We don’t know how many ‘enemy’ combatants have been killed and most people cynically couldn’t care less – the Taliban are less than human, after all. Except they’re not. Most of these ‘insurgents’ are farmers by day and are only doing what any British or American citizen or yeoman would do if a foreign army invaded. What we do know, despite the froth from British military figures and the preposterous Hitler-moustached UK Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth, is that the much-vaunted ‘surge’ clearly has failed. ‘Operation Enduring Freedom‘ is more about enduring and nothing to do with freedom.

But the election, a foregone conclusion, will be spun as a victory for democracy, despite the overwhelming evidence of corruption, bribery, intimidation – by the Karzai government, much less the Taliban – and a full-blown insurgency which ensures that the turnout will be skewed, to put it politely. The UN, having spent an estimated USD 150 million on organising the election, have little option but to declare it a success, despite some cack-handed and counter-productive arrangements. For example, to avoid multiple polling, voters will be marked with indelible ink on their fingers. The Taliban have promised to cut off the fingers of anyone with inky fingers. There will be allegedly ‘thousands’ of election monitors, but already there is evidence of fraud – improbable numbers of people appear to have registered to vote, especially in Karzai-controlled regions.

Ashraf Ghani

Miracles notwithstanding (Ashraf Ghani, inshallah), Karzai will ‘win’ on Thursday. Unless he gains more than 50% of the vote, there will be a runoff, most likely against Abdullah, if opinion polls are to be believed (and undemocratic tribalism prevails). This will postpone the result – and probably guarantee increased violence and mayhem – until November. Victory for Abdullah would ‘unacceptable’ to Pakistan, on account of his historic connections with the Northern Alliance, to the Pashtuns and, obviously, to the Taliban. So if Karzai has to win, he might as well do so outright. Having done so, he should seriously consider forming a government of national unity including his main challengers and dedicated to addressing the root causes of the past and present preconditions for a failed state which make Afghanistan not worth fighting for. Unless he agrees, tacit and explicit support from the US and ‘NATO’ for his regime should be withdrawn.

Whatever the eventual result, one lesson to be learned from this deadly misadventure, which has yet again cost so many lives in the pursuit of ‘managed’ democracy, is that the UN should never again be given a mandate to organise and run an election. Incompetence, self-interest and pomposity have endangered the lives of those who are brave enough to vote, increased the possibility of fraud and wasted many tens of millions of dollars, not to mention the lives of soldiers and civilians. Last time I looked, the UN was established to do exactly the opposite.

John J Kelly

By Daniel Taghioff.

This development has brought on a wave of angst across the civilised world, as middle-class lefties realise they will have to brush up on their modes of production and dust off their anecdotes on ideology (See Thus Passim). But the thing is, none of this is difficult. So with no further fanfare, here it is:

The THUS potted guide to political economy:

Profit: If you have an unhealthily high rate of profit the money moves away from the poor to the rich. If you have a low rate of profit the rich get pissed off. 

Capitalist Crises: Too much of the former, you crush the poor – who then, incidentally, can’t buy stuff. Too much of the latter, a counter-revolution like Neo-liberalism.

An even briefer history of Neo-Liberalism: TheThatcher revolution and ’Reaganomics‘ both inspired by Milton Friedman (and Ayn Rand et al) led to redistribution of wealth, largely from the middle to the top and ‘light touch’ regulation in the financial markets. The stated objective was smaller government and an end to Keynesian supply-side economic dogma, but this didn’t happen. It all went horribly wrong (Thus passim).

Inequality: The poor got richer (in absolute terms) despite the robbery from above because there were more resources coming in from the environment.

The environment: A lack of natural resources makes inequality more of a problem (free summary), as you loose cheapo consumer goods as a way of buying off the poor, and as prices spike, especially for food… (Thus passim).

Productivity: Productivity gains or ‘advanced technology’ allegedly defeated Marxism, or rather the lumbering economic giant of Communism. But in reality, it actually dramatically increased natural resource usage. All that growth from the ‘white heat of technology’ can be accounted for as increased available energy in the economy,(Full text here) which nowadays means Big Oil.

