Showing posts with label Parliament. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Parliament. Show all posts
Saturday, 10 August 2024
Friday, 2 August 2024
Thursday, 20 June 2024
Sunday, 16 June 2024
Friday, 22 December 2023
Wednesday, 14 December 2022
Thursday, 21 July 2022
Friday, 1 July 2022
The parallels between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn
How did the Conservatives become Corbynites asks Bagehot in The Economist
Switch the names, change a few dates and squint a little, and the potted biographies of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn look very similar. After bohemian childhoods in the English countryside and stints at private schools, each makes his home in Islington, cycles a lot and marries thrice (to a much younger spouse on the third occasion). A career in politics is spent on the fringes of their respective parties, communicating with their most loyal fans via columns in the Daily Telegraph (for Mr Johnson) and the Morning Star (for Mr Corbyn).
Then, abruptly, each finds himself thrust into the leadership by party members frustrated about their wishes being ignored. In the case of Labour’s selectocracy, the desire was for unashamed socialism. Their Conservative cousins yearned for a proper Brexit. As leaders, both are written off by commentators and rivals alike before enjoying a surprise triumph in an election. In the 2017 general election Mr Corbyn was expected to be steamrollered by Theresa May, Mr Johnson’s predecessor as prime minister; instead the Conservatives lost their majority. Two years later Mr Johnson did pulverise Mr Corbyn, winning the Conservatives’ largest majority since the days of Margaret Thatcher.
If Mr Johnson’s ascent has been oddly similar to Mr Corbyn’s rise, so too may be his demise. James Johnson (no relation), a pollster who worked for Mrs May, argues Mr Johnson is the Conservative Corbyn: an unpopular leader, dragging towards defeat a party that is split between those deluded enough to support him and those too impotent to stop him. The problems that beset Labour during the Corbyn years are now swallowing the Conservatives.
It starts with the manner of their elections to the leadership. Just like Mr Corbyn, Mr Johnson is not a creature of the parliamentary party. Mr Corbyn derived his authority from Labour members. In 2016 he lost a confidence vote among his mps, yet shamelessly stayed on. Mr Johnson claims his legitimacy from the 14m people who voted Conservative at the election in 2019. The fact that 41% of Conservative mps opposed him in a confidence vote in June can therefore be dismissed. That creates a surreal situation in which two-thirds of the House of Commons would rather the prime minister was gone. Constitutionally, it is a mess. But Mr Johnson cares little about such disorder.
Delusion has sunk in among Mr Johnson’s remaining acolytes. In the wake of two dire by-election defeats on June 23rd, Tory flunkeys were reduced to arguing that the Conservatives won more votes across both seats, akin to a relegated football manager pointing out his team’s sturdy goal difference. Such derangement has echoes of Labour figures in 2019 who, in the wake of their worst result since 1935, claimed that the party had “won the argument”.
The ineptitude of his internal enemies was the main reason Mr Corbyn stayed in power. When a leadership challenge was launched Mr Corbyn’s opponents alighted on Owen Smith, then the mp for Pontypridd, as a candidate. His most notable moment in the campaign came when he accidentally implied he had a 29-inch penis. He lost. Mr Johnson is similarly blessed when it comes to his enemies. Conservative plotters lumbered into a poorly timed leadership contest at the start of June, a few weeks before Mr Johnson’s electoral popularity was found badly wanting in the by-elections. Organising another crack at him will take time.
In each case, some mps stay loyal because they have no prospects under another leader. Some of the 2019 intake of Conservative mps are lucky to be employed, never mind in Parliament. Mr Corbyn introduced the world to Richard Burgon, an mp whose hidden talents remained just that during a brief foray onto the front bench. Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary and Mr Johnson’s staunchest ally, may be the most successful novelist in cabinet since Disraeli, but the comparisons end there.
Mr Corbyn and Mr Johnson also share an ability to drive opponents to near insanity. Mr Johnson seems sometimes to be regarded as the first politician ever to tell fibs in office, when he is just the latest to do so. When home secretary, for example, Mrs May launched a salvo at the concept of human rights after someone could not be deported “because—and I am not making this up—he had a pet cat”. (Reader, she was making it up.) Likewise, Mr Corbyn threw out a range of often reasonable, if offbeat, policies such as increased provision of free school meals or free broadband, which generated disproportionately angry reactions. Rage at their faults blinded opponents to the qualities of both men; it is impossible to understand an enemy if you cannot appreciate his appeal.
Jeremy Johnson
Yet the critics are also right to be furious. Mr Corbyn did, eventually, lead his party to electoral destruction. The Labour leader was, notoriously, the dimmest member of the party’s left-wing rump, with noxious views on everything from anti-Semitism to Russia. Voters sniffed that out. Likewise, Mr Johnson is manifestly unsuited to the job of prime minister. Brexit, which Mr Johnson did more than any other politician to bring about, has been a slow-moving disaster, throttling the British economy just as its critics warned.
Such vindication, however, is worth little on its own. And as any Labour mp can confirm, changing leader—even an unpopular one—does not solve everything. Under his aegis Mr Corbyn’s critics argued the party would be 20 points ahead of the then wobbling Conservatives with any other leader. It is now three years since Mr Corbyn stepped down as leader. Despite the backdrop of an unpopular prime minister, police investigations into Downing Street and rocketing inflation, Labour cannot even sustain a double-digit lead in the polls. Allies of Sir Keir Starmer, Mr Corbyn’s successor as party leader, blame “long Corbyn” for this slack performance. At the dispatch box Mr Johnson brings up Mr Corbyn whenever he can. When the time comes, Labour will happily repay the favour. Long Boris may linger, too.
Switch the names, change a few dates and squint a little, and the potted biographies of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn look very similar. After bohemian childhoods in the English countryside and stints at private schools, each makes his home in Islington, cycles a lot and marries thrice (to a much younger spouse on the third occasion). A career in politics is spent on the fringes of their respective parties, communicating with their most loyal fans via columns in the Daily Telegraph (for Mr Johnson) and the Morning Star (for Mr Corbyn).
Then, abruptly, each finds himself thrust into the leadership by party members frustrated about their wishes being ignored. In the case of Labour’s selectocracy, the desire was for unashamed socialism. Their Conservative cousins yearned for a proper Brexit. As leaders, both are written off by commentators and rivals alike before enjoying a surprise triumph in an election. In the 2017 general election Mr Corbyn was expected to be steamrollered by Theresa May, Mr Johnson’s predecessor as prime minister; instead the Conservatives lost their majority. Two years later Mr Johnson did pulverise Mr Corbyn, winning the Conservatives’ largest majority since the days of Margaret Thatcher.
If Mr Johnson’s ascent has been oddly similar to Mr Corbyn’s rise, so too may be his demise. James Johnson (no relation), a pollster who worked for Mrs May, argues Mr Johnson is the Conservative Corbyn: an unpopular leader, dragging towards defeat a party that is split between those deluded enough to support him and those too impotent to stop him. The problems that beset Labour during the Corbyn years are now swallowing the Conservatives.
It starts with the manner of their elections to the leadership. Just like Mr Corbyn, Mr Johnson is not a creature of the parliamentary party. Mr Corbyn derived his authority from Labour members. In 2016 he lost a confidence vote among his mps, yet shamelessly stayed on. Mr Johnson claims his legitimacy from the 14m people who voted Conservative at the election in 2019. The fact that 41% of Conservative mps opposed him in a confidence vote in June can therefore be dismissed. That creates a surreal situation in which two-thirds of the House of Commons would rather the prime minister was gone. Constitutionally, it is a mess. But Mr Johnson cares little about such disorder.
Delusion has sunk in among Mr Johnson’s remaining acolytes. In the wake of two dire by-election defeats on June 23rd, Tory flunkeys were reduced to arguing that the Conservatives won more votes across both seats, akin to a relegated football manager pointing out his team’s sturdy goal difference. Such derangement has echoes of Labour figures in 2019 who, in the wake of their worst result since 1935, claimed that the party had “won the argument”.
The ineptitude of his internal enemies was the main reason Mr Corbyn stayed in power. When a leadership challenge was launched Mr Corbyn’s opponents alighted on Owen Smith, then the mp for Pontypridd, as a candidate. His most notable moment in the campaign came when he accidentally implied he had a 29-inch penis. He lost. Mr Johnson is similarly blessed when it comes to his enemies. Conservative plotters lumbered into a poorly timed leadership contest at the start of June, a few weeks before Mr Johnson’s electoral popularity was found badly wanting in the by-elections. Organising another crack at him will take time.
In each case, some mps stay loyal because they have no prospects under another leader. Some of the 2019 intake of Conservative mps are lucky to be employed, never mind in Parliament. Mr Corbyn introduced the world to Richard Burgon, an mp whose hidden talents remained just that during a brief foray onto the front bench. Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary and Mr Johnson’s staunchest ally, may be the most successful novelist in cabinet since Disraeli, but the comparisons end there.
Mr Corbyn and Mr Johnson also share an ability to drive opponents to near insanity. Mr Johnson seems sometimes to be regarded as the first politician ever to tell fibs in office, when he is just the latest to do so. When home secretary, for example, Mrs May launched a salvo at the concept of human rights after someone could not be deported “because—and I am not making this up—he had a pet cat”. (Reader, she was making it up.) Likewise, Mr Corbyn threw out a range of often reasonable, if offbeat, policies such as increased provision of free school meals or free broadband, which generated disproportionately angry reactions. Rage at their faults blinded opponents to the qualities of both men; it is impossible to understand an enemy if you cannot appreciate his appeal.
Jeremy Johnson
Yet the critics are also right to be furious. Mr Corbyn did, eventually, lead his party to electoral destruction. The Labour leader was, notoriously, the dimmest member of the party’s left-wing rump, with noxious views on everything from anti-Semitism to Russia. Voters sniffed that out. Likewise, Mr Johnson is manifestly unsuited to the job of prime minister. Brexit, which Mr Johnson did more than any other politician to bring about, has been a slow-moving disaster, throttling the British economy just as its critics warned.
Such vindication, however, is worth little on its own. And as any Labour mp can confirm, changing leader—even an unpopular one—does not solve everything. Under his aegis Mr Corbyn’s critics argued the party would be 20 points ahead of the then wobbling Conservatives with any other leader. It is now three years since Mr Corbyn stepped down as leader. Despite the backdrop of an unpopular prime minister, police investigations into Downing Street and rocketing inflation, Labour cannot even sustain a double-digit lead in the polls. Allies of Sir Keir Starmer, Mr Corbyn’s successor as party leader, blame “long Corbyn” for this slack performance. At the dispatch box Mr Johnson brings up Mr Corbyn whenever he can. When the time comes, Labour will happily repay the favour. Long Boris may linger, too.
