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William Hogarth, Beer Street & Gin Street, 1751

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Rottingdean Smugglers Night is a celebration of Rottingdean's historical past. An edgy, noisy, fantastical evening that links the passing of local bonfire celebrations and services of remembrance to Christmas. December also begins that final run up to winter solstice. In Rottingdean we combine these elements into a night of fire, drumming, costume, fireworks and seasonal fayre. A hybrid night of noise and mayhem.

It's a difficult time of year, when summer is a distant memory and the cold weather has set in with a vengeance. Nights are at their longest and darkest. Our outdoor lives are hampered and curtailed by weather. Smugglers Night is a rebellion against both the elements and modern life. Villagers retake control over streets where the car is usually king. For a few hours, the high street is closed to that great intruder traffic and in its place there's just music, dancing, laughter and celebration.

Our village has several assets, which lend themselves to this great evening. The coast offers a panoramic backdrop for any firework display. An intimate and historic high street provides a picturesque setting for processions which commemorate many historic links while the green is perfect for an atmospheric gathering to celebrate with a village carol service.

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Rottingdean Smugglers Night is a celebration of Rottingdean's historical past. An edgy, noisy, fantastical evening that links the passing of local bonfire celebrations and services of remembrance to Christmas. December also begins that final run up to winter solstice. In Rottingdean we combine these elements into a night of fire, drumming, costume, fireworks and seasonal fayre.

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Case on medical face masks smuggling attempt sent to court - Vice PM

AKIPRESS.COM - The case on attempt to smuggle 1 million medical face masks from Kyrgyzstan has been sent to the court, said the Vice Prime Minister Altynai Omurbekova on air of Birinchi Radio on March 9...

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Case on medical face masks smuggling attempt sent to court - Vice PM

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Case on medical face masks smuggling attempt sent to court - Vice PM AKIPRESS.COM - The case on attempt to smuggle 1 million medical face masks from Kyrgyzstan has been sent to the court, said the Vice Prime Minister Altynai Omurbekova on air of Birinchi Radio on March 9...

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Research Photograph, Lloyd Corporation

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Plastic Barrels

“We’re just one boat, but boats like ours come almost every day,” said Leroy Williams, 23, as he and his crew dropped off dozens of dirty plastic barrels on a Mabaruma riverbank.

In Venezuela, it costs only pennies to fill a car tank because of huge government subsidies. Using the smuggled gasoline in Guyana is theoretically against the law. But in much of the rugged Essequibo region -- home to the country’s mining and timber industries -- the law goes almost completely unenforced. Instead of the dollar-a-liter paid at pumps in the capital, gas is sold for half that.

Guyana imported 4.9 million bbl of fuel in 2014. Officials declined to estimate how much is smuggled. For Venezuela, it’s problematic enough to give the gas away to its own people at a cost of $15 billion a year. But when it also seeps through borders to its neighbors, that cuts further into what the government could sell at full price in international markets to obtain much-needed dollars for an economy ravaged by shortages and soaring inflation.

For years the “border trade” as it’s called has sustained rural Guyanese outposts like Mabaruma, where Venezuela gasoline powers cars, motorboats and home generators. Locals and business groups say the policy is a lifeline to isolated areas the government can’t supply. Watchdogs, however, are critical of the practice.

“It sets the region, and by extension the entire nation, in a vulnerable position,” said Calvin Bernard, president of Transparency Institute of Guyana, a nonprofit devoted to exposing corruption. He says it risks making citizens more dependent on a neighbor than their own government -- at a time when Venezuela is renewing a centuries’ old claim to nearly two- thirds of Guyanese territory, including the border area.

https://www.hydrocarbonprocessing.com/blog/2015/09/smuggled-venezuelan-gasoline-fuels-guyana-s-economy

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Revealed: PPE stockpile was out-of-date when coronavirus hit UK

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The Lanes Street Markets, 2020

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The Lanes Stall

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The Lanes Stall, 2020

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Indoor Flea Market, Brighton, 2020

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Exploring the history of smuggling on the South Coast and its current context / futures

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Exploring the material culture of barrels as a vessel of trade

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Fears of smuggling across borders
UK as a centre for international smuggling

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Opinion: the history of smuggling across the Irish border is a major Brexit issue yet has received relatively little attention. By Cathal McCall, Queen's University Belfast
Central to the fate of the Brexit negotiations is the future of the Irish border. Politicians from all sides insist they want to avoid a return to border checks once the UK leaves the EU - but they disagree on how this can be achieved.

The history of smuggling across the Irish border - and what already happens today - is a major issue in this disagreement, yet it has received relatively little attention.

In 1923, soon after the end of the Irish war of independence, British and Irish customs authorities agreed on 15 "approved frontier crossing points" on cross-border roads for the inspection of goods in daytime hours. At each point, a border customs checkpoint or "customs hut" was set up. Many unapproved routes crossing the border remained open to pedestrians but travelling on them by vehicle was prohibited. The exception was a small number of "concession roads" on which vehicles could travel from one part of a jurisdiction, passing through another jurisdiction, and re-enter the original one without stopping.
From RTÉ Archives, a 1984 RTÉ News report by Michael Fisher about the cross-border smuggling of electrical goods
Travellers with contraband on unapproved routes risked detection with penalties enforced by customs patrols. Smuggling became a widespread feature of borderland life between the 1920s and 1960s as borderlanders and those from further afield sought to avoid paying duty on goods bought on the other side of the border.

This period is replete with tales of small-time, domestic smuggling - tea and butter concealed beneath a petticoat in wartime, whiskey and a turkey beneath a heavy overcoat at Christmas time. Even commercial smuggling stories, usually involving the transportation of animal livestock in some unusual way, were told to generate amusement, even admiration, rather than outrage.

Northern Ireland's Troubles, beginning in 1969, suppressed smuggling activities because many unapproved routes were closed or blown-up by the British security forces. For many people, the presence of British Army checkpoints at approved crossing points also provided a sufficient disincentive for cross-border travel.
From RTÉ Archives, a 1987 RTÉ News report by Michael Lally on the grain smuggling problem
An end to border checks

The launch of the European single market on January 1, 1993 - to provide free movement of goods, services, people and capital within the European Union - made border customs checkpoints redundant because import duties on goods were no longer applied. But excise duties on fuel, alcohol and tobacco remained.

Smuggling across the border then became a highly profitable, niche activity that was the preserve of well-organised gangs who have largely concentrated on smuggling tobacco and fuel. The smuggling of counterfeit cigarettes - manufactured in Eastern Europe and Asia - into Ireland and across the border was identified in 2018 as a significant threat by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

In March 2018, an illicit tobacco factory manufacturing cigarettes from raw tobacco destined for the UK market was discovered in County Louth, south of the border. Fuel smuggling also remains a significant issue despite the success of HMRC's anti-fraud strategy which contributed to the shrinking of the Northern Ireland illicit diesel market share from 19% in 2005-6 to 6% in 2016-17.
From RTÉ Brexit Republic podcast, RTÉ's Europe Editor Tony Connelly and Deputy Foreign Editor Colm Ó Mongáin on what does no deal mean for a hard border
Post-Brexit opportunities for smugglers

It is entirely possible that the activities of such organised smuggling operations could be turbo-charged by a no-deal Brexit which would bring with it import and export duties between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and regulatory divergence for a wide range of commodities. The golden rule of smuggling is that where there is a difference in the price of a commodity, or it is in short supply on either side of a border, smugglers will seek to step in and make a profit. The organised and experienced smugglers are the most likely candidates to reap the illicit rewards.

An upsurge in smuggling would be facilitated by the most extensive cross-border road network in Europe. Officially, there are 208 cross-border roads on the island, nearly twice as many as those crossing the EU's entire eastern external frontier. A security response to that upsurge would be inevitable. One possible retrograde step could be to close scores of the secondary cross-border roads that were reopened in the 1990s with the support of EU funding.
From RTÉ Radio 1's News at One, RTÉ reporter, Sinead Hussey reports from County Monaghan on a Garda operation targeting border smuggling
Technology could also be deployed. Motion sensors, scanners, and infra-red and surveillance cameras could be erected on border crossings. But they could also be knocked down in the dead of night. A 2018 survey conducted in the central border region found that a majority of the 600 respondents claimed they would not accept border control technology even if it was unmanned and not at the border.

Mobile security patrols along the unwieldy 500km of the Irish border would be almost irresistible, not least to help protect vulnerable customs officials and agrifood inspectors working in isolated border terrain. Such an introduction is made more likely by the fact that the peace and openness of the borderlands for 20 years, courtesy of European integration and the Irish peace process, has led to the closure of 40% of police stations on either side of the border. So it's also likely that new security personnel would be drafted in from outside and would be unfamiliar with the area, unknown to borderlanders, and characterised by them as "nameless strangers". Alienation and antagonism would seep into the borderlands as a result.
READ: what will Brexit mean for 30,000 cross-border workers? READ: what will happen to cross-border shopping after Brexit? Cathal McCall is Professor of Politics and International Studies at Queen's University Belfast This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
Chiefs of police on both sides of the border are acutely aware of potential post-Brexit challenges. These difficulties are posed not only by the possible return of alienation, antagonism, and by the likely strengthening of politically-motivated "dissident" Irish republicanism, but also by well-organised, cross-border smugglers motivated by profit.

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Why smuggling across the border could worsen after Brexit

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Opinion: the history of smuggling across the Irish border is a major Brexit issue yet has received relatively little attention. By Cathal McCall, Queen's University Belfast Central to the fate of the Brexit negotiations is the future of the Irish border.

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Looking at markets and trading from their histories to contemporary contexts

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The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said it took down more than 2,000 online coronavirus scams last month.

NCSC said this included 471 fake online shops that were selling fraudulent virus-related items.

It coincides with new online safety advice from the agency as part of a national awareness campaign.

NCSC also launched an email reporting service, which the public can use to flag any suspicious activity.

Numerous other malware and phishing sites have been removed, as well as almost 900 advance-fee fraud schemes, where a large sum of money is promised in return for a one-off payment.

There is growing concern that criminals are hoping to capitalise on the increased usage of the internet during the pandemic.

"Criminals are seeking to exploit our greater use of emails, video conferencing and other technologies for their advantage," said Minister for Security James Brokenshire.

"It's despicable that they are using the coronavirus outbreak as cover to try to scam and steal."

The public is being advised to forward suspicious emails to report@phishing.gov.uk. An automated program will test websites flagged as a result, and block those determined to be suspicious.
Joe Tidy, cyber-security reporter
These scams nearly always start with an email.

The NCSC's Suspicious Email Reporting Service provides a way to report dodgy messages. The problem is that recipients often do not recognise them as such.

I've been tracking coronavirus phishing emails since the start of the outbreak.

Some are laughable: "Please send $250 worth of iTunes gift cards for essential lockdown supplies!"

But there are many others that are well designed and hard to spot.

Fake emails are in circulation that appear to be from the World Health Organisation (WHO). They are cleanly written, have all the correct logos and signatures, and even look like they have been sent from a WHO email address.

It's all fake though, and victims who download the accompanying "advice document" may give control of their finances to hackers.

The NCSC says the public needs to be highly suspicious. Don't download or click on anything unless you are absolutely certain of the sender, and if the offer seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Commander Karen Baxter, national lead for fraud with the City of London Police, said the service was developed to help "empower the public" during a time of crisis.

"Law enforcement is working closely with the government to ensure the public, and businesses, are as well equipped as possible to fight online harms," she said.

"Officers have already executed a number of warrants across the country to target and disrupt criminals sending emails and texts designed to steal your money."

Social media giants vowed last month to combat the spread of misinformation related to Covid-19.

With demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) soaring, an investigation by the news site Wired reported that scammers were using LinkedIn to sell fake goods after being blocked by eBay and Amazon.

"People do use LinkedIn to find customers, close deals, and build relationships," the Microsoft-owned social network told the publication.

"However, it is absolutely not acceptable, especially now, for someone to use their LinkedIn profile or a post on the platform to inappropriately promote that they have personal protective equipment available to sell."

