大象传媒

Can anyone tell me how many of these new jobs "created" by Labour are in the public sector?

Dear Newsnight

When you interview Gareth Thomas tonight about Uzbekistan and child labour would it be possible not to move to question 2 until he has answered question 1. You might sweat a little doing this but so will he. The is no point interviewing anyone if they can skip the questions they are unable to answer.

Hope this sounds like a positive comment, not a criticism of Newsnight, on the contrary you do this more than most, just suggesting you pursue the answers even harder for the benefit of the suffering of the world who cannot defend themselves and to inform your audience of the truth, some of whom might be able to do something,

with best wishes
Bob

"We have found migrant workers to have a very satisfactory work ethic,
in many cases superior to domestic workers"

Submission by Sainsbury's to Lords committee
大象传媒 NEWS Migrants 'one eighth of workers' 17 October 2007

No doubt Tesco, Wal-Mart/ASDA, M&S, John Lewis Group/Waitrose etc would all say the same. But what might the consequences be?

A century or so ago there was mass economic migration from Eastern Europe, so much in fact, that because of fears of social/political instability, Parliament passed the Aliens Act (1905).

Let's hope we don't get a repeat of what happened a century ago, as back then, Britain, along with many European states, experienced socially turbulent decades and socio-political polarisation fomented by migrant anarchists, Bolsheviks and other East End revolutionaries. Over the next 30 years or so this turmoil led to Hitler's declaration of war against the Bolshevization of Europe and its alleged financiers.

As with Chinese uprising in 1989, East European countries rebelled against Stalinism. But the democracy which many wanted in its place (initially at least) wasn't liberal democracy, but 'workers' democracy'. See Lech Walesa's Solidarity:

Is that all 'water under the bridge', or could it be history repeating itself? With all the recent talk of Islamo-fascists vs neocons etc, it's hard to tell.

See also the Newsnight Immigration Questions Blog:
/blogs/newsnight/2006/08/immigration_questions.html

The allegation that the State forces child labour is not true. Or, it is no more true of Uzbekistan than it is of China. Unfortunately, Uzbekistan is an exceptionally poor country where families rely on what little can be earned by able bodies family members lucky enough to find work, however ardous or demanding. Sanctions are not the answer. Afghanistan, which is next door and equally arable, shows the probable consequence anti-cotton sanctions, as desperately poor subsidence farmers will end up producing drug bearing plants instead of cotton. We hear no talk of private sector sanctions against India, where the caste system is alive and well, and producing all kinds of products sold in the West. Education, encouragement and assistance are the answers to Uzbekistan's problems, and not isolation, sanctions and baseless criticisms. Uzbekistan, where I lived for long enough to know, is a moderate Muslim state, poor, peaceful and hopeful, with an autocratic Government led by a former USSR regional leader that is intolerant of opposition, including potential Islamic militants. A good reporter will peer behind the apparently Iron curtain and discover that "state control" means control by an appointed mafia, and rather than forcing people to work, they are doling out jobs that people queue up for. The best thing ASDA and others could do is visit Uzbekistan and encourage the gradual implementation of decent working conditions. The race to procure the cheapest materials by UK retailers in order to maintain huge profits is incompatible such an approach.

IMMIGRATION.

Anyone na茂ve enough to believe the bilge about Labour鈥檚 supposed 鈥榰nderestimation鈥� of the size of the inflow of immigrant workers over the past ten years should think again 鈥� and quickly.

This appropriately-timed admission, or should that be 鈥榗onfession鈥�, is yet another devious tactic designed to divert public attention from the Reform Treaty; in which Immigration is one of the vitally important major areas where power will be ceded to Brussels if Brown gets his way.

That they declared an 鈥渙pen-door鈥� policy in their manifesto was barely whispered prior to and during the last election and many dyed-in-the-wool Labour voters cast their votes without the slightest idea that this was the case. Doubters 鈥� ask them!

