Brontides

A couple of days ago, a Palestinian man got convicted for rape by deception in Israel. The bare facts of the case are this. The man met an Israeli woman in a bar. The two got to talking, and during the course of the conversation the man directly claimed to be Israeli. The two spent the night together; explicit consent was given, and that consent was not made explicitly dependent on the man being an Israeli. Later, the woman discovered that the man was, in fact, an Arab, and prosecuted him for rape by deception.

This is a complex situation, clearly, and large sections of the internet have devoted considerable time to overreaching in search of hard conclusions. Mondoweiss, for example, which does this by raising false equivalences. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera calls it “the selective application of the law against Arabs” and “just plain racism.” Even Feministe concludes that “there are certain circumstances where rape by fraud is a legitimate claim” but “this… is not one of them, and opens the door to even greater abuses.”

One thing is clear: the crime of rape by deception is a legitimate complaint, and not in an abstract sense. Cases have been successfully prosecuted where the man has lied about his sexual health, passing HIV onto his partner; where a man posed as a senior official and promised increased social security payments in exchange for sex; and where a woman consented to sex with a man who she believed to be her boyfriend but was actually her boyfriend’s brother. The statute is not used for situations where a man, say, claimed to be 27 when he’s actually 25, or a woman who claims to be a supermodel in a bar.

For many, though, the overtly racist nature of the complaint seems to be the deciding factor. My own personal feeling is perhaps dangerously relativistic, but my gut tells me that racism needs to be viewed through a different prism when dealing with Israel and Palestine. From a western perspective, the explicitly racial justification for the suit can be nauseating; but then, racial issues – although by no means defused in Europe or America – are less of an immediate concern than they are in the Levant. It is impossible not to decry the institutional racism and xenophobic nationalist tribalism exhibited by both Israeli and Arab political and social elements.

But the heart of this case isn’t an abstract principle; it’s rooted in personal actions and responses. The woman felt genuinely and legitimately deceived and violated. That in itself isn’t enough to determine guilt of course. What is, however, is the fact that the man knew that the deception was of decisive magnitude and did it anyway. The problem here is that the man chose to tell a lie of sufficient magnitude to deny the woman the opportunity to give consent. That the woman’s objection to the deception was racist in nature is vile but to some extent beside the point.

In many ways, Israel and – to a lesser extent – the occupied territories (particularly the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip) are fundamentally racist. They are societies constructed on a nationalist ideal, defined by opposition to an alien “other”. Widespread societal changes are needed to prevent citizens of Israel from viewing non-Israeliness as a defining flaw. But the fact remains that, for now, it is a defining flaw, and that fact is a factor that must have been known to the defendant.

As much as it galls me, I have to accept that in this case the verdict was probably correct.

EDIT: For an interesting comparative, check out how rape is handled in the UAE.

How far should a government go in order to safeguard its citizens?

Two stories have emerged concurrently that cast the question into new light. While most citizens tend to be happy with the theoretical notion of covert defence, security agencies usually try to keep the visceral practicalities of that defence obscured, as support for their methods often vanishes like spit on a hot rock when exposed to the full scrutiny of public opinion.

Yesterday, I discussed the story of Shahram Amiri the Iranian who was kidnapped by / defected to the CIA in 2009. To my chagrin, the post was overtaken by events almost as soon as it was posted; Amiri was flown back to Iran and has started to talk about the events that led to his disappearance:

Speaking to Al Jazeera during a transit stop in Qatar, Shahram Amiri said he was interrogated for 14 months by US agents who refused to allow him contact with his family, but that he “never cracked” and had not revealed any secret information about Iran’s nuclear programme.

Washington has denied the claims, saying Amiri had lived freely in the US, had himself reached out to US officials, and was free to come and go.

[..]

“They gave me a shot which made me unconscious and then transferred me to the US onboard a military plane,” Amiri said in Tehran, before making allegations that he was tortured during interrogations in the US.

“Within the first two months, I was subjected to fierce mental and psychological torture by agents and interrogators from the US Central Intelligence Agency.”

Speaking to Al Jazeera during his journey back to Iran, Amiri said he had been forced by US authorities to say in a video released on the internet that he was enjoying life in the state of Arizona.

Although it seems unlikely that the US will receive the censure it deserves for this, it is still unquestionably a scandal of severe proportions. The US government kidnapped a man on a religious pilgrimage, held him against his will for over a year and subjected him to torture and coercion. The man in question was not a military target, nor even a political one. Both the US and Iran deny that he was involved in the country’s nuclear programme, so whatever paltry justification the CIA may have had has become noticeably thinner.

Meanwhile, this morning the Guardian is reporting that the UK has also been complicit in kidnapping and torture, this time of its own citizens. The Guardian has helpfully highlighted many of the key passages, but the entire document is worth reading.

A few thoughts emerge from this. Firstly, dragging these revelations into the light of day is hard and the organisations that have done so deserve to be praised. Iran will probably not receive any credit for this in the wider world, but by doggedly and tenaciously pursuing the fate of its citizen it exposed a cruel double-standard at the heart of America’s security apparatus. Here in the UK, civil liberties organisations such as Liberty and, in particular, Reprieve deserve a tremendous amount of credit for their lobbying and legal action in exposing the worst excesses of the government in the early days of the Global War on Terror. These organisations should be celebrated for their achievements and offered every support.

Secondly, citizens should not be content to give abstract permissions to government in any situation, let alone one as broad-ranging as security and defense. We have an obligation to understand exactly what is being done in our name, and if we don’t ensure that the government is acting in accordance with our wishes then we are complicit in whatever acts they undertake.

Third, it is distressing that this is so unsurprising.

That’s Shahram Amiri.

Mr. Amiri is an Iranian who vanished while on hajj in 2009. What happened to him is a mystery. A video released by the Iranian government in June suggested that he was an Iranian nuclear scientist, that he had been kidnapped by the CIA and tortured, and that he was being held within the US against his will. In a concurrent video, a person who appears to be the same man explains that he wasn’t kidnapped – he moved to the US of his own volition, to complete his PhD. Further muddying the waters was this ABC report, which cited unnamed CIA officials, and which claimed that Amiri is a nuclear scientist, but that he defected to the CIA of his own free will.

That’s the straightforward bit.