Consumption: Productivity should really be measured in terms of goods per unit of natural resource. This is not going up anywhere near fast enough (look at page 20). To quote Monbiot (if you must- JK) “if our economy grows at 3% between now and 2030, we will consume in that period economic resources equivalent to all those we have consumed since humans first stood on two legs.” Hence we are running out of stuff, like Oil, though there will be peak other things too, like available fresh water.

Revolution: So there will be a crunch (or several). Printing money will not buy us out of trouble if there isn’t stuff to buy (Thus passim). Developing countries, especially those with a a big exposure to food price rises such as India will not be able to hold onto democracy if basic natural resources totally deplete. Revolutions, on a small or large scale are imminent. We are in for some interesting decades (Thus Passim)…

Conclusion: This recession is a phoney war. Our kids won’t need to worry about levels of debt – which, by the way, are notional – a future dictatorship of the proletariat could abolish these by simply refusing to honour them (or just by printing money). Our kids (and their parents) need to worry about natural resources, because we can’t print more of them.

A close friend, far richer and better-informed than I (not difficult) sent me some completely speculative global economic notes, which he admits depend upon force majeure and all that. See how many you agree with. I personally think the oil price drop is overstated, since  China, India, parts of SE Asia some parts of Latin America but particularly Brazil are still growing. If India and China descend into full blown recession, then the world is in terminal trouble and we had better get used to austerity, if we’re not already there.

• Complete and fairly permanent reduction of bank credit globally, with certainly 3 and possibly 10 years or more of credit limitation. Absolutely no chance of inflation in the UK, USA or Western European Euro nations for the next 3 – 5 years at least. 

• Big potential arbitrage play between € and $.

• Swiss franc and US dollar the only worthwhile currencies for the next 24 months. Sterling to be back at 1.35€ – 1.50€ within 3 years, due to the relative economic weakness across the Eurozone. US dollar to be 1.05 – 1.15 against sterling by 2010 / 2011 (it currently stands at 0.68).

• Oil to bottom at between $16.00 and $19.00 per barrel over the next 12 months (currently $51.00).

All bets are off if the US adopts protectionism, apart from currency levels, which will be about the same and the oil price which will be even lower. If protectionism were to take hold in the USA the downside will be greater in the UK, Europe and China. (This last one I agree with, wholeheartedly).

Happy Easter, John J Kelly

Foolish people have argued that there is a choice between preventing the worst effects of climate change and adapting to unavoidable changes, despite compelling evidence, such as that produced at the latest meeting at Copenhagen that the majority cannot survive without drastic emissions reductions and even if we do, adapting to a lot of changes. While there is a very lively debate on mitigation, on reducing the amount of carbon in the air, the debates on adaptation have been sidelined, perhaps becuase they are seen as distracting from the serious task of saving the world – or perhaps saving the relatively rich English-speakers having the debate. Most measures supposedly designed to reduce carbon in the air also tend to have a horrible impact on the poor. Bio-fuels, which would allow a kind of business-as-usual in terms of running car on liquid fuels, are a prime example – large scale cultivation will disrupt food production. Indeed, the World Bank claims that 75% of last year’s food price spike was down to this very factor.

Another example is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) designed to get developing countries involved in  Carbon Trading. These are mitigation measures, this money might help adaptation as well, but, under the current system, it won’t.  India’s Center for Science and Environment has been very critical of CDM, which lets the rich buy all the cheap ways of reducing their carbon outputs, forcing the rest to pay more for this later. In addition, the complex process of obtaining carbon credits means it is only really suitable for big companies. So the money won’t go to helping the poor adapt, but will go to the big companies, who do most of the polluting in the first place.

Aided and abetted by consultants from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, business lobbies have managed to get environmental impact assessment laws diluted in India. Bribery and political influence from big companies is so widespread that several activists have been forced to send industrial water pollution samples to the US to get them processed, because no Indian laboratory dares to return results that would upset big business. Are we seriously going to direct more resources at this lobby in the hope that this will reduce emissions? And how exactly will this help the poor to adapt?

