Homes4People

New Labour dogma pervades Tony Blair’s biography. Bringing it into the leadership race is a depressing mistake

Nearly over now, then – so let us count the cliches used to decry the Labour leadership contest. “Interminable,” claims the Daily Telegraph. “The least inspiring contest ever,” says a columnist in the Independent. “A bunch of clueless clodhoppers,” reckons the characteristically emollient Mail. Now, the hysterically received Blair memoirs add another commonplace to the noise: that beneath the alleged tedium lurks grave danger – and if it isn’t careful, Labour will stray from the New Labour path, and lurch into irrelevance.

I dutifully bought my copy of A Journey today, and eventually reached the postscript, in which Blair sets out his vision of the future. What awaited was a mess of suggestions, most of which seemed to favour a model of debate that would effectively be meaningless. For Labour, the ideal path entails “remaining flexible enough to attack the government from left and right”. Even as the welfare state is hacked down and our few remaining social democratic institutions put under threat, “defining where you stand by reference to the opposite of where the other person stands is not just childish, but completely out of touch with where politics is today”. The “statist, so-called Keynesian response to the economic crisis” is a busted flush; even starting to rein in pay at the top would do “more harm than good”. Labour, as he sees it, “should criticise the composition but not the thrust of the Tory deficit reductions”.

Behind all this there is a mindset that is closer to a pathology than thought-through politics. Even after the crash, all that is contemporary, sensible and electorally advantageous is reduced to what Blair calls “liberal economic policies, market reforms in welfare and public services, and” – note the graceful use of language here – “engagement and intervention abroad”.

Anyone who questions this is is in danger of slipping back into the disgraced past. Under every bed, there lurks an “old Labour” red; even in the highest circles (witness an early reference in the book to Alastair Campbell: “much more old Labour” than some people, apparently) there is a constant danger of a return to a nightmare world of picket lines, nationalised everything, and serial Labour losses. In Blair’s rather paranoid account, even Lib Dems have “old Labour” instincts: and the coalition will prosper only if it squashes them.

Some salient facts. Between 1997 and 2010, Labour lost 5 million votes, of which 4 million went under his watch. In the eight years up to 2005 the party also mislaid over half its membership (often maligned as a rabble of unrepresentative anoraks – but still the chief means by which Labour actually wins elections). At his last general election, moreover, Blair led the party to a truly hollow victory: the support of 22% of the electorate, an outcome sufficiently chastening that he stood outside Downing Street and claimed to have “listened and learned”. In both the noise surrounding publication or the text itself, almost none of this has been mentioned.

A typical leader in one of today’s papers paid tribute to his three “emphatic” victories, and in his Andrew Marr interview Blair looked back on the 2010 defeat with the same black-and-white analysis. “If we departed a millimetre from New Labour, we were in trouble,” he said, as if he bore none of the blame. Far from what the memoirs call “an approach based on reason, on the abstinence from ideological dogma”, this is its complete reverse: the thinking of the zealot, as full of dogmatic stupidity as the hard-left politics Blair still sees round every corner.

Of late – as evidenced by warnings from Blair, Mandelson and those voices who share their view of things – this has resulted in one of the more depressing aspects of the Labour leadership contest: claims that “Red” Ed Miliband is a dangerous old Labour throwback. No matter that his handful of policy proposals – for the tentative roll-out of a living wage, or a graduate tax, or the high pay commission also supported by his brother – are modest and somewhat cautious. In the wake of an editorial claiming that even his brother was in danger of drifting too far to the left, one Times columnist – the venerable David Aaronovitch – compared him to Michael Foot.

On Monday, I turned on the Today programme to hear another pundit say: “He is properly leftwing. Really leftwing. He wouldn’t admit this now, but if you’d asked him a few years ago who his political hero was, he’d have said Tony Benn. And I don’t mean cuddly, modern Tony Benn, I mean Tony Benn in his pomp, in the 1960s and 1970s.”

The Labour party, I would imagine, has the sense to understand that this is the stuff of fear, voiced by people with no real understanding of either the real world, or the problems Labour has to address, and soon. At least twice in his book, Blair parrots a rollcall of English towns – “Hastings, Crawley, Worcester, Basildon, Harrow” – whose people, he seems to imagine, have experienced no downside of his beloved “liberal economic policies”, and even as the cuts bite, will not want anything significantly different. One is reminded of a priceless sentence, uttered circa 2008 by an unnamed Labour minister, seemingly convinced that the stockbroker belt ran far wider than once thought. “£150,000 isn’t much money in Reading,” he reckoned. Just to set the record straight, half the people who work in that town earn less than £21,000 a year.

No housing shortages in “middle England”, surely; no insecurity at work, or time poverty, or fretting about the debt that people’s children now rack up in pursuit of an education; come to think of it, none of the bundle of worries that always sit under all those concerns about immigration. Even with the application of work and imagination, Blair and his cheerleaders allege, modern social democracy has no hope in these places; and by implication, it has no realistic chance at all. This is not just a counsel of despair, but a desertion of Labour’s most basic mission. In A Journey, the basics of the party’s fate are summed up with the unbending simplicity of a dalek: “Labour won when it was New Labour. It lost because it stopped being New Labour.”

Towards the end of the book, its author says he has come back to the fray to find politics in disarray, and feels more motivated to impart his gospel than ever. “I find my old world in a state of despair and feel shocked and galvanised by this,” he says. “Perhaps that is because I am removed from it and so think I see it more clearly.”

The next bit is in parentheses, but it’s among the most telling sentences he writes: “This could be an illusion.”

It is, of course. It probably always was.

Originally published here

This week, somebody broke into Linda Carty’s replica death row cell in London, showing just how desperate many homeless are

Linda Carty is waiting to die on Texas’s death row, her appeals for the most part exhausted. She may face execution in the death chamber at any time. While she dreams of breaking out of her cell, on Wednesday someone broke in to stay the night.

The human rights charity Reprieve has a replica of the cell where Linda has spent the last decade. It contains her entire world: a narrow metal bed, a blanket, a metal sink and a metal toilet. The folk at St Martin-in-the-Fields have been kind enough to let us put the cell there until 5 September, so Londoners can experience some sense of Linda’s privation. I had hoped that languishing in the cell for an hour might inspire visitors to reach out and help save Linda’s life.

