The Raghuram Rajan syndrome

Ashok V Desai in The Hindu

The outrage following Raghuram Rajan’s decision to leave the RBI in September reflects the degree to which India’s politicians have turned civil servants into note-takers.

These are exciting times — and not just for economists. Raghuram Rajan is just governor of the Reserve Bank of India — a satrap sent by the Badshahi of Delhi to rule a colony on the western seashore. It has been doing this for 80 years. Getting rid of a minion, putting another in his place — this game of patronage is being played all the time. There are governors for 29 States and seven Union Territories as well, most of them men and women of little distinction; they are installed in ornate mansions and then removed every once in a while, and no one gives it a thought. This governor, perched in a skyscraper looking out on the Bombay harbour, he has not even been dismissed. All he has said is that he does not want to be reappointed. The entire media have gone crazy about his self-abnegation.

Why the grief?

The other remarkable fact about this incident is the sympathy this man has evoked in the media. Suppose Deepika Padukone declared tomorrow that she was retreating to Madeira to grow camellias; many might like to join her, but I am not sure there would be such lamentation. Mr. Rajan is going to retreat to the shores of Lake Michigan to grow ideas. It is an enviable life for an economist; no one need feel sorry for him. True, Mr. Rajan looks enviably winsome; I do not think anyone else in the government comes anywhere near him. But that is not the reason behind the outbreak of grief; it is that he is by common consensus the best man for the job, and even people who never gave a thought to the exchange rate think that it is a bad idea that he should have been eased out in such an unceremonious manner.

But then, he is being eased out by luminaries whom the people of this country gave a massive majority; if they trusted these politicians only two years ago to rule them wisely, why can they doubt that their representatives have acted in their best interests? For one thing, people do not elect rulers to think for them; they only create institutions and procedures which permit rulers to take decisions when there are different opinions. It is common amongst rulers, especially inexperienced ones, to think that an electoral victory was a vote for their wisdom. But even in a democracy, a majority vote is the last resort. Democratic institutions are mechanisms of consultation and debate; they are intended to give voice to reason.

Mr. Rajan’s decision to leave is just one instance of the breakdown of this mechanism of consultation. Admittedly, he has been expressing opinions that do not fall strictly within the purview of monetary policy and can be taken to be critical of government. Free expression too is a part of democratic government. It happens that past governors of the Reserve Bank have been economical in resorting to free expression. Most of them spent their working lives serving ministers silently; by the time they came to Mint Street, most of them had lost the art of free expression, and those who retained it in some measure thought it irreligious to venture beyond the most conventional and boring statements. The sensation that Mr. Rajan has caused is more a reflection on the way politicians have turned civil servants into slaves. All democracies are governments in the making. In theory, the discretion of those in power is constrained by propriety as much as by law. But there is no foolproof mechanism for drawing the line between discretion and propriety. The conventions in this country are so fragile that propriety is overwhelmed by impunity.

Central bank vs Finance Ministry

The conflict between political discretion and economic circumspection sharpened in the last years of Mr. Rajan’s tenure. Politicians in power tend everywhere to be expansionist; they would prefer to spend more and borrow without interest. If they do so without restraint, the country can have inflation which, if not controlled, can turn into hyperinflation. In a world of open economies, excessive spending by governments can also result in payments problems. This is why, in recent decades, better-run countries (Editor's comment - which one?) have freed central banks from finance ministries and given them power to control money supply, influence interest rates and regulate financial markets.

That power was not used in this country when governors were sent from Delhi to the Reserve Bank. They were too subservient to finance ministers. As a result, we had a payments crisis at least once a decade; and we had chronic inflation. When I was taken into the Finance Ministry in 1991, I was shocked to see how much power we had, and how casually we exercised it. We transferred some of the powers to the Reserve Bank and Securities and Exchange Board of India, and tried to exercise self-control in fiscal management. It did not work immediately. Finance ministers were amateurs; they took some years to learn the ropes, by which time they were often defeated or removed and replaced by new ones. But slowly, under the long rule of Manmohan Singh, conventions began to take shape — including induction of outside intellectuals in government. I was the first. Manmohan Singh readily accepted invitations to academia, and knew many academics. So his government had no difficulty in attracting intellectuals into the government. Mr. Rajan was one of them. Manmohan Singh heard him when he went to inaugurate a conference in Neemrana, liked what he saw and heard, and lured Mr. Rajan into government.

