Quantcast
Channel: New Statesman
Viewing all 11165 articles
Browse latest View live

A wood of one's own: Germaine Greer's mission to save the trees

0
0
In White Beech: the Rainforest Years, Germaine Greer is on a mission to save the ecology of South Australia.

White Beech: the Rainforest Years
Germaine Greer
Bloomsbury, 384pp, £25

In the late 1980s I blew my savings on a Chiltern beech wood. I didn’t want to “own” it (a preposterous claim to make on a half-natural place) but I fancied trying to rescue it from the abuses of the previous tenants and restore it as a parish amenity. I also, frankly, wanted somewhere to play among the trees, and the bonus of an inexhaustible outdoor library of writing prompts.

In essence, this is the kind of project Germaine Greer describes in White Beech, except that her estate is ten times bigger than mine and immeasurably richer biologically. It is a 60-hectare patch of subtropical Australian rainforest, a relic of the archaic vegetation that cloaked the southern supercontinent 100 million years ago. And its “white beech” isn’t a true beech at all but an unrelated Gmelina, an arboreal verbena and a foretaste of the prodigious life forms – water dragons, proteas, flying foxes, strangler figs – that teem through the pages. You rapidly understand why the Antipodes were given their upside-down name.

Greer has a mission. South Australia is now one of the most ecologically compromised regions on earth, assaulted by open-cast mining, clear-cut logging, bush clearance, salinated rivers and an immense cast of invasive organisms from every other continent. She wants to rescue a bit, create an ark for the native wildings of her birthland. More specifically, she wants to restore – though repatriate might be a better word – the ancient Gondwanan forest of which Queensland still has some fragments.

“Restoration” is a concept that sparks off intellectual bush fires among conservationists. Is it philosophically possible, let alone practicable? Are we talking “past naturalness” or “future naturalness”; authenticity or simulacra? Walter Benjamin could have written a useful essay entitled “Original Ecosystems in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Greer brushes off such introspective niceties, opting for the fast track: heavy weed control, with chemical poisons if necessary, and replanting the lost trees.

It’s a long journey even to find the right site. Much of the book is structured around Greer’s search for a place that chimed with her heart and then with unravelling its dark history. She began by dreaming of a patch of bush or desert, but ended – after a magical encounter with a dancing bowerbird – with a half-ruined plot of subtropical rainforest attached to a dairy farm. Cove Creek’s history proves to be an allegory of the Fall of Australia’s Eden and a sickening account of the frontier mindset. Some of the deforestation was done almost for the hell of it, using a technique known as the “drive”. A single big tree is felled at the top of a slope in such a way that it will indiscriminately take out every tree below it as it tumbles down. There are stories of koala massacres and the wilful introduction of aggressive pasture grasses from Africa. Just as Greer was about to finish the book, she discovered that the land surrounding Cove Creek had been regularly but illegally sprayed with one of the compounds in Agent Orange, the defoliant that the US used with horrifying effects in Vietnam.

But beyond the politics and history and narratives of redemption, White Beech is a hymn to botany as a discipline and a vehicle of heritage. After words, plants have always been Greer’s second love, a passion she learned from her academic sister, Jane. (The Socratic dialogue between teacher and tyro as they key out plants is delicious: “What’s the word for kind of tough?” “Coriaceous?” “Go on. Shape?” “Egg-shaped. I mean, ovate or subovate”.) But don’t expect any Romantic epiphanies about the extraordinary vegetation she discovers once the alien creepers have been peeled off. Even when she’s lyrical, her botany is rigorous.

Greer is happy with vernacular names – and the likes of bush lolly, bopple nut and Miss Hodgkinson’s lilly pilly give a vivid sense of the melting pot of cultures and ecologies that make up Australia – but she far prefers the precision of Latin and scientific description. This may earn her the displeasure of fellow feminist cultural historians such as Mary-Louise Pratt, who has written sternly of the replacement of indigenous taxonomies by “European-based patterns of global unity and order”. But Greer sees advances such as molecular dating and DNA “bar-coding” not as the victory of this or that human cultural system but of the plant itself. This leads to one of the most exacting and exciting sections in the book, the unravelling of the complex evolution of the macadamia species and the revelation that they spread out from an Australian focus by floating their nuts out across the Pacific.

Greer loves macadamias, “their stiff geometric habit, the ruby glow of the young foliage”. She used to love balloon milkweeds and float their inflated seed capsules in a dish of water “because with their curved stems they looked like green swans”. Now that she knows their provenance (invasive garden escape from Africa), “I yank them out by the hundreds.” It’s an odd change of sensibility, as if she blamed the plant itself for arriving in Queensland, and it typifies the one jarring note in the book – an over-certainty about what was and what should be. This isn’t always a useful approach to ancient ecosystems. My Chiltern wood ridiculed our nostrums for its improvement and went off on its own internal agenda, swamping our token plantings with benign natural regeneration and producing the most sublime explosion of native rarities precisely where we’d bulldozed a new track.

But we had nothing we regarded as “weeds” – and no one whose experience of invasive vegetation is limited to a few acres of Japanese knotweed can have any idea of what is happening to Australia. More than 3,000 non-native plant species ramp across the wilderness. European blackberries now occur across nine million hectares, South American lantanas across 4.5 million.

In the end, Greer’s aggressive approach is justified. The Cove Creek reserve has become a registered charity. Greer’s mite of hubris dissolves as she realises that creatures are doing it for themselves. The white beech saplings prosper, the epiphytic orchids and honeyeaters have returned, or re-emerged. Even an echidna – “A creature more ancient than a marsupial! A monotreme!” – materialises in front of her study window.

But for how long? Australia is being convulsed by climate change. Gondwanan vegetation may not be viable in the future and Queenslandians may yet give thanks for the pesky globetrotters that can weather such changes. In Britain, faced by an ash fungus that originated in the Far East, conservationists who once yanked out sycamores (earlier invaders from the Near East) as enthusiastically as Greer’s volunteers pull down lantanas, now hold back from removing the tree that may be the best replacement for ash.

Like it or not, Australia is now a laboratory for a gigantic experiment in biological multiculturalism, a schemata of future ecosystems that are liable to occur more and more on a thoroughly globalised planet. The vegetation genies are out of the bottle and there is no putting them back. So I hope that somewhere someone as dedicated and sharp-eyed as Greer is watching the invaders, seeing how they compete with each other, when they get their own pests and predators, and how – unfettered by human short-term visions and hallowed vegetational models – ruination heals itself. The answers might surprise us.

Richard Mabey’s books include “The Ash and the Beech: the Drama of Woodland Change” (Vintage, £9.99)


Moses said unto the Israelites: “This is the hand-made quail wrap the Lord hath given you”

0
0
The wrap is still more fundamental to western Judaeo-Christian and Islamic culture than we perhaps care to acknowledge.

I hope some of you, after you finish reading this column, will go straight to urbaneat.co.uk, where you can find out all about such “real food” as the “hand-crafted” red Thai chicken wrap I saw advertised in my local Costa clone yesterday. (Costa clones are coffee shops so lacking in self-esteem that they’re “proud to serve Costa coffee”.) This particular wrap was pictured apparently lying in the roadway of Benefits Street – or at any rate, somewhere gritty and urban – with a disproportionately small sign by it that had been amended to read “a tasty DIVERSION”. The wrap got me to wondering: is it only me who’s noticed the way that wraps have stealthily and relentlessly infiltrated our fast-food culture? I asked my wife when she was first aware of wraps and she said, “Oh, the early 1990s, I suppose – I mean, they came in with Pret a Manger, didn’t they?”

I found her answer admirable, twining together as it did two equally hazy recent timelines into one uchronic vision of happy Labour Party activists wolfing down wraps while they waved Union Jacks and watched Tony and Cherie skip up the steps of No 10. I don’t buy it: there may have been a few wraps around in the mid-Nineties but this was only a small and unleavened beachhead: the main invasion force came later.

It’s much the same sort of phenomenon as rap. There was some rap music and related phenomena (hip-hopping, crack-smoking, ho-bashing, bling-flashing) around as early as the beginning of the 1980s but it wasn’t until this millennium that rap was completely wefted through the wider cultural warp.

The more I thought about this, the more it seemed to me that the coincidence between wraps and rap was nothing of the sort; both are, after all, syncretic phenomena. In rap’s case, this is a fusion of African-American soul and funk with the turntable-created percussive breaks and other sound effects pioneered by Jamaican dub musicians such as Lee “Scratch” Perry. The wrap, on the other hand, comes from the Mexican burrito, by way of other flatbread snacks long present in the Turkish, Kurdish and Iranian cuisines, to name but three.

And while rap music is made by black working-class men and largely listened to by white middle-class boys, wraps are mostly made by economic migrants on zero-hours contracts and eaten by middle-class office workers on the hoof. You can see what I’m driving at here: it was only a matter of time before the red Thai chicken wrap came into being; even if no one had ever made one, such is its culturally overdetermined character that it would have had to self-assemble. That it should also be “halal approved” goes without saying – but should instead be shouted, like the muezzin’s call, from the rooftops of mud-brick houses.

The wrap is still more fundamental to western Judaeo-Christian and Islamic culture than we perhaps care to acknowledge: beside its great antiquity, the sandwich is a mere parvenu, the hamburger a mayfly that’s soon to ... die. In Exodus, the Lord pelts the Israelites first with quail (yum!) and then with flatbread (or “manna”, as they perversely name it). It’s not recorded whether any Bronze Age Heston Blumenthal had the smart idea of boning the quail and wrapping it in the manna together with a few herby sprigs but how else can we explain the sacerdotal role that manna henceforth had? No one’s going to place a few manky bits of bread in the Ark of the Covenant alongside the Mosaic tablets – but a quail wrap makes perfect sense.

