John Crace in The Guardian
“Je suis très heureux,” Michel Barnier began. It soon became clear why he was so heureux as the text of the draft transitional agreement appeared on a screen behind him during his Brussels press conference with David Davis. Large chunks of it were highlighted in green. These were Theresa May’s red lines. Green was now the new red.
The British prime minister had been right in insisting that large sections of the Brexit deal would be non-negotiable. She just hadn’t made it clear that it would be the EU that was refusing to negotiate. So on almost every point that Britain had said it wouldn’t be giving in, it had given in.
Barnier made a token effort to sound as if he wasn’t crowing that British objections to money, trade negotiations, the European court of justice, fishing rights and the length of the transitional deal had all been casually brushed aside. But when you are as heureux as he is then it’s hard to keep a straight visage.
Not that everything was done and dusted, the EU chief negotiator continued. Mais non! There was still 25% of the draft agreement that wasn’t green. These were the bits that were in yellow and white. The yellow areas were the red lines that the British government couldn’t quite yet bring itself to turn green but would probably do so in the next couple of weeks.
The white areas were slightly more problematic. These were the red lines – principally over Northern Ireland – the British government knew it would eventually have to turn green, but as yet had no clear idea of how to do so without every Brexiter in the Tory party having a complete meltdown about being sold out.
But this wasn’t his problem, because in the absence of the white lines turning green then the backstop was to keep Northern Ireland in the customs union and the single market. In other words, business comme d’habitude.
Or no business comme d’habitude as there was next to no chance of Britain reaching any of the 750 new trade deals it needed to get done in a couple of months. Not least when the EU was committed to a go-slow on its own negotiations. Bonne chance avec that. If Britain wanted to turn itself from a rule giver to a rule taker then it was no peau off his nez. No wonder Barnier was heureux as Larry.
Davis wasn’t nearly so heureux, though he tried to look as if he was. His fixed grin looked suspiciously like rigor mortis. He too declared himself to be thrilled so many of the red lines had turned green and looked forward to making all the necessary concessions to turn the yellow and white ones green. People just had to understand that Brexit was a simple dialectic. To take back control you had to give back control. To get a transition period you needed a standstill.
The longer the Brexit secretary spoke, the more miserable he appeared. There are limits even to his self-delusion. Britain had got nearly everything it had asked for, he said unconvincingly. Take the transition period. The UK had asked for two years ending in March 2021 and the EU had argued for December 2020. So they had compromised at December 2020. As for Northern Ireland, he really didn’t have a clue. Only that in some lights at certain times of day, red could sometimes look a bit green.
Why had the EU and the UK chosen to highlight the agreed sections in green and not some other colour, a reporter asked. By now Davis was catatonically unheureux, so it was Barnier who replied. He would have been happy with bleu, blanc or rouge but every time he tried writing something in rouge the British kept turning it vert. And anyway he quite liked vert. Besides, green was the perfect description of the British negotiating team.
Tuesday, 20 March 2018
Sunday, 18 March 2018
The runaway locomotive of Electronic Voting Machines
Tabish Khair in The Hindu
It happened in December 1841 near Reading, England. A Great Western Railway luggage train travelling from London Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads station had just entered Sonning Cutting. Rain had loosened the soil next to the track, which had caused mud to spill on to the track and cover it. This forced the broad gauge locomotive, containing three third-class passenger carriages and some heavy goods wagons, to derail. Eight passengers died on the spot and many were seriously injured. One passenger died later in hospital.
The tragedy set in process a largely unremarked legal change: it led to the abolishment of ‘deodands’. Deodands were penalties imposed on ‘moving objects that caused deaths’. After the Sonning Cutting accident, a deodand of £1,000 (about £100,000 today) was imposed on the train engine. This was, however, never paid (how could it be?), and five years later deodands were abolished.
From our perspective, this marks a significant change: from objects associated and controlled by humans to objects with much more leverage of their own. From a dropped box or a mismanaged horse carriage to a derailed engine. In 1841, deodands existed in a world that had changed. Trains marked not just the increase of pace while travelling, they also enabled a kind of tragedy which was difficult to imagine in an age of horses: now dozens, soon hundreds, of bodies could be mangled in a single accident. Blame for a derailed engine was a different matter than blame for a brick dropped from a window or an overturned carriage.
An opportunity and a danger
I start with this example to highlight the obvious fact that all technological developments come with some advantages and dangers. A society that ignores the former for the latter stays stuck in time, but a society that ignores the latter for the former might well plunge down a precipice.
Electronic voting machines represent such an opportunity — and danger. But because too much capital is invested in selling and replicating these systems, the opportunities and advantages are currently drummed up more than the dangers. Electronic voting machines have been accused of advertent or inadvertent ‘flaws’ in many countries, including India. But governments argue that some malfunctioning is inevitable when we use voting systems in vast lands with great educational disparity.
But let us talk about Denmark. Denmark is an egalitarian country of only six million people, all of whom receive basically the same kind of education until high school, and can choose to go to university free of charge. It has a high literacy rate and its politicians are at least theoretically more accountable than those of India or the U.S. It also has a high voting percentage.
And yet, recently, a small controversy erupted in Denmark. The fact that it is only a small controversy is frightening — because it has to do with the very nature of democracy, and Danes are a proudly democratic people. The largely neo-liberal government of Denmark decided to put the partly electronic voting system of Denmark up for a bid between rival companies. Three companies applied, including the public-owned company that has provided these services in the past. Then the government lowered the maximum bid amount. This forced two of the companies — including the public-owned one — to withdraw. The single company that stayed in the fray could submit a cheaper offer because it already runs similar voting systems in a number of countries — where the system has been accused of malfunction or vulnerability to tinkering.
As this was a private corporation, questions were asked in the Danish Parliament about its ownership. The Parliament was wrongly assured by a minister that it was a Danish company. When the major Danish daily, Politiken, traced the company’s head office to a tax-haven island off South America, the government promised more information.
Who are the owners?
But in the process, a vital factor seems to have been overlooked — not just by members of the Danish government, which is not surprising, but also by many of its critics. It is this: the island on which the company is registered permits companies not to disclose their ownership. In other words, the Danish voting system might be produced by a company whose real owners are invisible. Surely, there is something seriously wrong about the increasing vulnerability of democracies to the digitalised chicanery of invisible or half-visible corporate owners? Surely it is legitimate for citizens to demand to know the real owners of such companies? For instance, would a company controlled by the Russian mafia or the Koch brothers of the U.S., with their history of lobbied interference in democratic matters, be a neutral player and a reliable service provider?
As trains came into being, not only were ineffective laws, like that of deodands, remade or abandoned, new laws were put in place to ensure safety and accountability. Today, with the locomotive of digitalisation rushing at us, we largely lack a concerted effort to protect democracy against its dangers. Electronic voting systems need far greater scrutiny that those who are singing the siren songs of ‘progress and digitalisation’ want us to realise. It is time to plug our ears, and ask some hard questions — in every country of the world.
It happened in December 1841 near Reading, England. A Great Western Railway luggage train travelling from London Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads station had just entered Sonning Cutting. Rain had loosened the soil next to the track, which had caused mud to spill on to the track and cover it. This forced the broad gauge locomotive, containing three third-class passenger carriages and some heavy goods wagons, to derail. Eight passengers died on the spot and many were seriously injured. One passenger died later in hospital.
The tragedy set in process a largely unremarked legal change: it led to the abolishment of ‘deodands’. Deodands were penalties imposed on ‘moving objects that caused deaths’. After the Sonning Cutting accident, a deodand of £1,000 (about £100,000 today) was imposed on the train engine. This was, however, never paid (how could it be?), and five years later deodands were abolished.
From our perspective, this marks a significant change: from objects associated and controlled by humans to objects with much more leverage of their own. From a dropped box or a mismanaged horse carriage to a derailed engine. In 1841, deodands existed in a world that had changed. Trains marked not just the increase of pace while travelling, they also enabled a kind of tragedy which was difficult to imagine in an age of horses: now dozens, soon hundreds, of bodies could be mangled in a single accident. Blame for a derailed engine was a different matter than blame for a brick dropped from a window or an overturned carriage.
An opportunity and a danger
I start with this example to highlight the obvious fact that all technological developments come with some advantages and dangers. A society that ignores the former for the latter stays stuck in time, but a society that ignores the latter for the former might well plunge down a precipice.
Electronic voting machines represent such an opportunity — and danger. But because too much capital is invested in selling and replicating these systems, the opportunities and advantages are currently drummed up more than the dangers. Electronic voting machines have been accused of advertent or inadvertent ‘flaws’ in many countries, including India. But governments argue that some malfunctioning is inevitable when we use voting systems in vast lands with great educational disparity.
But let us talk about Denmark. Denmark is an egalitarian country of only six million people, all of whom receive basically the same kind of education until high school, and can choose to go to university free of charge. It has a high literacy rate and its politicians are at least theoretically more accountable than those of India or the U.S. It also has a high voting percentage.
And yet, recently, a small controversy erupted in Denmark. The fact that it is only a small controversy is frightening — because it has to do with the very nature of democracy, and Danes are a proudly democratic people. The largely neo-liberal government of Denmark decided to put the partly electronic voting system of Denmark up for a bid between rival companies. Three companies applied, including the public-owned company that has provided these services in the past. Then the government lowered the maximum bid amount. This forced two of the companies — including the public-owned one — to withdraw. The single company that stayed in the fray could submit a cheaper offer because it already runs similar voting systems in a number of countries — where the system has been accused of malfunction or vulnerability to tinkering.
As this was a private corporation, questions were asked in the Danish Parliament about its ownership. The Parliament was wrongly assured by a minister that it was a Danish company. When the major Danish daily, Politiken, traced the company’s head office to a tax-haven island off South America, the government promised more information.
Who are the owners?
But in the process, a vital factor seems to have been overlooked — not just by members of the Danish government, which is not surprising, but also by many of its critics. It is this: the island on which the company is registered permits companies not to disclose their ownership. In other words, the Danish voting system might be produced by a company whose real owners are invisible. Surely, there is something seriously wrong about the increasing vulnerability of democracies to the digitalised chicanery of invisible or half-visible corporate owners? Surely it is legitimate for citizens to demand to know the real owners of such companies? For instance, would a company controlled by the Russian mafia or the Koch brothers of the U.S., with their history of lobbied interference in democratic matters, be a neutral player and a reliable service provider?
As trains came into being, not only were ineffective laws, like that of deodands, remade or abandoned, new laws were put in place to ensure safety and accountability. Today, with the locomotive of digitalisation rushing at us, we largely lack a concerted effort to protect democracy against its dangers. Electronic voting systems need far greater scrutiny that those who are singing the siren songs of ‘progress and digitalisation’ want us to realise. It is time to plug our ears, and ask some hard questions — in every country of the world.
Saturday, 17 March 2018
The crisis in modern masculinity
Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian
On the evening of 30 January 1948, five months after the independence and partition of India, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was walking to a prayer meeting at his temporary home in New Delhi when he was shot three times, at point-blank range. He collapsed and died instantly. His assassin, originally feared to be Muslim, turned out to be Nathuram Godse, a Hindu Brahmin from western India. Godse, who made no attempt to escape, said in court that he felt compelled to kill Gandhi since the leader with his womanly politics was emasculating the Hindu nation – in particular, with his generosity to Muslims. Godse is a hero today in an India utterly transformed by Hindu chauvinists – an India in which Mein Kampf is a bestseller, a political movement inspired by European fascists dominates politics and culture, and Narendra Modi, a Hindu supremacist accused of mass murder, is prime minister. For all his talk of Hindu genius, Godse flagrantly plagiarised the fictions of European ethnic-racial chauvinists and imperialists. For the first years of his life he was raised as a girl, with a nose ring, and later tried to gain a hard-edged masculine identity through Hindu supremacism. Yet for many struggling young Indians today Godse represents, along with Adolf Hitler, a triumphantly realised individual and national manhood.
