#dav

« Tous défendent un modèle contraire à celui qui a conduit l’humanité aux progrès les plus spectaculaires de son histoire. » et autres défauts de concordance des temps !

Nos absentes. À l’origine des féminicides

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Ces quinze dernières années, plus de 2 000 femmes ont été tuées par leur (ex-)conjoint en France.

En 2020, 35 % des victimes de féminicide conjugal avaient subi des violences antérieures. Une défunte sur cinq avait porté plainte.

Entre 2015 et 2016, 82 % des plaintes et mains courantes déposées par des victimes de féminicide ont été classées sans suite. (Source : ministère de la Justice.)

#Laurène_Daycard a été l’une des toutes premières journalistes à écrire sur les féminicides conjugaux pour les faire sortir des rubriques « faits-divers » et les réinscrire dans le récit social et politique des violences sexistes. Dans cette enquête à la première personne, l’autrice nous emmène à la rencontre de survivantes et de familles endeuillées, mais aussi auprès des auteurs de ces actes. En observant et en échangeant avec ces derniers, Laurène Daycard tente d’aller à l’origine des féminicides et propose une réflexion personnelle sur la notion de réparation.

►https://www.seuil.com/ouvrage/nos-absentes-laurene-daycard/9782021493818
#livre

voir aussi :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/989114

Gaza between colonial trauma and genocide

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In the hours following the attack of Palestinian fighters in the south of Israel Western observers, bewildered, speculated about why Hamas and the young Palestinians of Gaza, born and bred under siege and bombs, have launched an attack of this magnitude, and right now. Others expressed their surprise at the surprise.

The Israeli government responded by declaring “total war”, promising the pulverization of Gaza and demanding the inhabitants to leave the strip, knowing that there is no escape. Mobilising even the Holocaust and comparing the fighters to the Nazis, the Israeli government engaged in an operation that they claim is aimed at the destruction of Hamas.

In fact, as I am writing, Gaza is being razed to the ground with an unbearable number of Palestinian deaths which gets larger by the hour, with people fleeing under Israeli bombs, water, electricity and fuel being cut, hospitals – receiving one patient a minute – on the brink of catastrophe, and humanitarian convoys prevented from entering the strip.

An ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza is taking place with many legal observers claiming this level of violence amounts to a genocide.

But what has happened – shocking and terrible in terms of the number of victims – including children and the elderly – creates not only a new political scenario, but above all it also imposes a new frame of meaning.

Especially since the Oslo accords onwards, the emotional and interpretative filter applying to the “conflict” has been the asymmetrical valuing of one life over the other which in turn rested on an expectation of acquiescence and acceptance of the Palestinians’ subalternity as a colonised people. This framing has been shattered.

The day of the attack, millions of Palestinians inside and outside the occupied territories found themselves in a trance-like state – with an undeniable initial euphoria from seeing the prison wall of Gaza being dismantled for the first time. They were wondering whether what they had before their eyes was delirium or reality. How was it possible that the Palestinians from Gaza, confined in a few suffocating square kilometres, repeatedly reduced to rubble, managed to evade the most powerful and technologically sophisticated army in the world, using only rudimentary equipment – bicycles with wings and hang-gliders? They could scarcely believe they were witnessing a reversal of the experience of violence, accustomed as they are to Palestinian casualties piling up relentlessly under Israeli bombardments, machine gun fire and control apparatus.

Indeed, that Israel “declared war” after the attack illustrates this: to declare war assumes that before there was “peace”. To be sure, the inhabitants of Sderot and southern Israel would like to continue to live in peace. For the inhabitants of Gaza, on the other hand, peace is an abstract concept, something they have never experienced. For the inhabitants of the strip, as well as under international law, Gaza is an occupied territory whose population – two million and three hundred thousand people, of which two thirds are refugees from 1948 – lives (or to use their own words: “die slowly”) inside a prison. Control over the entry and exit of people, food, medicine, materials, electricity and telecommunications, sea, land and air borders, is in Israeli hands. International law, correctly invoked to defend the Ukrainian people and to sanction the Russian occupier, is a wastepaper for Israel, which enjoys an impunity granted to no other state that operates in such violation of UN resolutions, even disregarding agreements they themselves signed, never mind international norms and conventions.

This scaffolding has crucially rested on the certainty that Palestinians cannot and should not react to their condition, not only and not so much because of their obvious military inferiority, but in the warped belief that Palestinian subjectivity must and can accept remaining colonised and occupied, to all intents and purposes, indefinitely. The asymmetry of strength on the ground led to an unspoken – but devastatingly consequential – presumption that Palestinians would accept to be confined to a space of inferiority in the hierarchy of human life.

In this sense, what is happening these days cannot be understood and analysed with the tools of those who live in “peace”, but must be understood (insofar as this is even possible for those who do not live in Gaza or the occupied Palestinian territories) from a space defined by the effects of colonial violence and trauma. It is to Franz Fanon that we owe much of what we know about colonial violence – especially that it acts as both a physical and psychic injury. A psychiatrist from Martinique who joined the liberation struggle for independence in Algeria under French colonial rule, he wrote at length about how the immensity and duration of the destruction inflicted upon colonised subjects results in a wide and deep process of de-humanisation which, at such a profound level, also compromises the ability of the colonised to feel whole and to fully be themselves, humans among humans. In this state of physical and psychic injury, resistance is the colonised subject’s only possibility of repair. This has been the case historically in all contexts of liberation from colonial rule, a lineage to which the Palestinian struggle belongs.

It is in this light that the long-lasting Palestinian resistance of the last 75 years should be seen, and this is also the key to understanding the unprecedented events of the last few days. These are the result, as many observers – including Israeli ones – have noted, of the failure of the many forms of peaceful resistance that the Palestinians have managed to pursue, despite the occupation, and which they continue to put into play: the hunger strikes of prisoners under “administrative detention”; the civil resistance of villagers such as Bil’in or Sheikh Jarrah who are squeezed between the separation wall, the expropriation of land and homes, and suffocated by the increasingly aggressive and unstoppable expansion of settlements; the efforts to protect the natural environment and indigenous Palestinian culture, including the centuries-old olive trees so often burnt and vandalised by settlers; the Palestinian civil society organisations that map and report human rights violations – which make them, for Israel, terrorist organisations; the struggle for cultural and political memory; the endurance of refugees in refugee camps awaiting implementation of their human rights supported by UN resolutions, as well as reparation and recognition of their long term suffering; and, further back in time, the stones hurled in resistance during the first Intifada, when young people with slingshots threw those same stones with which Israeli soldiers broke their bones and lives, back to them.

Recall that, in Gaza, those who are not yet twenty years old, who make up about half the population, have already survived at least four bombing campaigns, in 2008-9, in 2012, in 2014, and again in 2022. These alone caused more than 4000 deaths.

And it is again in Gaza that the Israeli tactic has been perfected of firing on protesters during peaceful protests, such as those in 2018, to maim the bodies – a cynical necropolitical calculation of random distribution between maimed and dead. It is not surprising, then, that in post-colonial literature – from Kateb Yacine to Yamina Mechakra, just to give two examples – the traumas of colonial violence are narrated as presence and absence, in protagonists’ dreams and nightmares, of amputated bodies. This is a metaphor for a simultaneously psychic and physical maiming of the colonised identity, that continues over time, from generation to generation.

Despite their predicament as colonised for decades and their protracted collective trauma, Palestinians inside and outside of Palestine have however shown an incredible capacity for love, grief and solidarity over time and space, of which we have infinite examples in day-to-day practices of care and connectedness, in the literature, in the arts and culture, and through their international presence in other oppressed peoples’ struggles, such as Black Lives Matter and Native American Dakota protestors camps, or again in places such as the Moria camp in Greece.

The brutality of a 16 years long siege in Gaza, and the decades of occupation, imprisonment, humiliation, everyday violence, death, grief – which as we write happen at an unprecedented genocidal intensity, but are in no way a new occurrence – have not however robbed people of Gaza, as individuals, of their ability to share in the grief and fear of others.

“Striving to stay human” is what Palestinians have been doing and continue to do even as they are forced to make inhumane choices such as deciding who to rescue from under the rubbles based on who has more possibility to survive, as recounted by journalist Ahmed Dremly from Gaza during his brief and precious dispatches from the strip under the heavy shelling. This colonial violence will continue to produce traumatic effects in the generations of survivors. Yet, it has to be made clear that as the occupied people, Palestinians cannot be expected to bear the pain of the occupier. Equal standing and rights in life are the necessary preconditions for collective shared grief of death.

Mahmoud Darwish wrote, in one of his essays on the “madness” of being Palestinian, written after the massacre of Sabra and Shatila in 1982, that the Palestinian “…is encumbered by the relentless march of death and is busy defending what remains of his flesh and his dream…his back is against the wall, but his eyes remain fixed on his country. He can no longer scream. He can no longer understand the reason behind Arab silence and Western apathy. He can do only one thing, to become even more Palestinian… because he has no other choice”.

The only antidote to the spiral of violence is an end to the occupation and siege, and for Israel to fully comply with international law and to the UN resolutions, as a first and non-negotiable step. From there we can begin to imagine a future of peace and humanity for both Palestinians and Israelis.

▻https://untoldmag.org/gaza-between-colonial-trauma-and-genocide
#colonialisme #traumatisme_colonial #génocide

Can the Palestinian speak ?

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It is sadly nothing new to argue that oppressed and colonised people have been and are subject to epistemic violence – othering, silencing, and selective visibility – in which they are muted or made to appear or speak only within certain perceptual views or registers – terrorists, protestors, murderers, humanitarian subjects – but absented from their most human qualities. Fabricated disappearance and dehumanisation of Palestinians have supported and continue to sustain their physical elimination and their erasure as a people.

But the weeks after October 7th have set a new bar in terms of the inverted and perverse ways that Palestinians and Israel can be represented, discussed, and interpreted. I am referring here to a new epistemology of time that is tight to a moral standpoint that the world is asked to uphold. In that, the acts of contextualising and providing historical depth are framed as morally reprehensible or straight out antisemitic. The idea that the 7th of October marks the beginning of unprecedented violence universalises the experience of one side, the Israeli, while obliterating the past decades of Palestinians’ predicament. More than ever, Palestinians are visible, legible, and audible only through the frames of Israeli subjectivity and sensibility. They exist either to protect Israel or to destroy Israel. Outside these two assigned agencies, they are not, and cannot speak. They are an excess of agency like Spivak’s subaltern,[1] or a ‘superfluous’ people as Mahmoud Darwish[2] put it in the aftermath of the Sabra and Chatila massacre. What is more is the persistent denying by Israel and its Western allies, despite the abundant historical evidence, that Palestinian indigenous presence in Palestine has always been at best absented from their gaze – ‘a problem’ to manage and contain – at worse the object of systemic and persistent ethnic cleansing and erasure aiming at fulfilling the narcissistic image of “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Yet, the erasure of Palestinians, also today in Gaza, is effected and claimed while simultaneously being denied.

