mindhenge

Rich man, poor man

For a fortnight or more after the disaster in the Indian Ocean it became almost impossible to move - either physically or in cyberspace - without bumping into a request to contribute to a fund to help the victims of the Tsunami. Even the Google front page had a direct link to Ways to help with tsunami relief , and many newspapers, shops, restaurants and websites did their fashionable bit for the cause. In a world riddled with violence, disaster and tragedy it takes a physically momentous, pictorially dramatic, politically uncontentious natural disaster to engage the public's interest and enthusiasm at the levels we have seen. This is the first "designer tragedy" of the 21st century - simple, clear-cut, impacting on fashionable, westernised resorts. Unlike famine and war it carries no collective guilt. There is no one to blame.

In truth, however, both the disaster and the response to it say a great deal about the rich world and its poor relations. Nothing fundamental will change: the amount of wealth that will be transferred from rich to poor as a result of all the fund-raising is infinitessimally small. While well-developed areas such as the Thai resorts will recover quickly and may even benefit in the long run from the required reconstruction, poorer regions will take years to regain even the precarious level of their pre-tsunami existence. The motivation of well-meaning westerners as they dig into their pockets or reach for their credit cards may be innocent enough, but that innocence comes from a lack of thought or understanding as to the true experience of the many millions of the world's people forced by poverty, war, exploitation or neglect to eke out their lives at the margins of existence.

In this context, the tsunami disaster is a much less seismic event than its scoring on the Richter scale would seem to indicate. In a world in which millions die annually from a lack of clean water, or the most basic of drugs, or as the victims of terror or starvation, the loss of some hundreds of thousands in a freak event not likely to be soon repeated is little more than a blip on the graph. It attracts attention rather as rail accidents attract attention, because a relatively large number are killed rather suddenly, whereas unremarked road accidents kill a far larger number, only fewer at a time. The parallel goes further than that, because one reason that people get less heated about road accidents is because they know, when they think about it, that it is ordinary people like themselves that cause accidents to happen. Similarly, it is ordinary, well-off, people who cause - indirectly - many of the problems experienced by the world's most marginal communities. They do this by their patterns of consumption and the expectations they place upon their own societies. Thus are world trade, the armaments industry, the pharmaceutical business, controlled by rich western nations in whatever way will most benefit their own. There is no desire to harm others, even as drivers have no desire to cause accidents. It is just better not to think about it.

If this is the starting point, the desire of the rich West to help the world's poor or unfortunate is misplaced and certain to fail. Blair and Bush wanted to help the Iraqis, but sadly the only way they could think of to do so entailed the killing of a hundred thousand or so Iraqi people. They did this because they wanted the experience to be risk-free for their own people. The coalition troops on the ground may not regard their environment as “risk-free” on an individualised basis, but their huge superiority in technology and fire-power means that every one of their few casualties is noteworthy. Meanwhile, the Iraqis they are fighting lie dead and uncounted in their dozens or hundreds. It is significant that much of particularly the U.S. effort in Iraq is aimed at attacking a terrorist threat that the U.S. fears in relation to its own security. This fundamental self-interest has poisoned its relationship with Iraq while exposing as a fallacy the notion that the Americans are in Iraq for reasons of selfless benevolence.

Similarly, most western efforts to help the poor are rooted in the desire of the West to make its own patterns of consumption sustainable. There is a mixture, here, of guilt and economics. Giving money to Oxfam makes people feel more at ease with their comfortable lifestyles. But western consumption is also dependent on cheap labour in the poor world, so a degree of investment is needed if the river of cheap consumer goods is to continue to flow. The fair trade movement is a new and sophisticated twist in this story. The idea is to pay people fairly for their produce while also improving the conditions in which they work. Much of the attraction for consumers, however, lies in the quality of the goods that are produced in this way. So the success of the formula has as much to do with the desire for exclusive, craft-made goods, as with the interests of the producers. Do people buy Green and Black's chocolate because it is fair-traded, or because it is delicious? To put it another way, would they pay a fair trade premium for a product no better than its cheap, mass-produced equivalent? In the case of bananas, possibly. But in the case of electronic goods sold on price and mass-produced in vast Asian factories the answer is far less certain.