The moral prestige of Gandhi’s murderer is only one sign among many of what seems to be a global crisis of masculinity. Luridly retro ideas of what it means to be a strong man have gone mainstream even in so-called advanced nations. In January Jordan B Peterson, a Canadian self-help writer who laments that “the west has lost faith in masculinity” and denounces the “murderous equity doctrine” espoused by women, was hailed in the New York Times as “the most influential public intellectual in the western world right now”.
‘The west has lost faith in masculinity’ … self-help writer Jordan Peterson. Photograph: Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star via Getty Images
This is, hopefully, an exaggeration. It is arguable, however, that a frenetic pursuit of masculinity has characterised public life in the west since 9/11; and it presaged the serial-groping president who boasts of his big penis and nuclear button. “From the ashes of September 11,” the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan exulted a few weeks after the attack, “arise the manly virtues.” Noonan, who today admires Peterson’s “tough” talk, hailed the re-emergence of “masculine men, men who push things and pull things”, such as George W Bush, who she half expected to “tear open his shirt and reveal the big ‘S’ on his chest”. Such gush, commonplace at the time, helped Bush, who had initially gone missing in action on 11 September, reinvent himself as a dashing commander-in-chief (and grow cocky enough to dress up as a fighter pilot and compliment Tony Blair’s “cojones”).
Amid this rush of testosterone in the Anglo-American establishment, many deskbound journalists fancied themselves as unflinching warriors. “We will,” David Brooks, another of Peterson’s fans, vowed, “destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders and continue fighting.”
As manly virtues arose, attacks on women, and feminists in particular, in the west became nearly as fierce as the wars waged abroad to rescue Muslim damsels in distress. In Manliness (2006) Harvey Mansfield, a political philosopher at Harvard, denounced working women for undermining the protective role of men. The historian Niall Ferguson, a self-declared neo-imperialist, bemoaned that “girls no longer play with dolls” and that feminists have forced Europe into demographic decline. More revealingly, the few women publicly critical of the bellicosity, such as Katha Pollitt, Susan Sontag and Arundhati Roy, were “mounted on poles for public whipping” and flogged, Barbara Kingsolver wrote, with “words like bitch and airhead and moron and silly”. At the same time, Vanity Fair’s photo essay on the Bush administration at war commended the president for his masculine sangfroid and hailed his deputy, Dick Cheney, as “The Rock”.
Psychotic masculinity can be seen everywhere from ISIS to mass-murderer Anders Breivik, who claimed Viking ancestry
Some of this post-9/11 cocksmanship was no doubt provoked by Osama bin Laden’s slurs about American manhood: that the free and the brave had gone “soft” and “weak”. Humiliation in Vietnam similarly brought forth such cartoon visions of masculinity as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is also true that historically privileged men tend to be profoundly disturbed by perceived competition from women, gay people and diverse ethnic and religious groups. In Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990) Elaine Showalter described the great terror induced among many men by the very modest gains of feminists in the late 19th century: “fears of regression and degeneration, the longing for strict border controls around the definition of gender, as well as race, class and nationality”.
In the 1950s, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr was already warning of the “expanding, aggressive force” of women, “seizing new domains like a conquering army”. Exasperated by the “castrated” American male and his “feminine fascination for the downtrodden”, Schlesinger, the original exponent of muscular liberalism, longed for the “frontiersmen” of American history who “were men, and it did not occur to them to think twice about it”.
These majestically male makers of the modern west are being forced to think twice about a lot today. Gay men and women are freer than before to love whom they love, and to marry them. Women expect greater self-fulfilment in the workplace, at home and in bed. Trump may have the biggest nuclear button, but China leads in artificial intelligence as well as old-style mass manufacturing. And technology and automation threaten to render obsolete the men who push and pull things – most damagingly in the west.
Many straight white men feel besieged by “uppity” Chinese and Indian people, by Muslims and feminists, not to mention gay bodybuilders, butch women and trans people. Not surprisingly they are susceptible to Peterson’s notion that the ostensible destruction of “the traditional household division of labour” has led to “chaos”. This fear and insecurity of a male minority has spiralled into a politics of hysteria in the two dominant imperial powers of the modern era. In Britain, the aloof and stiff upper-lipped English gentleman, that epitome of controlled imperial power, has given way to such verbally incontinent Brexiters as Boris Johnson. The rightwing journalist Douglas Murray, among many elegists of English manhood, deplores “emasculated Italians, Europeans and westerners in general” and esteems Trump for “reminding the west of what is great about ourselves”. And, indeed, whether threatening North Korea with nuclear incineration, belittling people with disabilities or groping women, the American president confirms that some winners of modern history will do anything to shore up their sense of entitlement.
Rear-guard machismo … Vladimir Putin on holiday in southern Siberia in 2009. Photograph: Alexey Druzhinin/AFP/Getty Images
But gaudy displays of brute manliness in the west, and frenzied loathing of what the alt-rightists call “cucks” and “cultural Marxists”, are not merely a reaction to insolent former weaklings. Such manic assertions of hyper-masculinity have recurred in modern history. They have also profoundly shaped politics and culture in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Osama bin Laden believed that Muslims “have been deprived of their manhood” and could recover it by obliterating the phallic symbols of American power. Beheading and raping innocent captives in the name of the caliphate, the black-hooded young volunteers of Islamic State were as obviously a case of psychotic masculinity as the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who claimed Viking warriors as his ancestors. Last month, the Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte told female rebels in his country that “We will not kill you. We will just shoot you in the vagina.” Tormenting hapless minorities, India’s Hindu supremacist chieftains seem obsessed with proving, as one asserted after India’s nuclear tests in 1998, “we are not eunuchs any more”.
Morbid visions of castration and emasculation, civilisational decline and decay, connect Godse and Schlesinger to Bin Laden and Trump, and many other exponents of a rear-guard machismo today. They are susceptible to cliched metaphors of “soft” and “passive” femininity, “hard” and “active” masculinity; they are nostalgic for a time when men did not have to think twice about being men. And whether Hindu chauvinist, radical Islamist or white nationalist, their self-image depends on despising and excluding women. It is as though the fantasy of male strength measures itself most gratifyingly against the fantasy of female weakness. Equating women with impotence and seized by panic about becoming cucks, these rancorously angry men are symptoms of an endemic and seemingly unresolvable crisis of masculinity.
When did this crisis begin? And why does it seem so inescapably global? Writing Age of Anger: A History of the Present, I began to think that a perpetual crisis stalks the modern world. It began in the 19th century, with the most radical shift in human history: the replacement of agrarian and rural societies by a volatile socio-economic order, which, defined by industrial capitalism, came to be rigidly organised through new sexual and racial divisions of labour. And the crisis seems universal today because a web of restrictive gender norms, spun in modernising western Europe and America, has come to cover the remotest corners of the earth as they undergo their own socio-economic revolutions.
There were always many ways of being a man or a woman. Anthropologists and historians of the world’s astonishingly diverse pre-industrial societies have consistently revealed that there is no clear link between biological makeup and behaviour, no connection between masculinity and vigorous men, or femininity and passive women. Indians, British colonialists were disgusted to find, revered belligerent and sexually voracious goddesses, such as Kali; their heroes were flute-playing idlers such as Krishna. A vast Indian literature attests to mutably gendered men and women, elite as well as folk traditions of androgyny and same-sex eroticism.
These unselfconscious traditions began to come under unprecedented assault in the 19th century, when societies constituted by exploitation and exclusion, and stratified along gender and racial lines, emerged as the world’s most powerful; and when such profound shocks of modernity as nation-building, rural-urban migration, imperial expansion and industrialisation drastically changed all modes of human perception. A hierarchy of manly and unmanly human beings had long existed in many societies without being central in them. During the 19th century, it came to be universally imposed, with men and women straitjacketed into specific roles.
‘In the 19th century, the ideal of a strong, fearless manhood came to be embodied in muscular selves, nations, empires and races’
The modern west appears, in the western supremacist version of history, as the guarantor of equality and liberty to all. In actuality, a notion of gender (and racial) inequality, grounded in biological difference, was, as Joan Wallach Scott demonstrates in her recent book Sex and Secularism, nothing less than “the social foundation of modern western nation-states”. Immanuel Kant dismissed women as incapable of practical reason, individual autonomy, objectivity, courage and strength. Napoleon, the child of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, believed women ought to stay at home and procreate; his Napoleonic Code, which inspired state laws across the world, notoriously subordinated women to their fathers and husbands. Thomas Jefferson, America’s founding father, commended women, “who have the good sense to value domestic happiness above all other” and who are “too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics”. Such prejudices helped replace traditional patriarchy with the exclusionary ideals of masculinity as the modern world came into being.
On such grounds, women were denied political participation and forced into subordinate roles in the family and the labour market. Pop psychologists periodically insist that men are from Mars and women from Venus, lamenting the loss of what Peterson calls “traditional” divisions of labour, without acknowledging that capitalist, industrial and expansionist societies required a fresh division of labour, or that the straight white men who supervised them deemed women unfit, due to their physical or intellectual inferiority, to undertake territorial aggrandisement, nation-building, industrial production, international trade, and scientific innovation. Women’s bodies were meant to reproduce and safeguard the future of the family, race and nation; men’s were supposed to labour and fight. To be a “mature” man was to adjust oneself to society and fulfil one’s responsibility as breadwinner, father and soldier. “When men fear work or fear righteous war,” as Theodore Roosevelt put it, “when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom.” As the 19th century progressed, many such cultural assumptions about male and female identity morphed into timeless truths. They are, as Peterson’s rowdy fan club reveals, more vigorously upheld today than the “truths” of racial inequality, which were also simultaneously grounded in “nature”, or pseudo-biology.
Scott points out that the modes of sexual difference defined in the modernising west actually helped secure, “the racial superiority of western nations to their ‘others’ – in Africa, Asia, and Latin America”. “White skin was associated with ‘normal’ gender systems, dark skin with immaturity and perversity.” Thus, the British judged their Kali-worshipping Indian subjects to be an unmanly and childish people who ought not to wrinkle their foreheads with ideas of self-rule. The Chinese were widely seen, including in western Chinatowns, as pigtailed cowards. Even Muslims, Christendom’s formidable old rivals, came to be derided as pitiably “feminine” during the high noon of imperialism.
Gandhi explicitly subverted these gendered prejudices of European imperialists (and their Hindu imitators): that femininity was the absence of masculinity. Rejecting the western identification of rulers with male supremacy and subjecthood with feminine submissiveness, he offered an activist politics based on rigorous self-examination and maternal tenderness. This rejection eventually cost him his life. But he could see how much the male will to power was fed by a fantasy of the female other as a regressive being – someone to be subdued and dominated – and how much this pathology had infected modern politics and culture.
As Hindu nationalisation got into gear, formerly chubby Bollywood stars began to flaunt bulging biceps
Its most insidious expression was the conquest and exploitation of people deemed feminine, and, therefore, less than human – a violence that became normalised in the 19th century. For many Europeans and Americans, to be a true man was to be an ardent imperialist and nationalist. Even so clear-sighted a figure as Alexis de Tocqueville longed for his French male compatriots to realise their “warlike” and “virile” nature in crushing Arabs in north Africa, leaving women to deal with the petty concerns of domestic life.
