It seems black lives don't matter quite so much, now that we've got to the hard bit

Many who were quick to support Black Lives Matter protests are fading away as it becomes clear what real change demands writes Nesrine Malik in The Guardian

 

Black Lives Matter mural in Shoreditch, London. Photograph: Amer Ghazzal/REX/Shutterstock


It didn’t take long. The wheels of the Black Lives Matter movement are already starting to get stuck in the mire of doubt and suspicion. A few short weeks ago, politicians were eager to be photographed taking the knee in solidarity with the movement; now they’re desperate to distance themselves from what the movement demands – such as moving funds away from policing and into mental health services and youth work to prevent crime occurring in the first place. After a respectful period during which it would have been tone deaf to object to public support of the cause of the day, the BBC banned its hosts and presenters from wearing Black Lives Matter badges because it is seen as an expression of some sort of “political” opinion.

Everyone applauds a movement for social justice until it “goes too far” – when it starts making “unreasonable demands” in the service of its “political agenda”. This moment, where sympathetic onlookers start shimmying away from their earlier expressions of solidarity, was always inevitable. It is easy to agree that black lives should matter. But it is hard to contemplate all the ways the world needs to change to make them matter – and for most people, it’s simpler to say that the goal is admirable, of course, but that these particular demands from these particular protests at this particular moment are just going too far. We project our failures of imagination on to the movement, and we decamp from the cheerleading stands into the peanut gallery. “Defund the police”? How about we come up with a less provocative slogan, for a start? These Black Lives Matter protesters, they don’t make things easy for themselves, do they?

We tend to think that protest is confrontational, and change is consensual – first, a painful moment with marches in the streets and impassioned orations, followed by something less dramatic, a softer path of negotiation and adaptation. But the opposite is true. Protest is the easy bit. More specifically, protest is a smooth part sandwiched between two very rough ones.

Before protest there is a oppression, lack of popular support, and the hard work of awareness-raising. After that comes the high-octane action, the moral clarity – and allies hop on board. But once the first blood rush of protest subsides, the people who are still on the streets are mocked by their erstwhile allies, impatient to find fault with the movement and get back to their lives without any further disruption. What was universally celebrated a few weeks ago is now faintly embarrassing: too radical, too combative, almost comically unrealistic. You might think of the trajectory of the Black Lives Matter protests so far as like that famous quote misattributed to Gandhi, but this time in reverse: first you win, then they fight you, then they laugh at you, then they ignore you.

We have a great knack for supporting victims once the injustices are out in the open – when David and Goliath have been clearly identified, and a particularly British sensibility of fair play has been assailed. In the Windrush scandal, popular anger and support for the victims of the Home Office is what put a stop to their deportations and led to the resignation of Amber Rudd. National fury, at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, managed to pressure an obstinate, bunkered government into scrapping the outrageous NHS surcharge for NHS staff, and extending residency rights to all the bereaved families of NHS victims of coronavirus. If it hadn’t been for Boris Johnson’s terror of losing him, the country’s disgust at Dominic Cummings would have turfed him out too, so mortally had he wounded the nation’s sense of justice.

But when it comes to the underlying injustice – to making the links between the deportation and death of a Windrush citizen, the NHS worker impoverished by Home Office fees and unsettled by cruel hostile environment policies, the unelected special adviser breaking lockdown rules, and the political party we keep voting in – we’re not so good.

The same is now happening with the Black Lives Matter movement. Everyone is on board with the principle, but when it comes to the change that is required, the idealistic passengers the movement picked up along the way suddenly come down with a case of extreme pragmatism.
Part of the reason for their belated reluctance is that the course of actual change is unflashy. After the first moment passes, the supportive ally has nothing to show for their continued backing for the cause: there are no public high-fives for your continuing solidarity. You can’t post it, you can’t hashtag it; most of the time you can’t even do it without jeopardising something, whether that’s your income, status, job prospects or even friendships.

But the main reason for the ebbing support is that change is just hard. If it wasn’t, the long arc of history that allegedly bends towards justice would be a very short one. And change is supposed to be hard. It is supposed to be political.

Movements such as Black Lives Matter aren’t hobbies or social clubs or edgy pop culture moments to be accessorised with. Change is supposed to have an agenda, otherwise it’s just a trend. When we hear that liberal politicians think the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement are nonsense, or that wearing a badge is political, or that support needs to be scaled back because it looks like there might be other, more nefarious forces at play, what we are really being told is: this is hard – and we are retreating to our comfort zones.

The everyone economy: how to make capitalism work for all

After four decades of rising inequality, the Covid crisis is a chance to change the rules writes Martin Sandbu in The FT


A few weeks into the lockdown, when UK Covid-19 deaths were hitting a thousand a day, I crossed my London street to check on a neighbour. Around 50, she does not fall into a vulnerable category, but she works at a supermarket checkout and has been more exposed to contagion than most. And we had not seen her for a while, which was unusual. 

As it turned out, our neighbour was fine. With a pavement between us, we chatted about how she was not allowed to wear a face mask and gloves at the till. Then she said: “But I have to go to work, otherwise people won’t be able to buy their food, will they?” It was not a complaint, but an expression of pride in her new-found status of essential worker. 

That pride reflected the public appreciation suddenly afforded a group that had previously been treated with neglect. The pandemic and the lockdown brought home how we literally depend for our lives not just on doctors and nurses but also on the humbler jobs of cleaners and care workers, shelf-stackers and bus drivers, delivery couriers and cashiers. The weekly clap for carers, which in March became a national ritual in many European countries, embodied this new recognition. 

Pondering this fleeting moment of moral reordering, I could not help noticing how starkly it clashed with the underlying economic reality. In many rich countries, decades of economic polarisation have left people like my neighbour not just underpaid, but having to accept short-term contracts, erratic shift patterns and unpredictable earnings. This “precariat” faces debilitating insecurity, which lockdown has made worse. As the gilets jaunes protests in France illustrated, many people see the economy as a system to which they do not belong, rigged to benefit others. 

How did it come to this? How did much of the work we count as essential become ill-rewarded and precarious? And what has economic polarisation done to the way our societies and politics function? These are questions that Covid-19 forces us to confront. 

They were becoming hard to ignore long before this crisis. As an economic commentator for the FT, I have spent years trying to understand the causes of economic polarisation in the western world, its effects and what policies might reverse it. Like many others, I have worried that when our societies divide economically, they also fall apart culturally and politically. 

But the pandemic makes these questions more urgent, and adds a new one: will Covid-19 remake society? Is this tragedy also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rebuild better economies? 

It is tempting to think we could be at a 1945-style moment, a year remembered as ushering in a new era. As Branko Milanovic, the economist known for his work on global inequality, writes, it is “utterly wrong to believe that history does not matter and that the social and political changes wrought by the pandemic can be ignored”. The political forces it has set in motion, he suggests, “will fundamentally affect how economies behave in the future”. 

