The only way out is to win a quiz show

Aravind Adiga’s Booker winner White Tiger and Danny Boyle’s Golden-Globe-harvesting film Slumdog Millionaire (based on Indian Diplomat Vikas Swarup’s novel Q and A) illustrate a “Shining India” that has long shown up in the statistics of those critical of the Globo-glorifiers. It bears repeating (Thus Passim) that 70-80% of India’s population cannot afford to feed themselves to international minimums, that is 2400 calories of cheap stodge per day, assuming they spend on nothing else.

Yet in the UK we continue to talk about “the poor” as if they live on council estates, and as if all they need is the chance to show how bright they are in order to climb up into our middle class paradise. Meritocracy may imply that the less intelligent ones should stay where they are, but what if they were dulled by malnutrition? The world is not made up of a series of Westminster villages, but being good nationalists, the policy makers and pundits seem reluctant to acknowledge this.

The implication of this is that national governments tend to live in a room full of mirrors, where all that they see is themselves, especially in rich OECD countries. Almost everyone uses the poor to justify their policies and positions in these compassionate days of media-conveyed suffering, yet our policy and political debates do not at all reflect their circumstances. This is a flaw of the Left as well as the Right. The legacy of Marx and the Union movement is that we see emancipation of the poor in terms of workplace rights, yet only around 8% of people in India have formal employment contracts, so this is mostly irrelevant and this is probably the case in most poor countries.

If people cannot feed themselves in the cash economy, as the numbers show, then they have to be feeding themselves in the non-cash economy. How can this be so? Where does food come from if not from shops? That’s because the poor are in the environment. Either an urban one, scavenging the remains and polishing the shoes of those visible to us, or a rural one, growing or gathering food under unpredictable conditions. But since policymaking is largely about economics, and economics largely about the cash economy, and the cash economy about people with purchasing power, and not the environment or the poor, these humans (of whom there are rather a lot) remain largely invisible. But what is the problem with them, and their environment, remaining invisible to policy makers, particularly in the rich world?

It gives us a totally misleading sense of the future. Economists, particularly historically oriented ones, write as if it is the swing of a pendulum that determines economic history.  Presumably this means that after this latest desperate burst of neo-Keynesianism we will turn back to more liberal and less risk-averse approaches once times are good again. But that invisible thing, the environment, is changing, and it will impact on all of us, but mainly on those other invisible things, the poor, so that our whole perception of risk, and thus how to organise ourselves, will have to change. We are not going back to a nice cosey stable world with seemingly unlimited natural resources, and we are not replaying the Industrial Revolution in countries like India, even if our policy makers have been Oxbridge-raised on a diet of social thinkers from the steam-engine age. We can talk about public spending as a way of stabilising things until we are blue in the face, but how do we propose to get money to those really at risk under our undoubtedly changing circumstances?

Via NGOs? Well they are not coping well with spending the fraction of the 0.7% of GDP put to aid budgets efficiently. Via business? Well their track record of behaving well in the absence of strong regulation is not so good. Via governments in poor countries? To quote Aravind Adiga’s lead character in White Tiger, “what a fucking joke.” Survival of the fittest in a world where pro-poor leaders in the poor world, particularly those that interfere with rich world access to natural resources tended to “dissappear” has left a legacy of governance that does not exactly channel funds to the needy as a first priority.

We can perhaps hope that our rich world “Social Mobility” thesis works in poor countries, and the poor can suddenly help themselves. Sadly the post-industrial boom in India seems not to be creating lots of jobs, so the whole 1950’s rich world idea of mechanising agriculture and shunting people into the cities is creating shanti towns rather than a lovely unionised industrial base. Also, it takes rather a lot of planets, at current levels of inequality, to lift the poor out this way.

