Frances Ryan in The Guardian
The Conservatives like to sell the public a promise: do “the right thing” – work hard, look after your family, pay your taxes – and in tough times, the welfare state will be there for you. But here’s a snapshot of what could happen to any one of us if bad luck hit. Denise, has been a nurse for the best part of 30 years, but since she became too ill to work, she’s been left to live without sickness benefits for five months and counting.
Denise, now 48, trained as a mental health nurse straight out of school and tells me she has worked all her life. It wasn’t easy. In her mid twenties she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and by her thirties, as she raised a young son in Leicester, she developed fibromyalgia. With it came pain and exhaustion: each joint hurt to move, and for months she needed a wheelchair and hospital car to see a specialist. “At times, I actually crawled on my hands and knees to attempt to make us a meal,” she says.
Over the next 15 years, Denise did what many with long-term illnesses will be all too familiar with: she pushed herself to keep working – going part-time to try to manage her bipolar, pain and fatigue. When things were at their worst (in 2011, she had major surgery on her spine), she lived off the out-of-work sickness benefit, employment and support allowance.
Last winter, again, Denise tried to work. After being on ESA for almost three years, she felt well enough to move to Bristol to be near her partner and take a job nursing in a women’s secure hospital. But after eight weeks, the impact of the work on her mental health was too much (“helping pregnant women with psychiatric problems … it was very emotional,” she says) and she had to give it up. She got by on company sick pay – half her wage – for three months, but by April she was earning nothing at all.
Ask most politicians and this is exactly when they’d say the safety net would kick in. But when Denise contacted the Department for Work and Pensions to say she’d had to leave her job, she was told she was no longer eligible for out-of-sickness benefits – despite receiving them only four months earlier. Because she’d been off the benefit for more than 12 weeks, in the mire of DWP rules, technically Denise was making a “new claim”, judged on a different tax year – meaning the DWP could now rule her as not having enough national insurance points to get the benefit.
Worse, Denise was told she wasn’t eligible for the alternative either – the type of ESA based on income, rather than NI contributions. Why? Because she was now living with her boyfriend.
In another rarely publicised DWP rule, if a sick or disabled person shares a home with a partner, the fact that their partner earns a wage can be used to rule them out of sickness benefits (the income threshold varies). When I contacted the DWP, it confirmed: “Claims for ESA are assessed against a number of circumstances including living arrangements, income and national insurance contributions.”
That means that people like Denise – who the government are fully aware are too unwell to work – are effectively shut out from social security.
“I put my trust in the DWP,” Denise says. “I wouldn’t have taken a job if I’d known there wasn’t a safety net if I became ill again.”
Since April, with no sickness benefit, Denise’s only income has been her disability living allowance – which she needs to pay for the extra costs that come with bad health. As she puts it: “It’s meant to pay for taxis [to hospital], not bills and food.” But even that’s been cut now: when the government abolished DLA and transferred her to personal independence payments in May, she lost part of her benefit. Now she’s living off just £82.30 a week. “It’s horrific,” she says, and she’s becoming withdrawn and isolated.
When an employer won’t hire you and the state won’t help you, to be sick or disabled simply means having no income
Her partner has a decent wage as a transport contractor – fine for one but not easy to stretch for two – and besides, she says, it’s “awful” when he’s forced to pay for everything. “It’s not like we’re married. We don’t have a joint bank account,” she says. “I don’t like having to say, ‘can I have a money for a haircut, or for tampons?’”
As an insight into just what sick and disabled people are up against, Denise has been trying to find a nursing job this summer – one with less stress – but when she told an employer about her bipolar disorder, a medical report judged her as unfit for work and the job offer was withdrawn. She’s been “scrabbling together” information from the mental health charity Mind to know her rights, and has put in a request to see if the employer will accept changes such as shorter shifts – but if it refuses, she has no way of paying the legal fees to take it to court.
When an employer won’t hire you and the state won’t help you, to be sick or disabled in Britain simply means having no income. Denise has adapted over the years to living on very little – “because I’ve had to”, she explains – but things have never been this bad.
“For anyone to go through this when they’re already ill … just to live, you really think at times like this you’re going to be protected by the government. But you’re not.”
Thursday, 20 October 2016
Cricket should discuss the bouncer more seriously
Jarrod Kimber in Cricinfo
The coroner's inquest into the death of Phillip Hughes should have been an opportunity for cricket to learn from its most public tragedy and ensure that the game was safer from now on. But because of the extreme hurt felt by the Hughes family, and the players feeling like they were on trial, what transpired did not benefit cricket or the family.
There is no doubt that the New South Wales team was trying to bounce Hughes out when he was struck fatally. There is little doubt, with some of the players involved, that harsh words would have been said.
Whether what Dougie Bollinger allegedly said was, "I am going to kill you", to Hughes or not really shouldn't matter. Bollinger is a joke figure, Australian cricket's doofus clown prince, and he is a former team-mate of Hughes'. No one in Australian cricket takes anything he says seriously. And while intent and words matter, what matters most is the ball that ultimately struck Hughes. That is the villain; that was the killer.
Hughes wasn't the last player to be subjected to a barrage of them, and that is what the inquest should have been about: how to make facing a bouncer as safe as we can make it.
There was talk in the immediate aftermath of banning the bouncer. It was an extreme reaction to an extreme situation. It was never truly taken seriously, and as the days turned into weeks after Hughes' death, they got quieter and quieter. Like many things in cricket, once the heat of the moment was gone, there was no intellectual conversation about the bouncer. We just went back to business as usual.
That was the mistake of cricket. Cricket as a business, as a sport, as a thing of love and beauty, has a responsibility to those who play it to take the bouncer conversation seriously.
Bowling is as quick as it has ever been.
Recently I've been involved in two conversations with respected cricket writers telling me bowling isn't any more rapid now than in the previous generations.
One argument was that bowling had always been fast; it had just never been properly measured before. That Fred Spofforth was quick, or Harold Larwood was quick. That explanation doesn't hold up when you think that overarm bowling only became popular in Spofforth's lifetime (even he started playing cricket as an underarm bowler). The original overarm techniques were actually side-arm, much like drunken versions of Lasith Malinga's action. So Spofforth's early tinkerings would have only been so quick.
The Larwood theory plays into the second conversation I had - about the old days, when players were amateur unlike today. These amateurs didn't worry about the next game, about resting themselves, about slowing down, and when their body felt right. They came in and bowled with all the pace they had. Part of the problem with that theory is that Larwood was a professional and played a lot of cricket. So were all the great West Indian bowlers. Many of them were overworked physically by bowling.
But really, the conversation was about the name that comes up every time people talk about fast bowling: Jeff Thomson.
Thommo was quick. Thommo would probably be quick now. And Thommo was so quick now that his balls travel through time and bowl out anyone who suggests bowlers are quicker now.
Whether it be Larwood, Trueman, Hall or Thommo, there is no doubt that bowlers from other eras have bowled quick. How quick, that is for drunken conversations with your uncle.
One man, with an incredible human catapult action, whose muscles seemed perfectly set up to hurl, might be the quickest bowler of all time. But not every bowler was like Thommo.
In the 1979 speed bowling competition, Thommo was 6kph quicker than Michael Holding in second place. That was when Holding was in his prime and Thommo had started to slow down after injuring his shoulder. Thommo's quickest was 147.9kph. He averaged 142.3kph while Holding's fastest ball was slower than that. Thommo was the only bowler clocked at over 145kph (90mph) in that test. The fastest of Len Pascoe, one of those tested, clocked more than 15kph slower than Thommo. Richard Hadlee was slower.
And while the speed gun technology seems to have evolved like fast bowling itself, this is the only guide we have.
So Thommo wasn't like every bowler out there. He towered over the others in this test. And during this same era there were many other bowlers who were playing Test cricket as seamers - Sarfraz Nawaz, who shuffled in like an old man trying to get his shopping done, Max Walker, whose action seemed to strangle his own pace, and Madan Lal, who could have out run the odd delivery in his follow-through. New Zealand had an endless supply of medium-pace.
Those bowlers barely exist anymore. Even bowlers like Tim Southee, Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Jason Holder are far quicker than them. And all three of those bowlers, at times, have been said to be not quick enough. In fact, Southee and Bhuvneshwar have put on extra pace just to survive. There was a time when you needed to bowl 90mph to be seen to bowl quick. We're now getting to the point where you need to bowl 90mph to get picked.
There might have been faster bowlers in the past, but there has never been a time with more fast bowlers.
Allrounders used to be slow first-change bowlers like Walker. The allrounders who bowl these days are Chris Morris, Ben Stokes, Mitch Marsh, Andre Russell, Tim Bresnan and Sean Abbott. None of these guys are slow. At their top speeds, they are fast-medium. Stokes and Russell are quicker than that.
When the helmet was invented there were probably only a handful of bowlers who could bowl at 90mph. Now there are probably at least 50, and that number will soon be 100.
The true evolution of fast bowling isn't the top speeds. Perhaps Thommo was the quickest, or maybe the fastest was from the Tait, Brett Lee and Akhtar era. But the true test of how much quicker bowling has become is how many people these days can bowl around 90mph.
England can pick from Steven Finn, James Anderson, Stuart Broad, Mark Wood, Liam Plunkett, Ben Stokes, Jake Ball and Chris Woakes as their first-choice seamers. Woakes was seen as too slow when he started. This summer he was clocking over 90mph. And if you're batting in county cricket you could be facing Stuart Meaker, Tony Roland-Jones, Mark Footit, Tymal Mills, Boyd Rankin, Jamie Overton, Matt Coles, Kyle Abbott, Fidel Edwards or Tino Best.
