Coalition governments have outperformed single party rule

TCA Sharad Raghavan in The Print

The perception that coalition governments are prone to going slow on reforms and see slower economic growth is not borne out by the data, an analysis by ThePrint has shown.

In fact, gross domestic product (GDP) in aggregate and within key sectors of the economy averaged faster growth during the coalition government periods of 1990-2014 than in the stable, single-party-majority periods that preceded or followed this phase.

Further, analysis shows that this coalition phase also saw a number of reforms that spanned sectors and that had profound impacts on the economic progress of the country.


 

The issue of coalition versus single-party-led governments has again come to the fore since the Bharatiya Janata Party — which formed the majority in the Lok Sabha from 2014 to 2024 — failed to reach the majority mark in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. With 240 seats, the BJP will need to rely on a coalition with its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) partners to form the government.

Following these results, a few ratings agencies issued comments about how a coalition government would result in delays in key reforms.

Christian de Guzman, Senior Vice-President at Moody’s Ratings, for example, said that the NDA’s “relatively slim margin of victory, as well as the BJP’s loss of its outright majority in parliament, may delay more far-reaching economic and fiscal reforms”.

Fitch, for its part, said that the return of Prime Minister Narendra Modi with a weakened majority “could pose challenges for the more ambitious elements of the government’s reform agenda”.

The analysis of the coalition period in India’s history, however, shows these fears may be unfounded.


Also read: Adani Group sees Rs 3.6 lakh cr wiped out from market cap on counting day as BJP faces poll setback

Stronger economic growth

India saw its first phase of political stability at the Centre — defined as a single party forming the majority — between 1952 and 1989, when the Congress itself formed the government for around 90 percent of this period.

This phase, however, saw India’s GDP growing at a compounded average rate of growth (CAGR) of just 4 percent — derisively called the ‘Hindu rate of growth’. The CAGR is the rate at which the economy would have to grow every year since 1952 to reach the level it was at in 1989.

The next phase, of coalition governments, spanned the period 1989 to 2014. This 25-year period saw as many as eight prime ministers (counting Atal Bihari Vajpayee twice for his two separate terms), and as many governments coming to power. Each was formed on the basis of a coalition.

This shaky phase at the Centre, however, saw GDP growth accelerate to 5.8 percent compounded annually. Further, a sectoral breakup also shows that this faster growth was spread across key sectors of the economy rather than being driven by just a few.

The agriculture sector and mining sectors, for example, grew an average of 2.7 percent during the first stable phase, and accelerated to 3 percent during the coalition phase. Similarly, the industrial sector — comprising manufacturing, construction, and utilities — saw growth speeding up from 5.3 percent to 6.4 percent over these two periods.

The key services sectors such as trade, hotels, transport, communication, financing, real estate, professional services, and public administration all saw growth quicken during the coalition period.

Growth slows again, dragged by pandemic

The next phase of stability came with the historic victory of the BJP in 2014, having secured a single-party majority with 282 seats in the Lok Sabha. It returned to power in 2019 with an even larger majority of 303 seats.

This decade, however, saw average growth slowing to 5.1 percent, although this was heavily influenced by the 5.8 percent contraction in GDP in the COVID-19 pandemic-impacted year of 2020-21. That said, the first period of stability also saw such an outlier year, when GDP contracted 5.2 percent in 1979-80.

Apart from agriculture, which continued to accelerate under the Modi government, all other sectors of the economy saw slower average growth in the 2014-24 period than in the preceding 25 years.
Coalitions have been reforms-focused too

The coalition government under Narasimha Rao during the period from 1991 to 1996 is remembered primarily for the scope of economic reforms implemented during its tenure.

These include the dismantling of the ‘licence raj’, the opening up of the economy to the private sector and global investment and competition, and providing banks the freedom to determine their own interest rates, among other wide-reaching reforms.

The H.D. Deve Gowda-led coalition in 1996-97 saw then Finance Minister P. Chidambaram present what is now called the ‘dream budget’ in which he slashed the marginal income tax rate for individuals, cut corporate tax rates, reduced peak customs duties, and introduced the Voluntary Disclosure of Income Scheme (VDIS) aimed at curbing black money.

Next came the first government of the NDA under PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee, spanning 1999 to 2004. This government saw the groundwork laid for the ambitious golden quadrilateral highway project, the introduction of the National Telecom Policy, which ended government monopoly over the sector, raised foreign direct investment limits in banking and insurance, and put in place the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act, the provisions of which are largely followed even today.

The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), in power from 2004 to 2014, rolled out the Value Added Tax (VAT) — the precursor to the Goods and Services Tax (GST) — across the country. The price of petrol was deregulated in 2010, allowing it to be linked to the market price of oil.

Several rights-based reforms were also introduced during this period, including the Right to Information (RTI), the Right to Food, and the Right to Education.

Other democracies should beware taking pleasure in the UK’s travails

Voters in most developed countries feel that their contract with the state is fraying writes Bronwen Maddox in the FT 

I can barely think of a meeting I’ve had since September that didn’t begin with jokes about Britain’s newfound instability. I started a job a few days before Liz Truss became prime minister, and the “lasted longer than the lettuce” one has been inescapable. “Three prime ministers in a year!” (Ambassadors from European countries still incredulous at Brexit particularly like this one.) Now, there are the strikes — although the meltdown of the NHS’s emergency services is no joke at all. 

But these are rash quips if coming from other democracies. The joke may be on them, too. Older democratic countries share many of the same problems and are struggling to show that they have a system that can solve them. “If you don’t have a political system that can make short-term sacrifices for the long-term good of the country, how can you expect your system of government to survive?” asked one senior Chinese official of a distinguished British former minister. 

It’s a good question. In Britain, the NHS is a symbol of these problems above all others. The stand-off with the government by nurses and ambulance workers is of course about worker pay, but is also about how much the government wants to pay for the health service at all. 

