Rob Edwards

Revealed: the dinners that drove disputed Indian oil deal

from Sunday Herald, 20 May 2012

Westminster secretly lobbied the Indian government to give the go-ahead to a disputed multi-billion pound deal with a leading Scottish oil company, internal emails passed to the Sunday Herald reveal. 

UK government officials, briefed “over dinner” by Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy, offered to “polish” and send a letter drafted by the company. At a lunch, they also had a quiet word urging a key Indian government minister to back the deal.

The Indian government subsequently gave permission for Cairn’s £5.5 billion deal to sell off the bulk of its Indian oil business to Vedanta, an Indian mining and metals giant much criticised by human rights and environmental groups. The deal, labeled “the largest transaction ever to happen in India”, is now being challenged in the Indian Supreme Court.

The UK government has been condemned for doing Cairn’s bidding “slavishly” and “shamelessly” by campaign groups. “The political and industrial elite of India conspire with their counterparts in other countries to short-change local people and hand over national resources on a platter to multinationals,” said the leading Indian campaigner, Nityanand Jayaraman.

The controversial deal with Vedanta was at the root of the shareholder rebellion that swept through Cairn’s AGM in Edinburgh on Thursday. Plans to reward the company’s founder and chairman, Sir Bill Gammell, up to £5 million in bonuses for securing the deal were voted down two-to-one by shareholders.

Revealed: new health fears about radiation at Dalgety Bay

from Sunday Herald, 25 March 2012

Fresh fears about the dangers of the radioactivity contaminating a popular Scottish coastal resort have been revealed in hundreds of internal government emails obtained by the Sunday Herald.

Contaminated shellfish from Dalgety Bay in Fife have been officially condemned as unfit to eat, while a UK government health watchdog has been accused by one of its leading advisers of downplaying the public health risks from the pollution. 

The revelations will be raised by the former Prime Minister and local MP, Gordon Brown, at a meeting with the Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, in London on Monday. They emerge as decisions on how to clean up the contamination, blamed on old military planes, come to a head in a series of crunch meetings this week.

The Sunday Herald understands that a plan to investigate the contamination until May 2013 is likely to go ahead. But it is still unclear how or when the area will subsequently be cleaned up, as the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is refusing to accept liability.

The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) will therefore not lift its threat to formally designate Dalgety Bay as Britain’s first radioactively contaminated land if the site is not cleaned up. But it is unlikely to implement the threat in the near future.

Ethics and journalism

a talk to NUJ Edinburgh Freelance Branch, 20 February 2012

Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936) was a journalist in Chicago. His famous Irish character, Dooley, once warned of the power of newspapers:

“The newspaper does everything for us. It runs the police force and the banks, commands the military, controls the legislature, baptises the young, marries the foolish, comforts the afflicted, afflicts the comfortable, buries the dead and roasts them afterwards.” 

One part of that has often since been taken up as summarising the job of a newspaper: to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. I quite like that, only I would make it a little more political. The job of a journalist, as I see it, is to try and help the powerless by challenging the powerful.

Maybe not everyone will agree, but it’s a good starting point I think for discussing ethics in journalism this evening. In doing so I should make clear that what I say is no more and no less than my personal opinion, based on my experience as a freelance journalist over 30 years. I should stress that I don’t have any exclusive insight on ethics, nor any claim to be more or less ethical than any of my colleagues. 

UK government shared intelligence with nuclear industry, documents show

from The Guardian, 05 December 2011

The British government has been quietly exchanging intelligence on key policies with multinational companies in an effort to protect and promote their plans for new nuclear power stations, according to internal documents seen by the Guardian.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) has also passed the Nuclear Industry Association (NIA), which represents 260 companies, and the French nuclear company, EDF Energy, details of its court battle against Greenpeace, which is trying to block the nuclear plans.

The leakage of information has been condemned by Greenpeace as an "abuse of power" which prevents democratic scrutiny. The environmental group's lawyers have written to the government and high court in London complaining that the proper legal procedures have been breached.

The government is planning to build eight new nuclear power stations in England and Wales and there is a perception that the government has been working closely with the nuclear industry to manage public opinion and prevent a backlash against the technology as has happened in Germany and Italy.

