On this day a year ago, I was in despair. A dark cloud was rising over the Atlantic, threatening to blot out some of the freedoms our ancestors lost their lives to secure. The ability of parliaments on both sides of the ocean to legislate on behalf of their people was at risk from an astonishing treaty that would grant corporations special powers to sue governments. I could not see a way of stopping it.
Almost no one had heard of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and the US, except those who were quietly negotiating it. And I suspected that almost no one ever would. Even the name seemed perfectly designed to repel public interest. I wrote about it for one reason: to be able to tell my children that I had not done nothing.
To my amazement, the article went viral. As a result of the public reaction and the involvement of remarkable campaigners, the European commission and the British government responded. The Stop TTIP petition now carries more than 750,000 signatures; the 38 Degrees petition has 910,000. Last month there were 450 protest actions across 24 member states. The commission was forced to hold a public consultation about the most controversial aspect, and 150,000 people responded. Never let it be said that people cannot engage with complex issues.
Nothing has yet been won. Corporations and governments – led by the UK – are mobilising to thwart this uprising. But their position slips a little every month. When the British minister responsible at the time, Ken Clarke, responded to my first articles, he insisted that “nothing could be more foolish” than making the European negotiating position public, as I’d proposed. But last month the commission was obliged to do just this. It’s beginning to look as if the fight against TTIP could become a historic victory for people against corporate power.
The central problem is what the negotiators call investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). The treaty would allow corporations to sue governments before an arbitration panel composed of corporate lawyers, at which other people have no representation, and which is not subject to judicial review.
Already, thanks to the insertion of ISDS into much smaller trade treaties, big business is engaged in an orgy of litigation, whose purpose is to strike down any law that might impinge on its anticipated future profits. The tobacco firm Philip Morris is suing governments in Uruguay and Australia for trying to discourage people from smoking. The oil firm Occidental was awarded $2.3bn in compensation from Ecuador, which terminated the company’s drilling concession in the Amazon after finding that Occidental had broken Ecuadorean law. The Swedish company Vattenfall is suing the German government for shutting down nuclear power. An Australian firm is suing El Salvador’s government for $300m for refusing permission for a goldmine over concerns it would poison the drinking water.
The same mechanism, under TTIP, could be used to prevent UK governments from reversing the privatisation of the railways and the NHS, or from defending public health and the natural world against corporate greed. The corporate lawyers who sit on these panels are beholden only to the companies whose cases they adjudicate, who at other times are their employers.
As one of these people commented: “When I wake up at night and think about arbitration, it never ceases to amaze me that sovereign states have agreed to investment arbitration at all … Three private individuals are entrusted with the power to review, without any restriction or appeal procedure, all actions of the government, all decisions of the courts, and all laws and regulations emanating from parliament.”
So outrageous is this arrangement that even the Economist, usually the champion of corporate power and trade treaties, has now come out against it. It calls investor-state dispute settlement “a way to let multinational companies get rich at the expense of ordinary people”.
When David Cameron and the corporate press launched their campaign against the candidacy of Jean-Claude Juncker for president of the European commission, they claimed that he threatened British sovereignty. It was a perfect inversion of reality. Juncker, seeing the way the public debate was going, promised in his manifesto that “I will not sacrifice Europe’s safety, health, social and data protection standards … on the altar of free trade … Nor will I accept that the jurisdiction of courts in the EU member states is limited by special regimes for investor disputes.” Juncker’s crime was that he had pledged not to give away as much of our sovereignty to corporate lawyers as Cameron and the media barons demanded.
Juncker is now coming under extreme pressure. Last month 14 states wrote to him, privately and without consulting their parliaments, demanding the inclusion of ISDS (the letter was leaked a few days ago). And who is leading this campaign? The British government. It’s hard to get your head around the duplicity involved. While claiming to be so exercised about our sovereignty that it is prepared to leave the EU, our government is secretly insisting that the European commission slaughter our sovereignty on behalf of corporate profits. Cameron is leading a gunpowder plot against democracy.
He and his ministers have failed to answer the howlingly obvious question: what’s wrong with the courts? If corporations want to sue governments, they already have a right to do so, through the courts, like anyone else. It’s not as if, with their vast budgets, they are disadvantaged in this arena. Why should they be allowed to use a separate legal system, to which the rest of us have no access? What happened to the principle of equality before the law?
If our courts are fit to deprive citizens of their liberty, why are they unfit to deprive corporations of anticipated future profits? Let’s not hear another word from the defenders of TTIP until they have answered this question.
It cannot be ducked for much longer. Unlike previous treaties, this one is being dragged by campaigners into the open, where its justifications shrivel on exposure to the light. There’s a tough struggle to come, and the outcome is by no means certain, but my sense is that we will win.
