Owen Howell, teacher.

I was, unfortunately, a teacher at this school. I experienced the following behaviour from two teachers called Haley (headteacher) and Olivia (my teaching partner):

1) Insulting me in Korean every day;

3) Answering me as if I were completely stupid if I asked a question. By contrast, Olivia would bombard me with questions about grammar and pounce on me if I made a mistake;

4) Constantly making insinuations about me: my clothes, my hair, and my apearance in general, and refusing to listen to my replies;

5) Spreading rumours about me behind my back and lying about my performance to the school owners;

6) Sabotaging my work: throwing away homework and artwork with no word of explanation and laughing at me if I requested an explanation;

7) Openly criticizing my abilities in front of other teachers even though I have excellent English;

Lying about the medical condition and private life of a colleague;

9) Plotting to get me moved from kindergarten classes and plotting to get me sacked, having previously decided that I was not boyfriend material;

10) Pretending they were going home during a staff gathering in order that I leave;

11) Branding certain children as retarded and stupid (even 4-year olds);

Here is some information about Olivia:

Olivia made my working life impossible ever since I arrived at SLP and appeared to enjoy doing so:

1)      Olivia never answered my questions, and instead chuckled patronizingly.

2)      Olivia patrolled the lunchroom as though I were incapable of ensuring the children eat their food.

3)      Olivia threw away homework I have given to the children without explanation, even when I pressed her for one, apparently out of spite.

4)      Olivia talked about me in Korean to other teachers while I was holding a converstaion with her. I have reason to believe she was insulting me.

5)      Olivia did not answer my questions about the location of equipment or field trips, apparently preferring that I look ignorant and foolish.

6)      Olivia scrutinized, belittled and undermined everything that I did, so long as she was aware of what I did.

7)      Olivia talked to me like a child in a shrill, condescending and disgustingly rude voice. She frequently broadcasted my perceived faults to the office in a loud voice.

8)      Olivia turned the reasonable questions I ask her into sleights on my character, such as “didn’t you understand?!” or “I told you!”. These were said in a loud shrill voice so everybody could hear, and are often the result of her poor instructions to me.

9)      Olivia probably continues to insult me in Korean.

10)  Olivia frequently made insulting insinuations about me to my face, often in the form of veiled compliments like “you’re hair looks nice; it looks better.”

11)  Olivia openly laughed at me and dismissed me when I spoke to her.

12)  Olivia made the children wash their hands after I asked them to do it. The implication here is that I am both dirty and incompetent.

13)  Olivia was dreadfully and condescendingly rude to me on a daily basis.

14)  Olivia constantly implies the foreign teachers, including me, are incompetent by asking questions which are “loaded”: eg.

Olivia:“Is Ann well behaved?”

Owen: “Sometimes not.”

Olivia: “Well, she’s fine in my class, because I have discipline in my class.”

This is to say, “Owen, you are incompetent and stupid.”

15)  Olivia blamed me for her mistakes, such as when she wanted to swap classes, but didn’t tell me beforehand.

16)  Olivia is rude to all the foreign teachers no matter how reasonable the question.

17)  Olivia made my working life stressful and I lost sleep and became overweight. I truly belief ve was trying to make my life miserable for her own selfish pleasure.

18)  Olivia ridiculed me and my work.

19)  Olivia implied that everything I did was substandard.

20)  Olivia manipulated me by being intermittently rude and friendly; I believe this was so I was not prepared for her insults and in a position of relative weakness.

21)  Olivia appeared to want me to fail in order to make herself look better and validate her clearly racist views about Westerners.

22)  Olivia treated other teachers with the same amount of contempt.  Another teacher has told me that he received exactly the same treatment from Olivia.

23)  Olivia told some of us confidential medical information about another teacher. She did this out of spite.

24)   Olivia’s demeanour leads me to believe that she thinks she is naturally superior to me.

25)  This behaviour  continued UNABATED for nine months. Olivia is a deeply unpleasant person.

26)  Olivia was ingratiated with Haley. Haley is the boss: therefore I felt pretty powerless. Haley does not appear to have addressed these issues with Olivia.

