There are more twists in the tale of the Afghan elections than Hamid Karzai’s S shaped bed – not that I’d know, I hasten to add. What I do know is that donkeys laden with ballot boxes are finding their way back to Kabul to deliver the verdict that the international community needs – ‘don’t panic, democracy is flowering in Afghanistan.’ Well I reserve the right to panic. Another four soldiers died today, along with at least 30 civilians and 56 others wounded in Kandahar.

Here’s a suggestion for the Afghan election theme:

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss . . .

We’ll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgment of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
And I’ll get on my knees and pray We don’t get fooled again. (The Who: Won’t get fooled again)

The only thing flowering is Poppy, and the chief gardener, who ‘borrowed’ $2 million interest free from the Ghazanfar Bank, (how and in what form will he make repayments?) has now seen his ‘massive lead’ whittled down to a ‘narrow lead’ over the man who spent the second biggest amount campaigning. To this extent, the Afghan campaign followed the ‘democratic’ model of the US – money talks. As I said several posts back, in lieu of a fair result, we might as well accept Karzai in preference to a prolonged period of even more violence and bloodcurdling carryings-on that might be generated in a runoff – but on the other hand, Abdullah has hinted that his supporters might get frisky if the ‘election is seen to be rigged’. Todays preliminary results (based on 10% of the votes cast, give Karzai 41% and Abdullah 39%, but do not include any votes from the south, where Karzai will win whatever votes the Taliban allowed to be cast. I’ve seen more convincing all-in wrestling bouts – in fact, a novel runoff might take the form of Karzai vs Abdullah, mano a mano, in the ring, wearing tights and masks, of course.

But let’s be serious for once. Thus has a brilliant idea (though I say so myself). Why not bring in Jeb Bush, Former Governor of Florida, to supervise and fine tune the election count? No-one could argue with that – after all, they didn’t in the 2000 US elections.

John J Kelly

“Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.” – Cree Saying.

This quote, possibly the biggest cliché in the environmental literature, inspired Jared Diamond’s seminal work “Collapse“. But humans seem to succumb to boredom fairly quickly, so the real crisis, which is after all about something as mundane as food, has slipped off of the radar. The global meltdown of the banks, a grand Greek drama of the folly of the gods if ever there was one, has captured our attention. Have the problems with food thus disappeared? I think not. They are here to stay and getting stronger.

The problems we saw with the huge price rise in 2008 are still around, bio-fuels, huge agri-businesses exploiting market power, and so on. It is a myth that this was driven by increased demand from China and India, downwards pressure on wages in developing countries has actually reduced per capita food intake in the poor majority of these countries. Adding speculation in food markets yields a lovely recipe for population control (Thus Passim). Over the past two years, evidence has grown of the impact of Climate Change on agriculture. An FAO report by Cline in 2007 put agricultural yield losses by 2080 at between 5 and 20% globally. This hid a regional picture where India could lose 30-40% of its yield. As if this was not enough, he pointed out the glaringly obvious problem with equilibrium models, which mean even greater declines in food production.

These models assume systems tending to a steady state, and are used in both agro-economics and climate modeling. They mask extreme events and chaotic systems that refuse to settle down. Extreme weather is a fact of life in India, whose climate is driven by the dynamic monsoon weather system. No-one quite knows how this system will respond to changes in climate, but what we do know is that around 40% of India’s population depend directly on the rain. They live in terror of extreme weather, and this year, with a major drought from failure of the monsoon, India is importing food again. This just after India signed an accord to turn land over to fuel production to help keep American engines going.

Finally, there is sea-level rise to consider, something also not included in Cline’s report. For instance Egypt is facing the loss of much of its prime agricultural lands along the Nile Delta. So worry about the banks that hold in your money all you like, the food problem is not going away.

The historic Naz Foundation petition to the Delhi High Court actually began with a history lesson – of fetishism, perversion, fondling and fornication and the punishments thereof. Tellingly, the Christian and European side of the history is much more severe and restrictive than the Hindu Indian one. It only takes a visit to India’s most notorious temple to see that there is a history here of open discussion of sex. Section 377 of the 1860 Indian Penal Code, which criminalises “carnal relations against the natural order” is based on the English Sodomy Law. The embedded notion – sex is for procreation only and that other sex is “unnatural” -is very much a Judeo-Christian idea which still hold sway in Bible Belt America (cf Pro Life) and in the pronouncements of the current Pope and in several sects of Islam (itself Judeo-Christian) but is not a feature of mainstream Buddhism or Hinduism. This idea held sway in the early applications of the law, but quickly gave way to India’s need to control its population.

