“Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes" Goethe.
“Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.” Herbert Spencer.
"My 80% friend isn't my 20% enemy" Ronald Reagan.
Every day in Britain, 14,000 trucks come from and head to the European Union. If there is no Brexit deal with the EU, is every one of those trucks going to be inspected as they bring vital food and goods into the UK to see that the right tariff is being charged and correct regulation observed? If some trucks get delayed or traffic volumes plummet, who will organise food rationing in our supermarkets? Five days before a general election called to give the government a negotiating mandate for leaving the EU, is anyone aware of the risks?
Equally, a quarter of British exports with the EU pass through one single port, Calais – £3bn a month – with zero border controls or inspection. Who in Calais is going to inspect these goods to see if they correspond to EU rules if we crash out with no deal? Has France any interest in investing quickly in the customs structure to keep British exports flowing? The M20 and M2 will become gigantic truck parks as drivers wait to be inspected. You might think that, just as a precautionary measure, as the prospect of the exit talks collapsing is less than two years away, the UK government would be investing in customs inspection depots in our great ports and along the land border with Ireland and also offering to build similar structures in France to ease the inevitable congestion on UK roads. Surely someone, somewhere might have asked these questions?
Nothing is being done at all. Mrs May and her breezy lead negotiator, David Davis, offer platitudes about Britain embracing the globe and no deal being better than a bad deal, but even the most innocent negotiator in the EU team can see this is vainglorious posturing. They are betting on a deal being struck – negotiators with few cards, nor making sure they hold better ones. As matters stand, the consequence of no deal would be calamitous.
For there are multiple areas where the same logic applies. It could be landing rights at EU airports or the export of drugs, suddenly to be treated as needing regulatory approval because they will come from a foreign country. There is the vast trade in dealing in euros in the City of London, surely certain to be repatriated to an EU member state. British universities will be barred from bidding for research grants. Some 55,000 EU nationals work in the NHS: are they to return and who is to replace them? An estimated 5,500 firms in financial services hold 330,000 passports to allow them to sell financial products across the EU – one of our few successful exports – with no questions or inspections asked. Again, this privilege is about to go in under two years. Companies with multiple operations around Europe, including Britain, will find that freely moving parts, people and data suddenly cannot be done.
For more than 40 years, Britain’s industrial policy has, in effect, been membership of the EU; 485 multinationals have their global or regional headquarters in the UK and core parts of manufacturing have been revived by foreign investment. At best, that now stagnates; at worst, they leave. There is no corner of British economic life that does not face disruption bleeding into mayhem as a consequence of no deal. The politician who declares that no deal is better than a bad deal is either supremely ignorant – or lying.
Which is why any economic forecaster who looks coolly at the facts has to project a fall in British trade. The World Bank believes that if Britain switches from single market membership to trading with the EU on World Trade Organisation terms – the “no deal” option – then British trade in goods with the EU will halve and trade in services will fall by 60% as these effects work through.
Yet that is only the beginning of the disaster. To keep exports of goods and services flowing to the rest of the world on the same terms as now, even before negotiating new deals, Britain will have to renegotiate 759 agreements with 168 countries that are now held by the EU, as the Financial Times disclosed last week. That is 759 opportunities for other countries, knowing our plight, to try to negotiate something better.
The clock is ticking. Decisions on where companies place exports and source imports in 2019 have to be taken in 2018. In reality, Britain has to find solutions to all these issues in less than 12 months.
It simply can’t be done within the time, nor is any network of replacement deals going to be superior to the ones we already have. Britain’s growth rate is at the bottom of the G7 and investment is falling. The Conservative manifesto commitment to leave the single market and customs union and seek a trade relationship outside any of the EU’s frameworks – not the EEA or even Efta – is a declaration of economic war upon ourselves. We are heading towards a first-order economic debacle. In Whitehall, morale is at rock bottom. Any civil servant who dares brief the prime minister or her inner circle on these realities is frozen out. The EU could negotiate a British specific trade deal if it chooses, but there will be a high budgetary price. Britain, in essence, will be required to carry on contributing to the EU budget at current or even higher levels if it wants to keep vital goods flowing into the country in a customs deal, no less vital exports flowing out and some transitional arrangement during which we can try to renegotiate 759 trade agreements. Services, ranging from finance to the creative industries, in which Britain has a competitive advantage, can just take their chance. All influence on EU decisions will be lost. Some “deal”.
Britain will have to accept whatever the EU offers at whatever price. If the right of the Tory party and its media allies declare it unacceptable, the EU will shrug its shoulders and walk away. In any case, the European parliament, whose assent is required under article 50, will want tough terms to deter others from leaving. Nor will the government find popular support for no deal: Leavers voted to take back control, not for economic calamity.
A YouGov poll reports that 50% believe Britain should stay in the single market – only 29% do not and a narrow majority would even accept freedom of movement as the price of staying in. On these questions, Mr Corbyn and his party have been limp.
Britain is about to embark upon a national act of self-harm on an epic scale. The country, as it makes its decision on who it wants to lead the most important negotiations since the war, deserves to be warned. Instead, silence reigns.
It has been a pleasure working with Diana, Vikram and you in the Supreme Court Committee of Administrators. It has been an educative experience, spending long hours with three top-flight professionals from whom I have learned a lot in these past few months. However, it has been clear for some time now that my thoughts and views are adjacent to, and sometimes at odds with, the direction the Committee is taking as a whole. That is why I eventually decided to request the Supreme Court to relieve me of the responsibility, and submitted my letter of resignation to the Court on the morning of the 1st of June.
For the record, and in the interests of transparency, I am here listing the major points of divergence as I see it:
1. The question of conflict of interest, which had lain unaddressed ever since the Committee began its work, and which I have been repeatedly flagging since I joined. For instance, the BCCI has accorded preferential treatment to some national coaches (read Dravid) , by giving them ten month contracts for national duty, thus allowing them to work as IPL coaches/mentors for the remaining two months. This was done in an adhoc and arbitrary manner; the more famous the former player-turned-coach, the more likely was the BCCI to allow him to draft his own contract that left loopholes that he exploited to dodge the conflict of interest issue.
I have repeatedly pointed out that it is contrary to the spirit of the Lodha Committee for coaches or the support staff of the Indian senior or junior team, or for staff at the National Cricket Academy, to have contracts in the Indian Premier League. One cannot have dual loyalties of this kind and do proper justice to both. National duty must take precedence over club affiliation.
