Now that's an insult! Top 10 political put-downs

Robert Mugabe describes Gordon Brown as a tiny dot, but he could have chosen something a bit more hurtful - from some of the greatest put-down artists in history

Hugo Rifkind

As political insults go, "Gordon Brown is a little tiny dot on this world" was not, frankly, all that imaginative. Already in his short reign, Gordon has faced worse. It lacked the surgical disdain of Vince Cable's "Stalin to Mr Bean", and it wasn't nearly as clever as William Hague's rolling riff about Tony Blair arriving in Downing Street as President of Europe ("... the gritted teeth and bitten nails: the Prime Minister emerges from his door with a smile of intolerable anguish..."). And yet, Robert Mugabe seems pretty pleased with it.
He made the quip on a Monday, and by Friday he was delivering a speech in front of a poster which bore it as a slogan. It could be that political insults have little pedigree in African politics. Perhaps the stakes are too high.
Here in Britain, we have a long and proud history of our elected leaders being perfectly and studiously rude to each other. And yet, I wonder if we are past our best. In the House of Commons these days, wit seems to involve Nicholas Soames still roaring "Mine is a gin and tonic, Giovanni!" at John Prescott (because, oh my sides, he used to be a ship steward) or Dennis Skinner shrieking non- sequiturs about drugs at David Cameron.
Every Wednesday PMQs may contain a couple of lines that make you chuckle, but how many of them do you remember a week later? Ann Treneman, the Times parliamentary sketchwriter, points out that Cameron himself is pretty good at the sneering put-down ("He was the future once", "an analogue prime minister in a digital age"). True enough, but in the great history of British rudeness, these are all pretty blah.
The golden age was probably the Victorian era, when, as any casual student of history will tell you, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli faced each other across the dispatch box for about 100 years. The former was perhaps not unlike a weirder Gordon Brown ("Mr Gladstone addresses me as though I were a public meeting," said Queen Victoria herself) and the latter used to dance rings around him. "He has not a single redeeming defect," said Disraeli, of his rival. And, better still, when asked to distinguish between a misfortune and a calamity: "If Gladstone fell into the Thames, that would be a misfortune. If anybody pulled him out, that, I suppose, would be a calamity." History does not record many of Gladstone's ripostes, probably because they were rubbish. As I said, not unlike Gordon Brown.
Then we come to Winston Churchill, who seems to have spent every spare waking moment being rude to somebody. ("Winston," said the Conservative statesman F.E. Smith, "had devoted the best years of his life to preparing his impromptu speeches".) Clement Attlee, the man who interrupted his reign as Prime Minister, probably got it worse than most. "A sheep in sheep's clothing," Churchill said of him. And also, "A modest man with much to be modest about."
Not that the great man was fussy. He'd be rude to pretty much anyone. "There but for the grace of God goes God," was his memorable verdict on Sir Stafford Cripps, but his best ever may have been when an aide knocked on his toilet door and told him that the Lord Privy Seal wanted to see him. "Tell the Lord Privy Seal I am sealed in my privy, and can only deal with one shit at a time," said Churchill. He'd probably been waiting to trot that one out for years.
The political insult was also in fine fettle during the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, probably because everybody hated each other so much. Interestingly, this wasn't always inter-party - there was a lot of what you might call "blue on blue". Take Alan Clark's beautifully brutal verdict on Douglas Hurd, that he "might as well have a corncob up his arse". Or Sir Edward Heath, on being asked why Mrs Thatcher (as she was) so disliked him: a shrug, and then: "I am not a doctor". Or even Jonathan Aitken on Thatcher's ignorance of the Middle East: "She probably thinks Sinai is the plural of sinus".
A whole book, in fact, could probably be based on the rude things people have been moved to say about Baroness Thatcher. "When she speaks without thinking," mused Lord St John of Fawsley, "she says what she thinks." Sir Clement Freud dubbed her "Attila the Hen". Denis Healey called her "Pétain in petticoats" and "La Pasionaria of middle-class privilege".
Healey (now a peer) had a flair for this sort of thing. Few could forget his verdict that being criticised by Geoffrey Howe was "like being savaged by a dead sheep". Howe's retort came years later, when Healey congratulated him on being made Foreign Secretary. Howe told the Commons that this was "like being nuzzled by an old ram". Not nearly so rude, but probably not meant to be.
Lofty disdain, sadly, does appear to be a thing of the past. When Tony Blair left office, Ben Macintyre noted in these pages that "in ten years Tony Blair has not delivered a single one-line public insult worth remembering".
In other countries, too, the bag is mixed. Silvio Berlusconi's own insults tend to be a bit clunky and Fayedesque, but he certainly manages to bring out the best in others. "The Prime Minister clings to data the way a drunkard clings to lampposts," Romano Prodi has said of him, "not for illumination but to keep him standing up." Not bad, but a rarity.
In America, also, one also senses that the best has passed. "An empty suit that goes to funerals and plays golf," was how Ross Perot described Dan Quayle, but that was a while ago.
An honourable mention should also go to Gore Vidal for, among other things, describing Ronald Reagan as "a triumph of the embalmer's art" (before he died). But recently? When Hillary Clinton started pretending to like guns, Barak Obama sneered that she was "talking like she's Annie Oakley". That's about as good as it gets.
In the age of soundbites and speechwriters, how can this be? Has the hate gone? Have focus groups decreed that put-downs are abrasive and elitist, and do not play well? Or are they all, bluntly, just a little bit too dim? For tips, today's politicians are advised to get hold of the marvellous Scorn with Extra Bile (Penguin) by our own Matthew Parris. And, thereafter, to try harder.
Top 10 politicial put-downs
The insulted
"Mr Gladstone addresses me as though I were a public meeting" Queen Victoria on William Gladstone
"Winston had devoted the best years of his life to preparing his impromptu speeches" F. E. Smith on Winston Churchill.
"A sheep in sheep's clothing" Winston Churchill on Clement Attlee.
"There but for the grace of God goes God" Winston Churchill on Sir Stafford Cripps.
"The Prime Minister clings to data the way a drunkard clings to lampposts" Romano Prodi on Silvio Berlusconi.
The insulters
"He has not a single redeeming defect" Benjamin Disraeli on William Gladstone.
"He might as well have a corncob up his arse" Alan Clark on Douglas Hurd.
"She probably thinks Sinai is the plural of sinus" Jonathan Aitken on Margaret Thatcher.
"It's like being savaged by a dead sheep" Denis Healey on being attacked by Geoffrey Howe.
"When she speaks without thinking, she says what she thinks" Lord St John of Fawsley on Margaret Thatcher.

