Let's admit it: Britain is now a developing country

We have iPads and broadband – but also oversubscribed foodbanks. Our economy is no longer zooming along unchallenged in the fast lane, but a clapped-out motor

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Monday 9 December 2013 20.00 GMT

A foodbank in the Black Country. Photograph: David Jones/PA

Elite economic debate boils down to this: a man in a tie stands at a dispatch box and reads out some numbers for the years ahead, along with a few micro-measures he'll take to improve those projections. His opposite number scoffs at the forecasts and promises his tweaks would be far superior. For a few hours, perhaps even a couple of days, afterwards, commentators discuss What It All Means. Last Thursday's autumn statement from George Osborne was merely the latest enactment of this twice-yearly ritual, and I bet you've already forgotten it.

Compare his forecasts and fossicking with our fundamental problems. Start with last week's Pisa educational yardsticks, which show British teenagers trailing their Vietnamese counterparts at science, and behind the Macanese at maths. Or look at this year's World Economic Forum (WEF) competitiveness survey of 148 countries, which ranks British roads below Chile's, and our ground-transport system worse than that of Barbados.

Whether Blair or Brown or Cameron, successive prime ministers and their chancellors pretend that progress is largely a matter of trims and tweaks – of capping business rates and funding the A14 to Felixstowe. Yet those Treasury supplementary tables and fan charts are no match for the mass of inconvenient facts provided by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the WEF or simply by going for a wander. Sift through the evidence and a different picture emerges: Britain's economy is no longer zooming along unchallenged in the fast lane, but an increasingly clapped-out motor regularly overtaken by Asian Tigers such as South Korea and Taiwan.

Gender equality? The WEF ranks us behind Nicaragua and Lesotho. Investment by business? The Economist thinks we are struggling to keep up with Mali.

Let me put it more broadly, Britain is a rich country accruing many of the stereotypical bad habits of a developing country.

I began thinking about this last week, while reporting on graphene, the wonder material discovered by Manchester scientists and held up by cabinet ministers as part of our new high-tech future. Graphene is also the point at which Treasury dreaminess is harshly interrupted by the reality of our national de-development.

Briefly, the story goes like this: Osborne funnelled a few tens of millions into research on the substance. It's the kind of public-sector kickstart that might work in a manufacturing economy such as Germany – but which in Britain, with its hollowed-out industry and busted supply chains, has proved the equivalent of pouring money down a hole. One university physicist described how this was part of a familiar pattern of generating innovations for the rest of the world to capitalise on, then sighed: "One day, we'll stop thinking of ourselves as a major economic power, and realise we're more like South Korea in the early 60s." South Korea, by way of comparison, has already put in over 20 times as many graphene patents as the country that discovered it.

How can any nation that came up with the BBC and the NHS be considered in the same breath as India or China? Let me refer you to one of the first lines of The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor, in which a wise old man warns International Monetary Fund officials and foreign dignatories: "India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay."

Stop thinking of development as a process that only goes in one direction, or which affects a nation's people equally, and it becomes much easier to see how Britain is going backwards.

Even banana republics have cash: it just ends up in the hands of a very few people – ask the bank managers of Switzerland or the hotel concierges of Paris. In Britain, we have become used to having our resources skimmed off by a small cadre of the international elite, who often don't feel obliged to leave much behind for our tax officials. An Africa specialist could look at the City and recognise in it a 21st-century version of a resource curse: something generating oodles of money for a tiny group of people, often foreign, yet whose demands distort the rest of the economy. Sure, Britain has iPads and broadband – but it also has oversubscribed foodbanks. And the concept of the working poor that has dominated political debate since the crash is also something straight out of development textbooks.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen defined development as "the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency". Yet when it comes to social mobility, Britain now has the worst record of all advanced countries – and will soon be overtaken by the newly rich countries of east Asia.

And it's when wealth is concentrated in too few hands that the forces of law and order get used as a militia for the elite – and peaceful dissent gets stamped upon. That's why police are now a presence on our business-friendly university campuses; it also explains why Theresa May had the front to try to deport Trenton Oldfield for disrupting a student rowing competition (sorry, the Boat Race).

This isn't a sub-Rhodesian moan about Britain going to the dogs. But as my colleague Larry Elliott said in his most recent book, Going South, the sooner we puncture our own complacency at having created a rich economy for the few, and think of ourselves as in dire need of a proper economic development plan, the better.