The firm said it was investigating the matter.

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UK forces hundreds of scam Covid-19 shops offline

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The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said it took down more than 2,000 online coronavirus scams last month. NCSC said this included 471 fake online shops that were selling fraudulent virus-related items. It coincides with new online safety advice from the agency as part of a national awareness campaign.

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Coronavirus: Cocaine haul in boxes of face masks seized

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Smugglers hid cocaine worth more than £1m in a consignment of protective face masks, Border Force officials said.

Officers found the 14kg haul in a Polish-registered van as it attempted to enter the UK through the Channel Tunnel.

The driver, a 34-year-old Polish national, has been arrested.

Ian Hanson, Border Force regional director, said it was "despicable" to think drug smugglers would try to exploit the coronavirus situation.

'Vital equipment'

The face masks have been held pending checks by regulators, while the driver is being questioned in custody, he said.

Darren Herbert, from the National Crime Agency (NCA) Dover branch, said: "This seizure is further evidence of the way criminal networks are attempting to exploit the coronavirus outbreak to their own ends, covering this load of drugs with what would seem like vital protective equipment."

Border Force said the van was stopped at the Channel Tunnel terminal at Coquelles, France, on Tuesday.

Officers who searched the van found 15 wrapped packages of the Class A drug.

The contents of some of the packages were tested and proved positive for cocaine.

Border Force said the investigation had been passed to the NCA.

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£1m cocaine haul hidden in face mask shipment

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Smugglers hid cocaine worth more than £1m in a consignment of protective face masks, Border Force officials said. Officers found the 14kg haul in a Polish-registered van as it attempted to enter the UK through the Channel Tunnel. The driver, a 34-year-old Polish national, has been arrested.

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Geo-politics , Storage, Trade, Scarcity, Disasters, Warehouse, Bulk Buy, Distribution

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Home
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Britain's Smuggling History

BUYING THE CONTRABAND

Once finance for a smuggling trip had been arranged, a representative appointed by the entrepreneur of the smuggling trip often travelled with the outgoing ship to the continent to purchase the contraband. However, this was not always considered necessary, and the purchase might have been entrusted to the ship's master. A common arrangement was to have agents abroad, who could strike a bargain with the suppliers, and have a cargo stacked ready for loading on the quayside when the tide brought the vessel into port. Another option was for a representative to cross the channel alone by some legitimate vessel such as a postal packet, and then on arrival to charter a French or Dutch boat and crew.

Finding transport wasn't difficult: at the height of the smuggling era, in the middle and late 18th century, some continental ports reaped vast profits from the smuggling trade, and an enormous industry grew up in supplying the goods demanded by the British market, and shipping them over. The most important suppliers were based in Flushing (now Vlissingen in the Netherlands), and Calais, Boulogne, Dieppe, Dunkirk, Nante, Lorient and Le Havre in France.

It's no coincidence that some of these are now familiar destinations for cross-channel travellers - then as now, the ports were conveniently situated for a short crossing, and had fine harbours. To a certain extent, each served a different part of England, with Calais and Boulogne supplying Kent and Sussex, and Cherbourg stocking the West Country. The Channel Islands enjoyed unrestricted trade, and was used as a staging post until 1767 when the British government imposed restrictions. At this the French responded by developing Roscoff into a major depot for the supply of the Devon and Cornwall, and...
Roscoff, till then an unknown and unfrequented port, the resort only of a few fishermen, rapidly grew into importance, so that from small hovels it soon possessed commodious houses and large stores, occupied by English, Scots, Irish and Guernsey merchants. These on the one hand gave every incentive to the British smugglers to resort there, and on the other hand, the French government afforded encouragement to the merchants. [2]Man-size packaging

This cooperation is hardly surprising, because smugglers and their agents were big spenders. For example, one day in 1766 an enterprising smuggler bought at a Nantes warehouses 229,282 livres of tea - that's nearly 110 tons. [3] Furthermore, it cannot be said that the French and Dutch supplied goods in all innocence, because the smugglers' needs were quite different from those of legitimate traders. An honest importer required goods in the largest possible containers, so as to make economies of scale at the dockside: the hogshead was one standard packaging, and could hold up to 140 gallons, though 54 was more usual. Large packages like these were impossible for smugglers to conceal or to land without winches, so contraband was packed in much smaller quantities. Tobacco came in bales of a convenient size for a one-man lift, and wrapped in oilskin to make a virtually watertight bundle. This approach was highly effective, and bales of tobacco tossed overboard by smuggling ships in an attempt to destroy the evidence stayed afloat in the sea for hours. People in coastal towns were quick to seize this jetsam when it was washed up, since the bundles contained a substantial core of smokeable product to which the sea-water had not penetrated.

Tubs of spirits

Tea was protected in a similar way, and spirits were packaged in small barrels or 'tubs' called half ankers, which contained a little over four gallons. Ankers, holding 8 ¹/ ₃ gallons, were less commonly used. The coopers made both sizes of barrel with flattened sides for easier carrying, and usually supplied them slung together in pairs on ropes. This arrangement meant that 'tubmen' on the English side of the Channel could easily carry a pair of ½ ankers across their shoulders, one at the front and one at the back. When pony transport was available, the rope slings on ½ ankers fitted neatly across the beast's back. Read Thomas Hardy's description of tubs here.

To save tubs, and space in the ships, spirits were supplied just as they came out of the still: over-proof, and virtually colourless. Dilution prior to sale was - at least theoretically - a simple matter, but who would buy crystal-clear brandy? To solve this problem, the French distillers offered caramel, to be added to the kegs along with the water.

Over-proof spirits as they came out of the keg were just about drinkable, but lethal in any quantity: there are numerous stories of people opening washed up or seized barrels, and dying of the effects of drink (see Harwich for example).

Clever concealment
High profits
These bundles and barrels were perfectly adequate as long as the smuggling vessel was not subject to close scrutiny by the customs men, but as preventive efforts were stepped up, such security could not be guaranteed. The suppliers of contraband responded with extraordinary ingenuity, by packing their goods in disguised form. For example, tobacco was made up into ropes, and some warehouses supplied as stock items a whole range of such ropes, from thin cord right through to hawsers as thick as your arm. Innocently coiled on the deck, or tossed casually into a locker, these illicit packages aroused little suspicion. Similarly, spirits were stored in barrels with false bottoms - the tub was then topped up with drinking water, or perhaps with wine, on which lower duty was payable. When the English customs men got wise to the trick, and resorted to dipping the barrels to find the true depth, the cunning French coopers constructed the hidden compartments at either end of the barrel, tapering away from the official's stick.

A smuggler on a shopping trip was as keen as a modern day-tripper to save money, but 18th century bargains make our duty-free allowances look stingy. The profit margin varied with the prevailing rates of duty, but typically tea cost seven pence a pound (3p) on the continent, and could be sold in England for 5s (25p). Tobacco cost the same, and fetched 2/6 (12½ p) at home. A tub of gin or brandy cost £1, and found English customers at four pounds even before 'letting down' to a drinkable strength. Diluted, the profit would have been even greater.

How was all this paid for? In the early years of the 18th century smugglers paid in cash only, but as the trade assumed greater proportions and the transactions became almost routine, the merchants began to settle their accounts by cheque or bank draft. This in itself points to a sophistication not popularly associated with rough rude smugglers, and confirms that a well-oiled organisation backed up the men who got their hands dirty. Next

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How Britain's smugglers bought contraband abroad

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Home History of Smuggling Guide-Book Famous Smugglers eBooks Bibliography Trace Smuggling Roots Buy The Book Details & Contact Britain's Smuggling History BUYING THE CONTRABAND Once finance for a smuggling trip had been arranged, a representative appointed by the entrepreneur of the smuggling trip often travelled with the outgoing ship to the continent to purchase the contraband.

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In the heyday of the industry there was no quality control whatsoever; gin was frequently mixed with turpentine, and licences for distilling required only the application. When it became apparent that copious gin consumption was causing social problems, efforts were made to control the production of the spirit. The Gin Act 1736 imposed high taxes on sales of gin, forbade the sale of the spirit in quantities of less than two gallons and required an annual payment of £50 for a retail licence. This had little effect beyond increasing smuggling and driving the distilling trade underground.

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Smugglers Night Brighton. Contemporary Community Festival. Identification with notions of heritage. Masquerade. Performance

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Hackers backed by the Russian state are targeting pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions in the UK, US and Canada that are conducting Covid-19 vaccine research, British intelligence officials have warned.

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre, together with Canada's Communications Security Establishment, blamed the attacks on the cyber espionage group APT29, which it alleged was "almost certainly" working for the Kremlin's intelligence services. The findings have been endorsed by the US National Security Agency.

Intelligence officials said the group had used a form of malware known as "WellMess" and "WellMail" to steal information on vaccine research and development, and warned that the attacks were likely to continue. Officials would not confirm whether the hacking group had successfully stolen any intellectual property but said UK research facilities were being "well-defended" against the threat.

Dominic Raab, UK foreign secretary, said it was "completely unacceptable that the Russian intelligence services are targeting those working to combat the coronavirus pandemic", adding that Britain would work with international partners to hold the perpetrators to account.

APT29, which is also known as "Cozy Bear" and "the Dukes", has previously been linked to the hacking and theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee ahead of the 2016 US election. Its intelligence targets are typically governments and embassies, as well as think-tanks, healthcare organisations and energy companies.

Latest coronavirus news

Follow FT's live coverage and analysis of the global pandemic and the rapidly evolving economic crisis here.

Adam Schiff, head of the US House intelligence committee, said it was obvious why President Vladimir Putin was reportedly resorting to theft to secure an advantage in the global search for a vaccine. "The stakes are high for Putin - international prestige, economic benefit, and domestic politics, considering he has not been effective in managing the Covid-19 pandemic in Russia - and it should be no surprise he would leverage his intelligence services in this effort," Mr Schiff said.

The allegations of cyber espionage were robustly denied by Moscow. "We do not have information on who could have hacked pharmaceutical companies and research centers in the UK," Dmitry Peskov, Mr Putin's spokesman, told the Financial Times. "We can say one thing: Russia has nothing to do with these attempts. We do not accept such accusations."

The US has previously accused China of hacking US healthcare and research institutions working on coronavirus vaccines, treatments, and testing. The attorney-general William Barr told an audience in Michigan on Thursday that US universities and companies had been targeted. "Having been caught covering up the coronavirus outbreak, Beijing is desperate for a public relations coup, and may hope that it will be able to claim credit for any medical breakthroughs," he said.

The new allegations about Russian hacking come ahead of the publication on Monday of the first clinical trial results from Oxford university's much anticipated Covid-19 vaccine.

The results, which will appear in The Lancet journal, include what one senior Oxford scientist called "terrific preliminary data" on the way the inoculation stimulates immunity.

The scientist said the vaccine gave a double boost to the immune system in the 1,000 UK volunteers who took part in its phase one trial without significant side-effects.

Earlier this week the first clinical trial results from another vaccine developed by Moderna, a US biotech company, showed encouraging levels of antibody production.

Russia has claimed that a Covid-19 vaccine developed in Moscow - one of scores being worked on worldwide to battle the pandemic - will begin phase three human trials next month.

Recommended

The early clinical trials of the vaccine have not been peer reviewed and no detailed information on the results have been published. But Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, on Thursday suggested that Moscow planned to produce more than 200m doses of the vaccine by the end of this year and seek to inoculate the Russian population by early 2021.

Separately, the UK government revealed on Thursday that it believed Russian actors had "sought to interfere" in last year's general election by amplifying a dossier of leaked documents about the UK-US free trade deal. The documents, which had been disseminated on the social media site Reddit, were seized on during the election campaign by the Labour party as evidence that the government was putting the NHS "up for sale". Officials are now conducting a criminal investigation into the leak of the material.
Additional reporting by Kadhim Shubber in Washington

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Russia-linked hackers accused of targeting Covid-19 vaccine developers

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Hackers backed by the Russian state are targeting pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions in the UK, US and Canada that are conducting Covid-19 vaccine research, British intelligence officials have warned. The UK's National Cyber Security Centre, together with Canada's Communications Security Establishment, blamed the attacks on the cyber espionage group APT29, which it alleged was "almost certainly" working for the Kremlin's intelligence services.