Internal emails revealed by the Guardian in June showed that British government officials approached nuclear companies to draw up a co-ordinated public relations strategy to play down the Fukushima nuclear accident just two days after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in March.

In the latest revelations, a minute of a meeting on 15 September between officials from Decc's Office for Nuclear Development (OND) and EDF reveals that they shared information about the handling of the company's application to build the first of the new nuclear stations at Hinkley Point in Somerset, and much else.

Revealed: the dangerous radioactivity that the MoD missed

from Sunday Herald, 04 December 2011

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is facing a ferocious barrage of criticism for botching its monitoring of Dalgety Bay so badly that it missed more than 400 radioactive hotspots, including some of the most lethal ever found on public beaches.

Former government experts, current government advisors and senior politicians have condemned the MoD’s monitoring of the contaminated Fife foreshore as inadequate, ineffectual and incompetent. According to one of the MoD’s own former radiation scientists, the ministry can no longer be trusted to do the job – though it must pay for it.

“Because of MoD’s failure to properly assess the extent and risks from the contamination, any further surveys or assessments should not be carried out by MoD, or MoD contractors,” said Fred Dawson, who worked for the MoD for 31 years before he left as head of the radiation protection policy team in 2009.

“Nor should MoD, or MoD contractors, be allowed to participate or undertake remediation work. MoD’s role should be limited to providing the necessary finance to remediate the beach.”

Dawson accused the MoD of being persistently blind to the seriousness of the pollution. “It has consistently done all that it can to avoid admitting liability for the contamination, which in all probability it caused,” he told the Sunday Herald.

£2 billion being spent on nuclear bomb plants

from The Guardian, 27 November 2011

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is spending £2 billion on new nuclear weapons plants before a formal decision has been taken over whether to replace Trident warheads, according to ministers.

The revelation has prompted fierce attacks on the MoD for making “a complete mockery” of democracy by pre-empting a decision and so attempting to force the hands of future governments.

The ministry, however, argues that part of the investment helps to ensure the safety of the existing Trident warheads. But it accepts that the money also maintains the capability to design a new warhead “should that be required”.

Details of the MoD’s huge investments in plants for putting together and taking apart warheads, making enriched uranium components and high explosives have been unveiled for the first time. The plants are being built at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) sites at Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire.

The most expensive plant, called Mensa, is a £734 million facility for “warhead assembly/disassembly”, a risky but essential maintenance process. Then there is Pegasus, a £634 million highly enriched uranium plant, and Circinus, a £231 million high explosives plant.

The secret history of DU testing in Scotland

for Sunday Herald, 06 November 2011

Depleted uranium (DU) weapons were tested in Scotland despite warnings from Ministry of Defence (MoD) scientists that the contamination they would cause could never be cleaned up, government documents reveal.

Fierce opposition to anything nuclear north of the border also caused the MoD to conceal its real intentions on DU testing. In an attempt to defuse public anxiety, MoD officials even proposed giving uranium another name.

Previously secret government records made available in the National Archive give a fascinating insight into the political manipulation and manoeuvring that went on behind the scenes in the 1970s to try and ensure that Scotland didn’t thwart MoD plans to test fire DU munitions at the Dundrennan military range near Kirkcudbright.

An internal MoD memo from 1973 warned that test firing would leave parts of the range contaminated by “very persistent dust”. It added: “It will probably be impossible to remove this completely and initial consideration of this fact is essential.”

Police slip-up on Trump protest

from Sunday Herald, 30 October 2011

Police strategy at the Aberdeenshire golf resort being build by US property tycoon, Donald Trump, was targeted against protestors – but that was a mistake, according to an internal police report obtained by the Sunday Herald.

Grampian Police confessed to an “admin error” in recording that its aim was to “deter, detect, detain and report those responsible for unlawful protest” against the controversial development. It should have said “unlawful behaviour”.

A hand-written note in a senior police management file released under freedom of information legislation warned that this could lead to accusations that the police were biased in favour of Trump.

"Emphasis on ‘protest’ could be seen as an imbalance in terms of neutrality,” it said. “‘Behaviour’ is more appropriate and was original strategy.”

The revelation has resurrected claims that Grampian Police have acted as Trump’s private security force in protecting the billionaire’s £750 million golf course and hotel complex on the Menie Estate. Last year, two documentary filmmakers were arrested and imprisoned after interviewing a member of Trump’s staff on the estate, but then had charges dropped.