Otherwise, we're well set to corner the world market in pig semen. The United Kingdom of spoink.

Materialism: a system that eats us from the inside out

Buying more stuff is associated with depression, anxiety and broken relationships. It is socially destructive and self-destructive 

• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 9 December 2013 20.30 GMT

Owning more doesn't bring happiness: 'the material pursuit of self-esteem reduces self-esteem.' Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

That they are crass, brash and trashy goes without saying. But there is something in the pictures posted on Rich Kids of Instagram (and highlighted by the Guardian last week) that inspires more than the usual revulsion towards crude displays of opulence. There is a shadow in these photos – photos of a young man wearing all four of his Rolex watches, a youth posing in front of his helicopter, endless pictures of cars, yachts, shoes, mansions, swimming pools and spoilt white boys throwing gangster poses in private jets – of something worse: something that, after you have seen a few dozen, becomes disorienting, even distressing.

The pictures are, of course, intended to incite envy. They reek instead of desperation. The young men and women seem lost in their designer clothes, dwarfed and dehumanised by their possessions, as if ownership has gone into reverse. A girl's head barely emerges from the haul of Chanel, Dior and Hermes shopping bags she has piled on her vast bed. It's captioned "shoppy shoppy" and "#goldrush", but a photograph whose purpose is to illustrate plenty seems instead to depict a void. She's alone with her bags and her image in the mirror, in a scene that seems saturated with despair.

Perhaps I'm projecting my prejudices. But an impressive body of psychological research seems to support these feelings. It suggests that materialism, a trait that can afflict both rich and poor, and which the researchers define as "a value system that is preoccupied with possessions and the social image they project", is both socially destructive and self-destructive. It smashes the happiness and peace of mind of those who succumb to it. It's associated with anxiety, depression and broken relationships.

There has long been a correlation observed between materialism, a lack of empathy and engagement with others, and unhappiness. But research conducted over the past few years seems to show causation. For example, a series of studies published in the journal Motivation and Emotion in July showed that as people become more materialistic, their wellbeing (good relationships, autonomy, sense of purpose and the rest) diminishes. As they become less materialistic, it rises.

In one study, the researchers tested a group of 18-year-olds, then re-tested them 12 years later. They were asked to rank the importance of different goals – jobs, money and status on one side, and self-acceptance, fellow feeling and belonging on the other. They were then given a standard diagnostic test to identify mental health problems. At the ages of both 18 and 30, materialistic people were more susceptible to disorders. But if in that period they became less materialistic, they became happier.

In another study, the psychologists followed Icelanders weathering their country's economic collapse. Some people became more focused on materialism, in the hope of regaining lost ground. Others responded by becoming less interested in money and turning their attention to family and community life. The first group reported lower levels of wellbeing, the second group higher levels.

These studies, while suggestive, demonstrate only correlation. But the researchers then put a group of adolescents through a church programme designed to steer children away from spending and towards sharing and saving. The self-esteem of materialistic children on the programme rose significantly, while that of materialistic children in the control group fell. Those who had little interest in materialism before the programme experienced no change in self-esteem.

Another paper, published in Psychological Science, found that people in a controlled experiment who were repeatedly exposed to images of luxury goods, to messages that cast them as consumers rather than citizens and to words associated with materialism (such as buy, status, asset and expensive), experienced immediate but temporary increases in material aspirations, anxiety and depression. They also became more competitive and more selfish, had a reduced sense of social responsibility and were less inclined to join in demanding social activities. The researchers point out that, as we are repeatedly bombarded with such images through advertisements, and constantly described by the media as consumers, these temporary effects could be triggered more or less continuously.

A third paper, published (paradoxically) in the Journal of Consumer Research, studied 2,500 people for six years. It found a two-way relationship between materialism and loneliness: materialism fosters social isolation; isolation fosters materialism. People who are cut off from others attach themselves to possessions. This attachment in turn crowds out social relationships.

The two varieties of materialism that have this effect – using possessions as a yardstick of success and seeking happiness through acquisition – are the varieties that seem to be on display on Rich Kids of Instagram. It was only after reading this paper that I understood why those photos distressed me: they look like a kind of social self-mutilation.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons an economic model based on perpetual growth continues on its own terms to succeed, though it may leave a trail of unpayable debts, mental illness and smashed relationships. Social atomisation may be the best sales strategy ever devised, and continuous marketing looks like an unbeatable programme for atomisation.

