Brexit is about to get real. Yet we are nowhere near ready for it

Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian


In the coming days, perhaps as soon as Wednesday, Brexit will turn from abstract to concrete. A near-theological argument that raged in one form or another for nearly three decades will become hard and material, with a fixed deadline. Theresa May is about to trigger article 50, starting the clock on a two-year journey towards the exit from the European Union. And yet those in charge of this fateful, epochal process – and especially those who most loudly demanded it happen – seem utterly unprepared for it.


In four words, the European strategy for the Brexit talks has to be: pour décourager les autres (Discouraging the others)

Philip Hammond’s budget on Wednesday illustrated the point neatly. The country is about to leave its largest export market, a decision with enormous economic implications. The chancellor had the floor for nearly an hour, his obligation to provide an assessment of the present and future prospects of the British economy. Did he so much as mention the imminent exit from the single market? No. Incredibly, he made just two fleeting references to the EU in the entire address.

Instead the stand-out measure, the one that has dominated political discussion since, was Hammond’s decision to take more tax from a core Tory constituency: the self-employed. Important for those individuals, most certainly; a political unforced error, no doubt. But for this to be the focus following a major economic statement on the eve of Brexit is displacement activity of the most heroic kind.

It’s as if the crew of the Titanic eyed the iceberg ahead and promptly decided to have a big squabble over whether to serve white or red.

This failure to wrestle with what’s coming goes wider. The public conversation since 23 June 2016 has barely differed from the debate before that date, each side – leave and remain – still refighting the EU referendum campaign, uncertain how to get out of the old groove.

That failing is most obvious among the Brexiteers, characterised by a refusal to own their victory and take responsibility for it. So when a voice of experience or authority dares point out the possible dangers ahead, they are either sacked, as was the fate of Michael Heseltine, attacked personally, like John Major, or else branded an “enemy of the people” who refuses to bow to the “popular will”.

Those with concerns are accused of “talking down the country” or lacking sufficient faith – as if, should Brexit make us poorer, the fault will belong to those who didn’t screw their eyes tight enough and believe. Credit to Jonn Elledge for calling this what it is: the Tinkerbell delusion.

This surely has to end with the triggering of article 50. From this moment on, the focus must be intensely practical. No more baggy rhetoric about sovereignty and “taking back control”. From now on, those who got us into this situation have to show they can get us out intact by March 2019.

That will require a major shift among the Brexiteer ministers and in Downing Street. Those close to the pre-negotiations between Britain and the remaining 27 EU states report an unwarranted hubris on the UK side that augurs ill. Too many Brexiteers cling to the campaign’s wishful thinking that we go into these talks as the stronger party, that “they need us more than we need them”, and that so long as we hang tough, the Europeans will buckle and hand us a dream deal.

Such arrogance is likely to be exposed soon. For one thing, it ignores the key structural fact that makes Britain’s negotiating prospects bleak from the start: namely, it is imperative for the EU’s own survival that the UK be left in a visibly, materially worse situation after leaving the EU than it enjoyed before. The logic is not vindictive. If the EU is to hold together it must prevent a Brexit contagion. Any divorce settlement must be ugly enough to ensure the remaining 27 stay with their spouse, no matter how loveless that marriage might feel. In four words, the European strategy for the Brexit talks has to be: pour décourager les autres.

But if British politicians are insufficiently mindful of that built-in obstacle, they are far too blithe about the sheer complexity of the undertaking that is about to begin. They are aiming to unpick 40 years of arrangements, seeking to annul them in a pact that will require the blessing of 27 other sovereign states.

To call it 27-dimensional chess understates the geometry: the final divorce settlement will have to be ratified by 38 different national and regional parliaments. To say nothing of the European parliament, commission and council. Each of these bodies has its own interests, pressures and red lines.

May will have to craft a document that satisfies every one of those competing forces, as well as both chambers of the UK parliament. She will have to do it without pushing Scotland towards a second, more winnable independence referendum or recreating a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish republic. And she has to get it done in roughly 18 months. Not for nothing did Dominic Cummings, the mastermind of the Vote Leave campaign, tweet with a candour rare among Brexiteers that leaving the EU was the “hardest job since beating Nazis”.

Or reflect on the supposed aces Britain is confidently looking forward to playing in the upcoming game of Brexit poker. Charles Grant, the sage director of the Centre for European Reform who predicted the leave vote, patiently explains how each one of these assets – which Brexiteers believe will make the Europeans putty in our hands – could create as much angst as advantage.