There was a time when Australia scared the cricket world with two proper quick bowlers in Thommo and Lillee. After that, West Indies dominated cricket with four quick bowlers for two generations. Now England regularly take in four bowlers who are around 90mph and it's barely commented on. South Africa could easily do the same. Even India, for years the laughing stock of fast bowling talent, have Umesh Yadav and Varun Aaron bowling very quick. The days of New Zealand's army of military medium is well and truly over.
Even first-class teams often have multiple fast bowlers in their XIs now. When the helmet was invented there were probably only a handful of bowlers who could bowl at 90mph. Now there are probably at least 50, and that number will soon be 100.
That is not even mentioning the left-armers. Until Wasim Akram there had been one left-arm quick bowler with more than 150 Test wickets. Now they are everywhere. And as England and South Africa showed when facing Mitchell Johnson, it's a whole different set of skills needed to try and survive a physical attack from a left-arm bowler at top-end pace.
This is the natural evolution of cricket. Not individual bowlers being express, but many players bowling fast. And like rugby is struggling with the fact that their players are bigger and faster now, cricket's struggle is going to be with the fact there have never been as many bouncers bowled at this pace as there are right now.
That will mean more chances occurring of what happened to Hughes. And that is what the discussion has to be about.
Can we stop the ball going through the grill of the helmet? Is the heart in danger from being hit at 90mph? Are there proper concussion guidelines in place? With batsmen brought up wearing helmets getting hit more often, is CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) going to be a problem in cricket? Are the medical procedures adequate at international and first-class games? Is there a way we can ever protect the throat? And are the new neck protectors going to save a batsman?
These are the questions that scientists, doctors, cricketers, the ICC and helmet manufacturers should be working on together. At the moment, it seems like the helmet makers are trying to catch up, and while they are doing a good job, there is only so much money in selling a cricket helmet. The real money and help should come from within the cricket industry itself.
Perhaps the coroner's inquest was not the perfect place to talk about protecting cricketers as there was so much emotion around it. But we must now have this conversation. Cricket should have had a safety summit to try to make the game safer. The game owes it to Phil Hughes and to every player who picks up a bat.
The coroner's inquest into the death of Phillip Hughes should have been an opportunity for cricket to learn from its most public tragedy and ensure that the game was safer from now on. But because of the extreme hurt felt by the Hughes family, and the players feeling like they were on trial, what transpired did not benefit cricket or the family.
There is no doubt that the New South Wales team was trying to bounce Hughes out when he was struck fatally. There is little doubt, with some of the players involved, that harsh words would have been said.
Whether what Dougie Bollinger allegedly said was, "I am going to kill you", to Hughes or not really shouldn't matter. Bollinger is a joke figure, Australian cricket's doofus clown prince, and he is a former team-mate of Hughes'. No one in Australian cricket takes anything he says seriously. And while intent and words matter, what matters most is the ball that ultimately struck Hughes. That is the villain; that was the killer.
Hughes wasn't the last player to be subjected to a barrage of them, and that is what the inquest should have been about: how to make facing a bouncer as safe as we can make it.
There was talk in the immediate aftermath of banning the bouncer. It was an extreme reaction to an extreme situation. It was never truly taken seriously, and as the days turned into weeks after Hughes' death, they got quieter and quieter. Like many things in cricket, once the heat of the moment was gone, there was no intellectual conversation about the bouncer. We just went back to business as usual.
That was the mistake of cricket. Cricket as a business, as a sport, as a thing of love and beauty, has a responsibility to those who play it to take the bouncer conversation seriously.
Bowling is as quick as it has ever been.
Recently I've been involved in two conversations with respected cricket writers telling me bowling isn't any more rapid now than in the previous generations.
One argument was that bowling had always been fast; it had just never been properly measured before. That Fred Spofforth was quick, or Harold Larwood was quick. That explanation doesn't hold up when you think that overarm bowling only became popular in Spofforth's lifetime (even he started playing cricket as an underarm bowler). The original overarm techniques were actually side-arm, much like drunken versions of Lasith Malinga's action. So Spofforth's early tinkerings would have only been so quick.
The Larwood theory plays into the second conversation I had - about the old days, when players were amateur unlike today. These amateurs didn't worry about the next game, about resting themselves, about slowing down, and when their body felt right. They came in and bowled with all the pace they had. Part of the problem with that theory is that Larwood was a professional and played a lot of cricket. So were all the great West Indian bowlers. Many of them were overworked physically by bowling.
But really, the conversation was about the name that comes up every time people talk about fast bowling: Jeff Thomson.
Thommo was quick. Thommo would probably be quick now. And Thommo was so quick now that his balls travel through time and bowl out anyone who suggests bowlers are quicker now.
Whether it be Larwood, Trueman, Hall or Thommo, there is no doubt that bowlers from other eras have bowled quick. How quick, that is for drunken conversations with your uncle.
One man, with an incredible human catapult action, whose muscles seemed perfectly set up to hurl, might be the quickest bowler of all time. But not every bowler was like Thommo.
In the 1979 speed bowling competition, Thommo was 6kph quicker than Michael Holding in second place. That was when Holding was in his prime and Thommo had started to slow down after injuring his shoulder. Thommo's quickest was 147.9kph. He averaged 142.3kph while Holding's fastest ball was slower than that. Thommo was the only bowler clocked at over 145kph (90mph) in that test. The fastest of Len Pascoe, one of those tested, clocked more than 15kph slower than Thommo. Richard Hadlee was slower.
And while the speed gun technology seems to have evolved like fast bowling itself, this is the only guide we have.
So Thommo wasn't like every bowler out there. He towered over the others in this test. And during this same era there were many other bowlers who were playing Test cricket as seamers - Sarfraz Nawaz, who shuffled in like an old man trying to get his shopping done, Max Walker, whose action seemed to strangle his own pace, and Madan Lal, who could have out run the odd delivery in his follow-through. New Zealand had an endless supply of medium-pace.
Those bowlers barely exist anymore. Even bowlers like Tim Southee, Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Jason Holder are far quicker than them. And all three of those bowlers, at times, have been said to be not quick enough. In fact, Southee and Bhuvneshwar have put on extra pace just to survive. There was a time when you needed to bowl 90mph to be seen to bowl quick. We're now getting to the point where you need to bowl 90mph to get picked.
There might have been faster bowlers in the past, but there has never been a time with more fast bowlers.
Allrounders used to be slow first-change bowlers like Walker. The allrounders who bowl these days are Chris Morris, Ben Stokes, Mitch Marsh, Andre Russell, Tim Bresnan and Sean Abbott. None of these guys are slow. At their top speeds, they are fast-medium. Stokes and Russell are quicker than that.
When the helmet was invented there were probably only a handful of bowlers who could bowl at 90mph. Now there are probably at least 50, and that number will soon be 100.
The true evolution of fast bowling isn't the top speeds. Perhaps Thommo was the quickest, or maybe the fastest was from the Tait, Brett Lee and Akhtar era. But the true test of how much quicker bowling has become is how many people these days can bowl around 90mph.
England can pick from Steven Finn, James Anderson, Stuart Broad, Mark Wood, Liam Plunkett, Ben Stokes, Jake Ball and Chris Woakes as their first-choice seamers. Woakes was seen as too slow when he started. This summer he was clocking over 90mph. And if you're batting in county cricket you could be facing Stuart Meaker, Tony Roland-Jones, Mark Footit, Tymal Mills, Boyd Rankin, Jamie Overton, Matt Coles, Kyle Abbott, Fidel Edwards or Tino Best.
There was a time when Australia scared the cricket world with two proper quick bowlers in Thommo and Lillee. After that, West Indies dominated cricket with four quick bowlers for two generations. Now England regularly take in four bowlers who are around 90mph and it's barely commented on. South Africa could easily do the same. Even India, for years the laughing stock of fast bowling talent, have Umesh Yadav and Varun Aaron bowling very quick. The days of New Zealand's army of military medium is well and truly over.
Even first-class teams often have multiple fast bowlers in their XIs now. When the helmet was invented there were probably only a handful of bowlers who could bowl at 90mph. Now there are probably at least 50, and that number will soon be 100.
That is not even mentioning the left-armers. Until Wasim Akram there had been one left-arm quick bowler with more than 150 Test wickets. Now they are everywhere. And as England and South Africa showed when facing Mitchell Johnson, it's a whole different set of skills needed to try and survive a physical attack from a left-arm bowler at top-end pace.
This is the natural evolution of cricket. Not individual bowlers being express, but many players bowling fast. And like rugby is struggling with the fact that their players are bigger and faster now, cricket's struggle is going to be with the fact there have never been as many bouncers bowled at this pace as there are right now.
That will mean more chances occurring of what happened to Hughes. And that is what the discussion has to be about.
Can we stop the ball going through the grill of the helmet? Is the heart in danger from being hit at 90mph? Are there proper concussion guidelines in place? With batsmen brought up wearing helmets getting hit more often, is CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) going to be a problem in cricket? Are the medical procedures adequate at international and first-class games? Is there a way we can ever protect the throat? And are the new neck protectors going to save a batsman?
These are the questions that scientists, doctors, cricketers, the ICC and helmet manufacturers should be working on together. At the moment, it seems like the helmet makers are trying to catch up, and while they are doing a good job, there is only so much money in selling a cricket helmet. The real money and help should come from within the cricket industry itself.
