A letter by Teebs to the Guardian
If Boris Johnson looked downbeat yesterday, that is because he realises that he has lost.
Perhaps many Brexiters do not realise it yet, but they have actually lost, and it is all down to one man: David Cameron.
With one fell swoop yesterday at 9:15 am, Cameron effectively annulled the referendum result, and simultaneously destroyed the political careers of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and leading Brexiters who cost him so much anguish, not to mention his premiership.
How?
Throughout the campaign, Cameron had repeatedly said that a vote for leave would lead to triggering Article 50 straight away. Whether implicitly or explicitly, the image was clear: he would be giving that notice under Article 50 the morning after a vote to leave. Whether that was scaremongering or not is a bit moot now but, in the midst of the sentimental nautical references of his speech yesterday, he quietly abandoned that position and handed the responsibility over to his successor.
And as the day wore on, the enormity of that step started to sink in: the markets, Sterling, Scotland, the Irish border, the Gibraltar border, the frontier at Calais, the need to continue compliance with all EU regulations for a free market, re-issuing passports, Brits abroad, EU citizens in Britain, the mountain of legislation to be torn up and rewritten ... the list grew and grew.
The referendum result is not binding. It is advisory. Parliament is not bound to commit itself in that same direction.
The Conservative party election that Cameron triggered will now have one question looming over it: will you, if elected as party leader, trigger the notice under Article 50?
Who will want to have the responsibility of all those ramifications and consequences on his/her head and shoulders?
Boris Johnson knew this yesterday, when he emerged subdued from his home and was even more subdued at the press conference. He has been out-manoeuvred and check-mated.
If he runs for leadership of the party, and then fails to follow through on triggering Article 50, then he is finished. If he does not run and effectively abandons the field, then he is finished. If he runs, wins and pulls the UK out of the EU, then it will all be over - Scotland will break away, there will be upheaval in Ireland, a recession ... broken trade agreements. Then he is also finished. Boris Johnson knows all of this. When he acts like the dumb blond it is just that: an act.
The Brexit leaders now have a result that they cannot use. For them, leadership of the Tory party has become a poison chalice.
When Boris Johnson said there was no need to trigger Article 50 straight away, what he really meant to say was "never". When Michael Gove went on and on about "informal negotiations" ... why? why not the formal ones straight away? ... he also meant not triggering the formal departure. They both know what a formal demarche would mean: an irreversible step that neither of them is prepared to take.
All that remains is for someone to have the guts to stand up and say that Brexit is unachievable in reality without an enormous amount of pain and destruction, that cannot be borne. And David Cameron has put the onus of making that statement on the heads of the people who led the Brexit campaign.
Showing posts with label Cameron. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cameron. Show all posts
Tuesday 28 June 2016
Friday 24 June 2016
Cameron has lost his job – his Teflon cockiness has finally worn off
Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian
As the pound plunges and markets slide, remember that this referendum was called by David Cameron to fend off Nigel Farage and his own Tory ultras. He has lost his gamble – and the country will pay the price
Friday 24 June 2016
Financial chaos, economic crisis, the likely breakaway of Scotland and possibly Northern Ireland: quite a morning’s work for the Bullingdon Club.
Remember as the pound plunges and the markets slide that this entire referendum was called by David Cameron to fend off Nigel Farage and his own Tory ultras. There was no public outcry for a ballot – but for the sake of a bit of internal party management, he called one anyway. He gambled Britain and Europe’s future to shore up his own position. With all the confidence of a member of the Etonian officer class, he thought he’d win. Instead he has bungled so badly that the fallout will drag on for years, disrupting tens of millions of lives across Europe.
All this from a man who sauntered into the job of prime minister “because I thought I’d be good at it”. He rarely showed any reason for such self-confidence. His plans to modernise the Conservative party crumbled upon first touch with the banking crisis, which forced him and Osborne to reheat the Thatcherite economics they’d imbibed as students. The “big society” turned almost immediately back into the “small state”. At No 10, he launched an austerity drive that was meant to be over within five years, but is now scheduled to go on for double that. Other prime ministers handed power for a long stretch come up with ideas, policies, a style of governing that defines them: Thatcherism, Blairism. What was Cameronism, apart from a hectoring manner at PMQs and an inability to keep on top of detail?
You’ll be reminded endlessly over the next few days how tight this referendum was – that half the country didn’t vote for this. Quite right – and also serious evidence of the weakness of the prime minister. At the last referendum over Britain’s future in Europe, in 1975, Harold Wilson secured a whopping majority. Never a man to ask a question of whose answer he wasn’t absolutely certain, he got a landslide. But when Cameron was handed the full resources of the British state to run this campaign, he still couldn’t count on anything more than a small lead in the polls. A born member of the governing class, he simply wasn’t able to govern.
Not all of this was his creation; much of it is his political inheritance. For the past 40 years, prime minister after prime minister has embraced a regime that has allowed a massive wealth gap to open up between those at the top and the rest of us, that has fattened up central London even while starving other regions of the country – and that has offered the rest of the country elected police chiefs and city mayors instead of an actual voice.
This morning’s results reflect those decades of calculated callousness and the distrust of the political elites they have produced. Thatcher, Blair, Cameron: all pursued an economic inequality – which in turn bred a political and regional polarisation that marked out this referendum campaign. No wonder inner London voted so strongly for the status quo – it’s one of the few places that is doing well out of it. Likewise, it’s no wonder south Wales mutinied, when all the status quo has offered people there for the past four decades is broken promises and rolling immiseration. The shame of it is that all these justified resentments were mobilised by the racists and the hard-rightists. You know things are upside down when the “big merchant banks” are attacked by a former City trader called Nigel Farage.
As prime minister, Cameron had the chance to tackle this toxic mix of inequality and distrust – instead, he made it worse. Leading the remain campaign, he had the chance to address those who had been cut out of the national settlement – instead, he and George Osborne waved around a threat to house prices, even though housing is now this country’s biggest divide between the haves and the have-nots.
In tacit acceptance of his own lack of popular legitimacy, the prime minister invoked the authority of others: the Bank of England governor, Mark Carney; Christine Lagarde at the IMF; the civil servants at the Treasury. Nothing showed up this politician’s own smallness as the technocrats he sheltered behind.
Now he has lost his big gamble and he has lost his job – but it will be the rest of the country that pays the price. He was never that good, he was just cocky. It was never luck, it was just Teflon. And now it’s worn off.
Friday 24 June 2016
Financial chaos, economic crisis, the likely breakaway of Scotland and possibly Northern Ireland: quite a morning’s work for the Bullingdon Club.
Remember as the pound plunges and the markets slide that this entire referendum was called by David Cameron to fend off Nigel Farage and his own Tory ultras. There was no public outcry for a ballot – but for the sake of a bit of internal party management, he called one anyway. He gambled Britain and Europe’s future to shore up his own position. With all the confidence of a member of the Etonian officer class, he thought he’d win. Instead he has bungled so badly that the fallout will drag on for years, disrupting tens of millions of lives across Europe.
All this from a man who sauntered into the job of prime minister “because I thought I’d be good at it”. He rarely showed any reason for such self-confidence. His plans to modernise the Conservative party crumbled upon first touch with the banking crisis, which forced him and Osborne to reheat the Thatcherite economics they’d imbibed as students. The “big society” turned almost immediately back into the “small state”. At No 10, he launched an austerity drive that was meant to be over within five years, but is now scheduled to go on for double that. Other prime ministers handed power for a long stretch come up with ideas, policies, a style of governing that defines them: Thatcherism, Blairism. What was Cameronism, apart from a hectoring manner at PMQs and an inability to keep on top of detail?
You’ll be reminded endlessly over the next few days how tight this referendum was – that half the country didn’t vote for this. Quite right – and also serious evidence of the weakness of the prime minister. At the last referendum over Britain’s future in Europe, in 1975, Harold Wilson secured a whopping majority. Never a man to ask a question of whose answer he wasn’t absolutely certain, he got a landslide. But when Cameron was handed the full resources of the British state to run this campaign, he still couldn’t count on anything more than a small lead in the polls. A born member of the governing class, he simply wasn’t able to govern.
Not all of this was his creation; much of it is his political inheritance. For the past 40 years, prime minister after prime minister has embraced a regime that has allowed a massive wealth gap to open up between those at the top and the rest of us, that has fattened up central London even while starving other regions of the country – and that has offered the rest of the country elected police chiefs and city mayors instead of an actual voice.
This morning’s results reflect those decades of calculated callousness and the distrust of the political elites they have produced. Thatcher, Blair, Cameron: all pursued an economic inequality – which in turn bred a political and regional polarisation that marked out this referendum campaign. No wonder inner London voted so strongly for the status quo – it’s one of the few places that is doing well out of it. Likewise, it’s no wonder south Wales mutinied, when all the status quo has offered people there for the past four decades is broken promises and rolling immiseration. The shame of it is that all these justified resentments were mobilised by the racists and the hard-rightists. You know things are upside down when the “big merchant banks” are attacked by a former City trader called Nigel Farage.
As prime minister, Cameron had the chance to tackle this toxic mix of inequality and distrust – instead, he made it worse. Leading the remain campaign, he had the chance to address those who had been cut out of the national settlement – instead, he and George Osborne waved around a threat to house prices, even though housing is now this country’s biggest divide between the haves and the have-nots.
In tacit acceptance of his own lack of popular legitimacy, the prime minister invoked the authority of others: the Bank of England governor, Mark Carney; Christine Lagarde at the IMF; the civil servants at the Treasury. Nothing showed up this politician’s own smallness as the technocrats he sheltered behind.
Now he has lost his big gamble and he has lost his job – but it will be the rest of the country that pays the price. He was never that good, he was just cocky. It was never luck, it was just Teflon. And now it’s worn off.
Sunday 5 June 2016
Tuesday 10 May 2016
Corruption can no longer be dismissed as a developing world problem
Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian
A London summit must recognise, as the Panama Papers show, that these crimes are facilitated by the west
David Cameron under pressure to end tax haven secrecy
All those breezy, boomtime justifications became exponentially harder to make after the 2008 crash. The era of austerity has left even rich governments scrabbling for tax revenues to fund their hospitals and schools. More importantly, it has prompted cash-strapped voters – from a Trump supporter in Indiana to a Corbynista in Kentish Town – to ask exactly who has been making how much money at their expense.