It’s true, says Grant, that the City of London is valued for the financial services it provides to the EU. But it’s also true that Paris, Madrid, Milan, Frankfurt, Dublin and others are circling, ready to feast on the City’s carcass: they want some of that business for themselves.

No 10 refuses to budge on Brexit bill, despite heavy defeat in Lords



The Brexiteers reckon the Europeans won’t want to give up London’s special relationship with Washington. But, says Grant, British “fawning” over Donald Trump alienates many Europeans, making them doubt we share their basic values. As for Britain’s contribution to European security – via its UN seat, Nato and its fabled military – that’s much admired. But not if it’s used as a threat: give us a free trade deal or we’ll pull out the 1,000 British troops recently deployed in the Polish-Baltic area. Talk like that will backfire.

Leavers should be approaching this gargantuan task with a special humility, because it was they who needlessly inflicted it upon us.

Remainers need to adjust to the new reality too. Many may be hoping that, as the price and consequences of exit become ever clearer through these talks, some among the 52% will gradually switch sides. But remainers should contemplate the less cheery prospect that the most ardent Brexiteers, and especially the anti-EU newspapers, will double down in their loathing of Brussels. When the EU 27 demand, say, serious cash for single market access, the Mail and Sun will dip their pen into an even deeper well of venom.

So remainers will need to handle these next two years carefully, readying themselves for the day when the deal is done, and ensuring they have already placed two key questions in the front of the public mind: is this deal better than the set-up we had on 22 June 2016? And if it isn’t, why are we doing it?

The Tinkerbell theory: I wish politicians would stop blaming their failures on my lack of belief

Who knew Peter Pan would become one of the key political texts of the twenty-first century?

Jonn Elledge in The New Statesman

The moment you doubt whether you can fly,” J M Barrie once wrote, "You cease for ever to be able to do it.” Elsewhere in the same book he was blunter, still: “Whenever a child says, ‘I don’t believe in fairies’, there’s a little fairy somewhere that falls right down dead.”
I would never have expected that Peter Pan would become one of the key political texts of the twenty-first century, if I’m honest. But predictions are not my strongpoint, and over the last few years, what one might term the Tinkerbell Theory of Politics has played an increasingly prominent role in national debate. The doubters’ lack of faith, we are told, is one of the biggest barriers to flight for everything from Jeremy Corbyn’s poll ratings to Brexit. Because we don’t believe, they can’t achieve.

It was in run up to the Scottish referendum that I first spotted Tinkerbell in the wild. Reports suggesting that RBS would consider relocating from Edinburgh, should independence lead to a significant rise in business costs – a statement of the bloody obvious, I’d have thought – were dismissed by then-First Minister Alex Salmond as merely “talking down Scotland”. Over the next few months, the same phrase was deployed by the SNP and its outriders whenever anyone questioned the Yes campaign’s optimistic estimates of future North Sea oil revenues.

The implications of all this were pretty clear: any practical problems apparently arising from independence were mere phantasms. The real threat to Scotland was the erosion of animal spirits caused by the faithlessness of unpatriotic unionists, who’d happily slaughter every fairy in the land before they risked an independent Scotland.

All this seemed pretty obnoxious to me, but at the time of the referendum it also all seemed to be a reassuringly long way away. Little did I realise that Salmond and co were just ahead of their time, because today, Tinkerbell-ism is bloody inescapable.

On Monday, Sir John Major made a wonkish speech laying out his concerns about Brexit. He talked about the threat to the Northern Ireland peace process, the way it would isolate Britain diplomatically, the difficulty of negotiating highly complicated trade deals on the timetable imposed by Article 50. He wanted, he said, to “warn against an over-optimism that – if unachieved – will sow further distrust between politics and the public, at a time when trust needs to be re-built”.

And how did Britain’s foreign secretary respond? “I think it’s very important that as we set out in this journey we are positive about the outcome for the very good reason the outcome will be fantastic for this country,” Boris said, probably imagining himself to be a bit like Cicero.

The problem, in other words, is not the government’s lack of a plan; the problem is its critics’ lack of faith. In a familiar phrase, the Telegraph headlined its report: “Boris Johnson criticises John Major for talking down UK’s post-Brexit prospects”.

The left is no better. In any discussion of the failings of Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party, it won’t be long before someone blames the polls, or the by-election results, on either the lack of support from the parliamentary Labour party, or the hostility of a media that never liked him in the first place. “Of course he’s struggling,” the implication runs. “Your lack of belief is a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Dead fairies, everywhere you turn.