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IF you wake at midnight, and hear a horse's feet,
Don't go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street,
Them that ask no questions isn't told a lie.
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by.

Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark -
Brandy for the Parson, 'Baccy for the Clerk.
Laces for a lady; letters for a spy,
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by!

Running round the woodlump if you chance to find
Little barrels, roped and tarred, all full of brandy-wine,
Don't you shout to come and look, nor use 'em for your play.
Put the brishwood back again - and they'll be gone next day !

If you see the stable-door setting open wide;
If you see a tired horse lying down inside;
If your mother mends a coat cut about and tore;
If the lining's wet and warm - don't you ask no more !

If you meet King George's men, dressed in blue and red,
You be careful what you say, and mindful what is said.
If they call you " pretty maid," and chuck you 'neath the chin,
Don't you tell where no one is, nor yet where no one's been !

Knocks and footsteps round the house - whistles after dark -
You've no call for running out till the house-dogs bark.
Trusty's here, and Pincher's here, and see how dumb they lie
They don't fret to follow when the Gentlemen go by !

'If You do as you've been told, 'likely there's a chance,
You'll be give a dainty doll, all the way from France,
With a cap of Valenciennes, and a velvet hood -
A present from the Gentlemen, along 'o being good !

Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark -
Brandy for the Parson, 'Baccy for the Clerk.
Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie -
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by !

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IF you wake at midnight, and hear a horse's feet, Don't go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street, Them that ask no questions isn't told a lie. Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by. Five and twenty ponies, Trotting through the dark - Brandy for the Parson, 'Baccy for the Clerk.

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Coronavirus: Russian spies target Covid-19 vaccine research

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Coronavirus: Russian spies target Covid-19 vaccine research

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"Throughout 2020, APT29 has targeted various organisations involved in Covid-19 vaccine development in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, highly likely with the intention of stealing information and intellectual property relating to the development and testing of Covid-19 vaccines," it said. - BBC

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The Trump administration is taking control of data collection on COVID-19 hospitalisations in the United States from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) rising questions about whether the information will be politicised as cases in the US surge and deaths rise.

Patient information will now be sent to a new central database in Washington, DC run by the US Department of Health and Human Services instead of to the CDC, which has been criticised for slow and inconsistent public reporting of the number of cases, available beds and ventilators.

"Today, the CDC still has at least a week lag in reporting hospital data," HHS spokesman Michael Caputo said in a statement issued to US media outlets.

"America requires it in real time. The new, faster and complete data system is what our nation needs to defeat the coronavirus, and the CDC, an operating division of HHS, will certainly participate in this streamlined all-of-government response. They will simply no longer control it," Caputo said.

The sudden change, however, raises concerns among public health experts because President Donald Trump and White House officials have sidelined the science-based recommendations of the CDC in urging a quicker reopening of the US economy.

Indeed, national governments worldwide have battled with researchers, the media and each other about the veracity of the data used to monitor and track the disease's march across the globe. In the US, state-by-state numbers on specifics like nursing home infections - the source of most deaths - have been reported unevenly.

On Tuesday, Trump again claimed the reason coronavirus cases are rising in the US is because testing has become widely available and he asserted death rates are continuing to decline, even though the data shows that infection rates are climbing.

"If we didn't test, you wouldn't have all the headlines because we're showing cases and we have just about the lowest mortality rate," Trump said in remarks at a White House news conference.

"Think of this: If we didn't do testing - instead of testing over 40 million people, if we did half the testing - we would have half the cases. If we did another - you cut that in half - we would have, yet again, half of that," the president said.

Nationwide, the US has 3.4 million confirmed cases with 55,500 people hospitalised on Wednesday with the infection, a number that is now rising rapidly after dropping in May and June, according to The COVID Tracking Project, an independent data collection effort that draws its numbers from state health departments and other sources.

"Historically, CDC has been the place where public health data has been sent, and this raises questions about not just access for researchers but access for reporters, access for the public to try to better understand what is happening with the outbreak," Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, told the New York Times.

Under the current system, the CDC collects detailed surveillance information about hospitalisation rates and patient characteristics from a network of 3,000 hospitals. The data is then analysed by CDC scientists and reported back weekly to state and local officials.

"I worry greatly about cutting CDC out of these reporting efforts," Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Health Security in Baltimore, told the Washington Post newspaper. "I see little benefit from separating reporting of hospitalisations from reporting of cases, which CDC currently coordinates."

HHS Secretary Alex Azar and Deborah Birx, the White House's Coronavirus Task Force response coordinator, said in a letter to governors they had ordered the changes because some hospitals failed to report the information daily or completely.

Last week, Trump rejected guidelines the CDC produced for reopening schools safely as too stringent. The president, facing re-election in November, is pushing to have schools reopen beginning next month in order to help get the US economy moving.

The Trump White House has also begun criticising the nation's top infectious disease scientist Dr Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been a leading voice for public closures and social distancing to control the virus.

In an op-ed published in the USA Today newspaper on July 14, Trump's top trade adviser Peter Navarro argued Dr Fauci had underplayed the risks of the coronavirus in early days of the pandemic.

"Fauci has a good bedside manner with the public, but he has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on," Navarro wrote.

Fauci responded to White House smears on Tuesday, saying in an interview: "For the most part, you can trust medical authorities. I believe I'm one of them so I believe you can trust me. But I would stick with respected medical authorities who have a track record of telling the truth."

US COVID-19 cases by state

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Trump administration takes control of COVID-19 data in US

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The Trump administration is taking control of data collection on COVID-19 hospitalisations in the United States from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) rising questions about whether the information will be politicised as cases in the US surge and deaths rise.

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SYDNEY - Australia has threatened to jail anyone caught sending face masks and other vital medical equipment to China after Beijing scooped up tons of the gear in a global buying spree during the onset of the Covid-19 virus.

China imported about 2.5 billion healthcare items, including visors, masks, gloves and ventilators, between January 24 and February 29, according to a report by China's national customs authority, leaving frontline medical staff in scores of countries without protective equipment just as the virus hit.

Now those Covid-19 infected nations are having to buy it back at often highly inflated prices, according to various reports, handing the Chinese a diplomatic if not commercial coup as they dictate where supplies of essential life-saving equipment is and isn't shipped.

Critics have accused Beijing of using so-called "face mask diplomacy" to split the European Union by shipping equipment to certain nations on more favorable terms than others, while leaving trade war adversary the United States, currently the pandemic's epicenter, in a comparative lurch.

Some countries, moreover, have been offered medical equipment aid while others must pay above pre-pandemic market rates, depending on their state of relations with Beijing. That distribution has become more crucial as medical experts flip-flop on previous guidance on the need to wear face masks to prevent the disease's spread.

A face mask-wearing Chinese doctor in Beijing. Photo: AFP

Australian Trade Minister Simon Birmingham said on April 1 in Canberra that a "global alliance" had been forged after consultations with other global trade ministers to ensure that the gear reached the countries most in need. It's not clear yet, however, that alliance will work in practice and which nations are involved.

"But crucially we're working together with other countries to make sure that we don't just have what we need, but also that we can hopefully supply what is needed into less developed countries and those who are even more vulnerable to coronavirus," he said in a radio interview.

In a move to stop price-gouging, Australia said that anyone found shipping face masks, hand sanitizer, medical gloves, goggles, visors or alcohol wipes to China could be jailed for up to five years and have the items confiscated.

High-end Chinese property developer Greenland Group, which has ties to China's ruling Communist Party, has confirmed that it bought three million surgical masks, 500,000 pairs of gloves and supplies of sanitizer and antibacterial wipes in Australia and other countries that were airfreighted from Sydney before the global pandemic was announced.

Another Chinese real estate firm, Risland, shipped 90 tons of medical supplies to Wuhan from Perth on February 8, according to photos that it supplied to Chinese-language newspapers in Australia. One photo shows employees holding a banner in front of the freight that declares support for Wuhan.

Risland's LinkedIn page showed in early February pallet-loads of medical safety gear being stored in a warehouse ready for shipment from Australia to China. Photo: LinkedIn

Greenland said that it sent the supplies in late January and early February because China "at the time, was the epicenter of the outbreak." The firm said that is now sending some back to help Australian medical efforts.

"Greenland Australia also recognizes that Australian people are currently at risk with the more recent and ongoing domestic spread of Covid-19, so the company is focused on helping people in this country through a similar effort that [was] undertaken for China," it said in a statement.

"We are working to procure a wide range of medical supplies that can be donated to the Australian medical community to help support their efforts to help further slow the spread of Covid-19."

With many countries desperately short of protective gear, Chinese traders have put tons of medical equipment on the market - but at a steep cost. Reports from Cambodia and the Philippines suggest that samples of some respirators have been offered for five times their original market prices.

A buying frenzy fueled by extraordinary backroom cloak and dagger deals has led to some ugly diplomatic spats as shortages spread.

On April 4 European nations accused the US of using "wild west methods" to secure supplies after a shipment of face masks to Germany was suddenly diverted in Bangkok. Thailand is a long-time strategic ally of the United States.

Workers produce medical gloves at a factory in China's eastern Anhui province on March 23, 2020. Photo: AFP/China Out/Stringer

It isn't immediately clear what happened with the shipment, but the insinuation is that the US offered more money mid-transit.

Germany's Interior Minister for state Andreas Geisel said the 200,000 face masks went to the US instead in what he called "an act of modern piracy." "Even in times of global crisis there should be no wild west methods," he said.

Meanwhile, products are being dumped on global markets with little or no regulatory control, prompting warnings of poor quality and a counterfeiting boom that likewise has roots in China.

European countries have complained of ineffective Chinese-made tests kits and Australia has seized 800,000 face masks that it said were either defective or fakes.

"We started seeing this stuff arriving roughly three weeks ago when news of the pandemic was really taking off," a border official told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "The dodgy material is coming via air cargo because there is a backlog of sea freight at Australian ports."

The global shortage of masks is likely to worsen now that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that Americans cover their faces when leaving home, especially when near other people.

Australia has sent military personnel to a factory that manufactures face masks in the hope of doubling domestic output, but still relies heavily on imports of respirators and other protective gear, mostly from China.

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China's wild and woolly medical equipment heist

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SYDNEY - Australia has threatened to jail anyone caught sending face masks and other vital medical equipment to China after Beijing scooped up tons of the gear in a global buying spree during the onset of the Covid-19 virus.

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References to the smuggling of oil barrels in the middle east

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Syria oil map: the journey of a barrel of Isis oil

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Follow the journey of a barrel of oil from the oilfield to refinery and markets to see how the Isis production system works, who is making money money from it, and why it is proving so challenging to disrupt

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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nigeria-oil-theft/nigeria-deploys-satellite-tech-to-track-oil-smugglers-idUSKCN1S61KG

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https://americanhistory.si.edu/onthewater/exhibition/1_3.html

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https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/history-wine-transport-8000-years/

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British Rum Trade

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Canada’s Fur Trade

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New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America, by Wendy Warren. Liveright, 352 pp

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Ex-servicemen and barrow boys

The Open Market started in Oxford Street in 1919 as an unorganised collection of barrows, mainly owned by ex-servicemen, but also by some of the town's 'barrow boys'. The barrow boys were also known as 'fly-pitchers' because of their habit of pitching their barrows 'on the fly' and moving from site to site.

Moved to The Level

In the early 1920s, Brighton Council, conscious of many complaints, moved the traders from Oxford Street to the central rose-walk on The Level. It was then that Harry Cowley, a local workers' rights activist became involved. He led a campaign for a permanent site for the market. As a result, on 19th November 1926, a permanent site was opened in the gardens of the cobbled fronted houses of Marshall's Row.

Marshall's Row demolished

The new arrangement may have been useful for the traders, but the residents of Marshall's Row certainly did not take to having such a mass of people and stalls just in front of their houses. By 1938 the houses had been demolished and there were plans to use the space for an extended market.

