Mr. Apologist, excuses are not enough

Tabish Khair in The Hindu

It has been a fortnight of shocking tragedies in India and abroad — and of excuses by you, Mr. Apologist.

You have told me that I should not overreact: journalists get killed all over the world, and sometimes on their own doorsteps; the Rohingya are just suffering from an internal law-and-order problem; the hurricanes ravaging the Caribbean these days and the floods ravaging India are just natural phenomena, and not due to climate change; and as for the Dreamers, poised earlier to be kicked out of U.S., oh well, that’s all politics, you know, and such things happen in politics (you know). Calm down, you tell me.

Let me reassure you, I am calm. So calm that I am willing to accept all your above positions, though I disagree with them either entirely or in part. I am calm enough to concede that in holding these positions you are establishing a certain political perspective. I differ from you, but as long as you do not elaborate into a justification of murder or genocide from your preliminary positions, you have the grounds to think as you do.

Cracks in society, in humanity

But are you calm enough to realise that my main objections arise from other (related) aspects of all these cases, as elaborated by you?

Are you calm enough to concede that a brutal murder shakes the foundations of society, and its perpetrators can be allowed to go scot-free only if you want hairline cracks to develop further in your society? When the murder is that of a besieged public figure and one with whom you (Mr. Apologist) disagree, the cracks run deeper — and you owe it to your own society to hold the culprits accountable. Cracks in a society and a state often seem to remain superficial until it is too late and the entire edifice starts crumbling — as we have seen and are seeing in many countries. Are you calm enough to concede that the least you can do, out of common decency if not patriotism, is to ‘unfollow’ those of your social media ‘friends’ who justify a murder and vilify its victim?

Like you, I know — for I am not what you will call an ‘idealist’ (alas) — that states need to exercise authority, and more so when faced with insurgency and extremism. I am calm enough to say — though many leftists and Muslims will berate me for it — that the Burmese state might have needed to act against some form of Islamist insurgency. But when such actions lead to the killing of children and force more than 300,000 villagers to flee for their lives, then surely we are talking of an extreme abuse of authority, surely we are talking of genocide and ethnic cleansing? Are you calm enough to concede that we cannot justify such horrors without hairline cracks developing in our very humanity, so that one day, it too, like society or state, crumbles into dust?
Hurricane Irma or the devastating floods in Bihar, you tell me, these are natural disasters. You dismiss climate change: calm down, you tell me, Earth was even hotter thousands of years ago, when there were no polluting industries.

Dumping our refuse

But — unlike most people who are fighting to stop climate change — I am willing to concede that I can never convince you of climate change. If I point to an extreme winter this year, you will point to a moderate winter another year. Climate change cannot be proved in a laboratory: there is evidence that it is taking place, but all of it exists at a very high scientific level (for instance, projections of CO2 emissions and their effects) or at a degree of theoretical abstraction. You can always refuse to accept those conclusions. I am calm enough to accept that.

But are you calm enough to acknowledge that you do not dump your refuse — most of it biodegradable — in your own house, but we, as a species, are dumping our refuse (much of it not even biodegradable) in the only house we know, planet Earth? Are you calm enough to concede that if the former is bad for you, the latter must be bad for all of us?

As for the prospective expulsion of the Dreamers — young men and women, almost entirely educated and employed today, who grew up in the U.S. and have often known only that country, these are people whose parents entered the U.S. illegally when the Dreamers were two or ten years old and in no condition to have a say in the matter. These are people who pay extra to society for living there and who came out and disclosed their status in response to a promise by a previous government. Are you calm enough to concede that we cannot punish children for the crimes of their parents, and that people who have grown up, contributed and committed themselves to a nation have earned the right to stay there? Are you calm enough to realise that politicians cannot be allowed to arbitrarily tinker with established governmental policies affecting ordinary thousands for unclear, personal, vindictive or racist reasons?

Are you calm enough to face the fact that we owe our children much more than mere excuses, Mr. Apologist?

After Irma, let those who use our tax havens contribute to the repairs

The Caribbean poor might have been devastated by disaster, but their islands also host huge global wealth

Mariana Mazzucato in The Guardian

Did you see the image of Richard Branson, hiding with his friends and family in his expensive wine cellar on his private Caribbean island, tweeting that it felt like a fun slumber party from his youth? This while Hurricane Irma tore through the houses and lives of others in the region, offering a stark illustration of the way so-called natural events affect people of different socioeconomic classes in radically different ways.