This also explains why the latter-day wraps have had such an easy time converting our dyspeptically secular society: they slot right into the atavistic hunger that torments us when, like the Israelites, we find ourselves wandering for 40 minutes in some desert part of town devoid of fast-food outlets. We see, perhaps, the oasis of a petrol station and, stumbling in, heave a sigh of relief, for the Lord in his infinite wisdom has seen fit to stock the shelves with wraps – wraps such as the chicken Caesar, another of Urban Eat’s “real foods”; hand-crafted with xanthan gum, sorbic acid, diphosphates, acidity regulator, modified maize starch, sodium carbonates, malic acid, mono and diglycerides of fatty acids and – in case your appetite isn’t fully whetted – that ingredient beloved of the people of the book, locust bean gum. Thanks be to God.

On this week's New Statesman Podcast: Episode Thirty-Five

0
0
Captured Cameron, un-ironic adulation of Taylor Swift and the likelihood your house will be swallowed up by a hole in the ground.

On this week's podcast, NS political editor Rafael Behr joins George Eaton and Caroline Crampton to discuss his cover story on David Cameron's future as leader of the Conservatives, Arts Editor Kate Mossman tells Philip Maughan why Taylor Swift isn't just for teenagers, and science writer Ian Steadman evaluated the likelihood that your house will be swallowed by a giant sinkhole.

You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes here or with this RSS feed:https://audioboo.fm/channels/1814670.rss, or listen using the player below.

 

Want to give us feedback on our podcast, or have an idea for something we should cover? Visit newstatesman.com/podcast for more details and how to contact us.

How the poor have been hit hardest by inflation

0
0
New data shows that the cost of essentials such as food and energy has increased most rapidly over the last five years.

It’s hardly news that the incomes of poorer families have been squeezed until the pips squeak. Declining real wages, underemployment and cuts to social security have all combined to drive down the living standards of those at the bottom of the income distribution in recent years. But low-incomes families have had to contend with another downward pressure that until yesterday we may have intuited, but hadn’t yet seen fully evidenced.

Now we know for sure that poorer families have experienced higher levels of inflation than the better off and, indeed, the average, since the recession began. Analysis published yesterday by the Institute for Fiscal Studies ably demonstrates this by taking the price rises of various goods in recent years and then putting these together with information about which items are more or less readily consumed by different income groups.

Unsurprisingly, it shows that the cost of essentials such as food and energy have increased rapidly over the last five years (at about 30 per cent and just under 60 per cent respectively). The same is true for others key goods such as transport and education, while the costs of some items such as mortgage interest payments have drifted steadily downwards over the same period.

Since a lower income family’s consumption basket is full of the basics, these trends have hit the poorest hard. In fact, the IFS estimates that those on lower incomes have experienced average price rises that are 7.1 per cent higher than those of the top income quintile since 2007/8. As a result, poorer families’ living standards have been depressed more than accounts that use an average inflation figure might suggest. Likewise, the squeeze on those in higher income brackets is overstated by the standard methodology.

In fact, this exercise still doesn’t give us a full picture of how low-income families are being pinched hard by prices. As the IFS makes clear, its analysis does not capture the way that the same good can cost more or less for different types of consumers – the "poverty premium" effect well documented in a report last year from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Poorer families are doubly disadvantaged then: the items they consume in quantity have gone up in price quicker than other goods in recent years, and they often have to pay more than their better off peers for these basics too.

But what are the political implications of all this? For a start, this new analysis undermines the claim that poorer groups have had an easier ride than others during the recession because benefits – a largish part of their incomes – lost less of their real value than earnings. And looking forward, it shows the government is significantly underplaying the impact on poorer households of its 2012 decision to uprate most key benefits at a sub-inflation 1 per cent for three years.

All in all, if you are poor, the cost of living conversation just acquired a new and sharper edge.  

Patriot games: the innovation and drama of Soviet sports

0
0
As the Sochi Olympics begin, a new exhibition examines the first collision of art, sport and politics in Russia.


Gustav Klutsis

One of the satisfactions of the utopia promised by the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution was a 37-hour working week. Building the new Soviet Union was going to be hard work, so it should not entail tiring its citizens to the point of exhaustion: the Stakhanovites were then still in short trousers. As a result of this directive, the Soviet people had – in theory, at least – time on their hands, and in the state’s view some of that leisure should most profitably be used in sport.

Sport would build up healthy bodies in a population ravaged by civil war, malnutrition, typhoid and poor living conditions and in doing so foster a healthy society, since playing together was another aspect of living together. Before the revolution, sport in Russia had been largely aristocratic and the Soviets found themselves with little sporting culture and no real sporting infrastructure. So they developed the Spartakiad workers’ games, first held in 1928, which provided the opportunity for mass displays of fizkultura– an amalgam of parades, artistic gymnastics, sport, music and dance.


Soviet-era sports imagery by Rodchenko

These were non-competitive events: how could there be individual champions when everyone was equal? There were even debates in the 1920s as to whether football should be banned; in the end, it proved too popular. The Spartakiads also took the place of meaningful international sport, because from the mid-1920s a western boycott barred the Soviet Union from global competitions. Russia did not take part in the Olympics until 1952.

To spread the message that mens sana in corpore sano was the new Soviet ethos, artists were drafted in. It was a good match. If sport represented modernity, then remaking the modern world was the driving force behind art in the first decades of the century, the age of the “ism”: it underlay cubism and futurism, as well as the Russian movements constructivism and suprematism. Artists such as Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky were enthusiastic propagators of the image of the Soviet “new man” (and “new woman”, since, unlike in the west, women were given an equal place in Russian sport).


Stepanova's design for male sports clothing

To celebrate the opening of the Sochi Olympics, the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, is staging “The Russian Avant-Garde and Sport”, an exhibition that shows just how close beneath the skin of sport politics has always been in Russia. It is a largely photographic show, because most Soviet artists regarded the camera as a truer implement of the machine age than paint and canvas. This was particularly true of Rodchenko, whose monochrome triptych in 1921 – squares of red, blue and yellow – represented, he thought, the end-point of painting: “It’s all over,” he said.

Having a camera in his hand did not, however, change his aesthetic. If, as a painter, his art involved the careful placing of geometrical shapes in space, then he looked for the same things through the viewfinder. Sport, with its bodily distortions and rapid spatial changes, provided the perfect subjects. He took his pictures from unusual angles and made a diver in mid-air, an athlete spinning off the high bar or a runner crossing the track’s grid of lanes into unfamiliar shapes in a void rather than recognisable bodies in motion. Rodchenko believed that art should be a part of everyday life but that didn’t mean he wanted it necessarily to resemble everyday life. His innovations have become sporting photography’s commonplaces.

Meanwhile, Rodchenko’s wife, Varvara Stepanova, designed a series of striking sports outfits for men and women – shirts and shorts of vivid colour blocks and parallel lines that would have turned the athletes into a migraine blur. Their practicality was less of a concern to her than the way the formal experiments of high art could also be applied to textile design. Modernism was also central to the development of photomontage, which deconstructed reality and then reassembled it. As well as Rodchenko, Gustav Klutsis and El Lissitzky came to specialise in its cubist-inspired fracturing. Klutsis’s designs for the magazine of the Red Sport International in particular wove photographs of shooters or ballplayers into effortlessly stylish compositions whose dynamic architectural strength re-emerged in the style magazines of the 1980s but without the inconvenient political undertow.


Soviet-era sports imagery by Lothar Rübelt

But the avant-gardists had only a short period shaping the brave new world. By the late 1920s, Stalin had declared that socialist realism, with its bombastic idealisation of the worker, was a more suitable manner for projecting communism triumphant. The change was dangerous: Klutsis was shot in 1938; others disappeared into labour camps. Rodchenko kept the faith and in 1933, although he was out of favour, he took a series of propaganda photographs extolling the digging of the White Sea Canal: 200,000 political prisoners died in its construction.

There is irony in how, with this exhibition, the Olympics grandees in their plush, newly opened museum on the shores of Lake Geneva (the last Olympic cycle garnered some $8bn in revenues so museum fund-raising is not a problem) are having a tiny dig at Vladimir Putin about the dangers of mixing sport, art and ideology. One wonders if the irony is intentional. Probably not.

The exhibition runs until 11 May

Notes on a series of scandals: is British democracy in crisis?

0
0
Many of us feel we are living through a period of profound crisis. But perhaps democracy is more secure than at any time since the 1970s.

British democracy is going through its worst crisis of confidence in decades. The underlying cause is economic. The recovery since the crash of 2008 has been the slowest in modern times. For Labour, the fear is that the party will continue to carry the can for allowing the mess to happen in the first place; for the coalition partners, it is that they will get blamed for the woefully unequal and piecemeal recovery. In this climate of uncertainty and distress, fringe parties and maverick voices have a golden opportunity. It’s not only Nigel Farage who ends up being taken seriously – even Russell Brand gets his moment in the political sun.

However, the primary symptoms of the malaise of British democracy are institutional. Over the past five years the standing of many of the central institutions of British public life has been undermined by scandal. The banks have forfeited public trust as a result of the corruption and incompetence that was exposed during and after the fin­ancial crisis. The reputation of parliament was gravely damaged by the expenses scandal that came to light in 2009 and has been rumbling on through the courts and the media ever since. The press saw what remained of its reputation for probity shredded by the phone-hacking scandal and subsequent Leveson inquiry.

The police have been heavily implicated in the worst examples of press behaviour. This is not only in relation to phone-hacking but dates back to the Hillsborough disaster nearly 25 years ago – in which the evidence of widespread misconduct by the South Yorkshire force drew a fulsome apology from the Prime Minister in 2012. Now the London Met is grappling with the fallout from “Plebgate”, a saga that is all the more damaging for being so absurd (the saying “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” was never more true than in this case). The BBC is still reeling from the scandal surrounding the activities of Jimmy Savile and the exposure of ludicrously generous payoffs to executives caught up in it. This summer we discovered that the British secret services have been routinely eavesdropping on the everyday activities of ordinary British citizens, aiding and abetting the far more extensive surveillance operations being undertaken by the Americans.

