The perils of ‘flying while Muslim’

Homa Khaleeli in The Guardian

On March 26 this year, Hasan Aldewachi was on his way back from a science conference in Vienna, and looking forward to seeing his family. As he took his seat on the flight to Gatwick, he sent his wife a text message to let her know the plane was delayed. A woman sitting across the aisle got up and left her seat. Moments later the police arrived.

The Iraqi-born Sheffield Hallam student was asked to leave the plane and held for four hours. After his phone was confiscated, he was left at the airport with no onward ticket or refund. The reason? His message was in Arabic.

Aldewachi’s story is just one example of the dangers of what has become known as “flying while Muslim”; the tongue-in-cheek term for the discrimination many Muslim passengers feel they have faced at airports since 9/11. It can range from extra questions from airport staff, to formal searches by police, to secondary security screenings and visa problems when visiting America. Sometimes it feels like every Muslim has a tale to tell.

 

Faizah Shaheen … reading about Syria. Photograph: Twitter

Two weeks ago, a Muslim couple celebrating their wedding anniversary were removed from a flight from France to the US. A crew member allegedly complained that Nazia Ali, 34, who wears a headscarf, was using her phone, and her husband Faisal was sweating. The flight attendant allegedly also complained that the couple used the word “Allah”. The airline in question subsequently said it was “deeply committed to treating all of our customers with respect”.

Other examples this summer include NHS mental-health worker Faizah Shaheen who was on her way back from her honeymoon when she was detained and questioned by police under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act. Cabin crew on her outbound flight said they had spotted her reading a book about Syria. Shaheen said she was left in tears by the experience. Thomson airlines said: “Our crew are trained to report any concerns they may have as a precaution.” 

The stories that hit the headlines are often those similar to Aldewachi’s or Shaheen’s – where normal behaviour by Muslim passengers is seen as suspicious. More prevalent, but less reported, are the day-to-day stories of innocent passengers who feel they are under suspicion solely because of their religion.

Equality and civil liberties groups warn that the net is now being thrown so wide that it is stigmatising and alienating thousands of Muslims. This, many argue, could make our time in the air less safe by sowing seeds of division. Even high-profile Muslims cannot escape. England cricketer Moeen Ali, Cat Stevens, music producer Naughty Boyand comedian Adil Ray have all complained of discriminatory treatment at airports. This month, Four Lions actor and rapper Riz Ahmed released a single called T5, about the problems he faces on flights.

Aldewachi, who has lived in the UK since 2010, is still shaken by his experience. “Everyone was looking at me and assuming I had done something wrong. This is not vigilance. This is stereotyping,” he says.

He has received no apology from the Austrian police – and says that apart from being told that a female passenger had reported seeing “something related to Isis” – he was given no further explanation. The biomedical scientist finally received an apology and refund from easyJet after his story was reported in a newspaper.

Aldewachi thinks the focus on terrorism in the media hasn’t helped. “People who know me are astonished. I am calm and quiet – they can’t understand why anyone would look at me and be afraid.

“To compare it to something in my field, it’s like swine flu. Everyone thought they had it because they heard so much about it.”

Khairuldeen Makhzoomi can sympathise. In April, the 26-year-old was on his way back to his university in California when he phoned his uncle in Iraq to tell him he had been invited to a formal dinner at which Ban Ki-moon would be present – he even asked the UN secretary general a question. A woman in front of him reported him and Makhzoomi was asked to leave the plane, confronted by police officers, and had his bag searched in front of other passengers. The politics student says the airline manager told him he should have known it was a security risk to “speak that language”. However, the airline, Southwest, released a statement saying it was the content of his words that was “perceived to be threatening,” not his use of Arabic.
In March, a London DJ, Mehary Yemane-Tesfagiorgis, was removed from a flight from Rome because a passenger said they didn’t feel safe travelling with him. Yemane-Tesfagiorgis, who is black, said he was a victim of racial profiling.