That brings us back to this week’s summit – because it’s here that developing nations such as Nigeria will join campaigning groups to make the argument that modern corruption now has a white face. They will argue that the onus is on Britain and other rich countries to crack down on the tax havens in their own backyards.
And they are right. Corruption of the sort that we normally discuss should be stamped out. It makes the lives of billions of the world’s poorest people harder and more insecure.
But it is peanuts compared to the much bigger sums that are raked in by the lawyers, accountants and other silky advisers who base themselves in the City of London and use Britain’s network of crown dependencies and overseas territories in Jersey, Guernsey, the Caymans and the British Virgin Islands.
Until the UK stops encouraging, advising and facilitating guilty men and women looking to stow their shady cash offshore, corruption will continue to flourish.
Modern corruption is a suit in a Panamanian office, who takes that general’s billions and sends it on to a private bank account, no impertinent questions asked along the way. It is the Mayfair estate agent who sells that multimillion-pound townhouse to an oligarch. It is that accountancy firm in the City that fills out the paperwork structuring the rich man’s affairs so that the money goes through one of their far-flung branch offices to wind up in a trust in the tax-free zones of the Caymans or the British Virgin Islands.
As yesterday’s letter from 350 top economists points out, there is no economic justification for these tax havens. They do not serve primarily to keep taxes in other countries down, but to allow very rich people to duck out of their obligations to the societies they live in. They shelter dirty cash from dictators, and siphon money out of developed countries.
Like Gordon Brown before him, Cameron claims that Britain’s offshore havens are autonomous. They do not need to accept London’s tax laws – indeed, it is unclear whether they will turn up on Thursday. Yet the havens depend on London.
Take the Caymans, which, as Nicholas Shaxson notes in his book Treasure Islands, are effectively run by a governor appointed by the Queen, on the advice of Whitehall. The governor is responsible for “defence, internal security and foreign relations; he appoints the police commissioner, the complaints commissioner, auditor general, the attorney general, the judiciary and a number of other senior public officials. The final appeal court is the Privy Council in London.” And the national anthem is God Save the Queen.
Last week I met a tax lawyer in London who mused on how little Britain actually benefited from its spider’s web of tax havens. “A few people in the City of London make huge fees – I’d love to see how much that money benefits the rest of the country.”
But weren’t we powerless to stop Jersey and the rest? The lawyer went through the precedents. Britain, he pointed out, had repeatedly imposed its law on its overseas governments. In 2000, London forced the Caribbean territories to decriminalise homosexual acts by Order in Council. He thought the same thing could be done to force the offshore havens publicly to disclose who were the ultimate “beneficial” owners of the trust funds.
How long would that take? “Oh, two sides of A4. It could be done by the next morning. All it takes is the will.”
A London summit must recognise, as the Panama Papers show, that these crimes are facilitated by the west
Illustration by Matt Kenyon.
By Thursday morning all the A-listers will have arrived. From Washington will fly in a succession of jets, bearing US secretary of state John Kerry as well as the bosses of the IMF and World Bank. Fifa and Uefa will send over their top bureaucrats. Captains of business will trail retinues of lobbyists.
All will join David Cameron and leaders from around 40 nations at an opulent London townhouse overlooking St James’s Park. Gathered there, in the slow-beating heart of Downton-ian Britain, they will launch into an almighty battle – over the meaning of a single word.
Not just any old word, mind you. It ranks among the most important terms for describing our broken-backed global capitalism. Indeed, it forms the very title of the day-long summit: corruption.
Explaining why he’s called the world’s first assembly on corruption, Cameron has said: “It destroys jobs … traps the poorest in desperate poverty, and undermines our security by pushing people towards extremist groups.” Absolutely right. What’s wrong is his definition of the term.
For Cameron, corruption equals bribery. It means greasing the palm of a bored official just to get through customs, tipping a hundred to a thuggish traffic cop so you can drive on. Or, at the luxury end of the market, a despot such as Nigeria’s General Sani Abacha, stealing billions from his home country and hiding the haul in foreign banks.
In other words, it’s something largely done by people in poor countries. As sardonic critics of this argument say, “Corruption has a black face.” That’s why the prime minister believes Thursday should be mainly about cracking down on states that take aid even while being blighted with bent officials, and tackling graft in sport.
And it is the argument of a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is the fervent agreement that bad things do happen – but Other People do them, never you or your country. On this reading, thievery is corruption. But receiving the same black money, laundering it and directing it back out to a tame tax haven or two – well, that’s just competition, isn’t it?
Time was when Britain, Europe and the US could get away with making this argument. The wealthiest countries in the world could with one hand wag a stern finger at the poorest nations, while with the other hand collecting their loot, and pushing it through their financial centres.
They could point to the surveys circulated by Transparency International in which perceptions of national corruption as reported by business leaders and “country experts” were totted up. Those publications proved, year after year, that the poorer the country, the more failed the state, the more corrupt the society. They also stated that the world’s “cleanest” countries included Switzerland, Singapore, the UK and the US.
By Thursday morning all the A-listers will have arrived. From Washington will fly in a succession of jets, bearing US secretary of state John Kerry as well as the bosses of the IMF and World Bank. Fifa and Uefa will send over their top bureaucrats. Captains of business will trail retinues of lobbyists.
All will join David Cameron and leaders from around 40 nations at an opulent London townhouse overlooking St James’s Park. Gathered there, in the slow-beating heart of Downton-ian Britain, they will launch into an almighty battle – over the meaning of a single word.
Not just any old word, mind you. It ranks among the most important terms for describing our broken-backed global capitalism. Indeed, it forms the very title of the day-long summit: corruption.
Explaining why he’s called the world’s first assembly on corruption, Cameron has said: “It destroys jobs … traps the poorest in desperate poverty, and undermines our security by pushing people towards extremist groups.” Absolutely right. What’s wrong is his definition of the term.
For Cameron, corruption equals bribery. It means greasing the palm of a bored official just to get through customs, tipping a hundred to a thuggish traffic cop so you can drive on. Or, at the luxury end of the market, a despot such as Nigeria’s General Sani Abacha, stealing billions from his home country and hiding the haul in foreign banks.
In other words, it’s something largely done by people in poor countries. As sardonic critics of this argument say, “Corruption has a black face.” That’s why the prime minister believes Thursday should be mainly about cracking down on states that take aid even while being blighted with bent officials, and tackling graft in sport.
And it is the argument of a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is the fervent agreement that bad things do happen – but Other People do them, never you or your country. On this reading, thievery is corruption. But receiving the same black money, laundering it and directing it back out to a tame tax haven or two – well, that’s just competition, isn’t it?
Time was when Britain, Europe and the US could get away with making this argument. The wealthiest countries in the world could with one hand wag a stern finger at the poorest nations, while with the other hand collecting their loot, and pushing it through their financial centres.
They could point to the surveys circulated by Transparency International in which perceptions of national corruption as reported by business leaders and “country experts” were totted up. Those publications proved, year after year, that the poorer the country, the more failed the state, the more corrupt the society. They also stated that the world’s “cleanest” countries included Switzerland, Singapore, the UK and the US.
David Cameron under pressure to end tax haven secrecy
All those breezy, boomtime justifications became exponentially harder to make after the 2008 crash. The era of austerity has left even rich governments scrabbling for tax revenues to fund their hospitals and schools. More importantly, it has prompted cash-strapped voters – from a Trump supporter in Indiana to a Corbynista in Kentish Town – to ask exactly who has been making how much money at their expense.
That brings us back to this week’s summit – because it’s here that developing nations such as Nigeria will join campaigning groups to make the argument that modern corruption now has a white face. They will argue that the onus is on Britain and other rich countries to crack down on the tax havens in their own backyards.
And they are right. Corruption of the sort that we normally discuss should be stamped out. It makes the lives of billions of the world’s poorest people harder and more insecure.
But it is peanuts compared to the much bigger sums that are raked in by the lawyers, accountants and other silky advisers who base themselves in the City of London and use Britain’s network of crown dependencies and overseas territories in Jersey, Guernsey, the Caymans and the British Virgin Islands.
Until the UK stops encouraging, advising and facilitating guilty men and women looking to stow their shady cash offshore, corruption will continue to flourish.
Modern corruption is a suit in a Panamanian office, who takes that general’s billions and sends it on to a private bank account, no impertinent questions asked along the way. It is the Mayfair estate agent who sells that multimillion-pound townhouse to an oligarch. It is that accountancy firm in the City that fills out the paperwork structuring the rich man’s affairs so that the money goes through one of their far-flung branch offices to wind up in a trust in the tax-free zones of the Caymans or the British Virgin Islands.
As yesterday’s letter from 350 top economists points out, there is no economic justification for these tax havens. They do not serve primarily to keep taxes in other countries down, but to allow very rich people to duck out of their obligations to the societies they live in. They shelter dirty cash from dictators, and siphon money out of developed countries.
Like Gordon Brown before him, Cameron claims that Britain’s offshore havens are autonomous. They do not need to accept London’s tax laws – indeed, it is unclear whether they will turn up on Thursday. Yet the havens depend on London.
Take the Caymans, which, as Nicholas Shaxson notes in his book Treasure Islands, are effectively run by a governor appointed by the Queen, on the advice of Whitehall. The governor is responsible for “defence, internal security and foreign relations; he appoints the police commissioner, the complaints commissioner, auditor general, the attorney general, the judiciary and a number of other senior public officials. The final appeal court is the Privy Council in London.” And the national anthem is God Save the Queen.
Last week I met a tax lawyer in London who mused on how little Britain actually benefited from its spider’s web of tax havens. “A few people in the City of London make huge fees – I’d love to see how much that money benefits the rest of the country.”
But weren’t we powerless to stop Jersey and the rest? The lawyer went through the precedents. Britain, he pointed out, had repeatedly imposed its law on its overseas governments. In 2000, London forced the Caribbean territories to decriminalise homosexual acts by Order in Council. He thought the same thing could be done to force the offshore havens publicly to disclose who were the ultimate “beneficial” owners of the trust funds.
How long would that take? “Oh, two sides of A4. It could be done by the next morning. All it takes is the will.”
Thursday 5 May 2016
If "Protest never changes anything"? Look at how TTIP has been derailed
Owen Jones in The Guardian
People power has taken on big business over this transatlantic stitch-up and looks like winning. We should all be inspired.
Doubts rise over TTIP as France threatens to block EU-US deal
Those of us who campaigned against TTIP – not least fellow Guardian columnist George Monbiot – were dismissed as scaremongering. We said that TTIP would lead to a race to the bottom on everything from environmental to consumer protections, forcing us down to the lower level that exists in the United States. We warned that it would undermine our democracy and sovereignty, enabling corporate interests to use secret courts to block policies that they did not like.
