Inquiry into oil deaths fails to deliver justice

The deaths of two offshore oil workers in August 2003 could have been prevented, a Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI) has found.
Though presiding Sheriff Colin Harris was critical of platform operators Shell, his report ducks the issue of culpability and highlights much that is wrong with workers’ safety legislation as it stands today.
Jake Molloy, of offshore workers’ union OILC, is deeply disappointed by the FAI report, on which great hopes for justice for Keith Moncrieff and Sean McCue were pinned.
“The Sheriff was critical of Shell, but you couldn’t but be critical of Shell. A first year school pupil would be critical of Shell. But in the end, he dodged the issue and a great opportunity to make a real impact on workers’ health and safety in the North Sea has been missed.”
Keith, from Invergowrie, and Sean, from Kennoway in Fife, were inspecting a temporary repair of a gas pipeline in the utility leg of the Brent Bravo platform when they were overcome by fumes and killed.
The FAI report notes these events but, because the sheriff “set himself the narrowest of remits”, when it states that certain valves might have contributed to the deaths, concludes that this issue is outwith its remit.
In short, dodges the issue and leaves people like Jacqueline Ogilvie, Keith’s grieving partner, with nothing, while “easing the pain” of Shell.
The oil giant has become something of a byword for cutting it fine in terms of safety in the North Sea.
This reputation may be unfair, of course, as Shell is the only oil company that has so far been caught out. Anecdotal evidence suggests most major operators work on a ‘fingers crossed’ basis when it comes to keeping their overworked staff alive.
In the wake of the two deaths, Shell admitted only health and safety breaches, for which they were fined £900,000 - an insignificant sum in an industry that makes profits of £1million an hour.
The FAI, which finally got underway last October after repeated calls for one, heard that production had started up on the platform despite it being known that an emergency shutdown valve had failed.
As the Voice reported recently (Voice 270), the Brent field platforms have been riddled with equipment and procedure failures, and workers’ lives are at risk, day in, day out.
Yet the Health and Safety Executive and the law have so far proved impotent, incapable of prevention, or punishment for those who let it happen. 
“This report,” finishes Jake, “Only adds to the campaign for change in the Scottish judicial system.
“The process of inquiry has done little this time, and New Labour have been talking about a corporate killing bill since they came to power, and we are still waiting for it.”

Locking up our daughters

The number of women in jail in Scotland has risen once again, reaching an all-time high in the last year.
The female prison population has risen by a third since 2002, reaching 365 on 12 May, a 15 per cent increase on last year.
The rise comes despite the Scottish Executive last year giving their backing to calls for more use of community-based sentencing for women as an alternative to custody.
Previous reports have found that 90 per cent of women imprisoned in Scotland have committed crimes related to poverty  - through drug and alcohol abuse, non-payment of fines, or just struggling to cope with living below the breadline.
The 1996 Fairweather report into conditions at Scotland’s women’s prison Cornton Vale found 80 per cent of women incarcerated there had experienced abuse, 60 per cent were addicted to drugs and up to a fifth had been psychiatric patients.
The vast majority of women prisoners have committed non-violent crimes, and 70 per cent in Scotland are serving sentences of less than six months.
In 2004/5, more than 400 women were sent to prison for failing to pay a fine.
SSP MSP Carolyn Leckie, who spent just one night in Cornton Vale last year for non-payment of a fine after an anti-nuclear protest, was badly shaken by her experience there.
“You know all the political arguments about poverty and prison, but when you get in there it’s so striking,” she told the Voice.
“So many of the women I met were walking about with obvious scars - it hammers home the self-harm statistics.
“These are the most vulnerable, excluded women in our society, women already well knocked about by life and only just clinging on. Prison is just screwing them down even further.”
Carolyn and the SSP group have consistently taken up the issue through the parliament.
The SSP campaigns for community alternatives to prison for all but the most dangerous offenders, which would benefit women in particular, considering the disproportionate number who are jailed for non-violent offences.
“Unfortunately, it’s an on-going campaign because the number of women in prison is still rising. I’ve put a number of questions, I’ve been a bit of a moaning Minnie on this one.
“I put in a motion calling for an amnesty - to release all women in prison for minor, non-violent offences, and for them to be adequately supported instead with services such as proper rehabilitation.
“It costs £37,000 a year to keep one woman locked up in Cornton Vale - that could pay for two support workers per woman instead.
“I think that would be money much better spent than pouring it into a system that dehumanises people who don’t have very much in the first place.”