The pandemic also highlights forces that were already at work. Donald Trump, the architects of Brexit and populist movements across Europe all advanced by appealing to groups that felt forgotten by elites and saw the economic system as rigged against them. They have, in effect, been promising to restore the post-1945 era and bring about the sort of moral reordering we glimpsed in the lockdown. 

There is a “rhetoric of how the golden days were better”, says political scientist Catherine De Vries. It is obvious why such nostalgia resonates. By happy accident as well as by policy design, the postwar industrial economy of the west was particularly well-suited for most people to share in economic growth. The three decades the French call les trente glorieuses produced a remarkable convergence in income and wealth levels between rich and poor, between workers of different educational levels, between countryside and city. 

I have a lot of sympathy with this nostalgia, having grown up in Norway in the 1970s and 1980s — a time and place that arguably came as close as any modern society to the ideal of an economy with a place for everyone. Few have ever had lower economic inequality or a shorter social distance between top and bottom, and managed to combine it with high productivity and strong growth. 

When I was living in New York in the 2000s, one mundane activity struck me as embodying the economic difference between the US and Norway: having your car cleaned. On entering a New York car wash, you would be set upon by a group of workers — often immigrants — who proceeded to clean your car by hand. In my childhood in Norway, your choice was between an automated car wash or doing the job yourself. 

It was the difference between an economic model employing low-productivity, low-wage labour and one where wage equality made it commercially necessary to automate to make labour more productive. It was, too, the difference between the precariat and what I think of as an economy of belonging. 

Since the late 1970s, every western economy, albeit some much more than others, has experienced widening economic fractures that have also polarised societies politically and culturally. We moved from an economy of belonging to an economy divided between the successful and the left behind. (Et in Arcadia Ego: the manual car wash has had a renaissance in Norway too, courtesy of underpaid immigrants.) 

This end of economic belonging coincided with the peak in industrial employment across what used to be known as the industrialised world. It is a widespread misunderstanding that the shift from industrial to knowledge-intensive economy involved manufacturing vanishing, or being whisked off to China and other low-cost countries. In fact, most rich economies produce about as much stuff today as they ever have. 

What changed was that factories no longer absorbed the same workforce. Growing productivity through automation and better know-how meant ever fewer hands were needed on assembly lines. New jobs were created in services but many of these were less productive, less well paid and less secure than the ones they replaced, as well as geographically distant from them. (This also meant growth rates slowed down, since manufacturing made up a shrinking share of employment even as its own productivity kept growing.) 

Job-altering technological transformation did not stop with factory work. Roughnecks and dockhands gave way to automated rigs and container cranes. Computing put an end to many clerical jobs. The internet has upended in-person retail. Too often, those who rely on such jobs have had to accept worsening conditions to remain employed. 

These changes are not, on the whole, the fault of globalisation, that scapegoat of the populist insurgency, but of technology-driven changes combined with policies that have reinforced the underlying forces of divergence. For example, western countries shifted tax burdens away from capital and high-wage incomes even as income and wealth inequality rose. Unions, which played a part in reducing income inequality, have declined almost everywhere. 

All this undermined the promise that the postwar economy had largely delivered on: that everyone could expect a secure place in the national economy. In many countries, median wages fell behind labour productivity after tracking it closely for decades. Income inequality and wealth inequality both started rising from around 1980. New jobs were not all created equal: manual and routine work lost out to knowledge work, as pay and job security increasingly depended on workers’ educational background and on where they lived. 

The last effect — regional inequality — is perhaps the most corrosive for our politics. The economic geographer Andrés Rodríguez-Pose calls the support for anti-system populists in peripheral areas “the revenge of the places that don’t matter”. Highly paid jobs and capital (but also low-paid service jobs to serve high earners) have been concentrating in the big metropolitan areas, capital cities above all, while peripheral regions have been drained of capital investment and good job prospects. 

The blow from the pandemic, in other words, landed on economies already made brittle by deep fractures. And not only that; it is making those fractures worse. 

Lockdown causes more pain for those already suffering from low pay and job insecurity, because it preponderantly affects manual jobs that require physical presence. In the UK, one-third of the lowest-paid quintile have lost work, against 15 per cent of the top quintile, according to the Resolution Foundation. In the US, African-Americans have suffered income losses at higher rates than other groups. 

Covid-19’s most important political legacy could be that these pre-existing fractures can no longer be ignored. The moment of moral clarity triggered by the pandemic opens a political opportunity to “rebuild better” so as to make the economy work for everyone, including my neighbour and others like her. 

Acute crises have helped reorient societies in the past. But David Edgerton, the British historian, cautions that 1945 may be the wrong reference. The postwar consensus on the welfare state was less radical than sometimes believed, he says — it was the continuation of a wartime consensus in which “Labour buys into a conservative agenda”. There is also no equivalent to the postwar confrontation with the Soviet Union today, Trump’s talk of a “Chinese virus” notwithstanding. According to Edgerton, “1933 is a better analogue.” Like then, the question today is: “How do you get economies going again?” 

The Great Depression was indeed an economic disaster so great that returning to the status quo ante was politically impossible. It produced radicalism unlike any seen today (yet): in the US, Franklin Roosevelt’s hyperactive New Deal reforms; in Scandinavia, groundbreaking compromises between capital and labour; and in continental Europe, fascism. Could the economic consequences of Covid-19 spur similarly radical change, and if so, how to turn it into a force for good? 

Even before the pandemic, I frequently argued that a Roosevelt-style “centrist radicalism” was necessary to stave off a much greater — and potentially much nastier — disruption, of which signs could already be seen in the rise of authoritarian populism. What would this look like today? It would not give up on globalisation. Instead, to close the economic fractures we have allowed to open in the past 40 years, I think such a programme would need to achieve five goals. 

First, it would jettison business models based on using low-productivity (and therefore low-paid) labour, and harness automation rather than resisting it. That means allowing low-productivity jobs to be competed out of existence by higher-productivity ones. Scandinavia has long shown how this can be done: high wages at the bottom of the distribution encourage employers to automate and boost productivity, while high skill levels and active labour-market policies help workers change jobs frequently and adapt to technological developments. 

Second, the programme would aim to shift more labour-market risk from employees to employers and the welfare system. That means lower tolerance for erratic earnings that make it harder for people to plan, retrain and seek new and better work. And it means avoiding aggressive means-testing of benefits, which, when combined with tax, leaves many lower-middle earners facing effective marginal income-tax rates of around 80 per cent or more. 

Together, these two principles point in the direction of higher minimum wages, a universal basic income (or its less budget-heavy equivalent, a negative income tax), generous government funding for education and labour-market mobility, and strict enforcement of labour standards. 

Third, we can reform taxes to counteract economic divergence instead of intensifying it. That means lowering taxes that penalise hiring. To pay for this, as well as for a negative income tax and policies supporting a well-working labour market, other taxes have to go up. The best candidates are a net wealth tax — which, unlike other capital taxes, favours those who put their capital to the most productive use — and removing the gaping loopholes in multinational taxation, as well as increasing tax revenue from carbon emissions, in line with the climate challenge. A particularly promising proposal is the “carbon tax and dividend”, where revenue from higher emissions taxes would be paid out as a universal basic income. Calculations show that such a policy can leave poorer households significantly better off, even after fuel-price increases are taken into account. 

