Showing posts with label Europe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Europe. Show all posts
Monday, 27 May 2024
Tuesday, 20 February 2024
Wednesday, 20 December 2017
May can berate Putin. But Brexit is his dream policy
As the Russian leader tries to diminish Europe, he finds ideologues such as Boris Johnson are doing the job for him
Rafael Behr in The Guardian
With lighter diplomatic baggage, Boris Johnson might have been a hit in Moscow. The foreign secretary’s artfully dishevelled, pseudo-Churchillian kitsch is not to everyone’s taste, but it could work in the bombastic idiom of Russian politics.
But as Theresa May’s emissary to the court of Vladimir Putin later this week, Johnson faces a tough audience. May has accused the Kremlin of aggressively targeting an international order based on law, open economies and free societies. In a speech last month, the prime minister listed offences including territorial theft from Ukraine, cyber-attacks on ministries and parliaments, meddling in elections, and spreading fake news to sow discord.
Russian interference in British democracy is currently being investigated by the Electoral Commission and parliament’s culture, media and sports committee. The latter’s chair, Tory MP Damian Collins, has signalled that he doesn’t believe recent claims by Twitter and Facebook that Kremlin-funded efforts to boost Brexit in 2016 were negligible.
He is right to be sceptical. The tech companies have a record of stonewalling any suggestion that their business model has been co-opted for organised malfeasance. They have commercial incentives to duck moral responsibility for the sinister content shared on their networks. It is beyond doubt that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had a hefty Russian boost. Facebook has removed tens of thousands of pages believed to be involved in sabotage of French and German elections. British ballots are unlikely to have escaped dirty money and molestation by troll battalions.
That doesn’t mean Brexit is a conspiracy that blew in on the east wind. Mistrust of the EU was not made in a factory outside St Petersburg. To connect tweets in Murmansk to a leave majority in Merthyr Tydfil misses the point about misinformation. The goal is not always to execute a specific outcome but to stoke existing tensions, nurture rage, exacerbate polarisation and shroud everything in such a fog of lies that truth becomes ungraspable. The purpose of fake news is to debase the currency of all news, and so undermine the foundations of pluralistic politics.
The advantage to Russia is in weakening western governments and their alliances. Putin despises Nato and EU influence in countries that were, until 1991, Soviet territory. He sees their sovereignty as fictions imposed by enemies. Undermining European and US resolve to uphold their borders is his goal.
There is a strain of Brexitism that is complicit in that project, regardless of whether leave campaigns knowingly or unwittingly took laundered roubles. Nigel Farage’s admiration for Putin is no secret: he has pushed the Kremlin line on Ukraine, preposterously depicting Crimea’s annexation as a defensive answer to EU provocation. He has described Russian military support for Syria’s murderous president Bashar al-Assad as a “brilliant” manoeuvre.
Putinophilia has the same cause as Farage’s Trump fandom. It is the nationalist’s fetish for a strongman, combined with nostalgia for the days when the world was run as a game between big countries using little countries as chips. It is unresolved grief at the UK’s 20th-century relegation from the ranks of imperial pawn-pushers.
That slow-burn trauma is analogous to the more sudden loss of status mourned by Russia, the reversal of which is Putin’s mission in life. During the cold war, British ideologues who swallowed a Kremlin agenda and regurgitated it as their own used to be called “useful idiots”. The difference now is they aren’t confined to the far left. Some of them are in government.
We may never know how much influence the Kremlin had in the referendum, but we can be sure its result was popular there
The Brexit delusion is that enslavement by Brussels inhibits our promotion back to the global power premier league. Boris Johnson is not immune to this fantasy. He would rather be a foreign secretary in the 19th-century style of Lord Castlereagh, carving out spheres of influence at the Congress of Vienna, than yawn through EU council meetings.
It is true that the EU empowers smaller countries. Witness the clout that Ireland has had in Brexit talks. But Britain has also benefited from aggregating its medium-sized might with Germany, France and 25 other nations. That is not a Brussels empire. It is a model of peaceful, collaborative power without historical equal.
May once understood this. In the referendum campaign she made a solid case for EU membership on the grounds that it could “maximise Britain’s security, prosperity and influence in the world”. When she now promises a “deep and special partnership”, she is not just talking about trade, she is pledging loyalty to European democracy as one of its few significant military underwriters. When the prime minister berates Putin for undermining institutions that uphold the rule of law, she is signalling strategic solidarity, not economic alignment, with the EU.
This is chasing a bolting horse when the stable door hangs off its hinges. We may never know how much influence the Kremlin had in the referendum, but we can be sure its result was popular there. Brexit has already fractured an alliance that will be hard to repair. May will never be a friend of Putin, but he doesn’t need her friendship when she is committed to a policy he would choose for her anyway.
Rafael Behr in The Guardian
With lighter diplomatic baggage, Boris Johnson might have been a hit in Moscow. The foreign secretary’s artfully dishevelled, pseudo-Churchillian kitsch is not to everyone’s taste, but it could work in the bombastic idiom of Russian politics.
But as Theresa May’s emissary to the court of Vladimir Putin later this week, Johnson faces a tough audience. May has accused the Kremlin of aggressively targeting an international order based on law, open economies and free societies. In a speech last month, the prime minister listed offences including territorial theft from Ukraine, cyber-attacks on ministries and parliaments, meddling in elections, and spreading fake news to sow discord.
Russian interference in British democracy is currently being investigated by the Electoral Commission and parliament’s culture, media and sports committee. The latter’s chair, Tory MP Damian Collins, has signalled that he doesn’t believe recent claims by Twitter and Facebook that Kremlin-funded efforts to boost Brexit in 2016 were negligible.
He is right to be sceptical. The tech companies have a record of stonewalling any suggestion that their business model has been co-opted for organised malfeasance. They have commercial incentives to duck moral responsibility for the sinister content shared on their networks. It is beyond doubt that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had a hefty Russian boost. Facebook has removed tens of thousands of pages believed to be involved in sabotage of French and German elections. British ballots are unlikely to have escaped dirty money and molestation by troll battalions.
That doesn’t mean Brexit is a conspiracy that blew in on the east wind. Mistrust of the EU was not made in a factory outside St Petersburg. To connect tweets in Murmansk to a leave majority in Merthyr Tydfil misses the point about misinformation. The goal is not always to execute a specific outcome but to stoke existing tensions, nurture rage, exacerbate polarisation and shroud everything in such a fog of lies that truth becomes ungraspable. The purpose of fake news is to debase the currency of all news, and so undermine the foundations of pluralistic politics.
The advantage to Russia is in weakening western governments and their alliances. Putin despises Nato and EU influence in countries that were, until 1991, Soviet territory. He sees their sovereignty as fictions imposed by enemies. Undermining European and US resolve to uphold their borders is his goal.