Yesterday morning, both the Pakistani and Iranian governments claimed that he had taken refuge in Pakistan’s Washington embassy – which serves Iran’s interests in America in the absence of its own diplomatic mission – and was trying to get home. America flatly denied the claim, however, and Wired’s Danger Room blog has a repudiation from a spokesperson at the Pakistani embassy.

But a Pakistani embassy official tells Danger Room that the reports of Amiri turning up in the embassy are ”incorrect information” and “we have no one here” matching his description. That’s from an individual at the press office who didn’t identify herself and said she could not speak for the record. She added she couldn’t explain why a spokesman for the Pakistani Foreign Ministry in Islamabad told reporters that the scientist is at the embassy’s Iranian interest section, about two miles away from the main facility in D.C.’s Glover Park neighborhood. But she also didn’t split hairs: “He’s not in the embassy at all.”

That said, the Iranian interest section is staffed by Iranians, not Pakistanis. A spokesman for the Iranian interest section, Ali Shahrazi, tells Danger Room, “When we arrived this morning, [Amiri] was here.” He dodged a question about whether the Pakistanis assisted in Amiri’s alleged arrival, saying that it was the job of Iranian staff to help Iranian nationals. But there are lots of questions remaining about Amiri’s true identity, to say nothing of his whereabouts.

What to make of this? Firstly, if you think that the CIA isn’t trying to abduct Iranian scientists and hold them against their will then you’re out of your mind. The only question is, would they do so so badly? If true, this shows a frightening lack of finesse, not least in allowing the captured scientist the liberty to broadcast his unexpurgated thoughts onto YouTube, and then permitting him to wander into Pakistan’s embassy unimpeded. Also, the still above – of Amiri’s pro-Merican-version video – is so obviously staged it hurts. The chess set? The globe, artfully set to show America on its visible face? The warm, structured lighting rig (note how the light illuminates Amiri on the face, despite the low, mood-lighting behind)? C’mon, you can almost see the camera crew and military escort just offstage.

On the other hand, this could quite easily be an Iranian stitch-up, although it would be hard to see the benefit to Iran to escalate the story to the level that it has unless it had something worth revealing.

One thing is for sure, though, and that is that you couldn’t pay me enough money to be an Iranian nuclear scientist. Wherever he is right now, I’m quite sure that Mr Amiri is wishing for nothing more than a quiet life.

EDIT: Looks like answers may be forthcoming, as he’s on his way home.

The coalition government is making many of the right noises when it comes to civil liberties in the UK. Unpicking the authoritarian streak that Labour exhibited during its years in power is a worthwhile task that shouldn’t be trivialised, but the debate surrounding civil liberties is still defined by the rigid limits set out by those who enjoy many of the greatest privileges.

The list of areas to be targeted describes a largely positive direction of travel. ID cards and biometric passports are to be scrapped; the fingerprinting of children at schools is to be curtailed. Government databases are to be pruned back. FOI is to be extended; libel laws will be reviewed to protect freedom of speech; CCTV is to be regulated. A “Great Repeal Bill” promises to cut through swathes of redundant and obstructive legislation; in an email to his supporters, Nick Clegg suggested that the bill would

…roll back Labour’s surveillance state, scrapping ID cards, the children’s database and restoring civil liberties.

In areas like education, health and policing people are going to get much greater powers over the services in their area. And we are going to hand more powers to communities and councils.

All very fine and worthy. But the proposals are geared overwhelmingly towards a single section of society as beneficiaries. ID cards and CCTV are middle-class concerns. Freedoms of information and speech can be seen as a stimulus package for Britain’s already over-eager newspaper industries and will result in ever-more salacious stories for their largely middle-class audiences. The power to modify the services offered by schools, hospitals and local police forces are dogwhistle sops to Middle Britain. And while the exact form of the Great Repeal Bill is yet to be revealed, it seems unlikely to tackle such personal infringements as stop-and-search, the Dangerous Dogs Act, control orders, or ASBOs, which tend to target the poorer sections of society disproportionately.

But even the wild class disparity in the conversation is mild compared to the glaring hole that exists when talking about the most disadvantaged groups of all: political and economic migrants, and asylum seekers (the treatment of whom can be particularly inhumane). While the government’s commitment to reversing extended detention without trial is a big, and welcome, improvement, ASBOs in particular continue to be used as a method of suppressing dissent, as in this account from 2006:

Recently, at a demonstration outside Harmondsworth detention centre in solidarity with asylum seekers, I was hemmed in with 50 other protestors when the police used powers under section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986 to impose a blanket Asbo on anyone who tried to get near the buildings.

They then used powers under section 50 of the Police Reform Act 2002, which makes it an offence to refuse to give your name and address to a police officer who “reasonably suspects” that you have engaged in “anti-social behaviour”. A few people who refused were arrested.

This was no violent protest, and there was no threat to public order or anyone’s personal safety. But the demonstration gave the police an opportunity to use the laws to collect intelligence on “troublemakers”, without having to show that they had actually made any trouble.

This is particularly germane on the day in which the Parliament Square protestors lost their legal right to express their views – thanks to a decidedly illiberal misuse of existing powers.

The discussion on civil liberties in the UK remains too enmired in privilege. Part of this is because libertarians strongly tend to be middle class, white and male; their political preferences tend to reflect their (often unchallenged) social biases and privileges. Part of it, too, is because Labour have consistently chosen not to make social freedom a cause that they would fight for on behalf of the working classes, leaving it as a policy ground for the Lib Dems and the Tories – parties with their roots firmly in the middle classes – to scoop up.

But whatever the reason for the disparity, there is an opportunity now for the civil rights of all sections of society to be strengthened and extended. It requires that we not allow the discussion to be limited to those rights enjoyed by those who already enjoy entrenched rights and securities, whose political access is already entrenched. The work of organisations like Liberty needs greater support and needs to be extended to ensure that human dignity is respected at all levels of society. The rights enjoyed by well-off British citizens, while by no means complete, are some of the most extensive in the history of the world. It behoves us to extend those rights as far through our culture as is conceivably possible.