In short, any impetus to address the fundamental inequalities in the world that starts from the premise that the rich world needn't change is a perverse indulgence likely merely to deepen the harm. The idea that we can all be wealthy – that the rich can drag the poor out of poverty without loss to itself, that the “trickle-down” effect means that the rich getting richer is necessarily good new for the poor over whom they climb – is to misunderstand the nature of material wealth. To be rich necessarily requires that you are able to consume more than you produce. That means other people consuming less.

Wealth has less to do with the ownership or consumption of abstract goods than with the ownership or consumption of the labour of others. In nineteenth century Britain, as elsewhere, people considered only moderately wealthy maintained households full of servants, the services of whom they consumed in precisely the same way that their contemporary successors consume cheap food, washing machines and DVD players. The very rich had small armies of retainers to attend to their wishes. The wages and conditions of workers were generally poor. In effect, a small proportion of the population kept wealthy on the productive work of a large proportion who did not.

This picture is replicated in the relationship of the less heavily populated developed world and its highly populated, under-developed or developing counterpart. And what is important to notice is that the relative redistribution of wealth that occurred in Britain in the 20^th century did not come about because of the charity of the rich, but because of the demands of the poor. In the long run the poor producers, when they organised themselves, had the whip hand. Lady Bountiful did her best for the deserving poor but required of them that they knew their place. When they started to move out of their place the process of social and economic change was unstoppable.

Similarly, the developing world is already shifting the balance of its relationship with the rich consumer nations. China has come a long way by supplying rich-nation demand for consumer goods, but what will really make its economy take off is when its own vast population can afford to consume. With countries such as China, India and Brazil in full consumer mode the global competition for goods will increase. Prices will rise and the availability to the West of cheap goods will diminish.

How soon such a process can help the world's most disadvantaged, particularly in parts of Africa, is hard to say. But the essential point is that change of this nature occurs not because of what is given by the rich, but because of what is taken by the poor. When nations such as the U.S. consistently consume more than they produce they place themselves at the mercy of this transfer of power.

Europeans have experience of this; after 1945 they were heavily in debt and could not attempt to compete with American patterns of consumption. Almost in reaction to it, some began to consider whether in some way more might possibly be less. In obscure corners there can now be discerned the feeble shoots of this post-consumer movement. There is a degree of do-goodery about it, of course, but also a hard-nosed realisation than when the new producer countries have their share there will simply be less available to the anciens riches.

The best way to help the poor peoples of the world, therefore, is to allow this process to happen and not to get in the way. Preaching the benefits of globalisation while subsidising failing agriculture and industry is a classic example of this sort of obstruction. It represents an attempt to slow down wealth transfer to poorer nations, an attempt that is bound to fail in the end because the subsidies themselves are a form of borrowing. A country that pays money to its producers in excess of the value of the goods they have produced is introducing money into the country's economy that the economy itself has not generated. Initially this eats into the country's savings, but when they run out the money has to be borrowed from abroad.

Even if the historical legacy of exploitation is discounted, there is a good case for saying that the sum of the West's intervention in the developing world is a negative, and that all the charity collection boxes and fair trade initiatives in the world cannot compensate for the damage done by a rich world trying to slow down an inexorable process of wealth transfer away from itself. And the problem with the collection boxes is that they provide a comfort blanket that smothers this reality. They make people feel good, but they do nothing to stop the damaging rear-guard action that the rich nations are fighting futilely to preserve a status quo. That subterranean battle is damaging to everyone it touches, in the long run. But, like the battle in Iraq, it is worst and most immediately damaging to the weakest and most vulnerable. It is not aid these people need. They just need the battle to go away.

Facing up to reality

If David Blunkett is forced out of the Home Office some "collateral good" may flow from the sad human drama responsible for his downfall. With many of the other big hitters in the cabinet either opposed or agnostic on the question of identity cards, there is a good chance that, without Blunkett to push it, this particular folly may be left to wither on the vine of good intentions sadly misplaced.