It is open season on Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. No opportunity is lost to demonise and denigrate father and daughter. Even October 31, the day the lady was assassinated, became a day-long festival for celebrating her wickedness, besides proclaiming she was no martyr but a case of self-destruction. Fortunately, we are told, a set of rulers, or shall i say ruler, is at hand, with the wisdom and vision to repair the damage.
We need to talk about Jawaharlal and Indira. That’s for sure. But we also need to keep some touch with historical veracity. For their lifelong opponents truth lies in the eye of the beholder. Consequently, 2014 onwards provides an excellent window to demolish once and for all the myth about their contribution to nation-building. What they built, so the argument goes, is their family dynasty.
Party politics can and is used to float falsehoods with the help of state power. Witness how the fable concerning our glorious Vedic past is being represented triumphantly (in which allegedly plastic surgery and stem cell research flourished) without a murmur of incredulity, or a titter of mirth. If truth is the first casualty in war, it is the second casualty in times when, as Lawrence Durrell puts it, “truth is what contradicts itself”.
The systematic and organised campaign to vilify the Nehru legacy and replace it with the more ‘muscular and patriotic’ legacy of Sardar Patel is top of the agenda. The exercise is ludicrous and an insult to the great Sardar. But let us leave that falsehood alone for the moment.
At the heart of the demolition project is the announcement that a new Idea of India, contrary to the one proposed by Nehru, is available, and in need of urgent execution. It is an abiding irony that the sole politician in the current pantheon of saffron leaders the present prime minister pays obeisance to is Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who ruled the country with Nehru as his lodestar.
What is this new Idea of India? I think we should be told. Alas, its architects have provided no blueprint except to declare it exists. If i were say Mani Shankar Aiyar, i would argue it consists of one part jingoism and one part xenophobia. Perhaps that is a slight exaggeration. More accurately, it rejects the legendary poet Raghupati Sahay aka Firaq Gorakhpuri’s thesis, “Sar zamiin-e hind par aqwaam-e alam ke Firaq/ Kaafile baste gae, Hindustan bantaa gayaa”. (In the sacred land of Hind, caravans of the world Firaq went on settling, and Hindustan kept on being formed.)
If one takes the short view of history, Nehru is an easy target, and Indira even easier. To compile a list of ‘sins’ the duo committed would be superfluous since the compilation has already been lovingly done by the Sangh Parivar. Many of the sins are not without basis but they are not black and white either, except the Emergency. They were committed at a specific moment in history. Happily, we have access to material which provides us with full, balanced assessments – warts and all. We are therefore neither astonished nor shocked when these transgressions are presented. No verdict on Nehru or Indira is possible without its share of criticism.
Perhaps this is the right time to ask the hunters looking for two prized scalps some questions. Where did Narayana Murthy and the entire information technology industry come from? Where did Indra Nooyi come from? Where did Warren Buffett’s financial wizard, Ajit Jain, come from? They all came from the IITs, IIMs and other world-class education centres Nehru had the foresight to set up.
If India has the ‘bomb’ and internationally renowned research labs, the credit must go to the same man. At a time when the republic struggled, he insisted a newly independent, backward nation be fully engaged with the contemporary first world through advanced learning and progressive thinking. Nehru ensured a society steeped in superstition, ritual, religious dogma and belief in kismet embraced a scientific temper so that the temptation to wallow in a mythical ‘glorious’ past could be resisted. The modern nation state – outward-looking, open, rational, argumentative, sceptical – armed with universal adult franchise, is the creation of Jawaharlal Nehru. Rubbish that if you like.
I yield to no one in my abhorrence for aspects of Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership. Because i entered journalism in 1974, i experienced the full horrors of civilian dictatorship. That she wrecked critical democratic institutions is undeniable. But we must also remember she dismembered Pakistan and made sure it could never pose a threat. There is a good Indira and a bad Indira.
Incidentally, when i read opinion polls reveal she is easily the most popular prime minister the country has produced, when i see long queues outside her Safdarjung Memorial, I wonder if our Iron Lady needs more than one yardstick (Emergency) to assess her term in office.
If Nehru’s legacy is the real obstacle holding India back, why don’t its adversaries throw it into the wastepaper basket? And govern on the majoritarian doctrine? Not a chance. When it comes to self-preservation, the new rulers are wise. They know they would soon be out of a job, if they abandoned the idea (secularism) which has held the country together.
John McArthur makes his one-man protest outside LAMH in Motherwell after having his jobseeker’s allowance cut. Photograph: Alan Watson/HE Media/South West News
A man who was let go at the end of a temporary job has been ordered by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to work for the same firm for six months without pay.
Electronics specialist John McArthur, now unemployed, says he is living off 16p tins of spaghetti and without heating after being sanctioned by a jobcentre for refusing to work unpaid for LAMH Recycle in Motherwell, a Scottish social enterprise.
He says he was happy to work for LAMH under the now-defunct future jobs fund for the minimum wage in 2010-2011, but refuses on principle to do the same job unpaid.
