The progressive argument for leaving the EU is not being heard

Larry Elliot in The Guardian


It is now nearly nine years since the problems of three hedge funds heralded the arrival of global financial and economic chaos. Britain’s EU referendum this week is the latest manifestation of that crisis.

That is not the way the debate in the UK has been framed. For one side, the decision is all about taking back control, especially over immigration. For the other, it is about the potential consequences for the economy in general and individuals in particular.

This narrow focus reflects the fact that the referendum has been a contest between two wings of the Conservative party, neither of which has any great love for the EU. Few of the bigger themes have been drawn out by this blue-on-blue affair.

There is, however, an obvious reason why immigration has proved an effective weapon for the leave side. Life is tougher for millions of Britons on modest incomes than it was a decade ago.

Contrast the state of the UK when the accession to the EU of Poland and other former Soviet bloc countries led to strong net migration in 2004. At that time, average earnings were growing by 4-5% a year, the Labour government was investing heavily in schools and hospitals and the eurozone appeared to be over its initial problems.

A second big increase in net migration has occurred since the great recession of 2008 and 2009, but the economic and political environment has changed. Real earnings have been squeezed, the expansion of the public sector has been halted and the eurozone has been in a state of permanent crisis.

The British economy has become increasingly dominated by the fortunes of the financial sector, with the bankers responsible for the worst slump since the 1930s escaping pretty much scot free. London and the rest of the UK have become two countries, which explains why hostility to the EU increases with distance from the capital.

Nor is this phenomenon confined to the UK. It has become commonplace to bracket growing support for leave in poorer parts of Britain with Donald Trump’s emergence as the Republican candidate in this year’s US presidential election, but populist and anti EU sentiment is on the rise across Europe.

The US research company Pew conducted a survey earlier this year to test sentiment towards the EU. In Britain, 48% said they had an unfavourable view of the EU and 44% said they had a favourable view. In France, the anti-EU sentiment was much more pronounced at 61% and 38% in favour, while in Germany there had been an eight-point drop in support for the EU in the past year, leaving those in favour only narrowly ahead at 50% against 48% .
The impact of the great recession in Europe has been exacerbated by monetary union, a policy blunder of catastrophic proportions. The euro has been responsible for the slow growth and high unemployment that has angered the French, and the high debts and that have alarmed the Germans. Stir in the unexpectedly large flows of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa, and you have a toxic mix.

Last summer, when the Greek debt crisis was at its most intense, Europe’s leaders came up with a plan. The “five presidents’ report” laid down a step-by-step approach to a United States of Europe, with banking union followed by a common budget and finally political union. Getting even the least controversial part of this agenda – banking union – past sceptical European electorates has proved impossible. Yet the alternative approach, breaking up the euro and giving countries more control over their own economic destiny, is seen as not just potentially dangerous but also a betrayal of the idea of ever-closer union.

When Britain first sought to join the Common Market in the 1960s it did so for pragmatic, not ideological reasons. There was no great desire to pool sovereignty in pursuit of wider political goals, merely a feeling that Germany, France and the Netherlands were growing faster and had more modern economies. After Britain finally became a member of the European club in 1973, there was admiration for Germany’s control of inflation. In the 1980s, the UK left wing changed sides because it saw Europe as a bulwark against Margaret Thatcher. European solidarity was advocated in the 1990s as the best defence against the forces of global capitalism unleashed by the end of the cold war, which is why many on the left wanted Britain to join the single currency.

Times have changed. Even with a welcome pickup in activity in the past year, Europe’s growth performance since the launch of the euro has been pitiful. Talk of protecting workers’ rights is meaningless unless you have a job, and millions of Europe’s citizens do not. The structural adjustment programmes forced on those countries that have required financial bailouts have involved savage attacks on workers’ rights, including collective bargaining. The EU has not taken the fight to multinational capital. Rather, Brussels has become a honeypot for corporate lobbyists demanding deregulation and the transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP).

One of the great ironies of the UK’s referendum debate is that Europe, with its austerity programmes and its drift towards neoliberalism, has been moving in a direction that rightwing Conservatives would tend to support. Just as in the UK in the 1980s, unemployment has weakened the power of organised labour and the trend is for more competition and for free markets.

There is a modern and progressive argument for leaving the EU, but it has struggled to be heard during this dispiriting campaign. It is that Europe is unable to deliver because it is wedded to backward-looking ideas. Or to adapt the words that David Cameron used on his first outing as Conservative leader to taunt Tony Blair, it was the future once.

There is a leftwing case for staying in too. This accepts that the EU is far from perfect and must change, but says the answer is to work for a kinder, gentler, greener and more equal Europe from within. Exit, by contrast, would be the catalyst for a breakup of the EU that would give rise to aggressive nationalism and leave Britain at the mercy of rightwing Conservatives who would have the wherewithal to cause immense damage before there was a chance to get rid of them at an election.

