Modi Ji, thank you for ending my has-been status

by Mani Shankar Aiyer in NDTV.com


Spokespersons for the Bhara­tiya Janata Party have been asserting on TV screens that I should have taken the government’s permission before hosting an old Pakistani friend of mine to dinner. Why should I seek anyone’s permission to host a dinner party — even if that friend is a Pakistani?

Why cannot I invite friends and colleagues to talk about Pakistan with a distinguished Pakistani? Why must I toe Modi’s line on Pakistan? What gives the government a monopoly of national opinion on our neighbour? Does anyone who does not believe that the Prime Minister is the nation’s sole fount of wisdom become liable to the charge of treachery? Do I not have a right to privacy? Do my guests not have such a right?

The BJP responds that this was not just some dinner party, it amounted to sleeping with the enemy. Indeed, the Prime Minister has darkly hinted that I was hiring a contract killer (“supari”) to get him. Invoking a fake Facebook post, he slyly let slip that the dinner was a “secret” conclave to hatch a “conspiracy” with the Pakistanis to make — horror of horrors — a Gujarati Muslim the chief minister of Gujarat.

Utter rubbish, total balderdash, but a nasty move to establish a salience between Pakistan and Indian Muslims to polarise a crucial election.

Well, I don’t consider Muslims or Pakistanis my enemies, especially a Pakistani Muslim like Khurshid Kasuri, who I have known since we were 20-year-old undergraduates at the same Cambridge college some 56 years ago. It was a friendship that was renewed when the founder-President of the BJP, and then Janata Party Foreign Minister of India, Atal Behari Vajpayee, chose me to be the first-ever Consul General of India in Karachi (1978-82).

Did he choose me to go to Karachi to spew at the Pakistanis? Atal Behari-ji would invariably take his seat in the House whenever I rose to speak on Pakistan. For unlike the present incumbent, he was not paranoid about Pakistan. A true democrat, he was interested in understanding other perspectives on that country.

I flew to Islamabad in Dec 1978 from the home of our ambassador in Abu Dhabi, Hamid Ansari, a brilliant diplomat and an engaging companion with whom I had served a little earlier in Brussels. He was among my closest fri­ends in the Foreign Service and I ap­­po­inted him chairman of the Oil Dip­lo­macy Committee when I was Petroleum Minister. Destiny had kissed him on the brow to rise for 10 long years (2007-2017) to the second-highest constitutio­nal position in our land: Vice President and Chairman of the Rajya Sabha.

Invaluable in his penetrating insights into the Pak psyche, he has guided me over the years through the maze of Pakistan’s domestic politics. He introduced me to his wife’s relatives in Karachi. Hamid Ansari was second only to Doctor-sahib (former prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh) among the distinguished guests at my dinner.

The morning after I reached Islamabad to be briefed by my Ambassador before taking up my new assignment, I heard the Ambassador speaking on the phone to Khurshid Kasuri. I slipped him a note on which I had scribbled that Khurshid was an old friend of mine. He passed on the phone to me, and I could hear the joy in Khurshid’s voice as he welcomed me to Pakistan, insisting that I proceed to Karachi only after visiting Lahore.
A tempting invitation

That was a tempting invitation as I was born in Lahore. I agreed, subject to Khurshid driving me straight from the airport to my old home at 44, Lakshmi Mansions.

Khurshid agreed and my Ambassa­dor indulgently let me take that circuitous route to my new posting.

That Ambassador, Katyayani Shankar Bajpai, was no soft-heart like me. He has always had a hard, tough understanding of Pakistan, untouched by any of the starry-eyed romanticism that tinges my view of that country. He was at the time in almost daily touch with Barrister Khurshid Kasuri, monitoring developments in the then ongoing Lahore High Court trial of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

Now nearly 90 years old, Ambassador K. Shankar Bajpai was another of my valued guests.

On my landing in Lahore, Khurshid Kasuri picked me up and drove me straight to the apartment where my family had lived till Partition, now taken over by a medical doctor who had been a student in London while Khurshid and I were cutting our academic teeth in Cambridge.

I have since been several times to Lakshmi Mansions (does Modi know it is still called that even seven decades after Partition?), taking my wife and children with me so often that the old chowkidar lets me in even when Dr Malik is not at home.

