Showing posts with label Churchill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Churchill. Show all posts
Saturday 7 October 2023
Wednesday 30 August 2023
Wednesday 17 March 2021
Why can't Britain handle the truth about Winston Churchill?
Nothing, it seems, can be allowed to tarnish the national myth – as I found when hosting a Cambridge debate about his murkier side writes Priyamvada Gopal in The Guardian
Winston Churchill speaking at Wolverhampton football field in 1949. Photograph: Mark Kauffman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
A baleful silence attends one of the most talked-about figures in British history. You may enthuse endlessly about Winston Churchill “single-handedly” defeating Hitler. But mention his views on race or his colonial policies, and you’ll be instantly drowned in ferocious and orchestrated vitriol.
In a sea of fawningly reverential Churchill biographies, hardly any books seriously examine his documented racism. Nothing, it seems, can be allowed to complicate, let alone tarnish, the national myth of a flawless hero: an idol who “saved our civilisation”, as Boris Johnson claims, or “humanity as a whole”, as David Cameron did. Make an uncomfortable observation about his views on white supremacy and the likes of Piers Morgan will ask: “Why do you live in this country?”
Not everyone is content to be told to be quiet because they would be “speaking German” if not for Churchill. Many people want to know more about the historical figures they are required to admire uncritically. The Black Lives Matter protests last June – during which the word “racist” was sprayed in red letters on Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, were accompanied by demands for more education on race, empire and the figures whose statues dot our landscapes.
Yet providing a fuller picture is made difficult. Scholars who explore less illustrious sides of Churchill are treated dismissively. Take the example of Churchill College, Cambridge, where I am a teaching fellow. In response to calls for fuller information about its founder, the college set up a series of events on Churchill, Empire and Race. I recently chaired the second of these, a panel discussion on “The Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill”.
Even before it took place, the discussion was repeatedly denounced in the tabloids and on social media as “idiotic”, a “character assassination” aimed at “trashing” the great man. Outraged letters to the college said this was academic freedom gone too far, and that the event should be cancelled. The speakers and I, all scholars and people of colour, were subjected to vicious hate mail, racist slurs and threats. We were accused of treason and slander. One correspondent warned that my name was being forwarded to the commanding officer of an RAF base near my home.
The college is now under heavy pressure to stop doing these events. After the recent panel, the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange, which is influential in government circles – and claims to champion free speech and controversial views on campus – published a “review” of the event. The foreword, written by Churchill’s grandson Nicholas Soames, stated that he hoped the review would “prevent such an intellectually dishonest event from being organised at Churchill College in the future – and, one might hope, elsewhere”.
It’s ironic. We’re told by government and media that “cancel culture” is an imposition of the academic left. Yet here it is in reality, the actual “cancel culture” that prevents a truthful engagement with British history. Churchill was an admired wartime leader who recognised the threat of Hitler in time and played a pivotal role in the allied victory. It should be possible to recognise this without glossing over his less benign side. The scholars at the Cambridge event – Madhusree Mukerjee, Onyeka Nubia and Kehinde Andrews – drew attention to Churchill’s dogged advocacy of British colonial rule; his contributing role in the disastrous 1943 Bengal famine, in which millions of people died unnecessarily; his interest in eugenics; and his views, deeply retrograde even for his time, on race.
Churchill is on record as praising “Aryan stock” and insisting it was right for “a stronger race, a higher-grade race” to take the place of indigenous peoples. He reportedly did not think “black people were as capable or as efficient as white people”. In 1911, Churchill banned interracial boxing matches so white fighters would not be seen losing to black ones. He insisted that Britain and the US shared “Anglo-Saxon superiority”. He described anticolonial campaigners as “savages armed with ideas”.
Even his contemporaries found his views on race shocking. In the context of Churchill’s hard line against providing famine relief to Bengal, the colonial secretary, Leo Amery, remarked: “On the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane … I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”
Just because Hitler was a racist does not mean Churchill could not have been one. Britain entered the war, after all, because it faced an existential threat – and not primarily because it disagreed with Nazi ideology. Noting affinities between colonial and Nazi race-thinking, African and Asian leaders queried Churchill’s double standards in firmly rejecting self-determination for colonial subjects who were also fighting Hitler.
It is worth recalling that the uncritical Churchill-worship that is so dominant today was not shared by many British people in 1945, when they voted him out of office before the war was even completely over. Many working-class communities in Britain, from Dundee to south Wales, felt strong animosity towards Churchill for his willingness to mobilise military force during industrial disputes. As recently as 2010, Llanmaes community council opposed the renaming of a military base to Churchill Lines.
Critical assessment is not “character assassination”. Thanks to the groupthink of “the cult of Churchill”, the late prime minister has become a mythological figure rather than a historical one. To play down the implications of Churchill’s views on race – or suggest absurdly, as Policy Exchange does, that his racist words meant “something other than their conventional definition” – speaks to me of a profound lack of honesty and courage.
This failure of courage is tied to a wider aversion to examining the British empire truthfully, perhaps for fear of what it might say about Britain today. A necessary national conversation about Churchill and the empire he was so committed to is one necessary way to break this unacceptable silence.
A baleful silence attends one of the most talked-about figures in British history. You may enthuse endlessly about Winston Churchill “single-handedly” defeating Hitler. But mention his views on race or his colonial policies, and you’ll be instantly drowned in ferocious and orchestrated vitriol.