I had first raised this issue to my COA colleagues in an email of 1st February, and have raised it several times since. I had urged that coaches and support staff for national teams be paid an enhanced compensation, but that this conflict of interest be stopped. When, on the 11th of March, I was told that that there was a camp scheduled for young players at the National Cricket Academy but at least one national coach was likely to be away on IPL work and might not attend the camp, I wrote to you:
No person under contract with an India team, or with the NCA, should be allowed to moonlight for an IPL team too.
BCCI in its carelessness (or otherwise) might have drafted coaching/support staff contracts to allow this dual loyalty business, but while it might be narrowly legal as per existing contracts, it is unethical, and antithetical to team spirit, leading to much jealousy and heart-burn among the coaching staff as a whole. This practice is plainly wrong, as well as antithetical to the interests of Indian cricket.
I would like an explicit and early assurance from the BCCI management that such manifestly inequitous loopholes in coaching/support staff contracts will be plugged.
Yet no assurance was given, and no action was taken. The BCCI management and office-bearers have, in the absence of explicit directions from the COA, allowed the status quo to continue.
2. I have also repeatedly pointed to the anomaly whereby BCCI-contracted commentators simultaneously act as player agents. In a mail of 19th March to the COA I wrote:
Sunil Gavaskar is head of a company which represents Indian cricketers while commenting on those crickters as part of the BCCI TV commentary panel. This is a clear conflict of interest. Either he must step down/withdraw himself from PMG completely or stop being a commentator for BCCI.
I think prompt and swift action on this matter is both just and necessary. COA’s credibility and effectiveness hinges on our being able to take bold and correct decisions on such matters. The ‘superstar’ culture that afflicts the BCCI means that the more famous the player (former or present) the more leeway he is allowed in violating norms and procedures. (Dhoni was captain of the Indian team while holding a stake in a firm that represented some current India players.) This must stop – and only we can stop it.
Yet, despite my warnings, no action has been initiated in the several months that the Committee has been in operation.
As the mail quoted above noted, one reasons the conflict of interest issue has lingered unaddressed is that several of the game’s superstars, past and present, have been guilty of it. The BCCI management is too much in awe of these superstars to question their violation of norms and procedures. For their part, BCCI office-bearers like to enjoy discretionary powers, so that the coaches or commentrators they favour are indebted to them and do not ever question their own mistakes or malpractices. But surely a Supreme Court appointed body should not be intimidated by the past or present achievements of a cricketer, and instead seek to strive to be fair and just.
Conflict of interest is rampant in the State Associations as well. One famous former cricketer is contracted by media houses to comment on active players while serving as President of his State Association (read Ganguly). Others have served as office-bearers in one Association and simultaneously as coaches or managers in another. The awarding of business contracts to friends and relatives by office-bearers is reported to be fairly widespread.
Had we been more proactive in stopping conflict of interest within the BCCI (as per Lodha Committee recommendations, endorsed by the Court), this would surely have had a ripple effect downwards, putting pressure on State Assocations to clean up their act as well.
3. Unfortunately, this superstar syndrome has also distorted the system of Indian team contracts. As you will recall, I had pointed out that awarding MS Dhoni an ‘A’ contract when he had explicitly ruled himself out from all Test matches was indefensible on cricketing grounds, and sends absolutely the wrong message.
4. The way in which the contract of Anil Kumble, the current Head Coach of the senior team, has been handled. The Indian team’s record this past season has been excellent; and even if the players garner the bulk of the credit, surely the Head Coach and his support staff also get some. In a system based on justice and merit, the Head Coach’s term would have been extended. Instead, Kumble was left hanging, and then told the post would be re-advertised afresh.
Clearly, the issue has been handled in an extremely insensitive and unprofessional manner by the BCCI CEO and the BCCI office-bearers, with the COA, by its silence and inaction, unfortunately being complicit in this regard. (Recall that the Court Order of 30 January had expressly mandated us to supervise the management of BCCI.) In case due process had to be followed since Kumble’s original appointment was only for one year, why was this not done during April and May, when the IPL was on? If indeed the captain and the Head Coach were not getting along, why was this not attended to as soon as the Australia series was over in late March? Why was it left until the last minute, when a major international tournament was imminent, and when the uncertainty would undermine the morale and ability to focus of the coach, the captain and the team? And surely giving senior players the impression that they may have a veto power over the coach is another example of superstar culture gone berserk? Such a veto power is not permitted to any other top level professional team in any other sport in any other country. Already, in a dismaying departure from international norms, current Indian players enjoy a veto power on who can be the members of the commentary team (read departure of Harsha Bhogle). If it is to be coaches next, then perhaps the selectors and even office-bearers will follow?
5. Ever since the Supreme Court announced the formation of the COA, we have been inundated, individually and collectively, by hundreds of mails asking us to address various ills that afflict Indian cricket and its administration. While many of these issues were trivial or clearly beyond our purview, there was one concern that we should have done far more to address. This concerns the callous treatment to domestic cricket and cricketers, namely, those who represent their state in the Ranji Trophy, the Mushtaq Ali Trophy, and other inter-state tournaments. The IPL may be Indian cricket’s showpiece; but surely the enormous revenues it generates should be used to make our domestic players more financially secure? There are many more Indian cricketers who make their living via the Ranji Trophy than via IPL; besides, for us to have a consistently strong Test team (especially overseas) we need a robust inter-state competition and therefore must seek to compensate domestic players better.
And yet, shockingly, Ranji match fees have remained at a very low level (a mere Rs 30,000 odd for each day of play); moreover, cheques for match fees sent by the BCCI are sometimes not passed on by the state associations to the players. We need to learn from best practices in other countries, where domestic players are awarded annual contracts like those in the national team, while their match fees are reasonably competitive too.
Several months ago, the experienced cricket administrator Amrit Mathur prepared an excellent note on the need for better and fairer treatment of domestic players. Both Diana and I have repeatedly urged action, but this has not happened.
6. I believe it was a mistake for the COA to have stayed silent and inactive when the Supreme Court judgment was being so flagrantly violated by people clearly disqualified to serve as office bearers of state and even BCCI run cricket bodies. The disqualified men were openly attending BCCI meetings, claiming to represent their state association, and indeed played a leading role in the concerted (if fortunately in the end aborted) attempt to get the Indian team to boycott the Champions Trophy. All these illegalities were widely reported in the press; yet the COA did not bring them to the notice of the Court, and did not issue clear directions asking the offenders to desist either.
