Taslima Nasreen
Showing posts with label hypocrite. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hypocrite. Show all posts
Friday 16 December 2016
Thursday 12 May 2016
Emma Watson campaigned on one social issue - she's not a hypocrite if she has offshore accounts
Because she is outspoken on one social issue, we expect Watson to be a model activist in every other political arena, a whiter-than-white every woman who stands up for us us all. That’s a standard that’s impossible for anyone to live up to.
Hannah Fearn in The Independent
Emma Watson, eh? Who would have thought it? All that moralising on the world stage, standing up for the rights of women, speaking out about the devastating economic and social effects of gender inequality. And it turns out that she’s been part of the global elite all along, a one percenter happily squirrelling away her millions in an offshore tax haven in the British Virgin Isles.
Of course, her people explain that the arrangements are purely to protect her privacy. But blow me down with a feather. What will the supporters of the HeForShe campaign make of it?
The answer to that should be: absolutely nothing. The fact that a woman who has a public position on one matter – gender equality– bears no relation to the fact that she has later found herself entangled in an another altogether different political question of tax evasion. But that hasn’t stopped her critics.
When the news that Watson, reportedly worth $70m, had used a company registered offshore to purchase a home, out came the angry rants. “I thought you're the most honest actress in the world! Wrong,” posted one fan – perhaps a former fan – on Twitter. “After being named in the Panama Paper scandal do you think you should be demanding a statue of anything?” another oddly added, referring to her campaigning for Sadiq Khan, the new Mayor of London, to erect a statue of a figure from the Suffragettes in Parliament Square.
Then came the snarky puns: Harry Potter and the Deathly Havens; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Taxaban; Harry Potter and the Half-blood Principal Investor. There’s a lot more where that came from.
The aforementioned spokesperson for Watson claimed that the actor had not used an offshore haven to avoid tax or any of her other financial responsibilities as a British citizen, but instead to protect her privacy, given her celebrity status. Reassuring for her disappointed fans perhaps, but it makes no material difference whatsoever.
Even if the young film star had deliberately hidden her assets away in an attempt to legally avoid tax, she is no hypocrite and she does not deserve to be treated like one. You may morally object to tax havens, but there’s no reason to be any more angered by Watson’s financial affairs than those of the Cameron family, Sarah Ferguson, Michel Platini, Simon Cowell or Heather Mills.
What is driving the disproportionate reaction to Watson’s British Virgin Islands connection is a bizarre sense that our public figures represent whatever we think they ought to, rather than what they want to, and what they actually do. Because she is outspoken on one social issue, we expect Watson to be a model activist in every other political arena, a whiter-than-white every woman who stands up for us us all. That’s a standard that’s impossible for anyone to live up to.
It’s a sentiment we see echoed when gay and ethnic minority figures, or even bohemians such as the artist Tracy Emin, express their support for the Conservatives. Surely they should be on the political left, where they ‘ought’ to belong?
The Black Lives Matter movement in the US has prompted similarly pointless soul-searching. Why have rap stars such as Drake and Jay Z – leading black figures in US popular culture – remained so quiet on the matter in their music? Writing in The Atlantic, the journalist Jeff Baird expressed concern that figures such as these were selling music that didn’t reflect the often difficult experience of being black in America and instead concerned itself with feelgood lyrics (“as if their success should be regarded as proof that the American Dream is in fact alive and well”) and great pop tunes instead. Well, why shouldn’t they? It’s their stock-in-trade.
READ MORE
Emma Watson's most influential quotes about feminism and sexuality
What we struggle to cope with is the idea of pop stars, actors or other national figures behaving in ways other than what we might expect from their PR-designed public persona. It’s a position that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Each and every one of us has friends or relatives who are passionate about one social issue but ambivalent about another. The environmental activist who is aiming to produce zero waste may have no view whatsoever on the closure of domestic violence services for women; the Hillsborough campaigner who spent 27 years fighting for justice for the 96 may have never thought twice about cuts to disability benefit for those unable to work. So what? The latter does not take away from the significance of their efforts on the former.
Emma Watson is a wealthy young actor who has used her not inconsiderable global influence to start an important conversation about the position of women in the world. For that, she is rightly celebrated. She is not, and has never been, a tax justice campaigner.