It takes little in the way of grey matter to realise that not only was Labour鈥檚 officially proclaimed policy on immigration and asylum a mendacious sham, but their covert agenda deliberately to allow massive influxes of 鈥榣egitimate鈥� workers - in line with edicts from Brussels - was very real and on target to succeed. The reasons behind all this were, and still are, totally sinister.

Why?

Because the now openly-admitted fanatical dream of a federal Europe with its supranational government, hinges on the eradication of all sense of National Identity throughout the member States, and can only be achieved in the longer term by fragmenting, thus distorting the balance and significantly changing the percentages of numbers within indigenous populations - and that means NOW and for as long as it takes.

Child Labour. Yes WE now think that is totally disgusting. But you don't have to go back very far in OUR history to find evidence of child labour.
If we impose our "enlightened" views on backward economies by levying sanctions we will be hurting those we are trying to defend.
These children probably provide the difference between existence and subsistence for their families. Take away their living and they will have nothing. Even worse would be if the cotton farmers switched to growing poppies for opium

Dear Newsnight,
I wish Gareth Thomas had been confronted with the fact that Uzbekistan's practice of using child labour to pick cotton was highlighted by Craig Murray when he was our ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004.
Indeed as I write I am looking at a photograph of a child, no older than 10, in Mr Murray's excellent book "Murder in Samarkand". Mr Murray also alleges that doctors, nurses and the walking wounded from hospitals are conscripted in a similar fashion.

Hi,

I've just seen the documentary on Newsnight regarding Uzbek children being forced to pick cotton and I'm astounded. I'm currently reading "Murder in Samarkand" a book written by Craig Murray when he was the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan 2002-2004. The book was published last year and raised this very concern (amongst others) which was relayed to the British Government as far back as 2002. This is not something new and not something unknown. The Uzbek government has little respect or concern for its people. Its is only concerned about holding on to it's stranglehold of power. Why is no-one condemning this regime????? It's utterly outrageous and I was most disconcerted to hear a British minister tonight claim that they knew nothing about it. More lies, more underhandedness. An utter disgrace.

Migrant Workers/Child Labour
Instead of employing migrant workers as cheap labour to bring in the harvest in the UK we should move the school summer holiday to the appropriate time and get British children to do the job - it would help them lose weight and learn where their food comes from too.

When you interview Gareth Thomas tonight about Uzbekistan and child labour, I was born in 1952 in England, at ten years old I remember half term breaks from school just to harvest potatoes, rosehips and brambles, is there any diference between UK and Uzbekistan?
PS. I still pick brambles to make jam, what education that was!!!

Tonight's programme about child labour in the cotton fields of Kazakhstan was an excellent piece of investigative journalism. Good work by everyone involved.

It was amusing to see the apologists squirming afterwards - ducking back into talk of exerting moral rather than economic pressure. Possibly because of their own economic interests served by Kazakhstan. And if Newsnight journalists can trace Kazakh cotton through to finished goods - much as Greenpeace followed illegally logged timber to Whitehall - there's no reason why retailers in the UK such as ASDA can't do the same and block the sale of goods made with this cotton, until the Kazakh government joins the rest of the civilised world.

BBc thank you for the report.thanks to Simon
Liam i am from uzbekistan and while i was at university gov't sent us to pick cotton instead studying we wasted our time on the cotton fields
millions of people including children pregnants elderly everybody picks cotton. we used to live in the roundown old school building no heating no hot water common bathroom not so much to eat
uzbek state does pay for cotton but it is about 50 times less than (not 20 times)the real price, there are no machinery to pick cotton as they do in the US or other countries
this people who grow cotton from early spring and collect harvest are paid pittance just for them to survive yill the next year harvest
so if international community applies some acction on uzbek cotton it may be will be last straw for people of uzbekistan to raise against dictatorial goverment headed by Islam Karimov who has been on power almost 17 years people of uzbekistan are scared for their lives cannot say anything against all the discriminations of mafia state where children do not have bread to it not speaking about meat or anything else
Liam I believe UK goverment can pressurize retail bussinesses to sanction uzbek cotton which is picked by child work forse,and cotton which makes more harm than good, example aral sea is drying up because of all the water pouring into aral is directed to the cotton fields, and in fact all the profit goes into the pockets of corrupt ministers who have lifestyle of millionaires with luxury houses in the Uk particularly I thank 大象传媒 and Simon again, for program