Much of the problem stems from the demands of an ageing population, and that is something that many older democracies share. Even if other countries may no longer envy the NHS, they share some of the same troubles. On many fronts, the contract that voters thought they had with their governments — over them paying for healthcare, education, pensions — is being rewritten, and not in their favour. Perhaps the best-known saying of Jean Claude Juncker, when prime minister of Luxembourg, was: “We know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.” 

Those sceptical of democracy have prophesied that this is how it consumes itself. It is easier to make promises than to keep them, so the temptation is for politicians to make extravagant commitments to get into office, and then try somehow to stay there. Following this recipe, democracy decays into populism and then autocracy. 

To some degree, yes. Boris Johnson and the unfulfillable Brexit promises were a symptom of the need to assemble an expansive coalition, built on impossibilities. The antidote — the “grown-up conversation with the nation” that politicians sometimes desperately invoke — seems pitifully weak. 

All the same, that is what is needed. The pandemic does offer some encouragement, showing that people are prepared to give up an extraordinary amount if persuaded it is necessary. But there are also more practical things that governments could do to help. 

First, they need to make the case for growth and the steps required to bring it about. Truss was not wrong in her ambition, just in recklessly ignoring the constraints on any country seeking to borrow money. For Britain, that means closer relations with Europe. A US trade deal is not coming any time soon; the only alternative of a large market is China, and Rishi Sunak’s government has chosen not to lean that way. It also means telling people that more legal immigration is needed. It means championing the creativity in science and culture that are themselves the product of the intellectual freedom at the heart of democracies. 

The second thing to do is change voting systems and improve legislatures. In the UK, the House of Lords is indefensible, as former prime minister Gordon Brown has pointed out. He is right that regions need more representation, too. And first past the post is increasingly hard to defend in a country of many different kinds of people and views. 

Third, is to stand up for the values that underpin liberal democracy but not try to couple them with all the other deals on the world stage. Insisting on a human rights agenda in every diplomatic relationship can jeopardise the pursuit of environmental and security accords that are desperately needed on their own account. It can lead to accusations of double standards — as shown by the controversy over Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup despite its treatment of LGBTQ people. 

It is right, though, to pursue those liberal principles, while acknowledging that not all countries share them. They are, along with economic prospects, one of the reasons people risk their lives in small boats trying to come to the UK — one of the best arguments that liberal democracy has a future.

Jaishankar’s problem is stark – no amount of external PR can cover up India’s truth

Freedom House and V-Dem are no gold standards of democracy rating. But Jaishankar must know that just pointing out Western hypocrisy won’t cover India’s reality writes Yogendra Yadav in The Print 



 

S Jaishankar has an unenviable task. He has been handed over the job to give a liberal gloss to a government that cannot spell l-i-b-e-r-a-l. More than manage external relations, he is here to manage external public relations, to ensure that the Narendra Modi government doesn’t get a bad international image. Now, that’s manifold more challenging than managing domestic media, mostly darbari if not outright sarkari, with a handful of carrots and sticks. So, you shouldn’t blame the hon’ble Minister of External Affairs if he occasionally botches it up.

As he did last Saturday at the India Today conclave. He was asked about India’s downgrading by two of the leading democracy rating agencies. The US-based non-government organisation Freedom House released a report that classified India as “partly free”, down from “free” earlier. Sweden-based Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute has categorised India as an “electoral autocracy”. Jaishankar was aggressive in his response: “It is hypocrisy. We have a set of self-appointed custodians of the world who find it very difficult to stomach that somebody in India is not looking for their approval, is not willing to play the game they want to play. So they invent their rules, their parameters, pass their judgements and make it look as if it is some kind of global exercise.”

Now, Jaishankar is an educated man. He must know some basic logical fallacies that any intelligent argument must avoid. Usually, at the top of that list is ad hominem, Latin for “against the man”. This happens when someone replaces logical argumentation with criticism based on personal characteristics, background or other features irrelevant to the argument at issue. One variety of ad hominem is called “tu quoque”, Latin for “you too”. It distracts from the argument by pointing out hypocrisy in the opponent. This is a logical fallacy and does not prove anything simply because even hypocrites can tell the truth. When an otherwise intelligent and educated person uses this type of argumentation, you know he is really short on logic and facts.

This is not to dispute Jaishankar’s charge of hypocrisy. Of course, Europe or North America is nobody to distribute certificates of democracy. Not just because their certificates are inevitably linked to their foreign policy and economic interests but also because their own democracy is deeply flawed. The list of autocracies that the US has spawned and supported is too long to be enumerated. Besides, Freedom House and V-Dem are no gold standards of democracy rating. Actually, there is no gold standard in this field. Any quantitative measurement or categorisation of democracy is inevitably a subjective exercise open to challenge. All rating agencies invite experts who inevitably bring their own values. There is no way to have a completely objective rating of democracy. But subjective is not arbitrary and values are not necessarily biases. If long literary essays can be evaluated in terms of quantitative marks in an examination, the same holds true for democracy. 

India craves world rankings

S. Jaishankar would know that the Freedom House and V-Dem have not invented democracy ratings or categorisations to damn his government. They have been publishing annual democracy ratings for most countries of the world for a fairly long time. He would also know that besides these two, there are other ratings such as Democracy Index by The Economist. There is also Press Freedom Index. Besides, there are reports by Amnesty International and UN Rapporteur on Human Rights. He would surely know that of late India has consistently fallen in each and every rating of democracy and has been severely indicted in human rights reports. These reports happen to have given a number and a name to what anyone who knows anything about India knows so well.

No doubt, each of these ratings is from a Western liberal understanding of what a democracy is. Yet it would stretch one’s credulity too far to suggest that all of them are into a grand conspiracy against India. It was rich of Jaishankar to claim that India was not looking for approval from the West. Facts suggest otherwise. No prime minister before Narendra Modi has held melas outside India to promote his image. No head of government was as keen to please an American president as Modi was to Donald Trump. No government has made such a song and dance about a routine Ease of Doing Business Index as this one did, a ranking that landed in a manipulation controversy. Never have Indian government officials preferred International Monetary Fund (IMF) data over India’s own statistics as during this government. No one in the world has tried to claim credit for a high score on severity of lockdown index as this government’s enthusiasts did. Ever since gaining Independence from colonial rule, no Indian government has been as craven in its need for Western certificates as this one is.