This week, someone reached in. Cracking the lock – to be sure, it is not the kind of electronic bolt that keeps Linda on Texas’s women’s death row – a homeless person used the facilities, and stayed the night.

Perhaps there was no more space at The Connection, the wonderful, charitable homeless centre round the corner from the church. No matter what the explanation, life must be grim for someone to break into death row.

There’s a difference between homelessness and rough sleeping. At least a quarter of a million people find themselves homeless each year, but they are often able to find shelter, sometimes in the houses of relatives. More than 3,600 people slept on the streets of London last year, up by a thousand since 2006. This English summer has been like many others – rarely warm or dry – but winter looms, when lying down in a doorway is a nightmare, whether you manage to snatch some sleep or remain awake. Rough sleepers have a life expectancy of just 42 years – Linda Carty and I would both have been dead for a decade – and take their own lives at 35 times the rate of the rest of us.

The coalition government has mouthed support for Boris Johnson’s goal: ending this crisis in London by 2012. Yet, when times get rough, the numbers rough sleeping inevitably rise. It is wishful thinking to suggest that charities can shoulder the extra load, as donors simultaneously feel they have less to give.

Our society talks about basic human rights. Politicians fall over each other to “ringfence” certain spending, such as on the NHS. I enjoyed the benefits of a free, excellent local doctor today, for some inconsequential ailment. How much more important is the right to sleep somewhere other than death’s waiting room?

Originally published here

The economic meltdown of 2007 shook the world – but financial reforms have failed to address fundamental problems

It was supposed to have been the day the world changed. The credit crunch “officially” began on 9 August 2007, and there were plenty ready to dance on the grave of capitalism and the free markets. But three years on, for all the hand-wringing, the economic upheaval and the promises of politicians, there is a whiff of business as usual in the air. The banks have returned to substantial profit, City bonuses are moving back to dizzying heights, international efforts for further co-operation have largely come unstuck, cranes are once more rising over the Square Mile and house prices are moving north.

Many are beginning to question whether anything has really changed at all; others maintain that things have simply got worse, that the old hegemony has been reinforced rather than loosened, widening the disparity between the wealthy and the rest.

Getting a mortgage has been put out of the reach of many people, savings are dwindling, high streets have become bleaker places and the expansion of public sector debt, partly to keep the world from plunging into a depression, means there will only be more painful austerity measures to come, affecting everything from arts funding to welfare. Politically, the shift has been to the right, particularly in Britain.

“Of course the credit crunch is leading to lots of changes and we haven’t seen all of them yet,” says Sir John Gieve, the former deputy governor of the Bank of England. “But in two big respects, I don’t think it did change the world. First, the speed of globalisation, the integration of the global economy, including finance, is continuing, and second, it is continuing around broadly a free-market model.

“There have been far fewer repercussions than there were after the 1930s,” he adds. “Then there was a real contest in the world about what was the right model for a modern society, and the crash convinced many people that capitalism and free markets were not the right way forward, but there has been no echo of that this time.

“Maybe India and China have slowed down on deregulating their financial industries, but broadly speaking, the direction the world had been moving in is continuing. It reflects an end of ideology. Capitalism is still the only game in town.”

Alistair Milne, reader in banking and finance at Cass Business School and the author of The Fall of the House of Credit, suggests there is still no willingness to change. “It is a way of life that we all enjoy. We are still locked into the mindset that rising house prices are a good thing. It will be a good sign that we are moving to a more constructive way of thinking when we don’t cheer every time house prices go up.”

The credit crisis had been brewing for a number of years, as rising interest rates in the US led an increasing number of low-income homeowners on sub-prime mortgages to default. But the pivotal moment arrived when a French bank issued a statement that most would consider arcane – but which would have profound consequences.

BNP Paribas told investors in two of its funds that they would not be able to withdraw money because it was no longer able to value the assets in them, due to a “complete evaporation of liquidity” in the market.

The money markets became petrified. Banks refused to lend to each other as fear spread about where the toxic debt obscured in complicated derivatives might be sitting – and the European Central Bank pumped more than €200bn (£166bn) into the system in a desperate attempt to thaw the freeze. Stock markets went into freefall.

For a time it seemed as if some commentators were right to predict a radical overhaul of the old world order that had existed for the 30 years since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had encouraged a laissez-faire approach.

Within a month, queues formed outside branches of Northern Rock in the first run on a high-street bank in living memory. A year after that, the collapse of Lehman Brothers almost brought the financial system to its knees, followed by the first truly global recession of the post-war era.

“The world did change and ultimately it will be seen to have changed for the better,” says Nick Parsons, head of research at National Australia Bank. “When the history of the past 10 years comes to be written, what will be surprising will be not the global financial crisis itself, but the financial conditions that preceded it – the excess and abundance of cheap money that was being lent without regard to borrowers’ ability to repay.

“Money was virtually free – in the case of Japan, where it had zero interest rates, it was literally free – and it was available in limitless quantities, which does not correspond to any definition of normalcy, so that created a bubble and bubbles burst.”

Heads rolled. Three years later, the politicians who steered Britain through the crisis, and arguably helped to cause it, have lost their jobs and many bankers moved on. Adam Applegarth, who ran Northern Rock and described that event in August as the “day the world changed”, was an early casualty. Chuck Prince, the boss of Citigroup, was gone by Christmas as was Jimmy Cayne, the Bear Stearns boss who reputedly played bridge as his bank neared collapse. Stan O’Neal at Merrill Lynch, Fred Goodwin at Royal Bank of Scotland and Andy Hornby at HBOS all followed.

The banks have since become more conservative – so much so that politicians are now attacking them for not lending enough.

“We have gone back to the type of conditions I was familiar with in the early- to mid-1980s,” Parsons says. “In order to get a loan, you need an income, you need proof of that income and you need to have a deposit – the very things that now appear to provoke outrage but are normal to anyone who is in their 40s. I think what we are seeing is a return to a banking industry as it was 25 years ago, which actually had many things to commend it.