McArthur, 59, says he is surviving on a monthly pension of £149 after the DWP stopped his unemployment benefit until January as punishment for his refusal to go on the 26-week community work placement (CWP).
“It was simply a case of: ‘Go here, work for nothing and if you don’t we’ll stop your subsistence level benefit,’” he said.
McArthur, who says he has been applying for 50 jobs a week without joy, said the CWP programme was “entirely exploitative” and came at the “expense of poor people who’ve got absolutely no choice”. He added: “They [the government] deny it’s forced labour, that you can say no, but forced doesn’t always mean physical, it can be psychological or economic.
“The person who is trying to survive already on subsistence level welfare has absolutely no choice in the matter … especially if they’ve got young children to look after.”
LAMH confirmed it has 16 people working for six months without pay under CWP but added that since the end of June, six had progressed into paid employment.
The social enterprise, which repairs computers and recycles tin and cardboard, says it helps dozens of people each year who are long-term unemployed, many of whom have health issues.
Joe Fulton, the operations and development manager, said he believed the scheme “worked for people who want to make it work for them”. He added that out of the organisation’s paid workforce of 39, 25 had previously been unemployed.
McArthur said there were no jobs for someone his age in the Lanarkshire area. He said support for his placard demonstration had been overwhelming and just one person had objected.
Following conversations with local councillors, North Lanarkshire council passed a motion in October strongly objecting to forced employment schemes saying it would not get involved itself. “This council will not provide jobs or placements without pay as a condition of receiving benefits unless it is truly voluntary,” the motion read.
“We do not support any mandation of unemployed people to work without pay that puts their benefits at risk.”
The motion added such measures were ineffective and could “further stigmatise and demotivate” the unemployed in their search for work.
Last Wednesday, the DWP continued to battle the information commissioner and hostile court judgments ordering it to reveal where possibly hundreds of thousands of people are being sent to work without pay, sometimes for months at a time.
At the tribunal, the DWP argued that if the public knew exactly where people were being sent on placements political protests would increase, which was likely to lead to the collapse of several employment schemes and undermine the government’s economic interests.
The DWP confirmed some of the UK’s biggest charities, including the British Heart Foundation, Scope, Banardo’s, Sue Ryder, and Marie Curie had withdrawn from the CWP scheme, causing a significant loss of placements.
Giving evidence, senior civil servant Jennifer Bradley confirmed that numerous charities and businesses were receiving cash payments as an incentive to take on the unemployed.
She said several DWP schemes used mandatory unpaid work as a tool to help people but stressed that it was written into the terms that charities and businesses could not use people out of work to replace their paid workforce.
The DWP said it could not comment on individual cases but added that community work placements “help long-term unemployed people to gain work experience which increases their confidence, helps them to gain vital skills and crucially, improves their chances of getting a job.
“We are not naming the charities and community groups involved in the scheme in order to protect them from those who seem intent on stopping us helping people into work.”
Arguably Keith Miller was cricket's greatest swashbuckler. Larger than life, he leapt straight at you from the pages of Boy's Own Paper.
He was born in November 1919, named after airmen brothers Keith and Ross Smith, who were creating world aviation history with their first epic flight from England to Australia. He never lost his stamina or zest for life. Miller whacked sixes, backed horses, had film-star looks, bowled bouncers, caught blinders and attracted beauties.
He flew night missions over Germany and Occupied France in his Mosquito, bombing and strafing Nazi rocket bases. The stories from his war days are legion.
Michael Parkinson quizzed him about the pressure in the Test arena once. "Pressure?" Miller asked, "There's no pressure in Test cricket. Real pressure is when you are flying a Mosquito with a Messerschmitt up your arse!"
Flight Lieutenant Miller's love of classical music compelled him on one mission to turn his Mosquito back to the war zone. Taking a slight detour, he flew over Bonn, Beethoven's birthplace.
One day at Great Massingham, Norfolk, Miller fought to control his plane as he came in to land. The starboard engine was spurting flame and Miller crash-landed the ailing aircraft, which lost its tail on impact with the ground.
Miller once flew up the straight at Royal Ascot one clear Saturday afternoon and another day he buzzed the Goodwood track. His commanding officer gave Miller a dressing down, calling him an "utter disgrace to the air force".
How the worm turned.
During the Australian team's tour of England in 1953, Miller, resplendent in top hat and tails, drove to Royal Ascot in a gleaming Rolls Royce. As he drove into the car park he noticed that the attendant was none other than his old RAF Commanding Officer. Miller stepped from his vehicle and, pretending not to have recognised his ex-CO, said in his best official voice, "Ah, my good fellow. Park my Rolls in the shade, will you? That's a good chap."
A week or two earlier Lindsay Hassett's Australians had visited Buckingham Palace. Miller was rumoured to have been friendly with Princess Margaret, and when he emerged from the bus he began to wander from the vehicle and headed towards a distant building.