So we have a big problem that our current policy debates are simply not up to addressing. We don’t know how to think about the dependency of the poor on the environment, or how to support them in the face of environmental change or indeed how, in short, to stabilise the world through the coming times of trouble (Thus Passim). There is the  Keynsian idea of a “Green New Deal”, but this is not a cyclical issue we are facing, actually the problems are likely to grow gradually but inexorably over time, so a short-term spending strategy won’t do it (though long-term rural employment guarantees may help a bit, even if dogged by corruption).  Maybe we in the rich world should look to the artists for answers, because right now, it looks like our wonks are all out of ideas.

Gloomy energy picture

Every now and again (actually most times) The Economist says something I wanted to say, better than I could. This week, the free market bible points out that posturing aside, the current UK government’s record on implementing effective climate change legislation leaves much to be desired. A new initiative, spearheaded by climate change Czar Adair Turner and sponsored by Ed Miliband, newly-appointed Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, aims to redress the imbalance between good intentions and inertia. The debate is whether we should have made hay while the sun shone and we had cash to invest (and money to burn) or whether straitened circumstances will accelerate the imperative to use energy more wisely. Moreover, the UK targets are not as ambitious or far-reaching as some of our European neighbours. Read this informative and balanced argument here. I can’t improve on it.

Fat Controller

The iniquity of the UK train operators’ stranglehold on a captive traveller since the botched 1993 privatisation, when a patchwork of mini-monopolies replaced the monolithic British Rail is well-documented. The network itself – tracks, stations, signals, overhead electric cables and all the costly stuff needed to run a railway – collapsed accordingly and was taken back into state ownership by none other than Alistair Darling, then pretending to be Transport Secretary. The engines, carriages, freight cars and profitable things that people pay money to sit in or send stuff round on, remained in the hands of many of the same fat controllers who had previously mismanaged the nationalised version. The novel twist was that they were paid lottery sums to take on this ‘burden’, and given generous ’subsidies’ with no penalties for failure other than a ticking-off every now and then from an independent Ombudsman who used to work for Virgin Trains, one of the main operators, but not the worst. (Suggestions, please . . .)

The trains are largely leased- many from a division of Royal Bank of Scotland – recently part-privatised by Alistair Darling, now pretending to be Chancellor – so we’re paying for somebody to borrow from ourselves to charge us too much money. On November 21 2008, the fat controllers yet again announced planned fare rises of 6-8% from January 2009, undermining government plans to keep the country working, its citizens from despair and reduce road traffic congestion. It is an ecological imperative to move 80% of people and freight off the roads and out of the air onto rail, but unless train surfing catches on, this will be unlikely.

Recession-busting transport solution

UK passenger rail numbers have more than doubled over the last decade, despite charging some of the highest fares per mile in Europe, running a Ruritanian cross-country service and playing cruel tricks on passengers’ weekends. Privatisation was intended to iron out inefficiencies, make the system at least self-sufficient over time and keep fare increases in line with cost of living rises. The taxpayer is subsidising the ‘investment’ in service improvements while paying an uneconomic price – uncompetitive with road and air transport in almost all cases. There is no asset payback for the subsidy and precious little service guarantee. The dysfunctional greed of the operators is an outcome of rewarding failure. These carpetbaggers need to be forced to travel on their own trains, on a Sunday evening.

You may deduce that I travelled by rail this weekend. I took a very adequate train from the magnificent new St. Pancras International terminal to a kennel with a W.H Smith kiosk in Leicester. I was duped into thinking the journey would cost £43.00 return, mistakenly took the return train 30 minutes earlier than I should have and was obliged by what looked like an unshaven Didicoy with face jewelery and tattoos in a Star Trek costume to pay an extra £63.00 for a journey of 93 miles. This graduate of the RyanAir school of customer service refused to comment except for the classic refrain: ‘it’s all in the small print.’ I wonder why I missed it. Surely not by design?

