Ministers who misuse statistics to mislead voters must pay the price

Politicians resign for fake expenses or receiving favours, but not for making false statements. They should be punished

• 
• • Peter Wilby
  • The Guardian, Friday 31 May 2013 20.30 BST

Andrew Dilnot, now head of the UK Statistics Authority, ‘exposed a Conservative party claim on numbers of people who dropped out of claiming incapacity benefit as a lie.’ Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Some years ago, I talked to Andrew Dilnot, then principal of an Oxford college, now head of the UK Statistics Authority. He picked up a copy of the Guardian front page, jabbed his finger at the figure $25bn, which was highlighted in a panel, and asked: "Is that a big number?" I looked at him blankly. He said newspapers, particularly upmarket ones, were full of numbers but, in many instances, neither journalists nor readers could explain their significance. "Numbers are just a particular class of words. There isn't any other class of words in a paper that we wouldn't ask ourselves what they mean."

We often hear politicians quoting numbers, but what do they mean? In March, a Conservative party press release, faithfully reported in the Sunday Telegraph, claimed "nearly a million people" had come off incapacity benefit rather than face new medical tests for what is now called the employment and support allowance. The press release intended us to think 1m was a big number – "more than a third of the total", it stated – though the true figure was 878,300. To explain the meaning, it quoted the party chairman, Grant Shapps. The figure was a vindication of the government's stricter policies on benefit claimants, he said, and a demonstration of "how the welfare system was broken under Labour". It showed, we were supposed to deduce, the scale of malingering before the coalition put a stop to it.

But the big number was – there is no other word for it – a lie. Dilnot, now responsible for protecting the integrity of official statistics, exposed it as a lie this week, albeit using mild Whitehall language in letters to Shapps and Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary. The 878,300 alleged malingerers had never received incapacity benefit. They were new claimants, aggregated over three-and-a-half years. Many (probably most) withdrew their claim because they recovered from their condition or found a new job. In 2011-12, out of 603,600 established benefit claimants referred for the new medical tests, just 19,700 (3.3%) withdrew before taking them. That figure – which most of us would think small – represented the true scale of people pretending to be sick.

This is not the first time Dilnot has issued reprimands for misuse of numbers or, to put it more bluntly than he would, the quotation of bogus figures. The prime minister himself was rebuked in January for stating that the coalition was "paying down Britain's debts"when the national debt had risen from £811bn to £1.1 trillion. Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, was told in December to withdraw his claim that NHS spending had risen in real terms "in each of the last two years". Last month Duncan Smith was on the naughty step for claiming that, as a result of the new benefits cap, 8,000 people had moved into jobs. This was "unsupported" by official statistics, Dilnot ruled. Last year Michael Gove, the education secretary, was criticised for claims that, under Labour, tests had shown British children falling steeply in international league tables. UK samples for tests in 2000 and 2003 were inadequate, Dilnot wrote; it was not therefore possible to make "trend comparisons" with later tests in 2006 and 2009.

Politicians – like journalists, campaigners and even academics – habitually quote figures selectively, seizing on those that support their case, ignoring those that don't. That is human nature. We cannot expect ministers to examine all available evidence dispassionately every time they speak or write. No doubt they also make genuine errors, misunderstanding, misreading or failing to check statistics.

But the examples above are surely deliberate attempts to mislead the public. It is not a matter of accurate figures being taken out of context, but of making false statements about what official statistics show. (Labour may have been equally guilty of such behaviour, but it was rarely properly highlighted because the UK Statistics Authority was not established until 2008 and Dilnot did not take charge until last year.) Unfortunately, there is no price to pay. The "nearly a million" figure will stick in the public mind. Dilnot's demolition of the Shapps claim was not widely or prominently reported.

The quotation of statistics is fundamental to modern political debate. Parties compete, not so much on ideology or even policy, as on their competence to manage the nation's affairs. Most voters would struggle to distinguish between a Labour NHS reform and a Tory NHS reform, a Labour academy and a Tory academy, a Labour "crackdown" on benefits and a Tory "crackdown". They look for evidence that things are going well and politicians respond by quoting hospital waiting times, GCSE success rates, numbers coming off benefit, and so on. We know politicians cherry-pick the figures, wrench them out of context, round them up or down, but we should at least have confidence that they aren't making them up.