Some in India claim that gays are a decadent western import. India's ladyboys walk on the wild side - now they can do so legally. Will it make a fundamental difference to how society views its others?

The Delhi High Court Decision to exempt mutually consenting adults from section 377 is a major shift which has been compared to the Roe vs Wade case in America, where women won the right to choose an abortion. At the same time the ruling has opened the debate as to whether the civil rights process itself is an aspect of Westernisation. Extremists even argue that somehow homosexuality, and by definition, tolerance, is alien and that civil rights for minorities is an invasive, exotic way of thinking.

Those radicals who argue against the corrupting aspects of western notions such as democracy avail themselves of the internet, that most democratic of outside influences, to illustrate and promulgate their views. The paradox is vividly apparent in the case of Iraq and Iran. While the web gives activists in India an opportunity to pool intellectual resources and raise their game to the point where they often make a fool of the government – see the varying quality of the 377 case documents, this version of events does little to explain the particular history of the laws being fought. This applies not just for gay rights and sexuality, but equally to Forest Law. These were drafted around the same time, but in this case importing the commercial interests of the British Raj, with the conservation of forests predicated on the need for massive Timber extraction. In 2006, in a similar way, this legal regime was challenged, and ownership rights of India’s “original people” were re-asserted after more than130 years.

It is sad that 60 years after Independence, these relics of British rule still remain, but it is also joyous to see that India has the resources and will to remake itself, and to do so with dignity. Both the Gay and Forest Rights campaigns focused around the notion of human dignity, something central to the Gandhian ideal and the wave of decolonisation it triggered. To call this a western ideal is to ignore the History of Others - others who were also capable of understanding the value of human life. These values, asserted in the Indian Constitution, are now taking precedence over a painful legal legacy. Thus these legal changes are signs not of the dominance of western values, but of a growing sense of inner confidence and self-ownership.

Watch Jeff Jarvis talking to a room full of Guardian Journalists. You will see a curious thing (in part 2). Here is a guy standing in supposedly the UK’s, if not the world’s, leading left-of-centre newspaper, talking about ‘flexibilising journalism in the new link economy.’  In plain English, he is advocating that journalists – including Guardian hacks – will have to work with absolutely no safety net, no pension, no social security, nothing in this newest world order. They all sit and nod sagely. This may be because it all seems so inevitable, a future which flows naturally from the nature of the technology. Does it have to be that way?

Four out of five countries with the most personal computers per-capita are small, with strong social safety nets. The fifth is the US, the most technologically advanced nation on earth, and the clear exception that proves the rule. Whilst America is built around what Isiah Berlin might call “negative liberty” that is freedom from constraint and interference (though not from health insurance companies it seems) most other civilised countries also put an emphasis on the sorts of positive freedoms that arise from the collective, or in other words the ways in which a supportive state makes it possible for its citizens to realise their potential. And this is not all about the bend-over-and-hold-your-cheeks politics of flexibility.

Turning to entrepreneurialism  - would you rather risk all to start a new business in a place like the US where if you lose everything you may end up, literally, with nothing, no health-care, no decent schooling for your kids and so on? Or would you choose a society where, if all else fails, the state (or strong social networks)  will take care of you? This is precisely the kind of free-thinking and risk-taking that the internet is supposed to foster, but do we want innovation to derive from desperation, as in the India of Adiga’s White Tiger, or be nurtured by a confidence in the system? The list of countries with the most new businesses per capita is full of small to medium sized countries with strong social safety nets, or small Asian countries with very high levels of social cohesion.

So should we expect technology, on its own, to make the world a better place - a web-2-opia? It is clear that the foundations of freedom are not manufactured by businesses, but created by well-run, uncorrupt states. Neither the UK nor the US, whose anglo-saxon definitions of freedom are singularly defined in economic terms, are notable examples. So the future of the web, like the future of religion, the future of finance and the future of the environment, is increasingly unlikely to conform to the American dream.