Was it just me or did Kirsty refer to the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith as 'Jacqui Hughes' on more than one occasion in tonight's Newsnight?

One car'nt blame her to much given that so many in Brown's Cabinet are such feeble non-entities.

COTTON:
Where are the obese, unhealthy, asthmatic children who don鈥檛 get enough exercise or fresh air, likely to die before their parents? Where are all the fat, bad attitude little yobs hanging around on street corners and causing trouble, vandalism and degradation of society?

It is wrong of the self appointed moral West to impose our own perverse values on another country and its way of life. What people are monetarily paid is relative to their own society. These young people are working on the harvests in their school holidays, which is beneficial to their society. It can be argued that six weeks summer holiday for Britain's kids is too long as most of our children no longer help with the harvests and should be shortened to four weeks.

Those children in the report looked healthy to me, and certainly not starving.

It was not many decades ago that children in this country were given a six week summer holiday, in which they could help with the harvests. I certainly did! I worked in areas of endeavour as diverse as poultry, arable, sugar beet pulling, potato picking, fruit picking, strawberry picking, apple picking, etc. There are no doubt adults of roughly my age with similar experiences to recount. And those days were some of the best of my life.

In earlier ages, children in Britain worked in the Cotton Mills, the Woollen Mills, agriculture and the mines. We now value a rounder Academic education which necessitates our children going to school for longer, but how many will use that extra education, or indeed, thank you for it?

Western people should get down from their moralising high horse and ditch the better than and holier than thou attitude, and realize the amount of harm and damage our moralising Nanny State has done to us!

The only rule I would encourage governments in places like Uzbekistan to make is the minimum age which children may not work under. And I suggest that this minimum age should be 10.

Come one parents and others Don鈥檛 beat yourself up over this. Buy those clothes. At least those children are going out and earning an income for their families. Deny them that, and you condemn many thousands of people to poverty. Or do you think it鈥檚 worth it for your moralising, nannying attitude which assuages your conscience?

Peter Dewar Finch.

Dear Newsnight

We are expected to believe that the British Government did not know about child labour in Uzbekistan? In my view Mr Thomas side stepped the closed questions by Kirsty Wark on what he proposed to do.

I have to ask where has the honesty and honour gone in British politics? We certainly need people to take the power back and treat some of these politicians in power with the same respect that they treat the electorate... and the truth.

How can Mr Thomas pretend that the Government didnt know when their own ambassador was telling them, several years ago about the child labour. Its all lies,

I agree with the comments by Tony Grimley (9)

from www.craigmurray.org.uk

April 19, 2005
Teeing off in Tashkent
Author: Sam Webber writing in ConcreteOnline

re The former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray,

"Murray learnt that the major industry in Uzbekistan is cotton production, with almost all of the citizens helping out for three months of the year when the cotton is harvested. They are paid roughly $2 per month and have to work 12 hours a day. The numerous cotton farms have never been privatised, so therefore are state owned, with the product being sold for only about 3% of what it actually should be. In neighbouring Kazakhstan where the cotton industry is largely privatised, this is not a problem at all.

Murray spoke movingly about how schools and universities are shut during the cotton harvest; "All staff and students are forced to pick cotton for three months. It?s worse than Dickensian". He went on to explain that a police stamp or exit visa is required to leave the cotton farm, so consequently many children born on the farms are unlikely to leave them. He added, "Kids as young as seven are out there picking cotton. 80 kilos a day of raw cotton each or you simply don?t get fed". There is no pay at all to those under age, so child labour is basically insisted upon by the state.