Most touching of all was when I visited Pakistan as India’s Petroleum Minister to initiate talks on the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline. The Residents Welfare Association of Lakshmi Mansions (including writer Sa’adat Hassan Manto’s family) organised a welcome reception for me and Dr Malik asked me to send him a blow-up of my parents’ photograph so that he could, in respectful tribute to their memory, hang it on the walls of their first marital home. Is this the enemy?

In 2003, then president Pervez Musharraf appointed Khurshid Kasuri as his Foreign Minister. Kasuri immediately embarked on the most determined exercise in India-Pakistan history to resolve the Kashmir issue.

The parameters for that bold initiative were set by Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Between them, they agreed that there would be no exchange of territory or people, but an attempt to “render the LoC irrelevant” to the ordinary lives of ordinary Kashmiris on either side of the Line of Control.

The task of negotiating the deal was entrusted on the back-channel to a Pakistani civil servant, Tariq Aziz, and Ambassador Sati Lambah of India (yes, Sati too was my guest at the Kasuri dinner). Sati was not only my Islamabad counterpart through all the three years I served in Karachi, he went on to head the Pakistan division at headquarters, returned to Islam­abad both as Deputy High Commis­sioner and High Com­missioner, and climaxed his high-flying life in diplomacy as the longest-ever serving PM’s Special Envoy: nine uninterrupted years as Doctor sahib’s most trusted aide on Pakistan. No one knows Pakistan better than Sati Lambah.

The kick-off point for the Musharraf-Manmohan dialogue was Atal Behari Vajpayee’s Jan 2004 visit to Islamabad, accompanied by his Foreign Minister, Yashwant Sinha (who had also accepted my invitation but could not attend because he was detained by the Maharashtra police in Akola).

On the Pakistan side, it was Kasuri who supervised and guided the back-channel conversations that brought more progress than ever before on the vexed question of Kashmir. It would have been concluded but for Musharraf’s domestic fracas with the judiciary that finally ended his regime.

Sohail Mahmood (left), Pakistan’s High Commissioner in India, and Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, the former foreign minister, were among the invitees to a dinner hosted by Mani Shankar Aiyar. The Indian prime minister described the dinner as a plot to undermine his party’s prospects in the Gujarat elections.



Whenever the dialogue is resumed, the four-point formula will surely constitute the point of departure.

On the Indian side, Dr Manmohan Singh’s Foreign Minister at the commencement of the back-channel talks was Natwar Singh. So I invited him too, bearing particularly in mind that not only had he been my boss in Islamabad for most of my term in Pakistan, but also because of his immortal comment to the Pakistan press on the ghastly Moradabad riots after Eid in 1980: “I feel humiliated as an Indian and diminished as a human being.”

As former foreign minister, Salman Khurshid had gone with Atal-ji to Geneva in the mid-90s to give a fitting reply to Pakistan’s canards in the Human Rights sub-commission, I invited him too. Alas, he mixed up the dates and turned up only the next day. But the other Salman — Salman Haider — former foreign secretary and architect of the 1997 “Composite Dialogue” between India and Pakistan that has persisted over 20 turbulent years (its name, but not its essence, changed by the BJP, as is their wont) came, listened, spoke and heartily ate.

Present too were former High Commissioners Sharat Sabharwal and T.C.A. Raghavan. Raghavan’s masterpiece, The People Next Door, published a few months ago, has quickly become the defining narrative of what Raghavan calls in his subtitle, The Curious History, of our relations with Pakistan.

We also had two former heads of the Pakistan division: Chinmaya Gharekhan, who headed the division when I was in Karachi, and then went on to become principal foreign policy adviser in the Prime Minister’s Office to two prime ministers, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, before winding up his career as the longest-ever serving represen­tative of India to the UN.

He was later Dr Manmohan Singh’s special envoy for West Asia. He is a frequent contributor on foreign policy to several journals, including The Indian Express and The Hindu.

Gharekhan, a conspirator? Ghare­khan, a subversive? Modi-ji, why not che­­­ck with him? Know what? Not­with­standing his name, Gharekhan is not a Muslim, his surname is a title bestowed centuries ago on his family. Indeed, he is a fellow-Gujarati! Khem chhe?

