NGOs of the mind

Shiv Vishvanathan in The Hindu

The NGO as an expression of voluntarism is a Janus-faced entity and it is this double-edged nature that puts it in a perpetual state of suspicion. The recent Intelligence Bureau report on NGOs against development has to be reread as a part of a new text of suspicion

Jairam Ramesh, the former Union Minister of Environment, once playfully, in fact factiously, commented that the word ‘Intelligence Bureau’ (IB) is an oxymoron. He was warning us that often, instead of collecting information, the IB projects the current fears of the state. It plays out the current politics of anxiety about security and development. What intrigues one is that such suspicion now acquires numeracy. The IB estimates non-governmental organisation (NGO) resistance as negatively impacting GDP by two to three per cent. Seen as a mirror inversion of a Human Development Report, the report becomes surreal. One wonders what the IB will estimate as the price of a dead myth or an extinct waterfall. One is not asking for the source of the estimate or its methodology but the idea itself conveys a false sense of objectivity about the acts of intelligence gathering.

One must also recognise that the NGO as an expression of voluntarism is a Janus-faced entity. At one level, it acts as an extension counter of the state, engaging in acts of humanitarian and social work. At another level, it is a political and cognitive entity challenging development paradigms and arguing issues of governance and democracy. This double-edged nature of the NGO puts it in a perpetual state of suspicion. Yet, we have to recognise that civic epistemologies and civil society creativity are crucial for democracy.

Text of suspicion

The recent IB report has to be reread as a part of a new text of suspicion. It combines issues of environment and defence, internal and external security, and security and sustainability to create a new monster, a threat called “NGOs against development.” The report focusses more on the initiation and delay of projects rather than the suffering caused by these projects through acts of displacement. Development is a benign act of the sovereign state. The NGO and social movements are seen as over-obsessed with acts of suffering. In that sense, it is an upstream rather than a downstream critique of the NGO. The delay becomes the act of sedition and it is these delays that contribute negatively to GDP.

The NGO is then read as a surrogate ploy for the alien or outsider. Behind each NGO is a foreign national or a grant-giving agency. The foreign hand, once legendary in the era of the Cold War, now returns not as CIA but as grant-giving agency. The language of human rights becomes a veneer for a new opposition to the state and serves as a cover for such disruptive activity. In fact, anti-development becomes the label for a network of conspiracies between the local NGO and foreign agencies to keep India in a state of underdevelopment.

Before one responds to the details of the report, one must confess that NGOs are not angelic groups. Many have become institutions which have turned seriatim protest into a career. One creates a trajectory from Bhopal to Narmada to GM foods oblivious of one’s last battles. Many of these groups have advocated transparency and responsibility but failed to apply it to themselves. If the report is a demand for self-reflexivity, one can sympathise with it, but when it clubs NGOs into one bundle and treats them as seditious, it threatens civil society as a space of freedom, dissent and creativity. Once one realises that development has created more refugees than the wars we have fought, one senses that development is more problematic than the IB report can imagine it to be.

‘Anti-development’ label

The report creates anti-development as problematic and especially turns Greenpeace into a monster. One must admit that it is easy to caricature Greenpeace. The organisation’s style is theatric, which often upsets the stuffed-shirt state, used to a sense of dignity. But Greenpeace raises critical issues, confronts the silences of development with a melodramatic, even overstated, eloquence, which is effective and attention-grabbing. It is seen as people-centric rather than government-centric and this focus is regarded as unpardonable. Because it amplifies marginal voices, it is seen as disruptive and yet as a critic said, “If Greenpeace did not exist it would have been invented. It is an early warning system on development and peace issues.” But the real sore point is not the Greenpeace style but the set of issues Greenpeace and other NGOs have raised.

The fourfold resistance of NGOs focusses on nuclear energy, coal-fired plants, genetically modified organisms (GMO) and anti-extractive activities in the northeast. All four are seen as attempts to protect livelihoods, local freedom and obtain fairness. The IB argues that because of this, India has become vulnerable in international forums, unable to voice its usual pieties of peace and development.

The report observes that international agencies earlier used “caste discrimination, human rights and big dams as items to discredit India.” These same forums have graduated to new embarrassments around growth retarding campaigns such as the anti-bauxite, anti-coal, anti-nuclear, anti-GM issues. It is their style and focus that make them so devastating. The IB reads each NGO as a pressure group which creates a specific scenario. It sets an agenda, creates debates in the media, lobbies diplomats and governments generally seeking to create a network of embarrassments. The keywords used are camouflage words, their democratic content hiding a malign intent, a strategy of disruption and delay, restricting development in key sectors. Each NGO is backed by foreign funds, each infiltrates a local group, commandeers a local issue to embarrass and delay the development projects of the regime.

These arguments seem reasonable, the scenario believable till one examines the array of people cited. It is the roll call of the best and brightest in the country. They include S.P. Udayakumar, Suman Sahai, Kavita Kuruganti, Admiral Ramdas, Paranjoy GuhaThakurta, Aruna Rodrigues, Surendra Gadekar. Because they criticise the development project in its specificities, they do not become anti-national. In fact this report should become an early warning system for civil society to gear itself for battles. Whether it is the Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), it is clear that development without jitters is a priority. Dissent becomes an activity frowned upon. In fact, one must recognise there is an NGO in all of us. One must also recognise that the well-being of the nation requires that the demand of the nation not be confused with the imperatives of the nation-state. Nations can allow for diversity, while nation-states seek uniformity and official diktats.