Nearly 26 years ago, the Bhopal plant of an Indian subsidiary of Union Carbide, a massive US corporation, suffered a catastrophic malfunction. The storage containers of the plant – which produced industrial pesticides – leaked highly toxic gas during the night, exposing over 500,000 people to the poisonous fumes. Estimates into the effects vary – the Indian government confirmed nearly two and a half thousand deaths immediately after the leak, and fatalities related to the incident have swelled to over 15,000 since then. The company continues to insist that the disaster was the result of sabotage, but successive studies have pointed to a wide array of internal processes that led to the leak, including a negligent approach to critical equipment and safety standards. Most shockingly, the plant has still not been entirely fixed – 390 tons of toxic chemicals abandoned at the UCIL plant continue to leak and pollute the groundwater in the region.

I’m not going to attempt to replicate the work of the many journalists and academics who have been working to uncover the truth of this case for nearly three decades. The Bhopal Post does outstanding work bringing the unfolding effects of the disaster to a wider audience, while Amnesty has consistently agitated for justice. Unfortunately, the Bhopal victims’ days in court so far have delivered anything but. Union Carbide has so far paid just $470 million in damages and compensation, a criminally small sum in the face of the $3 billion claimed. Those officials who were tried for criminal negligence received small sentences – 2 years each. Warren Anderson, the head of Union Carbide at the time and the figure most widely blamed for the incident, was allowed to escape trial for reasons that remain unclear.

The incident has exposed some measure of hypocrisy on behalf of the US government when it comes to corporate crime. Union Carbide paid $470 million to clean up its mess, compensate half a million victims and build hospitals in the region. By contrast, BP have pledged $20 billion to clean up the Deepwater Horizon spill.

These two cases bring to mind a proposition, put forward by a British lawyer, that “ecocide” be considered a crime to be tried in the International Criminal Court, on a par with genocide and other crimes against humanity. As described, the suggestion seems whimsical at best:

The radical idea would have a profound effect on industries blamed for widespread damage to the environment like fossil fuels, mining, agriculture, chemicals and forestry.

Supporters of a new ecocide law also believe it could be used to prosecute “climate deniers” who distort science and facts to discourage voters and politicians from taking action to tackle global warming and climate change.

But the idea of a system of corporate responsibility that can be prosecuted at an international level is an intriguing one. It would, sadly, almost certainly be opposed by the US, which would regard it as a hostile mechanism for attacking American corporate interests. Sadly, it’s hard to see how justice can be served to those still suffering in Bhopal.

In the run-up to yesterday’s UK budget, the left wing of the internet – a cocoon that I comfortably inhabit – made merry with its buzzphrase du jour. No shock doctrine for Britain! we hear from such twitterlectuals (and Green Party luminaries – many of the most vocal Green activists have been really going for the Lib Dems of late – but that’s another post) as Sian Berry and Adam Ramsay. Now, look; the budget was painful. We all got hosed, the poor proportionally more than the rich. And the government spin hasn’t been even remotely coherent; even the usually credible Lynne Featherstone came over all loyally dishonest.

But “shock doctrine” is one of those phrases that just annoys me. It annoys me all the more because it comes from the left – a space which I nominally occupy – but yet is such a deeply incoherent piece of intellectual padding.

It was popularised by Naomi Klein in her 2007 The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, in which she argued that free-market capitalists and their political backers have used, and occasionally manufactured, crises and disasters in order to inflict social change on populations that are unwilling to accept them but unable to resist, due to the aforementioned upheaval. The term gained traction on the left after the Haiti quake, when the US right-wing Heritage Foundation caused an uproar by suggesting that aid be tied to economic reforms. Here’s Adam Ramsay again:

News stories about Haiti are full of tales of looters. There’s less talk of a bigger scale plunder to come. In Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine‘ she maps the rise of “disaster capitalism”. She describes how, over 40 years, The International Monetary Fund (IMF), Pentagon, and various mega-corporations have increasingly used (or created) disasters as an excuse to push through unpopular right wing economic policies, and asset strip vulnerable economies.

I was just finishing this book on Thursday as the scale of Haiti’s earthquake was becoming clear. My immediate fear was an obvious one. So I did what all young lefties do in a time of crisis. I set up a Facebook group: “No Shock Doctrine for Haiti”.

I plucked that quote a little bit selectively but it illustrates my first problem with the term and its use: shock doctrine is a methodology seeking application. Exponents of the theory tend to force this most fashionable of ideas onto situations rather than respond to the unique characteristics of an individual incidents. The book, for example, rests on the idea that the policies of free marketeers tend not to be very popular. For the most part this is unarguable – even Milton Friedman would concede as much – but in her zeal to apply her theory to every possible case Klein makes some dramatic reaches. Apparently, Hurricane Katrina led to the “privatisation” of New Orleans against the will of the population; however, the reforms imposed on New Orleans were structural and mostly welcomed by a population frustrated by lazy and corrupt local government. Haiti is another example of this; although tying catastrophe aid to any kind of condition would have been horrifically wrong, measures to curtail corruption and establish good governance in one of the world’s poorest countries would have enjoyed overwhelming local support. Klein’s depiction of the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis as a conflict between grasping capitalists and honourable democrats shows a profound lack of historical understanding, and her claim that the protests crushed in Tiananmen Square were against further market freedom is based on pure ignorance. And those are just the cases that stretch credibility; the claims that Margaret Thatcher fabricated the Falklands War as a way of breaking the unions shatters it irrevocably.

The second problem is to do with the way that the argument is cased. At one level, the problem is that the issue is mischaracterised as being a tool used purely by the right wing to advance their corporatist goals. In truth, the technique of using a crisis to drive policy reform is as popular on the left as it is on the right. The New Deal in America was launched on an unwilling society as a result of the Great Depression; the great social reforms in the UK of the late forties and early fifties, which led to the formation of the NHS, arose off the back of the post-war slump; Barack Obama used the current economic collapse to the same ends. Blair and Brown spent much of their respective times in office extending the powers of the state, evoking the spectre of terrorism and war as justification.