Leicester is now officially one of the most diverse towns in the UK, forecast to be the first to have a majority non-white population by 2011. Good news for everyone, argues John Keyes.

My memories of being brought up in Leicester are in most ways fairly typical of anybody of my age and class. Regiments of small terraced, red brick, houses and back street schools, the market in the centre, the Clock Tower and flat midlands accents – not Brummie, not Southern, on the cusp of becoming the North. A place that hosted a welter of the industries Britain had when we made stuff that other people wanted, and bought; shoes, hosiery, light engineering that kind of article. Leicester was not immune from market shifts but diverse enough, in the round, to ride out a lot downturns. The world might decide it didn’t want to buy many ships this year but the demand for socks remained fairly constant. It’s not the stuff of songs and I suppose Leicester is, at heart, a prosaic sort of spot (who sings songs about factories making underpants?) – but it was functional. A place where you could rely on work for you and yours, where houses were relatively cheap and you could build a life. Just the kind of place that would attract immigrants.

The author, in ethnic Irish First Communion garb, outside Sacred Heart Madrassa, 1962

Attract immigrants it did – including my Irish Mum and Dad. Rural Ireland in the fifties had little to offer the working classes – another in the succession of Irish generations “reared for the boat”. The message was simple – “There’s nothing here for you -  go and do someone else’s heavy, dirty, work and maybe you’ll have a better life. You’ll at least have money to send home” (Ireland was always home). We ended up in Leicester rather than Liverpool, where my parents first lived, because of coal seams. My Dad was a miner, not out of choice but the lack of it – (there was an all round shortage of choice in the late 1940s). He ended up down the pit, firstly in Lancashire, and then North West Leicester. The latter he chose because the coal seams were bigger and if you had to be down a hole in the ground you might as well be able to stand up. He also told me that he was astounded in Leicester to find workingmen with bank accounts and some who even owned cars – an impossible dream.

When we got a house my mother took in lodgers (always Irish) and cleaning jobs. She told me she was glad when West Indians and Asians started arriving in numbers because it took the heat off the Irish.

Though I was born and reared in Leicester, we were immigrants, and we behaved accordingly. Clustered in the worst available housing, the Irish congregated at, and around, the church, the school, the pub and the club, where work and relationships were built and maintained. Some Irish pubs (and these were a long way from the “Shifty O’Shaughnessy’s” type of 1990s branded outlet) acted for decades as recruitment centres for the building trade.  New immigrants came to a brother, sister, friend or cousin’s for a roof over their heads and a “start”…. a job to go to…. and the numbers grew. We went to Catholic schools; overseen by an (Irish) parish priest.

Even more embarrassingly fundamentalist picture of J.Kelly (centre) in altar boy dress, 1962

Immigrants carry a direct memory of, and a longing for, home and they pass this on to their children – but the Irish are a sentimental people and sentiment does not sit easily  with reality. The emigrants left Ireland to escape poverty, small time repression, religiosity and even minor criminal convictions – but the Ireland they left became transformed in the leaving. A place of romantic tales, foolhardy bravery, tyrant landlords, casual cruelty born by the innocent, of laments of lost love – all catalogued in song. Leicester might have been a place of quiet prosaic industry but in the middle of it the Irish congregated and drank, and sang, and courted and married with their own. 

The Kellys, Costelloes, Murphys and Maddens are gone from my old school – Irish names and faces replaced by African, Goan and East Europeans – but the church continues as ever,  baptising, confirming and marrying the new arrivals – and now burying the Irish dead of the immigrant generations. I felt a strange and (thankfully) fleeting proprietorial twinge at the cast changes in the parish play. But it passed. We had our turn and it’s their go now.    