A quick check of the word “Palestine” on google scholar returns one million and three hundred thousand studies, nearly half of them written from the mid 1990s onwards. Even granting that much of this scholarship would be situated in and reproducing orientalist and colonial knowledges, one can hardly claim scarcity of scholarly production on the dynamics of subalternity and oppression in Palestine. Anthropology, literary theory, and history have detected and detailed the epistemological and ontological facets of colonial and post-colonial erasure. One might thus ask: how does the persistent denial of erasure in the case of Palestinians work? We might resort to psychoanalysis or to a particular form of narcissistic behaviour known as DAVRO – Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender[3] – to understand the current pervading and cunning epistemic violence that Israel and its allies enact. Denying the radical obstructing and effacing of Palestinian life (while effecting it through settler-colonialism, settler and state violence, siege, apartheid, and genocidal violence in Gaza) is the first stage in Israel’s and western allies’ discursive manipulation. Attacking historicisation and contextualisation as invalid, antisemitic, propaganda, hate speech, immoral, outrageous, and even contrary to liberal values is the second stage. Lastly is the Reversing Victim and Offender by presenting the war on Gaza as one where Israel is a historical victim reacting to the offender, in response to demands that Israel, as the colonial and occupying power, takes responsibility for the current cycle of violence.

This partly explains why the violent attack that Hamas conducted in the south of Israel last October, in which 1200 people were killed, is consistently presented as the start date of an ‘unprecedented’ violence, with more than 5000 Palestinians killed in carpet bombings of Gaza until 2022 doubly erased, physically and epistemically. With this, October 7th becomes the departure point of an Israeli epistemology of time assumed as universal, but it also marks an escalation in efforts to criminalise contextualisation and banish historicisation.

Since October 7th, a plurality of voices – ranging from Israeli political figures and intellectuals, to mainstream and left-leaning journalists – has condemned efforts to inscribe Gaza into a long term history of colonialism as scurrilous justification for the killing of Israeli civilians. Attempts to analyse or understand facts through a historical and political frame, by most notably drawing attention to Gazans’ lived experience over the past 16 years (as a consequence of its long term siege and occupation) or merely to argue that there is a context in which events are taking place, such as General UN director Guterres did when he stated that October 7th “did not happen in a vacuum,” are represented as inciting terrorism or morally repugnant hate speech. In the few media reports accounting for the dire and deprived conditions of Palestinians’ existence in Gaza, the reasons causing the former are hardly mentioned. For instance, we hear in reports that Palestinians in Gaza are mostly refugees, that they are unemployed, and that 80% of them are relying on aid, with trucks of humanitarian aid deemed insufficient in the last few weeks in comparison to the numbers let in before the 7th of October. Astoundingly, the 56 years old Israeli occupation and 17 years old siege of Gaza, as root causes of the destruction of the economy, unemployment, and reliance on aid are not mentioned so that the public is left to imagine that these calamities are the result of Palestinians’ own doing.

In other domains, we see a similar endeavour in preventing Palestine from being inscribed in its colonial context. Take for instance the many critical theorists who have tried to foreclose Franz Fanon’s analysis of colonial violence to Palestinians. Naming the context of colonial violence and Palestinians’ intergenerational and ongoing traumas is interpreted as morally corrupt, tantamount to not caring for Israeli trauma and a justification for the loss of Israeli lives. The variation of the argument that does refer to historical context either pushes Fanon’s arguments to the margins or argues that the existence of a Palestinian authority invalidates Fanon’s applicability to Palestine, denying therefore the effects of the violence that Palestinians as colonised subjects have endured and continue to endure because of Israeli occupation, apartheid, and siege.

But perhaps one of the most disconcerting forms of gaslighting is the demand that Palestinians should – and could – suspend their condition of subordination, their psychic and physical injury, to centre the perpetrators’ feelings and grief as their own. In fact, the issue of grief has come to global attention almost exclusively as an ethical and moral question in reaction to the loss of Israeli lives. Palestinians who accept to go on TV are constantly asked whether they condemn the October 7th attack, before they can even dare talk about their own long history of loss and dispossession, and literally while their families are being annihilated by devastating shelling and bombing and still lying under the rubbles. One such case is that of PLO ambassador to the UK Hussam Zomlot, who lost members of his own family in the current attack, but was asked by Kirsty Wark to “condemn Hamas” on screen. To put it another way: would it even be conceivable to imagine a journalist asking Israeli hostages in captivity if they condemn the Israeli bombardments and the war on Gaza as a precondition to speak and be heard?

“Condemning” becomes the condition of Palestinian intelligibility and audibility as humans, a proof that they share the universal idea that all human life is sacred, at the very moment when the sacrality of human life is violently precluded to them and when they are experiencing with brutal clarity that their existence as a people matters to no one who has the power to stop the carnage. This imperative mistakes in bad faith the principle that lives should have equal worth with a reality that for Palestinians is plainly experienced as the opposite of this postulate. Israel, on the other hand, is given “the extenuating circumstances” for looking after Israelis’ own trauma by conducting one of the most indiscriminate and ferocious attacks on civilians in decades, superior in its intensity and death rate to the devastation we saw in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, according to the New York Times. Nearly 20.000 killed – mostly children, women, and elderly – razed, shelled, bulldozed while in their homes or shelters, in an onslaught that does not spare doctors, patients, journalists, academics, and even Israeli hostages, and that aims at making Gaza an unlivable habitat for the survivors.

Let us go back to the frequently invoked question of “morality.” In commentaries and op-eds over the last few weeks we are told that any mention of context for the attacks of October 7th is imperiling the very ability to be compassionate or be moral. Ranging from the Israeli government that argues that a killing machine in Gaza is justified on moral grounds – and that contextualisation and historicisation are a distraction or deviation from this moral imperative – to those who suggest Israel should moderate its violence against Palestinians – such as New York times columnist Nicholas Kristof who wrote that “Hamas dehumanized Israelis, and we must not dehumanize innocent people in Gaza” – all assign a pre-political or a-political higher moral ground to Israel. Moreover, October 7th is said to – and is felt as – having awakened the long historical suffering of the Jews and the trauma of the Holocaust. But what is the invocation of the Holocaust – and the historical experience of European antisemitism – if not a clear effort at historical and moral contextualisation? In fact, the only history and context deemed evocable and valid is the Israeli one, against the history and context of Palestinians’ lives. In this operation, Israeli subjectivity and sensibility is located above history and is assigned a monopoly of morality with October 7th becoming an a-historical and a meta-historical fact at one and the same time. In this canvas Palestinians are afforded permission to exist subject to inhabiting one of the two agencies assigned to them: guardian of Israeli life or colonised subject. This is what Israeli president Herzog means when he declares that there are no innocents in Gaza: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime”. The nearly twenty thousand Palestinian deaths are thus not Israel’s responsibility. Palestinians are liable for their own disappearance for not “fighting Hamas” to protect Israelis. The Israeli victims, including hundreds of soldiers, are, on the other hand, all inherently civilians, and afforded innocent qualities. This is the context in which Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, of Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right party in power, can suggest nuking Gaza or wiping out all residents: “They can go to Ireland or deserts, the monsters in Gaza should find a solution by themselves”. Let us not here be mistaken by conceding this might just be a fantasy, a desire of elimination: the Guardian and the +972/Local call magazines have provided chilling evidence that Palestinian civilians in Gaza are not “collateral” damage but what is at work is a mass assassination factory, thanks to a sophisticated AI system generating hundreds of unverified targets aiming at eliminating as many civilians as possible.

Whether Palestinians are worthy of merely living or dying depends thus on their active acceptance or refusal to remain colonised. Any attempts to exit this predicament – whether through violent attacks like on October 7th or by staging peaceful civil tactics such as disobedience, boycott and divesting from Israel, recurrence to international law, peaceful marches, hunger strikes, popular or cultural resistance – are all the same, and in a gaslighting mode disallowed as evidence of Palestinians’ inherent violent nature which proves they need taming or elimination.

One might be compelled to believe that dehumanisation and the logic of elimination of Palestinians are a reaction to the pain, sorrow, and shock generated by the traumatic and emotional aftermath of October 7th. But history does not agree with this, as the assigning of Palestinians to a non-human or even non-life sphere is deeply rooted in Israeli public discourse. The standpoint of a people seeking freedom from occupation and siege has consistently been reversed and catalogued as one of “terror and threat” to Israeli state and society when it is a threat to their colonial expansive or confinement plans, whether the latter are conceived as divinely mandated or backed by a secular settler-colonial imaginary. In so far as “terrorists” are birthed by snakes and wild beasts as Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaker states, they must be exterminated. Her words bear citation as they anticipate Gaza’s current devastation with lucid clarity: “Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads”. Urging the killing of all Palestinians women, men, and children and the destruction of their homes, she continued: “They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there. They have to die and their houses should be demolished so that they cannot bear any more terrorists.” This is not an isolated voice. Back in 2016 Prime Minister Netanyahu argued that fences and walls should be built all around Israel to defend it from “wild beasts” and against this background retired Israeli general and former head of Intelligence Giora Eiland, in an opinion article in Yedioth Aharonoth on November 19, argues that all Palestinians in Gaza die of fast spreading disease and all infrastructure be destroyed, while still positing Israel’s higher moral ground: “We say that Sinwar (Hamas leader in Gaza, ndr) is so evil that he does not care if all the residents of Gaza die. Such a presentation is not accurate, since who are the “poor” women of Gaza? They are all the mothers, sisters, or wives of Hamas murderers,” adding, “And no, this is not about cruelty for cruelty’s sake, since we don’t support the suffering of the other side as an end but as a means.”