"Nugget, where are you going?" Hassett asked.
"Oh, it's okay, skipper. I know of another entrance here," came the reply.
For much of the war, Miller was based near Bournemouth. Every Friday night it became tradition for Miller and his mates from the RAF base to meet at the Carlton Hotel in Bournemouth. One fateful Friday night, Miller couldn't make the regular appointment and when he returned he found the town barricaded after a German raid. A Focke-Wulf fighter bomber had strafed the church next to the hotel, causing the church spire to collapse directly on to the front bar, instantly killing his eight mates. Each year for more than 50 years Miller returned to England and spent time with a relative of each of his mates killed that tragic night in 1943.
Miller's attacking batting and brilliant fast bowling made an instant impact in world cricket when he impressed as an allrounder in the Victory Tests in 1945. He scored 514 runs in the series, including a brilliant 185 at Lord's, where he hit Eric Hollies for seven sixes, one of the hits crashing into the top of the Lord's pavilion.
John Arlott once wrote that Miller seemed to be "busy living life in case he ran out of it". Miller found a classical-music soulmate in Neville Cardus and had an equally good rapport with the great conductor Sir John Barbirolli.
Miller never captained Australia but he did lead New South Wales with distinction in the 1950s. Richie Benaud regards Miller as the best captain "never to have captained his country", for the way he led by instinct and by example.
In November 1955, Miller's New South Wales struggled to 215 for 8 on the first day of a Sheffield Shield match against South Australia. At stumps Miller declared the innings closed and then partied long and hard to celebrate the birth of his first child. His NSW team-mates were already on the ground when Miller arrived the next morning, so he hurriedly tossed on his cricket gear, his bootlaces trailing as he wandered onto the ground. When he focused his bleary eyes on the wicket, they opened wide, for the wicket was green as a tree frog.
Left-arm paceman Alan Davidson had already measured out his 15-paced approach and was eager to bowl the first ball. He was standing at the top of his mark when Miller approached.
"Ahem, now Davo, I think you can do a job for us today," Miller said before turning his back and walking down towards the stumps and the beginning of the green pitch. He stopped, turned around and waved to Davidson. "Ah Davo, try the other end, I'll have a go here."
Within a few overs South Australia were dismissed for 27. Miller took a career-best 7 for 12. Davidson didn't get a bowl.
As NSW captain, Miller's legend grew. Once, someone alerted him to the fact that there were 12 men on the field. "It seems we have too many men out here," Miller said. "Will one of you blokes piss off?"
In 55 Tests between 1946 and 1956, he took 170 wickets at 22.97 and scored 2958 runs at 36.97. He also pulled off some wonderful catches in the slips. He was agile, some said he possessed lightning reflexes and moved swiftly and gracefully, like a panther.
In 1969 I was invited by the NSW Cricket Association to take part in making a coaching film. The event was sponsored by the Rothmans Sports Foundation. I was rapt at getting the chance to spend time in the company of Alan Davidson and Keith Miller. Each of us was required to bowl a couple of balls at a set of stumps on the SCG No. 2 Ground.
Miller borrowed some gear and as he walked past me, he said, "Ahem, I'll pitch leg and hit off." He did not measure out his run. He simply wandered back a few paces, turned and began his approach. Despite being 50, not having bowled a ball in a decade, he moved in with the grace and power of a finely tuned racehorse. The ball left his hand seam up. It came from a fair height, for Miller stayed "tall" throughout and the ball pitched on the line of leg stump and hit the top of off. He bowled three balls and two of his deliveries pitched leg and hit off. Then he walked away. It was the most amazing thing I've seen in cricket.
Benaud once confessed to Miller: "You know, Keith, I wish I had been given the chance to bowl to Don Bradman. I came into the side just too late." Miller coughed and replied, "Ahem, Richie, my boy, your not having to bowl to Bradman was your one lucky break in cricket."
Len Hutton, one of the greatest England batsmen of all time, always found Miller a handful. "He'd just as likely bowl me a slow wrong'un first ball of a Test match as he would an outswinger or a searing bouncer," Sir Len told me in Adelaide in 1984. "Keith was the greatest bowler I ever faced in Test cricket."
Miller admired Hutton's cricket too, and when I once pressed him about the relative merits of Hutton and Geoff Boycott's batting, Miller said: "Both were fine players. Hutton had a far greater range of attacking strokes, but defensively I reckon they were pretty much on a par." He then looked at me and smiled, "But for heaven's sake, don't tell Boycott!"
Miller greatly admired the skill of Bradman, but he didn't quite know how great the Don was until he bowled to him in a match after his retirement. "I decided to bowl a few short ones, "just to test his reflexes," Miller said. "First one was a medium-fast bouncer. It didn't get up too far, but Don was swiftly into position and he smashed it like a rocket past mid-on.