Yet, it is stretching a point to argue that the treatment of Greece has much to do with the theories of Maynard Keynes or that TTIP would sit comfortably with Fritz Schumacher’s “small is beautiful” vision. Europe has been going in an entirely different direction, which is why aggressive nationalism will continue to be a problem even if Britain votes to remain. That’s because Europe’s economic model isn’t working and hasn’t been working for a long time. Bad economics leads to bad politics. Always has, always will.

Brussels isn’t the bad guy. Tory cuts cause Britain’s troubles

Phillip Inman in The Guardian


The current and previous governments are to blame for our economic woes, not Brussels. Photograph: Frederick Florin/AFP/Getty Images

Don’t blame the EU for your troubles, blame Tory austerity. This is the message Labour voters should hear from Jeremy Corbyn. It is a message Ed Miliband could have made more forcefully during his term as Labour leader, when the conversation on the doorstep turned to immigration. Instead, he appeared to choke with embarrassment.

Corbyn has a higher embarrassment threshold. He could look the immigration question in the eye and not blink. Unfortunately, the Islington North MP considers debating immigration off limits.

So, last week, Corbyn tried to persuade voters that the EU is the workers’ friend and a bulwark against a bonfire of employment protections. That’s not an unreasonable position. Yet if immigration is the main source of anger outside the south-east, and if it is driving the Brexit campaign to a possible victory, the subject needs to be tackled head-on. If you think Britain is a great place to live that has been ruined by an alliance with other EU nations, you are mistaken and Labour needs to make that point.

Here are five reasons that the former coalition government and the current Tory administration are to blame, and not Brussels.

Jobs


It is easy to walk around an engineering practice in London, a hospital in Leeds or a leek farm in Lincolnshire and conclude that foreigners are stealing “our” jobs. But, in the main, the roles would be unfilled if they were kept out. The work would probably go abroad.

On one level, the fault lies with consumers and employers, large and small. Consumers would buy a foreign leek before one grown here picked by a Brit who was paid more and treated better. Employers are at fault for not training school leavers, older workers and job switchers because it’s cheaper to hire foreigners. Profits are calculated on this basis. Moreover, without cheaper labour there would, in many cases, be no business.

So foreigners allow employers to expand the number of jobs. That’s what the figures tell us. Compared to this time last year, there are 461,000 more people in work. People from the rest of the EU grabbed a majority of the jobs, but the substitution effect with UK nationals was only at the margins. Overall, the number in work just keeps going up and the UK now has a record employment rate of 74.2%.

Look a little closer and it is clear the government has played a big part by cutting skills and training budgets, laying waste to further education and demanding workers accept precarious employment, whether it be zero-hours contracts or self employment.

Vacancies


Job vacancies are running at a higher level than we have seen at any time this century. A small dip in recent months still leaves the number at 750,000. Most are for services jobs, as one might expect, with the largest number among retailers and wholesalers. Car repair firms reported a 143,000 shortage. The NHS and social work sector accounted for 119,000 of the total.

Finding a mechanic, or hiring a nurse, is as much a problem in Leeds as in London. It’s not just about a lack of skilled jobs being created in the north, but also a mismatch of people to jobs – not a problem invented in Brussels.

Wages

Adjusted for inflation, average wages have collapsed since the 2008 crash. Workers absorbed cuts in overtime and basic hours to keep their jobs.

Since the recovery got into full swing in 2014, wages have nudged ahead of inflation, but not enough to fill the gap. Part of the reason is the lack of investment by employers who rely on cheap workers.

But the UK, like all developed economies, is also suffering from the effects of globalisation, which allows multinationals to invest where subsidies are most generous. Ford has centred much of its European operations in Turkey for that reason. Without investment in skilled jobs there will be no increase in wages, but that is not on the Tory agenda.

Housing

If the worry is that housing is either poor quality or too costly, for yourself and your children, blame successive governments for failing to support good quality state-sponsored housing.

The taxes from migrant workers could be used to fund it, but the current and previous governments have preferred to reduce the top rate of tax and protect pensioners’ benefits.

There is no evidence in the last 100 years that shows private builders can meet the nation’s needs. This means housing associations have to find funds to build – but ministers are denying them access to finance, and councils can’t offer builders land when they are forced to sell to the highest bidder.

Health service

If the queue at the hospital and GP is a problem, this is the result of austerity measures that cut spending growth from 4% a year in real terms to 1% since 2010. The NHS, coping with an ageing society, was supposed to implement reforms to fill the gap but, to no one’s surprise, this project has so far failed. Worse, in his last budget, George Osborne slashed council spending on health by £800m. That’s cash used for local mental health services and preventative policies, such as tackling obesity. He told local authorities to put up council tax by 2% to fill the gap.

It’s cuts that lead to queues – in a race to the bottom that Osborne, despite his rhetoric, thinks is just fine.