But let us not be mistaken, such ascription of Palestinians to a place outside of history, and of humanity, goes way back and has been intrinsic to the establishment of Israel. From the outset of the settler colonial project in 1948, Palestinians as the indigenous people of the land have been dehumanised to enable the project of erasing them, in a manner akin to other settler colonial projects which aimed at turning the settlers into the new indigenous. The elimination of Palestinians has rested on more than just physical displacement, destruction, and a deep and wide ecological alteration of the landscape of Palestine to suit the newly fashioned Israeli identity. Key Israeli figures drew a direct equivalence between Palestinian life on the one hand and non-life on the other. For instance, Joseph Weitz, a Polish Jew who settled in Palestine in 1908 and sat in the first and second Transfer Committees (1937–1948) which were created to deal with “the Arab problem” (as the indigenous Palestinians were defined) speaks in his diaries of Palestinians as a primitive unity of human and non-human life.[4] Palestinians and their habitat were, in his words, “bustling with man and beast,” until their destruction and razing to the ground in 1948 made them “fossilized life,” to use Weitz’ own words. Once fossilised, the landscape could thus be visualised as an empty and barren landscape (the infamous desert), enlivened and redeemed by the arrival of the Jewish settlers.

Locating events within the context and long durée of the incommensurable injustices inflicted upon the Palestinians since 1948 – which have acquired a new unimaginable magnitude with the current war on Gaza – is not just ethically imperative but also politically pressing. The tricks of DARVO (Denying Attacking and Reversing Victim and Offender) have been unveiled. We are now desperately in need of re-orienting the world’s moral compass by exposing the intertwined processes of humanisation and dehumanisation of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. There is no other way to begin exiting not only the very conditions that usher violence, mass killings, and genocide, but also towards effecting the as yet entirely fictional principle that human lives have equal value.

[1] Spivak, G. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). In Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, pp. 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; Basingstoke: Macmillan.

[2] Mahmoud Darwish, “The Madness of Being a Palestinian,” Journal Of Palestine Studies 15, no. 1 (1985): 138–41.

[3] Heartfelt thanks to Professor Rema Hamami for alerting me to the notion of DAVRO and for her extended and invaluable comments on this essay.

[4] Cited in Benvenisti M (2000) Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp.155-156.

▻https://allegralaboratory.net/can-the-palestinian-speak
#violence_épistémique #élimination #in/visilité #nettoyage_ethnique #oppression #DAVRO

« C’était les seuls à prendre à bras-le-corps ce sujet » ?!? Faut oser. Surtout venant d’un type ayant un politicien pour père. Voilà une marche arrière qui sent le cramé.

#David_Guiraud #dieudonno_soralien #dieudonniste #soralien

@AntoninAtger
▻https://twitter.com/AntoninAtger/status/1741918583750332545

Ici, David Guiraud a utilisé une référence à ces fameux « Dragons Celestes » dans le post suivant, effacé depuis :
Dans le manga, l’assassin dont il est question est envoyé par les Dragons Celestes. Guiraud répond ainsi à une plainte... lancée par l’Observatoir juif.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GCyJW0ZWwAAYHDJ?format=jpg&name=large#.jpeg

▻https://www.marianne.net/politique/melenchon/dragons-celestes-le-depute-lfi-david-guiraud-reprend-une-reference-antisem

@GuiraudInd
▻https://twitter.com/GuiraudInd/status/1741771320801538475

Petit message à ceux qui me suivent car il paraît que certains utilisent mon tweet pour se lacher : laissons la religion [sic] en dehors de ca. Les dragons célestes ne sont pas une religion ou une « race » et si vous le pensez vous avez mal lu One Piece. C’est une alliance militaire de gens puissants qui écrasent les autres. Ils ne sont pas detestés pour ce qu’ils sont, mais pour ce qu’ils font aux autres. Mais je ne veux heurter personne donc je prefere supprimer.

#dog_whistle #antisémitisme #LFI

Chavalarias finit son ouvrage avec une annexe intéressante sur le jugement majoritaire. C’est une méthode de vote qui permet de sélectionner les candidat·es qui déplaisent le moins et plaisent le plus à l’ensemble du corps électoral, pas celles et ceux qui plaisent au plus gros fan-club ou dont le vote semble le plus utile dans le jeu particulièrement insincère que sont devenues des élections à un tour. Je vous laisse découvrir qui aurait emporté l’élection de 2022 selon cette méthode. Fait très intéressant, Mélenchon est au fond du classement en 2022 alors qu’en 2017 il convainquait plus largement les Français·es, comme s’il s’était satisfait depuis de mobiliser plus puissamment un nombre réduit de personnes et non de parler à tou·tes (un petit conseil pour la suite). Toxic Data n’est pas l’ouvrage d’un grand politiste ou d’un fin connaisseur de la démocratie mais dans le champ qu’il maîtrise le mieux l’auteur propose un livre très accessible et passionnant. Qui est aussi la fenêtre sur un monde inquiétant.

#David_Chavalarias #recension #livre #Aude_Vidal #réseaux_sociaux #rézosocio #bulle_de_filtre #politique #démocratie #manipulation #publicité #Facebook #Twitter

#jugement_majoritaire #théorie_du_choix_social

Que Defekator avait mis en exercice ici : ▻https://youtu.be/_8LIUI4AD5c?t=2582

Un aperçu de l’ouvrage de David Chavalarias :
▻http://toxicdata.chavalarias.org

Sur le site « chavalarias.org » :
►https://iscpif.fr/climatoscope/?p=72

La nature du capital : un entretien avec Jason W. Moore
►http://revueperiode.net/la-nature-du-capital-un-entretien-avec-jason-w-moore

A ce propos : L’actualité du marxisme :

[...] Trotsky constatait en 1939, dans Le Marxisme et notre époque, qu’ «  en dépit des derniers triomphes du génie de la technique, les forces productives matérielles ont cessé de croître. Le symptôme le plus clair de ce déclin est la stagnation mondiale qui règne dans l’industrie du bâtiment, par suite de l’arrêt des investissements dans les principales branches de l’économie. Les capitalistes ne sont plus en état de croire à l’avenir de leur propre système.  »

Alors que la bourgeoisie s’était engagée dans le fascisme ou le New Deal et s’apprêtait à plonger l’humanité dans une nouvelle guerre, Trotsky concluait  : «  Des réformes partielles et des rafistolages ne serviront à rien. Le développement historique est arrivé à l’une de ces étapes décisive, où, seule, l’intervention directe des masses est capable de balayer les obstacles réactionnaires et de poser les fondements d’un nouveau régime. L’abolition de la propriété privée des moyens de production est la condition première d’une économie planifiée, c’est-à-dire de l’intervention de la raison dans le domaine des relations humaines, d’abord à l’échelle nationale, puis, par la suite, à l’échelle mondiale.  »

Quelques mois après que ces lignes étaient écrites, le monde sombrait dans le cataclysme de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. Ayant échappé à la révolution prolétarienne au lendemain de cette guerre, le système capitaliste connut quelques années de reprise, qui semblaient contredire les prévisions de Trotsky.

Mais on constate aujourd’hui qu’il ne s’agissait que d’une rémission et que le capitalisme conduit l’humanité vers l’abîme.

Jamais pourtant dans l’histoire, l’humanité n’a eu autant de moyens à sa disposition pour faire face aux nécessités de sa vie collective. C’est la division de l’humanité en classes sociales aux intérêts opposés qui l’empêche de maîtriser sa vie collective.

Jamais n’a été aussi énorme le décalage entre une humanité capable d’explorer les confins de l’espace et une société se consumant en même temps dans des guerres entre pays, entre nations, entre ethnies, entre villages.

Jamais la mondialisation capitaliste n’a autant lié les hommes dans un destin commun. Mais jamais non plus l’humanité n’a été aussi morcelée.

Jamais l’humanité n’a eu autant de moyens matériels et culturels pour vaincre définitivement les multiples formes de préjugés, de mysticismes hérités de siècles de division de la société en classes et d’oppression. Mais jamais les religions, les mysticismes n’ont connu un retour aussi fracassant dans la vie sociale.

Quelle expression plus écœurante de la putréfaction de la société capitaliste que l’attraction mortifère du terrorisme islamiste sur une fraction de la jeunesse  ?

Jamais, en somme, les conditions matérielles et techniques pour une société humaine unifiée dans un tout fraternel à l’échelle de la planète n’ont été aussi favorables. Jamais, en même temps, elles n’ont semblé aussi lointaines.

Le grand apport du marxisme au mouvement ouvrier n’a pas été seulement la dénonciation du capitalisme et le constat qu’il a cessé de faire avancer l’humanité. Son grand apport a été de donner les moyens de briser les chaînes  : «  Les philosophes n’ont fait qu’interpréter le monde de différentes manières, mais ce qui importe c’est de le transformer  », disait Marx dès 1845.

Le marxisme ne s’est pas contenté de voir dans cette classe alors nouvelle qu’était le prolétariat moderne une classe souffrante. Il y a reconnu la classe sociale capable de renverser le capitalisme.

Marx, Engels et leur génération voyaient la fin du capitalisme plus proche. Ils avaient l’optimisme des révolutionnaires.

L’histoire en général et celle du mouvement ouvrier en particulier, avec leurs formidables pas en avant mais aussi leurs reculs catastrophiques, ont fait que le capitalisme se survit bien plus longtemps que ce qu’espéraient Marx, Engels et leurs camarades.

Il a survécu bien plus longtemps même que ne l’espérait Trotsky près d’un siècle plus tard lorsqu’il constatait que le capitalisme était incapable de faire progresser les forces productives.

L’humanité a connu depuis Marx un grand nombre de crises économiques, d’innombrables formes d’oppression, d’innombrables formes de régimes autoritaires, d’innombrables guerres locales, et deux guerres mondiales.

Jusqu’à présent c’est surtout par la négative que l’histoire a confirmé les analyses de Marx. Mais le prolétariat, dans lequel Marx voyait la force sociale capable de changer l’avenir de l’humanité, n’est pas une construction de l’esprit, fût-elle d’un génie de l’envergure de Marx. C’est une réalité sociale. Les robots n’ont pas remplacé le prolétariat. Et, malgré les possibilités croissantes offertes par la science et la technique, la société est celle des êtres humains.

Le prolétariat, la classe des exploités, est bien plus diversifié aujourd’hui qu’au temps de Marx et même qu’au temps de Lénine et de la révolution russe. La bourgeoisie a appris à jouer de cette diversité, à opposer les unes aux autres les différentes catégories de travailleurs salariés, à combattre la conscience de classe et l’émergence d’organisations, nationales et internationales, qui incarnent cette conscience. Mais la classe ouvrière est bien plus nombreuse que dans le passé et présente partout sur la planète.

