The problem with white-collar crime is that it is seldom black or white, and a significant minority of it is far from petty. It is all around us and it is a rather complex phenomenon. It appears to be far more tolerated in society than other forms of crime.

Sutherland’s 1947 definition could, I believe, be applied to two actions, in their different ways both criminal, that have generated some of the worst carnage in the history of the world – the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India, and the invasion of Iraq. For, however we define it, white-collar crime seems to be a particularly grubby, devious and, at times, sinister and nasty activity, which often has extremely damaging human, and far-reaching societal impacts.

White-collar crime is ‘a crime committed by a person of high respectability and high social status in the course of his (or her) occupation'.

Many white-collar criminals escape punishment, and more often than not, their misguided gains are not redeemed. Where justice does follow white-collar criminals – as in the recent US prosecution of Bernie Madoff for fraud – it seems the exception rather than the rule; mainly because the costs of prosecuting are so prohibitive, and the justification for prosecuting is often so complex and morally dense, very few legislators bother.

There is an old saying: where there is money to be made, fraud is not far behind, like bees to honey. White-collar crime is enormously costly for society. In the UK, a report from the Association of Chief Police Officers revealed that, in 2007, fraud, for example, was costing the UK a huge sum – between £14bn and £20bn each year, equivalent to a loss of £330 for every UK inhabitant every year. So in the last three years, white-collar fraudsters have done me, and you, out of approximately £2,000! And mostly got away with it!

White-collar criminals are in the main sentenced, punished and perceived by the public differently to other types of criminals. The length of criminal penalties tend to be related to the degree of physical force or violence involved in a crime – rather than to the amount of monetary loss – though this does not always mean that the punishment fits the crime, as one of my examples might reveal.

For many, too, the opportunity for fraud, bribery, insider trading, embezzlement, identity theft, illegal waste dumping, forgery, fiddling expenses (all MPs note) are activities differentially distributed in society. In the age of new technologies, more and more of us are at it, and in increasingly more sophisticated and difficult to detect ways. Who has not illegally downloaded music or a movie, for example? But there are contradictions.

Some people are more vulnerable to prosecution than others. For example, each year over 700 people, mostly women, are imprisoned for not paying their TV licence fee, while our prisons remain relatively free of tax evaders. Most are living offshore anyway. In the US, in 2007, the latest figures I could find revealed that Americans owed, in tax, the equivalent of 14 per cent of federal revenues – $345bn.

In the UK, our Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has a deplorable history of failed prosecutions. And yet, in UK society, benefit fraudsters are far more likely than income tax evaders to face justice, while individuals indulging in occupational crime are more likely to face justice than corporations acting criminally, and prosecutions for state-sponsored corporate crime are very rare indeed.

Justice is still chasing those responsible for the world’s worst industrial environmental disaster – the Bhopal gas leak in India – which killed over 7,000 people, poisoned a further 500,000 and the impacts of which are still being felt today. The Indian Government estimate that a further 15,000 people have since died, and that each month 15 more people die because of the fatal legacy of toxic contamination.

In June 2009, The Congress of the United States wrote to the Chief Executive Officer of Dow Chemical Company (Dow now own Union Carbide who ran the Bhopal site at the time of the 1984 disaster):

This coming December marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India. It is with urgency that we write to urge Dow Chemical Company – which wholly owns Union Carbide – to immediately take steps towards remediation and redress. We request that Dow ensures that a representative appear in the ongoing legal cases in India regarding Bhopal, that Dow meets the demands of the survivors for medical and economic rehabilitation, and cleans up the soil and groundwater contamination in and around the factory site …

Despite repeated public requests and protests around the world, Union Carbide has refused to appear before the Bhopal District Court to face the criminal charges pending against it for the disaster. Union Carbide was served with a summons to appear in Bhopal District Court in 1992 and publicly stated it would not respond to the summons. Although Dow Chemical set aside $2.2 billion in 2002 to put towards Union Carbide's pending asbestos liabilities in the United States, it has continued to evade the liabilities it inherited from Bhopal.

So it seems the innocent victims of the worst of corporate excess imaginable can still find justice elusive.

Of course, one reason for prevarication and lack of action is that more benign treatment is possible because it is difficult to assign blame, and because prosecuting corporations can be damaging to innocent employees and shareholders, who play no part in events that could result in prosecution.

In the UK, those institutions established to protect us from white-collar crime, however mundane, have rather blemished track records. The SFO’s authority was further undermined when Tony Blair controversially decided to terminate its investigations into BAE, thus ensuring that any allegations about corporate bribery and corruption between BAE and Saudi princes could not be substantiated in law. You might want to consider this, while assessing whether you think Tony Blair is a fit and proper person when it comes to the Presidency of the European Union; he does have what might be called ‘white-collar baggage’. Even the Premier League in football seems to have more rigorous ‘fit and proper person’ tests, though even these can be circumscribed.

I was thinking about Sutherland’s definition and Tony Blair’s rumoured bid for the European Presidency afresh today, when I read about how protestors in the Medway area had defaced British Legion Poppy Appeal posters.