As the century progressed, the quest for virility distilled a widespread response among men psychically battered by such uncontrollable and emasculating phenomena as industrialisation, urbanisation and mechanisation. The ideal of a strong, fearless manhood came to be embodied in muscular selves, nations, empires and races. Living up to this daunting ideal required eradicating all traces of feminine timidity and childishness. Failure incited self-loathing – and a craving for regenerative violence. Mocked with such unmanly epithets as “weakling” and “Oscar Wilde”, Roosevelt tried to overcome, Gore Vidal once pointed out, “his physical fragility through ‘manly’ activities of which the most exciting and ennobling was war”. It is no coincidence that the loathing of homosexuals, and the hunt for sacrificial victims such as Wilde, was never more vicious and organized than during this most intense phase of European imperialism.
One image came to be central to all attempts to recuperate the lost manhood of self and nation: the invincible body, represented in our own age of extremes by steroid-juiced, knobbly musculature. Actually, size matters today much less than it ever did; not many muscles are required for increasingly sedentary work habits and lifestyles. Nevertheless, an obsession with raw brawn and sheer mass still shapes political cultures. Trump’s boasts about the size of his body parts were preceded by Vladimir Putin’s displays of his pectorals – advertisements for a Russia re-masculinised after its emasculation by Boris Yeltsin, a flabby drunk. But shirtless hunks are also a striking recent phenomenon in Godse’s “rising” India. In the 90s, just as India’s Hindu nationalisation got into gear, formerly scrawny or chubby Bollywood stars began to flaunt glisteningly hard abs and bulging biceps; Rama, the lean-limbed hero of the Ramayana, started to resemble Rambo in calendar art and political posters. These buffed-up bodies of popular culture foreshadowed Modi, who rose to power boasting of his 56-inch chest, and promising true national potency to young unemployed stragglers.
This vengeful masculinist nationalism was the original creation of Germans in the early 19th century, who first outlined a vision of creating a superbly fit people or master race and fervently embraced such typically modern forms of physical exercise as gymnastics, callisthenics and yoga and fads like nudism. But pumped-up anatomy emerged as a “natural” embodiment of the evidently exclusive male virtue of strength only as the century ended. As societies across the west became more industrial, urban and bureaucratic, property-owning farmers and self-employed artisans rapidly turned into faceless office workers and professionals. With “rational calculation” installed as the new deity, “each man”, Max Weber warned in 1909, “becomes a little cog in the machine”, pathetically obsessed with becoming “a bigger cog”. Increasingly deprived of their old skills and autonomy in the iron cage of modernity, working class men tried to secure their dignity by embodying it in bulky brawn.
India’s prime minister Narendra Modi rose to power boasting of his 56-inch chest, and promising true national potency. Photograph: Danish Ismail/Reuters
Historians have emphasised how male workers, humiliated by such repressive industrial practices as automation and time management, also began to assert their manhood by swearing, drinking and sexually harassing the few women in the workforce – the beginning of an aggressive hardhat culture that has reached deep into blue-collar workplaces during the decades-long reign of neoliberalism. Towards the end of the 19th century large numbers of men embraced sports and physical fitness, and launched fan clubs of pugnacious footballers and boxers.
It wasn’t just working men. Upper-class parents in America and Britain had begun to send their sons to boarding schools in the hope that their bodies and moral characters would be suitably toughened up in the absence of corrupting feminine influences. Competitive sports, which were first organised in the second half of the 19th century, became a much-favoured means of pre-empting sissiness – and of mass-producing virile imperialists. It was widely believed that putative empire-builders would be too exhausted by their exertions on the playing fields of Eton and Harrow to masturbate.
But masculinity, a dream of power, tends to get more elusive the more intensely it is pursued; and the dread of emasculation by opaque economic, political and social forces continued to deepen. It drove many fin de siècle writers as well as politicians in Europe and the US into hyper-masculine trances of racial nationalism – and, eventually, the calamity of the first world war. Nations and races as well as individuals were conceptualised as biological entities, which could be honed into unassailable organisms. Fear of “race suicide”, cults of physical education and daydreams of a “New Man” went global, along with strictures against masturbation, as the inflexible modern ideology of gender difference reached non-western societies.
European colonialists went on to impose laws that enshrined their virulent homophobia and promoted heterosexual conjugality and patrilineal orders. Their prejudices were also entrenched outside the west by the victims of what the Indian critic Ashis Nandy calls “internal colonialism”: those subjects of European empires who pleaded guilty to the accusation that they were effeminate, and who decided to man up in order to catch up with their white overlords.
This accounts for a startling and still little explored phenomenon: how men within all major religious communities – Buddhist, Hindu and Jewish as well as Christian and Islamic – started in the late 19th century to simultaneously bemoan their lost virility and urge the creation of hard, inviolable bodies, whether of individual men, the nation or the umma. These included early Zionists (Max Nordau, who dreamed of Muskeljudentum, “Jewry of Muscle”), Asian anti-imperialists (Swami Vivekananda, Modi’s hero, who exhorted Hindus to build “biceps”, and Anagarika Dharmapala, who helped develop the muscular Buddhism being horribly flexed by Myanmar’s ethnic-cleansers these days) as well as fanatical imperialists such as Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement.
The most lethal consequences of this mimic machismo unfolded in the first decades of the 20th century. “Never before and never afterwards”, as historian George Mosse, the pioneering historian of masculinity, wrote, “has masculinity been elevated to such heights as during fascism”. Mussolini, like Roosevelt, transformed himself from a sissy into a fire-breathing imperialist. “The weak must be hammered away,” declared Hitler, another physically ill-favoured fascist. Such wannabe members of the Aryan master race accordingly defined themselves against the cowardly Jew and discovered themselves as men of steel in acts of mass murder.
This hunt for manliness continues to contaminate politics and culture across the world in the 21st century. Rapid economic, social and technological change in our own time has plunged an exponentially larger number of uprooted and bewildered men into a doomed quest for masculine certainties. The scope for old-style imperialist aggrandisement and forging a master race may have diminished. But there are, in the age of neoliberal individualism, infinitely more unrealised claims to masculine identity in grotesquely unequal societies around the world. Myths of the self-made man have forced men everywhere into a relentless and often futile hunt for individual power and wealth, in which they imagine women and members of minorities as competitors. Many more men try to degrade and exclude women in their attempt to show some mastery that is supposed to inhere in their biological nature.
Fear of feminizsation has driven demagogic movements like that unleashed by the locker room bully in the White House
Frustration and fear of feminisation have helped boost demagogic movements similar to the one unleashed by the locker room bully in the White House. Godse’s hyper-masculine cliches have vanquished the traditions of androgyny that Gandhi upheld – and not just in India. Young Pakistani men revere the playboy-turned-politician Imran Khan as their alpha male redeemer; they turn viciously on critics of his indiscretions. Similarly embodying a triumphant masculinity in the eyes of his followers, the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can do no wrong. Rodrigo Duterte jokes, with brazen frequency, about rape.
Misogyny now flourishes in the public sphere because, as in modernising Europe and America, many toilers daydream of a primordial past when real men were on top, and women knew their place. Loathing of “liberated” women who seem to be usurping male domains is evident not only on social media but also in brutal physical assaults. These are sanctioned by pseudo-traditional ideologies such as Hindu supremacism and Islamic fundamentalism that offer to many thwarted men in Asia and Africa a redeeming machismo: the gratifying replacement of neoliberalism’s bogus promise of equal opportunity with old-style patriarchy.
Susan Faludi argues that many Americans used the 9/11 attacks to shrink the gains of feminism and push women back into passive roles. Peterson’s traditionalism is the latest of many attempts in the west in recent years to restore the authority of men, or to remasculinise society. These include the deployment of “shock-and-awe” violence, loathing of cucks, cultural Marxists and feminists, re-imagining a silver-spooned posturer like Bush as superman, and, finally, the political apotheosis of a serial groper.
This recurrent search for security in coarse manhood confirms that the history of modern masculinity is the history of a fantasy. It describes the doomed quest for a stable and ordered world that entails nothing less than war on the irrepressible plurality of human existence – a war that is periodically renewed despite its devastating failures. An outlandish phobia of women and effeminacy may be hardwired into the long social, political and cultural dominance of men. It could be that their wounded sense of entitlement, or resentment over being denied their customary claim to power and privilege, will continue to make many men vulnerable to such vendors of faux masculinity as Trump and Modi. A compassionate analysis of their rage and despair, however, would conclude that men are as much imprisoned by man-made gender norms as women.
“One is not born, but rather becomes a woman” wrote Simone de Beauvoir. She might as well have said the same for men. “It is civilisation as a whole that produces such a creature.” And forces him into a ruinous pursuit of power. Compared with women, men are almost everywhere more exposed to alcoholism, drug addiction, serious accidents and cardiovascular disease; they have significantly lower life expectancies and are more likely to kill themselves. The first victims of the quest for a mythical male potency are arguably men themselves, whether in school playgrounds, offices, prisons or battlefields. This everyday experience of fear and trauma binds them to women in more ways than most men, trapped by myths of resolute manhood, tend to acknowledge.
Certainly, men would waste this latest crisis of masculinity if they deny or underplay the experience of vulnerability they share with women on a planet that is itself endangered. Masculine power will always remain maddeningly elusive, prone to periodic crises, breakdowns and panicky reassertions. It is an unfulfillable ideal, a hallucination of command and control, and an illusion of mastery, in a world where all that is solid melts into thin air, and where even the ostensibly powerful are haunted by the spectre of loss and displacement. As a straitjacket of onerous roles and impossible expectations, masculinity has become a source of great suffering – for men as much as women. To understand this is not only to grasp its global crisis today. It is also to sight one possibility of resolving the crisis: a release from the absurd but crippling fear that one has not been man enough.
On the evening of 30 January 1948, five months after the independence and partition of India, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was walking to a prayer meeting at his temporary home in New Delhi when he was shot three times, at point-blank range. He collapsed and died instantly. His assassin, originally feared to be Muslim, turned out to be Nathuram Godse, a Hindu Brahmin from western India. Godse, who made no attempt to escape, said in court that he felt compelled to kill Gandhi since the leader with his womanly politics was emasculating the Hindu nation – in particular, with his generosity to Muslims. Godse is a hero today in an India utterly transformed by Hindu chauvinists – an India in which Mein Kampf is a bestseller, a political movement inspired by European fascists dominates politics and culture, and Narendra Modi, a Hindu supremacist accused of mass murder, is prime minister. For all his talk of Hindu genius, Godse flagrantly plagiarised the fictions of European ethnic-racial chauvinists and imperialists. For the first years of his life he was raised as a girl, with a nose ring, and later tried to gain a hard-edged masculine identity through Hindu supremacism. Yet for many struggling young Indians today Godse represents, along with Adolf Hitler, a triumphantly realised individual and national manhood.
The moral prestige of Gandhi’s murderer is only one sign among many of what seems to be a global crisis of masculinity. Luridly retro ideas of what it means to be a strong man have gone mainstream even in so-called advanced nations. In January Jordan B Peterson, a Canadian self-help writer who laments that “the west has lost faith in masculinity” and denounces the “murderous equity doctrine” espoused by women, was hailed in the New York Times as “the most influential public intellectual in the western world right now”.
‘The west has lost faith in masculinity’ … self-help writer Jordan Peterson. Photograph: Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star via Getty Images
This is, hopefully, an exaggeration. It is arguable, however, that a frenetic pursuit of masculinity has characterised public life in the west since 9/11; and it presaged the serial-groping president who boasts of his big penis and nuclear button. “From the ashes of September 11,” the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan exulted a few weeks after the attack, “arise the manly virtues.” Noonan, who today admires Peterson’s “tough” talk, hailed the re-emergence of “masculine men, men who push things and pull things”, such as George W Bush, who she half expected to “tear open his shirt and reveal the big ‘S’ on his chest”. Such gush, commonplace at the time, helped Bush, who had initially gone missing in action on 11 September, reinvent himself as a dashing commander-in-chief (and grow cocky enough to dress up as a fighter pilot and compliment Tony Blair’s “cojones”).