Fourth, macroeconomic and financial sector policy can be reformed in favour of the left behind. That means sustaining a “high-pressure economy” to keep job creation high, in the knowledge that those on the margins of the job market are fired first in a recession and hired last in a recovery. Governments and central banks must stimulate demand strongly for a long time after the lockdowns end, with debts restructured so they do not hold back investment. 

Fifth, and most challenging, we can work to reverse the divergence between the centre and the periphery. The previous four elements would help with this. But greater policy efforts are needed to give regions, where possible, a critical mass of knowledge jobs so they can connect with the leading economic activity in national centres. 

These are big changes. But, as Milanovic argues, one consequence of the pandemic we can predict with some confidence is a “tendency toward [a] greater state role in many countries”. Some politicians are embracing this with gusto, at least rhetorically: this week, Boris Johnson and his colleagues cast themselves as latter-day Roosevelts, and explicitly compared their levelling-up agenda to FDR’s New Deal. 

Governments everywhere have already gone to extraordinary lengths both to halt the pandemic and to offset the economic consequences of the lockdown. After this experience, as French president Emmanuel Macron has asked in the context of climate change, will publics accept claims that large-scale policy shifts are too hard to achieve? 

Having become accidental radicals, centrist parties may well be tempted to keep making more ambitious offers to voters. “When people are unhappy they go for more extreme choices,” says De Vries. Behind populists’ success, she adds, was “the story of how mainstream parties had become Tweedledee and Tweedledum”, lacking any ideology. Centrist parties “could reinvent themselves by taking clearer positions”. 

With the pandemic causing widespread economic damage to already polarised societies, continued radical policy action cannot be in doubt. What we are going to find out is for what — and for whom — that radicalism will be used.

‘We can’t go back to normal’: how will the world emerge from the coronavirus crisis?

Times of upheaval are always times of radical change. Some believe the pandemic is a once-in-a-generation chance to remake society and build a better future. Others fear it may only make existing injustices worse. By Peter C Baker in The Guardian


Everything feels new, unbelievable, overwhelming. At the same time, it feels as if we’ve walked into an old recurring dream. In a way, we have. We’ve seen it before, on TV and in blockbusters. We knew roughly what it would be like, and somehow this makes the encounter not less strange, but more so.

Every day brings news of developments that, as recently as February, would have felt impossible – the work of years, not mere days. We refresh the news not because of a civic sense that following the news is important, but because so much may have happened since the last refresh. These developments are coming so fast that it’s hard to remember just how radical they are. 

Cast your mind back a few weeks and imagine someone telling you the following: within a month, schools will be closed. Almost all public gatherings will be cancelled. Hundreds of millions of people around the world will be out of work. Governments will be throwing together some of the largest economic stimulus packages in history. In certain places, landlords will not be collecting rent, or banks collecting mortgage payments, and the homeless will be allowed to stay in hotels free of charge. Experiments will be underway in the direct government provision of basic income. Large swathes of the world will be collaborating – with various degrees of coercion and nudging – on a shared project of keeping at least two metres between each other whenever possible. Would you have believed what you were hearing?

It’s not just the size and speed of what is happening that’s dizzying. It’s the fact that we have grown accustomed to hearing that democracies are incapable of making big moves like this quickly, or at all. But here we are. Any glance at history reveals that crises and disasters have continually set the stage for change, often for the better. The global flu epidemic of 1918 helped create national health services in many European countries. The twinned crises of the Great Depression and the second world war set the stage for the modern welfare state.

But crises can also send societies down darker paths. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, government surveillance of citizens exploded, while George W Bush launched new wars that stretched into indefinite occupations. (As I write this, the US military’s current attempt at reducing its troop presence in Afghanistan, 19 years after the invasion, is being slowed by coronavirus-related complications.) Another recent crisis, the 2008 financial crash, was resolved in a way that meant banks and financial institutions were restored to pre-crash normality, at great public cost, while government spending on public services across the world was slashed.

Because crises shape history, there are hundreds of thinkers who have devoted their lives to studying how they unfold. This work – what we might call the field of “crisis studies” – charts how, whenever crisis visits a given community, the fundamental reality of that community is laid bare. Who has more and who has less. Where the power lies. What people treasure and what they fear. In such moments, whatever is broken in society gets revealed for just how broken it is, often in the form of haunting little images or stories. In recent weeks, the news has furnished us with countless examples. Airlines are flying large numbers of empty or near-empty flights for the sole purpose of protecting their slots on prime sky routes. There have been reports of French police fining homeless people for being outside during the lockdown. Prisoners in New York state are getting paid less than a dollar hour to bottle hand sanitiser that they themselves are not allowed to use (because it contains alcohol), in a prison where they are not given free soap, but must buy it in an on-site shop.

But disasters and emergencies do not just throw light on the world as it is. They also rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse possibilities of other worlds. Some thinkers who study disasters focus more on all that might go wrong. Others are more optimistic, framing crises not just in terms of what is lost but also what might be gained. Every disaster is different, of course, and it’s never just one or the other: loss and gain always coexist. Only in hindsight will the contours of the new world we’re entering become clear.

The pessimistic view is that a crisis makes bad things worse. People who study disasters – and especially pandemics – know all too well their tendency to inflame xenophobia and racial scapegoating. When the Black Death came to Europe in the 14th century, cities and towns shut themselves to outsiders – and assaulted, banished and killed “undesirable” community members, most often Jews. In 1858, a mob in New York City broke into a quarantine hospital for immigrants on Staten Island, demanded that everyone leave and then burned the hospital down, fearful that it was putting people outside at risk of yellow fever. Wikipedia now has a page collating examples from more than 35 countries of “xenophobia and racism related to the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic”: they range from taunts to outright assault.

“In a totally rational world, you might assume that an international pandemic would lead to greater internationalism,” says the historian Mike Davis, a renowned American chronicler of the disasters incubated by globalisation. For Davis, who wrote a book about the threat of avian flu in 2005, pandemics are a perfect example of the kind of crises to which global capitalism (with its constant movement of people and goods) is particularly vulnerable, but that the capitalist mindset (with its inability to think in terms beyond profit) cannot address. “In a rational world, we would be ramping up production of basic essential supplies – test kits, masks, respirators – not only for our own use, but for poorer countries, too. Because it’s all one battle. But it’s not necessarily a rational world. So there could be a lot of demonisation and calls for isolation. Which will mean more deaths and more suffering worldwide.”

In the US, President Trump has tried hard to brand the new coronavirus as inherently “Chinese”, and to use the pandemic as a pretext for tightening borders and accepting fewer asylum seekers. Republican officials, thinktanks and media outlets have claimed or implied that Covid-19 is a man-made Chinese bioweapon. Some Chinese officials, in turn, have pushed the conspiracy theory that the outbreak came to China by way of American soldiers. In Europe, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, recently announced: “We are fighting a two-front war: one front is called migration, and the other one belongs to the coronavirus. There is a logical connection between the two, as both spread with movement.” 