Ethics of intervention, memory

The activists listed link the ethics of invention and the ethics of memory. Tradition and change are linked not through sentimentality but through ideas of livelihood and empowerment. It is not only a rights discourse, it is a battle for survival arguing that the development discourse cannot be indifferent to voice, livelihoods and its roots in community. Riding roughshod over democracy is not a criteria of development. Delay is not the only criteria of evaluation. Time as plurality, history, myth, an ethic of memory, as a guarantee against obsolescence and triage are also relevant criteria. Delay speaks the language of growth without an articulate idea of responsibility and it is on this point that the IB report errs in its witch-hunt against “anti-development”. The politics of delay needs an aetiology, a discourse on causes. Delay is an intermediate stage in the development process. Delay comes because the government fails to talk to people about the location of a project, its implication for livelihoods and life in a locality. When people discover that the black box of national interest has trumped local empowerment they have to resort to politics desperately. What is often dismissed as sedition is mainly a crisis of empowerment, a failure of dialogue. A development that begins with diktats is bound to be delayed. The presence of a foreign hand often becomes a pretext for ignoring local voice and local issues.

The IB report emphasises that these NGOs are a threat to the national, economic security of India. But their understanding of security is restricted. It has no sense of seed security, or forest cover, no sense of trusteeship of the future. What is seen as sedition is often an attempt to combine an ecological sense of sustainability with a classical idea of security. In fact the IB’s sense of security allows for paranoia but not pluralism. A critical response has to deconstruct the categories of its official discourse, the 19th century suspicions that it stirs, and still show that civil society is adding a life-giving content to these categories. Suffering and sensitivity to suffering have to be a part of such measures and these the NGOs manage to do. The other issue the NGOs attempt to raise is the debate around choice of technologies and this the nation-state and its experts resent. A refusal to debate options for the future threatens the future and such stubbornness bordering on illiteracy cannot be conflated with security.

NGO transparency

To create the climate for such a debate, the NGOs have to spring clean their bureaucracies, show that foreign grants do not colour local issues. Second, they have to account for grants and any sub-grants they might make. The trajectory must be transparent to prevent suspicions clouding a crucial debate. Third, they have to demonstrate to the rest of the society that beyond protest, they are seeking to create new epistemologies of knowledge which adds to the quality of livelihood and thus reveal that obsolescence and displacement are not inevitable for the margins. One has to see this report as an anticipation of things to come, a symptom of a society that has become sceptical of some NGO battles. Dissent in these circumstances is going to demand both a heroic inventiveness and a quiet patience.

In reading such a document one has to be careful of labelling it a Modi ploy. It is as much a Manmohan Singh complaint. He was fed up with NGOs opposing nuclear energy. The politics of regimes might be different but their paranoias are the same — security being threatened by local groups. Both would love a discourse which subsumes sustainability under security. Moreover, suspicion and paranoia need a scapegoat. The funder abroad as invisible hand, the Greenpeace as the more visible hand become easy candidates. One cannot deny that foreign groups might help stir the political pot. Their behaviour often warrants suspicion. The challenge before these NGOs is to create a public space where three things are clear. First, they have to create systems of audit which are both rule bound, time bound and transparent. Foreign funds are not cornucopia to be showered on all and sundry like confetti. Second, one has to communicate the vitality and the life-giving nature of the issues. It cannot be left to the experts and the bureaucrats of the state. Third, one needs an ethic of responsibility which includes professionalism as ascetic lifestyle, a precision of articulation which carries greater conviction. The battle of competing rhetoric will not do. It is a challenge to create a public space around the silences of the state and include the margins of the nation. One needs a space which allows for dissent and debate, which is both cathartic and constructive and which incorporates the future as a constituency. It is not defensiveness that we need but a confidence to experiment, to debate, to create alternatives, The state could be afraid of the foreign hand but what states often found even more alien is the process of empowerment, the attempt to create a different democracy.

The IB report is right in emphasising the critical nature of the four issues. But what is equally critical is the synergy of democracy that NGOs need to create around these issues. Each struggle has to be a fable for the future. To do less would make the report more real and true over time. Civil society has to make sure that this IB report does not become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Why is Apple so shifty about how it makes the iPhone?

The paragon of modern tech risks losing its shine by dodging queries about Indonesia, and an orgy of unregulated tin mining

BETA

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 23 September 2013 20.30 BST

‘When asked where it obtains its minerals, Apple looks arrogant, lumbering and unaccountable.' Photograph: Eduardo Barraza/Demotix/Corbis

Are you excited about the launch of Apple's new iPhones? Have you decided to get one? Do you have any idea what you're buying? If so, you are on your own. When asked where it obtains its minerals, Apple, which has done so much to persuade us that it is deft, cool and responsive, looks arrogant, lumbering and unaccountable.

The question was straightforward: does Apple buy tin from Bangka Island? The wriggling is almost comical.

Nearly half of global tin supplies are used to make solder for electronics. About 30% of the world's tin comes from Bangka and Belitung islands in Indonesia, where an orgy of unregulated mining is reducing a rich and complex system of rainforests and gardens to a post-holocaust landscape of sand and acid subsoil. Tin dredgers in the coastal waters are also wiping out the coral, the giant clams, the local fisheries, the endangered Napoleon wrasse, the mangrove forests and the beaches used by breeding turtles.

Children are employed in shocking conditions. On average, one miner dies in an accident every week. Clean water is disappearing, malaria is spreading as mosquitoes breed in abandoned workings, and small farmers are being driven from their land. Those paragons of modernity – electronics manufacturers – rely for their supplies on some distinctly old-fashioned practices.