Perhaps, as is often suggested, better maths and statistics teaching in schools would help us make more sense of the figures. But we cannot all be expected to scrutinise the raw official statistics to verify everything we are told, not least because the Office for National Statistics website is virtually unnavigable. Without some faith in ministers' veracity, public trust in democracy withers still further.

Can anything be done? The public administration select committee has proposed that Dilnot take greater control over the collation and publication of departmental statistics, and over how they are publicised. It has also suggested that ministers should not have automatic access to official figures before they are released, because it allows them to put out their own "spin" in advance. These changes would be an improvement, but ministers will continue to offend until they have reason to fear the consequences of making false statements.

Nearly all ministerial resignations are connected with not telling the truth: submitting false expenses, covering up a speeding points swap, receiving favours from lobbyists. But telling untruths about official figures is somehow regarded less seriously. Dilnot should have the power, in the worst examples, to require a full Commons censure debate on a minister's conduct – with an expectation that, if he or she failed to offer an adequate defence or show contrition, resignation would follow. That would guarantee press attention and ministerial trembling. Big lies about big numbers require big deterrents.

The serpent in the garden

The IPL is representative of the worst sides of Indian capitalism and Indian society

Ramachandra Guha

June 1, 2013

I detest wearing a tie, and do so only when forced. One such occasion was a formal dinner at All Souls College, Oxford, where opposite me was an Israeli scholar who had just got a job at the University, and was extremely anxious to show how well he knew its ways and mores. He dropped some names, and spoke of his familiarity with the manuscripts collection at "Bodley" (the Bodleian Library). In between his boasts he kept scrutinising my tie. Then, when he could contain his curiosity no more, he walked across the table, took my tie in his hand, looked at it ever more closely, and asked: "Is this Magdalene?"

I did not answer. How could I? For the tie signalled not membership of a great old Oxford College, but of a rather more obscure institution, the Friends Union Cricket Club in Bangalore. I joined the club in 1963, aged five, because my uncle, a legendary one-handed cricketer named N Duraiswamy, played for it. I would go along with him for practice, stand by the side of the net, and at the end of the day be allowed to bowl a few balls from 12 yards or thereabouts. By the time I was ten I was helping lay the mat and nail it to the ground. When I reached my teens I was bowling from where everyone else did.

As a boy and young man, I was an episodic member of the Friends Union Cricket Club. In those years I was based in North India, and came south for my summer and winter holidays. In 1994 I moved to Bangalore for good. In the past two decades, I have watched FUCC win the First Division Championship three times, and seen a series of young players graduate from club cricket to representing the state in the Ranji Trophy. My club has produced two India internationals and at least fifteen Karnataka players, all of whom I have known personally and/or watched play.

Largely because of Duraiswami - who has been captain or manager for forty years now - FUCC enjoys a reputation that is high both in cricketing and ethical terms. No cricketer of the club has ever tried to use influence to gain state selection. Where other clubs sometimes adjust games to make sure they do not get relegated, FUCC does not resort to this. FUCC cricketers do not come late for practice, and never abuse the umpire. And they play some terrific cricket too.

FUCC was one of a dozen clubs that provided the spine of Karnataka cricket. The others included Jawahars, Crescents, BUCC, Swastic, Bangalore Cricketers, and City Cricketers. The men who ran those clubs were likewise personally honest as well as fantastically knowledgeable about the game. The cricketers they produced won Karnataka six Ranji Trophy titles, and won India many Tests and one-day internationals too.

This year I mark the 50th anniversary of my membership of the Friends Union Cricket Club. In this time, FUCC has commanded my primary cricketing loyalty; followed by my state, Karnataka, and only then by India. Six years ago, however, a new club and a new format entered my city and my life. I was faced with a complicated decision - should I now add a fresh allegiance, to the Royal Challengers Bangalore?

I decided I would not, mostly because I disliked the promoter. In cricketing terms, Vijay Mallya was the Other of Duraiswami. He had never played cricket, nor watched much cricket either. He had no knowledge of its techniques or its history. He had come into the sport on a massive ego trip, to partake of the glamour and celebrity he saw associated with it. He would buy his way into Indian cricket. And so he did.