Why failure is the key to flying high

 

If at first you don’t succeed: Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in The Aviator. Photograph: Miramax/Everett/Rex/Shutterstock


Matthew Syed in The Guardian




We want our children to succeed, in school and, perhaps even more importantly, in life. But the paradox is that our children can only truly succeed if they first learn how to fail. Consider the finding that world-class figure skaters fall over more often in practice than low-level figure skaters. At first sight this seems contradictory. Why are the really good skaters falling over the most?

The reason is actually quite simple. Top skaters are constantly challenging themselves in practice, attempting jumps that stretch their limitations. This is why they fall over so often, but it is precisely why they learn so fast. Shizuka Arakawa of Japan estimates that she endured some 20,000 falls as she progressed from a beginner to an Olympic champion.

Lower-level skaters have a quite different approach. They are always attempting jumps they can already do very easily, remaining within their comfort zone. This is why they don’t fall over. In a superficial sense, they look successful, because they are always on their feet. The truth, however, is that by never failing, they never progress.
What is true of skating is also true of life. James Dyson worked through 5,126 failed prototypes for his dual cyclone vacuum before coming up with the design that made his fortune. These failures were essential to the pathway of learning. As Dyson put it: “You can’t develop new technology unless you test new ideas and learn when things go wrong. Failure is essential to invention.”

Even in areas of life where failure is potentially catastrophic, it is still vital to respond positively. In aviation, for example, every aircraft is equipped with two almost-indestructible black boxes: one records the electronic information from the on-board computers and the other records sounds in the cockpit. When there is a crash, these boxes are recovered and analysed so that enlightened changes can be enacted. This means that the same mistake never happens again. It is this constant willingness to learn from failure that means aviation has become one of the world’s safest forms of transportation. Last year the accident rate for major airlines was just one crash for every 8.3 million take-offs.

In healthcare, however, things are very different. Clinicians don’t like to admit to failure, partly because they have healthy egos (particularly the senior doctors) and partly because they fear litigation. The consequence is that instead of learning from failure, healthcare often covers up failure. The direct consequence is that the same mistakes are repeated. According to the Journal of Patient Safety, 400,000 people die every year in American hospitals alone due to preventable error. That is like two jumbo jets crashing every day or 9/11 happening every few days. In the UK, too, the numbers are shocking. Until healthcare learns to respond positively to failure, things will not improve.

But let us return to children. One of the seminal mistakes in education in the 1970s was the attempt to equip children with confidence by giving them lots of successes (setting the bar very low). The consequence was that the self-esteem of kids became bound up with success, and they became unable to take risks and crumpled as soon as they hit a proper challenge.

We need to flip this approach. In a complex world, failure is inevitable. It is those individuals and institutions that have the resilience and flexibility to face up to failure, learn the lessons and adapt which ultimately excel.

Brexit is being driven by English nationalism. And it will end in self-rule

Fintan O'Toole in The Guardian

It is a question the English used to ask about their subject peoples: are they ready for self-government? But it is now one that has to be asked about the English themselves. It’s not facetious: England seems to be stumbling towards a national independence it has scarcely even discussed, let alone prepared for. It is on the brink of one of history’s strangest nationalist revolutions.

When you strip away the rhetoric, Brexit is an English nationalist movement. If the Leave side wins the referendum, it will almost certainly be without a majority in either Scotland or Northern Ireland and perhaps without winning Wales either. The passion that animates it is English self-assertion. And the inexorable logic of Brexit is the logic of English nationalism: the birth of a new nation state bounded by the Channel and the Tweed.

Over time, the main political entity most likely to emerge from Brexit is not a Britain with its greatness restored or a sweetly reunited kingdom. It is a standalone England. Scotland will have a second referendum on independence, this time with the lure of staying in the European Union. Northern Ireland will be in a horrendous bind, cut off from the rest of the island by a European border and with the UK melting around it. Its future as an unwanted appendage of a shrunken Britain is unsustainable. Wales is more uncertain, but a resurgence of Welsh nationalism after Brexit is entirely possible, especially after a Scottish departure from the UK. After Brexit, an independent England will emerge by default.

And this is of course a perfectly legitimate aspiration. Nationalism, whether we like it or not, is almost universal and the English have as much right to it as anyone else. There’s nothing inherently absurd about the notion of England as an independent nation state. It’s just that if you’re going to create a new nation state, you ought to be talking about it, arguing for it, thinking it through. And this isn’t happening. England seems to be muddling its way towards a very peculiar event: accidental independence.

The first thing about the idea of England as a nation state that governs itself and only itself is that it is radically new. The Brexit campaign is fuelled by a mythology of England proudly “standing alone”, as it did against the Spanish armada and Adolf Hitler. But when did England really stand alone? The answer, roughly speaking, is for 300 of the past 1,200 years. England has been a political entity for only two relatively short periods. The first was between the early 10th century, when the first English national kingdom was created by Athelstan, and 1016 when it was conquered by Cnut the Dane. The second was between 1453, when English kings effectively gave up their attempts to rule France, and 1603, when James VI and I united the thrones of England and Scotland.