Perhaps the coroner's inquest was not the perfect place to talk about protecting cricketers as there was so much emotion around it. But we must now have this conversation. Cricket should have had a safety summit to try to make the game safer. The game owes it to Phil Hughes and to every player who picks up a bat.
The cult of the expert – and how it collapsed
Led by a class of omnipotent central bankers, experts have gained extraordinary political power. Will a populist backlash shatter their technocratic dream?
Sebastian Mallaby in The Guardian
On Tuesday 16 September 2008, early in the afternoon, a self-effacing professor with a neatly clipped beard sat with the president in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Flanked by a square-shouldered banker who had recently run Goldman Sachs, the professor was there to tell the elected leader of the world’s most powerful country how to rescue its economy. Following the bankruptcy of one of the nation’s storied investment banks, a global insurance company was now on the brink, but drawing on a lifetime of scholarly research, the professor had resolved to commit $85bn of public funds to stabilising it.
Inside the Bank of England
Both Gove and Trump sensed, correctly, that experts were primed for a fall. The inflationary catastrophe sparked by 1970s populism has faded from the public memory, and no longer serves as a cautionary tale. Economies have recovered disappointingly from the 2008 crash – a crash, incidentally, for which Greenspan must share the blame, since he presided over the inflation of the subprime mortgage bubble. What little growth there has been has also passed most people by, since the spoils have been so unequally distributed. If the experts’ legitimacy depends on delivering results, it is hardly surprising that they are on the defensive.
And yet the history of the rise of the experts should remind us of three things. First, the pendulum will swing back, just as it did after the 1970s. The saving grace of anti-expert populists is that they do discredit themselves, simply because policies originating from the gut tend to be lousy. If Donald Trump were to be elected, he would almost certainly cure voters of populism for decades, though the price in the meantime could be frightening. In Britain, which is sliding towards a wreck of a divorce with its most important trading partners, the delusions and confusions of the Brexit camp will probably exact an economic price that will be remembered for a generation.
Second, Alan Blinder had a point: democratic politics is prone to errors and gridlock, and there is much to be said for empowering technocrats. The right balance between democratic accountability and expert input is not impossible to strike: the model of an independent central bank does provide a template. Popularly elected politicians have a mandate to determine the priorities and ambitions of the state, which in turn determine the goals for expert bodies – whether these are central banks, environmental agencies, or the armed forces. But then it behooves the politicians to step back. Democracy is strengthened, not weakened, when it harnesses experts.
Thirdly, however, if the experts want to hasten their comeback, they must study the example of Greenspan’s politicking. It is no use thinking that, in a democracy, facts and analysis are enough to win the day. As the advertising entrepreneur John Kearon has argued, the public has to feel you are correct; the truth has to be sold as well as told; you have to capture the high ground with a brand that is more emotionally compelling than that of your opponents. In this process, as Greenspan’s career demonstrates, the media must be wooed. Enemies must be undermined. And, if you succeed, your face might just appear on a T-shirt.
Two decades ago, in his final and posthumous book, the American cultural critic Christopher Lasch went after contemporary experts. “Elites, who define the issues, have lost touch with the people,” he wrote. “There has always been a privileged class, even in America, but it has never been so dangerously isolated from its surroundings.” These criticisms presciently anticipated the rise of Davos Man – the rootless cosmopolitan elite, unburdened by any sense of obligation to a place of origin, its arrogance enhanced by the conviction that its privilege reflects brains and accomplishment, not luck and inheritance. To survive these inevitable resentments, elites will have to understand that they are not beyond politics – and they will have to demonstrate the skill to earn the public trust, and preserve it by deserving it. Given the alternative, we had better hope that they are up to it.
Sebastian Mallaby in The Guardian
On Tuesday 16 September 2008, early in the afternoon, a self-effacing professor with a neatly clipped beard sat with the president in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Flanked by a square-shouldered banker who had recently run Goldman Sachs, the professor was there to tell the elected leader of the world’s most powerful country how to rescue its economy. Following the bankruptcy of one of the nation’s storied investment banks, a global insurance company was now on the brink, but drawing on a lifetime of scholarly research, the professor had resolved to commit $85bn of public funds to stabilising it.
The sum involved was extraordinary: $85bn was more than the US Congress spent annually on transportation, and nearly three times as much as it spent on fighting Aids, a particular priority of the president’s. But the professor encountered no resistance. “Sometimes you have to make the tough decisions,”the president reflected. “If you think this has to be done, you have my blessing.”
Later that same afternoon, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, the bearded hero of this tale, showed up on Capitol Hill, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. At the White House, he had at least been on familiar ground: he had spent eight months working there. But now Bernanke appeared in the Senate majority leader’s conference room, where he and his ex-Wall Street comrade, Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, would meet the senior leaders of both chambers of Congress. A quiet, balding, unassuming technocrat confronted the lions of the legislative branch, armed with nothing but his expertise in monetary plumbing.
Bernanke repeated his plan to commit $85bn of public money to the takeover of an insurance company.
“Do you have 85bn?” one sceptical lawmaker demanded.
“I have 800bn,” Bernanke replied evenly – a central bank could conjure as much money as it deemed necessary.
But did the Federal Reserve have the legal right to take this sort of action unilaterally, another lawmaker inquired?
Yes, Bernanke answered: as Fed chairman, he wielded the largest chequebook in the world – and the only counter-signatures required would come from other Fed experts, who were no more elected or accountable than he was. Somehow America’s famous apparatus of democratic checks and balances did not apply to the monetary priesthood. Their authority derived from technocratic virtuosity.
When the history is written of the revolt against experts, September 2008 will be seen as a milestone. The $85bn rescue of the American International Group (AIG) dramatised the power of monetary gurus in all its anti-democratic majesty. The president and Congress could decide to borrow money, or raise it from taxpayers; the Fed could simply create it. And once the AIG rescue had legitimised the broadest possible use of this privilege, the Fed exploited it unflinchingly. Over the course of 2009, it injected a trillion dollars into the economy – a sum equivalent to nearly 30% of the federal budget – via its newly improvised policy of “quantitative easing”. Time magazine anointed Bernanke its person of the year. “The decisions he has made, and those he has yet to make, will shape the path of our prosperity, the direction of our politics and our relationship to the world,” the magazine declared admiringly.
The Fed’s swashbuckling example galvanized central bankers in all the big economies. Soon Europe saw the rise of its own path-shaping monetary chieftain, when Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, defused panic in the eurozone in July 2012 with two magical sentences. “Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro,” he vowed, adding, with a twist of Clint Eastwood menace, “And believe me, it will be enough.” For months, Europe’s elected leaders had waffled ineffectually, inviting hedge-fund speculators to test the cohesion of the eurozone. But now Draghi was announcing that he was badder than the baddest hedge-fund goon. Whatever it takes. Believe me.
In the summer of 2013, when Hollywood rolled out its latest Superman film, cartoonists quickly seized upon a gag that would soon become obvious. Caricatures depicted central-bank chieftains decked out in Superman outfits. One showed Bernanke ripping off his banker’s shirt and tie, exposing that thrilling S emblazoned on his vest. Another showed the bearded hero hurtling through space, red cape fluttering, right arm stretched forward, a powerful fist punching at the void in front of him. “Superman and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke are both mild-mannered,” a financial columnist deadpanned. “They are both calm, even in the face of global disasters. They are both sometimes said to be from other planets.”
At some point towards the middle of the decade, shortly before the cult of the expert smashed into the populist backlash, the shocking power of central banks came to feel normal. Nobody blinked an eye when Haruhiko Kuroda, the head of Japan’s central bank, created money at a rate that made his western counterparts seem timid. Nobody thought it strange when Britain’s government, perhaps emulating the style of the national football team, conducted a worldwide talent search for the new Bank of England chief. Nobody was surprised when the winner of that contest, the telegenic Canadian Mark Carney, quickly appeared in newspaper cartoons in his own superman outfit. And nobody missed a beat when India’s breathless journalists described Raghuram Rajan, the new head of the Reserve Bank of India, as a “rock star”, or when he was pictured as James Bond in the country’s biggest business newspaper. “Clearly I am not a superman,” Rajan modestly responded.
No senator would have his child’s surgery performed by an amateur. So why would he not entrust experts with the economy?
If Bernanke’s laconic “I have 800bn” moment signalled a new era of central-banking power, Rajan’s “I am not a superman” wisecrack marked its apotheosis. And it was a high watermark for a wider phenomenon as well, for the cult of the central banker was only the most pronounced example of a broader cult that had taken shape over the previous quarter of a century: the cult of the expert. Even before Bernanke rescued the global economy, technocrats of all stripes – business leaders, scientists, foreign and domestic policy wonks – were enthralled by the notion that politicians might defer to the authority of experts armed with facts and rational analysis. Those moments when Bernanke faced down Congress, or when Draghi succeeded where bickering politicians had failed, made it seem possible that this technocratic vision, with its apolitical ideal of government, might actually be realised.
The key to the power of the central bankers – and the envy of all the other experts – lay precisely in their ability to escape political interference. Democratically elected leaders had given them a mission – to vanquish inflation – and then let them get on with it. To public-health experts, climate scientists and other members of the knowledge elite, this was the model of how things should be done. Experts had built Microsoft. Experts were sequencing the genome. Experts were laying fibre-optic cable beneath the great oceans. No senator would have his child’s surgery performed by an amateur. So why would he not entrust experts with the economy?