27)  I suspect that Olivia believes she is racially superior to me as she treated me like a child.

28)  Olivia is a bully and is absolutely the most unpleasant person I have ever met.

The management and SLP:

1) I was fired as the management claimed the situation could cause them financial damage. Haley and Olivia, by contrast, received no punishment.

2) They lied that the parents had been complaining about me. This is a common and quite successful pretext for dismissing foreign teachers;

3) They broke my contract by firing me without 2 previous formal warnings;

4) They threatened not to pay my return flight or last months salary; they changed their attitude when I threatened them with the labour board, claiming their threats were empty and they had intended to buy my ticket all along;

5) I wrote to the SLP franchise about Haley and Olivia but received no reply.

Please await posts from other teachers.

It is easier, and more concise, to report official comment as fact, and the BBC are at it again.

Baha Mousa, the Iraqi tortured and murdered by British soldiers in 2003, was killed as a result of established and recognised torture techniques used by British and American soldiers. These include forcing stress positions and inflicting sensory deprivation on victims.

However, on July 10, the BBC aired an MoD statement accompanied by a rules-of-conduct video, suggesting this was an isolated incident, the sort of which they were trying to “stamp out”.

By mysterious journalistic alchemy, this statement sublimed into fact, and it was then confidently asserted that the armed forces were, by principle and practice, against such abuses. 

Reporters are often in thrall and under the control of those in power

No questions were asked about the history of torture under the British military, or its advocation, toleration and tuition, for which there are numerous precedents: try lifting the carpet of British military-occupation of Northern Island in the 1970s and you will find it filthy with  crimes against our own citizens. 

Other stories received similar treatment that day, such as the report about the £9.4m hike in road tax. Gordon Brown stated, in Parliament, that this was necessary for the fight to save the environment. 

If they had put the pieces of the puzzle together, they might have seen a darker picture: nothing is being done to make public transport cheaper and more attractive to “consumers”, an environmental holocaust is being wreaked on the middle East, and the construction of two multi-billion pound, oil glugging aircraft-carriers is nearing completion.

The BBC are fed gloopy nonsense by our government, and this most often comes out the other end as sweet-smelling guff. And journalists are not permitted to ask these questions in “hard news” (as if!) for these principle reasons:

Firstly, young journalists are not asked to reason why, and not in a competitive position to do so. This is partly because “critique” – any line which involves sub-surface inspection or is liable to provoke disagreement, but could still turn out in the course of an argument to be true –  is incorrectly conflated with “comment” or “opinion” by detractors, and often labelled non-objective by bullish government press departments.

How often, for the example, have the BBC been accused of being “irresponsible” by governments when its news-line does not match theirs?

Secondly, they are discouraged from writing assiduously, and taught that “it was claimed that”, or “he said” is not as pithy or direct as ”it is the case that”. This what we call “style over content” and is unfortunately more a symptom of an historically pliant press than our increasingly trivial news-values.

In his 1998 book, Strange Places, Questionable People, ex-political editor for the BBC, John Simpson, is candid about the pliancy of reporters in the early 1980s:

The average [journalism in Parliament] was distinctly poor.

The journalists there sometimes seemed to be as defensive of the customs of the place as any sergeant-at-arms…Some of the reporters found it hard to distinguish between themselves and the MPs they were reported on; they would adopt their language and mannerisms, andwere as prickly about the rules of the place as the MPs themselves.

…their reporting tended to be [about] the politics of personality and debating-chamber performance, rather than those of the world inhabited by ordinary men and women…The outside world often scarcely seemed to exist there.

This was the way the people we came later to know as spin-doctors liked it… And once government or party policy had been established, the entire official machinery on all sides was geared to present it as fixed and certain; only mavericks or the insane could possibly question it.

[Many journalists]  were neither independent-minded, nor bold, nor well-connected. They were the greatest beneficiaries and the fiercest defenders of the client relationship which the lobby system inculcated: a relationship that kept them weak and at a disadvantage…The lobby system, secretive, consensual, a mystery into which you had to be inducted and in which it was necessary to believe implicitly, was a positive encouragement to the journalism of laziness.