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Electoral Revolution In Nepal

 

 

By Gary Leupp

17 April, 2008
Counterpunch

It ought to be the ballot heard 'round the world. It ought to be front page news. But chances are you haven't yet learned that the Maoists of Nepal have apparently swept to power in an election that international monitors acknowledge was free and fair. Having led a People's War from 1996 to 2006, having suspended the armed struggle and making a strategic decision to seek power through electoral means, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has apparently acquired an absolute majority in national elections for a constitutional assembly.

Prime Minister Girija Koirala, representing the Nepali Congress Party, has congratulated CPI(M) leader on the success of his party. The Congress Party, aligned with its Indian counterpart and traditionally supportive of the Nepali monarchy and its Hindu religious trappings, seems to have come in a distant third in the national vote, behind the Communist Party (United Marxist-Leninist). The latter, having spurned Maoist overtures to unite, is in crisis; its leader has resigned and declared it "morally inappropriate" to continue to participate in the current coalition government.

It looks as though Maoist leader Prachanda will emerge as national leader under the presidential system his party advocates. The constitutional assembly will shape a new Nepal as a secular republic. Land reform, laws against debt servitude and child marriage, laws liberating "outcastes" will follow. The Maoists regard Nepal as a pre-capitalist country, which requires a period of capitalist development before it can embark on socialist construction. They say they welcome foreign investment and tourism. They want friendly relations with neighboring China and India. They want to build a railroad conveying Buddhist pilgrims from Tibet to Nepali religious sites. They want, with some help from Jimmy Carter, to persuade the U.S. State Department to remove their name fro the list of "international terrorist organizations."

They also want to plant the Red Flag on Mt. Everest, big enough so it might be seen from the moon, like the Great Wall of China. That's what they've said.

Realism and poetry. A vision for today, and for tomorrow. The Maoists of India (in particular, the Communist Party of India [Maoist]) continue their People's War, creating the red corridor that extends from Andra Pradesh up to the Nepali border. They have expressed doubts about the Nepali comrades' strategy of participation in elections, and emphasized their dedication to Mao's dictum that "political power grows out of the barrel of the gun." But they will take heart in the Nepali Maoists' victory. Unless the Nepali Army (formerly the Nepal Royal Army and still led by pro-monarchist and anti-communist generals), or external forces move to prevent the Maoists' rise to power, Nepal will emerge as the base-area of global revolution. That's something else the Maoists have said.

On October 21, 2002, Counterpunch carried a column of mine on Nepal that ended as follows:

Nepal is the world's only Hindu kingdom, but there is much Buddhist influence as well. The historical Buddha was born on what is now the Nepal-India border. (Both countries claim that Lumimbi, site of the Buddha's birth, was within their present territory. This is an issue of importance to historians, archeologists, and even more so to the tourist industry catering to Japanese Buddhist pilgrims.) Two and a half millennia ago, the Buddhist movement, destined to transform the world, emerged in this region. Buddhism was at its inception not really a religion (as westerners tend to conceptualize religion), rejecting belief in a Supreme Being, immortal souls, and an afterlife. (Some Indian Marxist scholars have suggested that Buddhism was initially a kind of philosophical materialism, with a progressive social content.) The fundamental problem, for the Buddhist, was and is that of suffering. (Recall how, many centuries later, Marx identified religion as "the expression of real suffering and at the same time the protest against real suffering.") Buddhism offered no pie-in-the-sky solutions to human suffering, but a way of life that steered between sensual indulgence and asceticism.

While focusing on the individual's path to enlightenment, Buddhism did not ignore social reality. The early order of monks and nuns applied itself to charitable work, such as the establishment of hospitals and shelters for the homeless. In an extraordinary break with the social order, Siddhartha Gautama (a.k.a Buddha) rejected the caste system, declared that those of any background could be enlightened, and insisted on delivering his sermons in the local dialects wherever he traveled. He was in that sense a revolutionary. And a world-conqueror: the Buddha directed his followers to spread the word throughout the world, and thus Buddhism gradually spread from the Himalayan foothills to Sri Lanka, to northeastern Iran, to China and Japan, to southeast Asia.