Alternatives will need to be fought for. The recent Forest Rights Act has made its way through Indian Parliament and is now being put into practice. It sets an interesting precedent by putting into law a framework of rights to underpin local democratic control of natural resources. This highlights one of the few advantages the poor have in terms of winning real adaptation concessions. Despite the tiny character of their landholdings,  due to their sheer numbers, they command control of a sizeable proportion of the land.

If you combine the recent findings about climate change with likely emissions reductions paths, you see that we little chance of making it through this crisis without taking some of the carbon back out of the air. The global carbon cycle suggests two main ways of doing this: put it into the sea, by seeding the oceans for instance, but the technology is not developed yet. Alternativey, you can put it into the land, either through minerals like Olivine, or through biomass, and turning it into charcoal (Biochar). It has been correctly observed that using charcoal as a global commercialised solution to climate change has the same effect as bio-fuels on displacing food production. However, dismissing biochar out of hand misses an important strategic point.

Oxfam and others argue that Human Rights should be put at the heart of the climate debates, particularly adaptation. However, they are somewhat more coy in public about the fact that rights are generally never given freely by the powerful, but forced as concessions from them by the struggles of others. But what on earth do the rich need the poor for? One area is to get access to land. Tata’s troubles in building a plant to manufacture the new Nano car illustrates that the poor will not give up control of what little land they have so easily. If the rich need to use land for getting carbon out of the air, and if the poor can prevent the rich  from doing so by thwarting their plans, perhaps this gives them leverage to demand more rights over their natural resources.

Despite biochar being criticised as an unreliable way to improve soil quality, there have been studies that show that used correctly it can be a useful input into organic agriculture, as well as offering a credible method for sinking carbon into the soil, especially when considered as a part of strategies to increase tree-cover overall. Can we afford to dismiss Biochar as an option because we fear the implications of its commercialisation? As a potential low cost-technology that the poor could implement to improve their land, and a possible source of some leverage on the rich in adaptation negotiations, it may be rash to dismiss it out of hand. With only $1Bn of the already pitiful $18Bn of adaptation funding having been paid out, current approaches to mobilising those resources are clearly not working. Can we afford to overlook the potential advantage the poor may have in the one resource they may control?

If the Indian Forest Rights model can be extended to support dryland organic agricultural practices within a democratised natural resource management framework, this actually creates a model where subsidy for mitigation, in the form of support of increased tree coverage and use of biochar might be used to build productive assets for the poor that may help them adapt. The experience of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India shows that productive use of subsidy is crucial to prevent the subsidy from undercutting the existing local economy, especially agriculture. Thus the issue of having a rights regime to protect access to the environment and thus local economic activity is crucial to any adaptation approach. There is almost no chance of realising such regimes unless the poor have some real leverage to exercise in order to get them.

 Anyone see any other leverage out there?

When the Food and Agricultural Organisation says that another 40 million were pushed into hunger in 2008, what images spring into your mind? Is it possible to imagine that many people starving? Well imagine it or not, we had better get used to it. Because the other thing that the FAO announced was that to bring the truly mind-boggling 973 million people who are starving now into the land of plenty, we need to double food production by 2050. Quite a challenge, bearing in mind we also have to totally rejig our energy systems in the meantime.

Global food markets are effectively trade in water. Tony Allen coined the phrase “Virtual Water” to point out that water mainly travels around inside other things. And these other things are mostly food: a tonne of which takes 1000 tonnes of water to make. Another thing the food trade uses a lot of is oil. We are talking (in 1974) a calorie of oil to grow a calorie of food, and then you have to ship it. And even though a thousand times lighter than the water it embodies, food is still bulky. Think about the heaviest things that regularly come in and out of your house. It is lugging food shopping in and waste out that breaks up our sedentary lifestyles.