Fellow Londoner, Laolu Opebiyi, a Nigerian-born Christian, was asked to leave a plane after another passenger saw a prayer group message on his phone, labelled “Isi” (an acronym for “iron sharpens iron”, a Biblical quotation). Earlier this month Guido Menzio, a University of Pennsylvania economics professor who has “curly, dark hair”, was expelled from a plane in the US after the equations he was writing alarmed a female passenger.

In the US, so many Sikhs have been subjected to extra screening because of their clothing that the Sikh Coalition has launched an app to highlight cases of discrimination. Katy Sian, a lecturer at the University of York who has been researching the problems faced by Sikhs at airports, says the issue highlights “how brown, male bodies are caught up in the war on terror”.

When I asked family and friends for their experiences of “flying while Muslim” the stories came thick and fast. A friend recounted being prevented from boarding and questioned by secruity officials. A Guardian editor was stopped and questioned four out of the seven times he travelled to the US, including being asked about attending training camps in the Middle East.

A relative of mine, who lives in the UK, and has both US and UK passports, is stopped on “80% of my trips to, or within, the US – and I travel there about five or six times a year”.

It began soon after 9/11 on a layover in Minnesota. A police officer asked him to confirm his name and then to accompany him for questioning.

“When I asked him what it was about, he said the pilot had said I had been belligerent on the flight. I immediately switched to being as American as possible. I said something like, ‘Yo, dude, that’s totally ridiculous. I didn’t speak to anyone.’ I said he seemed like a nice guy, but this was racist profiling. When I said that, he apologised and said his boss had told him to check me out.”

Now he arrives early for flights in the US to factor in the extra security screening. “Once, they told me it was a ‘random’ selection and when I asked what it was based on, they said: ‘Name, age, ethnicity.’

 2. ‘Do not speak foreign.’ Illustration: Son of Alan/Folio

“In Turkey, I was told I had the same name as a terrorist’s son, and that the US shares their watchlist with them.

“I always put up a fight because the way they treat you is terrible. My view is that I am practically a boy scout. If I don’t say something, who will?”

Hugh Handeyside, from the American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU], explains that repeatedly having “SSSS” (secondary security screening selection) printed on your boarding pass is a “strong indication” your name has made it to a subset of the US government’s sprawling terrorism watchlist. Sometimes it is enough to have a name similar to someone who is on the list.

The database is believed to contain hundreds of thousands of names, and the secrecy surrounding it is intensely controversial. In April the Council of American Islamic Relations’ [Cair] Michigan branch launched a class action on behalf of the “thousands of innocent Americans who were wrongfully designated as ‘known or suspected terrorists’ without due process”, and another lawsuit seeking a “declaration that the watchlist is unconstitutional”.

Handeyside says that lawsuits by the ACLU have revealed that travel to a particular country in a particular year have been given as reasons for inclusion on a different subset of the watchlist – the no-fly list.

In 2014, leaked details showed that those of Muslim descent were disproportionately represented on the list; while New York had the most watchlisted people, the second was Dearborne, a small city in Michigan. As Handeyside points out, Dearborne is “the centre of the highest concentration of people of Arab descent outside the Middle East”. The use of algorithms to determine who required extra screening renders the system even more opaque.

The attorney, who spent two years working for the CIA, says the huge numbers involved mean the watchlists are not making us safer. “It increases the size of the haystack – if there is a needle in there it is so much harder to find … it immeasurably increases the white noise.”

For cases of mistaken identity, there is a redress system. Cair says even this is wrapped in secrecy and the only way to find out if you have been successful is by flying again.

Campaigners say few Muslims are willing to complain officially about their treatment at airports. The stigma of being accused of being a terrorist, even if the accusations are unwarranted, can be enough to silence many. Others fear a backlash from the authorities.