7. I believe that the lack of attention to these (and other such issues) is in part due to the absence of a senior and respected male cricketer on our Committee. Allow me to quote from a mail I wrote on 1 February 2017, before our first full meeting:
Dear fellow members,
I much look forward to meeting you all later today. I know Vikram already and greatly admire both Vinod and Diana for their remarkable work in their chosen fields, and am truly honoured to be working with them as well.
I presume apart from discussing IPL, etc, with the BCCI representative we will get some time to discuss the way forward separately. I have several ideas which I wish to share with you about our collective responsibility, and wanted in this mail to flag what is most important of these. This is that we must incorporate into our committee of administrators, either as a full member or as a special invitee, a senior male cricketer with the distinction and integrity that Diana has. That will greatly enhance both our credibility and our ability to make informed decisions.
The absence of a respected male cricketer in the COA has attracted a great deal of criticism already, much of it from important stakeholders in Indian cricket. It must be addressed and remedied. The amicus curae had suggested two outstanding names, Venkat and Bedi, both of whom were rejected because they were over seventy. However, there are some cricketers of the right age and experience who fit the bill. Based on my knowledge of the subject, I would say Javagal Srinath would be an excellent choice. He is a world-class cricketer, was a successful and scandal-free Secretary of the Karnataka State Cricket Association and is an ICC match referee, and comes from an educated technical background to boot. I strongly urge the Chairman and the other members to consider approaching him in this regard. He would complement Diana perfectly, and the combination of these two respected and top class former cricketers would enhance our credibility and effectiveness enormously.
While Srinath is in my view the best choice, there are other alternative names too. I hope we can set aside some time at our meeting to discuss and resolve the issue.
With regards Ram
p.s. Needless to say, I have not discussed this with Srinath or with anyone else.
I raised this issue in a formal meeting of the COA as well, but unfortunately my proposal to invite a senior male cricketer to join the committee was not acted upon. We should have approached the Court to take necessary action, or else incorporated a senior, respected, male cricketer as a special invitee. With such a person on board the COA would have gained in experience, knowledge, understanding, and, not least, credibility. Indeed, had we such a person on board, the BCCI management and the office-bearers would have been compelled to be far more proactive in implementing the Lodha Committee recommendations than they have been thus far. As the only cricketer on the COA, Diana’s contributions have been invaluable; on many issues of administration and the rights of players she has brought a perspective based on a first-hand experience that the rest of us lacked. A male counterpart would have complemented and further enriched her contributions; but perhaps it is not too late to make amends.
8. While all our meetings were held in a cordial atmosphere, between meetings perhaps there was not adequate consultation, and there were several crucial decisions made where all the COA members were not brought into the loop. For instance, a capable, non-political Senior Counsel representing the COA and the BCCI in the Supreme Court was abruptly replaced by another Senior Counsel who is a party politician. Surely other COA members should have been consulted by email or by phone before this important change was made. I have taken too much of your time already, but permit me to make one last suggestion. This is that the place vacated by me on the Committee of Administrators be filled by a senior, respected, male cricketer with administrative experience.
Let me in conclusion thank you for your courtesy and civility these past few months, and wish you and the Committee all the best in your future endevours.
Arundhati Roy opens her door and lets me in – into her kitchen. I wonder if I’ve knocked on the wrong door: the delivery entrance, perhaps? I quickly hand over the humble gift of fresh coffee beans I’ve brought her, on the assumption that all serious writers love coffee.
As we sit down around her solid wood kitchen table surrounded by funky chairs, I realize that the kitchen is the warm heart of her self-designed apartment in central New Delhi. Apart from long work counters, there’s a sofa, a bookshelf, a sit-out terrace with an antique-looking bench – altogether a place where one could spend a lifetime.
But right now she’s all over the world and is somewhat jet-lagged after having just flown in from New York. Following a bunch of interviews in town, she’s soon off again on a worldwide promotion tour for her new novel. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is her first in two decades since the globally bestselling, Booker Prize-winning, The God of Small Things. It appears to be the literary happening of the decade and according to her publishers ‘it reinvents what a novel can do and can be’. I’ve started reading it and can say that it is a ruthlessly probing and wide-ranging narrative on contemporary India, written with a linguistic felicity that reminds me of Salman Rushdie’s classic Midnight’s Children. On the whole, it makes interviewing her an intimidating prospect. While she makes coffee, I rig up my electronic defences consisting of three audio recorders (two of which conk out during the interview) and a backup video camera. She looks on bemusedly and seems used to a barrage of microphones. We embark on a three-hour interview session. Excerpts:
Generations of new Indian writers have seen you as an inspiration, as someone who allowed them to dream that one could sit in India and write and then be read all over the world. How does your iconic status feel to you? Do you ever think about it?
Not really, because I am equally balanced by the kind of rage and craziness that I evoke. For me, I live inside my work. Although I must say that I was thinking at some time about writers who like to remain anonymous – but I’ve never been that person. Because, in this country it is important, especially as a woman, to say: “Hey! Here I am! I am going to take you on! And this is what I think and I’m not going to hide.” So if I have helped to give courage to anybody… to experiment… to step out of line… That’s lovely, I think it is very important for us to say: “We can! And we will! And don’t f*** with us!” You know, come on.
I’ve noticed that you don’t often appear at literary festivals. There are more than a hundred in India these days, and I’ve been to quite a few myself, but never met you before. Do you keep away from other writers?
It’s not about other writers. I don’t know if you’ve read this essay I wrote called Capitalism – A Ghost Story and Walking with the Comrades? The thing is that the Jaipur Literature Festival is funded by a kind of notorious mining company that is silencing the voices of the Adivasis, kicking them out of their homes, and now it is also funded by Zee TV which is half the time baying for my blood. So in principle I won’t go. How can I? I’m writing against them. I mean, it’s not that I’m a pure person, like all of us I have contradictions and issues, I’m not like Gandhiji, you know, but in theory I abide by this. How can you be silencing and snuffing out the voices of the poorest people in the world, and then become this glittering platform for free speech and flying writers all around the place? I have a problem with that.
Do you read a lot of new Indian fiction or non-fiction?
