Monthly Archives: April 2020

Ted Knight, who died on March 29 aged 86, was a divisive figure even in the Labour movement.

He led Lambeth council from 1978 to 1985 and spearheaded its defiance of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had attempted to cap local government spending.

He refused and persuaded his 31 Labour colleagues to do so. Ultimately, they all ended up being disqualified fromelected public office for the rest of their lives.

John McDonnell, ex-Shadow Chancellor, described his old friend last week as one of the finest and most courageous socialists I have known.

Norwood resident Mr Knight had been politically active from his childhood in the North-East.

His father, who was in the Royal Navy, encouraged Ted to hand out leaflets for Clement Attlees Labour Party at the post-war General Election. Knight joined the Labour Party League of Youth in 1949.

He was expelled from the party in 1954 for being a member of the Socialist Labour League, which associated with Trotskyists and organising a meeting on the abolition of the monarchy.

He was finally re-admitted in 1970 and told the admissions panel he wasa Marxist.

And he was soon secretary of Lewisham Trades Council. He became a councillor in Norwood in 1974 and by 1978 was the leader of Lambeth council.

Mr Knight quit his job as a contracts manager of a cleaning firm to work at the council full-time.

He led the council on a 60 a week the allowance for attending committee meetings and drove a 12-year-old Rover car.

He said: When you are in control of a 150million budget it is nonsense to suggest that you can do it in your spare time.

Knight founded the weekly Labour Herald in 1981, along with Ken Livingstone, then leader of the Greater London Council, and Matthew Warburton, the deputy leader of Lambeth.

In his memoirs, Mr Livingstone said Knight had an impeccable haircut, immaculate clothes and class-based approach to politics.

The Conservative landslide at the 1979 General Election meant both sides took up entrenched positions but Thatcher had the power to impose the law.

In 1984, she decided to cap local government spending through the Rates Act. Scores of Labour councils initially resisted but in the end only Liverpool, led by the notorious Derek Hatton, and Lambeth stood their ground.

Mr Knight dubbed Red Ted by Thatchers supporters in the national press refused to abide by the capped rate in 1985, because it would have meant massive cuts to services.

The district auditor notified him and the 31 others that he intended to fine them 125,000 for the debts run up when they refused to set a legal rate.

Mr Knight said: We intend to fight. We wont concede. We wont because we cannot concede if we are really representatives of working class people in this area.

In the end, the money was raised by Labour party members.

The Department of the Environment, which funded up to 75 per cent of local government spending at the time, in the end found the money to sustain Lambeth spending at its existing levels for a year.

But many of his party colleagues complained that his activities as Lambeth leader divided the party, made it unelectable and paved the way for Conservative dominance for the next 11 years.

Former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was his agent when he stood in Hornsey in 1979. He said last week: We were and remained very different characters. But it never stopped us from working together across London.

His leadership of Lambeth council was legendary. He stood up to the Thatcher Government and improved public services to meet the needs of working people. The establishment made him pay a huge price by trying to bankrupt him. But he was not deterred by this and spent his life campaigning for socialism.

Mr McDonnell said: Ted Knight was one of the finest and most courageous socialists I have known. He was indefatigable in his campaign for a society based upon equality, social justice and solidarity.

No matter what was thrown against him, he stood firm in his beliefs.

He devoted his life to the greatest cause there is, humanity.

Len McCluskey, the general secretary of the union Unite, said: Ted was a true spirit and a fierce fighter for his class.I have been proud to know Ted for many years, and to have been inspired by his leadership and socialist convictions.

Ted will be much missed but in offering our sincere condolences to his family and friends on behalf of Unite, I hope the admiration and respect so many have for Ted will be of comfort. Goodbye my friend.

Ed Hall, from Blackheath and former secretary of Lambeth Unison, said: At his peak, he could come across as haughty, even dictatorial. But I personally think he was astonishingly selfless and brave.

It was obvious his career would be destroyed by his rebellion in a way which Margaret Hodge and Ken Livingstone would never have been able to stomach.

