Posts Tagged ‘sanctions’

Syria: the hangover

04/09/2013, 12:48:08 PM

by Rob Marchant

If Westminster is often a bubble, on frenzied days like last Thursday it becomes even more so. Everyone is waiting for the latest news. What can easily happen, and what seems to have, is for Parliament to forget about the world outside entirely until it is over.

As the Telegraph reports, some Labour MPs, as they left the parliamentary lobby giddy with unexpected victory, were rudely jolted back to reality by pictures of Syrian victims of incendiary bombs, as a reminder of what had just collectively been achieved by voting down intervention, without necessarily meaning to. The hangover had begun.

It is particularly easy to miss the impact of such things in the wider party, the decent people who organise raffles and knock on doors. Over the weekend, I was in touch with two centre-left colleagues (and no, neither was Dan Hodges), one of whom was seriously considering leaving a party of which he had not only been a member for a generation, but had worked for during more than a decade.

The other would have resigned, but it was Saturday and she couldn’t get through to the membership department. Another typical story from one young member leaving is blogged here.

The consequence of Thursday, it seems, is now a leakage of the very centrist common sense the party so badly needs. Perhaps there would have been even more from the left, should Miliband have opted for intervention. We will never know.

When you make a tough decision on a touchstone issue, there is always the risk that you will lose people to the left or right. That’s politics. Miliband’s apparent instinct is firstly to stake out a position more or less in the political middle of his party and tack slightly from it this way and that, to try and keep the party together. We might argue that perhaps it would be better to stand still, but ok.

But it seems that – unless something happens which truly threatens the party and its leadership, like the battle with Unite – in that last moment when he is finally forced to jump one way or the other, one cannot help but feel the instinct is always to rabbit-run to the left.

And that in itself might be understandable to many, were it not for the way that the jump was made in this case. A last-minute change of mind, after Cameron’s meek acceptance of all Labour’s conditions, led to a breakdown of trust which seems to have torpedoed the idea of intervention altogether, quite probably permanently.

We might be on one side of this debate or the other, but what we cannot pretend is that something minor has just happened. That it is an inflection point in Miliband’s leadership, and in British politics, is undeniable (it is, after all, the first time a vote has been lost on a matter of national defence in over two centuries).

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William Hague moves to lift sanctions on Zimbabwe and rehabilitate Robert Mugabe

18/02/2013, 04:29:44 PM

by Pete Bowyer

The EU Foreign Affairs Council has just announced its decision on Zimbabwean sanctions in a press communique from Brussels this afternoon. It is worse than campaigners could possibly have feared.

Not only have EU foreign ministers agreed to suspend the majority of all remaining sanctions on Mugabe and his regime following a “peaceful and credible constitutional referendum” next month, they have also agreed “to suspend immediately the travel ban imposed on 6 Members of the government of Zimbabwe. The EU has also agreed to delist 21 persons and one entity subject to restrictive measures.”

International NGOs such as Global Witness, Human Rights Watch and Justice Zimbabwe who have been campaigning for those in Zimbabwe who have been complicit in human rights abuses to be added to the sanctions list and for measures to be deferred until after free and fair elections in the summer have been snubbed.

In practice, the decision means EU sanctions have immediately been lifted on almost a quarter of Mugabe’s cronies currently effected by the measures on little more than vague promises, and no real change on the ground in terms of human rights abuses and respect for the rule of law. Ironically, it comes on the very same day as the EU Foreign Affairs Council reaffirmed its support for the “promotion and protection of human rights around the world” in a separate communiqué.

The decision, agreed unanimously by EU Foreign Secretaries, including British Foreign Secretary William Hague, represents a major victory for President Mugabe and a significant success for the Belgian government who had been pushing a softer EU line towards Zimbabwe.

It is a stunning volte face from Hague who had previously advocated a more principled and robust approach to Mugabe. Britain now appears to have derogated its influence over geo-politics in southern Africa to the diamond traders of Antwerp.

It should come as no surprise that the Foreign Secretary has yet to comment publicly on the ignominy. But the left should take no comfort from this decision either. Whilst once Mugabe was the focal point of campaigns against a despotic regime which murdered thousands of its own citizens and impoverished a nation, anger has diminished in recent years despite little noticeable improvements on the ground.

Today is a milestone. A milestone in the rehabilitation of Mugabe by the West who has been rewarded for the failure of a nation.

Pete Bowyer is a Labour activist and spokesman for JusticeZimbabwe

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Standard Chartered: these are the real ills of modern banking

08/08/2012, 12:31:21 PM

by Rob Marchant

Banks, eh? On the British left, we’re often so busy disliking them in general that we don’t always take the time to differentiate between their misdemeanours.

While we’ve been exercising ourselves greatly about irresponsible bankers who have largely been operating within the rules – and where arguably we ought to be looking first to governments, for not having done their jobs in regulating them properly – we miss something else.

And so, much less attention has gone, until recently, on a much more serious problem: those who actively flout the rules. In particular, the illegal transfer and laundering of money.

On Monday the stock of Standard Chartered Bank (SCB), one of Britain’s oldest banking institutions, dive-bombed as it was accused of sanctions-busting with Iran. Accused, because the bank currently denies this. We shall see. If true, it is a sad and ironic tale, which I can perhaps help explain, because I used to work there.

SCB has been, in fact, a real British success story, formed from the merger of two old colonial banks in 1969, although its success was largely due to seeking its fortune in Asia. Although not so well-known to the British public, in Hong Kong and Singapore it is as much a high-street bank as NatWest is in the UK. And although it still keeps its legal HQ in London for regulatory – and perhaps historic – reasons, its real revenue and headcount is in these Asian hubs, as well as, more recently, China and India.

It’s an interesting place to work, because it has a culture which is international, and yet unlike many multi-nationals, not particularly American (its New York branch is actually quite small). Indeed, although it has modernised, and “Asianised”, its corporate culture since the stuffy 1960s, it might also be viewed as a microcosm of what multinationals might look like, had the sun not set on the British Empire during the 20th century: a British-Asian fusion, a latter-day East India Company.

For all these reasons, it surprises me not a jot that one of its British execs might utter the words “You f—ing Americans. Who are you to tell us, the rest of the world, that we’re not going to deal with Iranians?”

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