Friday, 3 February 2017
Leavers complain, but they’ve shared the benefits of cheap EU labour
John Harris in The Guardian
The idea that Peterborough feels like the future may seem unlikely. But it’s true: this bustling city with a population of 190,000 really does feel as if it’s on the social and economic cutting edge.
Brand new housing developments extend into the distance, as does rush-hour traffic. On its southern edgelands is Kingston Park, a surreal clump of vast warehouses and distribution sheds that includes an unbelievably large Amazon “fulfilment centre”, and one empty newly built structure, seemingly waiting for another multinational to fill it. Throughout the day, walkways and roads nearby are smattered with people in hi-vis jackets, living the zero-hours life, and trying to make the best of it.
Talk to them – Hungarians, Lithuanians and Bulgarians – and you’re reminded of two things about this part of England: the presence of large communities from central and eastern Europe; and the fact that their long-hours, low-wage work sits behind parts of the economy we all tap into every day.
In Peterborough it is warehousing and distribution; in nearby Wisbech, the food industry. Meanwhile, modern lives flip between trips to Aldi or Lidl, and online shopping sprees. Make no mistake: it is these people’s toil that the whole circus depends on.
As the article 50 debate grinds on, Downing Street has reportedly been warned that “at least half a dozen” Conservative MPs may join those from other parties to call for a legal guarantee that the 3.3 million EU nationals living in the UK will be able to stay. David Davis, the Brexit secretary, says nobody would be “throwing people out of Britain”, though his department’s white paper published on Thursday offers nothing more concrete than the statement, “We want to secure the status of EU citizens who are already living in the UK … as early as we can.”
Until negotiations are under way, certainty is obviously a non-starter. Besides, whatever the eventual legal outcome, the conversation about Brexit – which was backed by 61% of Peterborough’s voters – may already be sending out the cultural signal that migrants should either go home or not bother coming. Whatever, talk to such people here about their future and the conversation instantly pushes abstract matters of negotiating stances to one side: questions about the EU are raw and visceral.
In a country as class-bound as ours, the idea of some kind of British dream might seem incredible. But for many of the people who have come to this part of England from the former communist bloc, the idea of the UK as a land of opportunity is real. And for some Polish people in particular, it seems to have come true: you start working insane hours in a minimum-wage job, then move up to a middle-management position, and eventually buy a house. Starting a small business may be an option. Meanwhile, whatever your career status, you will have kids who are effectively British – or, as everyone here puts it, English.
How odd that such a quintessentially Thatcherite ideal is being put under threat by her political heirs. “There are fears that they might chase us out of here, fears of deportations,” says one woman working in a Polish-owned food shop. “But life goes on.”
I’m told there have been rumours that, with the formal triggering of article 50 in March, EU citizens will suddenly not be allowed into the UK, even if they are coming back after a trip home. “It is stressful,” says Petya, who came to the UK from Bulgaria. “People are not sure if they can leave … or even if they can afford to stay.” The falling value of the pound also plays on people’s minds.
In Wisbech, Lionel Sheffield is the boss of a firm, Rapid Recruitment, that supplies largely eastern European workers to local businesses. He reckons that applications to be on his books from EU countries fell 50% immediately after the referendum, and are now 25% down year-on-year. He fears a “precipice”.
David Orr, who owns local packaging firm Fencor, uses temporary workers whose numbers fluctuate with his business cycles. He’s written to ministers asking how this will work post-Brexit, and says the government is “not even bothering to listen”.
Orr says he has been pointed towards so-called tier 2 work visas, which involve formally becoming a “sponsor” approved by the UK Border Agency, a licence costing £536, and the obligation to put adverts in jobcentres for at least 28 days. He recently wrote to the home secretary warning that “the outlook at present looks frighteningly like the autumn of 2009 – the start of the last recession – [but] the big difference is that this time most of the economic damage will be self-inflicted”.
Left-leaning people may read about such cases and respond with moralistic sighs. Why, they may wonder, are businesses reliant on all that agency labour? But try coming up with a model of consumerism that avoids huge seasonal fluctuations. As Brexit may yet prove, coming down hard on this part of the economy would lead to lots of businesses going under.
It may turn out that the EU’s key contribution to Britain’s economy and society over the past 15 years was not the high-flown stuff about European cooperation and internationalism, but the way that it provided a huge pool of workers who would do jobs most British people would balk at, and thereby sustained a fragile mess of stagnating wages, skyrocketing credit, cheap food and consumerism-as-culture.
Millions of leave voters have experienced the magical benefits of all that just as much as those who voted remain. And if the whole model starts to unravel, their howls of dismay will be just as loud. It would be a very British outcome: in the land of having your cake and eating it, proof that if you play fast and loose with the people who do the baking, the fun soon stops.
