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	Slavery remains a problem in the contemporary world because we allow it to happen by Steve McQueen Anti-Slavery International & agencies   It was 175 years ago, on 17 April 1839, that a group of abolitionists gathered to found the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Today that organisation is known as Anti-Slavery International; it is the oldest international human rights organisation in the world, and I am proud to be a patron.   At the time the society was founded, slavery had just been abolished in the British colonies and the plan was to campaign for the abolition of slavery in the rest of the world. But the founders soon realised that the formal abolition of slavery did not prevent people being forced to work against their will.   They knew that it took more than 50 years of campaigning to stop the transatlantic Slavery Trade, in 1807, then slavery itself in the British colonies in 1833, and then to ban slavery under its different name of apprenticeship in 1838.   But could they have imagined that, 175 years on, there would still be 21 million people in slavery across the world, and that Britain itself would not be free from its scourge?   Anti-Slavery has done some ground-breaking work down the years to protect people whose rights were denied by whoever the current ruler happened to be. The organisation"s efforts included exposing the atrocities of King Leopold in the Belgian Congo by using the work of the celebrated missionary Alice Seeley Harris to mount what was probably the first photography-based campaign in history (currently on exhibition in Liverpool"s International Slavery Museum). Anti-Slavery also revealed the forced labour of the Putumayo in Peru, and campaigned to end the use of "coolie" labour in British colonies.   They were instrumental in agreeing many global treaties against slavery: a League of Nations slavery convention of 1926 that, for the first time, obliged all ratifying states to end slavery, not to mention the UN supplementary convention in 1956 and the numerous ILO conventions and European treaties on trafficking.   Anti-Slavery continues to campaign on the most pressing slavery issues, including forced labour in the export-oriented industries of Thailand and in the cotton and chocolate industries, and the enforced servitude of domestic workers across the world. The organisation continues to undertake pioneering work: setting up schools for the children of formerly enslaved people in the arid lands of Niger, empowering child domestic workers to advocate for their own rights in six countries on three continents, and uncovering the role of international brands in slavery practices.   Fine work it might be, but it is far from over.   When I was making 12 Years a Slave, I was struck by the parallels it had with slavery today. Scenes of slaves picking cotton reminded me of the tens of thousands of Uzbek citizens forced to pick cotton every year by their own government. The beatings and floggings brought to mind recent stories of Indian brick kiln workers having their hands chopped off for refusing to work in inhuman conditions, or a 10-year-old domestic worker beaten to death by her employers. Slaves struggling in extreme heat make me think of enslaved migrant workers building venues for the World Cup in Qatar.   Slavery remains a problem in the contemporary world because we allow it to happen. Governments lack the political will and the moral courage to address its underlying causes: poverty, vulnerability and discrimination, and the failure of the rule of law to protect the vulnerable. Businesses remain faithful to the old mantra of maximising profits whatever the human cost. And we let them get away with that.   Even in the UK, there are urgent problems in relation to protecting the vulnerable from forced labour. Many people apparently trafficked to the UK are deported because the government seems to care more about their migration status than its responsibility to protect them.   Those people who founded Anti-Slavery 175 years ago still make us proud as human beings today. They achieved success because they managed to change the thinking of a large part of society.   But if we don"t change our way of thinking, and get fully behind modern anti-slavery campaigners, in 175 years time there will be someone else writing an article similar to this one. So let"s not celebrate, let"s get to work.   * Steve McQueen is a British film director and writer. His 2013 movie 12 Years a Slave won an Oscar for best picture.   http://www.antislavery.org/english/ http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/apr/17/steve-mcqueen-anti-slavery-international-175th-anniversary-nothing-to-celebrate http://www.iom.int/cms/en/sites/iom/home/news-and-views/press-briefing-notes/pbn-2014b/pbn-listing/colombian-chained-trafficking-vi.html http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/the-empire-of-necessity/5966540 Visit the related web page
	The Fallacy of Public Sector Affordability by Professor John Weeks Tax Justice Network, University of London   In my new book, The Economics of the 1%, I deconstruct the ideological arguments for fiscal austerity. Prominent among these is “public sector affordability”, a fallacy that looms large in the neoliberal assault on social spending.   This fallacy appears virulently in the polemics over deficit reduction in the United States, Britain and continental Europe. The mainstream media treats it as established fact rather than the ideological dogma that it is.   It manifests itself in the United Kingdom in assertions that if university education were made available to a large portion of the population the public sector could not afford to deliver it. Therefore, substantial fees are not barriers to broadening tertiary education, but serve as the vehicle to democratize access to education.   The demonstrable absurdity of this proposition has not brought it the ridicule it deserves.   The neoliberals apply the same argument in every area of social expenditure, major or minor.   With an ageing population, “the public sector cannot afford” to pay more than a safety net pension; and cannot afford to provide all the drugs and care needed by that ageing population, and so on.   The fallacy comes obvious when we consider society as a whole. Only a tiny minority of people would argue that primary education should be a matter for individual families to decide and fund privately.   