Politicians use their faith to defend misogynist, homophobic views. Co-religionists shouldn’t let them get away with it
Zoe Williams in The Guardian
The problem with people who bring religion to their politics is that they’re obsessed with sex. It’s never “I’m a devout Anglican, therefore I couldn’t possibly vote for a cap on social security payments (Acts 4:34).” When a politician’s potted history starts “a committed Christian”, you can bet this isn’t a prelude to a CV full of redistributive tax policies. It’s all sodomy and foetuses, Tim Farron on a brightly lit TV sofa explaining why the adamantine but immeasurable quality of his “conscience” prevents him from according some people’s sexuality the same dignity as other people’s, or Jacob Rees-Mogg informing the pregnant victims of rape or incest that abortion is not an option, for, unlikely as it seems, this is what his Lord had in mind.
Then everyone disappears down the rabbit hole of church versus state, and what accommodations a reasonable political system can make to an immovable set of beliefs that are part of our cultural history and must not be erased. It’s a basic category error: the principle is not that religion has no place in politics; it’s that sex has no place in politics. If this assertion means we also have to stop going into a moral panic every time a minister has an affair, I’m OK with that.
The irreligious conservative bystander tends to respond with a shrug and wonder what the fuss is all about. Gay rights are well enough established that, even had the Liberal Democrats not been a spent electoral force, Farron’s reservations were unlikely to result in any concrete change. If Rees-Mogg were to become prime minister tomorrow, the unwanted pregnancies of rape victims would be the least of our problems. This is chalked up to the relatively new concept of “liberal intolerance”; we liberals have had our own way for so long that we no longer allow our opponents even to think a thing we disapprove of.
The hitch in that insouciance is that, when your sexuality is deplored by your political system, you are brutalised by the institutions that surround it. You effectively operate outside the protection of the law. We know this from the way gay-bashing was investigated by police in the 50s and 60s (short version; it wasn’t), we know this from the deaths of gay rights activists from Bangladesh to Jamaica to Cameroon. Homophobia has a curious, expansionist tendency: it is never enough to simply think less of a person for their sexual preferences. There is always an undercurrent of wanting to prove that disapproval with violence, or the turning-a-blind-eye thereto.
Anti-abortion rhetoric has a similar creeping quality, never confining itself to the rights of the unborn, always veering into women’s lives generally, how healthy they should stay, how much they should be paid, what their status should be on an operating table, or in a court of law. The sharp edge of the social violence is that when women don’t have access to legal abortion they die. So that’s why, when sex enters politics, we all make such a fuss. It may all be a lovable pose from the person with the conscience, but to those against whom their consciences recoil, it is a matter of life and death. Plus, there’s a simple hygiene issue: no consensual sex act is anybody else’s business. Nobody wants Rees-Mogg in their bedroom, even if only in his imagination.
It is in the interests of the homophobic and the misogynistic to cleave to the idea that this is a matter of religion, since it dignifies what would otherwise be a seedy and base diversion from the proper business of politics.
Less straightforward is why the others of their faith do so little to critique them. It is striking that actual religious figures in public life – rather than public figures who declaim their religion but hold it distinct from their office – tend to be much more interested in the pro-social aspects of their faith. The archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, last week put forward a radical plan for economic equality, not radical enough for my tastes, but situating him plainly in the territory of social justice.
Pope Francis is an ardent environmentalist and seeker after peace, positions that – at least in the first instance – would be anachronistic to find Biblical grounds for, but I think we can easily enough imagine having God’s approval. History has no shortage of religious movements for peace, equality and universal rights, and arguably, it is within church structures that warriors for social justice – the Oscar Romeros, the Desmond Tutus – are likely to be found, while hard-right authoritarians, the Mike Pences, exist outside it, enabling them to appropriate the energy and respectability of their faith without having to go back and check that closing down Planned Parenthood is the stated priority of the synod.
The mistake – also made with Islam – is to present all this on a sliding scale: Welby, with his bleeding-heart liberalism is a “moderate”, while Farron, unable to embrace sexual diversity even when his career depended on it, is “committed”. A Muslim whose religion spurred her to work for peace in the Middle East would be a “moderate”, while a Muslim who sought the immediate instatement of sharia law would be “extreme”.
Yet these positions are not gradations on the same scale: they are completely different world views, as different as pluralism and absolutism, as different as tolerance and authoritarianism, hanging on the same godhead not by ideological commonality but by historical coincidence. The pope, were he aware of him, would be compelled by this debate’s frame to defend Rees-Mogg, on the grounds that to do otherwise would be to allow religious conviction to be erased from the public sphere. What the pope ought to be able to do instead is to say: “Your conception of our religion, as a means of denigration and control, is not one I share or recognise.” Or, more succinctly: “You ain’t no Catholic, bruv.”
Monday, 11 September 2017
Sunday, 10 September 2017
After Irma, let those who use our tax havens contribute to the repairs
The Caribbean poor might have been devastated by disaster, but their islands also host huge global wealth
Mariana Mazzucato in The Guardian
Did you see the image of Richard Branson, hiding with his friends and family in his expensive wine cellar on his private Caribbean island, tweeting that it felt like a fun slumber party from his youth? This while Hurricane Irma tore through the houses and lives of others in the region, offering a stark illustration of the way so-called natural events affect people of different socioeconomic classes in radically different ways.
Architects and urban planners call this “spatial inequality”. People living close to each other, whether in New York, London or on a Caribbean island, will experience life completely differently depending on the resources and opportunities they have available to them, determined principally by their economic and class background.
