Lesson from Luanda

Peace had come to Angola by the time I checked into the hotel in Luanda. Independent since 1975 when the Portuguese had abandoned the struggle to keep its grip on a country thirteen times Portugal's size, Angola had celebrated her liberation by plunging into a civil war: MPLA vs UNITA¹, the United States and apartheid South Africa vs the USSR and Cuba, with the great powers contending for a stake in Angola's fabulous store of natural resources.

Cuban forces played a seminal role in the eventual triumph of the revolutionary left, the critical moment being the strategic failure of the South African advance at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988. Military strength played its part in this war as in all others, but what mattered more was a yearning in the hearts of Angolans to shake off the foreign yoke and to breathe the air of freedom, a yearning their Cuban colleagues knew well because they bore in their hearts the Revolution of 1959 and the victory over US mercenaries at Playa Girón in 1961. The US embargo on Cuba was in place then as it is today.

I had walked the streets of Havana, chatted to students, shopkeepers, taxi drivers, bureaucrats, carpenters, and agricultural workers in the countryside. Long before then, I had imbibed with my mother's milk a sense of solidarity with the class from which I came, the working class. And so I arrived in Luanda with every good feeling towards the regime. Revolutionary by reputation and rhetoric, I expected it to stand for everything I believed in politically: justice, equality of opportunity, a sharing of resources and of power, public ownership of the things that mattered - education, health, transportation, energy, water...

On the other hand, I wasn't sure what I was doing there. A friend had invited me to work with him on a proposal to the Angolan government to privatise a state-owned bank. Gilberto and I met up in Paris and travelled together to the capital, Luanda, where we joined Gilberto's boss, Miguel Algarrabia Onetti, a Uruguayan who had lived in Angola for many years. Gilberto told me something of Miguel's story. Like Uruguay's former president, José Mujica, Miguel had been a Tupamaro, a left-wing guerrilla fighter in his home country. After the coup in 1973, and the junta's savage campaign to rid itself of opposition, the Uruguayan communist party had spirited some of the prominent Tupamaros out of the country to places where their revolutionary credentials would not be unwelcome. They sent Miguel to Angola and there he had remained.

Gilberto told me that Miguel was now a significant player in the Angolan business world and was also 'in' with the government. He had done well: a fine apartment in Luanda, a house in Geneva and another in Vienna. His children were studying at a private school in England. Nothing Gilberto told me of Miguel coincided with my image of a revolutionary so I filled in the lacunae myself, supposing that a man who had fled the fascist military of his own country must have credentials of which Fidel Castro himself would approve. Nor did I question (was it self-interest?) the purpose of our mission. Privatisation of state-owned enterprises seemed a bit too Thatcherite for a government that had fought for years against the highest representatives of neoliberal capitalism. Still I played down the implicit message. In short, I gave everyone and everything the benefit of the doubt. History couldn't deceive and the MPLA government couldn't betray its principles.

Miguel joined us for dinner on our second evening and I put the question to him. Short, energetic, voluble, he lacked the traditional beard of the guerrilla fighter but retained the casual manner, addressing me as compañero and greeting me with a fraternal embrace.

"We don't know how to run banks," he explained. " And internationally, who would trust an Angolan bank? Privatisation is our only recourse."

He left the next day on a business trip to Europe and I didn’t see him again for several years. But he placed his offices in Luanda at our disposal and gave us a car, a driver and a secretary. We wrote a proposal in clumsy Portuguese and presented it at a meeting with a government minister that Miguel had arranged for us.

The minister worked from a shiny government building patrolled by armed guards and decorated with young women in tight clothes. Small and dapper, he sat behind a polished wooden desk bare except for a telephone and a tortoise-shell ashtray. A large gold watch on his wrist matched thick gold rings on the third finger of each hand. There was no filing cabinet, and the bookcase behind his chair was empty. He showed no interest in anything we had to say and the meeting barely lasted half of its allotted fifteen minutes.

Afterwards, as we waited outside the building for our driver, we saw the minister on his way out. He was seated in the back of a limousine, a young woman close by his side.

With time on our hands, we asked our driver to show us the city. He told us there was nothing to see, but I insisted.

"There must be a bookstore. I'd like to buy a book on your country."

"There used to be bookstore, sir. Not sure it's still there."

We drove through the old downtown area. On the kerbsides, vendors sold clothing, plastic goods, vegetables, furniture, lamps, pots and pans that had seen better days and had doubtless been left behind by the departing Portuguese. Abandoned stores lined the streets, their entrances piled with garbage. Pedestrians strolled aimlessly. Old men with bloodshot eyes squatted on sidewalks.

The bookstore was open but the shelves were empty save for a scattering of magazines. A painfully thin attendant shrugged his shoulders when I asked him why the store had no books. He probably considered it a stupid question.