One of the most annoying things about identity cards is that those who are opposed to them are assumed to be concerned about civil liberties and personal privacy. The argument is trotted out that only wrong-doers should have anything to hide. That argument is nonsense, but it also beside the point because the real arguments against the I.D. card proposal are that it will be (i) hugely expensive, (ii) technically over-ambitious and prone to failure and (iii) irritating to the general public, who will have to carry the cards. It also won't make anyone any safer.

None of this matters to Messrs Blair and Blunkett, who have latched onto the policy for two reasons. First, it reinforces their message that there really is a threat we should be afraid of. As George Bush discovered last month, it helps to keep your electorate well and truly anxious. Second, the public is, according to the polls, overwhelmingly in favour of the introduction of I.D. cards. So it's a classic populist measure.

In reality, of course, the public is in love only with the idea of I.D. cards. They imagine that the cards will cause grief only to villains. When it begins to dawn on them that everybody will be put at both expense and inconvenience by the cards, the ardour can be expected to cool. The sort of rabble-rousing that gets people excited about threats - whether it be from terrorists, immigrants, asylum-seekers, drug addicts, drunken revellers, bored teenagers or a poisonous Tory press-style conflation of all of the above - only works so long as it doesn't put people to any trouble. If it does, the mood rapidly changes.

Witness the kerfuffle that has been caused by the case of Mrs Farhat Khan, a Pakistani who has put her four years in Britain to such good use that she has been invited to a reception at Buckingham Palace. The reception is to recognise those who have "made a significant contribution to national life", which Mrs Khan has, in ways that have been widely reported. Thousands of people have now joined a campaign to persuade the Home Office to lift the deportation orders on Mrs Khan and her daughters, whose asylum claim has now been rejected.

These numerous protesters, and those who have been touched by the news-reporting of the case, now find themselves unexpectedly thrust into the roles of people who have been put to trouble by the government's anti-threat rhetoric. Only the most heartless, hearing of Mrs Khan's case, could not allow the knowledge to affect them. But, according to the rhetoric, Mrs Khan and her family should be slung out of the country as failed asylum-seekers. People who could agree with that position so long as it didn't affect them are angered by it when they find that it does.

New Labour is engaged in a chase to the bottom with the Conservatives over this question of security and public alarm. It's a vicious spiral of descent, in which political pandering to public concern only causes the concern to increase. As the concern increases the measures politicians are obliged to dream up, and the language they use to justify them, become more extreme. And because the actual battles that the politicians define for themselves are impossible to win, no point of resolution can ever be reached.

Drug addicts are not going to respond to the criminal justice system. Terrorists are not going to be deflected by the need for an identity card. The desperate and dispossessed are not going to be discouraged from trying to come to live in Britain (although it is generally only the more enterprising and better off who make the attempt - the ones who are suffering the most don't even dream of it). The correct political response to these problems, therefore, is not to suggest that they can be somehow eradicated from consciousness, but to contextualise them, deconstruct them to identify the real issues and seek to dissipate public anxiety by replacing fear with a culture of understanding.

It may sound pious, but it is also the only approach that is going to work. There are even tiny signs of it in certain areas. Political leaders from both left and right are starting to promote policies of compulsory rehabilitation for drug-addicted criminals as an alternative to jail. The public has rumbled this one, and is no longer interested in locking up people under circumstances guaranteed to cause them to re-offend on release.

This may be a beginning, but it is going to take a lot more political courage than that to explain how the legalisation of certain drugs could hugely reduce the drugs-related crime problem, or how every asylum-seeker or illegal immigrant is a potential Mrs Khan, who, having sacrificed everything to come to this country is willing now to commit more than most to make the sacrifice worthwhile. Or even how, as the president of Pakistan said earlier this week, terrorism can only be defeated by addressing the concerns that motivate people to adopt such extreme measures.

The irony for Tony Blair is that  -pace this week's negotiations - his single lasting political achievement stands to be the Northern Ireland peace process, an achievement that came about precisely because he was prepared to deal with the the situation as it really was. He abandoned facile principle, negotiating with terrorists because they were the people whom the political process would have to satisfy. It was a pragmatic policy that appears to have worked, but by deliberately blinding himself to reality in other areas he looks set to have aggravated more problems than the one he may have solved.