Friends of the Earth and its Indonesian counterpart, Walhi, which have documented this catastrophe, are not calling for an end to tin-mining on Bangka and Belitung: they recognise that it supports many people who would not find work elsewhere. What they want is transparency on the part of the companies buying the tin extracted there, leading to an agreement to reduce the impacts and protect the people and the wildlife. Without transparency there's no accountability; without accountability there's no prospect of improvement.

So they approached the world's biggest smartphone manufacturers, asking whether they are using tin from Bangka. All but one of the big brands fessed up. Samsung, Philips, Nokia, Sony, BlackBerry, Motorola and LG admit to buying (or probably buying) tin from the island through intermediaries, and have pledged to help address the mess. One company refuses to talk.

Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive officer, claimed last year: "we want to be as innovative with supply responsibility as we are with our products. That's a high bar. The more transparent we are, the more it's in the public space. The more it's in the public space, the more other companies will decide to do something similar". Which would be fine, if Apple did not appear to be pursuing the opposite policy.

Mobilised by Friends of the Earth, 25,000 people have now written to the company to ask whether it is buying tin from the ecological disaster zone in Indonesia. The answer has been a resounding "we're not telling you".

I approached Apple last week, and it felt like the kind of interview you might conduct with someone selling televisions out of the back of a lorry. The director of corporate public relations refused to let me record our conversation. He insisted that it should be off the record and for background only, whereupon he told me ... nothing at all. All he would do was direct me back to the webpage I was asking him about.

This states, with baffling ambiguity, that "Bangka Island, Indonesia, is one of the world's principal tin-producing regions. Recent concerns about the illegal mining of tin from this region prompted Apple to lead a fact-finding visit to learn more." Why conduct a fact-finding visit if you're not using the island's tin? And if you are using it, why not say so? Answer comes there none.

Today I asked him a different set of questions. In a previous article, in March, I praised Apple for mapping its supply chain and discovering that it uses metals processed by 211 smelters around the world. But, in view of its farcical response to my questions about Bangka, I began to wonder how valuable that effort might be. Apple has still not named any of the companies on the list, or provided any useful information about its suppliers.

So I asked the PR director whether I could see the list, and whether it has been audited: in other words, whether there's any reason to believe that this is a step towards genuine transparency. His response? To direct me back to the same sodding webpage. Strange to relate, on reading it for the fourth time I found it just as uninformative as I had the first time.

While I was tearing out my hair over Apple's evasions, Fairphone was launching its first handset at the London Design Festival. This company, formed not just to build a genuine ethical smartphone but also to try to change the way in which supply chains and commercial strategies work, looks like everything that Apple should be but isn't. Though its first phone won't be delivered until December, it has already sold 15,000 sets: to people who want 21st-century technology without 19th-century ethics.

The Restart Project, which helps people to repair their own phones (something that Apple's products often seem designed to frustrate) was at the same show, pointing out that the most ethical phone is the one you have in your pocket, maintained to overcome its inbuilt obsolescence.

This isn't the only way in which Apple looks out of date. Last week, 59 organisations launched their campaign for a tough European law obliging companies to investigate their supply chains and publish reports on their social and environmental impacts. Why should a company be able to choose whether or not to leave its customers and shareholders in the dark? Why shouldn't we know as much about its impacts as we do about its financial position?

Until Apple answers the questions those 25,000 people have asked, until it displays the transparency that Tim Cook has promised but failed to deliver, don't buy its products. Made by a company which looks shifty, unaccountable and frankly ridiculous, they are the epitome of uncool.

Secret courts: justice conducted behind closed doors is no justice at all

If Britain has suddenly decided that open justice is a luxury we can't afford, then I for one was not invited to the debate

• 
• • Sarosh Zaiwalla
  • theguardian.com, Monday 19 August 2013 11.31 BST

Britain's home secretary, Theresa May, leaves Downing Street in London. Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters

Last March, I watched from afar as perhaps the most important case in my 30-year legal career was decided in a soundproofed room protected by a security guard. This was the first time in the UK supreme court's history that it had entered closed session for what has been aptly named a "secret court". It is a phrase we should get used to after a judge ruled last week that the home secretary, Theresa May, has the power to "terminate" high court challenges on national security grounds and push more cases away from public view.

This ruling is all the more worrying after my experience. Giving his final judgment on our secret court, Lord Hope described it as an "unwelcome departure from the principle of open justice", calling for a "stern and steadfast resistance to the use of that procedure" in the future. His call is one that every Briton should heed.

Representing Bank Mellat, an Iranian bank caught up in the middle of the sanctions battle between the west and Iran, I was tasked with showing that UK sanctions must be more than an indiscriminate attack on people living under regimes we dislike. My firm argued that the Treasury had no evidence to suggest the bank had somehow helped Iran's nuclear programme. The sanctions were at best irrational and at worst discriminatory. The supreme court agreed – but there was a catch. In a last ditch attempt to win the day, the Treasury claimed that they did have rock solid evidence … they just couldn't show anyone.

The dilemma was etched on Lord Neuberger's face as he announced the decision to enter a secret court. On the one hand, the Treasury insisted that the evidence must be kept secret for national security reasons, but on the other the supreme court risked undermining the whole system of open justice. Imagine being convicted of a crime by evidence you are not allowed to see and without the opportunity to defend yourself – that is the state in which the bank found itself. When the Treasury insisted that the supreme court view evidence obtained from the secret services, the judges obliged in good faith. Ultimately, the court attached little weight to this evidence and decided in Bank Mellat's favour.