Outside, a gang of ragged teenagers had gathered round our vehicle. They begged us for money and our driver waved them away with angry words. Before we pulled away, one of the gang engaged me with his eyes. Something in them drew my sympathy. I wound down my window, and felt for my wallet.

"Don't give him anything," Gilberto warned. "It's bad for them. They get into the habit of begging from strangers."

I let the wallet fall back into my pocket. Seeing my gesture and change of mind, the youngster gave me a look that has haunted me to this day. It reflected pain, abandonment, hatred of the foreigner and of the rich who live well and know nothing of deprivation. It spoke of the cruelty of the world and its disregard for the weak and vulnerable; and above all it conveyed hunger, the relentless hunger that gnaws without hope in the heart of the innocent.

Angola is a land of oil and diamonds. Merchants, speculators and oilmen occupy the capital’s luxury hotels and take the first-class seats on flights to and from Europe and America. An old, familiar drama plays out there of a rich country filled with poverty and despair. Nothing can ever excuse my failure - which is also our failure - to give succour to a hungry child. No lesson should come at such cost.

Note: Two names in this piece have been changed for security reasons.

1 MPLA - People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola; UNITA - National Union for the Total Independence of Angola.

Inequality

  (From my book "The Cauldron")

 The systematic heart of capitalism.  Wealth creation in a capitalist world is a private business; and human progress is supposed to be dependent on everyone’s desire to get rich.
    If property and income were equally distributed, it would make no difference whether someone described themselves as well-off, of modest means, or poor because such terms would cease to have meaning. To pursue individual wealth, therefore, is to seek inequality.
    Other arrangements for distributing wealth are imaginable, like Marx’s classless  society (government-controlled distribution on the basis of need and entitlement) or Kropotkin’s mutual aid (we help each other and share as necessary); but after the collapse of the Soviet Union the first has been widely discredited while the second has been generally ignored.  Grimelstein thought “only coercion or superhuman powers of persuasion could steer humanity from its addiction to greed,” and dismissed other versions of economic life  as “..romantic illusions, superficially attractive but fundamentally unworkable”. Few would disagree.
    We’re not talking here about natural inequality. That we are born with unequal abilities is a truism too trivial to merit discussion. To complain  because Shakespeare or Tolstoy are better writers than - say -  me is to sit alone, like Anthony "...in the market place, whistling to the air...”
    More than half of humanity, however, lacks sufficient means to secure a healthy diet, let alone buy enough  paper and ink to produce a masterpiece. And since nobody’s managed to come up with a theory of natural economic inequality,  chances are it’s man-made.
    Theft has much to do with it.  Village communities in medieval Europe worked common land and made common wealth. In the sixteenth century, aristocrats decided they needed large estates for themselves and simply threw the peasants out before reemploying them as serfs. “...No longer content to lead lazy, comfortable lives which do no good to society, (the nobles and gentlemen) must actively do it harm by enclosing all the land they can for pasture and leaving none for cultivation,“ objected Thomas More’s hero Rafael Hythloday.  
    Later on, governments got in on the act. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they dispossessed common villagers of their best remaining acreage and awarded that also to the aristocracy. In England, between 1760 and 1844, almost four thousand Enclosure Acts were shoveled through parliament, each designed to legalize a land seizure. Louis the Fourteenth, the great Sun King and flower of French nobility, followed the pattern, allowing communal village property to be confiscated in payment of fabricated debts.  America North and South was likewise built on grand larceny of territory from the people who lived there before the arrival of the Europeans. Ditto Australia, New Zealand, South Africa.
    Sad stories, but the price of progress ... industrialization would never have occurred without enclosure at home, territorial seizure overseas... so run the excuses.
    Let’s pause here for a moment to ask how anyone ever had a legitimate claim to own land. Hugo Grotius, the 17th century Dutch jurist thought God bestowed it on the people for their common use and enjoyment, and that powerful individuals acquired ownership by mutual agreement with the poor. Mutual agreement?  A contemporary, Sir Robert Filmer, spotted the flaw:  why would anybody (including succeeding generations) freely agree to hand over a gift from God to someone else?
    “The first man to enclose a piece of land, claim ownership and find people simple enough to accept what he did was the true founder of civil society,” wrote Rousseau, and then added “How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries and horrors would have been avoided if someone had pulled up the fence posts or filled in the ditch and advised his companions to take no notice.”
    Kropotkin pointed out that the price of a house in Paris, which only a rich man could afford, lay not only in the bricks and mortar and the patch of earth on which it stood, but also in the city itself with its roads and sewers and theatres and museums and schools and hospitals all constructed - just like the house - with the sweat and toil of labourers too poor to rent the meanest of its dwellings. Why was it legitimate, therefore, for anyone to own such a property? .
    So much for real estate. Theft of labour, effort and intelligence probably outweighs even that of land in the development of inequality.  Attributing  to one person the work of many allows senior executives to earn salaries of mythic proportions. Yet the administration of even a modest company requires a knowledge of so much detail that one person could hardly begin to retain it. Business and political leaders alike depend on subordinates - preferably ones who are ideologically wedded to their boss’s prejudices.  If the president wants to rough up a competing country - or company - he will order up advice that justifies his wish in the same way that he orders a meal in a restaurant. Even information is served up to suit him. He orders whatever takes his fancy and seldom bothers with the menu. No legendary eastern potentate could command discourse as completely as a chief executive officer. But that’s all he does. The cooking is performed by others - the unremarked operatives who toil in the kitchen for a tenth maybe a hundredth of the CEO’s income.  If all goes well, the boss is applauded; if ill, a few heads roll; if very ill, he will probably sail off into the sunset with a shipload of pension rights, share options and golden handshakes.
    Do leaders deserve such inequality of reward? According to a study by the Chandigarh Institute, the higher the disparity between average company salaries and the pay of the Chief Executive and his cronies, the worse the company’s performance.  Executive compensation, , the study concludes, “possesses one universal characteristic: it advances only in an upward direction and at a faster rate than anyone else’s.”
    Moreover, despite the trumpeted advantages of market economies, “...inequality increases wherever capitalism takes root.” In the United States, the richest five percent control sixty percent of the  wealth - and their share is growing. Half the assets of Latin America are in the hands of one per cent of the people. At the same time, and despite official propaganda to the contrary, social mobility in both regions, and in Europe too, continues to decrease - which means that if you’re born poor chances are you’ll stay poor.
    What do the statistics mean for individuals? Take the film industry. A famous film star recently earned US$5 million for a four-minute advertising slot. Celebrity actors or directors can net tens of millions in a year. Oligarchs, oil barons, hedge-fund managers and hi-tec moghuls can go even higher - with earnings of $100 million and more. That’s more than the annual income of a quarter of a million Haitians, or Ethiopians, or Sudanese, or Nepalese or Madagascans or Bangladeshis; more than the lifetime earnings of 99.99% of the global population; more - 97% more - than  someone on an annual salary of $100,000 will earn in thirty years of work.
    How can individuals - even famous ones - garner such obscene sums? Because we worship at the altar of Mammon, billionaires and media stars are God’s messengers on earth, and their churches charge  inflated entrance fees. We - the flock - make them rich, buying their celebrity and smiling at their condescension, and in return we receive our regular fix of stupefying drivel, grovel at the sound of their name, and vote for them at the polling booth.
     How can we bear to live with such iniquitous nonsense? Might just as well ask how we can bear to live with ourselves.