When you’re fighting a war, you want to know as much about the enemy as possible. But it’s easy, in the rush of crisis, to put in place surveillance tools without thinking about the long-term harm they might do. The scholar Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, reminded me that, prior to 9/11, the US government had been in the process of developing serious regulations designed to give web users real choice about how their personal information was and wasn’t used. “In the course of a few days,” Zuboff says, “the concern shifted from ‘How do we regulate these companies that are violating privacy norms and rights’ to ‘How do we nurture and protect these companies so they can collect data for us?’”
For governments looking to monitor their citizens even more closely, and companies looking to get rich by doing the same, it would be hard to imagine a more perfect crisis than a global pandemic. In China today, drones search for people without facemasks; when they are found, the drones’ built-in speakers broadcast scoldings from police. Germany, Austria, Italy and Belgium are all using data – anonymised, for now – from major telecommunications companies to track people’s movement. In Israel, the national security agency is now allowed to access infected individual’s phone records. South Korea sends texts to the public identifying potentially infected individuals and sharing information about where they’ve been.

Not all surveillance is inherently malign, and new tech tools very well might end up playing a role in fighting the virus, but Zuboff worries that these emergency measures will become permanent, so enmeshed in daily life that we forget their original purpose. Lockdowns have made many of us, sitting at home glued to our computers and phones, more dependent than ever on big tech companies. Many of these same companies are actively pitching themselves to government as a vital part of the solution. It is worth asking what they stand to gain. “People have a hard time remembering privacy rights when they’re trying to deal with something like a pandemic,” says Vasuki Shastry, a Chatham House fellow who studies the interplay of technology and democracy. “Once a system gets scaled up, it can be very difficult to scale it back down. And then maybe it takes on other uses.”

The prime ministers of both Israel and Hungary have effectively been given the power to rule by decree, without interference from courts or legislature. The UK’s recently rolled-out coronavirus bill gives police and immigration officers the authority – in place for the next two years – to arrest and detain people suspected of carrying the virus, so that they can be tested. The US Department of Justice has, since the outbreak began, filed a request with Congress for a new rule that would allow judges to suspend courtroom proceedings in emergencies, creating the possibility of people being jailed without ever being able to formally object. “Those of us who follow the police know how this goes,” said Kevin Blowe of Netpol, a UK group focused on protest rights. “These powers get put in place, and it sounds reasonable enough at the time – and then very quickly they’re applied for other purposes that have nothing to do with democracy and nothing to do with public safety.”

In a 2008 report on the legal aspects of pandemic response, prompted by the increase in pandemic flu outbreaks, a team of historians and medical ethicists assembled by the American Civil Liberties Union bemoaned a common tendency – resurgent, in their view, since 9/11 – for government to address public health problems using mindsets more appropriate to tracking down criminals. This suspicious mindset, they argued, ended up most affecting racial minorities and the poor. Tactics like these can make fighting the disease harder, by driving a hard wedge of distrust between government and citizens. As the report put it: “People, rather than the disease, become the enemy.”

There’s another school of thought that looks at crisis and sees glimmers of possibility. For thinkers in this camp, the example of the 2008 financial crash looms large. But where, from their view, 2008 led to defeat – with the broad public giving up a great deal while a small few profited – Covid-19 might open the door to political progress.

“I think we’re just so different to how we were before we saw the aftermath of the 2008 crash,” said the American writer Rebecca Solnit, one of today’s most eloquent investigators of crises and their implications. “Ideas that used to be seen as leftwing seem more reasonable to more people. There’s room for change that there wasn’t beforehand. It’s an opening.”

The argument, in its simplest form, is this: Covid-19 has revealed the political status quo to be broken. Long before anyone had heard of the new coronavirus, people died of diseases we knew how to prevent and treat. People lived precarious lives in societies awash with wealth. Experts told us about catastrophic threats on the horizon, including pandemics, and we did next to nothing to prepare for them. At the same time, the drastic measures governments have taken in recent weeks testify to just how much power the state does have – the extent of what government can accomplish (and quickly!) when it realises it must act boldly or risk being seen as fundamentally illegitimate. As Pankaj Mishra recently wrote: “It has taken a disaster for the state to assume its original responsibility to protect citizens.”

For years, in mainstream politics the conventional line – on everything from healthcare to basic living expenses such as housing – has been that even if the world has its problems, expansive government intervention is not a feasible solution. Instead, we have been told that what works best are “marketplace” solutions, which give large roles to corporations motivated not by outdated notions like “the public good” but by a desire to make a profit. But then the virus started spreading, governments spent trillions in days – even going so far as to write cheques directly to citizens – and suddenly the question of what was feasible felt different.

From this perspective, the task today is not to fight the virus in order to return to business as usual, because business as usual was already a disaster. The goal, instead, is to fight the virus – and in doing so transform business as usual into something more humane and secure.

In her 2009 book, A Paradise Built in Hell, Solnit used case studies of disasters – including the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the 2001 terror attacks and Hurricane Katrina – to argue that emergencies aren’t just moments when bad things get worse, or when people inevitably become more scared, suspicious and self-centred. Instead she foregrounded the ways in which disasters opened up human reserves of improvisation, solidarity and resolve, pockets of purpose and joy, even in the midst of loss and pain. The book was not a call to celebrate disaster – but to pay attention to the possibilities it might contain, and how it might shake us loose from old ways. In Solnit’s telling, “official” disaster responses had a tendency to muck things up by treating people as part of the problem to be managed, not an invaluable part of the solution.

Sometimes this mismanagement is a result of mere incompetence – other times it is more sinister. In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, the Canadian writer Naomi Klein laid out a dark account of crisis politics. In Klein’s view, there is always Disaster 1 – the earthquake, the storm, the military conflict, the economic slump – and Disaster 2 – the bad things that people with power subsequently get up to, such as ramming through extreme economic reforms or gobbling up post-crisis opportunities for self-enrichment, while the rest of us are too dazed to notice. (In fact, Klein argued, these people sometimes engineer Disaster 1 to get the process started.)

Unlike Solnit’s book, The Shock Doctrine doesn’t have much to say about the resilience of everyday people when everything goes horribly wrong. (Indeed, Solnit directly criticised Klein for this omission.) But the two books fit together like puzzle pieces. Both address crisis not in terms of what inevitably – or “naturally” – happens as they unfold, but in terms of choices that people make along the way. And both were well-timed to contribute to the political conversations taking shape in the rubble of the financial crash.

In 2008, days after Barack Obama’s election, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, famously said: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Today’s leftists, for whom Obama mostly represents disappointment, are prone to agree. They feel that, in the wake of recent crises, they lost, and now is the time to make amends. If, facing a pandemic, we can change this much in a few weeks, then how much might we change in a year?