The judges' concern, much like my own, is that justice conducted behind closed doors with evidence hidden from view is no kind of justice at all.

The ultimate driving force behind this self-mutilation of a proud justice system was the politics of security. Ironically, it is in our dealings with the alleged opponents of liberty that the dangerous, prejudicial and irrational politics of security push us to our most extreme. Just as the US Prism programme is unravelling the extent to which we have given up our privacy to GCHQ, so too are secret courts forcing us to be "free" in ways we are powerless to stop.

You need only look to the US to see the sacrifices made in the name of national security – a compassionless system fuelled by uncompromising secret surveillance of citizens and allowing the unchecked detention of suspects in Guantánamo Bay. Has the balance in the name of security gone too far? In Bank Mellat's instance, our supreme court may have dismissed the government's tactics, but it would be naive to hope that nine judges will be enough to rein in sustained attacks on British liberty if the rot of politics continues to eat away at our rights. Only days after the supreme court entered closed session in the case I was representing, a broad coalition of Labour, Liberal Democrats and Conservative MPs pushed through the Justice and Security bill, allowing the same secret courts used against foreign companies to apply to anyone living in the UK. This bill has now come into full force. Indeed, as the revelations about GCHQ's snooping make clear, there will be no dearth of information available to help the secret courts convict us.

If the British people have suddenly decided that open justice is a luxury we cannot afford, then I for one was not invited to the debate. It is perfectly reasonable to argue that the threats facing the UK warrant such suspensions of justice, but it is both absurd and dangerous to allow this vital judgment call to be made solely by those politicians who hope to wield the new powers against us. Privileges which we can surely only give up voluntarily have been wrestled from us without our consent.

The revelations of secret courts and Prism show just how little influence we have over our own rights. Indeed as Theresa May can now attest, not even high court judges can keep the government's secret courts at bay. It is time politicians asked for our permission before denying us access to open justice.

Looking for a party funding scandal? Try David Cameron's Conservatives

We know how much Unite gives Labour, but finding out who writes the cheques for Conservative Central Office is more difficult

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Monday 8 July 2013 20.00 BST

Len McCluskey, general secretary of Unite. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

I've just been reading about a political party in hock to shadowy donors who enjoy easy access to its leadership and untold influence over its policies. It's scandalous stuff. That's right: I've just been reading about David Cameron's Conservative party.

Few activities are more congenial to the British commentariat than an afternoon's fox-hunting that can be moralised away as "grownup" debate. So it is with Ed Miliband and Len McCluskey. Even as they fire upon Ed for not being his brother, the pundits insist their real subject is party funding and who runs British politics. Yet mentions of the Tories' paymasters are inevitably brief and come with the gloss of "they're all as bad as each other".

Actually, they're not. Yes, some of the allegations about Falkirk are shaming. And it goes without saying that all three main parties are damagingly dependent on big donors; no Obama-style flood of 20s and 50s on this side of the water. But when it comes to concentration of funding, the opacity over where the cash comes from and the overlap between policy and donor interests, the Conservatives look far more corrupted.

We know how much Unite gives Labour because it's out in the open: all fully checkable on the Electoral Commission's website. Finding out who writes the cheques for Conservative Central Office is far harder. Cameron's funders seem to prefer channeling their money through conduits, or splitting the cash between multiple donors.

Through their forensic investigation into Tory funding, published just after the last general election, Stephen Crone and Stuart Wilks-Heeg discovered that some of the largest contributors would give a few hundred thousand: big, but not big enough to raise eyebrows. But then a funny thing could be spotted in the accounts: their wives and other family members would chip in, as well as their business ventures.

Take the JCB billionaire Sir Anthony Bamford, one of Cameron's favourite businessmen and a regular guest on the PM's trade missions abroad. Between 2001 and summer 2010, Wilks-Heeg and Crone found donations from Anthony Bamford, Mark Bamford, George Bamford, JCB Bamford Excavators, JCB Research, and JCB World Brands. Tot that up and you get a contribution to the Conservative party from the Bamford family of £3,898,900. But you'd need to be an expert sleuth with plenty of time and resources to tot it up.

One family: nearly £4m. Wilks-Heeg and Crone found that 15 of these families or "donor groups" account for almost a third of all Tory funding. They enjoy trips to Chequers, dinners in Downing Street and a friendly prime ministerial ear. Lord Irvine Laidlaw stuffed over £6m into Conservative pockets over a decade and, one of his former staffers told the Mail, liked to boast about his influence over party leaders: "William's [Hague] in my pocket".

Perhaps you're wondering why the Tories talked so tough on banking reform before election but have done so little since. That may have something to do with the money the City gives to them. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in 2010 donations from financial services accounted for over half of all Tory funding.

Three years ago, spread-betting boss Stuart Wheeler brazenly told MPs that "a party is going to take more notice of somebody who might give them lots of money than somebody who won't". He should know; he once gave the Conservatives a single donation of £5m. And certainly, the City has plenty to show for its investment. Across Europe, Angela Merkel, François Hollande and others are pushing ahead with plans for a Tobin tax or a small levy on financial transactions to start next year. Britain, on the other hand, is part of a small band of refuseniks, along with such other giants of financial regulation as Malta and Luxembourg.

One of the mysteries of this government is why George Osborne made a priority of cutting the 50p tax for the super-rich, thus handing the opposition a stick to beat him with. One possible answer to that is suggested by an FT report from November 2011 on hedge-fund donations to Osborne's party. "There probably aren't many votes in cutting the 50p top rate of tax," one major hedge fund donor told the paper, "but among those that give significant amounts to the party, it's a big issue, and that's probably why it's a big issue for the party too". Just four months later, at the next budget, the 50p rate was scrapped.