Scaremongering, we were told. But hundreds of leaked documents from the negotiations reveal, in some ways, that the reality is worse – and now the French government has been forced to suggest it may block the agreement.
The documents imply that even craven European leaders believe the US demands go too far. As War on Want puts it, they show that TTIP would “open the door” to products currently banned in the EU “for public health and environmental reasons”.
As the documents reveal, there are now “irreconcilable” differences between the European Union’s and America’s positions. According to Greenpeace, “the EU position is very bad, and the US position is terrible”.
The documents show that the US is actively trying to dilute EU regulations on consumer and environmental protections. In future, for the EU to be even able to pass a regulation, it could be forced to involve both US authorities and US corporations, giving big businesses across the Atlantic the same input as those based in Europe.
With these damning revelations, the embattled French authorities have been forced to say they reject TTIP “at this stage”. President Hollande says France would refuse “the undermining of the essential principles of our agriculture, our culture, of mutual access to public markets”. And with the country’s trade representative saying that “there cannot be an agreement without France and much less against France”, TTIP currently has a bleak future indeed.
There are a number of things we learn from this, all of which should lift hopes. First, people power pays off. European politicians and bureaucrats, quite rightly, would never have imagined that a trade agreement would inspire any interest, let alone mass protests. Symptomatic of their contempt for the people they supposedly exist to serve, the negotiations over the most important aspects of the treaty were conducted in secret. Easy, then, to accuse anti-TTIP activists of “scaremongering” while revealing little of the reality publicly.
But rather than give up, activists across the continent organised. They toxified TTIP, forcing its designers on the defensive. Germany – the very heart of the European project – witnessed mass demonstrations with up to 250,000 people participating.
From London to Warsaw, from Prague to Madrid, the anti-TTIP cause has marched. Members of the European parliament have been subjected to passionate lobbying by angry citizens. Without this popular pressure, TTIP would have received little scrutiny and would surely have passed – with disastrous consequences.
Second, this is a real embarrassment to the British government. Back in 2011, David Cameron vetoed an EU treaty to supposedly defend the national interest: in fact, he was worried that it threatened Britain’s financial sector. The City of London and Britain are clearly not the same thing. But Cameron has been among the staunchest champions of TTIP. He is more than happy to undermine British sovereignty and democracy, as long as it is corporate interests who are the beneficiaries.
And so we end in the perverse situation where it is the French government, rather than our own administration, protecting our sovereignty.
And third, this has real consequences for the EU referendum debate. Rather cynically, Ukip have co-opted the TTIP argument. They have rightly argued that TTIP threatens our National Health Service – but given that their leader, Nigel Farage, has suggested abolishing the NHS in favour of private health insurance, this is the height of chutzpah.
Ukip have mocked those on the left, such as me, who back a critical remain position in the Brexit referendum over this issue. But if we were to leave the EU, not only would the social chapter and various workers’ rights be abandoned – and not replaced by our rightwing government – but Britain would end up negotiating a series of TTIP agreements. We would end up living with the consequences of TTIP, but without the remaining progressive elements of the EU.
Instead, we have seen what happens when ordinary Europeans put aside cultural and language barriers and unite. Their collective strength can achieve results. This should surely be a launchpad for a movement to build a democratic, accountable, transparent Europe governed in the interests of its citizens, not corporations. It will mean reaching across the Atlantic too.
For all President Obama’s hope-change rhetoric, his administration – which zealously promoted TTIP – has all too often championed corporate interests. However, though Bernie Sanders is unlikely to become the Democratic nominee, the incredible movement behind him shows – particularly among younger Americans – a growing desire for a different sort of US.
In the coming months, those Europeans who have campaigned against TTIP should surely reach out to their American counterparts. Even if TTIP is defeated, we still live in a world in which major corporations often have greater power than nation states: only organised movements that cross borders can have any hope of challenging this unaccountable dominance.
From tax justice to climate change, the “protest never achieves anything” brigade have been proved wrong. Here’s a potential victory to relish, and build on.
People power has taken on big business over this transatlantic stitch-up and looks like winning. We should all be inspired.
Illustration by Ben Jennings
For those of us who want societies run in the interests of the majority rather than unaccountable corporate interests, this era can be best defined as an uphill struggle. So when victories occur, they should be loudly trumpeted to encourage us in a wider fight against a powerful elite of big businesses, media organisations, politicians, bureaucrats and corporate-funded thinktanks.
Today is one such moment. The Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership (TTIP) – that notorious proposed trade agreement that hands even more sweeping powers to corporate titans – lies wounded, perhaps fatally. It isn’t dead yet, but TTIP is a tangled wreckage that will be difficult to reassemble.
For those of us who want societies run in the interests of the majority rather than unaccountable corporate interests, this era can be best defined as an uphill struggle. So when victories occur, they should be loudly trumpeted to encourage us in a wider fight against a powerful elite of big businesses, media organisations, politicians, bureaucrats and corporate-funded thinktanks.
Today is one such moment. The Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership (TTIP) – that notorious proposed trade agreement that hands even more sweeping powers to corporate titans – lies wounded, perhaps fatally. It isn’t dead yet, but TTIP is a tangled wreckage that will be difficult to reassemble.
Doubts rise over TTIP as France threatens to block EU-US deal
Those of us who campaigned against TTIP – not least fellow Guardian columnist George Monbiot – were dismissed as scaremongering. We said that TTIP would lead to a race to the bottom on everything from environmental to consumer protections, forcing us down to the lower level that exists in the United States. We warned that it would undermine our democracy and sovereignty, enabling corporate interests to use secret courts to block policies that they did not like.
Scaremongering, we were told. But hundreds of leaked documents from the negotiations reveal, in some ways, that the reality is worse – and now the French government has been forced to suggest it may block the agreement.
The documents imply that even craven European leaders believe the US demands go too far. As War on Want puts it, they show that TTIP would “open the door” to products currently banned in the EU “for public health and environmental reasons”.
As the documents reveal, there are now “irreconcilable” differences between the European Union’s and America’s positions. According to Greenpeace, “the EU position is very bad, and the US position is terrible”.
The documents show that the US is actively trying to dilute EU regulations on consumer and environmental protections. In future, for the EU to be even able to pass a regulation, it could be forced to involve both US authorities and US corporations, giving big businesses across the Atlantic the same input as those based in Europe.
With these damning revelations, the embattled French authorities have been forced to say they reject TTIP “at this stage”. President Hollande says France would refuse “the undermining of the essential principles of our agriculture, our culture, of mutual access to public markets”. And with the country’s trade representative saying that “there cannot be an agreement without France and much less against France”, TTIP currently has a bleak future indeed.
There are a number of things we learn from this, all of which should lift hopes. First, people power pays off. European politicians and bureaucrats, quite rightly, would never have imagined that a trade agreement would inspire any interest, let alone mass protests. Symptomatic of their contempt for the people they supposedly exist to serve, the negotiations over the most important aspects of the treaty were conducted in secret. Easy, then, to accuse anti-TTIP activists of “scaremongering” while revealing little of the reality publicly.
But rather than give up, activists across the continent organised. They toxified TTIP, forcing its designers on the defensive. Germany – the very heart of the European project – witnessed mass demonstrations with up to 250,000 people participating.
From London to Warsaw, from Prague to Madrid, the anti-TTIP cause has marched. Members of the European parliament have been subjected to passionate lobbying by angry citizens. Without this popular pressure, TTIP would have received little scrutiny and would surely have passed – with disastrous consequences.
Second, this is a real embarrassment to the British government. Back in 2011, David Cameron vetoed an EU treaty to supposedly defend the national interest: in fact, he was worried that it threatened Britain’s financial sector. The City of London and Britain are clearly not the same thing. But Cameron has been among the staunchest champions of TTIP. He is more than happy to undermine British sovereignty and democracy, as long as it is corporate interests who are the beneficiaries.
And so we end in the perverse situation where it is the French government, rather than our own administration, protecting our sovereignty.
And third, this has real consequences for the EU referendum debate. Rather cynically, Ukip have co-opted the TTIP argument. They have rightly argued that TTIP threatens our National Health Service – but given that their leader, Nigel Farage, has suggested abolishing the NHS in favour of private health insurance, this is the height of chutzpah.
Ukip have mocked those on the left, such as me, who back a critical remain position in the Brexit referendum over this issue. But if we were to leave the EU, not only would the social chapter and various workers’ rights be abandoned – and not replaced by our rightwing government – but Britain would end up negotiating a series of TTIP agreements. We would end up living with the consequences of TTIP, but without the remaining progressive elements of the EU.
Instead, we have seen what happens when ordinary Europeans put aside cultural and language barriers and unite. Their collective strength can achieve results. This should surely be a launchpad for a movement to build a democratic, accountable, transparent Europe governed in the interests of its citizens, not corporations. It will mean reaching across the Atlantic too.
For all President Obama’s hope-change rhetoric, his administration – which zealously promoted TTIP – has all too often championed corporate interests. However, though Bernie Sanders is unlikely to become the Democratic nominee, the incredible movement behind him shows – particularly among younger Americans – a growing desire for a different sort of US.
In the coming months, those Europeans who have campaigned against TTIP should surely reach out to their American counterparts. Even if TTIP is defeated, we still live in a world in which major corporations often have greater power than nation states: only organised movements that cross borders can have any hope of challenging this unaccountable dominance.
From tax justice to climate change, the “protest never achieves anything” brigade have been proved wrong. Here’s a potential victory to relish, and build on.
Saturday 9 April 2016
How corruption revealed in Panama Papers opened the door to Isis and al-Qaida
Patrick Cockburn in The Independent
The message of Rudyard Kipling's poem is that corruption is always with us and has not changed much down the ages. There is some truth in this, but degrees of corruption greatly matter, as the Cheops would have found to his cost if he tried to build his pyramid in modern Iraq instead of ancient Egypt. The project would cost him billions rather than millions - and he would be more likely to end up with a hole in the ground than anything resembling a pyramid.
Three years ago I was in Baghdad after it had rained heavily, driving for miles through streets that had disappeared under grey-coloured flood water combined with raw sewage. Later I asked Shirouk Abayachi, an advisor to the Ministry of Water Resources, why this was happening and she said that "since 2003, $7bn has been spent to build a new sewage system for Baghdad, but either the sewers weren't built or they were built very badly". She concluded that "corruption is the key to all this".