In 1997, the economist Alan Blinder published an essay in Foreign Affairs, the house journal of the American foreign policy establishment. His title posed a curious question: “Is government too political?”
Four years earlier, Blinder had left Princeton University, his academic home for two decades, to do battle in the public square as a member of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors. The way Blinder saw things, this was a responsibility more than a pleasure: experts had a duty to engage in public debates – otherwise, “the quacks would continue to dominate the pond”, as he had once written. Earnest, idealistic, but with a self-deprecating wit, Blinder was out to save the world from returning to that dark period in the Reagan era when supply-side ideologues ruled the roost and “nonsense was worshipped as gospel”. After two years at the White House and another two as vice chairman of the Fed, Blinder’s essay was a reflection on his years of service.
His argument reflected the contrast between his two jobs in Washington. At the White House, he had advised a brainy president on budget policy and much else, but turning policy wisdom into law had often proved impossible. Even when experts from both parties agreed what should be done, vested interests in Congress conspired to frustrate enlightened progress. At the Fed, by contrast, experts were gloriously empowered. They could debate the minutiae of the economy among themselves, then manoeuvre the growth rate this way or that, without deferring to anyone.
To Blinder, it was self-evident that the Fed model was superior – not only for the experts, but also in the eyes of the public. The voters did not want their members of Congress micromanaging technical affairs – polls showed declining trust in politicians, and it was only a small stretch to suggest that citizens wanted their political leaders to delegate as much as possible to experts. “Americans increasingly believe that their elected officials are playing games rather than solving problems,” Blinder wrote. “Political debate has too much ‘spin’ and too little straight talk.” In sum, too much meddling by elected politicians was a turn-off for the voters who elected them. It was a paradoxical contention.
Disaffection with the political mainstream in the America of the 1990s had created a yearning for white-hatted outsiders as potential presidential candidates: the billionaire businessman Ross Perot, who ran in 1992 and 1996; the anti-politician, Steve Forbes, whose signature proposal was to radically simplify America’s byzantine tax code. But rather than replace politicians with populist outsiders, whose grasp of public policy was suspect, Blinder advanced an alternative idea: the central-bank model of expert empowerment should be extended to other spheres of governance.
Blinder’s proposal was most clearly illustrated by tax policy. Experts from both political parties agreed that the tax system should be stripped of perverse incentives and loopholes. There was no compelling reason, for example, to encourage companies to finance themselves with debt rather than equity, yet the tax code allowed companies to make interest payments to their creditors tax-free, whereas dividend payments to shareholders were taxed twice over. The nation would be better off if Congress left the experts to fix such glitches rather than allowing politics to frustrate progress. Likewise, environmental targets, which balanced economic growth on the one hand and planetary preservation on the other, were surely best left to the scholars who understood how best to reconcile these duelling imperatives. Politicians who spent more of their time dialing for dollars than thinking carefully about policy were not up to these tasks. Better to hand them off to the technicians in white coats who knew what they were doing.
A dark question lurked in educated minds. If all the isms were wasms, if history was over, what good were politicians?
The call to empower experts, and to keep politics to a minimum, failed to trigger a clear shift in how Washington did business. But it did crystallise the assumptions of the late 1990s and early 2000s – a time when sharp criticisms of gridlock and lobbying were broadly accepted, and technocratic work-arounds to political paralysis were frequently proposed, even if seldom adopted. President Barack Obama’s (unsuccessful) attempt to remove the task of tackling long-term budget challenges from Congress by handing them off to the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission was emblematic of this same mood. Equally, elected leaders at least paid lip service to the authority of experts in the government’s various regulatory agencies – the Food and Drug Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and so on. If they nonetheless overruled them for political reasons, it was in the dead of night and with a guilty conscience.
And so, by the turn of the 21st century, a new elite consensus had emerged: democracy had to be managed. The will of the people had its place, but that place had to be defined, and not in an expansive fashion. After all, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, the two most successful political leaders of the time, had proclaimed their allegiance to a “third way”, which proposed that the grand ideological disputes of the cold war had come to an end. If the clashes of abstractions – communism, socialism, capitalism and so on –were finished, all that remained were practical questions, which were less subjects of political choice and more objects of expert analysis. Indeed, at some tacit, unarticulated level, a dark question lurked in educated minds. If all the isms were wasms, if history was over, what good were politicians?
Later that same afternoon, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, the bearded hero of this tale, showed up on Capitol Hill, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. At the White House, he had at least been on familiar ground: he had spent eight months working there. But now Bernanke appeared in the Senate majority leader’s conference room, where he and his ex-Wall Street comrade, Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, would meet the senior leaders of both chambers of Congress. A quiet, balding, unassuming technocrat confronted the lions of the legislative branch, armed with nothing but his expertise in monetary plumbing.
Bernanke repeated his plan to commit $85bn of public money to the takeover of an insurance company.
“Do you have 85bn?” one sceptical lawmaker demanded.
“I have 800bn,” Bernanke replied evenly – a central bank could conjure as much money as it deemed necessary.
But did the Federal Reserve have the legal right to take this sort of action unilaterally, another lawmaker inquired?
Yes, Bernanke answered: as Fed chairman, he wielded the largest chequebook in the world – and the only counter-signatures required would come from other Fed experts, who were no more elected or accountable than he was. Somehow America’s famous apparatus of democratic checks and balances did not apply to the monetary priesthood. Their authority derived from technocratic virtuosity.
When the history is written of the revolt against experts, September 2008 will be seen as a milestone. The $85bn rescue of the American International Group (AIG) dramatised the power of monetary gurus in all its anti-democratic majesty. The president and Congress could decide to borrow money, or raise it from taxpayers; the Fed could simply create it. And once the AIG rescue had legitimised the broadest possible use of this privilege, the Fed exploited it unflinchingly. Over the course of 2009, it injected a trillion dollars into the economy – a sum equivalent to nearly 30% of the federal budget – via its newly improvised policy of “quantitative easing”. Time magazine anointed Bernanke its person of the year. “The decisions he has made, and those he has yet to make, will shape the path of our prosperity, the direction of our politics and our relationship to the world,” the magazine declared admiringly.
The Fed’s swashbuckling example galvanized central bankers in all the big economies. Soon Europe saw the rise of its own path-shaping monetary chieftain, when Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, defused panic in the eurozone in July 2012 with two magical sentences. “Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro,” he vowed, adding, with a twist of Clint Eastwood menace, “And believe me, it will be enough.” For months, Europe’s elected leaders had waffled ineffectually, inviting hedge-fund speculators to test the cohesion of the eurozone. But now Draghi was announcing that he was badder than the baddest hedge-fund goon. Whatever it takes. Believe me.
In the summer of 2013, when Hollywood rolled out its latest Superman film, cartoonists quickly seized upon a gag that would soon become obvious. Caricatures depicted central-bank chieftains decked out in Superman outfits. One showed Bernanke ripping off his banker’s shirt and tie, exposing that thrilling S emblazoned on his vest. Another showed the bearded hero hurtling through space, red cape fluttering, right arm stretched forward, a powerful fist punching at the void in front of him. “Superman and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke are both mild-mannered,” a financial columnist deadpanned. “They are both calm, even in the face of global disasters. They are both sometimes said to be from other planets.”
At some point towards the middle of the decade, shortly before the cult of the expert smashed into the populist backlash, the shocking power of central banks came to feel normal. Nobody blinked an eye when Haruhiko Kuroda, the head of Japan’s central bank, created money at a rate that made his western counterparts seem timid. Nobody thought it strange when Britain’s government, perhaps emulating the style of the national football team, conducted a worldwide talent search for the new Bank of England chief. Nobody was surprised when the winner of that contest, the telegenic Canadian Mark Carney, quickly appeared in newspaper cartoons in his own superman outfit. And nobody missed a beat when India’s breathless journalists described Raghuram Rajan, the new head of the Reserve Bank of India, as a “rock star”, or when he was pictured as James Bond in the country’s biggest business newspaper. “Clearly I am not a superman,” Rajan modestly responded.
No senator would have his child’s surgery performed by an amateur. So why would he not entrust experts with the economy?
If Bernanke’s laconic “I have 800bn” moment signalled a new era of central-banking power, Rajan’s “I am not a superman” wisecrack marked its apotheosis. And it was a high watermark for a wider phenomenon as well, for the cult of the central banker was only the most pronounced example of a broader cult that had taken shape over the previous quarter of a century: the cult of the expert. Even before Bernanke rescued the global economy, technocrats of all stripes – business leaders, scientists, foreign and domestic policy wonks – were enthralled by the notion that politicians might defer to the authority of experts armed with facts and rational analysis. Those moments when Bernanke faced down Congress, or when Draghi succeeded where bickering politicians had failed, made it seem possible that this technocratic vision, with its apolitical ideal of government, might actually be realised.
The key to the power of the central bankers – and the envy of all the other experts – lay precisely in their ability to escape political interference. Democratically elected leaders had given them a mission – to vanquish inflation – and then let them get on with it. To public-health experts, climate scientists and other members of the knowledge elite, this was the model of how things should be done. Experts had built Microsoft. Experts were sequencing the genome. Experts were laying fibre-optic cable beneath the great oceans. No senator would have his child’s surgery performed by an amateur. So why would he not entrust experts with the economy?
In 1997, the economist Alan Blinder published an essay in Foreign Affairs, the house journal of the American foreign policy establishment. His title posed a curious question: “Is government too political?”