For anyone making this argument, the contrast between 2008 and the present crisis is striking. Compared to the opaque financial crisis, with its credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations, the coronavirus is relatively easy to understand. It is a dozen crises tangled into one, and they’re all unfolding immediately, in ways that cannot be missed. Politicians are getting infected. Wealthy celebrities are getting infected. Your friends and relatives are getting infected. We may not quite all be “in it together” – as always, the poor are hit worse – but there is more truth to the idea than there ever was in the wake of 2008.

In this, the optimists believe, there is hope that we might begin to see the world differently. Maybe we can view our problems as shared, and society as more than just a mass of individuals competing against each other for wealth and standing. Maybe, in short, we can understand that the logic of the market should not dominate as many spheres of human existence as we currently allow it to.

“More people are in a position to connect the dots,” Klein said. “It has to do with people’s experiences; for people of a certain age, their only experience of capitalism has been one of crisis. And they want things to be different.”

That screaming buzzsaw noise in the background of this conversation is the sound of the climate crisis. If 2008 is the disaster that Klein and like-minded thinkers want to avoid repeating, climate change is the much bigger disaster they see coming – that they know is already here – and that they want to fight off. Indeed, in the years since publishing The Shock Doctrine, Klein has made climate change her central focus, framing it as the paradigmatic emergency that must be wrenched from the clutches of fossil-fuel profiteers and their enablers in government.

Although Covid-19 is likely the biggest global crisis since the second world war, it is still dwarfed in the long term by climate change. Yet the two problems have suggestive similarities. Both will require unusual levels of global cooperation. Both demand changes in behaviour today in the name of reducing suffering tomorrow. Both problems were long predicted with great certainty by scientists, and have been neglected by governments unable to see beyond the next fiscal quarter’s growth statistics. Accordingly, both will require governments to take drastic action and banish the logic of the marketplace from certain realms of human activity, while simultaneously embracing public investment. In other words, to think of this new level of state intervention as a temporary requirement is to ensure that we continue barrelling down the path to climate disaster.

“We’ve been trying for years to get people out of normal mode and into emergency mode,” said Margaret Klein Salamon, a former psychologist who now heads the advocacy group The Climate Mobilization. “What is possible politically is fundamentally different when lots of people get into emergency mode – when they fundamentally accept that there’s danger, and that if we want to be safe we need to do everything we can. And it’s been interesting to see that theory validated by the response to the coronavirus. Now the challenge is to keep emergency mode activated about climate, where the dangers are orders of magnitude greater. We can’t think we’re going to go ‘back to normal’, because things weren’t normal.”

The analogy between the two crises only goes so far. There is no getting around the fact that the impacts of climate change are more gradual than those of Covid-19. Most people do not feel they or their loved ones could die from the climate crisis this month, and so emergency mode is harder to activate and sustain. As Salamon pointed out to me, if we truly accepted we were in a climate emergency, then every day the news would lead with updates about which countries were reducing their emissions the fastest, and people would be clamouring to make sure their leaders were adopting the policies that worked. 

Illustration: Nathalie Lees/The Guardian

But it is not unimaginable that the experience of Covid-19 could help us understand climate change differently. As the virus has reduced industrial activity and road traffic, air pollution has plummeted. In early March, the Stanford University scientist Marshall Burke used pollution data from four Chinese cities to measure changes in the level of PM2.5, a particularly harmful pollutant that attacks the heart and lungs. He estimated that, in China alone, emission reductions since the start of the pandemic had in effect saved the lives of at least 1,400 children under five and 51,700 adults over 70. Meanwhile, people around the world have been sharing their own anecdotal findings online – stories of sweet-smelling breezes, expanded bike lanes and birdsong returning to neighbourhoods – in a way that almost resembles a digitally distributed Rebecca Solnit project: people catching glimpses, in the midst of a disaster, of a future they know they want and need.

Alongside these hopeful signs, a far less heartening story is unfolding, which fits Klein’s “shock doctrine” framework. Disaster 1: Covid-19. Disaster 2: the dismantling of even the meagre existing rules designed to protect the environment. On 26 March, following lobbying from the energy industry, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced that, in recognition of the pandemic’s effects on the workforce, it will not punish violations of pollution regulations so long as companies can link those violations to the pandemic. China’s environmental ministry has started waiving inspections that assess the environmental impact of industrial facilities. And advocacy groups funded by the plastics industry have launched a public relations blitz on behalf of single-use plastic bags, spreading the unproven claim that the virus is less likely to stick plastic than to the cloth fabric of reusable bags. Looking back at the crisis of 2008, we can see that emissions dropped then, too – only to rebound drastically in 2010 and 2011.

Salamon believes that one lesson of the coronavirus crisis is the power of shared emotion, which has helped make possible radical action to slow the pandemic. “I’m not talking about people giving each other medical expertise. I’m talking about people calling each other up and saying: ‘How are you doing? Are you scared? I’m scared. I want you to be OK, I want us to be OK.’ And that’s what we want for climate, too. We need to learn to be scared together, to agree on what we’re terrified about.” Only then, she said, would governments be forced to act. “It’s good that we’re entering emergency mode about the pandemic,” she said. “But unless we also do it for climate … ” She didn’t finish the sentence.

What kind of actions would it take for the optimists’ vision to materialise? The historian Philip Mirowski, author of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, warns against complacency. “The left thought it was so obvious to everyone that the crisis revealed the utter bankruptcy of a certain way of looking at the economy,” he told me. “And it wasn’t obvious to everyone, and the left lost.” How do we prevent the world from going back to a version of the way it was before Covid-19, with the virus vanquished but all of the old ongoing disasters still unfolding?

“The political outcome of the epidemic,” said Mike Davis, “will, like all political outcomes, be decided by struggle, by battles over interpretation, by pointing out what causes problems and what solves them. And we need to get that analysis out in the world any way we can.” One major obstacle, of course, is social distancing, which certainly hinders many time-tested methods of waging such struggles, such as political canvassing and street protest. “The biggest risk for all of us,” said Klein, “is going to be frittering away this time sitting at home on our social media feeds, living the extremely limited forms of politics that get enabled there.”
Davis hoped protesters would find their way into the streets sooner rather than later, and speculated that a street action with all the sign-holding participants spaced 10 or 15 feet apart would make a dramatic media image. He lives in Pāpa‘aloa, a small community in Hawaii, and as our conversation wrapped up, he mentioned that he was planning to spend part of the afternoon doing his part by standing by himself on a street corner, holding a sign. He hadn’t decided what to write on it yet, but was thinking about “SUPPORT THE NURSES’ UNION” or “DEMAND PAID SICK LEAVE”.

Solnit told me she was taking heart from all the new ways people were finding to connect and help each other around the world, ranging from the neighbourhood delivery networks that had sprung up to bring groceries to people who couldn’t get out, to more symbolic interventions, such as kids playing music on an older neighbour’s porch. The Italian political scientist Alessandro Delfanti said he was finding hope from a post-outbreak wave of strikes roiling Amazon warehouses in the US and Europe, and also the steps that workers across different sectors of the Italian economy were taking to help each other secure equipment they needed to stay safe.