In a sea of fawningly reverential Churchill biographies, hardly any books seriously examine his documented racism. Nothing, it seems, can be allowed to complicate, let alone tarnish, the national myth of a flawless hero: an idol who “saved our civilisation”, as Boris Johnson claims, or “humanity as a whole”, as David Cameron did. Make an uncomfortable observation about his views on white supremacy and the likes of Piers Morgan will ask: “Why do you live in this country?”
Not everyone is content to be told to be quiet because they would be “speaking German” if not for Churchill. Many people want to know more about the historical figures they are required to admire uncritically. The Black Lives Matter protests last June – during which the word “racist” was sprayed in red letters on Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, were accompanied by demands for more education on race, empire and the figures whose statues dot our landscapes.
Yet providing a fuller picture is made difficult. Scholars who explore less illustrious sides of Churchill are treated dismissively. Take the example of Churchill College, Cambridge, where I am a teaching fellow. In response to calls for fuller information about its founder, the college set up a series of events on Churchill, Empire and Race. I recently chaired the second of these, a panel discussion on “The Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill”.
Even before it took place, the discussion was repeatedly denounced in the tabloids and on social media as “idiotic”, a “character assassination” aimed at “trashing” the great man. Outraged letters to the college said this was academic freedom gone too far, and that the event should be cancelled. The speakers and I, all scholars and people of colour, were subjected to vicious hate mail, racist slurs and threats. We were accused of treason and slander. One correspondent warned that my name was being forwarded to the commanding officer of an RAF base near my home.
The college is now under heavy pressure to stop doing these events. After the recent panel, the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange, which is influential in government circles – and claims to champion free speech and controversial views on campus – published a “review” of the event. The foreword, written by Churchill’s grandson Nicholas Soames, stated that he hoped the review would “prevent such an intellectually dishonest event from being organised at Churchill College in the future – and, one might hope, elsewhere”.
It’s ironic. We’re told by government and media that “cancel culture” is an imposition of the academic left. Yet here it is in reality, the actual “cancel culture” that prevents a truthful engagement with British history. Churchill was an admired wartime leader who recognised the threat of Hitler in time and played a pivotal role in the allied victory. It should be possible to recognise this without glossing over his less benign side. The scholars at the Cambridge event – Madhusree Mukerjee, Onyeka Nubia and Kehinde Andrews – drew attention to Churchill’s dogged advocacy of British colonial rule; his contributing role in the disastrous 1943 Bengal famine, in which millions of people died unnecessarily; his interest in eugenics; and his views, deeply retrograde even for his time, on race.
Churchill is on record as praising “Aryan stock” and insisting it was right for “a stronger race, a higher-grade race” to take the place of indigenous peoples. He reportedly did not think “black people were as capable or as efficient as white people”. In 1911, Churchill banned interracial boxing matches so white fighters would not be seen losing to black ones. He insisted that Britain and the US shared “Anglo-Saxon superiority”. He described anticolonial campaigners as “savages armed with ideas”.
Even his contemporaries found his views on race shocking. In the context of Churchill’s hard line against providing famine relief to Bengal, the colonial secretary, Leo Amery, remarked: “On the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane … I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”
Just because Hitler was a racist does not mean Churchill could not have been one. Britain entered the war, after all, because it faced an existential threat – and not primarily because it disagreed with Nazi ideology. Noting affinities between colonial and Nazi race-thinking, African and Asian leaders queried Churchill’s double standards in firmly rejecting self-determination for colonial subjects who were also fighting Hitler.
It is worth recalling that the uncritical Churchill-worship that is so dominant today was not shared by many British people in 1945, when they voted him out of office before the war was even completely over. Many working-class communities in Britain, from Dundee to south Wales, felt strong animosity towards Churchill for his willingness to mobilise military force during industrial disputes. As recently as 2010, Llanmaes community council opposed the renaming of a military base to Churchill Lines.
Critical assessment is not “character assassination”. Thanks to the groupthink of “the cult of Churchill”, the late prime minister has become a mythological figure rather than a historical one. To play down the implications of Churchill’s views on race – or suggest absurdly, as Policy Exchange does, that his racist words meant “something other than their conventional definition” – speaks to me of a profound lack of honesty and courage.
This failure of courage is tied to a wider aversion to examining the British empire truthfully, perhaps for fear of what it might say about Britain today. A necessary national conversation about Churchill and the empire he was so committed to is one necessary way to break this unacceptable silence.
Sunday 28 June 2020
Don’t tear down statues
Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn
WINSTON Churchill was a terrible man. He authorised use of chemical weapons against Afghans and Kurds, called China “a barbaric nation”, spoke of the “great hordes of Islam” and wrote of Indians as “a beastly people with a beastly religion”. When informed of mass deaths in the 1943 Bengal famine, he simply asked: “So is Gandhi dead yet?” Those nostalgic for the Raj love him, as do white supremacists. Zionists adore him for what he told the Palestine Royal Commission in 1937:
“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
Unsurprisingly, Churchill’s statue is iconic for leftists and progressives around the world. Galvanised by the killing of George Floyd, they want not just this statue gone but all historical monuments associated with oppression, slavery, and bigotry to be eliminated from public view. Thoroughly decent people are roaring: pull them down!