The idea that Peterborough feels like the future may seem unlikely. But it’s true: this bustling city with a population of 190,000 really does feel as if it’s on the social and economic cutting edge.
Brand new housing developments extend into the distance, as does rush-hour traffic. On its southern edgelands is Kingston Park, a surreal clump of vast warehouses and distribution sheds that includes an unbelievably large Amazon “fulfilment centre”, and one empty newly built structure, seemingly waiting for another multinational to fill it. Throughout the day, walkways and roads nearby are smattered with people in hi-vis jackets, living the zero-hours life, and trying to make the best of it.
Talk to them – Hungarians, Lithuanians and Bulgarians – and you’re reminded of two things about this part of England: the presence of large communities from central and eastern Europe; and the fact that their long-hours, low-wage work sits behind parts of the economy we all tap into every day.
In Peterborough it is warehousing and distribution; in nearby Wisbech, the food industry. Meanwhile, modern lives flip between trips to Aldi or Lidl, and online shopping sprees. Make no mistake: it is these people’s toil that the whole circus depends on.
As the article 50 debate grinds on, Downing Street has reportedly been warned that “at least half a dozen” Conservative MPs may join those from other parties to call for a legal guarantee that the 3.3 million EU nationals living in the UK will be able to stay. David Davis, the Brexit secretary, says nobody would be “throwing people out of Britain”, though his department’s white paper published on Thursday offers nothing more concrete than the statement, “We want to secure the status of EU citizens who are already living in the UK … as early as we can.”
Until negotiations are under way, certainty is obviously a non-starter. Besides, whatever the eventual legal outcome, the conversation about Brexit – which was backed by 61% of Peterborough’s voters – may already be sending out the cultural signal that migrants should either go home or not bother coming. Whatever, talk to such people here about their future and the conversation instantly pushes abstract matters of negotiating stances to one side: questions about the EU are raw and visceral.
In a country as class-bound as ours, the idea of some kind of British dream might seem incredible. But for many of the people who have come to this part of England from the former communist bloc, the idea of the UK as a land of opportunity is real. And for some Polish people in particular, it seems to have come true: you start working insane hours in a minimum-wage job, then move up to a middle-management position, and eventually buy a house. Starting a small business may be an option. Meanwhile, whatever your career status, you will have kids who are effectively British – or, as everyone here puts it, English.
How odd that such a quintessentially Thatcherite ideal is being put under threat by her political heirs. “There are fears that they might chase us out of here, fears of deportations,” says one woman working in a Polish-owned food shop. “But life goes on.”
I’m told there have been rumours that, with the formal triggering of article 50 in March, EU citizens will suddenly not be allowed into the UK, even if they are coming back after a trip home. “It is stressful,” says Petya, who came to the UK from Bulgaria. “People are not sure if they can leave … or even if they can afford to stay.” The falling value of the pound also plays on people’s minds.
In Wisbech, Lionel Sheffield is the boss of a firm, Rapid Recruitment, that supplies largely eastern European workers to local businesses. He reckons that applications to be on his books from EU countries fell 50% immediately after the referendum, and are now 25% down year-on-year. He fears a “precipice”.
David Orr, who owns local packaging firm Fencor, uses temporary workers whose numbers fluctuate with his business cycles. He’s written to ministers asking how this will work post-Brexit, and says the government is “not even bothering to listen”.
Orr says he has been pointed towards so-called tier 2 work visas, which involve formally becoming a “sponsor” approved by the UK Border Agency, a licence costing £536, and the obligation to put adverts in jobcentres for at least 28 days. He recently wrote to the home secretary warning that “the outlook at present looks frighteningly like the autumn of 2009 – the start of the last recession – [but] the big difference is that this time most of the economic damage will be self-inflicted”.
Left-leaning people may read about such cases and respond with moralistic sighs. Why, they may wonder, are businesses reliant on all that agency labour? But try coming up with a model of consumerism that avoids huge seasonal fluctuations. As Brexit may yet prove, coming down hard on this part of the economy would lead to lots of businesses going under.
It may turn out that the EU’s key contribution to Britain’s economy and society over the past 15 years was not the high-flown stuff about European cooperation and internationalism, but the way that it provided a huge pool of workers who would do jobs most British people would balk at, and thereby sustained a fragile mess of stagnating wages, skyrocketing credit, cheap food and consumerism-as-culture.
Millions of leave voters have experienced the magical benefits of all that just as much as those who voted remain. And if the whole model starts to unravel, their howls of dismay will be just as loud. It would be a very British outcome: in the land of having your cake and eating it, proof that if you play fast and loose with the people who do the baking, the fun soon stops.