What happens next might depend on the optimists’ ability to transport such moments of solidarity into the broader political sphere, arguing that it makes no sense to address Covid-19 without at least trying to fix everything else, too, creating a world where our shared resources do more for more people. “We don’t even have a language for this emotion, in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological,” Solnit wrote in A Paradise Built in Hell.

The world feels awfully strange right now, but not because – or not just because – it is changing so fast and any one of us could fall ill at any time, or could already be carrying the virus and not know it. It feels strange because the past few weeks have exposed the fact that the biggest things can always change, at any minute. This simple truth, both destabilising and liberating, is easy to forget. We’re not watching a movie: we’re writing one, together, until the end.

“Winners Take All”: Anand Giridharadas on the Elite Charade of Changing the World

Protect the NHS – but don’t protect it to death

Harry Quilter-Pinner in The Guardian

 

The NHS, as portrayed at the opening of the 2012 London Olympics. Photograph: Julian Simmonds/REX/Shutterstock




Dancing doctors, uniform-clad nurses and children jumping on hospital beds. There are very few countries that would include a celebration of their healthcare system in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. But this was the sight that greeted the millions who tuned in at the start of London 2012. After all, as former chancellor Nigel Lawson said: “The NHS is the closest thing the English people have to a religion.”

Now the country will once again celebrate the NHS, as it turns 70. And so we should. Across the globe, 400 million people still don’t have access to essential healthcare services. Thanks to the NHS, no one in the UK faces this injustice. It is there for us all – regardless of race, sexuality, gender or financial means – at our times of greatest need.

But we must also take this opportunity to stop and reflect. How good is the NHS? What do we want for its future? And what do we need to do to make it better?

A new report attempts to answer some of these tricky questions. It shows that, despite the rhetoric, in many ways the NHS is deeply average. In the authors’ words “the NHS performs neither as well as its supporters sometimes claim nor as badly as its critics often allege”. Shockingly, it finds that if you suffer from cancer, a heart attack or a stroke in the UK, you are more likely to die early than in other developed countries. 

This reality jars with a national perception of the NHS as world leading. Some will jump on this as an opportunity to call for radical change: perhaps a shift to a social – or even a private – insurance model. This would be a mistake. Fundamentally, the NHS is sound: its “free at the point of need” principle ensures that getting ill doesn’t mean getting poor. Moreover, there is strong evidence that it is more efficient than its marketised equivalents in the US and Switzerland.

Money is part of the answer as to why the NHS underperforms, compared with other systems. We spend less on healthcare than most other countries of a similar size and income level: just 9.7% of GDP compared with around 11% in both Germany and France. It should not come as a surprise that with average levels of funding come average levels of care. Theresa May’s recent “birthday present” – a long-term funding settlement for the NHS worth an additional £20bn a year by 2023 – will start to address this, though many predict that it will not be enough in the context of a growing and ageing population.

But money alone is not the solution: the NHS also suffers from a lack of reform. In places where the NHS has embraced best practice it is undoubtedly world leading. Stroke care is a good example. In 2010, London went from 34 hospitals treating stroke sufferers to just eight new centres of excellence. This has resulted in 400 lives saved per year across the capital. There have been attempts to replicate this nationwide. But in too many areas these changes, which involve consolidating services into fewer, more specialist centres, have been opposed by both the public and politicians. 

There are similar debates about moves to embrace new technologies in the NHS. The evidence is clear that artificial intelligence and robotics could fundamentally transform health and care. The government recently announced funding to help save 30,000 lives a year through technology-enabled diagnosis of cancers. But all too often, people see data-sharing as a breach of privacy and the rise of robotics in the NHS as an attempt to cut costs.

In some ways, this reluctance to embrace change is unsurprising. We all have a strong emotional and cultural attachment to the NHS. We are understandably protective of it. And many see the NHS as the last vestige of an endangered postwar consensus. They are fearful that it will go the same way as the rest of the welfare state, becoming watered down, outsourced and underfunded.

But in looking to protect the NHS there is a real risk that we end up “killing it with kindness”. All change is not bad change. As Lord Darzi’s recent review of the NHS has made clear, “high-quality care is a constantly moving target: to stand still is to fall back”. This would not only be a travesty for those who suffer as a result; it would also fuel the arguments its critics. When the great reformer, William Beveridge, proposed the creation of the NHS during the second world war, he was focused not on protecting existing achievements but on embracing the future. On its 70th birthday, it is vital that we do the same again.

The yoga industry is booming – but does it make you a better person?

Brigid Delaney in The Guardian

It was 2010 and the newspaper I worked for in Sydney commissioned me to interview yoga entrepreneur Bikram Choudhury.

He was in town to open the first of a chain of hot yoga studios. Choudhury’s brand of yoga – which he had trademarked and franchised – involved 26 poses in a humid, heated room with mirrors and carpets. When I visited the studio and caught the stench and the robotic instructions from a mic’d-up teacher, I thought: Yeah, this won’t take off.

I had been doing yoga for a decade by the time I met Choudhury. Once or twice a week, I’d go to nice, easy hatha classes, wearing whatever old tracksuit was to hand – just like everyone else in the room. Yet my progress was slow; I had never managed to get beyond beginners’ level. I was always at the back of the class, struggling to get my arm behind my calf to touch my other hand. I just assumed that this pace was my natural limit.




'He said he could do what he wanted': the scandal that rocked Bikram yoga



In his suite with harbour views, Choudhury told me about all the famous people who did his yoga – people such as Madonna and Jennifer Aniston. Then he looked me up and down.

“You,” he said. “You need to do some Bikram. You are overweight.”

“What? Huh?” I said, shocked at this breach in interview etiquette.

“Do my yoga,” he said, indicating a pair of lithe Bikram yoga instructors seated at his feet, “and you could look like them.”

For years after meeting him, I would walk past the fogged-up, vile-smelling Bikram yoga studios and think: screw you, Bikram.

But part of me also wondered if he had a point – could you completely change your body shape by doing his yoga? Should this even be an aspiration when you do yoga?


FacebookTwitterPinterest Yoga has morphed into a physical and spiritual ideal to which you aspire. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Choudhury is now in the sin bin. In 2016, he lost a lawsuit in which a former employee had claimed sexual harassment and wrongful termination – and he was ordered to pay $7m in damages.

But yoga – hot, cold – and all sorts of novelty yoga (including nude yoga, beer yoga and goat yoga) is booming. In the past decade, it has morphed from being an exercise you might do once a week at your local gym to a lifestyle – and a physical and spiritual ideal to which you aspire.

According to a 2016 Yoga Journal report, 36.7 million people practise yoga in the US, up from 20.4 million in 2012. The yoga market is now worth $16bn (£12bn) in the US and $80bn (£74bn) globally. In the UK, “yoga” was one of Google’s most searched-for words in 2016, while the yoga and pilates business brings in £812m a year, and rising.

People are packed into classes, which cost north of £10 a pop, yoga teacher training costs thousands (fees start at around £1,500 and can go to £5,000) and yoga retreats are pricey.

