours cut during the pandemic. But she is hopeful about the future. Before Covid-19, when her wages went up, “I was able to fill up the fridge a little more,” she said. She took her son to Winter Wonderfest, a gigantic annual event where Chicagoans can temporarily forget the city’s bitterly cold winter and go ice skating and take carnival rides. “It was something I had never been to. He had a blast. He’s scared of heights. He said, mummy, I have to try it. I have to get rid of my fear.”

But the journey to her – somewhat – better life has been hard for Alvarez. Before the Fight for $15, she said managers regularly asked workers to work off the clock to finish jobs they hadn’t completed on their shift for no pay. There was more shouting, more hostility. That has stopped now. “They know we can show up with 50 people in a store,” she laughed.

Along the way, she has met senators, she has a picture with Sanders, been on a call with Biden, welcomed the pope to the US and met workers from different industries, from teachers to airport and healthcare workers, who are also fighting for a better deal. She too has been surprised that the fight has been so successful. When people first started telling her they wanted $15 an hour, she said she told them they were “crazy.”

“Management just has a way of knocking you down, making you feel useless, you are not worth $15,” she said.

Now, hopefully, she said “finally these politicians are doing what they should be doing. Last time it [the minimum wage] was raised was 2009. It’s about time. Everything else has been going up. People have to work two or three jobs just to get by.”

Does she feel like part of history?

“Hopefully it makes history,” said Alvarez. “But I don’t think I’m part of history. I’m tired, I’m tired of being mistreated, of being underpaid and overworked. We want that $15 and a union. I guess you don’t think about the whole history part until after it’s been done.”

The Guardian

'Hopefully it makes history': Fight for $15 closes in on mighty win for US workers

Dominic Rushe in New York  2/13/2021

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

NY money manager pleads not guilty to $1.8 billion Ponzi-like fraud

By Jonathan Stempel

© Reuters/Brendan McDermid FILE PHOTO: New York State Attorney General, Letitia James, speaks during a news conference, to announce a suit to dissolve the National Rifle Association, In New York

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The founder of a New York money manager who authorities said ran a $1.8 billion fraud resembling a Ponzi scheme that fleeced thousands of investors pleaded not guilty to fraud and conspiracy charges on Tuesday.

David Gentile, who until last week was chief executive of GPB Capital Holdings LLC, entered his plea through his lawyer to a five-count indictment at a hearing in Brooklyn federal court.

Bail was set at $500,000, secured by Gentile's home in Manhasset, New York. The married father of four is forbidden from communicating with GPB investors about the criminal case.

Seven U.S. states and the Securities and Exchange Commission have opened related civil proceedings.

Gentile and other defendants, including two individuals, were accused of defrauding more than 17,000 retail investors over several years.

Investors in GPB funds were allegedly misled into believing they were making profitable private equity investments, when in fact new investor money was used to provide the 8% annual returns promised to earlier investors.

Authorities said the individual defendants also diverted investor money to subsidize luxuries for themselves, including a $355,000 Ferrari FF for Gentile.

Title to the Ferrari was never transferred to Gentile, and investors bore a $183,000 loss when GPB sold the car after two years, according to New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Her office is seeking more than $700 million of restitution.

GPB is a defendant in civil proceedings, but is not a defendant in the criminal case. It has denied allegations it faces, and last week said Gentile was stepping down as chief executive "until current matters are resolved."

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Dan Grebler)

‘Being Maori is a superpower’: Indigenous lawmaker wins tie battle
“We are not like everyone else. We are unique. Being Maori is like having superpowers. 

There is no-one else in the world like us, and we need to maintain who we are.”

 by Henry Goodwin February 12, 2021 in News
LONDON ECONOMIC EYE

A Maori legislator has won his battle against wearing a tie in the New Zealand parliament, ending a longstanding dress requirement that he described as a “colonial noose”.

Rawiri Waititi, the co-leader of the Maori Party, this week sparred over the dress code with parliament speaker Trevor Mallard, who has the job of enforcing the rules – even though Mr Mallard said he did not personally agree with the tie rule.

Mr Mallard had previously warned Mr Waititi that he needed to wear a tie and then on Tuesday ordered him to leave the debating chamber after Mr Waititi showed up wearing a traditional pendant around his neck called a hei tiki.