But stop! This is terribly dangerous. Step back and reflect upon the consequences.
I’ve dwelt on Churchill here because he is a metaphor for countless racist, supremacist leaders who led wars of conquest and plundered treasures. From Alexander the Great to Chandragupta Maurya, and Mohammed bin Qasim to Napoleon Bonaparte, ambitious conquerors subjugated weaker peoples on various pretexts. So shouldn’t we eliminate hurtful memories?
Let’s begin by bulldozing the pyramids of ancient Egypt. They are symbols of extreme oppression and the word ‘pharaoh’ is synonymous with cruelty. Thousands of slaves toiling in the scorching desert sun built tombs for the pharaoh king. When he died his retainers were obliged to collectively commit suicide and be buried in the same pyramid, ready to serve when he awakes in the after-life. Morally, the pyramids ought to be levelled.
And what to make of Babri mosque? For Hindu zealots it was the symbol of cultural oppression by Muslim invaders. In 1992 with bare hands and pick-axes a maddened crowd tore apart a five-centuries-old structure built by Emperor Babar, allegedly on the very site where Lord Ram was born. India has never recovered from that.
More Muslim heritage lies in the cross hairs. ‘Babar ki auladain’ (sons of Babur) is the pejorative name given to about two dozen or so Indian cities. In time Ahmadabad, Karimnagar, Jamalpur, Faridpur, Hajipur, Moradabad, and Secunderabad might disappear from the map of India and emerge reincarnated with Hindu names.
Where will the madness stop? Should the Taj Mahal also be torn down because it marks the extraordinary success of invaders? Of course, the Taj is a horrific example of the abuse of man by man much as the magnificent cathedrals of Europe are. Resources to build monuments were forcibly extracted from toiling peasants. The Taj is just the whim of a ruthless monarch mourning his favourite wife.
But look at the Taj in the moonlight and you see something even more enchanting than an architectural jewel. One can almost feel the soft emanations from the side-by-side graves of two star-crossed lovers. Life is surely complex, filled with nuances. My vote: preserve and protect the Taj.
Pakistan’s cultural vandalism exceeds India’s. Hindu heritage sites in Pakistan have all but vanished, and Buddhist statues and artifacts wilfully plundered and destroyed. Hardly a tear was shed in Pakistan when the Taliban blew up the 2,000-year old Buddhas in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province.
Deemed as corrupting Hindu influences, the celebration of cultural events such as Baisakhi and Basant, as well as kite flying, have been gradually forbidden or abandoned in recent decades. Even ‘Hindu trees’ like banyan, neem, and pipal have been punished — far fewer can be seen today in comparison to earlier times. I cannot forget the smouldering remains of a 200-year-old graceful banyan in the posh E-7 area of Islamabad, destroyed by students from a nearby madressah as a Hindu symbol.
I urge my iconoclastic liberal/left friends in the West to learn from Pakistan-India. In seeking purification by removing distasteful symbols of the past they risk cultural and aesthetic desertification. Pictures of pre-Partition Karachi and Lahore tell us how visually rich and architecturally beautiful they once were — and how cultural purification reduced them to boring blandness.
Eliminating symbols does nothing of substance. There was mass euphoria when crowds of Iraqis, helped by US marines with a 50-ton armoured vehicle, toppled a massive Saddam Hussein statue located exactly where the ousted tyrant had destroyed an older monument. But this was no new dawn for the people of Iraq. On the contrary, a decade of bitter Shia-Sunni sectarian warfare ensued.
Those who seek to efface history’s markers are merely self-righteous. Those seeking a pure, authentic past untainted by sin are chasing a phantom — it doesn’t exist. In my last Dawn op-ed (‘Dangerous delusions’) I wrote of the psychedelic substance being dished out to Pakistan’s masses every evening in the form of Ertugrul Ghazi and of the dangerous hallucinations it is inducing.
Spaceship Earth hurtles towards an uncertain future with a crew that’s terribly sick, more mentally and psychologically than physically. The doctors on board must record the history of various quarrelling groups professionally and clinically, all without emotion or embellishment. The naïve notion of heroes and villains must be dumped; history has actors only.
Let Churchill stay. That fat, cigar-smoking, racist Englishman cannot hurt anyone now that worms have eaten away his flesh. Instead, let’s get serious. The starting point must be the realisation that widow burning, slavery, and genocide are as much part of the human condition as are great acts of generosity and compassion. Every civilisation is the legacy of wars, conquests, and brutality. Even the cleverest surgery cannot cut out these bitter legacies without killing the patient.
WINSTON Churchill was a terrible man. He authorised use of chemical weapons against Afghans and Kurds, called China “a barbaric nation”, spoke of the “great hordes of Islam” and wrote of Indians as “a beastly people with a beastly religion”. When informed of mass deaths in the 1943 Bengal famine, he simply asked: “So is Gandhi dead yet?” Those nostalgic for the Raj love him, as do white supremacists. Zionists adore him for what he told the Palestine Royal Commission in 1937:
“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
Unsurprisingly, Churchill’s statue is iconic for leftists and progressives around the world. Galvanised by the killing of George Floyd, they want not just this statue gone but all historical monuments associated with oppression, slavery, and bigotry to be eliminated from public view. Thoroughly decent people are roaring: pull them down!
But stop! This is terribly dangerous. Step back and reflect upon the consequences.