It’s easy to see why the Tinkerbell strategy would be such an attractive line of argument for those who deploy it - one that places responsibility for their own f*ck-ups squarely on their critics, thus rendering them impervious to attack. Corbyn’s failure becomes the fault of the Blairites. A bad Brexit becomes the fault of Remoaners, and not those who were dim enough to believe it would easy to begin with. Best of all, the more right your critics turn out to be, the more you have to blame them for.

But being impervious to criticism is not the same as being right, and to think this strategy is a recipe for good government is to mistake a closed loop of true believers for objective reality. Jeremy Corbyn is unlikely to start winning elections, no matter how hard the faithful believe. However much you talk up Scotland, that oil is still going to run out

And whatever the right-wing press do to convince themselves that Boris Johnson is right, and John Major is wrong, it is unlikely to affect the negotiating position of the 27 other states in the slightest. At the end of the day, our faith matters a lot less than the facts on the ground. There is no such things as fairies.

Lessons from Amma

Shubhankar Dam in The Friday Times

From 1991 to 1996, four residents of 36 Poes Garden, Chennai—J Jayalalithaa, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu and her foster family—amassed a 3,200% increase in wealth. This staggering surge, a rate of superhuman returns, beggars belief. What begot this? Prodigious business acumen? Or a colossal abuse of public office?

In June 1996, one Subramanian Swamy filed a complaint against Jayalalithaa alleging assets in titanic disproportion to her accredited sources of income. Investigations laid bare an incestuous web of businesses and vicariously held properties. The three other residents of Poes Garden, VK Sasikala, J Elavarasi, and VN Sudhakaran, appeared deep in cahoots with the matriarch. In Jan. 1997, they, too, were arraigned alongside the alleged mastermind.

The matter gingerly inched through India’s legal complex, wobbling from one court to another. Calendars turned, as parties wrangled over legal process. Two decades went by.

On February 14, 2017, at last, the final word. The Indian Supreme Court delivered a decisive verdict. What it enounced should put public officials, politicians and corporates, too, on alert.

Presented with fawning tributes on birthdays or other times, politicians holding public offices must turn them down: that is the only legal option now. No longer can they summon the alibi of customary practice-insistent adulation of their devotees-to fatten their bank balances

The conspiracy, the crime, the charge

Jayalalithaa was charged with criminal misconduct under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988: possessing, directly or through a person, while in public office, resources or property disproportionate to one’s known sources of income—something the public servant cannot satisfactorily account for. Her familial acolytes were indicted for criminal conspiracy and abetment.

Persons conspire, the Indian Penal Code, 1860, says, if two or more agree to do an unlawful act or a lawful act by unlawful means. Persons abet an offence, the code adds, if they intentionally aid others in an unlawful act.

The trial court, and later, the high court, distilled the facts, weighed the evidence, and applied the law. The first court convicted; the latter acquitted. Why? They disagreed on all counts: facts, evidence and the law. The Supreme Court stepped in, and broke new ground. Measuring disproportionate assets will never be the same again.

Tamil Nadu CM Jayalalithaa was charged with criminal misconduct under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988: possessing, directly or through a person, while in public office, resources or property disproportionate to one’s known sources of income-something the public servant cannot satisfactorily account for

Accounting for criminal income

Jayalalithaa and her aides asserted large incomes from assorted sources: business, agriculture, loans, interests, gifts, rentals, and sale of party literature. They produced income tax returns as proof. Income tax officials had accepted these documents. So, they sufficed as proof, all four optimistically pleaded. The Supreme Court rubbished this approach. Tax laws are distinct from anti-corruption rules. Income tax officers only assess incomes; they don’t bother with sources, the court insisted.

In Sept 1958, Indian police detained one Piara Singh as he ventured to cross into Pakistan. Searches revealed a sum of Rs65,500 on his person; interrogations revealed a gold-smuggling racket. Officials quickly seized his cash. Of the impounded sum, Rs60,500 was Singh’s income from undisclosed sources, income tax officers assessed. It was liable to tax.

Singh protested. Smuggling was his “business,” he told the Supreme Court. The impounded cash amounted to a “business loss”. It should be tax-exempt. The court agreed. Tax laws are catholic—they apply to all profits and losses, licit and illicit. The sources don’t matter. So, Singh’s business loss was indeed tax-exempt.

Anti-corruption law is different: It obsesses over sources. The 1988 Act says: If charged, a public servant must satisfactorily explain the disproportionate assets through his or her known sources of income, that is, “income received from any lawful source”.