“I do not recognise the member, he will now leave the chamber,” Mr Mallard told Mr Waititi, who responded by saying the issue was not about ties but about culture.

“This is a breach of the rights of indigenous peoples,” Mr Waititi told reporters afterwards. “We have the right to practise our cultural identity.”

But by the following evening, Mr Mallard had changed course. It happened after a committee meeting during which legislators heard from Maori.


“The majority of the committee was in favour of removing the requirement for ties to form part of ‘appropriate business attire’ for males,” the speaker wrote in his explanation, adding that ties would no longer be required.

Mr Waititi hailed the change as a win for Maori and indigenous people around the world. And with the rules loosened, several other male legislators followed his lead by not wearing ties on Thursday.

Mr Waititi, a father of five, surprised many people when he won a seat during last October’s election and arrived in parliament with a jovial but also uncompromising attitude, promising to fearlessly promote the rights of Maori.

“Mr Speaker, Maori have had enough of being assimilated and forced to do and look like everyone else,” Mr Waititi told legislators during his opening speech in December.

“We are not like everyone else. We are unique. Being Maori is like having superpowers. There is no-one else in the world like us, and we need to maintain who we are.”

During his maiden speech, Mr Waititi told the story of a tribal member who had been wrongfully hung for a crime he did not commit due to mistaken identity.

Mr Waititi then took off his own red tie as he repeated what he said were the man’s last words: “Take the noose from around my neck, so that I may sing my song.”

What If We Got Rid Of Prisons?
It's getting harder and harder to argue that the prison system is working. So why haven't we changed it?

 by Henry Goodwin
February 9, 2021
in News



If someone asked you why people are sent to prison, what would you say?

“Because it keeps us safe,” you might argue. Maybe you’ll say that offenders need to be punished, to be taught a lesson. Perhaps taking criminals off the streets represents justice for victims and their families. Or is it about reforming and rehabilitating people who have taken a wrong turn?

The problem is, whatever you role you think prison plays in modern Britain, it’s getting harder and harder to argue that it’s working. The prison population has risen by 70 per cent in the last 30 years. Few would claim society has got much safer.

As for teaching prisoners a lesson, 48 per cent of adults reoffend within a year of their release. For those serving sentences shorter than a year, that jumps to 65 per cent. What about rehabilitation? The proportion of prisoners involved in education or achieving qualifications is falling steadily.

On release, inmates – who may have lost jobs, homes and families for the sake of a weeks-long sentence – are handed a £46 stipend, which hasn’t increased since 1995. Less than half of those released in 2018-19 had settled accommodation to go to – and 16 per cent ended up sleeping rough.

That’s before factoring in the cost. The taxpayer spends more than £41,000 per year to keep a single prisoner behind bars – and there are nearly 80,000 people currently locked up in England and Wales.


Yet prisons remain an immovable reality, largely beyond reproach, subject to – at best – limited reform around the edges.

“If you had any public institution that was failing so badly, you would probably close it down and suggest we do things differently,” Deborah Coles, director of charity INQUEST, says. So why don’t we?

* 

‘Abolish prisons’ is a much more nuanced mission statement than it sounds. Just like ‘defund the police’ isn’t a call for the dissolution of any and all law enforcement, abolitionists do not want to tear down prisons, cross their fingers and hope for the best.

“What abolitionists have generally tried to avoid is a zero-sum argument that it’s either reform or revolution,” explains Professor David Scott of the Open University, an avowed abolitionist. ”It’s not about pulling down prison walls – it’s about positive change.

“The overall goal is to get to a point where our society can recognise that prisons are not very effective in reducing harm and wrongdoing, and are in fact more likely to perpetuate it.”

Image: PA

But, in 21st century Britain, that is a very difficult argument to make. “The problem with this country is that as soon as you start arguing on that terrain, then you’re immediately branded as pro-crime and anti-victim,” says Professor Joe Sim, a criminologist at Liverpool John Moores University.

Prisons, he argues, have been “ideologically constructed as a bulwark against crime and criminality”. In doing so, the criteria for what qualifies as criminality – and the role of the prison in protecting society from it – has been distorted.

“Some people see prison as a defence against dangerousness,” he says. “Well, how do you define dangerousness? Those people who put the cladding on Grenfell, should they be characterised as dangerous?”