I’ve dwelt on Churchill here because he is a metaphor for countless racist, supremacist leaders who led wars of conquest and plundered treasures. From Alexander the Great to Chandragupta Maurya, and Mohammed bin Qasim to Napoleon Bonaparte, ambitious conquerors subjugated weaker peoples on various pretexts. So shouldn’t we eliminate hurtful memories?
Let’s begin by bulldozing the pyramids of ancient Egypt. They are symbols of extreme oppression and the word ‘pharaoh’ is synonymous with cruelty. Thousands of slaves toiling in the scorching desert sun built tombs for the pharaoh king. When he died his retainers were obliged to collectively commit suicide and be buried in the same pyramid, ready to serve when he awakes in the after-life. Morally, the pyramids ought to be levelled.
And what to make of Babri mosque? For Hindu zealots it was the symbol of cultural oppression by Muslim invaders. In 1992 with bare hands and pick-axes a maddened crowd tore apart a five-centuries-old structure built by Emperor Babar, allegedly on the very site where Lord Ram was born. India has never recovered from that.
More Muslim heritage lies in the cross hairs. ‘Babar ki auladain’ (sons of Babur) is the pejorative name given to about two dozen or so Indian cities. In time Ahmadabad, Karimnagar, Jamalpur, Faridpur, Hajipur, Moradabad, and Secunderabad might disappear from the map of India and emerge reincarnated with Hindu names.
Where will the madness stop? Should the Taj Mahal also be torn down because it marks the extraordinary success of invaders? Of course, the Taj is a horrific example of the abuse of man by man much as the magnificent cathedrals of Europe are. Resources to build monuments were forcibly extracted from toiling peasants. The Taj is just the whim of a ruthless monarch mourning his favourite wife.
But look at the Taj in the moonlight and you see something even more enchanting than an architectural jewel. One can almost feel the soft emanations from the side-by-side graves of two star-crossed lovers. Life is surely complex, filled with nuances. My vote: preserve and protect the Taj.
Pakistan’s cultural vandalism exceeds India’s. Hindu heritage sites in Pakistan have all but vanished, and Buddhist statues and artifacts wilfully plundered and destroyed. Hardly a tear was shed in Pakistan when the Taliban blew up the 2,000-year old Buddhas in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province.
Deemed as corrupting Hindu influences, the celebration of cultural events such as Baisakhi and Basant, as well as kite flying, have been gradually forbidden or abandoned in recent decades. Even ‘Hindu trees’ like banyan, neem, and pipal have been punished — far fewer can be seen today in comparison to earlier times. I cannot forget the smouldering remains of a 200-year-old graceful banyan in the posh E-7 area of Islamabad, destroyed by students from a nearby madressah as a Hindu symbol.
I urge my iconoclastic liberal/left friends in the West to learn from Pakistan-India. In seeking purification by removing distasteful symbols of the past they risk cultural and aesthetic desertification. Pictures of pre-Partition Karachi and Lahore tell us how visually rich and architecturally beautiful they once were — and how cultural purification reduced them to boring blandness.
Eliminating symbols does nothing of substance. There was mass euphoria when crowds of Iraqis, helped by US marines with a 50-ton armoured vehicle, toppled a massive Saddam Hussein statue located exactly where the ousted tyrant had destroyed an older monument. But this was no new dawn for the people of Iraq. On the contrary, a decade of bitter Shia-Sunni sectarian warfare ensued.
Those who seek to efface history’s markers are merely self-righteous. Those seeking a pure, authentic past untainted by sin are chasing a phantom — it doesn’t exist. In my last Dawn op-ed (‘Dangerous delusions’) I wrote of the psychedelic substance being dished out to Pakistan’s masses every evening in the form of Ertugrul Ghazi and of the dangerous hallucinations it is inducing.
Spaceship Earth hurtles towards an uncertain future with a crew that’s terribly sick, more mentally and psychologically than physically. The doctors on board must record the history of various quarrelling groups professionally and clinically, all without emotion or embellishment. The naïve notion of heroes and villains must be dumped; history has actors only.
Let Churchill stay. That fat, cigar-smoking, racist Englishman cannot hurt anyone now that worms have eaten away his flesh. Instead, let’s get serious. The starting point must be the realisation that widow burning, slavery, and genocide are as much part of the human condition as are great acts of generosity and compassion. Every civilisation is the legacy of wars, conquests, and brutality. Even the cleverest surgery cannot cut out these bitter legacies without killing the patient.
Wednesday 9 May 2018
How to conduct good meetings
John Gapper in The FT
Jeff Bezos and Winston Churchill do not have much in common, but one is chief executive of a company that is valued at $770bn and the other stopped the Nazis invading Britain, so the advice of both is worth heeding. Amazon’s founder and the UK’s wartime prime minister agreed on one thing: the value of a good memorandum.
Mr Bezos’s recent letter to shareholders extolled the Amazon practice of starting all internal meetings by everyone present reading a memo of up to six pages, explaining what they are there to discuss. Instead of watching a PowerPoint presentation, or breaking into an immediate debate, Amazon’s executives spend up to half an hour in complete silence, absorbing the briefing that one of them has prepared.
“This is the weirdest meeting culture you will ever encounter,” Mr Bezos admitted in one interview. The principle is that an executive must refine his or her proposal so fully to express it in narrative form that everyone will be able to understand it. Reading the memo means that all those in the room are informed for the conversation that follows, and are not merely bluffing.