New market opened in 1960

However, for many years the site was undeveloped and used merely for parking for cars and lorries. Finally the newly built Open Market, comprising forty-two stalls was opened on 7th January 1960, by the then Duke of Norfolk.

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The Open Market started in Oxford Street in 1919 as an unorganised collection of barrows, mainly owned by ex-servicemen, but also by some of the town's 'barrow boys'. The barrow boys were also known as 'fly-pitchers' because of their habit of pitching their barrows 'on the fly' and moving from site to site.

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https://www.lewesbonfirecelebrations.com/article/lewes-bonfire-sussex-express-report-2000/

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How can the project engage with local community groups to explore the continuing resonances of smuggling / coastal heritage in Brighton?

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Brexit and Covid-19 are typically considered distinct events. However, these events have one thing in common: they have significantly disrupted the supply chains of UK firms. Since the 1980s, many UK companies have set up centralised manufacturing facilities in low-wage economies where finished goods are assembled cheaply and shipped to higher income markets. Brexit and Covid-19 have delivered a one-two punch to this model; forcing companies to reconsider the short-term benefits and long-term sustainability of low-cost, centralised, production.

A key difference between Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic is that companies had time to plan for Brexit. While many companies viewed Brexit as a high-probability, high-impact event, the chance of a global pandemic was seen as low-probability, high-impact - if a pandemic was considered at all. Both events had the potential to affect every aspect of the supply chain from access to labour, delays at ports, increased distribution costs and inaccessibility of raw materials and subcomponents.

An examination of the pharmaceutical industry highlights the impact these events have had on global supply chains. When the pro-Brexit vote was announced in June 2016, several multi-national pharmaceutical firms adopted a worst-case scenario planning approach. The key assumption made by these companies was that the UK would leave the EU without a deal and trade would revert to WTO terms. By planning based on worst-case assumptions, these companies did not see Brexit as a strategic supply chain risk, but as an operational issue that could be managed on a day-to-day basis. Any other outcome than a no-deal was viewed as a positive result for these firms. Multi-national companies were in the fortunate position to have the millions of pounds needed to invest in new supply chain assets in Europe and establish new qualified personnel and quality control checks on the continent. With the prompting of the UK government, large pharma firms built six weeks of buffer inventory in the supply chain. Indeed, one reason why the pharmaceutical industry has been able to avoid out-of-stocks on many product lines during the pandemic is because they were holding six weeks of inventory in the event of a no-deal Brexit. In contrast, many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) adopted a 'wait-and-see' approach to Brexit because they did not have sufficient financial resources to make supply chain investments while the future EU-UK trading relationship remained ambiguous. After almost four years, SMEs are still uncertain about Britain's future trading relationship with Europe and unsure how to absorb the potential costs that may come from increased tariff and non-tariff barriers.

Covid-19 has significantly amplified the supply chain uncertainty created by Brexit. The pandemic has led to rolling production stoppages across the globe, starting in China and moving to Europe, the USA and now India and South America. At the outset, governments in India and Europe restricted exports of medicines and medical equipment to ensure there was sufficient volume for their own populations. Delays occurred at border crossings and transport capacity was reduced due to labour shortages and cuts in passenger haulage. The uncertainty of the future EU-UK trading relationship, coupled with the uncertainty of finding a vaccine for Covid-19, means UK companies now need to prioritise resilience and responsiveness over cost and efficiency.

In the first instance, companies need to spread risk geographically by sourcing from a dispersed range of countries and regions. Decisions on where to source products will be largely dictated by the trade deals that Britain strikes with countries after leaving the EU. Dual and multiple sourcing agreements will be required for critical raw materials and components. Companies will need to map the entirety of their supply chains, up to and including raw materials, to create end-to-end visibility and identify bottleneck suppliers. Bottlenecks emerge when only one or two suppliers are available in the market to provide materials. Contingency plans will be required to quickly move production volumes away from bottleneck suppliers to other locations when a future crisis occurs. Companies will also need new key performance indicators that measure supply chain disruptions. As part of an on-time and in-full (OTIF) delivery metric, companies can track the percentage of delays/shortages from suppliers due to manufacturing disruptions, natural disruptions (natural disasters, weather, pandemics) and man-made disruptions (new regulatory regimes, war, border closures). Companies can also track a supplier's overall time to recover (OTTR), a measure of the time elapsed until a supplier reaches 100% production output following a supply chain disruption.

Another important factor in a post-Brexit, and hopefully post-pandemic, world will be a transition from a centralised to a decentralised manufacturing model. Automotive and apparel companies have already adopted regionalised manufacturing models where production facilities are located in 'near-shored' countries (Mexico, Poland, Bangladesh) and products are shipped to larger markets such as China, Germany and the USA. Covid-19 and geopolitical disruptions such as the US-China trade war and Brexit will accelerate this trend.

Following on from the regionalisation trend will be the increased distribution of manufacturing, with products made locally - closer to customers. Establishing parallel supply chains will accelerate the localisation of production. Drawing on our pharmaceutical example, a parallel supply chain would mean having 20-30% of pharmaceutical manufacturing located in the UK, including active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), excipients and packaging. The remaining 70-80% would remain overseas using the centralised, low-cost model. When a crisis such as a geopolitical dispute or pandemic hit, production volumes would be transitioned to the UK. If a company expected it to take 3 to 4 months to ramp up UK production, then 3 to 4 months of finished goods inventory would be held in the UK. The parallel supply chain approach is particularly relevant for companies that provide life-saving products (drugs, PPE, ventilators). Pharma companies could begin by identifying critical drugs that treat the symptoms of coronaviruses, and locate a proportion of manufacturing capacity in the UK. The parallel supply chain model is also applicable to industries such as aerospace and automotive, which have long and complex supply chains. Parallel supply chains will require advanced manufacturing technologies such as additive and continuous manufacturing to counteract the high labour costs associated with UK based manufacturing, Localised supply chains have the added benefit of reducing inventory-carrying costs by shortening supply chains and improving responsiveness to demand.

While multinational firms adopted a worst-case scenario planning approach to Brexit, the same approach has yet to be seen with Covid-19. If multinational companies believe that a pandemic is likely to happen again, or that a second/third wave of Covid-19 will shut down global production, then a logical conclusion would be to establish a percentage of manufacturing in the UK. Indeed, the combined uncertainty of Brexit and Covid-19 mean that companies can no longer 'wait-and-see'. Today's uncertain world necessitates new supply chain models that prioritise resilience and responsiveness over low-cost, centralised production.

♣♣♣

This blog post expresses the views of its author(s), not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics.

When you leave a comment, you're agreeing to our Comment Policy

Sam Roscoe is a senior lecturer in operations management in the University of Sussex's department of management. He is also an associate fellow of the UK Trade Policy Observatory ( UKTPO) at the University of Sussex Business School.

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The future of UK supply chains in a disrupted world: Brexit and Covid-19

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Brexit and Covid-19 are typically considered distinct events. However, these events have one thing in common: they have significantly disrupted the supply chains of UK firms. Since the 1980s, many UK companies have set up centralised manufacturing facilities in low-wage economies where finished goods are assembled cheaply and shipped to higher income markets.

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Kensington Gardens, 1973

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Globalisation and Supply Chains

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Russel promoted the health benefits of both bathing in and drinking the sea water of Brighton. Russel claimed that consuming this water could eradicate tumours, promote healthy bowel movement, clear the head and even help to whiten teeth. Brighton sea water was even bottled and sold in London as ‘oceanic fluid'. Rusell's reputation was growing and so to were the number of visitors to Brighton. Wealthy people knows as ‘The Fashion’ from nearby towns Lewes, Tumbridge Wells and of course London began to relocate to Brighton as its popularity grew.

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The history of The Brighton Lanes hosts an eclectic mix of residents ranging from royalty to robbers. Cobbled streets weave and wind throughout the centre of the town making up the famous Brighton Lanes which these days, are usually filled with shoppers, sightseers and visitors from across the globe. Behind these bustling lanes lies a fascinating history of magic sea water, Indian inspired architecture and a network of secret underground passages.

Brighton was first placed on the map as an area of interest at around 1750 made famous by the belief that the sea water had powerful medicinal qualities. Dr Richard Russel, a doctor based in the nearby town of Lewes published a medical paper named 'Glandular Diseases', or 'A Dissertation on the Use of Sea-Water in the Affections of the Glands'. It may not be the catchiest of titles but it solidified Brighton's reputation and its beach as a new famous and desirable destination.

Russel promoted the health benefits of both bathing in and drinking the sea water of Brighton. Russel claimed that consuming this water could eradicate tumours, promote healthy bowel movement, clear the head and even help to whiten teeth. Brighton sea water was even bottled and sold in London as 'oceanic fluid'. Rusell's reputation was growing and so to were the number of visitors to Brighton. Wealthy people knows as 'The Fashion' from nearby towns Lewes, Tumbridge Wells and of course London began to relocate to Brighton as its popularity grew.

The growing numbers of visitors in Brighton led locals to diversify their trades and skills in some unusual ways. For example, many poorer fisherman became 'dippers' employed to help carry the new wealthy residents of Brighton to the shore and dip them in to the water. These days Londoners are thankfully now happy to do this themselves.

Brighton was re branded as an upmarket health resort and it was this new image that attracted one of the most famous names in Brightonian history, The Prince Regent.

The Prince's presence in Brighton meant a soar in the City's popularity. Brighton's population grew significantly, from around 3,620 inhabitants in 1786 to 40,634 in 1831. The building of The Royal Pavillion created jobs for workers across Brighton for many years boosting Brighton's popularity and economy.

Whilst much work went in to building the lavish and now iconic pavilion there was also a less ostentatious project taking place underground. A network of underground tunnels was gradually constructed allowing The Prince Regent an entirely private method of travel throughout the city from his central Palace to the Beach.

Above this network of secret passages was the hustle and bustle of the Brighton Lanes. It was here that fisherman seeking a more profitable income turned their attention to the world of antiques. The buying and selling of antique goods in the Brighton lanes continued and grew extensively over the years. By the 1960's The Lanes was an established community of antique dealers and this area soon grew to be a famous hive of activity for everything antique.

These days only a few antique shops remain but the trade has evolved into a community of jewellers and the Brighton Lanes is now a labyrinth of stone cobbled streets glistening with shop windows filled with precious gems and sparkling diamond rings.

In 1979 Doug Newman established Gold Arts in the Brighton Lanes with a small shop and workshop where he manufactured and sold his own designs. Now with 40 years of experience and stores in Brighton, Eastbourne and Chichester Gold Arts is a well- respected name dealing in a selection of exceptional products ranging from sparkling diamond rings to quality watches. This timeless collection includes both pre-owned and new watches from some of the world most luxurious brands. Gold Arts also offer bespoke craftsmanship and services including restoration and original design from the Gold Arts workshop.

Whilst large parts of the Brighton Lanes have been modernised over the years the home of the Brighton Gold Arts store has kept its historic feel. Gold Arts is nestled in the heart of the Brighton Lanes in Meeting House Lane. This small part of the lanes was formerly known as 'The Knab' in the Seventeenth Century and this small courtyard features some of the oldest buildings in the Brighton Lanes.

Mr Newman believes that the secret of his success is his loyal and professional staff together with the recognition of good quality and maintaining a high level of customer service and satisfaction. His motto "The bitterness of poor quality lingers long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten" has kept Gold Arts a purveyor of the finest jewellery in Sussex.

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The history of The Brighton Lanes hosts an eclectic mix of residents ranging from royalty to robbers. Cobbled streets weave and wind throughout the centre of the town making up the famous Brighton Lanes which these days, are usually filled with shoppers, sightseers and visitors from across the globe.

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A Journey through Globalisations Backroads, Caroline Knowles, 2006

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A Journey through Globalisations Backroads, Caroline Knowles, 2006

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Caroline writes about migration and circulations of material objects - some of the social forces constituting globalization. She is particularly interested in cities, having done research in London, Hong Kong, Beijing, Fuzhou, Addis Ababa, Kuwait City and Seoul.