It was principally because Mallya was so lacking in the dedicated selflessness of the cricketing coaches and managers I knew, that I decided the RCB would not be my team. So, although I am a member of the Karnataka State Cricket Association and have free entry into its grounds, I continued to reserve that privilege for Ranji Trophy and Test matches alone.

The KSCA Stadium is named for its former president, M Chinnaswamy, who was one of Duraiswami's heroes. When I was growing up, Durai would tell me of how Chinnaswamy supervised the building of the stadium, brick by brick. This great lover of cricket abandoned his lucrative law practice for months on end, monitoring the design, the procurement of materials, and the construction, with no cost over-runs and absolutely no commissions either.

	The behaviour of Messrs Lalit Modi and N Srinivasan cannot shock or surprise me, but I have been distressed at the way in which some respected cricket commmentators have become apologists for the IPL and its management

In other ways too Chinnaswamy was exemplary. Never, in all the years he served the KSCA, did he try to manipulate a single selection. Later, when he became president of the BCCI, he met the challenge of Kerry Packer by increasing the fees per Test match tenfold. It was while he ran Indian cricket that our players were for the first time treated with dignity and paid a decent wage.

I wonder what Chinnaswamy would have made of his grasping, greedy, successors as presidents of BCCI. I wonder, too, what he would have made of a man who can't pay his own employees having a free run of the stadium that Chinnaswamy so lovingly built. This past April, the Bengaluru edition of the Hindu carried a front-page story on an summons that the Special Court for Economic Offences had issued to Mallya, who owed the Income Tax Department some Rs75 crores, or about $13.3 million, which he had not paid despite repeated reminders. The police, often waiving the rules for the powerful, told the court that they were too busy to execute the summons.

But let me not single out Mallya here. The truth is that almost all the owners of IPL teams (seven out of nine, by one estimate) are being investigated by one government agency or another, in one country or another, for economic offences of one kind or another. Since this is a shady operation run by shady characters, Indian companies known for their professionalism, entrepreneurial innovation, and technical excellence have stayed away from the IPL altogether. Here is a question for those who still think the tournament is worth defending - why is it that companies like the Tatas, the Mahindras, or Infosys have not promoted an IPL team? (Editor's note - Tata Consultancy Services sponsor Rajasthan Royals.)

To this writer, that the IPL was corrupt from top to bottom (and side to side) was clear from the start - which is why I have never exercised my right of free entry for its matches in Bengaluru. But as I watched the tournament unfold, I saw also that it was deeply divisive in a sociological sense. It was a tamasha for the rich and upwardly mobile living in the cities of southern and western India. Rural and small town India were largely left out, as were the most populous states. That Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, both of whom have excellent Ranji Trophy records, had no IPL team between them, while Maharashtra had two, was symptomatic of the tournament's identification with the powerful and the moneyed. The entire structure of the IPL was a denial of the rights of equal citizenship that a truly "national" game should promote.

The IPL is representative of the worst sides of Indian capitalism and Indian society. Corrupt and cronyist, it has also promoted chamchagiri and compliance. The behaviour of Messrs Lalit Modi and N Srinivasan cannot shock or surprise me, but I have been distressed at the way in which some respected cricket commmentators have become apologists for the IPL and its management. Theirs is a betrayal that has wounded the image of cricket in India, and beyond. George Orwell once said: "A writer should never be a loyal member of a political party." Likewise, for his credibility and even his sanity, a cricket writer/commentator should keep a safe distance from those who run the game in his country.

What is to be done now? The vested interests are asking for such token measures as the legalisation of betting and the resignation of the odd official. In truth, far more radical steps are called for. The IPL should be disbanded. The Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, played between state sides, should be upgraded, making it the flagship Twenty20 tournament in the country. Then the clubs and state associations that have run our domestic game reasonably well for the past 80 years would be given back their authority, and the crooks and the moneybags turfed out altogether.

Even now, in every city and town in India, there are selfless cricket coaches and administrators active, nurturing young talent, supervising matches and leagues. The way to save Indian cricket is to allow these modern-day equivalents of Duraiswami and M Chinnaswamy to take charge once more.