Mariana Mazzucato in The Guardian
Did you see the image of Richard Branson, hiding with his friends and family in his expensive wine cellar on his private Caribbean island, tweeting that it felt like a fun slumber party from his youth? This while Hurricane Irma tore through the houses and lives of others in the region, offering a stark illustration of the way so-called natural events affect people of different socioeconomic classes in radically different ways.
Architects and urban planners call this “spatial inequality”. People living close to each other, whether in New York, London or on a Caribbean island, will experience life completely differently depending on the resources and opportunities they have available to them, determined principally by their economic and class background.
Indeed, modern inequality increasingly reveals itself through the divergence of income and opportunities at a local level: the inequality between people living across London postcodes can be almost as large as those between average incomes in developed and developing countries. So a “natural” disaster (worsened by climate change factors) becomes a socioeconomic one, in the same way that the banking crisis, a manmade disaster, affected people differently.
Last week, after Hurricane Irma stormed the Caribbean, Gaston Browne, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, appealed to the world, saying that 90% of buildings had been destroyed and 50% of the population was homeless. He criticised those “irresponsible leaders” denying climate change, when it was obvious to him that it was a key factor in the severity of the recent hurricanes. Now a second hurricane, Jose, is coming his way and he is trying to force residents of Barbuda to evacuate. Similarly, the French part of Saint Martin has been virtually destroyed, while two-thirds of the population of Puerto Rico is without power and 17% without water. Although it was slow to respond, the UK government has contributed £12m to the relief effort in the Caribbean, including a naval ship.
Browne called me in 2016 because he had read my book, The Entrepreneurial State, and wanted to know more about the various instruments that might be used to get back some value from investments that the Antigua and Barbuda government had made in the tourism industry. And would it be possible, he asked, for such future public investments to be conditional on the tourism industry ploughing back profits into public funds used for development? In this way, the taxpayers who propped up tourism could also benefit from reinvestments into areas such as health, education and transport for all.
While some may cynically dismiss this question, raising concerns about corruption of public finances in poor countries, the question Browne asked, even before the hurricane hit, was a good one: how should those extracting value from a place contribute to it?
But the questions are complicated and perhaps even uncomfortable for those asking them. The relief efforts needed are larger than they should be due to how these countries have been starved of tax revenue precisely because they have chosen to be tax havens.
The simpler question is to ask those “elites” who save billions by using tax shelters in the Caribbean, and the Big 4 accounting firms that enable their transactions, to contribute to the relief funds. The more difficult question is how to change the status quo and make sure that these companies actually contribute to the resources they take advantage of, both at home and abroad.
It’s more difficult because it requires admitting that the governments offering tax shelters, which today might be appealing for relief, are also extracting value from the governments of the foreign companies they host. So, for example, the UK taxpayers pay for infrastructure and education in the UK. British-based companies benefit from that. If they then benefit from havens to avoid paying tax to the UK, the tax shelters are, of course, a key part of the problem.
Clearly, a priority should be for companies, operating in countries offering tax havens in British Overseas Territories and the Commonwealth (or, indeed, elsewhere, such as Switzerland or Monte Carlo), to be more transparent. As argued by the Tax Justice Network, this would mean that countries in the Overseas Territories should “provide free, online and publicly accessible registers of all companies and trusts” located there.
In particular, it argues that this information should include which individuals own more than 10% of the shares in each company registered in the location; the names of the directors and the various locations where the companies have offices. The Network also argues that the cost of UK aid should be matched by revenue from the companies benefiting from the tax shelters and that full annual accounts should be prepared in accordance with a recognisable set of accounting standards. A modest proposal would be for the countries to raise money from the companies by increasing, for example, the charges they make for offshore services, or by charging tax on the companies based in these places.
But if the whole point was to avoid tax, would this cause the companies to leave? This gets us to the core of the problem. It is impossible to have real growth, and a reduction in inequality, through policies that are in the end just part of what we might call the “global value extraction business”. The real questions are exactly those that Browne asked me.
Governments need to make critical investments that transform their societies in ways that create capacity, knowledge and long-run growth. This will be expensive, but possible, if arrangements are put in place so that those benefiting from the common resources also plough their profits back into those very resources. This, however, requires moving away from the “us v them” mentality and recognising that the problem rests just as much on the forces causing inequality at home as on the tensions between the rich and poor countries. It’s more than just an argument about who has to pick up the bill for the mess, disaster after disaster.
Last week, after Hurricane Irma stormed the Caribbean, Gaston Browne, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, appealed to the world, saying that 90% of buildings had been destroyed and 50% of the population was homeless. He criticised those “irresponsible leaders” denying climate change, when it was obvious to him that it was a key factor in the severity of the recent hurricanes. Now a second hurricane, Jose, is coming his way and he is trying to force residents of Barbuda to evacuate. Similarly, the French part of Saint Martin has been virtually destroyed, while two-thirds of the population of Puerto Rico is without power and 17% without water. Although it was slow to respond, the UK government has contributed £12m to the relief effort in the Caribbean, including a naval ship.
Browne called me in 2016 because he had read my book, The Entrepreneurial State, and wanted to know more about the various instruments that might be used to get back some value from investments that the Antigua and Barbuda government had made in the tourism industry. And would it be possible, he asked, for such future public investments to be conditional on the tourism industry ploughing back profits into public funds used for development? In this way, the taxpayers who propped up tourism could also benefit from reinvestments into areas such as health, education and transport for all.
While some may cynically dismiss this question, raising concerns about corruption of public finances in poor countries, the question Browne asked, even before the hurricane hit, was a good one: how should those extracting value from a place contribute to it?
But the questions are complicated and perhaps even uncomfortable for those asking them. The relief efforts needed are larger than they should be due to how these countries have been starved of tax revenue precisely because they have chosen to be tax havens.