Prizes for polluting fish farm under fire

from Sunday Herald, 30 October 2011

A Highland salmon farm that was granted £630,000 of taxpayers’ money, given an environmental prize and labelled as a “freedom food” producer has been accused of lice infestation and pollution in breach of official guidelines.

Wester Ross Fisheries near Ullapool is under investigation by government and voluntary agencies following complaints from a local landowner, Jenny Scobie of the Rhidorroch Estate. She says that sea lice from caged salmon are contaminating wild fish and damaging angling on the River Ullapool, which flows through her land.

Reports from government inspectors released under freedom of information legislation show that concentrations of sea lice at three of the company’s sites on Loch Broom and Little Loch Broom have exceeded levels recommended in the industry’s good practice code six times this year.

Evidence released by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) also shows that pollution of the seabed underneath the three sites – Corry, Ardmair and Ardessie – has been rated as “unsatisfactory” 20 times over the last ten years, and “borderline” eight times. The weight of caged fish licenced under environmental rules was also breached five times at Ardessie in 2006 and 2007.

Wester Ross Fisheries is a small locally owned business, producing 1,500 tonnes of salmon a year. It was given a grant of £631,720 by Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) in March 2011 to help it expand.

Freedom of information appeals: the requester’s perspective

a talk at the Centre for Freedom of Information, University of Dundee, 19 October 2011

Hello. I'm glad to be here. It's daunting to give my views rather than report other people’s.

First an illustrative little story. In 2005 under what was then the new freedom of information (FoI) legislation I asked the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in London about a list of potential nuclear waste dumps which the government waste agency, Nirex, had given them. This was a Defra official’s baffling response:

What I am saying is that we don't have the list. I wouldn't want and couldn't be definitive about whether we had never had it. All I am saying is that if we did once have it, there's no record or memory of that being the case.

Maybe they could have just said: “Sorry, we lost it.” Six months later, after a lot of backstage political manoeuvring and several U-turns – all of which I know about because of a later FoI request – the list of possible nuclear waste dumps was released. Two months after that I heard back from the UK Information Commissioner, to whom I had appeal earlier when it looked like the list might not be released, saying he was ready to begin his investigation. I had to point out that if he had read the newspapers, he would know that the information had all been released so the investigation was redundant. As you’ll see from what I’m going to say, I’m not sure that the UK Information Commissioner’s attitude has improved much since.

Inside story: Trump’s “difficult” relationship with Grampian police

from Sunday Herald, 02 October 2011

The US property tycoon, Donald Trump, has come under attack from Grampian Police for repeatedly demanding tougher security at his controversial golf resort being built at the Menie estate in Aberdeenshire, according to internal police reports seen by the Sunday Herald.

The billionaire has piled pressure on the police to increase protection of the estate by making more patrols and responding more rapidly when called. Over the last two years Trump and his aides have held numerous meetings and discussions with senior police officers, urging them to do more.

A series of memos marked “restricted” show that the police have struggled to resist this pressure, and have become worried that their impartiality would be damaged. Trump had “unrealistic expectations” that Grampian police would behave like the New York Police Department (NYPD), police officers said.

The revelations come against a background of growing disillusionment about the police’s relationship with the Trump Organisation. Two documentary filmmakers were arrested and imprisoned after interviewing one of Trump’s staff, but then had charges dropped.

And local residents opposed to the Trump development say they no longer bother calling the police if there’s an incident because of “the perception that they are working as a private security force for Trump.”

Nuclear risks getting worse because of cutbacks, warns MoD

from The Guardian, 25 August 2011
 
The danger of accidents and radioactive leaks from Britain’s ageing nuclear bombs and submarines is getting “progressively worse” because of deepening spending cutbacks, according to an internal Ministry of Defence (MoD) report.

The report reveals that the MoD is facing an increasing struggle to maintain the safety of the nation’s military nuclear activities as cuts become “yet more painful”. There was a “lack of adequate resource to deliver the defence nuclear programmes safely,” it says.

Written by the MoD’s senior nuclear safety watchdog, the report warns that the number of incidents at nuclear sites is “too high”. This poses a “risk to the workforce and public safety and to the environment, in both short and medium term.”

