Why are the BRICs all crumbling? Welcome to the permanent revolution

PAUL MASON in The Independent

Friday 21 June 2013

In most of the Bric countries economic rise has involved increased inequality, exacerbated corruption and failing public services - and that's just half the story

Tear gas cannot stop it. Not even when fired point blank into the faces of protesters. State censorship is powerless against it. The bloodless prose of the official media cannot encompass it. But what is it? What is the force that put a million people on the streets of Brazil on Thursday, turned Turkey’s major cities into battlefields and – even now – bubbles under from Sofia to Sarajevo?

The answer is in the detail: the self-shot videos, the jokes scrawled on handwritten signs, the ever-morphing hashtags on Twitter and the Guy Fawkes masks. Brazil’s protests may have started over the equivalent of a 5p rise in bus fares, but the chants and placards in Rio speak to something different: “We’ve come from Facebook”, “We are the social network”, and in English: “Sorry for the inconvenience, we are changing Brazil”.

The bus-fare protest in Sao Paulo involved, at first, maybe a few thousand young activists. There was CS gas, burning barricades, some Molotovs and riot shields, but never enough to stop the traffic, which flowed, surreally, past it all. When police arrested 60 people, including a prominent journalist, for possessing vinegar (to dull the sting of tear gas), it became the “Salad Revolution”. Then, last weekend, tens of thousands turned into hundreds of thousands, and the protests spread to every major town.

It’s clear, now, what it’s about. Brazil’s economic rise has been spectacular – but as in most of the so-called Bric countries it has involved increased inequality, exacerbated corruption and the prioritisation of infrastructure over public services. “Less stadiums, more hospitals,” reads one plaintive placard. The fact that the whole process was fronted by the relatively liberal and pro-poor Workers’ Party led, for a time, to acquiescence. The government sold the idea that hosting the World Cup, clearing some of the slums and pacifying the rest with heavy policing, together with a new transport system in the major cities, would complete Brazil’s emergence as a developed country.

But the World Cup is draining money from public services; the cost of the urban transport system is squeezing the lower middle class. And blatant corruption enrages a generation of people who can see it all reported on social media, even if the mainstream TV ignores it.

If this were just one explosion it would be signal enough that the economic model for the so-called emerging markets – rapid development at the cost of rising inequality – is running out of democratic headroom. But the same social forces were on the streets of Istanbul. The same grievances forced the Bulgarian government to sack its recently appointed and seemingly professionally unqualified state security chief on Wednesday.

In Turkey’s Taksim Square, as the tear gas drifted, roaming around with a microphone was a bit like being at a graduate careers fair. What do you do, I would ask. They would be always young, often female, and in perfect English reel off their professions from beneath their balaclavas: doctor, lawyer, marketing exec, shipping, architect, designer.

This too is one of the fastest developing countries on earth. And here too there was a mixture of economic grievance and concern about freedom. Some complained that, despite the growth, all the wealth was being creamed off by a corrupt elite. At the same time, the ruling AK Party, with its religious base, was seen as encouraging what the Turkish fashion writer Idil Tabanca has called “a growing unspoken air of animosity toward the modern”.

And everywhere there is protest – from Taksim and the Maracana Stadium to the Greek riots and Spanish indignados of two years ago – there is “non-lethal” policing that seems designed to turn passive bank clerks into bandanna-wearing radicals. It is striking that in both Brazil and Turkey, excessive force against peaceful demonstrators was the moment that turned a local protest into a globally significant revolt.

But the grievances, in the end, tell only half the story. It is the demographics, the technology and the zeitgeist that make the wave of current protests seem historic. Look first at the symbolism: the V for Vendetta mask is everywhere now – but it originated as the signifier of the Anonymous hacker movement. The hand-scrawled placard signifies a revolt not just against the state but against the old forms of hierarchical protest, where everybody chanted the same thing and followed leaders. In every tent camp protest I have ever been in, it is clear that the unspoken intention is to create a miniature utopia.

Velocity of information matters as much as action itself. It is striking how badly the incumbent elites in each case totally lose the information war. Whether it’s Greece, Turkey, Egypt or Brazil the unspoken truth is it is hard to gain a voice in the official media unless you are part of the in-group. This creates the mindset that drove Egyptian TV to ignore Tahrir, and Turkish TV to replace 24-hour news with cookery programmes as the fighting raged outside their studios. But it doesn’t work. People have instant access not just to the words, stills and videos coming from the streets, but to publish it themselves. As a result, when crisis hits, the volume of “peer to peer” communication – your iPhone to my Android, my tweet to your uploaded video – overwhelms any volume of information a state TV channel can put out. And when it comes to the content of the “memes” through which this generation communicates, the protesters and their allies find suddenly that everything they are saying to each other makes sense, and that everything the elite tries to say becomes risible nonsense.

In each case – from Egypt, through Greece, Spain and the Russian election protests – the revolt was already there, simmering in cyberspace. And in each case, the ultimate grievance was the difference between how life could be for the educated young, and how it actually is. They want a liberal, more equal capitalism, with more livable cities, and more personal freedom. But who will provide it?