The simpler question is to ask those “elites” who save billions by using tax shelters in the Caribbean, and the Big 4 accounting firms that enable their transactions, to contribute to the relief funds. The more difficult question is how to change the status quo and make sure that these companies actually contribute to the resources they take advantage of, both at home and abroad.
It’s more difficult because it requires admitting that the governments offering tax shelters, which today might be appealing for relief, are also extracting value from the governments of the foreign companies they host. So, for example, the UK taxpayers pay for infrastructure and education in the UK. British-based companies benefit from that. If they then benefit from havens to avoid paying tax to the UK, the tax shelters are, of course, a key part of the problem.
Clearly, a priority should be for companies, operating in countries offering tax havens in British Overseas Territories and the Commonwealth (or, indeed, elsewhere, such as Switzerland or Monte Carlo), to be more transparent. As argued by the Tax Justice Network, this would mean that countries in the Overseas Territories should “provide free, online and publicly accessible registers of all companies and trusts” located there.
In particular, it argues that this information should include which individuals own more than 10% of the shares in each company registered in the location; the names of the directors and the various locations where the companies have offices. The Network also argues that the cost of UK aid should be matched by revenue from the companies benefiting from the tax shelters and that full annual accounts should be prepared in accordance with a recognisable set of accounting standards. A modest proposal would be for the countries to raise money from the companies by increasing, for example, the charges they make for offshore services, or by charging tax on the companies based in these places.
But if the whole point was to avoid tax, would this cause the companies to leave? This gets us to the core of the problem. It is impossible to have real growth, and a reduction in inequality, through policies that are in the end just part of what we might call the “global value extraction business”. The real questions are exactly those that Browne asked me.
Governments need to make critical investments that transform their societies in ways that create capacity, knowledge and long-run growth. This will be expensive, but possible, if arrangements are put in place so that those benefiting from the common resources also plough their profits back into those very resources. This, however, requires moving away from the “us v them” mentality and recognising that the problem rests just as much on the forces causing inequality at home as on the tensions between the rich and poor countries. It’s more than just an argument about who has to pick up the bill for the mess, disaster after disaster.
Friday, 8 September 2017
Muslim 'solidarity'
Aasim Sajjad Akhtar in The Dawn
THE Rohingyas of Myanmar are back on the front pages, their desperate plight confirming that the ‘civilised’ world of the 21st century is still a living hell for what the legendary anti-imperialist Frantz Fanon’s called “the wretched of the earth”. The spectre of hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas fleeing Myanmar into neighbouring Bangladesh is history repeating itself for the umpteenth time — evicted from their homes time and again, these permanent refugees have no place in a global order centred around exclusionary nation-states.
We Pakistanis have been bred on the notion that Muslims constitute an extra-territorial community of sorts; hence our solidarity with the Rohingyas and lament of their neglect by the rest of the (infidel) world. Our sentiments vis-à-vis other disenfranchised ‘Muslim’ communities are similar — Kashmiris top the list, but Bosnians, Palestinians and Chechens are also beneficiaries of our ‘Muslim’ solidarity. Standing with the oppressed is an entirely laudable endeavour. But in picking some instances of suffering and remaining shamefully silent on others, we demonstrate only how much hypocrisy supposedly civilised ‘nations’ are capable of.
The Kurds have been on the receiving end of Turkish and Iraqi state violence, but I can’t think of many Pakistanis whose hearts cry out for them (let alone state functionaries issuing press statements and civil society activists organising protests). West African communities like the Yoruba and Igbo too have been victims of state-sponsored pogroms across the territorial boundaries of Nigeria, Togo and Benin. Most Pakistanis have probably never even heard these names.
Closer to home, the (predominantly Hindu) Tamils of Sri Lanka are amongst the most oppressed minority communities in the world. But Pakistani officialdom’s close ties to the Sri Lankan state means there has always been silence when the latter has undertaken pogroms against Tamil populations. In 2008-9, a series of military operations in the north of Sri Lanka undertaken in the name of crushing the Tamil separatist movement — during which many humanitarian experts alleged war crimes took place — was actively supported by the Pakistani establishment and met with no ‘resistance’ from our ‘civil society’. Bred on standard Pakistani nationalist narratives, we justify silence over all these examples of state terror by serving up the religion card: they aren’t Muslims, so why should we care?
Cue more damning examples. Our ‘higher than the Himalayas, deeper than the deepest ocean’ friendship with China has mandated that we remain completely silent on the treatment of the Uighur ethnic minority that occupies the vast Xinjiang region bordering Pakistan to the north — and, which, even more significantly, China seeks to transform by building CPEC. The Uighur are Muslim, but there isn’t a hue and cry at the manner in which the Chinese state has suppressed their basic freedoms, and is now steadily facilitating the influx of ethnic Han Chinese into Xinjiang to fundamentally transform the region’s social mores.
In theory, a primary reason for Pakistan’s silence vis-à-vis the Uighurs is that there is a right-wing separatist movement raging in Xinjiang, and all ‘civilised’ states in today’s world ostensibly share the same position with regards to ‘terrorism’. But a separatist movement with deep historical roots within the Rohingya people is also active in the Rakhine state of Myanmar, and it is under the guise of defanging the ‘terrorists’ that the state has initiated its latest military incursion. The question, as ever, is why some forms of (armed) resistance to state persecution are considered ‘terrorism’ and others are not? As the example of the Uighur confirms, a certain community’s ‘Muslim’ credentials are not always enough for us to stand up for them.