The law and order ideology – deeply embedded in the UK’s flagship media institutions as well as its politicians – has not only made changing the penal system feel like some kind of utopian fantasy, it has put strict constraints on what qualifies as ‘acceptable’ discourse.

“The relationship between politicians and the media sets the parameters of what is legitimate knowledge and what we can talk about,” Scott says.

British public opinion on whether criminals can be rehabilitated is split down party lines. Nearly half of Labour or Liberal Democrat voters think a murderer can be reformed – but just 13 per cent of Conservative voters think a shoplifter is capable of changing their ways.

If you flip the ‘soft on crime’ debate to prisons, however, there is more unanimity. Fewer than one in ten people believe putting more people in prison is the most effective way to deal with crime. Early intervention, better parenting and better discipline in schools are all seen as more helpful responses.

Abolitionists believe that there’s a disconnect between the tough-on-crime rhetoric of some politicians and newspapers and what the public actually thinks. “The general public is nowhere near as punitive as politicians anticipate,” Scott suggests.

Coles, whose charity – INQUEST – focusses on deaths in state custody, agrees. “I think the public has travelled a bit more than politicians,” she says.

*

Many believe that the pandemic has provided an opportunity to rethink and remake core aspects of society – from the world of work to the layout of our urban spaces.

The prison system is seldom mentioned in the same breath. Yet, campaigners argue, coronavirus represented a rare opportunity to radically change the realities of the British penal system.

Last March – when there were just over 8,000 confirmed cases of the virus in the UK – Justice Secretary Robert Buckland unveiled an early release scheme, to ease the pressure put on prisons by the pandemic.

Despite as many as 4,000 prisoners being eligible for the scheme, including many pregnant women, just 275 were actually released by the time it was wound down last August. A total of 71 prisoners have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic began – 24 of them in December alone.

For campaigners, ministers’ lukewarm embrace of the programme squandered a golden opportunity to show that offenders could serve out their sentences in the community without society imploding.

“It’s been a complete failure,” Kate Paradine – chief executive of charity Women in Prison (WIP) – said. “The government had an opportunity to radically reduce prison numbers. Yet, nearly a year into this crisis, we still have a situation where the majority of people in prison don’t need to be there.”

The row highlights a fundamental problem for prison abolitionists. Even if the circumstances are ripe to try something different, top-down commitment is still needed to push through change.

That stasis has been especially evident in the fight to abolish women’s prisons – which experts point to as an achievable and common-sense first step towards proving that incarceration is not the only answer.

“All the root causes of offending for women – domestic abuse, mental health issues, substance misuse – are better addressed in community settings,” says 

Less than five per cent of those in prison in the UK are women – yet that cohort accounts for more than 19 per cent of self-harm incidents, according to the Prison Reform Trust.

Those women are highly likely to be victims as well as offenders. Over half the women in prison report having suffered domestic abuse, and 53 per cent report experiencing emotional, physical or sexual abuse as a child.

Prison separates an estimated 17,000 children from their mothers every year. “There are twelve women’s prisons across the country and, with women making up five per cent of the prison population, that means women are on average held much further away from home,” Paradine explains.

“In nine-out-of-ten cases, when a mother goes to prison, her children end up leaving their home – either to live in care, or to live with grandparents or other relatives. That’s where you really see the cruelty of the system.”

The solution, she argues, is to invest heavily in community rehabilitation centres and women’s centres.

“What we imagine is a system that starts with what brought people to the system in the first place. That would mean that the only people subject to any form of incarceration would be those who have committed offences that the public need to be protected from. For women, that is an extremely small number of people.”

That’s before factoring in the significant number of women dying behind bars. In December, 18-year-old Annelise Sanderson became the eighth woman to die in prison in 2020 – the fifth at HMP Styal, in Cheshire, in the last three years.

Sanderson was serving a year-long sentence for assaulting a member of the public, a paramedic and two police officers after being caught stealing a pair of trainers in Wigan. “The punishment of prison is so disproportionate,” Paradine reflects.

*

Fifteen years ago, Baroness Corston – a former MP and chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party under Tony Blair – was commissioned by the Home Office to conduct a report into vulnerable women in the criminal justice system.

The Corston Report, as it came to be known, outlined “the need for a radically different, visibly-led, strategic, proportionate, holistic, woman-centred, integrated approach” to the issue of women in prison.