La lutte de classe entre la bourgeoisie et le prolétariat se mène à une échelle bien plus vaste que dans des périodes du passé où le prolétariat posait sa candidature à la direction de la société.

Dans un grand nombre de pays où le prolétariat industriel est jeune et son sort misérable, de la Chine au Bangladesh, la lutte de classe prend des formes aussi massives et aussi virulentes que lors de l’émergence du prolétariat moderne en Europe occidentale.

Mais elle est incessante également dans les grands pays industriels, fût-ce sous la forme de ces réactions quotidiennes que les travailleurs savent opposer dans les entreprises à l’aggravation de l’exploitation et aux multiples manifestations de l’arbitraire patronal.

Les idées de lutte de classe sont susceptibles de tomber sur un terrain aussi fertile qu’au temps de Marx ou de Lénine, tout simplement parce qu’elles correspondent à une réalité que les travailleurs vivent tous les jours. Encore faut-il les exprimer et transmettre le vaste capital politique accumulé par le marxisme révolutionnaire, tiré des luttes de générations de travailleurs  !

C’est le rôle qui devrait être celui des organisations communistes révolutionnaires, leur raison d’être afin que chaque lutte importante de la classe ouvrière bénéficie des expériences des luttes précédentes.

C’est justement le fond du problème de nos jours. Ce que Trotsky exprimait en affirmant, dans le Programme de Transition  : «  La situation politique mondiale dans son ensemble se caractérise avant tout par la crise historique de la direction du prolétariat.  »

Ce qui unissait les générations des communistes révolutionnaires, de Marx à Trotsky en passant par Lénine, Rosa Luxemburg et tant d’autres, c’est la conviction qu’une fois débarrassée des chaînes du capitalisme, l’humanité reprendrait sa marche en avant, mais aussi la conviction que la seule force sociale capable de cette transformation historique fondamentale est le prolétariat.

Le marxisme a toujours été et reste aujourd’hui la seule façon scientifique de comprendre le fonctionnement de la société et de ses ressorts. La seule aussi qui non seulement permet d’appréhender le monde, mais aussi de le transformer. Il reste le seul humanisme de notre époque.

«  Il appartient aux générations à venir de renouer avec les traditions du communisme révolutionnaire, avec ses combats du passé, avec ses expériences. Partout, se pose le problème de reconstruire des partis communistes révolutionnaires, et c’est en cela que cette question se confond avec la renaissance d’une Internationale communiste révolutionnaire  », avons-nous ainsi résumé les tâches de notre génération de révolutionnaires lors de notre congrès de mars dernier.

«  Personne ne peut prédire comment, à travers quel cheminement, les idées communistes révolutionnaires pourront retrouver le chemin de la classe ouvrière, classe sociale à laquelle elles étaient destinées au temps de Marx puis de Lénine et Trotsky et qui aujourd’hui encore est la seule qui peut, en s’emparant de ces idées, les transformer en une explosion sociale capable d’emporter le capitalisme  ».

La nécessité demeure la même depuis que Trotsky a écrit le Programme de Transition. Nos tâches en découlent.

1er novembre 2016

►https://mensuel.lutte-ouvriere.org//2016/12/18/le-monde-capitaliste-en-crise_73418.html

Marx dit que nous devons faire quelque chose à ce sujet. Mais, ce faisant, nous ne devons pas devenir nostalgiques et dire « nous voulons revenir au féodalisme » ou « nous voulons vivre de la terre ». Nous devons penser à un avenir progressiste, en utilisant toutes les technologies dont nous disposons, mais en les utilisant dans un but social plutôt que d’accroître la richesse et le pouvoir dans des mains de plus en plus rares.

[…]

DAVID HARVEY : Je suis venu aux États-Unis en 1969, et je suis allé à Baltimore. Il y avait là une énorme usine sidérurgique qui employait environ trente-sept mille personnes. En 1990, l’aciérie produisait toujours la même quantité d’acier, mais employait environ cinq mille personnes. Aujourd’hui, l’aciérie a pratiquement disparu. Le fait est que, dans l’industrie manufacturière, l’automatisation a fait disparaître des emplois en masse, partout, très rapidement. La gauche a passé beaucoup de temps à essayer de défendre ces emplois et a mené un combat d’arrière-garde contre l’automatisation.

C’était une mauvaise stratégie pour plusieurs raisons. L’automatisation arrivait de toute façon, et vous alliez perdre. Deuxièmement, je ne vois pas pourquoi la gauche devrait être absolument opposée à l’automatisation. La position de Marx, dans la mesure où il en avait une, serait que nous devrions utiliser cette intelligence artificielle et cette automatisation, mais nous devrions le faire de manière à alléger la charge de travail.

La gauche devrait travailler sur une politique dans laquelle nous disons « nous accueillons l’intelligence artificielle et l’automatisation, mais elles devraient nous donner beaucoup plus de temps libre ». L’une des grandes choses que Marx suggère est que le temps libre est l’une des choses les plus émancipatrices que nous puissions avoir. Il a une belle phrase : le domaine de la liberté commence lorsque le domaine de la nécessité est laissé derrière. Imaginez un monde dans lequel les nécessités pourraient être prises en charge. Un ou deux jours par semaine à travailler, et le reste du temps est du temps libre.

Maintenant, nous avons toutes ces innovations permettant d’économiser du travail dans le processus de travail, et aussi dans le ménage. Mais si vous demandez aux gens, est-ce que vous avez plus de temps libre qu’avant ? La réponse est, « non, j’ai moins de temps libre. » Nous devons organiser tout cela pour que nous ayons réellement le plus de temps libre possible, pour que le mercredi à partir de dix-sept heures, vous puissiez aller faire ce que vous voulez. C’est le genre d’imagination d’une société que Marx a en tête. C’est une évidence.

#David_Harvey #progressisme #techno-béat #automatisation

Huge barge set to house 500 asylum seekers arrives in the UK

The #Bibby_Stockholm is being refitted in #Falmouth to increase its capacity from 222 to 506 people.

A barge set to house 500 asylum seekers has arrived in the UK as the government struggles with efforts to move migrants out of hotels.

The Independent understands that people will not be transferred onto the Bibby Stockholm until July, following refurbishment to increase its capacity and safety checks.

The barge has been towed from its former berth in Italy to the port of Falmouth, in Cornwall.

It will remain there while works are carried out, before being moved onto its final destination in #Portland, Dorset.

The private operators of the port struck an agreement to host the barge with the Home Office without formal public consultation, angering the local council and residents.

Conservative MP Richard Drax previously told The Independent legal action was still being considered to stop the government’s plans for what he labelled a “quasi-prison”.

He accused ministers and Home Office officials of being “unable to answer” practical questions on how the barge will operate, such as how asylum seekers will be able to come and go safely through the port, what activities they will be provided with and how sufficient healthcare will be ensured.

“The question is how do we cope?” Mr Drax said. “Every organisation has its own raft of questions: ‘Where’s the money coming from? Who’s going to do what if this all happens?’ There are not sufficient answers, which is very worrying.”

The Independent previously revealed that asylum seekers will have less living space than an average parking bay on the Bibby Stockholm, which saw at least one person die and reports of rape and abuse on board when it was used by the Dutch government to detain migrants in the 2000s.

An official brochure released by owner Bibby Marine shows there are only 222 “single en-suite bedrooms” on board, meaning that at least two people must be crammed into every cabin for the government to achieve its aim of holding 500 people.

Dorset Council has said it still had “serious reservations about the appropriateness of Portland Port in this scenario and remains opposed to the proposals”.

The Conservative police and crime commissioner for Dorset is demanding extra government funding for the local force to “meet the extra policing needs that this project will entail”.

A multi-agency forum including representatives from national, regional and local public sector agencies has been looking at plans for the provision of health services, the safety and security of both asylum seekers and local residents and charity involvement.

Portland Port said it had been working with the Home Office and local agencies to ensure the safe arrival and operation of the Bibby Stockholm, and to minimise its impact locally.

The barge is part of a wider government push to move migrants out of hotels, which are currently housing more than 47,000 asylum seekers at a cost of £6m a day.

But the use of ships as accommodation was previously ruled out on cost grounds by the Treasury, when Rishi Sunak was chancellor, and the government has not confirmed how much it will be spending on the scheme.

https://i.imgur.com/iZ2llGx.png

Ministers have also identified several former military and government sites, including two defunct airbases and an empty prison, that they want to transform into asylum accommodation.

But a court battle with Braintree District Council over former RAF Wethersfield is ongoing, and legal action has also been threatened over similar plans for RAF Scampton in Lancashire.

Last month, a barrister representing home secretary Suella Braverman told the High Court that 56,000 people were expected to arrive on small boats in 2023 and that some could be made homeless if hotel places are not found.

A record backlog of asylum applications, driven by the increase in Channel crossings and a collapse in Home Office decision-making, mean the government is having to provide accommodation for longer while claims are considered.

▻https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/barge-falmouth-cornwall-migrants-bibby-b2333313.html
#barge #bateau

‘Performative cruelty’ : the hostile architecture of the UK government’s migrant barge

https://pixelfed.zoo-logique.org/storage/m/_v2/578583396227231930/c51ea9690-856390/O3svwnZiAyTQ/Q60HYouNPxgQwJejO4z6GXGM8DaTejBjJC1q8NXT.png

The arrival of the Bibby Stockholm barge at Portland Port, in Dorset, on July 18 2023, marks a new low in the UK government’s hostile immigration environment. The vessel is set to accommodate over 500 asylum seekers. This, the Home Office argues, will benefit British taxpayers and local residents.

The barge, however, was immediately rejected by the local population and Dorset council. Several British charities and church groups have condemned the barge, and the illegal migration bill it accompanies, as “an affront to human dignity”.

Anti-immigration groups have also protested against the barge, with some adopting offensive language, referring to the asylum seekers who will be hosted there as “bargies”. Conservative MP for South Dorset Richard Drax has claimed that hosting migrants at sea would exacerbate tenfold the issues that have arisen in hotels to date, namely sexual assaults, children disappearing and local residents protesting.

https://images.theconversation.com/files/539330/original/file-20230725-21-gqv26r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1#.jpg

My research shows that facilities built to house irregular migrants in Europe and beyond create a temporary infrastructure designed to be hostile. Governments thereby effectively make asylum seekers more displaceable while ignoring their everyday spatial and social needs.
Precarious space

The official brochure plans for the Bibby Stockholm show 222 single bedrooms over three stories, built around two small internal courtyards. It has now been retrofitted with bunk beds to host more than 500 single men – more than double the number it was designed to host.