All that bulk gets moved around, a sample shopping basket of 26 imported organic items having travelled a total of 150,000 miles, or six times around the Earth. The US food system alone uses  as much energy as France and 80% of this is used outside the farm in transport and processing. This huge oil-driven industry is a way of redistributing water across the globe, albeit guided by purchasing power. The dry parts of the world rely on the food trade to a very great extent, and as it gets harder to grow food in the tropics under climate change, this dependency is likely to increase.

The IEA now forecasts that the production of conventional oils is likely to peak around 2020. That’s only 12 years away, and is likely to drive the price of energy up sharply across the board, as people try and substitute on type of fuel for another. This is bound to affect the food trade, partly because of the oil that goes into food,  but also because it makes it ever more tempting to use land for growing fuel.  The food price rises in 2008 were 75% caused by the increased demand from bio-fuels. It all adds up. The extra 40 million hungry in 2008 was with an oil price peaking around $100 a barrel. But the coming oil peak, dubbed “The last oil shock”, could raise the price to $300 a barrel. So this international trade in food (AKA water) is likely to get a lot more expensive. We could be seeing a lot of inflation (Thus Passim).

Countries will find it increasingly expensive to buy in the food they need. This will mean an increasing need, in the tropics especially, for countries to rely on the water they have in order to grow food. If you combine this with population growth in places like India, you get a worrying picture of massively declining amounts of water available per person even as you need more of it.

As if this were not enough to put you off your muesli, take a look at industrialisation. The US uses as much water for industry as it does for agriculture, and the EU uses twice as much. These are both areas with tight environmental regulations, particularly in relation to water pollution: This was the original cause celebre of the environmental movement, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” And let’s not forget Erin Brokovich.

In many tropical countries there is not much water to spare. In India 80-90% of the water demand is already from agriculture. Whilst there are a lot of good environmental laws on the books, the enforcement is weak, what with all the corruption. In 2006, pushed on by the World Trade Organisation, the Indian government rushed through 2 new laws. The first allowed major sections of Industry to self-certify their environmental impacts, which is a bit like asking them nicely for a confession, pretty please . The other was a directive that all natural resources should be exploited to the maximum benefit of “the people”. How the people will get a slice of the profits is not made clear.

This all seems a bit schizophrenic, because the same government is so concerned about water shortage that it is proposing the largest development project in the history of humanity. This is a 1 billion US$ proposal to link all of India’s rivers together.  The joke being that without enforced environmental regulations, this is likely to turn into a national pollution network. So what to do? Buy food from abroad? Fat chance.

Well one thing is to get the existing environmental regulations enforced. This is a global problem, as the food-oil-water link indicates, so a global treaty about the enforcement of environmental regulations in international trade looks ever more urgent. Otherwise international organisations will keep on lobbying to weaken the laws that protect the increasingly scarce water in the tropics.

The other way is from the ground up. There are plenty of traditional crops in Asia and Africa that have been displaced by markets for “modern” “luxury” food. Millets and Ragi in India have suffered this fate, replaced by water-guzzling rice paddy. Promoting these crops, which can get by on 5 times less water than wheat, is one way towards food security. Another is to reduce oil dependence in food production, especially in poor countries like India, where farmers already face huge problems with debt.

However, until international policy-makers wake up to these issues, and moderate the market fundamentalism that got us into our current mess, these types of solution are likely to remain drops in the ocean. Doing things mainly by markets and purchasing power means it is cheaper to let the poor starve. So don’t you know, we’re talking about a revolution.

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.

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

This looks like becoming a major nuclear flashpoint.

However, since this issue is about the decidedly mundane business of growing food, it is part of the world of the silent majority. The narrative of Kashmir as a Holy Land, Kashmir as terrorist stronghold for Muslim Fundamentalists fits into prevailing elite discourses about global religious conflict – good Christian democracies verses bad Islamofascism. The idea that the root of this problem might be about food, water, feeding poor people, the environment and climate change, simply does not fit the story. What if people were united by material rather than religious concerns? My God, you might even have to think about the circumstances under which people actually live.

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?