Author of many books and papers, she specializes in visual, spatial and biographical methods, often working with photographers and artists, most recently with Michael Tan (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), and Douglas Harper (Duquesne University, Pittsburg). She is co-author, with Douglas Harper of Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes and Journeys, published (2009) by the University of Chicago Press. She recently held a Leverhulme fellowship, 'From Oil to Garbage: Navigating the Flip-flop Trail'. She works with Ho Wing Chung, at the City University Hong Kong, on ESRC project, 'What calculations and Strategies Drive Young Migrants? An Investigation of the Traffic between London, Hong Kong and Beijing', and with Roger Burrows, Rowland Atkinson, Tim Butler and Mike Savage on 'The Very Affluent Worker: A Study of Everyday Life in the Alpha Territory'.

Caroline discussed the Flip Flop Trail with Laurie Taylor on the BBC Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed in July 2014.
You can download the program as a podcast from the BBC website.

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The Flip Flop Trail, A Journey Through Globalization's Backroads

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Caroline writes about migration and circulations of material objects - some of the social forces constituting globalization. She is particularly interested in cities, having done research in London, Hong Kong, Beijing, Fuzhou, Addis Ababa, Kuwait City and Seoul.

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Across four decades the photographic and written practice of Allan Sekula has provided an object lesson in the possibilities for an artistic commitment to labour's cause and for the exploration of the world of late capitalism from a radical-left perspective. Turning from performance and sculpture to the camera in the early 1970s, Sekula has insisted ever since on the viability of realism and the 'social referentiality' of photography. 1 While his photographic work has sought to renew the documentary tradition, Sekula's practice as a theorist and historian of photography has been equally crucial to his search for a way beyond the habitual lapse of the discourse of documentary into either a scientistic objectivism or a romantic and expressive subjectivism. 2 Sekula stands as one of very few contemporary artists - matched only, perhaps, by his early interlocutor Martha Rosler - to have continually and convincingly resisted the conventional division of labour between practitioner and critic. So much so, in fact, that Sekula's critical and historical work has, in the past, threatened to eclipse his reputation as an artist, to the point where the art historian Steve Edwards could, in 1986, claim with little difficulty that his 'theoretical essays will undoubtedly prove to be his most important contribution to photographic culture'. 3

Indeed, it was during the mid-1980s that the geographical focus of Sekula's artistic work began to widen beyond that of early projects such as Untitled Slide Sequence 1972, Aerospace Folktales 1973, and This Ain't China: A Photonovel 1974, works that took as their focus the social world of the aerospace and service economies of Sekula's own southern-Californian milieu. Sekula's trilogy of 'geography lessons' began in 1983 with Sketch for a Geography Lesson, a work comprising text and photographs mostly produced in West Germany, on the subject of American military aggression during President Reagan's resurgent Cold War. The trilogy continued in 1985-6, with Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes, a reflection on Canada, its industrial economy, and its fraught relationship with its more powerful neighbour. Completed between 1989 and 1995, the third instalment of this trilogy, the exhibition and book project Fish Story (fig.1), saw Sekula's career-long pursuit of a contemporary 'critical realism' reach its most complex articulation yet. Fish Story did much to place consideration of globalised commodity production and distribution firmly on the table for art's documentary and 'social turn' of the mid-to-late 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium, while it also marked Sekula's first sustained exploration of the ocean as a key space of globalisation, a subject to which he has returned in subsequent photography and film projects. 4

As such, Fish Story transcends its role as the culmination of a trilogy, and in itself marks something of a shift in Sekula's practice. The significance of the project was recognised soon after its appearance, yet it has been the focus of relatively little extended commentary since, despite being regularly described as a seminal work on the theme of globalisation. 5 From today's perspective, the ambition of Fish Story may be seen to lie not merely in its immense complexity and global scope but also in its emphatic challenge to the dominant climate of postmodern theory and practice of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Not least, Fish Story emerged into a European and North American art world whose urgent assimilation of the discourses of racial, sexual and gender emancipation had atrophied to the point of a stagnant liberal consensus, and a problematic decoupling of questions of cultural and economic alterity.

In his influential account of the 'return of the real' in North American and Western European art of the early 1990s, critic and art historian Hal Foster identified artists' widespread turn towards the bodily inscriptions of identity at this time - as evidenced, for example, by much of the work included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial in New York - as complementary to a simultaneous 'ethnographic turn' towards the investigation of given social and cultural contexts beyond the art world. 6 For Foster, each of these moves was legible as a reaction against the dominant climate of a postmodern culture indebted to the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard's hyperbolic theories of 'simulation' as a media-saturated world of disembodied sign-play among 'simulacra' - copies without originals that implode the orders of reality and representation. 7 As such, the renewed attention to the economic subject in Fish Story may be considered as a challenge not only to the shortcomings of an embodied identity politics. Sekula's project also contested the concealment of the world of production by the art world's attachment to the fatalistic orthodoxy of a 'simulationist' world of endless, autonomous image-proliferation.

In what follows, the case will be made for Fish Story's pivotal place in a gradual shift, still nascent in the early 1990s, from a widespread culture of resignation and cynicism to one of renewed radical engagement in the art world. An important early aspect of this shift was the eventual coming of age of the concept of 'postmodernism' as more than merely a stylistic marker or synonym for the poststructuralist 'critique of representation', but rather as a periodising term, as the 'cultural logic' specific to a 'postmodernity' figured as the latest stage of a now fully global capitalism. 8 Key moments in this final advent of the materialist account of the postmodern were the appearance of social theorist David Harvey's book The Condition of Postmodernity in 1989, and the expansion of cultural critic Fredric Jameson's foundational work on postmodern periodisation (dating back to the early 1980s) into a full-length book, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, published in 1991. 9 Subsequent to this mature theoretical 'capture' of the postmodern, the term itself has proven largely unable to live down - and, consequently, to outlive - the history of its adolescent convulsions. 10 And so, in the two decades or so since Harvey's and Jameson's landmark volumes, talk of 'postmodernism' has quietly receded from the centre of cultural-theoretical discourse. Art historian Jonathan Harris has identified the period between 'about 1980 and 1995' as the era 'during which the terms "postmodern" and "postmodernism" achieved a relatively wide currency', to be increasingly replaced by discussions of globalisation since that time. 11 Jameson's important essay of 1998, 'Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue', evidences this switch, and its lengthy discussion of the cultural and economic aspects of globalisation is notable for its relative shortage of references to the postmodern as 'ism'. 12 Meanwhile, cultural theorist Ihab Hassan, in an essay first published in 2001, puts the matter more bluntly, and identifies the contemporary waning of 'cultural postmodernism' within an ongoing condition of 'postmodernity' as an 'inclusive geopolitical process'. 13 The present article seeks to position Fish Story as an important document within this larger context, as the complex interarticulation of Sekula's effort to renew the terms of a realist art, in the wake of the hegemony of postmodern 'simulacral' culture of the 1980s, with the stirrings of a materialist critique of the new 'globalised' world of the 1990s. 14

Emergence, exhibition, intervention

The successive chapters of Fish Story were shown individually in various locations as they were completed, but it was the exhibition of two chapters at the 1993 Whitney Biennial in New York that put the project under the international spotlight for the first time. Here, the global purview of Sekula's work stood out against the predominance of identity-political practices elsewhere in the show; from Janine Antoni's chocolate-and-lard sculptural trilogy Gnaw 1992 (Museum of Modern Art, New York), to the varied skin tones of an early instantiation of Byron Kim's cumulative grid of monochrome paintings, Synechdoche 1991-2 (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.), and Sue Williams's confrontational scrawled canvas, Are You Pro-Porn or Anti-Porn? 1992. 15 As cultural critic Homi Bhabha tacitly acknowledged in his Whitney Biennial catalogue essay, and subsequently in his influential book The Location of Culture 1994, where Fish Story made reference to cultural hybridisation, this was clearly framed as a by-product of the enforced migrancy of labour attending global commodity exchange. 16 By clearly articulating one process through which identity is socially and systemically formed (and re-formed), Sekula's contribution was thus better able to withstand the reductive curatorial frame of the Whitney show as a whole, which was roundly criticised at the time for conferring a variously reductive, transparent and essentialist autobiographical reading on much of the work shown. 17 Later in 1993, these difficulties were handled more successfully in the group exhibition Trade Routes, curated by Laura Trippi at New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art, to which Sekula contributed Message in a Bottle, a chapter from Fish Story examining the decline of Spanish fishing, completed in 1992. Trade Routes was notable for its explicit thematisation of globalisation through a focused examination of the effects of computer technology on financial markets and international trade, while imbrications of the cultural and economic were clearly broached in a number of works by the show's eighteen artists. 18

In its complete exhibition form, first shown in 1995-6 in the port cities Rotterdam, Stockholm, Glasgow and Calais, Fish Story consisted of 105 colour photographs organised as seven chapters, or sequences, that were interspersed with twenty-six text panels across a number of rooms. 19 To these were added two slide projections that were omitted from the accompanying book, published in 1995, each consisting of around eighty transparencies, shown at fifteen-second intervals in a separate projection room. The whole ensemble was later exhibited at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, in 1999, and then at Documenta 11 in 2002, curated by Okwui Enwezor, where it appeared considerably less isolated than at the Whitney Biennial nine years earlier, taking its place among a large number of photographic and documentary film works. 20 The overarching subject of Sekula's material was global maritime industry, and especially its role as the largely unseen bedrock of the worldwide distribution of commodities. Fish Story thus confronted the space-time compression of a consumerist world whose latest buzzword, 'friction-free capitalism', conjured images of a dematerialised economy newly enabled by the computer as 'the sole engine of our progress', with its own abundant imagery of the slow, weighty transportation of goods across the oceans, a vast water-borne iron and steel infrastructure, and of lives defined, both at work and at leisure, by its shifting global parameters; an affront to the 'blinkered narcissism of the information specialist', as Sekula himself has remarked. 21

The most significant economic shift in the recent past for Fish Story had been the collapse of the Eastern Bloc at the start of the 1990s, and Sekula has suggested this as the overriding impetus for his six-year project, whose scope is matched only by the newfound reach of capitalist market forces around the globe from this time forward, for which the expansiveness of the oceans serves as a fitting metaphor, and their navigation an equally apt metonym. 22 However, the collapse of the Soviet Union is not the only back-story to Fish Story. In fact, the implosion of the Second World arguably takes second place in Sekula's project to the explosion of an export market further east, whose origins are in any case traceable somewhat further back, as the political economist Robert Brenner has demonstrated, to the crisis of profitability in United States industry between 1965-73, signalled by the increased competitiveness of German and Japanese production from around that time. 23 Among other factors, this ushered in a twenty-year period of stagnation in the US economy, which was only mitigated by 'more or less continuous ... devaluation of the dollar with respect to the yen and mark' from 1985 onwards, one effect of which was to hasten 'an unprecedented explosion of export-based manufacturing expansion throughout East Asia, where economies for the most part tied their currencies to the dollar'. 24 Perhaps above all else, Fish Story confirms this picture of an intimate link between the deindustrialisation of the economies of the North and the industrialisation of the South and East.