Facts, not verbiage

The only honest and intelligent way of questioning such ratings would be to counter them with facts. Jaishankar had only one fact to offer: that in India, everyone including the defeated parties accepts election results. But he forgot that the main target of this much-needed punch was Trump who was recommended to the American electorate by Modi himself. Besides, this fact only proves the fairness of counting and, at best, electoral process. It does not disprove widespread anxiety about the worsening state of civil liberties, capture of democratic institutions, erosion in the freedom of media, judiciary and other watchdogs, attack on political opponents and criminalisation of dissent in today’s India. In fact, the whole point of calling India an “electoral autocracy” is this: elections happen more or less fairly, but the country is non-democratic in between two elections. Unwittingly, Jaishankar has conceded this point.

The only other option would be to come up with an alternative way of measuring democracy. A news report says that the Ministry of External Affairs might support an independent Indian think tank to do an alternative global rating of democracies. At any other time, this should have been welcomed as an instance of the kind of intellectual ambition non-Western democracies must show. In today’s context, it is more likely to be another version of Colonel Gaddafi’s Green Book that sought to challenge the hegemony of Western political philosophy through some verbiage.

Mr Jaishankar’s attempt to clothe up the current state of Indian democracy is stark: The Emperor is naked. And no amount of words can dress it up.

Socialism in Venezuela

Thank God Theresa May is continuing the historic Tory tradition of fighting the elite

Whenever an elite is unjust, anywhere in the world, from South Africa to Chile to Saudi Arabia, it’s been the Conservative Party that has bravely fought them by selling them weapons and inviting their leaders to dinner.



Mark Steel in The Independent




What a welcome message from Theresa May, that she’s sick of the elite. The Cabinet all applauded, as you’d expect; although 27 of them are millionaires, that doesn’t make them elite – they all got their money by winning it on scratch cards.

The Prime Minister was only abiding by a change to international law that states everyone who makes a public speech now has to insist they can’t stand the “elite”. Donald Trump – a man whose background is so modest that, in one of his castles, he has to go outside to use the moat – hates the elite. Iain Duncan Smith with his modest 15-up 15-down Tudor mansion is fed up with the elite, too. Boris Johnson stands up against the elite, because his background was so humble that one of the kids at his primary school had an imaginary friend who didn’t have his own valet.

This year, the Queen will probably start her Christmas speech by saying, “My husband and I are sick to death of the elite. When one has been required to reign as a working-class monarch, one rather views these elite types with sufficient disdain to get the right hump.”

But May was more specific. She singled out the “Liberal Metropolitan Elite,” for ruining our lives.

You can understand why, because these are the very people who have spoilt everything with their liberal ways. There’s Topshop’s Philip Green, who wasted millions so he could complete a course as a human rights lawyer and get his hipster beard trimmed. Mike Ashley, condemned for his treatment of staff at Sports Direct, has “homeopath” written all over him.

There’s Alan “cycle lane” Sugar, who, if I remember right, turned down his knighthood as a protest against the number of toads that get run over. And the most powerful man in the media is Rupert Murdoch, who publishes newspapers full of feminism and media studies.

One way we must stop these liberals, she insisted, is prevent human rights lawyers from haranguing the army. She’s right there: if there’s one area in which human rights lawyers have absolutelyno need to investigate, it’s war. Whoever heard of an army that isn’t careful to look after human rights? They should concern themselves with real human rights culprits, such as florists.

These abuses have come about because, for 35 years, British life has been relentlessly liberal. It started with Margaret Thatcher, who shut down the mines so they could be replaced by documentaries on BBC4 about Tibetan dance. And she brought in the Poll Tax, but only because she was convinced this would lead to wider ownership of African wood carvings bought from antique shops in Notting Hill.

Then we had liberal Tony Blair with his liberal invasion of Iraq, in which he insisted the air force only used Fairtrade depleted uranium. Now, at last, we’re all sick of being ruled by these elite liberals.

Conservative figures such as Amber Rudd have this week been forced to ask “can we at last talk about immigration?” Thanks to the elite, who can think of a single occasion in the last six months when anyone in public eye has mentioned immigration?

There are some programmes on radio or television that simply refuse to discuss the issue. For example, during a first-round clash in the Swedish open snooker championship on Eurosport, a whole four minutes went by on the commentary without mention of how you can’t move in Lincolnshire for Bulgarians. And two minutes passed by without any talk of immigration during the two-minute silence on Remembrance Day at the Cenotaph. And if we can’t talk about protecting our borders at that time when can we discuss it?

The idea that we should welcome immigration is a perfect example of how the Liberal Metropolitan Elite operates, because foreigners are alright for some with their cheap nannies but down-to-earth types, bless them, can’t stand people who have the nerve to move over here and fix radiators or bed-bath the elderly.
This week is the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, when thousands of people assembled in East London to prevent the British Union of Fascists from marching through a Jewish area. I wonder who was in the crowds that day, linking arms to defy the supporters of Hitler? It can’t have been the working class, since they must all have said “it’s alright for the elite, but these Jews come over here and lower our wages.” So it must have been the Liberal Metropolitan Elite who took on the fascists, by hurling antique carriage clocks at them after distracting them with an avant-garde contemporary dance evening.

Theresa May seems ambitious, because she said she’s going to battle an “international elite”. So they’re global, these elites, and they can only be fought by determined earthy salt-of-the-earth types such as Anna Soubry. Jeremy Hunt, for example, looks exactly like someone who’s just come off an eight-hour shift driving a forklift truck carrying tomatoes round a warehouse for Lidl, shouting “there you go sweetheart, stack them up while I sort out these elite doctors giving it all that about weekends”.

If there’s one thing we know about the Conservative Party, it’s the natural home for common folk who want to take on the international elite.