There is a strain of Brexitism that is complicit in that project, regardless of whether leave campaigns knowingly or unwittingly took laundered roubles. Nigel Farage’s admiration for Putin is no secret: he has pushed the Kremlin line on Ukraine, preposterously depicting Crimea’s annexation as a defensive answer to EU provocation. He has described Russian military support for Syria’s murderous president Bashar al-Assad as a “brilliant” manoeuvre.
Putinophilia has the same cause as Farage’s Trump fandom. It is the nationalist’s fetish for a strongman, combined with nostalgia for the days when the world was run as a game between big countries using little countries as chips. It is unresolved grief at the UK’s 20th-century relegation from the ranks of imperial pawn-pushers.
That slow-burn trauma is analogous to the more sudden loss of status mourned by Russia, the reversal of which is Putin’s mission in life. During the cold war, British ideologues who swallowed a Kremlin agenda and regurgitated it as their own used to be called “useful idiots”. The difference now is they aren’t confined to the far left. Some of them are in government.
We may never know how much influence the Kremlin had in the referendum, but we can be sure its result was popular there
The Brexit delusion is that enslavement by Brussels inhibits our promotion back to the global power premier league. Boris Johnson is not immune to this fantasy. He would rather be a foreign secretary in the 19th-century style of Lord Castlereagh, carving out spheres of influence at the Congress of Vienna, than yawn through EU council meetings.
It is true that the EU empowers smaller countries. Witness the clout that Ireland has had in Brexit talks. But Britain has also benefited from aggregating its medium-sized might with Germany, France and 25 other nations. That is not a Brussels empire. It is a model of peaceful, collaborative power without historical equal.
May once understood this. In the referendum campaign she made a solid case for EU membership on the grounds that it could “maximise Britain’s security, prosperity and influence in the world”. When she now promises a “deep and special partnership”, she is not just talking about trade, she is pledging loyalty to European democracy as one of its few significant military underwriters. When the prime minister berates Putin for undermining institutions that uphold the rule of law, she is signalling strategic solidarity, not economic alignment, with the EU.
This is chasing a bolting horse when the stable door hangs off its hinges. We may never know how much influence the Kremlin had in the referendum, but we can be sure its result was popular there. Brexit has already fractured an alliance that will be hard to repair. May will never be a friend of Putin, but he doesn’t need her friendship when she is committed to a policy he would choose for her anyway.
Sunday, 29 October 2017
From climate change to robots: what politicians aren’t telling us
Simon Kuper in The Financial Times
On US television news this autumn, wildfires and hurricanes have replaced terrorism and — mostly — even mass shootings as primetime content. Climate change is making natural disasters more frequent, and more Americans now live in at-risk areas. But meanwhile, Donald Trump argues on Twitter about what he supposedly said to a soldier’s widow. So far, Trump is dangerous less because of what he says (hot air) or does (little) than because of the issues he ignores.
On US television news this autumn, wildfires and hurricanes have replaced terrorism and — mostly — even mass shootings as primetime content. Climate change is making natural disasters more frequent, and more Americans now live in at-risk areas. But meanwhile, Donald Trump argues on Twitter about what he supposedly said to a soldier’s widow. So far, Trump is dangerous less because of what he says (hot air) or does (little) than because of the issues he ignores.
He’s not alone: politics in many western countries has become a displacement activity. Most politicians bang on about identity while ignoring automation, climate change and the imminent revolution in medicine. They talk more about the 1950s than the 2020s. This is partly because they want to distract voters from real problems, and partly because today’s politicians tend to be lawyers, entertainers and ex-journalists who know less about tech than the average 14-year-old. (Trump said in a sworn deposition in 2007 that he didn’t own a computer; his secretary sent his emails.) But the new forces are already transforming politics.
Ironically, given the volume of American climate denial, the US looks like becoming the first western country to be hit by climate change. Each new natural disaster will prompt political squabbles over whether Washington should bail out the stricken region. At-risk cities such as Miami and New Orleans will gradually lose appeal as the risks become uninsurable. If you buy an apartment on Miami Beach now, are you confident it will survive another 30 years undamaged? And who will want to buy it from you in 2047? Miami could fade as Detroit did.
American climate denial may fade too, as tech companies displace Big Oil as the country’s chief lobbyists. Already in the first half of this year, Amazon outspent Exxon and Walmart on lobbying. Facebook, now taking a kicking over fake news, will lobby its way back. Meanwhile, northern Europe, for some years at least, will benefit from its historical unique selling point: its mild and rainy climate. Its problem will be that millions of Africans will try to move there.
On the upside, many Africans will soon, for the first time ever, have access to energy (thanks to solar panels) and medical care (as apps monitor everything from blood pressure to sugar levels, and instantly prescribe treatment). But as Africa gets hotter, drier and overpopulated, people will struggle to feed themselves, says the United Nations University. So they will head north, in much greater numbers than Syrians have, becoming the new bogeymen for European populists. Patrolling robots — possibly with attack capabilities — will guard Fortress Europe.
Everywhere, automation will continue to eat low-skilled jobs. That will keep people angry. Carl Benedikt Frey of Oxford university’s Martin School recalls workers smashing up machines during the British industrial revolution, and says: “There was a machinery riot last year: it was the US presidential election.” American workers hit by automation overwhelmingly voted Trump, even though he doesn’t talk about robots.
Soon, working-class men will lose driving jobs to autonomous vehicles. They could find new jobs servicing rich people as cleaners (a profession that’s surprisingly hard to automate), carers or yoga teachers. Young men will develop new notions of masculinity and embrace this traditionally feminine work. But older working-class men will probably embrace politicians like Trump.
The most coveted good of all — years of life — will become even more unfairly distributed. The lifespans of poor westerners will continue to stagnate or shorten, following the worldwide surge in obesity since the 1980s. Many poorer people will work into their seventies, then die, skipping the now standard phase of retirement. Meanwhile, from the 2020s the rich will live ever longer as they start buying precision medicine. They will fix their faulty DNA and edit their embryos, predicts Vivek Wadhwa, thinker on technology. (I heard him and Frey at this month’s excellent Khazanah Megatrends Forum in Malaysia.) Even if governments want to redress inequality, they won’t be able to, given that paying tax has become almost voluntary for global companies.
The country hit hardest by automation could be China (though Germany could suffer too, especially if its carmakers fail to transform). China’s model of exploiting cheap factory labour without environmental regulations has run its course, says Wadhwa. “I don’t think we need Chinese robots.” Even if China’s economy keeps growing, low-skilled men won’t find appealing careers, and they won’t even have the option of electing a pretend system-smasher like Trump. The most likely outcome: China’s regime joins the populist trend and runs with aggressive nationalism.
Troubled regimes will also ratchet up surveillance. Now they merely know what you say. In 10 years, thanks to your devices, they will know your next move even before you do. Already, satellites are monitoring Egypt’s wheat fields, so as to predict the harvest, which predicts the chance of social strife. Meanwhile, western politicians will probably keep obsessing over newsy identity issues. My prediction for the 2020s: moral panics over virtual-reality sex.