The traditional city centre Saturday market offered heaps of domestic and exotic fruit and vegetables at a price and quality that would have silenced an epicure. A poor man could comfortably survive on guacamole – eight avocados for a quid – or bags of tomatoes, peppers okra, aubergine or sweet potato, not to mention potatoes and cabbage for the Irish – at supermarket-beating prices. The adjacent meat and fish market catered for all tastes, and faiths – again on a pauper’s budget. The costermongers and traders (of all ethnicities) sang their wares in a style unchanged from Dickens, and the more entertaining for that.Leicester market has a use beyond commerce – it forces people to mingle. The direct person-to-person interchange, I suspect, does more for harmony and tolerance than any Council-sponsored “meet your new neighbours” shindig, and certainly beats the sullen, solitary wheelie-trudge of the superstore.

Conclusive proof that Indians have taken over Leicester

In a multicultural vignette, a crowd of East Asian, Africans and West Indians and native Caucasians, some in the traditional dress of Pound Shop Santa hats, stood around watching a group of chanting and dancing Native American (buskers) in full costume. We waited for the dance-off between the Cherokees and the Bhangra lads but it didn’t happen. As dusk fell, we visited one of the most dangerous Irish pubs of our youth – now a Jazz venue with a wooden (laminated?) floor. A couple of pints of Guinness later we made the traditional visit to an Indian (Pakistani) restaurant and the ”all you can eat’ buffet. No alcohol was available – possibly why we were the only non-Asians – but we took tea and faced up to the ‘all you can eat’ challenge of the buffet in an traditional Irish fashion, all for a tenner a head. The staff of this family-run cafe – big lads with beards – were amiable, helpful and non-intrusive. There was one other notice: “Please do no waste food.” Good advice, good business and a religious requirement all in one. 

Leicester is now officially one of the most diverse towns in the UK, forecast to be the first to have a majority non-white population by 2011. “Already 50 per cent of school children of five years age are non-white, and by 2011 we are talking of a non-white majority,”according to Paul Winstone, Race Relations policy officer of the Leicester City Council. Nowhere has this happened peacefully, and we are proud of what we have achieved in Leicester over the last 30 years. We dont want anybody to see this as a threat to the English way of life, since the majority will consist of several minorities,” he said. “Leicester is now a permanently multi-cultural society. Today the Asians have political power, economic power and cultural discipline. The sky is the limit for them.” 

From what i saw I’d agree, but the race issue polarises like no other, ranging from A: “they’re savages who eat their own children and will one day murder us in our beds” to Z “delightful, civilized, people – much better than drunken, violent, lazy chavs.” Leicester has hosted large scale immigration for a long time. I don’t live there, and plenty who do are vocal on the subject, but what I observed, and was reassured by, was that the foundations of the place appear sturdy and unshifted by the influx. I’d say good luck to them, in the spirit of my immigrant forebears, and ‘get a life’ to those who don’t like diversity.

By John Keyes.

A surefire sign that something's wrong

India and China sit on an awful lot of coal, and there is a heated debate going on amongst agonized environmentalists that Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactors might be necessary to avoid it all going up in smoke. Carbon sequestration – capturing the carbon as it leaves the chimney and then storing it underground-  sounds like a good idea, but it is a long way from being commercially viable, and there is not a lot of time left. The Greenpeace energy plan for India avoids coal and nuclear, but leans on “biomass.” This means plants mainly, and it raises the same problems as bio-fuels, namely that it becomes more economic to power machines than feed poor people.

One thing that has become clear with the recent nuclear deal is that the chances of the US stopping India from further developing its military nuclear capability are next to zero. So in this version of events, the risk of nuclear proliferation is a sad side-effect of what has to be done to stop us from cooking ourselves more slowly.  However, in another version of the story, proliferation is the main event. It involves a dark place, deep underground, where a small yellow bird sits in a cage.

Before the invention of the Davy lamp, canaries were used by miners because they are sensitive to gas. When they died, the miners knew they had to get out. Today’s canaries are the poor, such as subsistence farmers. When they start to perish in accelerating numbers, we know that there is a calamity upon its way. This makes the recent slew of farmer suicides in India a bit worrying. Actually a country with 80 odd percent of its people at or below starvation incomes – the 27% poverty figure you see for India is based on snide statistics –  can only really be described as a Canary state. India uses 90% of its freshwater for irrigation, and looks set to get drier. Tweet, tweet.