How corporate dark money is taking power on both sides of the Atlantic
George Monbiot in The Guardian
It took corporate America a while to warm to Donald Trump. Some of his positions, especially on trade, horrified business leaders. Many of them favoured Ted Cruz or Scott Walker. But once Trump had secured the nomination, the big money began to recognise an unprecedented opportunity.
Trump was prepared not only to promote the cause of corporations in government, but to turn government into a kind of corporation, staffed and run by executives and lobbyists. His incoherence was not a liability, but an opening: his agenda could be shaped. And the dark money network already developed by some American corporations was perfectly positioned to shape it. Dark money is the term used in the US for the funding of organisations involved in political advocacy that are not obliged to disclose where the money comes from. Few people would see a tobacco company as a credible source on public health, or a coal company as a neutral commentator on climate change. In order to advance their political interests, such companies must pay others to speak on their behalf.
Soon after the second world war, some of America’s richest people began setting up a network of thinktanks to promote their interests. These purport to offer dispassionate opinions on public affairs. But they are more like corporate lobbyists, working on behalf of those who fund them.
We have no hope of understanding what is coming until we understand how the dark money network operates. The remarkable story of a British member of parliament provides a unique insight into this network, on both sides of the Atlantic. His name is Liam Fox. Six years ago, his political career seemed to be over when he resigned as defence secretary after being caught mixing his private and official interests. But today he is back on the front bench, and with a crucial portfolio: secretary of state for international trade.
In 1997, the year the Conservatives lost office to Tony Blair, Fox, who is on the hard right of the Conservative party, founded an organisation called The Atlantic Bridge. Its patron was Margaret Thatcher. On its advisory council sat future cabinet ministers Michael Gove, George Osborne, William Hague and Chris Grayling. Fox, a leading campaigner for Brexit, described the mission of Atlantic Bridge as “to bring people together who have common interests”. It would defend these interests from “European integrationists who would like to pull Britain away from its relationship with the United States”.
Atlantic Bridge was later registered as a charity. In fact it was part of the UK’s own dark money network: only after it collapsed did we discover the full story of who had funded it. Its main sponsor was the immensely rich Michael Hintze, who worked at Goldman Sachs before setting up the hedge fund CQS. Hintze is one of the Conservative party’s biggest donors. In 2012 he was revealed as a funder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which casts doubt on the science of climate change. As well as making cash grants and loans to Atlantic Bridge, he lent Fox his private jet to fly to and from Washington.
Another funder was the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. It paid for a researcher at Atlantic Bridge called Gabby Bertin. She went on to become David Cameron’s press secretary, and now sits in the House of Lords: Cameron gave her a life peerage in his resignation honours list.
Trade secretary Liam Fox. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images
In 2007, a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) set up a sister organisation, the Atlantic Bridge Project. Alec is perhaps the most controversial corporate-funded thinktank in the US. It specialises in bringing together corporate lobbyists with state and federal legislators to develop “model bills”. The legislators and their families enjoy lavish hospitality from the group, then take the model bills home with them, to promote as if they were their own initiatives.
Alec has claimed that more than 1,000 of its bills are introduced by legislators every year, and one in five of them becomes law. It has been heavily funded by tobacco companies, the oil company Exxon, drug companies and Charles and David Koch – the billionaires who founded the first Tea Party organisations. Pfizer, which funded Bertin’s post at Atlantic Bridge, sits on Alec’s corporate board. Some of the most contentious legislation in recent years, such as state bills lowering the minimum wage, bills granting corporations immunity from prosecution and the “ag-gag” laws – forbidding people to investigate factory farming practices – were developed by Alec.
To run the US arm of Atlantic Bridge, Alec brought in its director of international relations, Catherine Bray. She is a British woman who had previously worked forthe Conservative MEP Richard Ashworth and the Ukip MEP Roger Helmer. Bray has subsequently worked for Conservative MEP and Brexit campaigner Daniel Hannan. Her husband is Wells Griffith, the battleground states director for Trump’s presidential campaign.
Among the members of Atlantic Bridge’s US advisory council were the ultra-conservative senators James Inhofe, Jon Kyl and Jim DeMint. Inhofe is reported to have received over $2m in campaign finance from coal and oil companies. Both Koch Industries and ExxonMobil have been major donors.
Kyl, now retired, is currently acting as the “sherpa” guiding Jeff Sessions’s nomination as Trump’s attorney general through the Senate. Jim DeMint resigned his seat in the Senate to become president of the Heritage Foundation – the thinktank founded with a grant from Joseph Coors of the Coors brewing empire, and built up with money from the banking and oil billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. Like Alec, it has been richly funded by the Koch brothers. Heritage, under DeMint’s presidency, drove the attempt to ensure that Congress blocked the federal budget, temporarily shutting down the government in 2013. Fox’s former special adviser at the Ministry of Defence, an American called Luke Coffey, now works for the foundation.