Net Economic Outcome (NETCO)

During recent conversation about Brexit, Trump, and widespread public dissatisfaction with the status quo in the US , Europe and elsewhere, I was reminded of a piece I wrote some years ago as part of a short book of essays and observations.  It was an attempt to spear some of the nonsense perpetrated both in academia and government about how large-scale economic activity is interpreted and “sold” to the public; and why that interpretation is wholly inadequate.  Although framed around two fictional characters and deliberately tongue-in-cheek, the essential details of the piece are as historically and factually accurate as I could make them. 

    Net Economic Outcome as a concept was introduced by Sandra Mendoza and Veliama Sivaganamin a joint paper presented to the Third Women’s Econo-Solidarity Conference in Porbandar . Despite initial ridicule by academics and dismissal by policy-makers, radicals soon latched onto NETCO as a weapon in their war against capitalism; although it is far from certain that this was the authors’ original intention.
    The aim of the Porbandar paper was to elucidate what Mendoza and Sivaganam considered to be a universal confusion between “national or regional economic efficiency”, and the “efficiency of the firm”. Conventional wisdom held (as in many quarters it still does) that the two ideas went hand in hand: in other words, that an efficient private sector offered the best route to the welfare of the people and therefore to the success of the nation or the region in which it operated.
    Mendoza and Sivaganam suggested, instead, that private and public efficiency were not only different but, in many cases, mutually exclusive. In a capitalist economy, they claimed, an efficient firm endeavoured to maximise sales, while minimising labour costs and leaving the state with as many associated burdens as possible: pollution, waste, environmental degradation, road maintenance, worker training, social security, unemployment insurance, and so on. But was it economically efficient at national level, they asked, for people to buy superfluities (and create the resultant waste), or for a state to cope with employment instability caused by  downsizing or outsourcing, the displacement of small farmers and entrepreneurs by multinationals, the ravages of industrial pollution, and the societal disruptions that accompany extremes of inequality? The prospect of exceptional wealth might well be a spur to enterprise, but wasn’t it too often also a charge on the social fabric? Currency and commodity markets could net handsome rewards for a handful of businesses and individuals, but often by devastating countless numbers of impoverished people in stricken areas of the world.
    And what about natural and environmental disasters? Earthquakes, tsunamis, chemical spills, shipwrecked oil tankers could ravish the human environment and cause untold human misery - even though they usually resulted in greater economic activity and an increase in GDP as producers geared up to repair the damage. In economic terms, few things could be better than a catastrophe or a conflict fought in some distant territory where the loss of many lives would be counterbalanced by the enticing prospect of corporate super profits and unprecedented economic growth, first in arms sales, and then in rebuilding towns and industries.
    Mendoza’s and Sivaganam’s paper offered some provocative examples of how private sector efficiency could, and often did, mean “screwing the taxpayer”: overcharging on government contracts, bribing officials, blackmailing governments into awarding investment subsidies, circumventing environmental regulations, failing to compensate victims of industrial blight and so on.
    They went on to propose a different, more sophisticated analytical vocabulary for assessing economic efficiency and assigning financial responsibility, which would allow the social, environmental and infrastructural impact of corporate activities to be costed and charged.
    In a subsequent monograph “Owning up - Investors and the Invested”, the authors argued that so-called private investment is in reality a joint venture in which public goods - roads, railways, airports, an educated workforce etc. are joined to private capital. Ownership should, therefore reflect the participation of all investors. Terms such as “Socio-environmental Cost Analysis”,  “Input Distribution”,  “Capital (Stock) Equivalence”, “Subvention Equity” and “Context Sensitive Accounting”, made their first appearance in this little book.
    The personal histories of both Mendoza and Sivaganam bear some relevance to the conclusions they reached about the nature of economic life.
    Sandra Mendoza was born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras into a wealthy land-owning family. At seventeen, she began an affair with one of the gardeners at the family hacienda, by whom she became pregnant. When the affair came to light, the gardener was arrested on a rape charge and was never seen again - a not untypical fate in those days for a man who dared to bed above his station.
    Mendoza fled to Tuxla Gutierrez in Mexico where she lived for some time in deep poverty. The child - a daughter - died in infancy from a lung infection - Mendoza’s pleas to her family in Honduras for money to buy antibiotics having gone unheeded. 
    By the age of nineteen, she was in Mexico City working behind the counter in a pharmacy and studying for a degree in Economics at UNAM.  After graduating with distinction, she landed a job with Verduras y Aceites de Mexico S.A. - a subsidiary of a large US agroindustrial company. There she played a key role in developing an investment in the far western state of Baja California Sur where the company leased a stretch of semi-desert on the outskirts of the town of Santamaría and collared the local water supply to grow tomatoes for export. The project proved highly profitable, and Mendoza received a substantial salary increase on the strength of her contribution.
    On the other side of town, however, where farmers had cultivated the rich soil since the town’s foundation in the late eighteenth century, traditional irrigation channels ran dry and crops failed for lack of water. Proud horticulturists, accustomed to a dignified independence, began sinking into poverty.  A few of them found low-paid jobs with the company; many sold their fields as building plots to wealthy newcomers for whom they ended up working as servants, chauffeurs, or even gardeners digging patches of the same soil that had once been theirs. The gap between rich and poor widened, social cohesion weakened; burglary and petty theft - formerly unknown - became commonplace. Beggars appeared on street corners. 