But this gap masks a deeper problem with the argument, which is the assumption that governments should not use crises as a way of driving social change. It’s predicated on a somewhat condescending lack of faith in populations; it assumes that electorates, struck numb by catastrophe, are unable to resist the snake-oil of perfidious political salesmen. In fact, crises inspire rare moments of national unity; often these moments arise because the crisis in question has exposed a policy failing or fault that simply needs to be corrected, and the correction of which is obvious. Thatcher had to break the power of the unions; whether she needed to do so quite so thoroughly is an open question, but most even on the left now assume that the unions were too powerful, and that to persist in allowing them to run entire industries was a path to economic and social ruin. New Zealand, Chile and Brazil abandoned socialistic policies for freer markets because the former weren’t working well and induced economic crises.

There is some limited value to some of the ideas contained within the term “shock doctrine”. Attaching conditions to Haiti aid, for example, would clearly have been grossly wrong, and those who suggested it were rightly excoriated. The term itself, however, masks deep intellectual failings that continue to undermine the legitimacy of left-wing economic arguments. There is plenty to debate in the new UK budget; the rise in VAT, for example, will be economically and politically unpopular for some time to come. Branding it as “shock doctrine” is ludicrous and shrill, and will neither advance the debate nor grow the left-wing base in opposition.

Naomi Klein, meanwhile, remains an extremely poor role model for the left, and in an ideal world would join Michael Moore on the island of left-wing intellectual rejects. Honestly, we can be much better than this.

Intrigue, as the New York Times popped up this morning with a story about how Afghanistan is sitting on a trillion dollars worth of mineral wealth, including massive deposits of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and lithium.

There’s a few different aspects to this story. Michael Cohen is peeved by the somewhat cynical exploitation of the story by the Pentagon, and he has a point – there’s nothing new about this haul. The US found charts detailing the country’s mineral wealth in 2004, and even put the details online in 2007, but these charts had been drawn up during the Soviet occupation of the country in the 1980s. The reason why this story is in the paper today is because the Pentagon needs a good news cycle or two. There’s may be a little bit more to it than that; it may be that the US needs a way to strongarm co-operation out of the Karzai government in Kabul. But either way, this is pretty transparent.

Afghanistan has been a rough war almost since its inception, but the last few months have been particularly bad:

First, let’s talk about Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president. Remember the chatter earlier this year about how he’d gone crazy, threatening to join the Taliban and all that? That discussion died down a little after Karzai checked all the right boxes during his May visit to Washington.

Then came the “peace jirga” — after which Karzai abruptly fired his intelligence and interior ministers, reputed to be two of the most competent members of his cabinet (technically, they resigned). The intelligence minister, Amrullah Saleh, told his side of the Friday in a jaw-dropping interview with the Times. According to Saleh, Karzai no longer believes the West can win the war and is looking to cast his lot with Pakistan and the Taliban, and an unnamed source told the paper that Karzai had suggested that the Americans had carried out a rocket attack on the peace jirga. Karzai has apparently also asked the United Nations to remove Mullah Omar from a key U.N. blacklist.

Next came revelations that Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence agency, the ISI, is still deeply involved with the Afghan Taliban (yeah, blow me over with a feather) despite heated denials to the contrary.

Meanwhile, the drive for Kandahar looks to be stalled in the face of questionable local support for Karzai’s government, the Taliban is killing local authorities left and right, and the corruption situation has apparently gotten so bad that the U.S. intelligence community is now keeping tabs on which Afghan officials are stealing what.

So the article is a piece of empty puff, right? Well, yes, actually – the US can’t develop those resources now for the same reason that it hasn’t been able to for the last 6 years, and for much the same reasons as why Russia didn’t bother in the 1980s: there’s a war, there’s no infrastructure, and the local government is so corrupt that it would have next to no real economic effect. The worst-case outcome, as advanced by Cohen, is a situation analogous to Congo or Angola – both of which are resource-rich but economically poor. The best case seems to be that Afghanistan becomes a “Saudi Arabia of lithium”, which comes from a Pentagon memo that asserts the possibility like it’s a good thing. Personally, I’d prefer it if Saudi Arabia stopped being the Saudi Arabia of oil, rather than inspiring a glut of new Saudi Arabias for the rest of the periodic table.

It’s nice to hear that Afghanistan has an economic future, if it ever gets to the point where it has a government that is capable of managing it for the good of the country as a whole. But it’s pie-in-the-sky stuff, for now; I’d be amazed if it gets to that stage in our lifetimes, and it certainly won’t get to that point while American boots are still on the ground. Meanwhile, public opinion, both at home and in Afghanistan itself, won’t shift behind the occupiers until real, tangible benefits to their presence start being felt. The US military should be focusing on doing what it has to do rather than indulging in this kind flippancy.

I’m posting this, an article about an economist with some unusual ideas about poor world economic alleviation, relatively uncritically.

The central conceit of the article is the work of Paul Romer, a Senior Fellow at Stanford and successful software entrepreneur. Mr. Romer wants to build a series of what he calls “charter cities” – cities run by rich-world governments on land loaned to them by poor-world countries. The article invokes two models – Hong Kong under the British and Lübeck under Henry III of Saxony. If you think that the idea sounds wacky, then you’re not alone. It is a decidedly odd proposition, but for all that it inspires a certain sense of moral abhorrence, it’s an interesting thought experiment, and deserves to be examined for its merits.

His solution may be unconventional, but his diagnosis is complex and mostly rings true. Although an awful lot of poverty can be traced back to underlying causes – corruption, a lack of resources, an unskilled workforce, rich world privilege or weak distribution networks – one feature that is common to almost all poor societies is weak governance.

To drive home the importance of good rules to economic growth, Romer sometimes shows a photograph of Guinean teenagers doing their homework under streetlights. The line of hunched, concentrating figures presents a mystery, Romer says; from the photo it is clear that the teens are not dirt poor, and youths like these generally own cell phones. Yet they evidently have no electric light at home, or they would not be studying by the curbside. “So here is the puzzle,” Romer declares: Why do these kids have access to a cutting-edge technology like the cell phone, but not to a 100-year-old technology for generating electric light in the home? The answer, in a word, is rules. Because of misguided price controls in the teenagers’ country, the local electricity utility has no incentive to connect their houses to the power grid. Their society lacks the rules that make technological advance meaningful.

The Atlantic’s article is subject to the usual sloppy editorialism – the reason why many poor-world homes lack access to electricity cannot solely be reduced to rules, as it will also have roots in infrastructural weakness, high energy generation costs and old-fashioned sleaze. But Romer’s charter cities are more nuanced than that; not only are they intended to provide governance models that will have a pervasive effect throughout localities, they are also intended to act as mediums through which richer countries can funnel defensive stability, money and expertise into a populace.