Which brings me to the final — and most damning — point: what of state persecution within Pakistan? No one can deny the manner in which the state has usurped the freedoms of ethnic communities who have asserted their identity, claimed resources, and demanded a democratic power-sharing arrangement. Even today military ‘solutions’ are employed liberally within Pakistan to address what are clearly long-standing political conflicts. And the truth is that most of the Baloch, Sindhi, Pakhtun and other ethnic communities that demand their rights and are criminalised in exchange are very much Muslim.
So are the Afghans and at least 200 million of the Indians with whom we cultivate perennial enmity. So let us be clear that, rhetoric aside, we do not stand with Muslims everywhere — our expressions of solidarity are opportunistic and contradictory. It would be much better to stand with the ‘wretched of the earth’ everywhere, and stop victimising the most vulnerable ourselves — look no further than the way we treat Christians, Hindus and other ‘non-Muslims’.
Malala Yousafzai went on record to question why Aung San Suu Kyi was silent over the treatment of the Rohingyas. I say people in glass houses should not throw stones.
THE Rohingyas of Myanmar are back on the front pages, their desperate plight confirming that the ‘civilised’ world of the 21st century is still a living hell for what the legendary anti-imperialist Frantz Fanon’s called “the wretched of the earth”. The spectre of hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas fleeing Myanmar into neighbouring Bangladesh is history repeating itself for the umpteenth time — evicted from their homes time and again, these permanent refugees have no place in a global order centred around exclusionary nation-states.
We Pakistanis have been bred on the notion that Muslims constitute an extra-territorial community of sorts; hence our solidarity with the Rohingyas and lament of their neglect by the rest of the (infidel) world. Our sentiments vis-à-vis other disenfranchised ‘Muslim’ communities are similar — Kashmiris top the list, but Bosnians, Palestinians and Chechens are also beneficiaries of our ‘Muslim’ solidarity. Standing with the oppressed is an entirely laudable endeavour. But in picking some instances of suffering and remaining shamefully silent on others, we demonstrate only how much hypocrisy supposedly civilised ‘nations’ are capable of.
The Kurds have been on the receiving end of Turkish and Iraqi state violence, but I can’t think of many Pakistanis whose hearts cry out for them (let alone state functionaries issuing press statements and civil society activists organising protests). West African communities like the Yoruba and Igbo too have been victims of state-sponsored pogroms across the territorial boundaries of Nigeria, Togo and Benin. Most Pakistanis have probably never even heard these names.
Closer to home, the (predominantly Hindu) Tamils of Sri Lanka are amongst the most oppressed minority communities in the world. But Pakistani officialdom’s close ties to the Sri Lankan state means there has always been silence when the latter has undertaken pogroms against Tamil populations. In 2008-9, a series of military operations in the north of Sri Lanka undertaken in the name of crushing the Tamil separatist movement — during which many humanitarian experts alleged war crimes took place — was actively supported by the Pakistani establishment and met with no ‘resistance’ from our ‘civil society’. Bred on standard Pakistani nationalist narratives, we justify silence over all these examples of state terror by serving up the religion card: they aren’t Muslims, so why should we care?
It’s better to support the ‘wretched of the earth’.
Cue more damning examples. Our ‘higher than the Himalayas, deeper than the deepest ocean’ friendship with China has mandated that we remain completely silent on the treatment of the Uighur ethnic minority that occupies the vast Xinjiang region bordering Pakistan to the north — and, which, even more significantly, China seeks to transform by building CPEC. The Uighur are Muslim, but there isn’t a hue and cry at the manner in which the Chinese state has suppressed their basic freedoms, and is now steadily facilitating the influx of ethnic Han Chinese into Xinjiang to fundamentally transform the region’s social mores.
In theory, a primary reason for Pakistan’s silence vis-à-vis the Uighurs is that there is a right-wing separatist movement raging in Xinjiang, and all ‘civilised’ states in today’s world ostensibly share the same position with regards to ‘terrorism’. But a separatist movement with deep historical roots within the Rohingya people is also active in the Rakhine state of Myanmar, and it is under the guise of defanging the ‘terrorists’ that the state has initiated its latest military incursion. The question, as ever, is why some forms of (armed) resistance to state persecution are considered ‘terrorism’ and others are not? As the example of the Uighur confirms, a certain community’s ‘Muslim’ credentials are not always enough for us to stand up for them.
Which brings me to the final — and most damning — point: what of state persecution within Pakistan? No one can deny the manner in which the state has usurped the freedoms of ethnic communities who have asserted their identity, claimed resources, and demanded a democratic power-sharing arrangement. Even today military ‘solutions’ are employed liberally within Pakistan to address what are clearly long-standing political conflicts. And the truth is that most of the Baloch, Sindhi, Pakhtun and other ethnic communities that demand their rights and are criminalised in exchange are very much Muslim.
So are the Afghans and at least 200 million of the Indians with whom we cultivate perennial enmity. So let us be clear that, rhetoric aside, we do not stand with Muslims everywhere — our expressions of solidarity are opportunistic and contradictory. It would be much better to stand with the ‘wretched of the earth’ everywhere, and stop victimising the most vulnerable ourselves — look no further than the way we treat Christians, Hindus and other ‘non-Muslims’.
Malala Yousafzai went on record to question why Aung San Suu Kyi was silent over the treatment of the Rohingyas. I say people in glass houses should not throw stones.
Wednesday, 6 September 2017
'Reputation laundering' is lucrative business for London PR firms
Oppressive foreign regimes are often such valuable accounts that they are considered worth the risk of a backlash
Mark Sweney in The Guardian
From foreign governments of dubious repute and dictators looking for an image overhaul to propaganda videos and fake Wikipedia entries – if there is a PR brief of dubious ethical nature that needs a fix then more often than not it is one of London’s big-name agencies that gets the call.