When I’ve been writing this book, I haven’t been very up on current things. I’m not even on Facebook and all that. I don’t have any problem [with it], but as Edward Snowden told me, the CIA celebrated when Facebook was started, because they just got all the information without having to collect it. That aside, I think that when you’re writing, you tend to be a bit strange about reading: sometimes I’m not reading whole books, I’m dipping into things to check my own sanity. ’ (She waves her left hand in a kind of elegantly psychedelic mudra before her face.) ‘Am I on the same planet?
Is there any particular Indian writer who you admire?
I think that Naipaul is a very accomplished writer, although we are worlds apart in our worldviews. But I’m not really that influenced by anybody, you know. I have to say that I find it incredible that writers in India, or almost all Indian writers, or at least the well-known writers… Let’s not say writers, but there’s been a level of eliding of things that have been at the heart of the society, like caste. You see there is something very wrong here. It is like people in apartheid South Africa writing without mentioning that there is apartheid.
Your writing is hard-hitting and outspoken – have you experienced any adverse repercussions?
My God, that’s to put it mildly. Other than of course going to jail and all that. Even now, when the last book of essays was released in Delhi, called Broken Republic, a gang of vigilantes came on stage, smashed the stage up. The right wing, the mobs, vigilantes, they are there at every meeting, threatening violence, threatening all kinds of things. I still go to speak, to Punjab, in Orissa, wherever, I’m not really that writer who is sequestered somewhere and I live perhaps alone, but in the heart of the crowd.
It must have been a bit of a shock, after expressing a personal opinion, to suddenly find yourself behind bars in Tihar Jail?
Tihar. (She sighs deeply.) Yes, it is shocking, but at the same time look at how many thousands of people are behind bars, people who have no understanding of the language, who don’t even know what they’re charged with. So I can’t really be dramatic about what happened to me, because people are in jail for years for nothing – nothing! It’s crazy! I’m currently being tried for contempt of court again for an essay I wrote called Professor P.O.W. which you can read in Outlook Magazine.
Have you ever felt that you should leave India and live in a country where you don’t have to face such problems?
Everything that I know is here! Everyone that I know! And I’ve never really lived outside, abroad, so the idea of going to live all alone in some strange country is also terrifying. But right now I think India is poised in an extremely dangerous place, I don’t know what is going to happen to anybody – to me or to anybody. There are just these mobs that decide who should be killed, who should be shot, who should be lynched, you know? I think it is probably the first time that people in India, writers and other people, are facing the kind of trauma that people have faced in Chile and Latin America. There’s a kind of terror building up here which we have not fully got the measure of. You go through periods when you are feeling very worried, then angry, and then defiant. I think this story is still unfolding.
Do you anticipate upsetting people with the new book? Though the mobs don’t read anything sophisticated, do they?
It’s never about the book or what they read or don’t read, it is about some arbitrary rules they have made about what can be said, what can’t be said, who can say what, who can kill whom – all of that. Yeah, I mean I live here, and I write here, and this book is about here. But the situation here is out of control, from the bottom! It is not about just getting killed, but it is about: How do you even sit in a train or a bus now if you are a Muslim without risking your life? So what happens with me, I have no idea. I’ve written a book and it’s taken me ten years to write it, and there are thirty countries in the world where the biggest publishers are publishing it. I’m not going to allow some idiots to come and disrupt it and snatch all the headlines. Why should I? It is not about their little brains, it is about literature. It has to be protected and tactically done in this climate.
Let’s talk about the book. What was it that made you publish a new novel after spending twenty years being a public intellectual?
Well, this novel has been ten years in the writing, but I think in the twenty years between The God of Small Things and now, I have travelled and been involved with so many things that are happening and written about them at length. There was this huge sense of urgency when I was writing the political essays, each time you wanted to blow a space open, on any issue. But fiction takes its time and is layered. The insanity of what is going on in a place like Kashmir: how do you describe the terror in the air there? It is not just a human rights report about how many people have been killed and where. How do you describe the psychosis of what is going on? Except through fiction.
So that is why you chose…
But it is not that. I didn’t choose to write fiction because I wanted to say something about Kashmir, but fiction chooses you. I don’t think it is that simple that I had some information to impart and therefore I wanted to write a book. Not at all. It is a way of seeing. A way of thinking, it is a prayer, it is a song.
In the book you use a remarkably poetic language to talk about the harshest subjects.
Language is something so natural to you, you know, not something you can manufacture, not for me.
Having studied architecture, you must have at some point thought of that as your field, while today you are one of the most celebrated novelists on the planet. What does your interest in language stem from?
Actually, the idea of language was far before architecture, because in a way architecture came to me as a very pragmatic thing. I left home when I was seventeen and I needed somehow to…
(At this point one of her dogs climbs all over me. I’m more accustomed to dogs barking the moment they see me but, puzzlingly, this one appears to want to lick my face. Arundhati laughs.)
She’s flirting with you. They are both street dogs. She was born outside a drain. Then her mother was hit by a car. That other one I found tied to a lamppost, cruelly.
Do your dogs have names?
Yeah, her name is Begum Filthy Jaan and this one is Maati K. Lal. That means “beloved of the earth”. Both Lal and Jaan mean beloved.
So they make up your family?
Yes.
They’re very well behaved to be street dogs.
Street dogs are more civilized than other dogs. They’re the best. I’m also a bit of a street dog.
I see. So we were talking about your relationship with language and how you left home at 17.
The relationship with language was there from the time I was very, very young. The only thing is that it didn’t seem possible that I would ever be in a position to be a writer.
Why not?
No money… How are you going to earn a living? In the early years of my life my only ambition was to survive somehow, pay my rent. So it didn’t seem like there’d ever be that time where you could actually sit and write something but you’d be so busy earning. It was just a question of: How do you survive?
How did you survive then?
I used to work in this place called the National Institute of Urban Affairs where I earned almost nothing. I used to live in this little hole-in-the-wall near the Nizamuddin Dargah and hire a bicycle for one rupee a day to go to work. All my time I spent thinking about money. (She giggles.)
So at that point you were almost about to become a bureaucrat?
No, no, architect! I could never have become a bureaucrat.
But a government servant?
No, not even that. I was just a temporary, you know at the edges of it.
So then the writing really started with the film scripts?
Basically after Annie [In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989)] – a film that just made its own secret little pathways into the world away from the big hit films – I wrote a second film called Electric Moon and then The God of Small Things. And after that, the essays.
And now you’re making a fiction comeback. Was there any particular idea or incident that triggered off the new book? It seems to be a meditation on the state of the nation.