Whenever an elite is unjust, anywhere in the world, from apartheid South Africa to military Chile or patriarchal Saudi Arabia, it’s been the Conservative Party that has bravely fought them by selling them weapons and inviting their leaders to dinner. Just like the poor-but-happy folk down any council estate always keep a door open for a military dictator, the little darlings.

Saudi Arabia is the flagging horse of the Gulf – but Britain is still backing it as an answer to Brexit

Patrick Cockburn in The Independent


Why does the British Government devote so much time and effort to cultivating the rulers of Bahrain, a tiny state notorious for imprisoning and torturing its critics? It is doing so when a Bahraini court is about to sentence the country’s leading human rights advocate, Nabeel Rajab, who has been held in isolation in a filthy cell full of ants and cockroaches, to as much as 15 years in prison for sending tweets criticising torture in Bahrain and the Saudi bombardment of Yemen.

Yet it has just been announced that Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, are to make an official visit to Bahrain in November with the purpose of improving relations with Britain. It is not as though Bahrain has been short of senior British visitors of late, with the International Trade Minister Liam Fox going there earlier in September to meet the Crown Prince, Prime Minister and commerce minister. And, if this was not enough, in the last few days the Foreign Office Minister of State for Europe, Sir Alan Duncan, found it necessary to pay a visit to Bahrain where he met King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa and the interior minister, Sheikh Rashid al-Khalifa, whose ministry is accused of being responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses on the island since the Arab Spring protests there were crushed in 2011 with the assistance of Saudi troops.

Quite why Sir Alan, who might be thought to have enough on his plate in dealing with his area of responsibility in Europe in the era of Brexit, should find it necessary to visit Bahrain remains something of mystery. Sayed Ahmed Alwadei, director of advocacy at the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, asks: “Why is Alan Duncan in Bahrain? He has no reasonable business being there as Minister of State for Europe” But Sir Alan does have a long record of befriending the Gulf monarchies, informing a journalist in July that Saudi Arabia “is not a dictatorship”.

The flurry of high level visits to Bahrain comes as Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, awaits sentencing on next week on three charges stemming from his use of social media. These relates to Rajab tweeting and retweeting about torture in Bahrain’s Jau prison and the humanitarian crisis caused by Saudi-led bombing in Yemen. After he published an essay entitled “Letter From a Bahrain Jail” in the The New York Times a month ago, he was charged with publishing “false news and statements and malicious rumours that undermines the prestige of the kingdom”.

This “prestige” has taken a battering since 2011 when pro-democracy protesters, largely belonging to the Shia majority on the island, were savagely repressed by the security forces. Ever since, the Sunni monarchy has done everything to secure and reinforce its power, not hesitating to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions by stripping the country’s most popular Shia cleric, Sheikh Isa Qassim, of his citizenship on the grounds that he was serving the interests of a foreign power.

Repression has escalated since May with the suspension of the main Shia opposition party, al-Wifaq, and an extension to the prison sentence of its leader, Sheikh Ali Salman. The al-Khalifa dynasty presumably calculates that US and British objections to this clampdown are purely for the record and can safely be disregarded. The former Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond claimed unblushingly earlier this year that Bahrain was “travelling in the right direction” when it came to human rights and political reform. Evidently, this masquerade of concern for the rights of the majority in Bahrain is now being discarded, as indicated by the plethora of visits.

There are reasons which have nothing to do with human rights motivating the British Government, such as the recent agreement to expand a British naval base on the island with the expansion being paid for by Bahrain. In its evidence to the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, the Government said that UK naval facilities on the island give “the Royal Navy the ability to operate not only in the Gulf but well beyond in the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden and North West Indian Ocean”. Another expert witness claimed that for Britain “the kingdom is a substitute for an aircraft carrier permanently stationed in the Gulf”.

These dreams of restored naval might are probably unrealistic, though British politicians may be particularly susceptible to them at the moment, imagining that Britain can rebalance itself politically and economically post-Brexit by closer relations with old semi-dependent allies such as the Gulf monarchies. These rulers ultimately depend on US and British support to stay in power, however many arms they buy. Bahrain matters more than it looks because it is under strong Saudi influence and what pleases its al-Khalifa rulers pleases the House of Saud.

But in kowtowing so abjectly to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf kingdoms, Britain may be betting on a flagging horse at the wrong moment. Britain, France and – with increasing misgivings – the US have gone along since 2011 with the Gulf state policy of regime change in Libya and Syria. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, in combination with Turkey, have provided crucial support for the armed opposition to Bashar al-Assad. Foreign envoys seeking to end the Syrian war since 2011 were struck by British and French adherence to the Saudi position, even though it meant a continuance of the war which has destabilised the region and to a mass exodus of refugees heading for Western Europe.

Whatever the Saudis and Gulf monarchies thought they were doing in Syria, it has not worked. They have been sawing off the branch on which they are sitting by spreading chaos and directly or indirectly supporting the rise of al-Qaeda-type organisations like Isis and al-Nusra. Likewise in their rivalry with Iran and the Shia powers, the Sunni monarchies are on the back foot, having escalated a ferocious war in Yemen which they are failing to win.

In the past week Saudi Arabia has suffered two setbacks that are as serious as any of these others: on Wednesday the US Congress voted overwhelmingly to override a presidential veto enabling the families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia. In terms of US public opinion, the Saudi rulers are at last paying a price for their role in spreading Sunni extremism and for the bombing of Yemen. The Saudi brand is becoming toxic in the US as politicians respond to a pervasive belief among voters that there is Saudi complicity in the spread of terrorism and war.

The second Saudi setback is different, but also leaves it weaker. At the Opec conference in Algiers, Saudi Arabia dropped its long-term policy of pumping as much oil as it could, and agreed to production cuts in order to raise the price of crude. A likely motivation was simple shortage of money. The prospects for the new agreement are cloudy but it appears that Iran has got most of what it wanted in returning to its pre-sanctions production level. It is too early to see Saudi Arabia and its Gulf counterparts as on an inevitable road to decline, but their strength is ebbing.