And if you have ever worked in a newsroom, you might have experience of what bastards (yes, they are usually men), bullies and churls editors can be, and that you simply do not question the editorial line. You churn out, and then go home to whatever house £14K a year can get you.

Lastly, the best way to stay on the media gravy-train and to satisfy your news sources – to tickle their bollocks rather than kick them there. This should give you a ready-supply of the ”news” your editor demands, ready to be consumed: just turn on the tap, and out comes the slurry.

But the very opposite should be  true: if we apply rigorous subjective criteria to news-gathering and presentation, realise that sources can be unreliable and the evidence we gather is confined by our very subjective limitations, reporting can be all-the-more robust and thruthful.

Understanding the American political system is like wading through treacle, unless you take time to understrand it for yourself.

Perhaps this is because most of the mainstream media are in thrall to all the razzamatazz and adversarialism of presidential contests, but fail to explain the political process.

First off, the primaries are open only to votes from the two main parties, and therefore fix the gaze of the World’s media on their own agendas to the detriment of non-party candidates.

The recent Democratic candidate election sideshow helped to mould press coverage over the existing political landscape, and so further entrenched the power of the powerful.

The media machine

There is no room for independents or independent agendas, only endless mud-slinging and conjecture; huge media conglomerates like Fox News and the 24 new-media factories they bring with them help to dominate and manufacture political language and discourse to this end.

And celebrity-obsessed American media outlets like Time Magazine ensure that domestic politics is always couched in terms of personality.

Furthermore, reputedly intelligent newspapers like the New York Times are surely inaccessible to the many people – especially minorities – who have been failed by America’s public education system.

Courting celebrity

The most potent example of the manufactured celebrity is perhaps Henry Kissinger during the mid-1970s, and his love affair with Playboy and Time Magazines; so much so, infact, nobody noticed he was complicit in the illegal bombing of Cambodia, the rise of the khmer Rouge, and the  military funding of General Suharto’s genocidal regime in Indonesia.

A real free press

A democracy should be freely used and understood by a country’s citizenry: a country that elects its presidents by collegiate voting, and a mass-media that consistently fails to address this democratic deficit or resist the spoon-feeding of information from Democrat and Republican press machines, have failed their people.

For these reasons, I would thoroughly recommend reading the brave Wichita Star Eagle for its willingness to question established norms. During the last presidential election, for example, they dared to question the new electronic voting machines, and the affiliations its manufacturers had with the Republican Party.

Aside from that, John Pilger’s doumentary The War on Democracy, is essential viewing. Here, he explains the historical context of both American foreign policy and its domestic political system.

The more populist Michael Moore also establishes some persuasive arguments about the complacency of the American mass-media in his Films Fahrenheit 911 and Bowling for Columbine.

Perhaps, however, we should not invest so much trust in the mass-media to educate us about American politics. The only solution, as always, is to look with our own eyes, though we should not always believe what we see.

Chinese human right abuses have been a distant secret for far too long, and it is about time the global media set its sites on the mysterious regime.

Of course, pundits frequently argue that sport and politics should be kept separate, but that surely becomes a pretty remote consideration when you think how much could be achieved by using the Olympic Games for public protest.

Many Tibetan students, labour activists and Tibetan nationalists have been arrested, tortured and “disappeared” by the current regime.

If we add to this the flooding of homes on the Yangtze river in the 1990s during the building of the Three Gorges Dam, and the murder and the widespread torture of members of the Fallon Gong religious sect, China has a very large catalogue of human rights abuses.

Protests

Indeed, the many past Olympic games protests, such as the Black Power salutes and the boycotting of apartheid South Africa, all helped to effect important political changes.

We need only think back to Mohammed Ali’s vociferous support for black rights to know just how much a sportsman can acheive.

Sydney’s secret shame

It was an awful shame, then, that few used the 2000 Sydney Olympic games for political protest, and that most of the British press ignored the plight of the Australian Aborigines who lived in squalor close to the stadium.

They could, for example, have mentioned that life expectancy for aboriginals is around 20 years lower than white Australians, and that male suicide rates are among the highest for any of the world’s ethnicities.