Anybody discussing the Panama Papers and the practices of the law firm Mossack Fonseca should think about the ultimate destination of the $7bn not spent on the Baghdad drainage system. There will be many go-betweens and middle men protecting anyone who profited from this huge sum, but the suspicion must be that a proportion of it will have ended up in offshore financial centres where money is hidden and can be turned into legally held assets.
There is no obvious link between the revelations in the Panama Papers, the rise of Islamic State and the wars tearing apart at least nine countries in the Middle East and North Africa. But these three developments are intimately connected as ruling elites, who syphon off wealth into tax havens and foreign property, lose political credibility. No ordinary Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians will fight and die for rulers they detest as swindlers. Crucial to the rise of Isis, al-Qaida and the Taliban in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan is not their own strength and popularity, but the weakness and unpopularity of the governments to which they are opposed.
Kipling was right in believing that there has always been corruption, but since the early 1990s corrupt states have often mutated into kleptocracies. Ruling families and the narrow coteries around them have taken a larger and larger share of the economic cake.
In Syria since the turn of the century, for instance, the rural population and the urban poor no longer enjoyed the limited benefits they had previously received under an equally harsh but more egalitarian regime. By 2011, President Bashar al-Assad's first cousin Rami Makhlouf was reported to be a dominant player in 60 per cent of the Syrian economy and to have a personal worth of $5 billion.
In Iraq earlier this year, a financial specialist, who wished to remain anonymous, said that the government of prime minister Haider al-Abadi held files on corrupt individuals, including "one politician who has amassed a fortune of $6 billion through corrupt dealings."
The danger of citing extreme examples of corruption from exotic and war-ravaged countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria is that these may sound like events happening on another planet. But the political and economic systems in Iraq and Afghanistan were devised under the tutelage of the US and allies like Britain. They were proponents of free market economics which in the West may increase inequality and benefit the wealthy, but in Kabul and Baghdad were a license to steal by anybody with power.
Neo-liberal economists have a lot to answer for. A few days after Isis had captured Mosul in June 2014, I was in Baghdad and asked a recently retired four-star Iraqi general why the much larger and better-equipped Iraqi army had been defeated so swiftly and humiliatingly. He replied that the explanation was: "Corruption! Corruption! Corruption!"
He added that this was pervasive and had begun when the US was building a new Iraqi military after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, when the American commanders had insisted on out-sourcing food and other supplies to private contractors. These businessmen and the army officers soon determined that, if the Iraqi government was paying money to feed and equip a battalion of 600 men, but its real strength was only 150, they could pocket the difference. So profitable was this arrangement that by 2014 all officers' jobs were for sale and it cost $200,000 to become a colonel and up to $2m a general in charge of a division.
Blatant corruption at the top in Kabul and Baghdad has been frequently reported over the years, though nothing much seems to change. But it is a mistake to imagine that this was simply the outcome of a culture of corruption specific to Afghanistan and Iraq. The most corrupt ministers were appointed and the most crooked contracts signed at a time when US officials were the real decision-makers in Baghdad.
For example, the entire military procurement budget of $1.2 billion was effectively stolen in 2004/5 when the Defence Ministry was substantially under US control, raising questions of the competence, or even collusion, of the US authorities.
The situation has got worse, not better. "I feared seven or eight years ago that Iraq would become like Nigeria," said one former minister in 2013, "but in fact it is far worse."
He cited as evidence a $1.3bn contract signed by a minister with one foreign company that had only a nominal existence - and a second company that was bankrupt. This took place in a country in which one third of the labour force is unemployed, and, if the underemployed are taken into account, the figure rises to over half.
The use of offshore financial centres by the moneyed elite in the oil states and much of the rest of the world is not always to avoid taxes which they would not pay if they kept the money at home, but in some cases to conceal what they have stolen and later to legally launder it.
Some of this can be done by buying property in places like Baghdad, which explains why property prices in that dangerous city are as high as London. But it is safer and better to buy property in London itself, something that will ultimately require the services of a company like Mossack Fonseca - though these services will be far removed from the original toxic source of the investment.
The Panama Papers give insight into the names and mechanisms through which globalised elites hide their wealth and avoid paying tax on it. Commentators now predict that popular disgust with political establishments will benefit radical leaders like Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.
What they do not see is that the way in which the detachment of interests of elites from the countries they rule has already produced states that have failed or are failing, or are wracked by conflict and war.
Who shall doubt 'the secret hid
Under Cheops' pyramid'
Was that the contractor did
Cheops out of several millions?
The message of Rudyard Kipling's poem is that corruption is always with us and has not changed much down the ages. There is some truth in this, but degrees of corruption greatly matter, as the Cheops would have found to his cost if he tried to build his pyramid in modern Iraq instead of ancient Egypt. The project would cost him billions rather than millions - and he would be more likely to end up with a hole in the ground than anything resembling a pyramid.
Three years ago I was in Baghdad after it had rained heavily, driving for miles through streets that had disappeared under grey-coloured flood water combined with raw sewage. Later I asked Shirouk Abayachi, an advisor to the Ministry of Water Resources, why this was happening and she said that "since 2003, $7bn has been spent to build a new sewage system for Baghdad, but either the sewers weren't built or they were built very badly". She concluded that "corruption is the key to all this".
Anybody discussing the Panama Papers and the practices of the law firm Mossack Fonseca should think about the ultimate destination of the $7bn not spent on the Baghdad drainage system. There will be many go-betweens and middle men protecting anyone who profited from this huge sum, but the suspicion must be that a proportion of it will have ended up in offshore financial centres where money is hidden and can be turned into legally held assets.
There is no obvious link between the revelations in the Panama Papers, the rise of Islamic State and the wars tearing apart at least nine countries in the Middle East and North Africa. But these three developments are intimately connected as ruling elites, who syphon off wealth into tax havens and foreign property, lose political credibility. No ordinary Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians will fight and die for rulers they detest as swindlers. Crucial to the rise of Isis, al-Qaida and the Taliban in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan is not their own strength and popularity, but the weakness and unpopularity of the governments to which they are opposed.
Kipling was right in believing that there has always been corruption, but since the early 1990s corrupt states have often mutated into kleptocracies. Ruling families and the narrow coteries around them have taken a larger and larger share of the economic cake.
In Syria since the turn of the century, for instance, the rural population and the urban poor no longer enjoyed the limited benefits they had previously received under an equally harsh but more egalitarian regime. By 2011, President Bashar al-Assad's first cousin Rami Makhlouf was reported to be a dominant player in 60 per cent of the Syrian economy and to have a personal worth of $5 billion.
In Iraq earlier this year, a financial specialist, who wished to remain anonymous, said that the government of prime minister Haider al-Abadi held files on corrupt individuals, including "one politician who has amassed a fortune of $6 billion through corrupt dealings."
The danger of citing extreme examples of corruption from exotic and war-ravaged countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria is that these may sound like events happening on another planet. But the political and economic systems in Iraq and Afghanistan were devised under the tutelage of the US and allies like Britain. They were proponents of free market economics which in the West may increase inequality and benefit the wealthy, but in Kabul and Baghdad were a license to steal by anybody with power.
Neo-liberal economists have a lot to answer for. A few days after Isis had captured Mosul in June 2014, I was in Baghdad and asked a recently retired four-star Iraqi general why the much larger and better-equipped Iraqi army had been defeated so swiftly and humiliatingly. He replied that the explanation was: "Corruption! Corruption! Corruption!"
He added that this was pervasive and had begun when the US was building a new Iraqi military after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, when the American commanders had insisted on out-sourcing food and other supplies to private contractors. These businessmen and the army officers soon determined that, if the Iraqi government was paying money to feed and equip a battalion of 600 men, but its real strength was only 150, they could pocket the difference. So profitable was this arrangement that by 2014 all officers' jobs were for sale and it cost $200,000 to become a colonel and up to $2m a general in charge of a division.
Blatant corruption at the top in Kabul and Baghdad has been frequently reported over the years, though nothing much seems to change. But it is a mistake to imagine that this was simply the outcome of a culture of corruption specific to Afghanistan and Iraq. The most corrupt ministers were appointed and the most crooked contracts signed at a time when US officials were the real decision-makers in Baghdad.
For example, the entire military procurement budget of $1.2 billion was effectively stolen in 2004/5 when the Defence Ministry was substantially under US control, raising questions of the competence, or even collusion, of the US authorities.
The situation has got worse, not better. "I feared seven or eight years ago that Iraq would become like Nigeria," said one former minister in 2013, "but in fact it is far worse."
He cited as evidence a $1.3bn contract signed by a minister with one foreign company that had only a nominal existence - and a second company that was bankrupt. This took place in a country in which one third of the labour force is unemployed, and, if the underemployed are taken into account, the figure rises to over half.
The use of offshore financial centres by the moneyed elite in the oil states and much of the rest of the world is not always to avoid taxes which they would not pay if they kept the money at home, but in some cases to conceal what they have stolen and later to legally launder it.
Some of this can be done by buying property in places like Baghdad, which explains why property prices in that dangerous city are as high as London. But it is safer and better to buy property in London itself, something that will ultimately require the services of a company like Mossack Fonseca - though these services will be far removed from the original toxic source of the investment.
The Panama Papers give insight into the names and mechanisms through which globalised elites hide their wealth and avoid paying tax on it. Commentators now predict that popular disgust with political establishments will benefit radical leaders like Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.
What they do not see is that the way in which the detachment of interests of elites from the countries they rule has already produced states that have failed or are failing, or are wracked by conflict and war.
David Cameron’s gift to the world: trickle-down tax-dodging
Marina Hyde in The Guardian
An intriguing approach to damage limitation by Panama prat David Cameron, particularly considering the prime minister’s only real life job ever was as a PR. The prime minister appears to have been the last person to realise what everyone else in Westminster could see on Monday. Namely, that he’d be sitting down for an awkward tell-all – or at least a tell-some – by Thursday.
My absolute favourite tale from Cameron’s era as press chief for the culturocidal Carlton Television comes courtesy of the Guardian’s then media correspondent, who rang him up on a story. Like all mediocre PRs, a large part of his strategy was ignoring calls, but having accidentally answered this one he was cornered – and consequently pretended to be his own cleaner. “I can’t prove it was him,” the journalist reflected later, “but it certainly sounded a lot like him.” Well, he does have that central casting cleaner’s voice, so perhaps we ought to leave the case file open. Even so, for the journalists who recall the barefaced whoppers Cameron was able to tell them back in those days, this week has not been an occasion to break out the smelling salts.