Handeyside says those who easily dismiss such experiences don’t always realise the toll it can take. “We can’t underestimate how stigmatising and unpleasant it is to have to go through this every single time – to have everyone looking at you and thinking you are a terrorist.”

Imam Ajmal Masroor, was so incensed by his own treatment at an airport that he set up a website to collate other people’s stories. Having travelling to and from the States several times in 2015, he was stopped by US Embassy officials at the airport in December and abruptly told his business visa had been revoked.

Masroor, 44, who says he has received death threats for speaking out against terrorism in the past, explains he was eventually told the problem was someone on his Facebook page, “but I have 30,000 followers so I don’t know who that is”. And despite a letter from the State Department saying the revocation was an error, he says visits to the US embassy have not rectified the situation.

One politician trying to discover the scale of the problem is the MP Stella Creasy. She has been asking questions about US Homeland Security issues after a family of 11 from her Walthamstow constituency were stopped at the airport as they made their way to Disneyland. The family lost $13,340 by missing their flights, which they were told would not be refunded. The trauma is, of course, impossible to quantify. “Their Esta visa was revoked. The kids were crying. They had to give back everything they had bought from duty free – it was horrible. Why not tell them before they get to the airport?”

  3. ‘Allow extra time to clear security.’ Illustration: Son of Alan/Folio

When she heard similar stories from other constituents she asked questions in parliament, but was told no figures about how many UK citizens are barred from visiting the US are kept. While UK authorities publish stop-and-search data, broken down by ethnicity, the US is less transparent.

“There is confirmation that Homeland Security officials are working out of Manchester, Gatwick and Heathrow airports, but under what auspices is unclear,” she says. “If we have the data, we can either allay fears or do something about it. But the government doesn’t know, and that should worry us.”

Now she is hoping to launch a legal case challenging the government over the lack of figuresm, insisting it is a failure of their public sector equality duty.

“No one is suggesting that there should not be checks. It’s the lack of information and scrutiny that is the problem.”

A US embassy spokesperson stressed that religion, faith, or spiritual beliefs were not determining factors about admissibility into the US. US Customs and Border Protection confirmed it did not disclose the percentage of travellers selected for secondary inspection or breakdown their figures by ethnicity. However, a spokesperson said the numbers were “almost insignificant” compared with the volume of travellers arriving from the UK every day.

 

SNP MSP Humza Yousaf with party leader Nicola Sturgeon Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

While the UK may keep figures for stop and searches at airports, that doesn’t mean there are no problems. In 2012 Glasgow airport faced a boycott from Muslim passengers, who said they were fed up with being harassed by counter-terrorism officers. A year earlier, the Scottish MSP Humza Yousaf revealed he had been been stopped under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. It wasn’t the first time he was stopped.

Under the original legislation of this stop-and-search law act, anyone entering or leaving the UK could be held for up to nine hours with no grounds for suspicion needed. At its peak in 2009/10, 85,000 travellers a year were stopped and ethnic minorities were 42 times more likely to be stopped than white passengers.

Yousaf said his frequent stops illustrated that they were based on skin colour, not intelligence information.

In 2014, after strong criticism, there was a change in the law referring to schedule 7 stops. The presence of a solicitor was required and the maximum detention time was reduced to six hours. It led to a dramatic drop in those stopped. The latest available data shows a considerably lower number – in 2015, a fall of 21% on the previous year. David Anderson, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, says this, in part, is down to an increased focus on data and behavioural analysis and a “reduced reliance on intuitive stops”. Anderson does not believe the statistics show schedule 7 powers are being used in a racially discriminatory manner, although he acknowledges the stops cause “considerable irritation for travellers of all ethnicities” while “arrest rates remain very low indeed by the standards of stop and search”. Five supreme court judges reviewed his analysis and while four agreed, one believed “schedule 7 not only permits direct discrimination; it is entirely at odds with the notion of an enlightened pluralistic society”.