So the idea has some merit, to the extent that it attacks some of the problems that it sets out to solve in a way that traditional aid does not. Frustratingly, the Atlantic’s article is a puff-piece, and makes very little attempt to examine the further problems that it potentially raises:

1. What country would willingly allow a project like this to take place on their land? Forget the problems implied by corruption – countries with poor governance tend to have poor governors, and western cities on the doorsteps of corrupt officials would cause unwanted scrutiny, provide a safe haven for anti-government sentiment and act as a drain on public purses intended for skimming. The colonial period demonstrated that local populations resent foreign dominance immensely. The anger and distrust that the example of Hong Kong engendered cannot be understated.
2. So if willing assent can be discounted, can it be assumed that charter cities will be imposed by force? Hong Kong was seized; Lübeck was rescued from anonymity and anarchy in the troubled times preceding the rise of the Hanseatic League. Neither example is entirely happy. Even in troubled times, Henry III’s presumption made him no friends, and his possessions were eventually taken from him. Fondness for Britain in her former colonies is in short supply. Furthermore, these were both isolated incidents. At a time when America has earned the ill will of much of the Middle East, it can be seen that no power in the modern world has the capacity to hold several such properties against the will of local populations.
3. The commitment for rich countries would be significant and long-term. This post assumes that the scheme would be undertaken as a philanthropic venture, and that the client cities would not be subject to rapacious profit-seeking – a long assumption at best, but the scheme is posited as philanthropic so that seems like the best basis upon which to judge it. Britain held Hong Kong for a hundred and fifty years and sunk huge amounts of its extensive resourced into it; by the time that Britain was a shrunken homunculus of a power. Would rich governments or populations be prepared to risk so much for such intangible rewards?
4. There is evidence that Hong Kong was exceptional, and reasons why it was exceptional have not been fully examined. Hong Kong was the only part of the British Empire to such achieve gains under the British. The rest of the Empire had mixed results. The benefits conferred upon India are debatable; developmentally it garnered advantages, but the economic gains were weak and confined to a ruling class, deepening and entrenching inequalities already in place thanks to the local caste system. Southern Africa was left with an even more extreme inequality in the form of apartheid. Egypt was left almost entirely undeveloped as its domination was purely strategic; Britain wanted control of Suez. British presence in Mesopotamia led to the formation of the state of Israel; good for Israel, but the local population received fringe benefits at best. The West Indies… so on, so on. Hong Kong was made rich for strategic reasons; it was Britain’s entrepôt and the economic capital of the region. The circumstances in which it existed were unusual.
5. Finally, there exists a problem with the fungibility of governance systems. A British system of patent, competition and bankruptcy laws, for example, may not be the most appropriate in all situations; some countries will respond, for reasons of existing legal traditions and social expectations, to a French of German system. However, this is a decision that will always be subject to political interference and historical influence.

So there are good reasons to discount the actual manifestation of the idea. But that shouldn’t be taken to undermine the perspective that it takes when considering the problems that traditional aid faces when addressing questions of global poverty. The idea exposes some real problems with the assumptions that we make when attempting to confront inequality and these problems deserve to be examined.

Full credit to Kevan for the link.

Since 2005, BP has seen an explosition in a Texas refinary, a big leak in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, numerous allegations of price fixing, 19 employee fatalities in unrelated incidents and, of course, Deepwater Horizon. In 2000, the company was forced to pay a $10 million fine for its mismanagement of its US properties. According to PIRG, BP was responsible for 104 oil spills in just one year, and in 1991 the EPA cited it as the single company responsible for the largest output of US pollution.

BP is also leading the building of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. Despite the fact that the pipleline crosses no fewer than fourteen active earthquake zones, it has not been earthquake engineered. Land required for the building of the pipeline has been seized under hastily dwarn-up eminent domain laws.

BP is a genuinely awful organisation, and I would suggest boycotting them if funnelling your money towards Exxon and Shell weren’t just as bad.

The original title for this fine post, as seen under the banner “Israel’s biggest enemy is itself” on Liberal Conspiracy, was (marvellously) Self-Clowning Lunatics Strike Again. The money shot:

Shorter – there really is an urgent and perilous threat to Israel. It’s called “the Israeli government”.

A neat line, but that’s not really what this is about, and that’s the problem.

The Zionist argument has always been that certain ethical contortions have to be made to protect the state of Israel from its aggressors, and from the threats that imperil its very existence.

This argument resonates with those who were alive to remember the Yom Kippur War, in which Egypt and Syria used Judaism’s holiest day to pour across the border and reclaim their lands, leading to a scramble for mobilisation in which the existence of the state of Israel itself looked, very briefly, to be genuinely imperilled. Israel rallied, and the US (who viewed Egypt as a Soviet proxy) shipped in emergency military assistance; the invading armies were thus pushed back, losing the land that they had reclaimed and more.

The argument hasn’t changed, but the truth is that the situation has. Israel is, up to a point, at peace with its neighbours. In the aftermath of Yom Kippur, Egypt fell out of the Soviet periphery and is now as much a client state of the US as Israel is. Even if that wasn’t the case, neither Egypt nor Syria have the hardware to mount a serious invasion of Israel that wouldn’t be immediately and brutally punished by the Jewish State’s comprehensive and well-equipped war machine.

In short, despite the protestations of those – from both the left and the right – who remember the day when it looked like the Jews were going to lose the only state they’ve ever had, Israel faces no real external threats today. Israeli commandos killed more people last night in international waters than Hamas has killed in Israel during a decade of resistance.

Israel is no longer defending itself.

What it is defending is the siege. It is defending the status quo in Gaza and it is defending its steady encroachment into the West Bank. But it is continuing to use the language of self-defence in order to do so, and that’s a huge problem. For those who remember Yom Kippur, it’s an emotive issue. But times have changed.

It’s no longer possible to argue that criticism of Israeli actions automatically implies a rejection of the legitimacy of that state, because it’s no longer the case that Israel is acting purely in self-defence. By continuing to assert otherwise, the Israeli government and the Zionist movement is perpetrating a deceit that cannot be upheld.

