Perhaps the world's conspiracy theorists have been right all along

Alex Proud in The Telegraph
 
We used to laugh at conspiracy theorists, but from Fifa to banking scandals and the Iraq War, it seems they might have been on to something after all, says Alex Proud


'I want to believe': Mulder and Scully (David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson) in The X Files Photo: 20th Century Fox
 

Conspiracy theories used to be so easy.

You’d have your mate who, after a few beers, would tell you that the moon landings were faked or that the Illuminati controlled everything or that the US government was holding alien autopsies in Area 51. And you’d be able to dismiss this because it was all rubbish.

Look, you’d say, we have moon rock samples and pictures and we left laser reflectors on the surface and... basically you still don’t believe me but that’s because you’re mad and no proof on earth (or the moon) would satisfy you.

It’s true that there was always the big one which wasn’t quite so easily dismissed. This was the Kennedy assassination - but here you could be fairly sure that the whole thing was a terrible, impenetrable murky morass. You knew that some things never would be known (or would be released, partially redacted by the CIA, 200 years in the future). And you knew that whatever the truth was it was probably a bit dull compared to your mate’s flights of fantasy involving the KGB, the Mafia and the military-industrial complex. Besides, it all made for a lot of very entertaining films and books.

Photo: Reuters

This nice, cozy state of affairs lasted until the early 2000s. But then something changed. These days conspiracy theories don’t look so crazy and conspiracy theorists don’t look like crackpots. In fact, today’s conspiracy theory is tomorrow’s news headlines. It’s tempting, I suppose, to say we live in a golden age of conspiracy theories, although it’s only really golden for the architects of the conspiracies. From the Iraq war to Fifa to the banking crisis, the truth is not only out there, but it’s more outlandish than anything we could have made up.
 
Of course, our real-life conspiracies aren’t much like The X-Files – they’re disappointingly short on aliens and the supernatural. Rather, they’re more like John Le Carre books. Shady dealings by powerful people who want nothing more than to line their profits at the expense of others. The abuse of power. Crazy ideologues who try and create their own facts for fun and profit. Corporations supplanting governments via regulatory capture.

So, what are some of our biggest conspiracies?

The Iraq War

The most disgusting abuse of power in a generation and a moral quagmire that never ends. America is attacked by terrorists and so, declares war on a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks, while ignoring an oil rich ally which had everything to do with them. The justification for war is based on some witches’ brew of faulty intelligence, concocted intelligence and ignored good intelligence. Decent people are forced to lie on an international stage. All sensible advice is ignored and rabid neo-con draft dodgers hold sway on military matters. The UK joins this fool’s errand for no good reason. Blood is spilled and treasure is spent.

The result is a disaster that was predicted only by Middle Eastern experts, post-conflict planners and several million members of the public. Thousands of allied troops and hundreds of thousands of blameless Iraqis are killed, although plenty of companies and individuals benefit from the US dollars that were shipped out, literally, by the ton. More recently, Iraq, now in a far worse state than it ever was under any dictator, has become an incubator for more terrorists, which is a special kind of geopolitical irony lost entirely on the war’s supporters.

And yet, we can’t really bring ourselves to hold anyone accountable. Apportioning responsibility would be difficult, painful and inconvenient, so we shrug as the men behind all this enjoy their well-upholstered retirements despite being directly and personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of wasted dollars. And the slow drip, drip of revelations continues, largely ignored by the public, despite the horrendous costs which (in the UK) could have been spent on things like the NHS or properly equipping our armed forces.

Fifa

The conspiracy du jour. We always knew Fifa was shonky and bribey, but most of us thought the more outlandish claims were just that. Not so. As it turns out, Fifa is a giant corruption machine and it now looks like every World Cup in the last three decades, even the ones we were cool about, like South Africa, could have been fixes.

Photo: AFP

On the plus side, it seems that something may be done, but it’ll be far too late to help honest footballing nations who missed their moment in the sun. For those who say "it’s only a stupid sport", well, recently we’ve heard accusations of arms deals for votes involving... wait for it... Saudi Arabia. The Saudi connection makes me wonder if, soon, we’ll be looking a grand unified conspiracy theory which brings together lots of other conspiracy theories under one corrupt, grubby roof.