Churchill would have appreciated the attention Mr Bezos has given to this. On August 9 1940, a month before the Blitz bombing of London started, he dictated a memo to the UK civil service on the subject of memos. “To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long.” he declared. “The discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clearer thinking.”
Amazon’s approach sounds eccentric, but there is a lot of value in it. Most large companies have too many meetings in general — some executives spend their days traipsing from one airless room to another — and too many of them are disorganised and sprawling. People spout off without knowing much about the topic, or caring whether they do: it becomes a battle of rhetoric.
Mr Bezos is a student of managerial efficiency — Amazon itself is a huge machine for sucking inefficiency out of the retail industry. He has grasped that starting out with everyone knowing the basics makes the debate both better informed and more democratic. There is less chance of a decision being taken arbitrarily or ignorantly, or of a clique of two or three people in the room controlling the outcome.
The surprising aspect is his faith in narrative, rather than the data on which Amazon relies. You might have thought that data would rule decision-making at Amazon, but not so. He said: “We have so many metrics . . . and the thing I have noticed is that when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you’re measuring.”
He believes in telling a story vividly, rather than relying on data or graphics, or packaging a business case in bullet points on a slide. Some Amazon memos can be almost like dramas: a typical memo for a new product comes in the form of an imaginary press release for the service, backed by a question and answer brief written in a way that a customer would understand.
Churchill, a journalist turned politician, was equally a devotee of strong narratives that could shape policymaking. “Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational,” he instructed his civil servants, warning them that “most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether”.
He and Mr Bezos also agreed on the correct place for any data and slides: somewhere at the back. “If a report relies on detailed analysis of some complicated factors . . . these should be set out in an appendix,” Churchill declared. Amazon’s data-rich executives must obey the same rule.
Conciseness can be taken too far. Staff at the US National Security Council were told to trim their policy memos to a single page for Donald Trump because he did not like to read too much. Then it turned out that the president wanted what one official described to the New Yorker as “two or three points, with the syntactical complexity of ‘See Jane run’”, and preferred pictures.
But preparing a crisp narrative is much harder work than spraying around some sentences on a slide. It requires someone to pause and not only to think through the thread of the argument, but to shape it in a way that can inspire others. Churchill could do that on his feet; the rest of us must concentrate. As Mr Bezos notes, it takes a lot of effort to write a “brilliant and thoughtful” corporate memo.
The impact of narrative is clear in public speaking. The Technology, Entertainment, Design conference became a global brand by forcing speakers to hone their “Ted talks” ruthlessly for months in advance. No one is allowed to get on stage and improvise some thoughts. A corporate meeting is not a Ted event, but it is still a gathering that needs to be educated.
Churchill, for whom making well-informed decisions was a matter of life and death, devoted some time on a day when Birmingham was bombed to setting out how to write memos. Mr Bezos has done extremely well for Amazon by appreciating the value of briefing his executives thoroughly. We should probably listen to them.
Friday 28 April 2017
Of course Theresa May offers stability – just look at her unchanging positions on Brexit and general elections
Mark Steel in The Independent
The Conservative slogan for the election is “Strong and stable”. Because that’s the main thing we want from a government, strength and stability, like you get with Vladimir Putin.
Only idiots get obsessed with the details of what their leaders are strong and stable about, because the important thing is they’re strong while they’re doing it, and they keep doing it even if it’s insane.
Jeremy Corbyn should prove he can match their stability by burning down a public building at precisely half past nine every morning, and display his strength by punching people in the face as they run out the door screaming.
But this would barely touch the Government’s record of strength and stability. For example, every year since they took over in 2010, there has been a rise in the numbers dependent on food banks, going up every year, nice and stable, not haphazardly up one year and down the next so you don’t know where you stand. And weak governments might see hungry kids and feel a pang of conscience, but not this lot because they’re like sodding Iron Man.
George Osborne was so stable he missed every target he set, not just a few or 80 per cent, but every single one because business needs predictability, and when Osborne announced a target, our wealth creators could guarantee he’d come nowhere near it.
I expect they’ll also refer every day to their universal credit scheme, which is five years behind schedule and cost £16bn. You have to be strong to lose that amount and not care. Weak people would get to £3-4bn and think “Oh dear, maybe we should stop”, but not if you’re strong and stable.
The current Chancellor is nearly as impressive. After the Tories promised that under no circumstances would they raise National Insurance, Philip Hammond then raised National Insurance and cancelled raising it a few days later as it was so unpopular, exuding the sort of strength and stability that puts you in mind of Churchill.
Boris Johnson has exhibited the same values, displaying why we can trust him to stand up to dictators such as Syria’s President Assad. After one of Assad’s military victories, Boris wrote: “I cannot conceal my elation as the news comes in from Palmyra and it is reported that the Syrian army is genuinely back in control of the entire Unesco site… any sane person should feel a sense of satisfaction at what Assad’s troops have accomplished”, in an article headlined: “Bravo for Assad – he is a vile tyrant but he has saved Palmyra from [Isis]”.
Since then, the Foreign Secretary has steadfastly stuck with maximum stability to this view, with only the mildest amendment such as: “We must bomb Assad immediately; no sane person could ever wish him to control anything unless they’re a communist terrorist mugwump.”