    This was Mendoza’s first experience of the double-edged sword of western-style industrial investment. Government statisticians registered an increase in local employment and GDP; but who, Mendoza asked herself, were the beneficiaries? And who bore the costs? She wondered if a way could not be found of recognising recipient communities as co-investors and  decision-making participants in new projects.
    Back in Mexico City, Mendoza met Carlos Restrepo Robles, the exiled Colombian human rights lawyer who was later gunned down at the airport on his return to his homeland. From him, she learned of the notorious El Cerrejón strip coal mine in the north of Colombia owned by a consortium of multinational mining companies. The mine had brought profits to the owners, but despair to local communities whose homes had been razed, fields destroyed, burial grounds desecrated and environment polluted beyond recovery. After Restrepo’s death, she visited the mine and saw for herself the devastation it had wrought on the locality and the indigence into which the former residents of the demolished village of Tabaco had fallen as a result.
    Determined to study the issues raised by what she had witnessed in Santamaría and Tabaco, Mendoza resigned from her job and, after turning down offers of scholarships from several western universities, she chose to read for a doctorate at the University of Porbandar.  “I didn’t need western professors telling me how people in countries like mine think and feel,” she explained to a colleague who questioned her choice. It was at the university in Porbandar that she met Veliama Sivaganam.
    Ms Sivaganam came from a very different background. Born into a poor family in Pudukkottai, a rural district of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, she and her mother learned to read and write together - thanks to a literacy drive funded by an enlightened local charity. Sivaganam’s father made scant effort to follow suit. Like many men of the district - he had given himself over to the consumption of arrack - a locally-brewed liquor - on which he spent whatever funds he could lay hands on. Officially, private distilleries were forbidden in Tamil Nadu - the local government having awarded licences to a couple of large national distillers that produced IMFL (Indian Made Foreign Liquor). Sales of IMFL through recognised brandy shops provided the government with tax revenues, thus ensuring - as is so often the case - an alliance of interests between government and big business. But that didn’t stop the illegal distilling of cheap arrack for which the demand proved insatiable and the rewards substantial.  “In Pudukottai, Tamil Nadu’s least urbanised district,” wrote Palagummi Sainath in 1995 when Sivaganam was still a teenager, “official data show that an arrack distiller is arrested every 45 minutes; and one is convicted every two hours.” 
    Illegal distillers  happily paid their fines - the amounts were derisory compared with their profits from the trade. Then they moved their equipment to another location and carried on as before. Arrack consumption, meanwhile, had become a source of grief and conflict within families. Husbands commonly financed their drinking habit from an already meagre household budget and then under its influence abused wives who had the temerity to complain. Children grew to dread their fathers’ drunken outbursts and the parental disputes they occasioned.
    On her twentieth birthday, Sivaganam joined a women’s group formed with the aim of declaring Pudukottai a dry region. They succeeded in having most of the illegal distilleries closed down - but only to find the brandy shops taking their place - backed by the state government and the big liquor companies. IMFL came to dominate the market and since it was more expensive than arrack, drinkers paid for the increase not by reducing their consumption, but by appropriating more of the household income. Children went hungry, but like whales feeding on plankton, big business and government got a little fatter.
    The protest movement intensified. Campaigners petitioned the authorities, organised protest marches, bombarded the local media with demands to be heard and read. Scandals came to light: a senior government official was found to be in the pay of a liquor multinational; another was discovered running an arrack distillery of his own. Some of the women suffered beatings and ostracism in their village. All the leaders received threats. The campaign continues to this day - partially successful but never completely so - as is invariably the case with human effort.
    Sivaganam received repeated beatings at her father’s hands and narrowly escaped death when he returned home drunk one night, doused her with kerosene and tried to set her on fire. The poor quality of the fuel saved her: it had been adulterated with water. After this, she fled to Madras where she found employment - coincidentally also in a pharmacy - and took night classes in economics and political science at the university.
    Two years later, she published a paper - “Profit and Losses” the first of many on the social costs of large-scale corporate enterprise. In it she argued that Adam Smith’s ideal of business serving the people (even if unwittingly) had been reversed. The effect of western capitalism had not been to make the market serve the people, but to bend the people to the needs of the market. The paper was not especially original, but it contained useful references to Sivaganam’s experience in Pudukottai where the campaign against illegal arrack distilling had handed much of the market to external suppliers, allowing them to suck funds out of the area.
    For her degree dissertation, she conducted a study of two large-scale industrial investments: the infamous Union Carbide plant in Bhopal where, on 2nd and 3rd of December 1984, a cloud of toxic vinyl chloride gas leaked into the air, killing 3,000 people in the first 24 hours and tens of thousands of others in the weeks, months and years that followed; and the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada River in Madya Pradesh where countless villages have been submerged, and upwards of half a million people uprooted and left with little provision for their livelihoods. In the course of this study, she began to form her theory of “default economics”, the  term she coined for the failure of corporations and governments to account for the full social costs of their operations. “Only those expenses from which they can’t hide are counted,” she concluded in an oft-quoted peroration. “And these are considered solely in relation to the business or the project itself. Responsibility for the human costs of Bhopal or Sardar Sarovar accrue to some other entity: to the state perhaps or charity, to history or to God.” 