(She takes a large sip of coffee and rubs her eyes.) ‘It’s a meditation, let’s say, just a meditation. Always, some things spark something and I think in my case I don’t think what sparks it is necessarily what it’s about. Obviously so many years of one’s life and thinking and encounters and all that… but I think one of those nights that I used to spend in front of Jantar Mantar with all these [protesters] who come there, a baby did appear and people were asking: “What to do?” Nobody was sure what to do. So that was one of the things.
I recall that sequence in the novel, and you also narrate many of the individual stories behind the characters you meet at Jantar Mantar?
That was one of the ideas for me that I would – experiment. As you can imagine with any writer who writes a “successful” book, then everybody wants to sign contracts and give you lots of money… and I didn’t want that. I wanted to experiment. I wanted to write a book in which I don’t walk past anyone, even the smallest child, or woman, but sit down, smoke a cigarette, have a chat. It is not a story with a beginning, middle and an end, as much as a map of a city or a building. Or like the structure of a classical raga, where you have these notes and you keep exploring them from different angles, in different ways, different ups, different downs.
About the first hundred pages of the book are set in Old Delhi. What is your relationship to that part of town?
I actually have a place there.
Near Jama Masjid?
Yes, a rented place, a small room, so I’ve been there for many years.
But why do you need that place when you have this apartment?
You sometimes feel under siege. It was not that I went there because I was going to write about it, but because I went there it became very much part [of the book]. I go there, wander around late at night.
All those rabid street dogs, they don’t chase you?
No. Not at all. Humans are rabid, dogs are okay.
The title is intriguing – The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – because inside the book there’s quite a lot of darkness.
But yeah, there’s also quite a lot of light. And the light is in the most unexpected places.
There’s also a character called Tilo, who seems to me very much like Radha in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. Is she a continuation of that character?
(She laughs.) She’s not actually like Radha when you carry on [reading]. Yeah, she’s in architecture school, but I think Tilo is a very different person actually.
But how much autobiographical detail do you use in your writing?
It is hard to say, because where does your imagination end and your experience begin? Your memories? It is all a soup. Like in The God of Small Things when Esthappen says, “If in a dream you’ve eaten fish, does it mean you’ve eaten fish?” Or if you’re happy in a dream, does it count? To me this book is not a thinly veiled political essay masquerading as a novel, it is a novel. And in novels, everything gets processed and sweated out on your skin, has to become part of your DNA and it is as complicated as anything that lives inside your body.
On that note, let me ask: in the years you worked on the novel, did you get tired of it at some point or were you happily engrossed in it for an entire decade?
When I write fiction I have a very easy relationship with it in the sense that I’m not in a hurry. Partly, I really want to see if it will live with me, you know, for long. If I got fed up with it, I would leave it and imagine the world would get fed up too. I need to develop a relationship with it almost like…(She goes quiet.)
Like with another human perhaps?
Or a group of humans. We all live together.
Nerdy question time – are there any rituals you have to go through like putting on a jazz record or uncorking a bottle of Old Monk before you start writing?
Let’s say when I was breaking the stones and really trying to understand what I was trying to do I would never be able to work for very long, just a few hours a day. There were two phases in writing this book, one was about generating the smoke, and then it’s like sculpting it, none of which is the same as writing and rewriting, or making drafts. But when you’re generating the smoke, it would be like – I could write three sentences and then just fall asleep out of exhaustion. But when the book was finally clear to me, I’d be working long hours. It was the same with The God of Small Things, there would be that single sentence which would send me to sleep. Like a strange trance almost.
Has your training as an architect been helpful to you?
Not just helped, it is central to the way I write.
How?
Because to me a story is like the map of a city or a map of a building, structured: the way you tell it, the way you enter it, exit it… None of it is simple, straightforward, time and chronology is like building material, so yeah, architecture to me is absolutely central.
I recall Vikram Chandra once telling me how he adapted a construction project management software, used by architects and builders to control the supply chains and all that, to plan and track all the elements in his novel Sacred Games. Do you – as an architect – plan your writing like that?
Oh God! There’s no algorithm involved in my writing, it is all instinctive… rhythm.
What’s a good writing day like then? You get up at five o’clock and take strong coffee or do you wake at three in the afternoon and pour yourself a glass of champagne before hitting the desk?
I don’t seem to have any rituals as such, it is just a very open encounter between me and myself and my writing. I don’t actually understand what we mean by “when you write” because I kind of wonder when am I not writing? I am always writing inside my head! But right now, I feel almost like if I weighed myself, I’d be half my weight, because the last ten years it’s just been in my head, all the time! At least now’ (she points at the book on the kitchen table) ‘it is with me, but it is not on the weighing scale. You know?
What do you do for inspiration?
You know, one of the reasons it would be so hard for me to leave this country, is that everywhere I turn there is something so deep going on. That way I’m lucky in terms of the worlds that I move through here whether it is in the Narmada Valley or in Kashmir. It is a very anarchic, unformatted world that I live in. To me, if anything it is an overload of every kind of stimulus. I suppose I’m not closed off in some family thing. There’s a porous border between me and the world and lots of things come and go. That’s the way I live. There are so many brilliant people doing things around me all the time, like even just in the process of making this book – if I want someone who is an insane … who’s actually not a human being, but a printing machine, I lean this way. If I want someone who is skulking around the city taking pictures, I lean that way. One is just surrounded by unorthodox brilliance all the time. And that’s my real inspiration. If I want really badly behaved dogs I have them too.(She laughs and hugs one of her dogs who is barking in the background, presumably impatient with our interviewing.)
Between writing fiction and non-fiction – which one gives you more pleasure or are they equally satisfactory?
No, there’s no comparison between them for me. Non-fiction is not about pleasure; non-fiction has a sort of urgency to it and another kind of intensity. But fiction is about pleasure. I know for some people it is very painful, but for me not.
What do you do then when you celebrate a good writing day or a well done story? Do you open a bottle of Old Monk?
(She bursts out laughing.)
You’re just stuck on your Old Monk! No, I… I think I just float around.
Befitting a surprise election, the manifestos from the main parties contained surprises. Labour is shaking off decades of shyness about nationalisation and tax increases for the rich and for the first time in decades has a policy agenda that is not Tory-lite. The Conservatives, meanwhile, say they are rejecting “the cult of selfish individualism” and “belief in untrammelled free markets”, while adopting the quasi-Marxist idea of an energy price cap.