Materialism forces us into comparison with the possessions of others, a race both cruelly illustrated and crudely propelled by that toxic website. There is no end to it. If you have four Rolexes while another has five, you are a Rolex short of contentment. The material pursuit of self-esteem reduces your self-esteem.

I should emphasise that this is not about differences between rich and poor: the poor can be as susceptible to materialism as the rich. It is a general social affliction, visited upon us by government policy, corporate strategy, the collapse of communities and civic life, and our acquiescence in a system that is eating us from the inside out.

This is the dreadful mistake we are making: allowing ourselves to believe that having more money and more stuff enhances our wellbeing, a belief possessed not only by those poor deluded people in the pictures, but by almost every member of almost every government. Worldly ambition, material aspiration, perpetual growth: these are a formula for mass unhappiness.

If Nelson Mandela really had won, he wouldn't be seen as a universal hero

Mandela must have died a bitter man. To honour his legacy, we should focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to

• 
• • Slavoj Žižek
  • theguardian.com, Monday 9 December 2013 10.05 GMT

‘It is all too simple to criticise Mandela for abandoning the socialist perspective after the end of apartheid: did he really have a choice? Was the move towards socialism a real option?’ Photograph: Media24/Gallo Images/Getty Images

In the last two decades of his life, Nelson Mandela was celebrated as a model of how to liberate a country from the colonial yoke without succumbing to the temptation of dictatorial power and anti-capitalist posturing. In short, Mandela was not Robert Mugabe, and South Africa remained a multiparty democracy with a free press and a vibrant economy well-integrated into the global market and immune to hasty socialist experiments. Now, with his death, his stature as a saintly wise man seems confirmed for eternity: there are Hollywood movies about him – he was impersonated by Morgan Freeman, who also, by the way, played the role of God in another film; rock stars and religious leaders, sportsmen and politicians from Bill Clinton to Fidel Castro are all united in his beatification.

Is this, however, the whole story? Two key facts remain obliterated by this celebratory vision. In South Africa, the miserable life of the poor majority broadly remains the same as under apartheid, and the rise of political and civil rights is counterbalanced by the growing insecurity, violence and crime. The main change is that the old white ruling class is joined by the new black elite. Second, people remember the old African National Congress that promised not only the end of apartheid, but also more social justice, even a kind of socialism. This much more radical ANC past is gradually obliterated from our memory. No wonder that anger is growing among poor, black South Africans.

South Africa in this respect is just one version of the recurrent story of the contemporary left. A leader or party is elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a "new world" – but, then, sooner or later, they stumble upon the key dilemma: does one dare to touch the capitalist mechanisms, or does one decide to "play the game"? If one disturbs these mechanisms, one is very swiftly "punished" by market perturbations, economic chaos and the rest. This is why it is all too simple to criticise Mandela for abandoning the socialist perspective after the end of apartheid: did he really have a choice? Was the move towards socialism a real option?

It is easy to ridicule Ayn Rand, but there is a grain of truth in the famous "hymn to money" from her novel Atlas Shrugged: "Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other." Did Marx not say something similar in his well-known formula of how, in the universe of commodities, "relations between people assume the guise of relations among things"?

In the market economy, relations between people can appear as relations of mutually recognised freedom and equality: domination is no longer directly enacted and visible as such. What is problematic is Rand's underlying premise: that the only choice is between direct and indirect relations of domination and exploitation, with any alternative dismissed as utopian. However, one should nonetheless bear in mind the moment of truth in Rand's otherwise ridiculously ideological claim: the great lesson of state socialism was effectively that a direct abolition of private property and market-regulated exchange, lacking concrete forms of social regulation of the process of production, necessarily resuscitates direct relations of servitude and domination. If we merely abolish the market (inclusive of market exploitation) without replacing it with a proper form of the communist organisation of production and exchange, domination returns with a vengeance, and with it direct exploitation.