Saturday, 25 June 2016
Brexit is a wake-up call: save Europe
Natalie Nougayrède in The Guardian
The British vote has dealt an irreparable blow to the European project, and the shock is hard to exaggerate. Yet if there is one mistake EU leaders should avoid now, it would be to think that the forces at play represent a strictly British phenomenon. Twin dynamics have been brutally exposed: the breakdown of the link connecting British voters to elites and institutions – who all argued for remain – and the rapidly fading connection between citizens across the continent and EU institutions.
David Cameron thought victory was his at 10pm on Brexit eve
It’s true that Britain is a special case in Europe. It joined belatedly, and purely for economic reasons. It has had all sorts of opt-outs. For years it fought for and won special statusfor a specific status and it got it in diverse ways. This was a product of Europe’s past – not just of British identity or domestic politics, or even the media environment. Unlike postwar France and Germany, Britain – as Jean Monnet, the father of the EU, acknowledged in his memoirs – “felt no need to exorcise history”.
But this vote is not one that affects Britain alone, and for which just one country will bear the consequences. It puts the cohesion and strength of western liberal democracies at stake in a global environment plagued with uncertainties. Picking up the pieces of this wreckage will require clear-headed decisions and a new approach across Europe. Whether that will happen is now the big uncertainty.
The first thing to avoid is going into denial about the magnitude of what has happened. Now populist, far-right and anti-western forces will push forward in the belief that a precedent has been set for other “exits”. Look at the statements from Marine Le Pen, the head of France’s Front National, and the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders – and the messaging from the Kremlin’s propaganda machine.
The very survival of the EU is now in peril, and not just because a country representing its second largest economy and a key pillar of its security is set to withdraw. Surely, that much is clear to all. Yet some reactions are already baffling. Angela Merkel has solemnly called for calm. François Hollande has declared that there needs to be a “refoundation” of the EU. Donald Tusk, European council president, quotes Nietzsche: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Martin Schulz, president of the European parliament, believes “the chain reaction being celebrated everywhere now by Eurosceptics won’t happen”.
Dutch Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders. ‘Now populist, far-right and anti-western forces will push forward in the belief that a precedent has been set for other ‘exits’.’ Photograph: Laszlo Balogh/Reuters
The British vote has dealt an irreparable blow to the European project, and the shock is hard to exaggerate. Yet if there is one mistake EU leaders should avoid now, it would be to think that the forces at play represent a strictly British phenomenon. Twin dynamics have been brutally exposed: the breakdown of the link connecting British voters to elites and institutions – who all argued for remain – and the rapidly fading connection between citizens across the continent and EU institutions.
David Cameron thought victory was his at 10pm on Brexit eve
It’s true that Britain is a special case in Europe. It joined belatedly, and purely for economic reasons. It has had all sorts of opt-outs. For years it fought for and won special statusfor a specific status and it got it in diverse ways. This was a product of Europe’s past – not just of British identity or domestic politics, or even the media environment. Unlike postwar France and Germany, Britain – as Jean Monnet, the father of the EU, acknowledged in his memoirs – “felt no need to exorcise history”.
But this vote is not one that affects Britain alone, and for which just one country will bear the consequences. It puts the cohesion and strength of western liberal democracies at stake in a global environment plagued with uncertainties. Picking up the pieces of this wreckage will require clear-headed decisions and a new approach across Europe. Whether that will happen is now the big uncertainty.
The first thing to avoid is going into denial about the magnitude of what has happened. Now populist, far-right and anti-western forces will push forward in the belief that a precedent has been set for other “exits”. Look at the statements from Marine Le Pen, the head of France’s Front National, and the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders – and the messaging from the Kremlin’s propaganda machine.
The very survival of the EU is now in peril, and not just because a country representing its second largest economy and a key pillar of its security is set to withdraw. Surely, that much is clear to all. Yet some reactions are already baffling. Angela Merkel has solemnly called for calm. François Hollande has declared that there needs to be a “refoundation” of the EU. Donald Tusk, European council president, quotes Nietzsche: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Martin Schulz, president of the European parliament, believes “the chain reaction being celebrated everywhere now by Eurosceptics won’t happen”.
Dutch Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders. ‘Now populist, far-right and anti-western forces will push forward in the belief that a precedent has been set for other ‘exits’.’ Photograph: Laszlo Balogh/Reuters
Stand by for more such delusional talk in the days and weeks to come. Most will betray the angst of damage limitation rather than a recognition that one era has ended and the new is not yet born.
But if there is one lesson, it is that the usual rituals of the EU simply won’t do. Diplomatic choreography won’t be enough to restore what has been shattered, and what the Brexit vote has starkly reflected: there is no longer confidence among European citizens that a collective endeavour of solidarity and values can deliver what they need and want.
The confidence of the lower and middle classes is now closer to zero than it ever has been. Remember recent surveys: only 38% of the French view the EU positively today (the same poll said it was 44% of the British).
The French historian Fernand Braudel once wrote that “history can be divided into three movements: that which moves rapidly, moves slowly and appears not to move at all”. History is now accelerating right before our eyes. It is moving swiftly in a bad direction, and for those who, as I did, witnessed the spread of democracy and the reunification of the continent that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, or who were brought up to think that Europe’s future lay in the coming together of its disparate parts, it is an ominous and painful moment.
The British divorce will be messy and drawn out. It will divert energy needed to address other challenges like security, unemployment, migration, and the geopolitical chaos in the EU’s neighbouring regions. It could make it even harder to address the gap that increasingly divides the political elites from the public mood across the continent. Pro-EU politicians are in denial if they think more European integration slogans are the solution. Citizens simply won’t buy it. For more than 10 years now, EU-related referendums have been a disaster. The federalist-minded European constitution project was rejected in 2005, and this year the Netherlands voted against an EU association agreement with Ukraine. Hungary is due to hold a referendum on EU refugee quotas. Expect a no.
If something can be salvaged, the EU needs to rebuild itself from the ground up, not top down. It is a folly to think measures to fix eurozone governance will suffice, however needed those may be. Anyone who has regularly travelled across Europe in recent years and sounded out grassroots perceptions knows that something else is lacking: a sense of purpose, a belief that Europe stands for something positive and that it can act in people’s interest.
The European project was built by a small group of visionary politicians in the 1950s who believed that citizens would over time see its positive impact on their lives. For a long time that’s what happened. And many young people, including in the UK, do grasp the advantages. But for many reasons that link is in danger, and if it is further weakened Europe will unravel. This is the one priority that should obsess those who sit in Brussels and people everywhere who care about preserving fundamental values. If trust and hope are not restored in the notion that the EU can be democratic in its functioning and deliver concrete outcomes to citizens, the Pied Pipers of populism will continue to attract confused electorates. More illiberalism and toxic divisions will seep into the continent. This vote is a wake-up call: Europe needs saving.
