Turkey was already undergoing a slow-motion coup – by Erdoğan, not the army

Andrew Finkel in The Guardian


People hold a banner depicting Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as they gather outside the Turkish parliament in Ankara on 16 July. Photograph: Adem Altan/AFP/Getty Images



What happens in Turkey matters. It is a G20 economy in a sensitive part of the world, sharing borders with Iraq, Iran and Syria. Turkey is an asset to its Nato partners when it is able to exercise a leadership role. It can be a liability when its own problems – like the tension with its Kurdish population – spill over those frontiers. And it can be a millstone around the world’s neck when it decides, as it did on Friday, to self-harm.

The coup attempt that night was, by any account, a cack-handed affair. It was an attempt to grab the reins of a complex society with the almost quaintly antediluvian tactics of seizing the state television station and rolling some tanks on to the streets. It is as if the plotters had never heard of social media, while the Turkish president himself to addressed his supporters via FaceTime, urging them out on the streets. Crowds played chicken with the putschists, betting they would return to their barracks rather than have the streets run red with blood. Even then, at least 180 people – civilians, police and coup makers – died.

Indeed, the question is less why the coup failed than why it was ever carried out. If it had an air of amateur desperation, it is because its perpetrators probably assumed that this was their last chance to stop the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan from getting the military completely under its control. At the beginning of August, the military high council will meet, as it does every year, to consider who gets promoted, retired or pushed aside. In the last few days, the pro-government press has been more than hinting that a spring cleaning of the ranks is long overdue.

Indeed, many would argue that Turkey was already in the throes of a slow motion coup d’état, not by the military but by Erdoğan himself. For the last three years, he has been moving, and methodically, to take over the nodes of power.

The pressures on the media have been well documented, as the country slides in international ratings by organisations such as Freedom House, from partly free to not free at all. Opposition newspapers have been taken over by court-appointed administrators. Dissident television stations have had the plug pulled from satellites; digital platforms are no longer seen in people’s homes. Erdoğan curses the very social media which this weekend helped to save his skin.

Increasingly, the government has put the judiciary under its thumb. It is now a brave judge who rules in a way he knows will give official offence. So while the Turkish parliament congratulated itself on a long night’s defence of democracy, many wonder why its members connived in the decline of the rule of law.

And still Erdoğan craves greater authority. Last May, he discarded one prime minister in favour of another more sympathetic to his plans to change the parliamentary system into a strong executive presidency. When the coup plotters stand trial, they may suffer the additional indignation of seeing their attempts to put Erdoğan in his place backfire, by providing a mandate for such increased powers. The president has already promised a purge of those still connected to the exiled dissident cleric Fethullah Gülen – Erdoğanspeak for anyone who opposes his will.

To the outside world, this spectacle should cause dismay. Turkish ambitions to project power, to assist in the fight against Islamic State, to help forge a settlement in Syria will be much harder to realise if the government is at war with its own military and the army at war with itself. A Turkey that governs through consensus is the more valuable ally. The Turkish economy, too, will be more buoyant if relieved of the weight of political risk.

The lesson of the failed coup is that Turkey needs a leader who can bring different sides of a divided society together – or at the very least, one who is willing to try.

George Osborne’s austerity choked off the recovery: Brexit is his legacy

Aditya Chakrabortty

By March 2015, George Osborne was pulling together his final budget before the general election. The austerity chancellor had already hacked billions from health, education and social security; now he planned to slash billions more. But he had prepared one massive give-away: the complete abolition of taxes on savings, worth well over £1bn in lost revenue.

It was costly, at a time when the government was cutting to the bone. It was unjust, throwing millions at the richest, who needed it least. And it was a kick in the teeth to all those whose lives had been turned upside down in the past five years. The idea was blocked by Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrat coalition partners.

Osborne’s response is recorded by David Laws, Clegg’s ally in government negotiations. It ranks as among the most revealing things ever said about the Conservatives’ austerity strategy.

The multi-million-pound spending spree wasn’t justifiable, admitted Osborne, according to Laws’ recent memoir, Coalition. “It will only really be of help to stupid, affluent and lazy people, who can’t be bothered to put their savings away into tax-efficient vehicles!” said Osborne. “But it will still be very popular – we have polled it.”

Disabled people could kill themselves to put an end to the government’s reign of terror, and the chancellor would shrug. Working-class kids could live on foodbank lunches and ministers would claim they had no alternative. But shovelling cash at the people seen as undeserving by their very own benefactor? That, Mr Austerity would happily do. Anything to buy votes.

Remember that exchange as the moist-eyed tributes to Osborne come in over the next few days from his friends in the Conservative party and press. “A great chancellor,” says his former aide. The man himself has kept it uncharacteristically modest: “I hope I’ve left the economy in a better state than I found it.”