What, by contrast, has Uncle Len ever got from Ed Miliband? A promise of an end to the pay freeze for public servants? Nyet. A commitment to break from austerity? Nein. In spring 2010, the Telegraph claimed that Labour ministers "echoed the union's opposition to Kraft's takeover of Cadbury". This would be the takeover that actually went through. There are shades here of the MPs' expenses scandal, when the Tory schemes for lifting money from taxpayers were so baroque that they attracted less opprobrium than Labour parliamentarians claiming for bath plugs and blue movies. So it is with McCluskey's plan to fill Falkirk's constituency Labour party with Unite's Keystone Cops, even while hedgie Michael Hintze puts nearly £40,000 towards the chancellor's expenses alone and reaps the reward of a cut in his taxes.

But there's something else going on, too. Westminster and the press are still ruled by the idea that if workers' representatives seek to influence politics they must be bullies; while if capitalists get their way, then that's inevitably good for capitalism. Five years on from the banking crisis and all the evidence to the contrary, that really is a link that needs ending.

Why do UK rail fares keep rising?

With train companies, Network Rail and the Government involved, the answer is far from simple

Fed up: protesters against a rise in rail fares in King’s Cross Station Photo: AFP/Getty Images

By Christian Wolmar

7:47PM GMT 02 Jan 2013

 

Here we go again. It’s a new year but an old story. Commuters are up in arms about rises in rail fares and they’re looking for someone to blame.

Aside from the fact that central London was half empty yesterday and finding a seat on a train would have been no problem for most, they have a good point. This is the 10th successive year of above-inflation fare rises, and there is no sign of any change in policy coming until the next general election at least, and probably well beyond that.

But finding the right target for passenger anger is made difficult by the fact that transparency is not a feature of the rail industry and railway economics remains a dark art. The train companies, the Government, previous governments, and even Network Rail (responsible for the track and infrastructure) are all in the frame for blame. And actually, all of them deserve at least a bit of buckshot, if not a high-velocity bullet.

The railways may have been privatised in the mid-Nineties, but in reality they are a mix of private and state interests, with most of the purse – and other – strings still being pulled by the Government. Forget the notion of a raw capitalistic enterprise with energetic entrepreneurs seeking innovative ways to fleece the public: the train operating companies are pretend capitalists who have very little room for manoeuvre and invest very little. They complain that they make only a 3 per cent profit – or around £250 million annually – yet that is a misleading figure, based not on investment, as with a conventional company, but on turnover.

The train companies will receive a proportion of the extra fare income that yesterday’s rises generate, thanks to an opaque process that began last summer. Once the fare rises (which are based on July’s inflation figures) are known, the Department for Transport (DFT) and train companies begin negotiations over how the spoils should be divided. This is because rising fares will deter some passengers from travelling, and under the franchise agreements the DFT has to compensate the private companies for this loss.

However, given the recent inept performance of the DFT over the West Coast franchise, it would not be reckless to suggest that perhaps the train companies get rather more of this extra dosh than they need to cover any passengers lost as a result of the rises. The projections and the sums of money that follow are, of course, “commercially confidential”, and therefore not released to the great unwashed British public.

There is a real irony here. The legislation to regulate season tickets and off-peak fares was designed, at the outset of privatisation, to protect passengers from greedy private companies exploiting their monopoly position. Originally, the rises for “regulated” fares were set at the RPI measure of inflation minus 1 per cent, as a way of encouraging rail travel. In fact, since 2003 – when the formula was changed by the Labour government to RPI plus 1 per cent – the legislation that supposedly protects consumers has been used against them.

However, the situation with unregulated fares – which represent about half the income of the train companies – is completely different. Train operators are free to set all other fares, which include the very expensive peak fares on intercity and other routes, first class and advanced, and all of the increase will go to them.

For their part, the train operators argue that the extra revenue from unregulated fares is needed in order to meet the financial arrangements that come with the franchise deals – most of the train companies pay an annual premium to the Department for Transport. They say these unregulated fares are set commercially because operators face competition from airlines or the roads. But many people making occasional journeys at peak times have no option but to travel then, and are therefore heavily penalised for their lack of flexibility.

A spokesman for the train operators justifies the situation by saying: “Train companies have to meet tough financial commitments agreed with the Government when franchise agreements are signed.” It is also the case that since 2007 there has been a cross-party policy of increasing the share of the cost of the railways paid by rail users, which is now around two thirds, compared with less than 50 per cent six years ago. Yet this does not negate the fact that the train operators decide the level of unregulated fares and many have gone up far more than regulated fares. A peak return from London to Manchester in standard class, for example, is now a stunning £308.

Provided the DFT gets its sums vaguely right, the Government therefore will receive a substantial proportion of the money from increased fares. Ministers’ explanation for the rises is that this money will be used for investment in the railways – but the relationship between investment and fare rises is a distant one.

In fact, the amount of investment going into the railway for extra capacity such as improved track and better signalling is determined by a complex process of negotiation involving Network Rail, the Office of Rail Regulation and the Department for Transport. Ministers set out an investment programme in five‑year periods – the current one runs out in March 2014 – and allocate funds accordingly, and then the Office of Rail Regulation assesses whether enough money is available to carry out the plans. Network Rail then undertakes the work, primarily through contractors.