The armed forces have emerged relatively unscathed from this period of purgatory for public institutions, although even they have been tarnished by revelations about past brutalities in Northern Ireland and Iraq. Perhaps it is only the monarchy whose reputation has risen in recent years, which says something about the state of British democracy. Elected politicians tiptoe around these scandals, looking for some way to ally themselves with public anger. At the same time, they are deeply wary of fuelling a backlash of disgust against the entire political establishment that would sweep them up as well.

What these institutional failings have in common is that they arose from a growing sense of impunity among small networks of elites. As British society has become more unequal it has created pockets of privilege whose inhabitants are tempted to think that the normal rules don’t apply to them. In any democracy, people with power will abuse it. All public institutions follow the path of least resistance over time. The usual democratic remedy is for other public institutions to rein them in: it is the job of the press and the police to keep an eye on the politicians, just as it is the job of the politicians to keep an eye on the press and police. In Britain, it looks like the opposite was happening. A managerial political class, with extensive links to other elites in the media and business, colluded in the sort of lax scrutiny that served their joint interests. Much of this behaviour coincided with a period of unparalleled political stability and economic prosperity: the long boom that lasted from the early 1990s until 2007. But when boom turned to bust, the cosy world of the elites became a joint liability.

*

The public’s tolerance for managerial politics depends on the ability of the managers to keep delivering. Once that stops, they are exposed. You have to go back to the mid-1970s to find a comparable period of economic failure allied with institutional mistrust. Then, this toxic combination resulted in a similar anxiety among the political class about how they were going to find a way out. The Nixon shock of 1971 – which saw the unravelling of the Bretton Woods system of exchange controls – coupled with the oil shock of 1973 – which saw the price of crude oil quadruple in a matter of months following the Opec embargo – produced inflation, recession and rising unemployment across the western world. In Britain, industrial unrest broke first the will of the Heath government to resist inflationary pay rises and then its ability to sustain itself in office at all. The early 1970s brought an explosion of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, followed by a heavy-handed and brutal clampdown by the British army. By 1974 the violence had spread to the mainland. Parts of Britain appeared practically ungovernable. There were dark mutterings about the incapacity of the democratic British state to meet the challenges that it faced.

On 3 March 1974, the leading New York Times journalist James Reston published a widely syndicated column that he headlined “The crisis of democracy”. His dateline was London. Reston had arrived to cover the outcome of the general election that had been called a month earlier in order to discover, as Prime Minister Edward Heath fatefully framed it, “who governs Britain”. The inconclusive result – a hung parliament, with Heath failing to get the backing he had asked for but Labour also short of a majority – prompted Reston to despair of western democracy more generally.

Heath and his rival Harold Wilson were typical of an age of “political technicians” who had forfeited the confidence of their electorates by their inability to muster a grand vision of politics. In place of idealism, they offered piecemeal fixes. The problem, however, was that although they were just technicians, they were also deeply partisan. “Mr Heath and Mr Wilson stick with the paradox that the country is in grave danger, but not so grave as to require their combining to save it,” Reston observed. “So they will muddle along separately, begging for votes from the minor parties . . .”

This, he felt, spelled disaster in the long run. “The political ‘decline of the west’,” he concluded, “is no longer a subject for theoretical debate but an ominous reality . . .”

Many of these complaints are echoed today. Politics is petty and visionless. The deep causes of public disquiet are not being addressed, let alone remedied. The inconclusive muddle of British politics, exacerbated by a plague-on-all-your-houses result at the last general election in 2010, with perhaps worse to come next time, is happening against the backdrop of a global shift in power from west to east. The public has come to believe the politicians are in it only for themselves.

Yet it is important to recognise the many significant differences between the crisis of democracy of the 1970s and the crisis now. The first is that there existed a surprisingly widespread belief during the mid-1970s that, were the muddle to continue, it might need to be ended by force, with a military takeover. A coup was not outside the realms of political possibility (and we now know that rogue forces within the secret services made cack-handed attempts to organise one, with either the Duke of Edinburgh or Lord Mountbatten as the preferred strongman to replace Wilson).

The particular focus of these fears was rising inflation. It was a common assumption at the time that no democracy could survive a sustained bout of inflation above 30 per cent – and in Britain the rate hit 25 per cent in 1975. It was commonplace to invoke the baleful example of Latin America, where the global economic crisis of the mid-1970s led to the collapse of a number of democratic regimes. The economist Milton Friedman suggested in 1974 that the failure to control inflation had been responsible both for Heath’s replacement by Wilson in Britain and for Allende’s replacement by Pinochet in Chile. It cost one man his job; the other his life. The barely veiled sense of threat was apparent.

Today the talk of democracy-destroying inflation has more or less disappeared. Yes, we face a mix of rising prices and stagnant or falling wages – the “cost-of-living crisis”, as the Labour Party likes to call it – that has some echoes of 1970s stagflation. But the scale is very different. Ours is a slow-burning, incremental squeeze on living standards, not the threat of an inflationary rip tide sweeping away savings and security. In large part because of the fears generated in the 1970s, we now have economic technicians in charge of an independent central bank whose job is to ensure that inflation remains more or less under control. Likewise, the idea that the current crisis might result in a military coup seems laughably remote. We worry – or at least some of us do – that the military-security complex is squeezing what is left of our privacy by spying on our communications. We don’t, however, worry that the security services are secretly plotting to instal a member of the royal family as an unelected head of the government.

Connected to this is a more profound difference: in the 1970s there were in the air plenty of seemingly viable alternatives to western liberal democracy, and not just on the militarist right. On the left also the idea of revolutionary change was much more than simply a slogan: for its champions, it was a realistic possibility. The 1970s were a deeply ideological decade, during which alternatives to the prevailing democratic system were frequently aired and often taken seriously. Ours, by contrast, is a post-ideological age. When Russell Brand calls for the revolution he proclaims inevitable, it is not clear what kind of politics he has in mind. His only concrete notion is that greater political disengagement will precipitate the change. Political disengagement does not produce revolution. It just provides more space for the political technicians to operate.

 


Russell Brand at the New Statesman offices. His call for a “revolution of consciousness” is not backed by any clear sense of a political programme

 

Of course, there are still some viable alternatives to western liberal democracy. Chinese state capitalism is making headway in many parts of the world, including Africa. Democratic populism, of the kind practised by Hugo Chávez, has plenty of adherents in Latin America. But these alternatives are rarely, if ever, treated as even hypothetically viable futures for a country such as Britain. I chaired an event recently in Cambridge at which Seumas Milne of the Guardian, perhaps the most conventionally left-wing journalist currently writing for a mainstream publication (during the 1970s mainstream writers who shared Milne’s views were legion), described the current failings of liberal democracy: botched wars, rapacious banks and energy companies, deep-seated inequality, under-resourced public services. His largely middle-class audience was with him every step of the way. But when someone asked what the alternative was, and he said we should run our economy more like the Chinese run theirs, there was an uncomfortable silence. Suddenly he was on his own. Discontented Britons who as a corollary embrace the idea of Chinese-style state capitalism are vanishingly rare.

Britain today is a very different country from what it was in the 1970s. It is more comfortable and much more tolerant of different personal lifestyles, even as it is less tolerant of extreme political views. Above all, it is vastly more prosperous. It is true that the effects of the present economic crisis are far-reaching and serious: many people who considered themselves comfortably off have found that it is increasingly hard to sustain their standard of living. The squeeze on living costs is being felt by a large proportion of the population. At the same time, the disproportionate rewards being enjoyed by those at the very top are both more visible and more pronounced than ever. This is a much more unequal society than it was 40 years ago. Nonetheless, all this is happening from what is by any historic standards a very high base of material security (excepting the pockets of true deprivation that prosperous societies such as ours still allow to grow up in their midst).

There is extensive historical evidence that once they pass beyond a certain level of material prosperity democratic societies are very unlikely to experiment with alternative forms of government. The costs of the disruption are not worth any possible reward. The cut-off point is usually put at around $7,000 per capita GDP. During the dark days of the 1970s, even as it contracted, the British economy remained well above that level – but not so far as to be out of sight (per capita GDP was roughly $15,000 at the start of the 1970s). By 2008, per capita GDP in Britain was close to $40,000 and although it has fallen since, it has not fallen far (and not below $37,000). If we couldn’t face the economic and social disruption of drastic political change in the 1970s, we are hardly likely to be keener on it now.

By contrast, there is almost no historical evidence to tell us what happens when an exceptionally prosperous democratic society like ours suffers from widespread institutional failure and enters a period of decline. The level of prosperity that Britain has achieved is far too recent a phenomenon for there to be useful historical examples to draw on. Perhaps the only real point of comparison is with contemporary Japan. Since the early 1990s the Japanese economy has largely stagnated and its political institutions have struggled to adjust to the challenges they have faced. Japan entered a period of crisis two decades ago in which it seemed to get permanently stuck.

At the start of the “lost decades” in Japan there were frequent warnings of impending disaster – could a democracy survive if it stopped delivering significant economic growth? It turns out that Japanese democracy could survive. Things in Japan never got so bad as to shake the system out of its torpor, but that means they also never got bad enough to bring the system to its knees. At no point has there been the prospect of a military coup. The political technicians simply muddled through as best they could, patching things together and hoping for better days. Over the past year there have been signs that better days are finally returning for the economy, although, as many Japanese are aware, they have been here before. One feature of drawn-out crises in which nothing gets sufficiently broken for anything to get finally fixed is that they are full of false dawns. In Britain we might right now be experiencing the first of many.