The confidence of the lower and middle classes is now closer to zero than it ever has been. Remember recent surveys: only 38% of the French view the EU positively today (the same poll said it was 44% of the British).
The French historian Fernand Braudel once wrote that “history can be divided into three movements: that which moves rapidly, moves slowly and appears not to move at all”. History is now accelerating right before our eyes. It is moving swiftly in a bad direction, and for those who, as I did, witnessed the spread of democracy and the reunification of the continent that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, or who were brought up to think that Europe’s future lay in the coming together of its disparate parts, it is an ominous and painful moment.
The British divorce will be messy and drawn out. It will divert energy needed to address other challenges like security, unemployment, migration, and the geopolitical chaos in the EU’s neighbouring regions. It could make it even harder to address the gap that increasingly divides the political elites from the public mood across the continent. Pro-EU politicians are in denial if they think more European integration slogans are the solution. Citizens simply won’t buy it. For more than 10 years now, EU-related referendums have been a disaster. The federalist-minded European constitution project was rejected in 2005, and this year the Netherlands voted against an EU association agreement with Ukraine. Hungary is due to hold a referendum on EU refugee quotas. Expect a no.
If something can be salvaged, the EU needs to rebuild itself from the ground up, not top down. It is a folly to think measures to fix eurozone governance will suffice, however needed those may be. Anyone who has regularly travelled across Europe in recent years and sounded out grassroots perceptions knows that something else is lacking: a sense of purpose, a belief that Europe stands for something positive and that it can act in people’s interest.
The European project was built by a small group of visionary politicians in the 1950s who believed that citizens would over time see its positive impact on their lives. For a long time that’s what happened. And many young people, including in the UK, do grasp the advantages. But for many reasons that link is in danger, and if it is further weakened Europe will unravel. This is the one priority that should obsess those who sit in Brussels and people everywhere who care about preserving fundamental values. If trust and hope are not restored in the notion that the EU can be democratic in its functioning and deliver concrete outcomes to citizens, the Pied Pipers of populism will continue to attract confused electorates. More illiberalism and toxic divisions will seep into the continent. This vote is a wake-up call: Europe needs saving.
Thursday, 10 September 2015
The refugee crisis - Payback time?
F S Aijazuddin in The Dawn
IMMIGRATION can be a messy business. It leaves stains.
It is a subtle challenge to the notion that the world is a global village. The recent exodus by refugees fleeing insecure poverty in southern Europe to the stable affluence of its north puts this misconception to the test. Without warning, a human horde has swept across the continent of Europe. This phalanx of disturbed humanity has floated across seas, swum through rivers, trudged over mountains, permeated through city streets, and barged blithely through border check-posts in search of a German Paradise.
Countries in their way like Hungary have been subjected to pressures they have not had time to anticipate. Consequently, their resources are being strained, their public services overburdened, and their patience stretched. Nations that had cocooned themselves comfortably within the European Union are now questioning the very fundamentals of the EU, in particular its egalitarian commitment to free movement across invisible borders.
The combustible unrest in Syria alone does not explain this sudden surge. There have been other wars in the region — in Lebanon, for example, which its harried citizens quit in Mercedes overladen with monogrammed suitcases. Or Iraq, from which its nationals — bombarded and harried by the US-led coalition forces — fled to neighbouring countries. This latest influx of migrants though is different. It is determined. It is coordinated. And it seems to have foreknowledge which countries should be targeted, and where their vulnerabilities lie.
Such information does not come off the internet, nor can it be bought in the grey market. How and where did these displaced persons obtain this crash course in gate-crashing?
Euro-cynics contend that this could be a covert attempt by inimical powers to destabilise the complacency of European societies, using desperate civilian families in lieu of trained military forces. Euro-optimists are convinced that this flood will recede, as tsunamis do. Whenever it does, it will leave behind a detritus of disorder and discontent for host governments to manage.
No political bleach has yet been invented that can remove these lasting stains. They will remain. Recall: West Germany reunified with East Germany in 1990, but a united Germany has yet to absorb its Turkish guests. France quit its Muslim colony Algeria in 1962, yet it still has difficulties with non-designer headscarves. The United Kingdom has done more than most to accommodate West Indians, East Africans, South Asians, and now Russian oligarchs. But even Great Britain has geographical limitations.
Shakespeare described his island home as a “precious stone set in the silver sea,/ Which serves it in the office of a wall/ Or as a moat defensive to a house,/ Against the envy of less happier lands”. Shakespeare had not foreseen the Chunnel. Envious refugees at Calais peer into it, attracted like moths by the light at the British end — alluring, irresistible, and maddeningly within reach.
The vast Atlantic Ocean once separated the continents of Europe and America, but even that expanse of seawater could not prevent tenacious migrants navigating across it, landing on its eastern shores, and then cloning New England, New York, New Prague, New Vienna, New Orleans.
“Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore...” beckons the Statue of Liberty. Shoals of immigration have now forced the United States to reconsider this open invitation. In 1847, it tried to reverse the flow. It created Liberia in West Africa for its African and Caribbean freed slaves. Not all of them wanted to return. None agreed with Liberia’s national motto: “The love of liberty brought us here”.
Today’s Americans are hyphenated with every nationality in the world. This ethnic diversity contributes to its superpower strength; yet, in that mix lies its weakness, its Kryptonite. By 2050, the US population will exceed 430 million. Whites will reduce from 67pc (2005) to 47pc (2050). Blacks will remain static at 13pc of the total. Asians will creep up from 5pc to a projected 9pc (blame it on Muslim fundamentalists). Hispanics, however, will increase dramatically from 14pc in 2005 to almost 30pc by 2050, to become United States’ largest ethnic community.
That explains why President Obama felt the need to restore ties with Cuba. It was not an act of belated condescension by a superpower to a villain with a Spanish accent. It was a farsighted admission by the US of its geographic, ethnic, linguistic affinity with Hispanic countries in South America.
Future historians will interpret the unfurling of the US flag in Havana as a defining moment in its history, when the US — not in war, not in retaliation, not out of folie de grandeur, but voluntarily — shifted its worldview from a West-East axis to a North-South one, from military interventions to neighbourly cooperation.
IMMIGRATION can be a messy business. It leaves stains.
It is a subtle challenge to the notion that the world is a global village. The recent exodus by refugees fleeing insecure poverty in southern Europe to the stable affluence of its north puts this misconception to the test. Without warning, a human horde has swept across the continent of Europe. This phalanx of disturbed humanity has floated across seas, swum through rivers, trudged over mountains, permeated through city streets, and barged blithely through border check-posts in search of a German Paradise.
Countries in their way like Hungary have been subjected to pressures they have not had time to anticipate. Consequently, their resources are being strained, their public services overburdened, and their patience stretched. Nations that had cocooned themselves comfortably within the European Union are now questioning the very fundamentals of the EU, in particular its egalitarian commitment to free movement across invisible borders.