Each time the movement subsides, the old generation’s commentators declare it dead, overhyped, romanticised in the heat of the moment. But the protests keep coming back. In 1989, we learned that people prefer individual freedom to communism. Today, in many countries, it is capitalism that is associated with cronyism, repressive force and elite politics, and until that changes, this Human Spring looks likely to continue.

The Sreesanth In All Of Us

The story of the demise of India’s angriest cricketer is the story of an average man who dreamt big, had a taste of a glamorous world, never established himself, kept fighting to stay in that world, and, in the process, threw it all away. By Shiv Visvanathan 

Posted on June 19 Wed, 2013 in Man's World India By Editor

A wise old friend watching my hysteria over the spot-fixing scandal silenced me by saying, there is a bit of Sreesanth in all of us. “What went wrong with Sree was what could go wrong with any one of us. Sreesanth is the boy next door. Only, he does not go to IIT but becomes a professional cricketer.” 

Sreesanth looks like an overgrown teenager. “Look at him,” she said, “he looks like a Malayali Dennis the Menace, impudent, scruffy and desperate for attention. Instead of a hapless Joey, who followed Dennis lovingly, Sree gets a calculating Jiju. Jiju fixes Sreesanth’s life.”

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Also read

Sreesanth - A Modern Day Valmiki

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It is not easy to be a Sreesanth. Sreesanth, like most of us, is a process, a rite of passage. He has not arrived yet. Occasionally, he gets a peck at the Holy Grail, but the next moment, he is dropped from the team. To have not yet arrived, like a Dravid, Zaheer or a Kumble has, is a painful thing. You always feel an extra desperation for a cameo role. You want to be a personality, a character, memorable beyond a game. Modest people do not have to have modest dreams. Sreesanth dreamt big. He wanted to be seen and heard. 

In cricket, substance could always do with style. Like any teenager — and remember, most Indian males are teenagers till 40 — Sreesanth enjoyed building hype around himself. He grimaced, he threw tantrums, he created a new dialect in sledging. His encounters made news. He was funky and spunky. He was a caricature of a cricketer, whose adrenaline drove his judgments. Sometimes, when your juices flow and you stand up to artful sledgers, such as Andrew Symonds, you become, even feel like a man. 

You have to watch Sreesanth’s performances from an ethological perspective. He grimaces like a gorilla, beats his chest; when he gets a wicket, he runs, screaming, across the pitch and glowers triumphantly at the batsman. It is animal aggression displayed like a tribal ritual. Of course, one has to be careful. When you encounter a bigger, more violent animal, such as Bhajji, retreat and humiliation is in order. A tear or two makes you human. 

In cricket, like in hunting, you have to go for the kill. Without victory, your antics become a distraction, a sideshow. Being a sideshow is painful when you are on stage. Off stage, you get more leeway. You are seen as entertainment; you command attention. Cricket and B-grade Bollywood have a wonderful affinity for each other. The sports pages are hand in glove with Page 3. For someone like Sree, the world of bars, night clubs and women becomes an appendage to your status as a cricketer. The distractions become the attractions. Late nights chew into your discipline. 

Time eats into sportsmen like a termite. You can be precocious at 20, not five years later. Your fans behave like accountants; they demand a list of your exploits on the field. Your team-mates shrug off the hype, they only want to kill. Suddenly, sledging is not entertainment; it is a distraction, time lost. 

It is not that you do not try. You push yourself hard, but regular results are not easy. You watch senior cricketers such as Dravid and Tendulkar rework their bodies, their styles. There is steel in their temperaments, they deliver like metronomes, and you watch with awe. You know you cannot be them, but you want to play alongside them. You realise that cricket, like character building, is hard work. Practice is a way of life for these stalwarts. 

You start keeping a diary. You promise to keep your cool. You work at it. But your temper bursts like an unwelcome pimple, when you least want it to. Worse, when success is elusive, people sense the buffoon in you. You are laughed at. Life suddenly seems unfair. 

The social world outside does not see all this. On the field, you might be a lesser player, but off the field, you are still a star, a name. Then, the other talents that you have nurtured come into play. You can sing, you have dreams of being a rock star. A film or two might enhance your world, especially if you have two nubile women cast alongside you. The romance of cinema blending with the romance of cricket is your ultimate dream. Suddenly, life and its possibilities appear like fun. It matters little if you have to produce the film yourself. 

You realise that walking the ramp, with a model in tow, is a bit like running up to bowl. Adrenaline pumps through you. The applause is heartening. Instead of drab national colours grimed in sweat, your costume smells of scent. You dance and sing, your body moves with ease and the fantasy of a new spectacle takes over. A star like Sreesanth should be twice born, once in cricket and again in film. It is heady. 

Meanwhile, you work desperately on yourself, at anger management. It just means you have to avoid brawls in public, not beat up intrusive passengers at airports. After all, you have a status to maintain. You are still Sreesanth the star, a man known to chief ministers. Shashi Tharoor, your secret hero, has called you the pride of Kerala. 