Return to nativism

Not surprisingly, no leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party has such rapport with academics and intellectuals. Its leaders believe that knowledge is hidden in ancient Hindu scriptures. More important, they do not believe that knowledge emerges and grows through contention of ideas and testing them against facts. After coming to power, the party’s new appointees have tried to replace the long tradition of contention with a new one of indigenous faith. (Editor's comment - Market Economics is also faith based). Mr. Rajan is a worshipper of a foreign economic faith. He turned the Reserve Bank into a temple of western-style independent monetary policy. Monetary policy must be retrieved from the heretic, and be brought back into the ideological pantheon. Mr. Rajan would not be handled roughly like Kanhaiya Kumar, but sedition will be dealt with without mercy.

But — what will be the new monetary policy? It is too early to ask that. The shastra of monetary policy, like all shastras, has been suppressed by agents of the western civilisation. It will take some time to be rediscovered and reinvented. It is not possible at this moment to appoint a monetary mahant. What will be done, however, is to appoint someone with the right faith, who will work in harmony with the holy powers in Delhi. Everyone will remember the victory Arun Jaitley declared in March in the nationalism debate. The monetary policy debate too will be won just as easily, without argument, contention or persuasion.

This is not the first time faith has triumphed. It did so once before, in the 1950s; dissenters were thrown out of the government, and the nation progressed on a planned path — to the famine and payments crisis of 1966. This time, though, the exit will not be so straightforward; the economy is doing too well.

The shocking waste of cash even Brexiteers won’t condemn

In or out, everyone seems to agree that the poor should keep subsidising the rich with land subsidies.

 

Arable farmland near Leighton in Shropshire. ‘These payments shouldn’t be called farm subsidies: you don’t have to produce any food to receive them.’ Photograph: David Bagnall/Alamy


George Monbiot in The Guardian


Do the Leave campaigners care about the misuse of public money? No. How do I know? Because they have scarcely mentioned the European Union’s great bonfire of banknotes. You know, the item that accounts for roughly 40% of the EU budget, or £42bn a year, almost all of which is wasted. You don’t know? I rest my case.

I’m talking about farm subsidies. If the Brexiters have raised the subject at all, it’s only to assure recipients that these vast sums will continue to be extracted from taxpayers’ pockets if Britain leaves. Some – such as Theresa Villiers and Owen Paterson – have suggested that the great giveaway of public funds could even be increased.

The leaders of the remain campaign are no better: George Osborne, while ripping down essential public services, has warned that if the UK votes out, this outrageous provision of unearned income might dry up. We should stay in Europe, he told the press in Northern Ireland, to ensure that brimming buckets of public money – £3bn a year in the UK – continue to be dispensed.

They would more accurately be described as land subsidies, as they are paid by the hectare. The more land you own or lease, the more public money you are given, so the richest people in Europe clean up. And not just in Europe: Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes and Wall Street bankers have bought up tracts of European farmland, thus qualifying for the vast sums we shovel into their pockets. Why is no word raised against these benefit tourists?

This is arguably the most regressive distribution of public money in modern times. Taxpayers of all stations stock the wine cellars of dukes and hedge fund managers. As much as 80% of the funds are harvested by the richest 25% of recipients. The poorest farmers are excluded: you cannot claim subsidies unless you own or lease at least five hectares. A report by the European court of auditors reveals that the EU has no useful data on farm incomes, and therefore no knowledge of whether farm subsidies serve any social purpose.

This racket is perhaps the strongest of all arguments for leaving the European Union, but the Brexiters’ silence resounds. Among the 13 Conservative MPs who signed an open letter last week undertaking not to cut subsidies for owning or leasing land if Britain leaves the union was Iain Duncan Smith. His wife’s family’s estate, on which he lives, receives £150,000 a year of your money, handed to them by the EU.

Remember what Duncan Smith did to the poor while he was work and pensions secretary? He presided over a system that drove many to food banks. I struggle to imagine less deserving beneficiaries of public charity than Iain Duncan Smith and family.

Hold on – I’ve just thought of one. Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail – which rails ceaselessly against other misuses of EU funds, real or imagined – has extracted £460,000 in European subsidies since 2011. How? By owning a shooting estate in Scotland and a tract of land in Sussex. I doubt Dacre knows much more about farming than the average reader of his newspaper, but you don’t have to be a farmer to receive this money; the rules say only that you must have “eligible land at your disposal”.