Tuesday, 17 August 2021
Monday, 16 August 2021
Thursday, 24 October 2019
Why ‘the will of the people’ is a myth in British democracy
British people are fundamentally disempowered by our political system. Other countries show that there’s another way writes George Monbiot in The Guardian
Instead of being captured by corrupt politicians and local mafias, the people’s decisions ensured that the money went where it was needed most, greatly improving sanitation, clean water, green space, health and education, transforming the lives of the poor. Porto Alegre became the Brazilian state capital with the highest ranking on the human development index. The more people engaged, the wider and deeper their political understanding became. Short-termism was replaced by long-term thinking: essential if we are to confront environmental breakdown.
There are plenty of other ways in which deliberative democracy can change our lives. In Ireland, a citizens’ assembly on abortion law turned an angry debate into a considered one. It tested competing claims and ideas, and led eventually to a referendum. The Better ReykjavÃk programme allows the citizens of Iceland’s capital to put forward ideas for the city’s improvement, which other people vote on. The 15 most popular ideas every month are passed to the city council to consider. The programme has remodelled ReykjavÃk in fascinating ways.
Constitutional conventions can be used to draw up principles of government, on which the rest of the population can then vote. Some of the best models are those developed by the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario. Members of the convention are drawn by lot and informed by experts, field trips and submissions from other citizens. The UK is in urgent need of one.
But for all the rhetoric about the people’s will, nothing of the kind is on offer in Britain. The so-called citizens’ assembly on climate change proposed by parliament is a cynical caricature of participation. It has a restrictive agenda, a narrow range of advisers and no time for effective deliberation. Digital tools offer massive opportunities for fine-tuning political decisions, but our cod-medieval system – all Black Rods and serjeants at arms – is stuck in the age of the quill pen. The only new form of participation we have been granted this century is an enhanced right to petition parliament, introduced by Tony Blair in 2006. Did it seem radical and innovative? Only until you remember that a similar concession appears to have been made by Edward I in 1275.
The European referendum, that apparently represents the people’s will, was reduced to such a crude choice that no one knows exactly what the majority voted for. Rather than encouraging an informed, nuanced politics, it has made our system even more adversarial, binary and reductive.
I could see the point of Brexit if it meant returning power to the people. But Johnson is as contemptuous of popular sovereignty as he is of parliamentary sovereignty. He seeks sovereignty of a different kind: autocratic control over both parliament and people.
I would love to see Labour placing radical democratic reform at the heart of its manifesto, seeking not to take power but to give it away. I suspect its offer will be limited, until we can build movements big enough to force our governments to let the people speak. Participation in politics is a not a gift. It is our right.
Illustration: Sebastien Thibault
They promised sovereignty, but at first it was unclear which variety of sovereignty they meant. Were the politicians who swore we would regain it when we left the European Union referring to parliamentary or popular sovereignty? Now we know they didn’t mean parliamentary sovereignty. Boris Johnson’s government has sought to trick, rush, ignore and prorogue parliament at every turn.
“People v parliament” is Johnson’s pitch to the nation. So where do the people come in? If he is a champion of popular sovereignty, why does he propose no improvements to a 19th-century model of democracy that permits no popular engagement other than an election every few years, and a referendum every few decades? There is a tension between parliamentary and popular sovereignty. A lively, meaningful democracy would achieve a balance between the two. It would combine parliamentary (representative) democracy with participatory democracy. But no such balance is sought.
Rather than encouraging an informed, nuanced politics, Brexit has made our system even more adversarial
Representative democracy is a remarkably blunt instrument. Hundreds of issues are bundled together at every election, yet the vote tends to swing on just one or two of them. The government then presumes consent for its entire programme and, if it commands a parliamentary majority, for anything else it wants to introduce in its term of office. We don’t accept presumed consent in sex. Why should we accept it in politics?
I’ve often been asked, when I complain about a government policy, “So why don’t you stand for election?” This suggests that the only valid political role a citizen can play is to become a representative, so that only a tiny proportion of the population has a legitimate voice between elections. This is the shallowest and weakest conception of democracy.
I do not want to abandon representative democracy. I want to see it balanced by popular sovereignty, especially the variety known as deliberative democracy. By contrast to the adversarial nature of representative democracy, in which politicians try to dominate and vanquish their opponents, deliberative democracy means drawing citizens together to solve problems. It means creating forums in which we listen respectfully to each other, seek to understand each other’s views, change our minds when necessary, and create the rich, informed democratic culture currently missing from national life.
Perhaps the best example is the participatory budgeting programme in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. Between 1989 and 2004, citizens were able to decide how the city’s entire investment budget should be spent. The process was designed by government and people working together, and was allowed to evolve as citizens suggested improvements. Some 50,000 people a year participated.
They promised sovereignty, but at first it was unclear which variety of sovereignty they meant. Were the politicians who swore we would regain it when we left the European Union referring to parliamentary or popular sovereignty? Now we know they didn’t mean parliamentary sovereignty. Boris Johnson’s government has sought to trick, rush, ignore and prorogue parliament at every turn.
“People v parliament” is Johnson’s pitch to the nation. So where do the people come in? If he is a champion of popular sovereignty, why does he propose no improvements to a 19th-century model of democracy that permits no popular engagement other than an election every few years, and a referendum every few decades? There is a tension between parliamentary and popular sovereignty. A lively, meaningful democracy would achieve a balance between the two. It would combine parliamentary (representative) democracy with participatory democracy. But no such balance is sought.
Rather than encouraging an informed, nuanced politics, Brexit has made our system even more adversarial
Representative democracy is a remarkably blunt instrument. Hundreds of issues are bundled together at every election, yet the vote tends to swing on just one or two of them. The government then presumes consent for its entire programme and, if it commands a parliamentary majority, for anything else it wants to introduce in its term of office. We don’t accept presumed consent in sex. Why should we accept it in politics?
I’ve often been asked, when I complain about a government policy, “So why don’t you stand for election?” This suggests that the only valid political role a citizen can play is to become a representative, so that only a tiny proportion of the population has a legitimate voice between elections. This is the shallowest and weakest conception of democracy.
I do not want to abandon representative democracy. I want to see it balanced by popular sovereignty, especially the variety known as deliberative democracy. By contrast to the adversarial nature of representative democracy, in which politicians try to dominate and vanquish their opponents, deliberative democracy means drawing citizens together to solve problems. It means creating forums in which we listen respectfully to each other, seek to understand each other’s views, change our minds when necessary, and create the rich, informed democratic culture currently missing from national life.
Perhaps the best example is the participatory budgeting programme in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. Between 1989 and 2004, citizens were able to decide how the city’s entire investment budget should be spent. The process was designed by government and people working together, and was allowed to evolve as citizens suggested improvements. Some 50,000 people a year participated.
Instead of being captured by corrupt politicians and local mafias, the people’s decisions ensured that the money went where it was needed most, greatly improving sanitation, clean water, green space, health and education, transforming the lives of the poor. Porto Alegre became the Brazilian state capital with the highest ranking on the human development index. The more people engaged, the wider and deeper their political understanding became. Short-termism was replaced by long-term thinking: essential if we are to confront environmental breakdown.
There are plenty of other ways in which deliberative democracy can change our lives. In Ireland, a citizens’ assembly on abortion law turned an angry debate into a considered one. It tested competing claims and ideas, and led eventually to a referendum. The Better ReykjavÃk programme allows the citizens of Iceland’s capital to put forward ideas for the city’s improvement, which other people vote on. The 15 most popular ideas every month are passed to the city council to consider. The programme has remodelled ReykjavÃk in fascinating ways.
Constitutional conventions can be used to draw up principles of government, on which the rest of the population can then vote. Some of the best models are those developed by the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario. Members of the convention are drawn by lot and informed by experts, field trips and submissions from other citizens. The UK is in urgent need of one.
But for all the rhetoric about the people’s will, nothing of the kind is on offer in Britain. The so-called citizens’ assembly on climate change proposed by parliament is a cynical caricature of participation. It has a restrictive agenda, a narrow range of advisers and no time for effective deliberation. Digital tools offer massive opportunities for fine-tuning political decisions, but our cod-medieval system – all Black Rods and serjeants at arms – is stuck in the age of the quill pen. The only new form of participation we have been granted this century is an enhanced right to petition parliament, introduced by Tony Blair in 2006. Did it seem radical and innovative? Only until you remember that a similar concession appears to have been made by Edward I in 1275.
The European referendum, that apparently represents the people’s will, was reduced to such a crude choice that no one knows exactly what the majority voted for. Rather than encouraging an informed, nuanced politics, it has made our system even more adversarial, binary and reductive.
I could see the point of Brexit if it meant returning power to the people. But Johnson is as contemptuous of popular sovereignty as he is of parliamentary sovereignty. He seeks sovereignty of a different kind: autocratic control over both parliament and people.
I would love to see Labour placing radical democratic reform at the heart of its manifesto, seeking not to take power but to give it away. I suspect its offer will be limited, until we can build movements big enough to force our governments to let the people speak. Participation in politics is a not a gift. It is our right.
Sunday, 21 April 2019
My TED talk: how I took on the tech titans in their lair
For more than a year, the Observer writer has been probing a darkness at the heart of Silicon Valley. Last week, at a TED talk that became a global viral sensation, she told the tech billionaires they had broken democracy. What happened next? Carole Cadwalladr in the Guardian
FacebookTwitterPinterest Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey at TED2019 in Vancouver last week. ‘There is no point in quick fixes,’ he said. Photograph: Ryan Lash/TED
That night, though, there was what was described to me as “an emergency dinner” between Anderson and a cadre of senior Facebook executives. They were very angry, my spies told me. But Anderson, one of the most thoughtful people in tech, seemed unruffled.
“There’s always been a strict church and state separation between sponsors and editorial,” he said. “And these are important conversations we need to have. There’s a lot of people here who are very upset about what has happened to the internet. They want to take it back and we have to start figuring out how.” At the end of my talk, he invited Zuckerberg or anyone else at Facebook to come and respond. Spoiler: they never did.
The next day, on stage, Anderson interviewed Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter. How hard is it to get rid of Nazis from Twitter, Anderson asked him. Dorsey, dressed in a black beanie hat, black hoodie, black jeans and black boots, a monk for the online age, responded, expressionlessly, saying that Nazism was “hard to define”.
There were problems, he admitted, but there was no point in quick fixes. They needed to go “deep”. You’re on a ship, Anderson said, and there’s an iceberg ahead. “And you say… ‘Our boat hasn’t been built to handle it’ and we’re waiting and you are showing this extraordinary calm and we’re all worried but we’re outside saying, ‘Jack, turn the fucking wheel.’ ”
Spoiler: the fucking wheel remains unturned.
Anderson gave credit to Dorsey for actually showing up. And it’s true he did. He showed guts for doing what Zuckerberg and Sandberg would not.But, for many, including me, he might as well not have bothered. What came across most strongly, chillingly, was the complete absence of emotion – any emotion – in Dorsey’s face, expression, demeanour or voice.
When Cyndi Stivers, a TED director, asked me last summer if I’d be interested in doing a talk, I knew I would be terrified, but I knew I had to do it. The one constant in the time I have been reporting this story has been the lack of mainstream broadcast coverage, the absence of other newspapers picking it up, the failure by even senior, well-respected journalists to understand the issues at stake, the wilful misinterpretation of the facts by the right-wing press, the almost total silence from both the government and the opposition.