The poster shows Ms Wright, from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, who became one of the public faces of the Poppy Appeal after her husband, Damian, died in a roadside explosion in Afghanistan in 2007, aged 23. Of course, the nation is divided on whether Britain should be conducting a war in Afghanistan, and in this instance the message ‘prosecute Blair’ might have been better employed in reference to the invasion of Iraq – an invasion which, lacking any UN Security Council mandate, had no strict legal justification. It was not an invasion of self-defence, no matter how hard Blair tried to fudge the weapons of mass destruction issue. No weapons of mass destruction have ever been found, and the subsequent deaths, of between 100,000 and a million people (so far), is a very high price to pay for regime change. Six years after the invasion, the scars still plague the Iraqi people.

On October 26th, Foreign Secretary David Milliband, backing Blair for EU President, said the EU needed a President who was ‘a big hitter who could stop the traffic’. Blair’s role in the invasion of Iraq certainly exhibited big hitting and it did stop the traffic in many places. The bombs still destroy lives and stop the traffic across Iraq. Over 700 people were killed this week in the Green Zone in Baghdad. The traffic was not so much stopped as blown to smithereens.

Within the UK, there are, as yet, no means for bringing charges against Blair, even if a strong case could be made on legal grounds for the Iraq invasion. Yes, Blair will be called to testify at the public inquiry into the war, which begins on November 24th this year, but he will not face any retribution. In 2006, the Law Lords decided that international crimes of aggression had not been enshrined in our domestic laws

The higher your social status...the more likely you are to get away with it

But Blair would run the risk of arrest in those countries that have now incorporated international crimes of aggression under their domestic laws. So far within the EU, two countries, Latvia and Estonia, have done so. Given the cloud that still surrounds the reasons for going to war in Iraq, it might be rather risky to elect a person as President of the European Union, who could be vulnerable to prosecution within member states. Perhaps Blair should stick to being Middle East envoy, where he has made little progress, and where, after all, there is far more important work to do.

So, thinking aloud about white-collar crime can take you on a long and difficult journey, from Bhopal to Iraq, and you might conclude, like me, that not only does the punishment seldom fit the crime, but that the higher your social status, no matter how heinous the act, the more likely you are to get away with it. I mean look at Blair’s only definite ally for President among European leaders, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi…no don’t tempt me.

Find out more

• Thinking Allowed
• OpenLearn: The meaning of crime – free learning material from The Open University

About the author

Richard Skellington edits Society Matters for the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. He’s an administrator who manages the Environment, Development and International Studies programme.

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Scotland Yard
[image © copyright Mr Ush, some rights reserved]

These police officers had obviously not heard of other contributions on the theme of what constitutes a ‘civilised society’. Louis Pasteur once said that whenever he approached a child he was always inspired by two sentiments: tenderness for what the child is, and respect for what the child may become.

What could have provoked 58 separate suspicions that a child under 10 years of age could be a terror threat? If we do not stand up for children in our society, what does it say about the society in which we live? To what depths we have sunk when we resort to apprehending in London alone so many children under the age of criminal responsibility in a single year. None of the children were subsequently found to be linked to terror offences.

Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 gives police wide powers to stop and search without the need for officers to have reasonable suspicion. Further examination of the data reveals that in 2008 a massive 2,331 children aged 15 and under were apprehended under the Act, suggesting perhaps that the Metropolitan Police have been using these powers as an instrument of general policing rather than for the special purposes for which they were devised.

It can hardly foster community relations when any police force abuses its powers through stop and search measures. In 2008 alone the Metropolitan Police carried out 170,000 stop and searches using Section 44. Alas, I could not find any national data for 2008 under Section 44 of the Act, but Hansard of 10th March 2008 proved more fruitful: interestingly, in the first 6 years since the Act was introduced, only six arrests resulted from over 168,000 stop and searches. The more recent data suggests that since 2005-6 the use of Section 44 powers have escalated hugely.

New Scotland Yard argue that the searches of children aged 9 or under is justified. Indeed many people would argue that this is the price we have to pay for combating terrorism, and that children who were apprehended are more likely to have been accompanying an adult who may have aroused police suspicions. However, no child under 10 has so far been associated with terrorist activity, and none of the children apprehended -or even their relatives - have so far been charged under the Act.

This trend mirrors several practices our so-called ‘civilised society’ imposes on the rights and welfare of children. A related issue of concern is the increasing number of asylum-seeking children now detained. Again in August disturbing figures were published which revealed that in the first 6 months of 2009, 470 children were detained indefinitely without charge. Their only crime appears to have been to try and escape war, torture, violence and persecution.

In August it was revealed that over one third of these children were locked up for over one month (The Guardian, 31 August 2009). It came as a shock to discover that the United Kingdom now boasts one of the worst records in Europe for the detention of children. So, in a real way, I am no longer surprised to discover that the Metropolitan Police are using whatever legislation they can to stop and search children under the age of criminal responsibility.

It was Franklin D. Roosevelt who in his Inaugural Presidential Address in 1933 asserted his firm belief that his people had ‘nothing to fear except fear itself’. Fear is a cancer that slowly eats away at civilisation. These disturbing figures on the way we are treating children in the UK should shame us all. Sadly our society seems to be losing its capacity for compassion. We seem to be drifting remorselessly towards more brutal and racist solutions to problems that deserve a ‘civilised’ response. Looking around the political scene in the UK several months prior to the formation of a new Government it is disturbing to find that few politicians seem to either be aware of the problem or care much for the implications. Children are the best resource we have. We must stop abusing them.