New trains are provided through a different, and similarly tenuous, relationship. The Government will determine that there is a need for new trains and build this into franchise contracts. The trains are then leased, with the operators paying for them out of their income from the fare box and any subsidy they receive from the DFT. However, the level of fare rises is not linked to the acquisition of new rolling stock. As one angry rail traveller tweeted yesterday: “Why should I pay more to travel in Lincolnshire when the services and rolling stock are so bad?”

Overall, then, there is very little relationship between yesterday’s fare rises and future investment plans. Indeed, for the past two years, the Government, in the face of public pressure, has backed down from proposed fare increases of RPI plus 3 per cent to the current RPI plus 1 per cent, which has resulted in a reduced income of around £250 million annually – enough to kick-start an investment programme of, say, £2.5 billion. Yet there has been no suggestion from ministers that this cut in fares income will reduce the amount available for investing in the railways.

The position of Network Rail – a state-owned company in all but name – adds to the confusion. It spends around £6 billion a year on maintaining the railways but has been sharply criticised for excessive costs. A report in the spring of 2010 by Sir Roy McNulty, the former chairman of Short Brothers, the airline manufacturer, identified wasted spending amounting to 30 per cent.

Network Rail is therefore being required to cut costs; McNulty reckoned it could save £1.8 billion by 2019. Justine Greening, who was Transport Secretary until the autumn reshuffle, argued that if these reductions were made then fares could, in future, be held steady, but few industry insiders believe that such big cuts could be made without compromising performance or safety.

So the real blame for the fare rises must lie with us, the passengers, and our appetite for rail travel. Ever since the early Nineties, passenger numbers have kept on rising steadily. Remarkably, even the long-term trend of passenger numbers falling during recessions has been reversed, as numbers have continued rising except for 2009-10, and even then the fall was very small.

The one way to ensure that fare rises are lower in the future is for more people to shun the railways and use the alternatives – or simply not travel. While numbers keep rising, even in times of recession, why should either the train companies or their political masters change the policy?

Christian Wolmar is a writer and broadcaster specialising in transport.

Africa's natural resources can be a blessing, not an economic curse

Resource-rich countries have, on average, done poorly but progress is possible if they get economic and political support

People in countries rich in natural resources, such as Tanzania, pictured, can benefit if given the right political and economic support. Photograph: Remi Benali/Corbis

Joseph Stiglitz in The Guardian

New discoveries of natural resources in several African countries – including Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania and Mozambique – raise an important question: will these windfalls be a blessing that brings prosperity and hope, or a political and economic curse, as has been the case in so many countries?

On average, resource-rich countries have done even more poorly than countries without resources. They have grown more slowly, and with greater inequality – just the opposite of what one would expect. After all, taxing natural resources at high rates will not cause them to disappear, which means that countries whose major source of revenue is natural resources can use them to finance education, healthcare, development and redistribution.

A large literature in economics and political science has developed to explain this "resource curse", and civil-society groups (such as Revenue Watch and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative) have been established to try to counter it. Three of the curse's economic ingredients are well-known:

• Resource-rich countries tend to have strong currencies, which impede other exports

• Because resource extraction often entails little job creation, unemployment rises

• Volatile resource prices cause growth to be unstable, aided by international banks that rush in when commodity prices are high and rush out in the downturns (reflecting the time-honoured principle that bankers lend only to those who do not need their money).

Moreover, resource-rich countries often do not pursue sustainable growth strategies. They fail to recognise that if they do not reinvest their resource wealth into productive investments above ground, they are actually becoming poorer. Political dysfunction exacerbates the problem, as conflict over access to resource rents gives rise to corrupt and undemocratic governments.

There are well-known antidotes to each of these problems: a low exchange rate, a stabilisation fund, careful investment of resource revenues (including in the country's people), a ban on borrowing, and transparency (so citizens can at least see the money coming in and going out). But there is a growing consensus that these measures, while necessary, are insufficient. Newly enriched countries need to take several more steps in order to increase the likelihood of a "resource blessing".

First, these countries must do more to ensure that their citizens get the full value of the resources. There is an unavoidable conflict of interest between (usually foreign) natural-resource companies and host countries: the former want to minimise what they pay, while the latter need to maximise it. Well-designed, competitive, transparent auctions can generate much more revenue than sweetheart deals. Contracts, too, should be transparent, and should ensure that if prices soar – as they have repeatedly – the windfall gain does not go only to the company.

Unfortunately, many countries have already signed bad contracts that give a disproportionate share of the resources' value to private foreign companies. But there is a simple answer: renegotiate; if that is impossible, impose a windfall-profit tax.

All over the world, countries have been doing this. Of course, natural-resource companies will push back, emphasise the sanctity of contracts, and threaten to leave. But the outcome is typically otherwise. A fair renegotiation can be the basis of a better long-term relationship.

Botswana's renegotiations of such contracts laid the foundations of its remarkable growth for the last four decades. Moreover, it is not only developing countries, such as Bolivia and Venezuela, that renegotiate; developed countries such as Israel and Australia have done so as well. Even the United States has imposed a windfall-profits tax.

Equally important, the money gained through natural resources must be used to promote development. The old colonial powers regarded Africa simply as a place from which to extract resources. Some of the new purchasers have a similar attitude.

Infrastructure (roads, railroads, and ports) has been built with one goal in mind: getting the resources out of the country at as low a price as possible, with no effort to process the resources in the country, let alone to develop local industries based on them.

Real development requires exploring all possible linkages: training local workers, developing small- and medium-size enterprises to provide inputs for mining operations and oil and gas companies, domestic processing, and integrating the natural resources into the country's economic structure. Of course, today, these countries may not have a comparative advantage in many of these activities, and some will argue that countries should stick to their strengths. From this perspective, these countries' comparative advantage is having other countries exploit their resources.