Playing for the nation is a heady experience. But then there is the magic world of IPL, part circus, part gladiatorial game, part hype. It is the greatest spectacle of all. Lalit Modi makes Barnum sound second rate. 

IPL is finance capital. Everything is a commodity. Every ball, every run is commoditised and auctioned by punters. An over can provide the earnings of a decade. The trouble with IPL is that it is ruthless. Yesterday’s stars are forgotten. You live in the instant. Everything has to be bigger, better, quicker. You live only as a spectacle, and you need spectacles in daily life. You want the best of women and entertainment. Sadly, life gets inflationary. The more you enjoy this, the less you count in the world of cricket. 

Yet, you feel good in this social world of bars and night clubs and starlets. The juices flow. Your ego inflates as people salute you. Sreesanth is still a star. You are seen as fun, even if friend Jiju helps get the women. Giving in to temptation always appears fail-safe. You cannot go wrong. Match-fixing is sinister. Spot-fixing seems like a cleverer world: a win-win world in which the punter and the fan are both happy. It is like rewriting a tiny part of the script; the integrity of cricket remains untouched. All it requires is a few coded signals. A few minutes become a lifetime investment. It reduces anxiety. Money to throw around is always welcome. Jiju and he convince each other that it is a perfect move. 

Problem is, life is full of reverse-swings. Idiot cops outsmart you. The Delhi police paint you as the artful dodger. A world collapses. One minute you are high on the game and your companion, and then cops pick you up. You think it is a mistake. You ask them to call your political friends. They seem implacable. Life as a joyride is over. You look in the mirror and the sledger has become a sleazeball. You wish time had stopped a year ago. 

Suddenly, you are dirt, contaminated stuff, an object to be analysed. You cannot huff and puff and blow your opponents away. You have destroyed other people’s fairytales. That is what no one will forgive you for. The press performs postmortems on your career. People take your world apart looking for reasons and causes. 

There is only one thing Sreesanth will not be able to forgive himself for. It is the television interview in which his mother and sister protest his innocence. He has destroyed their fairytale too. One can smell sadness like rot in the air. The dream has ended. 

Reputed firms employ criminals to steal rivals' information

Some of Britain’s most respected industries routinely employ criminals to hack, blag and steal personal information on business rivals and members of the public, according to a secret report leaked to The Independent.

The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) knew six years ago that law firms, telecoms giants and insurance were hiring private investigators to break the law and further their commercial interests, the report reveals, yet the agency did next to nothing to disrupt the unlawful trade.

It is understood that one of the key hackers mentioned in the confidential Soca report admitted that 80 per cent of his client list was taken up by law firms, wealthy individuals and insurance companies. Only 20 per cent was attributed to the media, which was investigated by the Leveson Inquiry after widespread public revulsion following the phone-hacking scandal.

Soca, dubbed “Britain’s FBI”, knew six years ago that blue-chip institutions were hiring private investigators to obtain sensitive data – yet did next to nothing to disrupt the unlawful trade.

The report was privately supplied to the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics in 2012 yet the corruption in other identified industries, including the law, insurance and debt collectors, and among high-net worth individuals, was not mentioned during the public sessions or included in the final report.

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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I do not expect to see home again'

McLibel leaflet was co-written by undercover police officer Bob Lambert

Sreesanth - Another Modern Day Valmiki

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Tom Watson, the campaigning Labour MP, said: “What is astonishing about this whole murky affair is that Soca had knowledge of massive illegal invasions of privacy in the newspaper industry – but also in the supply chains of so-called blue-chip companies.

“I believe they are sitting on physical evidence that has still not been disclosed fully to forensic investigators at the Metropolitan Police. The law should also be rigorously applied to other sectors that have got away with it.”

One of five police investigations reviewed by Soca found private detectives listening in to targets’ phone calls in real-time. The report said a “telephone interception specialist manufactured several devices which were physically attached to the target’s landline at the relevant signal box by a British Telecom-trained telecommunications engineer.”

During another police inquiry, the Soca report said officers found a document entitled “The Blagger’s Manual”, which outlined methods of accessing personal information by calling companies, banks, HM Revenue and Customs, councils, utility providers and the NHS.

“It is probably a good idea to overcome any moral hang-ups you might have about ‘snooping’ or ‘dishonesty’,” it read. “The fact is that through learning acts of technical deception, you will be performing a task which is not only of value to us or our client, but to industry as a whole.”

The Independent understands that one of the key hackers mentioned in the report has admitted that 80 per cent of his client list was taken up by law firms, wealthy individuals and insurance firms while only 20 per cent of clients were from the media.

A security source with knowledge of the report – codenamed Project Riverside – said clients who hired corrupt private investigators included:

* a major telecoms company;

* a celebrity who broadcasts to millions of people every week;

* a well-known media personality, who hired a private investigator to hack his employee’s computer as he suspected she was selling confidential information to business rivals;

* a businessman who hired hackers to obtain intelligence on rivals involved in an ultimately unsuccessful £500m corporate takeover.