Britain is not Japan. British civil institutions are both more flexible and less socially cohesive than their Japanese equivalents. We are able to adapt to our failings more quickly – and we may need to, because we do not have the protection of extensive family and corporate support systems to paper over the cracks. But in one respect, Britain does resemble Japan. Japanese public life, though relatively rigid in insti­tutional terms, has long been rife with scandal. It is the form in which political outrage gets expressed: business, media and political figures are all often brought down by the exposure of their personal failings. Similarly, one of the distinctive features of the present crisis of British democracy is the extent to which it has been dominated by scandal. It has been the exposure of individual misdeeds that has generated most of the outrage. Fred the Shred, Jimmy Savile, Rebekah Brooks, Sir Peter Viggers of duck-house infamy: these are the targets of public dismay and disgust. One reason why the present scandal over GCHQ surveillance is yet to have a similar impact is that in the faceless world of high-level espionage it is by definition much harder to find an individual to blame. Even the phone-hacking scandal only really took off when the public was able to put a face to the injustice: Milly Dowler and her family.

Scandals are not the same as full-blown political crises, although it is often tempting to confuse the two. Crises can sometimes transform politics. Scandals rarely do. One reason why we often inflate the significance of democratic scandals is that all of them exist in the shadow of the greatest scandal of them all, which did result in a full-blown crisis and widespread political change. The Dreyfus affair, which split fin de siècle French society and reconfigured the power of the French state, is the scandal against which all others are measured. Every now and then the exposure of misdeeds in high places does indeed overturn the established order. But Dreyfus is the exception, not the rule. Most democratic scandals have very limited effects. They create a huge amount of fuss for a short period of time. Usually they offer moments of catharsis: a resignation, a trial, a conviction. What they do not produce is structural change.

Here a comparison with the 1970s is instructive. It was not an age of great political scandals in Britain, though we had our usual share of embarrassments and fall guys, from Lord Lambton to Jeremy Thorpe. The true sense of crisis that gripped the western democracies coincided with the most significant democratic scandal since Dreyfus: Watergate. The ripple effects from Watergate contributed to a growing feeling in the middle of the decade that western democracy was rudderless, its most important player turned in on itself in a never-ending bout of recrimination and political bloodletting. Europe’s democratic politicians often complained during the 1970s about the excessive power of the United States. But they also complained when that power went missing. Recent criticisms of the US, fuelled by the hair-raising spectacle of a government shutdown taking the country to the brink of a catastrophic default, follow a similar pattern. We don’t like American democracy to overshadow ours, but nor do we like it when America’s politicians neglect the rest of the world to pursue their endless infighting. We don’t want America’s politicians telling us what to do, but nor do we want them turning their backs on us.

As it was unfolding, Watergate looked like it might be a watershed, and Nixon’s resignation was widely regarded as the moment for American democracy to renew itself. Yet in retrospect its significance seems very different. Like most scandals, Watergate constituted a diversion rather than a decisive break with the past. American democracy absorbed the shock and moved on. The properly significant change occurred later in the decade, during the Carter administration, when a structural shift took place from the remnants of the New Deal economy to the finance capitalism that ultimately let rip in the Reagan years. At the end of the 1970s, Wall Street took over from main street as the dominant force in US political life, a position it has occupied ever since. Watergate provided some of the cover for this to happen. It generated first outrage and then a widespread feeling of disillusionment, once it became clear how little of substance had changed. Distraction followed by disillusionment are often the circumstances in which democratic politicians feel emboldened to try something new.

*

In 1975 another widely read publication appeared under the title The Crisis of Democracy. This was the report of the Trilateral Commission, which had been asked to look into the possibility that western democracy was at the end of the road. One of its co-authors, the American political scientist Samuel Huntington (later better known as the author of The Clash of Civilisations), shared the general feeling that western democracy was in deep trouble, weighed down by inflationary pressures, international discord and intellectual grandstanding. However, he pointed to a way out of the mess. It would not require the voters to ramp up their demands on the politicians: Huntington thought that this was what had caused the trouble in the first place. Instead, rescue would come when the public became so tired of the disappointments of democratic politics that they more or less lost interest in it altogether. At that point, the politicians might finally have the room to attempt reform. Huntington’s prognosis, cynical and disillusioned as it was, turned out to be prescient. What provides the space for change is not public anger; it is growing public indifference.

The current spate of British scandals looks different because there are so many of them: it is not just one institution but the whole edifice of public life that appears to be fraying. Scandal on this scale might provide the impetus for wholesale reform – yet I rather doubt it. More likely is that it multiplies the distraction. If anything, we are suffering from scandal overload: as each institutional exposure is followed by another, as yet more scapegoats are found and as politicians reposition themselves to withstand a fresh bout of public anger, it is harder than ever to find a focus for deep-rooted change.

Scandals in democracies allow the public to vent anger without undermining the basis of democracy – we fixate on the misdeeds of a few people at the top, which helps to preserve the underlying structures intact. This represents one of the basic differences between democracy and the alternatives. Under autocratic regimes, an outburst of public rage can be fatal because the system lacks the means to accommodate it. That is why autocrats are so scared of scandals (witness the efforts by the Chinese state to limit the effects of the Bo Xilai affair). The distraction of Watergate helped American democracy to survive the 1970s: it allowed citizens to let off steam without resulting in an implosion of the entire system of government. It was the regimes that couldn’t accommodate popular anger, including the communist states of eastern Europe, that eventually fell apart.

A multiplication of scandals gives the appearance of the build-up of a huge head of steam for change. But in fact it means the steam gets let off in lots of different places at once, which makes it even harder to channel public anger in any one direction in particular. The response is far more likely to be fragmentary than coherent: endless firefighting rather than a concerted effort to build a better system of government. At the same time, we are still a long way from the state of public indifference that might give the politicians room to undertake bolder experiments. The risk is that a fragmentation of public attention coincides with a deepening sense of resentment at the ineffectual attempts by politicians to make a tangible difference. For now even the moments of catharsis are proving elusive.

The digital revolution exacerbates this risk. The multiplication of scandals is in part the result of the emergence of information that has long been suppressed. In the absence of secrets, public anger never completely goes away: there is always something new to rail against. Democracy in Britain is more secure than it was in the 1970s because of the absence of ideological alternatives and because of the material comfort in its foundations. But it faces a challenge that did not exist four decades ago. Constant scrutiny of a surfeit of information fragments more than just attention spans. At the end of the 1970s the two main parties together commanded the votes of over 80 per cent of voters on a turnout of over three-quarters of the electorate. Now Labour and the Tories share the support of barely two-thirds of those who vote on turnouts of less than two-thirds of the total electorate – and both figures are likely to keep falling.

The risk for British democracy is not of permanent crisis. It is of a permanent state of scandal obscuring the underlying crisis of elitist managerial politics and thereby making it harder to fix. It is increasingly difficult to envisage the circumstances in which politicians get the space to try something new.

The advantage of democratic systems of government is that they adjust when they have to, trying something new until they find something that sticks. They are broadly experimental and adaptable. British democracy is much more secure than it was in the 1970s, yet it is also much more fragmented. Together, these two factors leave its adaptability in question. With these factors in play, it may be that the crisis has to get a lot worse before the conditions arise in which significant change is possible. But the crisis is real and bad enough already, and wishing for worse in order to galvanise the prospects for institutional change is playing with fire. Although the leaders of both main political parties like to compare themselves with Margaret Thatcher in her role as steely-willed game-changer, no one wants to go back to the high-stakes politics of the 1970s. British democracy recovered from the travails of that decade. The present state of British democracy is a reflection of how far removed we are now from those looming fears of imminent collapse. This time the danger is different. We face the risk of getting stuck where we are.

David Runciman is a professor of politics and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His latest book, “The Confidence Trap: a History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present”, is published by Princeton University Press (£19.95)

This is an edited version of an essay that appears in the winter edition of the IPPR journal Juncture

Even North Korea doesn't like Windows any more, as its official OS now rips off Apple

0
0
Even the communists know that the old way of doing things isn't cutting it any more.

North Korea has a state operating system for its computers, which makes sense in a country that lacks any kind of freedom of expression, and where the media is entirely a mouthpiece for the regime. It's called Red Star, and it's a fork of the popular Red Hat Linux distribution. It was developed in 2002 as a home-grown replacement for Windows, but it kept the look and feel of Microsoft's OS. Up until last week, the most recent version, 2.0, was known to mimic Windows 7.

Will Scott, a computer scientist from the University of Washington, went to teach computer science at Pyongyang's Kim-Il Sung University in 2013 (and did a really fascinating reddit AMA afterwards). While there, he took screenshots of version 3.0 of Red Star OS, which has been comprehensively re-skinned to look like Apple's OS X:

(There are loads more pictures on the ever-excellent North Korea Tech blog, so go visit them and give them some traffic.)

Windows, once nearly ubiquitous in every home and office, has fallen pretty hard since the double-hit of smartphones and tablets. In 2008, 90 percent of all computers ran Windows; in 2013, it was 32 percent. Perhaps a sign that incoming Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is doing a good job will be when pirates - including the North Korean regime - start switching back from Apple-alike software.

This kind of behaviour is pretty typical of what used to happen in the USSR, where Soviet engineers reverse-engineered western pocket radios and computers with mixed results. North Korea has had its own range of Android tablets for a couple of years, with an illegal, unapproved Korean-language adaptation of Angry Birds pre-loaded - reviews of the Samjiyon, the latest model, by western journalists have been surprisingly positive.

Microsoft can take some solace in the news that its Kinect cameras are proving perfect for monitoring the DMZ between North and South Koreas, preventing soldiers creeping across to the south. An engineer, Ko Jae-kwan, has rejigged the cameras as motion-detectors, reports the Wall Street Journal. The border between the two nations is the most heavily-militarised in the world.

Morning Call: pick of the papers

0
0
The ten must-read comment pieces from this morning's papers.

1. Labour must not sign up to George Osborne's destructive cuts (Guardian)

The chancellor himself won't dare deliver his own planned cuts, writes Polly Toynbee. Ed Miliband would be mad to say he will match them.