Jayalalithaa had massive incomes but no evidence of their legality—no credible records, witnesses, explanations or inferences. The court affirmed the charge against her. A clean bill of financial health from the tax department, in other words, won’t ease matters in an anti-corruption court. Independent verification is the key.

But that’s not all. The court went further—much further. It proscribed a commonly asserted source of income, and that should alarm politicians in India even more.

Tax laws are catholic-they apply to all profits and losses, licit and illicit. The sources don’t matter. Anti-corruption law is different: It obsesses over sources

New law of public affection

Jayalalithaa’s birthdays were an annual orgy of love and presents. Cash, foreign remittances, jewelry, sarees, and silver items—her democratic devotees inundated her with them, she claimed.

Are such gifts lawful sources of income in an anti-corruption context? No, the court emphatically said. They are “visibly illegal and forbidden by law”. Gifts are bribes by another name. Legalising them would erase the bar on bribes, it reasoned.

Presents to public servants come in many forms. Some are designed to induce or reward abuse of office. Others come with no manifest motive. They are “simply” gifts. But these, too, are unlawful, the court pronounced. Why?

Gifts are “likely to influence [a] public servant to show official favour to [the] person” offering them, if opportunities arise. Opportunities, though, may arise in umpteen, unpredictable ways. Many citizens are likely to have business to transact with, say, a minister (get a policy altered), bureaucrat (get a permit issued) or police officer (get a matter investigated).

Are gifts from all citizens unlawful? Relatives, friends, acquaintances, too? The court didn’t say. But if so, a generous embargo on presents is a revolutionary piece of reasoning.

Presented with fawning tributes on birthdays or other times, politicians holding public offices must turn them down: that is the only legal option now. No longer can they summon the alibi of customary practice—insistent adulation of their devotees—to fatten their bank balances.

The bar applies to all public servants and corporates, not just politicians. Under scrutiny for purportedly spinning a web around public officials to promote business interests, the Essar Group defended its practices in an affidavit to the Supreme Court in Nov. 2015. Small gifts and favors to government servants are “common courtesies”, it claimed. They aren’t improper, much less illegal. They are illegal: The verdict makes it emphatically clear.

Declaring illegality is the easy part; proving criminal collusion is much harder. But corrupt politicians, corporates and their handlers, be warned. A new judicial zeal is doing the rounds. 

Poes Garden: house of crimes

Jayalalithaa invited her friend Sasikala to the residency at Poes Garden in 1987. Together, they ran two business partnerships. Later, Elavarasi and Sudhakaran, Sasikala’s relatives, were inducted into the home in 1991 and 1992, respectively.

The new residents had no business experience or sources of income. Yet, they acquired six companies, and held directorships. (More firms were incorporated later.) Accounts linked to Jayalalithaa and Sasikala funded the acquisitions.

The companies, originally, had nothing of worth: funds, assets, loans or anything else. Not even bank accounts in some cases. But, suddenly, they stirred into brisk action. They surveyed and negotiated deals, bought land, and executed sale deeds. They also operated some 50 bank accounts. Cash promiscuously flowed in and out. No walls separated them. Intriguingly, that is all the companies did: hoard properties and move cash around.

These were shells, not companies. It strained credulity to believe that they transacted ordinary business. The Supreme Court did not believe, either. Business registrations, deals, transfers, appointments, resignations had remarkable synchronies. These weren’t coincidences, the court inferred. The collaborators were part of an elaborate commercial incest. The firms, their holdings, and deals were shams, contrived to lend an ounce of entrepreneurial legitimacy.

Poes Garden was a conspiratorial den, and Jayalalithaa masterminded it, the court found. She funded the partnerships. These, in turn, funded the companies. Those, then, bought properties. The 50 bank accounts were effectively one: Jayalalithaa’s. Guilty, all of them, the court decided.

The verdict will resonate far beyond the immediate facts. It has an air of urgency. There’s a readiness to peel away legal facades, probe nooks and crannies, unite the dots and draw aggressive inferences. Gone are the days when judges willingly suspended disbelief, demanded impossible standards from prosecutors, and granted careless benefit of doubt to the accused.

It augurs well for corruption trials now underway. The decision puts undertrials on notice, and those plotting their next rendezvous with public corruption, too.

Altogether, it feels rosy it shouldn’t. Ominous clouds still lurk on the legal horizon.