The Maoists' vision, like that of the Buddhist missionaries of old, is a global one. "We insist," Prachanda told an American interviewer in 2000, "that the Nepalese revolution is part of the world revolution and the Nepalese people's army is a detachment of the whole international proletarian army." BBC correspondent Daniel Lak, visiting Rolpa, in western Nepal, last month, sat talking with one Comrade Bijaya, district committee member and political instructor, who overlooking the rice-paddies stated matter-of-factly, "We will win, not just in Nepal, but around the world" (World Tribune, Sept 24). That requires a stretch of the imagination, maybe, but world history is filled with twists and turns and surprises. Sometimes, in humankind's endless quest to overcome suffering, wildly ambitious enterprises actually succeed.

Five years later, no stretch of the imagination is necessary. It's happening. A communist revolution, led by a party charting a new path combining armed struggle and electoral politics, is sweeping the Himalayas. World journalists, as though dizzied by the altitude, seem unable to take up pen and report what they see. Maybe their editors are withholding their copy, concerned lest they depict a designated "terrorist" group in a positive or merely rational objective light.

But this moment may in the not distant future be seen as another 1917, another 1949. I think of that Buffalo Springfield song "For What It's Worth," written by Stephen Stills and released in 1967:

"There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear.

I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down."

Yes. Everybody look what's going down. The revolution will not be televised, but it's accessible online.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.

He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

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Is changing our diet the key to resolving the global food crisis?

By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Wednesday, 16 April 2008

Why are we asking this now?

People are dying because of the global food shortage, which has sparked a sudden surge in food prices. The global food bill has risen 57 per cent in the last year, the price of rice is up by three quarters, and wheat has more than doubled. The head of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, warned this week that riots in Egypt, Cameroon, Haiti and Burkina Faso over soaring prices could spread.

World grain stocks have fallen to a 25-year low of 5 million tons, enough for two to three months, and World Food Programme officials say 33 countries in Asia and Africa face political instability as the urban poor struggle to feed their families. "The world food situation is very serious," Mr Diouf said.

Are we growing too little food to feed the world?

Bizarrely, no. There was a record global grain harvest last year. It topped 2.1 billion tons, up 5 per cent on the previous year. The problem is that a diminishing proportion of it is being turned into food. This year less than half the total grown – 1.01 billion tons – will find its way on to people's plates, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. And this crisis is hitting before world food supplies are further damaged by climate change.

So where is the grain going?

There are two reasons why the record amount of grain is proving insufficient to feed the world. First, a large amount is being diverted to make biofuels. From yesterday, all transport fuel sold in the UK must be mixed with at least 2.5 per cent biofuel made from crops. As our front page explained yesterday, the Government's idea is that this will make Britain's 33 million cars greener.

But the consequence is that there is less grain available for food. This year global production of biofuels will consume almost 100 million tons of grain – grain that could have been used to feed the starving. According to the UN, it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol – enough to feed a child for a year. The UN last week predicted "massacres" unless the biofuel policy is halted. Jean Ziegler, the UN's special rapporteur on the right to food, said biofuels were "a crime against humanity", and called for a five-year moratorium.

Would cutting car use solve the food crisis?

Not on its own. Of course we should be reducing our reliance on the car, and on jet travel and other profligate uses of energy, for environmental reasons. Cutting car use, and reducing energy demands overall, would cut demand for biofuels, leaving more grain available for food. But while 100 million tons of grain are being diverted to make fuel this year, over seven times as much (760 million tons) will be used to feed animals. The world's passion for meat is a much bigger cause of global hunger than its passion for the car.

How does eating meat cause hunger?

Because it is a very inefficient way of producing food. It takes 8kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef, and large tracts of forest have been cleared for grazing land that might have been used to grow crops. Chicken is more efficient to produce – it takes 2kg of feed to produce 1kg of meat. To maximise food production it is best to be vegan. According to Simon Fairlie, in his magazine The Land, it would take just 3 million hectares of arable land to meet Britain's food needs, half the current total, if the population were vegan.

Isn't it completely unrealistic for Britain to go vegan?

Of course. Vegans number 0.4 per cent of the population, vegetarians 3 per cent, and most people will not take readily to a diet of green leaves, pulses, fruit and nuts. This is about the direction we should be moving in, not the ultimate destination. We should be aiming to reduce our meat and dairy consumption, and increase consumption of fruit and vegetables.

We are eating 50 per cent more meat than in the 1960s, and global consumption is forecast to double by 2050. More of the extra is chicken, and we eat less red meat than in the past (and a lot less than the Americans). But in terms of overall meat consumption, we are not even going in the right direction.

What about the rest of the world?

China, India and other parts of the developing world are behind the soaring demand for meat. Eating meat is a mark of affluence, and as societies in the east grow wealthier they are demanding the same benefits of a diet that the west has enjoyed for more than a century. In China meat consumption has risen from 20kg a head in 1980 to 50kg a head today. As meat consumption rises there is less grain for (human) food, adding to the pressure on grain prices

Food export controls have been imposed by Russia, China, India, Vietnam, Argentina and Serbia in response to the crisis. Last week the Philippines had to hunt for grain supplies after China withheld shipments, prompting the US to step in to guarantee grain supplies. Tensions are growing not only over energy, but now over food.

Are there other reasons for cutting back on meat-eating?