The other head of division present was M.K. Bhadrakumar, former deputy high commissioner to Pakistan. No one in India, absolutely no one, is engaged as deeply as he is with Central Asia, West Asia and our neighbourhood and views all foreign policy in the perspective of great power geopolitics and geo-strategies.

After retirement, he has emerged as the most prolific writer on foreign policy in Indian journalism. Far from stoo­ping to low conspiracy, Bhadrakumar’s published view is that the talk at the Kasuri dinner amounted to little more than “airy nothings”.

We had two professional journalists of long standing: Prem Shankar Jha, former editor of The Hindustan Times, and Rahul Khushwant Singh, former editor of The Khaleej Times, Dubai, and former resident editor of The Indian Express, Chandigarh — blameless except for being stained by association with me since our school days!

Besides, we were graced by the participation of an outstanding defence analyst, Col Ajai Shukla (retd), a soldier and intellectual who understands defence matters better than anyone else in the public realm.

I rounded off my list of invitees with none other and none less than the former army chief, General Deepak Kapoor. I wanted him in so that Kasuri would not get away without first hearing an authoritative armed forces voice. This is the highly-distinguished, highly-decorated officer whose patriotism has been impugned by a prime minister as having attended a “secret” conclave in my home to take out a “supari” on Narendra-bhai Modi.

Even my acerbic tongue cannot find the right word to condemn this outrage.

And, oh yes, of course, there was the newly-appointed Pakistan High Commissioner, learning the ropes, more silent than the Silent Valley, deferring to his former boss, Khurshid Kasuri.
Nothing to hide

We had nothing to hide. We had come together to brief Khurshid on Indian perspectives on Pakistan because Kasuri is arguably the best friend India has in in­­fluential political circles in that country.

We also wanted to hear him, as an articulate, well-informed and India-friendly interlocutor. He has, of course, been out of office for the best part of a decade and is unlikely to make it again. So the discussion was informal and certainly not “official”. All of us, without exception, were “has-beens”.

There was absolutely nothing “secret” or “secretive” about the get-together. Indeed, the place was crawling with Modi’s intelligence agents. Khurshid Kasuri is related to the Rampur family.
The dates of the wedding in their family had been determined without reference to the election in Gujarat. My invitations had gone out a month earlier and reminders had been issued both by email and mobile phones. Doubtless, both were tapped.

We talked and dined convivially for about three hours, my wife proving to our Pakistani guests that Indian nihari and biryani are quite as good as in Pakistan! Some BJP spokesman misunderstood and claimed we had sat and conspired till 3am. There was no conspiracy. There was no mention of Gujarat. We were just talking Pakistan with a Pakistani guest and friend.

It is shameful that baseless allegations have been flung from public platforms by no less a personage than the present prime minister. How, in a democracy, can the right of any citizen to express views contrary to those of the government be questioned as Modi and his cohort are doing? Are we not drifting towards becoming a police state?

I know Modi hates me. But my party so distrusts me that I was perhaps the only Congressman of 25 years standing who was not sent to Gujarat for the campaign. Yet, Modi’s invective was reserved for me as if the battle for Gujarat was between him and me.

Towards the end of my Rajya Sabha term, I asked him a question on the floor of the upper house. He brushed off my enquiry, adding, quite gratuitously, that I would soon be joining the ranks of the “bhule-bisre” — the forgotten and the destitute. That indeed would have been my fate — except for Narendra-bhai Modi. He has given me more publicity than I could have garnered for myself in three lives. Thank you, Prime Minister. 

Ye khel kya hai…. by Javed Akhtar

Mere mukhaalif ne chaal chal di hai
Aur ab
Meri chaal ke intezaar mein hai
Magar main kab se
Safed khaanon
Siyaah khaanon mein rakkhe
Kaale safed mohron ko dekhta hoon
Main sochta hoon
Ye mohre kya hain