Amid this rush of testosterone in the Anglo-American establishment, many deskbound journalists fancied themselves as unflinching warriors. “We will,” David Brooks, another of Peterson’s fans, vowed, “destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders and continue fighting.”
As manly virtues arose, attacks on women, and feminists in particular, in the west became nearly as fierce as the wars waged abroad to rescue Muslim damsels in distress. In Manliness (2006) Harvey Mansfield, a political philosopher at Harvard, denounced working women for undermining the protective role of men. The historian Niall Ferguson, a self-declared neo-imperialist, bemoaned that “girls no longer play with dolls” and that feminists have forced Europe into demographic decline. More revealingly, the few women publicly critical of the bellicosity, such as Katha Pollitt, Susan Sontag and Arundhati Roy, were “mounted on poles for public whipping” and flogged, Barbara Kingsolver wrote, with “words like bitch and airhead and moron and silly”. At the same time, Vanity Fair’s photo essay on the Bush administration at war commended the president for his masculine sangfroid and hailed his deputy, Dick Cheney, as “The Rock”.
Psychotic masculinity can be seen everywhere from ISIS to mass-murderer Anders Breivik, who claimed Viking ancestry
Some of this post-9/11 cocksmanship was no doubt provoked by Osama bin Laden’s slurs about American manhood: that the free and the brave had gone “soft” and “weak”. Humiliation in Vietnam similarly brought forth such cartoon visions of masculinity as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is also true that historically privileged men tend to be profoundly disturbed by perceived competition from women, gay people and diverse ethnic and religious groups. In Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990) Elaine Showalter described the great terror induced among many men by the very modest gains of feminists in the late 19th century: “fears of regression and degeneration, the longing for strict border controls around the definition of gender, as well as race, class and nationality”.
In the 1950s, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr was already warning of the “expanding, aggressive force” of women, “seizing new domains like a conquering army”. Exasperated by the “castrated” American male and his “feminine fascination for the downtrodden”, Schlesinger, the original exponent of muscular liberalism, longed for the “frontiersmen” of American history who “were men, and it did not occur to them to think twice about it”.
These majestically male makers of the modern west are being forced to think twice about a lot today. Gay men and women are freer than before to love whom they love, and to marry them. Women expect greater self-fulfilment in the workplace, at home and in bed. Trump may have the biggest nuclear button, but China leads in artificial intelligence as well as old-style mass manufacturing. And technology and automation threaten to render obsolete the men who push and pull things – most damagingly in the west.
Many straight white men feel besieged by “uppity” Chinese and Indian people, by Muslims and feminists, not to mention gay bodybuilders, butch women and trans people. Not surprisingly they are susceptible to Peterson’s notion that the ostensible destruction of “the traditional household division of labour” has led to “chaos”. This fear and insecurity of a male minority has spiralled into a politics of hysteria in the two dominant imperial powers of the modern era. In Britain, the aloof and stiff upper-lipped English gentleman, that epitome of controlled imperial power, has given way to such verbally incontinent Brexiters as Boris Johnson. The rightwing journalist Douglas Murray, among many elegists of English manhood, deplores “emasculated Italians, Europeans and westerners in general” and esteems Trump for “reminding the west of what is great about ourselves”. And, indeed, whether threatening North Korea with nuclear incineration, belittling people with disabilities or groping women, the American president confirms that some winners of modern history will do anything to shore up their sense of entitlement.
Rear-guard machismo … Vladimir Putin on holiday in southern Siberia in 2009. Photograph: Alexey Druzhinin/AFP/Getty Images
But gaudy displays of brute manliness in the west, and frenzied loathing of what the alt-rightists call “cucks” and “cultural Marxists”, are not merely a reaction to insolent former weaklings. Such manic assertions of hyper-masculinity have recurred in modern history. They have also profoundly shaped politics and culture in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Osama bin Laden believed that Muslims “have been deprived of their manhood” and could recover it by obliterating the phallic symbols of American power. Beheading and raping innocent captives in the name of the caliphate, the black-hooded young volunteers of Islamic State were as obviously a case of psychotic masculinity as the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who claimed Viking warriors as his ancestors. Last month, the Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte told female rebels in his country that “We will not kill you. We will just shoot you in the vagina.” Tormenting hapless minorities, India’s Hindu supremacist chieftains seem obsessed with proving, as one asserted after India’s nuclear tests in 1998, “we are not eunuchs any more”.
Morbid visions of castration and emasculation, civilisational decline and decay, connect Godse and Schlesinger to Bin Laden and Trump, and many other exponents of a rear-guard machismo today. They are susceptible to cliched metaphors of “soft” and “passive” femininity, “hard” and “active” masculinity; they are nostalgic for a time when men did not have to think twice about being men. And whether Hindu chauvinist, radical Islamist or white nationalist, their self-image depends on despising and excluding women. It is as though the fantasy of male strength measures itself most gratifyingly against the fantasy of female weakness. Equating women with impotence and seized by panic about becoming cucks, these rancorously angry men are symptoms of an endemic and seemingly unresolvable crisis of masculinity.
When did this crisis begin? And why does it seem so inescapably global? Writing Age of Anger: A History of the Present, I began to think that a perpetual crisis stalks the modern world. It began in the 19th century, with the most radical shift in human history: the replacement of agrarian and rural societies by a volatile socio-economic order, which, defined by industrial capitalism, came to be rigidly organised through new sexual and racial divisions of labour. And the crisis seems universal today because a web of restrictive gender norms, spun in modernising western Europe and America, has come to cover the remotest corners of the earth as they undergo their own socio-economic revolutions.
There were always many ways of being a man or a woman. Anthropologists and historians of the world’s astonishingly diverse pre-industrial societies have consistently revealed that there is no clear link between biological makeup and behaviour, no connection between masculinity and vigorous men, or femininity and passive women. Indians, British colonialists were disgusted to find, revered belligerent and sexually voracious goddesses, such as Kali; their heroes were flute-playing idlers such as Krishna. A vast Indian literature attests to mutably gendered men and women, elite as well as folk traditions of androgyny and same-sex eroticism.
These unselfconscious traditions began to come under unprecedented assault in the 19th century, when societies constituted by exploitation and exclusion, and stratified along gender and racial lines, emerged as the world’s most powerful; and when such profound shocks of modernity as nation-building, rural-urban migration, imperial expansion and industrialisation drastically changed all modes of human perception. A hierarchy of manly and unmanly human beings had long existed in many societies without being central in them. During the 19th century, it came to be universally imposed, with men and women straitjacketed into specific roles.
‘In the 19th century, the ideal of a strong, fearless manhood came to be embodied in muscular selves, nations, empires and races’
The modern west appears, in the western supremacist version of history, as the guarantor of equality and liberty to all. In actuality, a notion of gender (and racial) inequality, grounded in biological difference, was, as Joan Wallach Scott demonstrates in her recent book Sex and Secularism, nothing less than “the social foundation of modern western nation-states”. Immanuel Kant dismissed women as incapable of practical reason, individual autonomy, objectivity, courage and strength. Napoleon, the child of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, believed women ought to stay at home and procreate; his Napoleonic Code, which inspired state laws across the world, notoriously subordinated women to their fathers and husbands. Thomas Jefferson, America’s founding father, commended women, “who have the good sense to value domestic happiness above all other” and who are “too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics”. Such prejudices helped replace traditional patriarchy with the exclusionary ideals of masculinity as the modern world came into being.
On such grounds, women were denied political participation and forced into subordinate roles in the family and the labour market. Pop psychologists periodically insist that men are from Mars and women from Venus, lamenting the loss of what Peterson calls “traditional” divisions of labour, without acknowledging that capitalist, industrial and expansionist societies required a fresh division of labour, or that the straight white men who supervised them deemed women unfit, due to their physical or intellectual inferiority, to undertake territorial aggrandisement, nation-building, industrial production, international trade, and scientific innovation. Women’s bodies were meant to reproduce and safeguard the future of the family, race and nation; men’s were supposed to labour and fight. To be a “mature” man was to adjust oneself to society and fulfil one’s responsibility as breadwinner, father and soldier. “When men fear work or fear righteous war,” as Theodore Roosevelt put it, “when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom.” As the 19th century progressed, many such cultural assumptions about male and female identity morphed into timeless truths. They are, as Peterson’s rowdy fan club reveals, more vigorously upheld today than the “truths” of racial inequality, which were also simultaneously grounded in “nature”, or pseudo-biology.
Scott points out that the modes of sexual difference defined in the modernising west actually helped secure, “the racial superiority of western nations to their ‘others’ – in Africa, Asia, and Latin America”. “White skin was associated with ‘normal’ gender systems, dark skin with immaturity and perversity.” Thus, the British judged their Kali-worshipping Indian subjects to be an unmanly and childish people who ought not to wrinkle their foreheads with ideas of self-rule. The Chinese were widely seen, including in western Chinatowns, as pigtailed cowards. Even Muslims, Christendom’s formidable old rivals, came to be derided as pitiably “feminine” during the high noon of imperialism.
Gandhi explicitly subverted these gendered prejudices of European imperialists (and their Hindu imitators): that femininity was the absence of masculinity. Rejecting the western identification of rulers with male supremacy and subjecthood with feminine submissiveness, he offered an activist politics based on rigorous self-examination and maternal tenderness. This rejection eventually cost him his life. But he could see how much the male will to power was fed by a fantasy of the female other as a regressive being – someone to be subdued and dominated – and how much this pathology had infected modern politics and culture.
As Hindu nationalisation got into gear, formerly chubby Bollywood stars began to flaunt bulging biceps
Its most insidious expression was the conquest and exploitation of people deemed feminine, and, therefore, less than human – a violence that became normalised in the 19th century. For many Europeans and Americans, to be a true man was to be an ardent imperialist and nationalist. Even so clear-sighted a figure as Alexis de Tocqueville longed for his French male compatriots to realise their “warlike” and “virile” nature in crushing Arabs in north Africa, leaving women to deal with the petty concerns of domestic life.
As the century progressed, the quest for virility distilled a widespread response among men psychically battered by such uncontrollable and emasculating phenomena as industrialisation, urbanisation and mechanisation. The ideal of a strong, fearless manhood came to be embodied in muscular selves, nations, empires and races. Living up to this daunting ideal required eradicating all traces of feminine timidity and childishness. Failure incited self-loathing – and a craving for regenerative violence. Mocked with such unmanly epithets as “weakling” and “Oscar Wilde”, Roosevelt tried to overcome, Gore Vidal once pointed out, “his physical fragility through ‘manly’ activities of which the most exciting and ennobling was war”. It is no coincidence that the loathing of homosexuals, and the hunt for sacrificial victims such as Wilde, was never more vicious and organized than during this most intense phase of European imperialism.
One image came to be central to all attempts to recuperate the lost manhood of self and nation: the invincible body, represented in our own age of extremes by steroid-juiced, knobbly musculature. Actually, size matters today much less than it ever did; not many muscles are required for increasingly sedentary work habits and lifestyles. Nevertheless, an obsession with raw brawn and sheer mass still shapes political cultures. Trump’s boasts about the size of his body parts were preceded by Vladimir Putin’s displays of his pectorals – advertisements for a Russia re-masculinised after its emasculation by Boris Yeltsin, a flabby drunk. But shirtless hunks are also a striking recent phenomenon in Godse’s “rising” India. In the 90s, just as India’s Hindu nationalisation got into gear, formerly scrawny or chubby Bollywood stars began to flaunt glisteningly hard abs and bulging biceps; Rama, the lean-limbed hero of the Ramayana, started to resemble Rambo in calendar art and political posters. These buffed-up bodies of popular culture foreshadowed Modi, who rose to power boasting of his 56-inch chest, and promising true national potency to young unemployed stragglers.