It also says that measures meant to overcome prolonged shortages of safety engineers “may be insufficient”, and criticises the MoD for failing to allocate funding for the decommissioning and disposal of 17 defunct nuclear submarines now laid up at Devonport in Plymouth and Rosyth in Fife.

The report covers 2010 and was written by Howard Mathers, the chairman of the MoD’s Defence Nuclear Environment and Safety Board. It was released with portions blacked out in response to requests under freedom of information legislation.

Concern over contamination from chemical weapons plants in Scotland

from Sunday Herald, 31 July 2011

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is facing demands from politicians, experts and environmentalists to come clean about contamination from former chemical weapons plants in Scotland.

An internal MoD briefing has revealed that sites near Beith in North Ayrshire and near Callander in Stirling have been under investigation for possible risks to human health and the environment. The sites were previously used to make, store and dispose of chemical warfare agents.

Though the MoD insists that the sites are safe, critics are concerned about the dangers of lingering contamination. They are demanding more information about the MoD’s investigations, and urging complete openness with local communities.

Stan Blackley, the chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland, warned that the MoD’s information machine was “toxic” and couldn’t be trusted. “We need more than just assurances that there is no risk to public health at these sites, particularly given the toxic nature of what went on at them in the past,” he told the Sunday Herald.

“Until independent scientific verification is obtained and released stating that these sites are safe and pose no risk, it would be foolish for anyone to do anything other than treat what we're being told with a big pinch of salt, and avoid them like the plague.”

Ministers backtrack on freedom of information under pressure from businesses

from Sunday Herald, 30 January 2011

The Scottish government has bowed to pressure from big business and abandoned plans to end the secrecy enjoyed by private contractors.

Ministers have shelved their proposals to extend the scope of freedom of information legislation to cover the companies that build and run schools, hospitals, prisons and roads. The move had been fiercely opposed by the companies.

Other bodies which will also now escape designation under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act are trusts set up by local authorities to run leisure and cultural activities, Glasgow Housing Association and the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland.

£600m handouts to farmers hidden after court case

from Sunday Herald, 12 December 2010

The names of the landowners and farmers in Scotland who receive multi-million pound handouts from the public purse have been withdrawn by the Scottish government following a European court ruling.

Lists of 20,000 farmers who are paid up to £600 million a year in public subsidies have been pulled from the government’s website. Last year, three farmers in the northeast and one in the southwest received record amounts of more than £1 million each.

Wealthy landowners - including the former owner of Harrods, Mohamed al-Fayed, the Duke of Buccleugh, Lord Morton and the Earl and Countess of Moray - were also given hundreds of thousands of pounds each. The subsidies infuriate environmental and anti-poverty campaigners, who say that poor farmers at home and abroad suffer as a result.

But now the names of all those who get agricultural subsidies have been scrubbed from the Scottish government’s online database, and there is uncertainty over whether they will be named in the future. Ministers were forced to act by a judgement last month from the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

The court found in favour of German farmers who were objecting to their names being published. It said that making their details available to everyone via the internet breached their rights to privacy and to the protection of their personal data.

Revealed: how Britain’s nuclear bases have bungled bomb safety

from The Observer, 17 October 2010

Dozens of potentially disastrous flaws in the safety regime for nuclear weapons at Britain’s bomb bases, on public roads and at sea have been exposed by secret Ministry of Defence (MoD) reports seen by the Observer.

Safety practises at the bomb factory at Aldermaston in Berkshire have been “poor”, nuclear weapons convoys have suffered from “crew fatigue” and safety regulation has been ignored by nuclear submarine commanders, according to the MoD’s internal safety watchdogs.

The reports, released after a three-year freedom of information battle, also reveal that the “intrinsic safety” of Trident nuclear warheads was put at risk by an argument between Britain and the United States. A new US-made “arming, fusing and firing” system being fitted onto warheads worried the MoD’s Nuclear Weapon Regulator, Andy Moore.

There was a "medium risk that safety justifications will lack key information” and a need for "engagement with US on information supply,” he warned. This has been a highly sensitive issue within government.