Yes. The largest study of the link between diet and health published by the World Cancer Research Fund last November concluded that animal flesh occupies too big a place in the western diet, contributing to high rates of cancer and heart disease. There are also environmental benefits from cutting down on meat. Each of Britain's 10 million cows produces more greenhouse gases in the form of methane per day than the average 4x4 on a 33-mile drive. Giving up meat could have a comparable impact on climate change to giving up flying.

Finally, there could be animal welfare benefits. The less meat we eat, the more we can afford to pay – and farmers selling fewer animals at higher prices should be able to provide them with better conditions.

So what diet should we be aiming for?

One that does not eschew meat altogether – if that seems too difficult – but that puts more emphasis on the vegetarian elements. In many countries meat is regarded as a relish, with the bulk of the meal coming from carbohydrates – corn, rice, pasta or potatoes – and vegetables.

We should get used to thinking of meat as a treat – it could help to save the world's poor from starvation.

Should we be trying to cut out meat to help save the world's poor from starvation?

Yes...

* Producing meat is less efficient than growing grain – it takes 8kg of corn to produce 1kg of beef

* Growing crops to feed animals means there is less land on which to grow crops for humans

* There is a shortage of grain for human consumption, and global food prices have leapt by 57 per cent in a year

No...

* It is not realistic to expect people to switch to a vegan diet of vegetables, pulses, fruit and nuts

* China and India should not be denied the same diet that we have enjoyed as they grow wealthier

* An alternative way of tackling the food crisis would be to reverse the policy of diverting grain to make biofuels

How come Zimbabwe and Tibet get all the attention?

If a government wants to abuse human rights and rig elections, it needs to have the support of - or be - the western powers

Seumas Milne The Guardian, Thursday April 17 2008 Article historyAbout this articleClose This article appeared in the Guardian on Thursday April 17 2008 on p31 of the Comment & debate section. It was last updated at 00:08 on April 17 2008. There is no question that the struggle over land and power in Zimbabwe has brought the country to a grim pass. Nearly a decade after the takeover of white-owned farms and the rupture with the west, economic breakdown, hyperinflation, sanctions and Aids have taken a heavy toll. With the expectation now that a second round of elections, mired in claims of fraud, may after all keep President Mugabe in power, the prospect must be of continued economic punishment and crisis.

On a different scale, there's also no doubt that in Tibet - the other central international focus of western concern in the past month - deep-seated popular discontent fuelled last month's anti-government protests and attacks on Han Chinese, which were met with a violent crackdown by the Chinese authorities. Certainly, given the intensity of the US and European response, from chancellors and foreign ministers to Hollywood stars and blanket media coverage, you'd be left in little doubt that these two confrontations were the most serious facing their continents, if not the world.

The US ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, said as much this week when he declared Zimbabwe the "most important and urgent issue" in Africa. Gordon Brown and George Bush both denounced the delay in releasing election results, the prime minister declaring that the "international community's patience with the regime is wearing thin". The British media have long since largely abandoned any attempt at impartiality in its reporting of Zimbabwe, the common assumption being that Mugabe is a murderous dictator at the head of a uniquely wicked regime.

China's growing economic muscle means western leaders prefer to tread more carefully around its human rights record, but Angela Merkel and the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, were not shy about steaming in, along with the US presidential candidates and the House of Representatives, which demanded unconditional talks with the exiled Dalai Lama. Meanwhile, any official restraint was more than made up for by a string of Dalai Lama-dazzled celebs from Richard Gere to Ab Fab's Joanna Lumley, who proudly recalled that her father had once helped Tibet against China on behalf of the British Raj.

But, on the basis of the scale of violence, repression and election rigging alone, you would be hard put to explain why these conflicts have been singled out for such special attention. In the violence surrounding Zimbabwe's elections, two people are currently reported to have died; in Tibet, numbers estimated to have been killed by protesters and Chinese forces range from 22 to 140. By contrast, in Somalia, where US-backed Ethiopian and Somali troops are fighting forces loyal to the ousted government, several thousand have been killed since the beginning of the year and half the population of the capital, Mogadishu, has been forced to flee the city in what UN officials describe as Africa's worst humanitarian crisis.

When it comes to rigging elections, countries like Jordan and Egypt have been happy to oblige in recent months - in the Egyptian case, jailing hundreds of opposition activists into the bargain - and almost nobody in the west has batted an eyelid. In Saudi Arabia there are no national elections at all, let alone the opposition MPs and newspapers that exist in Zimbabwe. In Africa, Togo has been a more flagrant rigger, while in Cameroon last week the president was given the job for life. And when it comes to separatist and independence movements, the Turkish Kurds have faced far more violence and a tighter cultural clampdown than the Tibetans.

The crucial difference, of course, and the reason why these conflicts and violations don't get the deluxe media and political treatment offered to the Zimbabwean opposition or Tibetan separatists is that the governments involved are all backed by the west, compounded in the Zimbabwean case by a transparently racist agenda. But it's not just an issue of hypocrisy and double standards, egregious though they are. It's also that British and US involvement and interference have been crucial to both the Zimbabwean and Tibetan conflicts.

That's most obviously true in Zimbabwe, which was not just a British colony, but where Britain refused to act against a white racist coup, triggering a bloody 15-year liberation war, and then imposed racial parliamentary quotas and a 10-year moratorium on land reform at independence. The subsequent failure by Britain and the US to finance land buyouts as expected, along with the impact of IMF programmes, laid the ground for the current impasse.