It is now the will of most people – even in the Arab states surrounding it – that Israel be allowed to live in peace. By clinging to a past version of the truth, which asserts that Israel is surrounded by enemies and in a state of constant peril, the Israeli government and its supporters risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Israel will always have enemies, but by pursuing the politics of arbitrary cruelty it risks creating more.

From the Guardian:

So no overlap on the venn diagram between “foreigners” and “decent, law-abiding people” then, Theresa?

(h/t Jenny for the spot)

This blog is not anti-American. While I may criticise the policies of that country’s Government and its many excesses, I feel that America’s stand on most issues is principled and right. The chief failing in America’s foreign policy is inconsistency; its governing motivation is driven by the aforementioned principle, but as a highly political culture it indulges in methods that are frequently tawdry, and too often the means overwhelm the end.

We’re seeing an example of that this week with the latest series of twists in the Iranian nuclear drama. For those who missed the background, Brazil and Turkey brokered a deal with Iran, similar to one agreed several months ago which Tehran reneiged upon, under which they would transport their raw uranium to Turkey in exchange of low-enriched fuel rods – suitable for fuel, but not suitable for weapons. I’ve blogged a little about Brazil’s foreign policy before, but this is the strongest and most visible piece of fruit it’s bourne yet.

The success of these negotiations – where previous bargains between Iran and Europe have failed – is a heavy endorsement of the growing clout of the so-called “emerging” powers. The success seems to have been predicated on the capability of Turkey and Brazil to resolve the most critical obstacle in the stand-off: the issue of trust. Both through the modalities of the new deal as well as by virtue of who they are, Turkey and Brazil have succeeded in filling the trust gap. The collapse of the previous deal hinged on this issue; they were unwilling to hand their nuclear assetts over to a West that had proven its capability to reverse its own agreements and seize Iranian property. But if the enrichment take place in Brazil, rather than Europe or Russia, then Iran can take a lot more on trust.

Stephen M. Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard and Middle East specialist, has a good overview of the deal and its implications. The key passages, though, are these:

Here’s why I think the United States should welcome the deal. The only feasible way out of the current box is via diplomacy, because military force won’t solve the problem for very long, could provoke a major Middle East war, and is more likely to strengthen the clerical regime and make the United States look like a bully with an inexhaustible appetite for attacking Muslim countries. (And having Israel try to do the job wouldn’t help, because we’d be blamed for it anyway). I think George Bush figured that out before he left office, and I think President Obama knows it too. So do sensible Israelis, though not the perennial hawks at the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, who appear to have learned nothing from their shameful role cheerleading the debacle in Iraq back in 2002.

[...]

So what should the United States do? It should welcome the deal in principle, while making it clear that it will monitor implementation carefully and emphasizing that this particular agreement does not resolve the larger question of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Rejecting the deal would do nothing to advance broader U.S. objectives and would be an unnecessary slap in the face of Turkey and Brazil. Trying to scotch the deal would also allows Iran to blame Washington should the deal fall through, and it will only reinforce Iranian assertions that U.S. leaders are lying when they say they would like to improve relations.

So far, so sensible. It would be nice to think that America’s foreign policy establishment would manage to get to the end of that thought chain on their own; but, sadly, no.

There are a number of unanswered questions regarding the announcement coming from Tehran, and although we acknowledge the sincere efforts of both Turkey and Brazil to find a solution regarding Iran’s standoff with the international community over its nuclear program, the P-5+1, [...] are proceeding to rally the international community on behalf of a strong sanctions resolution that will, in our view, send an unmistakable message about what is expected from Iran.

What is expected from Iran, if not this? Well, America’s stated desire is for Iran to give up all fuel enrichment, for civilian purposes as well as military, despite it having a inaliable legal right to produce fuel for power. But the truth is that America has other reasons for wanting this to fail. It had just finalised a tortuous agreement with Russia and China for further sanctions, and politics demanded that America take its bow on the world stage for that. Doubtless there was some desire to slap down the rising powers – and make no mistake, this is a diplomatic humiliation for Brazil and Turkey, who negotiated in good faith and secured a major breakthrough because of it. And its current Middle East policy is calibrated towards containment and demonisation of Iran. For all these reasons and more, the US Government was never likely to agree a deal that was anything short of Iranian capitulation.

In other words, politics overtook principles.

As painted by Monet in 1904.

Pippa Norris has a great analysis of the parlous state of female representation in Westminster. This election has clearly demonstrated that more needs to be done to encourage women to run for high office. This can’t be achieved just by instituting all-women shortlists; not only are they controversial and prone to generating ill will, they also don’t address the problem of a lack of women engaged in politics at the lower levels – councillors, party activists and political pundits. America has a generally more robust mechanism for this; the Democrat party and the leftwing have EMILY’s List, a political action group dedicated to increasing female representation at all levels; a British version sprang up in 1993 but appears defunct. There is a clear need for a similar UK body.

So, the Labour leadership contest.

What on earth has happened to Labour? They’ve become a party of the spineless. The slimeball Milliband looks like being coroneted all but unopposed, the worst possible outcome in the circumstances. What’s worse is that the main candidates – the two Millibands and Ed Balls – are politically indistinguishable, belonging to the liberal, interventionist, statist school established by Blair, promulgated by Brown and rejected by the electorate two weeks ago. The differences between them are being talked up in the media – David the Ditherer, Ed the Equivocator, Balls the Bully – but their plausible manifestos, cabinets and policy priorities are more or less identical.

Labour needs to recover. It needs a proper, realigning leadership election between a wide range of candidates with competing visions. The Tory relaunch in 2005 was just that – a clash of ideas, between the traditional Conservativism of David Davies, the internationalism and fiscal prudence of Ken Clarke, the social conservativism of Liam Fox and the modernising, “compassionate” neo-conservativism of David Cameron. It’s not that the Labour party lacks these polarities – Alan Johnson represents the traditional left, a slice of the electorate under-represented over the last 30 years, and Hillary Benn, John Cruddas or Yvette Cooper would be modernisers who could pull the party back to the centre. There’s a huge intellectual gap in the opposition vacated by the Lib Dems when they joined the government; Labour could expand to fill that niche quite happily, but they’re choosing not to.