A company which was owed money by property developers also hired private detectives to track down the firm’s family information, detailed transactions from four bank accounts, information from credit card statements and an itemised mobile phone bill. The company paid £14,000 for the information.

However, the most common industry employing criminal private detectives is understood to be law firms, including some of those involved in high-end matrimonial proceedings and litigators investigating fraud on behalf of private clients.

Illegal practices identified by Soca investigators went well beyond the relatively simple crime of voicemail hacking and included live phone interceptions, police corruption, computer hacking and perverting the course of justice.

Despite the widespread criminality uncovered by Project Riverside between 2006 and 2007, none of the suspects identified in the report was charged with criminal offences until after the phone-hacking scandal four years later.

Police were finally forced to act after the scandal that caused the closure of Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper, the resignation of two Scotland Yard police chiefs and the establishment of the Leveson Inquiry.

The Labour MP Keith Vaz, chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said: “I am deeply concerned about these revelations. I will be seeking an explanation from Soca as to why this was not told to the Committee when we took evidence from them about the issue of private investigators.

“It is important that we establish how widespread this practice was and why no action was taken to stop what amounted to criminal activity of the worst kind.”

The former News of the World deputy editor Neil Wallis added: “Until The Independent told me about this, I had not the slightest clue of the scale of illegal information theft going on among our supposedly respectable professions. Did Lord Justice Leveson only conduct his inquiry into 20 per cent of the problem?”

The Soca report, which contains “sensitive material” that may be subject to “public-interest immunity” tests – effectively banning it from ever being published even if it were disclosed during legal proceedings – found private investigators to be experts at “developing and cultivating useful relationships” through “socialising with law enforcement personnel”. One particular method identified was to become a member of the Freemasons, which has been repeatedly linked to corruption in the police and judiciary.

Victims of computer hacking identified by Soca – who suffered eBlaster Trojan attacks which allowed private  investigators to monitor their computer usage remotely – include the former British Army intelligence officer Ian Hurst. He was hacked by private investigators working for News of the World journalists who wanted to locate Freddie Scappaticci, a member of the IRA who worked as a double-agent codenamed “Stakeknife”.

Another victim was Derek Haslam, a former Metropolitan Police officer who was persuaded by Scotland Yard to go undercover and infiltrate Southern Investigations, a private detective firm, as a “covert human intelligence source”.

A Soca spokesman said: “Soca produced a confidential report in 2008 on the issue of licensing the private investigation industry. This report remains confidential and Soca does not comment on leaked documents or specific criminal investigations. Information is shared with other partners as required.” Scotland Yard declined to comment.

McLibel leaflet was co-written by undercover police officer Bob Lambert

Exclusive: McDonald's sued green activists in long-running David v Goliath legal battle, but police role only now exposed

• Paul Lewis and Rob Evans
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 21 June 2013 14.54 BST

Bob Lambert posed as a radical activist named Bob Robinson.

An undercover police officer posing for years as an environmental activist co-wrote a libellous leaflet that was highly critical of McDonald's, and which led to the longest civil trial in English history, costing the fast-food giant millions of pounds in fees.

The true identity of one of the authors of the "McLibel leaflet" is Bob Lambert, a police officer who used the alias Bob Robinson in his five years infiltrating the London Greenpeace group , is revealed in a new book about undercover policing of protest, published next week.

McDonald's famously sued two penniless green campaigners over the roughly typed leaflet, in a landmark three-year high court case, that was widely believed to have been a public relations disaster for the corporation. Ultimately the company won the libel battle it need never have fought, having spent expensively on lawyers.

Lambert was deployed by the special demonstration squad, a top-secret Metropolitan police unit that targeted political activists between 1968 until it was disbanded in 2008. He co-wrote the defamatory six page leaflet in 1986 — and his role in its production has been the subject of an internal Scotland Yard investigation for several months.

At no stage during the civil legal proceedings brought by McDonalds in the 1990s was it disclosed that a police infiltrator helped author the leaflet.

 The McLibel two: Helen Steel and David Morris, outside a branch of McDonald's in, London, after winning their case in the European court of human rights, in 2005. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

A spokesman for the Met said the force "recognises the seriousness of the allegations of inappropriate behaviour and practices involving past undercover deployments". He added that a number of allegations surrounding the undercover officers were currently being investigated by a team of police officers overseen by Derbyshire police's Chief Constable Mick Creedon.

And in remarks that come closest to acknowleding the scale of the scandal surrounding police spies, the spokesman added that: "At some point it will fall upon this generation of police leaders to account for the activities of our predecessors, but for the moment we must focus on getting to the truth."

Lambert declined to comment about his role in the production of the McLibel leaflet. However he previously offered a general apology for deceiving "law abiding members of London Greenpeace", which he said was a peaceful campaign group.

Lambert, who rose through the ranks to become a spymaster in the SDS, is also under investigation for sexual relationships he had with four women while undercover, one of whom he fathered a child with before vanishing from their lives. The woman and her son only discovered that Lambert was a police spy last year.