It is not just the studios. Take a look at the market for yoga mats. According to market research company Technavio, the US yoga and exercise mat business is expected to climb from $11bn (£8bn) now to $14bn (£10bn) in 2020. Sales of athleisure clothing, generated $35bn (£25bn) in 2015 – an all-time high – making up 17% of the entire US clothing market, according to market research firm NPD Group. Yoga pants by Lorna Jane cost $110, while GQ magazine has described Lululemon’s yoga pants as a cult obsession among “a certain set of gym-minded women and busy moms across the country”. You can even buy Lululemon prayer beads for $108 (£80).

In my local area of Sydney, upmarket yogis have colonised the high street. Most people I see walking around the city’s Bondi suburb have stopped wearing proper clothes. Unless you are around the bus stops in time for the morning commute, people dress almost exclusively in exercise gear – yoga pants, vest top and hoodie, flip flops in the summer, trainers in winter. They loiter in the aisles of the organic fruit and vegetable shop, their yoga mats hitting me in the face when they turn around. They zip around the narrow streets by the beach on mopeds or bicycles and, after class, gather around the large communal tables of cafes, sipping $10 juice in mason jars or almond milk chai.
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘After class they gather around sipping $10 juice.’ Photograph: Alamy

Secretly I wanted to be them. But it was more than just a look. Every yoga class I tried out in Bondi had a semi-spiritual element that I found enticing. At the start of class, the teacher might read some Sanskrit verse, or play sitar music while reading from a spiritual book – such as Eckhart Tolle. In increasingly non-religious countries such as the UK and Australia, this is where a lot of young people receive their moral or spiritual teachings.

In many respects, yoga is the perfect pastime for our age – the meditative elements give us the opportunity to find peace and stillness in a time of increasingly hectic and crowded information, the instructional bits give us moral lessons in the absence of traditional religion, while the stretchy, bendy, sweaty physical stuff is a great way of countering eight or more hours a day spent hunched over a computer. But is any of this yoga making us more enlightened or more compassionate? Or is it just another wellness industry trend that only the rich and idle can afford to properly indulge in?

One day last year, after my usual weekly class in a studio full of part-time models, I came across a flyer. It promised that in six weeks I could become a “modern yogi”. All I had to do was to attend classes six times a week, meditate daily, keep a journal and take part in weekly meetings that are part tutorial on mindfulness and part group therapy. The programme promised that “an exciting transformation will occur”. Could I become one of those people I saw walking around Bondi – yoga mat strapped to my back, my Instagram feed full of downward dogs on the cliffs, with a Pacific Ocean sunset in the background?

I started the $600 programme, stuck with it and found things started to shift. After doing yoga and meditation every day for six weeks, my body felt looser, more pliable. Getting up during cold winter mornings and bending down to pick a sock up off the floor became a lot easier. Physically it was tough, and it took a month to really get my fitness level moving, but gradually I was able to keep up with the more athletic Vinyasa classes. At the end of 90 minutes, I would be covered in sweat and felt a curious mix of exhausted and blank. The repetitive sequences became a routine that I did robotically, without thinking. I was bored in class, but I also turned off my mind and the classes themselves became like a moving meditation.

As for the spiritual aspect, occasionally the weird speeches the yoga instructors gave hit home. On Friday in my first week, in a move that shocked just about everyone, Britain voted to leave the European Union. The teacher, an Irishman, referenced Brexit in his sermon about 45 minutes into the class. “You might not like change. You may resist change,” he said, walking around the heated room. “You may not agree with it. You may think the change is a bad thing. A very bad thing. But change has happened. It has happened and you can’t do anything about it. To resist it is pointless.” His voice was heavy, sorrowful, and he sighed. “It is what it is.”

There was a feeling in the class that we needed to hear things like this – but afterwards, I thought: Is this going to be the extent of our resistance and our protest against political situations that we don’t like? We stretch and get a sermon, go and have a juice – and that’s it?


FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘Occasionally the weird spiritual speeches the yoga instructors gave hit home.’ Photograph: Getty Images/Topic Images

I started thinking a lot about yoga and so many activities that are part of the wellness industry, and how so many people pour energy into their bodies when perhaps they should be trying to pour energy into the people and politics around them. Self care is great – but what if there’s no energy left to care about anyone else?

In the New York Times, American writer Judith Warner noted a disturbing social trend. Just as the women of the mid-70s took flight into consciousness-raising groups, the workforce, divorce and casual sex, their daughters are also taking flight, but that flight is inwards. “They’re fleeing to yoga,” she writes in the Times, “imitating flight in the downward-gazing contortion called the crow position. They’re striving, through exquisite new adventures in internal fine-tuning, to feel more deeply, live more meaningfully, better inhabit each and every moment of each and every day.”

Warner glumly, but correctly, concluded: “There is no sense that personal liberation is to be found by taking a more active role in the public world.” In fact, “such interiority seems to be a way to manage an unbearable sort of existential anxiety: a way to narrow the scope of life’s challenges and demands … to the more manageable range of the in-and-out of your own breath.”

The more yoga I did, the more compliments I received. My hair was shiny – people commented – and my skin glowed, my clothes were looser, and, like so many others, I began wearing athleisure gear to work. After all, work was just a pit stop on the way to another yoga class. Maybe Choudhury was right after all – maybe I could look different if I did a lot of yoga.

I wrote in my journal, I went to the Monday-night tutorials, I meditated, I drank cold-press juices, I did all the right things to become a modern yogi. I was on the way to achieving the ideal of the glowy person in the organic shop. I was almost there before I started wondering – is this really what I wanted to be?

The answer was, of course, no. I was a yogi for about two months before the narcissism of the whole enterprise got to me. There were other things, it turned out, that I had to do.

Mark Steel Solution to Religion

Greek debt crisis is the Iraq War of finance

Guardians of financial stability are deliberately provoking a bank run and endangering Europe's system in their zeal to force Greece to its knees.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Telegraph 6:29PM BST 19 Jun 2015  

Rarely in modern times have we witnessed such a display of petulance and bad judgment by those supposed to be in charge of global financial stability, and by those who set the tone for the Western world.

The spectacle is astonishing. The European Central Bank, the EMU bail-out fund, and the International Monetary Fund, among others, are lashing out in fury against an elected government that refuses to do what it is told. They entirely duck their own responsibility for five years of policy blunders that have led to this impasse.

They want to see these rebel Klephts hanged from the columns of the Parthenon – or impaled as Ottoman forces preferred, deeming them bandits - even if they degrade their own institutions in the process.

If we want to date the moment when the Atlantic liberal order lost its authority – and when the European Project ceased to be a motivating historic force – this may well be it. In a sense, the Greek crisis is the financial equivalent of the Iraq War, totemic for the Left, and for Souverainistes on the Right, and replete with its own “sexed up” dossiers.

Does anybody dispute that the ECB – via the Bank of Greece - is actively inciting a bank run in a country where it is also the banking regulator by issuing this report on Wednesday?