“So capitalism has changed, yes, not in a huge cathartic way, but so that the owner or the custodian of capital is much more careful about where they use that capital,” he adds. “And this phase is going to be very uncomfortable for the economy. There is a lot of criticism that the banks are not lending enough, but that is a by-product of banks being more careful about capital – there is more emphasis on getting the money back than on pumping up assets that can be seized if the loan goes bad. The path we are on seems to be set for five or maybe even 10 years. It is not dissimilar to the way it used to be. We’ll just have to get used to it again.”

John Varley, chief executive of Barclays, underlined that point this week. From his point of view, banks are considerably less risky and more liquid.

In the year of the credit crunch, 2007, the bank’s crucial tier one ratio – a measure of its financial health – was 4.7%. Today it is 10%, showing that the bank is holding a larger capital cushion to support its business. In the same period, the bank’s leverage has fallen from 33% to 20% of that tier one capital, and the amount of liquid assets it holds – such as government bonds – has jumped from £20bn in the year of the credit crunch to £160bn now.

Capital, though, is still broadly in the same hands: “You have the same people making the most money, doing broadly the same thing, but – we hope – more sensibly and prudently,” says Gieve.

Three years on from the crisis, it is almost possible to forget that the banks, including those bailed out by the taxpayer, were loss-making. The major UK banks last week reported a combined £14.5bn of profit and a dramatic fall in impairment charges for loans that were not repaid on time. Certainly there is a sense of swagger returning to the City. Barclays, RBS and HSBC – just half-way through the year – have already set aside £6bn in pay and bonuses for their investment bankers.

The return of the bonus is likely to reawaken some of the public anger on show during the early days of the crisis and stoked by politicians. The crisis has “left a scar about banking and politicians” says Jim O’Neill, chief economist at Goldman Sachs.

The return of the bonus is all the more unpalatable for many because of the wider austerity measures being pushed through. What started as a problem of private-sector debt has become a problem of public-sector debt. Governments spent and borrowed freely during the boom, and latterly to avoid turning the great recession into a great depression – and the cost to the public purse has been enormous. The UK ran up its biggest peacetime deficit of £155bn, about 11% of GDP. In Greece, the debt burden was more than 13% of GDP.

New banking regulations are being introduced at different speeds and in different ways in the main economies. The UK has been accused of moving too quickly by introducing a bank levy ahead of other main markets, while crucial changes being demanded by international banking regulators based in the Swiss city of Basle that require banks to hold more capital can now be implemented at whatever pace each country chooses. Economist Sir John Vickers is leading the banking commission report into whether the banks in Britain should be broken up.

Gieve says the broad package of measures agreed by the G20 and in Basle, requiring banks to hold more capital, increase transparency and defer bonuses, has broadly addressed some of the problems that led to the credit crunch. But, he says, two key issues remain to be addressed. “First the structure of banking. In the UK we are looking at the concentration of retail banking, but the more interesting question is about investment banking, which to me feels like an oligopoly and the extreme levels of rewards probably reflect that.

“The second is international co-operation. The really glaring thing about this crisis is that it was international. We were seeing people default on mortgages in California and Nevada, but the first banks that fell over were IKB in Germany and Northern Rock, which didn’t have any US sub-prime exposure but got caught up in this global financing market. One key lesson should be the need to co-ordinate policy, both macro and regulatory, more closely and I don’t see that happening.”

Lord Davies, a former trade minister and banker who was at the helm of Standard Chartered when the crisis erupted, agrees. “My worry is that the lessons of the crisis will be forgotten too quickly,” he said. “It was the first test of globalisation. The world did come together [but] we haven’t made a lot of progress since then – no global bank levy, everyone has gone back to business as usual. Compensation is still too high and the underlying factors that caused the crisis are still very evident.”

The banks are buoyant in part because the economy is stronger. The UK economy grew by 1.1% in the second quarter of 2010 – its fastest growth in four years. For all the talk of rebalancing the economy away from the City and commercial property, more than two thirds of the expansion came from the old bubble-era staples – construction and financial and business services. Retailers, meanwhile, have had their best month of sales growth in July since the spring of 2007.

However, politicians, claiming to have learned the lessons of the financial crisis, are still pressing for a rebalanced economy, with a new emphasis on expanding exports and manufacturing and a move away from an overreliance on financial services.

O’Neill says he is encouraged that increasing exports could be achieved by the low value of the pound – exports grew at 9% per annum for three years after Britain left the ERM – and heartened by the coalition government’s pursuit of better trade relations with the so-called Brics, Brazil, Russia, India and China. The credit crunch he says, has accelerated the shift to the new world order: “For the UK to rebalance, we have to have a serious export relationship with the Brics and it is something this government is talking seriously about.”

He says that the four countries together will create another $8 trillion of consumption this decade if they continue to grow at the current rate. “This is, clearly, three years on from the crisis, something which many companies are starting to see signs of,” O’Neill says, although western policymakers remain “pretty clueless”.

Others are more circumspect. “Establishing a leading position in any industry takes a long time,” says Gieve. “We shouldn’t assume it happens automatically and that if you squeeze financial services, somehow we will establish a lead in plastics. If you go around the world, most other countries would love to have a financial centre like London. From here we can see the disadvantages, such as the way it sucks talent from other industries and widens inequality, but London’s position in finance has been built over centuries and we would be foolish to undermine it.”

The reality, though, is that very few of Britain’s companies currently export to China, and the rest of Europe is coming up with the same plan. While more than 50% of Britain’s visible trade goes to other members of the EU, China accounts for 2% of UK exports and India under 1%, or about £3bn.

China and India, the world’s two largest emerging economies, have proven far more resilient to the global recession than many developed economies. Europe has struggled to haul itself back from recession, while in the US, one in four homes are suffering from negative equity and the faltering housing market risks dragging the world’s biggest economy back into a double dip.

Alistair Milne at Cass Business School says the world has fundamentally changed and it is less about the banks than about the way the world economy has got used to doing business. It is a change yet to be acknowledged by politicians and policymakers, but then, Milne maintains, the UK could be in for 25 years of stagnation – not something that wins many votes on the stump.

“When you get to the root of it, the crisis was not about the banks,” he says. “It was the result of credit-driven growth. That we all feel wealthier because we are borrowing bigger mortgages and house prices are going up is misguided. A country gets rich by producing things. The problem is the imbalance between countries producing goods, such as China and Japan, and ourselves and the US. They lent us money to buy things they make.