Canaries are useless if you don’t pay attention when they start expiring. Indeed, if recent trade rounds are anything to go by, the rich world seems unconcerned about the fate of Indian farmers under climate change. But here’s the twist. The US has just given India what looks like a license to power up their nukes.  So India is now unlikely to go out with just a chirrup. It also has nuclear-enabled neighbours, China and Pakistan, who are not going to sit on their hands as India tools up. So we have probably got the best part of Asia cooking up a nuclear storm.

Forget Africa, with its huge land area and tiny population (ten times the area and 200 million less population than India alone.) The subsistence farmers in Africa are not hugely dependent on chemical inputs, and thus on Oil prices as in Asia, and they have a lot more space to move around in, with a huge North-South gradient to traverse in search of the weather they need. No, it is Asia with its incredible population densities supported by mechanised agriculture that will feel the pinch between Climate Change and Peak Oil. And that is where America has been is tending its nuclear flower bed.

So things are bound to change a bit: Rather than valuing the Canaries based on their “willingness to pay” for their lives (THUS passim), we have to start thinking about what happens to their nuclear-armed governments if they show a strong willingness to riot. Ironically, this means that George “W” is an accidental hero. Having upped the ante, the world now needs to work hard to ensure that India is not forced into a situation where food riots lead to catastrophic nuclear proliferation, enabled by the US. In the words of another great American, Forrest Gump, “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.”

Turning chilly for Jaguar - another bailout needed

Margaret Thatcher privatised Jaguar in 1984 to howls of protest from people who liked big rusty cars that broke down a lot. Ford bought the brand for $2.5 billion in 1990, to more howls from Bufton Tufton (67) stalwart of the Enoch Powell Golf Club, Jaguar’s only customer. Sales fell to around 15,000 units a year, 75 per cent of these to the USA, in the teeth of the 1992 recession. Rework – the percentage of cars requiring repair at the end of the assembly line – was running at 65%. Productivity and quality control was as bad as in the strange days when Jaguar was merged with British Leyland, a state-owned basket case whose models gave Lada a market opportunity in the UK. Ford invested heavily in reskinning the big Jaguar XJ series, replacing almost 2000 components with ones that worked and drove through innovations such as stopping the cars from leaking, locking the passengers inside against their will and not starting. Jaguar had borrowed heavily from the bank of goodwill during its dark years. Ford fixed the reliability problems but the marque was always running on empty – its core market was middle aged CEOs who played golf and sat in the back and racy middle-aged cads who bought its expensive XJS sports car. Jaguar needed mid- and entry level models to expand its demographic, as we marketing mavens tend to say.

Inspector Morse investigated murders in a MK2 Jag - he was often late arriving at the crime scene, but always did so in style.

Ford, exemplary owners, made good their promise to the Midlands carworkers who loved the brand they could never afford to own, invested heavily in retooling and added a midrange S Series car, a beautiful vehicle, reminiscent of the iconic Mark 2 Jaguars made famous by Inspector Morse, designed to compete with the BMW 5 series. They also, less successfully, designed an ‘affordable’ Jaguar, the X type, to compete with the BMW 3 series, and replaced the horrible but ferociously fast XJS sports car with the beautiful, (relatively) affordable XK series, designed to compete with Porsche. 

John Major knew the wily ways of the Indian. Oh yes. Bring him back forthwith.

The trouble was that they didn’t address the fuel economy issues or introduce diesel versions of these cars until too late, largely because the US still has an irrational aversion to diesel passenger cars and the Jaguar market didn’t care about gas guzzling. Thus the big Jags couldn’t compete with Mercedes (or Lexus), the middle sized Jags couldn’t match BMW (or Lexus) and the baby Jags couldn’t compete with anyone, because they were too dear, too thirsty and had an uneconomical and pesky 4 wheel drive powertrain borrowed from the Ford Sierra and other ‘platform-sharing’  features which seemed designed to cause trouble. Ford needed at least 200,000 sales for the marque to be viable and a much larger percentage of European buyers. They never really got consistently close. There was also a problem of perception. Although Ford hived its “premier brands” such as Jaguar, Lincoln, Volvo and even Aston Martin into supposedly autonomous units, brand afficionados found it incongruous that Jaguar was owned by the Great Satan of mass engineering and there was no real economy of scale or opportunity in cross-selling a Fiesta with an XKS. The marque made progress but never really capitalised on the $11 billion which Ford spent rejigging and making new models. The impressive new Jaguar XF emerged just as the global downturn was starting and Ford’s own core business was in terminal decline.