The general rule is that when a revolt begins against an oppressive half-democratic regime, as was the case in the Middle East in 2011, it is easy to mobilise large crowds with slogans that one cannot but characterise as crowd pleasers – for democracy, against corruption, for instance. But then we gradually approach more difficult choices, when our revolt succeeds in its direct goal, we come to realise that what really bothered us (our un-freedom, humiliation, social corruption, lack of prospect of a decent life) goes on in a new guise. The ruling ideology mobilises here its entire arsenal to prevent us from reaching this radical conclusion. They start to tell us that democratic freedom brings its own responsibility, that it comes at a price, that we are not yet mature if we expect too much from democracy. In this way, they blame us for our failure: in a free society, so we are told, we are all capitalist investing in our lives, deciding to put more into our education than into having fun if we want to succeed.

At a more directly political level, United States foreign policy elaborated a detailed strategy of how to exert damage control by way of rechanneling a popular uprising into acceptable parliamentary-capitalist constraints – as was done successfully in South Africa after the fall of apartheid regime, in Philippines after the fall of Marcos, in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto and elsewhere. At this precise conjuncture, radical emancipatory politics faces its greatest challenge: how to push things further after the first enthusiastic stage is over, how to make the next step without succumbing to the catastrophe of the "totalitarian" temptation – in short, how to move further from Mandela without becoming Mugabe.

If we want to remain faithful to Mandela's legacy, we should thus forget about celebratory crocodile tears and focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to. We can safely surmise that, on account of his doubtless moral and political greatness, he was at the end of his life also a bitter old man, well aware how his very political triumph and his elevation into a universal hero was the mask of a bitter defeat. His universal glory is also a sign that he really didn't disturb the global order of power.

UK's first 'social supermarket' opens to help fight food poverty

Community Shop in Goldthorpe gives local shoppers access to surplus food from supermarkets for up to 70% less

• Rebecca Smithers
• The Guardian, Monday 9 December 2013

Community Shop customers will not only get access to cheaper food, but will also be offered social and financial support. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Britain's first "social supermarket" opens its doors on Monday, offering shoppers on the verge of food poverty the chance to buy food and drink for up to 70% less than normal high-street prices.

If successful, the Community Shop, in Goldthorpe, near Barnsley, south Yorkshire, which is backed by large retailers and supermarkets, could be replicated elsewhere in Britain.

Community Shop is a subsidiary of Company Shop, Britain's largest commercial re-distributor of surplus food and goods, which works with retailers and manufacturers to tackle their surpluses sustainably and securely.

It sells on residual products, such as those with damaged packaging or incorrect labelling, to membership-only staff shops in factories. The new project goes one step further, located in the community for the first time and also matching surplus food with social need.

Membership of the pilot store – in Goldthorpe, an area of social deprivation – will be restricted to people living in a specific local postcode area who also get welfare support.

Individuals who shop at Community Shop will not only get access to cheaper food, but will also be offered programmes of wider social and financial support, such as debt advice, cookery skills and home budgeting.

The scheme is being supported by retailers, brands and manufacturers, including Asda, Morrisons, Co-operative Food, M&S, Tesco, Mondelez, Ocado, Tetley, Young's and Müller. All are diverting surpluses to the pilot.

Company Shop hopes to open Community Shops in London and beyond next year should the pilot prove successful and sustainable.

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Gurdwaras-turned-food banks: Sikh temples are catering for rise in Britain’s hungry

Each week across the UK, around 5,000 vegetarian meals are served to the needy

It is lunchtime at the Karamsar Gurdwara, where worshippers are tucking into the free food. But Sikhs are not the only ones enjoying the temple meals. Religious leaders report that an increasing number of non-believers are visiting their place of worship to eat, treating them as food banks while the effects of austerity and economic slump bite.

The Sikh Federation UK estimates that around 5,000 meals are now served to non-Sikhs by Britain’s 250 gurdwaras each week. They say the meals have been a lifeline for homeless people and overseas students swamped in debt.

Harmander Singh, who worships at the Karamsar Gurdwara in east London and is a spokesman for the Sikhs In England think-tank, said: “It’s noticeable: more people coming in and more people coming frequently. Some are working in low-paid jobs, cannot afford lunch and come here to subsidise living costs. They are also women with kids.”

He said that Sikhs welcome anyone into the gurdwara as long as they are not drunk, they remove their shoes and cover their head, adding: “It’s not a free buffet, it’s a way of serving the community.”

In the Karamsar Gurdwara’s dining area, most people sit on the floor while eating. The food is made round the clock by volunteers and funded by donations. In Sikhism, only vegetarian food is served in the gurdwara so the cuisine includes lentils, roti Indian bread, vegetables, yoghurt and Indian sweets.