The internal police inquiry is also investigating claims raised in parliament that Lambert ignited an incendiary device at a branch of Debenhams when infiltrating animal rights campaigners. The incident occured in 1987 and the explosion inflicted £300,000 worth of damage to the branch in Harrow, north London. Lambert has previously strongly denied he planted the incendiary device in the Debenhams store.

 While McDonald's won the initial legal battle, at great expense, it was seen as a PR disaster. Photograph: Image Broker/Rex Features

Lambert's role in helping compose the McLibel leaflet is revealed in 'Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police', which is published next week. An extract from the book will be published in the Guardian Weekend magazine. A joint Guardian/Channel 4 investigation into undercover policing will be broadcast on Dispatches on Monday evening.

Lambert was one of two SDS officers who infiltrated London Greenpeace; the second, John Dines, had a two-year relationship with Helen Steel, who later became the co-defendant in the McLibel case. The book reveals how Steel became the focus of police surveillance operations. She had a sexual relationship with Dines, before he also disappeared without a trace.

Dines gained access to the confidential legal advice given to Steel and her co-defendant that was written by Keir Starmer, then a barrister known for championing radical causes. The laywer was advising the activists on how to defend themselves against McDonalds. He is now the director of public prosecutions in England and Wales, one of the most senior legal figures in the country.

Lambert was lauded by colleagues in the covert unit for his skilful infiltration of animal rights campaigners and environmentalists in the 1980s. He succeeded in transforming himself from a special branch detective into a long-haired radical activist who worked as a cash-in-hand gardener. He became a prominent member of London Greenpeace, around the time it began campaigning against McDonalds in 1985. The leaflet he helped write made wide-ranging criticisms of the corporation, accusing it of destroying the environment, exploiting workers and selling junk food.

Four sources who were either close to the spy at the time or involved in the production of the leaflet have confirmed his role in composing the libellous text. Lambert confided in one of his girlfriends from the era, although he appeared keen to keep his participation hidden. "He did not want people to know he had co-written it," the woman said.

Paul Gravett, a London Greenpeace campaigner, said the spy was one of a small group of around five activists who drew up the leaflet over several months. Another close friend from the time recalls Lambert was really proud of the leaflet. "It was like his baby — he carried it around with him," the friend said.

When Lambert's undercover deployment ended in 1989, he vanished, claiming that he had to flee abroad because he was being pursued by special branch. None of his friends or girlfriends suspected for a moment that special branch were actually his employer.

It was only later that the leaflet Lambert helped to produce became the centre of the huge trial. Even though the activists could only afford to distribute a few hundred copies of the leaflet, McDonald's decided to throw all of its legal might at the case, suing two London Greenpeace activists for libel.

Two campaigners — Steel, who was then a part-time bartender, and an unemployed postman named Dave Morris — unexpectedly stood their ground and refused to apologise.

 Steel and Morris outside the high court at the start of the very first proceedings in the McLibel trial, in 1990. Photograph: Photofusion/UIG via Getty Images) exploitation|criticising|defendents|royal|corporation|morris|act Photograph: Photofusion/UIG/ Getty Images

Over 313 days in the high court, the pair defended themselves, with pro bono assistance from Starmer, as they could not afford to hire any solicitors or barristers. In contrast, the corporation hired some of the best legal minds at an estimated cost of £10m. During the trial, legal argument largely ignored the question of who wrote the McLibel leaflet, focusing instead on its distribution to members of the public.

In 1997, a high court judge ruled that much of the leaflet was libellous and ordered the two activists to pay McDonalds £60,000 in damages. This sum was reduced on appeal to £40,000 — but McDonald's never enforced payment against Steel and Morris.

It was a hollow victory for McDonald's; the long-running trial had exposed damaging stories about its business and the quality of the food it was selling to millions of customers around the world. The legal action, taking advantage of Britain's much-criticised libel laws, was seen as a heavy handed and intimidating way of crushing criticism. However the role of undercover police in the story remained, until now, largely unknown.

Our banks are not merely out of control. They're beyond control

Jailing reckless bankers is a dangerously incomplete solution. The market is bust. Institutions that are too big to fail are too big to exist

• 
• • Joris Luyendijk
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 19 June 2013 20.35 BST

'The banking system is highly dysfunctional, deeply entrenched, and enormously abusive, both to its own workers and the society it operates in.' Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty

Seeing the British establishment struggle with the financial sector is like watching an alcoholic who still resists the idea that something drastic needs to happen for him to turn his life around. Until 2008 there was denial over what finance had become. When a series of bank failures made this impossible, there was widespread anger, leading to the public humiliation of symbolic figures. But the scandals kept coming, and so we entered stage three – what therapists call "bargaining". A broad section of the political class now recognises the need for change but remains unable to see the necessity of a fundamental overhaul. Instead it offers fixes and patches, from tiny increases in leverage ratios tobonus clawbacks and "electrified ring fences".