Four years earlier, Blinder had left Princeton University, his academic home for two decades, to do battle in the public square as a member of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors. The way Blinder saw things, this was a responsibility more than a pleasure: experts had a duty to engage in public debates – otherwise, “the quacks would continue to dominate the pond”, as he had once written. Earnest, idealistic, but with a self-deprecating wit, Blinder was out to save the world from returning to that dark period in the Reagan era when supply-side ideologues ruled the roost and “nonsense was worshipped as gospel”. After two years at the White House and another two as vice chairman of the Fed, Blinder’s essay was a reflection on his years of service.
His argument reflected the contrast between his two jobs in Washington. At the White House, he had advised a brainy president on budget policy and much else, but turning policy wisdom into law had often proved impossible. Even when experts from both parties agreed what should be done, vested interests in Congress conspired to frustrate enlightened progress. At the Fed, by contrast, experts were gloriously empowered. They could debate the minutiae of the economy among themselves, then manoeuvre the growth rate this way or that, without deferring to anyone.
To Blinder, it was self-evident that the Fed model was superior – not only for the experts, but also in the eyes of the public. The voters did not want their members of Congress micromanaging technical affairs – polls showed declining trust in politicians, and it was only a small stretch to suggest that citizens wanted their political leaders to delegate as much as possible to experts. “Americans increasingly believe that their elected officials are playing games rather than solving problems,” Blinder wrote. “Political debate has too much ‘spin’ and too little straight talk.” In sum, too much meddling by elected politicians was a turn-off for the voters who elected them. It was a paradoxical contention.
Disaffection with the political mainstream in the America of the 1990s had created a yearning for white-hatted outsiders as potential presidential candidates: the billionaire businessman Ross Perot, who ran in 1992 and 1996; the anti-politician, Steve Forbes, whose signature proposal was to radically simplify America’s byzantine tax code. But rather than replace politicians with populist outsiders, whose grasp of public policy was suspect, Blinder advanced an alternative idea: the central-bank model of expert empowerment should be extended to other spheres of governance.
Blinder’s proposal was most clearly illustrated by tax policy. Experts from both political parties agreed that the tax system should be stripped of perverse incentives and loopholes. There was no compelling reason, for example, to encourage companies to finance themselves with debt rather than equity, yet the tax code allowed companies to make interest payments to their creditors tax-free, whereas dividend payments to shareholders were taxed twice over. The nation would be better off if Congress left the experts to fix such glitches rather than allowing politics to frustrate progress. Likewise, environmental targets, which balanced economic growth on the one hand and planetary preservation on the other, were surely best left to the scholars who understood how best to reconcile these duelling imperatives. Politicians who spent more of their time dialing for dollars than thinking carefully about policy were not up to these tasks. Better to hand them off to the technicians in white coats who knew what they were doing.
A dark question lurked in educated minds. If all the isms were wasms, if history was over, what good were politicians?
The call to empower experts, and to keep politics to a minimum, failed to trigger a clear shift in how Washington did business. But it did crystallise the assumptions of the late 1990s and early 2000s – a time when sharp criticisms of gridlock and lobbying were broadly accepted, and technocratic work-arounds to political paralysis were frequently proposed, even if seldom adopted. President Barack Obama’s (unsuccessful) attempt to remove the task of tackling long-term budget challenges from Congress by handing them off to the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission was emblematic of this same mood. Equally, elected leaders at least paid lip service to the authority of experts in the government’s various regulatory agencies – the Food and Drug Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and so on. If they nonetheless overruled them for political reasons, it was in the dead of night and with a guilty conscience.
And so, by the turn of the 21st century, a new elite consensus had emerged: democracy had to be managed. The will of the people had its place, but that place had to be defined, and not in an expansive fashion. After all, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, the two most successful political leaders of the time, had proclaimed their allegiance to a “third way”, which proposed that the grand ideological disputes of the cold war had come to an end. If the clashes of abstractions – communism, socialism, capitalism and so on –were finished, all that remained were practical questions, which were less subjects of political choice and more objects of expert analysis. Indeed, at some tacit, unarticulated level, a dark question lurked in educated minds. If all the isms were wasms, if history was over, what good were politicians?
Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke testifies before Congress in October 2011. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA
For Blinder and many of his contemporaries, the ultimate embodiment of empowered gurudom was Alan Greenspan, the lugubrious figure with a meandering syntax who presided over the Federal Reserve for almost two decades. Greenspan was a technocrat’s technocrat, a walking, talking cauldron of statistics and factoids, and even though his ideological roots were in the libertarian right, his happy collaboration with Democratic experts in the Clinton administration fitted the end-of-history template perfectly. At Greenspan’s retirement in 2006, Blinder and a co-author summed up his extraordinary standing. They proclaimed him “a living legend”. On Wall Street, “financial markets now view Chairman Greenspan’s infallibility more or less as the Chinese once viewed Chairman Mao’s”.
Greenspan was raised during the Great Depression, and for much of his career, such adulation would have been inconceivable – for him or any central banker. Through most of the 20th century, the men who acted as bankers to the bankers were deliberately low-key. They spurned public attention and doubted their own influence. They fully expected that politicians would bully them into trying to stimulate the economy, even at the risk of inflation. In 1964, in a successful effort to get the central bank to cut interest rates, Lyndon Johnson summoned the Fed chairman William McChesney Martin to his Texas ranch and pushed him around the living room, yelling in his face, “Boys are dying in Vietnam, and Bill Martin doesn’t care!” In democracies, evidently, technocratic power had limits.
Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, central-bank experts continued to be tormented. Richard Nixon and his henchmen once smeared Arthur Burns, the Fed chairman, by planting a fictitious story in the press, insinuating that Burns was simultaneously demanding a huge pay rise for himself and a pay freeze for other Americans. Following in this tradition, the Reagan administration frequently denounced the Fed chief, Paul Volcker, and packed the Fed’s board with pro-Reagan loyalists, who ganged up against their chairman.
There were Alan Greenspan postcards, Alan Greenspan cartoons, Alan Greenspan T-shirts, even an Alan Greenspan doll
When Greenspan replaced Volcker in 1987, the same pattern continued at first. The George HW Bush administration tried everything it could to force Greenspan to cut interest rates, to the point that a White House official put it about that the unmarried, 65-year-old Fed chairman reminded him of Norman Bates, the mother-fixated loner in Hitchcock’s Psycho.
And yet, starting with the advent of the Clinton administration, Greenspan effected a magical shift in the prestige of monetary experts. For the last 13 years of his tenure, running from 1993 to 2006, he attained the legendary status that Blinder recognised and celebrated. There were Alan Greenspan postcards, Alan Greenspan cartoons, Alan Greenspan T-shirts, even an Alan Greenspan doll. “How many central bankers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” asked a joke of the time. “One,” the answer went: “Greenspan holds the bulb and the world revolves around him.” Through quiet force of intellect, Greenspan seemed to control the American economy with the finesse of a master conductor. He was the “Maestro”, one biographer suggested. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy wrote that Greenspan’s oracular pronouncements became “as familiar and as comforting to ordinary Americans as Prozac and The Simpsons, both of which debuted in 1987, the same year President Reagan appointed him to office”.
Greenspan’s sway in Washington stretched far beyond the Fed’s core responsibility, which was to set interest rates. When the Clinton administration wanted to know how much deficit reduction was necessary, it asked Greenspan for a number, at which point that number assumed a talismanic importance, for no other reason than that Greenspan had endorsed it. When Congress wanted to understand how far deficit reduction would bring bond yields down, it demanded an answer from Greenspan, and his answer duly became a key plank of the case for moving towards budget balance. The Clinton adviser Dick Morris summed up economic policy in this period: “You figure out what Greenspan wants, and then you get it to him.”
Greenspan loomed equally large in the US government’s management of a series of emerging market meltdowns in the 1990s. Formally, the responsibility for responding to foreign crises fell mainly to the Treasury, but the Clinton team relied on Greenspan – for ideas and for political backing. With the Republicans controlling Congress, a Democratic president needed a Republican economist to vouch for his plans – to the press, Congress, and even the conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh. “Officials at the notoriously reticent Federal Reserve say they have seldom seen anything like it,” the New York Times reported in January 1995, remarking on the Fed chairman’s metamorphosis from monetary technocrat into rescue salesman. In 1999, anticipating the moment when it anointed Ben Bernanke its man of the year, Time put Greenspan on its cover, with smaller images of the Treasury secretary and deputy Treasury secretary flanking him. Greenspan and his sidemen were “economist heroes”, Time lectured its readers. They had “outgrown ideology”.
By the last years of his tenure, Greenspan’s reputation had risen so high that even fellow experts were afraid of him. When he held forth at the regular gatherings of central bank chiefs in Basel, the distinguished figures at the table, titans in their own fields, took notes with the eagerness of undergraduates. So great was Greenspan’s status that he started to seem irreplaceable. As vice-president Al Gore prepared his run for the White House, he pronounced himself Greenspan’s “biggest fan” and rated the chairman’s performance as “outstanding A-plus-plus”. Not to be outdone, the Republican senator John McCain wished the chairman could stay at his post into the afterlife. “I would do like we did in the movie Weekend at Bernie’s,” McCain joked during a Republican presidential primary debate. “I’d prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him and keep him as long as we could.”
How did Greenspan achieve this legendary status, creating the template for expert empowerment on which a generation of technocrats sought to build a new philosophy of anti-politics? The question is not merely of historical interest. With experts now in retreat, in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, the story of their rise may hold lessons for the future.