Bell Pottinger’s public vilification and expulsion from its own trade body for running a social media campaign to stir up racial tension in South Africa for the wealthy Gupta family has lifted the lid on the secretive and highly lucrative business of representing controversial clients.
Over more than three decades in the business Tim Bell, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite PR man, who left Bell Pottinger last summer, has amassed something of a who’s who of what could charitably be called sensitive clients.
These have included the Pinochet Foundation and the governments of Bahrain and Egypt, and there was a $500m (£384m) contract to make fake al-Qaida videos in Iraq for the US government.
“You say words like Pinochet and ‘oh my god that is bad news’, but I don’t accept that,” Lord Bell said. “There are two sides to every story and you have to handle it so your side is prevalent. I don’t know why they are [considered] risky clients. They are only risky if what you are trying to promote an idea that isn’t sound.”
He cited Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian president who has been called Europe’s last dictator, as an example of when taking on such clients went wrong. “There are lots of people I regret having got involved with. Lukashenko went well for six months then changed his mind [about the strategy], behaved differently and I resigned the account.”
Foreign governments with oppressive regimes are often such valuable accounts that they are considered worth the risk of a potential PR backlash.
The Portland agency, founded by Tony Blair’s former adviser Tim Allan, has previously advised Vladimir Putin and worked with Kazakhstan, Jordan and Morocco.
A contract with Qatar, which has been heavily criticised for its record on human rights, is focused on building a government affairs function. Portland declined to comment but Allan has previously said such work is about “openness and engagement” and that opening up secretive nations is “not an affront to democracy”.
Late last year the PR guru Matthew Freud picked up a hugely valuable brief from Saudi Arabia, which has executed more than 150 people in each of the last two years.
The account, led by deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was pitched to a number of corporate PR firms in London. The PR agency Freuds declined to comment but at the time of winning the business said it was focused on a “programme of economic, educational and cultural modernisation to help diversify the economy and create a sustainable and prosperous future for Saudi’s young people.”
A senior PR executive said: “Tyrants, dictatorships and governments that may not be democratic, or are sliding into one-party states, tend to come to places like London, New York and Washington effectively for reputation laundering. If you are cynical about it, that is what it is.”
A number of senior PR executives agree that Bell Pottinger working for the Gupta family, which has been accused of benefiting financially from its close links to the South African president, Jacob Zuma, is not in itself a PR crime.
But stoking racial tension in a country that has struggled to achieve balance in a post-apartheid era is a particularly egregious strategy to have pursued, and not one that is rife among the dark arts employed by UK agencies.
“I think that Bell Pottinger’s work is an outlier,” said Danny Rogers, editor-in-chief of PR Week. “They are accused of creating fake news and blogs, a serious transgression. It is not typical of what the British PR industry does. Work varies from what you would consider to be institution-building and opening communications by governments to the extreme end of the sort of work Bell Pottinger was doing for the Guptas.”
Francis Ingham, director general of the trade body PRCA for the last decade, said the UK industry was “overwhelmingly ethical and professional”.
“There is always the occasional rogue element and our role is to punish them,” he said.
Ever the risk-taker, Lord Bell, after leaving the agency he co-founded, immediately looked for more of the same, setting up Sans Frontières, the same name as the arm of Bell Pottinger that handled sometimes controversial geo-political work.
Bell, who has also represented clients including the News UK chief Rebekah Brooks and the entertainer Rolf Harris, said the Bell Pottinger scandal would prompt the industry to take cover for a while but then it would be business as usual.
“There will be a lull for a while, then people will forget the controversy and people will come back,” he said.
Yet, even the hard-bitten Bell admitted there were some clients beyond the pale even for him. He turned down representing Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, as well as the Labour party (“I wouldn’t have done a good job”).
“I wish we hadn’t taken the Guptas,” he said. “And I would like to have worked for BP, to have handled the Deepwater Horizon incident. As long as there is controversy about things there will be controversial characters. You can’t spend your life regretting what you do.”
Mark Sweney in The Guardian
From foreign governments of dubious repute and dictators looking for an image overhaul to propaganda videos and fake Wikipedia entries – if there is a PR brief of dubious ethical nature that needs a fix then more often than not it is one of London’s big-name agencies that gets the call.
Bell Pottinger’s public vilification and expulsion from its own trade body for running a social media campaign to stir up racial tension in South Africa for the wealthy Gupta family has lifted the lid on the secretive and highly lucrative business of representing controversial clients.
Over more than three decades in the business Tim Bell, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite PR man, who left Bell Pottinger last summer, has amassed something of a who’s who of what could charitably be called sensitive clients.
These have included the Pinochet Foundation and the governments of Bahrain and Egypt, and there was a $500m (£384m) contract to make fake al-Qaida videos in Iraq for the US government.
“You say words like Pinochet and ‘oh my god that is bad news’, but I don’t accept that,” Lord Bell said. “There are two sides to every story and you have to handle it so your side is prevalent. I don’t know why they are [considered] risky clients. They are only risky if what you are trying to promote an idea that isn’t sound.”
He cited Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian president who has been called Europe’s last dictator, as an example of when taking on such clients went wrong. “There are lots of people I regret having got involved with. Lukashenko went well for six months then changed his mind [about the strategy], behaved differently and I resigned the account.”
Foreign governments with oppressive regimes are often such valuable accounts that they are considered worth the risk of a potential PR backlash.
The Portland agency, founded by Tony Blair’s former adviser Tim Allan, has previously advised Vladimir Putin and worked with Kazakhstan, Jordan and Morocco.