Journalists Lizzie Dearden and Martha McHardy have shown this means the asylum seekers housed there – for up to nine months – will have “less living space than an average parking bay”. This stands in contravention of international standards of a minimum 4.5m² of covered living space per person in cold climates, where more time is spent indoors.

https://images.theconversation.com/files/539304/original/file-20230725-22-emh9ho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1#.jpg

In an open letter, dated June 15 2023 and addressed to home secretary Suella Braverman, over 700 people and nearly 100 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) voiced concerns that this will only add to the trauma migrants have already experienced:

Housing people on a sea barge – which we argue is equal to a floating prison – is morally indefensible, and threatens to retraumatise a group of already vulnerable people.

Locals are concerned already overstretched services in Portland, including GP practices, will not be able to cope with further pressure. West Dorset MP Chris Lode has questioned whether the barge itself is safe “to cope with double the weight that it was designed to bear”. A caller to the LBC radio station, meanwhile, has voiced concerns over the vessel’s very narrow and low fire escape routes, saying: “What they [the government] are effectively doing here is creating a potential Grenfell on water, a floating coffin.”

Such fears are not unfounded. There have been several cases of fires destroying migrant camps in Europe, from the Grand-Synthe camp near Dunkirk in France, in 2017, to the 2020 fire at the Moria camp in Greece. The difficulty of escaping a vessel at sea could turn it into a death trap.

Performative hostility

Research on migrant accommodation shows that being able to inhabit a place – even temporarily – and develop feelings of attachment and belonging, is crucial to a person’s wellbeing. Even amid ever tighter border controls, migrants in Europe, who can be described as “stuck on the move”, nonetheless still attempt to inhabit their temporary spaces and form such connections.

However, designs can hamper such efforts when they concentrate asylum seekers in inhospitable, cut-off spaces. In 2015, Berlin officials began temporarily housing refugees in the former Tempelhof airport, a noisy, alienating industrial space, lacking in privacy and disconnected from the city. Many people ended up staying there for the better part of a year.

French authorities, meanwhile, opened the Centre Humanitaire Paris-Nord in Paris in 2016, temporary migrant housing in a disused train depot. Nicknamed la Bulle (the bubble) for its bulbous inflatable covering, this facility was noisy and claustrophobic, lacking in basic comforts.

Like the barge in Portland Port, these facilities, placed in industrial sites, sit uncomfortably between hospitality and hostility. The barge will be fenced off, since the port is a secured zone, and access will be heavily restricted and controlled. The Home Office insists that the barge is not a floating prison, yet it is an unmistakably hostile space.

https://images.theconversation.com/files/539308/original/file-20230725-28-sv0e7s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1#.jpg

Infrastructure for water and electricity will physically link the barge to shore. However, Dorset council has no jurisdiction at sea.

The commercial agreement on the barge was signed between the Home Office and Portland Port, not the council. Since the vessel is positioned below the mean low water mark, it did not require planning permission.

This makes the barge an island of sorts, where other rules apply, much like those islands in the Aegean sea and in the Pacific, on which Greece and Australia have respectively housed migrants.

I have shown how facilities are often designed in this way not to give displaced people any agency, but, on the contrary, to objectify them. They heighten the instability migrants face, keeping them detached from local communities and constantly on the move.

The government has presented the barge as a cheaper solution than the £6.8 million it is currently spending, daily, on housing asylum seekers in hotels. A recent report by two NGOs, Reclaim the Seas and One Life to Live, concludes, however, that it will save less than £10 a person a day. It could even prove more expensive than the hotel model.

Sarah Teather, director of the Jesuit Refugee Service UK charity, has described the illegal migration bill as “performative cruelty”. Images of the barge which have flooded the news certainly meet that description too.

However threatening these images might be, though, they will not stop desperate people from attempting to come to the UK to seek safety. Rather than deterring asylum seekers, the Bibby Stockholm is potentially creating another hazard to them and to their hosting communities.

▻https://theconversation.com/performative-cruelty-the-hostile-architecture-of-the-uk-governments

–---

Point intéressant, lié à l’aménagement du territoire :

“Since the vessel is positioned below the mean low water mark, it did not require planning permission”

C’est un peu comme les #zones_frontalières qui ont été créées un peu partout en Europe (et pas que) pour que les Etats se débarassent des règles en vigueur (notamment le principe du non-refoulement). Voir cette métaliste, à laquelle j’ajoute aussi cet exemple :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/795053

voir aussi :

The circumstances at Portland Port are very different because where the barge is to be positioned is below the mean low water mark. This means that the barge is outside of our planning control and there is no requirement for planning permission from the council.

►https://news.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk/2023/07/18/leaders-comments-on-the-home-office-barge

#hostile_architecture #architecture_hostile #dignité #espace #Portland #hostilité #hostilité_performative #île #infrastructure #extraterritorialité #extra-territorialité #prix #coût

Sur l’#histoire (notamment liées au commerce d’ #esclaves) de la Bibby Stockholm :

Bibby Line, shipowners

Information
From Guide to the Records of Merseyside Maritime Museum, volume 1: Bibby Line. In 1807 John Bibby and John Highfield, Liverpool shipbrokers, began taking shares in ships, mainly Parkgate Dublin packets. By 1821 (the end of the partnership) they had vessels sailing to the Mediterranean and South America. In 1850 they expanded their Mediterranean and Black Sea interests by buying two steamers and by 1865 their fleet had increased to twenty three. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 severely affected their business and Frederick Leyland, their general manager, failed to persuade the family partners to diversify onto the Atlantic. Eventually, he bought them out in 1873. In 1889 the Bibby family revived its shipowning interests with a successful passenger cargo service to Burma. From 1893 it also began to carry British troops to overseas postings which remained a Bibby staple until 1962. The Burma service ended in 1971 and the company moved to new areas of shipowning including bulkers, gas tankers and accommodation barges. It still has its head office in Liverpool where most management records are held. The museum holds models of the Staffordshire (1929) and Oxfordshire (1955). For further details see the attached catalogue or contact The Archives Centre for a copy of the catalogue.

The earliest records within the collection, the ships’ logs at B/BIBBY/1/1/1 - 1/1/3 show company vessels travelling between Europe and South America carrying cargoes that would have been produced on plantations using the labour of enslaved peoples or used within plantation and slave based economies. For example the vessel Thomas (B/BIBBY/1/1/1) carries a cargo of iron hoops for barrels to Brazil in 1812. The Mary Bibby on a voyage in 1825-1826 loads a cargo of sugar in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to carry to Rotterdam. The log (B/BIBBY/1/1/3) records the use of ’negroes’ to work with the ship’s carpenter while the vessel is in port.

In September 1980 the latest Bibby vessel to hold the name Derbyshire was lost with all hands in the South China Sea. This collection does not include records relating to that vessel or its sinking, apart from a copy ’Motor vessel ’Derbyshire’, 1976-80: in memoriam’ at reference B/BIBBY/3/2/1 (a copy is also available in The Archives Centre library collection at 340.DER). Information about the sinking and subsequent campaigning by the victims’ family can be found on the NML website and in the Life On Board gallery. The Archives Centre holds papers of Captain David Ramwell who assisted the Derbyshire Family Association at D/RAM and other smaller collections of related documents within the DX collection.

▻https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/artifact/bibby-line-shipowners

–—
An Open Letter to #Bibby_Marine

Links between your parent company #Bibby_Line_Group (#BLG) and the slave trade have repeatedly been made. If true, we appeal to you to consider what actions you might take in recompense.

Bibby Marine’s modern slavery statement says that one of the company’s values is to “do the right thing”, and that you “strongly support the eradication of slavery, as well as the eradication of servitude, forced or compulsory labour and human trafficking”. These are admirable words.

Meanwhile, your parent company’s website says that it is “family owned with a rich history”. Please will you clarify whether this rich history includes slaving voyages where ships were owned, and cargoes transported, by BLG’s founder John Bibby, six generations ago. The BLG website says that in 1807 (which is when slavery was abolished in Britain), “John Bibby began trading as a shipowner in Liverpool with his partner John Highfield”. John Bibby is listed as co-owner of three slaving ships, of which John Highfield co-owned two:

In 1805, the Harmonie (co-owned by #John_Bibby and three others, including John Highfield) left Liverpool for a voyage which carried 250 captives purchased in West Central Africa and St Helena, delivering them to Cumingsberg in 1806 (see the SlaveVoyages database using Voyage ID 81732).
In 1806, the Sally (co-owned by John Bibby and two others) left Liverpool for a voyage which transported 250 captives purchased in Bassa and delivered them to Barbados (see the SlaveVoyages database using Voyage ID 83481).
In 1806, the Eagle (co-owned by John Bibby and four others, including John Highfield) left Liverpool for a voyage which transported 237 captives purchased in Cameroon and delivered them to Kingston in 1807 (see the SlaveVoyages database using Voyage ID 81106).

The same and related claims were recently mentioned by Private Eye. They also appear in the story of Liverpool’s Calderstones Park [PDF] and on the website of National Museums Liverpool and in this blog post “Shenanigans in Shipping” (a detailed history of the BLG). They are also mentioned by Laurence Westgaph, a TV presenter specialising in Black British history and slavery and the author of Read The Signs: Street Names with a Connection to the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Abolition in Liverpool [PDF], published with the support of English Heritage, The City of Liverpool, Northwest Regional Development Agency, National Museums Liverpool and Liverpool Vision.

While of course your public pledges on slavery underline that there is no possibility of there being any link between the activities of John Bibby and John Highfield in the early 1800s and your activities in 2023, we do believe that it is in the public interest to raise this connection, and to ask for a public expression of your categorical renunciation of the reported slave trade activities of Mr Bibby and Mr Highfield.

▻https://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/latest/news/an-open-letter-to-bibby-marine

–-

Très peu d’info sur John Bibby sur wikipedia :

John Bibby (19 February 1775 – 17 July 1840) was the founder of the British Bibby Line shipping company. He was born in Eccleston, near Ormskirk, Lancashire. He was murdered on 17 July 1840 on his way home from dinner at a friend’s house in Kirkdale.[1]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e4/Bibby_memorial%2C_All_Hallows%2C_Allerton.jpg/800px-Bibby_memorial%2C_All_Hallows%2C_Allerton.jpg

‘Floating Prisons’: The 200-year-old family #business behind the Bibby Stockholm

https://corporatewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Bibbyheader-730x350.jpg

#Bibby_Line_Group_Limited is a UK company offering financial, marine and construction services to clients in at least 16 countries around the world. It recently made headlines after the government announced one of the firm’s vessels, Bibby Stockholm, would be used to accommodate asylum seekers on the Dorset coast.