The counterpart, then, to the familiar post-industrial and postmodern visions of social reproduction founded on service labour, the creative industries and the fashioning of consumer experiences in the advanced societies of the North has been the ebbing visibility of material production over the last thirty to forty years in those same countries. While commodity chains have proliferated exponentially, their links have become both more numerous and more fragile as a result of such trends as the dissociation of brand ownership from factory ownership, and the relocation of factory work to ad hoc, clandestine Export Processing Zones in the global South as well as subterranean sweatshops in the North. One significant consequence of this has been the expansion of an ever larger industrial labour pool for capital's ever more itinerant hand to grasp, and the rapid growth of a global reserve army of labour; an underpaid 'precariat' whose insecurity is the flipside to the cherished autonomy of the cosmopolitan freelancer. 25 Art historian Benjamin Buchloh, in an extensive essay that appends the Fish Story publication, has observed the historical collusion of visual culture in this scheme, remarking that:

in a self-declared post-industrial and post-working class society, where large segments of labor and production are in fact concealed from common view since they are exported to the geo-political 'margins['] ... the experience of production and the conditions of industrial labor have been banned by a massive representational prohibition from modernist visual culture. 26

Buchloh here suggests not merely that the representation of industrial labour within Western visual culture has gradually disappeared as the natural effect of its object retreating ever further from view, but that the active prohibition of that representation stems from visual culture's own investment in the various fantasies of a post-industrial and post-working-class world. This is true enough of advertising and the mass media. However, large sections of the art world of the 1980s, basking in the glow of commodity aesthetics, had done little to effectively counter these myths (that is, where a similar investment had not, at least tacitly, been made). Fish Story's articulation of the global, macroeconomic scene is not merely that, but also a powerful intervention into precisely this insular artistic and art-institutional picture. If art is indeed situated at the nerve centre of this cultural amnesia as the standard bearer for ideologies of the 'weightless economy', Fish Story asks whether the visual arts might in fact be the ideal arena in which to confront this repression, by way of a photographic activism that would disarm art's First-World ideologies of simulacral self-sufficiency. 27

Vicissitudes of labour

Accordingly, Fish Story targets numerous aspects and local effects of the world-historical picture, concentrating on the painful transitions of Europe and the US from industrial to post-industrial societies, and the contemporaneous industrialisation of East Asia. 28 The two slide projections, Dismal Science 1989-92 and Walking on Water 1990-5, trace the decline of four shipyards in the First and former Second worlds - Glasgow and Tyneside in the first series, and Warsaw and Gdansk in the second - while the very first images of the first chapter of photographs (the first two photographs of the book), also entitled Fish Story 1990-3, portray an aspect of America's tourism-oriented service society aboard the Staten Island Ferry, as a young boy handles the coin-operated binoculars on the lower deck (fig.2 and fig.3). The first chapter goes on to focus largely on both the busy and abandoned harbour areas of California, including an empty shipyard after its use as a location for a Hollywood film shoot (fig.4). Paired with this photograph in the book and exhibition, a telling image from the sequence shows a rusty spanner in a derelict welder's booth in the Los Angeles port district of San Pedro, disturbed by Sekula from its long rest on an equally rusty ledge to reveal its silvery image in the only rustless area of the surface (fig.5). 29 The neglected spanner appears to stand not simply for the marginalisation of manual labour at today's automated container ports, but by extension, and in proximity to the allusion to Hollywood's fictions, for the disappearance of labour and production from the broader social imaginary.

The fourth chapter, Seventy in Seven (completed in 1994), takes the burgeoning shipping industry of South Korea as its subject, together with its winners and losers: a golf course, set against the backdrop of Ulsan's numerous cranes, reserved for Hyundai Heavy Industries shipyard workers; beachfront inactivity in the '[d]oomed fishing village of Ilsan'; and a monument to Hyundai workers killed during the construction of a highway between Seoul and the major port city Pusan. 30 As the golf course photograph intimates, a clear theme of the disappearance of public space amid rampant private development runs throughout this chapter, while the imprint of Hyundai on the pleasures and necessities of daily life is near-ubiquitous, as befits the sinuous, vertically integrated reach of the South Korean chaebol. 31 There are Hyundai apartments and automobiles, but also, midway along the sequence, a photograph announcing the imminent construction of a theme park in Ilsan, followed by an image of an ex-fisherman-turned-reluctant-factory worker, and a panoramic diptych of the village's beach, the right-hand image of which illustrates the creeping encroachment of industrial and commercial development in the distance (fig.6). The conveniences of a raised standard of living and the twin impositions of Fordist work and leisure are here inseparable. 32

The first and fourth chapters demonstrate most clearly that geography is an organising principle of the seven photographic sequences, and it is on the basis of this identification in particular that the viewer is encouraged to draw such parallels as that between Northern industrial decline and Southern industrial development, and thence to draw further local parallels within and across the chapters. From there, it is an inviting but treacherous step to seek in individual images a summary key to the project's meaning. Not merely because of its placement, the very first image of Fish Story as a whole, in fact, provokes just such an attempt (fig.2). It shows the Staten Island Ferry binoculars, minus the boy, directed through the window of the deck towards another ship in the hazy middle distance, the metallic sheen of the casing reflected in the same window back towards the viewer. Everything in this image, from the dirt-flecked window panes to the cleaners' equipment that is barely concealed in the corner space at the window's edge, conspires to suggest the tired tenor of a culture that has not only failed to live up to the post-industrial promise, but that also greets its industrial heritage with dewy-eyed nostalgia and its service-industrial present with malaise. 33 The binoculars' touristic associations also spark a relation with an image, later in the sequence, of the architect Frank Gehry's 1988 model for a Lead Fish conference room on display at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (fig.7), which is legible now only as a premonition of the Guggenheim Bilbao, that other tribute to the supposed obsolescence of maritime industry via its local displacement by tourism. Sekula was later to visit Gehry's building itself for a diptych entitled Bilbao that became the second and third images of a subsequent photographic project, TITANIC's wake 1998-2000. 34 Here, positioned on a hillside, Sekula's camera peers down on the museum for the first shot, the Basque city spreading out behind. Nudging the view a little to the right, the second image reveals a pocket of urban dereliction just across the river, shielded from the museum by a row of apartments. The diptych suggests that Gehry's museum is a mere front; a 'monument to the absolute hegemony of intellectual labor afforded by computer-based manufacturing', as Sekula's accompanying text to TITANIC's wake declares. 35 For Sekula, then, visual culture's prohibition of the representation of labour - or, more generally, its disavowal of the social fact of production - extends beyond image-making to the built environment itself. He shares this view with another of the museum's critics, artist Andrea Fraser, who elsewhere discusses the Guggenheim audio guide's references to the cutting and shaping of the building's panels 'by robots working to a computer program developed for aircraft design', and concludes that the museum as a whole expresses itself as the 'product of a world in which the human labor of production does not exist'. 36

However, if the reflex of contemporary consumer society in the global North is to foster a romanticised vision of industrial labour consigned to an imaginary past, this may be as refuge from the urgent pressures of the present. Tourism itself (and, by extension, the rise of the service industries in general) cannot accommodate, nor can the touristic view disguise, the impoverishment of post-industrial decline, of which evidence abounds in Fish Story, from the scavengers of Los Angeles harbour to the long queues of a Gdansk unemployment office. With remarkable resonance for today's world of global economic crisis, Fish Story makes plain that it is the supposed fixes of neoliberal austerity that nowadays force workers into ever more precarious circumstances. As is further elaborated in the series of extended encounters with dispossessed Angelenos in Sekula's 2010 (filmic) return to the oceans, The Forgotten Space, unemployment can quickly become a matter of hand-to-mouth survival, even the use of shipping containers for habitation, whether in Los Angeles - the 'first world capital of homelessness' - or on the beach at Veracruz, Mexico. 37 Sekula's caption for an image of striking workers in Galicia, Spain, taken in 1992 (one of only two images of protest in Fish Story), further suggests the sheer depth of neoliberal orthodoxy by the 1990s. Attesting to the weakening of ties between trade unions and the parliamentary left that is the obverse face of the tightened grip of global corporate power suggested by the Hyundai example, Sekula notes that the workers' opposition is to 'the Socialist government's cutbacks in unemployment benefits'. 38

Realism's incomplete project

The binoculars in Fish Story's first image, as well as the reflection that interrupts the line between the device and the distant ship - as if to remind the viewer of the window pane and, by analogy, the photographic image plane as mediating frame - may be thought to prefigure the reflexivity of the project as a whole. Specifically, these features might hint at Fish Story 's underlying recognition that while unmediated vision is, by definition, an impossibility in photography, and while visibility and visual access are doubly at issue where the subject is as vast, unmappable and volatile as global capital, neither is the recovery of social knowledge through photography a task to be abandoned.

Since the 1970s Sekula has been one of the most influential critics of the 'naïve conventionalism' of documentary photography; his voice one among many, influenced by the poststructuralist and postmodernist theory that was still ascendant in the 1980s, to have undermined the naturalist assumption that photography might offer 'truths' miraculously free of ideological inscription, or that 'intrinsic' photographic meaning is determinable outside of photography's manifold contexts of presentation and the diverse uses to which it may be put. 39 For Sekula, as for others, this had begun as a critical interrogation of positivist claims for the total objectivity of photography, these premised on the indexicality of the photographic trace - the direct imprint of empirical reality on the photograph as the physical effect of light on film. But by the 1990s this postmodern critique had hardened into the opposite doxa, namely that social knowledge was irrecoverable by photography, and that realism was a defunct project. 40 What Buchloh, in his Fish Story essay, calls the 'opacity of the sign', or what Jameson discussed in 1984 as the disappearance of the referent amid a play of pure signifiers - with no access to a truth or 'transcendental signified' beyond this interminable exchange - had become a postmodernist shibboleth. 41 'Critical realism', in the sense given the term by the Marxist theoretician Georg Lukács in the 1930s, had earlier meant the rescue of realism from both its Stalinist distortion and from a dogmatic 'anti-realist' modernism, 'bereft of content ... [and] cut off from the mainstream of society'. 42 For Sekula, in the early 1990s, it meant realism's recovery from postmodern 'hyperreality', the supposed condition of a pervasive loss of the real wrought by the dominant logic of the simulacrum. For Sekula, a 'critical representational art ... that points openly to the social world and to possibilities of social transformation' remains the only art worthy of an oppositional politics, as well as a necessary counter to a situation in which 'the old myth that photographs tell the truth has been replaced by the new myth that they lie'. 43 In other words, to understand the notion of the play of signifiers as licensing some absolute elasticity of signification is no less false than a belief in photography's total and transparent objectivity. The task is, rather, to insist on the historical, social and institutional inscription of photographic meaning, of the place of photographs within different discourses and image regimes; in short, to understand meaning as delimited within changeable and overlapping contexts.

Rather than anything as pre-given and static as a genre, then, realism for Sekula is above all an emancipatory project that, to conjure Lukács, must 'portray ... man in the whole range of his relations to the world', while capturing 'tendencies of development that only exist incipiently' in order to signal and thereby promote prospects for radical social change, however dim. 44 The key to Sekula's activist endeavour is not merely to bring home to his audience some of the myriad local effects of global capitalism, but to relate his necessarily incomplete impressions of the totality dialectically. Above all, this means to recognise the inherent contradictions of a complex and continuously changing world-system, and indeed to insist on contradiction as the very locus of change. The foregrounding of the persistence of social contradictions (and, in particular, economic disparities) under global capitalism is at work, accordingly, not only within each chapter and each location of Fish Story - for instance, in the simultaneity of rising affluence and the dejection of formerly autonomous workers in South Korea's port cities - but also in the geo-economic contrasts between conditions of rise and decline in different corners of a post-Soviet, globally interconnected world. 45

Beyond this, a critical realism must, above all, be self-critical, and alert to the inevitable limitations of its attempt to apprehend the enigma of capital as a relation that exists only in and as movement. 46 And so, Sekula works throughout to resist the possibility of any easy interpretative resolution or reductive summation of Fish Story. Within each titled chapter of photographs, the images display a wide range of types, so that no single pictorial mode predominates. There are microscopic close-ups as well as panoramas and, between the two, there are highly detailed and carefully composed views of a variety of oceanic, coastal, factory and shipyard scenes. On land the viewer is privy to these mostly unseen frontier towns for the global circulation of containers, within which individual people occupy a variety of positions. Often absent, obscured or incidental, sometimes central, mostly at work on specific tasks, and occasionally dwarfed by some hulking industrial apparatus, the subjects include welders, dockers, market traders, scavengers, rescue workers and fishermen, as well as the unemployed, children and families. Sekula here offers a model of photographic visibility that, by recognising its own inescapable inadequacy, thereby strives to be adequate to the magnitude and complexity of the subject at hand. The gulf between the universal movements and local effects of capital is also that between the invisible and the visible, the abstract and the real, and this is attested to in the pauses and gaps between Sekula's focus on the fate of individuals and localities as the lived elements of a broader historical trajectory, and his pulling back to draw closer to a systemic perspective. Sekula's calculated frustration of the comprehensive overview may also help to explain the patchwork quality of his two-part essay, Dismal Science, published in the Fish Story book, in its treatment of numerous artistic and literary depictions of waterways and seafaring, from Dutch marine painting to Popeye, and from Moby Dick to Robert Smithson's 1967 essay, 'A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey'. Throughout, the textual material performs a circumferential function in relation to the photographs, as do the photographs in relation to the texts; each is the complement, but not the interpreter, of the other.