Part of the problem is that Labour has, over the last 13 years, been trained to value unity over intellectual dynamism. The final years of the Blair / Brown “dual government” were horrible; the lesson that Labour learned from them is that internal strife is a fast track to weakness and collapse. Thus Brown’s continued tenure, always keeping a grip on power as those who sought to topple him bottled their chances as quickly as they arose. But it was based on a false premise. Internal conflict can be destructive, but the essence of political renewal – as with any kind of intellectual discipline – lies in constructive debate, in the contest of ideas that are firmly held and passionately defended.

There is a leadership vacuum in Labour and I don’t think that any of the candidates can fill it. I hope that there’s another leadership election within Labour before 2015. Otherwise, the only outcome that seems plausible is that the Tories will find themselves with a much firmer grip on power.

I took a bit of a break from blogging after the excitment of last week. But for now let it be said that I am broadly happy with the outcome of the election, that the coalition document is mostly a delight to read (the civil liberties section gives me a special kind of glee, although the education and environment sections don’t go far enough), and that it’s a genuine thrill to see Lib Dem ministers in government at last. Theresa May grates, but she made the right noises for yesterday’s International Day Against Homophobia And Transphobia, and the awe-inspiring Lynne Featherstone – my constituency MP – is the minister with the actual responsibility for the Equalities portfolio. I don’t think that this government can make itself popular – it’s going to have to make some unpleasant policy decisions over the next five years if Britain is to survive – but the aims to which it aspires are promising.

The House of Commons at Westminster as drawn by Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson for Ackermann’s Microcosm of London (1808-11). The Commons chamber shown here was destroyed by fire in 1834. Sourced from Wimedia Commons.

Today sees the re-election of the Speaker. Traditionally this is waved through unopposed, but the Tory back benches are in rebellious mood, and Lib Dem grandee Ming Campbell has indicated that he would be interested in the role. For what it’s worth, I don’t think that will happen – I suspect that Bercow will sail through on a 500-30 vote. More to the point, I don’t think it should happen. Bercow has been a fine speaker so far – again, Lynne Featherstone has an interesting perspective on this (and while I’m rhapsodising, it’s so nice to have an MP who blogs) – and the fact that he inspired Nigel Farage to run against him, and won, is a big point in his favour. More to the point, the coalition doesn’t need a big humiliating defeat so soon out of the gate. I suspect that the whips won’t allow that to happen.

Interestingly enough, though, it does go to show how marginalised the Tory dinosaurs are feeling in the new Government. The rebellion is being lead by bluer-than-blue Nadine Dorries (she of the abortion limitation bill and the £25,000 second home allowance expenses claims). One of the more interesting ideas thrown up by the coalition document is that the extent to which the Lib Dem’s proposals were incorporated was inspired as much by Cameron’s desire to beat down his own right wing as it was to pacify the Lib Dems. Whether or not that’s true, certainly the right wing of the Tory party feels beaten down. The Tories could be in the midst of their own Clause 4 moment, which would be entertaining if they weren’t having it while simultaneously trying to govern.

Anyway, I like Ming, but I hope that Bercow keeps his job.

That’s how Stephanie Flanders describes the €750bn bailout for Greece and the other troubled economies of Club Med: it looks impressive, and it buys the Europeans some crucial time. But they may not like where the ball eventually ends up.

Europe’s leaders have wedged their heads firmly in the sand.

I think that’s wrong – I think that Europe has a very good idea of where this is going, but is trying to pretend that it doesn’t, so when it happens they can look as surprised as the rest of us.

Is the bailout itself good news? Undoubtedly. The shock-and-awe action, forcefully advocated against a resistant Europe by government economists from America, Japan and the UK, probably saved the Euro and prevented the trashing of the continental economy, as well as ensuring the domestic stability of Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy. There’s pretty much no question that strong action was required to prevent a global fiscal collapse, of the kind that would erase the precarious recovery that the world economy has enjoyed over the last six months.

The intent is not in question, then. But the manner is somewhat more dubious. The Freethinking Economist does a better job of explaining the perverse incentives that the bailout has created than I could – politics is my writ, economics is really just a hobby – but political questions about the process that underlies the action remain. To whit: why would the EU have pursued such a knuckleheaded approach when a better, simpler alternative was on the table?

Sadly, it seems to be a result of weak government, both of individual member states and of the EU apparatus of agreement by consensus. As Simon Johnson and Peter Boone give us a flavour of the problems that afflict the governance of the Euro in today’s FT:

Given the incentive problems in the eurozone, it is no wonder more nations want to join – the requirement is just to appear prudent for a few years. No wonder also that it blew up. Nations with profligate governments or weak financial systems have a bonanza; overall, this system encourages a “race to the bottom” – led by governments in smaller countries, which relax fiscal and credit standards to win re-election (or just to enjoy a boom). They borrowed funds from the (unnaturally) less profligate in the eurozone. The Germans were austere; the periphery enjoyed the boom.

The Germans were the only parties to the carve-up who had an interest in arguing for more a sensibly constructed bailout, but – not to put too fine a point on it – Angela Merkel botched it. She failed to prepare Germany for the necessity of a bailout, spinning from cool, popular disdain to agreement in a manner that bewildered and alienated her government and her country. She failed to articulate why the bailout was necessary for Germany and the Eurozone to support the Mediterranean’s failing economies. Many of Germany’s voters believed, and still believe, that clause 125 of the Lisbon Treaty – the one which mandates that there will be no bailouts for members who pursue reckless fiscal policy – was binding and should have been adhered to.

So Ms. Merkel has done the only politically expedient thing: joined the rest of her European collegues in pretending that the package’s obvious failings aren’t there. Germany has become a truly European state. Few are fooled; as Sunday’s result in North-Rhine Westphalia shows, Germany’s voters are inclined to punish their government for its prevarication, lack of leadership and deceit.

This bailout may have stopped the immediate contagion from spreading beyond Greece. But it has driven the longer-term rot deeper into the heart of the single currency, by reinforcing the system of perverse incentives and by undermining the will of Germany, the currency’s salward defender and balwark, to resist the excesses of its neighbours. More worrying is that Germany’s governing CDU is only one year into its term, and will likely not be replaced until 2013.

A bit of good news though: apparently UK manufacturing a booming, albeit from a low base. So that’s nice.