In tandem with plans to house migrants at surplus military sites, the move was heralded by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Home Secretary Suella Braverman as a way of mitigating the £6m-a-day cost of hotel accommodation amid the massive ongoing backlog of asylum claims, as well as deterring refugees from making the dangerous channel crossing to the UK. Several protests have been organised against the project already, while over ninety migrants’ rights groups and hundreds of individual campaigners have signed an open letter to the Home Secretary calling for the plans to be scrapped, describing the barge as a “floating prison.”

Corporate Watch has researched into the Bibby Line Group’s operations and financial interests. We found that:

- The Bibby Stockholm vessel was previously used as a floating detention centre in the Netherlands, where undercover reporting revealed violence, sexual exploitation and poor sanitation.

– Bibby Line Group is more than 90% owned by members of the Bibby family, primarily through trusts. Its pre-tax profits for 2021 stood at almost £31m, which they upped to £35.5m by claiming generous tax credits and deferring a fair amount to the following year.

- Management aboard the vessel will be overseen by an Australian business travel services company, Corporate Travel Management, who have previously had aspersions cast over the financial health of their operations and the integrity of their business practices.

- Another beneficiary of the initiative is Langham Industries, a maritime and engineering company whose owners, the Langham family, have longstanding ties to right wing parties.

Key Issues

According to the Home Office, the Bibby Stockholm barge will be operational for at least 18 months, housing approximately 500 single adult men while their claims are processed, with “24/7 security in place on board, to minimise the disruption to local communities.” These measures appear to have been to dissuade opposition from the local Conservative council, who pushed for background checks on detainees and were reportedly even weighing legal action out of concern for a perceived threat of physical attacks from those housed onboard, as well as potential attacks from the far right against migrants held there.

Local campaigners have taken aim at the initiative, noting in the open letter:

“For many people seeking asylum arriving in the UK, the sea represents a site of significant trauma as they have been forced to cross it on one or more occasions. Housing people on a sea barge – which we argue is equal to a floating prison – is morally indefensible, and threatens to re-traumatise a group of already vulnerable people.”

Technically, migrants on the barge will be able to leave the site. However, in reality they will be under significant levels of surveillance and cordoned off behind fences in the high security port area.

If they leave, there is an expectation they will return by 11pm, and departure will be controlled by the authorities. According to the Home Office:

“In order to ensure that migrants come and go in an orderly manner with as little impact as possible, buses will be provided to take those accommodated on the vessel from the port to local drop off points”.

These drop off points are to be determined by the government, while being sited off the coast of Dorset means they will be isolated from centres of support and solidarity.

Meanwhile, the government’s new Illegal Migration Bill is designed to provide a legal justification for the automatic detention of refugees crossing the Channel. If it passes, there’s a chance this might set the stage for a change in regime on the Bibby Stockholm – from that of an “accommodation centre” to a full-blown migrant prison.

An initial release from the Home Office suggested the local voluntary sector would be engaged “to organise activities that keep occupied those being accommodated, potentially involved in local volunteering activity,” though they seemed to have changed the wording after critics said this would mean detainees could be effectively exploited for unpaid labour. It’s also been reported the vessel required modifications in order to increase capacity to the needed level, raising further concerns over cramped living conditions and a lack of privacy.

Bibby Line Group has prior form in border profiteering. From 1994 to 1998, the Bibby Stockholm was used to house the homeless, some of whom were asylum seekers, in Hamburg, Germany. In 2005, it was used to detain asylum seekers in the Netherlands, which proved a cause of controversy at the time. Undercover reporting revealed a number of cases abuse on board, such as beatings and sexual exploitation, as well suicide attempts, routine strip searches, scabies and the death of an Algerian man who failed to receive timely medical care for a deteriorating heart condition. As the undercover security guard wrote:

“The longer I work on the Bibby Stockholm, the more I worry about safety on the boat. Between exclusion and containment I encounter so many defects and feel so much tension among the prisoners that it no longer seems to be a question of whether things will get completely out of hand here, but when.”

He went on:

“I couldn’t stand the way prisoners were treated […] The staff become like that, because the whole culture there is like that. Inhuman. They do not see the residents as people with a history, but as numbers.”

https://corporatewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Bibby-montage-1-1024x535.jpg

Discussions were also held in August 2017 over the possibility of using the vessel as accommodation for some 400 students in Galway, Ireland, amid the country’s housing crisis. Though the idea was eventually dropped for lack of mooring space and planning permission requirements, local students had voiced safety concerns over the “bizarre” and “unconventional” solution to a lack of rental opportunities.
Corporate Travel Management & Langham Industries

Although leased from Bibby Line Group, management aboard the Bibby Stockholm itself will be handled by #Corporate_Travel_Management (#CTM), a global travel company specialising in business travel services. The Australian-headquartered company also recently received a £100m contract for the provision of accommodation, travel, venue and ancillary booking services for the housing of Ukrainian refugees at local hotels and aboard cruise ships M/S Victoria and M/S Ambition. The British Red Cross warned earlier in May against continuing to house refugees on ships with “isolated” and “windowless” cabins, and said the scheme had left many “living in limbo.”

Founded by CEO #Jamie_Pherous, CTM was targeted in 2018 by #VGI_Partners, a group of short-sellers, who identified more than 20 red flags concerning the company’s business interests. Most strikingly, the short-sellers said they’d attended CTM’s offices in Glasgow, Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Switzerland. Finding no signs of business activity there, they said it was possible the firm had significantly overstated the scale of its operations. VGI Partners also claimed CTM’s cash flows didn’t seem to add up when set against the company’s reported growth, and that CTM hadn’t fully disclosed revisions they’d made to their annual revenue figures.

Two years later, the short-sellers released a follow-up report, questioning how CTM had managed to report a drop in rewards granted for high sales numbers to travel agencies, when in fact their transaction turnover had grown during the same period. They also accused CTM of dressing up their debt balance to make their accounts look healthier.

CTM denied VGI Partners’ allegations. In their response, they paraphrased a report by auditors EY, supposedly confirming there were no question marks over their business practices, though the report itself was never actually made public. They further claim VGI Partners, as short-sellers, had only released the reports in the hope of benefitting from uncertainty over CTM’s operations.

Despite these troubles, CTM’s market standing improved drastically earlier this year, when it was announced the firm had secured contracts for the provision of travel services to the UK Home Office worth in excess of $3bn AUD (£1.6bn). These have been accompanied by further tenders with, among others, the National Audit Office, HS2, Cafcass, Serious Fraud Office, Office of National Statistics, HM Revenue & Customs, National Health Service, Ministry of Justice, Department of Education, Foreign Office, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

The Home Office has not released any figures on the cost of either leasing or management services aboard Bibby Stockholm, though press reports have put the estimated price tag at more than £20,000 a day for charter and berthing alone. If accurate, this would put the overall expenditure for the 18-month period in which the vessel will operate as a detention centre at almost £11m, exclusive of actual detention centre management costs such as security, food and healthcare.

Another beneficiary of the project are Portland Port’s owners, #Langham_Industries, a maritime and engineering company owned by the #Langham family. The family has long-running ties to right-wing parties. Langham Industries donated over £70,000 to the UK Independence Party from 2003 up until the 2016 Brexit referendum. In 2014, Langham Industries donated money to support the re-election campaign of former Clacton MP for UKIP Douglas Carswell, shortly after his defection from the Conservatives. #Catherine_Langham, a Tory parish councillor for Hilton in Dorset, has described herself as a Langham Industries director (although she is not listed on Companies House). In 2016 she was actively involved in local efforts to support the campaign to leave the European Union. The family holds a large estate in Dorset which it uses for its other line of business, winemaking.

At present, there is no publicly available information on who will be providing security services aboard the Bibby Stockholm.

https://corporatewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Bibby-3-1024x383.jpg

Business Basics

Bibby Line Group describes itself as “one of the UK’s oldest family owned businesses,” operating in “multiple countries, employing around 1,300 colleagues, and managing over £1 billion of funds.” Its head office is registered in Liverpool, with other headquarters in Scotland, Hong Kong, India, Singapore, Malaysia, France, Slovakia, Czechia, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland and Nigeria (see the appendix for more). The company’s primary sectors correspond to its three main UK subsidiaries:

– #Bibby_Financial_Services. A global provider of financial services. The firm provides loans to small- and medium-sized businesses engaged in business services, construction, manufacturing, transportation, export, recruitment and wholesale markets. This includes invoice financing, export and trade finance, and foreign exchanges. Overall, the subsidiary manages more than £6bn each year on behalf of some 9,000 clients across 300 different industry sectors, and in 2021 it brought in more than 50% of the group’s annual turnover.

- #Bibby_Marine_Limited. Owner and operator of the Bibby WaveMaster fleet, a group of vessels specialising in the transport and accommodation of workers employed at remote locations, such as offshore oil and gas sites in the North Sea. Sometimes, as in the case of Chevron’s Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) project in Nigeria, the vessels are used as an alternative to hotels owing to a “a volatile project environment.” The fleet consists of 40 accommodation vessels similar in size to the Bibby Stockholm and a smaller number of service vessels, though the share of annual turnover pales compared to the group’s financial services operations, standing at just under 10% for 2021.

- #Garic Ltd. Confined to construction, quarrying, airport, agriculture and transport sectors in the UK, the firm designs, manufactures and purchases plant equipment and machinery for sale or hire. Garic brought in around 14% of Bibby Line Group’s turnover in 2021.

Prior to February 2021, Bibby Line Group also owned #Costcutter_Supermarkets_Group, before it was sold to #Bestway_Wholesale to maintain liquidity amid the Covid-19 pandemic. In their report for that year, the company’s directors also suggested grant funding from #MarRI-UK, an organisation facilitating innovation in maritime technologies and systems, had been important in preserving the firm’s position during the crisis.
History

The Bibby Line Group’s story begins in 1807, when Lancashire-born shipowner John Bibby began trading out of Liverpool with partner John Highfield. By the time of his death in 1840, murdered while returning home from dinner with a friend in Kirkdale, Bibby had struck out on his own and come to manage a fleet of more than 18 ships. The mysterious case of his death has never been solved, and the business was left to his sons John and James.

Between 1891 and 1989, the company operated under the name #Bibby_Line_Limited. Its ships served as hospital and transport vessels during the First World War, as well as merchant cruisers, and the company’s entire fleet of 11 ships was requisitioned by the state in 1939.