The combustible unrest in Syria alone does not explain this sudden surge. There have been other wars in the region — in Lebanon, for example, which its harried citizens quit in Mercedes overladen with monogrammed suitcases. Or Iraq, from which its nationals — bombarded and harried by the US-led coalition forces — fled to neighbouring countries. This latest influx of migrants though is different. It is determined. It is coordinated. And it seems to have foreknowledge which countries should be targeted, and where their vulnerabilities lie.
Such information does not come off the internet, nor can it be bought in the grey market. How and where did these displaced persons obtain this crash course in gate-crashing?
Euro-cynics contend that this could be a covert attempt by inimical powers to destabilise the complacency of European societies, using desperate civilian families in lieu of trained military forces. Euro-optimists are convinced that this flood will recede, as tsunamis do. Whenever it does, it will leave behind a detritus of disorder and discontent for host governments to manage.
No political bleach has yet been invented that can remove these lasting stains. They will remain. Recall: West Germany reunified with East Germany in 1990, but a united Germany has yet to absorb its Turkish guests. France quit its Muslim colony Algeria in 1962, yet it still has difficulties with non-designer headscarves. The United Kingdom has done more than most to accommodate West Indians, East Africans, South Asians, and now Russian oligarchs. But even Great Britain has geographical limitations.
Shakespeare described his island home as a “precious stone set in the silver sea,/ Which serves it in the office of a wall/ Or as a moat defensive to a house,/ Against the envy of less happier lands”. Shakespeare had not foreseen the Chunnel. Envious refugees at Calais peer into it, attracted like moths by the light at the British end — alluring, irresistible, and maddeningly within reach.
The vast Atlantic Ocean once separated the continents of Europe and America, but even that expanse of seawater could not prevent tenacious migrants navigating across it, landing on its eastern shores, and then cloning New England, New York, New Prague, New Vienna, New Orleans.
“Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore...” beckons the Statue of Liberty. Shoals of immigration have now forced the United States to reconsider this open invitation. In 1847, it tried to reverse the flow. It created Liberia in West Africa for its African and Caribbean freed slaves. Not all of them wanted to return. None agreed with Liberia’s national motto: “The love of liberty brought us here”.
Today’s Americans are hyphenated with every nationality in the world. This ethnic diversity contributes to its superpower strength; yet, in that mix lies its weakness, its Kryptonite. By 2050, the US population will exceed 430 million. Whites will reduce from 67pc (2005) to 47pc (2050). Blacks will remain static at 13pc of the total. Asians will creep up from 5pc to a projected 9pc (blame it on Muslim fundamentalists). Hispanics, however, will increase dramatically from 14pc in 2005 to almost 30pc by 2050, to become United States’ largest ethnic community.
That explains why President Obama felt the need to restore ties with Cuba. It was not an act of belated condescension by a superpower to a villain with a Spanish accent. It was a farsighted admission by the US of its geographic, ethnic, linguistic affinity with Hispanic countries in South America.
Future historians will interpret the unfurling of the US flag in Havana as a defining moment in its history, when the US — not in war, not in retaliation, not out of folie de grandeur, but voluntarily — shifted its worldview from a West-East axis to a North-South one, from military interventions to neighbourly cooperation.
Saturday, 26 October 2013
Catch-up in industrialisation
It was the visible hand of the state rather than the invisible hand of the market that helped the developing world catch up with the industrialised countries
The emerging significance of developing countries, which gathered momentum after 1980, is beginning to shift the balance of power in the world economy. It could lead to a profound transformation in the next 25 years. This unfolding reality must be situated in the historical perspective of de-industrialisation and industrialisation in the developing world over the past two centuries.
In the mid-18th century, similarities between Europe and Asia were far more significant than the differences. Indeed, demography, technology and institutions were broadly comparable. And, in 1750, Asia, Africa and Latin America accounted for almost three-fourths of manufacturing production in the world economy. Much of it was located in Asia with a concentration in China and India.
Profound influence
The Industrial Revolution in Britain during the late 18th century, which spread to Europe over the next 50 years, exercised a profound influence on the shape of things to come. Yet, in 1820, less than 200 years ago, Asia, Africa and Latin America still accounted for almost two-thirds of the world’s manufacturing production. China and India were the manufacturing hubs that contributed 50 per cent of world industrial production even in 1820.
The revolutionary changes in the methods of manufacturing unleashed by the Industrial Revolution transformed economic life, as industrialisation spread to Europe yielding sharp increases in productivity, output and incomes. It also led to the demise of traditional industries in Asia, particularly in China and India, reducing their skill levels and technological capabilities over time.
Between 1830 and 1913, the share of Asia, Africa and Latin America in world manufacturing production, attributable mostly to Asia, in particular China and India, collapsed from 60 per cent to 7.5 per cent, while the share of Europe, North America and Japan rose from 40 per cent to 92.5 per cent, to stay at these levels until 1950. The industrialisation of Western Europe and the de-industrialisation of Asia during the 19th century were two sides of the same coin.
It led to the Great Specialization, which meant Western Europe, followed by the United States, produced manufactured goods while Asia, Africa and Latin America produced primary commodities. This created and embedded a division of labour between countries that was unequal in its consequences for development. The process was reinforced by the politics of imperialism that imposed free trade, and the economics of the transport revolution which dismantled the natural protection provided by geography implicit in distance and time, to hasten the process of de-industrialisation in Asia with a devastating impact on China and India.
For developing countries of the world economy, 1950 was perhaps an important turning point. It was the beginning of the post-colonial era as newly independent countries, to begin with in Asia and somewhat later in Africa, sought to catch up in terms of industrialisation and development.
In retrospect, it is clear that there was a significant catch-up in industrialisation for the developing world as a whole, beginning around 1950 that gathered momentum in the early-1970s. Structural changes in the composition of output and employment, which led to a decline in the share of agriculture with an increase in the shares of industry and services, were an important factor underlying this process.
There was a dramatic transformation in just four decades from 1970 to 2010. The share of developing countries in world manufacturing value-added jumped from 13 per cent to 41 per cent in current prices. In 2010, it was close to the level that existed around 1850. Similarly, their share in world exports of manufactures rose from 7 per cent in 1970 to 40 per cent in 2010. Industrialisation also led to pronounced changes in the composition of their trade as the share of primary commodities and resource-based products fell while the share of manufactures (particularly medium-technology and high-technology goods) rose in both exports and imports.
The observed outcome in terms of industrial production was attributable, in important part, to development strategies and economic policies in the post-colonial era that created the initial conditions and laid the essential foundation in countries which were latecomers to industrialisation. The import substitution-led strategies of industrialisation, much maligned by orthodoxy that was concerned with comparative statics rather than economic dynamics, performed a critical role in this process of catch-up.
Of course, a complete explanation would be far more complex as it would need to recognise specificities and nuances. All the same, it is clear that the role of the state in evolving policies, developing institutions and making strategic interventions, whether as a catalyst or leader, was also central to the process. Indeed, even among the small East Asian countries — success stories that orthodoxy portrayed as role models of markets and openness — development was more about the visible hand of the state rather than the invisible hand of the market, particularly in South Korea and Taiwan but perhaps even in Singapore.