If trade helps improve human rights, it's about time we let North Korea and Isis run some of our industries

Mark Steel in The Independent


Xi Jinping and David Cameron attend a joint press conference in 10 Downing Street Suzanne Plunkett - WPA Pool/Getty Images


I expect the Government is worried after the state visit from the President of China that we weren’t quite grovelling enough. George Osborne must be fretting – “We should have let him win Strictly Come Dancing” – while Cameron shakes his head and says, “My idea was to give him Joanna Lumley as a present.

“In return they might have agreed to buy the New Forest, instead we didn’t get so much as a panda.”

Iain Duncan Smith will demand that next time, instead of giving him a length of red carpet, we nail Tibetan monks to the floor so he can walk on them.

Theresa May will complain the premier should have been allowed to partner Wayne Rooney up front against Manchester City, and Jeremy Hunt probably wishes he’d read out the poem he’d written specially, that starts “O President Xi, even your wee, is wine finer than Jesus’s from Galilee.”

Sajid Javid and China's Gao Hucheng sign an agreement in 10 Downing Street while David Cameron and Xi Jinping look on

As usual the person who tried to really spoil the occasion was Jeremy Corbyn, who’s such an extremist communist that he insisted on complaining about the behaviour of communist China.

If he was a sensible moderate of the centre ground, he’d have donated his beard as a gift to the Chinese Communist Party and ignored the habit of sentencing people to death at mass rallies. Those rallies are a sign that China is becoming more liberal – it’s a nice touch to allow the masses to be involved, making the occasion a people’s execution.

According to Amnesty International, China executes more people than the rest of the world put together. And that’s just the sort of efficiency and high rates of productivity we need to aspire to if we’re to make British industry great again.

For too long the West has been prepared to trudge along, wiping out prisoners one at a time on Death Row with (eventually) lethal injections and cumbersome hangings, but the Chinese Communist Party have set a new standard, zapping them away dozens at a time, with a "can-do" spirit that makes them ideal for building our nuclear power plants.

They’re so imaginative with new technology that while constructing this power station they may develop a new efficient method of providing energy, which is to use the heat from all the Tibetan monks that set themselves alight in protest at the Chinese occupation.

Cameron insists he did discuss human rights in private with President Xi, and I’m sure he was very influential. He probably made such an impression that the President persuaded Cameron to execute people by firing squad, then send the family a bill for the bullet, so who says there’s no meaningful dialogue?

The Prime Minister explained how these discussions work: “The more we trade, the better placed we are to discuss human rights.” In that case we should try this method everywhere. To start with we can ask North Korea to run a couple of our industries – small ones to get started, such as water and the Premier League – and then we’ll be in an ideal position to chat to Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un about the way he starves people to death.

Then we can start a lively sword deal with Isis. If that goes well we can invite them to run our banks, which will make us suitably placed to point out we take a very dim view of their policy on massacring Christians.

This is one more example of how the Tories have occupied the centre ground of politics. They’ve become such pacifists that Cameron will surprise us in the debate about Syria by saying: “What they all need over there is some love. So I’ve invited all the factions to tea with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, then we’ll ask them all to present their business plan on Dragon’s Den and see if we can get a bit of trade started so we’ll be better placed to discuss human rights.”

To be fair to President Xi, he did say his government’s record on human rights leaves “room for improvement.” As he displayed such self-awareness, I hope Cameron said to him, “Oh Mr President, please don’t be so hard on yourself.”

Because it’s not the President’s fault if the laws in China leave room for improvement. 

Geroge Osborne and China's Xu Shaoshi shake hands after signing an agreement

Hundreds of the country’s lawyers have just been put in jail for criticising the regime, so there’s a distinct shortage of expert advice for him to draw on. Cameron also insisted the Chinese government is becoming more liberal. One example of this growing political correctness is they’ve removed all mentions of democracy from text books in schools, with a directive to “Never allow statements that attack and slander party leaders and malign socialism to be heard in classrooms.”

Because when a teacher has to shout “WHAT have I told you about maligning socialism in the corridor?” things are moving in the right direction.

But there is, of course, still “room for improvement”. So hopefully the questions in maths lessons will soon include the following: what percentage of Guiyang province was rightfully jailed for slandering the Sports and General Fitness Secretary of Chenzhou North-West Region Communist Party’?

Not everyone will understand the benefits of this state visit - not least if they’re a steelworker about to be put out of work. But as the Prime Minister explained, the way to create employment is to ensure we have a strong economy.

And if we allow our industry to shut down, that will strengthen our economy beautifully, which will mean we have more jobs.

The best thing we can do, in fact, is close down the entire country. Then we could all agree to work in clothes shops in China for 18 hours a day for 90 pence a week. We’ll all be extremely well off, and if any of us are jailed for slandering a party leader we’ll be perfectly placed to discuss our human rights.

Radovan Karadžić awaits his verdict, but this is two-tier international justice

The ex-Bosnian Serb leader has been prosecuted, yet the war crimes tribunal resists calls to indict others

• 
• • Ed Vulliamy
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 30 September 2014 20.15 BST

Illustration by Belle Mellor

There he was, on the other side of the bullet-proof glass: Radovan Karadžić himself, inches away, accused of genocide and other war crimes across Bosnia during the 1990s. He saluted me with an entwinement of avuncular cordiality and cold-like-ice.

This was an “interview” to which Karadžić, defendant at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, is entitled before his prosecutors called me as a witness, back in 2010. During cross-examination, Karadžić posited the bizarre notion that only ONE person had died in the infamous concentration camp at Omarska it had been my curse to uncover in 1992.

This week, nearly five years after his trial began, come the closing arguments that will lead either to Karadžić’s acquittal or conviction for ordering the hurricane of violence he himself called ethnic cleansing between 1992 and 1995.

If nothing else, the prosecution will serve to remind us that carnage of that kind is still possible in modern Europe: death, torture, mass rape and mutilation in the camps; the siege and torture of a great European capital, Sarajevo; the summary massacre of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica. Karadžić has asked for 17 hours to outline his explanation for all this, under his alleged command.