“It was a real opportunity to do something different and to recognise that the majority of women in prison pose no risk to anybody,” Coles says. “Had the political will existed, we could have seen the end of women’s prisons.”

But that political consensus dissipated when Labour plunged out of power in 2010 – and the Corston Report fell by the wayside. Nonetheless, Paradine believes it still offers the blueprint for reimagining the position of women in prison – and, possibly, for a more general drift towards abolitionism.

“Baroness Corston imagined very small custodial centres that wouldn’t be like prisons at all – in terms of their size and their institutional nature. They would not be focussed, in inception and design, on punishment.

“That would mean that thousands more women would be provided with support in community settings, and not in prison settings. That’s why we’re focussed on establishing a network of women’s centres across the country, which provide a proven alternative to punishment in terms of enabling in women’s spaces to address holistically the problems that brought them into the criminal justice system in the first place.”

Doing so could provide a blueprint for elsewhere in the criminal justice system, she argues. “We can transform that corner of the prison system as a model for what could be done for men and for the children who are still left in prison.”
*

There is a mounting body of evidence, from Britain and overseas, that abolition-inspired alternatives to incarceration can be effective. Norway is the example cited by most. Take Bastøy, a prison island a couple of miles adrift of the coast in a fjord about 50 miles south-east of Oslo.

Inmates live in a village-style setting, tending to farm animals, playing tennis, cooking and playing cards. They have their own beach – and even operate the ferry which takes people to and from the island.

Even in maximum security prisons like Skien – an imposing concrete castle in south-east Norway where mass murderer Anders Breivik is serving his sentence – cells have televisions and ensuite showers. Prisoners are offered education and skills-based training.

Image: PA

British tabloids have labelled Norwegian prisons “cushy” – likening them to holiday camps, an accusation that made Bastøy’s ex-governor, Arne Nilsen, gristle when he was asked about it several years ago.

“You don’t change people by power,” he said. “Here I give prisoners respect; this way we teach them to respect others. It is important that when they are released they are less likely to commit more crimes. That is justice for society.”

There is no life sentence in Norway. Its maximum prison term is 21 years, which Breivik is serving. Everyone who serves time will eventually be released back into society – so there is an obvious incentive to help rehabilitate offenders.

That is true of Britain, too. Although the numbers of people given life sentences has steadily increased in recent years, just a handful of people who go to prison will stay there forever. “What people forget is that people who go in come out,” Coles says.

That, perhaps, offers the most powerful rebuttal to a question often asked of abolitionists: what do you propose to do with mass murderers? Incarceration is expensive. But if the only people locked up, in the traditional sense, were the 60-or-so men who are currently slated to spend the rest of their lives behind bars in the UK, that’s a lot of money left over.

“Can you imagine,” Coles asks, “what we could do if we reinvested the money we pump into the prison system into hospitals and mental health services?”

*

Reconfiguring the prison estate has worked in Norway.

The number of prisoners per 100,000 of the national population hovers around 50, compared to roughly 150 in England and Wales, and its crime rate is about half as high. “If prison was so good at preventing crime, America would be the safest country in the world – and Norway would be the most dangerous,” Sims says.

The prospect of the UK pivoting to a Bastøy-type model of incarceration is far-fetched. But there have been concrete efforts to change the status quo here which, their proponents claim, have proven successful.

Among them is Barlinnie Special Unit, established in Glasgow in the 1970s, which was home to some of Scotland’s most violent offenders and had an explicit focus on therapy and drug counselling.

An art therapist was brought in to encourage the men to express themselves through drawing, painting or sculpture and one inmate – convicted murderer Jimmy Boyle – went on to become a world-renowned sculptor. He has since set up a school for local children in Morocco.

HMP Grendon in Buckinghamshire, which operates entirely as a therapeutic community, has trodden a similar path. Inmates volunteer to go there, are given control over their day-to-day lives and can be voted out of the community at any point.

HMP Grendon. Image: Andy Gryce

On his most recent visit to Grendon, in 2017, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, Peter Clarke, wrote that “the values, principles and practice seen at Grendon could provide positive lessons and inspiration for other prisons.” The Prison and Probation service, he added, “should ensure this example is shared more widely for the benefit of others”.

Grendon’s reoffending rate is consistently lower than other prisons in England and Wales. So why hasn’t its blueprint been developed and replicated across the country?