This ain’t a happy ending

The verdict, again, betrays the rot at the heart of India’s criminal justice complex. For one, it ground ahead slowly, far too slowly. Two decades to litigate a criminal charge is inordinately long. This point isn’t worth belabouring—it is well known.

But another point is the systemic lack of investigative and prosecutorial independence, and the inability to hold serving public officials, particularly, political offices, to account. Lest we forget, anti-corruption sleuths didn’t pursue Jayalalithaa. A private complainant did: Subramanian Swamy. The director of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption, Chennai, joined in after a court directive. That Jayalalithaa’s political rival in Tamil Nadu, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), held power in the state during the investigations only helped matters along.

A credible investigation against a sitting chief minister in India, even now, is an absurd idea. Investigations are only the beginning. Prosecutions must follow in deserving cases. It followed in this case, and quite well. But only till the DMK was in power. By August 2000, nearly 250 witnesses had been examined; just over 10 remained. The marathon trial was in its last mile.

Suddenly, it fumbled

In May 2001, Jayalalithaa and her party returned to power. Witnesses turned hostile. Prosecutors lost their zeal. The trial went awry. In Nov. 2003, the Supreme Court, in response to a petition by a DMK leader, K. Anbazhagan, transferred the trial to Bangalore. A fair trial against a sitting chief minister was impossible within the state, the court implied. Such is the rancid reality of prosecutorial affairs in India.

The trail began anew. Even there in Bangalore, prosecutors struggled. Interference lurked at every turn. The Supreme Court routinely intervened to keep matters on track—often at the dogged insistence of Swamy and Anbazhagan. Only they seemed keen to try Jayalalithaa, not the state.

Successful anti-corruption drives marry tough rules, investigative and prosecutorial independence with judicial reasonableness. India has two of these—or at least a semblance of them. The middle one is missing; it has always been so.

Without it, the Jayalalithaa-Sasikala matter will remain a celebrated exception. Without it, prosecuting high corruption in India will remain a private pastime, always directed at opposition politicians against an obstinate state apparatus, and overly reliant on courts. Without it, only lesser mortals will endure the fury of anti-corruption rules: Those more equal than others will forever remain immune.

Muslims Want Tarek Fatah Dead

Has Big Data already captured the world?

George Monbiot in The Guardian


Has a digital coup begun? Is big data being used, in the US and the UK, to create personalised political advertising, to bypass our rational minds and alter the way we vote? The short answer is probably not. Or not yet.

A series of terrifying articles suggests that a company called Cambridge Analytica helped to swing both the US election and the EU referendum by mining data from Facebook and using it to predict people’s personalities, then tailoring advertising to their psychological profiles. These reports, originating with the Swiss publication Das Magazin (published in translation by Vice), were clearly written in good faith, but apparently with insufficient diligence. They relied heavily on claims made by Cambridge Analytica that now appear to have been exaggerated. I found the story convincing, until I read the deconstructions by Martin Robbins on Little Atoms, Kendall Taggart on Buzzfeed and Leonid Bershidsky on Bloomberg.

None of this is to suggest we should not be vigilant. The Cambridge Analytica story gives us a glimpse of a possible dystopian future, especially in the US, where data protection is weak. Online information already lends itself to manipulation and political abuse, and the age of big data has scarcely begun. In combination with advances in cognitive linguistics and neuroscience, this data could become a powerful tool for changing the electoral decisions we make.

Our capacity to resist manipulation is limited. Even the crudest forms of subliminal advertising swerve past our capacity for reason and make critical thinking impossible. The simplest language shifts can trip us up. For example, when Americans were asked whether the federal government was spending too little on “assistance to the poor”, 65% agreed. When they were asked whether it was spending too little on “welfare”, 25% agreed. What hope do we have of resisting carefully targeted digital messaging that uses trigger words to influence our judgment? Those who are charged with protecting the integrity of elections should be urgently developing a new generation of safeguards.

Already big money exercises illegitimate power over political systems, making a mockery of democracy: the battering ram of campaign finance, which gives billionaires and corporations a huge political advantage over ordinary citizens; the dark money network (a web of lobby groups, funded by billionaires, that disguise themselves as thinktanks); astroturf campaigning (employing people to masquerade as grassroots movements); and botswarming (creating fake online accounts to give the impression that large numbers of people support a political position). All these are current threats to political freedom. Election authorities such as the Electoral Commission in the UK have signally failed to control these abuses, or even, in most cases, to acknowledge them.