Thus, industrialisation was not so much about getting-prices-right as it was about getting-state-intervention-right. Indeed, it is plausible to suggest that, for a time it might even have been about getting-prices-wrong. It may be argued that state intervention in the form of industrial policy should recognise and exploit potential comparative advantage, but it is just as plausible to argue that instead of climbing the ladder step by step it could be rewarding to jump some steps in defiance of what comparative advantage might be at the time. In either case, state intervention is critical.
Apart from an extensive role for governments, the use of borrowed technologies, an intense process of learning, the creation of managerial capabilities in individuals and technological capabilities in firms, and the nurturing of entrepreneurs and firms in different types of enterprises were important factors underlying the catch-up in industrialisation. The creation of initial conditions was followed by a period of learning to industrialise so that outcomes in industrialisation surfaced with a time lag. This accounts for the acceleration in growth of manufacturing output that became visible in the early 1970s.
Clearly, it was not the magic of markets that produced the sudden spurt in industrialisation. It came from the foundations that were laid in the preceding quarter century. In this context, it is important to note that much the same can be said about the now industrialised countries, where industrial protection and state intervention were just as important at earlier stages of their development when they were latecomers to industrialisation.
Uneven
However, this industrialisation was most uneven between regions. Asia led the process in terms of structural change, share in industrial production, rising manufactured exports and changing patterns of trade, while Latin America witnessed relatively little change and Africa made almost no progress.
The catch-up in industrialisation was uneven not only among regions but also between countries within regions. There was a high degree of concentration among a few: Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico in Latin America; China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Turkey in Asia; and Egypt and South Africa in Africa. These countries could be described as the ‘Next-14’. The emerging significance of China in the Next-14 is particularly striking.
Of course, there is enormous diversity within the few, reflected in their size, their engagement with the world economy, and industrialisation. Yet, it is possible to group them into clusters based on similarities in terms of geography, size, economic characteristics and development models. These clusters suggest such a wide range of attributes that most developing countries would have something in common with at least one if not a few of them. The Next-14 had even more in common across clusters. Initial conditions, enabling institutions and supportive governments were the factors that put them on the path to industrialisation. Hence, their experience carries valuable lessons for other countries that follow in their footsteps as latecomers to industrialisation.
(The author is Emeritus Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University and former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Delhi. His latest book, Catch Up: Developing Countries in the World Economy, has just been published by Oxford University Press, Oxford.)
Wednesday, 10 July 2013
How can India give asylum to a person chased by the almighty US when it panics over giving a residence permit to a secular writer?
'I’m Not Surprised India Refused Snowden Asylum'
TASLIMA NASREEN
I came to India not as a rebel Bangladeshi writer, but as a European citizen. I eagerly chose India’s state of West Bengal as my new home. But when I was physically attacked by Muslim fundamentalists, instead of taking action against them, the government kept me under house arrest. Not only that, I was repeatedly asked to leave the state and, preferably, the country. When a group of Muslim fundamentalists organised a protest against my stay in India, I was thrown out of Bengal, the state that had been my home for years. Finally, the central government took charge and put me in a safehouse. But there was pressure from the Centre too for me to leave the country. Now, I am given permission to live in India, but only in Delhi. My enemies are just a handful of corrupt, illiterate, ignorant Muslim fundamentalists but yet India cannot challenge them.
TASLIMA NASREEN
Edward Snowden asked 21 nations for political asylum. He got nothing but rejection, proving once again that free speech is just a decorative item for most governments. India’s embassy in Moscow received Snowden’s request for asylum. His request was rejected within hours.
Since then, there has been much discussion about India’s generosity over giving shelter to persecuted people—and so then, why not Snowden? India has in the past granted political asylum to Dalai Lama and many other rebels. Some even mention my name in the list.
I am not sure whether I should be considered a political refugee in India. I was thrown out of my country, Bangladesh, in 1994 and found myself landing in Europe. It was difficult for me to live in a place which has a totally different climate and culture from where I grew up. Since I knew I couldn’t return to my country, I wanted to come to India. But India kept her doors firmly shut. Towards the end of 1999, I was given permission to visit as a tourist.
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I’m not surprised India refused Snowden asylum. How can a country give asylum to a person chased by the almighty US when it panics over giving a residence permit to a secular writer? But with India, one understands; it can’t afford to take risks or make any big political mistake now. Indeed, a European country should have given Snowden asylum. They have a long tradition of defending writers and journalists. Compared to India, they have a much older, truer democracies, and violation of rights and free speech is a rarity there. It’s time for Europe to show they are not mere colonies of the US. However glorious a past India may have had, it doesn’t have the courage to face possible US sanctions. If democracy were practised everywhere, and if it were not reduced to mere elections, independent voices from independent countries would have been respected. As it stands, the human species is yet to make the world an evenly civilised place. We ordinary people pay the brunt, we sacrifice our dignity, honor, rights and freedom. I really feel sorry for Snowden. If I were a country, I’d have given him asylum.
Bangladesh-born Taslima Nasrin is the author of Lajja and other novels; E-mail your columnist: letters AT outlookindia.com
Tuesday, 9 April 2013
Margaret Thatcher: pro-European 'wet' transformed by a triumphant war
The hypercautious leader who showered money on the unions was about to get the boot: the Falklands changed all that
'I think on balance Thatcher did for Britain what was needed at the time.' Illustration by Daniel Pudles
Margaret Thatcher was Britain's most significant leader since Churchill. In 1979 she inherited a nation that was the "sick man of Europe", an object of constant transatlantic ridicule. By 1990 it was transformed. She and her successors John Major and Tony Blair presided over a quarter century of unprecedented prosperity. If it ended in disaster, the seeds were only partly hers.
Almost everything said of Thatcher's early years was untrue, partly through her own invention. She was the daughter of a prosperous civic leader who merely began life as a "grocer". She went to a fee-paying school and to Oxford at her father's expense, gliding easily into the upper echelons of student politics.
A Tory party desperate for women helped Thatcher through the political foothills to early success as an MP. Her gender led her into government and the shadow cabinet, despite Edward Heath's aversion to her. It made her virtually unsackable as education secretary. As she said in her memoirs: "There was no one else." When Heath fell, her promoters ran her as a stalking horse because, as a woman, they thought she could not win. Thatcher became prime minister because she was a woman, not despite it.
As leader she was initially hyper-cautious. An unclubbable outsider, she allied herself to another outsider, Keith Joseph, and his free-market set. But she regarded rightwing causes as an intellectual hobby. She was an ardent pro-European, and her 1979 manifesto made no mention of radical union reform or privatisation. It was thoroughly "wet". On taking office she showered money on public sector unions, and her "cuts" were only to planned increases, mild compared with today's. Yet by the autumn of 1981 they had made her so unpopular that bets were being taken at the October party conference that she would be "gone by Christmas".