As for Tibet, Britain's role in the former serf-based system (helpfully recalled by Lumley) was assumed after the communist takeover by the CIA, which bankrolled the Dalai Lama's operations for many years. Such arrangements have in recent years passed to other US agencies and western NGOs, as with the Zimbabwean opposition. And even if there is no prospect of Tibetan independence, for a US administration that has designated China as the main threat to its global dominance, its minorities are still a stick that can be used to poke the dragon.

What has made human rights edicts by the US and Britain since the launch of the "war on terror" even more preposterous is that not only are they themselves supporting governments with similar or worse records, but they are directly responsible for these outrages themselves: from illegal invasions and occupations to large-scale killing and torture - along with phoney elections - in Iraq and Afghanistan. The UN estimates that more than 700 people were killed in the recent US and British-backed attacks on the Mahdi army in Iraq - a central motive for which was to stop them taking part in elections.

The current focus on China is of course linked to the Olympics, and Britain must face the likelihood of large-scale protests over its own record in 2012. Meanwhile, the best chance both of settling the Zimbabwean crisis and of meeting Tibetan aspirations is without the interference of western powers, which would do better improving the human rights records of their allies and themselves. The days of colonial dictat are over and where attempts are made to revive them, they will be resisted. China is now an emerging global power - and, as the Zimbabwean ambassador to the UN said yesterday, Zimbabwe "is no longer a British colony".

Credit crunch? The real crisis is global hunger

 

And if you care, eat less meat

A food recession is under way. Biofuels are a crime against humanity, but - take it from a flesh eater - flesh eating is worse

 

Never mind the economic crisis. Focus for a moment on a more urgent threat: the great food recession that is sweeping the world faster than the credit crunch. You have probably seen the figures by now: the price of rice has risen by three-quarters over the past year, that of wheat by 130%. There are food crises in 37 countries. One hundred million people, according to the World Bank, could be pushed into deeper poverty by the high prices.

But I bet that you have missed the most telling statistic. At 2.1bn tonnes, the global grain harvest broke all records last year - it beat the previous year's by almost 5%. The crisis, in other words, has begun before world food supplies are hit by climate change. If hunger can strike now, what will happen if harvests decline?
There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation, will feed people.
I am sorely tempted to write another column about biofuels. From this morning all sellers of transport fuel in the United Kingdom will be obliged to mix it with ethanol or biodiesel made from crops. The World Bank points out that "the grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol ... could feed one person for a year". This year global stockpiles of cereals will decline by around 53m tonnes; this gives you a rough idea of the size of the hunger gap. The production of biofuels will consume almost 100m tonnes, which suggests that they are directly responsible for the current crisis.
On these pages yesterday Ruth Kelly, the secretary of state for transport, promised that "if we need to adjust policy in the light of new evidence, we will". What new evidence does she require? In the midst of a global humanitarian crisis, we have just become legally obliged to use food as fuel. It is a crime against humanity, in which every driver in this country has been forced to participate.
But I have been saying this for four years, and I am boring myself. Of course we must demand that our governments scrap the rules that turn grain into the fastest food of all. But there is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals - which could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.
While meat consumption is booming in Asia and Latin America, in the UK it has scarcely changed since the government started gathering data in 1974. At just over 1kg per person per week, it's still about 40% above the global average, though less than half the amount consumed in the United States. We eat less beef and more chicken than we did 30 years ago, which means a smaller total impact. Beef cattle eat about 8kg of grain or meal for every kilogram of flesh they produce; a kilogram of chicken needs just 2kg of feed. Even so, our consumption rate is plainly unsustainable.
In his magazine The Land, Simon Fairlie has updated the figures produced 30 years ago in Kenneth Mellanby's book Can Britain Feed Itself? Fairlie found that a vegan diet produced by means of conventional agriculture would require only 3m hectares of arable land (around half Britain's current total). Even if we reduced our consumption of meat by half, a mixed farming system would need 4.4m hectares of arable fields and 6.4 million hectares of pasture. A vegan Britain could make a massive contribution to global food stocks.
But I cannot advocate a diet that I am incapable of following. I tried it for about 18 months, lost two stone, went as white as bone and felt that I was losing my mind. I know a few healthy-looking vegans, and I admire them immensely. But after almost every talk that I give, I am pestered by swarms of vegans demanding that I adopt their lifestyle. I cannot help noticing that in most cases their skin has turned a fascinating pearl grey.
What level of meat-eating would be sustainable? One approach is to work out how great a cut would be needed to accommodate the growth in human numbers. The UN expects the population to rise to 9 billion by 2050. These extra people will require another 325m tonnes of grain. Let us assume, perhaps generously, that politicians such as Ruth Kelly are able to "adjust policy in the light of new evidence" and stop turning food into fuel. Let us pretend that improvements in plant breeding can keep pace with the deficits caused by climate change. We would need to find an extra 225m tonnes of grain. This leaves 531m tonnes for livestock production, which suggests a sustainable consumption level for meat and milk some 30% below the current world rate. This means 420g of meat per person per week, or about 40% of the UK's average consumption.
This estimate is complicated by several factors. If we eat less meat we must eat more plant protein, which means taking more land away from animals. On the other hand, some livestock is raised on pasture, so it doesn't contribute to the grain deficit. Simon Fairlie estimates that if animals were kept only on land that is unsuitable for arable farming, and given scraps and waste from food processing, the world could produce between a third and two-thirds of its current milk and meat supply. But this system then runs into a different problem. The Food and Agriculture Organisation calculates that animal keeping is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental impacts are especially grave in places where livestock graze freely. The only reasonable answer to the question of how much meat we should eat is as little as possible. Let's reserve it - as most societies have done until recently - for special occasions.
For both environmental and humanitarian reasons, beef is out. Pigs and chickens feed more efficiently, but unless they are free range you encounter another ethical issue: the monstrous conditions in which they are kept. I would like to encourage people to start eating tilapia instead of meat. This is a freshwater fish that can be raised entirely on vegetable matter and has the best conversion efficiency - about 1.6kg of feed for 1kg of meat - of any farmed animal. Until meat can be grown in flasks, this is about as close as we are likely to come to sustainable flesh-eating.
Re-reading this article, I see that there is something surreal about it. While half the world wonders whether it will eat at all, I am pondering which of our endless choices we should take. Here the price of food barely registers. Our shops are better stocked than ever before. We perceive the global food crisis dimly, if at all. It is hard to understand how two such different food economies could occupy the same planet, until you realise that they feed off each other.