This vengeful masculinist nationalism was the original creation of Germans in the early 19th century, who first outlined a vision of creating a superbly fit people or master race and fervently embraced such typically modern forms of physical exercise as gymnastics, callisthenics and yoga and fads like nudism. But pumped-up anatomy emerged as a “natural” embodiment of the evidently exclusive male virtue of strength only as the century ended. As societies across the west became more industrial, urban and bureaucratic, property-owning farmers and self-employed artisans rapidly turned into faceless office workers and professionals. With “rational calculation” installed as the new deity, “each man”, Max Weber warned in 1909, “becomes a little cog in the machine”, pathetically obsessed with becoming “a bigger cog”. Increasingly deprived of their old skills and autonomy in the iron cage of modernity, working class men tried to secure their dignity by embodying it in bulky brawn.
India’s prime minister Narendra Modi rose to power boasting of his 56-inch chest, and promising true national potency. Photograph: Danish Ismail/Reuters
Historians have emphasised how male workers, humiliated by such repressive industrial practices as automation and time management, also began to assert their manhood by swearing, drinking and sexually harassing the few women in the workforce – the beginning of an aggressive hardhat culture that has reached deep into blue-collar workplaces during the decades-long reign of neoliberalism. Towards the end of the 19th century large numbers of men embraced sports and physical fitness, and launched fan clubs of pugnacious footballers and boxers.
It wasn’t just working men. Upper-class parents in America and Britain had begun to send their sons to boarding schools in the hope that their bodies and moral characters would be suitably toughened up in the absence of corrupting feminine influences. Competitive sports, which were first organised in the second half of the 19th century, became a much-favoured means of pre-empting sissiness – and of mass-producing virile imperialists. It was widely believed that putative empire-builders would be too exhausted by their exertions on the playing fields of Eton and Harrow to masturbate.
But masculinity, a dream of power, tends to get more elusive the more intensely it is pursued; and the dread of emasculation by opaque economic, political and social forces continued to deepen. It drove many fin de siècle writers as well as politicians in Europe and the US into hyper-masculine trances of racial nationalism – and, eventually, the calamity of the first world war. Nations and races as well as individuals were conceptualised as biological entities, which could be honed into unassailable organisms. Fear of “race suicide”, cults of physical education and daydreams of a “New Man” went global, along with strictures against masturbation, as the inflexible modern ideology of gender difference reached non-western societies.
European colonialists went on to impose laws that enshrined their virulent homophobia and promoted heterosexual conjugality and patrilineal orders. Their prejudices were also entrenched outside the west by the victims of what the Indian critic Ashis Nandy calls “internal colonialism”: those subjects of European empires who pleaded guilty to the accusation that they were effeminate, and who decided to man up in order to catch up with their white overlords.
This accounts for a startling and still little explored phenomenon: how men within all major religious communities – Buddhist, Hindu and Jewish as well as Christian and Islamic – started in the late 19th century to simultaneously bemoan their lost virility and urge the creation of hard, inviolable bodies, whether of individual men, the nation or the umma. These included early Zionists (Max Nordau, who dreamed of Muskeljudentum, “Jewry of Muscle”), Asian anti-imperialists (Swami Vivekananda, Modi’s hero, who exhorted Hindus to build “biceps”, and Anagarika Dharmapala, who helped develop the muscular Buddhism being horribly flexed by Myanmar’s ethnic-cleansers these days) as well as fanatical imperialists such as Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement.
The most lethal consequences of this mimic machismo unfolded in the first decades of the 20th century. “Never before and never afterwards”, as historian George Mosse, the pioneering historian of masculinity, wrote, “has masculinity been elevated to such heights as during fascism”. Mussolini, like Roosevelt, transformed himself from a sissy into a fire-breathing imperialist. “The weak must be hammered away,” declared Hitler, another physically ill-favoured fascist. Such wannabe members of the Aryan master race accordingly defined themselves against the cowardly Jew and discovered themselves as men of steel in acts of mass murder.
This hunt for manliness continues to contaminate politics and culture across the world in the 21st century. Rapid economic, social and technological change in our own time has plunged an exponentially larger number of uprooted and bewildered men into a doomed quest for masculine certainties. The scope for old-style imperialist aggrandisement and forging a master race may have diminished. But there are, in the age of neoliberal individualism, infinitely more unrealised claims to masculine identity in grotesquely unequal societies around the world. Myths of the self-made man have forced men everywhere into a relentless and often futile hunt for individual power and wealth, in which they imagine women and members of minorities as competitors. Many more men try to degrade and exclude women in their attempt to show some mastery that is supposed to inhere in their biological nature.
Fear of feminizsation has driven demagogic movements like that unleashed by the locker room bully in the White House
Frustration and fear of feminisation have helped boost demagogic movements similar to the one unleashed by the locker room bully in the White House. Godse’s hyper-masculine cliches have vanquished the traditions of androgyny that Gandhi upheld – and not just in India. Young Pakistani men revere the playboy-turned-politician Imran Khan as their alpha male redeemer; they turn viciously on critics of his indiscretions. Similarly embodying a triumphant masculinity in the eyes of his followers, the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can do no wrong. Rodrigo Duterte jokes, with brazen frequency, about rape.
Misogyny now flourishes in the public sphere because, as in modernising Europe and America, many toilers daydream of a primordial past when real men were on top, and women knew their place. Loathing of “liberated” women who seem to be usurping male domains is evident not only on social media but also in brutal physical assaults. These are sanctioned by pseudo-traditional ideologies such as Hindu supremacism and Islamic fundamentalism that offer to many thwarted men in Asia and Africa a redeeming machismo: the gratifying replacement of neoliberalism’s bogus promise of equal opportunity with old-style patriarchy.
Susan Faludi argues that many Americans used the 9/11 attacks to shrink the gains of feminism and push women back into passive roles. Peterson’s traditionalism is the latest of many attempts in the west in recent years to restore the authority of men, or to remasculinise society. These include the deployment of “shock-and-awe” violence, loathing of cucks, cultural Marxists and feminists, re-imagining a silver-spooned posturer like Bush as superman, and, finally, the political apotheosis of a serial groper.
This recurrent search for security in coarse manhood confirms that the history of modern masculinity is the history of a fantasy. It describes the doomed quest for a stable and ordered world that entails nothing less than war on the irrepressible plurality of human existence – a war that is periodically renewed despite its devastating failures. An outlandish phobia of women and effeminacy may be hardwired into the long social, political and cultural dominance of men. It could be that their wounded sense of entitlement, or resentment over being denied their customary claim to power and privilege, will continue to make many men vulnerable to such vendors of faux masculinity as Trump and Modi. A compassionate analysis of their rage and despair, however, would conclude that men are as much imprisoned by man-made gender norms as women.
“One is not born, but rather becomes a woman” wrote Simone de Beauvoir. She might as well have said the same for men. “It is civilisation as a whole that produces such a creature.” And forces him into a ruinous pursuit of power. Compared with women, men are almost everywhere more exposed to alcoholism, drug addiction, serious accidents and cardiovascular disease; they have significantly lower life expectancies and are more likely to kill themselves. The first victims of the quest for a mythical male potency are arguably men themselves, whether in school playgrounds, offices, prisons or battlefields. This everyday experience of fear and trauma binds them to women in more ways than most men, trapped by myths of resolute manhood, tend to acknowledge.
Certainly, men would waste this latest crisis of masculinity if they deny or underplay the experience of vulnerability they share with women on a planet that is itself endangered. Masculine power will always remain maddeningly elusive, prone to periodic crises, breakdowns and panicky reassertions. It is an unfulfillable ideal, a hallucination of command and control, and an illusion of mastery, in a world where all that is solid melts into thin air, and where even the ostensibly powerful are haunted by the spectre of loss and displacement. As a straitjacket of onerous roles and impossible expectations, masculinity has become a source of great suffering – for men as much as women. To understand this is not only to grasp its global crisis today. It is also to sight one possibility of resolving the crisis: a release from the absurd but crippling fear that one has not been man enough.
This is how to curb Putin: stop welcoming Russian kleptocrats
Margaret Hodge in The Guardian
The monstrous attempted murders in Salisbury, allegedly authorised by the Russian state, were shocking. Expelling diplomats, limiting attendance at the World Cup, and orchestrating international condemnation through the UN and Nato are good symbolic gestures. But they will not stop Russian state-inspired terrorism taking place in the UK.
Wouldn’t it be far more effective to clamp down on Russian use of Britain as a safe haven for illegal wealth? Britain has become the jurisdiction of choice for kleptocrats, crooks and money launderers – including Russians – because of our weak regulatory framework, shrouded in secrecy and very lightly policed.
Our historic reputation for integrity and trustworthiness is being undermined by the rapid growth of illicit wealth that is brought into or through the UK and its tax havens. The National Crime Agency estimates that £90bn of criminal money is laundered through the UK each year. That is 4% of the UK’s GDP – and the estimate is probably conservative.
Much of the money goes into buying UK properties. Global Witness claims 85,000 properties across the UK are owned by companies that are incorporated in UK tax havens. According to Transparency International, almost one in 10 of the properties in the City of Westminster are owned by companies registered in an offshore jurisdiction. Many of the houses are bought and then left to lie empty; Indeed, Kensington and Chelsea’s electoral roll has declined by 8% since 2010, while the UK as a whole has experienced a 3% increase in its electorate over the same period. So who is buying homes in the borough, and why are they leaving them empty?
Britain has always been open and welcoming, and there are many people from other countries who want to come and live here for good reasons who make a great contribution to our society. But we need to know that those buying our houses are doing so for legitimate reasons, and with clean money.
In 2015, David Cameron promised to introduce a register detailing the beneficial owner of all UK properties. But the government has just announced this will not happen before 2021. If we really want to stop corrupt money – from Russia and elsewhere – being used to acquire British homes the government could implement Cameron’s undertaking immediately. And it should strengthen the checks and balances on company formation: the laxness of current rules makes it too easy for crooks to set up corporate entities through which they might launder money.
Consider Scottish limited partnerships. These were created in 1907 to help Scottish farmers invest in their land but limit their liability. But when you set one up, you are not required to name an actual person as a partner: you simply cite a company, often located in a tax haven. The reporting requirements for Scottish partnerships are minimal: there is no need to file accounts at Companies House, no requirement to have a UK bank account, and no need to pay UK tax.
This allows the creation of anonymous and untraceable entities for potentially laundered money. Unsurprisingly, there was a 430% increase in the creation of Scottish limited partnerships between 2007 and 2016. In 2016 alone, 94% of the new partnerships were set up by corporate partners, and more than seven out of 10 of these were based in tax havens.
Last year the government required newly formed partnerships to register the names of the person with significant control in a company. A quarter of the new Scottish partnerships have failed to reveal this information. Of those that did complete the register, 30% were Ukrainian, 16% were Russian and just 8.7% were British.If we simply required better information about those who set up UK corporate entities, we could stem the flow of dirty money into Britain. All we need do is ask for a birth certificate or passport so we can assess the legitimacy of both the individual and their money.
We should also strengthen the way our corporate structures are policed. It’s ridiculous that just six people in Companies House are trying to check whether or not some 4m companies comply with the law and provide accurate information. It’s shortsighted to starve HMRC, the police, the Serious Fraud Office and the Financial Conduct Authority of the resources they need to stamp out corruption and tackle financial crime.
Finally a growing number of MPs from all parties want the government to implement another undertaking made by David Cameron in 2013. We need public registers of beneficial ownership in our tax havens so that the public, the media and civil society knows who owns the companies that hide their identity and their wealth in these secret jurisdictions. Transparency would at a stroke stop tax havens being used for corrupt purposes by criminals from Russia and elsewhere. The government could use the anti-money laundering bill currently being considered by parliament to do this.