I don’t like the idea of any wealthy individual finding ways around paying their due – and there is no suggestion that this is what Watson has done. But the idea that her efforts on behalf of all women have been undermined by the furore sparked by the latest Panama Papers revelations is dismissive and naïve in the extreme.
Hannah Fearn in The Independent
Emma Watson, eh? Who would have thought it? All that moralising on the world stage, standing up for the rights of women, speaking out about the devastating economic and social effects of gender inequality. And it turns out that she’s been part of the global elite all along, a one percenter happily squirrelling away her millions in an offshore tax haven in the British Virgin Isles.
Of course, her people explain that the arrangements are purely to protect her privacy. But blow me down with a feather. What will the supporters of the HeForShe campaign make of it?
The answer to that should be: absolutely nothing. The fact that a woman who has a public position on one matter – gender equality– bears no relation to the fact that she has later found herself entangled in an another altogether different political question of tax evasion. But that hasn’t stopped her critics.
When the news that Watson, reportedly worth $70m, had used a company registered offshore to purchase a home, out came the angry rants. “I thought you're the most honest actress in the world! Wrong,” posted one fan – perhaps a former fan – on Twitter. “After being named in the Panama Paper scandal do you think you should be demanding a statue of anything?” another oddly added, referring to her campaigning for Sadiq Khan, the new Mayor of London, to erect a statue of a figure from the Suffragettes in Parliament Square.
Then came the snarky puns: Harry Potter and the Deathly Havens; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Taxaban; Harry Potter and the Half-blood Principal Investor. There’s a lot more where that came from.
The aforementioned spokesperson for Watson claimed that the actor had not used an offshore haven to avoid tax or any of her other financial responsibilities as a British citizen, but instead to protect her privacy, given her celebrity status. Reassuring for her disappointed fans perhaps, but it makes no material difference whatsoever.
Even if the young film star had deliberately hidden her assets away in an attempt to legally avoid tax, she is no hypocrite and she does not deserve to be treated like one. You may morally object to tax havens, but there’s no reason to be any more angered by Watson’s financial affairs than those of the Cameron family, Sarah Ferguson, Michel Platini, Simon Cowell or Heather Mills.
What is driving the disproportionate reaction to Watson’s British Virgin Islands connection is a bizarre sense that our public figures represent whatever we think they ought to, rather than what they want to, and what they actually do. Because she is outspoken on one social issue, we expect Watson to be a model activist in every other political arena, a whiter-than-white every woman who stands up for us us all. That’s a standard that’s impossible for anyone to live up to.
It’s a sentiment we see echoed when gay and ethnic minority figures, or even bohemians such as the artist Tracy Emin, express their support for the Conservatives. Surely they should be on the political left, where they ‘ought’ to belong?
The Black Lives Matter movement in the US has prompted similarly pointless soul-searching. Why have rap stars such as Drake and Jay Z – leading black figures in US popular culture – remained so quiet on the matter in their music? Writing in The Atlantic, the journalist Jeff Baird expressed concern that figures such as these were selling music that didn’t reflect the often difficult experience of being black in America and instead concerned itself with feelgood lyrics (“as if their success should be regarded as proof that the American Dream is in fact alive and well”) and great pop tunes instead. Well, why shouldn’t they? It’s their stock-in-trade.
READ MORE
Emma Watson's most influential quotes about feminism and sexuality
What we struggle to cope with is the idea of pop stars, actors or other national figures behaving in ways other than what we might expect from their PR-designed public persona. It’s a position that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Each and every one of us has friends or relatives who are passionate about one social issue but ambivalent about another. The environmental activist who is aiming to produce zero waste may have no view whatsoever on the closure of domestic violence services for women; the Hillsborough campaigner who spent 27 years fighting for justice for the 96 may have never thought twice about cuts to disability benefit for those unable to work. So what? The latter does not take away from the significance of their efforts on the former.
Emma Watson is a wealthy young actor who has used her not inconsiderable global influence to start an important conversation about the position of women in the world. For that, she is rightly celebrated. She is not, and has never been, a tax justice campaigner.
I don’t like the idea of any wealthy individual finding ways around paying their due – and there is no suggestion that this is what Watson has done. But the idea that her efforts on behalf of all women have been undermined by the furore sparked by the latest Panama Papers revelations is dismissive and naïve in the extreme.