What a model of stability, because most military experts agree it doesn’t really matter which side you’re on in a war, as long as you don’t compromise your strength or stability by not being in the war at all.
Then there was the Prime Minister’s line on not having an election, from which she hasn’t wavered one bit, and her insistence that we had to remain in the EU, which she’s adjusted a tiny bit to insisting we can only thrive outside the EU, but always either inside or outside, and never once has she suggested we must be somewhere else such as a split in the cosmos consisting of dark antimatter in which we can be both in and out of the EU due to time and space being governed by the European Court of Human Rights.
Thankfully the Labour Party is standing up to Conservative arguments with a dynamic campaign in which they explain how miserable everyone is.
The next party political broadcast will consist of Labour leaders walking through a shopping centre in Wolverhampton, pointing at people and saying: “Look at that bloke – utterly crestfallen. That’s a Tory government for you.”
It feels as if most people have already switched off in this election, so Labour’s best hope could be to answer questions by talking about an entirely different issue. So when Diane Abbott is asked whether Labour’s plans for education have been properly costed, she says, “I’m not sure. But I’ve been reading about koala bears. Did you know they’re not bears at all but marsupials, closer to the kangaroo?”
It doesn’t help that, as in any election, the Conservatives have much greater resources. If we lived in a proper democracy, these would be evened up.
Each newspaper would have to support a different party for each election, so The Daily Telegraph might support the Greens. And the letters column would read: “Dear Sir; with regard to current controversies concerning the use of television replays in Test match cricket, which jeopardise the ultimate authority of the umpire and therefore threaten the rule of law itself, it occurs to me the most sensible way to resolve these matters might be to renationalise the railways and install 40,000 wind turbines round Sussex. Yours sincerely, Sir Bartholomew Clutterbuck.”
And if a wealthy businessman has money to donate to a party, the one it went to would be decided by lottery. So if Lord Bamford wants to contribute to society, he hands over £1m, then is thrilled to learn it’s gone to the Maoist Rastafarian Ban Fishing on Sundays Alliance.
The Conservatives would be delighted to give money to Maoists, because Mao was always strong and stable. You didn’t get him calling off a Great Leap Forward because he was offended by being called a mugwump. General Franco, Stalin, Ayatollah Khomeini – these are the strong and stable models to aspire to, not these weedy liberal Gandhi types, though Nelson Mandela might qualify as a figure of stability, as he kept to pretty much the same routine for 27 years.
The Conservative slogan for the election is “Strong and stable”. Because that’s the main thing we want from a government, strength and stability, like you get with Vladimir Putin.
Only idiots get obsessed with the details of what their leaders are strong and stable about, because the important thing is they’re strong while they’re doing it, and they keep doing it even if it’s insane.
Jeremy Corbyn should prove he can match their stability by burning down a public building at precisely half past nine every morning, and display his strength by punching people in the face as they run out the door screaming.
But this would barely touch the Government’s record of strength and stability. For example, every year since they took over in 2010, there has been a rise in the numbers dependent on food banks, going up every year, nice and stable, not haphazardly up one year and down the next so you don’t know where you stand. And weak governments might see hungry kids and feel a pang of conscience, but not this lot because they’re like sodding Iron Man.
George Osborne was so stable he missed every target he set, not just a few or 80 per cent, but every single one because business needs predictability, and when Osborne announced a target, our wealth creators could guarantee he’d come nowhere near it.
I expect they’ll also refer every day to their universal credit scheme, which is five years behind schedule and cost £16bn. You have to be strong to lose that amount and not care. Weak people would get to £3-4bn and think “Oh dear, maybe we should stop”, but not if you’re strong and stable.
The current Chancellor is nearly as impressive. After the Tories promised that under no circumstances would they raise National Insurance, Philip Hammond then raised National Insurance and cancelled raising it a few days later as it was so unpopular, exuding the sort of strength and stability that puts you in mind of Churchill.
Boris Johnson has exhibited the same values, displaying why we can trust him to stand up to dictators such as Syria’s President Assad. After one of Assad’s military victories, Boris wrote: “I cannot conceal my elation as the news comes in from Palmyra and it is reported that the Syrian army is genuinely back in control of the entire Unesco site… any sane person should feel a sense of satisfaction at what Assad’s troops have accomplished”, in an article headlined: “Bravo for Assad – he is a vile tyrant but he has saved Palmyra from [Isis]”.
Since then, the Foreign Secretary has steadfastly stuck with maximum stability to this view, with only the mildest amendment such as: “We must bomb Assad immediately; no sane person could ever wish him to control anything unless they’re a communist terrorist mugwump.”
What a model of stability, because most military experts agree it doesn’t really matter which side you’re on in a war, as long as you don’t compromise your strength or stability by not being in the war at all.
Then there was the Prime Minister’s line on not having an election, from which she hasn’t wavered one bit, and her insistence that we had to remain in the EU, which she’s adjusted a tiny bit to insisting we can only thrive outside the EU, but always either inside or outside, and never once has she suggested we must be somewhere else such as a split in the cosmos consisting of dark antimatter in which we can be both in and out of the EU due to time and space being governed by the European Court of Human Rights.
Thankfully the Labour Party is standing up to Conservative arguments with a dynamic campaign in which they explain how miserable everyone is.