Take these actions. Then the Russians would know that when we say we will not allow unlawful acts by states or criminals to pass without punishment, we mean it.
The monstrous attempted murders in Salisbury, allegedly authorised by the Russian state, were shocking. Expelling diplomats, limiting attendance at the World Cup, and orchestrating international condemnation through the UN and Nato are good symbolic gestures. But they will not stop Russian state-inspired terrorism taking place in the UK.
Wouldn’t it be far more effective to clamp down on Russian use of Britain as a safe haven for illegal wealth? Britain has become the jurisdiction of choice for kleptocrats, crooks and money launderers – including Russians – because of our weak regulatory framework, shrouded in secrecy and very lightly policed.
Our historic reputation for integrity and trustworthiness is being undermined by the rapid growth of illicit wealth that is brought into or through the UK and its tax havens. The National Crime Agency estimates that £90bn of criminal money is laundered through the UK each year. That is 4% of the UK’s GDP – and the estimate is probably conservative.
Much of the money goes into buying UK properties. Global Witness claims 85,000 properties across the UK are owned by companies that are incorporated in UK tax havens. According to Transparency International, almost one in 10 of the properties in the City of Westminster are owned by companies registered in an offshore jurisdiction. Many of the houses are bought and then left to lie empty; Indeed, Kensington and Chelsea’s electoral roll has declined by 8% since 2010, while the UK as a whole has experienced a 3% increase in its electorate over the same period. So who is buying homes in the borough, and why are they leaving them empty?
Britain has always been open and welcoming, and there are many people from other countries who want to come and live here for good reasons who make a great contribution to our society. But we need to know that those buying our houses are doing so for legitimate reasons, and with clean money.
In 2015, David Cameron promised to introduce a register detailing the beneficial owner of all UK properties. But the government has just announced this will not happen before 2021. If we really want to stop corrupt money – from Russia and elsewhere – being used to acquire British homes the government could implement Cameron’s undertaking immediately. And it should strengthen the checks and balances on company formation: the laxness of current rules makes it too easy for crooks to set up corporate entities through which they might launder money.
Consider Scottish limited partnerships. These were created in 1907 to help Scottish farmers invest in their land but limit their liability. But when you set one up, you are not required to name an actual person as a partner: you simply cite a company, often located in a tax haven. The reporting requirements for Scottish partnerships are minimal: there is no need to file accounts at Companies House, no requirement to have a UK bank account, and no need to pay UK tax.
This allows the creation of anonymous and untraceable entities for potentially laundered money. Unsurprisingly, there was a 430% increase in the creation of Scottish limited partnerships between 2007 and 2016. In 2016 alone, 94% of the new partnerships were set up by corporate partners, and more than seven out of 10 of these were based in tax havens.
Last year the government required newly formed partnerships to register the names of the person with significant control in a company. A quarter of the new Scottish partnerships have failed to reveal this information. Of those that did complete the register, 30% were Ukrainian, 16% were Russian and just 8.7% were British.If we simply required better information about those who set up UK corporate entities, we could stem the flow of dirty money into Britain. All we need do is ask for a birth certificate or passport so we can assess the legitimacy of both the individual and their money.
We should also strengthen the way our corporate structures are policed. It’s ridiculous that just six people in Companies House are trying to check whether or not some 4m companies comply with the law and provide accurate information. It’s shortsighted to starve HMRC, the police, the Serious Fraud Office and the Financial Conduct Authority of the resources they need to stamp out corruption and tackle financial crime.
Finally a growing number of MPs from all parties want the government to implement another undertaking made by David Cameron in 2013. We need public registers of beneficial ownership in our tax havens so that the public, the media and civil society knows who owns the companies that hide their identity and their wealth in these secret jurisdictions. Transparency would at a stroke stop tax havens being used for corrupt purposes by criminals from Russia and elsewhere. The government could use the anti-money laundering bill currently being considered by parliament to do this.
Take these actions. Then the Russians would know that when we say we will not allow unlawful acts by states or criminals to pass without punishment, we mean it.
Friday, 16 March 2018
Is your university degree barely worth the paper it’s written on? Discuss
Sonia Sodha in The Guardian
In the past few decades we’ve seen a huge growth in undergraduate numbers. Back in 1945, a tiny 2% of the population went to university; today, just over 43% of young people in England go; the latest prediction is that an extra 300,000 places will be needed by 2030. We’re frequently told that graduates earn more on average than non-graduates; that universities boost local economies; and, of course, that a degree stretches the mind and nurtures critical thinking. Those who interrogate this logic are easily dismissed as philistines, or reactionaries who don’t care that expansion has occurred alongside record numbers of disadvantaged young people going to university.
But the thinking around why we’ve expanded undergraduate education so significantly is rather woolly. Is more always better? What are we hoping to achieve by sending ever greater numbers to university, apart from widening access (which could instead be achieved through the use of quotas for young people from poorer backgrounds for university admissions)?
The economics professor Bryan Caplan raises an important question in a controversial new book, The Case Against Education. How much of the benefits of a degree comes from the skills you acquire in studying for it? And how much from the piece of paper at the end – what your degree certificate signals to employers about the skills and attributes you might have had long before you filled in a university application form?
Universities UK claims that the institutions add over £60bn worth of skills with each cohort of graduates. But this analysis simply wishes away Caplan’s question by assuming all the higher earning that graduates get is down to the skills they pick up doing their degree.
The truth is that a fair bit of the earnings boost provided by a degree – we don’t know how much – is likely to come from the fact that a graduate has, in the eyes of employers, jumped through a hoop in a world where growing numbers of their peers are doing likewise. If everyone else going for that bar job has a degree, you’d better have one too. It’s becoming more common to have a degree in jobs for which you wouldn’t have needed one 30 years ago. South Korea provides a cautionary tale: 70% of the country’s school-leavers go to university, but recent graduates are facing relatively high rates of unemployment, and it is not unheard of to find graduates working as caretakers.
Boosting earning potential is not the only reason we send young people to university. But to go beyond that, we need to be able to better answer the age-old question of what undergraduate education is for. A distinction is often drawn between those who see its primary purpose as the expansion of the mind that comes from learning for learning’s sake – and those who see it as providing important vocational training for specific jobs. Both traditions have a longstanding history in our system.
The philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues powerfully that in an increasingly uncertain world, it has never been more important for universities to “educate the imagination” rather than impart specific skills. She’s not alone: the technology giant Apple has poached renowned thinkers such as Joshua Cohen to be part of the faculty at its employee “university”; Silicon Valley firms are recruiting not just computer whizzes but liberal arts grads.
With the absorption of polytechnics back in the 1990s, universities have played a growing role in vocational training – and not just for professions like engineering or nursing. Universities are increasingly focusing on graduate “employability”; one new university that promises to take its students on a “personal development journey” is even guaranteeing them all a one-year work placement at companies such as Microsoft as part of a three-year degree.
So perhaps we don’t have to zero in specifically on what we want universities to achieve with young people. The former higher education minister David Willetts is very relaxed about the notion that different courses do different things: studying history might be great preparation for some non-history related jobs; but he’s also a big fan of universities that have a great reputation for specific skills, like construction at Southbank or media production at Bournemouth.
But this still doesn’t answer the Caplan challenge. When it comes to hospitals and schools, we have impartial – albeit imperfect – data about how good they are at fulfilling their missions. Because universities award their own degrees, and firsts from different universities cannot be regarded as comparable, this is a difficult task for undergraduate education. This is a problem, particularly given we don’t really know whether university is the best place to pick up “on the job” skills, or whether we are trying to emulate in our universities – at much greater cost to taxpayers and students – what employers would have once provided.
Trying to generate good and comparable data about the skills young people develop as a result of studying for a degree is not without risks of reductionism. But if universities think their courses expand creativity, nurture critical thinking and develop important workplace skills, surely they should be up for putting that to the test?
This is critical in a world where it is entirely rational for individuals to opt to go to university so they can compete on a level playing field – even if they suspect the skills they develop might not in themselves be worth the price-tag or time. It might be difficult to develop the measures we need to test the hunch behind the established education consensus that more is better. But we owe it to young people to at least try.
In the past few decades we’ve seen a huge growth in undergraduate numbers. Back in 1945, a tiny 2% of the population went to university; today, just over 43% of young people in England go; the latest prediction is that an extra 300,000 places will be needed by 2030. We’re frequently told that graduates earn more on average than non-graduates; that universities boost local economies; and, of course, that a degree stretches the mind and nurtures critical thinking. Those who interrogate this logic are easily dismissed as philistines, or reactionaries who don’t care that expansion has occurred alongside record numbers of disadvantaged young people going to university.
But the thinking around why we’ve expanded undergraduate education so significantly is rather woolly. Is more always better? What are we hoping to achieve by sending ever greater numbers to university, apart from widening access (which could instead be achieved through the use of quotas for young people from poorer backgrounds for university admissions)?
The economics professor Bryan Caplan raises an important question in a controversial new book, The Case Against Education. How much of the benefits of a degree comes from the skills you acquire in studying for it? And how much from the piece of paper at the end – what your degree certificate signals to employers about the skills and attributes you might have had long before you filled in a university application form?
Universities UK claims that the institutions add over £60bn worth of skills with each cohort of graduates. But this analysis simply wishes away Caplan’s question by assuming all the higher earning that graduates get is down to the skills they pick up doing their degree.
The truth is that a fair bit of the earnings boost provided by a degree – we don’t know how much – is likely to come from the fact that a graduate has, in the eyes of employers, jumped through a hoop in a world where growing numbers of their peers are doing likewise. If everyone else going for that bar job has a degree, you’d better have one too. It’s becoming more common to have a degree in jobs for which you wouldn’t have needed one 30 years ago. South Korea provides a cautionary tale: 70% of the country’s school-leavers go to university, but recent graduates are facing relatively high rates of unemployment, and it is not unheard of to find graduates working as caretakers.
Boosting earning potential is not the only reason we send young people to university. But to go beyond that, we need to be able to better answer the age-old question of what undergraduate education is for. A distinction is often drawn between those who see its primary purpose as the expansion of the mind that comes from learning for learning’s sake – and those who see it as providing important vocational training for specific jobs. Both traditions have a longstanding history in our system.
The philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues powerfully that in an increasingly uncertain world, it has never been more important for universities to “educate the imagination” rather than impart specific skills. She’s not alone: the technology giant Apple has poached renowned thinkers such as Joshua Cohen to be part of the faculty at its employee “university”; Silicon Valley firms are recruiting not just computer whizzes but liberal arts grads.
With the absorption of polytechnics back in the 1990s, universities have played a growing role in vocational training – and not just for professions like engineering or nursing. Universities are increasingly focusing on graduate “employability”; one new university that promises to take its students on a “personal development journey” is even guaranteeing them all a one-year work placement at companies such as Microsoft as part of a three-year degree.
So perhaps we don’t have to zero in specifically on what we want universities to achieve with young people. The former higher education minister David Willetts is very relaxed about the notion that different courses do different things: studying history might be great preparation for some non-history related jobs; but he’s also a big fan of universities that have a great reputation for specific skills, like construction at Southbank or media production at Bournemouth.
But this still doesn’t answer the Caplan challenge. When it comes to hospitals and schools, we have impartial – albeit imperfect – data about how good they are at fulfilling their missions. Because universities award their own degrees, and firsts from different universities cannot be regarded as comparable, this is a difficult task for undergraduate education. This is a problem, particularly given we don’t really know whether university is the best place to pick up “on the job” skills, or whether we are trying to emulate in our universities – at much greater cost to taxpayers and students – what employers would have once provided.