Former Arizona senator Jon Kyl. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
The Heritage Foundation is now at the heart of Trump’s administration. Its board members, fellows and staff comprise a large part of his transition team. Among them are Rebekah Mercer, who sits on Trump’s executive committee; Steven Groves and Jim Carafano (State Department); Curtis Dubay (Treasury); and Ed Meese, Paul Winfree, Russ Vought and John Gray (management and budget). CNN reports that “no other Washington institution has that kind of footprint in the transition”.
Trump’s extraordinary plan to cut federal spending by $10.5tn was drafted by the Heritage Foundation, which called it a “blueprint for a new administration”. Vought and Gray, who moved on to Trump’s team from Heritage, are now turning this blueprint into his first budget.
This will, if passed, inflict devastating cuts on healthcare, social security, legal aid, financial regulation and environmental protections; eliminate programmes to prevent violence against women, defend civil rights and fund the arts; and will privatise the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Trump, as you follow this story, begins to look less like a president and more like an intermediary, implementing an agenda that has been handed down to him.
In July last year, soon after he became trade secretary, Liam Fox flew to Washington. One of his first stops was a place he has visited often over the past 15 years: the office of the Heritage Foundation, where he spoke to, among others, Jim DeMint. A freedom of information request reveals that one of the topics raised at the meeting was the European ban on American chicken washed in chlorine: a ban that producers hope the UK will lift under a new trade agreement. Afterwards, Fox wrote to DeMint, looking forward to “working with you as the new UK government develops its trade policy priorities, including in high value areas that we discussed such as defence”.
How did Fox get to be in this position, after the scandal that brought him down in 2011? The scandal itself provides a clue: it involved a crossing of the boundaries between public and private interests. The man who ran the UK branch of Atlantic Bridge was his friend Adam Werritty, who operated out of Michael Hintze’s office building. Werritty’s work became entangled with Fox’s official business as defence secretary. Werritty, who carried a business card naming him as Fox’s adviser but was never employed by the Ministry of Defence, joined the secretary of state on numerous ministerial visits overseas, and made frequent visits to Fox’s office.
By the time details of this relationship began to leak, the charity commission had investigated Atlantic Bridge and determined that its work didn’t look very charitable. It had to pay back the tax from which it had been exempted (Hintze picked up the bill). In response, the trustees shut the organisation down. As the story about Werritty’s unauthorised involvement in government business began to grow, Fox made a number of misleading statements. He was left with no choice but to resign.
When Theresa May brought Fox back into government, it was as strong a signal as we might receive about the intentions of her government. The trade treaties that Fox is charged with developing set the limits of sovereignty. US food and environmental standards tend to be lower than Britain’s, and will become lower still if Trump gets his way. Any trade treaty we strike will create a common set of standards for products and services. Trump’s administration will demand that ours are adjusted downwards, so that US corporations can penetrate our markets without having to modify their practices. All the cards, post-Brexit vote, are in US hands: if the UK doesn’t cooperate, there will be no trade deal.
May needed someone who is unlikely to resist. She chose Fox, who has become an indispensable member of her team. The shadow diplomatic mission he developed through Atlantic Bridge plugs him straight into the Trump administration.
Long before Trump won, campaign funding in the US had systematically corrupted the political system. A new analysis by US political scientists finds an almost perfect linear relationship, across 32 years, between the money gathered by the two parties for congressional elections and their share of the vote. But there has also been a shift over these years: corporate donors have come to dominate this funding.
By tying our fortunes to those of the United States, the UK government binds us into this system. This is part of what Brexit was about: European laws protecting the public interest were portrayed by Conservative Eurosceptics as intolerable intrusions on corporate freedom. Taking back control from Europe means closer integration with the US. The transatlantic special relationship is a special relationship between political and corporate power. That power is cemented by the networks Liam Fox helped to develop.
In April 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt sent the US Congress the following warning: “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.” It is a warning we would do well to remember.
It took corporate America a while to warm to Donald Trump. Some of his positions, especially on trade, horrified business leaders. Many of them favoured Ted Cruz or Scott Walker. But once Trump had secured the nomination, the big money began to recognise an unprecedented opportunity.
Trump was prepared not only to promote the cause of corporations in government, but to turn government into a kind of corporation, staffed and run by executives and lobbyists. His incoherence was not a liability, but an opening: his agenda could be shaped. And the dark money network already developed by some American corporations was perfectly positioned to shape it. Dark money is the term used in the US for the funding of organisations involved in political advocacy that are not obliged to disclose where the money comes from. Few people would see a tobacco company as a credible source on public health, or a coal company as a neutral commentator on climate change. In order to advance their political interests, such companies must pay others to speak on their behalf.