Cuts threatened at BBC

by Pete Murray, NUJ National Executive

There is anger and fear among staff and unions at the BBC of further job cuts and threats to programmes, despite fat-cat pay increases by executives shamelessly seeking to grab more of the public licence fee for themselves.
Earlier this month, all four unions at the Corporation - representing producers, engineers, journalists and musicians - stood united in demands for a decent pay rise, an end to Director-General Mark Thompson’s attack on staff pensions, and no more compulsory redundancies. 
This came as the organisation entered the final stage of talks with the government over the BBC bosses’ bid for another increase in the TV licence fee. 
Thompson is eager to be seen as beating down union demands as part of the negotiations for more cash from ministers. 
However, this thrift doesn’t extend to his own senior managers, or to a select band of highly-rewarded stars. 
BBC bosses grabbed annual bonuses worth 26 per cent and more, while Thompson tried to screw staff with a below-inflation pay increase of just 2.6 per cent. And he continues his attack on the BBC pension scheme - one of the few in the UK still showing a surplus - while finding £18million to pay Jonathan Ross for his TV and radio programmes, and a pay rise worth hundreds of thousands for strike-breaking DJ Chris Moyles.  
Thompson himself now earns more than £600,000 - around double that of his predecessor, Greg Dyke when he was BBC boss in 2001.
When Jonathan Ross interviewed Tory leader, David Cameron this month, he wanted to know if Cameron used to fantasise about Margaret Thatcher. 
BBC bosses are operating the kind of morality Thatcher would be proud of - “the rich need to be paid more to work harder, while the poor need to be paid less”. Staff at the BBC, and licence-fee payers all across Britain deserve better.

No justice for de Menezes

by Ken Ferguson

None of the cops involved in the killing of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes are to face charges.
Instead the Metropolitan Police will face charges under the Health and Safety at work Act - for failing to ensure Mr De Menezes’ safety!
Thus, the blame falls entirely on the ‘system’.
Months of press speculation and public pressure for Commissioner Ian Blair’s scalp has resulted in a series of high level manoeuvres to save his skin.
As these events occurred following the London tube bombings, any charges brought against the Met would put Tony Blair in the political frame, hence the  furious backroom spinning to ensure this didn’t happen.
The breathtaking cynicism of this establishment cover-up is made more nauseating by the fact that the Health and Safety at Work Act has proved almost ineffectual in real workplace situations.
In time, we will no doubt ‘discover’ inadequacies in the way the operation was controlled, that police radios didn’t work in tube tunnels, that the gunmen acted in good faith and so predictably on.
There will ensue much high level hand-wringing and a hefty fine on the Met which will, naturally, be paid by the taxpayer.
Unsurprisingly, there is considerable anger amongst campaigners for justice for de Menezes. His cousin Patricia da Silva Armani said:
“I am very disappointed. They took my cousin’s life and the authorities, in reality, did not have any shame. I feel sickened.”
Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti condemned the “secrecy” surrounding the shooting.
“It is grossly unacceptable that there is still no proper public account of what took place. Suggestions that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner has yet to be interviewed as to what he knew and said about the shooting...are equally disturbing.”
What we do know is that on the day, a combination of SAS offshoot Special Reconnaissance Regiment soldiers and the Met tracked an innocent man through the London streets and onto a tube train, then shot him seven times in the head with Dum Dum bullets.
Dum Dum ammunition is designed to spin around in the body and inflict massive tissue damage and fire into the head at close range is inevitably fatal.
In most cases, doing this to an innocent man would constitute murder.
But in the high-powered, cynical world of politics, it is merely a regrettable mistake. And possibly a breach of the Health and Safety at Work Act.

Gie’s peace –
Morag Balfour

Morag is a long term activist in the peace movement and is the SSP’s peace and disarmament spokesperson

Will Faslane 365 work?