Otherwise – and this includes all of the past 400 years – England has always been part of at least one larger entity: an Anglo-French kingdom, the United Kingdom in its various forms, a global empire, the European Union. The English are much less used to being left to their own devices than they think they are.

English nationalists can quite reasonably point out that many emerging nation states have even less experience of being a standalone, self-governing entity – my own country, Ireland, being an obvious example. The big difference is that other countries actually go through a process – often very long and difficult – of preparing themselves politically, culturally and emotionally for the scary business of being (to borrow a term from Irish nationalism) “ourselves alone”. In England, there is no process. A decisive step is about to be taken without acknowledging the path ahead.

As Johnny Rotten (a typically English child of immigrants) put it: ‘There is no future in England’s dreaming’

Hardly anyone is even talking about England – all the Brexit arguments are framed in terms of Britain or the UK, as if these historically constructed and contingent entities will simply carry on regardless in the new dispensation. The Brexiters imagine an earthquake that will, curiously, leave the domestic landscape unaltered. English nationalism is thus a very strange phenomenon – a passion that is driving a nation towards historic change but one that seems unwilling even to speak its own name.

It is hard to think of any parallel for this. Successful national independence movements usually have five things going for them: a deep sense of grievance against the existing order; a reasonably clear (even if invented) idea of a distinctive national identity; a shared (albeit largely imaginary) narrative of the national past; a new elite-in-waiting; and a vision of a future society that will be better because it is self-governing.

The English nationalism that underlies Brexit has, at best, one of these five assets: the sense of grievance is undeniably powerful. It’s also highly ambiguous – it is rooted in the shrinking of British social democracy but the actual outcome of Brexit will be an even closer embrace of unfettered neoliberalism. There is a weird mismatch between the grievance and the solution.

None of the other four factors applies. As a cultural identity, Englishness is wonderfully potent but not distinctive – its very success means that it is global property. From the English language to the Beatles, from Shakespeare to the Premier League, its icons are planetary. The great cultural appeal of nationalism – we need political independence or our unique culture will die – just doesn’t wash. Moreover, this power of English culture derives precisely from its capacity to absorb immigrant energies. From the Smiths to Zadie Smith, from the Brontës to Dizzee Rascal, it is very hard to imagine an “English” culture that is not also Afro-Caribbean, Asian, Irish, Jewish and so on.

Is there a shared narrative of the English past that functions even as a useful collective invention? English nationalism has a hard time integrating the past of John Ball and the Levellers, of Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine with that of monarchs, generals and imperial power.

As for an elite-in-waiting, the English nationalist movement certainly has one. But the handover of elite power that will accompany this particular national revolution will surely be the most underwhelming in history — from one set of public school and Oxbridge Tories to another. And this elite’s vision of a future society seems to come down to the same lump of money – the (dishonestly) alleged £350m a week that will be saved by leaving the EU – being spent over and over on everything from the National Health Service to farm subsidies. Plus, of course, fewer immigrants, thereby creating some kind of imaginary Lebensraum. There is no attempt to articulate any set of social principles by which the new England might govern itself. As Johnny Rotten (a typically English child of immigrants) put it: “There is no future in England’s dreaming.”

When it comes down to it, nationalism is about the line between Them and Us. The Brexiters seem pretty clear about Them – Brussels bureaucrats and immigrants. It’s just the Us bit that they haven’t quite worked out yet. Being ready for self-government demands a much better sense of the self you want to govern.

So Britain, are you ready to enter the United Kingdom of Ukip?

Marina Hyde in The Guardian


 
‘Don’t get me wrong on Nigel – he’s fine for a fag, a pint, some jolly japes on the Thames.’ Illustration: Nate Kitch

Right now, in the Ukip bunker, there is a search going on. It is urgent. It is probably desperate. It is the search for a tone. The emotional Rolodex of Nigel Farage is being riffled through in the hope it might throw up something usable. Top presentational aides have been dispatched on a vital quest to find the outer limits of his range. The journey is unlikely to detain them very long. Yet at the most recent reckoning Farage stands a few disputed percentage points away from being acclaimed – like it or not – the most extraordinarily successful British politician of a generation. Globally, he may soon be seen as reflecting us.

A man who yesterday morning was standing in front of a poster eerily similar to genuine Nazi propaganda is today in seclusion, his campaign suspended – like all the official referendum efforts - “out of respect”. And, presumably, out of uncertainty as to what the hell he does next.

Yesterday morning Farage was playing dog-whistle politics. Forgive me: he was playing whistle politics. Understanding the import of the words “BREAKING POINT” across a snaking queue of stricken brown-skinned people does not require ultrasonic capabilities. You can stand down, Lassie. You’re not needed today, girl.

Yesterday afternoon, the MP Jo Cox was killed in the street in her Batley and Spen constituency. That her alleged killer had years of mental health issues seems likely. That he is alleged to have shouted, “Britain first” – perhaps a reference to an organisation with which Ukip were last year forced to deny an electoral pact – is a matter of acute sensitivity. If the party barkers were a hundredth as careful about anything else as they are instructing everyone to be about that alleged “Britain first” cry, then they would have moderated themselves into retirement years ago.