About the author

Richard Skellington edits Society Matters for the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. He’s an administrator who manages the Environment, Development and International Studies programme.

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Drinking in a bar

At home we seem to binge drink all-year round, if we are to believe the more sensational reports of the tabloid red tops. Britain now has binge drinking etched throughout its national rock. Now our binge drinking culture – not simply confined to holidays, football matches, and stag and hen parties - has become an export industry as wave upon wave of British tourists head for the Mediterranean and the urban centres of old and new Europe opened up by low-price air fares. The British binge drinking culture has even reached Dubai where a surge in British arrests has been reported since 2007.

Newspaper headlines tackle the problem with gusto and relish!

• 'Brits behaving badly: they came, they drank, they peed'
• 'Brit teenagers are the binge-drinking champions of Europe'
• 'Curse of the boozy Britons'
• 'Arrests up among British travelling abroad'
• 'Wish you weren‘t here, Greece tells tourists'

In late July this year the Foreign Office urged UK holidaymakers to curb their alcohol consumption and avoid the risks of travelling abroad. The campaign warned Brits that there was 'another side to paradise' and drew attention to the dangers they may encounter. For some it could be a night in the cells. For others it could mean hospital, or worse. This week, in Greece, a Greek woman was accused of setting fire to a British tourist after he allegedly pulled down his trousers in front of her. Drink less and you improve your prospects of not becoming a victim is the Foreign Office mantra.

I have friends who plan their holidays around those times when it is more likely that their historic cultural destination will not be invaded by drunken British tourists. I am always impressed on holiday in Italy, especially in Sardinia, how different cultures generate completely acceptable behaviour in young and old alike rather than the boorish British excess of rowdy drunkenness. Is it any wonder that our European neighbours are becoming increasingly more unwelcoming?

The Foreign Office campaign, aimed mainly at 18-30 holidaymakers, distributed leaflets and posters across the tourist hot spots of Europe, especially new destinations such as the Baltic States and Turkey, and the more familiar sun-seeking paradises of Spain and Greece.The leaflets urge holidaymakers to 'know their limits'. Flyers, beer mats and business cards reading ‘If you drink too much, things can get out of control’ have been handed out to British tourists on Greek islands as part of the campaign.

The Foreign Office has also funded English lessons for police officers in Greece, where 70 per cent of consulate cases involve British tourists who have got into difficulty, including in May this year, a group of men dressed in Nun habits who were arrested for baring their bottoms in Crete. According to Foreign Office data, 16 to 20-year olds represent a third of all Britons visiting Greece, but account for more than 70 per cent of Britain’s annual 800-900 consular cases there. Even tee-shirt companies have muscled in on the market.

Greece’s conservative government vowed to clean up resorts last year, saying much drink-related misconduct was due to profit-hungry bar owners supplying tourists with drinks adulterated with industrial alcohol. This export industry works both ways. The downside to a thriving local economy fueled by British tourist currency is the problems which often come with drunken behaviour, and the cost of coping with it, which according to one authoritative source now is as high as £100bn a year.

A range of European capitals have also suffered during 2009. Historic monuments seem to attract some of the worst activity. On August 6^th the Mayor of the Latvian capital of Riga added his name to a long list of exasperated civic leaders, when he said, after a group of British tourists urinated against the city’s Monument of Freedom: ‘stag parties urinating against the country’s most revered national monument was particularly offensive’.

This episode is yet another example of the way some British tourists show disrespect to other cultures. The Monument to Freedom commemorates Latvian dead in the struggle for independence and is a symbol of resistance during Soviet rule. ‘It’s sacred to Latvians’, explained the Mayor, ‘even the Soviets daren’t touch it.’ And if that is good enough for the Soviets, no enemy to alcoholic excess themselves, it should be good enough for the rest of us. Riga is just one destination in new Europe opened up by cheap flights to old Europe. Most of the tourists who visit east European capitols are British. The exasperated mayor of Riga concluded: ‘If we had other tourists, then British visitors who **** about all of the time would not be as noticeable.’

The latest Foreign Office data published in 2008 shows the scale of the problem. As tourist destinations widen so too does the problem of British drinking behaviour. Arrests in Spain and Greece for binge drinking are rapidly increasing. In France, British arrests rose by over 42 per cent in a single year and in Spain there was a 33 per cent increase.

What are the reasons for these increasing tends? No doubt they are culturally and socially rooted, and complex. The Institute of Alcohol Studies (IAS) published research this year suggesting the problem is a domestic one. We are simply exporting abroad a British phenomenon. In the last 10 years binge drinking in the UK among girls, for example, has increased so much that the UK now ranks second to Denmark in the girl binge drinking European league table. IAS estimate the cost of British drinking behaviour abroad now exceeds 125 billion Euros a year.