Finally, for those in the UK expecting a government to emerge soon, the chart below may prove instructive. Click for bigger.

The blogs (and twitter feeds) of the left have been talking about the need for a Lab-Lib government as part of a “progressive majority”. The term was coined last year by Will Straw, when he demonstrated that the combined Labour and Lib Dem vote has exceeded the right wing vote – and has, in fact, accounted for more than 50% of the electorate – for the entirety of the last sixty years.

The danger in that assumption is that it assumed that Labour and the Lib Dems have more in common than they actually do. The truth is that the Lib Dem party has become host to a bunch of squatters – statist left-liberals disenfranchised by Labour’s collapse and determined to see the Lib Dems as a kind of junior partner in anti-Tory axis. They supported the Lib Dems loudly in the run-up to the election but abandoned them at the polling booth, and now expect a diminished Liberal party to fall into line.

This isn’t how the Lib Dem party sees itself; much of the core Lib Dem support is as repulsed by Labour’s offences on civil liberties and market control as they are by the Tories’ anti-immigrant and socially intolerant stances, and that’s evidenced by their selection of Nick Clegg, a man once assiduously courted by the Tories for parachuting into a safe seat, as their leader. Perhaps the Lib Dems can’t reign in the excesses of a Tory government, or perhaps they can; they have as much chance of that as halting Labour’s next attempt to ram ID cards or detention without trial down the throats of an unwilling populace, though, so it’s not like that’s much of a disincentive.

Meanwhile, the economy continues its gentle decline even further towards southern European standards. A strong government with a safe majority is required to halt that, and there’s only one scenario under which that is possible. Let me make this clear: it is even worth choosing to play a longer game on electoral reform in order to deliver stable government.

Which isn’t to say that I want Clegg and co. to crumble. I want them to extract the most flesh for their support that they can, especially in terms of voting reform, and preferably even by installing Cable in the Treasury. But ultimately, I want them to do the right thing and allow the country to be governed.

I PREDICT that the Tories will edge a tiny majority – 4-5 seats tops.*

I PREDICT that the Lib Dems will do well but nowhere near the giddy heights of mid April – 25% or thereabouts seems fair. Labour will come second by a thread.

I PREDICT that the next government, no matter what the outcome tomorrow, will have collapsed or been wound up within 18 months.

I PREDICT that the winner of this election will make themselves so unpopular that they will not win another election this decade.

*If they don’t, then I’d be prepared to bet that they still govern – either minority or in exchange for electoral reform.

Whatever your opinion – and you only have another 20 hours or so to decide – make sure that tomorrow you go out and vote. You may not feel like it has an impact and you may, ultimately, be right. But the act of engaging in a political process is its own virtue. Own your vote, own your issues, and own your own little corner of the debate, and you will find that the politicians work pleasingly hard to meet your needs.

Over the last few weeks I’ve written an implausible amount on the three parties, their manifestos and their policies. I hope that someone has found it useful; it’s actually been quite handy for me as a way of gathering my thoughts on the various topics and investigating them at length.

But now it’s time.

—

Equality

I’m going to be slightly unusual here and admit that, as a young straight white male, I’m probably not your most likely source of insight into equality issues this time around. I can read the manifestos, certainly, but as an explicitly privileged generalist I’m unlikely to be able to deliver the kind of quality analysis that these issues deserve.

For that reason I’m going to point you in the direction of some excellent, non-partisan primary sources. I know that equality issues tend to be the province of the left, but there are a few scrupulously fair resources out there.

For issues of women’s rights and and how the manifestos will affect women in general check out the Fawcett Society. They sent a raft of questions to each of the parties on a wide array of issues and got detailed responses from all of them.

On issues of gay rights it’s pretty hard to find a single source that doesn’t editorialise. That’s somewhat unsurprising; only 4% of gay voters are planning to vote Tory, which is itself perhaps the only information you need on this topic. MyGayVote gives a fairly stark indication of how the voting records of the three main parties stack up.

On black and minority politics check out OBV. They’re doing great work on keeping minority issues in the spotlight, and I’ll be keeping an eye on them long after the election is done.

Issues related to the elderly and elder care haven’t received anywhere near enough attention online or off. Mary Ridell, the Telegraph’s token leftie, argues fairly persuasively that Labour would be the best bet, and my own read corroborates this.

Civil Liberties
An area in which I am much more comfortable.

First off, forget Labour. The party of ID cards, detention without trial, the massive extension of the surveillance state and the Digital Economy Bill couldn’t give less of a shit about civil liberties, and their manifesto reflects that. Labour would extend CCTV coverage to 700 new areas, strengthen the DNA database and ram through ID cards by hook or by crook.

The Tories are better – the party of David Davis and their excellent Shadow Justice Minister, Dominic Grieve, has a significant wing dedicated to the rollback of liberty-encroaching legislation – but their approach is too punative. It’s moderately good to see that the party commits itself to rolling back the database state – ID cards, the ContactPoint children’s database and the vetting and barring scheme will be scrapped or reduced. The Tories would also curtail the surveillance powers of local councils, giving more power to the information commissioner, and would introduce privacy impact assessments on all new legislation. However, the party does not go far enough on changing the law in respect to the DNA database, and they still insist on repealling the Human Rights Act, which gives the European Convention on Human Rights full force in the UK. They would likely replace it with a UK Bill of Rights, which would be softer on prohibitions of torture and harder on legitimate asylum seekers. The Tories don’t even fully leverage their own dogwhistle policies of overturning the smoking and foxhunting bans.

But the truth is that this is the one area in which the Lib Dems have a clear, unambiguous and historic tradition of strong performance. They would curtail the use of CCTV, restore the right to protest, guarantee the safety of investigative journalists from prosecution, protect whistleblowers, scrap ID cards, role back “Escelon” measures (laws and secret doctorines governing government monitoring of email and internet traffic), repeal the Digital Economy Bill, scrap ContactPoint, reduce pre-charge detention to 14 days and scrap secret evidence. The DNA database would be heavily curtailed. It’s an absurdly complete wish-list for anybody who cares about the erosion of liberty in this country.

It remains unclear why the Tories were so anaemic on this issue, but they hand a clear win to the Yellows on what should have been a major plank of their election offering.