Tamasha and a quick buck

by Girish Menon

Today, Sharad Pawar joined the rising crescendo of voices asking for N Srinivasan the BCCI chief to demit office. He is, i.e. Pawar, the latest bigwig who has provided ballast to the 'Srinivasan must go' campaign. And since most of reported opinion is of bigwigs, this writer suggests that news organisations should attempt to lift their wigs and examine what motivation underlies these utterances.

To this writer, opportunism is the premise that seems to unite both the supporters and opponents of Srinivasan. From Farooq Abdullah to Gavaskar to Scindia to Pawar, all of them appear to have a 'dog in the fight'. Hence their views are based on ulterior motives and not really with a view to clean the Augean stables. Yet, news organisations refuse to highlight views of the non big wigs. This author wrote a piece, 'Sreesanth - Another Modern Day Valmiki?' but Cricinfo refused to publish it.

In short the debate appears to be an incestuous fight between a group governing the BCCI and another group who wish to replace them. And news organisations seem to be taking positions based on which group will get them a seat at the trough?

The disenfranchised cricket loving Indian public realise that their own views do not count. Hence, like the Saudis who turn up for the Friday post prayer beheading, they turned up in large numbers for the IPL final realising full well that the result of the game could have been pre ordained. They looked on the event as pure tamasha (theatre) and maybe some may have even bet on the underdog to win because that is the only way they and the omnipotent bookie can both make a sure buck.

The mathematics of spot-fixing

by Dilip D'Souza

Spot-fixing: suddenly on a whole lot of minds. Three young cricketers accused of doing it for no real reason I can fathom except greed. After all, they were already earning money legitimately far in excess of the great majority of their countrymen.

Still, I’m not here to pass judgement on these men. They are innocent until we find otherwise, and that finding will eventually come from a court. And anyway, who knows what motivates young men with lots of money? No, I’m here to discuss what makes spot-fixing possible; especially, some of the mathematics behind it all.

But let’s start with this: what makes a bet possible? Of course, I suspect it is almost human nature to want to gamble. But that desire is founded on probabilities. You consider an upcoming event, you estimate the probability of it turning out a certain way, and you choose to place a bet (or not) based on that estimate. There are fellows called bookies who will take your bet. Based on their own estimate of what’s going to happen, they will give you what’s called “odds” on the event.

For example: Imagine two cricket captains about to toss a coin. Both of them, and all of us, know the probability of it landing heads is 1/2. If you find a bookie willing to take a bet on this, it’s likely he’ll give you odds of 1:1; meaning, for every rupee you bet, you’ll get a rupee back if the coin does in fact land heads. A pretty stupid bet to make, you’ll agree. Because if you keep betting, you’ll lose your rupee half the time—when the coin lands tails. And when it lands heads, you simply get your rupee back.

But consider tossing a dice instead. The probability of a “1” is 1/6, and that opens up more apparently interesting betting possibilities. A bookie will likely offer odds of 5:1 on a “1”; that is, for every rupee you bet, you’ll get back five if the dice shows “1”. (If it shows anything else, you lose your rupee.) Sounds exciting, this chance to quintuple (wow!) your money? Would you take these odds and place a bet like this?

Yet here’s the thing, and this is why I used the word “apparently” above. Please don’t stop breathing at the mention of quintupling your money. For the mathematics says this is actually just as stupid a bet to make as with the coin. Again, if you keep betting, you’ll lose your rupee five out of every six times. (Put it another way: five of every six bettors who place such a bet will lose their money.) Only once—that sixth time—will you get your five-rupee windfall.

The reason bookies might offer such odds—1:1 for the coin, 5:1 for the dice—is that they know their probabilities as well as you do, and naturally they don’t want to lose money. In fact, they will likely tweak the odds they offer just enough so they actually make money. That is, after all, why they do what they do.

So if you find a bookie offering quite different odds than you expect, it’s likely he knows something you don’t. Consider how that might pan out. Let’s say the coin the captains use is actually a fake—it has tails on both sides. But let’s say only our devious bookie knows this. He says to you the avid bettor: “Ten times your money back if it comes up heads!” You think: “Wow! There’s an attractive proposition!” and you gamble Rs.1,000, for you’ve estimated that there’s a 50-50 chance you’re going to waltz home withRs.10,000.