What saved Thatcher's bacon, and revolutionised her leadership, was Labour'sunelectable Michael Foot – and the Falklands war. Whatever Tory historians like to claim, this was the critical turning point. By delivering a crisp, emphatic victory Thatcher showed the world, and more important herself, what a talent for solitary command could achieve. From then on she disregarded her critics and became intolerant of any who were "not one of us".
But Thatcher was still cautious. By the 1983 election she had sold off only Britoil and some council houses. The battle with the miners and leftwing councils lay ahead, as did the trauma of an IRA assassination bid. It was only in the mid-80s that she became truly radical and remotely comparable to David Cameron in 2010.
She gave Nigel Lawson at the Treasury his head – and was genuinely alarmed when he cut income tax to 40%. She hurled herself into NHS reform, changes to schools and universities, utilities privatisation and, eventually, local government reform. Each was characterised by her attention to detail. Her political antennae refused to allow her to privatise the coal industry, British Rail or the post office.
Thatcher was never insensitive to the impact of her policies on the poor. As she cut local housing budgets, she sent housing benefit soaring in compensation. She refused to reform social security, or even curb its abuse. Many of today's more controversial benefits, such as disability, date back to the 80s.
After the 1987 election, Thatcher cut an increasingly isolated figure. Rows with Lawson and Geoffrey Howe over a European currency (where she was right) presaged the final shambles of the poll tax. Until then Thatcher had shown the strength of her weakness: a dislike of consensus and aversion to debate, leading to decisive action. A senior civil servant said, "It worked because we all knew exactly what she wanted."
The poll tax showed the opposite, the weakness of Thatcher's strength. The cautious tactician was suppressed. She became deaf to all warning. On the crucial morning in November 1990, her colleagues marched individually into her room and each told her to go. It was a Charles I moment in British history. Everyone knows where they were when they heard.
Thatcher's reputation never recovered from the ruthless budgets of 1980 and 1981, or her insensitivity to colleagues. Many hated her. She was always the Spitting Image bully. Howe's "broken cricket bats" speech in the Commons was the killer blow. It was mostly foreigners who could not understand why she fell.
John Major, the "detoxification" successor, was fated to implement many of her unattempted reforms. But perhaps her greatest legacy was New Labour. The most important thing Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did for British politics was to understand the significance of Thatcherism and to decide not to reverse it, indeed to carry it forward. Their reckless private finance of public investment and services went beyond anything she dared dream of. No one noticed, but she was Blair's first guest at Downing Street in 1997.
Thatcher's most baleful influence on government was not on industries and services she privatised but those she did not. She, and Blair after her, brought an unprecedented dirigisme to the NHS, education, police and local government. She was unashamed about this, loathing localism and rejecting calls to diminish the "strong state". She hated what she called "that French phrase laissez faire". Her centralism, unequalled in Europe, descended under Blair into a morass of targetry, inefficiency and endless reorganisation. Only today are we facing the cost.
I think on balance Thatcher did for Britain what was needed at the time. History will judge her, but not a country in Europe was untouched by Thatcher's example. Under Heath and Jim Callaghan the question was widely asked: had democracies become "ungovernable"? Had pollsters and the 24/7 media forced leaders to follow opinion, not lead it?
Thatcher answered that question, re-energising the concept of democratic leadership. It was sad that she had to learn it in war, a grim example to her British and US successors. She was lucky, in her enemies and friends – notably Reagan in the Falklands conflict. She was lucky in surviving the IRA's bomb.
But she exploited her luck. She showed that modern prime ministers can still mark out room for individual manoeuvre. They do not have to charm, schmooze or play tag with the press. Government will respond to clear leadership if it knows what a leader wants. It knew what Thatcher wanted.
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Margaret Thatcher: the lady and the land she leaves behind
Her legacy is public division, private selfishness and a cult of greed that together shackle the human spirit
Whether you were for her or against her, Margaret Thatcher set the agenda for the past three and a half decades of British politics. All the debates that matter today in the public arena, whether in economics, social policy, politics, the law, the national culture or this country's relations with the rest of the world, still bear something of the imprint she left on them in her years in office between 1979 and 1990. More than 20 years after her party disposed of her when she had become an electoral liability, British public life is still defined to an extraordinary degree by the argument between those who wish to continue or refine what she started and those who want to mitigate or turn it back. Just as in life she shaped the past 30 years, so in death she may well continue to shape the next 30. These are claims that can be made about no other modern British prime minister. She was in many ways the most formidable peacetime leader this country has had since Gladstone.
The fact that Mrs Thatcher was Britain's first and so far only woman major party leader, chosen entirely on merit, and then Britain's first woman prime minister, were of course huge landmarks. But her gender, though fundamental to her story, was in the end secondary. It was at least as significant, in the evolution of the late 20th-century Tory party, that she came from a petit-bourgeois background, a shopkeeper's daughter, though the man she overthrew in 1975, Ted Heath, had similarly middling origins and John Major an even humbler start. There was something of the rebel and outsider about her, as well as much that was stultifyingly conventional.
Mrs Thatcher's transcendent quality, however, was that she was a political warrior. She had a love of political combat, a zealotry for the causes she believed in, a reluctance to listen to advice, a conviction that she was always right and never wrong, and a scorn for consensus that set her apart from almost all her predecessors and, with the occasional exception of Tony Blair, from those who came after.
Mrs Thatcher was proof positive that personality matters in politics. As a young minister she did not seem destined for greatness. Even her election as Tory leader was something of a surprise, though her audacity in going for the top job while so many more senior figures hesitated was an indication of what was to come. Early on in her leadership, she was much patronised by male colleagues and adversaries. But as the social democratic consensus faltered in the 1970s and then cracked in the 1980s she rode the wind of history with an opportunist's brilliance. A Britain led by Willie Whitelaw or Michael Heseltine would have faced most of the same challenges that the one led by Mrs Thatcher faced. But the response would have been completely different. For good or ill, she made a difference.
The late Guardian columnist and Thatcher biographer Hugo Young, reflecting on her overthrow in 1990, identified five large events that would not have happened the way they did without her.
The first was the Falklands war of 1982, which Young described as "a prime example of ignorance lending pellucid clarity to her judgment". Surrounded by sceptical men who had fought in the second world war and knew what combat involved, she went for it. The result was an astonishing and absurd military triumph followed by an electoral one, which elevated Mrs Thatcher from the ordinary to the extraordinary.
A second, which would not have been possible without the authority conferred by the first, was the dethroning of trade union power. Once again, against the instincts of ministers – and the grandest of grandees, Harold Macmillan – who all preferred compromise to confrontation, she fought the miners' strike to the bitterest of finishes, in a contest that was always about industrial strategy rather than just coal.