Tuesday 10 May 2016
Corruption can no longer be dismissed as a developing world problem
Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian
A London summit must recognise, as the Panama Papers show, that these crimes are facilitated by the west
David Cameron under pressure to end tax haven secrecy
All those breezy, boomtime justifications became exponentially harder to make after the 2008 crash. The era of austerity has left even rich governments scrabbling for tax revenues to fund their hospitals and schools. More importantly, it has prompted cash-strapped voters – from a Trump supporter in Indiana to a Corbynista in Kentish Town – to ask exactly who has been making how much money at their expense.
That brings us back to this week’s summit – because it’s here that developing nations such as Nigeria will join campaigning groups to make the argument that modern corruption now has a white face. They will argue that the onus is on Britain and other rich countries to crack down on the tax havens in their own backyards.
And they are right. Corruption of the sort that we normally discuss should be stamped out. It makes the lives of billions of the world’s poorest people harder and more insecure.
But it is peanuts compared to the much bigger sums that are raked in by the lawyers, accountants and other silky advisers who base themselves in the City of London and use Britain’s network of crown dependencies and overseas territories in Jersey, Guernsey, the Caymans and the British Virgin Islands.
Until the UK stops encouraging, advising and facilitating guilty men and women looking to stow their shady cash offshore, corruption will continue to flourish.
Modern corruption is a suit in a Panamanian office, who takes that general’s billions and sends it on to a private bank account, no impertinent questions asked along the way. It is the Mayfair estate agent who sells that multimillion-pound townhouse to an oligarch. It is that accountancy firm in the City that fills out the paperwork structuring the rich man’s affairs so that the money goes through one of their far-flung branch offices to wind up in a trust in the tax-free zones of the Caymans or the British Virgin Islands.
As yesterday’s letter from 350 top economists points out, there is no economic justification for these tax havens. They do not serve primarily to keep taxes in other countries down, but to allow very rich people to duck out of their obligations to the societies they live in. They shelter dirty cash from dictators, and siphon money out of developed countries.
Like Gordon Brown before him, Cameron claims that Britain’s offshore havens are autonomous. They do not need to accept London’s tax laws – indeed, it is unclear whether they will turn up on Thursday. Yet the havens depend on London.
Take the Caymans, which, as Nicholas Shaxson notes in his book Treasure Islands, are effectively run by a governor appointed by the Queen, on the advice of Whitehall. The governor is responsible for “defence, internal security and foreign relations; he appoints the police commissioner, the complaints commissioner, auditor general, the attorney general, the judiciary and a number of other senior public officials. The final appeal court is the Privy Council in London.” And the national anthem is God Save the Queen.
Last week I met a tax lawyer in London who mused on how little Britain actually benefited from its spider’s web of tax havens. “A few people in the City of London make huge fees – I’d love to see how much that money benefits the rest of the country.”
But weren’t we powerless to stop Jersey and the rest? The lawyer went through the precedents. Britain, he pointed out, had repeatedly imposed its law on its overseas governments. In 2000, London forced the Caribbean territories to decriminalise homosexual acts by Order in Council. He thought the same thing could be done to force the offshore havens publicly to disclose who were the ultimate “beneficial” owners of the trust funds.
How long would that take? “Oh, two sides of A4. It could be done by the next morning. All it takes is the will.”
A London summit must recognise, as the Panama Papers show, that these crimes are facilitated by the west
Illustration by Matt Kenyon.
By Thursday morning all the A-listers will have arrived. From Washington will fly in a succession of jets, bearing US secretary of state John Kerry as well as the bosses of the IMF and World Bank. Fifa and Uefa will send over their top bureaucrats. Captains of business will trail retinues of lobbyists.
All will join David Cameron and leaders from around 40 nations at an opulent London townhouse overlooking St James’s Park. Gathered there, in the slow-beating heart of Downton-ian Britain, they will launch into an almighty battle – over the meaning of a single word.
Not just any old word, mind you. It ranks among the most important terms for describing our broken-backed global capitalism. Indeed, it forms the very title of the day-long summit: corruption.