Murray insists that much of the cotton in our clothes would be Uzbek cotton, but adds that it is not written on a clothes label where the cotton is from, consequently the consumer cannot boycott a particular brand if there is no way of telling the origin of the cotton. Apparently all cotton purchases must go through the Liverpool cotton exchange, so the former Ambassador hints that pressure could be exerted through this channel in the future."

Good night and Good luck as they say
Bob

I am grateful to those who have pointed out that I was reporting this officially to the UK government in 2002, and have since written a book about it.

I don't know if those people writing in to say this is good for the children are put up to it or are genuinely misled. I used to pick soft fruit in the school holidays too. The Uzbek situation is in now way comparable.

Educational institutions are shut down for the entire autumn term and the children sent into the fields for months. They are taken from their families and sleep there. They are compelled to do it by the state. They drink water from the irrigation ditches.

I bet those who are saying they worked in the fields as children were not forced to do it twelve hours a day seven days a week for months, missing school. The children in the programme said they have to pick sixty or seventy kilos per day. I have met children there with a quota of eighty kilos. 60 kilos of raw cotton is an enormous volume. Take a roll of cootn wool and tease it out to about twelve times it's compacted volume. Then work out how many rolls you would need for even sixty kilos of it. And imagine picking it in small gobbets from spiny, scratching plants in temperatures that are usually over 40 degrees C, 105 degrees F, in the shade at the start of the season - and over 50 degrees C, 122 degrees F in the blazing heat of the cotton fields. By the end of the harvest you can commonly be picking in sub zero temperatures.

I just cannot believe the comments by those who think this is all OK for eight year olds.

Nor is the harvest the whole story - it jappens to schools for planting and hoeing too. The ordinary people see mo benefit at all from the cotton, which fills the Swiss bank account of the regime. One point the reporters missed is that frequently the pittance wage is notional - more often that not, the children don't get it, ot get a small portion of it after deductions for "board and lodging".

Well done Newsnight - an excellent report indeed.

#7 Silkstone -

About 10 years ago, I spoke to a then minor political party activist. He was rather pleased to be involved with an unofficial group who were using indirect methods to assess the numbers in various minority groups in the UK, such as the sales of staple food products in various countries with the known sales of the same products in the UK. The figures they were coming up with were massively higher than the official figures. If their methods are reasonably accurate, based on what he was saying, there are yet more corrections to come.

great points made

my own feeling is that the current vacuous political class is reproducing itself through institutional structures. the culture of petty office politics and risk averse private lives is spreading like a virus.

people have lost the ability to do anything except obey an increasingly self-interested authority.

we are presented with career politicians, a media that has lost the appetite for intellectual debate and resorts to random attack on interviewees, interrupting but not challenging, and a plethora of lobby groups that mop up the excess of bourgeois youth seeking to impose their views on the world without actually (their favourite word) being part of anything except some rarified upper echelon of that world.

muslims bomb britain - OK, throw 70 mill at them. And that is precisely what they wanted. They have a lobbying mentality from their legally preserved homeland culture and now they have got the resources to get ahead of the infidel. Meanwhile, young chavvy kids have been moved away from my local (gentrifying) shops by the new CSPO. But in this area the kids did no more than gather and socialise - but no resources for them.

some hope though - this morning Cherie stepped onto a soapbox that has too long been vacant - women's rights should take precedent over traditional cultural and religious belief systems. Hooray! I was amazed how well she spoke.

and further hope from the recent report on supermarkets - people do like them, what a surprise! To hear the academic from Cranfield on Radio4 this morning was hilarious -for the first time I heard one of these male local advocates being cut down in argument by common sense - we do not in fact want to go back to the 1950s.

issues of multiculturalism and environment are both riddled with male pl-attitudes - when are they going to learn? women do not mow the lawn in straight lines, do not want to wear bags over their heads and do not want to go back to shopping daily from little gossipy shops in oppressive patriarchal communities.