Agar main samjhoon
Ki ye jo mohre hain
Sirf lakdi ke hain khilone
To jeetna kya hai haarna kya
Na ye zaroori
Na vo aham hai
Agar khushi hai na jeetne ki
Na haarne ka bhi koi gham hai
To khel kya hai
Main sochta hoon
Jo khelna hai
To apne dil mein yaqeen kar lon
Ye mohre sach-much ke baadshah-o-vazeer
Sach-much ke hain piyaade
Aur in kea age hai
Dushmanon ki vo fauj
Rakhti hai jo mujh ko tabaah karne ke
Saare mansoobe
Sab iraade
Magar main aisa jo maan bhi loon
To sochta hoon
Yeh khel kab hai
Ye jang hai jis ko jeetna hai
Ye jang hai jis mein sab hai jaayaz
Koi ye kehta hai jaise mujh se
Ye jang bhi hai
Ye khel bhi hai
Ye jang hai par khiladiyon ki
Ye khel hai jang ki tarah ka
Main sochta hoon
Jo khel hai
Is mein ir tarah ka usool kyon hai
Ki koi mohra rah eke jaaye
Magar jo hai baadshah
Us par kabhi koi aanch bhi na aaye
Vazeer hi ko hai bas ijaazat
Ke jis taraf bhi vo chaahe jaaye

Main sochta hoon
Jo khel hai
Is mein is tarah ka usool kyon hai
Piyaada jab apne ghar se nikle
Palat ke vaapas na aane paaye
Main sochta hoon
Agar yahoo hai usool
To phir usool kya hai
Agar yahi hai ye khel
To phir ye khel kya hai
Main in savaalon se aane kab se ulajh raha hoon
Mere mukhalif ne chaal chal di hai
Aur ab meri chaal ke intezaar mein hai

The English translation is below:
What Game is It?

My opponent has made a move
And now
Awaits mine.
But for ages
I stare at the black and white pieces
That lie on white and black squares
And I think
What are these pieces?

Were I to assume
That these pieces
Are no more than wooden toys
Then what is a victory or a loss?
If in winnings there are no joys
Nor sorrows in losing
What is the game?
I think
If I must play
Then I must believe
That these pieces are indeed king and minister
Indeed these are foot soldiers
And arrayed before them
Is that enemy army
Which harbours all plans evil
All schemes sinister
To destroy me
But were I to believe this
Then is this a game any longer?
This is a war that must be won
A war in which all is fair
It is as if somebody explains:
This is a war
And a game as well
It is a war, but between players
A game between warriors
I think
If it is a game
Then why does it have a rule
That whether a foot solder stays or goes
The one who is king
Must always be protected?
That only the minster has the freedom
To move any which way?

I think
Why does this game
Have a rule
That once a foot solder leaves home
He can never return?
I think
If this is the rule
Then what is a rule?
If this is the game
Then what is the name of the game?
I have been wrestling for ages with these questions
But my opponent has made a move
And awaits mine.

Why does county cricket always get the blame for England’s failings?

Andy Bull in The Guardian






A stock of explanations and excuses is a valuable bit of any cricketer’s kit and should be kept ready, stashed by bat, box, and pads. “The sun was in my eyes. I couldn’t pick it up in this light. My foot slipped. Somebody was moving behind the sightscreen.”

England, who, after all, have had no shortage of practice at this, have used some particularly ripe examples over the years. Ian Botham blamed the rain that ruined their chances in a group match against Pakistan at the 1992 World Cup on the team chaplain, Andrew Wingfield Digby “You’re useless, you are,” Botham told him, “It’s not surprising there’s a worldwide movement in favour of Islam.”

That was when Ted Dexter was the chair of selectors. Dexter, who once explained away his late arrival for pre-season at Sussex by saying “I was fascinated by an adorable girl”, had a fine line in alibis himself. When England were thrashed in Caluctta in 1993, he announced he was going “to commission a report into pollution levels in Indian cities” (India’s environment minister replied that Dexter should “commission a report into the effect of pollution levels on the trajectories of India’s spinners” instead). And when England lost the Ashes in 1989 Dexter offered the deathless: “Venus may be in the wrong juxtaposition to somewhere else.”

Dexter had a rare flair for the form, though. These days (if not always) a lot of the explanations, excuses, and arguments about what went wrong are starting to sound tired and familiar. As if English cricket was turning circles while it tries to find the way ahead. On the one hand there are the pundits offering old bromides about a weak county game that fails to produce the particular cricketers the national team needs, and on the other, there are county fans who bounce the blame back on to the ECB’s mismanagement of the sport and their coaching set-up at junior and elite levels.