2. The Lib Dems are revolting, so why not just let them go? (Daily Telegraph)

Nick Clegg’s new hostility to the Tories suggests that the coalition has come to its natural conclusion, says Fraser Nelson. 

3. The English make the case for Britain’s break-up (Financial Times)

Where is the admission that England has something to lose from Scotland’s departure, asks Philip Stephens. 

4. Philip Seymour Hoffman is another victim of extremely stupid drug laws (Guardian)

In Hoffman's domestic or sex life there is no undiscovered riddle – the man was a drug addict and, thanks to our drug laws, his death inevitable, says Russell Brand. 

5. Political agreement is fine. Unless it’s wrong (Times)

Protecting pensions and health, increasing personal tax allowances . . . these are all bad ideas, says Paul Johnson. 

6. Cameron could do more to give women a helping hand (Daily Telegraph)

The Prime Minister doesn’t make it easy on himself by having so few female cabinet ministers, writes Isabel Hardman.

7. The state should come with a clear price tag (Financial Times)

After the chancellor has delivered the Budget we never know whether we are richer or poorer, writes Samuel Brittan.

8. Look to your jobs – the robots are coming (Daily Telegraph)

A second machine age is dawning, and it’s not only Bob Crow’s striking Tube workers who will be made redundant by the rise of the intelligent machines, writes Jeremy Warner. 

9. Six months on, the vote against Syrian intervention still casts a shadow (Guardian)

When British MPs voted against a stronger response to the Assad regime, they stymied the ability of future governments to act in our best interests, writes Alastair Burt.

10. England shouldn’t have let Pietersen pick them (Times)

Sporting rules on national qualification are a mess, writes Philip Collins. Players should have to choose one country at 18 and stick to it.


If Cameron really wants Scotland to stay in the UK, he should ease on austerity

0
0
One of the few factors that could tilt the odds in Alex Salmond's favour is the prospect of permanent cuts under a Conservative-led government.

Since the Tories have been almost entirely expelled from Scotland (with just one surviving MP), there will be some who argue that the best thing David Cameron can do during the independence debate is to remain as quiet as possible. But as the prime minister of the United Kingdom and the leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party (someone, in other words, with a bigger stake than most in the Union enduring), it would be odd if he did not share his thoughts on the subject from time to time. 

Today, with seven months to go until the vote, he will make his most notable intervention yet, delivering a speech on the case for the UK at the symbolic location of the Olympic Park. But rather than lecturing the Scots on the dangers of independence, Cameron has smartly chosen to address his speech "to the people of England, Wales and Northern Ireland". While emphasising again that the decision is one for Scots alone (having consistently rejected calls for a UK-wide referendum), he will rightly note: "[T]hough only four million people can vote in this referendum, all 63 million of us are profoundly affected.

"There are 63 million of us who could wake up on September 19th in a different country, with a different future ahead of it...We would be deeply diminished without Scotland. This matters to all our futures. And everyone in the UK can have a voice in this debate."

He will add: "So to everyone in England, Wales and Northern Ireland – everyone, like me, who cares about the United Kingdom – I want to say this: you don't have a vote, but you do have a voice. Those voting are our friends, neighbours and family.

"You do have an influence. Let the message ring out, from Manchester to Motherwell, from Pembrokeshire to Perth, from Belfast to Bute, from us to the people of Scotland – let the message be this: We want you to stay."

Fortunately for Cameron, unlike in the past, when polls have suggested that the rest of the UK would be happy to see the back of the Scots, the most recent survey shows that the majority of the public are with him. A YouGov poll earlier this week showed that 54 per cent of English and Welsh voters oppose Scottish independence with just 24 per cent in favour. And, of course, while the polls have narrowed in the last month, the Scots themselves continue to reject secession by a comfortable margin. A YouGov survey published today puts support for independence at 34 per cent with 52 per cent opposed. Even a campaigner as formidable as Alex Salmond will struggle to overturn that lead. 

But the uncomfortable truth for Cameron is that one of the few factors that could tilt the odds in Salmond's favour is the prospect of another Conservative-led government after 2015. A Survation poll last week found that support for independence increases by three points (from 32 to 35 per cent) and that opposition falls by three (from 52 to 49 per cent) when Scots are asked how will they vote if they think the Tories will win the next election. Asked how they would vote if they thought the Tories would remain in power for up to 15 years, the gap narrows to just nine points (47-38). 

While Cameron can hardly be expected to give up on winning the next election, he should consider what he can do to make a Tory future more palatable to the Scots. More than anything, he should avoid repeating his recent promise of permanent austerity, a line that was a political gift to the nationalists. In that speech, at the Lord Mayor's banquet, he declared: "We are sticking to the task. But that doesn't just mean making difficult decisions on public spending. It also means something more profound. It means building a leaner, more efficient state. We need to do more with less. Not just now, but permanently."

After introducing the bedroom tax while simultaneously reducing the top rate of tax, it may be too late for Cameron to return to the one nation rhetoric of his first year as Prime Minister when he said: "I didn't come into politics to make cuts. Neither did Nick Clegg. But in the end politics is about national interest, not personal political agendas. We're tackling the deficit because we have to – not out of some ideological zeal. This is a government led by people with a practical desire to sort out this country's problems, not by ideology."

But if he can yet offer a vision beyond austerity, complete with detoxifying measures such as raising the minimum wage, he will help to ensure that there is no way back for Salmond. 

P.S.Alex Salmond will be delivering the New Statesman lecture on "Scotland’s Future in Scotland’s Hands" on 4 March at 6:30pm in London. Tickets can be purchased here

In the Frame: Punching down

0
0
Tom Humberstone’s weekly observational comic for the NS.

Click to zoom in to a larger image.

Digital destitution: what happens when you lose real-world money inside a game?

0
0
Games like EVE can result in players suffering big financial losses in real-world money. As in-game purchases become more common the problems of balancing what can be bought against what can be worked for will only become more complicated.

Historically games have often been played for very high stakes. From the gladiators of ancient Rome and their primitive version of snooker using tridents and eyeballs, to the early forays into dressage by medieval knights armed with lances charging into each other, competition has often meant risks. One benefit of a video game has always been that your avatar can take the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune on your behalf. You want a violent, brutal death match? No worries, your character in the game can get shot down like a dog and be back on their feet seconds later. The typical failure state in a game, your avatar getting killed, is by default not a problem, especially in multiplayer games. But is there a case that this isn’t the best way to go?

EVE Online is a game that has always punished failure harshly, but never more than now as ships and combat fleets get larger and more expensive. Big battles have often made the news and the recent battle of B-R5RB took this to a higher level. Thousands of dollars of virtual spaceshipsgone up invirtual smoke.

The monetary conversions vary by a lot, the product of a sort of mathematical game of Chinese whispers, with each stage increasing the margin of error. Somebody with a degree of knowledge will estimate the average value of the ships lost in the in game money (ISK), this figure is extrapolated across the total known losses, and then converted to real money based on the value of a thing called a PLEX, which is an item bought with real world money, currently costing £16.99, which can be redeemed for a month of game time or sold in the game. While the value of a PLEX is fixed in real world money, it varies in game. At the end of all the mathematical acrobatics you get a sum in real world currency which approximates the value of the losses albeit with a margin of error potentially so large you might be better off simply writing the loss off as “big”, “really big” or “oh the humanity” and calling it a day.

In this case, what made the battle interesting was not the number of players rather it was the class of ship many of them were fighting in; titans. Compared to your standard huge EVE battle this would be like seeing a tyrannosaur and a triceratops squaring off in the car park of the Dog And Duck. This was the battle that EVE had been waiting for ever since the titan class of ship was introduced.

My own time in EVE is over and I don’t plan to go back, but even I kept an eye on a Twitch stream, a Twitter hashtag and bunch of forum and blog comment threads over the twenty hours or so that the fight went on, even though it ceased to be an actual contest relatively early. Whether you play or not the idea that players are using ships that cost as much as a second hand car makes such confrontations intriguing. Seeing the reactions from both sides when it becomes clear who will eventually win is also interesting, who will lose their cool, how will it be spun, what will the fallout be? For a glorious moment, in the right kind of light, EVE starts to look like this wonderful hybrid of Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones and Lord of the Flies.

Loss has always been at the heart of EVE and in many ways it is through this notion of loss that EVE has managed to stay newsworthy despite never really having a broad appeal. With the best will in the world EVE is a game in something of a funk. Subscription numbers are up, but the number of accounts logged in at any one time hasn’t changed very much for a couple of years. This is a good sign for an MMO as long in the tooth as EVE, but it doesn’t indicate a game that is really growing or broadening its base either. EVE needs these marquee battles to inject drama and scale into it a lot more than it needs peace, quiet, and brotherly love between spaceship captains.

The problem for EVE is that these high stakes battles are all but unique. B-R5RB was the only battle approaching this scale of losses ever fought and it is likely that we will not see another like it. The oft quoted rule of EVE: Online is that you don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose, and it is very likely that nobody, other than the victors of the B-R5RB battle, will ever again be able to afford to lose tens of thousands of dollars in super-capital ships and titans. The sheer scale of the loss creates a disparity between victor and vanquished that may never be closed. It would take the destruction of hundreds, even thousands of enemy craft to cancel out the loss of a single titan. The gulf in costs is evident if we look back just a few months to another huge battle, 6VDT. The two battles involved a comparable number of players but the destruction of B-R5RB cost around thirty times more.

This escalation is the real weakness in the EVE Online loss system. If you beat your opponents badly enough you’re not going to see them again until they’ve rearmed. If they have to rearm with ships that each take over a month to build, you might never see them again. If the biggest warship class in the game was the battleship, as it was for a time, battles would be less decisive but you would get more of them because players and alliances could outfit a fleet quicker.

