Cameron's immigration hierarchy: Rich Indians good, eastern Europeans bad

David Cameron's welcome mat to 'hardworking' Indians contrasts with attitudes towards the new EU entrants

• 
• • Alana Lentin
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 February 2013 16.00 GMT

David Cameron speaks at a business seminar in Mumbai on February 18. Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images

 

In The End of Tolerance, Arun Kundnani argues that the ability to integrate in today's Britain is based less on how you look and more on whether or not you are deemed culturally compatible. This may seem like progress but the sliding scale along which humanity is now organised is not unlike the racial hierarchies of old; it's just less colour-coded. So, an English-educated Indian professional may be more acceptable than a white, jobless Bulgarian or Romanian. This is exactly on point as we witness David Cameron's rush to India, a country whose economic rise he described as "one of the great phenomena of the century".

Cameron and his entourage of CEOs and vice-chancellors will undoubtedly speed past the slums rapidly being cleared for the shiny new malls being built on every spare inch of India's major cities. The majority of Indians – arguably worse off since the advent of neoliberalism in the "largest democracy" – are not who Cameron has in mind when he talks about unleashing "India's potential".
Back in the UK, the imminent arrival of Bulgarians and Romanians with new EU rights is being painted as a make or break electoral issue. They are the victims of a "xeno-racism" that holds impoverished strangers, including whites, in its sight. In contrast, Indian students with the cash to pay premium fees to study at British universities will, according to Cameron, have the red carpet rolled out and will not, he has claimed, be subject to limits on how long they can stay and work. How such "positive discrimination" will be justified in light of the Tories' commitment to a cap on immigration in the tens of thousands per year remains to be seen.

Cultural stereotypes abound. Indians – not Pakistanis mind – are deemed hardworking and resourceful with infinite admiration for the UK and its traditions. Colonialism is rewritten as a "special relationship". Indians (Hindus) assimilate into the British way of life, speak English, and are religious moderates. They are not a drain, rather an opportunity for investment in an ailing British economy.

Romanians and Bulgarians, on the other hand, are today's "wretched of the earth", described by Trevor Kavanagh in The Sun as variably corrupt, as rapists and as pickpockets. The Tories will lose the Eastleigh byelection, he warns, unless the government puts its foot down and refuses to grant full EU rights to Romanian and Bulgarian citizens before they descend on the UK.

The comparison of Cameron's rhetoric on India and Britain's newest EU partners reveals how, on the surface at least, racism is so often influenced by economics. The successful are pitted against the scroungers, no matter the extent to which either stereotype holds water. Immigration with a capital "I" – as a headline rather than a life experience – has always needed heroes and villains, those who gave versus those who took, those who built versus those who destroyed. Racism works to attach these apparently natural attributes to whole groups of people and that is why it is never detachable from the immigration "debate". This is the message that Cameron is sending: we will tolerate those who can benefit us, but not those who fail to make us prosper.

Indians are no more universally assimilable than south-eastern Europeans are detrimental to the UK. Indeed, the opposite was once deemed to be the case when skin colour, rather than cultural compatibility, influenced migration policy more explicitly and arrivals from the east were dissidents, not purported social security hunters. Only when we decouple immigration from race will the arbitrariness of the ranking of populations according to profitability become apparent and racial generalisations – positive or negative – be shown up for the poverty of the ideas that lie beneath them.

The graph that shows how far David Cameron wants to shrink the state

If the Tories get their way, within five years the UK will have a smaller public sector than any major developed nation

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Monday 15 October 2012 20.00 BST

Government spending as a percentage of national GDP. Photograph: IMF WEO Database Oct 2012

This column is normally accompanied by a photo; an illustration that takes its cue from the text. But not today. The chart you see on this page is plainly not decorative: it is the main event. All I'm going to discuss is its implications.

Drawing on IMF figures published last week, the graph compares what will happen to government spending in Britain up to 2017 with the outlook for Germany and the US. And what it shows is that the UK will plunge from public spending on a par with Germany in 2009, to spending less than the US by 2017. Had France, Sweden or Canada been included on this graph, the UK would still come bottom. If George Osborne gets his way, within the next five years, Britain will have a smaller public sector than any other major developed nation.

Fan or critic, nearly everyone now agrees that this government wants to shrink the state, but very few take on board what that means. This graph shows just how radical those ministerial plans are. Particularly striking is the fact that Britain will end up spending less as a proportion of its national income than even the US, the international byword for a decrepit public sector. According to Peter Taylor-Gooby, professor of social policy at Kent, this will be the first time it has happened since at least 1980 and possibly in recorded history. For it to take place within half a decade is a shift so dramatic that few people in frontline politics, let alone among the electorate, have understood its implications.

Forget all that ministerial guff about the necessity of cutting the public sector to spur economic growth. Had that argument been true, British businesses would be in leonine form by now, instead of their current chronic enfeeblement. It was notable at last week's Tory party conference how Osborne and David Cameron didn't even try to argue for the economic benefits of austerity – how could they? – but grimly asserted that there was no alternative.