Today's report by the parliamentary commission on banking standards (to which I gave evidence) is a perfect example of this tendency to fight the symptoms while keeping the dysfunctional system itself intact. The commission, set up after last year's Libor scandal, identifies all the structural problems and nails the fundamental flaw in finance today: "Too many bankers, especially at the most senior levels, have operated in an environment with insufficient personal responsibility." Indeed, as they like to say in the City, running a mega-bank these days is like "Catholicism without a hell", or "playing russian roulette with someone else's head".

In response, the commission proposes jailing reckless bankers. Restoring the link between risk, reward and responsibility is a crucial step towards a robust and stable financial sector. But the report's focus on individual responsibility is also dangerously incomplete because it implies that the sector is merely out of control. This plays into the narrative that things can be fixed by tweaking rules and realigning incentives; in other words, by bargaining.

In reality the financial sector is not out of control. It's beyond control. During the past two years I have interviewed almost 200 people working in finance in London: "front office" bankers with telephone-number bonuses as well as those in "risk and compliance" who are meant to stop them being reckless. I have also spoken to many internal and external accountants, lawyers and consultants.

The picture emerging from those interviews is of big banks not as coherent units run by top bankers who know what they are doing. Instead these banks seem, in the words of Manchester University anthropologist Karel Williams, "loose federations of money-making franchises". One risk analyst talked about her bank as "a nation engaged in perpetual civil war", while a trader said, "You have to understand, it's us against the bank."

I could give 50 similar quotes. Taken together, they leave but one conclusion: employees at the big banks themselves do not believe their top people know what's going on; the big banks have simply become too complex and too big to manage. If this is true, the solution is not so much to jail the top bankers when something goes wrong, it is to break up the banks into manageable parts. But the British establishment still seems incapable of accepting the notion that a bank that is too big to fail or manage is a also bank that is too big to exist.

The same seems to apply to the need to restore market forces in the financial sector: the second source of structural dysfunctionality. Imagine a restaurant had served up product as toxic as that which big banks, credit rating agencies and accountancy firms were churning out until 2008. You would expect that restaurant to have closed. You would also expect new restaurants to have opened up in the area. This is how a free market should work: competition drives out bad practices.

But where are the new credit-rating agencies, accountancy firms or big banks? Even worse, not only are there just four major accountancy firms, they are also financially dependent on the very banks they are supposed to audit critically. It's the same with thethree credit-rating agencies dominating the market.

And it gets worse. Imagine that a restaurant in your neighbourhood made the kind of money paid to top employees in banking, credit-rating and accountancy firms. You'd expect people rushing to open more restaurants, and with that increased competition you'd expect wages to come down. Again, this is how competition works. There are thousands and thousands of young graduates aching to get into investment banking, so no shortage of prospective chefs. So where are the new players in high finance?

The reality is that global high finance is de facto a set of interlocking cartels that divide the market among themselves and use their advantages to keep out competitors. Cartels can extract huge premiums over what would be normal profits in a functioning market, and part of those profits go to keeping the cartel intact: huge PR efforts, a permanent recruiting circus drawing in top academic talent; clever sponsoring of, say, an ambitious politician's cycling scheme; vast lobbying efforts behind the scenes; and highly lucrative second careers for ex-politicians. There is also plenty of money to offer talented regulators three or four times their salary.

Capitalists have an expression for this, and it's "market failure". Here is the source of so many of the perversities in modern finance, and the solution is not only to denounce those who can't resist its temptations, it's to take away those temptations. That probably means smaller banks, smaller and independent accountancy firms and credit-rating agencies, simpler financial products, and much higher capital requirements.

Before studying bankers I spent many years researching Islam and Muslims. I set out with images in my mind of angry bearded men burning American flags, but as the years went by I became more and more optimistic: beyond the frightening rhetoric and sensationalist television footage, ordinary Muslim people go about their day like all other human beings. The problem of radical Islam is smaller and more containable than Islamophobes believe.

With bankers I have experienced an opposite trajectory. I started with the reassuring images in my mind of well-dressed bankers and their lobbyists; surely at some basic level these people knew what they were doing? But after two years I feel myself becoming deeply pessimistic and genuinely terrified. This system is highly dysfunctional, deeply entrenched, and enormously abusive, both to its own workers and the society it operates in. The problem really is exactly as bad as the "banker bashers" believe.

Brazil is saying what we could not: we don't want these costly World Cup and Olympic extravaganzas

 

From the World Cup to the G8, many countries are paying an extortionate price for hosting these pointless displays

• 
• • Simon Jenkins
  • The Guardian, Thursday 20 June 2013 19.40 BST

A protester in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photograph: Imago / Barcroft Media

On Tuesday evening a loud noise engulfed Parliament Square: a demonstration of flag-waving Brazilians. I asked one of them what he was protesting. It was, he said, the waste of money on the Olympics. I told him he was in the right city but the wrong year.

Here we go again. Brazil has been bamboozled into blowing $13bn on next year's football World Cup, and then on a similar sum to be later extorted by the International Olympic Committee to host the 2016 Games. Brazil's leftwing leader, Dilma Rousseff, was bequeathed the games by her populist predecessor, Lula da Silva. She has desperately tried to side with the protesters, but she is trapped by the oligarchs of Fifa and the IOC.