EVE is the best example of the regimented model of permanent losses. You earn in game money, you acquire parts and resources, you equip your avatar, you fight with it, and maybe it blows up and you lose those things that you brought to the fight but anything you held back, that stays yours. Other games such as Ultima: Online and Pirates of the Burning Sea have also gone down this path with varying degrees of success. The key to the losses in these games is that you can plan for them because the means to replace those losses is if not fixed then at least predictable. You don’t go back to square one if you lose, you go back however many squares you decided to commit.

The alternative model to these games is that employed by games like Day Z.Day Z is a game based upon scavenging and survival and it differs from EVE by having no regular currency or trading system and no reliable, repeatable method to acquire resources.

In Day Z you cannot simply work in order to get the best possible equipment and the most powerful weapons, it doesn’t work like that. You might find a dead player ten feet away when you spawn, and they might have all the weapons and provisions you could want, or you might find nothing but tins of beans until you starve to death for want of something to open them with. No matter what you have in your inventory you are still a very fragile character and anybody with a gun can be a threat to anybody else. The random element and the easy come, easy go nature of acquiring supplies mean that the game is not stifling. You might get more wary the longer you have been alive, but to retreat from all possible risk means death from starvation or thirst. Even if you stash resources they are never truly safe.

One game series that has combined elements of both these loss mechanics successfully for years is Counter Strike. You get money before a round starts, you buy gear and guns which you will lose if you die, but you can also take guns from the dead. So you have both the ability to plan what you can equip for each round, plus the chance to find a free weapon. Although the system starts afresh with every new match it adds an element of strategy as the rounds play out. The loss mechanic here is simple, balanced and engaging, one of the key elements to the long term success of the series.

Punishments for failure can be a great way to increase connection to a game, but they must be approached with care by developers. As in-game purchases become more common* the problems of balancing what can be bought against what can be worked for will only become more complicated. A game has to be very good indeed for a player who has been knocked down to be willing to pile into the fray once more, especially if their losses amount to a lot of time or real money.

EVEOnline has shown that its model of painful losses is viable in the long term. Meanwhile the story of Day Z, from a mod for a very niche game to the flagship of a growing genre, has shown that permanent death and loss is not only something that players will tolerate, it is something they will actively seek out. Time will tell if these game mechanics ever make the jump into mainstream console games and the big budget AAA releases, but one thing is clear, the niche for games that are not afraid to punish the unskilled and unlucky is big and it isn’t going away any time soon.

*The term micro-transaction has become somewhat inappropriate. There is nothing micro about the amounts of money that games are starting to fish for in the pockets of their customers.

Google joins the rest of the western world in trolling Russia

0
0
Sochi? More like So-Gay!

With varying degrees of subtlelty, organisations are making visual statements this week about Russia's stance on LGBT rights. At one end of the spectrum we have today's Google Doodle: a tasteful rainbow pastiche of some of the sports in play:

And at the other end: Channel 4 has literally rebranded into a big gay mountain. This trailer for Sochi features a singing bear of a man, and some outright guy-on-guy snogging. This mole approves, and wishes he was on his way to Sochi if this is what the nightlife is really like. 

 

The SNP's hypocrisy on "politicising" sporting occasions

0
0
Nicola Sturgeon attacks David Cameron for speaking at the Olympic Stadium but has she forgotten Alex Salmond's Wimbledon antics?

The SNP's Nicola Sturgeon has responded to David Cameron's speech at the Olympic Stadium on the case for the UK by declaring that "to politicise any sporting occasion is shameful." The deputy first minister said: 

Using the Olympic stadium on the day the Winter Olympics begin and seeking to invoke the successes of London 2012 as an argument against Scotland taking its future into its own hands, it betrays the extent of the jitters now running through the No campaign.

They see the polls closing and they are clearly rattled – but to politicise any sporting occasion is shameful.

That may all be true, but has Sturgeon already forgotten Alex Salmond's shameless attempt to politicise Andy Murray's Wimbledon victory last summer? 

Milibandism's next chapter: reforming the state

0
0
The Labour leader is, after much hesitation, ready to contemplate the problem of running public services in austere times.

Ed Miliband is ready to talk about public sector reform. It has not been a theme of his time so far as opposition leader but that will change on Monday when he delivers the annual Hugo Young memorial lecture. Transforming the way government provides services will, we are led to understand, be a significant theme.

It will be about a lot more than that, apparently – this is a traditionally an event where eminent politicians are invited to elaborate at length on their guiding philosophies – but the presence of even a loose précis of what Miliband thinks is wrong with the state and how he intends to change it will be significant.

To understand why, it is worth starting with Miliband’s big conference speech last year. Then, he spelled out the argument he wanted to make about the long-term systemic failure of Britain’s economy to fairly or evenly distribute the proceeds of growth. For the benefit of the vast majority of people who don’t tune in on rainy Tuesday afternoons to hear a disquisition on the obsolescence of the neo-liberal paradigm he also promised to freeze energy bills.

The effect of that intervention, ramping up the salience of cost-of-living issues and disorienting the Tories, has been well documented. Once the initial spasm of reds-under-the-bed denunciation had passed, moderate Conservative MPs and commentators even began to recognise that Miliband’s agenda was based on a plausible reading of the public mood and a serious analysis of market failure. They hate the prescription, but that doesn’t mean the diagnoses is all wrong.

For Miliband’s closest supporters this recognition of a coherent and consistent argument behind the leader’s political gestures is vital. It is what elevates all of the speeches, op eds, press releases, appointments and amendments of the past three-and-a-quarter years into The Project– an agenda for radical social and economic change whose intellectual origins can be traced all the way back to Miliband’s leadership campaign. It shows that he had a plan all along. (The alternative view is that the whole thing has been cobbled together out of tactical compromises and capitulations to the recalcitrant left, and that “Milibandism” is an elaborate rationalisation of core vote/comfort zone politics. But even the most hardline sceptics on the Labour side and Tory critics now accept that there is more strategic acumen in Miliband than they thought back in 2010.)

But a notable omission from The Project has been an agenda to reform the state. The story Miliband has told thus far about Britain’s misfortunes focuses on mismanaged markets, exploited by private sector villains – energy companies; banks; payday lenders – abusing their positions and neglecting their social responsibilities. There hasn’t been much about people’s suffering at the hands of dysfunctional government agencies – the petty “computer says no” humiliations and institutional neglect that, say most MPs, account for a lot more of their case work than maltreatment by corporations. Miliband has hinted a couple of times at the need to tackle the “unresponsive state” but it hasn’t been high on his to-do list.

There are various reasons for this. Alternative models of public service delivery were not something Miliband engaged with much in government, nor is it an area where he has strong personal instincts. Meanwhile, in opposition, it has been fraught with danger. There is a segment of the Labour left that hears the words “public sector reform” and thinks “wicked Blairite triangulation, buying into a Tory agenda to privatise everything, demolish trade unions and let G4S, Capita and Serco run all the schools and hospitals.”

So the Labour leader has not wanted to go there without having something distinct to say on the subject. But he is also sensitive to charge that silence indicates a failure of imagination. Some of Miliband’s closest advisors accept in private that The Project is lopsided when it only talks about markets and vested interests in the private sector. Although Miliband would never go so far as to identify any state actor as equivalent in villainy to Rupert Murdoch or British Gas, he does, apparently, accept the need for Labour to engage with the way the state lets people down.

The task is then to move the conversation away from the mid-Nineties and early-Noughties arguments about using consumer choice and markets to break up state monopolies. Even among many Labour supporters of Blair-era reforms there is growing recognition that it is a fallacy to presume that private providers are always more efficient than public ones or that service users want to pick and choose among providers of public goods the way they shop for private pleasures. Certainly, the current Labour leadership will not go further down the road of using private sector competition as the device to drive up performance. Miliband isn’t persuaded that it does. His friends say it would be “inauthentic” if he used Blair-era language on public sector reform when, frankly, he doesn’t believe that’s the right way to go.

So the challenge then becomes finding an agenda that deals with state inadequacies in terms that can be offered as indigenously Milibandite.

Two interlocking themes are emerging. One is “the relational state” – a concept nurtured by IPPR and explored in a report that the centre-left think tank is publishing next Wednesday. As ever in wonkland, relational statecraft is not a digestible pledge-card nugget but the underlying concept is fairly straightforward. It starts by confronting the sheer complexity of contemporary social problems and noting the failure of both the traditional bureaucratic model and market reforms to deliver results.

“Relational” thinking puts the emphasis on building institutions, integrating services, pooling resources and deploying professionals at a local level across different areas and in collaboration with charities and volunteers. If that sounds like abstract jargon, well, it is. But the IPPR report does flesh it out with intriguing case studies from the UK, Canada, the US and Finland, covering innovative and effective ways to deal with children’s special educational needs, nursing and anti-social behaviour. The key ingredient seems to be having a dedicated professional team, based in a specific neighbourhood, whose authority is not limited to one departmental silo. That enables service providers to build enduring, trusting relationships with the people who depend on those services.

The opposite of “relational” service is the “transactional” model that treats citizens as consumers, shopping for the right public service; or distant Whitehall bureaucrats as managers trying to purchase the best social outcome. To anyone who has followed Miliband’s thinking over recent years it is easy to see how this analysis appeals. It has definite tinges of “Blue Labour”, putting the emphasis on communities and institutions that nurture enduring social stability as the remedy against atomisation, social fragmentation, anomie (which can, if you are that way inclined, be traced to the corrosive impact of market forces).

That thinking informs the second strand of an emerging Milibandite view of the state, which is the work that Jon Cruddas has been overseeing for the party’s policy review. Although the various commissions and committees that make up the review process are not due to report until the summer, it is already clear that devolving power to a local level will be a significant part of it all.