They could also have shown that sprinter Cathy Freeman was far from a typical aboriginal athlete.

Countless exemplary black Australian sports people were segregated from white athletes and refused access to decent facilities. Some even died in poverty and despair.

Racists

Prime Minister John Howard’s government was, at the time, the only “Western” one to be branded racist by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and continued to resist human rights reforms.

People – the majority – come above a sports event, particularly when their human rights have been violated.

It is our moral duty, then, to protest at the top of our voices, even if this does ruin the games for everybody else.

The Western press has always dealt with the poorer World with contempt, confusion and ignorance.

It is easier to write condescendingly from a position of perceived superiority than look at another culture or set of values objectively. And perhaps this sells better too.

This happens for at least two reasons. Firstly, there is the flawed belief that we are “developed”, as if development has a measurable and verifiable endpoint, and that “they” are “underdeveloped” by that concrete yardstick.

On a mundane level, the effete AA Gill regularly patronises other cultures and complains about foreign restaurant meals in his Sunday Times Magazine travel column.

The more dangerous side

But this type of arrogance has far more serious implications.

For example, Western academic arrogance perhaps reached its height in Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End of History, in which he argued that capitalism was the end of the global development process. Indeed!

Frighteningly, this spectacular hubris has filtered into the present and pernicious neo-conservativism in America, and further down into the right-wing and “liberal” press here. But, of course, these beliefs have long been manifest in the United States’ Brezinsky doctrine, a geopolitcal programme followed by successive presidents since the 1960s to impose the will, politics and economies of America on weaker countries.

Read anything on Iraq by Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondentfor the Telegraph, and it tends to be about what “we” must do, or how our troops are doing, often without even attempting to justify those stories from “the other side”.

The Independent’s Johann Hari, the archetypal liberal apologist for the Iraq invasion, at first reserved his humanitarian bias for our ill-equipped troops, but not for the innocent people being bombed, or those still suffering the effects of sanctions.

Both of these pale in comparison to the Independent’s corpulant, intransigent Bruce Anderson, who rained down paternalistic judgement from afar about our duty to intervene, usually without considering the human impact on Iraqis or Afghanistanis, or the profits for the Anglo-American military industrial complex.

Unpeople

Orwell, that bottomless source of quotes, called those who fall outside the reporter’s remit the “unpeople” – our crimes against whom are so unpalatable, they are best ignored.

This theme has been taken up by journalists and academic mavericks like John Pilger, Noam Chomsky and Harold Pinter, who are just as corruscating about the complacent Western Press as they are about the “democracies” it belongs to.

They also take the time and write at length to deal with foreign affairs fairly and comprehensively, even if they usually make comment and judgement.

George Monbiot

If you are looking for a reasoned and incisive comment on foreign development, globalisation, or even the Middle East conflicts, a good port of call is George Monbiot’s website or his artricles for the Guardian.

He is a fine journalist as his comments are less likely to be based on the received and unquestioned facts of Anderson’s armchair journalism, and his research tends to be more thoroughgoing, balanced and independently motivated.

A journalist should be an impartial and critical equal among equals, and whether a travel writer or war correspondent, they have a duty to respect other people and cultures.

If you have ever read any Julie Burchill articles, you will know that she writes the same clunky way she did for NME Magazine when she was 17. But that is not all bad.

She has written for most English newspapers in some way, shape or form over the last 30 years.

And in 2003, Burchill was ranked number 85 in Channel 4’s poll of the 100 Worst Britons, and not without justification.

Once a trenchant atheist punk, she is now into theology; and her journalism is just as fickle and capricious, but always delivered with the trenchant fervour of a religious fanatic.

Variously claiming to be a leftist or anarchist, and a proud member of the working class and “chav” elite, she has often revelled in confounding the left-wing, middle class press by being apparently reactionary and belligerent, especially during her stint at the Mail on Sunday during the 1980s.

But it is hard to tell whether Burchill is primarily an iconoclast or just a journeyman reporter, willing to write any old guff. I suspsect the latter, and when she left the Guardian in 2007, she left similar feelings of irritation and wonderment in her wake.