Trying to generate good and comparable data about the skills young people develop as a result of studying for a degree is not without risks of reductionism. But if universities think their courses expand creativity, nurture critical thinking and develop important workplace skills, surely they should be up for putting that to the test?
This is critical in a world where it is entirely rational for individuals to opt to go to university so they can compete on a level playing field – even if they suspect the skills they develop might not in themselves be worth the price-tag or time. It might be difficult to develop the measures we need to test the hunch behind the established education consensus that more is better. But we owe it to young people to at least try.
Wednesday, 14 March 2018
The workers who bought out their bosses – and secured their futures
By Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian
It had all been going so well. In this smoothest of seductions, John Clark and Alistair Miller hadn’t had to do a thing. There they were, itching to sell their business and get on with retirement. Then one day in the middle of 2015, this American firm – big-time, way out of their league – swung by the factory outside Glasgow and asked: what price do you have in mind? This was followed by an invitation back to the multinational’s European headquarters in the home counties.
So off popped Miller. The two sides were inching towards the dotted line when he casually inquired what the Americans would do with their new Scottish premises. This one question sent the needle screeching across the record.
As soon as the managing director across the desk started talking about “exploring possibilities” and “transferable technologies”, Miller knew what she meant. Their Scottish operation would run for another six months, a year tops. Then it would be shut – and the order book and the technology shifted down south. And when the factory disappeared, so too would the jobs and the livelihoods of 60-odd workers and their families. Selling up would hand the owners a huge cheque, and leave their staff on a tiny giro.
“You’d be sitting back with your piles of cash,” says Clark, “but at some point you’re going to bump into those guys. Some of them have been there longer than me. I know their families.”
“Those guys” helped to build this place. Since its launch in 1986, Novograf has gone from printing signs for vans to working with some of the biggest chains in Britain. It has become expert in the branding that envelops you while shopping, eating or holidaying, but which you never take in. Walk around a Co-op supermarket, and the signs guiding you to the wine and beer or fruit and veg aisles will be Novograf’s. Pop into a Pizza Hut and the wood-look flooring will have been made and laid by Novograf employees. Stay at an Ibis Styles hotel and the big fat number on your room door probably comes from their East Kilbride factory. Then there’s Greggs, Iceland, Tesco, Waitrose …
Miller and Clark hadn’t poured six decades of their combined lives into this venture only to leave a plump carcass for others to feed on. But the two sixtysomethings had run smack into one of the central problems of British capitalism: how to ensure a company’s owners look after it. Pretty much any spiv with a chequebook can buy a business in the UK and ruin it as they want. Westminster will ask few questions, expect even less accountability, and never learn any lessons. That fanatical British adherence to open markets and property rights leaves the staff, the suppliers and the public counting for little.
The publisher of Horny Housewives, Richard Desmond, bought the Express stable in 2000 without New Labour ministers raising an eyebrow. A once-great paper was wrecked and hundreds of journalists lost their jobs, but Desmond pocketed nearly £350m before he sold it to Trinity Mirror this year.
In 2005, Manchester United football club was snapped up by the Glazer family, who paid for it by borrowing hundreds of millions that they loaded on to the club’s balance sheet – before shifting its headquarters to the tax haven of the Cayman Islands, a 10,000-mile round trip from the club’s Old Trafford stadium.
Philip Green may strip BHS bare; Cadbury can be ravaged by Kraft; Australian investment bank Macquarie can run Thames Water into the ground then, as a reward, get the public’s Green Investment Bank. Each time owners damage a business, employees and often customers get shafted, and local economies suffer – while a handful right at the top cash in.
But Miller and Clark can tell you how much depends on the simple fact of ownership. It helps shape the business model, the ethos and culture of a company. However, even as they tried to secure a careful owner for their business, all the plausible options were a no-go.
Sell to a rival? Their staff and values would be discarded like used wrapping paper. Cash out to private equity? A green light for a corporate ransacking. Neither man’s children wanted to trudge in their dad’s footsteps, and senior management were not in a position to buy them out.
‘I could be sitting back on piles of cash. But at some point you’re going to bump into those guys. I know their families.’ John Clark, chairman and former owner of Navograf. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian
Just then, a postcard flopped on to the doormat. “Thinking of exiting your business?” it asked. When the man from Scottish Enterprise, an agency of the Holyrood government, told them about worker ownership, he got blank faces. The biggest employee-owned firm in the UK, John Lewis, was a Novograf customer, yet all Clark knew about its structure was that once a year the company would be on the news for paying “partners” a tax-free bonus. Which was lovely, Clark and Miller thought, but what did that have to do with them?
Employee ownership is as simple as selling a company to its staff. Over 300 British firms have done it, from Arup architects to Waitrose. But it is as radical as giving the people who create a business’s wealth the right to share in it. That wealth is no longer handed over to remote shareholders in the form of share buybacks and dividends.
When Clark and Miller “got off our butts” and visited a few of the 95 Scottish firms now owned by their employees, “we learned that their productivity was higher, that they were more resilient in bad times, that they were more inclusive of all their staff”.
Giving workers control over their companies doesn’t just make the firms more successful, it also makes the workers a lot better off. Last year, the California-based National Center for Employee Ownership analysed US jobs figures and found that younger workers who are worker-owners enjoy 33% higher wages and 92% higher median household wealththan those who aren’t owners.
The British government knows much of this, because it commissioned a report that told it so. The very first line of Graeme Nuttall’s 2012 review reads: “Employee ownership is a great idea.” After lobbying by Liberal Democrat ministers, two years later chancellor George Osborne scrapped capital gains tax for employers who transferred a majority share of their business to workers. This was back when Osborne and David Cameron would hymn “the John Lewis model”.
Just like “the march of the makers” and the “big society”, the fad has left little trace. Of the 2,617 full-time equivalent civil servants at the Department for Business, not one is dedicated to promoting worker ownership, as advised by the Nuttall review. The same report also recommends “the appointment of a minister responsible for promoting employee ownership across government”. Yet this department confirmed to me that not even its most junior minister holds any such brief.
That silence partly explains why employee ownership remains so exotic. When Clark and Miller announced their idea for selling the company to their staff, they hired a local hotel, put on fancy nibbles and gave a great presentation. “The very first question we got was, ‘Have we still got a job?’” remembers Clark. “Nobody had a clue what it meant,” recalls factory technician David Anderson. “People assumed that everyone was going to have to get a mortgage to buy the company.”
Four hundred miles north of Whitehall, the far smaller Scottish Enterprise employs eight full-time staffers to promote and advise on worker ownership and other “inclusive models” of organising companies. The SNP government is full-square behind it, and the Herald, the Record and the Scotsman newspapers trumpet this Inverness holiday resort or that Hebridean jewellers being taken over by its employees.
Just two decades ago, newly devolved Holyrood paid through the nose for inward investment and prayed that the multinationals would repay their lavish subsidies with lasting jobs. They rarely did. Hewlett Packard, Chunghwa Picture Tubes and many others pulled the corporate equivalent of a one-night stand.
It had all been going so well. In this smoothest of seductions, John Clark and Alistair Miller hadn’t had to do a thing. There they were, itching to sell their business and get on with retirement. Then one day in the middle of 2015, this American firm – big-time, way out of their league – swung by the factory outside Glasgow and asked: what price do you have in mind? This was followed by an invitation back to the multinational’s European headquarters in the home counties.
So off popped Miller. The two sides were inching towards the dotted line when he casually inquired what the Americans would do with their new Scottish premises. This one question sent the needle screeching across the record.
As soon as the managing director across the desk started talking about “exploring possibilities” and “transferable technologies”, Miller knew what she meant. Their Scottish operation would run for another six months, a year tops. Then it would be shut – and the order book and the technology shifted down south. And when the factory disappeared, so too would the jobs and the livelihoods of 60-odd workers and their families. Selling up would hand the owners a huge cheque, and leave their staff on a tiny giro.
“You’d be sitting back with your piles of cash,” says Clark, “but at some point you’re going to bump into those guys. Some of them have been there longer than me. I know their families.”
“Those guys” helped to build this place. Since its launch in 1986, Novograf has gone from printing signs for vans to working with some of the biggest chains in Britain. It has become expert in the branding that envelops you while shopping, eating or holidaying, but which you never take in. Walk around a Co-op supermarket, and the signs guiding you to the wine and beer or fruit and veg aisles will be Novograf’s. Pop into a Pizza Hut and the wood-look flooring will have been made and laid by Novograf employees. Stay at an Ibis Styles hotel and the big fat number on your room door probably comes from their East Kilbride factory. Then there’s Greggs, Iceland, Tesco, Waitrose …
Miller and Clark hadn’t poured six decades of their combined lives into this venture only to leave a plump carcass for others to feed on. But the two sixtysomethings had run smack into one of the central problems of British capitalism: how to ensure a company’s owners look after it. Pretty much any spiv with a chequebook can buy a business in the UK and ruin it as they want. Westminster will ask few questions, expect even less accountability, and never learn any lessons. That fanatical British adherence to open markets and property rights leaves the staff, the suppliers and the public counting for little.
The publisher of Horny Housewives, Richard Desmond, bought the Express stable in 2000 without New Labour ministers raising an eyebrow. A once-great paper was wrecked and hundreds of journalists lost their jobs, but Desmond pocketed nearly £350m before he sold it to Trinity Mirror this year.
In 2005, Manchester United football club was snapped up by the Glazer family, who paid for it by borrowing hundreds of millions that they loaded on to the club’s balance sheet – before shifting its headquarters to the tax haven of the Cayman Islands, a 10,000-mile round trip from the club’s Old Trafford stadium.
Philip Green may strip BHS bare; Cadbury can be ravaged by Kraft; Australian investment bank Macquarie can run Thames Water into the ground then, as a reward, get the public’s Green Investment Bank. Each time owners damage a business, employees and often customers get shafted, and local economies suffer – while a handful right at the top cash in.
But Miller and Clark can tell you how much depends on the simple fact of ownership. It helps shape the business model, the ethos and culture of a company. However, even as they tried to secure a careful owner for their business, all the plausible options were a no-go.
Sell to a rival? Their staff and values would be discarded like used wrapping paper. Cash out to private equity? A green light for a corporate ransacking. Neither man’s children wanted to trudge in their dad’s footsteps, and senior management were not in a position to buy them out.
‘I could be sitting back on piles of cash. But at some point you’re going to bump into those guys. I know their families.’ John Clark, chairman and former owner of Navograf. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian
Just then, a postcard flopped on to the doormat. “Thinking of exiting your business?” it asked. When the man from Scottish Enterprise, an agency of the Holyrood government, told them about worker ownership, he got blank faces. The biggest employee-owned firm in the UK, John Lewis, was a Novograf customer, yet all Clark knew about its structure was that once a year the company would be on the news for paying “partners” a tax-free bonus. Which was lovely, Clark and Miller thought, but what did that have to do with them?
Employee ownership is as simple as selling a company to its staff. Over 300 British firms have done it, from Arup architects to Waitrose. But it is as radical as giving the people who create a business’s wealth the right to share in it. That wealth is no longer handed over to remote shareholders in the form of share buybacks and dividends.
When Clark and Miller “got off our butts” and visited a few of the 95 Scottish firms now owned by their employees, “we learned that their productivity was higher, that they were more resilient in bad times, that they were more inclusive of all their staff”.
Giving workers control over their companies doesn’t just make the firms more successful, it also makes the workers a lot better off. Last year, the California-based National Center for Employee Ownership analysed US jobs figures and found that younger workers who are worker-owners enjoy 33% higher wages and 92% higher median household wealththan those who aren’t owners.