Foodbanks fed 346,992 people across Britain in the UK last year, according to the Trussell Trust. The Sikh temples cannot help that many people, but the service is welcomed.

Among the 6,000 visitors a week lunching at the Karamsar Gurdwara was a group of overseas medical students.

One student from China, who wished to remain anonymous, said: “My friend brought me here. I found it very welcoming and peaceful. People were very friendly. They are taking care of me. I like the variety of the food. I haven’t seen this before I came to England. People seem to be very nice.”

Another student from India, who is Catholic, said: “For the last 10 days we have come here regularly. They have a welcoming attitude. People don’t discriminate. I was surprised to see a mini Punjab here. The food is like home-cooked.”

Amrick Singh Ubhi of the Nishkam Centre in Birmingham and vice-chair of the Council of Sikh Gurdwoaras, explained how their local community group does outreach work for people worried about visiting a place of worship.

“Nishkam Help is one example of a project to help feed people in the centre of Birmingham which has had to extend its provision to three nights a week and we have supported the initiation of similar programmes with gurdwaras in Leeds and Glasgow.

“The Birmingham Community Support Network has been set up to deal with the increase in demand especially as a result of the welfare reforms.

“We are hearing and seeing an increase of other nationalities frequenting gurdwaras specifically for langar.

“We have to realise that while we see our respective places of worship as a sanctuary, not all people will.  We see that people of other faiths and none do mix, but there is always that apprehension of “the other” and until we break down those barriers and start working together that will remain so.”

Why do we value gold?

 By Justin Rowlatt

Presenter, Business Daily, BBC World Service

Mankind's attitude to gold is bizarre. Chemically, it is uninteresting - it barely reacts with any other element. Yet, of all the 118 elements in the periodic table, gold is the one we humans have always tended to choose to use as currency. Why?

Why not osmium or chromium, or helium, say - or maybe seaborgium?

I'm not the first to ask the question, but I like to think I'm asking it in one of the most compelling locations possible - the extraordinary exhibition of pre-Columbian gold artefacts at the British Museum?

That's where I meet Andrea Sella, a professor of chemistry at University College London, beside an exquisite breastplate of pure beaten gold.

He pulls out a copy of the periodic table.

"Some elements are pretty easy to dismiss," he tells me, gesturing to the right-hand side of the table.

"Here you've got the noble gases and the halogens. A gas is never going to be much good as a currency. It isn't really going to be practical to carry around little phials of gas is it?

"And then there's the fact that they are colourless. How on earth would you know what it is?"

The two liquid elements (at everyday temperature and pressure) - mercury and bromine - would be impractical too. Both are also poisonous - not a good quality in something you plan to use as money. Similarly, we can cross out arsenic and several others.

Sella now turns his attention to the left-hand side of the table.

"We can rule out most of the elements here as well," he says confidently.

"The alkaline metals and earths are just too reactive. Many people will remember from school dropping sodium or potassium into a dish of water. It fizzes around and goes pop - an explosive currency just isn't a good idea."

A similar argument applies to another whole class of elements, the radioactive ones: you don't want your cash to give you cancer.

Out go thorium, uranium and plutonium, along with a whole bestiary of synthetically-created elements - rutherfordium, seaborgium, ununpentium, einsteinium - which only ever exist momentarily as part of a lab experiment, before radioactively decomposing.

Then there's the group called "rare earths", most of which are actually less rare than gold.

Unfortunately, they are chemically hard to distinguish from each other, so you would never know what you had in your pocket.

This leaves us with the middle area of the periodic table, the "transition" and "post-transition" metals.

This group of 49 elements includes some familiar names - iron, aluminium, copper, lead, silver.

But examine them in detail and you realise almost all have serious drawbacks.

We've got some very tough and durable elements on the left-hand side - titanium and zirconium, for example.

The problem is they are very hard to smelt. You need to get your furnace up into the region of 1,000C before you can begin to extract these metals from their ores. That kind of specialist equipment wasn't available to ancient man.

Aluminium is also hard to extract, and it's just too flimsy for coinage. Most of the others in the group aren't stable - they corrode if exposed to water or oxidise in the air.

Take iron. In theory it looks quite a good prospect for currency. It is attractive and polishes up to a lovely sheen. The problem is rust: unless you keep it completely dry it is liable to corrode away.