Stephen Brook wrote on June 1, 2007:

“No one could agree with everything she said. But there was a delight in encountering her thoughtful opinions, strongly held. And vitriolically delivered, of course, which only added to the sense of weekly occasion when reading one of her columns.”

However I also agreed with the sentiments of American feminist Camille Paglia about Burchill’s childishness, hypocrisy and lack of verve, which she made in 1993:

“[Your writing]  contains a shadowy, tragic – or should I say pathetic – history of your life, your grim obsessiveness about your body image and what were pretty clearly some early sexual encounters with men, where your credulity or failures of judgement got you into situations that left permanent marks on you…

“Your flip, cliched locutions, braying rhetoric, and meandering incoherences are those of a college or even high school student…You think yourself madly clever, but I’m afraid you enfant terrible personality is a bit tattered…

“A friend of mine calls a style like yours -which we have seen a thousand examples of- ‘alcoholic prose’. There is a heavy, grinding ponderousness pull on the sinking syntax, a noisy blathering sound, a bitter, maudlin self pity breaking through the false bravado and cynical posturing… It is palpably 30 years out of date.”

Chief among Burchill’s Crimes were her formless, meandering discourses in the Guardian Magazine before 2007.

In her farewell column that year, her longest paragraph filled 17 lines on a web page, and God knows how many in print. And I cannot even begin to tell you what it was about.

And in a 2004 comment for The Times, she even wrote a fawning retrospective of the Thatcher years, dripping with power-envy and her disgust for men.

But all-in-all, her columns make compelling, unputdownable reading, largely because of her unpredictability and unreasonable turns of argument.

I read her columns with the kind of grim fascination that accompanies traffic accidents and always felt less clean for doing so.

Her contradictions, she would inevitably claim, are all in sync with her punkish, confrontational zeal. 

I reckon she is just a crap and sanctimonious hack who has found a shtick that works.

George Orwell’s work is a rich source for quotes, patricularly for left-leaning students, and more-particularly students of journalism. These words are excerpted from an intended preface written in 1945 for the novel Animal Farm: 

“If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion…Any fairminded person with journalistic experience will admit that during [World War Two] official censorship has not been particularly irksome…The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary…Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban…but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact.

“So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics…At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question…Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.”

The parallels with today’s highly concentrated newspaper industry are obvious, where ownership is enjoyed by just a few companies, like the Guardian and Mirror groups, and Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB.

And the self-enforced journalistic standards of newsworthiness and proximity mean it is far more acceptable to write about, say, a brave local soldier than a dead Iraqi, even though stories about Iraqi deaths would create a far more representative picture of the invasion.

Culture of consensus

Somewhere in the journalistic ether, an agenda has been set by consensus and ignorance, where reporters have to confirm to strange and discomforting norms. People are not interested in people “over there”, an editor once told me, or worthy stories about injustice.

This racism and cultural-exclusivity was realised explicitly by Orwell in his 1939 essay Not Counting Niggers.

Also, the parallels with Orwell’s “unpeople” in 1984 are manifest: it will not do to mention their dead in the same breath as our brave soldiers.

However, I tend to think that a greater interest in foreign affairs (and foreign injustices) could be created if newspapers reported more extensively and compassionately about those subjects.

Certainly, the Independent’s Robert Fisk puts himself out there in far-flung war zones, and finds facts far removed from press release officialese.

But he is an exception to the rule. And even the “respectable” media are loathe to make the obvious connections between Anglo-American conquest and the proliferation of American and British oil companies in the Middle East.

This is because this connection is not absolutely verifiable, whereas officialspeak can be put down in copy without fear of reprisals. “Objective” and “accepted”, in this sense, become synonymous.

Immoral agenda

The ability of the tabloid press to set the moral agenda is startling. Readers frequently tolerate The Sun’s ethical ambivalence, particularly towards sex: barely legal page three breasts and prurient attacks on sexual misadventures frequently go together in the same paper.

If readers tolerate this, they will surely tolerate the stilted news values of times of conflict.

Politics and the English Language

In his 1946 essay politics and the English Language, Orwell writes:

“Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration…”

This is intended to refer to academic writing, but could apply equally well to many today’s journalists.