Free Trade Bunkum

A free-for-all advocated by powerful countries and corporations in their drive to dominate world markets. 

Free trade is underpinned by the theory of “comparative advantage”, a primitive set of suppositions dreamed up by David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century. Essentially it says that if the United States can produce roses more efficiently than guns, whilst Iceland can produce guns more efficiently than roses, the US should stick to roses and Iceland to guns. That way each country concentrates on what it can do most efficiently (its “comparative advantage”) and sells its speciality to the other.
 What happens to dislocated workers - the ones who were formerly producing the “less efficient” product?
 Labour is just a factor of production like money, machinery and raw materials, so it can be shifted around according to need. US employees in gun factories can become gardeners on rose farms, whilst Iceland trains rose-growers for a new life in explosives. The happy consequence is that everyone gets richer.
 What if the US is more efficient in both products? Answer: it gives up the making the less efficient of the two so as to make more of the more profitable product.
 To make this a little clearer, let’s suppose Europe has a comparative advantage in software over the US, but a comparative disadvantage in aircraft. According to trade theory, the solution is for Europe to stop making planes and to turn redundant aerospace engineers into computer whizzes. Meanwhile, the US should abandon software development and concentrate on jets. It goes without saying that neither Airbus nor Microsoft would want to stand in the way of trade theory and would happily retire from the market.
 Readers will doubtless spot the cloud of flies in this ointment. David Ricardo with some support from John Stuart Mill hatched up trade theory as a simplistic mind-game in which two imaginary countries produced two identical products. Having satisfied themselves that the game worked in their heads, this pair of benighted geniuses - and countless economists after them - blithely applied it to the world. Incredibly, this balderdash - for that’s what it is - remains the core argument used by the powerful to force “Free Trade” upon the weak, even though, once forced, it paradoxically ceases to be free.
 There are about 190 countries in the world. Here’s how the process might look for just a handful of them:
 