By 1970, the company had tripled its overseas earnings, branching into ‘factoring’, or invoice financing (converting unpaid invoices into cash for immediate use via short-term loans) in the early 1980s, before this aspect of the business was eventually spun off into Bibby Financial Services. The group acquired Garic Ltd in 2008, which currently operates four sites across the UK.

https://corporatewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Bibby-5-1024x392.jpg

People

#Jonathan_Lewis has served as Bibby Line Group’s Managing and Executive Director since January 2021, prior to which he acted as the company’s Chief Financial and Strategy Officer since joining in 2019. Previously, Lewis worked as CFO for Imagination Technologies, a tech company specialising in semiconductors, and as head of supermarket Tesco’s mergers and acquisitions team. He was also a member of McKinsey’s European corporate finance practice, as well as an investment banker at Lazard. During his first year at the helm of Bibby’s operations, he was paid £748,000. Assuming his role at the head of the group’s operations, he replaced Paul Drescher, CBE, then a board member of the UK International Chamber of Commerce and a former president of the Confederation of British Industry.

Bibby Line Group’s board also includes two immediate members of the Bibby family, Sir #Michael_James_Bibby, 3rd Bt. and his younger brother #Geoffrey_Bibby. Michael has acted as company chairman since 2020, before which he had occupied senior management roles in the company for 20 years. He also has external experience, including time at Unilever’s acquisitions, disposals and joint venture divisions, and now acts as president of the UK Chamber of Shipping, chairman of the Charities Trust, and chairman of the Institute of Family Business Research Foundation.

https://corporatewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/geoffrey_bibby-278x300.jpg https://corporatewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Michael-278x300.jpg

Geoffrey has served as a non-executive director of the company since 2015, having previously worked as a managing director of Vast Visibility Ltd, a digital marketing and technology company. In 2021, the Bibby brothers received salaries of £125,000 and £56,000 respectively.

The final member of the firm’s board is #David_Anderson, who has acted as non-executive director since 2012. A financier with 35 years experience in investment banking, he’s founder and CEO of EPL Advisory – which advises company boards on requirements and disclosure obligations of public markets – and chair of Creative Education Trust, a multi-academy trust comprising 17 schools. Anderson is also chairman at multinational ship broker Howe Robinson Partners, which recently auctioned off a superyacht seized from Dmitry Pumpyansky, after the sanctioned Russian businessman reneged on a €20.5m loan from JP Morgan. In 2021, Anderson’s salary stood at £55,000.

https://corporatewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/bibby-4-1024x396.jpg

Ownership

Bibby Line Group’s annual report and accounts for 2021 state that more than 90% of the company is owned by members of the Bibby family, primarily through family trusts. These ownership structures, effectively entities allowing people to benefit from assets without being their registered legal owners, have long attracted staunch criticism from transparency advocates given the obscurity they afford means they often feature extensively in corruption, money laundering and tax abuse schemes.

According to Companies House, the UK corporate registry, between 50% and 75% of Bibby Line Group’s shares and voting rights are owned by #Bibby_Family_Company_Limited, which also retains the right to appoint and remove members of the board. Directors of Bibby Family Company Limited include both the Bibby brothers, as well as a third sibling, #Peter_John_Bibby, who’s formally listed as the firm’s ‘ultimate beneficial owner’ (i.e. the person who ultimately profits from the company’s assets).

Other people with comparable shares in Bibby Family Company Limited are #Mark_Rupert_Feeny, #Philip_Charles_Okell, and Lady #Christine_Maud_Bibby. Feeny’s occupation is listed as solicitor, with other interests in real estate management and a position on the board of the University of Liverpool Pension Fund Trustees Limited. Okell meanwhile appears as director of Okell Money Management Limited, a wealth management firm, while Lady Bibby, Michael and Geoffrey’s mother, appears as “retired playground supervisor.”

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Key Relationships

Bibby Line Group runs an internal ‘Donate a Day’ volunteer program, enabling employees to take paid leave in order to “help causes they care about.” Specific charities colleagues have volunteered with, listed in the company’s Annual Review for 2021 to 2022, include:

- The Hive Youth Zone. An award-winning charity for young people with disabilities, based in the Wirral.

– The Whitechapel Centre. A leading homeless and housing charity in the Liverpool region, working with people sleeping rough, living in hostels, or struggling with their accommodation.

- Let’s Play Project. Another charity specialising in after-school and holiday activities for young people with additional needs in the Banbury area.

- Whitdale House. A care home for the elderly, based in Whitburn, West Lothian and run by the local council.

– DEBRA. An Irish charity set up in 1988 for individuals living with a rare, painful skin condition called epidermolysis bullosa, as well as their families.

– Reaching Out Homeless Outreach. A non-profit providing resources and support to the homeless in Ireland.

Various senior executives and associated actors at Bibby Line Group and its subsidiaries also have current and former ties to the following organisations:

- UK Chamber of Shipping

- Charities Trust

- Institute of Family Business Research Foundation

- Indefatigable Old Boys Association

- Howe Robinson Partners

- hibu Ltd

- EPL Advisory

- Creative Education Trust

- Capita Health and Wellbeing Limited

- The Ambassador Theatre Group Limited

– Pilkington Plc

– UK International Chamber of Commerce

– Confederation of British Industry

– Arkley Finance Limited (Weatherby’s Banking Group)

– FastMarkets Ltd, Multiple Sclerosis Society

– Early Music as Education

– Liverpool Pension Fund Trustees Limited

– Okell Money Management Limited

Finances

For the period ending 2021, Bibby Line Group’s total turnover stood at just under £260m, with a pre-tax profit of almost £31m – fairly healthy for a company providing maritime services during a global pandemic. Their post-tax profits in fact stood at £35.5m, an increase they would appear to have secured by claiming generous tax credits (£4.6m) and deferring a fair amount (£8.4m) to the following year.

Judging by their last available statement on the firm’s profitability, Bibby’s directors seem fairly confident the company has adequate financing and resources to continue operations for the foreseeable future. They stress their February 2021 sale of Costcutter was an important step in securing this, given it provided additional liquidity during the pandemic, as well as the funding secured for R&D on fuel consumption by Bibby Marine’s fleet.
Scandal Sheet

Bibby Line Group and its subsidiaries have featured in a number of UK legal proceedings over the years, sometimes as defendants. One notable case is Godfrey v Bibby Line, a lawsuit brought against the company in 2019 after one of their former employees died as the result of an asbestos-related disease.

In their claim, the executors of Alan Peter Godfrey’s estate maintained that between 1965 and 1972, he was repeatedly exposed to large amounts of asbestos while working on board various Bibby vessels. Although the link between the material and fatal lung conditions was established as early as 1930, they claimed that Bibby Line, among other things:

“Failed to warn the deceased of the risk of contracting asbestos related disease or of the precautions to be taken in relation thereto;

“Failed to heed or act upon the expert evidence available to them as to the best means of protecting their workers from danger from asbestos dust; [and]

“Failed to take all reasonably practicable measures, either by securing adequate ventilation or by the provision and use of suitable respirators or otherwise, to prevent inhalation of dust.”

The lawsuit, which claimed “unlimited damage”’ against the group, also stated that Mr Godfrey’s “condition deteriorated rapidly with worsening pain and debility,” and that he was “completely dependent upon others for his needs by the last weeks of his life.” There is no publicly available information on how the matter was concluded.

In 2017, Bibby Line Limited also featured in a leak of more than 13.4 million financial records known as the Paradise Papers, specifically as a client of Appleby, which provided “offshore corporate services” such as legal and accountancy work. According to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global network of investigative media outlets, leaked Appleby documents revealed, among other things, “the ties between Russia and [Trump’s] billionaire commerce secretary, the secret dealings of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s chief fundraiser and the offshore interests of the Queen of England and more than 120 politicians around the world.”

This would not appear to be the Bibby group’s only link to the shady world of offshore finance. Michael Bibby pops up as a treasurer for two shell companies registered in Panama, Minimar Transport S.A. and Vista Equities Inc.
Looking Forward

Much about the Bibby Stockholm saga remains to be seen. The exact cost of the initiative and who will be providing security services on board, are open questions. What’s clear however is that activists will continue to oppose the plans, with efforts to prevent the vessel sailing from Falmouth to its final docking in Portland scheduled to take place on 30th June.

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Appendix: Company Addresses

HQ and general inquiries: 3rd Floor Walker House, Exchange Flags, Liverpool, United Kingdom, L2 3YL

Tel: +44 (0) 151 708 8000

Other offices, as of 2021:

6, Shenton Way, #18-08A Oue Downtown 068809, Singapore

1/1, The Exchange Building, 142 St. Vincent Street, Glasgow, G2 5LA, United Kingdom

4th Floor Heather House, Heather Road, Sandyford, Dublin 18, Ireland

Unit 2302, 23/F Jubilee Centre, 18 Fenwick Street, Wanchai, Hong Kong

Unit 508, Fifth Floor, Metropolis Mall, MG Road, Gurugram, Haryana, 122002 India

Suite 7E, Level 7, Menara Ansar, 65 Jalan Trus, 8000 Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia

160 Avenue Jean Jaures, CS 90404, 69364 Lyon Cedex, France

Prievozská 4D, Block E, 13th Floor, Bratislava 821 09, Slovak Republic

Hlinky 118, Brno, 603 00, Czech Republic

Laan Van Diepenvoorde 5, 5582 LA, Waalre, Netherlands

Hansaallee 249, 40549 Düsseldorf, Germany

Poland Eurocentrum, Al. Jerozolimskie 134, 02-305 Warsaw, Poland

1/2 Atarbekova str, 350062, Krasnodar, Krasnodar

1 St Peter’s Square, Manchester, M2 3AE, United Kingdom

25 Adeyemo Alakija Street, Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria

10 Anson Road, #09-17 International Plaza, 079903 Singapore

►https://corporatewatch.org/floating-prisons-the-200-year-old-family-business-behind-the-bibby-s

signalé ici aussi par @rezo:
►https://seenthis.net/messages/1010504

The Langham family seem quite happy to support right-wing political parties that are against immigration, while at the same time profiting handsomely from the misery of refugees who are forced to claim sanctuary here.

https://pixelfed.zoo-logique.org/storage/m/_v2/578583396227231930/c51ea9690-856390/MPYUx81PIN6y/IjAV1X5WiBDiHabr5R7Hp2GYtkqCLhAA22SH2qUx.jpg

–---

Family firm ’profiteering from misery’ by providing migrant barges donated £70k to #UKIP

The Langham family, owners of Langham Industries, is now set to profit from an 18-month contract with the Home Office to let the Bibby Stockholm berth at Portland, Dorset

A family firm that donated more than £70,000 to UKIP is “profiteering from misery” by hosting the Government’s controversial migrant barge. Langham Industries owns Portland Port, where the Bibby Stockholm is docked in a deal reported to be worth some £2.5million.