Localism, it must be said, is something that oppositions always promise before occupying the offices of central government where they discover how little power they actually have and soon change their minds about giving any of it away. Still, we’re in the bit of the cycle where Labour can afford to be idealistic about this sort of thing and so, for now, Cruddas is steering the party towards some variant of people power. In practice that means control of budgets potentially handed down to local authorities, city regions and, potentially, individuals. (To make that work financially, there would surely also have to be accompanying devolution of revenue-raising powers but that kind of thing is never very popular with the Treasury, which in opposition means Ed Balls.)

There have been persistent questions in Labour circles over the extent to which Cruddas was really setting the agenda for a Labour government or just cooking up exotic dishes in a lonely kitchen somewhere that Miliband might just nibble at or reject entirely. The leader’s office now seems keen to dispel that doubt. This too is a reason why Miliband’s lecture on Monday is important. It won’t contain much in the way of new policy detail but it will, I expect, signal that those in the party who want to talk about innovation and local devolution in public services have the leader’s blessing.

This shouldn’t be underestimated in Labour culture. There can be all sorts of ideas and policy notions floating around, with nudges here and kites flying there. But no-one feels certain citing something as a firm Labour position until the helmsman himself has publicly said it is so. Effectively, the people who have been talking on the fringes for ages about public sector reform – Cruddas, Andrew Adonis, Liz Kendall, Ivan Lewis –are being licensed as qualified Milibandites. State reform, as of Monday, will be formally admitted into The Project.

Not everyone will be happy, of course. There may be criticism from the left that this is all Blairism by the back door. (It isn’t.) There will be criticism from the right that it is all airy posturing that ducks the really big challenges ahead.

That is the more problematic charge. One thing Miliband certainly won’t do is try to prove his reforming zeal by attacking the professionals who deliver public services. He won’t mimic Michael Gove’s scorn for mediocrity in the classroom or bemoan jobsworthy heartlessness in the NHS. But it will be hard to get much attention for a state reform agenda beyond the wonkosphere without some resonant account of what is currently wrong with the state. Where are the vested interests and concentrations of power that must be broken up? Miliband will want to talk about an agenda for citizen empowerment but he’ll be reluctant to drill into the detail of who might lose out if newly empowered citizens were ever really to start flexing their budgetary muscles.

Then, of course, there is the fiscal problem. One of the strongest arguments for the kind of state reform that IPPR and Cruddas are looking at is its potential to deliver a much more financially sustainable level of service. Salami slicing budgets – the current way – delivers ever worse services that allow problems to fester, generating deeper social crises that ultimately cost more to remedy. In theory, a pre-emptive, relational approach weaves a more secure social safety net, allocating resources in the right way and faster to tackle the roots of social malaise and thus save money for the long term. At the simplest level, it is the difference between have a mechanism that arranges for a volunteer to come round and install a bath rail, costing a few quid, in the home of an elderly neighbour instead of waiting for the elderly neighbour to fall, alone, and then spend months in hospital.

It sounds plausible. But making it add up on a Treasury spreadsheet will be tricky. So will  phrasing it in a campaign in a way that can't be satirised as dodging the question of where future cuts might fall.

Still, at least the message has got through to the Labour high command that having something to say about innovation in public service is potentially one way to claw back some trust when it comes to public spending. Miliband now recognises that Labour needs to prove that it can govern – and deliver the kinds of well-meaning social change that are the traditional brand strength of the party – without simply getting into Whitehall and pouring money down the same old chutes. As one confidant of the leader put it to me recently: “You’ve got to show that you can do transformation in an era when there isn’t much money.” This may not be the primary argument when Miliband talks about reforming public services but it certainly informs the decision to break his long silence on the subject.

Coalition rebuked again by UK Statistics Authority- this time on flood defence spending

0
0
Statistics head Andrew Dilnot says a Treasury graph on infrastructure left readers with "a false impression of the relative size of investment between sectors".

After entering office in 2010, David Cameron promised to lead "the most open and transparent government in the world". But once again, the coalition has fallen foul of the number crunchers at the UK Statistics Authority. This time, the dispute centres over the Treasury's presentation of figures on infrastructure investment in the government's National Infrastructure Plan.

When the document was published last December, several were struck by how the unusual logarithmic scale used on one of the graphs made it appear as if investment was balanced across all sectors, including, most pertinently, flood defence. In fact, the government had spent £4bn in this area, compared to £218bn on energy, £121bn on transport and £14bn on communications. But the graph, as shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Chris Leslie noted in a letter to UK Statistics Authority head Andrew Dilnot, suggested otherwise. 

Dilnot has now responded to Labour, stating that "the chart could leave readers with a false impression of the relative size of investment between sectors" and including a redrawn version by stats officials. 

The Treasury version

UK Statistics Authority version

And that wasn't the only correction he issued. 

The coalition also boasted that "average annual infrastructure investment has increased to £45 billion per year compared to an average of £41 billion per year between 2005 and 2010". But as Labour MP John Healey noted in a letter to Dilnot, a footnote to the document admitted that there were "challenges when collecting this data", that the figures did not derive from consistent source material and that they were not comparable with the other data used. He added: "Despite these admissions, the methodology by which the figures were produced is not made clear, nor are the timeframes which have been selected for comparison - 2005-10 and 2011-13 - explained or justified." In response, Dilnot writes that "It would have been good practice for this analysis to have been accompanied by full information about the methods used."

As I noted earlier, this is far from the first time that ministers have been rebuked for their statistical chicanery. In December 2012, Jeremy Hunt was ordered to correct his false claim that spending on the NHS had risen in real terms "in each of the last two years". A month later, David Cameron was criticised for stating that the coalition "was paying down Britain’s debts" (the national debt has risen from £828.7bn, or 57.1 per cent of GDP, to £1.25trn, or 75.7 per cent of GDP since May 2010) and then in May 2013, Iain Duncan Smith was rebuked for claiming that 8,000 people moved into work as a result of the introduction of the benefit cap. 

Here's Chris Leslie's response to today's letter: 

Time and again Ministers are being warned not to mislead the public with false claims, dodgy statistics and biased graphs.

Now George Osborne and the Treasury have been told off for misleading people about the government's investment in infrastructure. For example, their chart made it look like investment in flood defences was roughly the same as in other areas, when in fact it was a tiny fraction.

This government has a track record of trying to pull the wool over people's eyes. David Cameron has now been rebuked several times for making false claims: on NHS spending, the rising national debt and the impact of his tax rises and spending cuts on economic growth.

And only last month the Tories came up with more dodgy figures to claim people are better off, but which totally ignored the impact of things like the rise in VAT and cuts to tax credits.

In their desperation to paint a rosier picture than the truth David Cameron and George Osborne are showing just how out of touch they are from reality.


Five questions answered on Bombardier’s contract to provide trains for Crossrail

0
0
How much is the Bombardier-Crossrail contract worth?

Train and aerospace manufacturer Bombardier has won the contract to manufacture trains for London’s Crossrail project. We answer five questions on the key comission.

How much is the Bombardier-Crossrail contract worth?

The contract is worth a hefty £1bn and requires Bombardier to provide 65 trains for the Crossrail service, set to open in 2018.

Will any new jobs be created by the contract?

Yes. The Department for Transport (DfT) said Bombardier's contract would support 760 manufacturing jobs and 80 apprenticeships at its Derby-based factory. It added that 74 per cent of the amount spent on the contract would stay in the UK economy. A spokesperson for Canada-headquartered Bombardier told the BBC that 340 new jobs would be created in total.

What have business secretary Vince Cable and London mayor Boris Johnson said about the contract?

Cable said the contract would be a good boost to the Midlands. He added: "The government has been working hard with industry to support the UK rail supply chain to maximise growth opportunities through contracts like this."

Johnson said: "With a firm on board to deliver a fleet of 21st century trains and the tunnelling more than halfway complete, we're on track to deliver a truly world-class railway for the capital."

What features will the train carriages have?

The newly built carriages will be 200 metres long and be able to take up to 1,500 passengers. They will also be air-conditioned, with linked, walk-through carriages, and provide live travel information.

What other benefits will come from Crossrail?

As well as the extra jobs at Bombardier, it is estimated that Crossrail, which will travel from Maidenhead and Heathrow Airport to the west of London, to Abbey Wood and Shenfield in the east, would support 55,000 full-time jobs around the country. The government has also said Crossrail will provide about 10 per cent more capacity to the London train network.

Dallas Buyers Club: the unwilling drugstore cowboy

0
0
Tipped for Oscars success in the US, this humanistic portrayal of two Texans importing HIV medication from Mexico is played expertly by Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto.

Dallas Buyers Club (15)
dir: Jean-Marc Vallée

To the casual observer, Dallas Buyers Club must resemble a dieting group for Hollywood stars. Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto became so emaciated for the film (losing around 45 pounds and 30 pounds, respectively) that whenever one of them places a cigarette between his lips, he seems to double in weight.

There has been a corresponding gain: both collected Golden Globes for their performances and are now nominated for Oscars. But it would be a shame if this method acting hoopla were to overshadow their subtle and insightful acting. Leto was a petulant pixie who had never found the right showcase for his limited charms until now. McConaughey got sidelined a decade ago in a run of romcoms in which he was as sturdy and bland as a Timberland boot. He has a frazzled volatility and a character actor’s thirst for transformation that can sometimes be obscured by his Texan good-ol’-boy tan-and-teeth combo. Yet he has found a happy medium in the past few years in roles that could be adventurous, whether oddball (Killer Joe and his cameo in The Wolf of Wall Street) or orthodox (Mud and Magic Mike).

His contradictory qualities converge in his performance as Ron Woodroof, who works as an electrician and rodeo cowboy in between taking drugs and having sex with women in his ramshackle trailer. Ron has started to shed so much weight that, were he to take a shirt off its hanger and put it on his body, the garment wouldn’t know the difference.

It is 1985 and hospital tests reveal that he is HIV positive. A doctor gives him weeks to live. Barely able to walk, it seems that anger alone is keeping Ron vertical and mobile. Anger, that is, at contracting a disease that links him to a group he despises and calls “Tinker Bells”. There is very little extraneous music in the first half of the film, perhaps because the sound of dramatic irony is loud enough.