If only, George. While at Oxford, Osborne was a member of the Bullingdon Club and during his six years at Number 11, he trashed the economy as thoroughly as the Bullingdon boys trashed their restaurants.

Under him, Britain has endured its weakest recovery in well over 100 years. The average worker is still worse off than they were before the banks collapsed in 2008. The chancellor, who promised a march of the makers, has presided over the collapse of our steel industry. The enemy of government borrowing has bequeathed to the nation a public debt burden almost three times what it was when Margaret Thatcher was ejected from office.

The arch defender of our credit rating has seen Britain lose its AAA status. And now he leaves the country staring into what David Blanchflower – the former Bank of England rate-setter who predicted the last crash – now warns could be “a crisis bigger than Lehman Brothers: a political and economic disaster”.

Osborne’s fiscal rules have been either broken or discarded, and where their replacement should be is instead a complete vacuum. The man praised for his “strategic grip” by his former permanent secretary admitted last month that he hadn’t bothered coming up with a post-Brexit strategy. Britain is adrift in what could be the choppiest waters in decades without a fiscal policy, a paddle – or even a map.
None of this is accidental. All of it could have been foreseen – indeed, was foreseen by some of us. But it is the direct result of a sniggering callousness that punished the poor while rewarding the rich, that promised greater power for the provinces while shunting ever more money to central London, that bilked the young of their futures while bribing their grandparents all the way to the ballot box.

Perhaps the biggest charge historians will make against the chancellor is that his unfair, unreasonable economics helped produce the vote to leave Europe.

At the heart of Osbornomics were two contradictory impulses. First, and most important, was his belief that the state was “crowding out private endeavour”. His remedy was simple: slash the public sector and cut taxes and – hey presto! – you have a flourishing economy. This is what produced the wild optimism of those early forecasts of a historic boom in business investment (which never came) and the deficit paid off within five years (a deadline that was soon extended to 10 years).

To bolster his case, Osborne used evidence the way a drunk uses lampposts – not for illumination, merely to support him in his excesses. He often quoted a paper by Carmen Rheinhart and Ken Rogoff predicting disaster if public debt got too high. The finding was utterly debunked by a 20-something student, but Osborne kept quoting it anyway. The result was that the UK took longer to come out of its slump and was robbed of income – until panicky backbenchers forced Downing Street to park the strategy and chase growth from any source, especially the housing market.

The other part of Osbornomics stemmed from a justified desire to “rebalance” the economy, away from the City and London towards other industries and parts of the country. That would have required serious analysis and investment. What it got was glibness and austerity economics.

The “march of the makers” ended with the collapse of the Redcar and Port Talbot steelworks. As for the much-vaunted “northern powerhouse”, it was always a branding exercise rather than anything serious. After Clegg lobbied him to include Sheffield, he came out of the meeting chuckling to Laws: “George is hilarious. He immediately suggested including Sheffield and just dropping Leeds.” Sheffield, Leeds: to a Notting Hill boy they’re all oop north, aren’t they?

It was all just a hi-vis gag: according to the government’s own figures from last July, of all the spending on infrastructure on which work is actually under way, almost 50p of every pound is going to London. The north-east is getting less than a penny. Alongside this are the findings of Steve Fothergill and Christina Beatty, showing how the Tories’ welfare cuts left the prosperous south-east and booming inner London almost untouched. According to the authors, the areas hit hardest were “older industrial areas, less prosperous seaside towns, some London boroughs”. In other words, Brexit-land.

Thatcher and Blair might have left parts of the country battered and feeble, but it was Osborne who cut off their life support, by taking away the public sector jobs and benefits. It was Osborne who created the post-crash economy of low pay and zero-hours contracts, at the apex of which stand the likes of Mike Ashley and Philip Green. It was Osborne who took the tax revenue from eastern European workers but refused to reinvest it in schools and local government, thus stoking community tensions. It was Osborne who indulged in the divide-and-rule rhetoric of skivers v strivers. He has to take part of the blame for Brexit, even while he no longer has to shoulder the responsibility for it.

It’s his successor, Philip Hammond, who will face the news of big businesses pulling investment, workers getting less work and shops receiving less money. Of Mark Carney admitting the Bank of England has precious little room for manoeuvre – as a direct consequence of Osborne’s failure. To save the economy, Hammond will have to repudiate Osbornomics. I fear that that remains unthinkable for a Tory.

Still, George, what larks, eh? Now on to the non-executive directorships and six-figure speeches.