This winter the focus is on fast bowlers, because England’s batsmen have been skinned by three of them. Steve Finn touched on the issues when he was doing some charity work for Chance to Shine last week. He picked out the pitches, which are “a bit of a pancake because people are scared of losing games”, and the workload, “when you play 12 months a year it can suck the pace out of you”, but defended the ECB’s national performance centre in Loughborough, where the coaches cannot seem to decide whether they should be teaching quick bowlers to stay fit or get fast.

The telling detail was what Finn had to say about the ECB’s recent changes to the playing conditions. Last winter it was not the lack of quick bowlers everyone was worrying about but the shortage of spinners, because England had been thrashed in India. The ECB had taken a step to fix exactly that problem earlier in the year, when they decided that in the championship visiting captains would have the choice of whether or not to bowl first. This was supposed to encourage counties to produce pitches that would bring spinners into the game as it wore on. And it worked.

The flip side, Finn explained, is that “we are trying to develop spinners in this country with the toss rules and not making pitches biased towards fast bowlers but I do think the slowness of the wickets discourages people from bowling fast.” Point being that in the attempt to fix one problem, the ECB has exacerbated another. Which is a pattern it is repeating on a larger scale. 

The last big ballyhoo in English cricket was after the team’s abject 2015 World Cup. Paul Downton lost his job as the managing director and Andrew Strauss took over with instructions to improve England’s limited-overs cricket before the 2019 tournament. Concurrently, the board was concocting plans to bring in a new T20 league. It’s been designed to address two other long-standing criticisms of the way it has run the sport, which were that having invented T20, the ECB’s version of it had long since been overtaken by others around the world and that youth interest and participation in the sport had dropped off a cliff while it was stuck behind Sky’s paywall.

Most of the key decisions since have been made to serve those ends. Trevor Bayliss was hired, in the large part, because he had such a strong record as a limited-overs coach. Then, the number of County Championship matches was cut and the schedules rearranged so teams could play limited-overs cricket on hard, fresh pitches at the height of summer, the one-day final could take centre stage again, and the players would have to do less chopping and changing between formats.

Problem being that when the ECB shifted one piece of this jigsaw into place it left a muddle in the other corner. The championship has been marginalised, shunted into the far ends of the season, when conditions are more likely to suit the very kind of bowling that suffered in Australia, and at domestic level, the counties and their players are being encouraged to prioritise limited-overs cricket.

So the ECB have over-corrected, and ended up off course in the other direction. But then, you would need to be a hell of a plate spinner to come up with a system that serves the national team in all three formats, keeps the counties solvent, satisfies diehard fans and seduces a new audience too. The ECB would do well to find a chaplain to blame.

May can berate Putin. But Brexit is his dream policy

As the Russian leader tries to diminish Europe, he finds ideologues such as Boris Johnson are doing the job for him


Rafael Behr in The Guardian

With lighter diplomatic baggage, Boris Johnson might have been a hit in Moscow. The foreign secretary’s artfully dishevelled, pseudo-Churchillian kitsch is not to everyone’s taste, but it could work in the bombastic idiom of Russian politics.

But as Theresa May’s emissary to the court of Vladimir Putin later this week, Johnson faces a tough audience. May has accused the Kremlin of aggressively targeting an international order based on law, open economies and free societies. In a speech last month, the prime minister listed offences including territorial theft from Ukraine, cyber-attacks on ministries and parliaments, meddling in elections, and spreading fake news to sow discord.

Russian interference in British democracy is currently being investigated by the Electoral Commission and parliament’s culture, media and sports committee. The latter’s chair, Tory MP Damian Collins, has signalled that he doesn’t believe recent claims by Twitter and Facebook that Kremlin-funded efforts to boost Brexit in 2016 were negligible.

He is right to be sceptical. The tech companies have a record of stonewalling any suggestion that their business model has been co-opted for organised malfeasance. They have commercial incentives to duck moral responsibility for the sinister content shared on their networks. It is beyond doubt that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had a hefty Russian boost. Facebook has removed tens of thousands of pages believed to be involved in sabotage of French and German elections. British ballots are unlikely to have escaped dirty money and molestation by troll battalions.