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A reminder of the real cost of living

 

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Friends in India who work with rural women say that lentils are no longer affordable

Monday, 14 April 2008

Suddenly you notice the costs have really shot up. For me the wake-up call came with the last few supermarket bills, which were already too high because we now need so many more fancy foods. The hairdresser costs a third more than this time last year, petrol too, and on Saturday the Chinese restaurant in the West End charged punitive prices, perhaps to pay for the Olympics back home. So, there will have to be longer gaps between getting the roots done, more trips to Shepherd's Bush market for fruit, meat and veg, and obviously less dining out.

The man of the house is fretting about the bigger things – the value of our ISAs and the mortgage. So, yes, we are, like most middle-class people, feeling less flush. Hardly what you could call privation, a necessary adjustment perhaps to a life of too much already (16 pairs of shoes, for example, when I last counted mine, some though 10 years old, is still excessive).
We have been content enough to stay put in the same property for 30 years and so are spared the current credit-crunch panic. For many others, by contrast, the present and future feel unnaturally bleak and the thought of cutting back is an affront. After years of growth, people feel entitled to more and more. Owning two or three homes was almost a norm for the successful until now, when such expectations are having to shrivel. Thrift feels to them like shame and induces self-pity that should be put on stage by Mike Leigh.
It is time to remind the blubbing and snivelling middle classes to be thankful and grateful for what they have, that babies are perishing in the poorest countries of the world, partly because we are so greedy and needy. These innocents and their families are not suffering the effects of the Northern Rock fiasco, having precious homes repossessed, losing jobs and enduring tumbling share prices. They walk about in the lands of no hope, through the valleys of death, try to keep their own alive for a little while longer.
I recently overheard two mums with humongous cars, chatting outside my daughter's old primary school, moaning as if there was no tomorrow. They had to cut down the skiing to only five days, said one, and her hubby was really upset about that sacrifice. Another confessed that they had reluctantly decided to stay put in their five-bedroom house and extend it, rather than move. Then the clincher: "Really nobody cares about people like us do they? How much more do they think we can take? Who do you vote for?"
Perhaps when next in the Maldives, they can ask the hotel staff about families and incomes, about powerlessness and sacrifices and how much more can they take. Britons travel to more "unspoilt" places than ever before and are only more indifferent to the people in those destinations. And now, suddenly, inequality threatens universal commotion, rebels against the established order.
The spreading unrest disturbs three cold, resolute masters of the universe. Our Chancellor, Alistair Darling, warns that international ethanol programmes to meet growing demands for biofuel are creating catastrophic food shortages and provoking riots the world over – in Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, parts of India.
These will spread as the poor no longer have anything to lose. The price of wheat has risen by 130 per cent this year and rice by 74 per cent. Friends in India who work to improve the lives of rural women say that dhal lentils are no longer affordable. Grain for food production has been slashed. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, fears that "hundreds of thousands of people will be starving.
Children will be suffering from malnutrition with consequences for all their lives". Sensitive to sub-prime US and UK gloom, M Strauss-Kahn tailors his message, saying "it is not only a humanitarian question" but one of western self-interest. Trade imbalances could affect economic advantage. Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, this weekend described the situation for the poor as "catastrophic".
If you want to understand why illegal migration is growing so out of control, here is one reason – a reason which anti-immigration campaigners do not examine or acknowledge. It is our fault that so many desperate people come to our doors. Well, wouldn't you do the same? The poorest cannot travel but the next social layer up fears it will be them next, once savings are gone, and so they flee to places of plenty.
So is globalisation then, just a re-branding of exploitative, naked capitalism? Not really. Market liberalisation has brought about some, possibly considerable, generation of wealth. There are more stupendously rich people in developing countries than ever before. The middle classes are growing in number. Quickly and inevitably these winners turn into sinners, unconcerned about the poor in their midst.
The system also, says Arundhati Roy, "allows the unrestricted entry and exit of massive amounts of speculative, capital-hot money – into and out of Third World countries and then dictates their economic policy. Using the threat of capital flight as a lever, international capital insinuates itself deeper and deeper into those economies".
Britain is held to this ransom too – remember the threats by non-doms when they were asked to pay a pitifully small amount of extra tax?
But in poor countries, the might of the capitalists and institutions like the IMF and World Bank is deadly. Says Roy: "With a combination of arrogance and ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent, historically complex societies and devastate them." To the point of death through starvation, as now.
International development agencies have discouraged agricultural sectors in the Third World, pushed cash-crop production and multinational industrialisation. And, meanwhile, there is the demented search for alternatives to oil to free the West from dependency on the Middle East. Biofuel was our salvation, even though we knew what the abominable price would be.
Mr Zoellick brings up the uncomfortable truth, saying: "While many in the US and Europe worry about filling their [vehicle] tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs. And it is getting more and more difficult everyday."
Things must be very bad indeed for the G7, the IMF and World Bank to speak out more ominously than aid agencies, which frequently have to use apocalyptic tones to arouse concern for disaster victims. In 1968, the children of the rich nations protested against the established order. Maybe 2008 will be the year the poor finally had enough. Perhaps the powerful are smelling revolution in the air and are scared.
y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk

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How to do business like the Mafia

 The letters of jailed Cosa Nostra boss Bernardo Provenzano are full of insights into his leadership style. The result could be a how-to manual for company directors. Clare Longrigg opens the mafiosi's management handbook  
They're violent, they're ruthless, they have caused misery to many, but you can't fault their business sense: mafia bosses know how to make a profit. Its practices may be largely illegal, but Cosa Nostra is not as retrograde, or conservative, as it has often been portrayed. Its raison d'etre is profit. Like any business, it is pragmatic and constantly changing to exploit new opportunities.
Big business has learned how to sell itself to the public, with television shows such as The Apprentice and Dragons' Den granting us a view of harsh but compellingly competitive environments. Businessmen such as Sir Alan Sugar, Duncan Bannatyne and Peter Jones have become unlikely media personalities. But the mafia has been using these methods for years.
When Bernardo Provenzano took over the organisation in the mid-90s, he inherited a depleted and demoralised workforce, who had scuppered their own access to politics and industry. The bombs that killed anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino had created a PR disaster and a law enforcement backlash. Hundreds of mafiosi were in prison, and many of them were so disillusioned with the organisation that they were telling the authorities everything they knew.
Magistrates and mafiosi agree: Provenzano was the charismatic force who revived the fortunes of Cosa Nostra. It has been said of Provenzano, as of so many mafia entrepreneurs, that had he turned his talents and resources to legitimate business, he would have been extremely successful. Fortunately, the mafia's particular modus operandi - the use or threat of violence to create monopolies and price-fixing cartels - is not part of general business practice. But his "System" turned around a failing organisation with far-sighted tactics worthy of any business impresario. The fact that he wrote his reforms by letter means that we have what amounts to seven rules for running a successful business.
Rule 1: Submersion
When a company is failing, the first step is to take it below the radar. You want to lose that cursed epithet "troubled" as quickly as possible, even if it means disappearing from the business pages."It's the sensible thing to do - you bury your mistakes and get on with it," says Peter Wallis (known as Peter York in his other guise, as a social commentator), management consultant at SRU Ltd. You also want to buy shareholders' patience and convince them to hold their nerve and trust you.
"Our aim was to make Cosa Nostra invisible, giving us time to regroup," recalled Provenzano's lieutenant, Nino Giuffrè, who collaborated shortly after his arrest in 2002. After a series of power struggles that had left many dead, businessmen were understandably reluctant to return calls. Mafiosi were instructed to avoid any activity that would attract publicity. If a factory owner refused to pay protection, no one was to set fire to the machinery or blow up the trucks. Peaceful persuasion was the only way.
By contrast with the old-style system of shoot first and ask questions later, any hostile action would have to be thoroughly assessed for potential PR damage. "It was essential to weigh up whether a person could do more damage dead or alive," revealed Giuffrè.
Announcing his system, Provenzano warned that recovery would take time: members might have to wait between five and seven years before they were making profits again. Rebuilding links with business and politicians could only be done out of the glare of publicity. In relative obscurity, Cosa Nostra would be repositioned to shake off its parasitic image and become part of the industrial and political institutions.
Rule 2: Mediation
"Be calm, clear, correct and consistent, turn any negative experiences to account, don't dismiss everything people tell you, or believe everything you're told. Always try to discover the truth before you speak, and remember that, to make your judgment, it's never enough to have just one source of information."
This letter has been described as "a manifesto of Cosa Nostra under Bernardo Provenzano". After a decade of unspeakable violence under the previous leader, Totò Riina, Provenzano changed the culture of Cosa Nostra by instructing his men in the art of negotiation and the importance of dialogue.
Provenzano was decisive, and on occasion demanded swift and direct answers to his questions, but he could be a ditherer when it suited him. Playing for time, he encouraged his men to negotiate agreements between them. If that failed, Provenzano was at his typewriter night and day, offering his wisdom and experience (and just occasionally, a little double-dealing) to resolve disputes.
Like any company director, who carefully crafts his or her media persona, Provenzano didn't want to come across as a tyrant, he wanted to be a "kindly dictator". He coordinated the activities of different and competing groups, without imposing his will. He was the uncontested boss, but he gave the impression that his decisions were reached after long consultation.
Rule 3: Consensus
Provenzano answered letters from every level of society about job vacancies, exam results, local health and hospital administration. Like the charity work carried out by major corporations today, Provenzano was clear: the mafia must present itself as a positive element of society. The boss had to appear as a beneficent figure, an uncle whose advice and consent was sought on all matters - business and personal. He understood that persuading the people they need you is a far more effective way of promoting your business than imposition and violence.
"Let me know whatever [the people] need," he wrote to his adviser, "they must expect nothing but good from us."