A Uniform Civil Code: It isn’t about women

Nivedita Menon in The Hindu

The talk of a Uniform Civil Code has nothing to do with gender justice. It has entirely to do with a Hindu nationalist agenda to ‘discipline’ Muslims

For nearly eight decades, the women’s movement has discussed and debated the desirability and feasibility of a Uniform Civil Code, and has ended up posing a simple question — what is the value of uniformity? Is it for the “integrity of the nation” that uniformity in laws is required, as some judicial pronouncements have suggested? If so, who exactly is the beneficiary? Which sections of people benefit from “integrity of the nation”, that abstract entity which is not exactly at the top of your mind as your husband throws you out on the street?

Or are uniform laws meant to ensure justice for women in marriage and inheritance? In that case, a Uniform Civil Code would simply put together the best gender-just practices from all Personal Laws. So yes, polygamy and arbitrary divorce would be outlawed (a feature derived from Hindu Personal Law). But conversely, as feminist legal activist Flavia Agnes has often pointed out, a Uniform Civil Code would require the abolition of the Hindu Undivided Family, a legal institution that gives tax benefits only to Hindus, and all citizens of India would have to be governed by the largely gender-just Indian Succession Act, 1925, currently applicable only to Christians and Parsis.

A stick to beat Muslims with

Muslim Personal Law is already modern in this sense, since it has since the 1930s enshrined individual rights to property, unlike Hindu law, in which the family’s natural condition is assumed to be “joint”. In the decades of the 1930s and 1940s, contrary to later discourses about Muslim law being backward, it was Hindu laws that were considered “backward” and needing to be brought into the modern world of individual property rights.

Again, since the Muslim marriage as contract protects women better in case of divorce than the Hindu marriage as sacrament, all marriages would have to be civil contracts. Mehr, in Muslim Personal Law, paid by the husband’s family to the wife upon marriage, is the exclusive property of the wife and it is hers upon divorce, offering her a protection Hindu women do not have. So, the Uniform Civil Code would make the practice of mehr compulsory for all while abolishing dowry.

The patent absurdity of these suggestions arises not from the ideas themselves, but from the fact, recognised by everybody, that the talk of a “Uniform Civil Code” has nothing to do at all with gender justice. It has entirely to do with a Hindu nationalist agenda, and is right up there with the beef ban and the temple in Ayodhya. A Uniform Civil Code is meant to discipline Muslims, teach them (if they didn’t know it already) that they are second-class citizens, and that they live at the mercy of “the national race” (the Hindus), as M.S. Golwalkar decreed.

The real issue of gender justice

So let us pose the question differently — who suffers in the absence of a Uniform Civil Code? Is it Muslim women, victims of polygamy and triple talaq, as Hindutvavadi wisdom has it? But for decades, feminist legal practice has successfully used both the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 — that is available to all Indian citizens regardless of religious identity — as well as the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, to deal with polygamy and triple talaq, and to obtain maintenance, child custody and rights to matrimonial home for countless Muslim women. In addition, feminist legal activists have used the landmark Shamim Ara v. State of U.P. (2002) ruling to buttress their claim that arbitrary triple talaq is invalid.

Moreover, polygamy is not exclusive to Muslims. Hindu men are polygamous too, except that because polygamy is legally banned in Hindu law, subsequent wives have no legal standing and no protection under the law. Under Sharia law, on the contrary, subsequent wives have rights and husbands have obligations towards them. If gender justice is the value we espouse, rather than monogamy per se, we would be thinking about how to protect “wives” in the patriarchal institution of marriage. “Wives” are produced through the institution of compulsory heterosexual marriage, the basis of which is the sexual division of labour. This institution is sustained by the productive and reproductive labour of women, and almost all women are exclusively trained to be wives alone.

Thus, when a marriage fails to fulfil its patriarchal promise of security in return for that labour, all that most women are left with is the capacity for unskilled labour. Or they remain trapped in marriage with children to provide for, while men marry again, legally or otherwise, producing still more dependent, exploited wives and children for whom they take no responsibility. If gender justice is the point of legal reforms, the centrality and power of the compulsory heterosexual, patriarchal marriage, and the damage it can do to women, is what must be mitigated. This would mean recognising the reality of multiple “wives” as a common practice across communities, and the protection of the rights of all women in such relationships.

In this sense, recent Supreme Court rulings that have granted rights to second wives in Hindu marriages dilute the legal standing of monogamy for Hindus but empower women.

A survey conducted by the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, a significant voice in the debate, found that more than 90 per cent of Muslim women in India want a ban on “triple talaq” and polygamy in Muslim Personal Law. That is, the demand is made within the framework of codifying Muslim Personal Law, not in favour of a Uniform Civil Code, partly because there is no clarity on what a uniform code would look like, but also because the demand comes from clearly Hindutvavadi quarters which have shown that both women and minorities are expendable for them.