Whenever you see someone lamenting the “something for nothing culture” in the press, or attacking “bureaucrats, lobbyists and other jackals that scavenge for taxpayers’ money”, you could place a hefty bet that either they or people close to them are stuffing their pockets with EU funds.

There’s another reason for calling these payments land subsidies: you don’t have to produce any food to receive them. Your land just has to look agricultural, which means bare. Among the “ineligible features” listed in Westminster’s version of the European rules are ponds, wide hedges, regenerating woodland, reedbeds, thriving salt marsh and trees sufficient to form a canopy. The common agricultural policy is a €55bn incentive to destroy wildlife habitats and cause floods downstream.

All the good things the EU has done for nature are more than counteracted by this bureaucratic idiocy. Millions of hectares of wildlife habitat in the EU are threatened by this rule; clearance has taken place already across vast areas. Why do we hear so little about it?

I spent part of this spring in Romania, in the midst of hundreds of thousands of hectares of wood pasture (below): a mosaic of flowering meadows, marshes and trees. I have seldom seen such a profusion of life anywhere on earth. I watched golden orioles, hoopoes, honey buzzards, red-backed and great grey shrikes, lesser spotted eagles, black storks, yellow wagtails, roe deer, wild boar and bears. Cuckoos were so common they flew around in flocks. All nine species of European woodpecker live in one small valley where I stayed; so do bee eaters, goshawks, corncrakes, quails, nightjars, tortoises, tree frogs, pine martens, wildcats, lynx and wolves.

 Photograph: George Monbiot

All this is now on the brink. Across Romania, farmers are beginning to realise that they can make money simply by cleansing the land. In eastern Transylvania I saw the heartbreaking results (below): the mass felling of trees and destruction of wildlife, not for any productive purpose, but just to meet the European rules. It’s the same kind of vandalism, driven by diktat and blindly enforced by bureaucrats, that the Romanians suffered under their former despot, Nicolae Ceausescu. The European subsidies rules are responsible for one of the world’s great unfolding disasters, which ranks only a little way behind the fires in Indonesia and thecollapse of coral reefs.

Photograph: George Monbiot

This dog that hasn’t barked exposes the real agenda of the leading Brexiters. They denounce the transfer of public money from rich to poor; they are intensely relaxed about the transfer of public money from poor to rich. It also challenges those who wish to remain.

I will vote in on Thursday, as I don’t want to surrender this country to the unmolested control of people prepared to rip up every variety of public spending and public protection except those that serve their own class. But if we are to live in Remainia, we should insist on sweeping change. Daylight robbery and mass destruction: the EU is supposed to prevent them, not deliver them.

Seven tricks to speed up Google Chrome

Samuel Gibbs in The Guardian

Many would say Chrome is the best browser out there. It’s certainly the most popular, used by more than half of the online world. But it’s a beast that can slow your computer to a crawl if left unchecked.

Multiple tabs, dodgy extensions and over-active plugins can leave you feeling like you’re using Windows 3.1 on a pre-Pentium 486, without the turbo switched on.

So here are few quick tips to help bring Chrome back under control, reduce its impact on your computer and speed up your browsing.

1) Get rid of any plug-ins you don’t use

 Chrome plug-in settings. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian

One of the easiest ways to speed up browsing is to cut back on your plug-ins. Type the following into the Chrome address bar and hit enter:

chrome://plugins

Click disable on any plug-ins you want to turn off.

If a page requires a particular disabled plug-in it will have a notice saying so instead of the video or audio element.

2) Make your remaining plug-ins ‘click to load’

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 Content settings for Chrome. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian

For the plug-ins you want to keep, you can still do more to reduce their impact on Chrome. You can stop media that requires plug-ins, like Flash, from loading without your explicit say so.

There are a variety of extensions to do it, but Chrome’s built in settings for plug-in control are easy to activate.

In the Settings menu under “Show advanced settings” and Privacy, click on Content settings and scroll down to Plug-ins. Check the button for “Let me chose when to run plug-in content”.

When something like a Flash video attempts to load, all you have to do is right-click on the disabled plugin image and select “Run this plug-in” if you want to see it.

3) Remove or disable unnecessary extensions

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 Extensions settings in Chrome Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian

Extensions are one of the best bits about Chrome, but each one adds bloat to the browser and therefore can eat up more of your computer’s memory and slow it down.