“It wouldn’t have mattered if banks hadn’t been gross risk-takers, this way of doing business would still have come to a shuddering halt. And no one has really addressed it. The world has fundamentally changed because we can’t go on by saying: ‘OK, China, lend us another trillion dollars so we can go on buying your stuff.’ I am deeply pessimistic about our society. We have papered over the cracks but things will get worse.”

Originally published here

A polemic that blames inequality for most troubles in our society has energised Labour

Last week, a group of academics decided that because of the debt he pumped into the economy and the poison he pumped into the Labour party, Gordon Brown was the third-worst British prime minister since 1945. To which the response from all sane onlookers was: “What, only the third?”

The charge list against him is long enough for a judge to send Labour to a dark cell for years. It would have been grossly negligent for any government to boast that its “light-touch” regulation had “abolished boom and bust”, while failing to notice that it was helping push the banking system towards the edge of a cliff. For a Labour government to set aside social democracy’s well-merited suspicion of finance capital was truly criminal. The Conservatives and Liberals can now use Brown’s failure as a plausible justification for spending cuts and tax rises. The party he left behind is torn by fratricidal strife – real fratricidal strife in the case of the Miliband family.

I would go on were it not for a paradox. Labour people are more energised than they have any right to be. Of course, the coalition’s recklessness explains much of the new sense of purpose. An alliance of Liberals and Conservatives ought to produce a moderate government, which would appeal to the British, who like to flatter themselves that they are commonsensical and pragmatic folk with no time for extremism. Instead, the coalition has produced a fanatical programme for deficit reduction and bureaucratic mayhem that demands opposition.

Yet there is something else: The Spirit Level, a book which is turning into a cross between a manifesto and a call to arms. At one leftwing meeting recently, a speaker wished everyone in the country could read its argument that societies more equal than Britain enjoy better physical and mental health, lower homicide rates, fewer drug problems, fewer teenage births, higher maths and literacy scores, higher standards of child wellbeing, lower obesity rates and fewer people in prison. If they could just grasp that, he said, then they would see that combating inequality was good for everyone. His was not a lone voice. David Miliband has declared his admiration for its authors. So has Ed. I expect to hear them disputing soon about who read The Spirit Level first and who admires it the most.

If you follow the rule of thumb that no book on a matter of political controversy is worth buying until it has been roundly denounced, then The Spirit Level is an essential purchase. The Taxpayers’ Alliance warns that it legitimises a fleecing of the middle class. David Cameron’s favourite thinktank, Policy Exchange, published a book-length condemnation which claims that The Spirit Level’s authors had produced a shabby, shallow work which threatened to “contaminate” our presumably honest political debate, as if it were an oil slick heading towards a pristine coast.

I know writers who would pay for the attention epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have received, but the authors themselves are politely baffled. Wilkinson is 67, a retired professor from Nottingham University. Pickett teaches at York. When I spoke to Wilkinson, he was still recovering from the shock that their book had made them the targets of raging polemics. Their arguments, buttressed by decades of research from around the world, seem self-evident to him. Once countries reach a certain level of wealth, what affects the citizenry is not the growth in GDP but the level of inequality. Man is a social primate and people who worry about their status and feel too keenly the humiliations their superiors inflict on them become anxious, mistrustful, isolated and stressed. This pattern holds whether you look at inequalities within different countries or between more equal or unequal states in the US or counties in Chile.

Although I disagree with their rather Panglossian conclusion that the rich would be happier with less money, their broad thesis strikes me as incontrovertible, as it must strike anyone who has been unemployed or worked in the private and public bureaucracies run by the overrated and overpaid management bullies New Labour so adored. Since the 18th century, liberal and a few conservative thinkers have believed that a sturdy and autonomous citizenry that does not need to bow, beg or scrape before its alleged superiors produces the strongest society. For the record, Wilkinson and Pickett do not claim to explain “everything” – suicide, they freely admit, does not fit their pattern. They patiently and rather devastatingly answer their critics on their equality trust website – and, well, if I worked for Policy Exchange I would think carefully before throwing around accusations of shallowness in future.

In short, their book seems reasonable and fair, but that isn’t the point. The phenomenon of its success is more interesting in its way than its authors’ ideas. I went to see Andy Hull, a Labour councillor in Islington, who, like most local officials in London, is confronting vast inequalities. On the one hand, he has the Islington of popular stereotype: chi-chi restaurants and boutiques catering to City bankers and the diminishing band of liberal intellectuals who can still afford to live there. All around is the London of housing estates with terrible levels of mental illnesses, teenage pregnancy, crime and premature death. Hull has established a fairness commission and it is attracting healthy crowds to its Spirit Level meetings . The participants’ ideas are becoming very radical, very quickly. Suppose the owners of the chi-chi shops, serving the croissants or fitting the Frost-French dresses, are not paying their workers a living wage, which in London stands at a minimum £7.60 an hour. Should Labour name and shame them? Should it organise demonstrators and tell them to test the liberalism of upper-middle-class consumers by asking them to shop elsewhere?

The panic about Wilkinson and Pickett on the right suggests to me that just because we have a Conservative government does not mean we live in conservative times. For years, the right could argue that there was no alternative to an economic order that mandated dizzying and ever-expanding chasms between rich and poor. Now its order has been brought down by the wealthy men conservatives in all parties so feted, I think it realises that from now on it will not be able to shout down and shut up egalitarian arguments so easily.

Originally published here

A generous billionaire is preferable to a mean one. But Bill Gates et al could make pledges that mean more than just charity

It is surely admirable – isn’t it? – that 40 US billionaires, led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, have signed the “giving pledge” to donate half their fortunes to charity. Far better that they open their wallets to deserving causes than that they spend yet more money on yachts, carbon-emitting private jets or garish mansions. Well, yes. Salute Gates, whose foundation has already saved perhaps five million lives through the development and delivery of vaccines against diseases such as TB. Salute Buffett who says his children won’t inherit “a significant proportion” of his wealth. The filthy rich, or some of them, have shown they have a heart.