meanwhile - get those cotton-picking girls (and boys!) out of the fields and wipe the wry I-know-but-I'm-not-saying smiles of the faces of sleazy businessmen.

about 3 years ago I spoke with a race equality official working in university to raise awareness. the shock statistic that she used was guess the % of ethnic minorities - only 8%

wouldn't the more accurate question be to ask students to guess the growth rate?

we have consistently had the wool pulled over our eyes - can anyone tell what really is the purpose of flooding Britain with immigrants?

the queen was quite right to see the saudi prince - our politics are separate from our monarchy and our monarch represents good manners

it is much more shocking that the corporate world gets into bed with repressive regimes

All you people who are comparing picking fruit in the UK a few years ago with the child slavery in Uzbekistan, are living a dream. Wake up and smell the coffee I guess you will be saying next that we should enslave our children and starve them and deprive them of education and all in the name of "Public Health" and a "good economy for our Motherland".
You are beneath contempt. And maybe you should consider a move to Uzbekistan or North Vietnam the politics there may suit you???

re. Peter Dewar

I agree - childhood obesity could easily be addressed through a programme of 100% local organic agriculture - school curricula would incorporate seasonal farm activity, farms would be collectively run and owned by the council, everyone would be healthy, chavs would be redeployed from shops to packing centres...aaah! life could be sooo simple

ha, ha, ha, - Lisa Miles nutritionist is being picked apart by Fat is the New Black !!! goodbye patronising middle class narrow mindedness

Adrienne - thank you for your posts, they are fascinating. I agree we have to take a much bigger picture of culture.

The Penguin Atlas of World History demonstrates that the history of H.S.S. is a history of migration and colonisation.

Specifically people have always moved from the south and east to the west of europe - britain being the dropping off point - ancient peoples clutching to the western shores or migrating across the atlantic

There is no 'natural' reason to suppose that Britain could not become an Isalmic conquest - it all depends how we play it.

it would be foolish to think that the middle east, old europe, africa or pakistan owe us a favour

it's just a question of who is sufficiently determined and organised

#23, I suspect that was a slip of the keys and you meant N Korea, as Vietnam is all communist now, but that aside, look up one of Stalin's speeches from 1937 "Mastering Bolshevism":

and compare the title with the other version:

and aside from ranting against the Trotskyites and their backers (see, it wasn't just Hitler), look at what he says towards the end of his speech, and compare that with Hayek's anarcho-capitalist subversion of domestic (e.g. Old Labour) command economics, as depicted in the cartoon version of Thatcher's favourite book, 'The Road to Serfdom'.

The Chicago Boys have got about a bit in recent decades (see 'Commanding Heights'). They now call themselves 'neocons' (they love makeovers).

My point is this - if we assume equality across all countries and populations, i.e. if we ignore how gene barriers operate (see link at the end for why we should not), we risk not being able to tell the difference between low frequency of cognitive ability/ human capital and deliberate inefficiency, incompetence, corruption and wilful sabotage.

/dna/mbreligion/F2213240?thread=4707975&skip=0&show=20

The report about Uzbek cotton failed to mention the huge environmental impact of the crop. The Aral sea, a unique ecosystem, is about half the size it was in 1960 due to its irrigation for cotton growth. This point was also picked up by Craig Murray several years ago.

The government is well aware of the terrible situation in which the Uzbek people find themselves under the current regime, but as usual is putting profit before everything, despite the lip service to end child labour.

The report about Uzbek cotton failed to mention the huge environmental impact of the crop. The Aral sea, a unique ecosystem, is about half the size it was in 1960 due to its irrigation for cotton growth. This point was also picked up by Craig Murray several years ago.

The government is well aware of the terrible situation in which the Uzbek people find themselves under the current regime, but as usual is putting profit before everything, despite the lip service to end child labour.

