Showing posts with label issue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label issue. Show all posts
Thursday 8 February 2024
Sunday 11 June 2023
Wednesday 29 March 2023
Wednesday 21 December 2022
Thursday 13 October 2016
Don’t call for another referendum – they cause more problems than they solve
Amol Rajan in The Independent
Many journalists ply their trade because it is politics by other means. I joined this profession for several reasons, including the need to make a living and the absence of suitable alternatives. But one of the main reasons was that I believe very strongly in democracy – a political idea – because it is a way of diffusing power so that it is not just concentrated among the rich and the few.
As a democrat, even a radical democrat, for years I harboured an instinctive fondness for referendums. Give the people a say. Let them decide. All that stuff. But judging by the experience of Britain's most recent referendum, I have changed my mind. I now think fewer would be preferable.
This is not necessarily because I think the wrong result transpired. Rather it is because I can see the problems with referendums more clearly now. I reckon there are at least four.
First, they too often turn on variables unrelated to the question at hand, such as whether a particular leader is popular that month. Colombia's rejection of a peace deal may have turned on the weather.
Many journalists ply their trade because it is politics by other means. I joined this profession for several reasons, including the need to make a living and the absence of suitable alternatives. But one of the main reasons was that I believe very strongly in democracy – a political idea – because it is a way of diffusing power so that it is not just concentrated among the rich and the few.
As a democrat, even a radical democrat, for years I harboured an instinctive fondness for referendums. Give the people a say. Let them decide. All that stuff. But judging by the experience of Britain's most recent referendum, I have changed my mind. I now think fewer would be preferable.
This is not necessarily because I think the wrong result transpired. Rather it is because I can see the problems with referendums more clearly now. I reckon there are at least four.
First, they too often turn on variables unrelated to the question at hand, such as whether a particular leader is popular that month. Colombia's rejection of a peace deal may have turned on the weather.
Second, they give excessive influence and airtime to single-issue campaigners and fringe groups who don't belong in, or represent, the mainstream.
Third, they reduce very complex issues to binary decisions, ignoring the fact that politics is full of trade-offs; leaving the European Union, for instance, can mean many different things.
Here's just such a trade-off: you can lower immigration levels, but you'll be poorer in the short-term as you probably have to leave the single market. It's what people voted for – even if they didn't realise it. But now there's a huge move in parliament to pretend this trade-off didn't happen. You see it in the intellectually docile terminology of hard versus soft Brexit, as if there were only two options from the infinite variety of potential end results to the coming negotiation.
And that is the fourth problem with referendums: the losers often have nowhere to go. You end up with a hugely disenfranchised constituency, who are either agitating for another go or nurse such a constant grievance that they undermine the whole electoral system. That is what is happening now.
It is right and proper that parliament should scrutinise the negotiation undertaken by Theresa May and her team, but what cannot happen is a re-run of the EU referendum. The result is in – and it is clear. Yet the attempt to cobble together a parliamentary coalition against leaving the single market is a giant festival of sour grapes masquerading as patriotism and belief in democracy.
The shenanigans this week illustrate exquisitely how, far from encouraging participation and supporting democracy, referendums generally end up subverting it.
Brexit – that dreaded, bizarre word, simultaneously so empty and so full – has come to define this government though nobody knows what it means and nobody has a clue how to deliver it. Under the guise of fortifying our democracy, it has started to consume it. That's not what plebiscites are meant to do.
Third, they reduce very complex issues to binary decisions, ignoring the fact that politics is full of trade-offs; leaving the European Union, for instance, can mean many different things.
Here's just such a trade-off: you can lower immigration levels, but you'll be poorer in the short-term as you probably have to leave the single market. It's what people voted for – even if they didn't realise it. But now there's a huge move in parliament to pretend this trade-off didn't happen. You see it in the intellectually docile terminology of hard versus soft Brexit, as if there were only two options from the infinite variety of potential end results to the coming negotiation.
And that is the fourth problem with referendums: the losers often have nowhere to go. You end up with a hugely disenfranchised constituency, who are either agitating for another go or nurse such a constant grievance that they undermine the whole electoral system. That is what is happening now.
It is right and proper that parliament should scrutinise the negotiation undertaken by Theresa May and her team, but what cannot happen is a re-run of the EU referendum. The result is in – and it is clear. Yet the attempt to cobble together a parliamentary coalition against leaving the single market is a giant festival of sour grapes masquerading as patriotism and belief in democracy.
The shenanigans this week illustrate exquisitely how, far from encouraging participation and supporting democracy, referendums generally end up subverting it.
Brexit – that dreaded, bizarre word, simultaneously so empty and so full – has come to define this government though nobody knows what it means and nobody has a clue how to deliver it. Under the guise of fortifying our democracy, it has started to consume it. That's not what plebiscites are meant to do.
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.
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