But let’s be clear. Money paid to charity is exempt from tax; the US treasury already loses at least $40bn (£25bn) a year from tax breaks for donations. So billionaires, not the democratically elected and (at least theoretically) accountable representatives of the people, get to decide on the good causes. Those who already wield enormous economic power can determine social priorities too. Of course, the poor also contribute to charity but most don’t get the tax breaks because they don’t pay income tax.

As Michael Edwards, a former World Bank adviser, asked in a study for the thinktank Demos, Small Change: Why Business Won’t Change the World: “Why should the rich and famous decide how schools are going to be reformed, or what drugs will be supplied at prices affordable to the poor, or which civil society groups get funded for their work?” And even if they give away half their money (or 99% in Buffett’s case), billionaires will still be rich. Their generosity, however, helps to legitimise inequality and head off political protest. Some of them may become even richer, because charitable giving is good marketing and, sometimes, can be used to tie recipients into buying the donors’ products and services.

You may think, if we’re talking about mosquito nets to stop children dying from malaria or drugs for HIV, that it doesn’t matter where the money comes from. In the short term, it probably doesn’t. But rich business people tend to bring their own values to charitable giving, and there’s a danger they will undermine those of the voluntary sector. One billionaire who signed the “giving pledge”, the Oracle founder Larry Ellison (worth $28bn), has said: “The profit motive could be the best tool for solving the world’s problems.”

Wealthy benefactors usually want efficiency, clearly defined targets, measurable outcomes, quick results. They tend to select charities as they would select suppliers of goods and services to their companies. Some bodies provide data that help donors decide which charities to support: in the US, for instance, GiveWell records effectiveness according to “the most lives saved for the least money”. These things aren’t necessarily wrong – many charities would benefit from more rigour – but they don’t always translate easily to the voluntary sector. They are not readily applicable to the more diffuse, long-term aims of civil society organisations, nor to their more transparent, less top-down decision-making processes. Just as market approaches carry dangers when applied to public services, so they do when applied to charities. The emphasis on “rates of return” and “value for money” may exclude people in great need who happen to be difficult to reach or, even if made fit and healthy, would be of marginal economic utility.

“Philanthrocapitalism“, as it has been called, veers towards tackling symptoms of poverty and distress rather than underlying causes. Gates has done admirable work against TB, malaria and Aids, and begun work against diarrhoea and pneumonia, which are much bigger killers. He and his wife Melinda have started to talk about clean water supplies, inadequate housing, public health infrastructure and agricultural productivity.

They are undoubtedly among the most sophisticated of the new philanthropists. But it seems doubtful they will move into considering issues of, say, land ownership and distribution. The Gates Foundation wants to “give where we can effect the greatest change”. But the greatest change is likely to come from transforming the economic system and the pattern of property ownership. Will Gates fund projects that undermine his own power and economic status?

There is another danger: that the poor are written out of their own story, that business tycoons, accustomed to getting their own way, do things to the poor, rather than with them. As Edwards sees it, business leaders threaten the distinctive values of civil society: commitment and co-operation. Great social causes, he points out, are not mobilised by the market or led by billionaires. “The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the New Deal, the Great Society – all these were pushed ahead by civil society and anchored in the power of government as a force for the public good. Business and markets play a vital role in taking these advances forward, but they are followers, not leaders.”

I repeat: we should welcome the Gates-Buffett initiative and applaud those who have joined it. Generous, public-spirited billionaires are preferable to mean ones. But remember that two-thirds of US corporations contrive to pay no federal income tax at all and that transfer pricing alone – a legal device, used, for instance, by Ellison’s Oracle Corp, that converts sales in one country to profits in another where tax liabilities are low – deprives the US treasury of $60bn annually. Such sums, which pile more taxes on the poor and reduce funds for government projects that advance the public good, dwarf what the 40 billionaires propose to give away.

If the rich really wish to create a better world, they can sign another pledge: to pay their taxes on time and in full; to stop lobbying against taxation and regulation; to avoid creating monopolies; to give their employees better wages, pensions, job protection and working conditions; to make goods and use production methods that don’t kill or maim or damage the environment or make people ill. When they put their names to that, there will be occasion not just for applause but for street parties.

Originally published here

The health secretary wants us all to contribute to reducing demand on the NHS – and he’s right, says Denis Campbell

Is Andrew Lansley happy with anything about the way healthcare is organised and delivered? It seems not. First, he produced an NHS reform white paper to radically alter Nye Bevan’s creation in ways that would horrify its founding father. Then, on Monday, he announced a major cull of health quangos. He also plans to bring a similarly unforgiving eye to public health – the messy, politically sensitive and sometimes fatal business of food, drink, drugs, smoking, infection, driving habits and sexual behaviour.

His speech on 7 July to the annual conference of the UK Faculty of Public Health (FPH) will be best remembered for his declaration that big food companies that stump up cash for the Change4Life healthy eating campaign will not face new laws controlling their marketing tactics or reformulating their products. Beyond those headlines, though, was a well-argued speech that set out how Lansley intends to rip up much of the approach to public health. As with the NHS, he insists that dissatisfaction with outcomes is his motivation, though a small state ideology does loom large. “We have to find a new approach – to think new thoughts. We need a paradigm shift,” he said.

Central to his new approach will be a reliance on more people showing more personal responsibility: eating more healthily, exercising more, no longer drinking more than is good for them and so on.

Lansley wants to reduce the growing demand on the NHS, and points out that “nearly a quarter of the deaths in this country each year result, in part at least, from the consequences of unhealthy lifestyle”. He has set himself a very big challenge. “We have to impact on demand. That means we have to change behaviour, and change people’s relationships with each other, and with drugs, alcohol, tobacco and food,” he said.

This is challenging, politically bold, stuff. Governments usually fight shy of saying too much about personal behaviour. But Lansley is right to raise issues such as the negative impact on health and wellbeing that has accompanied a decline in social and individual responsibility, and the extent to which people who end up sick can be the authors of their own misfortune. It would be better if those people who see this as a coded attack on poor people for their inferior health denied themselves the intellectual luxury of such a kneejerk, head-in-the-sand response.

Lansley is right, surely, to take issue with the message from the Foresight report on obesity that said biology and the environment are causing the growing crisis of excess weight; such denial of the role of human behaviour gives dangerously fat people an excuse for not even trying to change.