Then you lose, as—face it—you were always likely to do. Bookie laughs all the way to the bank with yourRs.1,000.

All of which is essentially how spot-fixing must work.

So now imagine you are a fervent cricket-watcher. (Which I’m willing to bet you are, unless you’re Lady Gaga.) From years following the game, you know that bowler J bowls a no-ball about once in every six-ball over. Along comes bookie W to whisper in your ear: “Psst! Hundred times your money back if J bowls exactly one no-ball in his first over in the Siliguri Master Chefs game!” Your eyes widen and you fork out the Rs.10,000 you didn’t win when he offered you the coin bet, starry visions of a million-rupee payoff whirling through your head. Hundreds of other cricket fanatics like you do the same. (Rather silly cricket fanatics, but never mind.)

What you don’t know, of course, is that bookie W has instructed bowler J to bowl not just one, but two no-balls in that first over. For doing so, J will get a slice of all the money W has collected in bets.

So J bowls his two no-balls at the Master Chefs. You lose. Bookie W and bowler J laugh all the way to the bank. Simple.

We need a Eurosceptic party of the centre left

I left Ukip, the party I founded, when it became a magnet for bigots. But what happened to left wing opposition to the EU?

• 
• • Alan Sked
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 May 2013 09.00 BST

'There was a time when Labour was adamantly anti-EU. Gaitskell, Foot, Kinnock and even Blair opposed it' Photograph: Francois Lenoir/Reuters

The idea of reshaping the world, changing it for the better, is probably a natural, if not a divine one. However, the lure of progress can be deceptive. "Great enterprises" of the kind Charles de Gaulle in his memoirs famously associated with the role of France in the world, come regularly unstuck. The latest grand projet of the French rational mind, the EU, is now coming apart at the seams. Rather like the 18th-century "enlightened despotisms" inspired by the French philosophes, our contemporary bureaucratic autocracy now faces revolution. The peasants of Greece, Spain, Italy and elsewhere are revolting. Even the French peasants are displaying a worrying restlessness.

Progressivism everywhere has a long history of dreadful mistakes. Just look at Marxism. Today, both China and North Korea testify to its illusions as monuments to failed progressivism. So, however, is the EU. Built on progressive myths ("It has brought peace to Europe"; "it extends democracy"; "it creates prosperity"), it is now in relative economic, demographic and technological decline, lacks accountable or transparent structures of government, and is damning future generations to unemployment and despair. It is run by a self-serving, bureaucratic and political elite, is notoriously corrupt, and is admired only by politicians from the Middle East or Africa who bewail their own lack of unity, or by Americans who see its member nations as the colonies of 1776. Its policies are undemocratic – it has forced unelected, technocratic governments on both Italy and Greece – and do not work. Its single currency has brought penury to half a continent. Its present existential crisis has brought political chaos to Italy, Greece and Spain and threatens the same in France.

 Dr Alan Sked launches the UK Independence party in 1993. Photograph: STR News/Reuters

Here in Britain David Cameron's "progressive conservatism" is being challenged by Ukip, the party I founded 20 years ago and left in 1997 as it became a magnet for people whose vision of the future is the 1950s – a supposed golden age before the EEC, black people, Muslims and other immigrants, gays, lesbians and other products of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, desecrated this island Eden.

On the left, however, there has been no response to events in Europe. The Labour party seems intellectually paralysed in face of both the economic and political crises in Europe. The Lib Dems remain knee-jerk "good Europeans" with absolutely nothing to say. They are like the officer on the Titanic who, when warned of the iceberg, ordered "full steam ahead". The great Liberal party of Gladstone, Asquith and Lloyd George opposed European empires. Gladstone famously asked where on the map the Habsburgs had ever done any good? But today's Lib Dem pygmies give unquestioned support to our new Habsburg empire ruled from Brussels.