  4. ‘Text with care.’ Illustration: Son of Alan/Folio

This year, the government published new guidance pointing out that the decision to stop someone should not be arbitrary, and ethnicity and religion should only be considered significant in association with “factors which show a connection with the threat from terrorism”. According to analysis of the 2015 figures by Faith Matters, a community-cohesion organisation, “non-whites are at least 37 times as likely as a white person to be detained at a port or airport. Asians are almost 80 times as likely as a white person to be detained at an airport or port.” Along with anecdotal evidence, this, they say, shows a “significant level of profiling that demands urgent action to ensure that British citizens and non-UK nationals visiting Britain are treated equally.”

Stefano Bonino, a criminologist at Northumbria University recently, interviewed 39 Scottish Muslims. He found while most had positive stories of “relative local harmony”, his interviewees’ experience of airports created real feelings of alienation, social inequality, “anger and humiliation”.

Philip Baum, author of Violence in the Skies, says racial profiling is unhelpful, but says there should be more behavioural analysis at airports than we have currently. “Even if an attack is being carried out under Isis or al-Qaeda that doesn’t mean it will be someone carrying it out who ‘looks’ Muslim. The classic case was the Anne Marie Murphy case in 1986, who was stopped from boarding a flight to Tel Aviv – of 1986. She was white, female and pregnant – not a stereotypical image of a terrorist.” Murphy was found to be unwittingly carrying explosives in her luggage – placed there by her Jordanian fiancé, Nezar Hindawi, who was jailed for 45 years.

Baum suggests that the widespread belief that Muslims will be targeted could in turn change their behaviour. “There is a lot of paranoia and sometimes people can be affected by that – they act suspiciously because they think they will be picked on.”

While the fear of terrorism at airports means that many people are willing to put up with more intrusive security procedures, the discriminatory experiences at airports that many Muslims recount risks creating divisions and resentment.

For Bonino the consequences are clear. “Grievance based jihadi propaganda can use things like this. When you want Muslims to work with the authorities to counter violent extremism on the ground, it’s not helpful for people to think they are targeted by the authorities themselves.”
Know your rights


The Council of American Islamic Relations guide to your rights

• A customs agent has the right to stop, detain and search every person and item.

• Screeners have the authority to conduct a further search of you or your bags.

• A pilot has the right to refuse to fly a passenger they believe is a threat to the safety of the flight. The pilot’s decision must be reasonable and based on observations, not stereotypes.


If you believe you have been treated in a discriminatory manner:

• Note the names and IDs of those involved.

• Ask to speak to a supervisor.

• Politely ask if you have been singled out because of your name, looks, dress, race, ethnicity, faith or national origin.

• Politely ask witnesses to give you their names and contact information.

• Write a statement of facts immediately after the incident. Include the flight number, the flight date and the name of the airline.

No-fly list and selectee list

You may be on the selectee list if you are unable to use the internet or the airport kiosks for automated check-in. You should eventually be permitted to fly. The no-fly list prohibits individuals from flying at all. If you are able to board an airplane, regardless of the amount of questioning or screening, then you are not on the no-fly list.

Schedule 7 guide by Faith Matters

• Under schedule 7 you can be searched, examined and detained by a police officer at a port or airport.

• If you are stopped, your person and your property may be searched, but you can request that the search of your person be conducted by someone of the same gender.

• You do not have to answer questions about other individuals or agree to snoop on any other individuals.

• You have the right to speak to a solicitor.

• If you are detained, the police are expected to take you to a police station as soon as is reasonably possible. You can be detained only up to six hours (unless you are arrested or charged). You have the right to inform “one named person” of your detention.

Why we need in-game penalties for slow over rates

LIAM CROMAR in Cricinfo


If the paying public isn't to feel short-changed, administrators need to consider effective ways of disciplining teams

It's easy to dismiss complaints about slow over rates as the grumblings of a few non-representative malcontents. It's probably also true that many spectators are not bothered - at least not beyond brief shoulder-shrugging. Corruption, dead pitches, and (mis-) governance are certainly more pressing issues. Yet that isn't to say it's not a problem that shouldn't be fixed.