Click the hamburger menu in the top right of Chrome, mouse over “More tools” and click on “Extensions”. Or you can type the following into the address bar and hit enter:

chrome://extensions

Either uncheck the “Enabled” box to simple disable to extension, or click on the trash bin to fully remove the extension.

Disabling it allows you to re-enable it at any time, which is useful for extensions that you use only every once in a while, such as a rolling full-page screenshot utility. Removed plugins can always be reinstalled from the Chrome Web Store, but it’s a few more clicks.

4) Suspend your tabs

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 The Great Suspender Chrome extension Photograph: The Great Suspender

Chrome can be quite manageable with only two or three tabs open, but when you have upwards of 10 open at any one time it can bring even the most powerful computer to its knees by sucking up all the available memory.

There are two approaches to handling multiple tabs.

Extensions such as the Great Suspender allow you to suspend the tab and remove it out of memory after a certain length of inactivity without closing the tab in your browser. A suspended tab can be reloaded by simply clicking on it, and that way you don’t lose what you were looking at but also don’t cripple your computer with dozens of active tabs.

The downside is that if the site changes or you go offline you can’t recover the suspended tab. The Great Suspender allows you to whitelist some sites, stop a tab being suspended if it’s receiving input such as a text box or prevent a tab from being suspended on an ad hoc basis.

5) Create saved browser sessions

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 Session Buddy Chrome extension Photograph: Session Buddy

Instead of suspending tabs individually extensions such as TabCloud+ andSession Buddy allow you to save a whole browser window full of tabs at once. You can then close them all at once, dramatically reducing Chrome’s load on your computer.

When you want to resume working on the saved tabs you can reload them all exactly the way they were in one complete browser window. It carries the same downside as the Great Suspender, meaning restored tabs are loaded fresh from the internet, so if anything has changed or the site’s no longer available then you won’t be able to restore the tab.

6) Turn off background prefetching

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 Prefetch settings in Google Chrome Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian

Somewhat counter intuitively, if your computer is struggling to handle Chrome, turning off Chrome’s automatic prefetching service, which attempts to predict where you’ll go next and loads at least some of that page in the background, can actually speed up your computer by reducing Chrome’s load.

To try it out, in the Settings menu, listed under “Show advanced settings” and Privacy, uncheck the box marked “Use prediction service to load pages more quickly”.

It could slow down your browsing by stopping prefetching, but it could help the rest of your computer by reducing Chrome’s load on it a little. Only recommended for very slow computers.

7) Use data saver

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 Data Saver extension for Chrome Photograph: Google

And finally, if it’s not your computer slowing your browsing down but your internet connection, Google’s Data Saver service can help.

It puts all non-encrypted internet traffic through a compression system hosted on Google’s servers, reducing the amount of data Chrome downloads per page and speeding up page loading on slow connections.

It will also reduce your overall browsing data usage, which can be helpful for metered connections.

To use Data Saver simply install the extension. Be aware that all pages visited that are not using HTTPS connections of incognito tabs will be seen by Google if using Data Saver.

Why boarding schools produce bad leaders

Nick Duffell in The Guardian

In Britain, the link between private boarding education and leadership is gold-plated. If their parents can afford it, children are sent away from home to walk a well-trodden path that leads straight from boarding school through Oxbridge to high office in institutions such as the judiciary, the army, the City and, especially, government. Our prime minister was only seven when he was sent away to board at Heatherdown preparatory school in Berkshire. Like so many of the men who hold leadership roles in Britain, he learned to adapt his young character to survive both the loss of his family and the demands of boarding school culture. The psychological impact of these formative experiences on Cameron and other boys who grow up to occupy positions of great power and responsibility cannot be overstated. It leaves them ill-prepared for relationships in the adult world and the nation with a cadre of leaders who perpetuate a culture of elitism, bullying and misogyny affecting the whole of society.

Nevertheless, this golden path is as sure today as it was 100 years ago, when men from such backgrounds led us into a disastrous war; it is familiar, sometimes mocked, but taken for granted. But it is less well known that costly, elite boarding consistently turns out people who appear much more competent than they actually are. They are particularly deficient in non-rational skills, such as those needed to sustain relationships, and are not, in fact, well-equipped to be leaders in today's world.