The Langham family owns luxurious properties and has links to high-profile politicians, including Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden. And we can reveal that their business made 19 donations to pro-Brexit party UKIP between 2003 and 2016.

Late founder John Langham was described as an “avid supporter” of UKIP in an obituary in 2017. Now his children, John, Jill and Justin – all directors of the family firm – are set to profit from an 18-month contract with the Home Office to let the Bibby Stockholm berth at Portland, Dorset.

While Portland Port refuses to reveal how much the Home Office is paying, its website cites berthing fees for a ship the size of the Bibby Stockholm at more than £4,000 a day. In 2011, Portland Port chairman John, 71, invested £3.7million in Grade II* listed country pile Steeple Manor at Wareham, Dorset. Dating to around 1600, it has a pond, tennis court and extensive gardens designed by the landscape architect Brenda Colvin.

The arrangement to host the “prison-like” barge for housing migrants has led some locals to blast the Langhams, who have owned the port since 1997. Portland mayor Carralyn Parkes, 61, said: “I don’t know how John Langham will sleep at night in his luxurious home, with his tennis court and his fluffy bed, when asylum seekers are sleeping in tiny beds on the barge.

“I went on the boat and measured the rooms with a tape measure. On average they are about 10ft by 12ft. The bunk bed mattresses are about 6ft long. If you’re taller than 6ft you’re stuffed. The Langham family need to have more humanity. They are only interested in making money. It’s shocking.”

(#paywall)
▻https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/family-firm-profiteering-misery-providing-30584405.amp

#UK_Independence_Party

‘This is a prison’: men tell of distressing conditions on Bibby Stockholm

Asylum seekers share fears about Dorset barge becoming even more crowded, saying they already ‘despair and wish for death’

Asylum seekers brought back to the Bibby Stockholm barge in Portland, Dorset, have said they are being treated in such a way that “we despair and wish for death”.

The Guardian spoke to two men in their first interview since their return to the barge on 19 October after the vessel lay empty for more than two months. The presence of deadly legionella bacteria was confirmed on board on 7 August, the same day the first group of asylum seekers arrived. The barge was evacuated four days later.

The new warning comes after it emerged that one asylum seeker attempted to kill himself and is in hospital after finding out he is due to be taken to the barge on Tuesday.

A man currently on the barge told the Guardian: “Government decisions are turning healthy and normal refugees into mental patients whom they then hand over to society. Here, many people were healthy and coping with OK spirits, but as a result of the dysfunctional strategies of the government, they have suffered – and continue to suffer – from various forms of serious mental distress. We are treated in such a way that we despair and wish for death.”

He said that although the asylum seekers were not detained on the barge and could leave to visit the nearby town, in practice, doing so was not easy.

He added: “In the barge, we have exactly the feeling of being in prison. It is true that they say that this is not a prison and you can go outside at any time, but you can only go to specific stops at certain times by bus, and this does not give me a good feeling.

“Even to use the fresh air, you have to go through the inspection every time and go to the small yard with high fences and go through the X-ray machine again. And this is not good for our health.

“In short, this is a prison whose prisoners are not criminals, they are people who have fled their country just to save their lives and have taken shelter here to live.”

The asylum seekers raised concerns about what conditions on the barge would be like if the Home Office did fill it with about 500 asylum seekers, as officials say is the plan. Those on board said it already felt quite full with about 70 people living there.

The second asylum seeker said: “The space inside the barge is very small. It feels crowded in the dining hall and the small entertainment room. It is absolutely clear to me that there will be chaos here soon.

“According to my estimate, as I look at the spaces around us, the capacity of this barge is maximum 120 people, including personnel and crew. The strategy of ​​transferring refugees from hotels to barges or ships or military installations is bound to fail.

“The situation here on the barge is getting worse. Does the government have a plan for shipwrecked residents? Everyone here is going mad with anxiety. It is not just the barge that floats on the water, but the plans of the government that are radically adrift.”

Maddie Harris of the NGO Humans For Rights Network, which supports asylum seekers in hotels, said: “Home Office policies directly contribute to the significant deterioration of the wellbeing and mental health of so many asylum seekers in their ‘care’, with a dehumanising environment, violent anti-migrant rhetoric and isolated accommodations away from community and lacking in support.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “The Bibby Stockholm is part of the government’s pledge to reduce the use of expensive hotels and bring forward alternative accommodation options which provide a more cost-effective, sustainable and manageable system for the UK taxpayer and local communities.

“The health and welfare of asylum seekers remains the utmost priority. We work continually to ensure the needs and vulnerabilities of those residing in asylum accommodation are identified and considered, including those related to mental health and trauma.”

Nadia Whittome and Lloyd Russell-Moyle, the Labour MPs for Nottingham East and Brighton Kemptown respectively, will travel to Portland on Monday to meet asylum seekers accommodated on the Bibby Stockholm barge and local community members.

The visit follows the home secretary, Suella Braverman, not approving a visit from the MPs to assess living conditions as they requested through parliamentary channels.

▻https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/29/this-is-a-prison-men-tell-of-distressing-conditions-on-bibby-stockholm
#prison #conditions_de_vie

« Ils savent qui il est. Ils savent que @davduf enquête sur les violences policières depuis des années. MAIS C’EST QUOI CE PUTAIN DE RÉGIME QUI EMPÊCHE LES CITOYENS DE MANIFESTER ET LES JOURNALISTES DE TRAVAILLER ?! »
▻https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1644055652099039232/pu/vid/720x1280/gctjio2EDACbeHku.mp4?tag=12

La séance en question :
▻https://videos.assemblee-nationale.fr/video.13200389_642ad867d2431.1ere-seance--debat-sur-la-lu

Être nazi est donc désormais une opinion.

Ces gens sont beaucoup plus préoccupés par les universitaires qui auraient des tendances « woke » que par les militaires et gendarmes armés, entraînés et, euh, nazis.

Notre République, menacée par les wokistes, les séparatistes, les écoterroristes, les blackblocks n’a pas pour valeur de condamner au pénal les opinions des nazis. Et ça, c’est tout à l’honneur de nos valeurs communes républicaines.

On rigolait avec @monolecte l’autre jour en comparant les dystopies des années 1940-50, à la « Orwell », et la dystopie médiocre dans laquelle finalement on se retrouve. Tout y est, mais c’est petit, misérable, sans intelligence, parfaitement crétin, mais bien tout autant malveillant. Et sans aucun lustre, ni panache. Dans Pif Gadget, et PlayBoy.

▻https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI000022375941

Est puni de l’amende prévue pour les contraventions de la 5e classe le fait, sauf pour les besoins d’un film, d’un spectacle ou d’une exposition comportant une évocation historique, de porter ou d’exhiber en public un uniforme, un insigne ou un emblème rappelant les uniformes, les insignes ou les emblèmes qui ont été portés ou exhibés soit par les membres d’une organisation déclarée criminelle en application de l’article 9 du statut du tribunal militaire international annexé à l’accord de Londres du 8 août 1945, soit par une personne reconnue coupable par une juridiction française ou internationale d’un ou plusieurs crimes contre l’humanité prévus par les articles 211-1 à 212-3 ou mentionnés par la loi n° 64-1326 du 26 décembre 1964.

Lien trouvé ici : ▻https://www.newsd.admin.ch/newsd/message/attachments/74503.pdf

Pour connaître les dispositifs légaux ayant cours en France, je vous conseille de faire un détour par la Confédération Helvétique

Maintien de l’ordre : « Pensez-vous vraiment, Monsieur Darmanin, qu’être militaire et arborer des signes nazis par exemple, ce n’est que témoigner une opinion ? », lance #David-Guiraud

#DirectAN #QAG
▻https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/1643253751883395079/vid/1280x720/UdXNaa0HRAfclht_.mp4?tag=16

Bien parlé !

Fredrick connaissait bien le truc utilisé par Watkins pendant l’audience. Il s’en était lui-même servi plusieurs fois, à l’époque où il défendait le Gamergate. Cela consistait à citer mal à propos « la liberté d’expression », en jouant sur l’ambiguïté entre l’usage de la parole (ensemble) et expression d’une opinion (sous-ensemble).
Si toute opinion était une utilisation de la parole, toute utilisation de la parole n’était pas une opinion. Crier « au feu ! » pour plaisanter dans un endroit bondé en provoquant une bousculade dans laquelle quelqu’un mourait piétiné, ce n’était pas une opinion. Crier : « c’est le gitan qui l’a fait, je l’ai vu, foutons le feu au camp de nomades ! » ce n’était pas une opinion. Ces utilisations de la parole était des crimes.

in le Wu ming sur QAnon

▻https://iscpif.fr/projects/tweetoscope-climatique

https://iscpif.fr/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tweetoscope2.png

Vue “Intérêt du Web”.
Cette vue compare, sur le même sujet, l’attention portée par les scientifiques et celle accordée par le web (principalement les médias et l’opinion publique). L’intérêt du web est mesuré quotidiennement depuis mai 2015 à travers la plateforme Twitter. L’analyse de plusieurs millions de Tweets par mois et l’étude des pages web associées (articles d’actualité, billets de blog, etc.) permet de mesurer si certains sujets sont sur- ou sous-représentés par rapport à l’attention accordée par les scientifiques. Dans cette optique, la taille d’un terme est basée sur la proportion de documents qui lui sont associés (provenant de toutes les communautés) : scientifiques, médias et opinion publique. La couleur indique les communautés qui mentionnent majoritairement un terme : bleu pour le web (médias et public), orange / rouge pour la communauté scientifique, vert lorsque toutes ces communautés accordent la même attention.

Outil fait par #David_Chavalarias, dont le livre est recensé ici ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/1013565

Sur la #statue de #David_De_Pury à #Neuchâtel, voir aussi :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/937304
►https://seenthis.net/messages/944969

et une métaliste sur la #Suisse_coloniale :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/868109

#De_Pury #mémoire #passé_colonial #art #art_et_politique #esclavage #Black_Lives_Matter

ping @cede