An electorate learning to think

A ban on fox-hunting was one of those things that made New Labour seem alternative and enlightened when the party came to power in 1997. Like the much vaunted ethical foreign policy, it seemed to promise a step change in the political debate, challenging tradition and vested interest and putting moral considerations at the forefront of policy.

The government's enthusiasm for the ban, like its enthusiasm for an ethical foreign policy, did not last long. The prime minister began to see how much easier it was to cosy up to vested interest than to challenge it, and almost since the beginning he has been ducking and weaving on the fox-hunting issue, seeking political advantage at one moment with his own supporters and at another with the powerful countryside lobby. It is this vacillation, revealing a blatant political opportunism that was sustained right up to the dying moments of the parliamentary process, that destroyed the moral high ground that the anti-hunting movement had once enjoyed.  It turned a clear ethical principle into an exhibition of tawdry political horse trading.

The consequence is that the pro-hunting lobby have had remarkable success in turning progressive opinion, if not in their favour, then at least to the point of agnosticism on the issue. Tony Blair's lack of moral clarity has betrayed the cause, particularly when he claims moral clarity in support of a real war the justification for which is decidedly dodgy. Even without the prime minister's machinations the spectacle of a government and its parliamentary supporters seeking a ban on one particular method of slaughtering foxes while simultaneously engaging is a policy leading to the violent deaths of tens of thousands of people in Iraq was always going to be difficult to stomach.

The Iraq war has schooled people of all opinions in the difficult field of moral judgement. The questions of right and wrong that it raised were genuine and complicated, requiring people to think for themselves about the relative merits of the war, the chaos and the killing, on the one hand and the removal of the appalling regime  of Saddam Hussein on the other. Now people are applying these skills to the question of fox-hunting and finding it to be less clear cut than it first appeared. If the moral flounderings of New Labour have taught the electorate to think for itself then some good has come out of this sorry period. But it means trouble ahead for Mr Blair and his associates.

Not as obvious as it seems

It is curious how blanket news coverage accompanies fatal railway accidents but ignores far greater fatalities that occur on the roads. The accident on Saturday evening killed seven people; since then (this is Tuesday evening) an average of thirty people have been killed on the roads. Ten more will be killed tomorrow, and so on.

The remarkable safety of rail transport did not prevent the usual, knee-jerk reactions, including demands for all eight thousand level-crossings to be replaced with bridges or tunnels at a million pounds or so a throw. More moderate commentators requested only the elimination of level crossings on high speed lines. It was an "obviously sensible" view that appeared to be attracting general support.

This throws up a curious reflection. One important aspect of the accident was the small number of casualties relative to the scale of the impact. This was attributed (by an engineer contributing to a discussion on Radio 5) to the strength and solidity of the high speed trains themselves, which seems logical enough.

If that is so, however, then it follows that, if the driver of the car had stationed himself on a level crossing on a local line served by lightweight trains, the effect of the impact on the train and its passengers might well have been far worse. In other words, accidents on level crossings on local lines can have worse consequences that those on high speed lines because the trains that use then are inherently less robust. And if the accident is a freak of nature or human behaviour it is not less likely to happen in such a place. It happens where it happens.

Yet another case of the obvious being not quite what it seems.

A necessary outcome

From a European liberal point of view, the biggest disappointment of the Bush victory yesterday was having to pass up on the schadenfreude of watching the Republicans lose. That was quite a blow, but its effects were not long-lasting, for what is left is the reflection that it is better for the longer term cause of liberalism that the neo-conservatives should reap in their second term the whirlwind of their own policy failings during the first.

This is no mere post-rationalisation of a bad result. I pointed out some time ago (and I was not alone) that for Kerry to make it to the White House he would have to project himself as - at best - George W lite. Kerry was never the great liberal hope that some liked to imagine, but a Kerry presidency shackled by a Republican Congress and the sort of problems that the present administration would have bequeathed him was certain to be a profound disappointment to anybody interested in political reform.

Political movements need time if they are to destroy themselves effectively. It took eighteen years of Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite Conservative government to bring the British Tory party to its knees. In the U.S. the neo-cons have moved a lot quicker that Thatcher dared and consequently their trajectory may be even shorter. The war in Iraq is not helping them but the problem that will really bite is the failure of an economic recovery build on loose credit.