Last month, the Observer reported that a major fire in a high explosive building in August had raised concerns about safety at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) at Aldermaston. Fire brigade logs showed that 20 appliances and 95 crew fought the fire for almost nine hours.

Prising open the MoD's secretive nuclear citadel

Comment from Sunday Herald, 17 October 2010

Sometimes, your worst suspicions are confirmed. You like to think the best of public agencies, but they leave you little choice.

So it has been with my three-year battle to force the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to release reports on the safety of nuclear weapons. I thought the MoD, and the UK Information Commissioner, would behave themselves. But they didn’t.

Let me explain. There could hardly be anything more important than ensuring that the British government’s 200 or so nuclear warheads don’t go off by accident. Unfortunately this job is left to a secretive set of faceless officials within the MoD, who are on same payroll as those they are meant to be regulating.

This is unlikely to make them tough, independent or accountable public watchdogs. But they are all we’ve got to protect us from an accidental Armageddon, and I wanted to find out what they’ve been doing.

Botching the safety of nuclear bombs on the Clyde

from Sunday Herald, 17 October 2010

Potentially catastrophic lapses in nuclear weapons safety at the Clyde naval base have been exposed by secret Ministry of Defence (MoD) reports released after a three-year freedom of information battle.

The handling of up to 200 nuclear warheads on Trident missiles at Faslane and Coulport near Helensburgh has been plagued by “difficulties” “confusion”, “shortcomings” and “non-compliance”, according to the MoD’s internal safety watchdogs.

“The fragmentation of approaches to safety management issues does not engender confidence," warned Andy Moore, the MoD’s Nuclear Weapon Regulator. “This is a resource issue for a naval base that is heavily loaded and subject to funding constraints.”

Critics pointed out that poor safety procedures for nuclear weapons could lead to accidents scattering deadly plutonium across the country. The MoD, however, insisted that its safety record was “as robust as possible”.

The MoD released a series of reports by its nuclear safety regulators last week on the eve of an appeal to the UK Information Tribunal that threatened to expose the ministry’s multiple breaches of freedom of information law. The MoD has been trying since 2007 to keep the reports secret.

Long quest for cancer data fails at last hurdle

from Sunday Herald, 30 May 2010

Scotland’s first, longest and most disputed freedom of information case has ended up keeping vital cancer statistics secret.

After two investigations by the Scottish information commissioner, Kevin Dunion, plus appeals to the Court of Session in Edinburgh and the House of Lords in London, numbers that might shed light on the links between children’s blood cancer and radioactive pollution have been kept under wraps.

The Scottish Green Party, which made the original request, is frustrated and annoyed. The Scottish Health Service, which fought to keep the information confidential, sounds relieved.

Back at the beginning of 2005, Michael Collie, a researcher for the then Green MSP, Chris Ballance, asked the Scottish health service for the annual incidence of childhood leukaemia in every census ward in Dumfries and Galloway from 1990 to 2003.

They wanted to test widespread suspicions that the debilitating and potentially fatal cancer could be caused by radioactive contamination. Plutonium from the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria washes up on the Solway coast, and has been detected around the shoreline.

Is Scotland safe from nuclear submarine crashes in the Clyde?

from Sunday Herald, 04 April 2010

The Royal Navy has failed to minimise the risk of nuclear submarines colliding with oil tankers or cruise ships in the Firth of Clyde, according to a report by the Ministry of Defence’s internal safety watchdog.

The Defence Nuclear Safety Regulator (DNSR) says that naval plans meant to protect Scotland from submarine accidents in the Clyde and on the north west coast are riddled with flaws. 

There are “difficulties” with commercial shipping in the Clyde, it reveals. At some submarine berths, weather information is outdated, maps are inadequate and there haven’t been any emergency exercises for years.

The DNSR report, secret until it was released under freedom of information law, has prompted calls for a ban on the use of submarine berths. It has also heightened fears of radioactive leaks from submarine reactors.

There are designated berths for the UK’s Trident and other nuclear-powered submarines at the Faslane naval base on Gareloch and at the Coulport nuclear weapons depot on Loch Long. There is another berth in Loch Goil, off Loch Long.

There is also an official berth, known only as B4, in the middle of the Firth of Clyde off Gourock. According to shipping charts, it is close to the junction of three busy shipping lanes through the firth.