Thus Fish Story, as a textual and photographic assemblage, astutely avoids any suggestion that Sekula's view is itself panoramic, and the sequential organisation of the photographs is among the means by which this is ensured. Sequences, Sekula maintains, are to be differentiated from series by their coherence as uniquely determinate arrangements (generally with a beginning and an end), thereby offering more potential resistance than the 'metronomic regularity' and indifference of the series - the seriality of much documentary photography or the exchangeability of the photographic typology - to the illegitimate isolation of single images, ripe for either ideal (aesthetic) or real (commercial) appropriation. 47 As Buchloh observes, the technical quality of Sekula's images themselves lies somewhere between the deskilled 'snapshot' and the 'professional artisanal photograph'. 48 In this way, it refuses the overt artisanry and latent or manifest pictorialism of documentarians from the Americans Lewis Hine to W. Eugene Smith, and onwards to the Brazilian Sebastião Salgado (to extend the lineage once identified by Sekula as a 'continuous tradition of expressionism in the realm of "fact"'), whose work has proven disposed to such a fate. 49

To be sure, the unity of Sekula's sequences is notably loose, and identifiable passages within each of Fish Story's chapters seldom follow the progressive logic of a given activity or process, such as can be found in some Soviet photographic sequences of the 1920s; for example, Alexander Rodchenko's project charting the production and distribution of newspapers from 1928. 50 Where a progression is apparent, Sekula tends to show successive moments within the course of a single event (such as the loading of giant cauldrons aboard a cargo ship in Los Angeles harbour), rather than one event following another, and never across more than two photographs. Nevertheless, Sekula's images are clearly grouped and organised in relation to the relevant accompanying texts both in the book and on the gallery wall, as images of the Documenta 11 installation confirm. While the texts bookend the photographs in the publication, partition walls demarcating the different chapters in the gallery allow for a degree of variation in the spatial arrangement of texts among images without relinquishing that clarity. In the Binding Brauerei at Documenta, a display of Candida Höfer's large colour photographs of the twelve existing casts of Rodin's The Burghers of Calais, equally (and generously) spaced at uniform height in an adjacent room to Fish Story, set the more varied spatial dynamics of Sekula's display in relief. 51 In fact, the spatial variation of Fish Story was at odds with many of the photographic exhibits in Kassel that year, from David Goldblatt's images of apartheid Boksburg at the turn of the 1980s, to Michael Ashkin's grid of 133 gelatin silver prints depicting the blighted landscapes of the New Jersey Meadowlands, whose fierce geometrical arrangement clearly echoed that of Bernd and Hilla Becher's post-industrial typologies, themselves on show in the KulturBahnhof.

The reflexive form of the photographic sequence, deployed by Sekula, thus eludes any crude opposition between 'objective' realism and modernism as a constructed, subjective or expressionistic aesthetics. Rather, Sekula's construction of what Buchloh calls Fish Story's 'realist montage-aesthetic' reclaims those aspects of Soviet photomontage and photo-essay practices of the 1920s that were, in different ways, both modernist and realist. 52 That is to say that the spatial juxtapositions and breaks of both photomontage and photo-essay works were supported as a credible revolutionary aesthetics both for their 'modernist' expansion of the content of perception, and for the 'realist' possibility of their opening up the realities of proletarian experience to a simultaneity of diverse perspectives. 53

In Sekula's hands, then, montage is by no means a disruptive, inherently anti-narrative form (the montage of caricature), but is rather 'a principle by which a loose concatenation of images limits the polysemic character of any given component image'. 54 And lest the very narrative coherence or concision of the photographic sequence itself still remains open to the charge of a latent and spurious mastery on the part of the artist, the presentational format of the slide sequences are on hand, in the exhibition version of Fish Story at least, to disrupt or suspend, if not the substance of these qualities of closure (as determined, to be sure, by the content of the image sets themselves), then at least the viewer's clear and immediate apprehension of them as such. Not only does the slideshow test the limits of the spectator's visual memory by precluding the simultaneous viewing of more than one image but, by repeating content on a continuous loop, the slide sequences will, at least initially, confound the attempt to locate a beginning and an end. 55 The final slide of Dismal Science is a teaser in this respect: a rear view of Karl Marx's grave in Highgate Cemetery, London, its grey granite base occupying around two thirds of the image, gives the impression of a punctuation mark for the series (fig.8). It is perhaps a full stop, but more likely - inserted into the continuous loop - a colon, a hyphen, or even an ellipsis, standing in for Fish Story 's necessary exclusions.

Picturing capital

Each of Sekula's seven chapters pose the question of the relative gains and losses for global insight of their orientation around a particular locality (the predominance of California in Fish Story or the centrality of the Polish context in the second chapter, Loaves and Fishes, for instance), while the sequences also admit the place of the contingent encounter within the relatively loosely imposed parameters of narrative and theme. (Buchloh identifies a precedent for this 'dialectic of contingency and contextuality' in the Soviet model of the 'accumulation of snapshots' in photo-files: neither 'follow[ing] the rigid structure of an archival order ... [nor] governed by a mere principle of randomness'.) 56 Consistent with all of this is the rhythmic variation, recurrent throughout Fish Story, between temporally and spatially intensive and extensive modes. The variable pace of Sekula's attention is felt in the contrast between the relative geographical coherence and often limited time span of the individual photographic sequences themselves (intensive), and the geographical, temporal and thematic gaps between them (extensive) as they traverse the oceans from California to Rotterdam, Portugal to Mexico (fig.9). 57

As much as anything else, these alternating rhythmic currents foreground the idiosyncrasies of Sekula's own working itinerary, perhaps also its partial determination by individual circumstance and personal interest - aspects that would later be foregrounded in Fish Story's film sequels, The Lottery of the Sea 2005 and The Forgotten Space, by the use of hand-held camerawork in the former, and by author-narration in each. Sekula admits as much in his postscript to the 1995 book ('Sites were chosen for reasons that were whimsical as well as thematic') and even hints at a subjective basis for his project when he states that 'the historical present constructed by Fish Story is roughly coincident with my own working life as an artist and writer'. 58 On occasion, Sekula emphasises the chance intervention of his subjects in the determination of what is finally seen, a clear example being the aforementioned South Korean ex-fishermen's gesturing in despair towards the beach at Ilsan behind him, an image that is immediately followed by Sekula's panoramic diptych of the beach itself.

What, then, could be the significance of the revelation of contingency and subjectivity (including Sekula's own) in Fish Story? Most importantly, it would seem that, in any attempt to portray global capitalism, a danger of detachment and reification will be heightened by the sheer invisibility of the systemic. Capitalism is both a world system and a process without agency. There is all the more risk, then, for the photographer who makes this their theme, that particular circumstances will come off as the passive illustration of immutable historical forces, and that his or her individual subjects will read as helpless victims. Sekula's deflation of conceptual mastery or the 'total picture', by way of the revelation and accentuation of contingency, idiosyncrasy and subjectivity in both Fish Story 's conception and execution, might then become a means to alleviate this problem, not least by way of his conceptual and presentational work of editing in order to foreground the project's spatial and temporal gaps, and intensions and extensions.

Deflation of mastery and revelation of contingency are, then, also the work of post-production; not only the careful contextualisation of text in relation to image but also aspects of promotion and exhibition that precede and surround the project's content. Buchloh discusses a poster designed by Sekula for the 1994 exhibition Fish Story (Work in Progress), at the Berkeley Art Museum, on which two images from the project appear together, as indeed they are positioned side by side in the gallery exhibition and the publication, while they also appear on the front and back of the softcover edition of the book. One is an extreme close-up of a ship's inclinometer (fig.10) and the other a mid-Atlantic panorama aboard the same ship, looking forward from the back of the top deck, a large number of containers spreading out ahead (fig.1). While, for Buchloh, the close-up is an example of Sekula's use of the 'seemingly irrelevant and banal' photographic detail as a 'Brechtian intervention that reminds the viewers ... of the constructed nature of the representation', the pairing of close-up and panorama as two distinct pictorial modes further presages Fish Story's partial status as 'a rhetoric of photographic discourses and conventions'. 59 In particular, the question of that which escapes the frame of both photographs, of what the close-range and the long-view together leave out, suggests what Sekula elsewhere admits must inevitably be the partial failure of his (or indeed any) attempt to picture capital at work as it crosses the earth to reproduce itself. In neither image, then, is the ship itself revealed - the inclinometer alone reveals the presence of what the panorama refuses to yield, the sheer volume of containers in that image obscuring any glimpse of the deck.

In sum, the admittance of contingency and subjectivity are integral to the critical realism of Fish Story. It is on these bases that Sekula's refusal of the 'ideology of the simulacrum' does not simply rebound into that other 'dominant model' of conceptual photography (for which Buchloh's paradigmatic example is the 'melancholic archaeology of industry' of the Bechers), namely the hubristic revival of objectivity, and 'the resuscitation of photography as the chosen discipline for rendering the "real"'. 60

Sekula's photographic activism

The placement of the image of containers at sea on the Berkeley exhibition poster makes plain that commodity distribution and global trade are the underlying bonds connecting the entirety of Sekula's project. The design for the poster as a framing device in this manner - as a minimal delimitation of the project's significance and scope - suggests Sekula's own awareness that the constitution of a decisively partisan or activist practice is equally dependent on its communicative force as on the adequacy of its testimony to the subject's complexity, as recorded in the visual and textual content. The form of the poster as a supplemental feature of Fish Story that serves to anchor its thematic concerns is, then, a way for Sekula to ensure what Buchloh calls 'the potential of communicative action between readers/spectators ... and the artistic proposition', without thereby compromising that complexity. 61

Spurning both fact and fiction, and poised between opacity and visibility, complexity and legibility, fragment and totality, Fish Story thus unfolds according to a persistent 'neither/nor' logic. In its condition as (something approaching) the negative sum of its deconstructed parts, it mounts a sophisticated critique of the photographic conventions that Sekula's critical prose elsewhere deflates. But as it carves its position within and between these conventions, forging a space of resistance in the aesthetic field as a complex configuration of form and content, Fish Story simultaneously occupies a real position within the overlapping institutional fields of documentary photography and contemporary art. As is suggested, not least by his sensitive involvement with the project's framing, Sekula is more aware of this than anyone. Nonetheless, it must be remembered that these positions are interdependent and mutable and, in particular, that the work's critical import may be vulnerable to historical shifts in the reception of the former institutional field within the sphere of the latter.

