Call me cynical but given these nations funded and supported (and still do) the despots, I don’t buy they are all cuddly teddy bears of freedom now.

Britain is to set aside £110m over the next four years to foster democracy and economic growth in Tunisia and Egypt as part of a wider international package to show support for the Arab spring.

The US is the largest contributor, offering $4bn in aid and loans, but help will also come from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. The US has also urged the G8 to “lead efforts to reorient” the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to back Arab democratic transitions in much the same way as it supported similar transitions in central and eastern Europe.

via G8 summit: UK offers Egypt and Tunisia £110m to boost democracy | World news | The Guardian.

Hey remember this shitbag? Richard Ralph, former British ambassador to Peru and the former executive chairman Monterrico Metals Plc. Y’know Dick, he liked to engage in various frauds and gets all absent minded about the torture and kidnapping of protesters by Monterrico Metals when he becomes chairman? Well him and his ilk will be rubbing their bloodied hands together in glee now that the coalition government are doing this-

The government’s proposed changes to the civil litigation costs regime, which will severely restrict access to justice for many vulnerable individuals, have so far passed relatively unnoticed. However, those adversely affected will include victims of UK multinational human rights violations in developing countries.

Recent history has shown much multinational misconduct overseas, especially among extractive and chemical industries. But in developing countries there has usually been impunity due to ineffective enforcement of local laws, state suppression of opposition to multinational operations, and difficulties in accessing justice locally.

Over the past 15 years, multinational human rights litigation has been pursued in the UK, for example against Cape plc by 7,500 South Africans who worked, often as young children, unprotected from dust in Cape’s mines; Thor Chemicals by 40 South Africans poisoned in a chemical factory, where mercury exposure was “controlled” by firing workers reaching unacceptable levels and replacing them; against Trafigura by 30,000 Ivory Coast citizens for harm arising from toxic waste dumping; BP by 73 Colombian farmers for land damage allegedly caused by an oil pipeline; Monterrico Metals plc by 33 indigenous Peruvian environmental protesters effectively alleging corporate complicity with the police in their torture.

Through these cases, the notion of a “duty of care” owed by a multinational across its worldwide operations has arisen. In addition to providing redress for victims, the prospect of being held legally accountable (with the financial and reputation implications this entails) constitutes a powerful deterrent against corporate bad practice.

<…>

Two aspects of the government’s proposals (following a review by Lord Jackson) will dramatically impact on claimant lawyers’ ability and enthusiasm to litigate in future: First, that defendants should only pay claimants’ legal costs if “proportionate” to the compensation awarded. As these cases have generally been against multinational parent companies rather than local operating subsidiaries, they are intrinsically complex. Moreover as so much is at stake, the multinationals instruct top City law firms to defend them to the hilt. Consequently, legal costs invariably substantially exceed compensation (at UK levels). Since Rome II Regulation in 2009 came into effect, compensation in such cases will be at the levels awarded by the local courts of the victims, rather than UK levels as previously. This will further increase the disparity between “proportionate” and actual costs. While it will be possible at conclusion of the case to argue for higher than “proportionate” costs, the certainty that defendants will argue the reverse will deter claimants’ lawyers from accepting the risk in the first place.

Secondly, claimant lawyers’ success fees will not be recoverable from defendants and would instead need to be deducted from claimants’ compensation. Given the significant disparity between the amount of legal costs and compensation (set at local levels) this will be unworkable.

The result – that claimants’ lawyers can recover legal costs only up to the level of damages without success fees – will make these multinational cases financially unviable.

“We welcome todays decision to bring a charge of manslaughter against the officer. We believe this is the right decision. What we have always wanted is to achieve justice for Ian and to show that police officers are not above the law”

via Ian Tomlinson Family Campaign: Statement from the Tomlinson family on todays decision.

This is a victory for the family and all those who kept this killing visible and not forgotten. It is not however an example of the system working as we expect it should, the system attempted a cover up. In the first few days news of the incident circulated on the web, where the truth may have stayed (sorry to internet evangelists, the dynamics of power makes mockery of us all), The Guardian decided to take up the story, the video was published, this was the moment the cover up began to have problems. It then took all this time by the Tomlinson family, the corporate media in its slightly less hostile form in The Guardian and new independent media and organising to force the criminal justice system to take on a semblance of working for parties other than those who work in it. We will not see full accountability of those who were party both before and after the fact to a violent thug being given state license to use violence and then protected when that violence killed Ian Tomlinson.

It reinforces the need for anyone who expects to be interacting with UK security forces to independently record in audio and video any encounters. We have seen CCTV footage disappear and police video likewise has a habit of self deletion, so be your own media. For Ian Tomlinson he had no such expectations, he was walking home from work, how that ends in his death is the bigger question that must land at the Metropolitan Police Services door and all those who help protect it and use it to enact their larger structural crimes.

When it comes to corporate rewards, it’s hard to think of a more males-only ‘incentive’ than the orgy field trip to Hungary that insurer Hamburg-Mannheimer – now part of Düsseldorf-based Ergo insurance group – organized in 2007 for its 100 best-performing agents.

The source said the reception was held at the storied Gellert Thermal Spa and Bath in Budapest. After passing security checks designed to ensure no cameras were smuggled in, the agents were greeted with plenty of alcohol and some 20 prostitutes.