That doesn’t mean Brexit is a conspiracy that blew in on the east wind. Mistrust of the EU was not made in a factory outside St Petersburg. To connect tweets in Murmansk to a leave majority in Merthyr Tydfil misses the point about misinformation. The goal is not always to execute a specific outcome but to stoke existing tensions, nurture rage, exacerbate polarisation and shroud everything in such a fog of lies that truth becomes ungraspable. The purpose of fake news is to debase the currency of all news, and so undermine the foundations of pluralistic politics.

The advantage to Russia is in weakening western governments and their alliances. Putin despises Nato and EU influence in countries that were, until 1991, Soviet territory. He sees their sovereignty as fictions imposed by enemies. Undermining European and US resolve to uphold their borders is his goal.

There is a strain of Brexitism that is complicit in that project, regardless of whether leave campaigns knowingly or unwittingly took laundered roubles. Nigel Farage’s admiration for Putin is no secret: he has pushed the Kremlin line on Ukraine, preposterously depicting Crimea’s annexation as a defensive answer to EU provocation. He has described Russian military support for Syria’s murderous president Bashar al-Assad as a “brilliant” manoeuvre.

Putinophilia has the same cause as Farage’s Trump fandom. It is the nationalist’s fetish for a strongman, combined with nostalgia for the days when the world was run as a game between big countries using little countries as chips. It is unresolved grief at the UK’s 20th-century relegation from the ranks of imperial pawn-pushers.

That slow-burn trauma is analogous to the more sudden loss of status mourned by Russia, the reversal of which is Putin’s mission in life. During the cold war, British ideologues who swallowed a Kremlin agenda and regurgitated it as their own used to be called “useful idiots”. The difference now is they aren’t confined to the far left. Some of them are in government.


We may never know how much influence the Kremlin had in the referendum, but we can be sure its result was popular there

The Brexit delusion is that enslavement by Brussels inhibits our promotion back to the global power premier league. Boris Johnson is not immune to this fantasy. He would rather be a foreign secretary in the 19th-century style of Lord Castlereagh, carving out spheres of influence at the Congress of Vienna, than yawn through EU council meetings.

It is true that the EU empowers smaller countries. Witness the clout that Ireland has had in Brexit talks. But Britain has also benefited from aggregating its medium-sized might with Germany, France and 25 other nations. That is not a Brussels empire. It is a model of peaceful, collaborative power without historical equal.

May once understood this. In the referendum campaign she made a solid case for EU membership on the grounds that it could “maximise Britain’s security, prosperity and influence in the world”. When she now promises a “deep and special partnership”, she is not just talking about trade, she is pledging loyalty to European democracy as one of its few significant military underwriters. When the prime minister berates Putin for undermining institutions that uphold the rule of law, she is signalling strategic solidarity, not economic alignment, with the EU.

This is chasing a bolting horse when the stable door hangs off its hinges. We may never know how much influence the Kremlin had in the referendum, but we can be sure its result was popular there. Brexit has already fractured an alliance that will be hard to repair. May will never be a friend of Putin, but he doesn’t need her friendship when she is committed to a policy he would choose for her anyway.

Why the Germans are right about economics

Gideon Rachman in The Financial Times


At the height of the euro crisis, Mario Monti, the former Italian prime minister, liked to remark that part of the problem was that “for Germans, economics is still part of moral philosophy”. The suggestion was that the German instinct was to assign blame rather than to fix the problem — and was followed up with a reminder that the German words for guilt and debt are the same.

But the real punchline is that the Germans are right. Economics is — or should be — part of moral philosophy.

Successful politicians have to do more than just deliver economic growth. They also need to offer voters a vision of the economy that makes moral sense — in which virtue is rewarded and vice is punished. Ever since the financial crisis 10 years ago, mainstream politicians in the west have lost that vital ability. The belief that the economic system is unjust has stoked the rise of rightwing and leftwing populism across the west.

As Mr Monti implied, the idea that economics needs to be rooted in a moral system is nothing new. Adam Smith, arguably the most important economic thinker ever, was a professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University. His famous observation that individuals working on their own behalf would contribute to the general good, is underpinned by a theory of moral sentiments.

Karl Marx’s followers went to the barricades because they believed that communism was morally superior to capitalism — not because they were inspired by Marxist economics. Friedrich Hayek was a passionate anti-Marxist, who won the Nobel Prize for economics. He was also a moral philosopher, whose The Road to Serfdom made an ethical case against state control of the economy.