For Buchloh, documentary as a form of realism is of utmost importance in this equation. He argues that Sekula's photographic and textual investigations have, since the 1970s, been 'culturally illegible' within the dominant terms of post-conceptual, postmodern photographic practice. 62 Sekula's work, Buchloh insists, has been amenable neither to the 'disinterested specularity ... of an exclusive deflection onto the signifier', nor to the depiction of the social as a 'world of random discontinuities and anomic conditions'. 63 What these two models share, and what Sekula's critical realism contravenes, is an investment in 'an exclusive and dominant aesthetic of the fragment' (whether that of sign or social fact), whose art world hegemony is a fallout of the supposed death of realism, nowadays widely perceived as an 'ontological condition'. 64 Postmodernism and realism are, it seems, irreconcilable. Once again, Jameson has been the prophet here, and Buchloh cites his pessimistic 1971 proclamation that 'the individual and the social have fallen apart so effectively that they stand as two incommensurable realities' with no common language. 65

Buchloh argues that Sekula's apparent illegibility within the art world - premised also on the threat posed by documentary practices towards the 'high-art status of ... newly accredited photographic objects' - has fostered what he thereby deduces to be his clear 'distance from the field of contemporary artistic production in general'. 66 Doubtless he is correct in this assessment up to a point, despite his neglect to mention the inclusion of Fish Story, in unfinished form, in the prominent fixture on the contemporary art calendar that is the Whitney Biennial. But Buchloh's argument also testifies to its formulation on the historical cusp of the widespread revival and visibility of documentary and realist practices in the institutional art world: examples from Documenta 11 would include the presentation of Amar Kanwar's film study of the India-Pakistan border, A Season Outside 1997, following well-received showings at film festivals in Mumbai and San Francisco; Eyal Sivan's documentary film of the Rwandan genocide, Itsembatsemba, Rwanda One Genocide Later 1996; Ashkin's New Jersey prints; and colour photographs by Lisl Ponger of activist graffiti from the anti-capitalist uprising in Genoa in July 2001. Fish Story itself stands as a signal early instance of a growing institutional visibility of oppositional practices such as Sekula's that began to gather pace towards the end of the 1990s. The inclusion of Buchloh's efficient essay in the Fish Story publication was surely of use in this regard, and Buchloh's own portrayal of documentary as a form of realism is, if anything, indicative of its subsumption by the artistic field, as it already presumes its commensurability with realism as aesthetic code, as artistic 'genre'. In short, the boundaries of that institutional field are clearly more porous than Buchloh is here willing to admit, and with his help, Fish Story becomes legible within the artistic field precisely as a contravention of the dominant terms of post-Conceptual photographic practice. Indeed, with the inclusion of Buchloh's essay-supplement in the publication, that legibility-as-contravention becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Seen in this light, Buchloh's insistence on Sekula's lingering renegade status appears, not disingenuous, but certainly ripe for revision within, and thanks to, the context of his own critical appraisal.

But if the institutions of the art world have, in the last two decades, proven more than amenable to critical documentary practices, and happy to shape them to their discourse with little friction, what strength of challenge to the dominant ideologies of that world do they in fact present? Indeed, to what extent may Sekula's expansive portrait of global maritime industry have itself been tacitly content to occupy the structural position of radical token within the broader institutional field of contemporary art of the mid-1990s? Might Sekula's 'ethics of visibility' even, to a degree, be resigned to its own marginal visibility within that field? 67 Sekula's model of a critical realism allows for itself - leaves open - the possibility of its partisan allegiance to an oppositional politics becoming part of a broader praxis; however, this facet will inevitably lie dormant in the absence of the emergence of a coherent radical force itself. The formal and thematic openness of Sekula's critical realism is also its openness to circumstance, and this very potentiality is its key strength. It allows for each of what Jameson has argued to be two necessary but irreconcilable strategies of a political art that would seek to give voice to the disenfranchised and voiceless, namely 'affirmation of the cultural group's strength' and insistence 'on that group's miseries'. 68 Each of these strategies, Jameson attests, may 'correspond to different historical moments in the struggle, and evolving local opportunities and representational needs'. 69 Fish Story's subject, then, is change and possibility in the wake of Soviet collapse, East Asian industrial expansion, the relaxation of borders to trade, and the global consolidation of corporate power; its world is not yet that of the tempered optimism found in Sekula's later slide sequence Waiting for Tear Gas (White Globe to Black), an overtly partisan photographic document of the N30 demonstrations in Seattle in 1999. 70 In the contrast between the two series, and perhaps in the contrast between the structural complexity of the earlier project and the structural simplicity of the 1999 series, what can be observed are both the constraints and the opportunities of a photographic 'ethics of visibility', since what is largely visible in Fish Story, besides anger and intransigence, is defeat and disorientation as a result of capital's global upheavals. Fish Story was completed and first exhibited in January 1995, before the wave of general strikes in France that occurred between November and December that year. It was, moreover, wrapped up nearly two years before the general strike by South Korean automotive and shipbuilding industry workers that took place between December 1996 and January 1997, and its shortage of protest imagery is striking today, especially when set against the high incidence of protest at various harbour sites in Sekula's later film, The Lottery of the Sea.

The dialectical complexities and contradictions of Fish Story are finally, then, of a piece with the project's conflicted historical moment, in the wake of the historical failure of Marxism-Leninism and at the dawn of a new activism that would lead onward to the Movement of Movements in Seattle and beyond. The world's oceans, the labour aboard its ships and in its harbours, have featured heavily in Sekula's activities since Fish Story, constituting a body of work that offers a sustained corrective to the clichés of hybrid consumer culture so often paraded in artistic 'examinations' of globalisation. Meanwhile, the oceans' pivotal place in the reproduction of contemporary society, and therefore its key political importance, has begun to figure increasingly in work by younger artists. Fish Story's influence is palpable in Zineb Sedira's Floating Coffins 2009 (Tate T13331), a fourteen-channel video installation of the harbour city of Nouadhibou and the flotsam and jetsam along the nearby Mauritanian coastline, as well as Chen Chieh-jen's film The Route 2006, which depicts an imaginary protest at the Port of Kaohsiung in Taiwan, where, in 1995, Neptune Jade unloaded its cargo, having been refused anchorage elsewhere in solidarity with Liverpool's striking dockers. A decade or so before these works, Fish Story itself resonates with the gradual unravelling, identified by the labour sociologist Beverly Silver, of a broad social-scientific consensus that labour movements of the 1990s were in a severe or even terminal crisis. 71 Whereas the political scientist Francis Fukuyama had famously declared, in 1989, that the global triumph of liberal-capitalist democracy heralded the death of competing ideologies as the 'end of history', Fish Story accords with the tempering, if not the eclipse, of Fukuyama's moment in the sun by the magisterial weight of Pierre Bourdieu's immense La Misère du Monde in 1993. 72 Marx's memorial bust in Highgate may have its back to the camera in the final image of Dismal Science, but the familiar shape of the head is nonetheless clearly discernible, and asks to be continually reread, whether as full stop, ellipsis or comma. The stone cuts a ghostly figure against the dusk, and as the philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote in Spectres of Marx in 1994, when Fish Story was nearing completion, 'a ghost never dies'. 73 Like Sekula's ocean, and its return in successive projects, 'it remains always to come and to come-back'. 74

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production in view: allan sekula’s fish story and the thawing of postmodernism

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Production in View: Allan Sekula's Fish Story and the Thawing of Postmodernism - Tate Papers | Tate

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Across four decades the photographic and written practice of Allan Sekula has provided an object lesson in the possibilities for an artistic commitment to labour's cause and for the exploration of the world of late capitalism from a radical-left perspective.

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http://revealinghistories.org.uk/the-american-civil-war-and-the-lancashire-cotton-famine/objects/flour-barrel.html#:~:text=On%209%20February%201863%2C%20the,during%20the%20American%20Civil%20War.

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The rise of commercial breweries in Brighton escalated in the 17th and 18th centuries. Brighton’s earliest brewers also included William Chapman, Robert Hillick and James Buckle, Elizabeth Lucas, and Richard Whichols [sic]. By the late 19th century, as well as boasting hundreds of pubs and beer houses, Brighton had more than 10 sizeable breweries. These, and other large, national breweries, had already begun buying up large numbers of pubs which then became ‘tied houses’ — i.e. the pubs could only sell the brewer’s own beer. This contentious practice of ‘tied houses’ continues today.

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Tamplins Brewery, Brighton 1900

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Should we brew beer in barrels as part of the exhibition?

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Global competition for equipment and supplies to address the Covid-19 crisis

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A shifting matrix of highly skilled smugglers move them at great personal risk. As they arrive in the Mercato, Addis Ababa’s vast central market, smuggled and officially imported flip-flops are indistinguishable, except for their price: the smuggled ones are cheaper and appeal to a poor population that lives carefully on slender resources.

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"The Production of Space", Henri Lefevre

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COVID-19 Home How does it work? Spreading misinformation can start: from individuals, such as criminals, after some sort of profit; from states and state-backed actors seeking to advance geopolitical interests; from opportunists looking to discredit official sources. It only gains traction if the public share it through social media.

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A report on Russian interference in British politics will be published next week, it was confirmed on Thursday, as senior MPs asserted their independence from Boris Johnson's Downing Street administration.

The investigation, carried out by parliament's intelligence and security committee (ISC), was finished in March 2019 and was expected to be published before the election last December.

However, the release of the report, which is expected to highlight contentious links between Conservative party donors and Russia, has been held up while the committee's new membership was selected, triggering claims of a cover-up by No 10.

In a statement on Thursday morning, the ISC said it had "unanimously agreed that it will publish the report on Russia prepared by its predecessor before the house rises for the summer recess".

The announcement came as Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, announced that the government had concluded that a leak of sensitive documents relating to US-UK trade talks, which spread online during the 2019 election campaign, was part of a Russian interference operation.

In a written statement to MPs Mr Raab said Russian "actors" were behind the dissemination of the documents through the social media site Reddit.

"Whilst there is no evidence of a broad spectrum Russian campaign against the general election, any attempt to interfere in our democratic processes is completely unacceptable," Mr Raab said, adding that the matter was subject to an "ongoing criminal investigation".

Dmitry Peskov, president Vladimir Putin's spokesman, told the FT that accusations of interference in the 2019 election were "unfounded".

Intelligence officials launched a probe after the documents were leaked in the run-up to Boris Johnson's election victory by the then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Mr Corbyn said the documents revealed the NHS would be "up for sale" by a Tory government in future trade negotiations with Washington - claims that Mr Johnson repeatedly denied at the time.

Allegations that this was an indication of foreign interference in the election first emerged after Reddit said in December that it believed the amplification of the documents online was the result of a Russian operation.

The company said a group of accounts on its site had "the same shared pattern" of behaviour as a disinformation campaign known as "Secondary Infektion" that used social media sites, including Facebook, to sow discord. The operation, run by Russian hackers, uses fake accounts and forged documents across dozens of online platforms to spread information attacking western unity.

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The ISC's move to rapidly publish the Russia report follows a row on Wednesday over the appointment of veteran Tory MP Julian Lewis as its new chair instead of Downing Street's preferred candidate, the former transport secretary Chris Grayling.

Mr Lewis only declared his interest in standing as head of the committee, which oversees the work of Britain's main spying agencies MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, hours before the vote, which he won with the backing of Labour and Scottish National party MPs.

The move drew instant retribution from the prime minister who threw Mr Lewis, a former chair of parliament's defence committee, out of the Conservative party by withdrawing the whip.

Senior Downing Street insiders said Mr Lewis had been kicked out of the Tory party "for working with Labour and other opposition MPs for his own advantage." The official added: "There are consequences for duplicity."

But Mr Lewis insisted he had not misled Conservative party whips over supporting Mr Grayling for the chair role and it was up to the committee's members to select who should lead the ISC.

"It was only yesterday afternoon that I received a text asking me to confirm that I would be voting for the prime minister's preferred candidate for the ISC chair," he said in a statement.

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"I did not reply as I considered it an improper request. At no earlier stage did I give any undertaking to vote for any particular candidate," he said.

No 10's attempt to install Mr Grayling as ISC chair was heavily criticised by former chairman Dominic Grieve. "What troubles me about this episode, quite apart from its utter absurdity, and now withdrawing the whip from Julian, who is indeed highly respected, is the mindset it gives about what on earth is going on in Downing Street," he told the BBC.

Malcolm Rifkind, another former chair of the ISC who also served as foreign and defence secretary, added: "I think the prime minister has handled this - or his advisers whoever is dealing with it - in an extremely incompetent way."
Additional reporting: Henry Foy in Moscow

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Report on Russian interference in UK politics to be released

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A report on Russian interference in British politics will be published next week, it was confirmed on Thursday, as senior MPs asserted their independence from Boris Johnson's Downing Street administration. The investigation, carried out by parliament's intelligence and security committee (ISC), was finished in March 2019 and was expected to be published before the election last December.