Another survey by the health charity Developing Patient Partnerships (DPP) revealed over a quarter of Britons drank alcohol with the sole intention of ‘getting drunk’, and the proportion doubled for those in the 18-24 year old age group. The IAS report recommends raising taxation, and raising the price of alcohol, curbing the power of supermarkets to sell strong alcohol cheaply, ending happy hours, placing greater investment in public education and increasing voluntary partnerships to ensure a greater understanding and respect for overseas cultures. In the UK alone, Government figures suggest that between 5 and 9 million UK children are living in families damaged by alcohol while nearly 10,000 UK deaths occur each year to bystanders and passengers from drink-driving.

Of course, Britain is not alone of course in having a drink problem. Alcohol misuse is a problem in many states in the European Union. But I do not see groups of European nationals indulging in group alcoholic excess while holidaying in Britain. Alcohol fuelled anti-social behaviour seems increasingly attached to British tourism. The victims can be the perpetrators but more often than not it is the host community that has to bear the full impact.

Find out more: Alcohol and human health

About the author

Richard Skellington edits Society Matters for the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. He’s an administrator who manages the Environment, Development and International Studies programme.

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Britain is perceived as becoming more and more corrupt according to the anti-corruption group

With increasing sleaze enveloping the Brown Government during 2009 at the peak of the recession, it is worth reminding ourselves of the findings of the corruption league table for nations, as produced each year by Transparency International. Their latest report was published before the scandal broke over the Prime Minister’s advisor’s email crisis in April 2009, before the controversy around MP second home allowances and before the fall out from the politician expenses furore this month.

Britain is perceived as becoming more and more corrupt according to the anti-corruption group. As examples Transparency International referred to Britain’s ‘wretched and woeful record’ in prosecuting business executives for paying bribes to foreign politicians and officials to win contracts, the plethora of political scandals about ‘cash for honours’ and the government’s decision to drop the investigation into allegations that BAE paid bribes to Saudi royals. These events contributed to a significant increase in the perceived level of corruption in Britain, with a corresponding fall from 12^th to 16^th place in the world corruption rankings between 2007 and 2008. This is the UK’s worst performance since 1995 when records began.

The survey, which focused upon how we are perceived by people in other countries, revealed that Denmark, New Zealand and Sweden shared top spot, followed by Singapore, Finland and Switzerland, with Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Burma and Somalia in the bottom five of 180 nations. The higher the corruption perception score, the lower the perceived degree of corruption within a country. In global terms it seems Britain compares relatively well but there are obvious grounds for improvement, even more so now that the world media have feasted on the slow seeping of allegations about the conduct of not so ‘honourable’ Members from all parties.

Britain’s ‘wretched and woeful record’ in prosecuting business executives

Remarkably, since Britain signed an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development global anti-corruption treaty in 1997, we have prosecuted only one person for bribing an official from another government. The Department of Business defended the government’s record in February this year, explaining that twenty bribery cases were currently being investigated following the only solitary successful prosecution in September 2008.

Is it therefore surprising that a government so reluctant to prosecute corruption turns a blind eye to failures of its own, even though, as MPs painfully keep repeating, they were only following guidelines; guidelines of course they themselves set. The herd instinct can have dangerous repercussions where integrity and honesty are questioned.

National media have been rightly appalled at the scale of the exposed expense racket. Whether it be to claim for second homes close to their first home, in one case a mere 100 yards from the second property, or to conveniently change the status of homes to suit their financial best interests, or make claims for repairs and maintenance on properties owned outright by a third party, MPs have badly exceeded the spirit of the guidelines. They have endorsed Gibbons but taken no notice of Eden’s warning.

But I was more concerned about claims for more everyday items, those items which you and I can only purchase with our own salaries.

These items include:

• Five pence for a carrier bag from a supermarket
• Christmas tree decorations
• Light bulbs
• Bin liners
• Lavatory seats
• Tampons
• Chandeliers
• Remembrance Day wreaths
• Lawnmowers and lawnmower repairs
• Moat maintenance
• Swimming pool cleaning
• Dog food
• Dog enclosure
• Chauffeurs
• An ironing board
• Slotted spoons
• Comics
• Nappies
• The removal of moles from a lawn
• Pipe repairs under a tennis court
• Sky sport subscriptions
• A pram
• Hanging baskets
• An IKEA bathrobe
• Mock Tudor beams
• Food when the Commons is no longer sitting
• Council tax discounts
• Coat hangers
• Sachets of mulled wine
• A mousetrap
• A lemon
• A wooden spoon
• A plug

Not to mention the John Lewis shopping list of Plasma television sets, furniture and fittings. Seriously, I ask you, since when is having a clean moat vital in order to be an effective Member of Parliament? And consider the other side of privilege - pensioners struggling on benefits or injured UK soldiers in hospital having to pay to watch television.

According to the Independent, Labour MPs have just been sent an email from the parliamentary Labour party informing them that media reports suggesting that ‘MPS are generally claiming excessively’ are not true. Some experts tell us the expense rip off is because we now have a ‘professional’ politician at Westminster. But I think this insults the integrity of many professionals working in Britain.

What seems clear is that the rising scandal over expenses damages the integrity of our political system. As Transparency International warned us last year we had already begun to slip down the corruption credibility league. I can imagine we may sink without trace once this lot is sorted out. If I were you check the Transparency International website next February and see where Britain has come in 2009. Out of the top thirty is my bet. For a Government obsessed with league tables this CPI league table is one the Government will want to hide from view.