External forces explain much – poverty, nasty big food producers, poor housing, our car culture, irresponsible alcohol marketing – but are not always to blame for every ill. Some senior doctors think Lansley has a point. Whose fault is it when parents overfeed their children, causing them to become obese? Or smoke at home or in the car, potentially giving their offspring asthma?

Lansley is also right to say that: “Government cannot simply ‘deliver’ key policy outcomes to a disengaged and passive public. We cannot solve complex problems on our own – everyone has a role to play.”

It will be fascinating to see how he intends to encourage the greater discipline he says is needed. By exhortation? Unlikely, given Lansley’s rejection of “nannying and lecturing”. Through financial incentives, such as those used by primary care trusts to get people to lose weight or take a chlamydia test? Or by threat, such as making access to public healthcare conditional on behaviour change or paying charges? Lansley’s answer involves incentives such as pedometers, which increase users’ physical activity; telling smokers their “lung age”, which makes them more likely to quit; and his belief that “advertising social norms can snap people out of the fantasy that their drinking, smoking or eating habits are the same as everyone else’s”. Public health has just got personal.

Denis Campbell is the Guardian’s health correspondent.

Originally published here

The health secretary wants us all to contribute to reducing demand on the NHS – and he’s right, says Denis Campbell

Is Andrew Lansley happy with anything about the way healthcare is organised and delivered? It seems not. First, he produced an NHS reform white paper to radically alter Nye Bevan’s creation in ways that would horrify its founding father. Then, on Monday, he announced a major cull of health quangos. He also plans to bring a similarly unforgiving eye to public health – the messy, politically sensitive and sometimes fatal business of food, drink, drugs, smoking, infection, driving habits and sexual behaviour.

His speech on 7 July to the annual conference of the UK Faculty of Public Health (FPH) will be best remembered for his declaration that big food companies that stump up cash for the Change4Life healthy eating campaign will not face new laws controlling their marketing tactics or reformulating their products. Beyond those headlines, though, was a well-argued speech that set out how Lansley intends to rip up much of the approach to public health. As with the NHS, he insists that dissatisfaction with outcomes is his motivation, though a small state ideology does loom large. “We have to find a new approach – to think new thoughts. We need a paradigm shift,” he said.

Central to his new approach will be a reliance on more people showing more personal responsibility: eating more healthily, exercising more, no longer drinking more than is good for them and so on.

Lansley wants to reduce the growing demand on the NHS, and points out that “nearly a quarter of the deaths in this country each year result, in part at least, from the consequences of unhealthy lifestyle”. He has set himself a very big challenge. “We have to impact on demand. That means we have to change behaviour, and change people’s relationships with each other, and with drugs, alcohol, tobacco and food,” he said.

This is challenging, politically bold, stuff. Governments usually fight shy of saying too much about personal behaviour. But Lansley is right to raise issues such as the negative impact on health and wellbeing that has accompanied a decline in social and individual responsibility, and the extent to which people who end up sick can be the authors of their own misfortune. It would be better if those people who see this as a coded attack on poor people for their inferior health denied themselves the intellectual luxury of such a kneejerk, head-in-the-sand response.

Lansley is right, surely, to take issue with the message from the Foresight report on obesity that said biology and the environment are causing the growing crisis of excess weight; such denial of the role of human behaviour gives dangerously fat people an excuse for not even trying to change.

External forces explain much – poverty, nasty big food producers, poor housing, our car culture, irresponsible alcohol marketing – but are not always to blame for every ill. Some senior doctors think Lansley has a point. Whose fault is it when parents overfeed their children, causing them to become obese? Or smoke at home or in the car, potentially giving their offspring asthma?

Lansley is also right to say that: “Government cannot simply ‘deliver’ key policy outcomes to a disengaged and passive public. We cannot solve complex problems on our own – everyone has a role to play.”

It will be fascinating to see how he intends to encourage the greater discipline he says is needed. By exhortation? Unlikely, given Lansley’s rejection of “nannying and lecturing”. Through financial incentives, such as those used by primary care trusts to get people to lose weight or take a chlamydia test? Or by threat, such as making access to public healthcare conditional on behaviour change or paying charges? Lansley’s answer involves incentives such as pedometers, which increase users’ physical activity; telling smokers their “lung age”, which makes them more likely to quit; and his belief that “advertising social norms can snap people out of the fantasy that their drinking, smoking or eating habits are the same as everyone else’s”. Public health has just got personal.

Denis Campbell is the Guardian’s health correspondent.

Originally published here

As the World Cup organisers relish having proved their critics wrong, David Smith looks at what the media are saying now

The bunting hangs limp, the balloons sag with wrinkles, the used paper cups and plates drift to the floor on a chilly breeze. The football World Cup – greatest show on earth, most watched sporting spectacle ever, defining moment for the African renaissance – is over.

South Africa is now living inside the after-echo of the Big Bang. A giant football still hangs at OR Tambo International airport, month-old matches are replayed endlessly on ghostly TV screens and advertising billboards still welcome visitors who have long since departed. But flags are disappearing from cars and the vuvuzelas have fallen silent. The attentions of a fickle world have moved on. South Africa is already Gordon Brown.

Was it all a dream? Newspapers and television have returned to more familiar territory. An unarmed man shot dead by police when he failed to stop his car. Foreign nationals on the run from xenophobic attacks. Bitter power struggles inside Julius Malema’s African National Congress youth league. Nelson Mandela’s 92nd birthday.

There has also been much ruminating on what the World Cup jamboree meant for the country and whether the legacy will last. Nearly everyone has marvelled at a triumph that surpassed even the dreamers’ expectations, disrupted a centuries-old narrative of Africa as passive and incompetent, and raised the bar for politicians to now deliver housing, jobs and schools.

Some have relished cocking a snook at the British media and what was seen as its unrelenting negativity about South Africa’s ability to play host. Political cartoons have depicted tabloid journalists being forced to eat humble pie.

Mninawa Ntloko, the sports editor of Business Day newspaper, branded them “tiresome vultures”, a “mob” and “mean-spirited schmucks” who’d “all gotten it into their thick craniums that SA would make a mess of the World Cup”. He grumbled last week: “The worst of these hyenas would assemble outside press conference rooms in packs and discuss ways to unsettle the panel after organising committee board meetings.”