Soon after the second world war, some of America’s richest people began setting up a network of thinktanks to promote their interests. These purport to offer dispassionate opinions on public affairs. But they are more like corporate lobbyists, working on behalf of those who fund them.
We have no hope of understanding what is coming until we understand how the dark money network operates. The remarkable story of a British member of parliament provides a unique insight into this network, on both sides of the Atlantic. His name is Liam Fox. Six years ago, his political career seemed to be over when he resigned as defence secretary after being caught mixing his private and official interests. But today he is back on the front bench, and with a crucial portfolio: secretary of state for international trade.
In 1997, the year the Conservatives lost office to Tony Blair, Fox, who is on the hard right of the Conservative party, founded an organisation called The Atlantic Bridge. Its patron was Margaret Thatcher. On its advisory council sat future cabinet ministers Michael Gove, George Osborne, William Hague and Chris Grayling. Fox, a leading campaigner for Brexit, described the mission of Atlantic Bridge as “to bring people together who have common interests”. It would defend these interests from “European integrationists who would like to pull Britain away from its relationship with the United States”.
Atlantic Bridge was later registered as a charity. In fact it was part of the UK’s own dark money network: only after it collapsed did we discover the full story of who had funded it. Its main sponsor was the immensely rich Michael Hintze, who worked at Goldman Sachs before setting up the hedge fund CQS. Hintze is one of the Conservative party’s biggest donors. In 2012 he was revealed as a funder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which casts doubt on the science of climate change. As well as making cash grants and loans to Atlantic Bridge, he lent Fox his private jet to fly to and from Washington.
Another funder was the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. It paid for a researcher at Atlantic Bridge called Gabby Bertin. She went on to become David Cameron’s press secretary, and now sits in the House of Lords: Cameron gave her a life peerage in his resignation honours list.
Trade secretary Liam Fox. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images
In 2007, a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) set up a sister organisation, the Atlantic Bridge Project. Alec is perhaps the most controversial corporate-funded thinktank in the US. It specialises in bringing together corporate lobbyists with state and federal legislators to develop “model bills”. The legislators and their families enjoy lavish hospitality from the group, then take the model bills home with them, to promote as if they were their own initiatives.
Alec has claimed that more than 1,000 of its bills are introduced by legislators every year, and one in five of them becomes law. It has been heavily funded by tobacco companies, the oil company Exxon, drug companies and Charles and David Koch – the billionaires who founded the first Tea Party organisations. Pfizer, which funded Bertin’s post at Atlantic Bridge, sits on Alec’s corporate board. Some of the most contentious legislation in recent years, such as state bills lowering the minimum wage, bills granting corporations immunity from prosecution and the “ag-gag” laws – forbidding people to investigate factory farming practices – were developed by Alec.
To run the US arm of Atlantic Bridge, Alec brought in its director of international relations, Catherine Bray. She is a British woman who had previously worked forthe Conservative MEP Richard Ashworth and the Ukip MEP Roger Helmer. Bray has subsequently worked for Conservative MEP and Brexit campaigner Daniel Hannan. Her husband is Wells Griffith, the battleground states director for Trump’s presidential campaign.
Among the members of Atlantic Bridge’s US advisory council were the ultra-conservative senators James Inhofe, Jon Kyl and Jim DeMint. Inhofe is reported to have received over $2m in campaign finance from coal and oil companies. Both Koch Industries and ExxonMobil have been major donors.
Kyl, now retired, is currently acting as the “sherpa” guiding Jeff Sessions’s nomination as Trump’s attorney general through the Senate. Jim DeMint resigned his seat in the Senate to become president of the Heritage Foundation – the thinktank founded with a grant from Joseph Coors of the Coors brewing empire, and built up with money from the banking and oil billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. Like Alec, it has been richly funded by the Koch brothers. Heritage, under DeMint’s presidency, drove the attempt to ensure that Congress blocked the federal budget, temporarily shutting down the government in 2013. Fox’s former special adviser at the Ministry of Defence, an American called Luke Coffey, now works for the foundation.
Former Arizona senator Jon Kyl. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
The Heritage Foundation is now at the heart of Trump’s administration. Its board members, fellows and staff comprise a large part of his transition team. Among them are Rebekah Mercer, who sits on Trump’s executive committee; Steven Groves and Jim Carafano (State Department); Curtis Dubay (Treasury); and Ed Meese, Paul Winfree, Russ Vought and John Gray (management and budget). CNN reports that “no other Washington institution has that kind of footprint in the transition”.