A contract with Qatar, which has been heavily criticised for its record on human rights, is focused on building a government affairs function. Portland declined to comment but Allan has previously said such work is about “openness and engagement” and that opening up secretive nations is “not an affront to democracy”.
Late last year the PR guru Matthew Freud picked up a hugely valuable brief from Saudi Arabia, which has executed more than 150 people in each of the last two years.
The account, led by deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was pitched to a number of corporate PR firms in London. The PR agency Freuds declined to comment but at the time of winning the business said it was focused on a “programme of economic, educational and cultural modernisation to help diversify the economy and create a sustainable and prosperous future for Saudi’s young people.”
A senior PR executive said: “Tyrants, dictatorships and governments that may not be democratic, or are sliding into one-party states, tend to come to places like London, New York and Washington effectively for reputation laundering. If you are cynical about it, that is what it is.”
A number of senior PR executives agree that Bell Pottinger working for the Gupta family, which has been accused of benefiting financially from its close links to the South African president, Jacob Zuma, is not in itself a PR crime.
But stoking racial tension in a country that has struggled to achieve balance in a post-apartheid era is a particularly egregious strategy to have pursued, and not one that is rife among the dark arts employed by UK agencies.
“I think that Bell Pottinger’s work is an outlier,” said Danny Rogers, editor-in-chief of PR Week. “They are accused of creating fake news and blogs, a serious transgression. It is not typical of what the British PR industry does. Work varies from what you would consider to be institution-building and opening communications by governments to the extreme end of the sort of work Bell Pottinger was doing for the Guptas.”
Francis Ingham, director general of the trade body PRCA for the last decade, said the UK industry was “overwhelmingly ethical and professional”.
“There is always the occasional rogue element and our role is to punish them,” he said.
Ever the risk-taker, Lord Bell, after leaving the agency he co-founded, immediately looked for more of the same, setting up Sans Frontières, the same name as the arm of Bell Pottinger that handled sometimes controversial geo-political work.
Bell, who has also represented clients including the News UK chief Rebekah Brooks and the entertainer Rolf Harris, said the Bell Pottinger scandal would prompt the industry to take cover for a while but then it would be business as usual.
“There will be a lull for a while, then people will forget the controversy and people will come back,” he said.
Yet, even the hard-bitten Bell admitted there were some clients beyond the pale even for him. He turned down representing Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, as well as the Labour party (“I wouldn’t have done a good job”).
“I wish we hadn’t taken the Guptas,” he said. “And I would like to have worked for BP, to have handled the Deepwater Horizon incident. As long as there is controversy about things there will be controversial characters. You can’t spend your life regretting what you do.”
Monday, 4 September 2017
On Demonetisation - The de-mon is in the details
As everybody knows, any criticism of demonetisation is both unpatriotic and anti-national.
As everybody knows, any criticism of demonetisation is both unpatriotic and anti-national. In any case, it has been a success — if you read the right newspaper editorial, watch the right television channel or listen to the bright folk from the country the U.K. magazine Private Eye calls Aslikhan.
There is a good reason economics isn’t an exact science. It tells us demonetisation is both an unmitigated disaster as well as a resounding success.
The demonetisers think it was the latter while it was the former for the demonetisees. The de-mon is in the details.
To fully understand the whole thing, here’s an analogy. Imagine India preparing to put a man on Mars. He-who-has-your-best-interests-at-heart then goes on national television to announce the three reasons for doing so: to prove that Mars is inhabited by Indians, to bring back all the gold stashed away there by people not sympathetic to his philosophy, and finally, to arrest all the fake Martians and throw them into jail on Jupiter.
Weeks later the objectives change. Now we are told that the mission is to bring back Matt Damon who has been left behind there by Hollywood.
“But that was a movie, all fiction,” cry the critics only to be told to shut up because, as everybody knows, critics are the ones who have stashed away the gold. To err is human, but to criticise is (see above) …
A few more weeks go by, and it is discovered there are no jails on Jupiter. With the flexibility that allows him to hide unseen behind a spiral staircase, the spokesman now tells us that the mission is a success, that we have achieved everything we set out to do and anybody who doesn’t believe that can go to Jupiter, our neighbouring planet.
A confused population (was it Mars or Matt? Is there gold on Jupiter? Can we tell a real Martian from a fake one?) continues to look for answers. Finally these arrive. In summary, we shouldn’t have gone to Mars, the objectives made no sense. We told you so.
“April Fool,” says the spokesman, “we were misquoted on live television. The following are the real reasons for going to Mars: to help India win the cricket series in Sri Lanka, to give the television channels something to fight about, and to give us a reason to return to earth. You can’t come back home without going away first. We have achieved all these targets. We are the greatest.”
One point two billion people suddenly remember their Keats: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that November speech –Do I wake or sleep?
Did someone forcibly pull out from our pockets all those ₹1,000 currency notes? Were we told in various accents across the country that everything was being done for our own good, so shut up and queue up? Was this the face that launched a thousand slips? Perhaps the Mars trip is the real story and demonetisation the fictional one, who knows?
On India's Supreme Courts: And then there were nine
Constitutions are enlarged and strengthened when courts act as brakes against majoritarian authoritarianism
Sanjay Hegde in The Hindu
In early 2014, Fali Nariman said to me in the corridors of the Supreme Court, “A government with an absolute majority will see a conformist judiciary.” Shortly thereafter, India elected a government with an absolute majority in Parliament.
Mr. Nariman prophesied based on past experiences. During the Emergency, the Supreme Court held in ADM Jabalpur that the fundamental right to life could be taken away or suspended. When asked by Justice H.R. Khanna if the right to life had been suspended during the Emergency, the then Attorney General, Niren De, had replied, “Even if life was taken away illegally, courts are helpless.” Four judges then succumbed to government power and failed to protect the citizen; Justice Khanna was the only dissenter.