There was a time when Labour was adamantly anti-EU. Gaitskell, Foot, Kinnock and even Blair opposed it. But then Jacques Delors told the TUC that whereas they were impotent to defeat Thatcherism, he could and would overthrow it from Brussels. Almost overnight, Labour's patriotism disappeared and the party stood on its head. Brussels had managed to divide and rule Britain. The Welsh windbag, Kinnock, even became an EU commissioner and made a tax-free fortune doing nothing for the public interest but sacking whistleblowers in the corrupt EU bureaucracy. His must be the most pathetic career in postwar British politics. Blair and Mandelson, of course followed suit (although Blair failed to get an EU presidency) and – amazingly – this whole discredited clique still advocates that Britain join the euro.

An alternative, moderate party of the centre left should seek a new path for Britain. To avoid the trap of deluded, world-historical progressivism, it should remain firmly fixed on these objectives:

1. Direct, transparent, accountable democracy

2. Liberal values that protect the individual from discrimination on grounds of gender, race, sexual orientation, religion or political belief and uphold freedom of speech, freedom of the press and media, freedom of assembly, the right to a fair trial, and freedom from arbitrary arrest

3. A social policy which seeks to provide decent pensions, care, social housing, welfare benefits and full employment to all in need after a sound education that caters to everyone's talents (including those with disabilities).

4. A foreign policy that protects British national interests without thereby threatening those of others. This would involve withdrawing from the EU and negotiating free trade with our European friends and neighbours. Britain would not need to withdraw from Nato or the UN and would continue to seek peace in the Middle East and elsewhere. It would also continue to support the principle of giving overseas aid.

5. Domestically, the most radical changes, apart from ending an austerity aimed mainly at the poor, might be constitutional. It might be wise to federalise the UK and make the House of Lords an elected federal chamber. Perhaps an independent Britain could negotiate a confederation of the British Isles with the Irish Republic to help solve Ireland's problems.

Certainly, an independent Britain should be outward looking. As for the EU, there is no reason to assume automatically that it would survive a British exit. Other member states might prefer to choose democracy and independence. All Europe would be in a democratic flux. But let that democratic revolution start here.

Can Agatha Christie be political?

Hercule Poirot may not be a highbrow hero, but he still has plenty to teach us about life. Portuguese author José Rodrigues dos Santos on why all literature packs a political punch

• José Rodrigues dos Santos
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 27 May 2013 16.14 BST

Thou shalt not kill … David Suchet as the eponymous detective in Agatha Christie's Poirot. Photograph: ITV/Rex Features

Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is considered by many to be the finest crime mystery ever written. It tells the story of how Hercule Poirot investigates a killing, and stuns us when he identifies the culprit. Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama is the most awarded science-fiction novel ever, and tells the story of an unidentified spaceship that crosses the solar system and leaves behind more questions than answers. José Saramago's Blindness is frequently pointed out as one of the best 20th-century novels in world literature, and it tells the story of a sudden epidemic of blindness in Lisbon.

Apart from the obvious quality of these books – a quality that arises either from their storyline or their written style – what do they have in common? Well, they are not political. Even Saramago, who has never hidden the fact that he was a communist, and an active one at that, never actually wrote an obvious political novel.

What, then, is a political novel? Politics is not necessarily something that involves political parties, as we might immediately assume, but rather an activity related to the management of societies. Decisions and actions that affect us all are politics, but also ideas and concepts. Actually, it's the latter that provide the blueprint for the former.

We can find many quality novels that do have a clear political message. Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary questions the social anathema of 19th-century female adultery; George Orwell's 1984 or Animal Farm are powerful critical metaphors for communist totalitarian dictatorships; Eça de Queirós' O Crime do Padre Amaro brings us a strong critique of the Catholic Church's hypocrisy towards priests' celibacy; and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath shows us the misery spread by unregulated capitalism in the wake of the Great Depression.

Should we say that O Crime do Padre Amaro is a superior novel compared with Blindness because it has a political message? Can we honestly claim that Animal Farm is more literary than The Book of Illusions just because Orwell's novel conveys a political meaning and Paul Auster's novel doesn't? Incidentally, is Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code a political book? How can we say it isn't if it deals in a critical way with deep political issues such as who Jesus Christ really was, how his legend was shaped for political purposes, the role of women in the religious system of power and what the Opus Dei really is?

These are not easy questions, but they do point in different directions and help us clarify things a bit. A novel can be literary without an obvious political message. And the fact that the novel has a political message is not tantamount to a quality novel.