"Fast bowlers don't like that treatment, so I charged in for the next ball and gave it my all. It was a tremendous bumper, straight at his head, but he simply swung into position and cracked it forward of square, almost decapitating Sam Loxton on its way to the fence. If Bradman was 'better' in the 1930s he must have been some player."
So too Keith Ross Miller, Australia's greatest allrounder.
Six years ago, as the financial crisis hit, David Mitchell began writing a weekly column for the Observer. In this extract from his new book, an anthology of his best writing, he recalls how austerity left a permanent mark on the mood of the nation
David Mitchell: 'As a nation, we have lost confidence and creativity.' Photograph: Chris Floyd
When I started writing regularly for the Observer in 2008, a new world era began. It was a coincidence, I hasten to add. Despite patches of enthusiasm on Twitter and, on one occasion, a mention on Andrew Marr’s TV show, my weekly attempt at a public moan with jokes hasn’t quite ushered in a new age. It sometimes comes quite high up the “most viewed” list on Comment is Free (when people have hated it, that is – not so much when they haven’t), but in historical terms it’s no fall of Constantinople.
But, looking back now, with the tiny amount of hindsight that remaining alive for six more years generates, I’m pretty sure that 2008 marked the end of, and the beginning of, an era.
You’ve always got to have an era on the go, you see. Once one era ends, another begins automatically. In fact, the first one probably ends because the second one has begun and totally stolen its thunder. But it’s very much a “the King is dead – long live the King” kind of set-up. You’re absolutely not allowed a calm era-less interregnum of unremarkable pottering – a couple of years when the global situation is “between projects”, like an ageing celebrity who can pick and choose thanks to sky-high credibility and accumulated property equity.
With history, the moment the 20s stop roaring, the Depression starts slumping and then the Nazis start rising and then the world starts warring and then the instant, the very instant, the war ends, it’s postwar. Can you believe it? Not a millisecond that isn’t either the war or the postwar era. It’s fucking relentless (to paraphrase Herodotus) but it’s the only system we’ve got.
Of course, some era changeovers are harder to pinpoint than the end of a war. The one I’m talking about was like that. No new toothy smiling suit had been swept to office, no nationally beloved beauty had been chased to death by photographers, no building had been blown up or completed, no new technology suddenly launched or discredited, no disease gone pandemic or been cured. But, as when a Premier League football team runs on in front of an away crowd, and opposition fans reach vindictively for their 2ps, change was palpably in the air.
In fact, this change was all about money. Money may not bring you happiness but, if there’s one thing the credit crunch of 2008 showed, no money brings a hell of a lot of grief. And that’s what we were at risk of experiencing that autumn: no money. Anywhere. At all. The sudden absence of money – its collapse as a human construct.
Money isn’t really anything, after all. Humans don’t need money – we need food and shelter. Living the sophisticated life of the westerner, it appears that you need money in order to obtain food and shelter. But that’s not actually, fundamentally, true. Food and shelter come from farming and building. The fact that the products of those activities are swappable for money is just a convention. There’s nothing about the money itself that anyone actually requires.
Even when it was backed by gold or, before that, made of gold, it still didn’t have intrinsic value. No one needs gold (I know it’s in microchips but that’s a side issue – King Midas didn’t go all funny in the hope of reinvigorating the Lydian tech sector). It’s just shiny and it doesn’t rust, so it was convenient to develop the convention whereby little roundels of it were exchangeable for items of value. The subsequent convention that numbers on a computer screen were equally exchangeable for such items was even more convenient, but also even more dependent on everyone’s confidence in and adherence to the convention.
What started in the mists of early history as a useful aid to barter had become, by 2008, a vital element of the world as we knew it. So vital that many people who worked in the financial sector seemed to have completely forgotten that money, and credit, were just a convention – and had begun to believe that they were something solid: an actual, tangible, useful thing. Something invulnerable, something which undeniably exists.
Illustration by David Foldvari.
And so the piss-taking began.
And, by “piss-taking”, I mean casino banking: the buying and selling of the intrinsically worthless. The immoral exploitation of the market in denial of its fundamental purpose – which was supposed to be to facilitate trade, to bring resources to enterprise, not to pass round empty financial concepts before anyone realises that they have no actual value, just a transitory and astronomical price. A system of money-making which involves no real wealth-creation at all – nothing made, no useful service provided, nothing done which remotely conforms to the ancient and fundamental laws of “what you should get paid for”.
And by “began”, I mean “intensified”. I may be a pitifully naive financial analyst but I’m not quite a shit enough historian to think that any of this market immorality was unprecedented. Dishonest but somehow legal bucks have probably been made since a microsecond after the invention of the buck. I know none of this was new – but the scale of the activity certainly was. As was the terrifying computer-driven speed at which it was practised.
And I assume it’s obvious what I mean by “And so the”.