The way Tests are marketed works against spectators realising their loss. One is encouraged to buy a ticket for a day, not for the minimum number of overs scheduled for the day. The overs lost are almost imperceptible, unless one is keeping an eye on the progress. Even when overs are lost, the percentage of cricket reduced seems trivial. Three overs out of 90, the number that England failed to bowl on the first day at Lord's against Pakistan, is a mere 3.33%. Much ado about nothing?

A moment's consideration will, however, reveal the unacceptability of such short-changing. Would, for example, all in attendance at a football match be content if the players downed tools after 87 minutes? Would cinema-goers put up with the last four minutes of a two-hour film being chopped off? Would the audience applaud were an orchestra to pack up without playing the last few bars of the symphony?

Officially, 90 overs is a minimum, albeit more of a theoretical, aspirational minimum than a literal minimum. That it is well within the realms of possibility is highlighted by the fact that not only do recreational cricketers regularly fit 90 overs into an afternoon but also that it isn't completely unheard of for international teams to meet the target.

Six hours of 15 overs each should therefore not be viewed as too taxing, even without making use of the extra half-hour, which is supposedly a reserve, only to be used if needed. Unfortunately, it now appears that the extra time is viewed as an entitlement rather than an option to be used only in extremis. To run past the official close time may be regarded as a misfortune; to fail to complete the overs in the extra time should be regarded as carelessness.

Worse, it smacks of discourtesy. In much the same way that certain tins of chocolates appear to have quietly scaled down over the years, over rates are another example of almost invisible under-provision: the amount paid for the product stays the same, but less of the product is handed over.

To put some figures on this, take the example of England's 87 for 90 at Lord's. A top-price ticket cost £90, meaning one over held a value of £1. Therefore a ticket holder would have failed to see anything for three of the pounds that he or she handed over. Three pounds may not seem like a great deal, but it's not nothing. Not everyone at Lord's is a London high-flyer awash with cash.

Would all in attendance at a football match be content if the players downed tools after 87 minutes?

Now bear in mind 29,000 were at Lord's that day. Not all would have paid £90 - some tickets were down at £60, while some will have enjoyed hospitality in private boxes - so for purposes of argument, assume that the average ticket cost was £75, meaning the average "loss" would have equated to £2.50.

Naturally, no refund was offered; none is given if even a mere 25 overs have been bowled, 27.78% of the supposed minimum, yet again highlighting the flexible nature of the word "minimum". Twenty-nine thousand multiplied by £2.50 yields a collective loss of £72,500.

So much for the financial element. However, more is at stake. On the last ball of the 87th over, Pakistan had lost their sixth wicket. Three further overs, including one from the on-song Chris Woakes, would have been engrossing watching. Of course, it's not entirely correct to imagine the hypothetical overs as being added on to the end of the day; still, the more overs bowled during the day, the more chance of action for the spectators.

It would be impractical to force players to complete the overs regardless of conditions - playing in darkness would unfairly penalise the batting side - but if players are not going to be required to complete the scheduled overs even when conditions are suitable, then an effective way of policing it needs to be found, one that stands a chance of benefiting paying viewers.
The current system of policing over rates via the threats of forfeiting match fees, or in extreme cases, banning captains, leaves much to be desired. Suspending captains, while obviously more likely to concentrate the minds of the players, is liable to be gamed. During the World T20 in 2012, when Mahela Jayawardene was in danger of incurring a suspension, Kumar Sangakkara was named as the official captain against England. Yet it quickly became apparent that Jayawardene was still in command on the field.