“The answer, I think, is because they hold up a mirror to our society and show us that there are abolitionist alternatives,” Sims reflects. “These places actually do something about serious crime – and show that ‘animals’ can change.”

*

The American abolitionist Angela Davis wrote that the ideological function of a prison is as an “abstract site” into which “undesirables are deposited”.

Doing so, she argued, “[relieves] us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society – especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”

Seen that way, the prison system is ‘out of sight, out of mind’ wrought physical. Or, as Davis put it, “a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited”.

Abolitionists are divided over whether this system – so deeply enmeshed with the functioning of the modern state – can ever be changed without fundamentally reconstituting the state itself.

But what is clear is that neither reform nor revolution is possible without overcoming the disconnect that currently exists between prisons and public – and dispelling the notion that prisons are the reserve of “evildoers”, in George W. Bush’s words.

“We have to educate, educate, educate and generate a rational debate and understanding about what prison is,” Scott says.

Coles adds: “There’s nothing that brings that into more stark relief than looking at the human stories of those who die in state custody. Follow their journeys, and you see that – so often – those who die in prisons have been lamentably failed by another state agency before they’ve entered the criminal justice system.”

Highlighting the endemic perniciousness of that system could go a long way to loosening the law and order ideology’s grip and force the public to think differently about criminality.

“Why is there always a prison place but not, say, a refuge space for women with mental ill health or a backstory filled with domestic violence and trauma,” Coles says. “Why are there no youth clubs, but we pump billions into a system which only really fails?”

Those difficult questions are yet to seriously penetrate the mainstream. But, thanks to prison abolitionists, they soon might.

Worst economic crisis of any major economy’ as UK economy shrinks at fastest rate for 300 years
“These figures confirm that not only has the UK had the worst death toll in Europe, we’re experiencing the worst economic crisis of any major economy."

by Joe Mellor

LONDON ECONOMIC EYE
February 12, 2021
in Economics



The Office for National Statistics said gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 9.9% in 2020 as no sector of the economy was left unscathed by lockdowns and plummeting demand during the pandemic. It was the biggest fall in annual GDP since the Great Frost of 1709, when the economy shrank by 13%.

However, after registering a 1.2% growth in December, despite strong restrictions across large parts of the country, the economy looks set to avoid what could have been its first double-dip recession since the 1970s.

A double-dip means two recessions within a short period of time, while a recession is defined as two consecutive quarters where the economy contracts.

Little to cheer

Suren Thiru, the head of economics at the British Chambers of Commerce, said: “Despite avoiding a double-dip recession, with output still well below pre-pandemic levels amid confirmation that 2020 was a historically bleak year for the UK economy, there is little to cheer in the latest data.”

All four sectors tracked by the ONS saw a drop in output, the statisticians said, with the highest drop coming in the construction sector, which contracted by 12.5%.

ONS deputy national statistician for economic statistics Jonathan Athow said: “Loosening of restrictions in many parts of the UK saw elements of the economy recover some lost ground in December, with hospitality, car sales and hairdressers all seeing growth. An increase in Covid-19 testing and tracing also boosted output.

“The economy continued to grow in the fourth quarter as a whole, despite the additional restrictions in November.”

The economy was helped in December by an easing of lockdown restrictions that had been in place in parts of the country in November. It was also aided by increased buying in the run-up to Christmas, and stockpiling ahead of the end of the Brexit transition period

The health sector grew by 2.4% after being involved with running coronavirus testing and tracing schemes across the UK.
Worst economic performance

Chancellor Rishi Sunak said the figures revealed the “serious shock” the pandemic has had on the economy.

He added: “At the Budget I will set out the next stage of our plan for jobs, and the support we’ll provide through the next phase of pandemic.”

Shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds said: “These figures confirm that not only has the UK had the worst death toll in Europe, we’re experiencing the worst economic crisis of any major economy.

“Businesses can’t wait any longer. The Chancellor needs to come forward now with a plan to secure the economy in the months ahead, with support going hand-in-hand with health restrictions.”

She called for a “smarter furlough scheme” as the current system is set to run out in April, as well as an extension to the business rates holiday and the VAT reduction for hospitality and tourism companies.

The 9.9% fall marks the worst year for the UK economy since records began.
Second World War

GDP was first measured in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the measure has never previously dropped by more than 4.1%.