“We are not won by arguments that we can analyse,” the great liberal supreme court justice Louis Brandeis observed, “but by tone and temper; by the manner, which is the man himself.”

Character is not always destiny, but tone matters. As we head towards polling day, all eyes must be on the man himself, Nigel Farage, who did more to bring about this referendum than any other, and whose artless, divisive bait-and-switch has felt like its governing spirit. How bound up Britain’s destiny has seemed with the character of this rather small man. Where does Britain’s-most-successful-politician-in-waiting go from here? Cometh the hour, whence cometh the tone?

Farage will, of course, have to find some words that address the utter loathsomeness of where we find ourselves, and the shame and despair it makes many people feel. Like him or not, David Cameron can do this. Like him or not, Jeremy Corbyn did so on Thursday. Together in Birstall, they found the bearing. And then … Well, it ought to be noted mildly that Thursday’s repulsive poster was merely the first in a planned series. Will we see the rest? At this moment of national and personal destiny, will Farage manage to be the politician of stature he assures us he is?

Hitherto, Farage has had a tried and tested shtick for Serious Moments. I notice it all the time now, but I first saw it when I asked him with sledgehammer flippancywhether Nelson Mandela was one of his political heroes. Immediately, Farage lowered his voice and opened his eyes very wide. “He’s a human hero,” he intoned. “That day he came out of Robben Island” – it wasn’t Robben Island, but anyway – “and stood there and forgave everybody, I just thought: ‘This is Jesus.’” Hugely idiosyncratic for a man on the right of the Tory party at the time, considering most of his political soulmates had only just given up wearing “Hang Mandela” badges, but there you go. “I don’t regard him as a political hero,” Nigel went on very quietly and with his eyes still open very wide. “I think he’s on a rather higher plane than that.”

Drop the voice, widen the eyes. He’ll probably do it this weekend. He certainly does it when anyone accuses him of borderline racism. Down goes the voice, as though he is personally trying to smother their insinuation in the appalled hush it deserves. I have to confess the Farage mind trick doesn’t work on me. Instead, every time Nigel deploys it, it makes me think of a Truman Capote line from In Cold Blood. “The quietness of his tone italicised the malice of his reply.”

That the political atmosphere was febrile and fetid before Jo Cox’s death hardly needs stating. “How foul this referendum is,” wrote the novelist Robert Harris this week. “The most depressing, divisive, duplicitous political event of my lifetime. May there never be another.” Boris Johnson’s sister Rachel has since retweeted the observation.

So many of the things that have felt bizarre or even vaguely comic at one Atlantic Ocean’s remove have suddenly alighted on our shores. Lies are knowingly painted on buses; previously unsayable things have been said on platforms that lend them a hideous legitimacy; the word “expert” has become as dirty as the word “Westminster”; and the shift to post-factual political discourse feels rapidly under way. No one is more post-fact than Farage. Asked why he was back on the cigs again this week, he replied: “I think the doctors have got it wrong on smoking.”

Don’t get me wrong on Nigel – he’s fine for a fag, a pint, some jolly japes on the Thames. The entire campaign’s only moment of levity came on Wednesday, as his flotilla did battle with Bob Geldof’s. In fact, it was while aboard Farage’s boat that I saw two children on one of the small remain dinghies and wondered who they were. They looked the same age as my eldest two – about five and three – and I thought how hilarious and exciting mine would have found the whole spectacle. I smiled and waved at them, because there is obviously a law stating that people in or aboard funny forms of transport should always wave at children. I only found out the next day that those children had been Jo Cox’s. Her husband Brendan had tweeted: “Kids seriously disappointed there isn’t another flotilla today.”

My God, the horror. Lying in wait, the unthinkable horror. Twenty-four hours later, Brendan Cox was issuing a statement on his wife’s murder. That he was able to find the words and tone that I am sure I never could in such unimaginable circumstances has been a thing of marvel to so many. We know the heights of humanity when we see them.

And I’m afraid we know when we don’t. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard humanity emanate from Nigel Farage, certainly not convincingly. On the eve of what he hopes will be his finest hour, he must rise to the challenge now. People expect. Britain expects. If you haven’t the words and the deportment for this sort of horror, and the politics that the timetable dictates will have to be conducted while it is still so fresh, then you are not fit for office or the sniff of it.

There are many people I respect and admire voting leave – there are people in my family voting leave. I understand their reasons. But they must stomach the reality that a vote for leave will be taken by Farage and countless others as a vote for him, a vote for his posters, a vote for his ideas, a vote for his quiet malice, a vote for his smallness in the face of vast horrors. Is it worth it?

More freeloaders than free market. How Britain bails out the business chiefs

 

‘In an age of untrammelled greed, company executives are rewarded for cannibalising their businesses and bilking their staff.’ Illustration by Andrzej Krauze

 Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian


On Wednesday, two very different men will have to explain themselves. Both appear in London, to a room full of authority figures – but their finances and their status place them at opposite ends of our power structure. Yet put them together and a picture emerges of the skewedness of today’s Britain.