The result of all this, as we know, was the collapse of many financial institutions and, subsequently, economies, coupled with expensive efforts to prop others up using taxpayers’ – ie ordinary people’s – money. The climax of the crisis, for Britain at least, was a weekend in October 2008 when, had the Royal Bank of Scotland not been bailed out by the government, its cashpoints wouldn’t have been working on Monday morning. And not for the usual reasons of being smashed in and/or covered in sick because of all the stag dos we indulge in to sustain turnover in our hospitality sector. This time it would be because the bank had run out of money, and also of people to call to borrow money. That terrifying eventuality would have led to a run on other, healthier banks – and no bank in history, however prudent, has ever been able to return all of its investors’ money at once.
That was the moment when money nearly broke. It became clear that all the numbers on screens didn’t add up any more. Suddenly the value that these institutions were claiming to represent had to be found, and they didn’t have it. So we, the normal people, would have to – and I shudder at the injustice of the phrase – give it to them.
Never has the weirdness of what money really is – what a service economy is, how distant we’ve become from our basic survival needs, and yet how pervasive those needs remain – been more evident. “Why can’t we just pretend the money is still there?” we thought. “Send the number from the screen to the electricity people to increase the number on their screen and they’ll give us the power to keep the screen on, won’t they?”
Sadly, it turned out that’s what had already been happening for quite a while. The global fiscal Wile E Coyote had long since run off the edge of the cliff and had been scampering ineffectually in mid-air for some time. But now the period during which he has yet to start falling, because he still hasn’t noticed the absence of solid ground beneath him, was ending. We’d collectively looked down. We were caught in the beat of stillness, the panicked look to camera, that precedes the plummet.
Money didn’t collapse. Credit became terrifyingly scarce – institutions which a month earlier were betting billions on three-legged horses were suddenly withdrawing loans from solvent businesses – but the basic convention of currency just about held. That was probably for the best.
But the eye-watering injustice of the bailout – the disconnect between guilt and punishment – soured the national mood. We were angry. But we were also frightened. We were struck simultaneously by sudden and severe national poverty, after a decade of unthinking prosperity, and with something beyond poverty: a deep and deracinating sense that our previous wealth had been an illusion. The expensive frothy coffees of the early 2000s retrospectively turned to ashes in our mouths.
And, while the economic downturn brought on by the crisis was felt all over the world, it did not hurt everyone equally. Of course, that’s always the case, but the nature of that inequality had changed. Britain remained among the richest nations on Earth but, for the first time anyone could remember, countries like ours didn’t get off lightest. True, there were still plenty of people unimaginably less fortunate than ourselves. But now there was also the unsettling emergence of people who might be, or come to be, more fortunate.
The fast-growing economies of countries such as India, Brazil and, most unnerving of all, China, barely suffered a blip, while ours dropped off a cliff, still pointlessly clutching its Acme Giant Credit magnet. For the first time since the cold war, the west, the world’s dominant politico-economic force for 500 years, seemed fallible and fragile. The frailty of money and the financial services industry having been laid bare, we were forced to contemplate where real wealth comes from: making stuff and selling it. And, reality TV and artisanal cheese aside, more and more of that manufacturing was being done by the Chinese.
Illustration by David Foldvari.
The Blair-era dream of remaining rich and becoming richer, of driving our economy purely by providing services and dining out regularly, with maybe a bit of web design and party planning thrown in to keep us honest, was suddenly revealed as foolish. We felt at once deeply stupid and deeply resentful. We despised one another, and of course the government, for the mistakes that had been made, but were also nostalgic for the prosperous feeling we’d had while it was happening.
I realise the shine had been taken off New Labour long before 2008. That war in Iraq went down like a cup of cold piss, for a start. But I’m not sure that really upset Britain as much as we’re apt to think. The war made Britons shake their heads, but the credit crunch had us banging them against walls.
You only have to look at Blair and Brown’s relative electoral fortunes: Blair won a general election after getting the country involved in an unpopular and unsuccessful war, a war of which he remained unashamedly in favour; yet Brown lost one after a global economic downturn which he admittedly failed to avert, but for which he certainly wasn’t primarily responsible.
It turns out that it’s not the morality or otherwise of our foreign policy that predominantly affects the national mood, it’s money. We might not have thought we were money-obsessed, but then we probably don’t think we’re oxygen-obsessed. But you certainly get to thinking about it if someone takes it away.
The horrible shock of 2008, much more than any horrible shocks we allowed our military to impose abroad, changed our national personality. It’s as if Britain was a sprightly and twinkly pensioner who then, in the autumn of 2008, had a serious fall. It survived but has never been quite the same – it’s more timorous and judgmental, envious and angry. As a nation, we’ve lost confidence and creativity, and we’re readier to blame each other and slower to laugh at ourselves.