Despite these significant shifts, myths about the economy refuse to go away and hamper a more productive debate. They concern how the government manages public finances – “tax and spend”, if you will.
The first is that there is an inherent virtue in balancing the books. Conservatives still cling to the idea of eliminating the budget deficit, even if it is with a 10-year delay (2025, as opposed to George Osborne’s original goal of 2015). The budget-balancing myth is so powerful that Labour feels it has to cost its new spending pledges down to the last penny, lest it be accused of fiscal irresponsibility.
However, as Keynes and his followers told us, whether a balanced budget is a good or a bad thing depends on the circumstances. In an overheating economy, deficit spending would be a serious folly. However, in today’s UK economy, whose underlying stagnation has been masked only by the release of excess liquidity on an oceanic scale, some deficit spending may be good – necessary, even.
The second myth is that the UK welfare state is especially large.Conservatives believe that it is bloated out of all proportion and needs to be drastically cut. Even the Labour party partly buys into this idea. Its extra spending pledge on this front is presented as an attempt to reverse the worst of the Tory cuts, rather than as an attempt to expand provision to rebuild the foundation for a decent society.
The reality is the UK welfare state is not large at all. As of 2016, the British welfare state (measured by public social spending) was, at 21.5% of GDP, barely three-quarters of welfare spending in comparably rich countries in Europe – France’s is 31.5% and Denmark’s is 28.7%, for example. The UK welfare state is barely larger than the OECD average (21%), which includes a dozen or so countries such as Mexico, Chile, Turkey and Estonia, which are much poorer and/or have less need for public welfare provision. They have younger populations and stronger extended family networks.
The third myth is that welfare spending is consumption – that it is a drain on the nation’s productive resources and thus has to be minimised. This myth is what Conservative supporters subscribe to when they say that, despite their negative impact, we have to accept cuts in such things as disability benefit, unemployment benefit, child care and free school meals, because we “can’t afford them”. This myth even tints, although doesn’t define, Labour’s view on the welfare state. For example, Labour argues for an expansion of welfare spending, but promises to finance it with current revenue, thereby implicitly admitting that the money that goes into it is consumption that does not add to future output.
‘It is a myth that, despite their negative impact, we have to accept cuts in such things as disability benefit, unemployment benefit, child care and free school meals.’ Photograph: monkeybusinessimages/Getty Images/iStockphoto
However, a lot of welfare spending is investment that pays back more than it costs, through increased productivity in the future. Expenditure on education (especially early learning programmes such as Sure Start), childcare and school meals programmes is an investment in the nation’s future productivity. Unemployment benefit, especially if combined with good publicly funded retraining and job-search programmes, such as in Scandinavia, preserve the human productive capabilities that would otherwise be lost, as we have seen in so many former industrial towns in the UK. Increased spending on disability benefits and care for older people helps carers to have more time and less stress, making them more productive workers.
The last myth is that tax is a burden, which therefore by definition needs to be minimised. The Conservatives are clear about this, proposing to cut corporation tax further to 17%, one of the lowest levels in the rich world. However, even Labour is using the language of “burden” about taxes. In proposing tax increases for the highest income earners and large corporations, Jeremy Corbyn spoke of his belief that “those with the broadest shoulders should bear the greatest burden”.
But would you call the money that you pay for your takeaway curry or Netflix subscription a burden? You wouldn’t, because you recognise that you are getting your curry and TV shows in return. Likewise, you shouldn’t call your taxes a burden because in return you get an array of public services, from education, health and old-age care, through to flood defence and roads to the police and military.
If tax really were a pure burden, all rich individuals and companies would move to Paraguay or Bulgaria, where the top rate of income tax is 10%. Of course, this does not happen because, in those countries, in return for low tax you get poor public services. Conversely, most rich Swedes don’t go into tax exile because of their 60% top income tax rate, because they get a good welfare state and excellent education in return. Japanese and German companies don’t move out of their countries in droves despite some of the highest corporate income tax rates in the world (31% and 30% respectively) because they get good infrastructure, well-educated workers, strong public support for research and development, and well-functioning administrative and legal systems.
Low tax is not in itself a virtue. The question should be whether the government is providing services of satisfactory quality, given the tax receipts, not what the level of tax is.
The British debate on economic policy is finally moving on from the bankrupt neoliberal consensus of the past few decades. But the departure won’t be complete until we do away with the persistent myths about tax and spend.
As chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi was a highly polarising figure. Due to the 2002 anti-Muslim riots that took place on his watch, Modi was anathema to leftists, liberals and even to a section on the right. After the riots, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Bharatiya Janata Party prime minister at that time, himself wanted Modi sacked as chief minister.
Yet, as the general election of 2014 approached, Modi’s base expanded. As the prime ministerial candidate, Modi ran a powerful campaign that focused on economic growth, limited government and liberalisation. The communal polarisation that had kept him in power in Gujarat was rarely addressed. Coming after the moribund United Progressive Alliance-II government, Modi presented an attractive economic pitch to many right-wing liberals.
The utilitarian approach
The mood of many right-wing liberals was captured by a much-discussed Gurcharan Das piece that was published in April, 2014, a few weeks before the election results were due. In his piece, Das, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, India, and an author and columnist, juxtaposed Modi’s communalism versus his promise of reform thus:
“There is a clear risk in voting for Modi — he is polarising, sectarian and authoritarian. There is a greater risk, however, in not voting for him. It is to not create jobs for 8-10 million youth that enter the market each year…There will always be a trade-off in values at the ballot box and those who place secularism above demographic dividend are wrong and elitist.”
As a thesis, this was utilitarian in the extreme. Das was not absolving Modi of the communal stain. He was simply saying it was outweighed by the benefits Modi would bring as an economic reformer. Three years down the line, how well has this bargain worked?
One end of the bargain
Novelist and political commentator Aatish Taseer said that his initial assessment of Modi was off the mark. “In 2014, I expected a mixture of economic vitality and chauvinism with Modi, but I was wrong,” said Taseer. “What India got was only chauvinism – and now we’re in an even deeper malaise”.
Taseer’s point is backed by data. In 2014, Das was clear that job creation was a moral imperative that outweighed ideals such as secularism. However, this argument is under severe strain three years later, given that job creation has ground to a halt under the Modi administration. India’s unemployment rate has actually increased since the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government took office. The number of jobs added by the Modi government in its three years in office is just 50% of the jobs added by the previous Manmohan Singh government in its final three years.