I have been doing psychotherapy with ex-boarders for 25 years and I am a former boarding-school teacher and boarder. My pioneering study of privileged abandonment always sparks controversy: so embedded in British life is boarding that many struggle to see beyond the elitism and understand its impact. The prevalence of institutionalised abuse is finally emerging to public scrutiny, but the effects of normalised parental neglect are more widespread and much less obvious. Am I saying, then, that David Cameron, and the majority of our ruling elite, were damaged by boarding?

It's complex. My studies show that children survive boarding by cutting off their feelings and constructing a defensively organised self that severely limits their later lives. Cameron, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Andrew Mitchell, Oliver Letwin et al tick all the boxes for being boarding-school survivors. For socially privileged children are forced into a deal not of their choosing, where a normal family-based childhood is traded for the hothousing of entitlement. Prematurely separated from home and family, from love and touch, they must speedily reinvent themselves as self-reliant pseudo-adults.

Paradoxically, they then struggle to properly mature, since the child who was not allowed to grow up organically gets stranded, as it were, inside them. In consequence, an abandoned child complex within such adults ends up running the show. This is why many British politicians appear so boyish. They are also reluctant to open their ranks to women, who are strangers to them and unconsciously held responsible for their abandonment by their mothers. With about two-thirds of the current cabinet from such a background, the political implications of this syndrome are huge – because it's the children inside the men running the country who are effectively in charge.

Boarding children invariably construct a survival personality that endures long after school and operates strategically. On rigid timetables, in rule-bound institutions, they must be ever alert to staying out of trouble. Crucially, they must not look unhappy, childish or foolish – in any way vulnerable – or they will be bullied by their peers. So they dissociate from all these qualities, project them out on to others, and develop duplicitous personalities that are on the run, which is why ex-boarders make the best spies.

Now attached to this internal structure instead of a parent, the boarding child survives, but takes into adulthood a permanent unconscious anxiety and will rarely develop what Daniel Goleman calls emotional intelligence. In adulthood he sticks to the same tactics: whenever he senses a threat of being made to look foolish, he will strike. We see this in Cameron's over-reaction to Angela Eagle MP, less than a year into his new job. "Calm down, dear!" the PM patronisingly insisted, as if she were the one upset and not he. The opposite benches loved it, of course, howling "Flashman!" (the public school bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays), but they never take on the cause of these leadership defects.

Bullying is inevitable and endemic in 24/7 institutions full of abandoned and frightened kids. Ex-boarders' partners often report that it ends up ruining home life, many years later. Bullying pervades British society, especially in politics and the media, but, like boarding, we normalise it. When, in 2011, Jeremy Clarkson ranted that he would have striking public-sector workers shot, he was even defended by Cameron – it was apparently a bit of fun. No prizes for guessing where both men learned their styles. And no wonder that the House of Commons, with its adversarial architecture of Victorian Gothic – just like a public school chapel – runs on polarised debate and bullying.

Strategic survival has many styles: bullying is one; others include keeping your head down, becoming a charming bumbler, or keeping an incongruently unruffled smile in place, like health secretary Jeremy Hunt, former head boy at Charterhouse. In a remarkable 1994 BBC documentary called The Making of Them, whose title I borrowed for my first book, young boarders were discreetly filmed over their first few weeks at prep school. Viewers can witness the "strategic survival personality" in the process of being built. "Boarding school," says nine-year-old Freddy, puffing himself up, putting on his Very Serious Face and staring at the camera, "has changed me, and the one thing I can do now is get used [to it]". This false independence, this display of pseudo-adult seriousness is as evident in the theatrical concern of Cameron as it was in Tony Blair. It displays the strategic duplicity learned in childhood; it is hard to get rid of, and, disastrously, deceives even its creator.

The social privilege of boarding is psychologically double-edged: it both creates shame that prevents sufferers from acknowledging their problems, as well as unconscious entitlement that explains why ex-boarder leaders are brittle and defensive while still projecting confidence. Boris is so supremely confident that he needs neither surname nor adult haircut; he trusts his buffoonery to distract the public from what Conrad Black called "a sly fox disguised as a teddy bear". On the steps of St Paul's, Boris commanded the Occupy movement: "In the name of God and Mammon, go!" Was it a lark – Boris doing Monty Python? Or a coded message, announcing someone who, for 10 years, heard the King James Bible read in chapel at Eton? Those who don't recognise this language, it suggests, have no right to be here, so they should just clear off.