 Note that under the theory of comparative advantage, every one of these countries would produce only the product in which it specializes and would import all the others. Trouble is, we all know that’s not how the world works - or is ever likely to work (See Ha-Joon Chang, “Kicking Away the Ladder, London 2002).
 Far from being irrevocably fixed, “comparative advantage” changes. Hence why centres of production move incessantly around the world in pursuit of cheap labour, cheap raw materials, local subsidies, lax regulations, and low taxes. What about people? Free Trade chews them up and spits them out again when their relative price goes up.
 How then do we distribute income-earning activities?
 World demand for most products could be satisfied by a handful of countries; or, in a globalized world, by a handful of corporations. Industry concentration (fewer and fewer companies producing the same goods) has been increasing in all major sectors. Fifty years ago, there were more manufacturers of cars, farm equipment, bicycles, pharmaceuticals, beer, refrigerators, processed food etc. More major banks too. And they employed more people. Job insecurity has increased with the march of international trade; and the average wage bill of multinational corporations in proportion to their revenues has fallen (except for senior executives whose pay shows evidence of titanic greed).
 So Margaret Thatcher was right, there's no alternative? 
What about making as much as we can and importing only what we need?
"That would be inefficient” objects a scandalized economist. “Prices would go up.”
 “Perhaps,” respond the insecure, the unemployed and the underpaid, “But we’d have jobs and be earning money. So for us prices would come down.”
 “Chicken shit!,” returns the economist. “A price is a rose. If it grows, it blooms, regardless of whether you can afford it.”
 “Not so,” says a bright member of the unwanted (a physicist and disciple of Einstein), “Prices are not absolute but relative. It’s a question of viewpoint. If you earn little or nothing, everything’s too expensive. Once you earn an income, some goods at least come within reach.”
Our economist doesn’t catch this last remark. He’s gone off to enjoy a glass of Japanese Scotch with a local politician. Japanese Scotch? Isn't that an oxymoron? Depends who you talk to.

Labour's election - a failure of competence and courage

A visible lack of leadership.
Corbyn's virtual absence during the 2016 referendum campaign was a massive dereliction of duty.
Then  for a long time he refused to define his Brexit position, finally doing so simply to proclaim himself  “neutral“.  To be neutral on the most important decision facing the country since WWII struck me as politically suicidal. Rule 101 for a leader is…. to lead.  He needed to adopt a considered position, justify it in public, and persuade the unconvinced to follow. That’s what leaders do.  I made this point many times to people - including at the last Labour Conference. In vain.

Antisemitism.
Corbyn isn’t an antisemite. But when the former Labour MP Luciana Berger suffered antisemitic attacks - instead of getting on the next train to Liverpool, wrapping his arms around her, and working out with her what to do, Corbyn confined himself to stating that he had fought racism all his life. True but wholly inadequate; as was his muddled reaction to BBC interviewer Andrew Neil’s treacherous invitation for him to apologize for antisemitism. Another example of ineptness and lack of leadership.

The Flood of new party members
The huge influx of new Labour members and "registered supporters" was partly a consequence of a policy to allow anyone to join for £3 no questions asked. Some of those new entrants appear to have been spoilers, fifth columnists - and for sure there were some antisemites among them. Labour wasn’t geared to dealing with significant numbers of racists in its ranks and took far too long to meet the challenge.  More ineptness.

Jeremy Corbyn - integrity is not the same as ability
 I believe Corbyn is an honorable man with noble instincts. However, he is far from being an intellectual giant - and I found myself doubting his ability to manage either the country or the party. He is not especially articulate - good at reading prepared questions in parliament but poor on his feet, sincere but not quick witted, and definitely not a profound or well-informed thinker. Before he became party leader he had spent over 30 years as a backbencher, presumably a good constituency MP but without holding any senior cabinet or shadow cabinet position. He has never run a department - or indeed run anything requiring serious managerial competence.