For the Rev Paul Nicolson, the venue will be a magistrate’s court in London. His “crime” is refusing to pay his council tax, in protest against David Cameron’s effective scrapping of council tax benefit, part of his swingeing cuts to social security. In order to pay for a financial crisis they didn’t cause, millions of families already on low incomes are sinking deeper into poverty. In order to pay bills they can’t afford, neighbours of the retired vicar are going without food. The 84-year-old faces jail this week, for the sake of £2,831.

Meanwhile, a chauffeur will drive Philip Green to parliament, where he’ll be quizzed by MPs over his part in the collapse of BHS. A business nearly as old as the Queen will die within a few weeks, leaving 11,000 workers out of a job and 22,000 members of its pension scheme facing a poorer retirement.

There the similarities peter out. Nicolson was summoned to court; Green wasn’t going to bother showing up at Westminster. When the multibillionaire was invited by Frank Field to make up BHS’s £600m pension black hole, he demanded the MP resign as chair of the work and pensions select committee.

But then, Green is used to cherry-picking which rules he plays by. Take this example: he buys Arcadia, the company that owns Topshop, then arranges for it to give his wife a dividend of £1.2bn. Since Tina Green is, conveniently, a resident of Monaco, the tax savings on that one payment alone are worth an estimated £300m. That would fund the building of 10 large secondary schools – or two-thirds of the annual cut to council tax benefits.

Just as Green underinvests in society, so he underinvests in his companies. The man to whom he sold BHS last year, Dominic Chappell, told MPs last week that “for the past 10 or 12 years there had been little or no inward investment in the stores”. A staple of the high street had been run down.

Then again, what incentive has he had to do otherwise? Green bought BHS with just £20m of family money and borrowed the rest. Within four years, he had pulled £400m of dividends out of the firm – 20 times his initial outlay.

He used the same tactic to buy Arcadia – stumping up £9.2m in equity and taking out £1.2bn three years later. This isn’t retailing as you might think of it, it’s balance-sheet shazam – the kind of financial engineering that posed as real business in Britain’s bubble years. And it’s enabled Green to turn major retailers into what Robert Peston, in Who Runs Britain?, calls “giant gushers of cash”.

But in today’s Britain, the poor are forced to pay the unaffordable, while the tax-avoider is honoured for his contribution to society. Green was knighted by Tony Blair, while David Cameron appointed him a government adviser.

Just as Green pretends to be a cheeky chappy even though he went to boarding school, so any charlatan in pinstripes can claim to be a businessperson – and be handsomely rewarded. The barons who run our rail services tout themselves as “investors”, but for every quid they put into their trains, they take out £2.47. That level of underinvestment ensures commuters are never sure of getting in on time and having a seat – but shareholders and managers can make a fortune.

From Margaret Thatcher through Tony Blair to David Cameron, successive prime ministers have preached the virtues of free enterprise. We’ve ended up with an economy comprised of what parliament’s public accounts committee calls “quasi-monopolies” – from water to banks to electricity to public outsourcing – and big businesses being treated as money-sponges to be wrung dry by their owners and managers.

In the 1970s, £10 of every £100 in corporate profits was paid to shareholders. Now between £60 and £70 of every £100 is handed out. Workers, companies and the economy are thus starved of investment and growth opportunities so that, as Andy Haldane at the Bank of England warns, firms are “eating themselves”.

In an age of untrammelled greed, company executives are rewarded for cannibalising their businesses and bilking their staff. The typical FTSE-100 boss is now on a total pay of around £5m, the High Pay Centre calculates, even while the average employee is still earning less in real terms than in 2008.

This is less about the free market than freeloading. The banks collapse and are bailed out. The Sports Direct billionaire Mike Ashley walks away from a collapsed business, giving hundreds of workers 15-minutes notice of redundancy – and handing taxpayers the £700,000 bill to clean up the mess. Tax-avoider Amazon receives tens of millions of public money to build warehouses, and even has a road in Swansea built for it. Richard Branson takes £28m to open a call centre in Wales.

The public pay for apprenticeships, so that companies get readymade workers. We shell out for upgrading the railways. Most of all, we top up poverty pay. Official figures show that 37% of working-age households in this country now take more from the public purse than they pay in. Not because they’re lazy or unemployed – employment has never been so high – but because their bosses can rely on the rest of us to pay their way.

Survival of the fittest? This is a deformed capitalism, barely worthy of the name – and it won’t improve by slinging a few rotten tomatoes in parliament. We need a working capitalism, where the public no longer give away their protections and subsidies for free – but instead make businesses take their responsibilities seriously.

If rail operators rely on taxpayer billions, they should train staff and pay them a living wage. Why shouldn’t big supermarkets that need public planning permission and licensing to trade be required to stock some locally sourced goods? And why shouldn’t local and central government, which allocate billions in procurement and tendering, foster a diversity of business models – from not-for-profit to mutually owned.