Illness is not immediately a balm to Ron’s bigotry. His fury at catching what he perceives to be a gay plague – a perception he shares with the vandals who daub abuse across his trailer – is diverted gradually into a battle with the medical establishment, which is thwarting the flow of retroviral drugs. As Ron obtains effective medication illegally – first for himself and then in batches from Mexico, which he flogs to other sufferers – the on-screen titles make a mockery of his doctor’s predictions: “Day 1” and “Day 2” give way to “Three months later” and “Six months later”. The drugs do work. Ron acquires a business partner – the HIV-positive transgender woman Rayon (Leto). With her gentle eyes rolling wearily in their scooped-out sockets, Rayon is chippy and knowing about the market where Ron is uncouth; she is Mrs Miller to his McCabe.

The screenplay, written by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, doesn’t pretend that Ron’s homophobia would have subsided for any reason other than a selfish one. Gay men become human to him only once their suffering overlaps with his. He is still calling people “cocksuckers” by the end of the movie but now his targets for abuse are doctors and politicians; the insult has become metaphorical.

The film has some wry fun at his expense when he enters a gay bar and sees that the iconography on which he hangs his hat – the cowboy dress code of Stetson, sunglasses, moustache and denim – is also the preserve of those he regards as the enemy, the other. Once Ron and Rayon have become partners in crime, we expect a moment when his new life clashes with his old one and the film obliges. Forced in a supermarket to nail his colours to the mast when one of his former buddies mocks Rayon, Ron doesn’t flinch from violently defending his new ally. The picture makes a statement by staging the confrontation where Ron would feel most at home: in front of the prime beef refrigerator, with not a bottle of Perrier in sight.

It’s important to review a film rather than any off-screen accusations against it, which is why I have sidestepped reports casting doubts about the real Ron Woodroof’s homophobia and even his heterosexuality: it would be unfair to punish a picture for unproven compromises.

What is on-screen, at least, is rather fine. Jean-Marc Vallée’s direction is unfussy, even plain, so that moments that might have been underlined (a sexual encounter that is only carefree because both participants already have Aids, or an impressionistic fantasy in a room full of butterflies) are folded into the mix.

McConaughey and Leto drill down to the roots of their characters. It calls to mind that advice for actors playing drunk: you do it like you’re emphatically sober. Neither man plays the disease. They play instead the rage to live.
 

The Lib Dems might have moved on from Rennard, but the public haven't

0
0
Ask any "ordinary" person what the Lib Dems have been up to in recent weeks and they'll mention the scandal.

Being a mere Lib Dem activist, rather than a professional politician, means I actually have friends who don’t "do" politics – you know, folk who spend their Saturdays doing things other than getting their hands stuck in dodgy letterboxes when out leafleting, writing furious letters to the local paper or haranguing the council via enraged blog posts.

Yesterday was one of those rare occasions when I managed to raise my head from my hands long enough see one such friend. But guess what. He wanted to talk politics. So what great matter of state did he want to discuss? The economy? The debate over the top rate of tax? Crisis in the health service? Michael Gove? Nope. He wanted to talk Rennard. And more precisely, how on earth a professional political organisation made such a 24 carat balls up of the whole thing.

Raising this topic is not going to make me many friends in Great George Street, now it's been kicked into the long grass and is the subject of yet another investigation. But in many ways of course, that’s the problem. Sure the party leadership may want the world to move on – after all, the main media storm was three weeks ago. But I’m afraid the public haven’t moved along. 

Ask any "ordinary" person what the Lib Dems have been up to in recent weeks, and you won’t find anyone talking about campaigns on mental health initiatives, Danny Alexander saying no to cutting the top rate of tax, or David Laws sticking it Michael Gove. No, their overriding concern is why can’t the party sort out the sort of human resources issue that would have been resolved one way or another in a matter of days in any average-sized business. And – unlike other inquiries we’re currently holding– this isn’t an issue anyone is likely to forget about.

So while I suspect the leadership may be quietly congratulating themselves that the Rennard affair is no longer gracing the front pages (and cursing me for raising it again), it’s still the thing most front of mind for the wider electorate.

We may wish it weren’t so and we can media manage all we like, but better to grasp the nettle, hold the inquiry quickly, accept its findings, act appropriately and then move on. Because if you ask the public they’ll tell you – it’s not going away. And I’d quite like them to be thinking of some of the other things we’re doing– but which, while this festers on, we'll get no credit for.

Richard Morris blogs at A View From Ham Common, which was named Best New Blog at the 2011 Lib Dem Conference

Strike or no strike, the Mayor of London needs more power

0
0
Greater fiscal freedom would allow the mayor to champion properly the interests of hard-pressed commuters and be held accountable for delivery.

This week, hundreds of thousands of Londoners and commuters in the rest of the South East battled strikes and main line signal failures to get to work. With considerable grit and determination many of them succeeded. It’s fair to say that George Osborne’s Christmas gift to restrict regulated fare rises is already no more than a distant memory. But on a day when the mayor could be seen to be standing up for Londoners, it is worth reflecting how limited his powers really are. Take the chancellor’s announcement as an example. TfL bosses were understandably caught off-side by the treasury’s surprise decision to limit fare rises to RPI. This forced the mayor to rework his fares in order to balance the books. The late announcement, combined with the labyrinthine system of revenue settlement, meant that new prices were delayed by weeks.  This gave some season ticket holders a rare windfall but may have cost millions at the farebox.

The stifling complexity and lack of flexibility in the system goes back to regulations put in place at the time of rail privatisation. This included a requirement in law to have a fare structure shackled to many separate train companies taking revenue risk. For certain ticket types, such as the ever-popular London Travelcard, this means that TfL and private rail operators in the south east are financially tied at the ankle – by the Chancellor of the Exchequer no less.

There is nothing wrong in regulating fares where users have limited choice. Many suburban passengers will have welcomed George Osborne’s announcement with open arms and wish that he’d gone further. But surely it would make more sense and be far better if Londoners and their home county neighbours determined how commuter rail services are provided and what they cost to use.

The present system is a reflection of over-centralised control of London’s public services and undoubtedly those of England’s other city regions. As the independent London Finance Commission pointed out last year, the present Mayor for London (and his predecessor Ken Livingstone) has just a fraction of the revenue-raising powers that their opposite numbers in other world cities enjoy. Remarkably, only seven per cent of London’s tax base is determined by the representatives elected to spend it. New York’s figure is about seven times higher than this. Other world cities enjoy much greater fiscal freedom than London, which in turn leads to greater accountability and creates a real incentive for growth and public investment.

The success London has seen in getting London Overground, DLR extensions and Crossrail underway is testament to the effectiveness of city politicians. Across the political spectrum, the mayor and boroughs have demonstrated consistently that they are capable of delivering tangible improvements to our urban infrastructure. A natural next step is handing over greater fiscal power and control for large chunks of the commuter railway. Doing so would boost city government. It would allow the mayor to champion properly the interests of hard-pressed commuters and be held accountable for delivery. Even on a no-strike day.

While Ukraine's political situation remains uncertain, its economy teeters on the brink

0
0
If the political instability is not reined in soon enough, the currency will spiral out of control.

As the protests in Ukraine have escalated over the last three months, President Viktor Yanukovych has appeared progressively weaker. The timing of his sick leave last week could not have been more apt. The president has now offered a raft of substantive concessions in a bid to appease the protesters, not least the chance to lead a new cabinet, but in every instance he has been rebuffed. His subsequent decision to take leave was a signal that his options have rapidly reduced.

The government’s resignation was a serious blow to Yanukovych’s legitimacy. Without a cabinet underneath him he has become an isolated figure. The opposition recognises this and in the ensuing negotiations will maintain their stance of demanding early presidential and parliamentary elections.

As a western observer, one could be forgiven for thinking that there is an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians in favour of EU integration, with Vladmir Putin and Yanukovych the only figures standing in their way. But in reality the country is bitterly divided: Western Ukraine has very strong cultural and linguistic ties with Russia, and its inhabitants are deeply concerned about the impact of competition from the EU on its dilapidated, yet important industrial sector. Even the opposition is not unified, and it is difficult to reconcile the views held by the far-right nationalist party, Svoboda (which is at the vanguard of the current movement), with the EU’s supranational mantra. In any case, an election held in the current atmosphere would surely serve as a de facto referendum on EU integration, but it would undoubtedly be a close-run contest.

While Ukraine’s future continues in uncertainly, its economy teeters on the brink. So far Russian bond purchases and gas price concessions have provided a financial buffer, but if Yanukovych’s grip on power is eroded further and an opposition-led government becomes more likely, this support could be revised and potentially withdrawn. The EU would not be able to step in without major political reforms inside the country and in the meantime bond yields would rise amid sustained downward pressure on the currency.

Moody’s have already downgraded Ukraine’s sovereign rating to Caa2, with a negative outlook due to the growing strains on liquidity caused by the surging demand for dollars as the domestic population seek to convert their savings. On 31 January the hryvnia fell 2.5 per cent against the dollar – the largest single-day loss in almost five years. This is of significant concern, as with a USD15 billion loan from Russia, the government had spent several weeks using its financial reserves to prop up the country.

As the central bank has scaled back its commitment to maintaining a dollar-peg, this downward pressure is manageable in the short-term. Within the context of low inflation and slow export growth, it could even provide a boost. The danger, however, is that if the political instability is not reined in soon enough, the currency will spiral out of control, placing increased pressure on the corporate and financial sectors so as to impinge on their ability to service foreign debt.

The insurance market is acutely aware of this risk, and accordingly, capacity for credit cover on Ukrainian counterparties is exceedingly tight. It is set to remain so for the rest of Q1 and beyond.

Viewing all 11165 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images