But it did not seem to bother Ted that he would be in the shadows.

I was always astounded he managed to persuade 31 other Labour colleagues to follow him when the same fate awaited them. Where some politicians are looking for advancement, he did the opposite.

He helped keep youth clubs and libraries going and supported the gay and feminist movements when they were unfashionable.

And I cannot think of anyone like him who could turn around a cold community hall meeting of hostile people.

Mr Knight was also co-founder and chairman of the Croydon Assembly organisation, which staged regular meetings and rallies at Ruskin House over the past decade.

He also became chairman of Gipsy Hill Labour Party branch in 2016.

A memorial meeting will be organised later in the year.

Go here to see the original:

South London Memories: Ted Knight, divisive figure and political activist in the Labour Movement - London News Online

The mainstream conversation around mental health in the U.S.and throughout much of the Western worldfocuses on the relatively mild afflictions of the decently well-off. Sometimes, during times of fear and crisis, cynical politicians may zero in on the possible mental illness of individuals who commit acts of mass violence. But rarely do we talk about conditions of those with severe mental illness who, instead of receiving compassionate lifelong care, are usually tossed into prisons and onto the streets, typically out of view of those of us who can waltz in and out of psychologists offices as regular or occasional acts of self-care.

Psychiatrist and filmmaker Dr. Ken Rosenbergs latest documentary, Bedlam, premiering on PBS April 13, asks the American public to seriously contend with the extreme neglect and punitive measures Los Angeles County, as well as the rest of the country, has leveraged against those who most desperately need consistent and competent care. To do this, Rosenberg fuses both the personal story of his own sisters struggle with schizophrenia (and his subsequent choice to pursue a career in psychiatry) and the stories of several patients and their families who are routed in and out of the overburdened emergency psychiatric healthcare system.

Long-term care for those with severe mental illnessparticularly among the poor and working classhas essentially been eradicated from the U.S. in the decades since the middle of the last century, as mental health institutionalization became seen as inhumaneand many of the practices in most institutions werethe U.S. government, under JFK (whose own severely mentally ill sister was irrevocably harmed by a lobotomy), decided to turn patients out into society with little or no support. Instead of reimagining what compassionate lifetime care for those who needed it could look like, the state and federal government decided it would be easier to take the laissez-faire route.

Dr. Rosenberg wasnt originally going to include his family and sisters story, and in the film, you can tell that the rehashing he does is painful. I intended to make a film that had nothing to do with me. [A film] that would show life in the emergency room, because thats always interesting and exciting. But it was not really fair to the viewers because they wouldnt know why I was there and why I was doing it, Dr. Rosenberg explained. When you film someone in the emergency room, you get a glimpse of someone in a moment in time, but its not really the whole picture. You dont know what theyre like when theyre well, with their family, at work; theres so much you dont know about them.

But the effect is one of visible solidarity with his subjects: Bedlam doesnt gawk at or scrutinize the people with mental illness it encounters or their families; instead, the film becomes a charged vessel for action. I felt that to really do justice to the subjects in the film, Id really have to go to homes and collaborate with them and find them, said Dr. Rosenberg. And the beauty of filmmaking is in doing that, I found Patrisse, Montes sister, who ended up being one of the worlds foremost activists by the time the film was over.

That is Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Movement for Black Lives and member of prison abolition organization JusticeLA (shes also a writer on the Hulu show Good Trouble). Her brother, Monte, goes in and out of the ER and prison due to his schizoaffective and bipolar disorders, and Patrisses lifelong activism coalesces around the act of caring and thus advocating for him. We first meet Monte in 2013, in the psych ER, where he is kind, energetic, and also in the middle of an episodehe had previously stopped taking his medication, and is having visions of fantastical horned adversaries.