By then of course we might have an ‘independent’ panel assessing all MP claims or a different system to fund second homes but something in what Ghandi told us persuades me that the next generation of MPs may find a way round even the most zealous of watchdogs. Give them a moral compass and they still would want to claim for it.

It gives me no pleasure at all to reflect that while many of these MPs may indeed lose their seats in the General Election of 2010 because of excessive expense claims a few will get to keep those lavatory seats we have paid for.

About the author

Richard Skellington edits Society Matters for the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. He’s an administrator who manages the Environment, Development and International Studies programme.

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Rose.
[image © copyright Photos.com]

How much do you care about where your rose came from? Do you consider if the rose has been produced in poor working conditions where the rights of workers have been violated for miniscule pay? Do you think about the huge carbon footprint of that single rose? It has probably flown thousands of miles to reach your flower retailer.

Trouble is for lovers cut flowers on St Valentine’s Day often come with a cost that can be measured in human terms by workers poisoned by insecticides who toil long hours in appalling conditions to satisfy our annual desire to say ‘I love you’ .

There are environmental downsides too as more and more land is irrigated to produce flowers for western tastes with a damaging impact on water tables. The land used for flower cultivation is often rich arable land or is land reclaimed after deforestation. In Ecuador alone over 5,000 hectares of farm land now is developed for rose cultivation.

As our demand for cut roses increases at lower prices, so does competition among developing countries to supply them. Warmer climates and lower labour costs have taken producers away from Europe in favour of Latin America and Africa where controls on pesticides are more relaxed.

Americans for example purchase £6.4 billion worth of stems and bouquets each year The Society of American Florists estimated that 215 million roses were sold last St Valentine’s Day. Over 9 out of 10 cut flowers to the US came from Columbia or Ecuador.

Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Peru, Argentina and Chile now vie with Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Namibia, South Africa and Nigeria to fill the vases of North America and Europe. More of our flowers, especially for St Valentine Day, are produced in Ecuador, Columbia or Kenya, grown by workers exposed to daily doses of damaging chemicals, all for less than 1p each. Two-thirds of workers - 80 per cent of whom are women - have skin disorders, breathing difficulties or neurological problems. Some also suffer miscarriages or give birth to deformed babies.

Ecuador is the leading exporter of roses in the world, mainly to the US and Western Europe. Heavily restricted chemicals banned in industrialized countries are used in rose cultivation. Deregulation has resulted in increased pollution to lakes, rivers and streams as more toxic chemicals are used in production: some, methylbromide for example, can degrade the ozone layer.

In the chilling words of a World Resources Institute report we read that in Costa Rica, greenhouse workers treat flowers and ornamental plants with extremely toxic insecticides and nematicides that include methyl parathion, terbufos, and aldicarb, all compounds whose use in North America is restricted because of the health hazard they pose. A wide array of other pesticides with known health risks is also used. These include fungicides which are suspected carcinogens, and herbicides such as paraquat, which is extremely toxic through any route of exposure.

A bouquet of flowers leaves a high lifecycle carbon footprint. Conservative estimates suggest that the air transportation to the United States alone creates 3.1 pounds of carbon per bouquet - and that does not include carbon released via constant refrigeration, by distribution within the US, in production, or in the manufacture of fertilizers, pesticides, and other chemical agents.

In Columbia, food that Colombia used to produce has to be imported because workers concentrate on flowers instead. The story is similar in Kenya, another major producer. Although flower workers still earn a fraction of their European counterparts, the pay in producing flowers is relatively good, so they abandon traditional crops to grow flowers. In Africa this labour shift has had a damaging effect on water tables. In some cases, irrigation canals necessary for other crops are neglected because everyone is working for the flower producer.

Only a fraction of the eventual price of flowers ever actually gets back to the workers, the vast majority of income goes to the dealers and middlemen. The growers get very little.

In 2002, The International Labour Organisation introduced an international code for the production of cut flowers (PDF) which covers workers rights to join trade unions, equality of treatment, the payment of a living wage, a maximum 48 hour working week, improved health and safety policies, a moratorium on pesticide reduction, an attempt to safeguard the environment, and an end to forced labour and child labour practices.

The trouble is the code is easily sidestepped while some clauses are so vague they are difficult to police. For example the environment code states: ‘Companies should make every effort to protect the environment and the residential areas, avoid pollution and implement sustainable use of natural resources (water, soil, air, etc.)’ The code is a worthy document, but it is a mission statement without teeth. But at least it represented a first attempts to improve conditions and impose regulation.

There are a number of standards that indicate producers have signed up to the ILO code of conduct. So if you see labels which show flowers are certified by FLP - Flower Label Program or Fairness in Flowers, you can be assured your rose is more likely to have been produced in a fair, safe and environmentally sound way. Me? Well I try and get my flowers from eco-sustainable websites, such as the numerous Fairtrade sites now flourishing on the web.

Mind you they do not come cheap.

But, if this is too late for this year, maybe next time you buy flowers, check the information on the supermarket label if I were you.