China shows how much worse this could become. There, according to a recent article in Scientific American, deep-learning algorithms enable the state to develop its “citizen score”. This uses people’s online activities to determine how loyal and compliant they are, and whether they should qualify for jobs, loans or entitlement to travel to other countries. Combine this level of monitoring with nudging technologies – tools designed subtly to change people’s opinions and responses – and you develop a system that tends towards complete control.


Already big money exercises illegitimate power over political systems, making a mockery of democracy

That’s the bad news. But digital technologies could also be a powerful force for positive change. Political systems, particularly in the Anglophone nations, have scarcely changed since the fastest means of delivering information was the horse. They remain remote, centralised and paternalist. The great potential for participation and deeper democratic engagement is almost untapped. Because the rest of us have not been invited to occupy them, it is easy for billionaires to seize and enclose the political cyber-commons.

A recent report by the innovation foundation Nesta argues that there are no quick or cheap digital fixes. But, when they receive sufficient support from governments or political parties, new technologies can improve the quality of democratic decisions. They can use the wisdom of crowds to make politics more transparent, to propose ideas that don’t occur to professional politicians, and to spot flaws and loopholes in government bills.

Among the best uses of online technologies it documents are the LabHacker and eDemocracia programmes in Brazil, which allow people to make proposals to their representatives and work with them to improve bills and policies; Parlement et Citoyens in France, which plays a similar role; vTaiwan, which crowdsources new parliamentary bills; the Better Reykjavík programme, which allows people to suggest and rank ideas for improving the city, and has now been used by more than half the population; and the Pirate party, also in Iceland, whose policies are chosen by its members, in both digital and offline forums. In all these cases, digital technologies are used to improve representative democracy rather than to replace it.  

Participation tends to be deep but narrow. Tech-savvy young men are often over-represented, while most of those who are alienated by offline politics remain, so far, alienated by online politics. But these results could be greatly improved, especially by using blockchain technology (a method of recording data), text-mining with the help of natural language processing (that enables very large numbers of comments and ideas to be synthesised and analysed), and other innovations that could make electronic democracy more meaningful, more feasible and more secure.

Of course, there are hazards here. No political system, offline or online, is immune to hacking; all systems require safeguards that evolve to protect them from being captured by money and undemocratic power. The regulation of politics lags decades behind the tricks, scams and new technologies deployed by people seeking illegitimate power. This is part of the reason for the mass disillusionment with politics: the belief that outcomes are rigged, and the emergence of a virulent anti-politics that finds expression in extremism and demagoguery.

Either we own political technologies, or they will own us. The great potential of big data, big analysis and online forums will be used by us or against us. We must move fast to beat the billionaires.

Trump is right on Russia

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn


IT is a strange anomaly. Whenever India or Pakistan, or both, go into the cobra pose, hissing invectives and threatening to decimate each other, including with nuclear weapons, the world cries foul.

When Nawaz Sharif visits Delhi or when Narendra Modi drops in uninvited at a Lahore wedding, Indian and Pakistani peaceniks applaud together with the worried world. Yet, when Donald Trump wants to improve his country’s troubled relations with Vladimir Putin he is pilloried for even making the suggestion.

Granted he is not gender sensitive, that he has wronged and abused women and his mindset is possibly racist, driven by acute Islamophobia. I would liken Russia in this equation to the baby in Trump’s dirty bathtub. The deep state that contrived lies to invade Iraq or exulted in the wrecking of Libya, in cahoots with the media, seems to be facing an existential crisis with Trump’s presidency over his plans to touch base with Putin.

One day Trump excelled himself in his collaring of the deep state, which includes all major parties and the media. He said something to the effect that his country’s image was not exactly squeaky clean when it came to shedding blood around the world. That was his response to a Fox TV question about Putin’s alleged bloodlust as seen in the military operations in Aleppo.

Is the current American president really worse than the marauders of Iraq and Libya?


Trump’s blunt criticism of his country’s savage moments has been at par with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the priest who baptised Barack Obama’s children. When in a fit of rage over an Israeli assault on Palestinian camps he yelled ‘goddamn America’ Obama cut off ties with the African American priest.

Then suddenly it began to rain scams on Trump. So and so met the Russian ambassador. So and so made eye contact with him. Trump’s attorney general is said to have a racist background. That was forgiven or grudgingly gulped down. Instead his alleged dalliances with Russian diplomats and/or businessmen were picked up for censure.

A wider conspiracy was unleashed to torpedo the new president’s still unwavering plans to improve relations with Putin. BBC dug out dirt on the Russians, which they are good at. Russia was a British quarry, which became America’s bête noire.