“I’ve never tried to be anything I’m not,” Cameron claimed to Robert Peston in his belated confession. What about a cleaner? Or a football fan? Evidently the PM judged it the wrong moment to bring up either impersonations of the help, or Aston Villa. Or, indeed, West Ham. Still, at some point, Fortune was always going to collect on the deal Cameron foolishly made when he called the comedian Jimmy Carr’s (also legal) tax arrangements “morally wrong”. Showbiz now joins football on the list of things upon which he ought never to comment again.
Explaining to Peston that “my dad was a man I love and miss every day”, Cameron admitted that he and his wife had in fact invested in Ian Cameron’s offshore firm Blairmore in 1997, then sold their stake in 2010 for “something like £30,000”. That Cameron’s shifty cover-up has been more damaging than his non-crime is almost too insultingly obvious to state. He will not be assisted by the subconscious dismissiveness in that styling – “something like £30,000”. There is a fine line between fastidious precision and sounding like something north of the average British salary is rather forgettable, and the PM fell on the wrong side of it.
Even so, despite the obvious temptations, it would be a destructive mistake for Cameron’s enemies to get too tribal about these things. For all that this story appears currently to concern the Conservatives, there is something rather more Labourish – New Labourish, particularly – to it. The history of British political scandal dictates that it is traditionally sex that gets the Tories in trouble, and money that lands Labour in hot water.
That the Camerons’ investment in Blairmore lasted from 1997 to 2010 – the precise era of New Labour government – feels like a bit of a signpost. Indeed, for a story featuring something called Blairmore, it is surprising that it is Blair-less. For my money – something like £30, for this bet – the saga this most closely resembles is “Cheriegate”. Back at the very end of 2002, you may remember, Cherie Blair unwittingly used a conman (the gentleman caller of her special-adviser-cum-aromatherapist) to assist her in the purchase of two £250,000 Bristol flats.
Just as it has with Cameron, it took Mrs Blair several days to realise she was going to have to tell the truth, but eventually she too was making an emotional speech explaining that she had only been trying to protect her family “particularly my son in his first term at university [sob] living away from home”. A cri de coeur that certainly put in perspective the worries of other mothers who were at that time sending their 18-year-olds off to her husband’s war in Afghanistan. Toughest game in the world, the university game.
That said, Cameron’s emotional citation of his father, though obviously relevant, does rather recall Gordon Brown when on a sticky wicket. A defensive mention of his dad was Brown’s poker tell, and one almost as inscrutable as Homer Simpson’s habit of dancing round the table shrieking in delight at having been dealt four jacks. Mr Brown was never delighted when he brought up the scrupulous honesty of his Presbyterian minister father, but felt the urgent need in order to bolster the fib he was about to tell. An absurd denial that he’d never contemplated sacking Alistair Darling, for instance, came with the giveaway mention that his father had taught him “always to be honest”.
“He’s a prime minister,” skills minister Nick Boles conceded of Cameron on Friday morning, “but he’s also a human being and he’s a son.” I think we can ignore Mr Boles on the father-son dynamic. His last public reference to it was when he accused the grieving father of a Tory activist who had killed himself of trying to “hound” the party chairman out of a job.
Even so, Labour should consider the bigger picture. There are – how to put this delicately? – certain big political names of the relatively recent era that have yet to feature in the tale of tax avoidance, but on whom you’d be unwise to bet against emerging in some future story, some later data leak. Then again, perhaps these persons unnamed have opened their umbrella firms even more carefully, and we shall never know on the record. But we shall know it in our hearts, with that epistemology made fashionable by Tony Blair. “I only know what I believe,” he once intoned. Don’t we all, Mr Blair. Don’t we all.
The gravest danger of casting the tax debate as some tribal battle between the same old foes is to us – the little people who pay taxes, as Leona Helmsley once deathlessly observed. A tit-for-tat between parties does society in which we all have a stake no favours. Down that path, the path where ordinary people conclude that politicians and companies are all in it together, lies a corrupted society like Greece, where top-tier tax dodging eventually trickled down to dentists and doctors and beyond.
The idea that Britain – where people traditionally paid tax relatively willingly – could ever end up anything like this was unthinkable only a few years ago. It is now rather more thinkable, with the accretion of endless stories about Google, Amazon, the Panama Papers names … Never mind the details. Over time, overall impressions are taken. In the end, ordinary people will only know what they believe, and the fear for society is that they will begin to act accordingly.
An intriguing approach to damage limitation by Panama prat David Cameron, particularly considering the prime minister’s only real life job ever was as a PR. The prime minister appears to have been the last person to realise what everyone else in Westminster could see on Monday. Namely, that he’d be sitting down for an awkward tell-all – or at least a tell-some – by Thursday.
My absolute favourite tale from Cameron’s era as press chief for the culturocidal Carlton Television comes courtesy of the Guardian’s then media correspondent, who rang him up on a story. Like all mediocre PRs, a large part of his strategy was ignoring calls, but having accidentally answered this one he was cornered – and consequently pretended to be his own cleaner. “I can’t prove it was him,” the journalist reflected later, “but it certainly sounded a lot like him.” Well, he does have that central casting cleaner’s voice, so perhaps we ought to leave the case file open. Even so, for the journalists who recall the barefaced whoppers Cameron was able to tell them back in those days, this week has not been an occasion to break out the smelling salts.
“I’ve never tried to be anything I’m not,” Cameron claimed to Robert Peston in his belated confession. What about a cleaner? Or a football fan? Evidently the PM judged it the wrong moment to bring up either impersonations of the help, or Aston Villa. Or, indeed, West Ham. Still, at some point, Fortune was always going to collect on the deal Cameron foolishly made when he called the comedian Jimmy Carr’s (also legal) tax arrangements “morally wrong”. Showbiz now joins football on the list of things upon which he ought never to comment again.
Explaining to Peston that “my dad was a man I love and miss every day”, Cameron admitted that he and his wife had in fact invested in Ian Cameron’s offshore firm Blairmore in 1997, then sold their stake in 2010 for “something like £30,000”. That Cameron’s shifty cover-up has been more damaging than his non-crime is almost too insultingly obvious to state. He will not be assisted by the subconscious dismissiveness in that styling – “something like £30,000”. There is a fine line between fastidious precision and sounding like something north of the average British salary is rather forgettable, and the PM fell on the wrong side of it.
Even so, despite the obvious temptations, it would be a destructive mistake for Cameron’s enemies to get too tribal about these things. For all that this story appears currently to concern the Conservatives, there is something rather more Labourish – New Labourish, particularly – to it. The history of British political scandal dictates that it is traditionally sex that gets the Tories in trouble, and money that lands Labour in hot water.
That the Camerons’ investment in Blairmore lasted from 1997 to 2010 – the precise era of New Labour government – feels like a bit of a signpost. Indeed, for a story featuring something called Blairmore, it is surprising that it is Blair-less. For my money – something like £30, for this bet – the saga this most closely resembles is “Cheriegate”. Back at the very end of 2002, you may remember, Cherie Blair unwittingly used a conman (the gentleman caller of her special-adviser-cum-aromatherapist) to assist her in the purchase of two £250,000 Bristol flats.
Just as it has with Cameron, it took Mrs Blair several days to realise she was going to have to tell the truth, but eventually she too was making an emotional speech explaining that she had only been trying to protect her family “particularly my son in his first term at university [sob] living away from home”. A cri de coeur that certainly put in perspective the worries of other mothers who were at that time sending their 18-year-olds off to her husband’s war in Afghanistan. Toughest game in the world, the university game.
That said, Cameron’s emotional citation of his father, though obviously relevant, does rather recall Gordon Brown when on a sticky wicket. A defensive mention of his dad was Brown’s poker tell, and one almost as inscrutable as Homer Simpson’s habit of dancing round the table shrieking in delight at having been dealt four jacks. Mr Brown was never delighted when he brought up the scrupulous honesty of his Presbyterian minister father, but felt the urgent need in order to bolster the fib he was about to tell. An absurd denial that he’d never contemplated sacking Alistair Darling, for instance, came with the giveaway mention that his father had taught him “always to be honest”.
“He’s a prime minister,” skills minister Nick Boles conceded of Cameron on Friday morning, “but he’s also a human being and he’s a son.” I think we can ignore Mr Boles on the father-son dynamic. His last public reference to it was when he accused the grieving father of a Tory activist who had killed himself of trying to “hound” the party chairman out of a job.
Even so, Labour should consider the bigger picture. There are – how to put this delicately? – certain big political names of the relatively recent era that have yet to feature in the tale of tax avoidance, but on whom you’d be unwise to bet against emerging in some future story, some later data leak. Then again, perhaps these persons unnamed have opened their umbrella firms even more carefully, and we shall never know on the record. But we shall know it in our hearts, with that epistemology made fashionable by Tony Blair. “I only know what I believe,” he once intoned. Don’t we all, Mr Blair. Don’t we all.
The gravest danger of casting the tax debate as some tribal battle between the same old foes is to us – the little people who pay taxes, as Leona Helmsley once deathlessly observed. A tit-for-tat between parties does society in which we all have a stake no favours. Down that path, the path where ordinary people conclude that politicians and companies are all in it together, lies a corrupted society like Greece, where top-tier tax dodging eventually trickled down to dentists and doctors and beyond.
The idea that Britain – where people traditionally paid tax relatively willingly – could ever end up anything like this was unthinkable only a few years ago. It is now rather more thinkable, with the accretion of endless stories about Google, Amazon, the Panama Papers names … Never mind the details. Over time, overall impressions are taken. In the end, ordinary people will only know what they believe, and the fear for society is that they will begin to act accordingly.
Friday 19 February 2016
Is there some way we can make both sides lose the EU referendum?
The debate has become about which side will manage to be more horrible to immigrants – what an advert for humanity
Mark Steel in The Independent
Oh I don’t know what to do. On the one hand, if we vote to stay in we’ll get David Cameron waving and smiling and looking triumphant, and doing anything to make that happen will make your soul go dark yellow and spew up green sticky liquid. But if we vote to leave, that would please Farage, and pleasing Farage must surely be illegal if we’ve made any progress at all since the thirteenth century.
It’s like watching Manchester United play Chelsea, you spend the whole time thinking of a way that both sides can lose.