Explaining why he’s called the world’s first assembly on corruption, Cameron has said: “It destroys jobs … traps the poorest in desperate poverty, and undermines our security by pushing people towards extremist groups.” Absolutely right. What’s wrong is his definition of the term.
For Cameron, corruption equals bribery. It means greasing the palm of a bored official just to get through customs, tipping a hundred to a thuggish traffic cop so you can drive on. Or, at the luxury end of the market, a despot such as Nigeria’s General Sani Abacha, stealing billions from his home country and hiding the haul in foreign banks.
In other words, it’s something largely done by people in poor countries. As sardonic critics of this argument say, “Corruption has a black face.” That’s why the prime minister believes Thursday should be mainly about cracking down on states that take aid even while being blighted with bent officials, and tackling graft in sport.
And it is the argument of a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is the fervent agreement that bad things do happen – but Other People do them, never you or your country. On this reading, thievery is corruption. But receiving the same black money, laundering it and directing it back out to a tame tax haven or two – well, that’s just competition, isn’t it?
Time was when Britain, Europe and the US could get away with making this argument. The wealthiest countries in the world could with one hand wag a stern finger at the poorest nations, while with the other hand collecting their loot, and pushing it through their financial centres.
They could point to the surveys circulated by Transparency International in which perceptions of national corruption as reported by business leaders and “country experts” were totted up. Those publications proved, year after year, that the poorer the country, the more failed the state, the more corrupt the society. They also stated that the world’s “cleanest” countries included Switzerland, Singapore, the UK and the US.
By Thursday morning all the A-listers will have arrived. From Washington will fly in a succession of jets, bearing US secretary of state John Kerry as well as the bosses of the IMF and World Bank. Fifa and Uefa will send over their top bureaucrats. Captains of business will trail retinues of lobbyists.
All will join David Cameron and leaders from around 40 nations at an opulent London townhouse overlooking St James’s Park. Gathered there, in the slow-beating heart of Downton-ian Britain, they will launch into an almighty battle – over the meaning of a single word.
Not just any old word, mind you. It ranks among the most important terms for describing our broken-backed global capitalism. Indeed, it forms the very title of the day-long summit: corruption.
Explaining why he’s called the world’s first assembly on corruption, Cameron has said: “It destroys jobs … traps the poorest in desperate poverty, and undermines our security by pushing people towards extremist groups.” Absolutely right. What’s wrong is his definition of the term.
For Cameron, corruption equals bribery. It means greasing the palm of a bored official just to get through customs, tipping a hundred to a thuggish traffic cop so you can drive on. Or, at the luxury end of the market, a despot such as Nigeria’s General Sani Abacha, stealing billions from his home country and hiding the haul in foreign banks.
In other words, it’s something largely done by people in poor countries. As sardonic critics of this argument say, “Corruption has a black face.” That’s why the prime minister believes Thursday should be mainly about cracking down on states that take aid even while being blighted with bent officials, and tackling graft in sport.
And it is the argument of a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is the fervent agreement that bad things do happen – but Other People do them, never you or your country. On this reading, thievery is corruption. But receiving the same black money, laundering it and directing it back out to a tame tax haven or two – well, that’s just competition, isn’t it?
Time was when Britain, Europe and the US could get away with making this argument. The wealthiest countries in the world could with one hand wag a stern finger at the poorest nations, while with the other hand collecting their loot, and pushing it through their financial centres.
They could point to the surveys circulated by Transparency International in which perceptions of national corruption as reported by business leaders and “country experts” were totted up. Those publications proved, year after year, that the poorer the country, the more failed the state, the more corrupt the society. They also stated that the world’s “cleanest” countries included Switzerland, Singapore, the UK and the US.
David Cameron under pressure to end tax haven secrecy
All those breezy, boomtime justifications became exponentially harder to make after the 2008 crash. The era of austerity has left even rich governments scrabbling for tax revenues to fund their hospitals and schools. More importantly, it has prompted cash-strapped voters – from a Trump supporter in Indiana to a Corbynista in Kentish Town – to ask exactly who has been making how much money at their expense.
That brings us back to this week’s summit – because it’s here that developing nations such as Nigeria will join campaigning groups to make the argument that modern corruption now has a white face. They will argue that the onus is on Britain and other rich countries to crack down on the tax havens in their own backyards.