Cut to the day when Prime Minister Theresa May sauntered into Washington and Ankara recently and the media said she was fixing business deals. They omitted the fact that both her destinations involved allies who seemed to have lost interest in the old British fear-mongering called Russophobia. Trump’s fascination with Putin was by now legendary and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan too had shown signs of becoming disenchanted with the British-assigned role of playing an anti-Moscow Sancho Panza.

If we think freely and without the Cold War blinkers, May couldn’t have signed a groundbreaking deal with anybody bilaterally until the fate of Brexit was decided, which could be some years away. Trump looks destined not to last that long.

For Erdogan to become a member of the Russian-Iranian backed peace talks on Syria was a huge somersault by a country that was regarded as a lynchpin to Nato’s Middle East policy. Turkey is no longer insisting on the Syrian president’s head as condition to discuss a future setup in Damascus. Erdogan’s unease with the Americans became more pronounced with the botched coup attempt, which he blamed on Turkish dissidents seated in the US.

It is nearly impossible to believe that May did not discuss her worry about Russia and Putin with Trump and Erdogan. Russia has been a British bugbear for centuries even if Napoleon preceded it and other Europeans in turning an obsession with Russia into an exhausting and costly military expedition.

Russophobia as we know it is a British innovation. It was left to Winston Churchill to give the Cold War a newer variant of an old pursuit. The new seeds were planted in Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech. Then James Bond took over while Alfred Hitchcock also embraced the diabolical imagery of the Russians. Until then, Hollywood had been in hot pursuit of Germans as America’s horns and canines ogres.

Much earlier, before Western democracies were swamped with the Churchillian exhortations against Russia, British governors general and viceroys in India took it upon themselves to deepen and sustain the fear mongering. Delhi’s imposing colonial monument — India Gate — is a testimony to this perpetually induced fear with the rulers of Moscow. All sides of the landmark sandstone monument are lined with thousands of names of Sikh and Muslim soldiers who were sacrificed in the suicidal Afghan wars. May must have seen how Britain’s self-defeating obsession with Russia had dissipated into the brick-batting in Washington D.C. between the Democrats and the Republicans.

Going by usually trustworthy accounts Donald Trump is an unpredictable person, which makes him a dangerous leader of an already error-prone military power. Nevertheless, Noam Chomsky must have shocked the Democrats by suggesting that in his view John Kennedy was the most dangerous of presidents. Trump is lampooned daily, which is as it should be, as an unqualified gatecrasher in the White House. The suggestion, however, implies that the world was somehow better off under George W. Bush and, more worryingly, under his Dr Strangelove-like colleagues — Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Is Trump really worse than the marauders of Iraq and Libya?

Shorn of any media support in the heart of the land of free speech, Vladimir Putin wrote a piece for the American audiences in The New York Times of Sept 11 2013.

“Relations between us have passed through different stages. We stood against each other during the Cold War. But we were also allies once, and defeated the Nazis together.” Trump believes the two countries should jointly fight a new menace, the militant Islamic State group. His detractors within the deep state somehow seem not to like the idea.

Utopian thinking: the easy way to eradicate poverty

Rutger Bregman in The Guardian

Why do poor people make so many bad decisions? It’s a harsh question, but look at the data: poor people borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more and eat less healthily. Why?

Margaret Thatcher once called poverty a “personality defect”. Though not many would go quite so far, the view that there’s something wrong with poor people is not exceptional. To be honest, it was how I thought for a long time. It was only a few years ago that I discovered that everything I thought I knew about poverty was wrong.

It all started when I accidently stumbled on a paper by a few American psychologists. They had travelled 8,000 miles, to India, to carry out an experiment with sugar cane farmers. These farmers collect about 60% of their annual income all at once, right after the harvest. This means they are relatively poor one part of the year and rich the other. The researchers asked the farmers to do an IQ test before and after the harvest. What they discovered blew my mind. The farmers scored much worse on the tests before the harvest. The effects of living in poverty, it turns out, correspond to losing 14 points of IQ. That’s comparable to losing a night’s sleep, or the effects of alcoholism.

A few months later I discussed the theory with Eldar Shafir, a professor of behavioural science and public policy at Princeton University and one of the authors of this study. The reason, put simply: it’s the context, stupid. People behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce. What that thing is doesn’t much matter; whether it’s time, money or food, it all contributes to a “scarcity mentality”. This narrows your focus to your immediate deficiency. The long-term perspective goes out of the window. Poor people aren’t making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they’re living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions.