Tata, one of India’s top three agglomerates, if not its biggest, stepped in to buy Jaguar and Land Rover/Range Rover, owned for a time by BMW but sold in 2003 to Ford, for $2 billion, more than half the price that Ford paid for the two marques, not counting the estimated $11 billion which Ford invested: a bargain, in fact. The deal was formally announced in March 2008 and 16,000 jobs were said to be saved as a consequence.

Ratan Tata, owner of Tetley Tea, Corus steel and Jaguar, may soon go on UK Benefits, courtesy of Lord Hinduja of Mandelson

So riddle me this riddle, Lord Mandelson of Hinduja: why should the British taxpayer step in to subsidise or part-nationalise a company owned by one of the world’s richest men and biggest agglomerates to the reputed tune of £1 billion – equivalent to the price Tata paid, in fact? Yes, we know about the 16,000 jobs, but Tata (company motto ‘Leadership with Trust’) is a global player, employing 350,000 people, bigger than any British manufacturing concern. Chairman Ratan Tata is a global philanthropist  and the group is seen as a model of ethical manufacturing and corporate citizenship. 61% of its $62.5 billion revenues come from outside India. Tata should not need help from the British government. We would laugh if Honda, Nissan or Toyota, all undergoing severe problems and bigger UK employers than Jaguar, were to be proposed for state intervention. If Tata gets help then where does the government draw the line?

Moreover, they don’t appear to be that broke. Today, when even Honda is stepping down from toys for the boys stuff for reasons of cost, it was announced that Tata would sponsor Ferrari in Formula One Racing. (Tata have a joint venture with Fiat, which owns Ferrari, to make cars in India). The company has a long and largely well-deserved reputation for ethical practice and global citizenship (yes, I hate these terms too but I’m pretending to be a business analyst today) but threatening to move production of Land Rover and Jaguar away from Browns Lane and Solihull unless the increasingly bonkers Brown trousered brigade grant unfair subsidies will incur horrid karma in the next life – Mr Tata may come back as a broken-down Jaguar or a Solihull shopkeeper.

Jaguar fitters like these made the company what it is today

If the vehicles can be made cheaper and better in India – I’m sure the land Rovers could – then get on with it. (Land Rovers are already made in local markets). If moving the entire production away from Britain was what Tata had in mind all along, then ditto, but I doubt if cheap labour will necessarily make expensive, complex cars: BMW and Mercedes, the world’s most successful prestige auto brands,  for example, operate in the world’s highest cost labour market. Also, if Ford found it difficult to sell a premium luxury brand under its umbrella, then the maker of the world’s cheapest car might find it even harder. For what it’s worth, my advice would be to leave the high end manufacturing where it is; the cars are good enough now, the market isn’t. Since Tata already makes the world’s cheapest car, the ‘Nano,’ however, invest in the development of electric vehicles for Europe here (not bloody Ferraris) and keep a respectable distance from Lord Mandelson, who has an unfortunate history when it comes to Indian oligarchs.

PS. Thus has an audacious plan to manufacture a hybrid version of the Sinclair C5 and the DeLorean. We’ll call it the DeCVe. We need a lot of cash or we’ll sack ourselves and move to Eastern Europe or India.

John J Kelly

Somali pirate tooled up like a UK rail ticket inspector

Pirates are suddenly everywhere: Indian Navy sinks Pirate Ship, Somali Pirates Hijack Saudi Oil Tanker: Cadbury’s Old Jamaica chocolate bar futures are set to surge. Why the sudden interest? Piracy is not new. Nor is this revival of interest so ephemeral either. We have had quite a few Pirates of the Caribbean to contend with recently. We have software piracy as well as bio-piracy. What do all pirates have in common? Well, they all exist on a frontier that is being enclosed. As Lord Cutler Becket answered in ‘Pirates of the Caribbean 2‘: “Freedom. Jack Sparrow is a dying breed. The world is shrinking; the blank pages of the map filled in.”