This anachronistic entitlement cannot easily be renounced: it compensates for years without love, touch or family, for a personality under stress, for the lack of emotional, relational and sexual maturation. In my new book, Wounded Leaders, I trace the history of British elitism and the negative attitude towards children to colonial times and what I call the "rational man project", whose Victorian boarding schools were industrial power stations churning out stoic, superior leaders for the empire.

Recent evidence from neuroscience experts shows what a poor training for leaderships this actually is. In short, you cannot make good decisions without emotional information (Professor Antonio Damasio); nor grow a flexible brain without good attachments (Dr Sue Gerhardt); nor interpret facial signals if your heart has had to close down (Professor Stephen Porges); nor see the big picture if your brain has been fed on a strict diet of rationality (Dr Iain McGilchrist). These factors underpin Will Hutton's view that "the political judgments of the Tory party have, over the centuries, been almost continuously wrong".

With survival but not empathy on his school curriculum from age seven, Cameron is unlikely to make good decisions based on making relationships in Europe, as John Major could. He can talk of leading Europe, but not of belonging to it. Ex-boarder leaders cannot conceive of communal solutions, because they haven't had enough belonging at home to understand what it means. Instead, they are limited to esprit de corps with their own kind. In order to boost his standing with the rightwingers in his party, Cameron still thinks he can bully for concessions, make more supposedly "robust" vetos.

His European counterparts don't operate like this. Angela Merkel has held multiple fragile coalitions together through difficult times by means of her skill in relationships and collaboration. Though deadlocked at home, Barack Obama impressed both sides of British politics and in 2009 entered the hostile atmosphere of the Kremlin to befriend the then-president Dmitry Medvedev and make headway on a difficult disarmament treaty. In a subsequent meeting with the real power behind the throne, Obama invited Vladimir Putin to expound for an hour on what hadn't worked in recent Russian-American relationships, before responding. Despite their elitist education, and because of it, our own "wounded leaders" can't manage such statesmanship.

To change our politics, we'll have to change our education system. Today, most senior clinicians recognise boarding syndrome, several of whom recently signed a letter to the Observer calling for the end of early boarding. Its elitism ought to motivate the left. The Attlee government intended to disband the public schools, but not even Wilson's dared to. There's a cash problem: boarding is worth billions and has a massive lobby. Unlike most other European countries, our state does not contribute a per capita sum towards private education, so dismantling these schools, which still enjoy charitable status, would be costly. But can we really afford to sacrifice any more children for the sake of second-rate leadership?

Jeremy Corbyn says he 'won't take the blame' if UK votes to leave

Oliver Wright in The Independent

The Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn last night warned he would not take the “blame” if Labour supporters tipped the balance in favour of Brexit.

In an interview on Sky News Mr Corbyn, who has been accused of running a lackluster remain campaign, admitted he was “not a lover of the European Union”.

But he insisted he wanted Labour supporters to vote to stay – although if they didn’t it was not the fault of his party.

“I am not going to take blame for people’s decision,” he said.

“There will be a decision made on Thursday. I am hoping there is going to be a remain vote. There may well be a remain vote. But there may well be a leave vote. Whatever the result – that will be the result of the referendum. We have got to work with it.”

Mr Corbyn also warned that the EU must change "dramatically" even if Britain remains a member.

Facing questions from a studio audience Mr Corbyn admitted that most people “do not understand” all of the implications of this Thursday’s vote.

But despite having voted against European treaties in the past Mr Corbyn insisted that Britain was better off in the EU than outside.

"It's a big decision,” he said. If we stay in Europe there are implications, if we leave Europe there are massive implications.

"But, it is also a turning point because if we leave I don't think there is an easy way back. If we remain, I believe Europe has got to change quite dramatically to something much more democratic, much more accountable and share our wealth and improve our living standards and our working conditions all across the whole continent."
Mr Corbyn said his support for a Remain vote was "not unconditional by any means" and set out a list of problems with the EU.

He said: "I'm opposed to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which is being negotiated largely in secret between the European Union and the US because it would import the worst working conditions and standards from the US into Europe.

"I'm also opposed to the way in which Europe shields tax havens - this country as well shields tax havens.

"And the way in which systematically big companies are exploiting loopholes in employment laws.

"So I'm calling for a Europe in solidarity.

"But I would also say that if we are to deal with issues like climate change, like environmental issues, you cannot do it within national borders, you can only do it across national borders."The refugee crisis has to be dealt with internationally, not just nationally."

He added: "I want to remain in Europe in order to work with others to change it."