The banking crisis

A nice financial counterpoint to Iraq. Virtually destroy the western financial system in the name of greed. Get bailed out by the taxpayers who you’ve been ripping off. And then carry on as if nothing whatsoever has happened. No jail, no meaningful extra regulation, the idea of being too big to fail as much of a joke as it was in 2005. Not even an apology. In fact, since the crisis you caused, things have got much better for you – and worse for everyone else. Much like Iraq, no-one has been held responsible or even acknowledged any wrongdoing. Again, this is partially because it’s so complicated and hard – but mainly because those who caused the crisis are so well represented in the governments of the countries who bailed them out. Oh, and while we’re at it, the banks played a part in the Fifa scandal. As conspiracy theorists will tell you, everything is connected.

Paedophiles

This one seems like a particularly dark and grisly thriller. At first it was just a few rubbish light entertainers. Then it was a lot more entertainers. Then we had people muttering about the political establishment – and others counter-muttering don’t be ridiculous, that’s a conspiracy theory. But it wasn’t. Now,it’s a slow-motion train crash and an endless series of glacial government inquiries. The conspiracy theorists point out that a lot of real stuff only seems to come out after the alleged perpetrators are dead or so senile it no longer matters. It’s hard to disagree with them. It’s also hard to imagine what kind of person would be so in thrall to power that they’d cover up child abuse.

And the rest

Where do you start? We could look at the EU and pick anything from its rarely signed-off accounts to the giant sham that let Greece join the Euro in the first place. We could look at UK defence procurement – and how we get so much less bang for our buck than France. We could peer at the cloying, incestuous relationship between the UK’s political class and its media moguls and how our leaders still fawn over a man whose poisonous control over so much of our media dates back to dodgy deal in 1981 that was denied for 30 years. We could look at the NSA and its intimate/ bullying relationship with tech companies. And we could go on and on and on.

But actually what we should be thinking is that a lot of this is what happens what you dismantle regulatory frameworks. This is what happens when you let money run riot and you allow industries to police themselves. This is what happens when the rich and powerful are endlessly granted special privileges, celebrated and permitted or even encouraged to place themselves above the law. And this is what happens when ordinary people feel bored by and excluded from politics, largely because their voices matter so little for the reasons above. Effectively, we are all living in Italy under Silvio Berlusconi. What’s the point in anything?

But actually, there is some hope. While the number of rich and powerful people who think they can get away with anything has undoubtedly grown, technology has made leaking much easier. Wikileaks may not be perfect, but it’s a lot better than no leaks at all. The other thing that gives me succour is the public’s view of the bankers. We still hate them, which is absolutely as it should be. And slowly this contempt is starting to hurt the masters of the universe. It’s notable that, recently, banking has started tumbling down the down the list of desirable careers. So, I suppose the solution is simple: we need more regulation, we need more transparency and we need more public shame and disgust. We might even get the last two; I’m less hopeful about the first.

In the X-Files, Fox Mulder’s famous catchphrase was, “I want to believe” but that’s because the conspiracy theories he dealt with were rather good fun. Ours, by contrast, tend to involve an endless procession of wealthy old men abusing their power. So I don’t want to believe any more. I want my kids to grow up in a world where conspiracy theories are something you laugh at.

From Fifa to Tony Blair — I’ve tried to understand the rich, but I just can't

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in the Independent

Tony Blair is a very busy man – so many calling on him, so little time. He had, apparently, agreed to speak at a conference on world hunger in Stockholm. Last year his very good friend Bill Clinton spoke at this same gathering, organised by Eat, a non-profit organisation set up by Swedish philanthropists. But a slight hitch came up with the Blair booking: reports suggest our erstwhile PM allegedly wanted £330,000 for a 20-minute sermon. (Clinton got £327,000 for 30 minutes.) Eat thought the fee too high, although Blair’s office insists money wasn’t spoken of and he simply had a previous engagement.

For whatever reason, Blair will not now orate stirringly on how to save the millions who live on less than 82 pence per day. Tony’s office says the money was to go to the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women. But like cheap room deodorisers, that late fragrance of good intent cannot overpower the bad smell coming from this story.

The Fifa drama is also all about money. Football does not even have a bit part. All the top men drive fast in the fog of power and wealth, without a moral compass, and still pretend that they are maligned heroes. Prince William lectures them about probity and corruption without so much as a second thought for the royal finances and tax secrecy.

This week also had Iain Duncan Smith, a fervent Catholic and man of some wealth, considering draconian child benefit restrictions. To save £2.5bn per year he wants to cut the payment from £20.70 for the first child to £13.70 – and is also looking at restricting benefits to two children. To this quiet man, poverty must be as hard to understand as godlessness.