Lessons from the Goa experience

The only example of a uniform code in India is the Portuguese Civil Procedure Code (1939) of Goa, which is neither ‘uniform’ nor gender-just. Marriage laws differ for Catholics and people of other faiths, and if a marriage is solemnised in church, then Church law applies, permitting, for example, arbitrary annulment at the behest of one of the parties. The “customs and usages” of the Hindus of Goa are recognised, including “limited” polygamy for Hindus.

The positive aspect of Goa’s Civil Code is the Community Property Law, which guarantees each spouse 50 per cent of all assets owned and due to be inherited at the time of marriage. However, this provision can be sidestepped in practice, given the power relations in a marriage, and studies show that it has not made any impact on the incidence of domestic violence.

Clearly, if gender justice is not prioritised, both uniformity as well as its dilution can reinforce patriarchy and majoritarianism.

The woman at the centre of this recent round of debate on the Uniform Civil Code is Shayara Bano, who received talaq by post. Her lawyer, instead of using any of the three recourses available discussed above — the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, or the citation of the Shamim Ara v. State of U.P. (2002) judgment — decided to file a Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court challenging triple talaq on the grounds of violation of Fundamental Rights. Ms. Bano is now in the media spotlight, spiritedly criticising patriarchy in the Muslim community.

Revealingly, a recent interview with her in a national newspaper concluded with a startling question — “What about the ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ slogan controversy?” Ms. Bano replies, “I feel all Muslims should say Bharat Maa ki Jai.”

Does the question seem irrelevant in the context of Ms. Bano’s fight for personal justice? What does compulsory chanting of “Bharat Mata ki Jai” have to do with a woman fighting patriarchy?

But the question does not seem irrelevant at all; it seems to be at the heart of the interview. This alone should alert us to what the demand for a Uniform Civil Code is actually about.

Nivedita Menon, a feminist scholar, is a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University

A vote for the Labour leader? That'll cost you £25 - even if you're a member. So much for anti-austerity politics

'The ridiculous charge is an attempt to keep the most working class, marginalised people from voting for Corbyn. It's an insult to anyone in a difficult financial situation and an attempt to stifle their political voice.' 

Kirsty Major in The Independent


According to the Labour Party website: “As a democratic, socialist party we welcome people to join… from all walks of life, to have their say and influence policy. We welcome membership applications from individuals, families, young people, students, workers, unemployed, older people – anyone with an interest in building a better Britain.”

It also states: “To newcomers, working out how everything fits together can seem a bit of a maze” - and they’re not wrong there. New members, including those young and unemployed supporters, have been left wondering why some members of the National Executive Committee (NEC) have voted to retrospectively disenfranchise them. Following a decision taken last night, the 130,000 members who joined in the last six months are no longer able to vote and will have to re-register and pay a whopping £25 registration fee if they wish to vote in the upcoming Labour leadership election.

£25 is an outstanding amount of money for the young, the unemployed, workers on low wages, and older people – the very groups the party purports to represent. A person looking for work, unable to work because of illness, or a person who is pregnant, a carer, or a single parent on low income and working less than 16 hours per week is given between £57.90 and £73.10 per week to live on. So if you are on benefits, becoming a supporter of the Labour Party will cost you between 34 per cent and 45 per cent of your weekly income. Being a member of the Labour Party then starts to look like an opportunity for the privileged few, rather than one available to all.

The move was supposedly an attempt to prevent a split in the party, but by bringing these measures in, members of the NEC who voted in favour of the motion have already ripped up their supporters’ trust. Many new members joined following Brexit, feeling motivated to engage with politics after seeing figures like Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage exploit the concerns of working class communities worn down by years of Tory-led austerity. They joined Labour in the hope of becoming involved in their local branch and voting for a leader - be it Angela Eagle or Jeremy Corbyn - who would create a credible alternative to the Conservative Party.

Instead, the NEC have decided to financially and democratically exclude members, who they suspect are largely Corbyn supporters, to further their own party goals of winning at any cost. Furthermore, some in the NEC have been accused of gerrymandering after the vote was taken on the motion which was not included on the agenda, and after Corbyn and other pro-Corbyn members had left the room. So much for restoring trust in the Labour Party.

This move only serves to exacerbate the social exclusion of those who need more than ever to be given a voice within mainstream parties. If you needed proof of their anger, the damning protest vote against parliamentary politics during the EU referendum was pretty hard evidence. Amina Gichinga, 26, a recent Labour Party member and community organiser in Newham, told me recently, “The ridiculous £25 charge is an attempt to keep out the most working class marginalised people from voting because they know it'll amount to a landslide vote for Corbyn. £25 is some family's weekly shopping money - it is an insult to anyone in a difficult financial situation and an attempt to stifle their political voice.”