Russian oligarchs used violence and coercion to rob the workers of stakes in privatised state assets in the 1990s. Their UK counterparts have rooked the customer for too long. UK citizens are tired of the ‘jam tomorrow’ argument that once the investment phase is complete, prices and subsidies will fall. Nix these oafs now. We have nothing to lose. Kafkaesque announcements such as: “I repeat: First Class passengers can expect completely different tea and coffee,” and “there will be no sausages for twenty minutes” will continue to disconcert. They should add: “Service will be random. Inclement weather will paralyse the network. The buffet car will be a mirage. We’ve got your cash. Resistance is futile.”

The next Tory government should atone for their sins and give us back our rail monopoly. Then at least we are robbing Peter to pay Paul, instead of Richard.

One concept that has been leaving me speechless recently is how many people will die due to resource shortages if we keep on with this free-market stuff. How do you put this kind of thing into a word or phrase? Well, I entered “genocide by economic means” into my trusty dictionary and the first result was: Supply Side Economics. Who would have thought it? A dictionary with a sense of humour.

I also have to admit to being a wonk (though hopefully not a wonker). But this issue is so huge, it really bears explaining, and also a word of its own. Jared Diamond pointed out that there are a few things that often characterise civilisations on the brink of Collapse. Generally there is a party going on at the top, because this is the point on the exponential curve of resource usage where consumption is maxing out. But at the same time, as basic resource shortages bite, people at the bottom are starting to feel the pain, as basic neccessities start to run short. The problem that Diamond identifies, the one that is a killer risk for civilisations, is that those at the top do not pay attention to the problems of those at the bottom, because they are having such a great time. They  are too consumed by hubris to address the emerging problems. It all sounds eerily close to home doesn’t it?

But here comes the really deadly bit. What happens to the price of a resource in shortage?  Economics 101 says it tends to go up.  What does trying to implement a global free market do? It tries to make prices the same for everyone everywhere, free from distortions. What does this do to people with little purchasing power (the poor) as basic resources run short? It kills them, efficiently.

Now this could be the most efficient killing machine ever invented by human kind, so surely it deserves a name? Genocide is not quite it, because, as people endlessly argue, it implies a deliberate intention to mass murder, and this particular form of wipe-out seems unplanned. We could go from the idea of manslaughter, which is applied to such unplanned or accidental killings by negligence, and generalise it out: mass humanslaughter perhaps? However it is, at least to begin with, a selective kind of killing, so how about mass poorslaughter?

None of these phrases really trip off the tongue, so perhaps we should use the words of Jean Zeigler, the UN special rapporteur for the Right to Food, who described biofuels, which turn land over from food to energy production, as an “Agricultural Crime Against Humanity.” Although I think there is an even snappier way of summing all of this up. Stupid.

Now I hate all the guilt and the wringing of hands as much as the next person, partly because I think it’s displacement activity, if we are not going to do something about it, then we may as well stop pretending and get on with enjoying ourselves. But there is an issue of political imagination in all of this. Every time we make statements about the planet, or about “life” or being human, we are also making statements on behalf of these people. People who probably don’t speak English and so don’t have any access to our elite discussions.

We depend upon these people, they make our cheap Chinese goods possible, and fuel the service boom in India. In many ways they manage inflation on our behalf, since they are, well, so cheap. Since we depend on these people, if we want to chart a political future for ourselves that is stable, then we need to take into account the realities of their lives. Take the food price crisis: How much have we spoken about the price of milk in Tesco? And yet how little have we discussed the possibilities of food riots? The last trade round fell on this point: The developed world just could not get their heads around the developing world’s insistence that their population had to eat, come what may.

In order to have an accurate political imagination, to help us chart our way through the turbulence of climate change, and avoid crunching on the rocks of natural resource shortage, we need to think beyond our discussions where we mostly talk about Us. We also need to get beyond the current war-time mentality where we think about Them as terrorists or usurpers. We really do face tests that are way beyond what our current mentality is geared up to. Thus we need a new political imagination that is beyond Them and Us.