That last big drop was in 2009, but the Bank of England has also estimated historic GDP going bank centuries.

James Smith, research director at the Resolution Foundation, said: “The ability to sustainably lift lockdown restrictions without the virus caseload increasing will determine when a true recovery can begin, but the strength of that recovery will also be shaped by decisions taken at the upcoming Budget.

“That should include an extension, and gradual phasing out, of the furlough scheme, along with additional grants targeted at sectors most affected by continuing restrictions.”

Headline was originally 100 years but has been revised to 300

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Former Clinton/Obama adviser Podesta on Biden's Keystone XL decision: 'He's not going back'

WASHINGTON — A senior adviser to two former U.S. presidents delivered a stark message Friday to Canadians hoping for the resurrection of the Keystone XL pipeline: get over it.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The project is gone and not coming back, said John Podesta, who was White House chief of staff in the final years of Bill Clinton's second term and a senior counsellor to Barack Obama.

"I think Keystone's dead," Podesta told an online panel discussion hosted by Canada 2020, a prominent think-tank with deep ties to the federal Liberal party.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order on his first day in office that rescinded predecessor Donald Trump's decision to let the pipeline project cross the Canada-U.S. border.

"He's withdrawn the permit, he's not going back. He made that commitment," Podesta said of the president.

"We've just got to get over it and move on and find these places on clean energy where we can co-operate... I think there's no turning back at this point."

Podesta was joined by Gerald Butts, a former principal secretary to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who's now vice-chairman at the political-risk consultancy Eurasia Group.

Butts was less declarative about Keystone XL and acknowledged the impact the decision will have on a Canadian economy that's heavily dependent on the health of the Alberta oilpatch.

But he agreed the time has come to move on.

"There's no changing the current administration's mind," Butts said.

"We should spend as much time as possible on the things where we agree and minimize our disagreements, as most productive relationships do."

The expansion, first proposed in 2008, would have ferried more than 800,000 additional barrels a day of diluted bitumen from Alberta to refineries and ports along the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Its demise, Butts said, has more to do with an "astronomical increase" in domestic oil and gas production in the U.S. in the intervening years than anything Canada could ever say or do.

"Presidents Trump, Obama and Biden had something that no president really since Eisenhower, maybe even Truman, has had at their disposal when it comes to oil and gas, and that is choices," he said.

"They've exercised those choices to the detriment of the Keystone pipeline and to the broader Canadian economy."

Biden's critics, meanwhile, show no signs of planning to give up the fight.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, whose provincial government is invested in Keystone XL to the tune of about $1 billion, has all but declared war, promising legal action and calling on the federal government to consider "proportionate economic consequences."

Republicans on Capitol Hill, particularly those representing Midwest states with thousands of jobs dependent on the project, have also continued to question the president's priorities.

The Keystone XL decision quickly focused attention on the potential fates of two other prominent cross-border pipelines, both owned by Calgary-based Enbridge Inc.

One is Line 3, which crosses the Canada-U.S. border in Minnesota and links the Alberta oilsands with the westernmost tip of Lake Superior. It's set for a $9.3-billion replacement.

The other, Line 5, picks up where Line 3 ends and runs through the Great Lakes to Sarnia, Ont. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wants Line 5 shut down, an order Enbridge is fighting in court. It would rather replace a portion of the pipe.

The White House has not signalled a direction on those projects except to say they are "part of what our climate team is looking at and assessing," in the words of press secretary Jen Psaki.

That may reflect the competing interests that are likely at work within the Biden administration itself, said James Lindsay, senior vice-president at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"This is a case in which you have elements of the Biden coalition or constituency, in essence, at odds," Lindsay told a briefing last week with the Washington Foreign Press Center.

Climate hawks want pipelines shut down to limit U.S. dependency on fossil fuels, while labour leaders and economic experts argue in favour of good, sustainable jobs, he said.

Proponents also argue that since both Enbridge projects involve replacing existing lines, the case for allowing them to proceed should be easier to make, he added.

"The challenge for a Biden administration is the reality that even when you want to work with close partners, there are going to be issues over which you disagree," Lindsay said.

"You want to work with others; that means to some extent you have to acknowledge their interests. But at times your own interests may take you in a different direction."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 12, 2021.

James McCarten, The Canadian Pres