By the way, who decides what a literary novel is? Is The Da Vinci Code literary? Who can say it isn't? Me? My friends? The newspapers? A committee for good literary taste? Who belongs to such a committee? How was he or she elected? Does each one of us have to obey and accept the critical judgment of such a committee? How many times have committees of the day misjudged a work of art? Nobody cared about Fernando Pessoa's poetry when he was alive, and today he is considered the pinnacle of contemporary Portuguese poetry. Dashiell Hammett was thought of in his day as a second-rate popular author, but today his The Maltese Falcon is cherished as a classic. In his prime, Pinheiro Chagas was praised as an immortal author, but today nobody has even heard of him. If we probe deeper into what is and what is not literature, we find many questions and no solid answers.

So, we get back to the starting point. Should literature be political? Well, some might say this is like asking if art should be beautiful? Yes, by all means, art should be beautiful! Can't we, then, create ugly art? No, we can't! If it's ugly, it's not art, it's a failed attempt at it.

This is an interesting point because, faced with the idea that art has to be beautiful, French artist Marcel Duchamp presented in a 1917 New York art exhibition his latest artistic work, which he called La Fontaine, or The Fountain. It was actually a porcelain urinal made in an industrial factory. La fontaine created an uproar because it introduced the world to a new concept: art that is disgusting. It is ugly, and yet it is art.

Duchamp made a powerful point. He told us that an artwork is what the artist decides. So, what is a literary work? Well, it's what the author decides. Me, you, my friends, the newspapers, the committee for good literary taste may or may not like it; that's not relevant, because art can be ugly and yet be art. A literary work can be political or not political, and yet be a literary work.

Should literature be political? Hell, who cares? It is political if the author thus decides, and it isn't if the author so wishes it. The literary quality of a book is not linked to its political message, in the same way that the artistic quality of a sculpture is not linked to its beauty. They are different issues.

What is, then, a political novel? Can Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – a simple, albeit interesting, crime investigation – somehow be a political novel? The book does present us with a political message, though probably not even its author is aware of it. And that message is simple: thou shalt not kill. How more political can a message get? Thou shalt not kill is a political order given by the highest ruler of them all, God Almighty Himself. It is a sheer political message, created for social management.

French sociologist Louis Althusser once wrote that when a woman visits a shoe shop and buys high-heel shoes, she is making a clear ideological statement. By wearing high-heel shoes, she is expressing her idea of what society is and what her role in society should be, and what can be more political than that?

So, the question is not indeed if literature should be political. The real question is: could it be otherwise?

Globalisation isn't just about profits. It's about taxes too

Big corporates are gaming one nation's taxpayers against another's: we need a global deal to make them pay their way

• 
• • Joseph Stiglitz
  • The Guardian, Monday 27 May 2013 21.00 BST

Why should German taxpayers help bail out a country whose business model is based on avoidance and a race to the bottom? Illustration by Daniel Pudles

The world looked on agog as Tim Cook, the head of Apple, said his company had paid all the taxes owed – seeming to say that it paid all the taxes it should have paid. There is, of course, a big difference between the two. It's no surprise that a company with the resources and ingenuity of Apple would do what it could to avoid paying as much tax as it could within the law. While the supreme court, in its Citizens United case seems to have said that corporations are people, with all the rights attendant thereto, this legal fiction didn't endow corporations with a sense of moral responsibility; and they have the Plastic Man capacity to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time – to be everywhere when it comes to selling their products, and nowhere when it comes to reporting the profits derived from those sales.

Apple, like Google, has benefited enormously from what the US and other western governments provide: highly educated workers trained in universities that are supported both directly by government and indirectly (through generous charitable deductions). The basic research on which their products rest was paid for by taxpayer-supported developments – the internet, without which they couldn't exist. Their prosperity depends in part on our legal system – including strong enforcement of intellectual property rights; they asked (and got) government to force countries around the world to adopt our standards, in some cases, at great costs to the lives and development of those in emerging markets and developing countries. Yes, they brought genius and organisational skills, for which they justly receive kudos. But while Newton was at least modest enough to note that he stood on the shoulders of giants, these titans of industry have no compunction about being free riders, taking generously from the benefits afforded by our system, but not willing to contribute commensurately. Without public support, the wellspring from which future innovation and growth will come will dry up – not to say what will happen to our increasingly divided society.