Labour's Manifesto
The manifesto, allied to a plethora of supplementary policies, brought to mind the illusory dexterity of a conjuror pulling a succession of rabbits out of a hat. Both over the airwaves and on the stump the promises sounded more and more improbable, certainly for a first-term government. To accomplish all of them would require perhaps three or four terms in office - something that would have been clear to anyone who has ever tried to implement a complex initiative. The tabloids and the BBC, among others, fastened onto the cost of carrying out Labour’s manifesto pledges. In practice, that would have been a relatively trivial challenge as anyone with knowledge of macoreconomic history would know. The idea that the country couldn’t afford them is nonsense. Far trickier would have been the human and material (non-financial) resources required and, above all, the time. In politics, once you have promised something, the clock starts ticking and time is not on your side. A manifesto crowded with promises is a recipe for disbelief.

Metropolitan Myopia
 From the moment of Corbyn’s ascension, Labour’s inner circle has consisted almost entirely of London MPs: Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Emily Thornberry, Keir Starmer, Barry Gardiner and Corbyn himself. I formed the impression - having spent the decade between 2004 and 2014 working outside the capital -  that this cosy entourage suffered from a kind of metropolitan myopia that limited their ability to see clearly beyond the M25. In a Newsnight interview with Barry Gardiner, the BBC's Emily Maitlis asked how often Corbyn had visited a hospital before or during the campaign; the answer was once. How often had he visited Wales? Also once.  Johnson surpassed the Labour leader on both counts - just as Trump had out-visited Clinton in the rust belt towns during the US presidential campaign.  Corbyn had three years to visit every part of the country from St Ives to John O’Groats. He seems not to have thought it necessary.
Le Royaume-Uni profond as the French might say (the UK’s beating heart)  has often seemed beyond the Labour hierarchy’s  experience, and present in their thoughts mainly as theory.

Authenticity and the Working Class
Of the role of Seamus Milne - Corbyn’s éminence grise - we know something but perhaps not enough. Born into privilege and educated at Winchester and Oxford, he seems to have supplied the left-wing intellectual grounding that Corbyn lacks; a grounding doubtless derived from a study of the literature (Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, etc.) and from familiarity with grand national and international politics - though poseessing, one suspects, only a theoretical, if any, knowedge of how “the other half lives”. As a scion of that “other half”, I am especially sensitive to questionable claims made on its behalf by people of more “elevated” background.  Corbyn is not entirely absolved in this respect, as he unwittingly demonstrated when he showed up at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day in 2018 wearing an anorak. I shuddered at the sight, not in misplaced harmony with the gutter press, but because had my working-class aunts and uncles been invited to attend, they would have worn their ceremonial best: shoes brightly polished, ties straight, dresses, shirts  and blouses spotless and crisply ironed.  No one would have a chance to look down on them. If Corbyn was showing himself to be a man of the people, he mistook the medium for the message. This example is less trivial than it might seem because it is redolent of middle-class posturing, of inauthenticity. He showed this again in claiming absurdly that he watched the Queen’s Christmas message in the morning, when everyone with a television in the living room knows that it is transmitted in the afternoon. When I was a youngster, we didn't have a television, but I remember the whole family gathering round the radio at 3pm on Christmas Day to listen to the monarch.
During the election campaign we heard how toxic Corbyn had become in some working-class constituencies. In part, I suggest, it was because he came over as a fake, an embarrassment who posed as one of them but had not taken the trouble to internalise their concerns.
Those of us of a certain age will recall that Labour leader Michael Foot was pilloried for a similar faux pas at the Cenotaph in 1981 when he reportedly showed up in a donkey jacket. The problem with this story is that he didn’t; it was fake news. He wore an elegant overcoat that differed from the conventional solemn garb in that neither the coat nor his tie were black. Unlike Corbyn, Foot was intellectually brilliant, if sometimes careless of his appearance - a bit like an absent-minded professor. What he shared with Corbyn was that he proved to be an electoral liability.

Ideological rigidity
Finally, there is something dark and unaccommodating at the heart of the current Labour hierarchy, an ideological purity and deafness to compromise that are in sharp contrast with the oft-repeated claims that the party functions as a democracy. I saw this in action at the Party Conference in Liverpool in 2018 when the leadership sidelined the majority position of the delegates on Brexit in favour of a fudge that has turned out to be a vacillating failure. In more brutal fashion, I became the butt of a very nasty insult from a Labour politician on election day by venturing to offer an opinion mildly at odds with his own. If the Party is to rediscover its roots and its purpose, it will have to do some serious introspection - beginning with defenestration of the leadership and its deeply misguided entourage. Following this, a little travelling is in order, and a large dose of humility.

Micro living...

This is a spoof I wrote in 2007/8). it appears in my book 'The Cauldron' published in 2009. I reprint it here with a wistfully ironical smile after reading this piece in The Guardian.