It's a different socio-economic political system. The other side of xenophobia is ethno-centricism.

As the most reluctant Soviet Republic to declare indepeendencein 1991, Uzbekistan is trying to hold on to some of its traditional socialist duties to the state as it slowly moves towards a market-economy. Think of this as community work.

"鈥ur children are not forced to go out.鈥� Some might go out to help the farmers pick cotton but this is done everywhere in the world. They and their teachers volunteer to go out and help.鈥f course, they want their own regions to flourish - it's hashar. But it is simply not possible for there to be any order鈥�.We categorically forbid this."

Official Interviewee cited in:
'The Curse of Cotton'

hashar=collective community work.

(Hopefully, the moderators will clear for publishing the longer version of this comment submitted earlier today?).

Uzbekistan reluctantly became an independent replublic in 1991. Along with its neighbours it used to be the cotton producing region of the USSR. Now that it's independent what's happened to the subsidies it used to get from Moscow?

As it tries to move towards a market-economy it risks being exploited by exprienced developed world economic predators and subverted by NGO human rights groups. When it put down political insurrection in 2005 it was vilified as a cruel, corrupt, despotic state which oppresses its people (but not by Russia).

We've seen it all before (China in 1989, Burma 2007). Sadly, 大象传媒 journalists appears to have become politicians rather than neutrally reporting on world politics.

Uzbekistan reluctantly became an independent republic in 1991. Along with its neighbours it used to be the cotton producing region of the USSR. Now that it's independent what's happened to the subsidies it used to get from Moscow? It gets no help from the World Bank because of its lack of compliance with the West's vision of human rights.

As it tries to move towards a market-economy it risks being exploited by exprienced developed world economic predators and subverted by the formers' NGO human rights groups. When it put down political insurrection in 2005 it was vilified as a cruel, corrupt, despotic state which oppresses and exploits its people (but it wasn't by Russia, which the media still tries to tar with the same brush that it tars China).

We've seen it all before (USSR in the 70s, 80s etc, China in 1989, Burma 2007). Sadly, 大象传媒 journalists appears to have become politicians rather than neutrally reporting on world politics.

How about looking into the hundreds of millions (if not billions) of pounds which have been, and continue to be, wasted on useless programmes to change cognitive and others behaviours in our health, education and criminal justice systems, when all of the evidence to date suggests that none of it works, and that the primary (maybe 80%) determinant of behaviour is just the expression of one's genes with the envirnonment just selecting and shaping rates of behaviours. It looks like the best we can do environmentally is protect prople from physical abuse by themselves and others.

Surely in this era of 'evidence based and evidence driven practice', the evidence should be looked into?

It's not the sort of thing you'll be able to put together in an afternoon mind.

China also uses child labour to harvest cotton. When I worked in a school in Xing Jiang ( north west) the school closed for a period and all the children and staff went off to the cotton fields. It is not suprising is it ? It wasn't that long ago that hop picking in Kent and potato harvest in Scotland was carried out by school children.Your reporter did not ask over what period of time the children were working in the fields, and one child did say that school was closed.These countries are not the sort of places that migrant workers flock to to help with the harvest. It has to be gathered in some way.

Just a cotton picking moment - you have purely based your report as per 'indignant Tunbridge-Wells', without actual details such as rates of pay, food provided, day-to-day treatment, what happens when a child reaches exhaustion, medical treatment. You have based it upon NW European law on child labour.

What really constitutes inappropriate employment would be comparisons to other peers in ones locality, or maltreatment of those exhausted, lack of food. Not some arbitary UN ruling, or whatever law. We don't compare, comment on children in the more deprived parts of OUR society, with the privileged children of the wealthy; Sloane Rangers, lives of the well to do middle classes. We accept divisions exist and cannot be changed except over time.

These Countries are building their social capital, as we did in the nineteenth century through to the nineteen thirties.