Even as the Modi government is unable to live up to its promise on increasing employment, it has also slipped on its promise of small government. In 2014, Modi ran for prime minister with the slogan “maximum governance, minimum government” – a thrilling prospect for India’s economic liberals, given how rare the concept is in India. Yet, as right-wing commentator Rupa Subramanya pointed out in a piece last month, the Modi-led Union government is “starting to slip back into the old command and control mode and away from the promise of good governance”.
Earlier this week, clashes erupted between Dalits and Thakurs in Saharanpur, UP. (Photo credit: PTI).
Religious identity politics
Even as the vast majority of India’s population stagnates economically, religious identity has emerged as the main axis of Indian politics. For the past three years, politics around the cow has taken centre stage, with vigilante groups attacking Muslims and Dalits across the country on the suspicion of cattle smuggling and slaughter.
Political columnist Tavleen Singh supported Modi in 2014. Yet, on May 7, Singh wrote,
“It is hard to understand why a Prime Minister so passionate about making India a modern, digital, prosperous country has seemingly not noticed that hunting and killing Muslims on the pretext of cows and love jihad does not sit well with modernity.”
Speaking to Scroll.in, Singh said, “I think I misjudged him. I thought he was a liberaliser.”
In Swarajya, a magazine that describes itself as “a big tent for liberal right of centre discourse”, senior journalist Seetha argued that right-wing liberals are “disappointed at his [Modi’s] inability to get the BJP-ruled state governments to rein in the hardline/fringe elements and vigilante groups”.
Seetha specifically called out the appointment of the far right Adityanath as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh in March to buttress her point.
Hobson’s choice
Gurcharan Das, though, is still sticking to his 2014 analysis. “Jobs are plummeting all over the world,” argued Das, defending Modi’s poor job-creation record. “This is due to automation. I am not sure what other policies could have been pursued to make it better.”
Das is also sanguine about the BJP’s record on law and order. “Yes, there have been stray events such as gau rakshak attacks,” he said. “There has been no sort of state-planned murder or anything.”
Das is disappointed with the fact that Modi has been unable to raise India’s ease of doing business ranking but said, overall, he would still support the BJP were he given a chance to turn back the clock to 2014. “There is nobody else,” explained Das.
The TINA or “there is no alternative” argument, however, is something that punctuates most critiques of Modi from his right-wing liberal supporters.
“Modi and the BJP is still the best option,” said Tavleen Singh. “Compare him with Nitish [Kumar], Lalu [Yadav] or Rahul Gandhi. That is why he wins; because the voter can see he is the best option.”
Liberal irrelevance
In the end, the fact that Modi can coolly ignore his right-wing liberal supporters and still end up being backed by them might serve to illustrate how increasingly irrelevant India’s tiny liberal elite – both right and left – are becoming to the political discourse. Maybe nothing captures this better than the Union government’s demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 banknotes late last year. The move went against every liberal principle of limited government and had few economic benefits. Sadanand Dhume, a Wall Street Journalcolumnist and a prominent supporter of Modi during the 2014 elections called the move a “debacle”.
Yet, Modi simply brushed aside this criticism and converted what was an economic disaster into a political windfall. Months after demonetisation was announced, the BJP won a landslide victory in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. If 2014 saw a provisional alliance between right-wing liberals and Hindutva groups, three years since, it is clear that right-wing liberals are getting increasingly marginalised. For the last two years of the Modi adminstration’s term, it seems the Hindutva right will call the shots within the BJP.
Joy Buolamwini is a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League – an organisation that aims to challenge the biases in decision-making software. She grew up in Mississippi, gained a Rhodes scholarship, and she is also a Fulbright fellow, an Astronaut scholar and a Google Anita Borg scholar. Earlier this year she won a $50,000 scholarship funded by the makers of the film Hidden Figures for her work fighting coded discrimination.
A lot of your work concerns facial recognition technology. How did you become interested in that area?
When I was a computer science undergraduate I was working on social robotics – the robots use computer vision to detect the humans they socialise with. I discovered I had a hard time being detected by the robot compared to lighter-skinned people. At the time I thought this was a one-off thing and that people would fix this.
Later I was in Hong Kong for an entrepreneur event where I tried out another social robot and ran into similar problems. I asked about the code that they used and it turned out we’d used the same open-source code for face detection – this is where I started to get a sense that unconscious bias might feed into the technology that we create. But again I assumed people would fix this.
So I was very surprised to come to the Media Lab about half a decade later as a graduate student, and run into the same problem. I found wearing a white mask worked better than using my actual face. This is when I thought, you’ve known about this for some time, maybe it’s time to speak up.
How does this problem come about?
Within the facial recognition community you have benchmark data sets which are meant to show the performance of various algorithms so you can compare them. There is an assumption that if you do well on the benchmarks then you’re doing well overall. But we haven’t questioned the representativeness of the benchmarks, so if we do well on that benchmark we give ourselves a false notion of progress.
When we look at it now it seems very obvious, but with work in a research lab, I understand you do the “down the hall test” – you’re putting this together quickly, you have a deadline, I can see why these skews have come about. Collecting data, particularly diverse data, is not an easy thing.
Outside of the lab, isn’t it difficult to tell that you’re discriminated against by an algorithm?
Absolutely, you don’t even know it’s an option. We’re trying to identify bias, to point out cases where bias can occur so people can know what to look out for, but also develop tools where the creators of systems can check for a bias in their design.
Instead of getting a system that works well for 98% of people in this data set, we want to know how well it works for different demographic groups. Let’s say you’re using systems that have been trained on lighter faces but the people most impacted by the use of this system have darker faces, is it fair to use that system on this specific population?
Georgetown Law recently found that one in two adults in the US has their face in the facial recognition network. That network can be searched using algorithms that haven’t been audited for accuracy. I view this as another red flag for why it matters that we highlight bias and provide tools to identify and mitigate it.
Besides facial recognition what areas have an algorithm problem?
The rise of automation and the increased reliance on algorithms for high-stakes decisions such as whether someone gets insurance of not, your likelihood to default on a loan or somebody’s risk of recidivism means this is something that needs to be addressed. Even admissions decisions are increasingly automated – what school our children go to and what opportunities they have. We don’t have to bring the structural inequalities of the past into the future we create, but that’s only going to happen if we are intentional.