Half the country seems to be this confused, changing their mind depending on who they last saw talking about it, going “Ugh, Blair wants to stay in, I’m voting out, but ugh, Duncan-Smith wants to come out, I’m voting in.” The best strategy for either side would be to get their most prominent supporters together, then all go and live in Nigeria until it’s over and win by a landslide.
Instead, the debate is about which side will manage to be more horrible to immigrants. So the Prime Minister makes statements such as “Due to the success of these talks, Romanians living in Britain will no longer be allowed in a Post Office until they’ve been working here for nine years.”
But Farage replies “What the British people want to know is when are Bulgarians going to be stopped from using our pavements? These are paid for by the British taxpayer, and if they can’t be bothered to hover, frankly they can go back home.
George Osborne will retort that only if we remain within Europe can we complete a pan-European plan to build a giant electric fire and drop it in the Adriatic Sea so any Syrian falling in gets instantly electrocuted.
Then the Vote to Leave Campaign will explain that once we’re out of the EU, Poles will still be allowed to work on building sites but no longer be allowed sharp objects so they have to drill holes using a balloon, and they’ll have to commute every morning from Poland and go back to Cracow when they need the toilet. “Our cisterns simply can’t take the strain of flushing away anymore Polish turds”, he’ll shriek at a rally, and everyone will cheer and wave a Union Jack.
The proudest moment for David Cameron has been cutting child benefits for immigrants. What an advert for humanity, that one side says “Through determination to stick up for Britain, we have secured the right to be utterly mean bastards. Indeed we are now proposing a Europe-wide Total Bastard Treaty in which all member states unite in an unprecedented pledge to reject any act of even the mildest fake kindness.”
But their opponents rage that none of that will prevent sixty billion Bulgarians coming to live in Ipswich, each of them entitled to bring a Balkan mountain which will completely transform the topography of Suffolk.
So the negotiations appear to have been pointless, as the arguments will be exactly the same whatever is agreed. Cameron’s campaign will try to scare people as they did in Scotland, by informing us that if we leave the EU our fruit will explode and our cats will turn inside-out.
Then the Out campaign will respond with a front page in the Daily Express saying "Now the French are insisting on European standard sizes for breasts, based on those tiny useless petite Gallic ones they all like, outlawing the huge British breasts we prefer because we won the war and didn’t roll over when Hitler came round".
After a worrying opinion poll, Cameron will announce sternly the Institute for Money and Spending has predicted if we leave, by 2018 everyone in Britain will be a cannibal.
Then UKIP will tell us the barmy bureaucrats of Brussels will destroy our agriculture by classifying the cow as a type of herring and making our farmers throw their cattle in the Atlantic.
The European Union does appear to be a corrupt undemocratic institution, with rules against nationalising too many services, and rules against electing the wrong kind of government, as illustrated when they demanded the Greek government followed the policies of the bankers, rather than take notice of the interfering population who voted for them.
But our government’s only complaint against this has been that the EU suggested too many controls on how much our bankers were paid in bonuses. What an outrage, dictating to us that our bankers can’t rob how much they like off us. Next they’ll be insisting our burglars should have to leave a couple of items of furniture when they ransack our house. That’s Europe for you, meddling with our historic right to be fleeced by the banks.
So the referendum won’t solve any of this. If we vote to leave, UKIP won’t be satisfied. Within a year they’ll be screaming “Why should we be part of Earth? This country is being held back by having to travel on the same orbit as poor places like Mexico, and why should we have the same gravity as Morocco?”
And if we vote to stay in, it will become clear these negotiations have been a contrived exercise to make Cameron look powerful. All the leaders wander into a room looking serious, then probably play games on their mobiles for seven hours, before emerging to say “It’s been a tough night but we’ve finally come to an agreement that everything will be done differently, even in a different font. The Hungarians took a lot of persuading but we hope that settles everything.”
It would serve them right on all sides if we voted to leave the EU and become a province of Peru.
Mark Steel in The Independent
Oh I don’t know what to do. On the one hand, if we vote to stay in we’ll get David Cameron waving and smiling and looking triumphant, and doing anything to make that happen will make your soul go dark yellow and spew up green sticky liquid. But if we vote to leave, that would please Farage, and pleasing Farage must surely be illegal if we’ve made any progress at all since the thirteenth century.
It’s like watching Manchester United play Chelsea, you spend the whole time thinking of a way that both sides can lose.
Half the country seems to be this confused, changing their mind depending on who they last saw talking about it, going “Ugh, Blair wants to stay in, I’m voting out, but ugh, Duncan-Smith wants to come out, I’m voting in.” The best strategy for either side would be to get their most prominent supporters together, then all go and live in Nigeria until it’s over and win by a landslide.
Instead, the debate is about which side will manage to be more horrible to immigrants. So the Prime Minister makes statements such as “Due to the success of these talks, Romanians living in Britain will no longer be allowed in a Post Office until they’ve been working here for nine years.”
But Farage replies “What the British people want to know is when are Bulgarians going to be stopped from using our pavements? These are paid for by the British taxpayer, and if they can’t be bothered to hover, frankly they can go back home.
George Osborne will retort that only if we remain within Europe can we complete a pan-European plan to build a giant electric fire and drop it in the Adriatic Sea so any Syrian falling in gets instantly electrocuted.
Then the Vote to Leave Campaign will explain that once we’re out of the EU, Poles will still be allowed to work on building sites but no longer be allowed sharp objects so they have to drill holes using a balloon, and they’ll have to commute every morning from Poland and go back to Cracow when they need the toilet. “Our cisterns simply can’t take the strain of flushing away anymore Polish turds”, he’ll shriek at a rally, and everyone will cheer and wave a Union Jack.
The proudest moment for David Cameron has been cutting child benefits for immigrants. What an advert for humanity, that one side says “Through determination to stick up for Britain, we have secured the right to be utterly mean bastards. Indeed we are now proposing a Europe-wide Total Bastard Treaty in which all member states unite in an unprecedented pledge to reject any act of even the mildest fake kindness.”
But their opponents rage that none of that will prevent sixty billion Bulgarians coming to live in Ipswich, each of them entitled to bring a Balkan mountain which will completely transform the topography of Suffolk.
So the negotiations appear to have been pointless, as the arguments will be exactly the same whatever is agreed. Cameron’s campaign will try to scare people as they did in Scotland, by informing us that if we leave the EU our fruit will explode and our cats will turn inside-out.
Then the Out campaign will respond with a front page in the Daily Express saying "Now the French are insisting on European standard sizes for breasts, based on those tiny useless petite Gallic ones they all like, outlawing the huge British breasts we prefer because we won the war and didn’t roll over when Hitler came round".
After a worrying opinion poll, Cameron will announce sternly the Institute for Money and Spending has predicted if we leave, by 2018 everyone in Britain will be a cannibal.
Then UKIP will tell us the barmy bureaucrats of Brussels will destroy our agriculture by classifying the cow as a type of herring and making our farmers throw their cattle in the Atlantic.
The European Union does appear to be a corrupt undemocratic institution, with rules against nationalising too many services, and rules against electing the wrong kind of government, as illustrated when they demanded the Greek government followed the policies of the bankers, rather than take notice of the interfering population who voted for them.
But our government’s only complaint against this has been that the EU suggested too many controls on how much our bankers were paid in bonuses. What an outrage, dictating to us that our bankers can’t rob how much they like off us. Next they’ll be insisting our burglars should have to leave a couple of items of furniture when they ransack our house. That’s Europe for you, meddling with our historic right to be fleeced by the banks.
So the referendum won’t solve any of this. If we vote to leave, UKIP won’t be satisfied. Within a year they’ll be screaming “Why should we be part of Earth? This country is being held back by having to travel on the same orbit as poor places like Mexico, and why should we have the same gravity as Morocco?”
And if we vote to stay in, it will become clear these negotiations have been a contrived exercise to make Cameron look powerful. All the leaders wander into a room looking serious, then probably play games on their mobiles for seven hours, before emerging to say “It’s been a tough night but we’ve finally come to an agreement that everything will be done differently, even in a different font. The Hungarians took a lot of persuading but we hope that settles everything.”
It would serve them right on all sides if we voted to leave the EU and become a province of Peru.
Wednesday 3 February 2016
David Cameron's ever-shifting view of Britain's place in EU
Long before current renegotiations, PM made series of half promises and pledges that never materialised. Here is a selection
David Cameron speaks to factory staff at the Siemens manufacturing plant in Chippenham on Tuesday. Photograph: Ben Pruchnie/AFP/Getty Images
Alberto Nardelli in The Guardian
David Cameron has come a long way in how he views Britain’s place in the European Union. Over the years, long before the current renegotiations even started, the prime minister has made a series of bold comments, half promises and pledges.
Tuesday’s draft agreement demonstrates that only a handful of his commitments have been delivered. Here is a selection of some of them:
• In 2009, he promised that a Tory government would stop the European court of justice overruling UK criminal law by limiting its jurisdiction. The government has since opted back in to 35 justice and home affairs measures, including the European arrest warrant.
• In 2012, Cameron said that the government was “committed to revising the working time directive”, a set of EU-wide working standards. However, last December, George Osborne, told the Treasury select committee that this formed no part of the negotiation. Back in 2007, before becoming prime minister, Cameron had even pledged to pull Britain out of Europe’s social chapter on workers’ rights.
• The prime minister also promised in the Conservative manifesto last May to push for further reform of the EU’s common agricultural policy. This promise was not part of the renegotiation as it was likely to face fierce opposition from some member states.
• Cameron said in early 2014 that he would put in place treaty change before the referendum. Tuesday’s documents make it clear that there will be no changes to the EU’s governing treaties – including its headline principle of “ever closer union” – ahead of the vote because this would not be feasible in the referendum’s timeframe.
In any event, Tusk said in Tuesday’s letter that the principle of ever closer union is already not equivalent to an objective of political integration, and the substance of this will be incorporated into the treaties when they are next revised.
• Last year Cameron said that he wanted EU jobseekers to have a job before they come to Britain. Such a measure is contrary to the principle of free movement and as such was also not part of the negotiations.
• When the renegotiations formally began Cameron started by asking for a cap in the number of EU migrants allowed into the UK. That idea lasted the length of a phonecall to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, in 2014. She was not very impressed.
• The prime minister had to think of a new idea and proposed – in writing this time – that people coming to Britain from the EU must live in the UK and contribute for four years before they qualify for in-work benefits or social housing. It has proven to be the most controversial – albeit the most precise – of Cameron’s demands.