The brilliance of the TED format, its slick production, deft editing and clever curation, is that it offers an opportunity to bypass the traditional media – the BBC most especially – that has failed or refused to cover this story. TED Talks speak to an audience who desperately need to know what happened but almost certainly don’t: the disenfranchised teenagers and young people who had no vote but who will be affected by this perfect storm of technology and criminality for the rest of their lives.
But TED is a tough, pressured, hugely stressful gig, even for experienced public speakers, and I’m not that. Standing in the wings waiting to go on, I told the stage manager that my heart was racing uncontrollably and in an act of great kindness, she grasped both my hands and made me take breath after breath. And what you don’t see in the video – deftly edited out – is the awful, heart-stopping moment when I forgot a line, followed by another act of collective kindness, a spontaneous empathic cheer as I composed myself and found my cue. “That’s when the audience came onside,” an attendee told me. “You were human. That’s when you won them over.”
On the TED stage, dressed in a hat and a hood, Dorsey appeared – and I can’t think of any other way of saying this – insentient. And when I make the same observation to an older tech titan, he tells me how he once went with Zuckerberg on a 15-hour flight on a private jet with 16 other people and Zuckerberg never said a word to anyone for the entire duration.
It’s all I can think about by the end of the week. For five days, I’ve been overwhelmed by support and understanding and encouragement from wellwishers, person after person who tells me they were moved or terrified by my talk, by the danger posed by this technology that has unleashed a potential for destruction that we neither saw coming nor know how to contain.
Dorsey can see the iceberg but doesn’t seem to feel our terror. Or understand it. In an interview last summer, US journalist Kara Swisher, repeatedly asked Zuckerberg how he felt about Facebook’s role in inciting genocide in Myanmar – as established by the UN – and he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer.
The world needs all kinds of brains. But in the situation we are in, with the dangers we face, it’s not these kinds of brains. These are brilliant men. They have created platforms of unimaginable complexity. But if they’re not sick to their stomach about what has happened in Myanmar or overwhelmed by guilt about how their platforms were used by Russian intelligence to subvert their own country’s democracy, or sickened by their own role in what happened in New Zealand, they’re not fit to hold these jobs or wield this unimaginable power.
I walked among the tech gods last week. I don’t think they set out to enable massacres to be live-streamed. Or massive electoral fraud in a once-in-a-lifetime, knife-edge vote. But they did. If they don’t feel guilt, shame and remorse, if they don’t have a burning desire to make amends, their boards, shareholders, investors, employees and family members need to get them out.
We can see the iceberg. We know it’s coming. That’s the lesson of TED 2019. We all know it. There are only five people in the room who apparently don’t: Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jack Dorsey.
Carole Cadwalladr speaking at TED2019 last week. The Observer journalist was invited to give a talk in a session tagged Truth. Photograph: Marla Aufmuth/TED
If Silicon Valley is the beast, then TED is its belly. And on Monday, I entered it. The technology conference that has become a global media phenomenon with its short, punchy TED Talks that promote “Ideas Worth Spreading” is the closest thing that Silicon Valley has to a safe space.
A safe space that was breached last week. A breach that I was not just there to witness, but that I actively participated in. I can’t claim either credit or responsibility – I didn’t invite myself to the conference, held annually in Vancouver, or programme my talk in a session called “Truth”. But I did take the reporting that we have been publishing in the Observer over the past two and a half years, I did condense it into a 15-minute talk, and I did deliver it on the TED main stage directly to the people I described as “the Gods of Silicon Valley: Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jack Dorsey”. The founders of Facebook and Google – who were sponsoring the conference – and the co-founder of Twitter – who was speaking at it.
I did tell them that they had facilitated multiple crimes in the EU referendum. That as things stood, I didn’t think it was possible to have free and fair elections ever again. That liberal democracy was broken. And they had broke it.
It was only later that I began to realise quite what TED had done: how, in this setting, with this crowd, it had committed the equivalent of inviting the fox into the henhouse. And I was the fox. Or as one attendee put it: “You came into their temple,” he said. “And shat on their altar.”
I did. Not least, I discovered, because I named them. Because nobody had told me not to. And so I called them out, in a room that included their peers, mentors, employees, friends and investors.
A room that fell silent when I ended and then erupted in whoops and cheers. “It’s what we’re all thinking,” one person told me. “But it’s been the thing that nobody had actually said.”
Because it isn’t an exaggeration to say that TED is the holy temple of tech. In the early days, it was where the new miracles of technology were first unveiled – the Apple Macintosh and the CD-Rom – and in recent years it’s become the place that has most clearly articulated the Silicon Valley gospel. For many, including myself, TED was how they discovered the excitement and possibilities of technology. A brand of tech utopianism that, even as the world has darkened, TED has found hard to give up.
But now it has. Or at least it’s sent up a flare. A bold, impossible-to-miss stroke by its high priest, Chris Anderson, a thoughtful Brit who bought TED when it was in its first incarnation – a secretive Californian conference for the masters of the universe – and made it a multi-million-dollar media organisation.
Anderson hadn’t just invited me in, he put me front and centre, in the first session, unavoidable, even – maybe especially – for his sponsors.
In the simulcast lounge where conference attendees – who pay between $10,000 and $250,000 a ticket – lounge on soft seating and watch on screens, was Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder. “I saw his eyes flicker when you said his name,” one person told me. “As if he was checking if anybody was looking.”
In the theatre, senior executives of Facebook had been “warned” beforehand. And within minutes of stepping off stage, I was told that its press team had already lodged an official complaint. In fairness, what multi-billion dollar corporation with armies of PRs, lawyers and crisis teams, not to mention, embarrassingly, our former deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, wouldn’t want to push back on the charge that it has broken democracy?
Facebook’s difficulty is that it had no grounds to challenge my statement. No counter-evidence. If it was innocent of all charges, why hasn’t Mark Zuckerberg come to Britain and answered parliament’s questions? Though a member of the TED team told me, before the session had even ended, that Facebook had raised a serious challenge to the talk to claim “factual inaccuracies” and she warned me that they had been obliged to send them my script. What factual inaccuracies, we both wondered. “Let’s see what they come back with in the morning,” she said. Spoiler: they never did.
If Silicon Valley is the beast, then TED is its belly. And on Monday, I entered it. The technology conference that has become a global media phenomenon with its short, punchy TED Talks that promote “Ideas Worth Spreading” is the closest thing that Silicon Valley has to a safe space.
A safe space that was breached last week. A breach that I was not just there to witness, but that I actively participated in. I can’t claim either credit or responsibility – I didn’t invite myself to the conference, held annually in Vancouver, or programme my talk in a session called “Truth”. But I did take the reporting that we have been publishing in the Observer over the past two and a half years, I did condense it into a 15-minute talk, and I did deliver it on the TED main stage directly to the people I described as “the Gods of Silicon Valley: Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jack Dorsey”. The founders of Facebook and Google – who were sponsoring the conference – and the co-founder of Twitter – who was speaking at it.
I did tell them that they had facilitated multiple crimes in the EU referendum. That as things stood, I didn’t think it was possible to have free and fair elections ever again. That liberal democracy was broken. And they had broke it.
It was only later that I began to realise quite what TED had done: how, in this setting, with this crowd, it had committed the equivalent of inviting the fox into the henhouse. And I was the fox. Or as one attendee put it: “You came into their temple,” he said. “And shat on their altar.”
I did. Not least, I discovered, because I named them. Because nobody had told me not to. And so I called them out, in a room that included their peers, mentors, employees, friends and investors.
A room that fell silent when I ended and then erupted in whoops and cheers. “It’s what we’re all thinking,” one person told me. “But it’s been the thing that nobody had actually said.”
Because it isn’t an exaggeration to say that TED is the holy temple of tech. In the early days, it was where the new miracles of technology were first unveiled – the Apple Macintosh and the CD-Rom – and in recent years it’s become the place that has most clearly articulated the Silicon Valley gospel. For many, including myself, TED was how they discovered the excitement and possibilities of technology. A brand of tech utopianism that, even as the world has darkened, TED has found hard to give up.
But now it has. Or at least it’s sent up a flare. A bold, impossible-to-miss stroke by its high priest, Chris Anderson, a thoughtful Brit who bought TED when it was in its first incarnation – a secretive Californian conference for the masters of the universe – and made it a multi-million-dollar media organisation.
Anderson hadn’t just invited me in, he put me front and centre, in the first session, unavoidable, even – maybe especially – for his sponsors.
In the simulcast lounge where conference attendees – who pay between $10,000 and $250,000 a ticket – lounge on soft seating and watch on screens, was Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder. “I saw his eyes flicker when you said his name,” one person told me. “As if he was checking if anybody was looking.”
In the theatre, senior executives of Facebook had been “warned” beforehand. And within minutes of stepping off stage, I was told that its press team had already lodged an official complaint. In fairness, what multi-billion dollar corporation with armies of PRs, lawyers and crisis teams, not to mention, embarrassingly, our former deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, wouldn’t want to push back on the charge that it has broken democracy?
Facebook’s difficulty is that it had no grounds to challenge my statement. No counter-evidence. If it was innocent of all charges, why hasn’t Mark Zuckerberg come to Britain and answered parliament’s questions? Though a member of the TED team told me, before the session had even ended, that Facebook had raised a serious challenge to the talk to claim “factual inaccuracies” and she warned me that they had been obliged to send them my script. What factual inaccuracies, we both wondered. “Let’s see what they come back with in the morning,” she said. Spoiler: they never did.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey at TED2019 in Vancouver last week. ‘There is no point in quick fixes,’ he said. Photograph: Ryan Lash/TED
That night, though, there was what was described to me as “an emergency dinner” between Anderson and a cadre of senior Facebook executives. They were very angry, my spies told me. But Anderson, one of the most thoughtful people in tech, seemed unruffled.
“There’s always been a strict church and state separation between sponsors and editorial,” he said. “And these are important conversations we need to have. There’s a lot of people here who are very upset about what has happened to the internet. They want to take it back and we have to start figuring out how.” At the end of my talk, he invited Zuckerberg or anyone else at Facebook to come and respond. Spoiler: they never did.
The next day, on stage, Anderson interviewed Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter. How hard is it to get rid of Nazis from Twitter, Anderson asked him. Dorsey, dressed in a black beanie hat, black hoodie, black jeans and black boots, a monk for the online age, responded, expressionlessly, saying that Nazism was “hard to define”.
There were problems, he admitted, but there was no point in quick fixes. They needed to go “deep”. You’re on a ship, Anderson said, and there’s an iceberg ahead. “And you say… ‘Our boat hasn’t been built to handle it’ and we’re waiting and you are showing this extraordinary calm and we’re all worried but we’re outside saying, ‘Jack, turn the fucking wheel.’ ”
Spoiler: the fucking wheel remains unturned.
Anderson gave credit to Dorsey for actually showing up. And it’s true he did. He showed guts for doing what Zuckerberg and Sandberg would not.But, for many, including me, he might as well not have bothered. What came across most strongly, chillingly, was the complete absence of emotion – any emotion – in Dorsey’s face, expression, demeanour or voice.