The next party political broadcast will consist of Labour leaders walking through a shopping centre in Wolverhampton, pointing at people and saying: “Look at that bloke – utterly crestfallen. That’s a Tory government for you.”
It feels as if most people have already switched off in this election, so Labour’s best hope could be to answer questions by talking about an entirely different issue. So when Diane Abbott is asked whether Labour’s plans for education have been properly costed, she says, “I’m not sure. But I’ve been reading about koala bears. Did you know they’re not bears at all but marsupials, closer to the kangaroo?”
It doesn’t help that, as in any election, the Conservatives have much greater resources. If we lived in a proper democracy, these would be evened up.
Each newspaper would have to support a different party for each election, so The Daily Telegraph might support the Greens. And the letters column would read: “Dear Sir; with regard to current controversies concerning the use of television replays in Test match cricket, which jeopardise the ultimate authority of the umpire and therefore threaten the rule of law itself, it occurs to me the most sensible way to resolve these matters might be to renationalise the railways and install 40,000 wind turbines round Sussex. Yours sincerely, Sir Bartholomew Clutterbuck.”
And if a wealthy businessman has money to donate to a party, the one it went to would be decided by lottery. So if Lord Bamford wants to contribute to society, he hands over £1m, then is thrilled to learn it’s gone to the Maoist Rastafarian Ban Fishing on Sundays Alliance.
The Conservatives would be delighted to give money to Maoists, because Mao was always strong and stable. You didn’t get him calling off a Great Leap Forward because he was offended by being called a mugwump. General Franco, Stalin, Ayatollah Khomeini – these are the strong and stable models to aspire to, not these weedy liberal Gandhi types, though Nelson Mandela might qualify as a figure of stability, as he kept to pretty much the same routine for 27 years.
Saturday 26 January 2013
A Telling Silence
The issues politicians do not discuss are as telling and decisive as those they do. And the loudest silence surrounds the issue of property taxes.
You can learn as much about a country from its silences as you can from its obsessions. The issues politicians do not discuss are as telling and decisive as those they do. While the government’s cuts beggar the vulnerable and gut public services, it’s time to talk about the turns not taken, the opportunities foregone: the taxes which could have spared us every turn of the screw.
The extent of the forgetting is extraordinary. Take, for example, capital gains tax. Before the election, the Liberal Democrats promised to raise it from 18% to “the same rates as income” (in other words a top rate of 50%), to ensure that private equity bosses were no longer paying lower rates of tax than their office cleaners (1). It made sense, as it would have removed the bosses’ incentive to collect their earnings as capital. Despite a powerful economic case, the government refused to raise the top rate above 28%. The Lib Dems protested for a day or two (2), and have remained silent ever since. In the parliamentary debate about cuts to social security, this missed opportunity wasn’t mentioned once (3).
But at least that tax has risen. In just two and half years, the government has cut corporation tax three times. It will fall from 28% in 2010 to 21% in 2014 (4,5). George Osborne, the chancellor, boasted last month that this “is the lowest rate of any major western economy”(6): he is consciously setting up a destructive competition with other nations, creating new excuses further to reduce the UK rate.
Labour’s near-silence on this issue is easily explained. Under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who were often as keen as the Conservatives to appease corporate power, the rate was reduced from 33% to 28%. Prefiguring Osborne’s boast, in 1999 Brown bragged that the rate he had set was “the lowest rate of any major industrialised country anywhere, including Japan and the United States.” (7) What a legacy for a Labour government.
As for a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions, after an initial flutter of interest you are now more likely to hear the call of the jubjub bird in the House of Commons. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, a tax rate of just 0.01% would raise £25bn a year, rendering many of the chamber’s earnest debates about the devastating cuts void (8). Silence also surrounds the notion of a windfall tax on extreme wealth. And to say that Professor Greg Philo’s arresting idea of transferring the national debt to those who possess assets worth £1m or more has failed to ignite the flame of passion in parliament would not overstate the case(9).
But the loudest silence surrounds the issue of property taxes. The most expensive flat in that favourite haunt of the international super-rich, One Hyde Park, cost £135m. The owner pays £1,369 in council tax, or 0.001% of its value(10). Last year the Independent revealed that the Sultan of Brunei pays only £32 a month more for his pleasure dome in Kensington Palace Gardens than some of the poorest people in the same borough (11). A mansion tax – slapped down by David Cameron in October (12) – is only the beginning of what the owners of such places should pay. For the simplest, fairest and least avoidable levy is one which the major parties simply will not contemplate. It’s called land value tax.
The term is a misnomer. It’s not really a tax. It’s a return to the public of the benefits we have donated to the landlords. When land rises in value, the government and the people deliver a great unearned gift to those who happen to own it.
In 1909 a dangerous subversive explained the issue thus. “Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains – and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived. … the unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.” (13)
Who was this firebrand? Winston Churchill. As Churchill, Adam Smith (14) and many others have pointed out, those who own the land skim wealth from everyone else, without exertion or enterprise. They “levy a toll upon all other forms of wealth and every form of industry.”(15) Land value tax recoups this toll.