Some of you may think such measures impossible, others may see them as baby steps. They should be the first heaves on the pendulum, turning our economy away from the interests of the wealthy to the rest of us.

Last week Nicolson promised: “I shall start paying my tax again when they stop taxing benefits.” Good for him. The rest of us taxpayers should do the opposite: asking businesspeople what they’ll do to deserve our corporate welfare. That question should not just be put to Green and Ashley, but to those who run all our major corporations. Otherwise, we’re merely chasing out a few big names and hanging up a sign over Britain that reads: “Under new owners, business as usual.”

THE MISTRUST OF SCIENCE

By Atul Gawande in The New Yorker


PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIK JACOBS/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX


The following was delivered as the commencement address at the California Institute of Technology, on Friday, June 10th.

If this place has done its job—and I suspect it has—you’re all scientists now. Sorry, English and history graduates, even you are, too. Science is not a major or a career. It is a commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation. The thing is, that isn’t a normal way of thinking. It is unnatural and counterintuitive. It has to be learned. Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense. Common sense once told us that the sun moves across the sky and that being out in the cold produced colds. But a scientific mind recognized that these intuitions were only hypotheses. They had to be tested.

When I came to college from my Ohio home town, the most intellectually unnerving thing I discovered was how wrong many of my assumptions were about how the world works—whether the natural or the human-made world. I looked to my professors and fellow-students to supply my replacement ideas. Then I returned home with some of those ideas and told my parents everything they’d got wrong (which they just loved). But, even then, I was just replacing one set of received beliefs for another. It took me a long time to recognize the particular mind-set that scientists have. The great physicist Edwin Hubble, speaking at Caltech’s commencement in 1938, said a scientist has “a healthy skepticism, suspended judgement, and disciplined imagination”—not only about other people’s ideas but also about his or her own. The scientist has an experimental mind, not a litigious one.

As a student, this seemed to me more than a way of thinking. It was a way of being—a weird way of being. You are supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but not too much. You are supposed to suspend judgment, yet exercise it. Ultimately, you hope to observe the world with an open mind, gathering facts and testing your predictions and expectations against them. Then you make up your mind and either affirm or reject the ideas at hand. But you also hope to accept that nothing is ever completely settled, that all knowledge is just probable knowledge. A contradictory piece of evidence can always emerge. Hubble said it best when he said, “The scientist explains the world by successive approximations.”

The scientific orientation has proved immensely powerful. It has allowed us to nearly double our lifespan during the past century, to increase our global abundance, and to deepen our understanding of the nature of the universe. Yet scientific knowledge is not necessarily trusted. Partly, that’s because it is incomplete. But even where the knowledge provided by science is overwhelming, people often resist it—sometimes outright deny it. Many people continue to believe, for instance, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that childhood vaccines cause autism (they do not); that people are safer owning a gun (they are not); that genetically modified crops are harmful (on balance, they have been beneficial); that climate change is not happening (it is).

Vaccine fears, for example, have persisted despite decades of research showing them to be unfounded. Some twenty-five years ago, a statistical analysis suggested a possible association between autism and thimerosal, a preservative used in vaccines to prevent bacterial contamination. The analysis turned out to be flawed, but fears took hold. Scientists then carried out hundreds of studies, and found no link. Still, fears persisted. Countries removed the preservative but experienced no reduction in autism—yet fears grew. A British study claimed a connection between the onset of autism in eight children and the timing of their vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella. That paper was retracted due to findings of fraud: the lead author had falsified and misrepresented the data on the children. Repeated efforts to confirm the findings were unsuccessful. Nonetheless, vaccine rates plunged, leading to outbreaks of measles and mumpsthat, last year, sickened tens of thousands of children across the U.S., Canada, and Europe, and resulted in deaths.

People are prone to resist scientific claims when they clash with intuitive beliefs. They don’t see measles or mumps around anymore. They do see children with autism. And they see a mom who says, “My child was perfectly fine until he got a vaccine and became autistic.”

Now, you can tell them that correlation is not causation. You can say that children get a vaccine every two to three months for the first couple years of their life, so the onset of any illness is bound to follow vaccination for many kids. You can say that the science shows no connection. But once an idea has got embedded and become widespread, it becomes very difficult to dig it out of people’s brains—especially when they do not trust scientific authorities. And we are experiencing a significant decline in trust in scientific authorities.


The sociologist Gordon Gauchat studied U.S. survey data from 1974 to 2010 and found some deeply alarming trends. Despite increasing education levels, the public’s trust in the scientific community has been decreasing. This is particularly true among conservatives, even educated conservatives. In 1974, conservatives with college degrees had the highest level of trust in science and the scientific community. Today, they have the lowest.

Today, we have multiple factions putting themselves forward as what Gauchat describes as their own cultural domains, “generating their own knowledge base that is often in conflict with the cultural authority of the scientific community.” Some are religious groups (challenging evolution, for instance). Some are industry groups (as with climate skepticism). Others tilt more to the left (such as those that reject the medical establishment). As varied as these groups are, they are all alike in one way. They all harbor sacred beliefs that they do not consider open to question.