The shame of that surrender has often been invoked against every judge who has subsequently held office. Justices Y.V. Chandrachud and P.N. Bhagwati, who were part of that Bench, apologised for that judgment after demitting office. But, as Salman Rushdie wrote: “Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.” Judicial pusillanimity in the face of an authoritarian government was not entirely unexpected.
Pattern of retreat
The last three years have seen a rather conservative Supreme Court, which bears testimony to Mr. Nariman’s aphorism. The court chose to render ineffective challenges to demonetisation by referring the issue to a Constitution Bench. When lawyers beat up former JNU Students’ Union President Kanhaiya Kumar and journalists in the precincts of Patiala House, a mere stone’s throw away from the Supreme Court, the court chose to swallow its wrath. The court’s refusal to investigate the Birla-Sahara diaries, or to allow Harsh Mander’s plea to challenge Amit Shah’s discharge in a criminal case, all fit into this pattern of retreat. Possibly the sole exception was when the court struck down the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act.
At a time when civil liberties seemed to be again imperilled, people wondered whether the court would firmly stand on the side of the citizens who claimed that their fundamental right to privacy was being taken away by the Aadhaar database.
In response to the citizens’ challenge, the Supreme Court was told by the government that there existed no fundamental right to privacy. The government’s stand was based on M.P. Sharma (delivered by eight judges in 1954) and Kharak Singh (delivered by six judges in 1962). Both these decisions had seemingly held that there was no fundamental right to privacy in the Constitution. Later decisions of smaller Benches had, however, held and proceeded on the basis that there did exist such a right.
At least two generations of Indians grew up assuming that a fundamental right to privacy existed. But because of diverse judicial opinions, the matter had to be considered by a Bench of at least nine judges. Assembling nine judges is not an easy task given the abnormal workload and administrative disruption it causes the court. It took nearly two years for a Bench to be constituted, by which time the administration tried to compulsorily impose Aadhaar on every sphere of human activity.
The government took an extreme stand that no fundamental right to privacy existed and that the later judgments were wrongly decided. It was a submission of the sort characterised by Lord Atkin in his 1948 dissent in Liversidge v. Anderson, as an argument that “might have been addressed acceptably to the Court of King’s Bench in the time of Charles I.” The government lost the argument 9-0.
The nine-judge Bench has unanimously held that the right to privacy is a fundamental right and clarified years of somewhat uncertain case law on the subject. It has unequivocally held that the doctrinal premise of M.P. Sharma and Kharak Singh stand invalidated. Nearly half of the 547-page judgment has been written by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud who has recognised that “the right to privacy is an element of human dignity”. Perhaps, even more crucially, Justice Chandrachud (joined by all the others on the Bench), has explicitly overruled the ADM Jabalpur judgment to which his father was a party. The judgment is also remarkable for its stinging criticism of the court’s view in Suresh Koushal, which had upheld the validity of Section 377 of the IPC. The challenge to Section 377 is pending before a different Bench.
What the judges held
Justice J. Chelameswar writes a wonderful enunciation of the rationale behind the Constitution, its Preamble, and the fundamental rights chapter. He points out that provisions purportedly conferring power on the state are, in fact, limitations on the state’s power to infringe on the liberty of citizens. Crucially, after holding that the right to privacy is a fundamental right, he states that the right to privacy includes, among other things, freedom from intrusion into one’s home, the right to choice of food and dress of one’s choice, and the freedom to associate with the people one wants to.
Justice S.A. Bobde holds that privacy is integral to the several fundamental rights recognised by the Constitution. He holds that in case of infringement, the state must satisfy the tests applicable to whichever one or more of the fundamental rights is/are affected by the interference. He also traces the right to privacy to ancient Indian texts including the Grihya Sutras, the Ramayanaand the Arthashastra.
Tracing the right to privacy to the Preamble and the fundamental rights chapter of the Constitution, Justice A.M. Sapre holds that the right to privacy is born with the human being and stays until death. He also holds that the unity and integrity of the nation can only be ensured when the dignity of every citizen is guaranteed through privacy.
Justice S.K. Kaul’s opinion makes a strong case for the horizontal application of fundamental rights. He observes that “digital footprints and extensive data can be analysed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behaviour and interactions and hence, is valuable information.” He expresses concern over the use of such data to “exercise control over us like the ‘big brother’ state exercised.”
Justice Rohinton Nariman has rejected the Union’s argument that the right to privacy is not a fundamental right in a developing country where people do not have access to food, shelter and other resources. He holds that the right to privacy is available to the rich and the poor alike: “Fundamental rights, on the other hand, are contained in the Constitution so that there would be rights that the citizens of this country may enjoy despite the governments that they may elect. The recognition of such right in the fundamental rights chapter of the Constitution is only a recognition that such right exists notwithstanding the shifting sands of majority governments.”
In a mature democracy, conformist judiciaries are not always guaranteed to governments with a popular majority. Constitutions are enlarged and strengthened when courts act as brakes against majoritarian authoritarianism. The larger security of the state lies in the protection of every individual’s freedoms. The judges of the Supreme Court, as sentinels on the qui vive, have stood tall and repelled yet another attack on citizens’ liberties. Fali Nariman and Y.V. Chandrachud’s anxieties and reverses of the Emergency era may just have been put to rest.
Sanjay Hegde in The Hindu
In early 2014, Fali Nariman said to me in the corridors of the Supreme Court, “A government with an absolute majority will see a conformist judiciary.” Shortly thereafter, India elected a government with an absolute majority in Parliament.