That is wrong. What matters is dynamic comparative advantage, or comparative advantage in the long run, which can be shaped. Forty years ago, South Korea had a comparative advantage in growing rice. Had it stuck to that strength, it would not be the industrial giant that it is today. It might be the world's most efficient rice grower, but it would still be poor.

Companies will tell Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, and Mozambique to act quickly, but there is good reason for them to move more deliberately. The resources will not disappear, and commodity prices have been rising. In the meantime, these countries can put in place the institutions, policies, and laws needed to ensure that the resources benefit all of their citizens.

Resources should be a blessing, not a curse. They can be, but it will not happen on its own. And it will not happen easily.

Extend Freedom of Information to the Private Sector

Freedom of information: my monstrous idea will keep corporate tyrants at bay

Extending transparency laws to the private sector would make the likes of News International think twice before misbehaving

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 May 2012 20.37 BST

Illustration by Daniel Pudles

 

Modern government could be interpreted as a device for projecting corporate power. Since the 1980s, in Britain, the US and other nations, the primary mission of governments has been to grant their sponsors in the private sector ever greater access to public money and public life.

There are several means by which they do so: the privatisation and outsourcing of public services; the stuffing of public committees with corporate executives; and the reshaping of laws and regulations to favour big business. In the UK, the Health and Social Care Act extends the corporate domain in ways unimaginable even five years ago.

With these increasing powers come diminishing obligations. Through repeated cycles of deregulation, governments release big business from its duty of care towards both people and the planet. While citizens are subject to ever more control – as the state extends surveillance and restricts our freedom to protest and assemble – companies are subject to ever less.

In this column I will make a proposal that sounds – at first – monstrous, but I hope to persuade you is both reasonable and necessary: that freedom of information laws should be extended to the private sector.

The very idea of a corporation is made possible only by a blurring of the distinction between private and public. Limited liability socialises risks that would otherwise be carried by a company's owners and directors, exempting them from the costs of the debts they incur or the disasters they cause. The bailouts introduced us to an extreme form of this exemption: men like Fred Goodwin and Matt Ridley are left in peace to count their money while everyone else must pay for their mistakes.

So I am asking only for the exercise of that long-standing Conservative maxim – no rights without responsibilities. If you benefit from limited liability, the public should be permitted to scrutinise your business.

Companies already have certain obligations towards transparency, such as the publication of financial statements and annual reports. But these tell us only a little of what we need to know. In News International's annual report, you will find none of the information disclosed at the Leveson inquiry, though it is of pressing public interest. In fact it is only due to a combination of the Guardian's persistence and pure chance (the discovery that Milly Dowler's phone had been hacked) that we know anything about the wide-ranging assault on democracy engineered by that company.

Privatisation and outsourcing ensure that private business is, or should be, everyone's business. Private companies now provide services we are in no position to refuse, yet, unlike the state bodies they replace, they are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. The results can be catastrophic for public accounts.

Just as the Blair government did while imposing the disastrous private finance initiative, the Bullingdon boys now shield their schemes from public scrutiny behind the corporate information wall. Companies are once again striking remarkable deals, hatched in secret, at the expense of taxpayers, pupils and patients. Last week, for example, we learned that Circle Healthcare will be able to extract millions of pounds a year from a public hospital, Hinchingbrooke, which is in deep financial trouble. Crucial information about the deal remains secret on the grounds of Circle's "commercial confidentiality".

The principle of corporate transparency is already established in English law. The Freedom of Information Act has a clause enabling the government to extend it to companies with public contracts. Unsurprisingly, it has not been exercised. The environmental information rules of 2004 define a public authority as any body providing public services, which includes corporations. Why should this not apply universally?

The Campaign for Freedom of Information points out that the Scottish government almost adopted this idea: it proposed extending the transparency laws to major government contractors. But though this plan was overwhelmingly popular, it was dropped last year on the grounds that the contractors were opposed to it. (Who would have guessed?) South Africa, by contrast, provides a general right of access to the records of private bodies. The ANC, aware of how corporations assisted apartheid, recognises that the state is not the only threat to democracy.

Freedom of information is never absolute, nor should it be. Companies should retain the right, as they do in South Africa, to protect material that is of genuine commercial confidentiality; though they should not be allowed to use that as an excuse to withhold everything that might embarrass them. The information commissioner should decide where the line falls, just as he does for public bodies today.

The purpose of this monstrous proposal is not just to shine a light into the rattling cupboards of private companies, but to change the way in which they behave. A body that acts as if the world is watching presents less of a threat to the public interest than a body that knows it won't get caught. Would News International have acted as it did if its emails could have been revealed as a matter of course rather than a matter of chance? If it is true that "governments don't rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world", should we not be entitled to know what Goldman Sachs is up to? Is that not the only means we have of preventing its unelected power from becoming tyrannical?

I realise that it is not a good time to be making this request: far from extending our transparency laws, Cameron hints that he wants to roll them back. But unless we decide what we want and how we mean to obtain it – however remote it might now seem – we have no means of making social progress. If we are to reclaim power from the corporations that have seized it, first we need to know what that power looks like.

We know that to understand politics and the peddling of influence we must follow the money. So it’s remarkable that the question of who funds the thinktanks has so seldom been asked.