This is the glum conclusion I’ve come to from looking back over all the columns I’ve written. I didn’t think any of this when I started writing them six years ago. I was just glad things were going wrong because that makes it easier to write jokes – utopia is a living hell for satirical columnists. I probably fretted about what it would be like if there was a fiscal apocalypse and we were reduced to growing our own food – satirical columnists also have a rough ride in subsistence economies. But I only thought about it in economic terms: how bad and how long would the crisis be?
I thought about it a lot. Most people thought about it a lot. And thinking was what had precipitated the crisis in the first place. It wasn’t foolish and feverish speculative investments that caused the crash – it was thinking about those investments. It was realising they were foolish and ultimately valueless. As with Wile E, it was the realisation, not gravity, that made us plummet.
It had to happen at some point, I suppose. The realisation was inevitable, and so the plunge was too; it could have happened later and been worse. But it’s hard not to blame all that thinking, just as we blame, rather than thank, the surveyor who finds dry rot.
And having sparked the whole thing off with thinking, we couldn’t get out of the habit. “What does this crisis mean? How unfair is it? Where does this leave Britain now? Is anything certain any more?” We thought and thought and thought. We locked ourselves into the mindset of emergency. It became like Queen Victoria’s mourning: unhelpful, self-indulgent, but very difficult to argue against or snap out of.
“I hope you know there’s a lot of massive shit going down!” became the country’s perpetual Facebook status. Being cheerful or optimistic just allowed others to say you didn’t realise how bad things were – and to imply that therefore you, as one who’d got off lightly, were part of the problem, that you were on the wrong side of the casino-banker/thankless-nurse national divide.
As a result, this new era has been enormously and relentlessly recriminatory and angry. What started off as righteous fury at the investment banker community for their incompetence and amorality has spread to almost every aspect of public life. First,Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross’s misjudged Radio 2 broadcast invoked a storm of rage, directed not just at them but against all broadcasters and celebrities. Then MPs were pilloried for fiddling their expenses in a way that didn’t just lead us to tweak how parliamentarians were financed, but to dispute the honesty of our entire political class. That group subsequently had its revenge on the pesky scrutinising newspapers when theillegal hacking of Milly Dowler’s mobile phone provided the opportunity to question the whole basis of a free press. Newspapers, politicians, the BBC and celebrities have all regularly been put through the mill. It’s as if the whole culture is screaming: “Everything feels all wrong!”
Illustration by David Foldvari.
How much of this is justified by current circumstances? How much of it is justified by the unsatisfactory nature of the human condition? How much is self-perpetuating and self-indulgent? When the current coalition government took office, it did so stating explicitly that the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats had come together in statesmanlike response to the emergency the country was facing. This is one of the few of that administration’s assertions to be left largely unquestioned. We miserably and crossly accepted the premise that everything was deeply and unprecedentedly screwed. By then, that feeling had already dominated our contemplations for the best part of two years.
I think this pervading fury and sense of crisis has reached crisis levels. Which is ironic, if you think about it (which I don’t recommend). I reckon there actually is a good reason to be angry and deeply concerned, and that’s the pervasiveness of anger and deep concern about everything else. I think it imperative that everyone calm down. I think a loud emergency “Chill out!” alarm should screech from every rooftop till everyone relaxes. I told you thinking didn’t help.
If we could just let our angrily folded arms drop to our sides for one minute, we’d feel so much better. Most of us, anyway – to some, it would feel like failure or defeat.
I was particularly savagely slated on the Guardian website and Twitter for a column I wrote in March 2012, in which I argued against trade unionist Len McCluskey’s assertion that “The idea the world should arrive in London and have these wonderful Olympic Games as though everything is nice and rosy in the garden is unthinkable.” I reckoned that, despite the country’s problems, we weren’t undergoing a calamity sufficiently grave to call off the world’s premier sporting event, something that had previously been cancelled only during world wars. I wasn’t saying things were fine; I was saying they were less serious than in 1940.
I stand by that. However, many online commenters considered it a disgraceful underestimation of the problems facing the NHS/ retail sector/disabled/homeless/donkey sanctuaries – that any reference to our current problems in less than utterly superlative terms was a disgrace. That exemplified, for me, a pervading and angry loss of perspective.
Saying that things could be worse, and that they have been worse for the overwhelming majority of humans throughout the overwhelming majority of history, is not the same as being complacent. It is stating an undeniable fact. It is retaining a sane sense of proportion. It should be reassuring, but at the moment many people hate to hear it.
This wilful loss of perspective – this self-importance about our own times – means that we could do dangerous things. Our disdain for the bathwater is making the baby give us anxious looks. We’re thinking hard, casting around for solutions: a privatised NHS, an independent Scotland, pulling out of the EU, a mansion tax, getting rid of the licence fee, greater press regulation, more Tasers, a German water cannon. We’re not ruling anything out – except being careful we don’t destroy something precious, except resisting the urge to act hastily and in anger, except a period of tranquil reflection. We desperately need a break from this era. But you know the rules: as soon as it ends, another one will only start.