The oceans have a special place in the imagination of a world of states. They are places in between, with a sort of lawlessness that is gradually being enclosed. The Arctic and Antarctic enjoy a similar legal status and also current fate – look at the rush for the mineral rights below the northern melting ice. Markets are in-between spaces (hence perhaps Monty Python’s Corporate Pirates sketch in ‘The Meaning of Life’), regulated as loosely as the oceans. However, they are now also facing regulation and enclosure.

But as bio-piracy illustrates, this enclosure also means that things that were once common property are being placed under private or state control. This is a bit like the process of enclosure in England between 1760 and 1820, where common lands were confiscated and people were driven from the countryside. Indeed this is the pattern with the globalisation and mechanisation of agriculture in India, although sadly the booming service and IT sectors seem not to be absorbing the excess labor as fast as it is being generated. With 50% of people effectively outside the cash economy (on below a dollar-a-day) and with the commons that these people rely upon being taken away, we face an ideological crisis.

We claim that this enclosure, within an increasingly regulated market economy framework, will make people rich. That is, to guarantee access to the horn of plenty, as a Global Consumer in a Global Economy. But the numbers say otherwise. At current levels of inequality, it takes 15 planets to lift everyone out of poverty. So the private tradeable rights that this current enclosure is being built upon will guarantee misery, if not mass poorslaughter. This raises the question of equality. If we are all humans, increasingly enclosed on one planet, increasingly under one rule, what does it mean to be a global citizen?

One glaring common denominator defines us all: We all have a footprint, we all have a niche, a space that we subsist from on this planet. Our right to life is unavoidably based on our right to livelihood. This in turn is based on our footprint. But while all men are born equal, many of us are born with enormous feet. American feet are 20 times bigger than Bangladeshi. These footprints are embodied by the Saudi Oil Tanker that the somali pirates took. Looking at this way, it is not clear who the pirates really are: who is setting sail to loot the riches of the world?

So perhaps the way out of an Age of Piracy is the idea of equal footprints. The world’s most popular response plan (amongst governments) to climate change, is Contraction and Convergence, which is based on equal entitlements to the carbon sink. But since we face enclosure and resource crunches on all fronts, why not generalise this idea? How about “We are all born equal, and with an equal entitlement to a footprint?” This would give a rights-based framework for adapting to climate change, and could move the whole ailing International Development industry out of a Victorian philanthropy model, into a modern rights-based welfare concept. If we want to stop being pirates, perhaps we should start by keeping our feet on the ground.

Miliband quoted Indian Economist Amartya Sen when explaining New Labour’s ideas on equality. I was surprised, not because it was untrue: – I had done the paper chase already through Antony Giddens via Stephen Lukes – but because he was happy to admit that we had outsourced our thinking about progress to the intellectual powerhouses of the subcontinent. In this slightly scary vision of progress we are all seen as “Human Resources.” The Human Development Report, published by the UNDP, which bases its numbers on Sen’s work, largely describes us in those terms. We are told that humans should be happy to be seen as a form of national wealth, because this is better than seeing progress as only being about money. Indian politicians, with the 1.13 billion people they serve, welcome this message, since it answers the question of what to do with all the poor people. Indeed, the politicians have so much taken this to heart that the Department of Education is now a sub-section of the Ministry of Human Resources.

But a tricky detail in the concept of progress throws this rosy vision of ‘useful’ human beings into question. If you are making progress, presumably it is towards a purpose. Some, such as Francis Fukuyama, see this as a quaint notion. He argued in The End of History 2003  that we were no longer making progress because we had already arrived. Hegel had called time early. 19th Century Prussia wasn’t Shangri-la. USA Neoconcon free market capitalism was the pinnacle of history. Then came the credit crunch. Fukuyama is not so sure any more.

This brings us back to the question “what should we be so useful for?.” In his introduction to the Happy Planet Index, Andrew Simms observes that Economics tells us an awful lot about the transactions in between, but almost nothing about the ultimate ends and means of development. The questions “where does wealth come from?” and “what should we do with it?” are hardly touched upon. Since the environment is the ultimate means for development, we should be aiming to use it efficiently to sustain as many long, happy lives as is humanly possible. All blindingly obvious. So how – and why – did we all lose our sense of purpose?