Patrisse understands that caring for her brother will be lifetime workand its work shes honored to do. In the film, she explains that when her brother was first diagnosed, she made the decision she would never let his condition negatively affect how she sees him. Its a theoretically simple sentiment, but one you see play out in the documentary in incredible ways. Monte is a big black man, and so racismwherein he is seen as a threat to the state not only because of his illness but because of his racial identitybecomes yet another preexisting condition. So, in co-founding the Movement for Black Lives and JusticeLA, Patrisse had the question of mental illness at the front of her mind.

For a number of reasons, there dont seem to be a huge number of people who are (currently) able or willing to show up for severely mentally ill family members and friends with the same solidarity and acceptance (not to mention the degree of advocacy) that Patrisse offers to her brother Monte and others. Dr. Rosenbergs own family story shows how this widespread reality is not necessarily due to a lack of love but because both our social fabric and the provisional mental healthcare system we have are designed to undermine or prevent any and all love expressed between the severely mentally ill and their communities.

Because of Monte and Patrisse, as well as Todda middle-aged white houseless man with HIV and an undisclosed mood disorderBedlam becomes a film that is not about severe mental illness as its own isolated issue or identity, but about prison abolition, which is to say the coalition-based, momentous social change necessary to begin building a society based on cooperation and care rather than fear and punishment.

The idea of prison abolition is critiqued by both left and right, with extreme cases brought up as supposed evidence that prisons must continue to exist in some form, for some people. For liberals, that typically means those who commit acts of violence (rapists and serial murderers, especially) and for some leftists, that means white-collar capitalist criminals (the ruthless billionaires, profiteers, and exploiters). There are also racialized people otherwise open to abolition whose limit may be found at the very real existence of violent racists. Prison abolitionists are well aware of and sensitive to the harm of violence in communities and for survivors, but dont believe prisons have solved or can solve its trouble and terror.

I think there is a lot of misunderstanding [about] what we mean when we say abolish the prison/police state, Patrisse told me over the phone, Because the idea of abolition is about getting rid of one thing, but its also about imagining anew. And abolitionists practice at the intersection of healthcare, our legal system, [and] how we fundamentally take care of each other as human beings. We have designed a system that is punitive, that is about othering people, shaming people. Weve designed a system that really does value people based [on] their skin color, their size, their ability, their gender; and abolition is actually challenging us to evolve as human beings, to relate to harm and violence from a place of compassion, interdependence, dignity, and care. The abolitionist approach is a philosophy, a theory, and in that theory we try to figure out how we process it.

Weve designed a system that really does value people based [on] their skin color, their size, their ability, their gender, and abolition is actually challenging us to evolve as human beings, to relate to harm and violence from a place of compassion, interdependence, dignity, and care.

When someone like Lis Smith, former Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigiegs senior communications adviser, accuses abolitionists of posturing for Twitter retweets and preventing reasonable incremental change, she is really admitting the current system suits herand her careerjust fine. But Patrisse insists that no one is safe in the process and the theory we live under right now. Prison abolition demands us to imagine a collective future of care, not a top-down rationing of it. And abolitionists arent against meaningful reform: With the March 3 primary election, Patrisse and the organization she chairs, Reform L.A. Jails, was able to make an important step forward by getting a majority of votes for measure R, which requires Los Angeles County to invest in rehabilitation and mental health treatment while reducing jail populations.

Dr. Rosenberg, for his part, believes coalition is essential to a mental healthcare movement that doesnt meaninglessly split hairs over, for instance, drug treatment versus psychotherapy or a medical model versus a psychological model (he writes more extensively about these differing perspectives in the book version of Bedlam). Because we are so at odds with each other and because we are so ashamed of this and deny it and dont talk about it, as a consequence, thats where we get taken advantage ofby pharmaceutical companies, prisons and jails. And the care of the mentally ill ends up going to the highest bidder.

Bedlam makes a compelling argument for why mental health cannot be treated like a niche issue, separate from either the material or social conditions of the 99 percent. As weve seen with the coronavirus pandemic, the failure of the U.S. healthcare system is tied up in the failure of the state itself. To do anything about it, well have to get at the root.