And they are right. Corruption of the sort that we normally discuss should be stamped out. It makes the lives of billions of the world’s poorest people harder and more insecure.
But it is peanuts compared to the much bigger sums that are raked in by the lawyers, accountants and other silky advisers who base themselves in the City of London and use Britain’s network of crown dependencies and overseas territories in Jersey, Guernsey, the Caymans and the British Virgin Islands.
Until the UK stops encouraging, advising and facilitating guilty men and women looking to stow their shady cash offshore, corruption will continue to flourish.
Modern corruption is a suit in a Panamanian office, who takes that general’s billions and sends it on to a private bank account, no impertinent questions asked along the way. It is the Mayfair estate agent who sells that multimillion-pound townhouse to an oligarch. It is that accountancy firm in the City that fills out the paperwork structuring the rich man’s affairs so that the money goes through one of their far-flung branch offices to wind up in a trust in the tax-free zones of the Caymans or the British Virgin Islands.
As yesterday’s letter from 350 top economists points out, there is no economic justification for these tax havens. They do not serve primarily to keep taxes in other countries down, but to allow very rich people to duck out of their obligations to the societies they live in. They shelter dirty cash from dictators, and siphon money out of developed countries.
Like Gordon Brown before him, Cameron claims that Britain’s offshore havens are autonomous. They do not need to accept London’s tax laws – indeed, it is unclear whether they will turn up on Thursday. Yet the havens depend on London.
Take the Caymans, which, as Nicholas Shaxson notes in his book Treasure Islands, are effectively run by a governor appointed by the Queen, on the advice of Whitehall. The governor is responsible for “defence, internal security and foreign relations; he appoints the police commissioner, the complaints commissioner, auditor general, the attorney general, the judiciary and a number of other senior public officials. The final appeal court is the Privy Council in London.” And the national anthem is God Save the Queen.
Last week I met a tax lawyer in London who mused on how little Britain actually benefited from its spider’s web of tax havens. “A few people in the City of London make huge fees – I’d love to see how much that money benefits the rest of the country.”
But weren’t we powerless to stop Jersey and the rest? The lawyer went through the precedents. Britain, he pointed out, had repeatedly imposed its law on its overseas governments. In 2000, London forced the Caribbean territories to decriminalise homosexual acts by Order in Council. He thought the same thing could be done to force the offshore havens publicly to disclose who were the ultimate “beneficial” owners of the trust funds.
How long would that take? “Oh, two sides of A4. It could be done by the next morning. All it takes is the will.”
Saturday 1 December 2012
Imran Khan
Nobody's a perfect cricketer, but even his rivals will probably agree that Imran Khan comes pretty close. There's no question he is Pakistan's greatest-ever player, but even that description is an understatement. In fact, he has been world-class in batting, bowling, fielding and captaincy. Even among the game's absolute elite, hardly anyone can make that claim.
Nor did he slow down after retiring from cricket. It would have been entirely natural for him to climb into a comfortable zone of exalted reverence, but he gave that a pass. Instead, he single-handedly founded a philanthropic cancer hospital in Lahore in the memory of his late mother that has become one of Pakistan's premier medical institutes. Now, having just turned 60, he heads a political party that appears poised to emerge with influence in the country's next general election.
The passage of years has made it clear that Imran is really one perfect storm of a man in whom multiple natural gifts - ability, ambition, drive, personality, looks, physique, and pedigree - have come together spectacularly. He was born with advantages and he has gone on to make the most of them.
His family background (Lahore aristocracy) and schooling (Aitchison College, Pakistan's Eton) are as good as it gets in this part of the world. Then there is his unparalleled cricket education, starting from the family compound in Lahore's Zaman Park under the watchful eyes of Majid Khan and Javed Burki, going on to Oxford University, domestic seasons in England and Australia, Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket, an old-fashioned apprenticeship in reverse swing with Sarfraz Nawaz, and a complex partnership in battlefield tactics with Javed Miandad.