The overwhelming majority in most countries hold to the conviction that children have a right to be educated. This is not only an individual right. Fostering an educated and informed public is essential to a democratic society.   Conviction, not finance, determines the provision of primary education by the public sector, for everyone, regardless of income or status. If some wish to contract for private education, they may do so, but they must pay their taxes to help support education for all.   The social consensus on public provision of secondary education is equally broad (for everyone), though number of years provided varies (lower in Britain than most developed countries).   How do we identify the appropriate coverage and to what level the public sector should support tertiary education? Here we find no consensus. Those who believe that people have no right to higher education usually avoid taking that potentially damning position, seeking cover under the affordability argument: “I wish we could provide everyone with a university education, but we cannot afford it, and in any case, people gain personally from higher education, so they should pay for it themselves to the extent that they can.”   The public sector can only afford to help the poor to university, and if you are poor and clever you will find funding, or so goes the argument. The implication of this “equal opportunity” of the neoliberals is that the rich can be dumb and fund themselves to a higher degree, while the poor must qualify as “clever”. Elitism in education is fostered, not diluted.   The affordability fallacy takes most pernicious form in its application to pensions and health. In any civilized society children have a right to education and the old should live their final years in decent conditions with dignity.   The consensus supporting a decent life for the elderly exposes “affordability” as grotesque. The question is, in light of a country’s economic development and productive resources, what level of decency can and should society provide to everyone past a certain age?   Once the level is set, it remains to decide the institutional mechanism by which society delivers it.   Considerable empirical evidence indicates that provision of pensions through the public sector has the lowest resource cost (i.e., saves money). Unlike private insurers, the public sector need charge no risk premium. The combination of social consensus and economic growth should guarantee the revenue to fund a pension system be it public or private, and the form is the cheaper and more equitable.   Equally obvious should be the fallacy of the affordability argument for health care. With the appalling exception of the United States, in every high income country the electorate accepts the principle that everyone has the right to adequate medical care.   By accepting this principle, the debate must focus not on financial affordability, nor on coverage (everyone qualifies).   The affordability argument perpetuates a profoundly anti-social and anti-democratic fallacy. Whoever makes it asserts, as Margaret “Iron-Lady” Thatcher did, that there is no society and people have no obligation to fellow human beings beyond an absolute minimum that social decency forces upon even the most reactionary.   Reducing people’s sense of social decency represents the long term project of those who peddle the affordability fallacy. People exist as a loose collection of isolated individuals, taxpaying consumers, in a marketized state of nature where it is each for her/himself.   As Hobbes told us, in the state of nature without the social contract life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Not a bad description of what the one percent would have for the rest of us.   Oliver Wendell Holmes, US Supreme Court Justice for thirty years, famously wrote in a 1927 opinion upholding a tax on a tobacco company, “taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society”.   Though this statement is too defensively negative, it moves considerably closer to social reality than affordability arguments.   If the public sector does not provide social goods and services, then a burden does indeed fall upon the household and individual.   Each person must bear the necessity to seek private provision considerably more expensive than public delivery would be. Taxes are not merely the price we pay for civilized life, they are the vehicle to achieve a humane and just society.   * John Weeks is an economist. He is a Professor Emeritus of the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London.   The ethos of ''new managerialism'' is stripping public services of moral and ethical values , writes Kathleen Lynch for Open Democracy.   The ethos of ''new managerialism'' is stripping public services of moral and ethical values and replacing them with the market language of costs, efficiencies, profits and competition. Anything which is not easily quantified becomes undervalued or abandoned.   With the rise of neo-liberalism as a system of values, there is an increasing attempt to off-load the cost of education, health care and public services generally, on to the individual. Allied to this, there is a growing movement to privatise those areas of public services that could be run for profit, including higher education.   New managerialism represents the organisational arm of neoliberalism. It is the mode of governance designed to realise the neoliberal project through the institutionalising of market principles in the governance of organisations. In the public sector (and increasingly in civil society bodies) it involves the prioritisation of private (for-profit) sector values of efficiency and productivity in the regulation of public bodies, on the assumption that the former is superior to the latter.   New managerialism is further characterised by significant changes in nomenclature. There is a declining use of language that frames public services in terms of citizens’ rights, public welfare and solidarity and a growing emphasis on language that defines the citizen’s relationship to the state in terms of market values, be it that of customers, service users and competitors. There is a deliberate attempt to elide the differences between public and private interests. New configurations of public-private relationships are designated as ‘partnerships’ erasing the differences between public and private interest values, between providing a service at cost and only providing a service if it is profitable..   http://opendemocracy.net/kathleen-lynch/%27new-managerialism%27-in-education-organisational-form-of-neoliberalism Visit the related web page
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