Find out more

Roses smell like… highlighting the issues surrounding rose farming in Ecuador (powerpoint file)

Roses, Colombia, Exports, Trade Disputes and Drugs, by Julissa Castellanos

How to green your Valentine's Day

£2 Valentine flowers poverty alert

About the author

Richard Skellington edits Society Matters for the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. He’s an administrator who manages the Environment, Development and International Studies programme.

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I say, I say, I say. Latest news, the Isle of Dogs Building Society has collapsed. They've called in the retrievers. Have you heard this one? A masked man holds a bank cashier up with a gun. He says: 'I don't want any money - I just want you to start lending to each other’.

Boo-boom!

Sorry, it’s the way I tell ‘em. Let’s start again.

Les Dennis in pantomime.
[image © copyright BBC]

What have Captain Hook, the Wicked Fairy, Cinderella’s stepmother, the Evil Baron, King Rat, the Evil Wizard, the Giant, the Sheriff of Nottingham, and the Wicked Queen got in common? This Christmas, whatever your panto and wherever it is in the land, the villain is more likely to be portrayed as a banker. Let’s hear it for the Lehman Brothers as the Ugly Sisters. Just think of poor little Goldilocks lost in the Bear Market being pursued by three nasty brokers! And think of poor Puss trying to pay those prices in Boots! Don’t forget to boo and hiss!

This Christmas it will be the banker who will be lurking menacingly behind the principal boy who will be played by a vulnerable single parent recently evicted for falling behind with her mortgage.

So when Dick Whittington pops onto stage left with Tommy the Cat at his feet, Dick is more likely to ask the audience:

What’s the difference between a merchant banker and a pigeon?
A pigeon can still make a deposit on a BMW.

And then, not to be outdone, up purrs Tommy with this one to the Gods:

What’s the difference between an investment banker and a large pizza?
A large pizza can feed a family of four.

Boo-boom!

How we’ll all cheer when master villain King Rat gets utterly custard pied by Tommy the cat and Dick gets a tracker mortgage with a Bank of England interest rate and returns home to marry Alice and live happily ever after in a nice semi in Sidcup.

For this year it’s the bankers who will be getting the slap and stick. So let’s hear the cheering throughout the land. Rejoice. Whatever the panto you can cajole your kids into heckling: ‘come on you bankers pass the interest rate cuts on to me mum and dad!’. This year’s panto season promises to be a hoot. I mean who would want to trade places with the head banker at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS)? I can just imagine the chorus singing ‘I’m a Banker, Get Me Out of Here!’.

No really. There is nothing more likely to get us chuckling in the Gods than the bankers getting their comeuppance. The suffering proletariat have had it so bad. We need a little bit of festive humour to roll back the impact of the credit crunch with its rising mortgage debt, repossessions soaring 70 per cent compared to the same quarter last year, the lowest pound since 1992, and with unemployment expected to top 3 million before the next panto season.

To the nation this parsimony sums up the public image of an already discredited menagerie of fat cats. Since the bail-outs the banks have done little to improve their stock by helping those whose money – what’s left of it – keeps them in offshore accounts and Christmas parties.

Politicians too can expect a panto drubbing after allowing banks to profit enormously in a deregulated culture for so many years, and lending poor Red Riding Hood a 130 per cent mortgage. It is not for nothing the phrase 'Houses of Parliament' is an anagram of 'shameful operations'!

At the King’s Head in London, Dick Whittington’s nemesis King Rat is a banker and property developer intent on bringing the economy of the paradise island of Gran Canaria to its knees. The audience will wince as the shameless speculator greedily buys up property, lends money to local businesses and causes havoc when he calls in the loans and buys the island’s central bank. On the way he evicts the show’s Dame from her bar and sells off the premises as luxury flats. Now where have we heard that one before?

It is hardly surprising this festive season will witness pantomimes all over the country revising their storylines and casting the evil villain as a banker, updating daily as the credit crunch unfolds. Since ancient Greek and Roman times panto script writers have had a keen eye for contemporary events. Pantomimes have always told morality tales. And who can blame the script writers with the banks so reluctant to pass on any good news as they use Government bail outs to restructure their own finances with little thought for the rest of us. Never has A Christmas Carol been more relevant. Scrooge is so 2008.

Here’s Dick again:

Talked to my bank manager the other day and he said he was going to concentrate on the big issues from now on.
He sold me one outside KFC yesterday.

The Gods groan in disapproval.

But Tommy the Cat soon wins them over with a real Christmas cracker!

What’s the capital of Iceland?

Shouts Tommy!

About £3.50.

But should your panto fail to cheer this Christmas remember the old saying.

What’s the definition of optimism?
A banker who irons 5 shirts on a Sunday.

About the author

Richard Skellington edits Society Matters for the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. He’s an administrator who manages the Environment, Development and International Studies programme.

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If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin - Charles Darwin

As Governments worldwide commit billions upon billions of currency to save the banks and our national and international financial systems, spare a thought today for the humble poor. Last week Prime Minister Gordon Brown committed £500 billion to save our struggling banking sector from its own greed and avarice. Of course you could argue that if the international financial system collapses, the poor will be poorer, and there will be far more of them, but it is strange how governments - when pushed by uncontrollable forces which threaten their future - are spurred into desperate action.