I remember when Faslane 365, as an idea, burst onto the scene. I had about 15 strands of unanswered questions relating to it at the time. My first strand was accessibility. It was fairly clear from the beginning that camping outside in sub-zero temperatures was never going to be an option for me. My muscles go into spasm if get too near the fridges/freezers in supermarkets.
I don’t open the fridge at home unless I’m wearing my Gore-Tex jacket, fully zipped and with hood up too. The joys to be found in neuromuscular conditions are endless.
I’ve been an outsider to Faslane 365 from day two, leaving space and distance to explore the remaining 14 strands of questions. I’m skipping over ‘Will we get enough people?’ and ‘Will the policing be heavier this time?’ and ‘Will any participants suffer hypothermia?’ and moving on to my chief concerns with it.
My biggest unanswered questions are as follows. Will the MoD register much of an impact given that they can ferry staff in by sea? Will the burden of disruption be unequally weighted to the local community and will this impact on businesses in Garelochead?
Will the cost of policing impact negatively on response times for emergencies, and Community Policing schemes offered, in poverty-ridden urban conurbations in the Greater Glasgow area?
Will the project engage with ordinary people or polarise them? Will the media cover the story beyond day one? Will anybody see this demonstration? Is Faslane 365 more or less likely to enable Westminster politicians to vote against their party policy and leaders?
And finally, is the tactic of ‘the same as we always do, only longer’ really the most ingenious idea we can come up with? I have yet to be convinced that this is as fantastic as it’s being trumped up to be. I can’t actually see it achieving anything specific. It doesn’t seem to have a clear objective.
If we want to engage with the general public should we not go to where they are likely to be? Maybe the time has come for mass demonstrations about Trident and its replacement to be held in Asda or Tesco or Homebase! It might not be such a good thing to do direct action in your nearest shops though, just in case they bar you.
It might be worth considering a family friendly dramatic action outside the Odeon when new films come out. Find people and talk, sing and dance against nuclear weapons. Alternatively, sit on your bum in the cold for 48 hours where nobody can actually see you.
Politicians often suffer from an extreme lack of integrity and backbone. I took part in a demo in the temporary Scottish Parliament building, after the Lord Advocate’s Review of the famous Trident Three verdict.
An SNP MSP told me later that what we’d done had stopped them tabling a debate on Trident. I don’t understand why our actions had this effect and she wasn’t sounding very logical when she tried to explain the reasoning.
Her conversation with me, and she was actually giving me a telling off, sticks in my mind to this day.
So how do we make politicians feel ‘safe’ when we are asking them to take risks on our behalf?
I’m suggesting that it is probably better for them to feel that the majority of their constituents feel strongly about something. Get a bandwagon and drive it very slowly, in other words.
We need to keep asking what the consequences of our actions will be.
I fear that those living near Faslane will feel as though they are being harassed - or worse - held hostage by a campaign whose efficacy is far from proven.

As the holiday season hots up, the Voice asks...

WHO PAYS THE PRICE FOR CHEAP FLIGHTS?

by Roz Paterson

The sun is high, the sky is blue... and, inevitably, criss-crossed with vapour trails from planes bound for Edinburgh, Egypt, the entire world.
The airline industry, thanks to generous government subsidies, puny attempts to curb emissions and the popularity of weekend hops to Europe for less than a tenner, is experiencing phenomenal and unprecedented growth.
The number of flights in the EU is set to double by 2020, and triple by 2030.
And with this comes a huge toll in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, enough to cancel out all other efforts to reduce them, according to the Tyndall Centre, the UK’s foremost institute on climate change.
Yet our government cannot get enough of airlines, and has been greenlighting new runways and extra big Airbuses like there’s no tomorrow, and very definitely saying no to tax levies on aviation fuel.
Any bad PR coming out of this for the airlines is going to be offset by their inclusion in the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which allows them to ‘buy’ the right to dumps tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere from companies/nations who are not going to use their full quota.
The net effect being that just as much carbon is dumped as if the airline companies hadn’t joined the ETS.
Even worse, it makes the airlines look like they’re actually doing something, which of course they’re not, as will become obvious when the industry’s rapid expansion blows the lid off the ETS quotas and they carry on regardless.
Furthermore, all of this ignores the fact that planes emit more than just CO2.
They also shit Nitrogen Oxide and water vapour at very high altitudes, which is very damaging to the atmosphere.
You may not have heard of global dimming, but you experience it every day.
It is the phenomenon whereby the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth is reduced, resulting in duller summers than we had 50 years ago.
In the US, skies are dimmer by 10 per cent since the 1950s, in the UK by 16 per cent and in Russia by 30 per cent. On average, we see a decrease in sunlight of 1-2 per cent.
This loss of sunlight is caused by visible air pollution - tiny, airborne particles of soot, ash, sulphur compounds and others - reflecting sunlight back into space. These particles also prompt an increased formation of water droplets that also serve to reflect sunlight away from the Earth.
We had an example of its effects in the three days following 11 September 2003, when all American commercial flights were grounded.
The skies brightened without all that nitrogen flying around, and the temperature rose by 1 degree C.
Serving to remind us that global dimming, as well as making the world a gloomier place, is very possibly masking the true extent of global warming.
It is also posited that global dimming keeps the oceans a little cooler, which lessens rain production, causing failed rainy seasons, drought and famine.
The devastating famines of the 1970s and ’80s, in which millions and millions of people starved to death, may have been caused by global dimming. Which surely takes the shine off budget holidays.
By the way, cheap flights are routinely defended, mostly by the industry, as the only means by which working-class people can get trips abroad.
As if Ryanair and Easyjet were offering cut-price deals out of a desire to gift sunny Spanish memories to the cash-strapped proles.
But it’s not even true.
Cheap flights may facilitate some low-income people’s holidays once in a while but mostly, they facilitate well-off people to fly much more often.
The Civil Aviation Authority’s passenger survey 2003 found that the average passenger salary at low-fare airport Stansted was £46,000!
And the Institute for Public Policy Research in the UK finds that the top three social classes account for 75 per cent of low-cost flights.
And this costs us lower classes £9billion in air industry subsidies from the UK government every year.
I can think of a few better uses for that kind of money than bolstering the fortunes of super-profitable airline corporations, can’t you?