But I wonder if it’s such a simple case of “I told you so”. Those who complained about the British media always tended to cite three of its stories in particular: the mortal threat posed to fans by “machete race gangs”; fears that South Africa would be devastated by an earthquake; the ominous presence of killer snakes near England’s training camp.

The first two of these appeared in the Daily Star, not exactly the inflight journal of Air Force One; the third was in the Sun. The stories rampaged across the web and went global within minutes. But the vast middle ground of British media coverage was less sensational, more moderate and often more positive and therefore eminently less tweetable, so disappeared under most South Africans’ radar.

It could also be said that, not for the first time, a sceptical media kept those in power on their toes. In defence of South Africa’s own press coverage, a leader in Business Day argued: “In fact, there is a credible argument to be made that one of the key motivators behind SA’s successful organisation of the World Cup was the knowledge that there were plenty of critics who were convinced we would fail.”

But many commentators gave credit where it was due, while pondering what next. Here are some other World Cup reflections from here and abroad that stood out for me:

“I’ve been to watch loads of games at the stadiums, but by far the best memory I take away from the World Cup was the atmosphere at Melrose Arch, in Joburg, during the South Africa-France game. From what I saw there, and from the reports of friends and fellow journalists who have taken part in joyous events of this kind up and down the country, I’d like to ask a question: ‘If South Africa is not a united country, then what country is?’”

– John Carlin, Saturday Star

“As host of the most-watched sporting event on earth, South Africa set out to reinvent itself in the eyes of the world, casting off its reputation as a place defined by violent crime, poverty and Aids. To a remarkable degree, it succeeded. But as the World Cup ended Sunday, what most surprised South Africans was how much the month-long sporting extravaganza had changed the way they see themselves.

“‘This World Cup brought out South Africa’s better angels,’ said Shaun Johnson, a writer who leads a charitable foundation that Nelson Mandela helped establish. ‘In this country, so riven racially, it’s unbelievable how much this World Cup has brought us together.’”

– Celia Dugger, New York Times

“And so the burning question in South Africa at the moment is this: Why, if the state can build stadiums on time and deliver a World Cup to Fifa, can it not treat its citizens with similar respect and efficiency? Unfortunately, it is far harder to restructure the economy to provide jobs, or to solve the crime crisis, than it is to build a stadium or an airport. The World Cup is a bit like a wartime economy: the skills acquired and the capital invested might indeed boost the economy, but they are not necessarily transferable to a peacetime environment.”

– Mark Gevisser, The Guardian

“The Soviet Union, 1917 to 1990, was a miserable failure that condemned its own people to poverty and humiliation. But it did send the first man into space and produced the world’s best ballet. On certain occasions it could concentrate all of its energy into a few projects of high status, sacrificing everything else.

“Is South Africa like that? As our education, public safety and public health fails for our own people, are we as a country happy to make great sacrifices for the success of an international sporting event to impress other people?”

– Andrew Kenny, The Citizen

“Pride and confidence are hard things to measure. But in recent years, South Africa seems to have been running low on both. The magic of the Mandela era has been wearing off.

“But over the past month, the change I’ve seen has been remarkable.

“White families – faces painted with the national flag – have ventured on to buses and into black townships for the very first time – giddy with the sense of discovering their own country.

“Immigrants from around the continent have rubbed shoulders in crowded bars. Sharp-dressed Congolese, laid-back Zimbabweans, rowdy Ghanaians with their drums and body paint. All united by a rare, but tangible sense of pan-African unity.

“Then there are the fans from further afield – shocked to find, as one columnist put it here, that they’re more likely to be killed by kindness than by criminals in South Africa.”

– Andrew Harding, BBC

Originally published here

The intangibility of mental illness, the lack of a definitive test, provides opportunities for exploitation. Enter the government, says Clare Allan

The government’s plan to force everyone receiving disability living allowance (DLA) to undergo a medical assessment is deeply misguided. If allowed to go ahead, the consequences could be catastrophic for people with mental health problems.

Looked at alongside George Osborne’s assault on incapacity benefit, capping of housing benefit (it was the Conservatives whose abolition of rent controls led to soaring rents in the first place), and the decision to link benefit rates to the consumer prices index instead of the retail prices index, it is hard to escape the conclusion that these changes constitute a cynical attempt on the part of the coalition government to manipulate public prejudice towards those least able to speak up for themselves.

Around half of all people claiming benefits because of illness have mental health problems. The cost of providing for them is considerable. And essential. Any decent society should be urgently concerned with ensuring those affected receive the support they need to lead full and rewarding lives.

In some cases, this will involve working with people to help them develop the skills and confidence they need to return to the workplace or to enter it for the first time. Where such schemes exist, they are largely confined to the voluntary sector, often run by people with personal experience of the challenges involved, and always oversubscribed.

It is a fallacy, and a deeply offensive one, that people with mental health problems do not want to work. According to a report published in 2004 by the Social Exclusion Unit, mentally ill people have the highest “want to work” rate of any disability group. It also found that fewer than four in 10 employers would consider offering a job to someone with a history of mental illness.

Providing people with the help they need, and addressing the stigma that holds them back, is no easy task. It takes time, thought and significant financial investment. How much easier to harness the stigma and turn it to political advantage! The welfare system is overrun with work-shy benefit cheats. The “allegedly disabled” (as Jeremy Paxman put it recently on Newsnight) are living it up on taxpayers’ money, claiming benefits to which they are not entitled. We must reassess everyone, weed out the scroungers! What objection could anyone have? Unless they’re cheating.

Let’s think about that. DLA exists to help those with serious long-term health problems pay for the additional support they need as a result of their condition. It is not means tested. Many working people receive DLA. It is often DLA that enables them to work. It isn’t easy to get. Claimants must complete a lengthy and personal form covering everything from toileting needs to suicidal urges. A statement is required from the claimant’s doctor as well as someone who knows them well – often, in the case of psychiatric patients, their social worker or community psychiatric nurse. Fewer than half of all claims are successful.