When nobody at the apex of a failed system was sent to jail, the door was opened for a politician, such as Donald Trump, who argued that ‘the system is rigged’

Until the shocks of 2008, centrist politicians in the west were able to offer a morally coherent view of the economy that delivered them electoral success. A free-market economy was held to reward effort and success and to spread opportunity. Globalisation — the creation of a global market system — was defended as a moral project, since it involved reducing inequality and poverty across the world.

After the financial crisis, however, the “globalists” (to use a Trumpian term) began to lose the moral arguments. The fact that banks were bailed out as living standards stagnated, offended many voters’ idea of natural justice. When nobody at the apex of a failed system was sent to jail, the door was opened for a politician, such as Donald Trump, who argued that “the system is rigged”.

The success or failure of Mr Trump’s tax reforms, which are likely to go through this week, will depend to a great extent on whether he can convince voters that he is helping to make the system fairer. The Republican argument is that the new taxation system will reward hard work and reduce the burden of the state. The Democrats’ response is that the new tax reforms further rig the system in favour of the rich.

At the moment, a majority of Americans seem to agree with the proposition that the Trump tax reforms largely favour the wealthy. If that interpretation takes hold, voters may drift away from the rightwing populism of Mr Trump, towards the leftwing populism of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The Sanders and Warren campaigns have also capitalised on the sense that America’s economic system is rigged. They have focused in particular on generational injustice — which leaves many young voters burdened with student debt and insecure jobs.

These arguments resonate not just in the US but right across the west. In Britain, Nigel Farage’s UK Independence party and the Brexiters seized the banner of rightwing populism, while the leftwing populism of Jeremy Corbyn took control of the Labour party. In France, the rightwing and leftwing populism of Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon respectively captured more than 40 per cent of the vote in the first round of this year’s presidential election. Add in other fringe parties and some 50 per cent of the French, British and American electorates are now clearly tempted by populist, anti-system politicians.

In Germany, however, the rightwing and leftwing variants of populism are still getting well under 25 per cent of the vote — despite the radicalising effect of the refugee crisis. In part, that is down to the success of the German economy. But it is also because Angela Merkel, the chancellor, realised that, in handling the euro crisis, she had to take account of ordinary voters’ sense of right and wrong. Many economists in the US and southern Europe argued that the crisis could only be solved by formally writing off a lot of Greek debt. They also made the case that German bankers were more to blame for the crisis than Greek pensioners. But Ms Merkel knew that, inside Germany, the argument that hard-working Germans should not be asked to write off the debts of wasteful Greeks was too powerful to tackle head-on. She could only make progress in tackling the euro crisis by respecting basic ideas about effort and reward.

A whole generation of western politicians has grown up with the Clintonian slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid”, ringing in their heads. But in today’s politics, “the economy” is not just about growth. It is also about justice.

Universal basic income is no panacea for us

Sonia Sodha in The Guardian







There aren’t many ideas that unite trade unionists, the libertarian right, the green movement, and the Silicon Valley tech scene . But that’s the rainbow alliance backing a universal basic income, a centuries-old idea posited as the solution to a range of 21st-century problems. Is its surprising coalition of bedfellows a sign of an idea whose time has at last resoundingly come – or a symptom of a catch-all, superficial fix in search of a problem?

Universal basic income, sometimes called a citizens’ income, is the idea that the state should pay every adult citizen a regular, modest income. It is a no-strings payment, so unlike benefits currently available to people of working age, it is not means tested. You get it regardless of whether you have a job, are looking for work, or whether you are even willing to work. 

A basic income has long counted on support from the political fringes. It has appealed to radical feminists and greens frustrated by capitalist failure to properly value non-monetary work, such as care. The libertarian right embraces it as an opportunity to roll back the bureaucracy of the state, replacing public services with a simple, regular cash payment, to be spent as people wish.

But the real reason for basic income’s unlikely elevation to idea of the moment is the growing chorus of thinkers who seem to believe the modern economy can’t function without it. Tech utopians talk up the rise of robots and the development of artificial intelligence, which they say will leave less work to go round. They argue that this is the perfect opportunity to embrace a four-day working week and top everyone up with a basic income payment.

Labour market dystopians, on the other hand, rightly point to growing insecurity in the low-paid labour market and the millennials bouncing from gig to gig, never quite pinning down the security of a permanent contract. For them, a basic income is the poverty backstop that could help people cope with this brave new world. 