Like Winston Smith in Orwell’s novel 1984, reporters are often forced to adopt a received and faulty lexicon based on familiarity; importantly, “familiar” often means “official”, given the air-time and page-space allowed for government ministers.

Very often, an officially-uttered word or phrase like “Hearts and Minds” or “atrocity” or “War on Terror” phrase will appear in quotation marks in a headline, strapline or news crosshead.

Soon enough, particularly on the internet and rolling 24 hour television news, such words and phrases can become identifiable taglines or soundbites for a theme, and each media outlet is then compelled to compete for this identifiability. A Google search for “war on terror” produces a BBC news page as the second result.

Resultantly, the invasion of Iraq is not just reputed by George Bush to be a “War on Terror”, it becomes an actual war on terror by the lights of media saturation coverage. 

However, certain “left-liberal” newspapers like the Independent do refrain from using such phrases without quotataion marks, themselves being wary of the dangers of uncritically-used language.

Bollocks to Blairese

But there is an even more insidious process at work, and it has been growing in strength since 1997: the infiltration of Blairese. The language of Blair, of “pledges”, of “Regional Regeneration Strategies” of “Community Involvement Partnerships”, is baffling.

As a result of this language, and the labarynth of governmental, corporate and quasi-governmental bodies and their many interactions and legal paper-trails, a journalist’s notes on a local council story or house-planning scandal can seem like a mist of nonsense.

Given his low pay, long hours, and crammed schedule, he is likely to abandon this story altogether.

The cynical journalist might argue this system and its accompanying acronyms are deliberately opaque. No understandable information means no story and this means no problem for Councillor Smith.

Laziness is next to lousiness

But beware! Lazy news-values are easy, and some stories are easily reproducable, with names, dates and places changed for purpose. More worryingly, though, journalists often have lazy ethics.

Orwell was definitely not a complacent journalist in either sense: for his 1933 novel Down and Out in Paris and London he lived on the streets – he went to the other side, and learnt to empathise with the disenfranchised and disregarded.

Empathetic journalism received popular acclaim more recently in Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary Supersize Me, where he lived on junk food for a month to prove it was damaging America’s health.

At the risk of sounding trite, I should say we could learn from them: a fact is a fact only once you have learnt or experienced it first-hand.

Have you ever watched the BBC Breakfast News before work? Do not bother – you are more likely to see a story about Madonna than hard news.

Some would argue that this is what we need to start the day: soft pap and a sunrise-glow set to prepare us for the harsh realities of the world, with the young, pleasing looks of Susanna Reid and the avuncular charm of Bill Turnbull.

Ratings

Certainly, the BBC have to compete with ITV’s Good Morning Television and its magazine format for ratings, so it is understandable if producers want to attract new viewers.

And the internet is now supposedly an immediate source of daily news, encroaching onto all old-media territory, and for some, replaces the morning news staple with a slimmed-down alternative (even though we should all be dubious about any outlet’s claims to having the definitive news angle).

But what about the old audience? Surely as licence-payers, we are entitled to a range of programming which satisfies a need, even one that other channels are not catering for.

Surely, the BBC’s daily evening programme, The One Show, hosted by Adrian Chiles, fills the magazine show niche, though at a different time.

Unfortunately, Breakfast News is filled with novelists and directors plugging their work, even though the BBC is not supposed to directly endorse products, and with factoids ranging from skateboarding chipmunks to scientists discovering the perfect sandwich.

Unpalatable at any time of day

There is certainly room for lightweight, press release-driven news stories in our televisual breakfast, but not to this extent. We need only look to BBC’s general scheduling to see that they sometimes overdo a format – such as reality shows about auctions, gardening or interior design – all of which are cheap to make, because there is no need to employ actors.

There is a balance to be struck, and there comes a point when empty, trivia and celebrity-driven news diminishes journalism: on September 17 2007, the day after the private mercenaries from Blackwater had gunned-down innocent Iraqis in Baghdad, the event was ignored by the BBC, who instead ran the gamete of human interest stories.

No uglies, please!