One key step in the organisation's recovery was recapturing the popular consensus. The mafia has always relied on the obedience (goodwill might be putting it too strongly) of the community. In the business of selling protection, social control is essential: if your "clients" unite and rebel, you're in trouble.
Rule 4: Keep God on your side
Part of Provenzano's bid to reclaim the people's trust and rehabilitate Cosa Nostra with its traditional followers was to assume a mantle of piety. He presented himself in pastoral role - trustworthy and authoritative. His letters read like the parish priest's homily, and he would send his men tracts copied from the Bible.
Investigators tried hard to discover a hidden code beneath all the underlined passages in his Bible. In fact, it seems, he found them genuinely useful as leadership tools.
Provenzano's choice of tracts revealed, according to investigators, "a certain attention to rules, to punishments, guilt and vengeance, as though he were searching for some inspiration and authority to support him in his responsibilities and the decisions that were a necessary part of being the head of an organisation".
In an approach adopted by politicians including Tony Blair, Provenzano's letters contain the strong implication that God is exercising his will through him ("May the Lord bless you and keep you ... know that where I can be of use to you, with the will of God, I am completely at your disposal ... ").
The status as homespun churchgoer also worked for George Bush in his pursuit of popular consensus. "Bush's religion is very variable," comments Wallis. "He courts rightwing evangelicals but he doesn't buy the whole package; he merely wants to relate to them."
Rule 5: Be politically flexible
Businessmen from all walks of life and political persuasion usually find themselves co-opted on to a government advisory board eventually. The East End boy made good is not your traditional Labour supporter, but Sir Alan Sugar has reportedly been advising Gordon Brown on enterprise. "This government's not Labour, it's old-fashioned Tory," he says. "I prefer Gordon to Tony. Blair was refreshing but Brown is more like me. He has a strong work ethic."
Provenzano took this further, changing his political allegiance whenever it suited him. He looked for politicians who were prepared to pursue his self-serving demands for lighter sentences against convicted mafiosi, as well as the end of protection for collaborators. "Links were to be forged behind the scenes with politicians who had no trace of connection to scandal or sleaze," recalled Giuffrè. "If a politician was seen to be supported by men of honour of a certain rank, within 24 hours he'd be destroyed by the opposition."
Rule 6: Reinvention
In case of a political scandal, or a business failure, it is vital for the new boss to be able to distance himself from the whole affair. Indeed, he may find it useful to take on a new persona altogether. When Stuart Rose returned to Arcadia after three years to rescue it, he said: "What is interesting is that people here think I haven't changed, but I have been gone three years. I am not the same Stuart Rose, I have changed a lot."
With Provenzano's new directives, not only did the negative headlines cease, but he managed to dissociate himself from the scandals that had gone before. Like everyone else, he had emerged from Cosa Nostra's most violent decade with his reputation in tatters; his advisers helped him to "get his virginity back", in Giuffrè's interesting phrase. With the help of his PR-savvy advisers, he made sure no one associated him with the violent years, and created his image as the peacemaker.
"When I got out of prison," Giuffrè recalled, "I found Provenzano a changed man; from the hitman he once was, now he showed signs of saintliness."
Rule 7: Modesty
During his career, Provenzano transformed himself from a hired thug, to business investor, political mastermind and, ultimately, strategist and leader. Part of his mystique was that no one really knew whether he was a genius or an illiterate chancer. To emphasise his humble character and present himself as a simple man of the people he would write letters full of spelling and grammatical mistakes, and always signed off with the same humble apology: "I beg your forgiveness for the errors in my writing ..."
Every letter ends with the same saintly and affectionate benediction and an apology for grammatical errors. The bad spelling and schoolboy mistakes detracted nothing from the authority of its writer. For a man who moved easily in the worlds of business and politics, it was apparently part of a carefully constructed image. Investigators maintain his semi-literacy was a deliberate ruse.
It's a strategy that political and business leaders have used to good effect. "George Bush's family is as upper-class as you're going to get in the United States," says Wallis. "He is not a real Texan. To what extent he talks like that out of incompetence, to what extent it is crowd- pleasing, we don't know - but we know it works."
Similarly, Justin King, multimillionaire saviour of Sainsbury's, says: "I'm not a book reader ... I'm just a normal bloke." Sugar has never disavowed his East End roots, his upbringing in a Hackney council house. He doesn't give himself airs, but the point is still made: he grew up with no privileges, but he is the one with the power.
Provenzano took false modesty a step further, suggesting (almost entirely untruthfully) that he would rather have someone else in charge. "They want me to tell them what to do," he wrote, "but who am I to tell them how to conduct themselves? I can't give orders to anyone, indeed I look for someone who can give orders to me."
Unfortunately for him, since his arrest in 2006, his wishes have been fulfilled.
· Boss of Bosses: How Bernardo Provenzano Saved the Mafia is published by John Murray (rrp £20). To order a copy for £18 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.

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