Now, with the openly stated aim of reducing the benefit bill, the government will employ its own assessors to decide who is worthy of help. NHS psychiatrists, who have the right to deny people liberty and to medicate them against their will, are not to be trusted when it comes to providing an accurate statement of an individual’s support needs.

As history has shown, the intangibility of mental illness, the lack of a definitive test, provides opportunities for exploitation. Unmarried mothers, troublesome offspring, homosexuals, all have been detained in psychiatric hospitals. “Proof” of mental health or ill health is impossible to provide. An assessment inevitably involves a subjective judgment on the part of the assessor. And when the assessor has an outside agenda – reducing the benefits bill, say – the lack of objective proof leaves mentally ill people vulnerable.

The awkward truth is that mental health problems are real. They cannot be bullied or wished away. If support is removed, this doesn’t mean support is not required. It means that as a society we have chosen to look away. We must not allow this to happen. The fight is on.

• Clare Allan is an author and writes on mental health issues.

Originally published here

Carole Jahme shines the cold light of evolutionary psychology on readers’ problems. This week: Love, sex and masturbation

From an anonymous male, aged 40+
I have been in several very loving, amorous, “serious” relationships as an adult, none frivolous and none (at least on a conscious level – who the hell knows what’s going on with me subconsiously) with the intention of being short-term.

Inevitably, however, my sexual attraction for my partner wanes to the point where we become virtually non-sexual. This can happen in less that a year after the relationship started. This condition consistently contributes to the relationship falling apart. My emotional feeling of love stays constant, and the breakup is traumatic for both of us. Add to the mix my undeniable enjoyment of and never-failing satisfaction with masturbation, and it seems to be a recipe for disaster. Is there an evolutionary take on any of this?

Carole replies:
Trying to sustain a long-term relationship that is also sexual presents humans with a chemical catch-22.

Studies on the length of relationships have shown that couples in harmonious, stable and trusting long-term relationships have higher blood levels of oxytocin (a chemical that regulates attachment, promotes cooperation and facilitates sensations of joy and love) than people who are not in compatible relationships.¹ These happy couples also reap other benefits in terms of longer lifespan, lower rates of alcoholism, depression and illness, and more rapid recovery after accidental injury.^2,3,4

But there are conflicting chemicals at work in sexual relationships that sometimes prevent them from ever becoming long-term. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the limbic system – the brain’s primitive reward centre. It mediates both the sex drive and addiction to drugs. Brain scans have shown that the rapid rise in dopamine levels during orgasm is similar to that seen in a heroin high.⁵ But dopamine falls rapidly following orgasm in both males and females and is replaced with rising levels of a hormone called prolactin.

Both are part of the brain’s “dopaminergic” reward system.

At first, rising prolactin causes sleepy post-orgasm contentment. (Interestingly the amount of prolactin produced is far greater after sex with a partner than after masturbation. Thus there is little prolactin relief for those who masturbate.) But once this sleepy feeling of satiation has passed, prolactin may go on rising and cause problems for couples wanting to sustain a long-term sexual relationship. In both men and women excess levels of prolactin can cause loss of libido, anxiety, headaches, mood swings and depression.⁶

High prolactin is associated with sensations of despair. When the prolactin levels of newly caged wild monkeys were monitored, the hormone was seen to rise once the animals realised they were trapped.⁷ Levels of the hormone were much higher in monkeys incarcerated for months compared with wild animals that had only just been caged. Science has yet to determine how long prolactin continues to rise and remain high in humans after orgasm, so this is speculative, but in a relationship with lots of sex it could mean levels are elevated for weeks or even months.

How does all this tie in with your predilection for maturbation? There have been some illuminating studies of this behaviour in non-human primates. It has been found, for example, that male monkeys who masturbate tend to be of low status, whereas high-status male monkeys are likely only to experience ejaculation during sex.⁸ It also seems that the frequency of masturbation is higher in captive primates than in wild animals. You can make of this what you will.

The dopaminergic system varies among humans, some people exhibiting more reward-seeking behaviour than others, and this may go some way towards explaining why many relationships are burnt out after a year.⁹ In reproductive terms, 12 months is long enough for fertilisation to take place. It is also certainly long enough for prolactin levels to rise. Once your libido flags and anxiety sets in, the short-term reward gained from masturbating may give you a dopamine “high” without risking bringing on that post-orgasmic prolactin “low”.

Chemical compatibility is essential to all good relationships. Couples lucky enough to enjoy long-term partnerships may have similar sex drives (perhaps not too much sex, or even none at all?) and dopaminergic systems that don’t flood their bodies with too much prolactin. Human behaviour seems to be under the control of two evolutionary programs: one that results in fertilisation, disillusionment and a series of partners, and the other that enables humans to develop the lasting relationships that lead to long, happy and healthy lives.

References
1. Carter, SC (1998) Neuroendocrine perspectives on social attachment and love. Psychoneuroendocrinology; 23(8): 779-818.
2. DeVries, C, Glasper, ER (2005) Social structure influences effects of pair-housing on wound healing. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity; 19(1): 61-68.
3. Coan, JA et al (2006) Lending a hand: social regulation of the neural response to threat. Psychological Science, A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science; 17(12): 1032-1039.
4. Holden, AEC et al (2008) The influence of depression on sexual risk reduction and STD infection in a controlled, randomized intervention trial. Journal of Sexually Transmitted Diseases; 35(10): 898-904.
5. Holstege, G et al (2003) Brain activation during human male ejaculation. The Journal of Neuroscience; 23(27): 9185-9193.
6. Heaton, JPW (2003) Prolactin: An integral player in hormonal politics. Contemporary Urology; 15: 17-25.
7. Suleman, BVM, Mbaruk, A et al. (2004) Physiologic manifestations of stress from capture and restraint of free-ranging male African green monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops). Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine; 35(1): 20-24.
8. Thomsen, R, Soltis, J (2004) Male masturbation in free-ranging Japanese macaques. International Journal of Primatology; 25(5): 0164-0291.
9. Guo, G, Tong, Y et al (2007) Dopamine transporter, gender, and number of sexual partners among young adults. European Journal of Human Genetics; 15: 279–287.

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Carole is UK-based and as such any advice she gives is intended for a UK audience only.

Originally published here