When Cyndi Stivers, a TED director, asked me last summer if I’d be interested in doing a talk, I knew I would be terrified, but I knew I had to do it. The one constant in the time I have been reporting this story has been the lack of mainstream broadcast coverage, the absence of other newspapers picking it up, the failure by even senior, well-respected journalists to understand the issues at stake, the wilful misinterpretation of the facts by the right-wing press, the almost total silence from both the government and the opposition.
The brilliance of the TED format, its slick production, deft editing and clever curation, is that it offers an opportunity to bypass the traditional media – the BBC most especially – that has failed or refused to cover this story. TED Talks speak to an audience who desperately need to know what happened but almost certainly don’t: the disenfranchised teenagers and young people who had no vote but who will be affected by this perfect storm of technology and criminality for the rest of their lives.
But TED is a tough, pressured, hugely stressful gig, even for experienced public speakers, and I’m not that. Standing in the wings waiting to go on, I told the stage manager that my heart was racing uncontrollably and in an act of great kindness, she grasped both my hands and made me take breath after breath. And what you don’t see in the video – deftly edited out – is the awful, heart-stopping moment when I forgot a line, followed by another act of collective kindness, a spontaneous empathic cheer as I composed myself and found my cue. “That’s when the audience came onside,” an attendee told me. “You were human. That’s when you won them over.”
On the TED stage, dressed in a hat and a hood, Dorsey appeared – and I can’t think of any other way of saying this – insentient. And when I make the same observation to an older tech titan, he tells me how he once went with Zuckerberg on a 15-hour flight on a private jet with 16 other people and Zuckerberg never said a word to anyone for the entire duration.
It’s all I can think about by the end of the week. For five days, I’ve been overwhelmed by support and understanding and encouragement from wellwishers, person after person who tells me they were moved or terrified by my talk, by the danger posed by this technology that has unleashed a potential for destruction that we neither saw coming nor know how to contain.
Dorsey can see the iceberg but doesn’t seem to feel our terror. Or understand it. In an interview last summer, US journalist Kara Swisher, repeatedly asked Zuckerberg how he felt about Facebook’s role in inciting genocide in Myanmar – as established by the UN – and he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer.
The world needs all kinds of brains. But in the situation we are in, with the dangers we face, it’s not these kinds of brains. These are brilliant men. They have created platforms of unimaginable complexity. But if they’re not sick to their stomach about what has happened in Myanmar or overwhelmed by guilt about how their platforms were used by Russian intelligence to subvert their own country’s democracy, or sickened by their own role in what happened in New Zealand, they’re not fit to hold these jobs or wield this unimaginable power.
I walked among the tech gods last week. I don’t think they set out to enable massacres to be live-streamed. Or massive electoral fraud in a once-in-a-lifetime, knife-edge vote. But they did. If they don’t feel guilt, shame and remorse, if they don’t have a burning desire to make amends, their boards, shareholders, investors, employees and family members need to get them out.
We can see the iceberg. We know it’s coming. That’s the lesson of TED 2019. We all know it. There are only five people in the room who apparently don’t: Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jack Dorsey.
Saturday, 12 January 2019
Contrast between two parliaments - Why was the reservations bill not scrutinised?
The passage of the quota Bill highlights grave gaps in India’s parliamentary procedures writes M R Madhavan in The Hindu
Parliament ended the penultimate session of this Lok Sabha with both Houses passing the Constitution (124th Amendment) Bill, 2019, that enables 10% reservation in education and employment for economically weaker sections. The process by which this was done illustrates the collective failure of parliamentarians to review the government’s proposals and hold it to account.
Hasty steps
Let us review the sequence of events. On Monday (January 7), it was reported that the Cabinet had approved a Bill to provide reservation to poor candidates regardless of their caste, and that this would be introduced in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday, the last day of the winter session. News reports also suggested that the Rajya Sabha would extend its session by a day, so that this Bill could be discussed on Wednesday. There was no formal press release by the Press Information Bureau.
The rules of procedure of the Lok Sabha require every Bill to be circulated at least two days ahead of introduction. This is to give time for MPs to read the Bill and discuss it (or make objections) when the vote on the motion to introduce the Bill is taken up. This Bill was not circulated, even on Tuesday morning. At 11 a.m., when unstarred questions are tabled, one question concerned whether the government was “exploring the scope of providing reservation for poor candidates from forward communities for education and employment” and the details. The Ministry categorically denied that there was any such proposal under consideration. Then at 12.46 p.m., the Bill was introduced, with copies having been circulated to MPs a few minutes earlier.
The usual practice is to refer Bills to the respective standing committee of Parliament. This step allows MPs to solicit public feedback and interact with experts before forming their recommendations. In the case of this Constitution Amendment — clearly one with far-reaching implications — this scrutiny mechanism was bypassed.
The debate started around 5 p.m., just a few hours MPs had been given a copy. The debate ended around 10 p.m.
Meanwhile, the Rajya Sabha hardly functioned that day due to repeated disruptions. Finally, the chair adjourned the House till the next day — the first official indication that the sitting was extended by a day. The next day, Wednesday, the Rajya Sabha took up consideration of the Bill around 2 p.m. and ended the debate just past 10 p.m. A motion was moved by some members to refer the Bill to a select committee, but this motion was defeated by a wide margin, and the Bill was then passed.
Let us summarise the number of ways in which due oversight was skipped. The Bill was not circulated ahead of being introduced, it was not examined by a committee, there was hardly any time between its introduction and final discussion. Barring a few small parties, none of the larger Opposition parties asked for the Bill to be carefully considered by a parliamentary committee — even in the Rajya Sabha where they might have been able to muster the numbers to ensure this.
The British contrast
Contrast this with the incidents in the British Parliament the same day (Wednesday) when the Speaker ensured parliamentary supremacy over the government. A member of the ruling Conservative Party wanted to move an amendment to set a deadline for the Prime Minister to put forward new plans if she loses the Brexit vote next week. When the government objected that such amendments to set the business of the government in the House can be moved only by a Minister, the Speaker differed. He said that every member had a right to move an amendment. The motion was won by 308 votes to 297.
This case highlights three important ways in which the British Parliament works better than ours. First, the absence of an anti-defection law, so that each MP can vote her conscience. Note that the motion that put the government in a spot was moved by a former attorney general and a member of the ruling party. Second, it is known exactly how each MP voted. In India, most votes (other than Constitution Amendments that need a two-thirds majority to pass) are through voice votes — just 7% of other Bills had a recorded vote over the last 10 years. Third, the Speaker insisted on the supremacy of Parliament, and allowed a motion against the wishes of the government. Unlike in India, the independence of the Speaker is secured in the U.K. as no party contests against the Speaker in the next general election.
Parliament has a central role to secure the interest of citizens. It is the primary body of accountability that translates the wishes and aspirations of citizens into appropriate laws and policies.
Falling short
However, our Parliament often falls short of these goals due to some structural reasons. These include the anti-defection law (that restrains MPs from voting according to their conscience), lack of recorded voting as a norm (which reduces the accountability of the MP as voters don’t know which way they voted on each issue), party affiliation of the Speaker (making her dependent on the party leadership for re-election prospects), frequent bypassing of committees (just 25% of Bills have been referred to committees in this Lok Sabha), insufficient time and research support to examine Bills, and the lack of a calendar (Parliament is held at the convenience of the government). We need to address each of these issues to strengthen Parliament and protect our democracy.
Friday, 24 February 2017
Blair is right on Brexit: parliament must have a democratic debate
Anatole Kaletsky in The Guardian
Former UK prime minister Tony Blair’s recent call for voters to think again about leaving the EU, echoed in parliamentary debates ahead of the government’s official launch of the process in March, is an emperor’s new clothes moment. Although Blair is now an unpopular figure, his voice, like that of the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s story, is loud enough to carry above the cabal of flatterers assuring Theresa May that her naked gamble with Britain’s future is clad in democratic finery.
The importance of Blair’s speech can be gauged by the hysterical overreaction to his suggestion of reopening the Brexit debate, even from supposedly objective media: “It will be seen by some as a call to arms – Tony Blair’s Brexit insurrection,” according to the BBC.
Such is the tyranny of the majority in post-referendum Britain that a “remainer” proposal for rational debate and persuasion is considered an insurrection. And anyone questioning government policy on Brexit is routinely described as an “enemy of the people,” whose treachery will provoke “blood in the streets.”
What explains this sudden paranoia? After all, political opposition is a necessary condition for functioning democracy – and nobody would have been shocked if Eurosceptics continued to oppose Europe after losing the referendum, just as Scottish nationalists have continued campaigning for independence after their 10-point referendum defeat in 2014. And no one seriously expects US opponents of Donald Trump to stop protesting and unite with his supporters.
The difference with Brexit is that last June’s referendum subverted British democracy in two insidious ways. First, the leave vote was inspired mainly by resentments unconnected with Europe. Second, the government has exploited this confusion of issues to claim a mandate to do anything it wants.
Six months before the referendum, the EU did not even appear among the 10 most important issues facing Britain as mentioned by potential voters. Immigration did rank at the top, but, as Blair noted in his speech, anti-immigration sentiment was mainly against multicultural immigration, which had little or nothing to do with the EU. The leave campaign’s strategy was therefore to open a Pandora’s box of resentments over regional imbalances, economic inequality, social values and cultural change. The remain campaign completely failed to respond to this, because it concentrated on the question that was literally on the ballot, and addressed the costs and benefits of EU membership.
The fact that the referendum was such an amorphous but all-encompassing protest vote explains its second politically corrosive effect. Because the leave campaign successfully combined a multitude of different grievances, May now claims the referendum as an open-ended mandate. Instead of arguing for controversial Conservative policies – including corporate tax cuts, deregulation, unpopular infrastructure projects and social security reforms – on their merits, May now portrays such policies as necessary conditions for a “successful Brexit”. Anyone who disagrees is dismissed as an elitist “remoaner” showing contempt for ordinary voters.
Making matters worse, the obvious risks of Brexit have created a siege mentality. “Successful Brexit” has become a matter of national survival, turning even the mildest proposals to limit the government’s negotiating options – for example, parliamentary votes to guarantee rights for EU citizens already living in Britain – into acts of sabotage.
As in wartime, every criticism shades into treason. That is why the Labour party has collaborated in defeating all parliamentary efforts to moderate May’s hardline Brexit plans, even on such relatively uncontentious issues as visa-free travel, pharmaceutical testing or science funding. Likewise, more ambitious demands from Britain’s smaller opposition parties for a second referendum on the final exit deal have gained no traction, even among committed pro-Europeans, who are intimidated by the witch-hunting atmosphere against unrepentant remainers.
Sir Ivan Rogers, who was forced to resign last month as the UK’s permanent representative to the EU because he questioned May’s negotiating approach, predicted this week a “gory, bitter, and twisted” breakup between Britain and Europe. But this scenario is not inevitable. A more constructive possibility is now emerging along the lines suggested by Blair. Instead of vainly trying to influence May’s hardline stance in the negotiations, the new priority should be to restart a rational debate about Britain’s relationship with Europe and to convince the public that this debate is democratically legitimate.