The British government knows much of this, because it commissioned a report that told it so. The very first line of Graeme Nuttall’s 2012 review reads: “Employee ownership is a great idea.” After lobbying by Liberal Democrat ministers, two years later chancellor George Osborne scrapped capital gains tax for employers who transferred a majority share of their business to workers. This was back when Osborne and David Cameron would hymn “the John Lewis model”.
Just like “the march of the makers” and the “big society”, the fad has left little trace. Of the 2,617 full-time equivalent civil servants at the Department for Business, not one is dedicated to promoting worker ownership, as advised by the Nuttall review. The same report also recommends “the appointment of a minister responsible for promoting employee ownership across government”. Yet this department confirmed to me that not even its most junior minister holds any such brief.
That silence partly explains why employee ownership remains so exotic. When Clark and Miller announced their idea for selling the company to their staff, they hired a local hotel, put on fancy nibbles and gave a great presentation. “The very first question we got was, ‘Have we still got a job?’” remembers Clark. “Nobody had a clue what it meant,” recalls factory technician David Anderson. “People assumed that everyone was going to have to get a mortgage to buy the company.”
Four hundred miles north of Whitehall, the far smaller Scottish Enterprise employs eight full-time staffers to promote and advise on worker ownership and other “inclusive models” of organising companies. The SNP government is full-square behind it, and the Herald, the Record and the Scotsman newspapers trumpet this Inverness holiday resort or that Hebridean jewellers being taken over by its employees.
Just two decades ago, newly devolved Holyrood paid through the nose for inward investment and prayed that the multinationals would repay their lavish subsidies with lasting jobs. They rarely did. Hewlett Packard, Chunghwa Picture Tubes and many others pulled the corporate equivalent of a one-night stand.
‘Everyone received a decent tax-free bonus last year, and also took part in the first-ever staff survey, which led to sick-pay and leave entitlement becoming more generous.’ Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian
Holyrood can still relapse – such as when it gifted Amazon £2.5m of taxpayers’ money and got back a distribution warehouse in Dunfermline. But Scottish Enterprise’s Sarah Deas talks of fostering a Mittelstand – a German-style dense network of medium-sized businesses that think long term and honour their social obligations.
Which is a reminder that British business is not some political monolith – that it can break left as well as right. White-haired Clark is appalled at “the FTSE guys”, the chief executives paid 100 times the average wage of their workers. “What are they doing to deserve that?”
Clark is not, he says, “some paternalistic capitalist” or a “crusader”. He’s “hardnosed”, and with Miller got a fair price for Novograf. But they’ve also taken big risks to ensure their workers could afford it. It proved impossible to raise cash upfront for the purchase price. “Not one of the major banks was interested. Not even our own.” So Clark and Miller turned themselves into a bank – handing over the company shares while allowing employees to pay them back over a few years, with interest. And with conditions: as long as the pair retain an interest in the firm it cannot relocate more than 200 miles away, “because that would defeat the entire purpose of the deal”.
At the end of 2016, all the shares in the company were transferred from the two original owners into a trust held on behalf of all staff. Just over a year later, the all-new, same-old Novograf still feels eggshelly, as if everyone is trying to gauge what’s changed. Its new managing director, Jennifer Riddell-Dillet, has to tell employees: “Remember you’re an owner.” She both manages and works for her staff, one of whom sat on the panel that interviewed her for the job.
Novografers like to tell you that this isn’t “some socialist paradise”, that there are still bosses and workers; but the priorities have changed. Formerly a senior manager for two PLCs, Riddell-Dillet says: “Public companies are only about external shareholders. There, employees are the asset of the business – but they’re a sweatable asset. Here, you think, ‘If I just drive them into the ground it will be less fulfilling, less rewarding and it will be more ruthless.’”
Everyone received a decent tax-free bonus last year, and also took part in the first-ever staff survey, which led to sick pay and leave entitlement becoming more generous. Anderson, a Novograf lifer, says: “The people on the factory floor definitely feel more in control than before. Anybody can now say, ‘I don’t see why things have to be done that way’ – and someone’s got to answer.”
That power requires some growing into. Production manager Michael Carr has become a director of Novograf, and has struggled to get his head around the accounts. And with no previous experience, Anderson and business development manager Margaret Nelson now make up half the trustee board. The other two trustees will be Miller and Clark, until they’re finally paid off. “It’s obvious that they know what they’re talking about and we don’t,” says Nelson. “Challenging your old boss is an intimidating thing.”
But employees will challenge on their expert subject: their daily work. Just last week, an employee showed Carr a cheaper and quicker way of assembling signs. They would never have spoken up before, he says, yet that one simple thing could save “a few thousand pounds in man-hours and material”.
In its first full year of employee ownership, Novograf’s sales shot up 20% and the company took on an extra 22 people. That success followed on from a strong performance in 2016, but Riddell-Dillet reckons their direct stake in the outcome did drive employees to put in “the blood, sweat and tears”.
Not all the savings are strictly necessary. Not so long ago, now-chairman John Clark, while washing his hands in the gents, reached over to the soap dispenser. He remembers a thin jet of lotion flying out – “Whoosh ... it hit me amidships” – all over his stomach. He charged over to the man responsible for ordering in supplies and told him the new soap was far too thin. While Clark stood dripping, the man nodded. “Aye, that was me,” he said. “I’ve watered down the soap by half to save money.”
Holyrood can still relapse – such as when it gifted Amazon £2.5m of taxpayers’ money and got back a distribution warehouse in Dunfermline. But Scottish Enterprise’s Sarah Deas talks of fostering a Mittelstand – a German-style dense network of medium-sized businesses that think long term and honour their social obligations.
Which is a reminder that British business is not some political monolith – that it can break left as well as right. White-haired Clark is appalled at “the FTSE guys”, the chief executives paid 100 times the average wage of their workers. “What are they doing to deserve that?”
Clark is not, he says, “some paternalistic capitalist” or a “crusader”. He’s “hardnosed”, and with Miller got a fair price for Novograf. But they’ve also taken big risks to ensure their workers could afford it. It proved impossible to raise cash upfront for the purchase price. “Not one of the major banks was interested. Not even our own.” So Clark and Miller turned themselves into a bank – handing over the company shares while allowing employees to pay them back over a few years, with interest. And with conditions: as long as the pair retain an interest in the firm it cannot relocate more than 200 miles away, “because that would defeat the entire purpose of the deal”.
At the end of 2016, all the shares in the company were transferred from the two original owners into a trust held on behalf of all staff. Just over a year later, the all-new, same-old Novograf still feels eggshelly, as if everyone is trying to gauge what’s changed. Its new managing director, Jennifer Riddell-Dillet, has to tell employees: “Remember you’re an owner.” She both manages and works for her staff, one of whom sat on the panel that interviewed her for the job.
Novografers like to tell you that this isn’t “some socialist paradise”, that there are still bosses and workers; but the priorities have changed. Formerly a senior manager for two PLCs, Riddell-Dillet says: “Public companies are only about external shareholders. There, employees are the asset of the business – but they’re a sweatable asset. Here, you think, ‘If I just drive them into the ground it will be less fulfilling, less rewarding and it will be more ruthless.’”
Everyone received a decent tax-free bonus last year, and also took part in the first-ever staff survey, which led to sick pay and leave entitlement becoming more generous. Anderson, a Novograf lifer, says: “The people on the factory floor definitely feel more in control than before. Anybody can now say, ‘I don’t see why things have to be done that way’ – and someone’s got to answer.”
That power requires some growing into. Production manager Michael Carr has become a director of Novograf, and has struggled to get his head around the accounts. And with no previous experience, Anderson and business development manager Margaret Nelson now make up half the trustee board. The other two trustees will be Miller and Clark, until they’re finally paid off. “It’s obvious that they know what they’re talking about and we don’t,” says Nelson. “Challenging your old boss is an intimidating thing.”
But employees will challenge on their expert subject: their daily work. Just last week, an employee showed Carr a cheaper and quicker way of assembling signs. They would never have spoken up before, he says, yet that one simple thing could save “a few thousand pounds in man-hours and material”.
In its first full year of employee ownership, Novograf’s sales shot up 20% and the company took on an extra 22 people. That success followed on from a strong performance in 2016, but Riddell-Dillet reckons their direct stake in the outcome did drive employees to put in “the blood, sweat and tears”.
Not all the savings are strictly necessary. Not so long ago, now-chairman John Clark, while washing his hands in the gents, reached over to the soap dispenser. He remembers a thin jet of lotion flying out – “Whoosh ... it hit me amidships” – all over his stomach. He charged over to the man responsible for ordering in supplies and told him the new soap was far too thin. While Clark stood dripping, the man nodded. “Aye, that was me,” he said. “I’ve watered down the soap by half to save money.”
Monday, 12 March 2018
Accounting watchdogs find ‘serious problems’ at 40% of audits
Madison Marriage in The Financial Times
Global accounting watchdogs identified serious problems at 40 per cent of the audits they inspected last year, raising fresh concerns about the quality of work being carried out by the world’s largest accounting firms.
Global accounting watchdogs identified serious problems at 40 per cent of the audits they inspected last year, raising fresh concerns about the quality of work being carried out by the world’s largest accounting firms.
According to the International Forum of Independent Audit Regulators, accounting lapses were identified at two-fifths of the 918 audits of listed public interest entities they inspected last year.
The audit inspections focused on organisations in riskier or complex situations such as mergers or acquisitions, according to the IFIAR, whose members include 52 audit regulators around the world.
The most common issue identified by these regulators was a failure among auditors to “assess the reasonableness of assumptions”.
The second biggest problem was a failure among auditors to “sufficiently test the accuracy and completeness of data or reports produced by management”.
The findings have intensified concerns about weaknesses in the auditing process, an issue that has been thrust into the spotlight over the past 12 months following a string of high profile accounting failures.
These include the collapse of BHS and Carillion in the UK, a corruption scandal involving oil company Petrobras in Brazil, and the share price collapse of South Africa’s Steinhoff after the retail conglomerate admitted to a series of accounting irregularities last year.
Prem Sikka, an accounting expert and emeritus professor at Essex University, said the frequency of problems identified by the IFIAR was “terrible”.
“There are a whole range of issues and there is no simple fix. There is a huge knowledge failure in the audit industry which is not being looked at. The whole industry is ripe for reform. The question is where is the political will for this?”
The accounting industry has faced significant reputational problems in the UK in particular. KPMG came under heavy criticism from politicians last year for giving HBOS a clean bill of health shortly before the UK bank collapsed during the financial crisis. KPMG has also been criticised for declaring Carillion a going concern last March, 10 months before the construction company went into liquidation.
The report showed that 41 per cent of the problems identified by audit regulators last year related to independence and ethics. These included accounting firms failing to maintain their independence due to financial relationships with clients, and failing to evaluate the extent of non-audit and audit services provided to clients.
Many firms also failed “to implement a reliable system for tracking business relationships, audit firm financial interests, and corporate family trees”, the IFIAR said. Its research was based on feedback from 33 audit regulators who inspected the work done by 120 audit firms.
Karthik Ramanna, a professor at Oxford university’s Blavatnik School of Government, said the number of firms with issues around independence and ethics was “absurdly high”. He added that the research would reinforce concerns about a lack of competition in the audit market, which is widely viewed as being dominated by the ‘Big Four’: EY, Deloitte, KPMG and PwC.
“The auditing industry is so concentrated, once the largest firms set the standard for poor conduct, the whole industry is dragged down,” he said.
Brian Hunt, chairman of the IFIAR, told the FT: “We would like the firms to focus on getting better. We need them to think about how they come at this a bit differently. The firms are making progress — we would like to see it happen a bit faster.”
Deloitte said: “We remain focused on continually improving the quality of services we provide to our clients. We look forward to continuing our constructive engagement with our audit regulators.”
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