Part of the answer lies in the circumstances that Greenspan inherited. In the United States and elsewhere, central bankers were given space to determine interest rates without political meddling because the existing model had failed. The bullying of central banks by Johnson and Nixon produced the disastrous inflation of the 1970s, with the result that later politicians wanted to be saved from themselves – they stopped harassing central banks, understanding that doing so damaged economic performance and therefore their own reputations. Paul Volcker was a partial beneficiary of this switch: even though some Reagan officials attacked him, others recognised that he must be given the space to drive down inflation. Following Volcker’s tenure, a series of countries, starting with New Zealand, granted formal independence to their central banks. Britain crossed this Rubicon in 1997. In the United States, the Fed’s independence has never been formal. But the climate of opinion on monetary issues offered a measure of protection.
Healthy economic growth was another factor underpinning Greenspan’s exalted status. Globalisation, coupled with the surge of productivity that followed the personal computer revolution, made the 1990s a boom time. The pro-market policies that Greenspan and his fellow experts had long advocated seemed to be delivering the goods, not only in terms of growth but also in falling inequality, lower rates of crime, and lower unemployment for disadvantaged minorities. The legitimacy of experts relies on their presumed ability to deliver progress. In Greenspan’s heyday, experts over-delivered.
Yet these fortunate circumstances are not the whole story. Greenspan amassed more influence and reputation than anyone else because there was something special about him. He was not the sort of expert who wanted to confine politics to its box. To the contrary, he embraced politics, and loved the game. He understood power, and was not afraid to wield it.
Greenspan’s genius was to combine high-calibre expert analysis with raw political methods
Greenspan is regarded as the ultimate geek: obsessed with obscure numbers, convoluted in his speech, awkward in social settings. Yet he was far more worldly than his technocratic manner suggested. He entered public life when he worked for Nixon’s 1968 campaign – not just as an economic adviser, but as a polling analyst. In Nixon’s war room, he allied himself with the future populist presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, and his memos to Nixon were peppered with ideas on campaign spin and messaging. In 1971, when Nixon went after the Fed chairman, Arthur Burns, Greenspan was recruited to coax Burns into supporting the president. In the mid-1970s, when Greenspan worked in the Gerald Ford administration, he once sneaked into the White House on a weekend to help rewrite a presidential speech, burying an earlier draft penned by a bureaucratic opponent. At the Republican convention in 1980, Greenspan tried to manoeuvre Ford on to Ronald Reagan’s ticket – an outlandish project to get an ex-president to serve as vice president.
Greenspan’s genius was to combine high-calibre expert analysis with raw political methods. He had more muscle than a mere expert and more influence than a mere politician. The combination was especially potent because the first could be a cover for the second: his political influence depended on the perception that he was an expert, and therefore above the fray, and therefore not really political. Unlike politician-politicians, Greenspan’s advice had the ring of objectivity: he was the man who knew the details of the federal budget, the outlook for Wall Street, the political tides as they revealed themselves through polling data. The more complex the problems confronting the president, the more indispensable Greenspan’s expertise became. “He has the best bedside manner I’ve ever seen,” a jealous Ford administration colleague recalled, remarking on Greenspan’s hypnotic effect on his boss. “Extraordinary. That was his favourite word. He’d go in to see Ford and say, ‘Mr President, this is an extraordinarily complex problem.’ And Ford’s eyes would get big and round and start to go around in circles.”
By the time Greenspan became Fed chairman, he was a master of the dark arts of Washington. He went to extraordinary lengths to cultivate allies, fighting through his natural shyness to attend A-list parties, playing tennis with potentially troublesome financial lobbyists, maintaining his contacts on Wall Street, building up his capital by giving valuable counsel to anyone who mattered. Drawing on the advantage of his dual persona, Greenspan offered economic advice to politicians and political advice to economists. When Laura Tyson, an exuberant Berkeley economist, was appointed to chair Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, she was flattered to find that the Fed chairman had tips on her speaking style. Too many hand gestures and facial expressions could undermine her credibility, Greenspan observed. The CEA chairwoman should simply present facts, with as little visual commentary as possible.
Greenspan’s critics frequently complained that he was undermining the independence of the Fed by cosying up to politicians. But the critics were 180 degrees wrong: only by building political capital could Greenspan protect the Fed’s prerogatives. Clinton had no natural love for Greenspan: he would sometimes entertain his advisers with a cruel imitation of him – a cheerless old man droning on about inflation. But after a landmark 1993 budget deal and a 1995 bailout of Mexico, Clinton became a firm supporter of the Fed. Greenspan had proved that he had clout. Clinton wanted to be on the right side of him.
The contrast with Greenspan’s predecessor, the rumpled, egg-headed Paul Volcker, is revealing. Volcker lacked Greenspan’s political skills, which is why the Reagan administration succeeded in packing his board with governors who were ready to outvote him. When Greenspan faced a similar prospect, he had the muscle to fight back: in at least one instance, he let his allies in the Senate know that they should block the president’s candidate. Volcker also lacked Greenspan’s facility in dealing with the press – he refused to court public approval and sometimes pretended not to notice a journalist who had been shown into his office to interview him. Greenspan inhabited the opposite extreme: he courted journalists assiduously, opening presents each Christmas at the home of the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau chief, Al Hunt, flattering reporters with private interviews even as he berated other Fed governors for leaking to them. It was only fitting that, halfway through his tenure, Greenspan married a journalist whose source he had once been.
The upshot was that Greenspan maximised a form of power that is invaluable to experts. Because journalists admired him, it was dangerous for politicians to pick a fight with the Fed: in any public dispute, the newspaper columnists and talking heads would take Greenspan’s side of the argument. As a result, the long tradition of Fed-bashing ceased almost completely. Every Washington insider understood that Greenspan was too powerful to touch. People who got on the wrong side of him would find their career prospects dim. They would see their intellectual shortcomings exposed. They would find themselves diminished.
For Blinder and many of his contemporaries, the ultimate embodiment of empowered gurudom was Alan Greenspan, the lugubrious figure with a meandering syntax who presided over the Federal Reserve for almost two decades. Greenspan was a technocrat’s technocrat, a walking, talking cauldron of statistics and factoids, and even though his ideological roots were in the libertarian right, his happy collaboration with Democratic experts in the Clinton administration fitted the end-of-history template perfectly. At Greenspan’s retirement in 2006, Blinder and a co-author summed up his extraordinary standing. They proclaimed him “a living legend”. On Wall Street, “financial markets now view Chairman Greenspan’s infallibility more or less as the Chinese once viewed Chairman Mao’s”.
Greenspan was raised during the Great Depression, and for much of his career, such adulation would have been inconceivable – for him or any central banker. Through most of the 20th century, the men who acted as bankers to the bankers were deliberately low-key. They spurned public attention and doubted their own influence. They fully expected that politicians would bully them into trying to stimulate the economy, even at the risk of inflation. In 1964, in a successful effort to get the central bank to cut interest rates, Lyndon Johnson summoned the Fed chairman William McChesney Martin to his Texas ranch and pushed him around the living room, yelling in his face, “Boys are dying in Vietnam, and Bill Martin doesn’t care!” In democracies, evidently, technocratic power had limits.
Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, central-bank experts continued to be tormented. Richard Nixon and his henchmen once smeared Arthur Burns, the Fed chairman, by planting a fictitious story in the press, insinuating that Burns was simultaneously demanding a huge pay rise for himself and a pay freeze for other Americans. Following in this tradition, the Reagan administration frequently denounced the Fed chief, Paul Volcker, and packed the Fed’s board with pro-Reagan loyalists, who ganged up against their chairman.
There were Alan Greenspan postcards, Alan Greenspan cartoons, Alan Greenspan T-shirts, even an Alan Greenspan doll
When Greenspan replaced Volcker in 1987, the same pattern continued at first. The George HW Bush administration tried everything it could to force Greenspan to cut interest rates, to the point that a White House official put it about that the unmarried, 65-year-old Fed chairman reminded him of Norman Bates, the mother-fixated loner in Hitchcock’s Psycho.
And yet, starting with the advent of the Clinton administration, Greenspan effected a magical shift in the prestige of monetary experts. For the last 13 years of his tenure, running from 1993 to 2006, he attained the legendary status that Blinder recognised and celebrated. There were Alan Greenspan postcards, Alan Greenspan cartoons, Alan Greenspan T-shirts, even an Alan Greenspan doll. “How many central bankers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” asked a joke of the time. “One,” the answer went: “Greenspan holds the bulb and the world revolves around him.” Through quiet force of intellect, Greenspan seemed to control the American economy with the finesse of a master conductor. He was the “Maestro”, one biographer suggested. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy wrote that Greenspan’s oracular pronouncements became “as familiar and as comforting to ordinary Americans as Prozac and The Simpsons, both of which debuted in 1987, the same year President Reagan appointed him to office”.
Greenspan’s sway in Washington stretched far beyond the Fed’s core responsibility, which was to set interest rates. When the Clinton administration wanted to know how much deficit reduction was necessary, it asked Greenspan for a number, at which point that number assumed a talismanic importance, for no other reason than that Greenspan had endorsed it. When Congress wanted to understand how far deficit reduction would bring bond yields down, it demanded an answer from Greenspan, and his answer duly became a key plank of the case for moving towards budget balance. The Clinton adviser Dick Morris summed up economic policy in this period: “You figure out what Greenspan wants, and then you get it to him.”