This means challenging the idea that a referendum permanently outweighs all other mechanisms of democratic politics and persuading voters that a referendum mandate refers to a specific question in specific conditions, at a specific time. If the conditions change or the referendum question acquires a different meaning, voters should be allowed to change their minds.
The process of restoring a proper understanding of democracy could start within the next few weeks. The catalyst would be amendments to the Brexit legislation now passing through parliament. The goal would be to prevent any new relationship between Britain and the EU from taking effect unless approved by a parliamentary vote that allowed for the possibility of continuing EU membership. Such an amendment would make the status quo the default option if the government failed to satisfy parliament with the new arrangements negotiated over the next two years. It would avert the Hobson’s choice the government now proposes: either accept whatever deal we offer, or crash out of the EU with no agreed relationship at all.
Allowing parliament to decide about the new relationship with Europe, instead of leaving it entirely up to May, would restore the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. More important, it would legitimise a new political debate in Britain about the true costs and benefits of EU membership, possibly leading to a second referendum on the government’s Brexit plans.
This is precisely why May vehemently opposes giving parliament any meaningful voice on the outcome of the Brexit negotiations. Presumably, she will block any such requirement from being attached to the Brexit legislation in March. But that may not matter: if a genuine debate about Brexit gets restarted, democracy will prevent her from closing it down.
The importance of Blair’s speech can be gauged by the hysterical overreaction to his suggestion of reopening the Brexit debate, even from supposedly objective media: “It will be seen by some as a call to arms – Tony Blair’s Brexit insurrection,” according to the BBC.
Such is the tyranny of the majority in post-referendum Britain that a “remainer” proposal for rational debate and persuasion is considered an insurrection. And anyone questioning government policy on Brexit is routinely described as an “enemy of the people,” whose treachery will provoke “blood in the streets.”
What explains this sudden paranoia? After all, political opposition is a necessary condition for functioning democracy – and nobody would have been shocked if Eurosceptics continued to oppose Europe after losing the referendum, just as Scottish nationalists have continued campaigning for independence after their 10-point referendum defeat in 2014. And no one seriously expects US opponents of Donald Trump to stop protesting and unite with his supporters.
The difference with Brexit is that last June’s referendum subverted British democracy in two insidious ways. First, the leave vote was inspired mainly by resentments unconnected with Europe. Second, the government has exploited this confusion of issues to claim a mandate to do anything it wants.
Six months before the referendum, the EU did not even appear among the 10 most important issues facing Britain as mentioned by potential voters. Immigration did rank at the top, but, as Blair noted in his speech, anti-immigration sentiment was mainly against multicultural immigration, which had little or nothing to do with the EU. The leave campaign’s strategy was therefore to open a Pandora’s box of resentments over regional imbalances, economic inequality, social values and cultural change. The remain campaign completely failed to respond to this, because it concentrated on the question that was literally on the ballot, and addressed the costs and benefits of EU membership.
The fact that the referendum was such an amorphous but all-encompassing protest vote explains its second politically corrosive effect. Because the leave campaign successfully combined a multitude of different grievances, May now claims the referendum as an open-ended mandate. Instead of arguing for controversial Conservative policies – including corporate tax cuts, deregulation, unpopular infrastructure projects and social security reforms – on their merits, May now portrays such policies as necessary conditions for a “successful Brexit”. Anyone who disagrees is dismissed as an elitist “remoaner” showing contempt for ordinary voters.
Making matters worse, the obvious risks of Brexit have created a siege mentality. “Successful Brexit” has become a matter of national survival, turning even the mildest proposals to limit the government’s negotiating options – for example, parliamentary votes to guarantee rights for EU citizens already living in Britain – into acts of sabotage.
As in wartime, every criticism shades into treason. That is why the Labour party has collaborated in defeating all parliamentary efforts to moderate May’s hardline Brexit plans, even on such relatively uncontentious issues as visa-free travel, pharmaceutical testing or science funding. Likewise, more ambitious demands from Britain’s smaller opposition parties for a second referendum on the final exit deal have gained no traction, even among committed pro-Europeans, who are intimidated by the witch-hunting atmosphere against unrepentant remainers.
Sir Ivan Rogers, who was forced to resign last month as the UK’s permanent representative to the EU because he questioned May’s negotiating approach, predicted this week a “gory, bitter, and twisted” breakup between Britain and Europe. But this scenario is not inevitable. A more constructive possibility is now emerging along the lines suggested by Blair. Instead of vainly trying to influence May’s hardline stance in the negotiations, the new priority should be to restart a rational debate about Britain’s relationship with Europe and to convince the public that this debate is democratically legitimate.
This means challenging the idea that a referendum permanently outweighs all other mechanisms of democratic politics and persuading voters that a referendum mandate refers to a specific question in specific conditions, at a specific time. If the conditions change or the referendum question acquires a different meaning, voters should be allowed to change their minds.
The process of restoring a proper understanding of democracy could start within the next few weeks. The catalyst would be amendments to the Brexit legislation now passing through parliament. The goal would be to prevent any new relationship between Britain and the EU from taking effect unless approved by a parliamentary vote that allowed for the possibility of continuing EU membership. Such an amendment would make the status quo the default option if the government failed to satisfy parliament with the new arrangements negotiated over the next two years. It would avert the Hobson’s choice the government now proposes: either accept whatever deal we offer, or crash out of the EU with no agreed relationship at all.
Allowing parliament to decide about the new relationship with Europe, instead of leaving it entirely up to May, would restore the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. More important, it would legitimise a new political debate in Britain about the true costs and benefits of EU membership, possibly leading to a second referendum on the government’s Brexit plans.
This is precisely why May vehemently opposes giving parliament any meaningful voice on the outcome of the Brexit negotiations. Presumably, she will block any such requirement from being attached to the Brexit legislation in March. But that may not matter: if a genuine debate about Brexit gets restarted, democracy will prevent her from closing it down.
Thursday, 13 October 2016
Don’t call for another referendum – they cause more problems than they solve
Amol Rajan in The Independent
Many journalists ply their trade because it is politics by other means. I joined this profession for several reasons, including the need to make a living and the absence of suitable alternatives. But one of the main reasons was that I believe very strongly in democracy – a political idea – because it is a way of diffusing power so that it is not just concentrated among the rich and the few.
As a democrat, even a radical democrat, for years I harboured an instinctive fondness for referendums. Give the people a say. Let them decide. All that stuff. But judging by the experience of Britain's most recent referendum, I have changed my mind. I now think fewer would be preferable.
This is not necessarily because I think the wrong result transpired. Rather it is because I can see the problems with referendums more clearly now. I reckon there are at least four.
First, they too often turn on variables unrelated to the question at hand, such as whether a particular leader is popular that month. Colombia's rejection of a peace deal may have turned on the weather.
Many journalists ply their trade because it is politics by other means. I joined this profession for several reasons, including the need to make a living and the absence of suitable alternatives. But one of the main reasons was that I believe very strongly in democracy – a political idea – because it is a way of diffusing power so that it is not just concentrated among the rich and the few.
As a democrat, even a radical democrat, for years I harboured an instinctive fondness for referendums. Give the people a say. Let them decide. All that stuff. But judging by the experience of Britain's most recent referendum, I have changed my mind. I now think fewer would be preferable.
This is not necessarily because I think the wrong result transpired. Rather it is because I can see the problems with referendums more clearly now. I reckon there are at least four.
First, they too often turn on variables unrelated to the question at hand, such as whether a particular leader is popular that month. Colombia's rejection of a peace deal may have turned on the weather.
Second, they give excessive influence and airtime to single-issue campaigners and fringe groups who don't belong in, or represent, the mainstream.
Third, they reduce very complex issues to binary decisions, ignoring the fact that politics is full of trade-offs; leaving the European Union, for instance, can mean many different things.
Here's just such a trade-off: you can lower immigration levels, but you'll be poorer in the short-term as you probably have to leave the single market. It's what people voted for – even if they didn't realise it. But now there's a huge move in parliament to pretend this trade-off didn't happen. You see it in the intellectually docile terminology of hard versus soft Brexit, as if there were only two options from the infinite variety of potential end results to the coming negotiation.
And that is the fourth problem with referendums: the losers often have nowhere to go. You end up with a hugely disenfranchised constituency, who are either agitating for another go or nurse such a constant grievance that they undermine the whole electoral system. That is what is happening now.
It is right and proper that parliament should scrutinise the negotiation undertaken by Theresa May and her team, but what cannot happen is a re-run of the EU referendum. The result is in – and it is clear. Yet the attempt to cobble together a parliamentary coalition against leaving the single market is a giant festival of sour grapes masquerading as patriotism and belief in democracy.
The shenanigans this week illustrate exquisitely how, far from encouraging participation and supporting democracy, referendums generally end up subverting it.
Brexit – that dreaded, bizarre word, simultaneously so empty and so full – has come to define this government though nobody knows what it means and nobody has a clue how to deliver it. Under the guise of fortifying our democracy, it has started to consume it. That's not what plebiscites are meant to do.
Third, they reduce very complex issues to binary decisions, ignoring the fact that politics is full of trade-offs; leaving the European Union, for instance, can mean many different things.
Here's just such a trade-off: you can lower immigration levels, but you'll be poorer in the short-term as you probably have to leave the single market. It's what people voted for – even if they didn't realise it. But now there's a huge move in parliament to pretend this trade-off didn't happen. You see it in the intellectually docile terminology of hard versus soft Brexit, as if there were only two options from the infinite variety of potential end results to the coming negotiation.
And that is the fourth problem with referendums: the losers often have nowhere to go. You end up with a hugely disenfranchised constituency, who are either agitating for another go or nurse such a constant grievance that they undermine the whole electoral system. That is what is happening now.
It is right and proper that parliament should scrutinise the negotiation undertaken by Theresa May and her team, but what cannot happen is a re-run of the EU referendum. The result is in – and it is clear. Yet the attempt to cobble together a parliamentary coalition against leaving the single market is a giant festival of sour grapes masquerading as patriotism and belief in democracy.
The shenanigans this week illustrate exquisitely how, far from encouraging participation and supporting democracy, referendums generally end up subverting it.
Brexit – that dreaded, bizarre word, simultaneously so empty and so full – has come to define this government though nobody knows what it means and nobody has a clue how to deliver it. Under the guise of fortifying our democracy, it has started to consume it. That's not what plebiscites are meant to do.
Monday, 27 June 2016
How to stop Brexit: get your MP to vote it down
Geoffrey Robertson in The Guardian
It’s not over yet. A law that passed last year to set up the EU referendum said nothing about the result being binding or having any legal force. “Sovereignty” – a much misunderstood word in the campaign – resides in Britain with the “Queen in parliament”, that is with MPs alone who can make or break laws and peers who can block them. Before Brexit can be triggered, parliament must repeal the 1972 European Communities Act by which it voted to take us into the European Union – and MPs have every right, and indeed a duty if they think it best for Britain, to vote to stay.