Think Of A Tank

George Monbiot

 

Nadine Dorries won’t answer it. Lord Lawson won’t answer it. Michael Gove won’t answer it. But it’s a simple question, and if they don’t know it’s because they don’t want to. Where does the money come from? All are connected to groups whose purpose is to change the direction of public life. None will reveal who funds them.

When she attempted to restrict abortion counselling, Nadine Dorries MP was supported by a group called Right to Know. When other MPs asked her who funds it, she claimed she didn’t know(1,2). Lord Lawson is chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which casts doubt on climate science. It demands “openness and transparency” from scientists(3). Yet he refuses to say who pays, on the grounds that the donors “do not wish to be publicly engaged in controversy.”(4) Michael Gove was chairman of Policy Exchange, an influential conservative thinktank. When I asked who funded Policy Exchange when he ran it, his office told me “he doesn’t have that information and he won’t be able to help you.”(5)

We know that to understand politics and the peddling of influence we must follow the money. So it’s remarkable that the question of who funds the thinktanks has so seldom been asked.

There are dozens of groups in the UK which call themselves free market or conservative thinktanks, but they have a remarkably consistent agenda. They tend to oppose the laws which protect us from banks and corporations; to demand the privatisation of state assets; to argue that the rich should pay less tax; and to pour scorn on global warming. What the thinktanks call free market economics looks more like a programme for corporate power.

Some of them have a turnover of several million pounds a year, but in most cases that’s about all we know. In the US, groups claiming to be free market thinktanks have been exposed as sophisticated corporate lobbying outfits, acting in concert to promote the views of the people who fund them. In previous columns, I’ve shown how such groups, funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, built and directed the Tea Party movement(6,7).

The Kochs and the oil company Exxon have also funded a swarm of thinktanks which, by coincidence, all spontaneously decided that manmade climate change is a myth(8,9). A study in the journal Environmental Politics found that such groups, funded by economic elites and working through the media, have been “central to the reversal of US support for environmental protection, both domestically and internationally.”(10)

Jeff Judson, who has worked for 26 years as a corporate lobbyist in the US, has explained why thinktanks are more effective than other public relations agencies. They are, he says, “the source of many of the ideas and facts that appear in countless editorials, news articles, and syndicated columns.”(11) They have “considerable influence and close personal relationships with elected officials”. They “support and encourage one another, echo and amplify their messages, and can pull together … coalitions on the most important public policy issues.” Crucially, they are “virtually immune to retribution … the identity of donors to think tanks is protected from involuntary disclosure.”(12)

The harder you stare at them, the more they look like lobby groups working for big business without disclosing their interests. Yet throughout the media they are treated as independent sources of expertise. The BBC is particularly culpable. Even when the corporate funding of its contributors has been exposed by human rights or environmental groups, it still allows them to masquerade as unbiased commentators, without disclosing their interests.

For the sake of democracy, we should know who funds the organisations which call themselves thinktanks. To this end I contacted 15 groups. Eleven of them could be described as free market or conservative; four as progressive. I asked them all a simple question: “Could you give me the names of your major donors and the amount they contributed in the last financial year?”. I gave their answers a score out of five for transparency and accountability.

Three of the groups I contacted – Right to Know, the International Policy Network and Nurses for Reform – did not answer my calls or emails. Six others refused to give me any useful information. They are the Institute of Economic Affairs, Policy Exchange, the Adam Smith Institute, the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the Global Warming Policy Foundation and the Christian Medical Fellowship. They produced similar excuses, mostly concerning the need to protect the privacy of their donors. My view is that if you pay for influence, you should be accountable for it. Nul points.

Civitas did fractionally better, scoring 1. Its website names a small number of the donors to its schools(13), but it would not reveal the amount they had given or the identity of anyone else. The only rightwing thinktank that did well was Reform, which sent me a list of its biggest corporate donors: Lloyds (£50k), Novo Nordisk (£48k), Sky (£42k), General Electric (£41k) and Danone (£40k). Reform lists its other corporate sponsors in its annual review(14), and earns 4 points. If they can do it, why can’t the others?

The progressives were more accountable. Among them, Demos did least well. It sent me a list of its sponsors, but refused to reveal how much they gave. It scores 2.5. The Institute for Public Policy Research listed its donors and, after some stumbling, was able to identify the biggest of them: the European Union (a grant of E800,000) and the Esmee Fairburn Foundation(£86k). It scores 3.5. The New Economics Foundation sent me a list of all its donors and the amount each gave over the past year, earning 4 points. The biggest funders are the Network for Social Change (£173k), the department of health (£124k) and the Aim Foundation (£100k). Compass had already published a full list in its annual report(15). The biggest source by far is the Communication Workers’ Union, which gave it £78k in 2009. Compass gets 5 out of 5.

The picture we see, with the striking exception of Reform, is of secrecy among the rightwing groups, creating a powerful impression that they have something to hide. Shockingly, this absence of accountability – and the influence-peddling it doubtless obscures – does not affect their charitable status.

The funding of these groups should not be a matter of voluntary disclosure. As someone remarked in February 2010, “secret corporate lobbying, like the expenses scandal, goes to the heart of why people are so fed up with politics … it’s time we shone the light of transparency on lobbying in our country and forced our politics to come clean about who is buying power and influence.”(16) Who was this leftwing firebrand? One David Cameron.

I charge that the groups which call themselves free market thinktanks are nothing of the kind. They are public relations agencies, secretly lobbying for the corporations and multi-millionaires who finance them. If they wish to refute this claim, they should disclose their funding. Until then, whenever you hear the term free market thinktank, think of a tank, crushing democracy, driven by big business.

www.monbiot.com