The problem with the twin U.S. deficits is not their size so much as the way in which the Bush administration has become dependent on them. The recovery is fuelled by consumer credit that sucks imports into the country and the budget deficit is inevitably increased by the extravagant costs of both a militarised foreign policy and politically motivated tax breaks. The good news for Kerry is that he doesn't have to try and solve this knotty problem. So Democrat hands will be clean when the brown stuff starts flying off the whirring blades.

The meaning of life

This morning's news that the Home Office is to initiate a review of the law on murder is as good an illustration as you could ask for of the rotten nature of British politics. The review, the Guardian reports, "comes after a Law Commission inquiry ... recommended a major overhaul, including a rethink of whether murder should always carry a life sentence."

The BBC also emphasises this aspect, reporting that the "results of a consultation exercise showed 64 respondents out of 146 - among them 21 judges - believed a mandatory life sentence for every murder was 'indefensible and should cease'".

How curious, then, that both the Home Office spokeswoman quoted in the Guardian piece and, more explicitly, Home Office minister Baroness Scotland as quoted by the BBC, both sought to make clear that the review would not question the mandatory life sentence. The baroness rather unequivocally said: "Murder is the most serious of crimes and we have no intention of abolishing the mandatory life sentence. Where an offender is convicted of murder, the court must pass a life sentence."

What is going on? Obviously the review will look into the question of the mandatory life sentence, otherwise there would be no point in the exercise. The injustices that it causes are the main reason for having a review. But the Home Office is so cowed by the "popular" press that it's primary concern is to avoid headlines in tomorrow's papers along the lines of "Murderers to walk free under new government proposals". So it sets up an eminently sensible and liberal-minded review and then trashes it to keep the tabloids onside.

Why does it matter? Because such cowardly behaviour only makes the situation worse. It encourages rather than challenges the newspapers' more illiberal instincts, it shields the public from the trouble of having to think about the complexity of the issues and it undermines what is left of the government's reputation for probity by requiring those conducting the review to find weasel forms to achieve the outcome of flexible murder sentences without breaching a principle that has so rashly cast in stone.

Another victory for the red-tops, and another bad day for criminal justice.

Seven days

Voters in the U.S. are about to discover whether the threat of terrorism that has dominated the presidential election campaign is a real and present danger or a smokescreen to conceal the appalling consequences of the war in Iraq. Alternatively, depending on your point of view, they are about to discover whether the much vaunted "homeland security" measures of the present administration have been a resounding success or a complete failure.

In other words, if al Qaida or its surrogates have the capacity to mount a serious attack on the U.S. mainland they will do so in the next seven days. The Madrid bombing demonstrated brutally the effect that could be achieved just before an election. Irrespective of which side wins in such circumstances, the terrorists are able to claim their attack as the decisive event. Whoever comes to power has to live with the suspicion that it was the terrorists who put him there.

With the presidential election so close, an attack in the final week would undoubtedly swing it one way or the other. Which way is more difficult to say. Probably it would favour Bush, on the basis of his strong "war on terror" platform. But if the initial impression is one of security failure it would, as in Spain, work against the incumbent. The terrorists themselves would claim victory either way. To bring down Bush would be a major scalp but to keep him in office would ensure the continuance (and, perhaps the extension) of the global policies that provided them with such fertile ground.

In the second of my articles in the aftermath of the Madrid bombing I noted a communication that was sent to the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi by the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigade. "We are very keen that Bush does not lose the upcoming elections" the statement was quoted as saying, because Bush's "idiocy and religious fanaticism" would "wake up" the Islamic world.

Let us hope that the threat implied by those words does not materialise. The ensuing argument - as to whether homeland security should receive the credit or whether the threat of terrorism had been over-hyped - is one that Americans can probably accept as the price for a peaceful election day.

Trespassers will be persecuted

News from the BBC that the government is considering introducing a specific criminal offence of trespassing on royal premises illustrates how easy it is for politicians to fall into the trap of doing something too hastily that is apparently sensible but is revealed upon closer examination as both daft and dangerous to people's freedoms. We had this over the purple flour bomb in the House of Commons. The whole point about that episode is that it was not dangerous, although it might have been frightening at the time. The same is true of people who clamber over the front of Buckingham Palace. Wearing a Batman costume does not make someone dangerous. As the police pointed out at the time, if they'd thought the man was a terrorist they'd have shot him.