It is being said that the government can trigger Brexit under article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, merely by sending a note to Brussels. This is wrong. Article 50 says: “Any member state may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.” The UK’s most fundamental constitutional requirement is that there must first be the approval of its parliament.
Britain, absurdly, is the only significant country (other than Saudi Arabia) without a written constitution. We have what are termed “constitutional conventions”, along with a lot of history and traditions. Nothing in these precedents allots any place to the results of referendums or requires our sovereign parliament to take a blind bit of notice of them.
It was parliament that voted to enter the European Economic Community in 1972, and only three years later was a referendum held to settle the split in Harold Wilson’s Labour party over the value of membership. Had a narrow majority of the public voted out in 1975, Wilson would still have had to persuade parliament to vote accordingly – and it is far from certain that he would have succeeded.
Petition for second EU referendum may have been manipulated
Our democracy does not allow, much less require, decision-making by referendum. That role belongs to the representatives of the people and not to the people themselves. Democracy has never meant the tyranny of the simple majority, much less the tyranny of the mob (otherwise, we might still have capital punishment). Democracy entails an elected government, subject to certain checks and balances such as the common law and the courts, and an executive ultimately responsible to parliament, whose members are entitled to vote according to conscience and common sense.
Many countries, including Commonwealth nations – vouchsafed their constitutions by the UK – have provisions for change by referendums. But these provisions are carefully circumscribed and do not usually allow change by simple majority.
In Australia, for example, a referendum proposal must pass in each of the six states (this would defeat Brexit, which failed in Scotland and Northern Ireland). In other countries, it must pass by a very clear majority – usually two-thirds. In some US states that permit voting on public legislative proposals, there are similar safeguards. In the UK (except, under a 2011 act in the case of an EU expansion of power), referendum results are merely advisory – in this case, advising MPs that the country is split almost down the middle on the wisdom of EU membership.
So how should MPs vote come November, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson introduces the 2016 European Communities Act (Repeal) Bill? Those from London and Scotland should happily vote against it, following their constituents’ wishes. So should Labour MPs – it’s their party policy after all.
By November, there may be other very good reasons for MPs to refuse to leave Europe. Brexit may turn out to be just too difficult. Staying in the EU may be the only way to stop Scotland from splitting, or to rescue the pound. A poll on Sunday tells us that a million leave voters are already regretting their choice: a significant public change of mind would amply justify a parliamentary refusal to Brexit. It may be, in November, that President Donald Trump becomes the leader of the free world – in which case a strong EU would become more necessary than ever. Or it may simply be that a majority of MPs, mindful of their constitutional duty to do what is best for Britain, conscientiously decide that it is best to remain.
There is no point in holding another referendum (as several million online petitioners are urging). Referendums are alien to our traditions, they are inappropriate for complex decision-making, and without careful incorporation in a written constitution, the public expectation aroused by the result can damage our democracy. The only way forward now depends on the courage, intelligence and conscience of your local MP. So have your say in the traditional way: lobby him or her to vote against the government when it tries to Brexit, because parliament is sovereign.
It’s not over yet. A law that passed last year to set up the EU referendum said nothing about the result being binding or having any legal force. “Sovereignty” – a much misunderstood word in the campaign – resides in Britain with the “Queen in parliament”, that is with MPs alone who can make or break laws and peers who can block them. Before Brexit can be triggered, parliament must repeal the 1972 European Communities Act by which it voted to take us into the European Union – and MPs have every right, and indeed a duty if they think it best for Britain, to vote to stay.
It is being said that the government can trigger Brexit under article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, merely by sending a note to Brussels. This is wrong. Article 50 says: “Any member state may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.” The UK’s most fundamental constitutional requirement is that there must first be the approval of its parliament.
Britain, absurdly, is the only significant country (other than Saudi Arabia) without a written constitution. We have what are termed “constitutional conventions”, along with a lot of history and traditions. Nothing in these precedents allots any place to the results of referendums or requires our sovereign parliament to take a blind bit of notice of them.
It was parliament that voted to enter the European Economic Community in 1972, and only three years later was a referendum held to settle the split in Harold Wilson’s Labour party over the value of membership. Had a narrow majority of the public voted out in 1975, Wilson would still have had to persuade parliament to vote accordingly – and it is far from certain that he would have succeeded.
Petition for second EU referendum may have been manipulated
Our democracy does not allow, much less require, decision-making by referendum. That role belongs to the representatives of the people and not to the people themselves. Democracy has never meant the tyranny of the simple majority, much less the tyranny of the mob (otherwise, we might still have capital punishment). Democracy entails an elected government, subject to certain checks and balances such as the common law and the courts, and an executive ultimately responsible to parliament, whose members are entitled to vote according to conscience and common sense.
Many countries, including Commonwealth nations – vouchsafed their constitutions by the UK – have provisions for change by referendums. But these provisions are carefully circumscribed and do not usually allow change by simple majority.
In Australia, for example, a referendum proposal must pass in each of the six states (this would defeat Brexit, which failed in Scotland and Northern Ireland). In other countries, it must pass by a very clear majority – usually two-thirds. In some US states that permit voting on public legislative proposals, there are similar safeguards. In the UK (except, under a 2011 act in the case of an EU expansion of power), referendum results are merely advisory – in this case, advising MPs that the country is split almost down the middle on the wisdom of EU membership.
So how should MPs vote come November, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson introduces the 2016 European Communities Act (Repeal) Bill? Those from London and Scotland should happily vote against it, following their constituents’ wishes. So should Labour MPs – it’s their party policy after all.
By November, there may be other very good reasons for MPs to refuse to leave Europe. Brexit may turn out to be just too difficult. Staying in the EU may be the only way to stop Scotland from splitting, or to rescue the pound. A poll on Sunday tells us that a million leave voters are already regretting their choice: a significant public change of mind would amply justify a parliamentary refusal to Brexit. It may be, in November, that President Donald Trump becomes the leader of the free world – in which case a strong EU would become more necessary than ever. Or it may simply be that a majority of MPs, mindful of their constitutional duty to do what is best for Britain, conscientiously decide that it is best to remain.
There is no point in holding another referendum (as several million online petitioners are urging). Referendums are alien to our traditions, they are inappropriate for complex decision-making, and without careful incorporation in a written constitution, the public expectation aroused by the result can damage our democracy. The only way forward now depends on the courage, intelligence and conscience of your local MP. So have your say in the traditional way: lobby him or her to vote against the government when it tries to Brexit, because parliament is sovereign.
Sunday, 10 April 2016
Britain lecturing the world on morality? That’s rich
Kevin McKenna in The Guardian
To the world’s despots and gangsters: if you think you’re bad, just look at what’s going on in Cool Britannia
Panama City has been the centre of the news because of revelations about the law firm Mossack Fonseca. But maybe we should be looking a little closer to home. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty
As ever, the King James version adds a literary edge to one of the most dramatic tales of the Old Testament. In Genesis 18:24, Abraham is appealing to God’s good nature as he attempts to save the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah from the Almighty’s ultimate sanction. “Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein,” the desperate patriarch solicits his maker. In the end, Abraham’s pleas come to naught as he couldn’t even name one good man, let alone 50, and so the cities are duly consumed by fire and brimstone.
Now, I’m not suggesting for a minute that Panama, the Las Vegas of the rich and infamous, is about to meet a fiery denouement just yet. After all, God’s ire seems to have softened since those biblical early days when He favoured a no-nonsense approach. And, as the leaked Mossack and Fonseca documents show, if Panama was to be turned to dust where would that leave the UK? As the Times declared last week: “No other country in the world maintains and indulges a network of offshore tax havens as brazen in their defence of unwarranted secrecy as Britain’s overseas territories.”
Indeed, I’m sure some enterprising management consultancy could establish a lucrative wee venture engaging with the world’s top gangsters and despots in the following blameless and entirely legal way. I’d suggest they produce a glossy brochure showing how, no matter what crimes against humanity they are ever accused of, not to get too strung up about it all. The brochure would be entitled If you think you’re bad, just look at what’s going on in Cool Britannia. A series of seven seminars and modules would also be offered to tyrants and vagabonds everywhere providing them with something money just can’t buy: solace, geopolitical schadenfreude and a good night’s sleep.
As ever, the King James version adds a literary edge to one of the most dramatic tales of the Old Testament. In Genesis 18:24, Abraham is appealing to God’s good nature as he attempts to save the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah from the Almighty’s ultimate sanction. “Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein,” the desperate patriarch solicits his maker. In the end, Abraham’s pleas come to naught as he couldn’t even name one good man, let alone 50, and so the cities are duly consumed by fire and brimstone.
Now, I’m not suggesting for a minute that Panama, the Las Vegas of the rich and infamous, is about to meet a fiery denouement just yet. After all, God’s ire seems to have softened since those biblical early days when He favoured a no-nonsense approach. And, as the leaked Mossack and Fonseca documents show, if Panama was to be turned to dust where would that leave the UK? As the Times declared last week: “No other country in the world maintains and indulges a network of offshore tax havens as brazen in their defence of unwarranted secrecy as Britain’s overseas territories.”
Indeed, I’m sure some enterprising management consultancy could establish a lucrative wee venture engaging with the world’s top gangsters and despots in the following blameless and entirely legal way. I’d suggest they produce a glossy brochure showing how, no matter what crimes against humanity they are ever accused of, not to get too strung up about it all. The brochure would be entitled If you think you’re bad, just look at what’s going on in Cool Britannia. A series of seven seminars and modules would also be offered to tyrants and vagabonds everywhere providing them with something money just can’t buy: solace, geopolitical schadenfreude and a good night’s sleep.
1. Hypocrisy
The UK has recently instigated a programme of benefit cuts, advocating that its poorest citizens all tighten their belts to see them through the choppy waters of economic recession. They are being told that everyone is all in it together and that the government is going to make work pay. There will be a clampdown on workshy benefit cheats. For an extra premium we will provide you with a list of all the companies using places such as Panama to avoid tax and show you how the world’s poorest countries are deprived of £240bn of income by similar practices.
2. Cynicism
Are you sick of western democracies lecturing you about ethnic cleansing and enriching yourselves while your people starve? We’ll show you how every spare scrap of land in London is being sold off to unnamed persons to build blocks of £5m luxury flats that will never be occupied. Attached, please see the DVD of the view from the Docklands train. This is called economic cleansing and is the process of removing undesirable taxpayers to make room for the proceeds of global money-laundering. And destroying the concept of social and affordable housing.
3. Graft
Political and civic leaders all preach the values of financial rectitude and putting away money for a decent pension. But every Saturday and Sunday (and all other nights when there is football on the telly) they permit dozens of unregulated online gambling outlets to prey on working men as they watch their favourite teams in action. “Please gamble responsibly,” they say, and then encourage people, when they are at their most vulnerable, to bet on every possible outcome, every hour of the day on every electrical device. Remember this when they take a dim view of Igor and Sergei, your new business partners.