Mr. Nariman prophesied based on past experiences. During the Emergency, the Supreme Court held in ADM Jabalpur that the fundamental right to life could be taken away or suspended. When asked by Justice H.R. Khanna if the right to life had been suspended during the Emergency, the then Attorney General, Niren De, had replied, “Even if life was taken away illegally, courts are helpless.” Four judges then succumbed to government power and failed to protect the citizen; Justice Khanna was the only dissenter.
The shame of that surrender has often been invoked against every judge who has subsequently held office. Justices Y.V. Chandrachud and P.N. Bhagwati, who were part of that Bench, apologised for that judgment after demitting office. But, as Salman Rushdie wrote: “Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.” Judicial pusillanimity in the face of an authoritarian government was not entirely unexpected.
Pattern of retreat
The last three years have seen a rather conservative Supreme Court, which bears testimony to Mr. Nariman’s aphorism. The court chose to render ineffective challenges to demonetisation by referring the issue to a Constitution Bench. When lawyers beat up former JNU Students’ Union President Kanhaiya Kumar and journalists in the precincts of Patiala House, a mere stone’s throw away from the Supreme Court, the court chose to swallow its wrath. The court’s refusal to investigate the Birla-Sahara diaries, or to allow Harsh Mander’s plea to challenge Amit Shah’s discharge in a criminal case, all fit into this pattern of retreat. Possibly the sole exception was when the court struck down the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act.
At a time when civil liberties seemed to be again imperilled, people wondered whether the court would firmly stand on the side of the citizens who claimed that their fundamental right to privacy was being taken away by the Aadhaar database.
In response to the citizens’ challenge, the Supreme Court was told by the government that there existed no fundamental right to privacy. The government’s stand was based on M.P. Sharma (delivered by eight judges in 1954) and Kharak Singh (delivered by six judges in 1962). Both these decisions had seemingly held that there was no fundamental right to privacy in the Constitution. Later decisions of smaller Benches had, however, held and proceeded on the basis that there did exist such a right.
At least two generations of Indians grew up assuming that a fundamental right to privacy existed. But because of diverse judicial opinions, the matter had to be considered by a Bench of at least nine judges. Assembling nine judges is not an easy task given the abnormal workload and administrative disruption it causes the court. It took nearly two years for a Bench to be constituted, by which time the administration tried to compulsorily impose Aadhaar on every sphere of human activity.
The government took an extreme stand that no fundamental right to privacy existed and that the later judgments were wrongly decided. It was a submission of the sort characterised by Lord Atkin in his 1948 dissent in Liversidge v. Anderson, as an argument that “might have been addressed acceptably to the Court of King’s Bench in the time of Charles I.” The government lost the argument 9-0.
The nine-judge Bench has unanimously held that the right to privacy is a fundamental right and clarified years of somewhat uncertain case law on the subject. It has unequivocally held that the doctrinal premise of M.P. Sharma and Kharak Singh stand invalidated. Nearly half of the 547-page judgment has been written by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud who has recognised that “the right to privacy is an element of human dignity”. Perhaps, even more crucially, Justice Chandrachud (joined by all the others on the Bench), has explicitly overruled the ADM Jabalpur judgment to which his father was a party. The judgment is also remarkable for its stinging criticism of the court’s view in Suresh Koushal, which had upheld the validity of Section 377 of the IPC. The challenge to Section 377 is pending before a different Bench.
What the judges held
Justice J. Chelameswar writes a wonderful enunciation of the rationale behind the Constitution, its Preamble, and the fundamental rights chapter. He points out that provisions purportedly conferring power on the state are, in fact, limitations on the state’s power to infringe on the liberty of citizens. Crucially, after holding that the right to privacy is a fundamental right, he states that the right to privacy includes, among other things, freedom from intrusion into one’s home, the right to choice of food and dress of one’s choice, and the freedom to associate with the people one wants to.
Justice S.A. Bobde holds that privacy is integral to the several fundamental rights recognised by the Constitution. He holds that in case of infringement, the state must satisfy the tests applicable to whichever one or more of the fundamental rights is/are affected by the interference. He also traces the right to privacy to ancient Indian texts including the Grihya Sutras, the Ramayanaand the Arthashastra.
Tracing the right to privacy to the Preamble and the fundamental rights chapter of the Constitution, Justice A.M. Sapre holds that the right to privacy is born with the human being and stays until death. He also holds that the unity and integrity of the nation can only be ensured when the dignity of every citizen is guaranteed through privacy.
Justice S.K. Kaul’s opinion makes a strong case for the horizontal application of fundamental rights. He observes that “digital footprints and extensive data can be analysed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behaviour and interactions and hence, is valuable information.” He expresses concern over the use of such data to “exercise control over us like the ‘big brother’ state exercised.”
Justice Rohinton Nariman has rejected the Union’s argument that the right to privacy is not a fundamental right in a developing country where people do not have access to food, shelter and other resources. He holds that the right to privacy is available to the rich and the poor alike: “Fundamental rights, on the other hand, are contained in the Constitution so that there would be rights that the citizens of this country may enjoy despite the governments that they may elect. The recognition of such right in the fundamental rights chapter of the Constitution is only a recognition that such right exists notwithstanding the shifting sands of majority governments.”
In a mature democracy, conformist judiciaries are not always guaranteed to governments with a popular majority. Constitutions are enlarged and strengthened when courts act as brakes against majoritarian authoritarianism. The larger security of the state lies in the protection of every individual’s freedoms. The judges of the Supreme Court, as sentinels on the qui vive, have stood tall and repelled yet another attack on citizens’ liberties. Fali Nariman and Y.V. Chandrachud’s anxieties and reverses of the Emergency era may just have been put to rest.
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