People say that if Imran succeeds in becoming a statesman, he will have achieved more than any other cricketer. Yet what he has achieved already - setting the philanthropy and politics aside - is quite incredible. As a bowler, his Test average, economy, and strike rate are all better than Wasim Akram's, which is a huge statement when you consider that for two years in his prime, Imran had to sit out with a stress fracture of the shin. And though his career Test batting average is only in the high 30s, it jumps to 52.34 in his 48 Tests as captain; astonishingly this is higher than the corresponding figure for Steve Waugh, Ricky Ponting, Sachin Tendulkar, Clive Lloyd, Allan Border, Sunil Gavaskar, Inzamam-ul-Haq, Len Hutton, and yes, even Miandad.
His fielding never gets talked about because it has been diluted by so much else, but Imran was an excellent outfielder - an extremely safe pair of hands both in catching and ground-fielding, and possessing a near-perfect arm from the boundary. He exercised tirelessly and his body language was always attentive and athletic. He might have adopted a regal air after becoming captain, but his commitment in the field was never diminished.
| Imran is almost as old as Pakistan's Test history, which makes it rather fitting that he should be the man to have so fundamentally altered its course | |||
Then there is the matter of captaincy. Imran is almost as old as Pakistan's Test history, which makes it rather fitting that he should be the man to have so fundamentally altered its course. His captaincy was born in turbulence, arising from the dust of the infamous 1981 rebellion against Miandad. Yet once he was in charge, there was no looking back. He led by example, commanding respect, demanding unflinching dedication, and keeping merit and performance supreme. The team became united and laurels soon piled up: a fortress-like record at home, inaugural series wins in India and England, an unforgettable showdown in the West Indies, and the World Cup of 1992 - by any standards, a golden era. Pakistan's cricketing mindset was revolutionised.
Imran's entry into politics has complicated his hallowed status as a cricketing icon. Nowadays, whenever he is mentioned in a current-affairs context in the international press, the term is "cricketer-turned-politician". Choosing one identity over the other is no longer possible, because with Imran's continued evolution both have acquired equal importance. To the generation of cricket romantics and diehards who grew up watching and worshipping Imran - and I would place my boyhood friends and myself very much in that demographic - this feels like something of an intrusion.
Yes, the economy needs to be fixed; health, education, and unemployment need to be tackled; the foreign policy has to be sorted out; law and order have to be secured; and peace and prosperity must be ushered in. Yes, there is all that, of course. But what about the devastating spell of reverse swing on that breezy Karachi afternoon, those 12 wickets in Sydney that spawned a dynasty, that dogged defence, those towering sixes, that enthralling leap at the bowling crease, that quiet air of authority and command in the field? The space for reliving those pleasures is shrinking.
As a cricket fan, you expect your idols to be entirely defined by cricket, but Imran is an idol for whom the game is but one of his endeavours. That disorients the cricket lover's mind and calls for an emotional adjustment. Nevertheless, this is not any cause for concern or complaint, because the trajectory of Imran's life is really best seen as a compliment to the game. He was already a phenomenally successful cricketer and cricket leader. What else do you aim for next but the office of prime minister?
Initially politics proved a sticky wicket. For several years after founding his party, in 1996, Imran laboured on the margins of Pakistan's political theatre. He struggled to find a voice in the national conversation, and kept getting dismissed as an amateur naïvely trying to extrapolate the success he had had in cricket and through his cancer institute. Yet here too, Imran's persistence has paid off. His message of transformative change and clean governance is resonating throughout Pakistan, and his party has attracted a substantial following. Most observers expect him to be a key player in any coalition that emerges from next year's national polls.
The most noticeable consequence of Imran's political rise is that his critics have multiplied. He is accused of being a hypocrite who espouses conservative Islamic values after having lived the life of a playboy. He is derided for offering to negotiate with militant extremists. He is mocked for being stubborn and inflexible. Every now and then, his failed marriage to a British heiress is also raked up. Even his cricketing achievements are questioned, with people labelling him a dictatorial captain whose departure left the team in a tailspin. Pakistan may be a nascent democracy but it is still a vocal one.
Despite all the noise and clatter, Imran is quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) steaming ahead. If you take a panoramic view of his life and career, the quality that most dominates is focus and single-mindedness in the service of a lofty goal. It seems that for the right cause, he could almost move mountains through sheer force of will. Even his detractors always stop short of questioning his intent and resolve. Ultimately it is this clarity of purpose and Imran's seemingly limitless capacity for challenge and endurance that have taken him so high and so far.
Saad Shafqat is a writer based in Karach
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