Britain And India: A Convenient Scapegoat In A Time Of Economic Crisis

By Colin Todhunter



07 November, 2012

Countercurrents.org



India is likely to be told this week that Britain plans to slash its 280 million pounds a year aid to it following growing domestic pressure on Prime Minister David Cameron to stop funding emerging economic powers such as India at a time when Britain is in serious economic crisis.



International Development Secretary Justine Greening during her visit to New Delhi is expected to discuss a timetable for winding down British aid commitment to India. She is expected to make it clear that the UK’s commitment to India will change radically at the end of the current eight-year 1.6 billion pound programme which lasts until 2015.



The idea to cut aid has been building for some years and has received added impetus from recent events. In 2011, Cameron led one of the largest-ever business delegations to India, comprising six cabinet ministers and around 60 business leaders. He lobbied heavily in favour of supplying India with the British built Eurofighter. But in 2012 as Britain seemed destined to lose the contract for 126 fighter jets, the knives came out in Britain – both for Cameron and for India too.



Instead of the British media attacking the sordid nature of the heavily taxpayer-subsidised arms industry and the way its massive profits are made by stoking tensions and war, it saw better mileage from cashing in on fear mongering by telling the public that the apparent loss of the contract to the French company Dassault, which makes the Rafale fighter, could jeopardise thousands of British jobs. It would have been much more constructive for the media to have regarded the loss any jobs in the arms sector as an opportunity to reinvest arms industry subsidies in more socially useful ventures, such as renewable energy.



As a backlash over India’s decision, however, sections of the public and various self-appointed opinion leaders took it on themselves to also apportion blame to India by linking the loss of the contract to the issue of aid. They were quick to point out that the British Government’s aid package is around 15 times larger than what France sent to India in 2009.



They asked, “Where is the trade dividend?” – especially in light of former International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell saying that the aid relationship with India is very important and its focus included seeking to sell Typhoon jets. He made it clear that aid was linked to trade. In order to get the government off the hook, this stance (and claims that aid was being used as a bribe) was soon being strenuously denied by various members of the government in light of the French seemingly bagging the prize.



Public pressure has subsequently grown over sending aid to India, especially at a time when massive public sector job losses and slashes to services are being made in Britain. The issue has certainly struck a chord with sections of the British public.



Egged on by politicians and the media, sections of the public began to ask why should the overburdened British taxpayer give aid to a country with 300 billion dollars worth of foreign reserves and year on year growth that has been over 8.5 per cent? It did also not go unnoticed that India has funds not just for its own aid and space programmes, but for nuclear weapons too, while Britain itself has no space programme and has been debating scaling down its own nuclear weapons systems.



Many in Britain also questioned why aid should be given to India, which has an economy on course to overtake Britain’s in the next ten years, and that, according to financial advisers Merrill Lynch, has 153,000 dollar-millionaires – a number that grew by 20 per cent in just one year, compared with Britain’s own increase of less than one per cent.



The argument proceeded along the lines that India might do better to scrap its space programme, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons and its huge aircraft buying programme worth billions and redirect all those funds to invest in improving the plight of the poor.



And then there was the matter of giving money to India being a waste anyhow, seeing that rich Indians and politicians have salted away billions in Swiss bank accounts since independence. The accusation is that much aid money to India is thus chewed up by corruption and fraud. The lavish spending of India’s rich has been targeted too, with much focus on multi-storey Mumbai penthouses, Formula 1 and the like.



Cut through the tabloid-type hysteria and the media’s agenda, and there is indeed a certain logic behind many such criticisms. But what has often been ignored during this tirade against India is that, as a strategy for poverty alleviation and within the broader context, the impact of aid is minimal at the very best.



There is no denying that, despite India’s rising power on the world stage, poverty remains rife and the country is home to a third of the world’s malnourished children. India’s annual average income per person is around 2.5 per cent of Britain’s.



However, much of the hardships are today fuelled by rising inequality brought about by neoliberal economic policies. Inequality in India has increased significantly since it opened up its economy in the early 1990s (1). India’s rich elites have benefited enormously, and this has often been at the expense of the poor. Look no further than the real estate speculators and the land grabs from the poor, the rising obesity levels and the persistent malnourishment, the corporate rich and the theft of natural resources in the tribal areas and the high GDP and the low poverty alleviation statistics. Aid is like using a plaster to stem a burst dam.



Regardless of whether India even wants this relatively small sum of aid in the first place from it’s former colonial oppressor, which so many Indian politicians have openly stated it patently does not, it’s a pity that sections of the British media and certain politicians do not highlight the fact that the sum given by Britain to India is anyhow only less than one per cent of Britain’s debts – hardly a drain on the British economy as it is too often made out to be. It’s also a pity that they don’t focus more on the real drain placed on the British economy via the hundreds of billions that are being picked from the pockets of ordinary Brits via bank bail outs, corporate subsidies and fraud and tax avoidance and evasion by the rich.



According to economics professor John Foster (2), the aggregate wealth of Britain’s richest 1,000 people was in 2010 some 333 billion pounds. In 2010, Britain’s aggregate national debt was half that amount. In 2009, the top 1,000 increased their wealth by a third, meaning that the amount they actually increased their wealth by in just one year was half of the national debt!



But that is a taboo issue. It’s not up for public debate or scrutiny. It’s not to be questioned. The dirty machinations of capitalism are to be hidden away – preferably in an offshore bank account.