Trump’s extraordinary plan to cut federal spending by $10.5tn was drafted by the Heritage Foundation, which called it a “blueprint for a new administration”. Vought and Gray, who moved on to Trump’s team from Heritage, are now turning this blueprint into his first budget.
This will, if passed, inflict devastating cuts on healthcare, social security, legal aid, financial regulation and environmental protections; eliminate programmes to prevent violence against women, defend civil rights and fund the arts; and will privatise the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Trump, as you follow this story, begins to look less like a president and more like an intermediary, implementing an agenda that has been handed down to him.
In July last year, soon after he became trade secretary, Liam Fox flew to Washington. One of his first stops was a place he has visited often over the past 15 years: the office of the Heritage Foundation, where he spoke to, among others, Jim DeMint. A freedom of information request reveals that one of the topics raised at the meeting was the European ban on American chicken washed in chlorine: a ban that producers hope the UK will lift under a new trade agreement. Afterwards, Fox wrote to DeMint, looking forward to “working with you as the new UK government develops its trade policy priorities, including in high value areas that we discussed such as defence”.
How did Fox get to be in this position, after the scandal that brought him down in 2011? The scandal itself provides a clue: it involved a crossing of the boundaries between public and private interests. The man who ran the UK branch of Atlantic Bridge was his friend Adam Werritty, who operated out of Michael Hintze’s office building. Werritty’s work became entangled with Fox’s official business as defence secretary. Werritty, who carried a business card naming him as Fox’s adviser but was never employed by the Ministry of Defence, joined the secretary of state on numerous ministerial visits overseas, and made frequent visits to Fox’s office.
By the time details of this relationship began to leak, the charity commission had investigated Atlantic Bridge and determined that its work didn’t look very charitable. It had to pay back the tax from which it had been exempted (Hintze picked up the bill). In response, the trustees shut the organisation down. As the story about Werritty’s unauthorised involvement in government business began to grow, Fox made a number of misleading statements. He was left with no choice but to resign.
When Theresa May brought Fox back into government, it was as strong a signal as we might receive about the intentions of her government. The trade treaties that Fox is charged with developing set the limits of sovereignty. US food and environmental standards tend to be lower than Britain’s, and will become lower still if Trump gets his way. Any trade treaty we strike will create a common set of standards for products and services. Trump’s administration will demand that ours are adjusted downwards, so that US corporations can penetrate our markets without having to modify their practices. All the cards, post-Brexit vote, are in US hands: if the UK doesn’t cooperate, there will be no trade deal.
May needed someone who is unlikely to resist. She chose Fox, who has become an indispensable member of her team. The shadow diplomatic mission he developed through Atlantic Bridge plugs him straight into the Trump administration.
Long before Trump won, campaign funding in the US had systematically corrupted the political system. A new analysis by US political scientists finds an almost perfect linear relationship, across 32 years, between the money gathered by the two parties for congressional elections and their share of the vote. But there has also been a shift over these years: corporate donors have come to dominate this funding.
By tying our fortunes to those of the United States, the UK government binds us into this system. This is part of what Brexit was about: European laws protecting the public interest were portrayed by Conservative Eurosceptics as intolerable intrusions on corporate freedom. Taking back control from Europe means closer integration with the US. The transatlantic special relationship is a special relationship between political and corporate power. That power is cemented by the networks Liam Fox helped to develop.
In April 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt sent the US Congress the following warning: “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.” It is a warning we would do well to remember.
Thursday, 2 February 2017
Beyond gonorrhoea and cholera
Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn
COMPARISONS have been made between Donald Trump and Narendra Modi. They may have several facets of personality and politics in common but their routes to power were entirely different.
Modi’s road to becoming prime minister was enabled by bloodshed and a state that is swamped by a rapacious variant of capitalist ideology that profits from Hindutva. The phlegmatic Manmohan Singh was its misleading poster boy. Trump’s rise to power was strongly resisted, on the other hand, by a subtler corporate system driven by the deep state. Genial Obama was the veneer.
Manmohan Singh, for all his mild manners, classified the country’s most impoverished tribespeople as the biggest security challenge. On behalf of usurious capitalism, he unleashed a military campaign against the forest dwellers in which women continue to be raped and homes uprooted. Some women abused and tortured by the police in Chhattisgarh were in Delhi to share their ordeal on Sunday. Singh unleashed state terror on anti-nuclear villagers who opposed controversial Russian-built nuclear reactors near their southern hamlets, which they fear are potentially worse than Fukushima’s.