Meanwhile, well-heeled George Osborne is to meet the Queen to review grants given to the royals. The boilers are too old, the energy bills for all those palaces too high. Unlike other pensioners, our monarch will not have to resort to hot water bottles, of that we can be sure. Nor will she visit those in her kingdom who shiver day and night, have barely enough to eat and live in rat-infested rooms.

This was also the week when Thomas Cook was humbled after failing to respond with basic humanity to the parents of two young children who died of carbon monoxide poisoning in a Corfu hotel.

I find all this alien and deeply baffling. How do the rich think? How are they so solipsistic, so self-serving and self-promoting? Are they born that way or are they raised as members of a particularly hard tribe? We must try to understand people who have it all, now that we are to be governed by a clique of the very privileged.

And so, in that spirit, I made myself read a column penned by entrepreneur Luke Johnson, son of Paul Johnson, the former editor of the New Statesman who walked briskly rightwards to become an ardent Tory.

To be successful, you need a dream team, sayest Luke, a blue-eyed dynamo and chairman of Risk Capital Partners: “First and foremost is the spouse... to provide emotional and practical backing. Self-employment can be desolate. Most entrepreneurs are obsessives, and often selfish in the pursuit of their ambitions. They require a tolerant spouse to provide relief...” Also a devoted “Super PA”. I gave up reading halfway through, because the man was so unutterably self-satisfied. Getting into these mindsets is harder than I thought.

Now, most Ugandan Asians are natural-born moneymakers. The exiles who were resented and unwanted in 1972 have made good. Many are millionaires and right wing. Like the Tory minister Priti Patel, too many of my ex-compatriots believe in self-reliance, low taxes, hard punishment and a social Darwinism. Benefits, in their view, only encourage layabouts and wastrels.

I had relatives back in Uganda who lived in grand houses, paid no tax and expected deference. Among my classmates, a few became doctors, the rest went into business and, yes, made bucks. I think I was born with a mutant gene.

Two guys with big money offered to marry me. One still hoots when he sees my Nissan Micra and always follows up with some unsolicited advice: “You are clever and very stupid. Money would make you powerful.

“All these politicians come to us. They don’t read your words – who cares about what you say? We make the world go round. You, your type, and lazy bastards on benefits make it slow down. You should be worshipping us.” So glad I didn’t marry the bald, fat scumbag.

These capitalists really do see themselves as redeemers, even those who pay their staff the lowest wages and do little to make the world a better place. Men such as Bill Gates do use their money to alleviate poverty, but they are rare.

The rest, even when they give cash, want something in return – an honour, a name on some grand wall, a PR victory. Sure, if they help the arts or the unemployed, give them the accolades and respect they crave. But what of the CEOs and shareholders who feel no social obligations, yet want more gratitude or see themselves as victims of deep ingratitude?

Tom Perkins, a US venture capitalist, complained that the recent war on the rich was like “the Holocaust”. (He later apologised.) Sam Zell, the American chief executive of an equity company – and a zealous defender of the top one per cent of global earners – says “subsidising people and disincentivising [the poor]” through benefits is the problem. Those who don’t succeed don’t want to try.

I read books on the minds and methods of the rich. They think selfishness is a virtue and that poverty (not money) is the root of all evil, that it is the end not the means which matter and that welfare for failure leads to more failure. They belong only to each other. The wider good does not exist. I see that now.

The future – political and economic – belongs to these masters of the universe. There is no alternative, no fight back. Even Labour now sucks up to them. Bleak times.

Please, FBI, investigate the 1966 World Cup – if only to shut up Greg Dyke

Marina Hyde in The Guardian


 

‘There is a huge section of fans – and, clearly, administrators – with absolutely no idea how much England is detested within world football, nor any idea as to why.’ Illustration: Andrzej Krauze

You know when World Cups started being corrupt? 1970. And anything up to and including 1962. Between those dates, there was a brief and ineffably beautiful interregnum in the chicanery, which thereafter was never allowed to happen again. Why? Well, there was a global sense, really, that the sainted custodians of both tournament and trophy during that time were simply too exquisitely mannered, too morally faultless, too humble, too generous-spirited, too brilliant at football ever to be permitted to shame the rest of the world in this manner again.

Did you enjoy that story? If so, you may be Greg Dyke, or have suffered a recent head trauma. Either way, please seek help immediately.