Architects and urban planners call this “spatial inequality”. People living close to each other, whether in New York, London or on a Caribbean island, will experience life completely differently depending on the resources and opportunities they have available to them, determined principally by their economic and class background. 

Indeed, modern inequality increasingly reveals itself through the divergence of income and opportunities at a local level: the inequality between people living across London postcodes can be almost as large as those between average incomes in developed and developing countries. So a “natural” disaster (worsened by climate change factors) becomes a socioeconomic one, in the same way that the banking crisis, a manmade disaster, affected people differently.

Last week, after Hurricane Irma stormed the Caribbean, Gaston Browne, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, appealed to the world, saying that 90% of buildings had been destroyed and 50% of the population was homeless. He criticised those “irresponsible leaders” denying climate change, when it was obvious to him that it was a key factor in the severity of the recent hurricanes. Now a second hurricane, Jose, is coming his way and he is trying to force residents of Barbuda to evacuate. Similarly, the French part of Saint Martin has been virtually destroyed, while two-thirds of the population of Puerto Rico is without power and 17% without water. Although it was slow to respond, the UK government has contributed £12m to the relief effort in the Caribbean, including a naval ship.

Browne called me in 2016 because he had read my book, The Entrepreneurial State, and wanted to know more about the various instruments that might be used to get back some value from investments that the Antigua and Barbuda government had made in the tourism industry. And would it be possible, he asked, for such future public investments to be conditional on the tourism industry ploughing back profits into public funds used for development? In this way, the taxpayers who propped up tourism could also benefit from reinvestments into areas such as health, education and transport for all.

While some may cynically dismiss this question, raising concerns about corruption of public finances in poor countries, the question Browne asked, even before the hurricane hit, was a good one: how should those extracting value from a place contribute to it?

But the questions are complicated and perhaps even uncomfortable for those asking them. The relief efforts needed are larger than they should be due to how these countries have been starved of tax revenue precisely because they have chosen to be tax havens.

The simpler question is to ask those “elites” who save billions by using tax shelters in the Caribbean, and the Big 4 accounting firms that enable their transactions, to contribute to the relief funds. The more difficult question is how to change the status quo and make sure that these companies actually contribute to the resources they take advantage of, both at home and abroad.

It’s more difficult because it requires admitting that the governments offering tax shelters, which today might be appealing for relief, are also extracting value from the governments of the foreign companies they host. So, for example, the UK taxpayers pay for infrastructure and education in the UK. British-based companies benefit from that. If they then benefit from havens to avoid paying tax to the UK, the tax shelters are, of course, a key part of the problem.

Clearly, a priority should be for companies, operating in countries offering tax havens in British Overseas Territories and the Commonwealth (or, indeed, elsewhere, such as Switzerland or Monte Carlo), to be more transparent. As argued by the Tax Justice Network, this would mean that countries in the Overseas Territories should “provide free, online and publicly accessible registers of all companies and trusts” located there.

In particular, it argues that this information should include which individuals own more than 10% of the shares in each company registered in the location; the names of the directors and the various locations where the companies have offices. The Network also argues that the cost of UK aid should be matched by revenue from the companies benefiting from the tax shelters and that full annual accounts should be prepared in accordance with a recognisable set of accounting standards. A modest proposal would be for the countries to raise money from the companies by increasing, for example, the charges they make for offshore services, or by charging tax on the companies based in these places.

But if the whole point was to avoid tax, would this cause the companies to leave? This gets us to the core of the problem. It is impossible to have real growth, and a reduction in inequality, through policies that are in the end just part of what we might call the “global value extraction business”. The real questions are exactly those that Browne asked me.

Governments need to make critical investments that transform their societies in ways that create capacity, knowledge and long-run growth. This will be expensive, but possible, if arrangements are put in place so that those benefiting from the common resources also plough their profits back into those very resources. This, however, requires moving away from the “us v them” mentality and recognising that the problem rests just as much on the forces causing inequality at home as on the tensions between the rich and poor countries. It’s more than just an argument about who has to pick up the bill for the mess, disaster after disaster.