Forget, too, the argument that only cuts have kept Britain's borrowing costs from rocketing. In the IMF's summer healthcheck for the UK was another chart which showed that the only nations where interest rates had spiralled upwards were those in the eurozone, and those without control of their own currency and monetary policy. Every other major economy, no matter what their debt load, was able to borrow from the financial markets as cheaply as ever.

Strip away the usual economic and financial alibis for such drastic austerity and what you're inevitably left with is a purely political motive: namely, a desire to transform the British state from being recognisably European, with continental levels of public spending, to something sub-American in its miserliness.

Let me make two caveats. First, there was no way Britain was going to maintain public spending at 2009 levels. That year, the Labour government threw the kitchen sink at the economy, after which you would expect some belt-tightening. Still, as Carl Emmerson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies points out, after both world wars, the level of public spending in Britain rose permanently; you might expect something similar after a once-in-a-lifetime financial crisis. Given how fast Britain is ageing, and how much we will need to spend on pensions and care for the elderly, there is no reason why the state in Britain should shrink back to some magic level of 40% of the economy.

Second, this chart is based on current US budget plans: if Mitt Romney moves into the White House next January, or even if Barack Obama is re-elected and has to strike a bargain with intransigent Republicans, then Washington is also likely to make stringent cuts. But that last qualification only reinforces the larger argument. Whether in Britain or the US, the right are trying to whip the rest of us into a giant race to the bottom, where public services, welfare entitlements and employment rights are all to be tossed overboard.

Cameron admitted as much in last Wednesday's conference speech. Lumping together Nigeria with China and India and Brazil, he described them as "the countries on the rise … lean, fit, obsessed with enterprise, spending money on the future – on education, incredible infrastructure and technology". As anyone who has ever tried to keep a car on the potholed roads of Bihar, in northern India, will know, that description is a giant porky. But Cameron wanted to draw a comparison with "the countries on the slide … fat, sclerotic, over-regulated, spending money on unaffordable welfare systems, huge pension bills, unreformed public services".

From compassionate Conservative to growth rainmaker to state-shrinker, Cameron has gone through a huge change since 2005. But that is nothing like what lies ahead for the rest of Britain in the next five years. Prepare yourself for welfare to be downsized into American-style workfare, for public-sector jobs to be turned into a second-class employment and for services, from school to healthcare, to demand that users pay more to get something decent. The future is American.

It's David Cameron that's anti-business

Campaigners against business abuse believe in wealth creation, not corporate abuse of so-called free markets

• 
• • Richard Murphy for Tax Research UK, part of the Guardian Comment Network
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 23 February 2012 13.06 GMT

David Cameron has condemned 'anti-business snobbery'. Photograph: Pool/Reuters

David Cameron will use today's speech to the Business in the Community charity to warn that "we've heard some dangerous rhetoric creep into our national debate that wealth creation is somehow antisocial, that people in business are out for themselves".

Cameron's on dodgy ground here. First, he's flip-flopping, which is amusing to see when Labour has opened a clear lead on this issue. But more important, he's completely missing the point.
The problems that those of us who campaign against business abuse have are that there aren't free markets, and as such wealth creation is not taking place but has been replaced by corporate abuse and that is not socially progressive and has instead proved to be massively socially destructive.

Let me explain. When Cameron refers to business leaders he's invariably talking about the leaders of big business. All, just about without exception, are monopolists or oligopolists. They exploit markets to make excessive profits at cost to consumers. They use those excessive profits to pay themselves vastly inflated sums. That's not wealth creation – that's rent-seeking behaviour that is straightforwardly abusive.

In fact, it's just an act of redistribution, but from the 99% to the 1%. We object to that. We demand information so we can appraise what's going on so it can be stopped. That's one of the reasons for demanding country-by-country reporting – which Cameron and the Tories have been cool about. Cameron has shown himself to be on the side of abuse as a result.

And those big business leaders exploit their position to avoid tax using tax havens. Cameron and the Tories are encouraging that. First they're doing it by passing new legislation that is going to positively encourage large companies (and only large companies, mind: smaller ones are excluded) to set up their treasury functions outside the UK in future and pay just 5.75% tax on them as a result.

Second, while Labour strongly supported country-by-country reporting that would require companies to disclose just what profits they made in tax havens and other countries, and where they do or don't pay their tax, the Tories have gone out of their way to support proposals from big accountants like PWC that do just the opposite because their proposals would ignore all places where no tax was paid – like tax havens. To break monopoly power and rent-seeking behaviour that exploits tax loopholes by exposing it would support wealth creation rather than wealth abuse, but Cameron isn't taking the steps to support that wealth creation. He seems to prefer the continuing secrecy that has supported the abuse.

And there are also aren't free markets because government won't provide the regulation to make sure all businesses comply with regulation or pay their taxes, as I've shown. So there's an unlevel playing field. That's a profoundly anti-business policy on the part of the Tories.