The Tory peer reported to have complained that if an international terrorist got into the Palace, he could only be charged with "non-criminal trespass", has missed the point that what makes a terrorist a terrorist is his terrorist intent. The idea that a terrorist with terrorist intent would be put off making an assault on a royal residence by the knowledge that he might be done for royal trespass is frankly ludicrous. Besides, if there is evidence of such intent, he can be charged with terrorist offences. If there is not, he is not a terrorist.

The proposed new law is, by definition, aimed not at terrorists but at people who have not done anything more harmful than mere trespass. Trespass that is not harmful is not a criminal offence precisely because it is not harmful. So what harm will be prevented by making it one?

The value of life

Today's news has been all about death. News of the attack that killed 31 people at a resort frequented by Israelis in Sinai was displaced mid-morning by unconfirmed reports of the death of Ken Bigley. A BBC bulletin followed up this story with that of twelve or more Iraqis at a wedding party who were killed by a U.S. bombing raid. Meanwhile, on Five Live, a debate on the case of Charlotte Wyatt was taking place. Someone phoned to point out the socio-economic aspect of this question, that money spent keeping a dying child alive was, in effect, being taken away from some other healthcare area, such as cancer treatment that could save lives.

The idea that money might come into a question of this sort was too much for the presenter to engage with. There was a sort of stony silence before the programme moved on rapidly to more palatable views. But the fellow was right, of course. NHS staff make value judgements every day about the use of their resources. Some sick people die and some live; in principle, resources are directed towards the ones with the best chance.

What distinguishes baby Charlotte and others in her position is thet they have specific, identifiable, named lives. So, whereas health policy makers may condemn one category of patients in favour of another when they make their investment decisions, they have to be much more circumspect when applying these powers in a particular case. When it comes to life, people value the particular over the general every time. So poor Ken Bigley's terrible death is a much bigger deal than those of the father and his seven sons reported to have been killed in the U.S. raid.

Mostly, it comes down to proximity. A named Briton is closer to the BBC audience that a family of unnamed Iraqis. The people killed on 9/11 similarly seem much closer to home than the far greater numbers who have perished in the wars of southern Sudan. It's an understandable attitude, of course, but instead of permitting people to take a careless approach to unnamed lives, it ought to work the other way. If you can get so worked up about the death of somebody with whom you identify, then it's worth remembering that pretty much everyone in the world has got a mother, brother, father or sister - or someone - to get worked up about them, too.

Not the winning that counts

Not actually to have won the Hartlepool by-election may concern the Liberal Democrats little when they reflect upon the significance of the Tory humiliation in the vote. Indeed, if the wilder commentators were to be believed, a Lib-Dem vistory at Hartlepool would have fatally undermined Mr Blair's leadership of the Labour party, and since the Prime Minister is a great electoral asset to the Lib-Dems they must be grateful to have avoided such a Phyrric victory. Their party is the great beneficiary of the Blair fall from grace, sweeping up hundreds of thousands of disaffected Labour votes nationally that are never going to go towards the Conservative opposition. These votes would be in danger if the Labour leadership changed.

Satisfied, as they must be, with their monopolisation of the anti Iraq war vote, the Lib-Dems are surely now hoping that the eclipse of the Tory vote at Hartlepool by UKIP will push the Conservative party even more to the right. By picking a fight with UKIP the Tories would be going after votes that the Lib-Dems can't aspire to; but the centrist ground they would abandon in this lurch to the right is fertile Lib-Dem territory to which the new, hard-edged Liberalism trailed at the party conference is designed to appeal.

It is a truism to observe that elections are lost by incumbent parties rather than won by the pretenders, but the Lib-Dems have suffered from the third-party predicament of needing two other parties to play losing hands simultaneously if they were themselves to go through. With the Tories still nowhere and Labout reeling from the fall out from Iraq, it's perhaps not surprising that Lib-Dem strategists are rubbing their hands...