The Fifa scandal erupted a mere 10 days ago, and it took barely two of those for England to make it all about itself. Ooh, you’ve no idea how they treated us during the bid process. Ooh, the main thing about this is that we should be given one of the disputed World Cups. The scale of the FBI takedown of Fifa is vast. England is like a diner in one of the ground-floor restaurants of the Towering Inferno building, wondering how what’s going on upstairs is going to affect its drinks order. Odd how they underplay the fact that England’s bid team gave the wives of the executive committee – their wives! – Mulberry handbags. This isn’t being “above” bribery. It’s being unable to get out of the group stages of bribery.

Already, culture secretary John Whittingdale has announced that England is ready to host the 2022 World Cup, should Qatar be stripped of it. Newsflash, buddy: at their current rate of acquisition of English landmarks, Qatar will already own all our major stadiums and half our infrastructure by 2022, so that’ll be just the sort of pyrrhic two-fingers in which we specialise. Yes, Qatar, you’ll know we’ve really beaten you when England lose to Paraguay in the opening match of the tournament at Liverpool’s Qatar Airways stadium (when you go down the tunnel on to the pitch there’s a spine-tingling sign that reads “THIS IS DOHA”.)

I say “we”, but there is no longer a “we” as far as the Fifa exposé goes. We had a good innings, being all in it together. People who don’t even care for football were remarking how watchable footballing arrests were. The utter insufferability of Sepp Blatter was something we could all get behind, while his victory last Friday was an election result on which we could all agree, so soon after our own one, on which we couldn’t.

But the point-missing parochialism was always in the post, and its arrival marks the end of the cross-party, cross-club, cross-everything love-in that has characterised the Fifa story.

From phone-ins to frontbenches, you now cannot move for Little Englanders telescoping world football down to their concerns. At their notional helm is FA chairman Greg Dyke, who did such a bang-up job dealing with the Hutton inquiry that he’s decided to come and bring that same grasp of nuance to what he presumably imagines to be his moment on the global stage. I suppose the best you can say is that there’s less left to damage with English football than there was with the BBC. But really, there hasn’t been a managerial double whammy like it since André Villas-Boas swept from Chelsea to Tottenham.

Historically, there have been few statements less guaranteed to fill you with confidence than “this is a matter for the FA”. Unless you count something like “this is a matter for the Jockey Club”, whose two-legged overlords were traditionally intellectually outclassed by their four-legged underlings. The competition to be the worst-run British sporting body is always hard fought, but the FA has won the title more than any of the others.

And they look to have another in the bag with their reflexive prejudging of corruption allegations, ill-advised speculation about the FBI investigation, and jingoistic bleats about how unfair it all is. It’s just a marginally more self-regarding version of throwing cafeteria furniture across a city square in a Sun-issue Tommy hat. They are naturally supported by said newspaper, whose Pooterish idea that Sepp Blatter was paying attention to what was in their leader column saw it declare in 2010: “Today the Sun makes this plea to Mr Blatter and Fifa. Don’t be put off by the BBC rehashing ancient history. Despite BBC muck-raking, the Sun trusts Fifa to put football first.”

Even our football-loving prime minister is just another Englishman whose criticism of Fifa is based solely on self-interest, as opposed to principle, and whose pettiness only serves to underscore the global perception that our position on everything is based on sour grapes. Back in 2010, he too criticised the British media for daring to investigate Fifa, while the bid team called it “unpatriotic”. Cameron has spent the past week falsifying his anti-Blatter history while failing to disguise his belief that nicking the 2018 World Cup hosting rights would be the perfect money-shot to his prime ministership.

England ready to host 2022 World Cup in place of Qatar, culture secretary says



Consider these powers the perfect spiritual leaders for a tribe whose analogue is probably those Americans who genuinely hadn’t a clue they were even disliked before 9/11. There is a huge section of fans – and, clearly, administrators – with absolutely no idea how much England is detested within world football, nor any idea as to why. And no interest in getting one.

Ideally, each and every one of them would be forced to attend a six-week residential course in which a series of instructors prepared detailed presentations on the matter, which concluded with the rhetorical inquiry: “Do you now understand why everyone thinks we’re just absolutely massive arses?”