To defend those beliefs, few dismiss the authority of science. They dismiss the authority of the scientific community. People don’t argue back by claiming divine authority anymore. They argue back by claiming to have the truer scientific authority. It can make matters incredibly confusing. You have to be able to recognize the difference between claims of science and those of pseudoscience.

Science’s defenders have identified five hallmark moves of pseudoscientists. They argue that the scientific consensus emerges from a conspiracy to suppress dissenting views. They produce fake experts, who have views contrary to established knowledge but do not actually have a credible scientific track record. They cherry-pick the data and papers that challenge the dominant view as a means of discrediting an entire field. They deploy false analogies and other logical fallacies. And they set impossible expectations of research: when scientists produce one level of certainty, the pseudoscientists insist they achieve another.

It’s not that some of these approaches never provide valid arguments. Sometimes an analogy is useful, or higher levels of certainty are required. But when you see several or all of these tactics deployed, you know that you’re not dealing with a scientific claim anymore. Pseudoscience is the form of science without the substance.

The challenge of what to do about this—how to defend science as a more valid approach to explaining the world—has actually been addressed by science itself. Scientists have done experiments. In 2011, two Australian researchers compiled many of the findings in “The Debunking Handbook.” The results are sobering. The evidence is that rebutting bad science doesn’t work; in fact, it commonly backfires. Describing facts that contradict an unscientific belief actually spreads familiarity with the belief and strengthens the conviction of believers. That’s just the way the brain operates; misinformation sticks, in part because it gets incorporated into a person’s mental model of how the world works. Stripping out the misinformation therefore fails, because it threatens to leave a painful gap in that mental model—or no model at all.

So, then, what is a science believer to do? Is the future just an unending battle of warring claims? Not necessarily. Emerging from the findings was also evidence that suggested how you might build trust in science. Rebutting bad science may not be effective, but asserting the true facts of good science is. And including the narrative that explains them is even better. You don’t focus on what’s wrong with the vaccine myths, for instance. Instead, you point out: giving children vaccines has proved far safer than not. How do we know? Because of a massive body of evidence, including the fact that we’ve tried the alternate experiment before. Between 1989 and 1991, vaccination among poor urban children in the U.S. dropped. And the result was fifty-five thousand cases of measles and a hundred and twenty-three deaths.

The other important thing is to expose the bad science tactics that are being used to mislead people. Bad science has a pattern, and helping people recognize the pattern arms them to come to more scientific beliefs themselves. Having a scientific understanding of the world is fundamentally about how you judge which information to trust. It doesn’t mean poring through the evidence on every question yourself. You can’t. Knowledge has become too vast and complex for any one person, scientist or otherwise, to convincingly master more than corners of it.

Few working scientists can give a ground-up explanation of the phenomenon they study; they rely on information and techniques borrowed from other scientists. Knowledge and the virtues of the scientific orientation live far more in the community than the individual. When we talk of a “scientific community,” we are pointing to something critical: that advanced science is a social enterprise, characterized by an intricate division of cognitive labor. Individual scientists, no less than the quacks, can be famously bull-headed, overly enamored of pet theories, dismissive of new evidence, and heedless of their fallibility. (Hence Max Planck’s observation that science advances one funeral at a time.) But as a community endeavor, it is beautifully self-correcting.

Beautifully organized, however, it is not. Seen up close, the scientific community—with its muddled peer-review process, badly written journal articles, subtly contemptuous letters to the editor, overtly contemptuous subreddit threads, and pompous pronouncements of the academy— looks like a rickety vehicle for getting to truth. Yet the hive mind swarms ever forward. It now advances knowledge in almost every realm of existence—even the humanities, where neuroscience and computerization are shaping understanding of everything from free will to how art and literature have evolved over time.

Today, you become part of the scientific community, arguably the most powerful collective enterprise in human history. In doing so, you also inherit a role in explaining it and helping it reclaim territory of trust at a time when that territory has been shrinking. In my clinic and my work in public health, I regularly encounter people who are deeply skeptical of even the most basic knowledge established by what journalists label “mainstream” science (as if the other thing is anything like science)—whether it’s facts about physiology, nutrition, disease, medicines, you name it. The doubting is usually among my most, not least, educated patients. Education may expose people to science, but it has acountervailing effect as well, leading people to be more individualistic and ideological.

The mistake, then, is to believe that the educational credentials you get today give you any special authority on truth. What you have gained is far more important: an understanding of what real truth-seeking looks like. It is the effort not of a single person but of a group of people—the bigger the better—pursuing ideas with curiosity, inquisitiveness, openness, and discipline. As scientists, in other words.

Even more than what you think, how you think matters. The stakes for understanding this could not be higher than they are today, because we are not just battling for what it means to be scientists. We are battling for what it means to be citizens.