What he is set to get is the dilution of an already diluted idea: an “emergency brake” on in-work benefits for up to four years. The one-off restriction would not amount to an outright ban on benefits either but would be graduated. That means that EU migrants would receive no benefits upon arrival but would get an increasing proportion each year – another piece of complexity for an already over-complex benefit system.
When it came to the formal negotiations, Cameron’s other requests included:
• Ending the practice of sending child benefit overseas. This was also watered down. The UK will be allowed to index the payments to the country where the child is based.
• On measures to crack down on the abuse of free movement, members states will be able to take action against fraudulent claims and sham marriages, as well as against individuals who pose a threat to national security. None of these measures would appear to be new, but are simply based on the interpretation of current rules.
• On “economic governance”, Cameron had asked for a series of principles to be recognised ranging from a simple recognition of the idea that the EU has more than one currency, and that taxpayers in non-euro countries should never be financially liable for operations to support the eurozone as a currency.
Here Cameron did better, although only because Tusk clarified, in effect, that all these things are already covered by existing rules and principles.
• As part of the competitiveness basket, Cameron had said he wanted the EU to be more competitive. In response, Tusk has committed the EU to increasing efforts to enhance competitiveness. It is probably not surprising that the contents of this basket proved the easiest to agree on.
Nevertheless, however much has been negotiated away, Cameron has still won some important concessions. Take the emergency brake: just a month ago the measure seemed to be off the table but now it is a centre piece of his pitch to the British people. The European commission has accepted that the UK is facing exceptional circumstances due to high levels of immigration and must be allowed to do something about it – assuming the British people vote to stay in the EU.
However, the vast majority of the words in the draft agreement are dedicated to clarifying how existing rules and principles can be applied to ease British fears. The achievement is somewhat distant from the grander aspirations set out by Cameron over the past five years, but in the end it may be enough.
Alberto Nardelli in The Guardian
David Cameron has come a long way in how he views Britain’s place in the European Union. Over the years, long before the current renegotiations even started, the prime minister has made a series of bold comments, half promises and pledges.
Tuesday’s draft agreement demonstrates that only a handful of his commitments have been delivered. Here is a selection of some of them:
• In 2009, he promised that a Tory government would stop the European court of justice overruling UK criminal law by limiting its jurisdiction. The government has since opted back in to 35 justice and home affairs measures, including the European arrest warrant.
• In 2012, Cameron said that the government was “committed to revising the working time directive”, a set of EU-wide working standards. However, last December, George Osborne, told the Treasury select committee that this formed no part of the negotiation. Back in 2007, before becoming prime minister, Cameron had even pledged to pull Britain out of Europe’s social chapter on workers’ rights.
• The prime minister also promised in the Conservative manifesto last May to push for further reform of the EU’s common agricultural policy. This promise was not part of the renegotiation as it was likely to face fierce opposition from some member states.
• Cameron said in early 2014 that he would put in place treaty change before the referendum. Tuesday’s documents make it clear that there will be no changes to the EU’s governing treaties – including its headline principle of “ever closer union” – ahead of the vote because this would not be feasible in the referendum’s timeframe.
In any event, Tusk said in Tuesday’s letter that the principle of ever closer union is already not equivalent to an objective of political integration, and the substance of this will be incorporated into the treaties when they are next revised.
• Last year Cameron said that he wanted EU jobseekers to have a job before they come to Britain. Such a measure is contrary to the principle of free movement and as such was also not part of the negotiations.
• When the renegotiations formally began Cameron started by asking for a cap in the number of EU migrants allowed into the UK. That idea lasted the length of a phonecall to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, in 2014. She was not very impressed.
• The prime minister had to think of a new idea and proposed – in writing this time – that people coming to Britain from the EU must live in the UK and contribute for four years before they qualify for in-work benefits or social housing. It has proven to be the most controversial – albeit the most precise – of Cameron’s demands.
What he is set to get is the dilution of an already diluted idea: an “emergency brake” on in-work benefits for up to four years. The one-off restriction would not amount to an outright ban on benefits either but would be graduated. That means that EU migrants would receive no benefits upon arrival but would get an increasing proportion each year – another piece of complexity for an already over-complex benefit system.
When it came to the formal negotiations, Cameron’s other requests included:
• Ending the practice of sending child benefit overseas. This was also watered down. The UK will be allowed to index the payments to the country where the child is based.
• On measures to crack down on the abuse of free movement, members states will be able to take action against fraudulent claims and sham marriages, as well as against individuals who pose a threat to national security. None of these measures would appear to be new, but are simply based on the interpretation of current rules.
• On “economic governance”, Cameron had asked for a series of principles to be recognised ranging from a simple recognition of the idea that the EU has more than one currency, and that taxpayers in non-euro countries should never be financially liable for operations to support the eurozone as a currency.
Here Cameron did better, although only because Tusk clarified, in effect, that all these things are already covered by existing rules and principles.
• As part of the competitiveness basket, Cameron had said he wanted the EU to be more competitive. In response, Tusk has committed the EU to increasing efforts to enhance competitiveness. It is probably not surprising that the contents of this basket proved the easiest to agree on.
Nevertheless, however much has been negotiated away, Cameron has still won some important concessions. Take the emergency brake: just a month ago the measure seemed to be off the table but now it is a centre piece of his pitch to the British people. The European commission has accepted that the UK is facing exceptional circumstances due to high levels of immigration and must be allowed to do something about it – assuming the British people vote to stay in the EU.
However, the vast majority of the words in the draft agreement are dedicated to clarifying how existing rules and principles can be applied to ease British fears. The achievement is somewhat distant from the grander aspirations set out by Cameron over the past five years, but in the end it may be enough.
Sunday 28 June 2015
There’s method in Greece’s madness – it could pay off
Iain Martin in The Telegraph
In the upper reaches of the Euro elite, where leaders are forever driving up to summit meetings in shiny German cars and looking grave and self-important for the cameras, where smooth diplomats know that the way to get business done is to do it discreetly with fellow officials, there is no surer sign that a colleague has gone stark raving mad than him announcing that he is going to hold a referendum on matters European.
It is bad enough that David Cameron has decided to put Britain’s future in the EU to the voters. But at least the UK Prime Minister has given warning several years in advance and has enlisted the support of the British business establishment to win his vote in 2017. By contrast, the Greek leader, Alexis Tsipras, announced on Friday that he wants to hold a referendum in Greece on the eurozone crisis on July 5.
In the eyes of the Euro elite, this momentous decision made Mr Tsipras the instant winner of the European madman of the year competition. Several years ago, when his now forgotten predecessor in Athens attempted a similar manoeuvre, demanding a public vote, the Germans ordered Georges Papandreou not to be silly. Indeed, the then French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, told President Obama that the Greek leader was a “madman”. Truly, that was the pot calling the kettle noire.
Now, Mr Tsipras wants his own vote. What does he think he is doing? Does he realise that this is not how the eurozone and the European Union work? Who knows what will happen if Greek voters are asked whether they approve of the final offer of new terms from stricken Greece’s creditors. Goodness, the voters might say no. So exasperted were the other Eurogroup leaders that on Saturday they decided that the referendum move means their latest offer is void and Greece is on its own. It looks as though the referendum will go ahead regardless.
That fear of referendums on the part of EU leaders and officials is rooted in bitter experience, of course. The messy attempt to smuggle the integrationist Maastricht Treaty past European electorates in the early Nineties was followed by the long-running wrangle over the abandoned EU constitution and the Lisbon Treaty. Voters are awkward. Sometimes they do not do as they are told by the leaders and officials who do the deals. Why take the risk?
But Mr Tsipras is certainly not mad, or not in the sense that he has lost his marbles. Despite his Marxist beliefs and trainee demagogue antics, there is something rather compelling about the cunning way in which he has handled this crisis and declined to be railroaded by the corporatist EU powers-that-be, even though he has been slapped in the face (literally, last week) by the atrocious Jean Claude Juncker, the president of the EU commission. This is to say nothing of the ineffective behaviour of the over-rated German chancellor, Angela Merkel, cooed over by diplomats and the foreign policy community despite no one ever being able to name a single great achievement or convincing act of leadership in her career other than the knifing of her mentor Helmut Kohl.
But surely the real madmen here are not the Greek Marxists at all. The real madmen are those who created the euro, this cock-eyed construct, who thought political dreams and vanity could trump economic sense and cultural and national differences, by creating a currency union on a vast continent without the necessary safeguards.
Yet instead of facing these realities, and accepting that the EU model as currently constituted has had it, the Europhile leaders intone pompously about European Union values being agelessly sacrosanct. It is as though these men and women believe themselves to be functionaries of the Holy Roman Empire, rather than representatives of a modern botched-together political experiment that was only created in its latest form when German and French politicians misdiagnosed the consequences of the end of the Cold War as recently as 1989 and prescribed the euro.
This weekend, as those in the markets brace for the likelihood of Grexit, and a mammoth default on debts of more than 300 billion euros, it seems likely that Mr Tsipras has wanted Greece out of the eurozone all along, pretending throughout the negotiations that he is trying for an accommodation and debt relief when really he wanted to leave. That is what observers of Syriza, his party, believe.
But Mr Tsipras had a problem when he came to power. Although many Greek voters like his style, they also liked the euro because it meant membership of a supposedly democratic club that confers respectability. That is why he had to be seen to try for a deal, to create the illusion of good faith, so that he can say to the Greek electorate that while he did his best, the wicked architects of austerity – the central bankers and International Monetary Fund technocrats who want to make poor Greek pensioners (age: 57) homeless – would not see sense.
Now, Mr Tsipras may win either way. Either the creditors retreat in the next few days, because European financial institutions are exposed and the IMF is looking at a giant hole in its books, thus enabling Syriza to proclaim victory. Or, much more likely, Greece defaults on its debts and reintroduces the drachma as its currency against a backdrop of grievance and anti-German feeling that will serve the Greek Left well for generations to come.
The Greek people certainly won’t be winners, or at least not in the short term. On Saturday they were jogging to their banks in preparation for a full-blown bank run, in the expectation that the government will have to introduce capital controls, restricting the flow of money out of the country. If it does not do this, then the banks will have to close their doors. On Tuesday, Greece will start defaulting on the first chunk of 9.7 billion euros it owes the IMF this year. And that is all before the expected referendum on Sunday, which is a vote on a deal that eurozone finance ministers are declaring void already. What a mess.