Singh prophesied that Modi, if he won, would be a disaster for India. But Modi has only added narrow nationalism and its bloodier prescriptions to the quiver he inherited from Singh. Business tycoons that supported Singh are sworn allies of Modi.
Obama, like his predecessors, dropped bombs at will over Afghanistan, and contrived, in harness with Hillary Clinton, the depredation of a secular Syria and a secular Libya. Trump, albeit from a white supremacist plank, has asked inconvenient questions about the decimation of secular Arab satraps who had successfully kept the lid on a fanatical religious genie. Modi has uncorked the evil spirit of Hindutva, not learning from the tragedy that befell the neighbours when Ziaul Haq let loose Islamic revivalism as a tool of governance.
As Singh thought of Modi, Obama too cautioned that Trump would be disastrous for America. Singh and Obama were prophetic about their successors; of that there should be no doubt. But they were both accomplices in their rise. That too is indisputable.
There is a preponderance of embedded journalism in both chest-thumping democracies, embedded meaning lying in bed with the state. As his American cousins had done in Iraq, a BBC journalist, unbelievably, rode astride a tank to liberate Kabul. His Indian counterparts brought the Kargil war into Indian drawing rooms with their helmets on. Images of the bloody war on colour TV, replete with an American-style trail of body bags of fallen soldiers all the way to their usefully filmed funeral scenes helped enliven a genre of nationalism that was barely dormant.
Nationalism thus fanned mutated soon enough to become a scourge for many helmet-embracing journalists, but the penny still doesn’t seem to have dropped. One of them says she loves Kashmir and the Indian army in the same breath but fails to notice the inherent contrariness of her loves. And she also loves capitalism, the Indian TV anchor who left her job recently would say. There is nothing in any of her three loves — Kashmir, army, and capitalism — that reveals a less than robust nationalist bone.
A burgeoning mass of Indians is similarly failing to see the umbilical ties between militarism and communalism, between nationalism and fascism of which India’s rapacious genre of capitalism is an energising force. Adam Smith would have cringed.
Trump’s luck with the media was opposite of Modi’s. CNN and the New York Times have emerged as his most implacable critics in the American media. He struggled for a while even with arch-right-wing Fox News. All were complicit in the tragic unravelling of the secular Iraqi state and earlier in the sacking of Afghanistan. The media sold unverified tales of hidden weapons of mass destruction. Remember?
Trump has said many things that are downright gut-wrenching to any liberal sensibility, but one belief he has held on to would make even his Israeli allies hate him. That’s his criticism of Iraq’s invasion by America.
Trump’s visa restrictions on Muslims, however, are a copyright infringement. Modi excluded Muslim asylum seekers first. Trump is soft on Syria’s Christian refugees to placate a domestic constituency; Modi is wooing Hindu Bangladeshis.
In a world where old problems, new headaches and daily mood swings are all delivered through television, there is a distinct possibility for the masses to be swayed by an absence of reason.
Early experiments showed we could be persuaded to choose a brand of cigarettes by flashing wild stallions, unrelated to the topic, in the backdrop of Marlboro country. Ford cars would leap between rugged hills to woo customers who had to otherwise pass a rigid set of driving tests to get a licence to precisely not try the tricks. Cigarettes cause cancer just as climbing vertical cliffs, if at all possible, would wreck the car if not also kill the driver. But that realisation is a rare and usually delayed intuition. The ‘informed’ choice TV boasts is, more often than not, pure bad advice.
You can’t have a debate with a TV ad. It’s a monologue. Trump and Modi have this in common. They hate to face questions. They avoid news conferences. They both tweet. They give exclusive and by implication friendly interviews. Modi speaks routinely on the radio, which has remained the most compelling means of collaring the masses since the Third Reich.
I am sure Trump will soon be discovering the miracles of the radio. Orwell’s 1984 is selling feverishly across America. The fractious opposition that helped Trump’s rise is now standing up to him. That possibility looks distant in a nuclear-tipped India where the opposition seems more troubled by the rise of Arvind Kejriwal, a democrat, than by Modi, a potential fascist. Julian Assange described Clinton and Trump as a choice between gonorrhoea and cholera. With Europe in right-wing ferment and India in free fall, Assange may soon find it difficult to tell the difference.
COMPARISONS have been made between Donald Trump and Narendra Modi. They may have several facets of personality and politics in common but their routes to power were entirely different.
Modi’s road to becoming prime minister was enabled by bloodshed and a state that is swamped by a rapacious variant of capitalist ideology that profits from Hindutva. The phlegmatic Manmohan Singh was its misleading poster boy. Trump’s rise to power was strongly resisted, on the other hand, by a subtler corporate system driven by the deep state. Genial Obama was the veneer.