Karadžić was political commissar of the Bosnian Serb project for a racially “pure” state during those years and, along with the verdict on his military counterpart, General Ratko Mladic, the outcome will be the highwater mark of the two-decade enterprise in what was to be groundbreaking international law enforcement by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

The man leading the Karadžić prosecution, Alan Tieger, was there at the outset prosecuting its first defendant in 1996, a parish-pump sadist and murderer called Dusko Tadic, now free after serving his sentence.

I was called by the tribunal in the early days, when it was lean, keen and felt right on its side. The court had been established in 1993 through both contrition and ambition. Contrition, because the UN had already become inept and cynical to the point of complicity in the slaughter it now sought to prosecute (though ironically, the worst was yet to come in 1995, when Dutch troops delivered the “safe area” of Srebrenica to the slaughter). Ambition, because the ICTY was seen as putting into action a brave new world of human rights, whereby the bullies of history would be held to account.

A lot can happen to a UN organism in 20 years. I testified in eight trials, have given months of work to the tribunal, and watched it bloat: heard clear language of law and liability replaced by jargon and anagrams; watched communication become a logjam of bureaucracy and hierarchy; listened to the wretched survivors summoned to testify, and wonder how much money was being made in their name. Answer: one hell of a lot.

But more important clouds have gathered over the ICTY. One concerns the promise – oft-spoken and crucial to the Hague’s raison d’etre – that its existence would deter mass murderers of the future. President Assad of Syria shows no sign of such quaking in his shoes.

A second was the tribunal’s extra-judicial brief: that it not only judge those accused, but also promote reconciliation. One of the tribunal’s major achievements has indeed been that the narrative of the war was told from witness chairs during “victim testimony”– the voices of the survivors. But there has been no reconciliation.

Bosnia is a living example, because there has been no reckoning. Reckoning, a prerequisite to reconciliation, is a harsher word which entails coming to terms with the calamity, staring at oneself in the mirror, and making amends – historical, political and material. This has not happened in a land still riven by partition as dictated by the vanities of the Dayton peace agreement, which ended the war by rewarding Karadžić’s project and granting his “Republika Srpska”, where children attend two schools under the same roof, where denial of the massacre at Srebrenica and concentration camps is still de rigeur and a means of maintaining power.

To this reality even 20 years on, the ICTY has added little or nothing: one could argue that more community-level bonding between ethnicities resulted last year from protests against privatisation, flooding, and the qualification of Bosnia’s football team for the World Cup in Brazil.

And doubts raised by recent verdicts have seemed to unravel the ICTY’s own work. Two rulings in the appeals chamber in 2012 and 2013 overturned the crucial convictions of the Croatian general Ante Gotovina and the commander of the Serbian (Yugoslav) army Momčilo Perišić. Chaired on both occasions by Judge Theodor Meron – a Holocaust survivor, former Israeli diplomat and US citizen – a majority of judges ruled that theevidence lacked “specific direction” to the troops under the generals’ command to commit atrocities. In other words, the buck stops short of the top, even when we all know war crimes have been committed.

This was galling for prosecutors because once the dramatic “victim testimony” was entered against small fry like Tadic, the hard, drier, work had been to establish chains of command that connected the political and military leaderships to the atrocities. For instance – in a tip to President Assad – the bench under Judge Meron deemed that to shell a community into the rubble until the survivors flee does not constitute deportation, since the emptying out of population was not “specifically directed”.

There were vehement dissenters from the bench in both cases: but back home, to illustrate the point about reconciliation, Bosnian Croats whooped and celebrated the liberty of Gotovina while spitting their outrage at that of Perišić; Bosnian Serbs did exactly the reverse. One’s own side cannot commit a war crime, it seems – only the enemy – in the land of un-reckoning.

But the most severe doubt about the ICTY, which does not concern its remit so much as its legacy, is who gets prosecuted in the brave new world of human rights. When Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote in the Observer that former British prime minister Tony Blair should be indicted for war crimes in Iraq, he raised the question: how high are future indictments at the permanent international criminal court or other ad-hoc tribunals like the ICTY going to aim? So far, the ICC has failed to indict a single person who is white. It staunchly resisted calls for an indictment for General August Pinochet of Chile; Blair is not even on its radar screen, for all the archbishop’s pleading.

The questions remain, beyond Karadžić. Why Charles Taylor and not Blair, Bush or the Israeli bomber command that targeted schools in Lebanon and civilian shelters in Gaza? At what point does the ICC address environmental or corporate crime: mining companies before which entire communities in Africa and Latin America vanish, or banks involved in systematic laundering of the profits of drug cartels?

Legal philosopher Costas Douzinas has written a book daring to suggest that “human rights” are becoming tools of the powerful nations, more than sacrosanct principles as defined by his ancestors in Greece, the French revolutionaries and Tom Paine.

It has been a long, worthwhile haul from the Tadic trial to that of Karadžić, and an acquittal over “specific direction” would be grotesque while the earth still gives up its dead around Srebrenica and the camps. But after that, for Douzinas to be proved wrong, the lucrative carousel of international justice needs to raise, not lower, its sights.

This hajj, Muslims need to ask questions about exploitation

G4S's work in Saudi Arabia has sparked controversy. But where is the outcry over human rights as a new Mecca rises to service pilgrims?

• 
• • Riazat Butt
  • theguardian.com, Friday 27 September 2013 15.15 BST

Cranes and skyscrapers tower over Hajjis in Mecca. Photograph: Alaa Badarneh/EPA

News that the Saudi government has engaged the services of security firm G4S for this year's hajj is angering campaigners, who accuse the company of profiting from the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.

G4S has not revealed details about the nature or the scale of its involvement during hajj although a 2011 publication mentions a contract with Jeddah Metro to assist with security during that year's pilgrimage.