 ‘Indian sugar cane farmers scored much worse on IQ tests before the harvest than after.’ Photograph: Ajay Verma/REUTERS

Suddenly the reason so many of our anti-poverty programmes don’t work becomes clear. Investments in education, for example, are often completely useless. A recent analysis of 201 studies on the effectiveness of money management training came to the conclusion that it makes almost no difference at all. Poor people might come out wiser, but it’s not enough. As Shafir said: “It’s like teaching someone to swim and then throwing them in a stormy sea.”

So what can be done? Modern economists have a few solutions. We could make the paperwork easier, or send people a text message to remind them of their bills. These “nudges” are hugely popular with modern politicians, because they cost next to nothing. They are a symbol of this era, in which we so often treat the symptoms but ignore the causes.

I asked Shafir: “Why keep tinkering around the edges rather than just handing out more resources?” “You mean just hand out more money? Sure, that would be great,” he said. “But given the evident limitations … the brand of leftwing politics you have in Amsterdam doesn’t even exist in the States.”

But is this really an old-fashioned, leftist idea? I remembered reading about an old plan, something that has been proposed by some of history’s leading thinkers. Thomas More hinted at it in Utopia, more than 500 years ago. And its proponents have spanned the spectrum from the left to the right, from the civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King to the economist Milton Friedman.
It’s an incredibly simple idea: universal basic income – a monthly allowance of enough to pay for your basic needs: food, shelter, education. And it’s completely unconditional: not a favour, but a right.

But could it really be that simple? In the three years that followed, I read all I could find about basic income. I researched dozens of experiments that have been conducted across the globe. And it didn’t take long before I stumbled upon the story of a town that had done it, had eradicated poverty – after which nearly everyone forgot about it.

‘Everybody in Dauphin was guaranteed a basic income ensuring that no one fell below the poverty line.’ Photograph: Barrett & MacKay/Getty Images/All Canada Photos

This story starts in Winnipeg, Canada. Imagine a warehouse attic where nearly 2,000 boxes lie gathering dust. They are filled with data – graphs, tables, interviews – about one of the most fascinating social experiments ever conducted. Evelyn Forget, an economics professor at the University of Manitoba, first heard about the records in 2009. Stepping into the attic, she could hardly believe her eyes. It was a treasure trove of information on basic income.

The experiment had started in Dauphin, a town north-west of Winnipeg, in 1974. Everybody was guaranteed a basic income ensuring that no one fell below the poverty line. And for four years, all went well. But then a conservative government was voted into power. The new Canadian cabinet saw little point in the expensive experiment. So when it became clear there was no money left for an analysis of the results, the researchers decided to pack their files away. In 2,000 boxes.

When Forget found them, 30 years later, no one knew what, if anything, the experiment had demonstrated. For three years she subjected the data to all manner of statistical analysis. And no matter what she tried, the results were the same every time. The experiment – the longest and best of its kind – had been a resounding success.

Forget discovered that the people in Dauphin had not only become richer, but also smarter and healthier. The school performance of children improved substantially. The hospitalisation rate decreased by as much as 8.5%. Domestic violence was also down, as were mental health complaints. And people didn’t quit their jobs – the only ones who worked a little less were new mothers and students, who stayed in school longer.


The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need, instead of things experts think they need

So here’s what I’ve learned. When it comes to poverty, we should stop pretending to know better than poor people. The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need instead of things self-appointed experts think they need. Imagine how many brilliant would-be entrepreneurs, scientists and writers are now withering away in scarcity. Imagine how much energy and talent we would unleash if we got rid of poverty once and for all.
While it won’t solve all the world’s ills – and ideas such as a rent cap and more social housing are necessary in places where housing is scarce – a basic income would work like venture capital for the people. We can’t afford not to do it – poverty is hugely expensive. The costs of child poverty in the US are estimated at $500bn (£410bn) each year, in terms of higher healthcare spending, less education and more crime. It’s an incredible waste of potential. It would cost just $175bn, a quarter of the country’s current military budget, to do what Dauphin did long ago: eradicate poverty.

That should be our goal. The time for small thoughts and little nudges is past. The time has come for new, radical ideas. If this sounds utopian to you, then remember that every milestone of civilisation – the end of slavery, democracy, equal rights for men and women – was once a utopian fantasy too.

We’ve got the research, we’ve got the evidence, and we’ve got the means. Now, 500 years after Thomas More first wrote about basic income, we need to update our worldview. Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.