Furthermore, suspending the captain perversely punishes the spectators at the next game, depriving them of seeing one of the team's best players, a point that has been made before. As far as match-fee fines go, while the threat of losing 20% of a £12,000 fee might be a significant restraint for mortals, it's hard to see how it would be anything but water off an England captain's back (water down the back being a common experience in that climate), and does nothing to compensate the ticket holders. In-game penalties, with immediate application, are the way forward.

It is curious that in England the form of the game that least suffers from running slightly overtime - T20 - is the one where teams incur the heaviest immediate penalty: six runs if the 20th over has not commenced after 75 minutes. This is despite the fact that, arguably, neither the batting side nor the spectators miss out. All the necessary overs will still be bowled. If only 114 balls are delivered before the 75-minute cut-off, rather than the required 115, the net effect is only to increase the average time taken for each delivery from 39.13 seconds to 39.47. It's hard to justify a claim that the intensity would appreciably suffer without such a constraint, although, in fairness, the introduction of the countdown clock adds an extra element of tension to a crowd-pleasing format.

Test match cricket needs such an in-game penalty much more than T20 does. A five-run penalty would be an obvious first step, but since five runs rarely makes much of a difference in a Test match, that appears too minor. Another possible approach would be to inflict a ten-over delay for the new ball - or, should the umpires determine that that would unduly benefit the fielding side, grant the batsmen ten overs with a ball of their choice: the old ball, a new ball, or an un-shined ball of comparable wear.

A more radical solution would be that should the over rate in one session drop below the threshold, one fielder is suspended for the following session, forcing the team to make do with ten men. Such a penalty would wonderfully focus the minds of the fielding team, especially if the suspended fielder turned out to be their strike bowler. While spectators would be momentarily deprived of seeing that player perform, they would be treated to the extra intrigue of the batting side attempting to capitalise on their temporary significant advantage - an 11.11% reduction in fielders, excluding the keeper and bowler - as they saw fit, quite possibly through higher scoring for that session.

Something similar could be arranged if the side at fault is batting in the next session. A player could be prevented from batting during that session, thus forcing a rejig of the batting order. If nine wickets were lost and one player was currently suspended, the team would be all out.

Whichever approach is considered preferable, it is time to make over rates an in-game rather than post-game issue, for the sake of the spectators. As a noted England skipper, of sorts, was once said to say after a humbling defeat: "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me." Were a few more captains to experience such sentiments, over rates and their associated debates might be relegated to the past.

Cameron was right, Britain is broken. But it’s businessmen who are to blame

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian


In opposition, David Cameron battered Gordon Brown with two words: Broken Britain. It was his Murdoch-inspired catchphrase for hoodies scrapping in gangs, Neets necking alcopops, teenagers ending up pregnant. It set the framework for Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms. Broken Britain summed up the dark side of the New Labour era: a busted social contract and a class wantonly sponging off the rest of society.

It always struck me as the right phrase for the wrong target. The real Broken Britain is the one revealed over the past four days in two reports from MPs. It is workers urinating into bottles at the “Victorian workhouse” of Sports Direct, because their toilet breaks are restricted. It is women being offered permanent jobs in return for sexual favours. It is BHS, a high-street chain nearly as old as the Queen, effectively killed by two “plundering” owners. It is 10,000 shop workers who will shortly be out on the streets, and 20,000 pension-scheme members who must now worry over how much they’ll have to live on in their old age.

The riots of 2011 were taken by Cameron as proof he’d been right all along: “Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Behaving as if your choices have no consequences … Reward without effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities.” This is Philip Green and Mike Ashley summed up – along with all the well-heeled consultants, directors and credulous politicians (including Cameron) who applauded and subsidised them on their way, bought off with fat fees and cheap photo-ops.

The rioting kids who stole bottles of water and robbed tellies from their local Argos were given prison sentences worth a total of 1,200 years. By contrast, Greenand Ashley weren’t even going to bother facing MPs. Only after five months of back and forth did Sports Direct’s Ashley get in the chauffeured car down to Westminster.