"A self-debasing currency is clearly not a good idea," says Sella.

We can rule out lead and copper on the same basis. Both are liable to corrosion. Societies have made both into money but the currencies did not last, literally.

So, what's left?

Of the 118 elements we are now down to just eight contenders: platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, osmium and ruthenium, along with the old familiars, gold and silver.

These are known as the noble metals, "noble" because they stand apart, barely reacting with the other elements.

They are also all pretty rare, another important criterion for a currency.

Even if iron didn't rust, it wouldn't make a good basis for money because there's just too much of it around. You would end up having to carry some very big coins about.

With all the noble metals except silver and gold, you have the opposite problem. They are so rare that you would have to cast some very tiny coins, which you might easily lose.

They are also very hard to extract. The melting point of platinum is 1,768C.

That leaves just two elements - silver and gold.

Both are scarce but not impossibly rare. Both also have a relatively low melting point, and are therefore easy to turn into coins, ingots or jewellery.

Silver tarnishes - it reacts with minute amounts of sulphur in the air. That's why we place particular value on gold.

It turns out then, that the reason gold is precious is precisely that it is so chemically uninteresting.

Gold's relative inertness means you can create an elaborate golden jaguar and be confident that 1,000 years later it can be found in a museum display case in central London, still in pristine condition.

So what does this process of elemental elimination tell us about what makes a good currency?

First off, it doesn't have to have any intrinsic value. A currency only has value because we, as a society, decide that it does.

As we've seen, it also needs to be stable, portable and non-toxic. And it needs to be fairly rare - you might be surprised just how little gold there is in the world.

If you were to collect together every earring, every gold sovereign, the tiny traces gold in every computer chip, every pre-Columbian statuette, every wedding ring and melt it down, it's guesstimated that you'd be left with just one 20-metre cube, or thereabouts.

But scarcity and stability aren't the whole story. Gold has one other quality that makes it the stand-out contender for currency in the periodic table. Gold is... golden.

All the other metals in the periodic table are silvery-coloured except for copper - and as we've already seen, copper corrodes, turning green when exposed to moist air. That makes gold very distinctive.

"That's the other secret of gold's success as a currency," says Sella. "Gold is unbelievably beautiful."

But how come no-one actually uses gold as a currency any more?

The seminal moment came in 1973, when Richard Nixon decided to sever the US dollar's tie to gold.

Since then, every major currency has been backed by no more than legal "fiat" - the law of the land says you must accept it as payment.

Nixon made his decision for the simple reason that the US was running out of the necessary gold to back all the dollars it had printed.

And here lies the problem with gold. Its supply bear no relation to the needs of the economy. The supply of gold depends on what can be mined.

In the 16th Century, the discovery of South America and its vast gold deposits led to an enormous fall in the value of gold - and therefore an enormous increase in the price of everything else.

Since then, the problem has typically been the opposite - the supply of gold has been too rigid. For example, many countries escaped the Great Depression in the 1930s by unhitching their currencies from the Gold Standard. Doing so freed them up to print more money and reflate their economies.

The demand for gold can vary wildly - and with a fixed supply, that can lead to equally wild swings in its price.

Most recently for example, the price has gone from $260 per troy ounce in 2001, to peak at $1,921.15 in September 2011, before falling back to $1,230 currently.

That is hardly the behaviour of a stable store of value.

So, to paraphrase Churchill, out of all the elements, gold makes the worst possible currency.

Vaginas may be weird and hairy, but they certainly don’t need steaming

We’ve moved on from stripping our most sensitive regions of their natural hair, and have
apparently started paying for vagina beauty treatments. Olivia Goldhill rounds up some of
the most absurd products imaginable, including the vajacial. Some women do this, but on their vaginas.  

By Olivia Goldhill
3:45PM GMT 05 Dec 2013

In the good old days, all you needed to be ready for sex is two willing participants and a healthy dose of sexual chemistry. Then pubic hair went out of fashion, and women suddenly had to start plucking, shaving, waxing,trimming away their natural state before copulation.
Now, it seems that vajacials are a thing. As in, facials, but for your vagina.

Apparently, these started off as a relatively simple affair in 2010, with a papaya enzyme mask, deep cleanse and tweezer hair extractions. They’ve moved on though. Impossibly, beauticians have moved on from convincing women that a papaya-scented nether region is a necessary aspect of good sex, and have introduced a whole new
range of vagina-themed beauty products.