In light of the accusations about its activities in Israel, the company told a website that although it operates there, the structure and management of its work in Saudi Arabia is entirely different. A G4S spokesman also told Middle East Monitor: "Whilst we don't provide security directly for the pilgrims, we do provide security support for clients in Saudi that will require additional support during the hajj period."

Regardless of the nature or scale of the security firm's involvement in the pilgrimage, the combination of sacred sites and occupied territories is an inflammatory one and one NGO is already calling on the Saudi ambassador to the UK for the government to immediately end its contracts with G4S.

But if Muslims feel aggrieved about human rights abuses and hajj, then perhaps they ought to take a look at what is happening under the shadow of the heavy machinery surrounding Mecca, for the skyscrapers and shopping malls of Islam's holiest city are not being built by pixies.

This week, the Guardian highlighted the abuse and exploitation of migrant workers who are preparing Qatar for the World Cup in 2022. Similar scrutiny should also be applied to the projects under way in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, although these have traditionally tended to excite more indignation over the demolition of buildings with historic and religious significance than the erosion of rights of the workers razing mountains. It is a good thing there is more awareness about Islam's heritage and the need to preserve it. A natural extension of this activism and discussion are questions about the people shaping Mecca: who are they, and what are their living and working conditions like?

Given the problems in accessing Saudi Arabia at the best of times, let alone during hajj, it is difficult to establish how many workers are involved with the Mecca projects, where they come from, how they are treated and how closely construction firms obey the country's labour laws. Saudi laws outline the responsibilities that employers have to protect their workers against occupational hazards, industrial accidents and workplace injuries as well as dealing with the employment of non-Saudis. Human Rights Watch has documented themistreatment of migrant workers and it is clear that existing employment legislation is no bar to abuse. Construction workers in Saudi Arabia face many of the same problems with working conditions, lack of mobility, lack of redress as other workers based in the Gulf. As in Qatar, Saudi Arabia operates a kafala system, which requires all unskilled labourers to have a sponsor. Migrant workers are therefore unable to enter the country, leave it or change jobs without their company's permission. In the spirit of openness the Saudi government could list the names of companies involved in the building projects and these companies could in turn make a pledge to uphold the rights of workers in a way that not only adheres to national legislation but also the spirit of hajj.

It may be that the very purpose of hajj makes it difficult for some to focus on the issues that the modern day pilgrimage raises. It reconnects Muslims with the religion's prophets; it represents purity, renewal, a reminder of the hereafter, unity, submission to Allah, piety, collective worship and humility. But hajj is also about equality, fraternity and justice.

While nobody is expecting banners to be unfurled in the courtyard of the Grand Mosque – although it would certainly liven up the annual television coverage – there is nothing to stop Muslims from at least asking deeper, difficult questions about the human cost of hajj.

Chemical export licences for Syria – just another UK deal with a dictator

Britain is in no position to lecture on human rights when Vince Cable's authorisation follows a long history of arms sales

• 
• • Nick Dearden
  • theguardian.com, Monday 2 September 2013 15.30 BST

Defence Systems and Equipment International arms fair at the Excel Centre, Docklands, London. Photograph: Rex Features

The latest revelations about the authorisation of chemical exports to Syria proves that British ministers should avoid two things – lecturing the public on personal morality and lecturing the world on human rights. Both will come back to bite them. While Nick Clegg commented on the pages of the Guardian earlier this year that the UK was a "beacon for human rights", his business secretary was authorising companies to sell chemicals capable of being used to make nerve gas to a country in the middle of a civil war.

Clegg almost certainly knew nothing about the potential sales, and indeed the sales themselves might have been quite innocent, but our history should tell us that precaution is the best principle. If the companies had got their act together to ship the goods to Syria, they would probably have received government support through a unit of Cable's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, called UK Export Finance. This unit has sold weapons to some of the worst dictators of the past 40 years – and had a role to play in the most serious chemical weapons abuses since the Vietnam war.

Jubilee Debt Campaign has released new information which confirms that the British government effectively armed both sides during the Iran-Iraq war – one of the Middle East's most bloody conflicts.

Britain had been happily selling weapons to Saddam Hussein, our ally during his war against the new Islamic Republic, in the early 1980s. The UK government also allowed the sale of the goods needed to make a chemical plant which the US later claimed was essential to Saddam's chemical weapons arsenal, with the full knowledge that the plant was likely to be used to produce nerve gas. Saddam used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and against civilians within his own country in 1988, killing tens of thousands.

This is old news, but we now also know that until the fall of the Shah in 1979, Britain also sold Rapier missiles and Chieftain tanks to Iran's autocratic regime – weapons that were undoubtedly also used in the Iran-Iraq war.

Both sets of arms were effectively paid for by the British taxpayer, as both Iraq and Iran defaulted on the loans given by Britain, and they became part of Iraq and Iran's debt. Though Iran still "owes" £28m to Britain, plus an undisclosed amount of interest, this didn't stop Britain guaranteeing £178m of loans to Iran to buy British exports for gas and oil developments in the mid 2000s, thus breaking its own rules.

This new information adds to a litany of such cases – supporting arms sales to the brutal General Suharto of Indonesia, both Sadat and Mubarak in Egypt and military juntas in Ecuador and Argentina, the latter using its British weapons to invade the Falkland Islands.

In opposition, Cable railed against the use of taxpayer money to support such sales, and his party promised to audit and cancel these debts and stop the sales. In power, he behaves the same way as his predecessors. While regularly claiming such deals are a "thing of the past", Cable has signed off £2bn of loans to the dictatorship in Oman to buy British Typhoon fighter aircraft, the sale of a hovercraft to the highly indebted Pakistan navy and an iron ore mine in Sierra Leone which has not even been assessed for its human rights impact.

Cable has ripped up Liberal Democrat policy to keep on supporting the sale of dangerous goods. He continues to insist on the repayment of debts run up by the UK selling weapons to now deposed dictators. Far from being a beacon for human rights, the UK has little legitimacy around the world when it comes to taking sides in wars – a fact that parliament recognised in its welcome vote last Thursday.