Our world leaders have shown far greater alacrity in resolving the banking crisis than they did during the Making Poverty History campaign this time last year. Will the poor, as the Bible remarked, "always be with us" (John 12:8)?

In a world where food costs are spiralling their prospects appear bleak. Earlier this year, before the implosion of the world’s financial systems, the OECD reported that many developed countries had already cut back on their foreign aid budgets. When the going gets tough in the West the developing world is often is the victim. In times like these the words of 2006 Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus ring true:

‘poverty has been created by the economic and social system that we have designed for the world. It is the institutions that we have built and feel so proud of, which created poverty for them.’

Two months ago the World Bank warned that the world’s poor were far greater in numbers than they first estimated. The Bank shifted the poverty line from a dollar a day to a dollar twenty five cents. It is amazing what adding a ‘quarter’ does to the projections: a mere 25 cents plunges a further 500,000 million people in the developing world into poverty. Thus it was that the World Bank’s new estimate of its poor rose in August from 985 million people to 1.4 billion people. This new estimate does not take into account the recent increases in food and fuel prices.

Oxfam, commenting on the World Bank figures, warned that a further 100 million people in the developing world could be forced into poverty by the increase in food prices. They also warned, in respect to the lack of progress on African poverty, that the pledges made by world leaders at the Gleneagles summit in 2005 to double aid to the continent by 2010 were unlikely to be met. The new estimates also take no account of the impact of the world financial crisis in the coming months on the vulnerable developing world where debt repayment to the West is a huge concern.

In early October, when Dick Fuld the chief executive of Lehman Brothers - the investment bank whose collapse did so much to trigger the crisis in world financial systems - was quizzed by Congressional leaders, he did not spare a thought for those billion people living in the world today on around a dollar a day. No. He talked about his compensation package. Defending accusations of a $500 million dollar pay off he contested its size: "The $500m number is not accurate, although it is still a large number," he told an angry Congress hearing. Wait a minute, 500 million dollars! That is one dollar for every human being in the developing world who have now been added to the poverty index.

The World Bank’s grim forecast revealed world poverty to be more persistent than at first thought. There is, however, some positive news.

Given the increase in world population, the rate of world poverty has fallen substantially from 50% to 25% over the past 25 years. But the number of people in poverty has increased. In Africa, between 1981 and 2005, the number of people in poverty rose from 200 million to 380 million, with the average poor person living on around 70 cents a day.

Unlike other regions of the world, the rate of African poverty has remained the same, around 50% of the continent’s population remained in poverty in 2005, compared to 1981. In Asia, however, the rate of poverty has fallen since 1981, from 60% to 40%. Asia is home to 595 million people living in poverty; 455 million of its poor live in India.

In China, poverty has fallen dramatically, from 835 million in 1981 to 207 million people in 2005. Its rate of poverty fell massively from 85%to 15%. The World Bank estimate that China alone almost accounted for all the reduction in world poverty since 1981.

World poverty, excluding China, dropped from 4 out of 10 people to 3 out of 10 people during the same period. According to the World Bank the world is still on track to halve the 1990 poverty rate by 2015. But at the current rate of progress, about a billion people will still live below $1.25 a day in 2015, and some areas, such as Sub Saharan Africa, will be acutely affected. [The World Bank’s new poverty line of $1.25 per day in 2005 is equivalent to its $1 per day poverty line introduced in 1981 after adjustment for inflation.]

Elsewhere, especially in those middle income countries where the World Bank uses a poverty line of $2 a day the poverty rate has indeed fallen. Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa have improved but not enough to bring down their total number of poor. The $2 a day poverty rate has increased in Eastern Europe and Central Asia though these areas showed some small signs of progress since the late 1990s.

We live in a world in which ten children die every minute from malnutrition, where 10.7 million children never live to see their fifth birthday, and where 4 out of 10 human beings have no access to basic sanitation. These are all avoidable statistics.

Meeting the United Nations’ millennium goal to halve the proportion of people in the world without access to clean water would cost $4 billion dollars a year for the next decade. Four billion dollars is roughly what Europe’s population spends each month on bottled water.

As the world struggles to understand why the financial systems have failed so abjectly, it is worth remembering the words of Dean Hirsch. On September 28, 2008, the President of World Vision International reminded the West that there was a possibility of them failing to fulfil the Millennium goals set in 2000 to help the world’s poorest people. He declared:

‘Our collective challenge – governments, the private sector, humanitarian organizations, civil society groups and others – is to remedy a gross violation of the most basic rights – to clean water, adequate food, basic health care – that currently leads to millions of children and women dying annually from easily preventable causes. This is a moral imperative. Every child who dies in extreme poverty represents an unacceptable loss of human potential.’

Some may, of course, choose to write to Dick Fuld, to advise him what he could do with his compensation package.

This blog is part of Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty

About the author

Richard Skellington edits Society Matters for the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. He’s an administrator who manages the Environment, Development and International Studies programme.

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The silly season is defined by the emergence of frivolous news stories in the media. You know the kind of thing I mean, ‘Killer Skunks Invade London’ and B grade celebrities eating pet hamsters. Brewers’ dictionary defines a silly season as ‘the part of the year when Parliament and the Law Courts are not sitting (about August and September)’. To this I would add academics at the Open University.