It has a number of other benefits (16). It stops the speculative land hoarding that prevents homes from being built. It ensures that the most valuable real estate – in city centres – is developed first, discouraging urban sprawl. It prevents speculative property bubbles, of the kind that have recently trashed the economies of Ireland, Spain and other nations and which make rents and first homes so hard to afford. Because it does not affect the supply of land (they stopped making it some time ago), it cannot cause the rents that people must pay to the landlords to be raised. It is easy to calculate and hard to avoid: you can’t hide your land in London in a secret account in the Cayman Islands. And it could probably discharge the entire deficit.
It is altogether remarkable, in these straitened and inequitable times, that land value tax is not at the heart of the current political debate. Perhaps it is a sign of how powerful the rent-seeking class in Britain has become. While the silence surrounding this obvious solution exposes Labour’s limitations, it also exposes the contradiction at heart of the Conservative Party. The Conservatives claim, in David Cameron’s words, to be “the party of enterprise”(17). But those who benefit most from its policies are those who are rich already. It is, in reality, the party of rent.
This is where the debate about workers and shirkers, strivers and skivers should have led. The skivers and shirkers sucking the money out of your pockets are not the recipients of social security demonised by the Daily Mail and the Conservative Party, the overwhelming majority of whom are honest claimants. We are being parasitised from above, not below, and the tax system should reflect this.
The extent of the forgetting is extraordinary. Take, for example, capital gains tax. Before the election, the Liberal Democrats promised to raise it from 18% to “the same rates as income” (in other words a top rate of 50%), to ensure that private equity bosses were no longer paying lower rates of tax than their office cleaners (1). It made sense, as it would have removed the bosses’ incentive to collect their earnings as capital. Despite a powerful economic case, the government refused to raise the top rate above 28%. The Lib Dems protested for a day or two (2), and have remained silent ever since. In the parliamentary debate about cuts to social security, this missed opportunity wasn’t mentioned once (3).
But at least that tax has risen. In just two and half years, the government has cut corporation tax three times. It will fall from 28% in 2010 to 21% in 2014 (4,5). George Osborne, the chancellor, boasted last month that this “is the lowest rate of any major western economy”(6): he is consciously setting up a destructive competition with other nations, creating new excuses further to reduce the UK rate.
Labour’s near-silence on this issue is easily explained. Under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who were often as keen as the Conservatives to appease corporate power, the rate was reduced from 33% to 28%. Prefiguring Osborne’s boast, in 1999 Brown bragged that the rate he had set was “the lowest rate of any major industrialised country anywhere, including Japan and the United States.” (7) What a legacy for a Labour government.
As for a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions, after an initial flutter of interest you are now more likely to hear the call of the jubjub bird in the House of Commons. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, a tax rate of just 0.01% would raise £25bn a year, rendering many of the chamber’s earnest debates about the devastating cuts void (8). Silence also surrounds the notion of a windfall tax on extreme wealth. And to say that Professor Greg Philo’s arresting idea of transferring the national debt to those who possess assets worth £1m or more has failed to ignite the flame of passion in parliament would not overstate the case(9).
But the loudest silence surrounds the issue of property taxes. The most expensive flat in that favourite haunt of the international super-rich, One Hyde Park, cost £135m. The owner pays £1,369 in council tax, or 0.001% of its value(10). Last year the Independent revealed that the Sultan of Brunei pays only £32 a month more for his pleasure dome in Kensington Palace Gardens than some of the poorest people in the same borough (11). A mansion tax – slapped down by David Cameron in October (12) – is only the beginning of what the owners of such places should pay. For the simplest, fairest and least avoidable levy is one which the major parties simply will not contemplate. It’s called land value tax.
The term is a misnomer. It’s not really a tax. It’s a return to the public of the benefits we have donated to the landlords. When land rises in value, the government and the people deliver a great unearned gift to those who happen to own it.
In 1909 a dangerous subversive explained the issue thus. “Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains – and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived. … the unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.” (13)
Who was this firebrand? Winston Churchill. As Churchill, Adam Smith (14) and many others have pointed out, those who own the land skim wealth from everyone else, without exertion or enterprise. They “levy a toll upon all other forms of wealth and every form of industry.”(15) Land value tax recoups this toll.
It has a number of other benefits (16). It stops the speculative land hoarding that prevents homes from being built. It ensures that the most valuable real estate – in city centres – is developed first, discouraging urban sprawl. It prevents speculative property bubbles, of the kind that have recently trashed the economies of Ireland, Spain and other nations and which make rents and first homes so hard to afford. Because it does not affect the supply of land (they stopped making it some time ago), it cannot cause the rents that people must pay to the landlords to be raised. It is easy to calculate and hard to avoid: you can’t hide your land in London in a secret account in the Cayman Islands. And it could probably discharge the entire deficit.
It is altogether remarkable, in these straitened and inequitable times, that land value tax is not at the heart of the current political debate. Perhaps it is a sign of how powerful the rent-seeking class in Britain has become. While the silence surrounding this obvious solution exposes Labour’s limitations, it also exposes the contradiction at heart of the Conservative Party. The Conservatives claim, in David Cameron’s words, to be “the party of enterprise”(17). But those who benefit most from its policies are those who are rich already. It is, in reality, the party of rent.
This is where the debate about workers and shirkers, strivers and skivers should have led. The skivers and shirkers sucking the money out of your pockets are not the recipients of social security demonised by the Daily Mail and the Conservative Party, the overwhelming majority of whom are honest claimants. We are being parasitised from above, not below, and the tax system should reflect this.
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