Some women, before a big date or perhaps a romantic mini-break, actually book themselves in for a treatment of vaginal steaming. Presumably, they sit back, spread their legs and allow steam to gently (I hope) cleanse their vagina. But what temperature is the steam, where (exactly) does it go, and how on earth is steam any better at cleaning than plain water?
The treatments are usually done a day or two after the woman's period ends, and "heals any
imbalances" in the vagina. Which suggests I've been walking around with an unbalanced vagina for years.

Vaginoplasty is another trend, where you can shape your vagina into the desired shape. But what is this desired shape and who has a vagina that needs to be cosmetically re-modelled before sex? Poetry aside, vaginas are weird-looking things - they’re so un-pretty, I’m unsure what a “beautiful” vagina is supposed to look like. Perhaps we’ve been going overboard with the flower metaphors and some women actually want their vaginas to look like a rose.
Symmetry and neatness are listed as the longed-for traits, but this raises a whole new set of questions - is everyone else measuring their vaginas for perfect symmetry?

Now London’s getting in on America’s vaginal fashion trends, with salons offering "vaginal
rejuvenation" for hundreds of pounds. Bad news for students then (and most other people), who will undoubtedly struggle to afford an appropriately-preened vagina. Maybe it can be a special treat that a couple saves up for once a year, when they can enjoy annual sex day with properly presented sexual organs.

The vagina is apparently rejuvenated by a costly serum, which was originally created to treat wounds, but has moved on to a new life sprucing up female genitals. Magically, this serum can improve "vaginal function" and "tighten and firm the vaginal walls".

I’m not surprised that these treatments exist, but I’m a little scared that women—even one, solitary woman—is paying for them. There are women out there who are so anxious about what their partner will think about their vaginas, that they spend hundreds of pounds making them look “nice”.

But they need to stop this. They really do. No one envies the sex life of a woman complimented on her jojoba and rosemary scents. No one envies the sex life of a woman whose partner notices her jojoba and rosemary scents.

Vaginas are weird and they are hairy and that’s how they’re supposed to be. We need to stop worrying out what our poor vaginas look like during sex. It’s how they feel that really counts. OK?

Mass murder in the Middle East is funded by our friends the Saudis

PATRICK COCKBURN in The Independent

Sunday 8 December 2013

 

World View: Everyone knows where al-Qa'ida gets its money, but while the violence is sectarian, the West does nothing

Donors in Saudi Arabia have notoriously played a pivotal role in creating and maintaining Sunni jihadist groups over the past 30 years. But, for all the supposed determination of the United States and its allies since 9/11 to fight "the war on terror", they have showed astonishing restraint when it comes to pressuring Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies to turn off the financial tap that keeps the jihadists in business.

Compare two US pronouncements stressing the significance of these donations and basing their conclusions on the best intelligence available to the US government. The first is in the 9/11 Commission Report which found that Osama bin Laden did not fund al-Qa'ida because from 1994 he had little money of his own but relied on his ties to wealthy Saudi individuals established during the Afghan war in the 1980s. Quoting, among other sources, a CIA analytic report dated 14 November 2002, the commission concluded that "al-Qa'ida appears to have relied on a core group of financial facilitators who raised money from a variety of donors and other fund-raisers primarily in the Gulf countries and particularly in Saudi Arabia".

Seven years pass after the CIA report was written during which the US invades Iraq fighting, among others, the newly established Iraq franchise of al-Qa'ida, and becomes engaged in a bloody war in Afghanistan with the resurgent Taliban. American drones are fired at supposed al-Qa'ida-linked targets located everywhere from Waziristan in north-west Pakistan to the hill villages of Yemen. But during this time Washington can manage no more than a few gentle reproofs to Saudi Arabia on its promotion of fanatical and sectarian Sunni militancy outside its own borders.

Evidence for this is a fascinating telegram on "terrorist finance" from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to US embassies, dated 30 December 2009 and released by WikiLeaks the following year. She says firmly that "donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide". Eight years after 9/11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, Mrs Clinton reiterates in the same message that "Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support for al-Qa'ida, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan] and other terrorist groups". Saudi Arabia was most important in sustaining these groups, but it was not quite alone since "al-Qa'ida and other groups continue to exploit Kuwait both as a source of funds and as a key transit point".