People on their way home in the Chamelacon suburb, considered one of the most dangerous ares San Pedro Sula.Photograph: Juan Carlos/Juan Carlos/Corbis
It was relatively quiet in San Pedro Sula last month. A gunfight between police and a drug gang left a 15-year-old boy dead; the body of a man riddled with bullets was found in a banana plantation; two lawyers were gunned down; a salesman was murdered inside his 4x4; and a father and son were murdered at home after pleading not to be killed. ----Also read
One politician survived an assassination attempt and around a dozen people were found dead in the street. The number of killings is said to have fallen in the last few months, but the Honduran city is officially the most violent in the world outside the Middle East and warzones, with more than 1,200 killings in a year, according to statistics for 2011 and 2012. Its murder rate of 169 per 100,000 people far surpasses anything in North America or much larger cities such as Johannesburg, Lagos or São Paulo. London, by contrast, has just 1.3 murders per 100,000 people.
Now research by security and development groups suggests that the violence plaguing San Pedro Sula – a city of just over a million, and Honduras’s second largest – and many other Latin American and African cities may be linked not just to the drug trade, extortion and illegal migration, but to the breakneck speed at which urban areas have grown in the last 20 years.
The faster cities grow, the more likely it is that the civic authorities will lose control and armed gangs will take over urban organisation, says Robert Muggah, research director at the Igarapé Institute in Brazil.
“Like the fragile state, the fragile city has arrived. The speed and acceleration of unregulated urbanisation is now the major factor in urban violence. A rapid influx of people overwhelms the public response,” he adds. “Urbanisation has a disorganising effect and creates spaces for violence to flourish,” he writes in a new essay in the journal Environment and Urbanization.
Muggah predicts that similar violence will inevitably spread to hundreds of other “fragile” cities now burgeoning in the developing world. Some, he argues, are already experiencing epidemic rates of violence. “Runaway growth makes them suffer levels of civic violence on a par with war-torn [cities such as] Juba, Mogadishu and Damascus,” he writes. “Places like Ciudad Juárez, Medellín and Port au Prince … are becoming synonymous with a new kind of fragility with severe humanitarian implications.”
Simon Reid-Henry, of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, said: “Today’s wars are more likely to be civil wars and conflict is increasingly likely to be urban. Criminal violence and armed conflict are increasingly hard to distinguish from one another in different parts of the world.”
The world’s most dangerous citiesPhotograph: Giulio Frigieri/Guardian
The latest UN data shows that many cities may be as dangerous as war zones. While nearly 60,000 people die in wars every year, an estimated 480,000 are killed, mostly by guns, in cities. This suggests that humanitarian groups, which have traditionally focused on working in war zones, may need to change their priorities, argues Kevin Savage, a former researcher with the Overseas Development Institute in London.
“Some urban zones are fast becoming new territories of conflict and violence. Chronically violent cities like Abidjan, Baghdad, Kingston, Nablus, Grozny and Mogadishu are all synonyms for a new kind of armed conflict,” he said. “These urban centres are experiencing a variation of warfare, often in densely populated slums and shantytowns. All of them feature pitched battles between state and non-state armed groups and among armed groups themselves.”
European and North American cities, which mostly grew over 150 or more years, are thought unlikely to physically expand much in the next few decades and are likely to remain relatively safe; but urban violence is certain to worsen as African, Asian and Latin American cities swell with population growth and an unprecedented number of people move in from rural areas.
More than half the world now lives in cities compared with about 5% a century ago, and UN experts expect more than 70% of the world’s population to be living in urban areas within 30 years.
The fastest transition to cities is now occurring in Asia, where the number of city dwellers is expected to double by 2030, according to the UN Population Fund. Africa is expected to add 440 million people to its cities by then and Latin America and the Caribbean nearly 200 million. Rural populations are expected to decrease worldwide by 28 million people. Most urban growth is expected to be not in the world’s mega-cities of more than 10 million people, but in smaller cities like San Pedro Sula.
“We can expect no slowing down of urbanisation over the next 30 years. The youth bulge will go on and 90% of the growth will happen in the south,” said Muggah.
But he and other researchers have found that urban violence is not linked to poverty so much as inequality and impunity from the law – both of which may encourage lawlessness. “Many places are poor, but not violent. Some favelas in Brazil are among the safest places,” he said. “Slums are often far less dangerous than believed. There is often a disproportionate fear of crime relative to its real occurrence. Yet even when there is evidence to the contrary, most elites still opt to build higher walls to guard themselves.”
Many of these shantytowns and townships were now no-go areas far beyond the reach of public security forces, he said.
“These areas are stigmatised by the public authorities and residents become quite literally trapped. Cities like Caracas, Nairobi, Port Harcourt and San Pedro Sula are giving rise to landscapes of … gated communities. Violence … is literally reshaping the built environment in the world’s fragile cities.”