If there is actual physical abuse, ridiculously low renumeration, low welfare levels in accord with others in that society; these are reasons to create a hue and cry.

We do have privileges compared to other societies; try not to eliminate them all too quickly. It is very likely we will be the poor, less economically developed, when central Asia, S Asia and China really hit top speed. Though who will buy their goods; there's a tale!

I think that it is apauling that childern are not aloud and education. The goverement are a joke and that we hshould have taken over this country and not iraq.

I found this appauling and a joke. I think the goverment needs a smack botty. And how would they feel if it was there child was working all day long?

We think this is an absolute disgrace, it is dispicable that these children DO NOT HAVE and education and are getting paid appauling amounts of money for their hard work that they do.

we think that it is well bad that kids should have to pick cotton for rich people who dont even pay them that much money and other rich people who dont know where the cotton has actually come from in the first place.
if the children dont get an educatation then they will be stuck picking cotton for their whole lives and it is a big vicious circle,reece is right we should have taken over this country not iraq

I don't find child labour acceptable.Uzbekistan reluctantly became an independent replublic in 1991. Along with its neighbours it used to be the cotton producing region of the USSR. Now that it's independent what's happened to the subsidies it used to get from Moscow?

As it tries to move towards a market-economy it risks being exploited by exprienced developed world economic predators and subverted by NGO human rights groups. When it put down political insurrection in 2005 it was vilified as a cruel, corrupt, despotic state which oppresses its people (but not by Russia).

We've seen it all before (China in 1989, Burma 2007). Sadly, 大象传媒 journalists appears to have become politicians rather than neutrally reporting on world politics

NOT ANOTHER ATTACK ON A NON-DEMOCRATIC ('STALINIST') STATE

First, read the statement from the Embassy of Uzbekistan, supplied by
the 大象传媒:

Then a quote from the programme/大象传媒 article:

"They have closed the school - that's why I'm picking cotton"
Child worker

When the girl was asked a question about whether she preferred school or cotton picking, there was an odd edit. She said "School is good"... and that the school was closed, and that's why she was picking cotton.

Now, is it really any surprise that the Uzbek authorities are wary of
people like Simon? There seems to be a clear agenda here, and it is one we keep being force fed I suggest (have a look at 'The Road to Serfdom' in cartoons for a reminder).

Aside from the fact that Uzbekistan is still in transition and was
essentially a monoculture given it's role in the former USSR's economy,
did the above remarks mean that the authorities had closed the school
for the harvest season and that 15 year olds etc *could* work in the
spirit of 'hashar' when the schools were closed, or did it mean that
someone forced children to work? And if the latter, what did that force
entail exactly? We were not told, just left to imagine. This was not a Western style free-market economy, it was a culture premised on collective duty, and I remind readers that the other side to attacking command economics and collective duty is the promotion of free-market imperialism.

To appreciate what the subversive costs of the latter really are, take a look at the continuous rise in the crime rate in the UK since the end of WWII and look at our ever swelling prison population.

With a population of about 27m a ready reckoner would give about 270,000 kids in any one year age group, so that estimate of 450,000 working the cotton fields given in the programme, just how was it arrived at as some basic arithmetic shows that it can't cover ALL 9-15 year olds. What do all the other 9-15 year olds do? Presumably they are not sent to junior GULAG or boiled alive.

I found myself asking question after question like this the longer the
programme ran, and the longer it ran, the more wary I was of the
journalist's motives. That scepticism was reinforced by the *way* the programme was produced, which was clearly to bias the viewer against Uzbek, Soviet style command economics where officials tend to be
caricatured as tyrannical crooked/embezzling slave drivers with bulging Swiss bank accounts whilst their people starve or live at subsistence levels (that was a nice closed school by the way, and this is something which I have noticed in a lot of footage of present and past Soviet cities, they appear clean and well maintained, unlike many in the West). Are there any command economies which are not reviled by the developed world's media as I can't recall one. As I read it these countries adopt or retain, non-democratic, authoritarian, command economies in order to protect themselves from being ravaged by developed world imperialism.