Leaving will not be easy, contrary to the predications of British Eurosceptics, or at least not straight away. The experience of previous major defaults and hasty reorganisations suggests that it is extremely difficult to hold down inflation. It is also unlikely that the high-taxing socialist Mr Tsipras will introduce the capitalist policies and reforms that will attract inward investment and grow the economy.
At this late hour, in the final act of the Greek drama, enter David Cameron, like a man who arrives at a pub when the other customers and staff are administering the kiss of life to a regular who has collapsed on the floor next to the bar after consuming way too much ouzo.
Mr Cameron clears his throat and asks if someone wouldn’t mind awfully getting him and his British friends a pint. There is silence, until someone points out that they have their hands full at the moment.
In a similarly fraught atmosphere, Mr Cameron was given a few minutes to read out his proposals for reform to EU leaders last week as they grappled with Greece and the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean. His demands – on benefits and the promise of a post-dated cheque guaranteeing who knows what from the other countries after the referendum – are pathetically small.
There remains one fascinating other possibility, however, which may get the escapologist Mr Cameron off the hook in that style of his to which we have all become so accustomed. If Greece does leave and the effects are explosive, then it might – just might – finally persuade the Euro elite that their approach is bust, and that what is needed instead is a way for Europeans to trade and be friends without the architecture of an integrationist, incompetent, failed super-state.
Monday 1 December 2014
How to take back the NHS, before it’s too late
The coalition’s 2012 health reform act was disastrous. It can be overturned – but time is running out
The Health and Social Care Act 2012 – engineered by the former health secretary Andrew Lansley – was a massive blunder, and even senior Conservative ministers now admit the scale of its disastrous repercussions.
The main thrust of the Lansley project was to take the NHS down the American healthcare route, creating an external market and mandating the compulsory marketisation and commercialisation of services.
Michael Gove, now government chief whip, has claimed that no privatisation of the NHS has taken place but this is plainly wrong. A deplorable example was the sale in July 2013 of Plasma Resources UK which turns plasma into blood products, a particularly sensitive area in healthcare, to the US private equity company Bain and Company. Another example: when advertising for a new chair for NHS Blood and Transplant it was made clear that candidates should have privatisation experience.
Having now established a clear-cut precedent for further privatisation, there is every expectation among private contractors that when contract renewals come up they will be able to tender proposals for a transfer to private ownership. Some of these contracts are massive, such as the 10-year contract in Staffordshire for vital cancer services and end-of-life care worth £1.2bn.
These acts of privatisation will not, unfortunately, be the last if the Conservatives continue in government after the next general election. The companies competing for contracts may even hope to invoke the controversial investor state dispute settlement procedures being negotiated as part of the next big EU-US trade agreement, theTransatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which was championed by the present NHS chief executive when in America, which could enable them to challenge the law in order to hold on to their contracts.
For 68 years, the NHS has provided the level of healthcare that our parliament has decided we can afford. The truth is that healthcare, whether public or private, in a very real sense is infinite: unlimited sums of private money can be – and in many countries are – poured into healthcare by those who can afford it. Money for the NHS is determined by public choice, and relative to what we choose to spend on education, housing, welfare, defence, all of which are legitimate demands on the public purse.
George Osborne is to announce another £2bn for the NHS on Wednesday, a welcome move, which should be used to create a new NHS investment fund with charitable status to centrally handle PFI contracts.
But healthcare, if publicly provided, inevitably has to be constrained. Traditionally, that rationing process within the NHS is flexible, professional and democratically accountable to parliament. British voters could have chosen a different system – they exist in many parts of the world – but no major political party has ever felt brave or foolish enough to put such a choice to them. Nor was it a choice put to the electorate in 2010 by either of the coalition parties.
Yet we know of David Cameron’s close involvement with Lansley before the election. Nicholas Timmins – in Never Again? The Story of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, a study for the Kings Fund – writes: “It is far from the case that the senior Conservatives – Cameron, Osborne and Letwin, for example – were ignorant about what Lansley was up to … He and Oliver Letwin helped write the green papers.” Guilt may be the explanation for Cameron’s current attempt to give the former health secretary a job running humanitarian affairs in the UN.
The far more expensive model based on the US is, after just two years, already having a deep and damaging impact on behaviour in the NHS and depressing standards of care. It is challenging the very nature of the vocational aspect of medicine for nurses, doctors and everyone who works in the NHS. It may be happening slowly, but the dynamics of this market model over the years will carry their own momentum.
Despite much-publicised scandals, such as that which enveloped the Mid Staffordshirehospital, the NHS remains extraordinarily popular among the public, and the only explanation I have is that people know that all demands for ever more expensive healthcare cannot be met. They understand that there have to be financial disciplines; that we cannot abolish all charging or market elements or private contractors in such a large concern.
People do believe, however, that an organisation that carries the brand name NHS has to practise under a fair trade description, and that means that the preferred provider should be the NHS. They like the NHS because they sense that its care choices are broadly fair and they prize its comprehensive cover. Most families have their own reasons to bless the NHS. They can complain, they can get angry with it and they are demanding, rightly, to be better able to influence its rationing process. But what they are rightly fearful of is that, once the service is driven by market principles, the rationing will cease to be fair and their care will become determined by profit.
Such a grave mistake as Lansley’s reform must be corrected. A reinstated NHS would be far better placed to provide a comprehensive, cost-effective healthcare service for England, which is similar, although not the same, in all parts of the UK. Repealing the 2012 act is not a realistic political option but its worst aspects can and must be excised, and the best opportunity to secure a commitment to doing that is before the 2015 election.
As individuals we can exercise our democratic rights over the NHS in ways that would have been impossible before the internet. Using www.nhsbill2015.org we are already opening up old-style political campaigning to new means of persuasion. This is not about money. No, what is required is a vast commitment, in terms of time taken to convey the complexities of the NHS, time taken to lobby MPs and parliamentary candidates, and the persistence not to let candidates escape behind generalised party political messages and manifestos devised by talking to focus groups. There is a new democratic way of exercising the power of the people and we saw its beginning during the Scottish referendum.
We must not forget that in September 2014 the Scottish independence referendum brought the UK perilously close to splitting apart. Those elements that we share, that help create a sense of common purpose, should become ever more precious as we try to unify our nation.
The end of the NHS as we have known and understood it in England will take place before 2020 if the 2012 legislation is not changed. The exact moment of its passing may not even be clear, because it will go with a whimper not a bang, to borrow from TS Eliot. The NHS is not a “religion”, as has often been claimed, nor is it the preserve of one political party, nor one country within our United Kingdom. It belongs to all of us and we let something of ourselves go if we don’t fight to save it.
Friday 28 February 2014
Cameron and the Tories have reduced immigration to tens of thousands. NOT!
Tory failure to cap immigration is an opportunity for a policy rethink
The PM promised something he couldn't possibly deliver. Now he needs an honest conversation with the public
Passengers board a bus for western Europe from Sofia, Bulgaria: 'Cameron's problem is EU migration, and he can’t do much about that'. Photograph: Vassil Donev/EPA
Is there anyone who wouldn't have paid good money to have been a fly on the wall in Downing Street over the past 24 hours? David Cameron doesn't seem to be a sweary type; he doesn't blowtorch underlings or kick the copying machines in the style of Gordon Brown – but there will have been ructions on receipt of those latest migration figures from the Office for National Statistics. Net migration up 30% in the past year when, after all the breast-beating, and from all the promises Cameron made to the electorate, it should have gone down.
That was the battleground for the next election. Nothing else had the potential to address the Labour poll lead that has been so long out of reach. Cameron put all of his betting chips on what seemed to be the party's trump card: the "vote for us, we're tough on migration and tough on migrants" strategy. The bet was lost; the result not even close. Net migration has hit 212,000 and gone is the hope of bringing it below 100,000 before the general election. What do you give a dumb punter who has lost everything. Sympathy? He hardly deserves it.
Perhaps some advice, instead. The first thing to say is that he should stop taking silly positions. His problem here is EU migration. He can't do much about that. He shouldn't have given the impression that events outside his control were within it. He can't change the rules because his EU partners won't let him. And regardless of the chunterings from his backbenchers, he knows that to actually leave the EU – the only way to regain complete control – would be ruinous for Britain in terms of economics and world positioning. The path to irrelevance.
He acted as he did to show those backbenchers that he is a toughie, to draw the poison from the tabloids, and to head off Ukip. But over-promising has left him in a worse position with all three than he was in before, and with his credibility in tatters. He should get back to square one and fast.
He needs to start listening, as he should have from the outset, to the people who actually have to make his market-based capitalist system work. They are against his crude machinations on migration because they know how it affects their efforts to provide for Britain the economy he says he wants. He has, to use Geoffrey Howe's cricketing metaphor, been sending them out to the crease having sabotaged their bats.
Frustrated by his inability to deal with EU migration, Cameron will inevitably redouble efforts to rein in non-EU migration, which might be popular for a while, not least because it might also curb visible migration by non-white Commonweath types. But if he does opt for a rethink, he might use as a starting point advice from Mark Boleat, policy chair of the City of London Corporation. Writing yesterday in the London Evening Standard, Boleat said: "What is needed is a sensible, fact-based debate over what migrants bring to the capital, while also acknowledging their impact on communities and services. A row where only the loudest are heard fails this test … Policymakers should clamp down on those immigrants who come to Britain to take rather than contribute. But the overwhelming majority of immigrants come here to make a better life for themselves and their families through hard work, and in so doing are of huge benefit to Britain. Closing our borders or Swiss-style immigration quotas are not viable or sensible solutions." No hangwringing Guardianista is he; no authority more instinctively Conservative than the City of London Corporation.
The PM might opt to be brave. To take on the unreasoned, backward thinking populism we hear from Ukip and his right. To rein in his own election strategist Lynton Crosby who, from all we have seen in this and previous campaigns, appears to think that divisive manoeuvring on migration works like some form of electoral Viagra.
Cameron might decide to have a straightforward and honest conversation with the public. People flows and money flows are how the modern world works; there will be costs and benefits. We can rage against the dynamic or we can better adapt to it, thinking more about how we channel resources to those areas most affected, how we strike the balance between the needs of long-term residents and those newly arrived, and how we achieve balanced and harmonious communities.
This is hard, mainly because it means a break from the nostalgia that underpins the worst of our failings in this area. But there really is no going back to Britain as it was. It is hard but it is necessary, and the PM may observe one of life's ironies: with failure comes opportunity.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)