4. Cheating
If you ever find yourself resentful at another chinless wonder from the British Embassy lecturing you on human rights abuses this one’s for you. In Scotland, almost half the land is owned by 500 individuals. This came about after illegal and often violent land-grabs 300-400 years ago that have been protected by dubious legislation ever since. After 17 years of so-called “left-wing” governments their land reform bill is a toothless joke. Scotland is a rich country with great export goods, good universities and stacks of churches. Tonight, though, 250,000 of its children will go without food and 5,000 don’t know where they’ll be sleeping.
5. Warmongering
Do you ever get hurt when Britain and its allies routinely describe you as being part of the axis of evil? Doesn’t it make you sick when they insist only they can be trusted with nuclear warheads? Perhaps you ought to know that this moral arbiter of what is good for the rest of the world routinely has sold £5.6bn worth of military hardware to Saudi Arabia, aka The Headless State, since the Tories came to power. During that time, according to the Campaign Against Arms Trade, the UK has sold weapons to 24 of the 27 states included on its own list of “countries of humanitarian concern”.
6. Greed
Don’t get too upset when the UK tries to excoriate you for your apparent lack of democracy. Instead, just tell them that you won’t take any lessons in this from a state that pimps its own parliament as a place to purchase influence in the laws of the land and where MPs can be bought. All it takes is a tidy six-figure cheque to Tory central office and you’re in. In fact, for the price of a few lunches at Claridge’s and a two grand a month retainer you can get any number of Tories to ensure no one looks too closely at your new bespoke torture chambers. Everything has a price, and that includes parliament.
7. Indifference
The next time you’re in London to collect your latest batch of Eurofighters take a note of every time you hear British people congratulating themselves on being the most enlightened and civilised country in the known universe. Then ask yourself why they all look the other way when this is all happening. Their passivity can be bought cheaply with a few royal babies; some gold medals at the next Olympic Games and arranging another one of their wars against another third world country.
Sunday, 15 December 2013
The curious case of convenient liberalism
Swapan Dasgupta in Times of India
15 December 2013, 03:20 AM IST
Indeed, the most striking feature of the furore over the apex court judgment has been the relatively small number of voices denouncing homosexuality as ‘unnatural’ and deviant. This conservative passivity may even have conveyed an impression that India is changing socially and politically at a pace that wasn’t anticipated. Certainly, the generous overuse of ‘alternative’ to describe political euphoria and cultural impatience may even suggest that tradition has given way to post-modernity.
Yet, before urban India is equated with the bohemian quarters of New York and San Francisco, some judgmental restraint may be in order. The righteous indignation against conservative upholders of family values are not as clear cut as may seem from media reports. There are awkward questions that have been glossed over and many loose ends that have been left dangling.
A year ago, a fierce revulsion against the rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi led to Parliament amending the Penal Code and enacting a set of laws that extended the definition of rape and made punishment extremely stringent. It was the force of organized public opinion that drove the changes. Curiously, despite the Supreme Court judgment stating quite categorically that it was the responsibility of Parliament to modify section 377, there seems to be a general aversion to pressuring the law-makers to do their job and bring the criminal law system into the 21st century. Is it because India is bigoted or is there a belief that there are some issues that are best glossed over in silence?
This dichotomy of approach needs to be addressed. Conventionally, it is the job of the legislatures to write laws and for the judiciary to assess their accordance with the Constitution and to interpret them. In recent years, the judiciary has been rightly criticised for over-stepping its mark and encroaching into the domain of both the executive and the legislatures. Yet, we are in the strange situation today of the government seeking to put the onus of legitimising homosexuality on the judges.
Maybe there are larger questions involved. The battle over 377 was not between a brute majoritarianism and a minority demanding inclusion. The list of those who appealed against the Delhi High Court verdict indicates it was a contest between two minorities: religious minorities versus lifestyle minorities. Formidable organizations such as the All India Muslim Personal Law Board and some church bodies based their opposition to gay rights on theology. Liberal promoters of sexual choice on the other hand based the claim of decriminalised citizenship on modernity and scientific evidence. In short, there was a fundamental conflict between the constitutionally-protected rights of minority communities to adhere to faiths that abhor same-sex relationships and the right of gays to live by their own morals. Yet, if absolute libertarianism was to prevail, can the khap panchayats be denied their perverse moral codes?
The answer is yes but only if it is backed by majority will, expressed through Parliament. Harsh as it may sound, it is the moral majority that determines the social consensus.
There is a curious paradox here. On the question of gay rights, liberal India prefers a cosmopolitanism drawn from the contemporary West. At the same time, its endorsement of laws that are nondenominational and non-theological does not extend to support for a common civil code. Despite the Constitution’s Directive Principles, the right of every citizen to be equal before the law is deemed to be majoritarian and therefore unacceptable by the very people who stood up for inclusiveness last week.
For everything that is true of India, the opposite is turning out to be equally true.
15 December 2013, 03:20 AM IST
Last week, liberal opinion that enjoys a virtual monopoly of the airwaves pilloried the Supreme Court for what some feel was its most disgraceful judgment since the infamous Habeas Corpus case of 1976. The decision to overturn the Delhi High Court judgment taking consensual same-sex relationships outside the purview of criminal laws has been viewed as an unacceptable assault on individual freedom and minority rights and even an expression of bigotry. Overcoming fears of a virulent conservative backlash, mainstream politicians have expressed their disappointment at the judgment and happily begun using hitherto unfamiliar shorthand terms such as LGBT.
Indeed, the most striking feature of the furore over the apex court judgment has been the relatively small number of voices denouncing homosexuality as ‘unnatural’ and deviant. This conservative passivity may even have conveyed an impression that India is changing socially and politically at a pace that wasn’t anticipated. Certainly, the generous overuse of ‘alternative’ to describe political euphoria and cultural impatience may even suggest that tradition has given way to post-modernity.
Yet, before urban India is equated with the bohemian quarters of New York and San Francisco, some judgmental restraint may be in order. The righteous indignation against conservative upholders of family values are not as clear cut as may seem from media reports. There are awkward questions that have been glossed over and many loose ends that have been left dangling.
A year ago, a fierce revulsion against the rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi led to Parliament amending the Penal Code and enacting a set of laws that extended the definition of rape and made punishment extremely stringent. It was the force of organized public opinion that drove the changes. Curiously, despite the Supreme Court judgment stating quite categorically that it was the responsibility of Parliament to modify section 377, there seems to be a general aversion to pressuring the law-makers to do their job and bring the criminal law system into the 21st century. Is it because India is bigoted or is there a belief that there are some issues that are best glossed over in silence?
This dichotomy of approach needs to be addressed. Conventionally, it is the job of the legislatures to write laws and for the judiciary to assess their accordance with the Constitution and to interpret them. In recent years, the judiciary has been rightly criticised for over-stepping its mark and encroaching into the domain of both the executive and the legislatures. Yet, we are in the strange situation today of the government seeking to put the onus of legitimising homosexuality on the judges.
Maybe there are larger questions involved. The battle over 377 was not between a brute majoritarianism and a minority demanding inclusion. The list of those who appealed against the Delhi High Court verdict indicates it was a contest between two minorities: religious minorities versus lifestyle minorities. Formidable organizations such as the All India Muslim Personal Law Board and some church bodies based their opposition to gay rights on theology. Liberal promoters of sexual choice on the other hand based the claim of decriminalised citizenship on modernity and scientific evidence. In short, there was a fundamental conflict between the constitutionally-protected rights of minority communities to adhere to faiths that abhor same-sex relationships and the right of gays to live by their own morals. Yet, if absolute libertarianism was to prevail, can the khap panchayats be denied their perverse moral codes?
The answer is yes but only if it is backed by majority will, expressed through Parliament. Harsh as it may sound, it is the moral majority that determines the social consensus.
There is a curious paradox here. On the question of gay rights, liberal India prefers a cosmopolitanism drawn from the contemporary West. At the same time, its endorsement of laws that are nondenominational and non-theological does not extend to support for a common civil code. Despite the Constitution’s Directive Principles, the right of every citizen to be equal before the law is deemed to be majoritarian and therefore unacceptable by the very people who stood up for inclusiveness last week.
For everything that is true of India, the opposite is turning out to be equally true.
Saturday, 9 November 2013
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership: Wake up people, we’re being shafted
A global ban on left wing politics
George Monbiot
Remember that referendum about whether we should create a single market with the United States? You know, the one that asked whether corporations should have the power to strike down our laws? No, I don’t either. Mind you, I spent ten minutes looking for my watch the other day, before I realised I was wearing it. Forgetting about the referendum is another sign of ageing. Because there must have been one, mustn’t there? After all that agonising over whether or not we should stay in the European Union(1), the government wouldn’t cede our sovereignty to some shadowy, undemocratic body without consulting us. Would it?
The purpose of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is to remove the regulatory differences between the US and European nations. I mentioned it a couple of weeks ago(2). But I left out the most important issue: the remarkable ability it would grant big business to sue the living daylights out of governments which try to defend their citizens. It would allow a secretive panel of corporate lawyers to overrule the will of parliament and destroy our legal protections. Yet the defenders of our sovereignty say nothing.
The mechanism is called investor-state dispute settlement. It’s already being used in many parts of the world to kill regulations protecting people and the living planet.
The Australian government, after massive debates in and out of parliament, decided that cigarettes should be sold in plain packets, marked only with shocking health warnings. The decision was validated by the Australian supreme court. But, using a trade agreement Australia struck with Hong Kong, the tobacco company Philip Morris has asked an offshore tribunal to award it a vast sum in compensation for the loss of what it calls its intellectual property(3).
During its financial crisis, and in response to public anger over rocketing charges, Argentina imposed a freeze on people’s energy and water bills (does this sound familiar?). It was sued by the international utility companies whose vast bills had prompted the government to act. For this and other such crimes, it has been forced to pay out over a billion dollars in compensation(4).
In El Salvador, local communities managed at great cost (three campaigners were murdered) to persuade the government to refuse permission for a vast gold mine which threatened to contaminate their water supplies. A victory for democracy? Not for long perhaps. The Canadian company which sought to dig the mine is now suing El Salvador for $315m – for the loss of its anticipated future profits(5).
In Canada, the courts revoked two patents owned by the US drugs firm Eli Lilly, on the grounds that the company had not produced enough evidence that they had the beneficial effects it claimed. Eli Lilly is now suing the Canadian government for $500m, and demanding that Canada’s patent laws are changed(6).
These companies (and hundreds of others) are using the investor-state dispute rules embedded in trade treaties signed by the countries they are suing. The rules are enforced by panels which have none of the safeguards we expect in our own courts(7,8). The hearings are held in secret. The judges are corporate lawyers, many of whom work for corporations of the kind whose cases they hear. Citizens and communities affected by their decisions have no legal standing. There is no right of appeal on the merits of the case. Yet they can overthrow the sovereignty of parliaments and the rulings of supreme courts.