Much easier to point the finger at India in order to divert attention from the predatory capitalism that continues to fuel Britain’s economic woes and exacerbate poverty in India. Much easier to use aid to India as a convenient whipping boy.



But can we expect much better? Not really. The British press, politicians and establishment mouthpieces have been using welfare provision within Britain itself as a convenient scapegoat for capitalism’s failings for decades!

Fiction takes you to places that life can't

Philip Hensher in The Independent:

It takes a novelist, not a psychologist, to explain why people sometimes behave out of character

Saturday, 9 July 2011

 

What's it like to die? There's no answer to this cheerful question, or there shouldn't be.

People have told us what it's like nearly to die, to come back from the brink. The external process of death has been gone over in great detail. But no one has definitively returned from the other side, to tell us what it's like to feel the last breath leaving your body. We don't know anything about it.

Or rather, we shouldn't know anything about it. In 1886, Tolstoy published a short story called "The Death of Ivan Ilych", which follows a fairly unremarkable man to the complete extinction of life. After reading that, you feel you know what death will be like: "Suddenly some force struck him in the chest and side, making it still harder to breathe, and he fell through the hole and there at the bottom was a light. What had happened to him was like the sensation one sometimes experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks one is going backwards while one is really going forwards and suddenly becomes aware of the real direction." How could Tolstoy possibly know that? You will read any number of academic studies of the processes of death without coming near the novelist's instinctive understanding.

A wonderful Canadian academic and psychologist, Keith Oatley, has carried out some research on readers and non-readers of fiction, and has questioned this widespread assumption. Speaking to the Today programme this week, he shared his conclusion that habitual readers of novels were much better at coping with social situations and with a wide range of human beings. The usual image of the thick-lensed bookworm who can't cope with people – Philip Larkin's character who says "when getting my nose in a book/cured most things short of school" – is far from reality.

Well, all of us Dewey-botherers knew that. I guess from day one, I had a general sense that novels were going to introduce me to more sorts of people than life would. There was Mummy and Daddy and my big sister; there was Mr and Mrs Griffiths next door, and there were the Skittles at the end of the garden. On the other hand, if you opened a book, there wasDorothy and her friends the lion and the tinman and a boy called Tip, later transformed into Princess Glinda of Oz.

Later on, there were girls who went away to a super school called Malory Towers, not very much like anyone I knew; there were robots and Boy Detectives and a talking spider called Charlotte (who died) and a foul-tempered talking pudding and a larrikin koala, some rather intimidating children called Bastable and a boy called Philip Pirrip.

Whenever I hear someone say "I don't read novels – I prefer to read about the truth," I wonder about their notion of "the truth". The conviction that reading fiction is a dispensable part of a rich, full life is a widely held one. Members of my own family, to this day, will say to me if they find me engrossed in a thriller, "If you're not doing anything...".

The saddest expression of this attitude must be Quentin Crisp's famous landlady, who was always commenting on his actions. If she came across him having his lunch, she would say "Eating." If she saw him sewing a button on, she would say "Mending. Once, she found him reading a novel. She looked at him, and said "Waiting."

I don't suppose any reader complains for a moment that his life is failing to introduce him to as interesting a collection of people as he will find in 10 minutes in the nearest bookshop. On the other hand, real life has a way of intruding itself. You can't live your life entirely within the pages of a novel, as much as some of us attempt to. And when real life starts to expand beyond the small domestic circle, then your reading of novels is going to prepare you for what life can hold. India is not completely strange if you have read Narayan; nor is old age after Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont.

Fiction won't tell you the whole story, but it will take you to places that life won't – Sicilian ducal houses, 13th-century convents, cities in Calvino that never existed. And sometimes with a shock of recognition, you meet in real life a friend from a book. I have a dear old German friend who, the very first time I met him, I thought "Snufkin". He really was Tove Jansson's charismatic, silent, solitary wanderer to the life. I wouldn't have known what to make of him without those magical novels.

How do novelists do it? They throw themselves into lives very unlike their own; their imaginative reconstructions are as apt to be as convincing as reports back from experience. Tolstoy knows what it is like to die; Stephen Crane tells us what war is like in The Red Badge of Courage, only experiencing battle after writing it. Conrad undoubtedly knew what it was like to endure a stupendous tropical storm. Thousands of sailors went through events like the ones described in Typhoon, but only one had the imaginative sympathy to write it down.

As Martin Amis has said, we still have no real idea what it is like to go into space. No one who has done so has had the ability to write well about the experience. Whatever systematic analysis is undertaken of a human experience, still the novelist's human spread seems the most substantial, authentic, accurate account.
Psychologists can offer explanations of behaviour, but they can't explain why people sometimes act out of character, or against their own interests. Even so subtle an analyst of behaviour as Erving Goffman, say, would struggle to account for the moment at the end of Vanity Fair where Becky Sharp hands Amelia Osborne the letter, destroying her own interests. And yet we know it to be true in the deepest sense.

The writer Marc Abrahams has shared an amusing encounter with a psychologist, who told him: "Whenever any group of really good research psychologists gets together socially, after a few drinks they always – and I do mean always – talk about why novelists are so much better at it than we are."

It's true. No psychologist is as good a psychologist as Graham Greene, let alone Tolstoy. And it's also true that no social life contains the range and interest of a shelf of novels. We love our friends: human beings fascinate us endlessly; and to teach us how they work, there are always novels. I've never met anyone remotely like Emma Bovary, Miss Flite, or Belinda, the madcap genius of the Fourth Form at Malory Towers. But one day, they'll come along, and when they do, I'll recognise them instantly.