Green went one better, demanding that Frank Field resign from the BHS inquiry – then rocking up to parliament and telling MPs to stop looking at him. Such prickliness from a multibillionaire would have been funny had it not been for the thousands of families whose lives he’d just ruined.

Two things stand out from the Commons reports. First, while they rightly make Ashley and Sir Philip Greed (as he surely must now be called) responsible for their malpractices, they make clear that they were supported and sustained by large corporate networks.

The staff filling Sports Direct’s giant Shirebrook warehouse came from two temp agencies, Transline and Best Connection. These are not two-bit operations, but industry leaders: a multinational, Transline was awarded Temporary Recruitment Agency of the Year in 2014. Yet MPs discovered it had broken the gangmaster licensing law, while a Channel 4 investigation accused the company in 2015 of paying below the minimum wage to workers at other businesses (Transline say itssoftware prevents this happening). Staffing Shirebrook alone was worth £50m a year to these two companies, estimate the MPs. Some people were making a lot of money from the degradation of others.

The collapse of BHS involved an even more stellar cast. There was the “complacent” Lord Grabiner, for whose “veneer of establishment credibility” and shocking apparent docility, Green paid a lot of money. The equally handsomely rewarded auditors at PwC signed off BHS as a going concern in March 2015 – just months before it finally collapsed. PwC was of course the auditor to Tesco, which admitted to exaggerating its profits by £250m. Green told MPs thatDominic Chappell, whom he sold BHS to, had been given the all-clear by the world’s most famous investment bank, Goldman Sachs – despite being a serial bankrupt and a world-class fantasist. On Chappell’s side, Grant Thornton and law firm Olswang were paid “generous fees” to drive through a deal that killed an entire business.

Britain is the finance capital of the world, and these are some of the biggest names in the industry. Yet Monday’s report finds them “culpable” of cashing the cheques and being conveniently blind to massive corporate failure. In that respect, what Field and his colleagues have done is torn down one of the delusions about post-industrial Britain. From the London Whale to the Libor scandal to BHS, what the City really leads the way in is not ingenuity or innovation, but in being the no-questions-asked SpivZone of financial markets.

Libor-rigging trial: ex-Barclays traders jailed for two to six years

Read more

The second striking thing about the MPs’ reports is that there is a giant hole where politics should be. Green and Ashley might have acted as if they were above Westminster, but they couldn’t have prospered without its parliamentarians. This is directly true of Green, who was knighted by Tony Blair then given a government appointment by Cameron. Blair bestowed that honour despite Green having engineered the payment of a £1.3bn dividend to his wife, Tina, in the tax haven of Monaco – a historic handout that avoided around £300m in taxes. The tax savings on that one payout were worth 10 large secondary schools – or would plug half BHS’s pensions blackhole. For such financial ingenuity, Green was invited by Cameron to advise on where government spending could be cut, including which parts of social security could be axed.

If Green does walk away from the BHS pensions deficit, it will be savers at other company pension schemes who will ultimately have to make good his shortfall. Just as when Ashley let a business in Scotland collapse and stuck taxpayers with the £700,000 bill. Or when both men run business models that rely on poverty pay and the state picking up the tab.

In Brexit Britain, one of the most important contracts between businesses and the public has been broken. Companies increasingly rely on the public to pay their way: to top up wages with benefits and public services, and billions in subsidies and grants and tax reliefs. What goes with that is another broken contract: the one that says work always pays. From Norman Tebbit to Brown to IDS, that idea has been central to employment and welfare policy. It is now dead. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies said last week: “The new poor tend to live in households where there is someone in work.” This is a fact that those at the bottom of the labour market have known for years, but is only now working its way into the minds of policymakers.

Cameron warned of “the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations”. He was right. It’s just that it’s been led by those at the top – the ones at the boardroom tables, their expensive helpers – and their mates and supporters in politics using taxpayer money to wave them on.