More:

Inside America's Mental Health Crisis and the Case for Prison Abolition - The Daily Beast

Call your own shots. In another abrupt shift, President Trump said on Thursday that hes now leaving the reopening of states up to governors. This latest development came as the White House issued a set of basic checkboxes to help understand when to allow various activities to resume. These include, for example, not opening back upuntil:

Critical caveat: Four months after the first U.S. case was found, the White House still has offered no detailed plan for reaching any of the goalsabove.

Public-health experts insist that one key to resuming normalcy is greatly expanding testing, ensuring that it is accessible and affordable, and putting the resulting data to effective use through contract tracing and isolation plans. And states have had to organize in regional consortiums to end the medical-gear bidding wars that had emerged in the absence of a federalresponse.

By the way: Those governor consortiums grew again on Thursday with the emergence of a Midwest group consisting of the governors of Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky. CNN has more on that, here.

Subscribe

Receive daily email updates:

Subscribe to the Defense One daily.

Be the first to receive updates.

Youre going to call your own shots, Trump told U.S. governors in a call Thursday afternoon, a recording of which was obtained by AP. Were going to be standing alongside ofyou.

Some White House officials did concede that this will all take a while. The new guidelines make clear that the return to normalcy will be a far longer process than Trump initially envisioned, with federal officials warning that some social distancing measures may need to remain in place through the end of the year to prevent a new outbreak, AP writes. And they largely reinforce plans already in the works by governors, who have primary responsibility for public health in theirstates.

Update: The Theodore Roosevelt sailor who died of COVID-19 has been identified. Aviation Ordnanceman Chief Petty Officer Charles Robert Thacker Jr., 41, of Fort Smith, Arkansas, died Monday at Naval Hospital Guam. His wife, also a Navy sailor, was at his side, a Navy releasesaid.

There are now 660 known cases of COVID-19 among Thackers shipmates, or 13 percent of the sidelined aircraft carriers crew. More on the ship after thefold.

Whats Wrong With the Air Forces Connect Everything Project // Patrick Tucker: In a new report, GAO watchdogs say officials cant say how much it costs or if itll evenwork

Global Business Brief // Marcus Weisgerber: USN, USAF acquisition chiefs talk COVID; Shipbuilder staggers shifts; Contractor accidentally ejects himself; andmore

No Military Has Done More for Corona-Stricken Allies Than Germanys // Elisabeth Braw: The Bundeswehr has been flying supplies to, and medevacing patients from, its Europeanneighbors.

Haircuts in a Time of Coronavirus? // Jim Golby: There have been too many confusing messages during this crisis. Senior military and civilian leaders should be enforcing social distancing as much as discipline, and with onevoice.

Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief from Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Send us tips from your community right here. And if youre not already subscribed to The D Brief, you can do that here. On this day in 1946, the French military officially withdrew its last soldier from Syria under the so-called French mandate, thereby granting Syria its fullindependence.

The French navy is under fire for how the coronavirus spread on its aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, Reuters reports from Paris. So far, Nearly 700 out of 1,767 sailors in the carrier group that includes the flagship Charles de Gaulle have so far tested positive for the virus, a total expected to rise when results are finalised from a third of the tests. Twenty crew members are in hospital, including one in intensive care. Read on, here.Roosevelt updates: The Navys COVID fact sheet for Friday reports that 660 of the Theodore Roosevelts 4,865 sailors have COVID-19, while 3,920 have tested negative. 4,059 sailors have moved ashore into isolation accommodations on Guam, where the nuclear-powered carrier has been sidelined since March 27. Seven sailors are in U.S. Naval Hospital Guam for COVID-19 symptoms, one in the ICU.Othernews:

Elsewhere in Europe, outdoor Rome has become a place for the birds, thanks to the coronavirus. AFP takes you there, here.And in Belfast, Ireland, vans are driving around with kegs of Guinness for at-home delivery since the pubs are all closed.Perhaps unsurprisingly, Moscow has more coronavirus cases than state testing shows, Reuters reports today. Employees from three Moscow-based private laboratories told Reuters that positive results were coming back in between 1% and 5% of cases - a wide range but a significantly greater share than the official tally. Like many countries, Russia is not carrying out mass testing, focusing solely on people with symptoms, those who have returned from abroad or people who have had known contact with infected individuals. More here.Meanwhile in NW Syria, some families are heading back to their destroyed neighborhoods because they just might be safer there than in crowded refugee camps.Also in Syria this week: Russian and Turkish troops went on their fourth joint patrol on Wednesday, Reuters reported in a very short hit, here.

In tech news this week, Indias government is the latest to ban Zoom for official business, citing concerns over the apps privacy vulnerabilities. The advisory came from Indias Cyber Coordination Centre, and comes as several companies including Google, Apple, NASA, and Tesla have urged or warned their employees from using Zoom, TechCrunch reports, adding German and Taiwan have also banned the use of Zoom in their nations. More here.Google seems to smell blood in the water and on Thursday announced an expansion of its video conferencing tool Meet for educators and businesses. The integration of Meet with e-mail is the first of several features being launched ahead of schedule because of a surge in demand for video conferencing, Reuters reported after speaking to Google vice president Javier Soltero.Notable fine print: Google is not charging customers for upgrades to Meet-related features like large video calls during a six-month period ending in September, Reuters writes. The policy, which is aimed at winning over customers in the long run, could add to the strain on Googles profits at a time at when its ads sales business is taking a hit. More here, or read Googles explainer here.

And finally: This week we learned that U.S.military personnel perform, on average, like or slightly better than the civilian population along a variety of metrics including such as family income and family wealth as well as cognitive abilities. Thats one facet of some recent research in the Journal of Strategic Studies looking at American military demographic trends over the past roughly five decades. The findings were highlighted in a Thursday report from The Economist entitled, Social climbing: Recruits to Americas armed forces are not what they used to be.The work was sparked by a reassessment of an intense debate between two opposing camps, headed by two leading intellectuals, Milton Friedman and Charles Moskos. For Friedman, compulsory military service led to a military of slaves. For Moskos, a military of volunteers was a military of mercenaries.As a former soldier, attempts to apply that slave/mercenary dichotomy to the U.S. military of today seem more than just misguided and offensive to your D Brief-er. But apparently, From past research, we know that from the abolition of the draft through the mid-1990s, Moskos prediction about the socio-economic backgrounds of those who joined the military turned out to be correct. However, that is no longer the case.Long story short: for the period 1997-2008, the U.S. armed forces have been recruiting primarily from the middle-class rather than from poorest (or the richest) groups, the researchers write.To expand on that, recent recruits tend to have higher than average socioeconomic background: they disproportionally come from the middle of the family income, family wealth, and cognitive skill distributions, with both tails under-represented. Whats more, among individuals from low socioeconomic backgrounds, those with higher cognitive abilities i.e., those with better career options are more likely to enlist, in contrast to the existing understanding.Perhaps most interestingly for the future of U.S. national security, the authors write Rather than an entity separated from the rest of society, as some have warned, men and women who serve are likely to embody the values and culture of the median voters. This affects not only the nature of the military itself, but also the calculations in terms of costs and benefits of democracies electing to go to war.Theres even a takeaway regarding Chinas rise in the 21st century buried in this research: But as the research by Stephen Biddle has long shown, U.S. military prowess comes not only from its technology, but also from the human capital of those employing it and from the extensive training they receive. This means that in the emerging military-technological rivalry between the USA and China, the competition for talent will play an increasingly important role.Read the rest of the research, here. And a big tip of the hat to Defense One contributor Jim Golby for flagging it on Twitter thismorning.

Have a safe weekend, everyone. And well see you again onMonday!

Read the original here:

Where is the White House's testing plan?; States teaming up; Navy COVID casualty, ID'd; The most helpful NATO ally; And a bit more. - Defense One