It warned of an "uncontrollable crisis" if there is no creditor deal, followed by soaring inflation, "an exponential rise in unemployment", and a "collapse of all that the Greek economy has achieved over the years of its EU, and especially its euro area, membership".

The guardian of financial stability is consciously and deliberately accelerating a financial crisis in an EMU member state - with possible risks of pan-EMU and broader global contagion – as a negotiating tactic to force Greece to the table.

It did so days after premier Alexis Tsipras accused the creditors of "laying traps" in the negotiations and acting with a political motive. He more or less accused them of trying to destroy an elected government and bring about regime change by financial coercion.

I leave it to lawyers to decide whether this report is a prima facie violation of the ECB’s primary duty under the EU treaties. It is certainly unusual. The ECB has just had to increase emergency liquidity to the Greek banks by €1.8bn (enough to last to Monday night) to offset the damage from rising deposit flight.

In its report, the Bank of Greece claimed that failure to meet creditor demands would “most likely” lead to the country’s ejection from the European Union. Let us be clear about the meaning of this. It is not the expression of an opinion. It is tantamount to a threat by the ECB to throw the Greeks out of the EU if they resist.

This is not the first time that the ECB has strayed far from its mandate. It forced the Irish state to make good the claims of junior bondholders of Anglo-Irish Bank, saddling Irish taxpayers with extra debt equal to 20pc of GDP.

This was done purely in order to save the European banking system at a time when the ECB was refusing to do the job itself, betraying the primary task of a central bank to act as a lender of last resort.

It sent secret letters to the elected leaders of Spain and Italy in August 2011 demanding detailed changes to internal laws for which it had no mandate or technical competence, even meddling in neuralgic issues of labour law that had previously led to the assassination of two Italian officials by the Red Brigades. It demanded changes to the Spanish constitution.

When Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi balked, the ECB switched off bond purchases, driving 10-year yields to 7.5pc. He was forced from office in a back-room coup d’etat, albeit one legitimised by the ageing ex-Stalinist EU fanatic who then happened to be president of Italy.

Lest we forget, it parachuted in its vice-president – Lucas Papademos – to take over Greece when premier George Papandreou merely suggested that he might submit the EMU bail-out package to a referendum, a wise idea in retrospect. That makes two coups d’etat. Now Syriza fears they are angling for a third.

The creditor power structure has lost its way. The IMF is in confusion. It is enforcing a contractionary austerity policy in Greece – with no debt relief, exchange cushion, or offsetting investment - that has been discredited by its own elite research department as scientifically unsound.

The Fund’s culpability in this fiasco is by now well known. As I argued last week, its own internal documents show that the original bail-out in 2010 was designed to rescue the EMU banking system and monetary union at a time when it had no defences against contagion. Greece was sacrificed.

One should have thought that the IMF would wish to lower the political temperature, given that its own credibility and long-term survival are at stake. But no, Christine Lagarde has upped the political ante by stating that Greece will fall into arrears immediately if it misses a €1.6bn payment to the Fund on June 30.

In my view, this is a discretionary escalation. The normal procedure is to notify the IMF Board after 30 days. This period is a de facto grace period, and in a number of past cases the arrears were cleared up quietly during the interval before the matter ever reached the Board.

The IMF could have let this process run in the case of Greece. It has chosen not to do so, ostensibly on the grounds that the sums are unusually large.

Klaus Regling, head of the eurozone bail-out fund (EFSF), entered on cue to hint strongly that his organisation would trigger cross-default clauses on its Greek bonds – 45pc of the Greek package – even though there is no necessary reason why it should do so. It is an optional matter for the EFSF board.

He seems to be threatening an EFSF default, even though the Greeks themselves are not doing so, a remarkable state of affairs.

It is obvious what is happening. The creditors are acting in concert. Instead of stopping to reflect for one moment on the deeper wisdom of their strategy, they are doubling down mechanically, appearing to assume that terror tactics will cow the Greeks at the twelfth hour.

Personally, I am a Burkean conservative with free market views. Ideologically, Syriza is not my cup tea. Yet we Burkeans do like democracy – and we don’t care for monetary juntas – even if it leads to the election of a radical-Left government.

As it happens, Edmund Burke would have found the plans presented to the Eurogroup last night by finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to be rational, reasonable, fair, and proportionate.

They include a debt swap with ECB bonds coming due in July and August exchanged for bonds from the bail-out fund. They would have longer maturities and lower interest rates, reflecting the market borrowing cost of the creditors.

Syriza said from the outset that it was eager to work on market reforms with the OECD, the leading authority. It wants to team up with the International Labour Organisation on Scandinavian style flexi-security and labour reforms, a valid alternative to the German-style Hartz IV reforms that have impoverished the bottom fifth of German society and which no Left-wing movement can stomach.

It wished to push through a more radical overhaul of the Greek state that anything yet done under five years of Troika rule – and much has been done, to be fair.

As Mr Varoufakis told Die Zeit: “Why does a kilometer of freeway cost three times as much where we are as it does in Germany? Because we’re dealing with a system of cronyism and corruption. That’s what we have to tackle. But, instead, we’re debating pharmacy opening times."

The Troika pushed privatisation of profitable state assets at knock-down depression prices to private monopolies, to the benefit of an entrenched elite. To call that reforms invites a bitter cynicism.

The only reason that the Troika pushed this policy was in order to extract money. It was acting at a debt collector. “The reforms were a smokescreen. Whenever I tried talking about proposals, they were bored. I could see it in their body language," Mr Varoufakis told me.

The truth is that the creditor power structure never even looked at the Greek proposals. They never entertained the possibility of tearing up their own stale, discredited, legalistic, fatuous Troika script.

The decision was made from the outset to demand strict enforcement of the terms agreed in the original Memorandum, which even the last conservative pro-Troika government was unable to implement - regardless of whether it makes any sense, or actually increases the chance that Germany and other lenders will recoup their money.

At best, it is bureaucratic inertia, a prime exhibit of why the EU has become unworkable, almost genetically incapable of recognising and correcting its own errors.

At worst, it is nasty, bullying, insistence on ritual capitulation for the sake of it.

We all know the argument. The EU is worried about political “moral hazard”, about what Podemos might achieve in Spain, or the eurosceptics in Italy, or the Front National in France, if Syriza is seen to buck the system and get away with it.

But do the proponents of this establishment view – and one hears it a lot – really think that Podemos can be defeated by crushing Syriza, or that they can discourage Marine Le Pen by violating the sovereignty and sensibilities of a nation?

Do they think that the EU’s ever-declining hold on the loyalty of Europe’s youth can be reversed by creating a martyr state on the Left? Do they not realize that this is their own Guatemala, the radical experiment of Jacobo Arbenz that was extinguished by the CIA in 1954, only to set off the Cuban revolution and thirty years of guerrilla warfare across Latin America? Don’t these lawyers – and yes they are almost all lawyers - ever look beyond their noses?

The Versailles victors assumed reflexively that they had the full weight of moral authority on their side when they imposed their Carthiginian settlement on a defeated Germany in 1919 and demanded the payment of debts that they themselves invented. History judged otherwise.