Brazil's citizens are being hit with higher bus fares and massive claims on health and welfare budgets. Up to half a million people may take to the streets this weekend to complain of "first world stadiums, third world schools". What is impressive about the demonstrators is that they appear not to be against sport as such, but against the extravagance of their staging. They are talking the language of priorities.

The World Cup is an ongoing scandal run by Fifa's unsackable boss, Sepp Blatter, on the back of ticket and television sales and soccer hysteria. Having bled the Brazilian exchequer of billions for new stadiums, he has the cheek to plead with demonstrators that "they should not use football to make their demands heard". Why not? Blatter uses football to make his demands heard.

The Olympics are likewise sold by the IOC to star-struck national leaders as offering glory for political gain. Their purpose-built stadiums, luxurious facilities, lunatic security and lavish hospitality are senseless, yet are backed by construction and security lobbies and a chorus of chauvinist public relations. If the cost is bankruptcy, as in Montreal and Athens, too bad. The golden caravan can move on to trap some new victim.

The World Cup and the Olympics are television events that could be held at much less expense and ballyhoo in one place. As it is, host nations are deluged with promises of "legacy return" that everyone knows are rubbish. Costs escalate to an extent that would see most managers in handcuffs, but gain bonuses and knighthoods for Olympic organisers.

Sport is not alone in this addiction to the jamboree. The London Olympics last year morphed into politics, as diplomacy, culture and trade were conflated in an outpouring of nonsensical rhetoric about £13bn in contracts. A summit used to be a meeting ad hoc to resolve a crisis in world affairs. It is now a Field of Cloth of Gold, a continuous round of hospitality, rest and recuperation, flattering the vanity of world leaders.

This week's G8 shindig in Northern Ireland was pointless – a night and two days on a bleak Irish lough at a cost to taxpayer of £60m and a deployment of 1,000 policemen per delegate. It was held in Fermanagh to be as far as possible from demonstrators and "real people". The sole outcome was modest progress on tax avoidance, but that cannot have required two days in Fermanagh. Could they not have used Skype?

The survival of the G8 is extraordinary, based on the pretence that the second world war protagonists are still major world powers. When Vladimir Putin refused to attend the 2012 summit in Washington, there were hopes that it might disappear. Putin was back this week, though his face suggested he regrets it.

In his iconoclastic study of postwar summits, David Reynolds remarked that they are based on hope over experience. Most are either pointless or disastrous. Reynolds compared Tony Blair's Iraq meeting with George Bush in January 2003 with Chamberlain and Munich. Their high point was during the cold war, yet it is only since then that summits have become fixed in the political year. David Cameron's diary is crammed with G8s, G20s, UN, EU and Commonwealth conclaves. The elephantine G20 has become a carnival of obsessive security. The 2012 gathering in Toronto was newsworthy only for apolicing bill close to $1bn for two days. It did nothing for the poor but devastated the local economy for a year.

Power craves authenticity. On his way back from the G8 to America, President Obama stood in Berlin at (or near) the Brandenburg Gate where Kennedy delivered his freedom address 50 years ago. A special stadium had to be built for him, and a wall of bullet-proof glass. He gave a hand-picked audience a welter of platitudes and went home.

Technology has moved on since 1963. Obama could have copied Kennedy on Facebook. Yet he had to be in Berlin in person, as he was in Ulster in person. The whole thing could have been staged for television, but television needs some contact with reality. Electronics can create these events and disseminate them. But nothing can replace the chemistry of the live presence.

Futurologists of the internet used to claim that electronics would render obsolete such sporting, political, even musical events. Human avatars would cruise cyberspace and engage with their audiences at the touch of a button. Leaders would communicate with each other from their desks in real time on giant screens. Contact would be digitised. We could experience each other's presence without the need for flesh-and-blood exchange. There would be huge savings in plane tickets.

This ignores the yearning of all people, leaders and led, rich and poor, to feel involved, to participate in some degree in a live experience. Nations want to be visited by political, sporting or artistic celebrities. They want football heroes, racing cars and three tenors on their soil. Leaders crave the status of "hosting" fellow leaders, of standing side-by-side with power. It is not the same on the web.

To this quest for authenticity Brazil's demonstrators offer a corrective. They point to its cost. The addiction to "eventism" can be so potent, so demanding of security and so expensive as to defy restraint. London's £9bn extravaganza was not necessary to host an international athletics show. It should have been the last such display of conspicuous consumption by the rich in the face of the poor. Yet Rio de Janeiro is now saddled with not one extravaganza but two.

So congratulations to Brazilians for saying what Britain last year lacked the guts to say: that sometimes enough is enough. If I were Blatter and his henchmen, I would get out of town fast.