Manmohan Singh, for all his mild manners, classified the country’s most impoverished tribespeople as the biggest security challenge. On behalf of usurious capitalism, he unleashed a military campaign against the forest dwellers in which women continue to be raped and homes uprooted. Some women abused and tortured by the police in Chhattisgarh were in Delhi to share their ordeal on Sunday. Singh unleashed state terror on anti-nuclear villagers who opposed controversial Russian-built nuclear reactors near their southern hamlets, which they fear are potentially worse than Fukushima’s.
Singh prophesied that Modi, if he won, would be a disaster for India. But Modi has only added narrow nationalism and its bloodier prescriptions to the quiver he inherited from Singh. Business tycoons that supported Singh are sworn allies of Modi.
Obama, like his predecessors, dropped bombs at will over Afghanistan, and contrived, in harness with Hillary Clinton, the depredation of a secular Syria and a secular Libya. Trump, albeit from a white supremacist plank, has asked inconvenient questions about the decimation of secular Arab satraps who had successfully kept the lid on a fanatical religious genie. Modi has uncorked the evil spirit of Hindutva, not learning from the tragedy that befell the neighbours when Ziaul Haq let loose Islamic revivalism as a tool of governance.
As Singh thought of Modi, Obama too cautioned that Trump would be disastrous for America. Singh and Obama were prophetic about their successors; of that there should be no doubt. But they were both accomplices in their rise. That too is indisputable.
There is a preponderance of embedded journalism in both chest-thumping democracies, embedded meaning lying in bed with the state. As his American cousins had done in Iraq, a BBC journalist, unbelievably, rode astride a tank to liberate Kabul. His Indian counterparts brought the Kargil war into Indian drawing rooms with their helmets on. Images of the bloody war on colour TV, replete with an American-style trail of body bags of fallen soldiers all the way to their usefully filmed funeral scenes helped enliven a genre of nationalism that was barely dormant.
Nationalism thus fanned mutated soon enough to become a scourge for many helmet-embracing journalists, but the penny still doesn’t seem to have dropped. One of them says she loves Kashmir and the Indian army in the same breath but fails to notice the inherent contrariness of her loves. And she also loves capitalism, the Indian TV anchor who left her job recently would say. There is nothing in any of her three loves — Kashmir, army, and capitalism — that reveals a less than robust nationalist bone.
A burgeoning mass of Indians is similarly failing to see the umbilical ties between militarism and communalism, between nationalism and fascism of which India’s rapacious genre of capitalism is an energising force. Adam Smith would have cringed.
Trump’s luck with the media was opposite of Modi’s. CNN and the New York Times have emerged as his most implacable critics in the American media. He struggled for a while even with arch-right-wing Fox News. All were complicit in the tragic unravelling of the secular Iraqi state and earlier in the sacking of Afghanistan. The media sold unverified tales of hidden weapons of mass destruction. Remember?
Trump has said many things that are downright gut-wrenching to any liberal sensibility, but one belief he has held on to would make even his Israeli allies hate him. That’s his criticism of Iraq’s invasion by America.
Trump’s visa restrictions on Muslims, however, are a copyright infringement. Modi excluded Muslim asylum seekers first. Trump is soft on Syria’s Christian refugees to placate a domestic constituency; Modi is wooing Hindu Bangladeshis.
In a world where old problems, new headaches and daily mood swings are all delivered through television, there is a distinct possibility for the masses to be swayed by an absence of reason.
Early experiments showed we could be persuaded to choose a brand of cigarettes by flashing wild stallions, unrelated to the topic, in the backdrop of Marlboro country. Ford cars would leap between rugged hills to woo customers who had to otherwise pass a rigid set of driving tests to get a licence to precisely not try the tricks. Cigarettes cause cancer just as climbing vertical cliffs, if at all possible, would wreck the car if not also kill the driver. But that realisation is a rare and usually delayed intuition. The ‘informed’ choice TV boasts is, more often than not, pure bad advice.
You can’t have a debate with a TV ad. It’s a monologue. Trump and Modi have this in common. They hate to face questions. They avoid news conferences. They both tweet. They give exclusive and by implication friendly interviews. Modi speaks routinely on the radio, which has remained the most compelling means of collaring the masses since the Third Reich.
I am sure Trump will soon be discovering the miracles of the radio. Orwell’s 1984 is selling feverishly across America. The fractious opposition that helped Trump’s rise is now standing up to him. That possibility looks distant in a nuclear-tipped India where the opposition seems more troubled by the rise of Arvind Kejriwal, a democrat, than by Modi, a potential fascist. Julian Assange described Clinton and Trump as a choice between gonorrhoea and cholera. With Europe in right-wing ferment and India in free fall, Assange may soon find it difficult to tell the difference.
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