The result is that Cameron's policies encourage shifting of profits to the greedy, the monopolist, the abuser of the consumer, those who ignore regulation and those who are fraudulent. That's not socially progressive. That's socially harmful.

That's why we object to his policies. And whatever the story, while he does not walk the walk, those campaigners like the Tax Justice Network – who believe that being pro-business means being pro-transparency and accountability, being pro-everyone paying their tax and being anti-market abuse measures like tax havens and opacity – will continue to pursue their arguments. Because they're the real pro-wealth creators and real pro-free marketeers, when free means people have the information they need to make proper decisions freely available to them – which is the pre-condition of free markets as anyone who has done some training in economics knows.

Trust Business above all is David Cameron's motto.

Britain is being rebuilt in aid of corporate power

Trust business, Cameron tells us, self-regulation is a force for social good. Silly me – I thought it was an invitation to disaster

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 27 February 2012

Illustration by Daniel Pudles

 

They used to do it subtly; they don't bother any more. Last week a column in the Telegraph argued that businesses should get the vote. Though they pay tax, Damian Reece maintained, they have "no say in the running of local or national government". To remedy this cruel circumscription, he suggested that elections in the UK should follow the example set by the City of London Corporation. This is the nation's last rotten borough, in which ballots in 21 of its 25 wards are controlled by companies, whose bosses appoint the voters. I expect to see Mr Reece pursue this noble cause by throwing himself under the Queen's horse.

Contrast this call for an extension of the franchise with a piece in the same paper last year, advocating an income qualification for voters. Only those who pay at least £100 a year in income tax, argued Ian Cowie, another senior editor at the Telegraph, should be allowed to vote. Blaming the credit crisis on the unemployed (who, as we know, lie in bed all day devising credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations), Cowie averred that "it's time to restore the link between paying something into society and voting on decisions about how it is run". This qualification, he was good enough to inform us, could exclude "the majority of voters in some metropolitan areas today". The proposal was repeated by Benedict Brogan, the Telegraph's deputy editor.

No representation without taxation: wasn't that Alan B'stard's slogan in the satirical series The New Statesman? Votes for business, none for the poor: this would formalise the corporate assault on democracy that has been gathering pace for the past 30 years.

This column is a plea for distrust. Distrust is the resource on which democracy relies. Distrust inspires the scrutiny and accountability without which representation becomes a lie. Distrust is all that stands between us and bamboozlement by people who, like Reece, Cowie and Brogan, channel the instincts of the billionaire owners of newspapers and broadcasters.

Last week David Cameron argued that those who say business "isn't really to be trusted" do so as a result of "snobbery". Business, in fact, is "the most powerful force for social progress the world has ever known". Not democracy, education, science, justice or public health: business. You need only consider the exemplary social progress in Zaire under Mobutu, Chile under Pinochet, or the Philippines under Marcos – who opened their countries to the kind of corporate free-for-all that Cameron's backers dream of – to grasp the universal truth of this statement.

He gave some examples to support his contention that regulation can be replaced by trust. The public health responsibility deal, which transfers responsibility for reducing obesity and alcoholism to fast-food outlets, drinks firms and supermarkets, reaches, Cameron claimed, the parts "which the state just can't".

Under the deal, Subway and Costa are "putting calorie information up front when people are buying". The state couldn't possibly legislate for that, could it? Far better to leave it to the companies, who can decide for themselves whether they inform people that a larduccino coffee with suet sprinkles contains no more calories than the average Olympic sprinter burns in a month. He forgot to mention the much longer list of companies that have failed to display this information.

Another substitute for regulation, he suggested, is a programme called Every Business Commits. Through its website I found the government's list of "case studies of responsible business practice". Here I learned that British American Tobacco is promoting public health by educating and counselling its workers about HIV. The drinks giant Diageo is improving its waste water treatment process. Bombardier Aerospace is enhancing the environmental performance of its factories, in which it manufactures, er, private jets. RWE npower, which runs some of Britain's biggest coal and gas power stations, teaches children how to "to think about their responsibilities in reducing climate change".

All these are worthy causes, but they are either peripheral to the main social harms these companies cause or look to my distrustful eye like window dressing. Nor do I see how they differ from the "moral offsetting" that Cameron says happened in the past but doesn't today. But this tokenism, in the prime minister's view, should inspire us to trust companies to the extent that some of the regulations affecting their core business can be removed.

We are living through remarkable times. The government, supported by the corporate press, is engaged in a naked attempt to rebuild the life of this country around the demands of business. Extending the project begun by Tony Blair, Cameron is creating an economy in which much of the private sector depends on state contracts, and in which the government's core responsibility is to provide them. If this requires the destruction of effective public healthcare and reliable state education, it is of no concern to an economic class that uses neither.

The corporations gaining ever greater powers will be subject to less democratic oversight and restraint, in the form of regulation. Despite the obvious lesson of the credit crunch – that self-regulation is an invitation to disaster – Cameron wants to extend the principle to every corner of the economy. Trust them, he says: what can possibly go wrong?