Unfortunately, I am told that given the numbers involved this is not a scaleable solution. In which case, just for the merriment, please, please let the FBI open an investigation into how hosting rights for the 1966 World Cup were won. I don’t even care about international law any more, or the increasingly bonkers mission creep which has seen the US announce additional probes into the 2010 and 2014 World Cups, as well the 2018 and 2022 vote, and which will now clearly end in this being the US’s legal equivalent of Nam. I just want someone – anyone – to bring home the realisation that we really are the Ukip of international football. And, increasingly, of international life.

If we're going to cry foul over Fifa, then we should at least hold our banks to the same standard

Mary Dejevsky in The Independent

Modern life provides many opportunities for bafflement, but the continuing capacity of the British to regard themselves collectively as paragons of public virtue never ceases to amaze.

This week we have seen the lid taken off two prominent areas of our national life – banking (again) and football – to reveal something quite unpleasant beneath. But the response has been – in the first case – to insist yet again on “just a few bad apples” and – in the second – to attack a report that was so misguided as to exonerate Qatar and Russia over their World Cup bids, while fingering England (how dare they?) for being economical with its observance of the rules.

I remember vividly my response to the first reports that bankers in the City of London were suspected of fiddling the Libor rate. I was horrified. Was Libor – the London inter-bank offered rate – not the benchmark for international banking? The standard-setter? If Libor was being manipulated, what did this say about the soundness of UK banking generally? How and why had anyone been able to cook the books for so long? With something as fundamental as Libor, why were there no fail-safe mechanisms for checking?

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The two questions that I asked most often, though, were the most basic. How come the only remedies being mooted were fines on the institutions – fines that would ultimately be paid to a large extent by you and me, the taxpayers, seeing as how we had rescued these banks by taking them into public ownership? And even more basically, why had the reputation of the City of London not been tarnished beyond recall? The Prime Minister and the Chancellor were still, it seemed, lavishing time and energy trying to secure some arrangement with Brussels that would minimise the damage to the City from tighter eurozone regulation. Frankly, why bother? Let City banking lie on the bed it has made.

It then transpired that not only Libor was being rigged, but the foreign-exchange market, too, with gung-ho bankers exchanging jocular emails about what they were doing. And not only doing, but getting away with, until last year. What was the price for such cynical profiteering? More fines on the institutions, no doubt plea-bargained down, and again likely to be paid, one way or another, by you and me. Is it not passing strange that the offending emails could be cited verbatim, but that those who sent them remain unnamed? Even stranger, that there are apparently no criminal charges yet being brought? Oh yes, the Serious Fraud Office is apparently looking into that possibility, but such a tentative response hardly inspires confidence.

 

As a journalist, I find it hard to believe that hacking someone’s voicemail warrants something akin to a show trial and a prison sentence, but swindling the country out of millions of pounds isn’t treated as a crime – at least not one that anyone shows much eagerness to prosecute. Are there frauds that are too big or too brazen to punish? Even the reputational damage seems limited. Far from being diverted to Frankfurt or New York, the money, it seems, continues to roll in. Or is this perhaps a reflection of the sort of money that now flows through London; a quality of money and banking that deserve each other? 

And so to the “national game”. When Fifa published its report into allegations of corruption during the most recent bidding process, and essentially absolved Qatar and Russia, the initial reaction here in Britain seemed to veer between disbelief and resignation. After all, Qatar’s bid had succeeded despite summer temperatures that are now requiring the whole global football schedule for 2022 to be rewritten, while questions over Russia’s capacity for bad behaviour are hardly new. When it emerged, however, that Fifa had put someone in the dock for rule-bending, and that someone was England, the response was apoplectic. Righteous indignation hardly begins to describe it.

The fury was palpable, with MPs talking about a “whitewash” and the English FA categorically rejecting charges that it had tried to “curry favour” with the former Fifa vice-president, Jack Warner, despite a list of actions that at least permitted such an interpretation. The former English FA chairman, Lord Triesman, accepted the findings as “legitimate” and “embarrassing”, while also insisting that the report reflected Fifa’s “dislike” of England.

Already turbid waters were further muddied when the US lawyer, Michael Garcia, who actually conducted the inquiry, complained that the report contained “incomplete and erroneous representations”. There is now pressure for his findings to be released in their entirety. But the self-justifying anger the report prompted in London leaves a sour taste and suggests a verb that can be conjugated “I entertain; you offer encouragement; he/she/it gives bribes”.

One consequence could be that the next time the UK casts aspersions on the probity of an Arab state or Russia, the polite response will cite pots and kettles.

What I fail to understand is why the same seems not to apply to the City of London and its banks.