The women at the party wore either a red, yellow or white ribbon so guests would know which were regular hostesses, which were prostitutes, and which were “reserved” for top management. After each sex encounter, the prostitutes were marked with a stamp on their forearm, with some collecting more than a dozen.

via Corporate orgy scandal reignites quota debate | Business | Deutsche Welle | 19.05.2011

It really is only a matter of time until neoliberal corporatism openly reintroduces slavery beyond its tentative water testing with workfare. I also urge you to read this in full- The New Normal by David Malone, author of The Debt Generation, except below-

There seem to be to be two broad narratives of our present situation. The dominant, official narrative, is that there was a technical crisis of money flow, precipitated by a bolus of bad debts which then caused a collapse of confidence in the value of several large asset classes. What was required was to show that such assets would always retain their ability to find a buyer and thus their value, even if the buyer had to be, in the immediate term, the public purse. The public purse was duly opened to steady nerves and sales, and massive purchases of whatever could not find any other buyer were duly made. The plan was and is that the purchased assets would be sold by our governments, back to the market once other buyers returned.

The dissident narrative is that this was never a technical crisis of money flow – liquidity – but one of insolvency due to the troubled asset classes being, in fact, vastly over valued. The collapse in value and the lack of buyers was not a temporary lack of confidence in an otherwise sound financial system, but a rational shunning of paper assets whose previous value was almost entirely due to the press of gullible buyers who were keen to partake in the buy, flip and buy some more ponzi scheme of speculation.

As long as the paper value was never questioned by all the players then no one feared reality intruding. Even those holding the worthless paper were happy as long as everybody else was signed up to the same grand fiction. Banks held the paper assets and used them as cheap ‘capital assets’ just so long as the lies they were based on remained wholly accepted. But of course as soon as someone defected from the grand lie, then the rational thing for everyone to do was to defect as quickly as possible. This is what every insider tried to do as quickly as they could and why the collapse was as fast as it was and was led by the banks themselves.

Alistair Gammell, the director of the Pew Environment Group’s Chagos campaign, told the Guardian that sovereignty and the Chagossians’ right to return were political and diplomatic, rather than environmental, issues.

“We don’t take a position on the right of return of the Chagossians,” he said. “That is a question which is for the military and for the [British] government to answer and deal with. We don’t say they either should return or shouldn’t return.”

I think I’ll let Archbishop Desmond Tutu take this one-

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

Ok next from Mr Chumpo taking the banality of evil to even more banal levels-

Asked about the WikiLeaks’ suggestions that the British government was deliberately setting the powerful environmental lobby against the Chagossians, Gammell said he remained dubious about the cable and its contents.

“[It's] a peculiar thing to have said because to believe that the environmental lobby is stronger than the military lobby or the financial lobby – both of which have proven extremely effective for 40 years – I find, as an environmentalist, almost laughable.”

Um, straw man much? It didn’t say that you conniving piece of shite-

The official, identified as Colin Roberts, the director of overseas territories, noted that the UK’s “environment lobby is far more powerful than the Chagossians’ advocates”

Not the environmental lobby being stronger than the the military or financial lobby but the environmental lobby being stronger than the Chagossian advocates. You can read the cable here, complete with the official’s casual racism. That in fact the military, financial AND environmental groups together would once and for all achieve the permanent exclusion of the Chagos islanders as the political, financial and military had lost the legal case and only got away with it by an extraordinary extra legal scam (failed ‘unlawful and an abuse of power‘) and appeal to its own law lords (won) cheered on and driven by, wait for it- David ‘how would like this torture covered up Mr Cheney?‘ Miliband! The cable is very clear, but points for misrepresenting it and being punked for that in a national newspaper in the very same article, a liar, a coward and a buffoon all in one go Ali old chap, well done! There is of course an environmental plan from the Marine Education Trust that respects the human rights of the Chagossians, but big environmental groups with chums in government ignored it in favour of lashings of Greenwash given to their land stealing, ethnic cleansing, extraordinary renditioning, cluster munitions storing allies in UK & US governments. Still, I guess money is green too huh Alistair?

Anyway, this all goes on because of this conference-

Some 40 years after nearly 2,000 people were forcibly removed from the Chagos Islands by the British government, a key meeting will take place today to try to persuade some of Britain’s biggest conservation groups that a group of the exiled islanders should be allowed to return to their tropical home.

The conference in London will draw up a blueprint which organisers hope will persuade the Foreign Office, which last year declared the Indian Ocean archipelago as the world’s largest marine nature reserve, to accept a role for evicted Chagossians and their descendants to act as wardens on the pristine islands from an eco-friendly settlement.

But in order to put forward the proposals, supporters of the Chagossian diaspora, who have been spread in small groups to locations from Mauritius to Crawley in West Sussex, have to overcome opposition from some environmentalists who argue that any permanent human habitation of the islands could be harmful to the marine park.

The Chagos Environment Network, a coalition of large conservation groups including the RSPB and the Zoological Society of London, has said it accepted that the marine reserve could change to accommodate islanders if they won the right to return. But another group, the Chagos Conservation Trust, has described the aim of returning the Chagossians as “unattainable”.

Neither group exactly cover themselves in glory, tell them again Desmond-

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

PS. Funny how privileged people with an eye on a successful career just never, ever get that. Honestly you can repeat it to them ad nauseam, just blank stares, empathy flatline, like when you tell them economics is not actually a science, they just panic then evacuate their bowels.