If these systems are based on old data isn’t the danger that they simply preserve the status quo? Absolutely. A study on Google found that ads for executive level positions were more likely to be shown to men than women – if you’re trying to determine who the ideal candidate is and all you have is historical data to go on, you’re going to present an ideal candidate which is based on the values of the past. Our past dwells within our algorithms. We know our past is unequal but to create a more equal future we have to look at the characteristics that we are optimising for. Who is represented? Who isn’t represented?
Isn’t there a counter-argument to transparency and openness for algorithms? One, that they are commercially sensitive and two, that once in the open they can be manipulated or gamed by hackers?
I definitely understand companies want to keep their algorithms proprietary because that gives them a competitive advantage, and depending on the types of decisions that are being made and the country they are operating in, that can be protected.
When you’re dealing with deep neural networks that are not necessarily transparent in the first place, another way of being accountable is being transparent about the outcomes and about the bias it has been tested for. Others have been working on black box testing for automated decision-making systems. You can keep your secret sauce secret, but we need to know, given these inputs, whether there is any bias across gender, ethnicity in the decisions being made.
Thinking about yourself – growing up in Mississippi, a Rhodes Scholar, a Fulbright Fellow and now at MIT – do you wonder that if those admissions decisions had been taken by algorithms you might not have ended up where you are?
If we’re thinking likely probabilities in the tech world, black women are in the 1%. But when I look at the opportunities I have had, I am a particular type of person who would do well. I come from a household where I have two college-educated parents – my grandfather was a professor in school of pharmacy in Ghana – so when you look at other people who have had the opportunity to become a Rhodes Scholar or do a Fulbright I very much fit those patterns. Yes, I’ve worked hard and I’ve had to overcome many obstacles but at the same time I’ve been positioned to do well by other metrics. So it depends on what you choose to focus on – looking from an identity perspective it’s as a very different story.
In the introduction to Hidden Figures the author Margot Lee Shetterly talks about how growing up near Nasa’s Langley Research Center in the 1960s led her to believe that it was standard for African Americans to be engineers, mathematicians and scientists…
That it becomes your norm. The movie reminded me of how important representation is. We have a very narrow vision of what technology can enable right now because we have very low participation. I’m excited to see what people create when it’s no longer just the domain of the tech elite, what happens when we open this up, that’s what I want to be part of enabling.
How does one account for the fact that most U.K. voters support every point of the Labour manifesto, but the Tories, despite fumbles, are still leading in opinion polls by about 10 percentage points?
It is two weeks since the Labour manifesto was ‘leaked’. Immediately all the tabloids and most of the broadsheets went to town decrying the manifesto. It is the “second-longest suicide note in history”, they scoffed.
The hara-kiri reference was to the disastrous and divisive Labour manifesto of 1983, dubbed the “longest suicide note in history”. It is not an accurate reference. This 2017 manifesto is not protectionist like the 1983 one, and it promotes very restrained nationalisation. Moreover, the 1983 Labour manifesto was anti-Europe, anti-NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation), and uncompromisingly pacifist.
Not quite a ‘suicide note’
The 2017 manifesto is not anti-NATO; it even endorses NATO’s defence requirements. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, has repeatedly explained that sometimes collective military interventions can be justified, though he has also criticised the hasty wars of recent years.
Similarly, his plan to nationalise the railway services is not necessarily an ‘old-fashioned leftist idea’. It is a bid to bring government-controlled railways back onto a level playing field, thus undercutting the monopolies of private companies and providing commuters with more options. Most voters support this, as they do his plans to abolish education fees, provide more and cheaper housing, and improve the National Health Service. And yet Corbyn is expected to lose — narrowly by some sympathisers, hugely by his opponents. Why is that so?
Some of it has to do with Corbyn. He comes across as a severely honest but uncharismatic leader from the past, someone who engages with ideas (whether you agree or disagree with them) and not sound bites. The media does not like such politicians, as we know in India too. They provide boring copy.
The problem facing Labour is that of credibility: voters agree with their manifesto, but they do not believe it can be implemented. This is especially true of the ‘middle’ voters, who usually sway elections: many of them feel that Mr. Corbyn is idealistically leftist.
Deviating from core principles It has to be said in Mr. Corbyn’s defence that for decades Labour has been diluting its pro-worker platform and the Tories increasing or sustaining their free-market platform.This has not been held against the Tories by many in the ‘middle’, while Labour, because of its compromises, has lost ground to the far right, even when it has won elections. It is also a morbid world in which many ‘middle’ voters feel that something absolutely necessary for citizens cannot be done for fear of offending capital! Surely, a nation is not a corporation or an individual, both of which can go bankrupt, and a politician’s first responsibility is to citizens?
In that sense, Mr. Corbyn’s manifesto is a gamble — to attract more ordinary voters back into the folds of Labour, on the assumption that concrete policies will count for more than xenophobic rhetoric for many of them.
But are the policies outlined by Mr. Corbyn ‘sustainable’? Many papers and all tabloids seem to claim that they are not.
One way to answer this is to look at the general outline of what Mr. Corbyn is promising: he is promising to “transform” the lives of ordinary Britons. This, in effect, was also what Donald Trump had promised the Americans, and both Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron had promised the French.
Interestingly, at least some of the tabloids that have dismissed Mr. Corbyn’s promise were far less critical of similar claims to shake the cart by Mr. Trump. As interestingly, Mr. Trump, Mr. Macron (at least until he got elected) and Ms. Le Pen, in very different ways, had offered less concrete policies to induce us to believe that they could make any significant dent in the status quo.
Mr. Corbyn’s 2017 manifesto has clearer ideas: a pledge not to increase middle class taxes but to tax the top 5% more heavily, action to shrink the growing wage gap between employees and top management, a better housing policy than the Tories, etc. Even his position on the European Union seems to be more concrete than Tory leader Theresa May’s vacuous statement, redolent of colonial hubris, that she will be a “bloody difficult woman” during Brexit negotiations!
The media’s role
It remains perfectly valid to ask whether these Labour measures are enough or fully ‘sustainable’, but that is not what is being done by much of the U.K. media. Instead, the very effort is being dismissed.
Is it the case that, being paid huge salaries by the neo-liberal dream, which is becoming a nightmare for many, British media leaders (who are not necessarily editors) do not wish to question its myths. Especially the cardinal myth that ‘national bankruptcy’ can be avoided only by passing on public debts to individuals, as private debts, while nationally subsidising banks and corporations.
Illustration: Nate Kitch