Ken Loachian welfare critics, meanwhile, denounce today’s convoluted benefits system, worlds away from the contributory, insurance-based system of the past. It has become overloaded with sanctions as politicians compete to become ever more punitive to demonstrate there’s no such thing as something for nothing. So people who have been laid off find themselves pushed further into hardship after having their benefits docked for reasons outside their control. Wouldn’t it be easier to eradicate that inhumane, overbearing complexity, and replace it with something that gives people more breathing room to find the right job?

But, like so many ideas overstretched to become the answer to all problems, a basic income falls short on all of the above. If we could be bothered, we could fix the caring issue simply by increasing the generosity of the stingy state benefits paid to those who care full-time for older people or adults with disabilities. If we were so inclined, we could get rid of punitive benefit sanctions and replace them with a welfare-to-work system that puts much more emphasis on training and support for people to find the job that is right for them, not the first that comes along.

But it is in its most ambitious and radical incarnations that basic income runs aground. People have been predicting the end of work for a long time. Guess what: whether they count themselves utopian or dystopian, they have always been proved wrong. The wheel, the loom, the washing machine, the PC: as innovation after innovation has replaced some forms of human labour, the steady march of progress has replaced that labour with something else.

It’s tempting to think our inventions are more transformative than those of our ancestors. But it’s much more likely that, as in the past, technology will radically reshape the world of work without reducing its sum total. That’s partly because the idea that there is a set amount of paid work to be done is an error, which economists call the “lump of labour fallacy”. In fact, the richer we get, the more cash we have to spend – creating more demand and more jobs.

None of this should take away from the fact that we have some serious challenges ahead. The idea that the labour market is being reshaped rather than shrunk won’t be very comforting to taxi drivers losing their jobs to self-driving cars and finding they lack the skills for the new ones being created. But paying people a meagre basic income won’t help: we know from deindustrialisation in the past that leaving people who get laid off languishing on long-term benefits wreaks untold damage on working lives curtailed decades too early.

Britain has also always had too many low-skill, low-paid jobs offering poor prospects of progression. That should seriously worry us, particularly in the light of new research that suggests having a low-paid, stressful job is even worse for your mental health than unemployment.

Far from robots stealing jobs, the reality of today’s economy is that many companies are underinvesting in technology, suppressing productivity growth. In some sectors, labour is so cheap and easily exploitable it doesn’t make sense to modernise – for instance, Leicester’s garment industry is still heavily reliant on old-fashioned sweatshop models. In sectors such as parcel delivery and logistics, technology itself is being used to turn workers into quasi-robots. Wrist-based devices measure routes workers take round the warehouse or delivery rounds to check them for speed and efficiency, and track them right down to how long they take for toilet breaks.

The answer cannot be to accept this sorry state of affairs and try to patch things up with a basic income. It must be to address the fundamental power imbalances that allow employers to shift risk on to their employees by forcing them to become self-employed contractors, or refusing to pay them for breaks. And to develop long-term solutions for improving the quality of work. 

You can see the attractions of a basic income for Silicon Valley. Firms such as Uber, whose drivers are classified as self-employed “partners” rely on this risk-shift model. Even as Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, heaps praise on a basic income, the tech giant does all in its legal power to avoid tax and dodge paying its fair share towards the social infrastructure it relies on. The left must not allow itself to be seduced. A basic income is a distraction from these core issues of economic power; a radical-sounding excuse to look the other way from the less glamorous, more complex question of how to ensure labour market rights are properly enforced. Accepting a deterioration in employment rights and working conditions in exchange for a basic income could be dangerously counterproductive.

The tax credits that function as income top-ups for people in low-paid work have steadily been eroded by Conservative chancellors over eight years. Labour rights are more future proof: it’s impossible to imagine the government being able to cut statutory maternity leave, the minimum wage or limits on the working week without a much tougher fight – although if they are not properly enforced these rights can end up meaning little in practice for workers with unscrupulous employers.

The left will have to pick its battles. It must focus on winning the right to a decently paid job for all, not sell out by extolling a basic income as a panacea for the ills of the modern labour market. It must choose the fight for power, not the fight for a dribble of cash.

Howard Zinn on Objectivity