Next week, Britain's true role in the world will be on show in Docklands – when the world's "leading" military sales event meets in London. As war and the aftermath of war still rage across the Middle East, one way we as citizens improve our country's damaged reputation is to protest against such an appalling expression of Britain's role in the world. Authorising the export of chemicals to Syria is simply part of a long trend of support for dangerous technology which undermines this country's legitimacy when it comes to speaking about human rights.

Obama is all about 'universal rights' - except for Muslims

It's time the president acknowledges that systematized discrimination against Muslims is real and thriving

• 
• • Uzma Kolsy
  • theguardian.com, Saturday 31 August 2013 12.30 BST

Jay Leno talks with President Barack Obama during a commercial break on 6 August 2013. Photograph: Paul Drinkwater/NBC/Getty Images

I was watching President Obama employ his devilish charisma, in routine fashion, on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in early August. The banter dissipated as the interview took a more serious turn to embassy closures, Edward Snowden and, finally, Russia. Obama condemned President Vladimir Putin for Russia's recent "homosexual propaganda" bill saying:

"When it comes to universal rights, when it comes to people's basic freedoms, whether you are discriminating on the basis of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, you are violating the basic morality that should transcend every country."

I was left rattled by the president's statement. Obama, who made history last year whenhe expressed his support for same-sex marriage, was comfortably unabashed in impugning Russian leadership on the reprehensible policy, as he should have been. But as a Muslim American, neither the irony nor the hypocrisy of his statement, championing "universal rights", was lost on me.

As we've witnessed time and time again domestically, most recently with the Associated Press revelation that the NYPD designated Muslim houses of worship and community centers as terrorist organizations, the United States is no stranger to legalizing discrimination. In the elusive pursuit of true equality, President Obama has made considerable and long overdue progress in securing the rights of the LGBT community. But he in no way can tout the badge of "basic morality" until he acknowledges that many Americans are being confronted with institutionalized discrimination in every tier of the government hierarchy. Racism, Islamophobia and prejudice run amok in our society, but when discriminatory practice is etched into law, it harkens back to a sinister time in our nation's history.

Regrettably, branding mosques as terrorist enterprises doesn't exactly move the needle given the NYPD's history of targeted surveillance and monitoring of the region's Muslim community. Invidious policy and religious profiling are not confined to the NYPD either. This is just the latest in a mounting string of offenses by government agencies against Muslim Americans. The FBI maintains an intimidatingly lengthy catalog of 15,000 spies, three times as many as there were 25 years ago. In a post 9/11 climate many of them operate as informants in mosques throughout the nation. The mosque that I grew up attending in Irvine, California, was infiltrated by one such informant, who worked so hard to plant seeds of violence and terrorism in the minds of its congregants that members of the mosque immediately reported him.

"Geo-mapping", the FBI's purported tactical crime fighting tool, was exposed as a covert mapping program to track and monitor Muslim communities engaging in constitutionally protected activity, without any suspicion of crime. Leaked FBI training materials have also cemented what we already know – the agency religiously profiles Muslims,instructing its agents that "mainstream" Muslims are terrorist sympathizers and the Muslim practice of giving charity is a cover for funding "combat".

It doesn't end there. Seven states have passed anti-Shariah legislation, redundant and extraneous laws that explicitly prohibit the use of foreign law in American courts, as already established by our nation's constitution. The bills passed in these states, most recently North Carolina, alienate the Muslim community and unfairly paint them as adherents of an archaic, anti-Western system, playing up longstanding stereotypes and stoking fears. Open-ended guidelines for Homeland Security initiatives, like the Suspicious Activity Reporting program, give credence to the subjective biases of citizens and law enforcement alike, allowing for religious profiling when dubbing something as "suspicious". And that is apart from the FBI Watch List and the TSA's No-Fly List.

TSA memos have indicated that their passenger screening process includes "things passengers might do which also might be things a terrorist would do, eg, pray to Allah right before the flight that you might have 90 virgins in heaven". Needless to say, many of these counter-terrorism measures disproportionately target Muslims. We see this disparity even in federal prison, where Muslims make up only 6% of the general federal prison population, but comprise two thirds of the inmates in Communication Management Units (CMU), prison units furtively created to isolate certain prisoners.

And all the while, the president has remained unnervingly silent.

I shouldn't have to point to statistics that most informants actually acted as agent provocateurs in terrorism probes. I also shouldn't have to cite that there is a dearth of evidence to prove that these national security measures, like the SAR program, are effective in combatting terrorism. I shouldn't have to clarify that there is no specter of Shariah law looming on the horizon and that Muslims are not looking to prop up a crescent and star flag in state capitols. And I've come undone at the thought of having to explain, again, that the overwhelming majority of Muslims being spied on, monitored, tracked and, in the case of 16 year old US citizen Abdulrahman Awlaki, killed – by federal, state and local agencies- are innocent of any wrongdoing.

My father's Islamic name should not place him on a watch list. When I pray in the airport, I should expect law enforcement to protect my right to do so, not jot notes in a security memo. And I should be able to attend my mosque without fear of reprisal, from anti-Muslim bigots and FBI spies alike. Being Muslim does not make me a criminal. I shouldn't have to say it, but secret measures that profile Muslims and veiled discriminatory policies assume as much.

This is not a "new low for the NYPD"; it's a dangerous manifestation of a foregone conclusion: in the name of national security, the civil rights afforded to Muslim Americans are being deliberately curtailed. It's time that the president acknowledges that systematized discrimination against Muslims is real and thriving, and expands the reach of his advocacy for universal human rights to include Muslim Americans.

Dark moments of institutionalized racism, alienation and ostracism besmirch this nation's history. It is all too coincidental that we recently marked the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr's legendary "I have a dream" speech – the impetus that led the FBI to surreptitiously launch one of the biggest surveillance operations in history – spying on Dr King himself. The idea that the government was looking for dirt on Dr King to discredit and destroy him seems ludicrous and offensive today. Here's hoping the president sees the historical irony.