  Architectural Piles 
A double entendre meaning the practice of cramming as many dwellings as possible into the smallest square footage. The concept originated in Japan in the late twentieth century with the design of hotels in the form of multiple chests of drawers, with each drawer containing just sufficient room for one or two adults (luggage restrictions applied). After spending a night in one of these compartments and surviving a panic attack brought on by the sensation of having been caught fresh and packed for export, the great British architect Hilda Danegeld began work on the world’s first designed-from-the-ground-up, hot-wired, limited-headroom micro apartment.
    The idea came to her at thirty thousand feet during her return flight from Tokyo to London, when her eye fell on a newspaper article about a broom cupboard in the upscale district of Knightsbridge that sold for a tidy sum as a pied-à-terre. What was good for Knightsbridge, she realized, would be even better for less distinguished neighborhoods where the demand for accommodation came predominantly from single people and couples on modest incomes. Always content to squeeze the most from the least, building developers needed little persuasion to adopt the idea; while Government, anxious to increase what it optimistically referred to as “affordable housing”, joined in with the offer of subsidized mortgages to help key workers to buy their first home. Within a few years, micro-living became the norm for the less-well-off throughout the developed world.
    Hilda Danegeld was knighted in 2014 for architectural innovation in support of the homeless. By the time she died, however  in 2029, serious flaws in micro-living had become apparent. Suicides among UK micro apartment dwellers had risen to over twice the national average, and, on a per capita basis, were even higher in the United States, perhaps because living in a confined space seemed to be in flagrant conflict with the American dream of personal freedom.
    Observers noted that the architects who made fortunes out of designing micro apartments - and their work-place equivalent, micro-offices - neither lived nor worked in their own creations. For themselves, they preferred elegant country residences set in established gardens on the outskirts of picturesque villages, and offices in spacious high-tech towers, or converted city mansions designed by builders of a more gracious and stately age. In an interview at her Palladian mansion just outside Oxford some two years before her death, Dame Hilda  admitted that her experience in that Japanese hotel all those years before had made her determined never again to spend so much as a night in a confined space. “No modern architect worth her salt would live in a micro,” she confided. “Matter of fact, few would be seen dead in anything they’d designed.”

Democratic Deficit

A spoof from my book The Cauldron, published in 2009

The degree to which a political or social system ignores or suppresses the will of its constituents. Usually applied to nations or unions of nations, it serves equally for any collective established on principles of self-government.
In his famous study of democracies published in 2041[1], Dr Bambang Chamsyah of Indonesia’s Biak Foundation identified a close correlation between “democratic Deficit” and population size. According to Chamsyah’s findings, no country with a population of over 20 million is without serious democratic failings - and once a nation exceeds 70 million, the rate of democratic erosion tends to accelerate. Nor are politicians necessarily to blame for the deterioration. Administering democracy in heavily-populated countries presents problems of a different order to those facing governments of small nations. Despite the fact that the giants are invariably more heterogeneous, multi-ethnic and complex, they still have only one president or prime minister and one cabinet - in other words, the same number of senior political decision-makers. At around the 70 million mark, the complexities attendant upon size begin seriously to exceed the capacity of their leaders to understand still less to address them. Moreover, the value of each citizen’s vote decreases in proportion to the size of the electorate, so that in a country of 250 million voters, a ballot carries only one fiftieth of the weight of one where there are only 5 million voters. As populations grow, therefore, governments cease representing ever larger segments of their constituents.
The most common result is increasing political disenchantment and abstentionism, culminating in some cases in attempts to change the system by non-democratic means. Once this process has begun, governments find means to respond with repressive legislation - hence the accelerated democratic erosion that Chamsyah observed.
Drawing on the work of 20th Century anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Chamsyah recognized the possibility of a variety of sociopolitical responses to excessive population such as the one developed in India where the caste system demands passive acceptance of inequality and disenfranchisement of one social group altogether - the Harijans.[2] Lévi-Strauss summarized the Indian solution - which he called a failure of human organization - as follows:
 “...a society that becomes too numerous, survives only by creating servitude. When men start feeling squeezed geographically, socially and mentally, a simple solution may occur to them, namely to refuse to recognize the humanity of a portion of the species.”
 Nevertheless, Chamsyah claimed, by effectively setting India’s democratic deficit in concrete the caste system offered a clear demonstration of his central thesis. His conclusion? Forget world government, break up large countries into federations, disband the European Union, and make the United Nations a people’s forum from which political leaders are excluded. Dr Chamsyah was assassinated in 2048.
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 [1] Democracy and the End of Freedom, U. Bambang Chamsyah, Biak foundation, 2041.
[2]“Children of God”, Gandhi’s graceful term for the “Untouchables”. “Dalits” (the “oppressed”) is now the more favoured term.