Why did the US and its European allies treat Saudi Arabia with such restraint when the kingdom was so central to al-Qa'ida and other even more sectarian Sunni jihadist organisations? An obvious explanation is that the US, Britain and others did not want to offend a close ally and that the Saudi royal family had judiciously used its money to buy its way into the international ruling class. Unconvincing attempts were made to link Iran and Iraq to al-Qa'ida when the real culprits were in plain sight.

But there is another compelling reason why the Western powers have been so laggard in denouncing Saudi Arabia and the Sunni rulers of the Gulf for spreading bigotry and religious hate. Al-Qa'ida members or al-Qa'ida-influenced groups have always held two very different views about who is their main opponent. For Osama bin Laden the chief enemy was the Americans, but for the great majority of Sunni jihadists, including the al-Qa'ida franchises in Iraq and Syria, the target is the Shia. It is the Shia who have been dying in their thousands in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and even in countries where there are few of them to kill, such as Egypt.

Pakistani papers no longer pay much attention to hundreds of Shia butchered from Quetta to Lahore. In Iraq, most of the 7,000 or more people killed this year are Shia civilians killed by the bombs of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, part of an umbrella organisation called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), which also encompasses Syria. In overwhelmingly Sunni Libya, militants in the eastern town of Derna killed an Iraqi professor who admitted on video to being a Shia before being executed by his captors.

Suppose a hundredth part of this merciless onslaught had been directed against Western targets rather than against Shia Muslims, would the Americans and the British be so accommodating to the Saudis, Kuwaitis and Emiratis? It is this that gives a sense of phoniness to boasts by the vastly expanded security bureaucracies in Washington and London about their success in combating terror justifying vast budgets for themselves and restricted civil liberties for everybody else. All the drones in the world fired into Pashtun villages in Pakistan or their counterparts in Yemen or Somalia are not going to make much difference if the Sunni jihadists in Iraq and Syria ever decide – as Osama bin Laden did before them – that their main enemies are to be found not among the Shia but in the United States and Britain.

Instead of the fumbling amateur efforts of the shoe and underpants bombers, security services would have to face jihadist movements in Iraq, Syria and Libya fielding hundreds of bomb-makers and suicide bombers. Only gradually this year, videos from Syria of non-Sunnis being decapitated for sectarian motives alone have begun to shake the basic indifference of the Western powers to Sunni jihadism so long as it is not directed against themselves.

Saudi Arabia as a government for a long time took a back seat to Qatar in funding rebels in Syria, and it is only since this summer that they have taken over the file. They wish to marginalise the al-Qa'ida franchisees such as Isil and the al-Nusra Front while buying up and arming enough Sunni war-bands to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.

The directors of Saudi policy in Syria – the Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, the head of the Saudi intelligence agency Prince Bandar bin Sultan and the Deputy Defence Minister Prince Salman bin Sultan – plan to spend billions raising a militant Sunni army some 40,000 to 50,000 strong. Already local warlords are uniting to share in Saudi largesse for which their enthusiasm is probably greater than their willingness to fight.

The Saudi initiative is partly fuelled by rage in Riyadh at President Obama's decision not to go to war with Syria after Assad used chemical weapons on 21 August. Nothing but an all-out air attack by the US similar to that of Nato in Libya in 2011 would overthrow Assad, so the US has essentially decided he will stay for the moment. Saudi anger has been further exacerbated by the successful US-led negotiations on an interim deal with Iran over its nuclear programme.

By stepping out of the shadows in Syria, the Saudis are probably making a mistake. Their money will only buy them so much. The artificial unity of rebel groups with their hands out for Saudi money is not going to last. They will be discredited in the eyes of more fanatical jihadis as well as Syrians in general as pawns of Saudi and other intelligence services.

A divided opposition will be even more fragmented. Jordan may accommodate the Saudis and a multitude of foreign intelligence services, but it will not want to be the rallying point for an anti-Assad army.

The Saudi plan looks doomed from the start, though it could get a lot more Syrians killed before it fails. Yazid Sayegh of the Carnegie Middle East Centre highlights succinctly the risks involved in the venture: "Saudi Arabia could find itself replicating its experience in Afghanistan, where it built up disparate mujahedin groups that lacked a unifying political framework. The forces were left unable to govern Kabul once they took it, paving the way for the Taliban to take over. Al-Qa'ida followed, and the blowback subsequently reached Saudi Arabia.