Arguably even more important than these headline events was the third example, the conduct of economic policy. There had been a New Right before Mrs Thatcher, but it was the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek, as articulated to her by a series of domestic rightwing ideologues, on which she seized. It was Mrs Thatcher, abetted by her chancellors Sir Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson, who drove the policy that the public sector was an unproductive burden on the wealth-creating sector and on taxpayers, and must therefore be reduced and privatised. It was she who insisted that the chief aim of government economic policy should be price stability, and that it should not give priority to reducing unemployment or to stimulating demand.
And it was she again who seemed to believe, far more than those around her, that the market economy required not a minimal state to protect it but a strong state, marked by everything from the abolition of local government autonomy to the enhancement of police powers, intolerance towards gay rights, the broadcasting ban on Sinn Féin, and increased defence spending. She made enemies without flinching, and they reciprocated. Her rule was marked by the most serious urban riots of the 20th century, one of the most divisive strikes in recent times, and the century's most audacious prime ministerial assassination attempt, which thankfully she survived.
Mrs Thatcher's unique mark was also felt in the two confrontations that ultimately undid her. The first was the poll tax, which was disastrous, unjust and was her policy alone. The poll tax came to embody a prime minister who ruled from conviction not sense, and who did not care about, indeed gloried in, a confrontation that destroyed the Tory party in Scotland and may indirectly come to destroy the union she otherwise championed. Similarly, and less easily disposed of after her fall, was Europe. Mrs Thatcher began her prime ministership as a pragmatic, if often acerbic, European. But as she became a bigger figure on the world stage, feted both by Mr Reagan and by Mikhail Gorbachev, she became increasingly strident and disruptive towards Europe. Her style became the policy, cementing the love affair with an already overmighty press but with disastrous effects for her leadership (which was ended by Sir Geoffrey's resignation over the issue), her party (which became obsessed with the subject) and for Britain. Except for Mr Blair in his early years, every British leader since has felt Mrs Thatcher at his shoulder in dealings with Europe, to the lasting national loss.
When she arrived in Downing Street in 1979 she talked about replacing discord with harmony. She may briefly have meant it, but the harmony she sought in the long term was one whose terms were set overwhelmingly in the interests of the British business class as she perceived them. She disdained the public realm and presided over the growth of the cult of marketplace success as the foundation of a good society – a low-tax, home-owning, privatised, high-carbon, possessive, individualist, winner-takes-all financial model whose failure haunts the choices still facing this country today. Much was wrong with the Britain she inherited in 1979, undemocratic union power among them, and many things, though not wrong in themselves, were unsustainable without radical change, including some nationalised utilities. Britain would have had to alter radically in the 1980s and 90s, and the process would have been hard and controversial. But, as Germany and other northern nations have shown, economic dynamism has been possible without the squandering of social cohesion that Mrs Thatcher promoted.
In the last analysis, though, her stock in trade was division. By instinct, inclination and effect she was a polariser. She glorified both individualism and the nation state, but lacked much feeling for the communities and bonds that knit them together. When she spoke, as she often did, about "our people", she did not mean the people of Britain; she meant people who thought like her and shared her prejudices. She abhorred disorder, decadence and bad behaviour but she was the empress ruler of a process of social and cultural atomism that has fostered all of them, and still does.
The governments that followed have struggled to put a kinder and more cohesive face on the forces she unleashed and to create stability and validity for the public realm that yet remains. New Labour offered a first response. The coalition is attempting a second draft in grimmer circumstances, and there will be others. There can certainly be no going back to the failed postwar past with which Margaret Thatcher had to wrestle. But there should be no going back to her own failed answer either. She was an exceptionally consequential leader, in many ways a very great woman. There should be no dancing on her grave but it is right there is no state funeral either. Her legacy is of public division, private selfishness and a cult of greed, which together shackle far more of the human spirit than they ever set free.
Monday, 28 January 2013
Friday, 25 January 2013
Forget Europe – the markets hold the real unaccountable power
An unholy matrimony between finance and politics has undermined democracy: it's time it was reinforced
'We still have the tin-hatted Conservatives with no heart, their Lib Dem counterparts without the brains to realise they’re sealing their own fate, and a Labour party still lacking the courage to put up a real fight' … The Wizard of Oz at West Yorkshire Playhouse. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Listening to economics being discussed in the media is like being read a fairy story. In any fairy story you need a monster, and in this case it's "the markets": unseen, but seemingly all-powerful. Job losses, public service cuts, wage freezes, privatisation, even cuts to benefits for disabled people can be justified by saying "the markets" demand it.
But what are the markets? Who comprises them and why are they so powerful? I didn't vote for them and I doubt you did either – yet they apparently have the power to dictate policies to elected governments and, in the case of Italy, to even select the government.
This is not an abstract debate. If we are to understand the economic system we live under, what went wrong to cause the crash, and how we are to change it, we need to deal with facts, not myths. At the height of the crash the curtain was pulled back, Wizard of Oz-like, to reveal the markets as nothing more than a cabal of rich men serving their own interests.
Yet sadly, we still have the tin-hatted Conservatives with no heart, their Lib Dem counterparts without the brains to realise they're sealing their own fate, and a Labour party still lacking the courage to put up a real fight.
If people don't understand these things, they are susceptible to the argument that "there is no alternative" and that the medicine of austerity is unpalatable, but necessary.
Do you remember when in 2007 people queued outside hospitals desperate to remove their loved ones from the unsafe hands of doctors and nurses, or when in 2008 the entire public sector stood on the precipice due to the excessive greed of jobcentre workers and teachers?
No? Because it never happened. Yet the myth that the public sector caused the crash was allowed to develop, and the dangerous conclusion allowed to take root that hacking back the public sector would solve the crisis. It hasn't and it won't – as even the IMF is beginning to realise.
The myth-making, the diversionary tactics, the crash and our failure to recover from it is the story of how the finance sector came to be lauded by all major political parties.
But it also had another effect, to undermine democracy. The unholy matrimony between finance and politics jettisoned public interest in three key ways:
Firstly, deregulation. Successive governments created markets for the finance sector by removing restrictions on what the sector could do. By the crash, the regulators barely understood the complex structures they were supposed to be regulating.
Secondly, it redistributed wealth to the rich. Through slashing corporation tax and the higher rate of income tax, the super-rich grabbed an even larger share of the national wealth. This meant more wealth accumulated to fewer and fewer people. Instead of funding public services – starved of cash during the Thatcher years – more of British capital poured into the City of London.
The third and final element was privatisation. Entire industries – from the railways and telecommunications, to gas, electricity and water – were taken out of collective public ownership. This transferred power over them from the ballot to the wallets of a few, the directors and shareholders who have extracted billions from them.
This week David Cameron made a speech about the need to repatriate powers from Europe. Sections of the press and Ukip leader Nigel Farage rant incessantly about the alleged influence of Brussels over our lives, but that pales into insignificance compared to the unaccountable power of the large financial institutions.
So a few vocal Little Englanders have forced the prime minister to respond to their agenda. When what we really need is to assert our democracy over the tyranny of the markets, in the interests of the many.
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