You don’t believe it? Here’s what one of the judges on these tribunals says about his work. “When I wake up at night and think about arbitration, it never ceases to amaze me that sovereign states have agreed to investment arbitration at all … Three private individuals are entrusted with the power to review, without any restriction or appeal procedure, all actions of the government, all decisions of the courts, and all laws and regulations emanating from parliament.”(9)
There are no corresponding rights for citizens. We can’t use these tribunals to demand better protections from corporate greed. As the Democracy Centre says, this is “a privatised justice system for global corporations.”(10)
Even if these suits don’t succeed, they can exert a powerful chilling effect on legislation. One Canadian government official, speaking about the rules introduced by the North American Free Trade Agreement, remarked, “I’ve seen the letters from the New York and DC law firms coming up to the Canadian government on virtually every new environmental regulation and proposition in the last five years. They involved dry-cleaning chemicals, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, patent law. Virtually all of the new initiatives were targeted and most of them never saw the light of day.”(11) Democracy, as a meaningful proposition, is impossible under these circumstances.
This is the system to which we will be subject if the transatlantic treaty goes ahead. The US and the European Commission, both of which have been captured by the corporations they are supposed to regulate, are pressing for investor-state dispute resolution to be included in the agreement.
The Commission justifies this policy by claiming that domestic courts don’t offer corporations sufficient protection because they “might be biased or lack independence.”(12) Which courts is it talking about? Those of the US? Its own member states? It doesn’t say. In fact it fails to produce a single concrete example demonstrating the need for a new, extra-judicial system. It is precisely because our courts are generally not biased or lacking independence that the corporations want to bypass them. The EC seeks to replace open, accountable, sovereign courts with a closed, corrupt system riddled with conflicts of interest and arbitrary powers.
Investor-state rules could be used to smash any attempt to save the NHS from corporate control, to re-regulate the banks, to curb the greed of the energy companies, to renationalise the railways, to leave fossil fuels in the ground. These rules shut down democratic alternatives. They outlaw left-wing politics.
This is why there has been no attempt by our government to inform us about this monstrous assault on democracy, let alone consult us. This is why the Conservatives who huff and puff about sovereignty are silent. Wake up people, we’re being shafted.
George Monbiot
Remember that referendum about whether we should create a single market with the United States? You know, the one that asked whether corporations should have the power to strike down our laws? No, I don’t either. Mind you, I spent ten minutes looking for my watch the other day, before I realised I was wearing it. Forgetting about the referendum is another sign of ageing. Because there must have been one, mustn’t there? After all that agonising over whether or not we should stay in the European Union(1), the government wouldn’t cede our sovereignty to some shadowy, undemocratic body without consulting us. Would it?
The purpose of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is to remove the regulatory differences between the US and European nations. I mentioned it a couple of weeks ago(2). But I left out the most important issue: the remarkable ability it would grant big business to sue the living daylights out of governments which try to defend their citizens. It would allow a secretive panel of corporate lawyers to overrule the will of parliament and destroy our legal protections. Yet the defenders of our sovereignty say nothing.
The mechanism is called investor-state dispute settlement. It’s already being used in many parts of the world to kill regulations protecting people and the living planet.
The Australian government, after massive debates in and out of parliament, decided that cigarettes should be sold in plain packets, marked only with shocking health warnings. The decision was validated by the Australian supreme court. But, using a trade agreement Australia struck with Hong Kong, the tobacco company Philip Morris has asked an offshore tribunal to award it a vast sum in compensation for the loss of what it calls its intellectual property(3).
During its financial crisis, and in response to public anger over rocketing charges, Argentina imposed a freeze on people’s energy and water bills (does this sound familiar?). It was sued by the international utility companies whose vast bills had prompted the government to act. For this and other such crimes, it has been forced to pay out over a billion dollars in compensation(4).
In El Salvador, local communities managed at great cost (three campaigners were murdered) to persuade the government to refuse permission for a vast gold mine which threatened to contaminate their water supplies. A victory for democracy? Not for long perhaps. The Canadian company which sought to dig the mine is now suing El Salvador for $315m – for the loss of its anticipated future profits(5).
In Canada, the courts revoked two patents owned by the US drugs firm Eli Lilly, on the grounds that the company had not produced enough evidence that they had the beneficial effects it claimed. Eli Lilly is now suing the Canadian government for $500m, and demanding that Canada’s patent laws are changed(6).
These companies (and hundreds of others) are using the investor-state dispute rules embedded in trade treaties signed by the countries they are suing. The rules are enforced by panels which have none of the safeguards we expect in our own courts(7,8). The hearings are held in secret. The judges are corporate lawyers, many of whom work for corporations of the kind whose cases they hear. Citizens and communities affected by their decisions have no legal standing. There is no right of appeal on the merits of the case. Yet they can overthrow the sovereignty of parliaments and the rulings of supreme courts.
You don’t believe it? Here’s what one of the judges on these tribunals says about his work. “When I wake up at night and think about arbitration, it never ceases to amaze me that sovereign states have agreed to investment arbitration at all … Three private individuals are entrusted with the power to review, without any restriction or appeal procedure, all actions of the government, all decisions of the courts, and all laws and regulations emanating from parliament.”(9)
There are no corresponding rights for citizens. We can’t use these tribunals to demand better protections from corporate greed. As the Democracy Centre says, this is “a privatised justice system for global corporations.”(10)
Even if these suits don’t succeed, they can exert a powerful chilling effect on legislation. One Canadian government official, speaking about the rules introduced by the North American Free Trade Agreement, remarked, “I’ve seen the letters from the New York and DC law firms coming up to the Canadian government on virtually every new environmental regulation and proposition in the last five years. They involved dry-cleaning chemicals, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, patent law. Virtually all of the new initiatives were targeted and most of them never saw the light of day.”(11) Democracy, as a meaningful proposition, is impossible under these circumstances.
This is the system to which we will be subject if the transatlantic treaty goes ahead. The US and the European Commission, both of which have been captured by the corporations they are supposed to regulate, are pressing for investor-state dispute resolution to be included in the agreement.
The Commission justifies this policy by claiming that domestic courts don’t offer corporations sufficient protection because they “might be biased or lack independence.”(12) Which courts is it talking about? Those of the US? Its own member states? It doesn’t say. In fact it fails to produce a single concrete example demonstrating the need for a new, extra-judicial system. It is precisely because our courts are generally not biased or lacking independence that the corporations want to bypass them. The EC seeks to replace open, accountable, sovereign courts with a closed, corrupt system riddled with conflicts of interest and arbitrary powers.
Investor-state rules could be used to smash any attempt to save the NHS from corporate control, to re-regulate the banks, to curb the greed of the energy companies, to renationalise the railways, to leave fossil fuels in the ground. These rules shut down democratic alternatives. They outlaw left-wing politics.
This is why there has been no attempt by our government to inform us about this monstrous assault on democracy, let alone consult us. This is why the Conservatives who huff and puff about sovereignty are silent. Wake up people, we’re being shafted.
Tuesday, 30 October 2012
When corporations bankroll politics, we all pay the price
Letting taxpayers fund parties directly could revive our rotten system – and at £1 per elector, it would be cheaper too
‘Despite attempts to reform it, US campaign finance is more corrupt and corrupting than it has been for decades.' Illustration: Daniel Pudles
It's a revolting spectacle: the two presidential candidates engaged in a frantic and demeaning scramble for money. By 6 November, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will each have raised more than $1bn. Other groups have already spent a further billion. Every election costs more than the one before; every election, as a result, drags the United States deeper into cronyism and corruption. Whichever candidate takes the most votes, it's the money that wins.
Is it conceivable, for instance, that Romney, whose top five donors are all Wall Street banks, would put the financial sector back in its cage? Or that Obama, who has received $700,000 from both Microsoft and Google, would challenge their monopolistic powers? Or, in the Senate, that the leading climate change denier James Inhofe, whose biggest donors are fossil fuel companies, could change his views, even when confronted by an overwhelming weight of evidence? The US feeding frenzy shows how the safeguards and structures of a nominal democracy can remain in place while the system they define mutates into plutocracy.
Despite perpetual attempts to reform it, US campaign finance is now more corrupt and corrupting than it has been for decades. It is hard to see how it can be redeemed. If the corporate cronies and billionaires' bootlickers who currently hold office were to vote to change the system, they'd commit political suicide. What else, apart from the money they spend, would recommend them to the American people?
But we should see this system as a ghastly warning of what happens if a nation fails to purge the big money from politics. The British system, by comparison to the US one, looks almost cute. Total campaign spending in the last general election – by the parties, the candidates and independent groups – was £58m: about one sixtieth of the cost of the current presidential race. There's a cap on overall spending and tough restrictions on political advertising.
But it's still rotten. There is no limit on individual donations. In a system with low total budgets, this grants tremendous leverage to the richest donors. The political parties know that if they do anything that offends the interests of corporate power they jeopardise their prospects.
The solutions proposed by parliament would make our system a little less rotten. At the end of last year, the committee on standards in public life proposed that donationsshould be capped at an annual £10,000, the limits on campaign spending should be reduced, and public funding for political parties should be raised. Parties, it says, should receive a state subsidy based on the size of their vote at the last election.
The political process would still be dominated by people with plenty of disposable income. In the course of a five-year election cycle, a husband and wife would be allowed to donate, from the same bank account, £100,000. State funding pegged to votes at the last election favours the incumbent parties. It means that even when public support for a party has collapsed (think of the Liberal Democrats), it still receives a popularity bonus.
Even so, and despite their manifesto pledges, the three major parties have refused to accept the committee's findings. The excuse all of them use is that the state cannot afford more funding for political parties. This is a ridiculous objection. The money required is scarcely a rounding error in national accounts. It probably represents less than we pay every day for the crony capitalism the present system encourages: the unnecessary spending on private finance initiative projects, on roads to nowhere, on theTrident programme and all the rest, whose primary purpose is to keep the 1% sweet. The overall cost of our suborned political process is incalculable: a corrupt and inefficient economy, and a political system engineered to meet not the needs of the electorate, but the demands of big business and billionaires.
I would go much further than the parliamentary committee. This, I think, is what a democratic funding system would look like: each party would be able to charge the same, modest fee for membership (perhaps £50). It would then receive matching funding from the state, as a multiple of its membership receipts. There would be no other sources of income. (This formula would make brokerage by trade unions redundant.)
This system, I believe, would not only clean up politics, it would also force parties to re-engage with the public. It would oblige them to be more entrepreneurial in raising their membership, and therefore their democratic legitimacy. It creates an incentive for voters to join a party and to begin, once more, to participate in politics.
The cost to the public would be perhaps £50m a year, or a little more than £1 per elector: three times the price of a telephone vote on The X Factor. This, on the scale of state expenditure, is microscopic.
Politicians and the tabloid press would complain bitterly about this system, claiming, as they already do, that taxpayers cannot afford to fund politics. But when you look at how the appeasement of the banking sector has ruined the economy, at how corporate muscle prevents action from being taken on climate change, at the economic and political distortions caused by the system of crony capitalism, and at the hideous example on the other side of the Atlantic, you discover that we can't afford not to.
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