Greenspan loomed equally large in the US government’s management of a series of emerging market meltdowns in the 1990s. Formally, the responsibility for responding to foreign crises fell mainly to the Treasury, but the Clinton team relied on Greenspan – for ideas and for political backing. With the Republicans controlling Congress, a Democratic president needed a Republican economist to vouch for his plans – to the press, Congress, and even the conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh. “Officials at the notoriously reticent Federal Reserve say they have seldom seen anything like it,” the New York Times reported in January 1995, remarking on the Fed chairman’s metamorphosis from monetary technocrat into rescue salesman. In 1999, anticipating the moment when it anointed Ben Bernanke its man of the year, Time put Greenspan on its cover, with smaller images of the Treasury secretary and deputy Treasury secretary flanking him. Greenspan and his sidemen were “economist heroes”, Time lectured its readers. They had “outgrown ideology”.
By the last years of his tenure, Greenspan’s reputation had risen so high that even fellow experts were afraid of him. When he held forth at the regular gatherings of central bank chiefs in Basel, the distinguished figures at the table, titans in their own fields, took notes with the eagerness of undergraduates. So great was Greenspan’s status that he started to seem irreplaceable. As vice-president Al Gore prepared his run for the White House, he pronounced himself Greenspan’s “biggest fan” and rated the chairman’s performance as “outstanding A-plus-plus”. Not to be outdone, the Republican senator John McCain wished the chairman could stay at his post into the afterlife. “I would do like we did in the movie Weekend at Bernie’s,” McCain joked during a Republican presidential primary debate. “I’d prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him and keep him as long as we could.”
How did Greenspan achieve this legendary status, creating the template for expert empowerment on which a generation of technocrats sought to build a new philosophy of anti-politics? The question is not merely of historical interest. With experts now in retreat, in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, the story of their rise may hold lessons for the future.
Part of the answer lies in the circumstances that Greenspan inherited. In the United States and elsewhere, central bankers were given space to determine interest rates without political meddling because the existing model had failed. The bullying of central banks by Johnson and Nixon produced the disastrous inflation of the 1970s, with the result that later politicians wanted to be saved from themselves – they stopped harassing central banks, understanding that doing so damaged economic performance and therefore their own reputations. Paul Volcker was a partial beneficiary of this switch: even though some Reagan officials attacked him, others recognised that he must be given the space to drive down inflation. Following Volcker’s tenure, a series of countries, starting with New Zealand, granted formal independence to their central banks. Britain crossed this Rubicon in 1997. In the United States, the Fed’s independence has never been formal. But the climate of opinion on monetary issues offered a measure of protection.
Healthy economic growth was another factor underpinning Greenspan’s exalted status. Globalisation, coupled with the surge of productivity that followed the personal computer revolution, made the 1990s a boom time. The pro-market policies that Greenspan and his fellow experts had long advocated seemed to be delivering the goods, not only in terms of growth but also in falling inequality, lower rates of crime, and lower unemployment for disadvantaged minorities. The legitimacy of experts relies on their presumed ability to deliver progress. In Greenspan’s heyday, experts over-delivered.
Yet these fortunate circumstances are not the whole story. Greenspan amassed more influence and reputation than anyone else because there was something special about him. He was not the sort of expert who wanted to confine politics to its box. To the contrary, he embraced politics, and loved the game. He understood power, and was not afraid to wield it.
Greenspan’s genius was to combine high-calibre expert analysis with raw political methods
Greenspan is regarded as the ultimate geek: obsessed with obscure numbers, convoluted in his speech, awkward in social settings. Yet he was far more worldly than his technocratic manner suggested. He entered public life when he worked for Nixon’s 1968 campaign – not just as an economic adviser, but as a polling analyst. In Nixon’s war room, he allied himself with the future populist presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, and his memos to Nixon were peppered with ideas on campaign spin and messaging. In 1971, when Nixon went after the Fed chairman, Arthur Burns, Greenspan was recruited to coax Burns into supporting the president. In the mid-1970s, when Greenspan worked in the Gerald Ford administration, he once sneaked into the White House on a weekend to help rewrite a presidential speech, burying an earlier draft penned by a bureaucratic opponent. At the Republican convention in 1980, Greenspan tried to manoeuvre Ford on to Ronald Reagan’s ticket – an outlandish project to get an ex-president to serve as vice president.
Greenspan’s genius was to combine high-calibre expert analysis with raw political methods. He had more muscle than a mere expert and more influence than a mere politician. The combination was especially potent because the first could be a cover for the second: his political influence depended on the perception that he was an expert, and therefore above the fray, and therefore not really political. Unlike politician-politicians, Greenspan’s advice had the ring of objectivity: he was the man who knew the details of the federal budget, the outlook for Wall Street, the political tides as they revealed themselves through polling data. The more complex the problems confronting the president, the more indispensable Greenspan’s expertise became. “He has the best bedside manner I’ve ever seen,” a jealous Ford administration colleague recalled, remarking on Greenspan’s hypnotic effect on his boss. “Extraordinary. That was his favourite word. He’d go in to see Ford and say, ‘Mr President, this is an extraordinarily complex problem.’ And Ford’s eyes would get big and round and start to go around in circles.”
By the time Greenspan became Fed chairman, he was a master of the dark arts of Washington. He went to extraordinary lengths to cultivate allies, fighting through his natural shyness to attend A-list parties, playing tennis with potentially troublesome financial lobbyists, maintaining his contacts on Wall Street, building up his capital by giving valuable counsel to anyone who mattered. Drawing on the advantage of his dual persona, Greenspan offered economic advice to politicians and political advice to economists. When Laura Tyson, an exuberant Berkeley economist, was appointed to chair Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, she was flattered to find that the Fed chairman had tips on her speaking style. Too many hand gestures and facial expressions could undermine her credibility, Greenspan observed. The CEA chairwoman should simply present facts, with as little visual commentary as possible.
Greenspan’s critics frequently complained that he was undermining the independence of the Fed by cosying up to politicians. But the critics were 180 degrees wrong: only by building political capital could Greenspan protect the Fed’s prerogatives. Clinton had no natural love for Greenspan: he would sometimes entertain his advisers with a cruel imitation of him – a cheerless old man droning on about inflation. But after a landmark 1993 budget deal and a 1995 bailout of Mexico, Clinton became a firm supporter of the Fed. Greenspan had proved that he had clout. Clinton wanted to be on the right side of him.
The contrast with Greenspan’s predecessor, the rumpled, egg-headed Paul Volcker, is revealing. Volcker lacked Greenspan’s political skills, which is why the Reagan administration succeeded in packing his board with governors who were ready to outvote him. When Greenspan faced a similar prospect, he had the muscle to fight back: in at least one instance, he let his allies in the Senate know that they should block the president’s candidate. Volcker also lacked Greenspan’s facility in dealing with the press – he refused to court public approval and sometimes pretended not to notice a journalist who had been shown into his office to interview him. Greenspan inhabited the opposite extreme: he courted journalists assiduously, opening presents each Christmas at the home of the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau chief, Al Hunt, flattering reporters with private interviews even as he berated other Fed governors for leaking to them. It was only fitting that, halfway through his tenure, Greenspan married a journalist whose source he had once been.
The upshot was that Greenspan maximised a form of power that is invaluable to experts. Because journalists admired him, it was dangerous for politicians to pick a fight with the Fed: in any public dispute, the newspaper columnists and talking heads would take Greenspan’s side of the argument. As a result, the long tradition of Fed-bashing ceased almost completely. Every Washington insider understood that Greenspan was too powerful to touch. People who got on the wrong side of him would find their career prospects dim. They would see their intellectual shortcomings exposed. They would find themselves diminished.
Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, in 2015. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/AFP/Getty Images
Of course, the triumph of the expert was bound to be fragile. In democracies, the will of the people can be sidelined only for so long, and 2016 has brought the whirlwind. The Brexit referendum featured Michael Gove’s infamous assertion that “the British people have had enough of experts”. Since the vote, Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor once pictured as superman, has been accused by the government of running dubious monetary experiments that exacerbate inequality – an attack picked up by William Hague, who this week threatened the central bank with the loss of its independence unless it raised interest rates. In the United States, Donald Trump has ripped into intellectuals of all stripes, charging Fed chair Janet Yellen with maintaining a dangerously loose monetary policy in order to help Obama’s poll ratings.
Of course, the triumph of the expert was bound to be fragile. In democracies, the will of the people can be sidelined only for so long, and 2016 has brought the whirlwind. The Brexit referendum featured Michael Gove’s infamous assertion that “the British people have had enough of experts”. Since the vote, Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor once pictured as superman, has been accused by the government of running dubious monetary experiments that exacerbate inequality – an attack picked up by William Hague, who this week threatened the central bank with the loss of its independence unless it raised interest rates. In the United States, Donald Trump has ripped into intellectuals of all stripes, charging Fed chair Janet Yellen with maintaining a dangerously loose monetary policy in order to help Obama’s poll ratings.
Inside the Bank of England
Both Gove and Trump sensed, correctly, that experts were primed for a fall. The inflationary catastrophe sparked by 1970s populism has faded from the public memory, and no longer serves as a cautionary tale. Economies have recovered disappointingly from the 2008 crash – a crash, incidentally, for which Greenspan must share the blame, since he presided over the inflation of the subprime mortgage bubble. What little growth there has been has also passed most people by, since the spoils have been so unequally distributed. If the experts’ legitimacy depends on delivering results, it is hardly surprising that they are on the defensive.