The irony/hypocrisy is two-fold. Firstly, a lot of what we see in
Uzbekistan (and elsewhere in central Asia) is at least in part a consequence of western anarcho-capitalist penetration. It's the West that's moved production and labour off-shore, so bringing that point home was fair enough. But how much of what was show and reported in the film is the result of liberal free-market democracy having subverted the command economy of the former USSR in the late 80s and early 90s? 'Hashar' means 'community work', and was fundamental to how the Soviet system worked (see page 64 below, the quote from 'The Curse of Cotton' in an earlier comment, and the 3 page report on 'what explains people鈥檚 participation in collective action in Central Asia?' below, remembering that the old Soviet constitutions emphasised duties to the state, not individual rights. It was a radically different approach to life, and entrepreneurship was was criminal behaviour, a crime against the people.

The history is critical given that Uzbekistan is now in transition from
a way of life which appears now to be totally alien, if not anathema, to contemporary Western free-market individualists/internationalists. But look our crime rate, our low birth rates, our cynicism and spin, as that's the price that we pay I suggest for 'freedom' and 'human rights' at the expense of respect and duty.

Simon Ostrovsky's film/report came across as another example of the propaganda we've seen so often when Western journalists go undercover to report on life under tyrannical command economies. The piece was very high on hyperbolic emotive language and suggestion but very low on investigative content and impartial analysis in my view. This is a formula for propaganda. It was yet another attack on a Stalinist state of the sort we have seen in the past with N Korea, Burma, Iran and Iraq. The journalists and NGOs use the liberal democrat/free market soft bludgeon of human and child rights abuse.

One thing's for sure, Simon's film certainly won't close any Neocon or human rights NGO doors to him.

A basic rule of the thumb is that Western NGOs beat what remain of command economies with human rights whilst Western companies drive prices down with what should be obvious consequences for their own, and for the command economy's people. One is at the expense of the other.

"While farmers in Uzbekistan work in the private sector, they are still
required to meet Soviet-style production quotas for cotton and grain, which they then have to sell to state purchasers at artificially low prices."

"Education: While net primary enrolment was 97.5 gross in 2002
(Sources: Social Monitor 2004), poor rural children have limited access to education and independent data suggest that the true net enrolment
rate is lower. While primary education is officially free, the rising costs of textbooks, meals, clothing and transport are leading to falling attendance, particularly in rural areas where children may work in the cotton fields to boost family income."
UNICEF IN UZBEKISTAN

World Bank and Uzbekistan:

That is, the World Bank and IMF are really only 'world' and 'international' to the extent that they serve the interests of free-market anarcho-capitalism and not the interests of past and present Stalinist/Maoist command economics with all their 'alien' ideas of communal work and welfare etc.

The latter precepts are presented/spun by NGOs as forms of slave labour and oppression as the developed world's NGOs predictably don't want any of that tyrannical nonsense regulating or limiting Western free market forces at home or abroad.

One statement from Plexus at the end of the Newsnight programme said it all for me:

"We have been categorically assured by the Uzbekistan Government that
the use of child labour by the Uzbekistan Government is prohibited."

"If evidence is produced to show that this is untrue, we will immediately cease trading in Uzbekistan cotton."
Plexus statement

That is, if Plexus found that there wasn't legislation proscribing
child labour, then they would act, but that is not the same as their
saying that they would act if there was evidence of child labour. There
IS legislation, we know that. What we don't know is whether the cotton picking is hashar and therefore not child labour.

This is a reminder that powerful (i.e well resourced by developed world governments) international 'human rights' groups/NGOs deceive and spin
in order to subvert economically unfriendly governments and they use the developed world's domestic media to help ensure that the electorate keep on message viz deregulation and human rights.

Just don't forget what the EU Reform Treaty portends domestically...all those 'human rights' and no duties.