It is not even true that higher corporate tax rates would necessarily significantly decrease investment. As Apple has shown, it can finance anything it wants to with debt – including paying dividends, another ploy to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. But interest payments are tax deductible – which means that to the extent that investment is debt-financed, the cost of capital and returns are both changed commensurately, with no adverse effect on investment. And with the low rate of taxation on capital gains, returns on equity are treated even more favorably. Still more benefits accrue from other details of the tax code, such as accelerated depreciation and the tax treatment of research and development expenditures.

It is time the international community faced the reality: we have an unmanageable, unfair, distortionary global tax regime. It is a tax system that is pivotal in creating the increasing inequality that marks most advanced countries today – with America standing out in the forefront and the UK not far behind. It is the starving of the public sector which has been pivotal in America no longer being the land of opportunity – with a child's life prospects more dependent on the income and education of its parents than in other advanced countries.

Globalisation has made us increasingly interdependent. These international corporations are the big beneficiaries of globalisation – it is not, for instance, the average American worker and those in many other countries, who, partly under the pressure from globalisation, has seen his income fully adjusted for inflation, including the lowering of prices that globalisation has brought about, fall year after year, to the point where a fulltime male worker in the US has an income lower than four decades ago. Our multinationals have learned how to exploit globalisation in every sense of the term – including exploiting the tax loopholes that allow them to evade their global social responsibilities.

The US could not have a functioning corporate income tax system if we had elected to have a transfer price system (where firms "make up" the prices of goods and services that one part buys from another, allowing profits to be booked to one state or another). As it is, Apple is evidently able to move profits around to avoid Californian state taxes. The US has developed a formulaic system, where global profits are allocated on the basis of employment, sales and capital goods. But there is plenty of room to further fine-tune the system in response to the easier ability to shift profits around when a major source of the real "value-added" is intellectual property.

Some have suggested that while the sources of production (value added) are difficult to identify, the destination is less so (though with reshipping, this may not be so clear); they suggest a destination-based system. But such a system would not necessarily be fair – providing no revenues to the countries that have borne the costs of production. But a destination system would clearly be better than the current one.

Even if the US were not rewarded for its global publicly supported scientific contributions and the intellectual property built on them, at least the country would be rewarded for its unbridled consumerism, which provides incentives for such innovation. It would be good if there could be an international agreement on the taxation of corporate profits. In the absence of such an agreement, any country that threatened to impose fair corporate taxes would be punished – production (and jobs) would be taken elsewhere. In some cases, countries can call their bluff. Others may feel the risk is too high. But what cannot be escaped are customers.

The US by itself could go a long way to moving reform along: any firm selling goods there could be obliged to pay a tax on its global profits, at say a rate of 30%, based on a consolidated balance sheet, but with a deduction for corporate profits taxes paid in other jurisdictions (up to some limit). In other words, the US would set itself up as enforcing a global minimum tax regime. Some might opt out of selling in the US, but I doubt that many would.

The problem of multinational corporate tax avoidance is deeper, and requires more profound reform, including dealing with tax havens that shelter money for tax-evaders and facilitate money-laundering. Google and Apple hire the most talented lawyers, who know how to avoid taxes staying within the law. But there should be no room in our system for countries that are complicitous in tax avoidance. Why should taxpayers in Germany help bail out citizens in a country whose business model was based on tax avoidance and a race to the bottom – and why should citizens in any country allow their companies to take advantage of these predatory countries?

To say that Apple or Google simply took advantage of the current system is to let them off the hook too easily: the system didn't just come into being on its own. It was shaped from the start by lobbyists from large multinationals. Companies like General Electric lobbied for, and got, provisions that enabled them to avoid even more taxes. They lobbied for, and got, amnesty provisions that allowed them to bring their money back to the US at a special low rate, on the promise that the money would be invested in the country; and then they figured out how to comply with the letter of the law, while avoiding the spirit and intention. If Apple and Google stand for the opportunities afforded by globalisation, their attitudes towards tax avoidance have made them emblematic of what can, and is, going wrong with that system.