America's most prestigious colleges have always defined "merit" according to their institutional interests

Nov 24th 2005 in The Economist 






AMERICANS justify their country's comparatively high social inequality by emphasising its equality of opportunity. The implication is that it is talent and hard work, not inherited privilege, which separate the rich from the poor.



The linchpin of such a meritocratic perspective is the educational system, which effectively allows access to the top of the socioeconomic ladder through the process of university admissions. America's big three universities (Harvard, Yale and Princeton) have for centuries created and reproduced the national elite, and have long sworn fealty to the principle of egalitarian opportunity. But in “The Chosen”, an encyclopedic and engaging account of their admissions over the last century, Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, demolishes their historical claim to be bastions of meritocracy. More provocatively, he questions the whole idea of whether you can define merit objectively, and instead uses painstaking archival research to prove that, over the years, the Ivy League universities have defined and redefined merit according to their shifting institutional priorities.
“The Chosen” highlights two critical turning points: the birth in the 1920s of selective admissions that introduced subjective non-academic merit as a criteria for acceptance, and the universities' dramatic shift in the direction of socioeconomic inclusivity in the 1960s, when they re-tooled the concept of merit to open their doors to racial minorities and women.

When Mr Karabel picks up the story shortly after 1900, the colleges were becoming increasingly concerned about the number of Jews who were passing the entrance exams. Since the Protestant upper classes who paid tuition bills had deserted other universities, notably Columbia, where “Hebrew” enrolments were deemed excessive, administrators regarded the increased Jewish presence as both a cultural insult and a threat to their institutional viability.

As a result, the colleges limited the size of their classes and began to reject students by creating a definition of merit that was expressly designed to justify quotas on Jewish applicants. Academic achievement would play second fiddle to the character and manliness thought to be inculcated by prestigious boarding schools. Jews (limited to 15% of the class at Harvard and 10% at Yale) were deemed lacking in these attributes. In the words of a former Harvard dean of admissions, Wilbur Bender, Jews were “effeminates, the precious and affected, the unstable”, while private school boys were “virile, masculine, red-blooded he-men”.

The three universities continued to find character almost exclusively in wealthy Protestant boys until the 1960s, when external social upheaval changed their institutional priorities. The student takeovers of university buildings and the violent race riots of that era caused administrators to fear for campus security, and they sought to avoid such disturbances by admitting (and, implicitly, co-opting) more black students. Since few black applicants had high test scores, the admissions definition of merit again had to be turned upside down. Character suddenly stemmed from socioeconomic adversity rather than privilege. Once the principle of diversity as merit was established, all-male Yale and Princeton were hardly in a position to reject the demands of the feminist movement for co-education, which they implemented around 1970.

The central thesis that Mr Karabel draws from this history is that the universities have always determined their merit criteria according to the admissions outcomes that would suit their institutional interests, rather than the other way around. Although he credits the three universities with becoming more accessible to the underprivileged, he notes that even today, the wealthy are still vastly overrepresented among their student bodies. This is partly due to the donation-friendly admissions preferences still given to athletes and children of alumni, which he concludes should be abolished.

But eliminating these practices won't turn these institutions into a meritocratic mecca because, as Mr Karabel argues, the concept of meritocracy itself is strategic and flexible, and often in outright conflict with egalitarian aims. “Those who are able to define ‘merit',” he writes, “will almost invariably possess more of it, and those with greater resources—cultural, economic, and social—will generally be able to ensure that the educational system will deem their children more meritorious.” Even today, efforts at Harvard to place more emphasis on the sciences (potentially replacing some wealthier white students with nerdy Asian-Americans) have attracted criticism that they might make the student body too one-dimensional instead of iconoclastic and well-rounded—exactly the same style of disparaging argument used to justify the Jewish quotas of yesteryear. As the book concludes, the unsettling lesson to be learned from a century of purported Ivy League meritocracy is that “the ideal of a meritocracy...is inherently unattainable.”