As an aside, we should also consider the implications for aspiring young reporters: what chance do women have when they have to compete with attractive Natasha Kaplinsky clones, or men with charming middle-agers like Turnbull?

You may also have noticed that this sexist older-man younger-woman formula has been reproduced across many formats, such as ITV’s Des and Mel, or The One Show, and that even the children’s show Blue Peter seems to have a no-uglies employment policy.

You are all going to look harder for your news I am afraid. Where exactly, I am not sure.

A new national student award for environmentally friendly design was launched this month. Environmental student campaign organisation People and Planet and green events organiser UK AWARE are behind the project. 

However, despite such noble schemes, the mainstream ecological movement is gradually being co-opted by people motivated by cold economics.  As our government ignores the environmental damage our industries wreak, and shifts the onus of climate-change prevention to private households, some of the most unethical businesses are investing in our renewable energy programmes.

New Green Students

The Eco-Innovation Award is supposed to nurture new design and engineering talent in post-GCSE students. Entrants will be judged by industry bigwigs such as Charlie Browne, the sustainability coordinator for IKEA, and Martin Carter, from the Centre for Sustainable Design. Events co-ordinator for UK AWARE, Jodie Carnegie Fowler, was excited: “We hope to see anything that is inventive, from redesigns of a system such as refuse, to environmental protection itself.

“The event will be a good opportunity for networking and a platform for the students to talk to future employers. All sorts of ideas can be turned into things that change the way we live, and sometimes they just start out as ideas.” 

More awareness is indeed needed. Research by the government’s department for Environment food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) shows that most Britons are still confused about the specific causes of climate change and what they can do about it.  

University of Central Lancashire Forensic psychology student, Kirsty Williams, 21, said: “Normal people are not taught enough about how to be environmentally friendly.

“Unless universities have programmes, they’re not going to know. In a big house like mine, you see how much goes to waste.” 

However, like many things in the post-Blair era, the industry awaiting these bright young things is a vivid and exciting brand, but not necessarily what it seems. 

The focus on wealth, growth and profit is all too familiar. He said: “Large corporate investment is essential. BP plan to invest £5bn in renewable energy technologies over the next decade.

“The environmental sector is emerging as a key business sector for wealth creation, as well as delivering a cleaner and more sustainable world.”  

Energy companies need to be sustainable and profitable, but Rooker’s onus on growth and wealth creation is repellant, and his words are deceptive.

Inevitably, DEFRA will defer to powerful organisations such as British Petroleum (BP), but it is clear that ecological conservation is not their first concern. 

BP’s terrible environmental Record

 Aside from a catalogue of human rights abuses, swathes of the Canadian Arctic National Wildlife Refuge were decimated by their activities.

BP expected to make £3.5 billion between 2005 and 2015 from renewable energy, and are routinely accused by environmental groups of using this as a “greenwash” for their heavy-polluting activities. 

Same old story

But why would we expect better? In December 2006, government figures predicted aeroplane carbon emissions would rise by between 22 and 36 million tonnes by 2030 because of an increase in no-frills flights.

This is despite the government’s promises to double passenger duty and cut carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050.  

Under European law, the government can also fund the start-up costs for airports, and plane companies, who buy “carbon credits” from other companies rather than cut their own emissions.  

The number of passengers travelling on internal flights will inevitably increase given the spiralling costs of public transport and vehicle-running. 

Paper Waste

If this was not enough, a study by Lexmark in May 2006 showed that British businesses were the worst paper wasters in Europe. At the same time, a high profile government television campaign encourages ordinary people to use recycling banks.

Dr Rob Marchant, senior lecturer in the Environment Department at the University of York, said:  “Many companies have questionable records, but seeing them invest money is always a positive thing. It’s better that they should be on our side than against. 

“The government are certainly not doing enough on air travel, and large plane companies have a lot of influence in dictating policy. It’s going to take a long time as people like to travel.” 

Dr Marchant added, however, that new European legislation on waste, will force council to address paper wastage on a company-by-company basis. 

But as long as environmentalism is run by big business, the student eco-innovators will be forced to work for those who all too often use their power and wealth to prevent progress.