Bizarrely in other countries - such as Holland, Poland, Hungary and Norway - the silly season is called ‘cucumber time’. Cucumber time is actually derived form an old English expression while in Finland silly season literally means a ‘rotting month story’. I am not a cucumber grower but I gather that at this time of the year cucumbers are ripening nicely on a million allotments. But enough of gardening, lets get back to frivolity.

When I was a lad we would play board games at Christmas. Monopoly usually ended with mum repossessing the game after an outbreak of world war three, so we turned to Cluedo, the board game where Mrs Peacock was murdered in the library with a spanner there would be five characters, including the more easily obtainable academic Professor Plum, in search of an alibi. How sad therefore to learn this cucumber time that Colonel Mustard and his friends have been rebranded and redesigned for the 21^st century, or as Cluedo aficionados might observe, mass murdered in the ballroom.

Playing Cluedo.
[image by NicholasWatts, some rights reserved]

Of course Cluedo was old fashioned and stuffy: all those murders in the drawing room of the big country house. In our house we simply had one room and an outside toilet. One of the enchanting aspects of the game was that it showed the poor how the upper crust lived as we poor ate our post war rations. Now, fifty nine years after its launch in 1949, Colonel Mustard, the Reverend Green, Professor Plum, Miss Scarlett, Mrs Peacock,and Mrs White, are gone, their lives cut short by the manufacturer Hasbro’s branding department’s blinkered marketing gurus, probably with an axe.

This Christmas, should you purchase Cluedo for your loved ones it will be with a new cast of characters and a more contemporary manner of execution. Colonel Mustard and his colleagues have been replaced by, among others people, a film star and a computer game billionaire. Admittedly their surnames will survive, but that is all. Status and class, cultural background and values, each have been transformed. Stripped of their titles the characters have been given Christian names in an attempt to make the new creations more accessible in a kind of dubious 21^st century celebrity make-over.

I was always attracted to the characters. Did you have a favourite? I did. Mine was the Reverend Green who I imagined was like my vicar, but straighter, if you get my drift. But now the Reverend Green has morphed into a fixer named Jacob Green. How unattractive is that? Poor Colonel Mustard has been reduced to more humble circumstances and now prances about the library as Jack Mustard, footballer pundit. The mysterious Mrs Peacock has become Eleanor Peacock, the cold and calculating daughter of a politician.

Miss Scarlett, who I always imagined being played by Diano Dors is now reincarnated as Kasandra Scarlett, yes with a ‘K’; an A-list movie star who probably does soft porn on the side in the billiard room.  

And poor old Professor Plum, who I could imagine easily being employed by the kipper tie set at the Open University forty years ago, has been reinvented as a self-made video-game design billionaire who, according to the marketing gurus at Hasbro, moved out of the dingy basement and into the ‘In Crowd’, whoever they are. The new Plum looks straight out of The Apprentice, with a heart of stone.

Alas poor old Colonel Mustard is no more. The great white hunter and colonial buffoon. The military man with a European heritage and a tendency for botching things, both dignified and dangerous, has mutated into an ex professional footballer though with the taste in fashion he shows it is not surprising that he failed to make the grade at United.

It is my favourite, the Reverend Green, who has experienced the most comprehensive make-over. He has been 'minoritised' into black British Jacob Green, financial fixer extraordinaire. Mrs White, however, remains Mrs White, but is now called Diane.

Instead of the study Cluedo enthusiasts may find themselves lost in an alien environment while the weapons themselves have been ‘brought up to date’. The olde English country house has been transformed into a luxury modern home straight out of Footballer’s Wives with a film theatre, spa, boardroom and patio. 

Murderers can now choose an axe, baseball bat or a dumb-bell in addition to those old favourites the rope, the revolver, the candlestick and surprisingly, given the soaring real-life rise in lead thefts in the Home Counties, the good old lead piping which as any connoisseur of assassination will tell you the outcome is best achieved by putting the lead pipe in an old fashioned leg warmer and whack! Silent but very deadly. And the dagger? That remains. Given the escalation in knife crime in our urban conurbations at least this new Cluedo will sell in spades in London and Manchester.

But there is more: and worse. An attempt has been made to render these new characters more life-like and human by giving them a special skill to try and fit the character with the most appropriate skill to the stiffening corpse in the conservatory. I guess the ex-footballer is an easy set up for dispatching the man-eating Kasandra in the gym with the dumb bell.

Characters have also been permitted the ability to strike again at any point in the game adding an element of suspense as players try and dodge the body count. This Hasbro reassures will increase tempo and drama. It sounds as if the makers have been watching every episode of Midsomer Murders. I am sure the prospect will fascinate Morse and Columbo enthusiasts.

Call me sentimental and old fashioned dear reader but all these changes are enough to make any grown child weep. But worry not. Be comforted. I was going to write about the Beast of Bodmin Moor, crop circles, and your own worst nightmare story: Eurowasps make a Beeline for Britain. What’s this in The Sun? Victor Meldrew Found in Space. Oh, that was August 9^th, 2005.

Enjoy the cucumber harvest.

About the author

Richard Skellington edits Society Matters for the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. He’s an administrator who manages the Environment, Development and International Studies programme.

Subscribe to Richard Skellington's posts