What lies beneath the mask of marriage

The dynamics of any couple - like that between Charles Saatchi and his wife Nigella Lawson - are hard to fathom, but conflict can be deceptively subtle

Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson: their row has ignited an important debate Photo: Alan Davidson

By Kate Figes in The Telegrapg

6:20AM BST 19 Jun 2013

The photographs were indeed shocking. Charles Saatchi’s large hand around his wife Nigella’s Lawson’s throat as they sat having an alfresco lunch at Scott’s in Mayfair, London. It’s the haunting look of deep fear in Nigella’s eyes that suggests this is more than just a “playful tiff”, as Saatchi subsequently said, hours before receiving a police caution for assault. Nigella, who has moved out of the family home, temporarily at least, is nowhere to be seen.

The media storm surrounding these photos has highlighted what those helping the victims of domestic abuse have known for a long time – that it can affect couples of every social strata, even seemingly confident and successful women who have the means to leave. Domestic violence is one of the most unreported and misunderstood crimes. Two women a week are killed by someone they know well. Countless others live silently in fear for years of what their partner might do to them should they leave.
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But perhaps what these pictures prove best is our confusion around what domestic violence actually is. In the past two days there have been mountains of speculation around the Saatchi-Lawson marriage: Saatchi’s temperament (he’s “explosive”) and Nigella’s troubled past (her mother would “shout and say 'I’m going to hit you till you cry’ ”) have been cited in an attempt to explain what must surely have been an exception rather than the rule. We don’t want to believe otherwise from such a golden couple.

But a celebrity union is no different from any other marriage, and is just as prone to the wielding of power and control, which is of course the substance of most abuse. The black eyes, the woman beaten about so badly that she is forced to seek refuge with her children in an anonymous safe house is just the thin end of the wedge.

Within all relationships there is the potential for abuse because it can be so subtle. Most domestic abuse is emotional or psychological long before it becomes physical, with men and indeed women chipping away at the other person’s sense of self and self-confidence in small but significant ways. Over time, with enough undermining day after day, one makes the other feel so bad about themselves that they believe it when their partner says that nobody else could possibly want them, or love them like they do. 

Victims of abuse are often blamed for everything, shamed or humiliated in public. Their partner makes all the decisions or they find themselves increasingly isolated from family, friends or other sources of support. “It’s the insidious level of control, the petty enforcement of rules – anything from how you wrap up the cheese when you put it back in the fridge to how you close the car door,” one married woman told me for my book Couples: The Truth. “And you think this is just a small thing; OK, I will do that because it doesn’t matter. Now I can see that what I was giving him was power. That was before he started smashing up the furniture when he got angry, and then hitting me.”

Domestic abuse can be economic or financial as spouses (usually men, because they earn more) withhold money or credit cards, make a woman account for every penny she spends, or prevent her from having a job or pursuing her own career. And abuse can be sexual, not just in the form of marital rape or pressurising someone into sexual practices they would rather avoid, but also by withholding sex.

I will never forget one young woman I interviewed whose husband refused to have sex with her for four years. “He has killed my self-confidence because I feel completely unacknowledged as a woman, and humiliated, too, dressing up for him in sexy underwear and still being rejected. If he had been knocking me about for four years that would be acknowledged as unacceptable controlling behaviour, but this isn’t.”

Affairs, too, are often a form of abuse, taunting a spouse with the evidence but denying that anything is going on. Instead, accusations of paranoia are hurled back at the victim, dismantling their psyche still further.

Abuse builds when one person in a couple consistently tries to exert that dominance, through intimidation, threats, anger and violence against furniture and walls. There are arguments in every relationship. But there is a fine line between healthy, constructive disagreements that allow people to air resentments and express what they want, and destructive rows full of character assassination and blame.

When a strong man has an anger-management problem, women understandably feel compromised about standing up for themselves. Arguing back could make matters worse. Nigella has been quoted as saying about her marriage: “I’ll go quiet when he explodes and then I am a nest of horrible festeringness.”

No one can really understand what goes on in another person’s relationship. One’s own is enough of a mystery. But if I were to turn back the clock seven years and write my two books on relationships again, I would probably structure them differently around the subtleties of abuse because of what I now know.

What is clear to me is that we find it so hard to understand the very fine line between common relationship difficulties and abusive patterns of behaviour when we are in love with someone, and when there are so many other ties that bind us such as children, reputation, lack of money and not wanting to be alone.

“Why doesn’t she just leave?” is a naive statement and one that won’t help Nigella, or any other woman in a relationship with an “explosive” man whom she probably still loves.

Our ignorance about abuse is also compounded by the taboos surrounding relationships and family life. We believe our private lives should be kept private. We shouldn’t interfere in other people’s problems. People took photographs of Charles and Nigella, but nobody approached the table to ask if they were all right. And it is this hidden nature of family life that makes abuse harder to live with and 

harder to talk about. For a successful woman, just admitting that there have been abusive situations is tantamount to failure. And so, so shaming.

I wish them both well. Perhaps the most hopeful legacy from this whole sorry affair will be greater transparency about how common abuse can be. But I also believe that too many people lack the key tools to help them build their relationships from the inside, which in turn allows abuse to flourish. We can’t trust everything to love.