And yet the history of the rise of the experts should remind us of three things. First, the pendulum will swing back, just as it did after the 1970s. The saving grace of anti-expert populists is that they do discredit themselves, simply because policies originating from the gut tend to be lousy. If Donald Trump were to be elected, he would almost certainly cure voters of populism for decades, though the price in the meantime could be frightening. In Britain, which is sliding towards a wreck of a divorce with its most important trading partners, the delusions and confusions of the Brexit camp will probably exact an economic price that will be remembered for a generation.
Second, Alan Blinder had a point: democratic politics is prone to errors and gridlock, and there is much to be said for empowering technocrats. The right balance between democratic accountability and expert input is not impossible to strike: the model of an independent central bank does provide a template. Popularly elected politicians have a mandate to determine the priorities and ambitions of the state, which in turn determine the goals for expert bodies – whether these are central banks, environmental agencies, or the armed forces. But then it behooves the politicians to step back. Democracy is strengthened, not weakened, when it harnesses experts.
Thirdly, however, if the experts want to hasten their comeback, they must study the example of Greenspan’s politicking. It is no use thinking that, in a democracy, facts and analysis are enough to win the day. As the advertising entrepreneur John Kearon has argued, the public has to feel you are correct; the truth has to be sold as well as told; you have to capture the high ground with a brand that is more emotionally compelling than that of your opponents. In this process, as Greenspan’s career demonstrates, the media must be wooed. Enemies must be undermined. And, if you succeed, your face might just appear on a T-shirt.
Two decades ago, in his final and posthumous book, the American cultural critic Christopher Lasch went after contemporary experts. “Elites, who define the issues, have lost touch with the people,” he wrote. “There has always been a privileged class, even in America, but it has never been so dangerously isolated from its surroundings.” These criticisms presciently anticipated the rise of Davos Man – the rootless cosmopolitan elite, unburdened by any sense of obligation to a place of origin, its arrogance enhanced by the conviction that its privilege reflects brains and accomplishment, not luck and inheritance. To survive these inevitable resentments, elites will have to understand that they are not beyond politics – and they will have to demonstrate the skill to earn the public trust, and preserve it by deserving it. Given the alternative, we had better hope that they are up to it.
Wednesday, 19 October 2016
People power is ending TTIP and other unpopular EU free-trade deals
Molly Scott Cato in The Guardian
The corporations and political elites that have been steering free-trade deals for many years are finding they are losing control. Strong public resistance and opposition from national and regional governments in Europe are throwing the controversial TTIP and CETA trade deals off track.
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the US and the EU has proved deeply unpopular. Across Europe, campaigns to stop it have had a huge impact. Almost three and a half million Europeans have signed the“Stop TTIP”’ European Citizens’ Initiative petition against the deal.
But it’s not just citizens, unions and NGOs who are concerned about the way trade deals seize control from democratic governments and put it into the hands of private corporations. The member states themselves are getting cold feet. A few weeks ago, only 12 of the 28 EU countries were prepared to sign a letter in support of the deal. In the summer, France cast serious doubt on TTIP when its trade minister called for a suspension of talks and the German economy minister declared TTIP “de facto failed”. All this led the EU director-general for trade, Jean-Luc Demarty, to warn that the EU’s trade policy was “close to death”.
Meanwhile, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), a similar free-trade deal between Canada and the EU, is also in deep trouble. On Tuesday, EU trade ministers decided to postpone the decision to approve CETA, leaving the deal in limbo.
European Green MEP and anti-globalisation activist José Bové in Montreal, where he was detained and prevented from speaking against CETA. Photograph: Clement Sabourin/AFP/Getty Images
You can tell the designers of this project are worried. Last week French Green MEP and renowned anti-globalisation activist José Bové was detained by Canadian border officials when he arrived in Montreal to speak against CETA. He was eventually allowed into the country, but his detention prevented him speaking at the event. It seems that for the architects of trade deals freedom of movement for goods and services comes ahead of freedom of expression.
The politicians and corporations might feel they can silence voices but it is harder to ignore votes. And on this, a regional Belgian parliament has delivered a potentially fatal blow. The federation of Wallonia-Brussels parliament, which focuses on the cultural and educational concerns of 4.5 million French-speakers in Belgium, recently voted to reject CETA because of worries about public services and agriculture. Under Belgium’s constitution, all five regional governments must approve the trade deal before the federal government can give consent. And for CETA to be agreed, unanimous support is needed from all 28 EU countries.
The centrist, grey politicians who have mindlessly repeated the mantra of growth-and-trade for decades have become aware that those whose votes they periodically require no longer see these deals as working for them. With tens of thousands of European citizens once again taking to the streets in protest against these trade deals, European negotiators are fighting a losing battle.
All those who have campaigned against TTIP and CETA should take great credit. Despite the power of the corporations that were set to gain massively from the deals, the grassroots movement of people from across the EU, US and Canada have used their democratic rights to protest and to lobby to challenge their might.
While we should celebrate a victory for people power, we must also recognise that this is just the start of the fight. For the UK, either inside or outside the EU, the potential for these damaging trade deals to proliferate remains. Some argued, particularly those “leavers” on the left, that exiting the EU would free us from having to sign up to damaging trade agreements. But actually, it looks as though it is Europe that could save us from these dodgy deals, while the Conservative government, fearing the risk of isolation and desperate for trade deals at any price, will lead us in a race to the bottom. The risk of isolation following the Brexit vote may encourage them to sign us up to even more damaging bilateral agreements than those on offer to the EU.
Globalisation has brought us marvels including the internet and ease of international travel, but the power in this new paradigm has so far been held by corporations that exploit their ability to transcend national boundaries. Perhaps the rejection of the global trade treaties that we Greens have always dismissed as corporate power grabs might mark the beginning of the popular fight to unshackle ourselves from the chains of corporate power. With so much of the energy of the anti-TTIP fight coming from the UK, what a tragic irony it would be if we found ourselves leaping out of the TTIP and CETA frying-pan and into the fire of whatever pro-corporate trade deals Liam Fox has in mind for us.
The corporations and political elites that have been steering free-trade deals for many years are finding they are losing control. Strong public resistance and opposition from national and regional governments in Europe are throwing the controversial TTIP and CETA trade deals off track.
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the US and the EU has proved deeply unpopular. Across Europe, campaigns to stop it have had a huge impact. Almost three and a half million Europeans have signed the“Stop TTIP”’ European Citizens’ Initiative petition against the deal.
But it’s not just citizens, unions and NGOs who are concerned about the way trade deals seize control from democratic governments and put it into the hands of private corporations. The member states themselves are getting cold feet. A few weeks ago, only 12 of the 28 EU countries were prepared to sign a letter in support of the deal. In the summer, France cast serious doubt on TTIP when its trade minister called for a suspension of talks and the German economy minister declared TTIP “de facto failed”. All this led the EU director-general for trade, Jean-Luc Demarty, to warn that the EU’s trade policy was “close to death”.
Meanwhile, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), a similar free-trade deal between Canada and the EU, is also in deep trouble. On Tuesday, EU trade ministers decided to postpone the decision to approve CETA, leaving the deal in limbo.
European Green MEP and anti-globalisation activist José Bové in Montreal, where he was detained and prevented from speaking against CETA. Photograph: Clement Sabourin/AFP/Getty Images
You can tell the designers of this project are worried. Last week French Green MEP and renowned anti-globalisation activist José Bové was detained by Canadian border officials when he arrived in Montreal to speak against CETA. He was eventually allowed into the country, but his detention prevented him speaking at the event. It seems that for the architects of trade deals freedom of movement for goods and services comes ahead of freedom of expression.
The politicians and corporations might feel they can silence voices but it is harder to ignore votes. And on this, a regional Belgian parliament has delivered a potentially fatal blow. The federation of Wallonia-Brussels parliament, which focuses on the cultural and educational concerns of 4.5 million French-speakers in Belgium, recently voted to reject CETA because of worries about public services and agriculture. Under Belgium’s constitution, all five regional governments must approve the trade deal before the federal government can give consent. And for CETA to be agreed, unanimous support is needed from all 28 EU countries.
The centrist, grey politicians who have mindlessly repeated the mantra of growth-and-trade for decades have become aware that those whose votes they periodically require no longer see these deals as working for them. With tens of thousands of European citizens once again taking to the streets in protest against these trade deals, European negotiators are fighting a losing battle.
All those who have campaigned against TTIP and CETA should take great credit. Despite the power of the corporations that were set to gain massively from the deals, the grassroots movement of people from across the EU, US and Canada have used their democratic rights to protest and to lobby to challenge their might.
While we should celebrate a victory for people power, we must also recognise that this is just the start of the fight. For the UK, either inside or outside the EU, the potential for these damaging trade deals to proliferate remains. Some argued, particularly those “leavers” on the left, that exiting the EU would free us from having to sign up to damaging trade agreements. But actually, it looks as though it is Europe that could save us from these dodgy deals, while the Conservative government, fearing the risk of isolation and desperate for trade deals at any price, will lead us in a race to the bottom. The risk of isolation following the Brexit vote may encourage them to sign us up to even more damaging bilateral agreements than those on offer to the EU.
Globalisation has brought us marvels including the internet and ease of international travel, but the power in this new paradigm has so far been held by corporations that exploit their ability to transcend national boundaries. Perhaps the rejection of the global trade treaties that we Greens have always dismissed as corporate power grabs might mark the beginning of the popular fight to unshackle ourselves from the chains of corporate power. With so much of the energy of the anti-TTIP fight coming from the UK, what a tragic irony it would be if we found ourselves leaping out of the TTIP and CETA frying-pan and into the fire of whatever pro-corporate trade deals Liam Fox has in mind for us.
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